Category: Civil Rights Movement

September 4, 1957 – The Little Rock Crisis: begins as Gov. Orval Fabus calls out the National Guard to prevent African American students from enrolling in Little Rock Central High School.

9/4/2021

The U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, on May 17, 1954. Tied to the 14th Amendment, the decision declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional, and it called for the desegregation of all schools throughout the nation.[ After the decision, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the school board agreed to comply with the high court's ruling. Virgil Blossom, the Superintendent of Schools, submitted a plan of gradual integration to the school board on May 24, 1955, which the board unanimously approved. The plan would be implemented during the fall of the 1957 school year, which would begin in September 1957.

By 1957, the NAACP had registered nine black students to attend the previously all-white Little Rock Central High, selected on the criteria of excellent grades and attendance.[2] Called the "Little Rock Nine", they were Ernest Green (b. 1941), Elizabeth Eckford (b. 1941), Jefferson Thomas (1942–2010), Terrence Roberts (b. 1941), Carlotta Walls LaNier (b. 1942), Minnijean Brown (b. 1941), Gloria Ray Karlmark (b. 1942), Thelma Mothershed (b. 1940), and Melba Pattillo Beals (b. 1941). Ernest Green was the first African American to graduate from Central High School.

When integration began on September 4, 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was called in to "preserve the peace". Originally at orders of the governor, they were meant to prevent the black students from entering due to claims that there was "imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace" at the integration. However, President Eisenhower issued Executive order 10730, which federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them, as well as a detachment of the 101st Airborne Division stationed at Jacksonville, Arkansas, abut 10 miles from Little Rock. to support the integration on September 23 of that year, after which they protected the African American students, who became known in Civil Rights history as the Little Rock Nine.

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August 28, 1955 – Black teenager Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent civil rights movement.

8/28/2021

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Open Casket at Emmett Till's funeral in Chicago

Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

Till was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Although what happened at the store is a matter of dispute, Till was accused of flirting with or whistling at Bryant. Till's interaction with Bryant, perhaps unwittingly, violated the unwritten code of behavior for a black male interacting with a white female in the Jim Crow-era South. Several nights after the incident in the store, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam were armed when they went to Till's great-uncle's house and abducted Emmett. They took him away and beat and mutilated him, before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river.

Till's body was returned to Chicago where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket which was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. It was later said that "The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention not only on U.S. racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy". Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the lack of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the U.S. critical of the state. Although local newspapers and law enforcement officials initially decried the violence against Till and called for justice, they responded to national criticism by defending Mississippians, temporarily giving support to the killers.

In September 1955, an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Till's murder. Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with Look magazine that they had killed Till. Till's murder was seen as a catalyst for the next phase of the civil rights movement. In December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott began in Alabama and lasted more than a year, resulting eventually in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. According to historians, events surrounding Emmett Till's life and death continue to resonate. An Emmett Till Memorial Commission was established in the early 21st century. The Sumner County Courthouse was restored and includes the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. Fifty-one sites in the Mississippi Delta are memorialized as associated with Till.

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August 12, 2006 – Victoria Gray Adams, American civil rights activist, dies.

8/12/2021

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Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Jackson Gray and Annie Devine reading a telegram at the U.S. Capitol Building in 1965 from Speaker of the House granting them permission to be seated on the House floor during the debate about the newly elected representatives from Mississippi.

The American Civil Right Movement has as many unsung heroes as any great endeavor. That is the way of history, to focus on great events and the great figures at their center, leaving the details of those who worked along the margins to the shadows. Victoria Gray Adams was one of many such who toiled in the shadows.

Born Victoria Almeter Jackson on November 5, 1926 in a black community called Palmer's Crossing, which is now a part of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Adams was the daughter of Mack and Annie Mae Jackson. Her mother died when she was three years old, and she was then raised by her grandparents. Unusually for the time and place, her grandparents were not tenants farmers, owning and farming their own land.  Thus, Adams grew up with a strong sense of independence.

In 1945, she graduated from Depriest Consolidated School. She then attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, but had to quit after one year due to lack of funds for tuition. Her first marriage was with Tony West Gray, a soldier who was subsequently stationed Germany, taking his family with him. They returned to the United States and lived in Maryland, during which time Adams worked as a cosmetics sales representative. They later returned to Mississippi

Adams' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement began in the early 1960s when she convinced her pastor to open up their church to workers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In the 1960 elections, Adams trained individuals from her hometown in voter registration. Many African Americans at the time were illiterate, which prevented them from registering, so she taught began teaching reading, writing, and civics, using the Constitution as her primary text.

Adams' work in the Movement put a great strain on her marriage to Gray, and they couple divorced. She would later marry Rueben Adams, and while much of he early work was under he former married name, she later insisted that she be known as Victoria Gray Adams in all references to her in articles and histories of the Movement.

In 1962, she became field secretary for the SNCC, and led a boycott against Hattiesburg businesses. In 1964, Adams, who continued to work as cosmetics salesperson, decided to run against Senator John Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat who at the time had been in the Senate for 16 years. She announced that she and others from the tiny Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, of which she was a founding member, along with Fannie Lou Hamer and Annie Devine, would challenge the power of white segregationist politicians like Stennis. The time had come, she said, to pay attention "to the Negro in Mississippi, who had not even had the leavings from the American political table."

Adams called the MFDP the true Democratic Party of Mississippi and boasted its accomplishment of tearing down the "curtain of fear in Mississippi for African Americans demanding their rights." During her campaign for Senate, which she knew was a futile effort given that Mississippi politics was tightly controlled by the Democratic Party Machine, she stated that "Unemployment, automation, inadequate housing, health care, education, and rural development are the real issues in Mississippi, not 'states rights' or 'federal encroachment.'"

During the Freedom Summer of 1964, Adams helped open the Freedom Schools that pushed for civil rights in Mississippi. Along with Hamer and Devin and 62 other members of the MFDP, she went to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Mississippi Democratic Party had withdrawn support for President Lyndon Johnson because of Johnson's work to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and sent an all-white delegation to the convention. The three women fought to be seated among the delegation, but were unsuccessful because the rules of the Convention required it to seat the delegates designated by the recognized state party. One of the “Mississippi regulars,” as the white delegates were known, declared they could seat “a dozen dead dodos” and no one could do anything about it.

Eventually, a compromise was devised: If the Freedom Democrats would accept two delegate-at-large seats and withdraw the rest of their delegation, then the Democratic leadership would pledge to ban segregation from all future conventions. For national civil rights leaders, the deal seemed pretty sweet. But not for the Mississippians, who wanted their whole delegation seated. In the hotel rooms, the debate over whether to take the deal raged (and now, in history classrooms, still rages). When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. weighed in, he phrased it perfectly: “So, being a Negro leader, I want you to take this, but if I were a Mississippi Negro, I would vote against it.”

In the end, the Freedom delegates refused the deal. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” said Hamer, “’cause all of us is tired.” Gray’s explanation was more restrained. She argued that “people back home were counting on them to bring back gains deep enough and fair enough to hold against conditions in Mississippi.”

The delegation fight played out on national television and heightened public awareness of the divide between the mainstream Democratic Party and the "Dixiecrats" of the South.  John Lewis, the civil rights leader who is now a Georgia congressman, said later, “As far as I’m concerned, this was the turning point of the civil rights movement.”

Adams noted that people made a discovery while in Atlantic City. People realized there was a way out of the lives they had been living in for so long. She explained that the way out of that life would be through "the execution of the vote" and getting representation. In an interview with the Virginia Organizing Project, she says, "We were going in the face of the Mississippi Democratic Party, which included some of the most powerful members of the U.S. Congress, to demand that we be recognized to have representation at the Democratic National Convention."

Adams said she learned in 1964 that there were two kinds of people in the grass-roots politics of the civil rights movement, "those who are in the movement and those who have the movement in them." "The movement is in me", she said, "and I know it always will be."

Adams also founded the Council of Federated Organization (COFO). COFO was a coalition of all the freedom organizations working during the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. COFO was the main organization responsible for leading all the other umbrella organizations, which included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

As was true throughout the South, the civil rights movement in Mississippi was inspired by the grand oratory of men like King and Andrew Young. On the ground, though, away from the crowds, it was often women’s work. Stanley Zibulsky, a Northern white teacher who camped out on Gray’s floor during the summer of 1964, explained that women were compelled to put their bodies on the line. “Men couldn’t even answer the door,” he recalled recently. “It was considered too dangerous. There would be a knock, and Vicky [Adams] was the one who opened the door.”

Adams has received many awards for her courageous work. Two of the most noticeable include, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Service Award and the Fannie Lou Hammer Humanitarian Award. Adams died at her son Cecil's home in Baltimore on August 12, 2006, of cancer, aged 79. Her papers are at the McCain Library and Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi.

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August 11, 1965 – Riots begin in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California.

8/11/2021

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Buildings Burning During the Watts Riots

The Watts riots, sometimes referred to as the Watts Rebellion or Watts Uprising, took place in the Watts neighborhood and its surrounding areas of Los Angeles from August 11 to 16, 1965. On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old African American man, was pulled over for drunken driving. After he failed a field sobriety test, officers a physical confrontation ensued in which Marquette was struck in the face with a baton. Meanwhile, a crowd of onlookers had gathered. Rumors, later proved to be unfounded, spread that the police had kicked a pregnant woman who was present at the scene. Six days of civil unrest followed, motivated in part by allegations of police abuse. Nearly 14,000 members of the California Army National Guard helped suppress the disturbance, which resulted in 34 deaths and over $40 million in property damage. It was the city's worst unrest until the Rodney King riots of 1992.

While the origins of racial tension in Los Angeles have roots deed in the city's history extending back to its founding, which Spanish settlors divided into a powerful landowning class of Europeans and a peasant class of mixed-race mestizos, it was the World War II era migration of large numbers of African Americans from the east to California which resulted in the adoption of both public and private restrictions creating de facto color barriers (despite such restrictions having been ruled unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948)). Racial tensions were high in the city during the summer of 1965, as in much of the country, as a result of local obstruction of efforts to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On the evening of Wednesday, August 11, 1965, 21-year-old Marquette Frye, an African-American man driving his mother's 1955 Buick while drunk, was pulled over by California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer Lee Minikus for alleged reckless driving. After Frye failed a field sobriety test, Minikus placed him under arrest and radioed for his vehicle to be impounded. Marquette's brother, Ronald, a passenger in the vehicle, walked to their house nearby, bringing their mother, Rena Price, back with him to the scene of the arrest.

When Rena Price reached the intersection of Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street that evening, she scolded Frye about drinking and driving. However, the situation quickly escalated: Someone shoved Price, Frye was struck, Price jumped an officer, and another officer pulled out a shotgun. Backup police officers attempted to arrest Frye by using physical force to subdue him. After community members reported that police had roughed up Frye and shared a rumor they had kicked a pregnant woman, angry mobs formed. As the situation intensified, growing crowds of local residents watching the exchange began yelling and throwing objects at the police officers. Frye's mother and brother fought with the officers and eventually were arrested along with Marquette Frye.

After the arrests of Price and her sons the Frye brothers, the crowd continued to grow along Avalon Boulevard. Police came to the scene to break up the crowd several times that night, but were attacked when people threw rocks and chunks of concrete. A 46-square-mile (119 square kilometer) swath of Los Angeles was transformed into a combat zone during the ensuing six days.

After a night of increasing unrest, police and local black community leaders held a community meeting on Thursday, August 12, to discuss an action plan and to urge calm. The meeting failed. Later that day, Chief Parker called for the assistance of the California Army National Guard. Chief Parker believed the riots resembled an insurgency, compared it to fighting the Viet Cong, and decreed a "paramilitary" response to the disorder. Governor Pat Brown declared that law enforcement was confronting "guerrillas fighting with gangsters".

The rioting intensified, and on Friday, August 13, about 2,300 National Guardsmen joined the police in trying to maintain order on the streets. Sergeant Ben Dunn said: "The streets of Watts resembled an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country, it bore no resemblance to the United States of America." The first riot-related death occurred on the night of August 13, when a black civilian was killed in the crossfire during a shootout between the police and rioters. Over the next few days, rioting had then spread throughout other areas, including Pasadena, Pacoima, Monrovia, Long Beach, and even as far as San Diego, although they were very minor in comparison to Watts. About 200 Guardsmen and the LAPD were sent to assist the Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) in controlling the unruly crowd.

By nightfall on Saturday, 16,000 law enforcement personnel had been mobilized and patrolled the city. Blockades were established, and warning signs were posted throughout the riot zones threatening the use of deadly force (one sign warned residents to "Turn left or get shot"). Angered over the police response, residents of Watts engaged in a full-scale battle against the first responders. Rioters tore up sidewalks and bricks to hurl at Guardsmen and police, and to smash their vehicles. Those actively participating in the riots started physical fights with police, blocked Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) firefighters from using fire hoses on protesters and burning buildings, or stopped and beat white motorists while yelling racial slurs in the area. Arson and looting were largely confined to local white-owned stores and businesses that were said to have caused resentment in the neighborhood due to low wages and high prices for local workers.

To quell the riots, Chief Parker initiated a policy of mass arrest. Following the deployment of National Guardsmen, a curfew was declared for a vast region of South Central Los Angeles. In addition to the Guardsmen, 934 LAPD officers and 718 officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) were deployed during the rioting. Watts and all black-majority areas in Los Angeles were put under the curfew. All residents outside of their homes in the affected areas after 8:00 pm were subject to arrest. Eventually, nearly 3,500 people were arrested, primarily for curfew violations. By the morning of Sunday, August 15, the riots had largely been quelled.

Over the course of six days, between 31,000 and 35,000 adults participated in the riots. Around 70,000 people were "sympathetic, but not active." Over the six days, there were 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, 3,438 arrests, and over $40 million in property damage. Many white Americans were fearful of the breakdown of social order in Watts, especially since white motorists were being pulled over by rioters in nearby areas and assaulted.[36] Many in the black community, however, believed the rioters were taking part in an "uprising against an oppressive system."

Despite allegations that "criminal elements" were responsible for the riots, the vast majority of those arrested had no prior criminal record. Only three sworn personnel were killed in the riots: an LAFD firefighter was struck when a wall of a fire-weakened structure fell on him while fighting fires in a store, an LASD deputy was shot when another deputy's shotgun was discharged in a struggle with rioters, and an LBPD officer was shot by another police officer's gun that was discharged during a scuffle with rioters. 23 out of the 34 people killed in the riots were shot by LAPD officers or National Guardsmen.

Debate rose quickly over what had taken place in Watts, as the area was known to be under a great deal of racial and social tension. Reactions and reasoning about the riots greatly varied based on the perspectives of those affected by and participating in the riots' chaos.

National civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke two days after the riots happened in Watts. The riots were partly a response to Proposition 14, a constitutional amendment sponsored by the California Real Estate Association and passed that had in effect repealed the Rumford Fair Housing Act. In 1966, the California Supreme Court reinstated the Rumford Fair Housing Act in the Reitman v. Mulkey case (a decision affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court the following year), declaring the amendment to violate the US constitution and laws.

A variety of opinions and explanations were published. Public opinion polls studied in the few years after the riot showed that a majority believed the riots were linked to communist groups who were active in the area protesting high unemployment rates and racial discrimination. Those opinions concerning racism and discrimination were expressed three years after hearings conducted by a committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights took place in Los Angeles to assess the condition of relations between the police force and minorities. These hearings were also intended to make a ruling on the discrimination case against the police for their alleged mistreatment of members of the Nation of Islam. These different arguments and opinions are often cited in continuing debates over the underlying causes of the Watts riots.

A commission under Governor Pat Brown investigated the riots, known as the McCone Commission, and headed by former CIA director John A. McCone. The commission released a 101-page report on December 2, 1965, entitled Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning?: A Report by the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, 1965. The McCone Commission identified the root causes of the riots to be high unemployment, poor schools, and related inferior living conditions that were endured by African Americans in Watts. Recommendations for addressing these problems included "emergency literacy and preschool programs, improved police-community ties, increased low-income housing, more job-training projects, upgraded health-care services, more efficient public transportation, and many more." Most of these recommendations were never implemented.

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August 9, 1909 - Willa Beatrice Player, American educator, first Black woman college president is born in Jackson Mississippi

8/9/2021

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Willa Beatrice Player (August 9, 1909 – August 29, 2003) was an American educator, college administrator, college president, civil rights activist, and federal appointee. Player was the first African-American woman to become president of a four-year fully accredited liberal arts college when she took the position at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Willa Player, the youngest of three children, was born to Clarence C. and Beatrice (Day) Player in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909. Her family moved to Akron, Ohio, in 1917 when Player was eight years old, as part of the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century of African Americans to northern and midwestern industrial cities for work and educational opportunities. Growing up in a religious family, Player was active with them in the Methodist church. As a teenager, she spent hours as a member of the youth choir, which aided her pathway to college. Player graduated from West High School in Akron and was accepted in 1925 to Ohio Wesleyan University, a Methodist university.

She was one of three African-American students admitted to the college that year. They were not allowed to live in the dorms on-campus, as it was thought special provisions needed to be made for them. Player graduated in 1929, along with her sister, musician Edith Player Brown. In 1930, Player earned a master's degree from Oberlin College.

In the fall of 1930 at the age of 21, Player was hired to teach Latin and French at Bennett College, a historically black, United Methodist-affiliated college located in Greensboro, North Carolina. Originally founded in 1873 as a coed normal school for training teachers, it had become a women's college in 1926.

After teaching at Bennett for a few years, Player took a leave of absence for postgraduate studies. She studied at the University of Grenoble in France, where she received a Certificat d'Études in 1935.

Player returned to Bennett College after studying in France. She was selected as Director of Admissions and also served as the Acting Dean. In 1937, freshman student Frances Jones, daughter of the college president, David Dallas Jones, led a civil rights action in Greensboro. Player and R. Nathaniel Dett advised the younger Jones as she led a boycott and protest of segregated movie theaters and racist portrayals in film offerings in downtown Greensboro.

Player left Bennett College to pursue her Ph.D., which she received from Columbia University in 1948. Years later, she did post-doctoral studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin. After Player returned to Bennett, she was promoted to Coordinator of Instruction and, in 1952, to Vice-President of Bennett College. Jet reported that she was the first person of color to be offered the presidency of Spelman College in Atlanta that year, but chose to stay with Bennett. Its president was still David Dallas Jones.

From 1955 to 1966, Player served as president of the historically black college, during a period of heightened civil rights activism in the South. She supported Bennett students who took part in the lengthy sit-ins started by the Greensboro Four to achieve integration of lunch counters in downtown stores.

After leaving the Bennett presidency, Player was appointed in 1966 by President Lyndon B. Johnson as the first female Director of the Division of College Support in the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, serving until 1986.

She received several honorary doctorates during her career: Doctor of Laws, Ohio Wesleyan University (1953); Doctor of Laws, Lycoming College (1962); Doctor of Laws, Morehouse College (1963), Doctor of Laws, Albion College (1963); Doctor of Humane Letters, Keuka College (1967); Doctor of Humane Letter, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (1969); Doctor of Public Service, Prairie View A & M University (1971).

Dr. Player died in Greensboro on August 29, 2003, aged 93.

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August 6, 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

8/6/2021

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United States President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections.[7] Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country. It is also "one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history."

The act contains numerous provisions that regulate elections. The act's "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2 is a general provision that prohibits every state and local government from imposing any voting law that results in discrimination against racial or language minorities. Other general provisions specifically outlaw literacy tests and similar devices that were historically used to disenfranchise racial minorities. The act also contains "special provisions" that apply to only certain jurisdictions. A core special provision is the Section 5 preclearance requirement, which prohibits certain jurisdictions from implementing any change affecting voting without receiving preapproval from the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the change does not discriminate against protected minorities. Another special provision requires jurisdictions containing significant language minority populations to provide bilingual ballots and other election materials.

Section 5 and most other special provisions apply to jurisdictions encompassed by the "coverage formula" prescribed in Section 4(b). The coverage formula was originally designed to encompass jurisdictions that engaged in egregious voting discrimination in 1965, and Congress updated the formula in 1970 and 1975. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional, reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions. The court did not strike down Section 5, but without a coverage formula, Section 5 is unenforceable. The jurisdictions which had previously been covered by the coverage formula massively increased the rate of voter registration purges after the Shelby decision.

Research shows that the Act successfully and massively increased voter turnout and voter registrations, in particular among blacks. The Act has also been linked to concrete outcomes, such as greater public goods provision (such as public education) for areas with higher black population shares, and more members of Congress who vote for civil rights-related legislation.

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July 28, 1917 – The Silent Parade takes place in New York City, in protest against murders, lynchings, and other violence directed towards African Americans.

7/28/2021

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The Silent Parade, was a silent march of about 10,000 African Americans along Fifth Avenue starting at 57th Street in New York City on July 28, 1917. The event was organized by the NAACP, church, and community leaders to protest violence directed towards African Americans, such as recent lynchings in Waco and Memphis. The parade was precipitated by the East St. Louis riots in May and July 1917 where at least 40 black people were killed by white mobs, in part touched off by a labor dispute where blacks were used for strike breaking.

Prior to May 1917, there began a migration of blacks fleeing threats to life and liberty in the South. Tensions in East St. Louis, Illinois, were brewing between white and black workers. Many black workers had found work in the local industry. In Spring 1917, the mostly white workers of the Aluminum Ore Company voted for a labor strike and the Company recruited hundreds of black workers to replace them. The situation exploded after rumors of black men and white women fraternizing began to circulate. Thousands of white men descended on East St. Louis and began attacking African Americans. They destroyed buildings and beat people. The rioting died down, only to rise with vigor again several weeks later. After an incident in which a police officer was shot by black residents of the city, thousands of whites marched and rioted in the city again. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance states that "Eyewitnesses likened the mob to a manhunt, describing how rioters sought out blacks to beat, mutilate, stab, shoot, hang, and burn."

The brutality of the attacks by mobs of white people and the refusal by the authorities to protect innocent lives contributed to the responsive measures taken by some African Americans in St. Louis and the nation. Marcus Garvey declared in a speech that the riot was "one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind" and a "wholesale massacre of our people", insisting that "This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one's voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy." After the riots, many black people felt that there was little "possibility of the United States ever permitting black people to enjoy full citizenship, equal rights and dignity." Writers and civil rights activists, W.E.B DuBois and Martha Gruening visited the city after the riot on July 2 in order to speak to witnesses and survivors. They wrote an essay describing the riots in "gruesome detail" for The Crisis, an NAACP publication.

James Weldon Johnson, the Field Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), worked with a group of influential community leaders at the St. Philip's Church in New York to decide how to protest the riots. The idea of a silent protest had first been suggested in a 1916 NAACP Conference by Oswald Garrison Villard. Black women in New York had also participated in earlier silent parades with white women, like the June 1917 silent parade in support of the Red Cross. Villard's mother, Fanny Garrison Villard, had organized a silent march for suffragettes in New York in 1913. However, for this protest, organizers felt that it was important that only black people participate because they were the main victims of the recent violence.

Two prominent members of the local clergy were tapped to serve as the executives for the parade. Rev. Dr. Hutchens C. Bishop, rector of the city's oldest Black Episcopal parish, and Rev. Dr. Charles D. Martin, founder of the Fourth Moravian Church, respectively, served as the President, and Secretary for the parade. With "righteous indignation", Dr. Martin wrote the call to action entitled simply "Why We March". It laid out the rationale for the protest, and was distributed before and during[ the parade.

The parade was advertised in The New York Age where it was described as a "mute but solemn protest against the atrocities and discrimination practiced against the race in various parts of the country." Men, women and children alike were invited to take part. It was hoped that around ten thousand people would be able to participate, and that African Americans in other cities might hold their own parades. The New York parade was announced ahead of time in other cities as well.

In the midst of record heat in New York City on July 28, an estimated 8,000 to 15,000 African Americans[ marched in silent protest to the lynchings, as in Waco, Memphis, and especially the East St. Louis riots. The march began at 57th Street, down Fifth Avenue, to its end at 23rd Street. Protesters carried signs that highlighted their discontent. Some signs and banners appealed directly to President Woodrow Wilson.[9] A mounted police escort led the parade. Women and children were next, dressed in white. They were followed by the men, dressed in black. People of all races looked on from both sides of Fifth Avenue. The New York Age estimated that "fully fifteen thousand Negroes, who should have taken an active part, looked on." Black boy scouts handed out fliers describing why they were marching. During the parade, white people stopped to listen to black people explain the reasons for the march and other white bystanders expressed support and sympathy. Some of the messages written on fliers were:

We march because by the Grace of God and the force of truth, the dangerous, hampering walls of prejudice and inhuman injustices must fall.

We march because we deem it a crime to be silent in the face of such barbaric acts.

We march because we want our children to live a better life and enjoy fairer conditions than have fallen to our lot.

The parade marked the first large black-only protest parade in New York.[27] The New York Times described it the following day:

To the beat of muffled drums 8,000 negro men, women and children marched down Fifth Avenue yesterday in a parade of "silent protest against acts of discrimination and oppression" inflicted upon them in this country, and in other parts of the world. Without a shout or a cheer they made their cause known through many banners which they carried, calling attention to "Jim Crowism," segregation, disenfranchisement, and the riots of Waco, Memphis, and East St. Louis.

— New York Times

Media coverage of the march helped to counter the dehumanization of black people in the United States. The parade and its coverage helped depict the NAACP as a "well-organized and mannerly group" and also helped increase its visibility both among white and black people alike.

Marchers hoped to influence Democratic President Wilson to carry through on his election promises to African American voters to implement anti-lynching legislation and promote Black causes. Four days after the silent parade, black leaders involved in the protest, including Madame C.J. Walker, went to Washington D.C. for a planned appointment with the president. The appointment was not kept, as the group of leaders were told that Wilson had "another appointment." They left their petition for Wilson, which reminded him of African Americans serving in World War I and urged him to prevent riots and lynchings in the future. Wilson did not do so and repudiated his promises. Federal discrimination against African Americans significantly increased under the Wilson administration.

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July 17, 2020 - Civil Rights Leader and US Congressman John Lewis dies at age 80

7/17/2021

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John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American statesman and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020. He was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966. Lewis was one of the "Big Six" leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington. He fulfilled many key roles in the civil rights movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States. In 1965, Lewis led the first of three Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In an incident which became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers and police attacked the marchers, including Lewis.

A member of the Democratic Party, Lewis was first elected to Congress in 1986 and served 17 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district he represented included most of Atlanta. Due to his length of service, he became the dean of the Georgia congressional delegation. While in the House, Lewis was one of the leaders of the Democratic Party, serving from 1991 as a Chief Deputy Whip and from 2003 as a Senior Chief Deputy Whip. John Lewis received many honorary degrees and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

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July 2, 1908 -- Thurgood Marshall is born in Baltimore, Maryland

7/2/2021

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Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the first African-American United States Solicitor General and Supreme Court Justice in the history of the United States. Prior to his judicial service, he successfully argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall graduated from the Howard University School of Law in 1933. He established a private legal practice in Baltimore before founding the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he served as executive director. In that position, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Smith v. Allwright, Shelley v. Kraemer, and Brown v. Board of Education, the latter of which held that racial segregation in public education is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as the United States Solicitor General. In 1967, Johnson successfully nominated Marshall to succeed retiring Associate Justice Tom C. Clark as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Marshall retired during the administration of President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and was succeeded by Clarence Thomas

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June 30, 1917 -- Singer Lena Horne is born in in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York

6/30/2021

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Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American dancer, actress, Grammy-winning singer, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned over 70 years, appearing in film, television, and theater. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of 16 and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood.

Horne advocated for human rights and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. Later she returned to her roots as a nightclub performer and continued to work on television, while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, retreating from the public eye in 2000. Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010, at the age of 92.

Horne was long involved with the Civil Rights Movement. In 1941, she sang at Café Society, New York City's first integrated venue, and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of black servicemen", according to her Kennedy Center biography. Because the U.S. Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she staged her show for a mixed audience of black U.S. soldiers and white German POWs. Seeing the black soldiers had been forced to sit in the back seats, she walked off the stage to the first row where the black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her. However, the USO observed at the time of her death that Horne did in fact tour "extensively with the USO during WWII on the West Coast and in the South." The organization also commemorated her for the appearances she made on Armed Forces Radio Service programs Jubilee, G.I. Journal, and Command Performances. In the film Stormy Weather (1943), Horne's character would perform the film's title song as part of a big, all-star show for World War II soldiers as well. After quitting the USO in 1945, Horne financed tours of military camps herself.

She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt in attempts to pass anti-lynching laws. Tom Lehrer mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965. In 1983, the NAACP awarded her the Spingarn Medal.

Horne was a registered Democrat and on November 20, 1963, she, along with Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman John Bailey, Carol Lawrence, Richard Adler, Sidney Salomon, Vice-Chairwoman of the DNC Margaret B. Price, and Secretary of the DNC Dorothy Vredenburgh Bush, visited John F. Kennedy at The White House, two days prior to his assassination.

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September 4, 1957 – The Little Rock Crisis: begins as Gov. Orval Fabus calls out the National Guard to prevent African American students from enrolling in Little Rock Central High School.

August 28, 1955 – Black teenager Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent civil rights movement.

August 12, 2006 – Victoria Gray Adams, American civil rights activist, dies.

August 11, 1965 – Riots begin in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California.

August 9, 1909 - Willa Beatrice Player, American educator, first Black woman college president is born in Jackson Mississippi

August 6, 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

July 28, 1917 – The Silent Parade takes place in New York City, in protest against murders, lynchings, and other violence directed towards African Americans.

July 17, 2020 - Civil Rights Leader and US Congressman John Lewis dies at age 80

July 2, 1908 -- Thurgood Marshall is born in Baltimore, Maryland

June 30, 1917 -- Singer Lena Horne is born in in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York

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