329 results
Moore, Harry T.
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 193-194
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Born: November 18, 1905, Houston, FL
Education: Florida Memorial High School, graduated 1925; Florida Normal Institute, Bethune-Cookman College, A.A., 1936, B.S., 1951
Died: December 25, 1951, Tallahassee, FL
A bomb demolished the Florida home of Harry and Harriette Moore, parents, teachers, and civil rights activists, Christmas night in 1951. He died then; hospitalized, she died January 3. Pressed by the NAACP, the FBI investigated the Ku Klux Klan to no avail. The killers remain unknown.
The Moores reflected the activism of many black teachers in the segregated South. Founders of the Brevard County (1934) and Florida State (1941) NAACP, they fought segregation, initiating teachers’ equal salary suit and seeking the right to vote. “A Voteless Citizen Is a Voiceless Citizen” was the motto of the Progressive Voters League, which Harry founded (1945). That year alone, it boosted statewide voter registration from 5 to 37 percent of voting age blacks. Retaliating, Brevard County's school board fired the couple in 1946. After, as state NAACP executive director (1946–51), Harry protested to stop police brutality against blacks. Conceding ground, Brevard County hired the state's first black deputy sheriff (1950) and even allowed him to arrest whites. In addition, Harry pursued the prosecution of Lake County's sheriff for shooting two black men, both in handcuffs. But he and his wife soon were killed. The National NAACP honored them as Civil Rights Martyrs (1952).
Technology
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 272-273
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
African Americans influenced technological developments as consumers and creators during and following America's industrialization (1870s–1930s). As automation and the factory system powered the rise of cities, millions of rural black southerners migrated to the urban South, North, and West, where they interfaced whites and foreign immigrants in the nation's labor pool. An estimated 5.1 million or 43 percent of blacks were city residents by 1930.
Blacks contributed inventions along the way. Lewis H. Latimer devised the blueprint for Bell's telephone and remade Edison's electric light bulb with a longer-burning filament. Garrett A. Morgan invented the gas mask and traffic light. A number of others made women's hair straighteners and skin lighteners, creating a profitable beauty industry in a “race market” of banks, insurance firms, newspapers, funeral homes, groceries, eateries, and more. Black workers (especially those in coal, steel, automobile, meat packing, textile, tobacco, and timber industries) increasingly used new products. Those included cast-iron stoves, which domestics for white employers cooked on and cleaned, and factory-made clothes. More and more blacks bought tractors, cars, electricity, radios, and telephones, all mirroring intrablack educational, income, and cultural differences.
World War II and the postwar period brought shifts in race relations and influences of technology. Even as car, tractor, and television-buying increased among middle-class blacks, tractors and mechanical cotton pickers displaced black sharecropper and tenant farmer families. An estimated 1.5 million of them migrated to the North and West between 1939 and 1950. The percentage of all African American urban dwellers rose from 50 percent in 1940 to 80 percent in 1970. Desegregation and civil rights reforms leveraged blacks’ progress in education, technical training, skilled occupations, and professions, including medicine, engineering, electronics, and computer science. But poor and unskilled blacks were left behind. Deindustrialization (severe in steel, auto, and other manufacturing plants by the late 1960s) brought massive layoffs and plant shutdowns. Plants also moved from industrial centers like Detroit, Michigan and reopened in Sun Belt states. Conspicuous among the jobless and unemployable were African Americans without skills as well as a growing black underclass, who, with their counterparts in Rural America, had become victims of America's service and information economy.
Terrell, Mary Church
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 275-276
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Born: September 23, 1863, Memphis, TN
Education: Oberlin College, B.A. honors, 1884, M.A., 1888
Died: July 24, 1954, Washington, DC
Terrell fought for social justice. “A White Woman has only one handicap to overcome–a great one, true, her sex; a colored woman faces two–her sex and race,” she said in A Colored Woman in a White World (Simian, 2006, p. 93). “A colored man has only one–that of race.”
Espousing racial, class, and gender equality, she advanced black education and progress. Child of an ex-slave who amassed considerable wealth in Jim Crow Tennessee, well educated, and wife of a federal judge, Terrell served her community. She taught school; led women in charity service, and organized the National Association of Colored Women, whose motto was “Lifting as We Climb.” With state and local affiliates, it supported schools, nurseries, and housing in underserved communities. It also espoused moral respectability. Cofounder of the NAACP, Terrell helped lead its antilynching and women's suffrage campaigns. A leader in the National Council of Negro Women, she became a forerunner in the use of sit-down protests at segregated restaurants ca. 1940s. During their 1950 “sit down,” a Washington, DC café refused to serve Terrell and others. They sued. In 1953 the US Supreme Court approved their suit and ordered the desegregation of District of Columbia public accommodations.
Davis, Angela Y.
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 76-77
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Born: January 26, 1944, Birmingham, AL
Education: Brandeis University, B.A. magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1965; University of California San Diego, M.A., 1969; Humboldt University of Berlin, Ph.D.
Davis is one of the most influential political activists of the twentieth century. While a graduate student, she was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther and Communist Parties. She taught philosophy at UCLA (1969–70). Fired for being a communist, she sued and stayed until her contract ended.
But she earned international respect. She proved crucial in the Panthers’ efforts to liberate “black political prisoners” such as the “Soledad Brothers,” one of whom was George Jackson. George's brother Jonathan, not incarcerated and using Davis's registered guns, attempted to free two black convicts at the Marin County courthouse in August 1970. He and three others, including the judge, were killed. Guards fatally shot George Jackson, allegedly attempting to escape, in 1971. Charged as a co-conspirator, Davis fled. Arrested by October in New York and extradited to California, she was held without bail until a February 1972 trial. Meanwhile, the National Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners, a multiracial coalition, organized “Free Angela” rallies internationally. The jury acquitted her. Afterward, she founded the National Alliance against Racism and Political Repression, which helped secure federal antihate crime laws. A public intellectual, Davis remains outspoken on civil and human rights.
Parks, Gordon
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 217-218
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Born: November 30, 1912, Fort Scott, KS
Education: Fort Scott, KS high school
Died: March 7, 2006, New York, NY
Growing up poor with fourteen siblings, Parks struggled to succeed and did so remarkably. The camera “was to become my weapon against poverty and racism,” he declared. He took many pictures of everyday life on his train stopovers as a Pullman porter in the mid-1930s. Those photos not only earned him a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship but also attracted the attention of Eastman Kodak Company, which exhibited them at its store in Chicago.
Parks rose to be an award-winning photographer, writer, and filmmaker. He worked for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information in the 1940s. His photo of black housekeeper Ella Watson, posing with her broom and mop beside the US flag in a federal building, is an American classic. He desegregated the photography staffs of Vogue and Life, completing more than 300 assignments between 1948 and 1972 for Life alone. He photographed racial and social conditions from Harlem to Latin America as well as 1960s civil rights protests and race riots. In its effort to address issues that the rioting bared, the motion picture industry named Parks director of The Learning Tree (1969), based on his autobiography (1963) and the first Hollywood film directed by an African American.
Evers, Medgar W.
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 92-93
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Born: July 2, 1925, Decatur, MS
Education: Alcorn A & M College, B.A., 1952
Died: June 12, 1963, Jackson, MS
Evers was shot fatally on the portal of his Jackson, Mississippi home in 1963. The assassin was not convicted and imprisoned for life until 1994.
Evers became NAACP state field secretary in 1954. He recruited members, organized local chapters, led pickets against gas stations denying restrooms to blacks, and investigated racial atrocities. He publicized the murders of Emmett Till (age fourteen) in 1955 and Charles Mack Parker (age twenty-three) in 1959, blaming the Ku Klux Klan. He urged blacks to demand civil rights.
His leadership inspired others. When students from Tougaloo College and Jackson State University began the Jackson sit-ins in 1961, he spearheaded a boycott of white merchants. This move, along with arrivals of CORE-sponsored Freedom Riders, attracted media to the city. He also insisted that Ole Miss admit James Meredith, whose admission would require the federal marshals he had been requesting for years. In the meantime, Klansmen escalated their attempts to kill him. They threw a dynamite bomb into his garage, which failed to explode, only weeks before his assassination. Evers's shameful death fueled international publicity on the black freedom struggle in the South and the nation.
Tuskegee Experiment
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 281-282
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Authorized by the US Public Health Service (PHS) and Tuskegee Institute, “Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” was one of the most inhumane medical experiments in the twentieth century. Centered in Macon County, Alabama and enrolling 600 poor black men, 399 infected and 201 noninfected, the experiment began in 1932 and lasted until 1972, when public censure forced its termination.
It enjoyed official sanction. Subjects received free meals, physical examinations, and burial costs. Syphilitic subjects were never informed of their disease, merely told that they had “bad blood.” Penicillin became available for treatment of syphilis in the 1940s, but they did not get it. Instead, while infected men suffered, doctors studied their syphilitic symptoms. Many endured painful deaths; eight survived. Five of them attended a White House ceremony to hear the president's apology (1977). Since that time the federal government has paid more than $10 million in compensation to the men's survivors and heirs.
Immigration
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 134-134
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Black immigration is a rich source of US cultural pluralism; it evolved from racial slavery and discrimination.
Europeans imported more than 12 million African blacks to the Western Hemisphere as slaves ca. 1502–1888, with British North American colonies importing 6.45 percent of them. Congress made only whites eligible for citizenship in 1790 and, from 1865 to 1965, when it abolished “quotas based on national origin,” denied alien status to Africans.
African, Caribbean, and South American immigrants arrived in large numbers post-1965. Seeking asylum and jobs, they helped increase the foreign-born black population sevenfold between 1960 and 1980. Foreign-born blacks increased from 125,000 (1980) to 2,815,000 (2005), most immigrating after 1990. One-third originated in Africa and two-thirds in the Caribbean and Latin America. Ten countries, notably Nigeria and Ethiopia, accounted for 70 percent of black African immigrants. They tended to settle in densely populated cities such as Washington, DC and New York City. A majority of Caribbean blacks and Latinos came from Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and the Dominican Republic; two-thirds of their total number settled in the New York and Miami metropolitan areas. About a million black-immigrant Africans, plus 3 million West Indians and Latinos of African descent, live in the United States today.
Massive Resistance
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 179-180
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Brown (1954) and Brown II (1955) disallowed school segregation and ordered desegregation “with all deliberate speed.”
Segregationists objected. Senator Harry Byrd (D–VA) invoked “massive resistance to this order” and a hundred congressmen endorsed the Southern Manifesto (1956) defying “judicial encroachment.” Five state legislatures amended laws so no white child would be forced to attend a desegregated school; four denied funds to racially mixed schools; and eight adopted resolutions upholding the right to close public schools. Ten enacted statutes banning the NAACP, alleging it was a communist front. Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan harassed African American parents who signed NAACP petitions for pupil transfers and whose children attended white schools. When a black woman enrolled at the University of Alabama in the fall of 1956, whites rioted. Little Rock, Arkansas became a battleground the next year when the governor defied a Federal Court order to enroll nine black students at all-white Central High School. The president eventually deployed the 101st Airborne Division to protect them. Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its schools (1959–64). Resisters undermined America's reputation abroad and escalated civil rights enforcement. Defiance waned after the Supreme Court overruled states’ freedom-of-choice plans (1968) and permitted busing for school integration (1971).
Film
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 100-101
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Although negative images of black people pervaded the early New York and Hollywood motion picture industry, blacks contested racism in film. Silent movies invariably depicted a dumb, silly, and subservient Negro. Depicting that character was The Birth of a Nation (1915); a three-hour melodrama of the Civil War and Reconstruction, it glorified slavery and the Ku Klux Klan and set box office records. Race caricatures infused sound pictures such as The Jazz Singer (1927). Gone with the Wind (1939) featured plantations with “crooning darkies and mint juleps.” Television followed suit in the late 1940s. Amos’ n’ Andy (1950), a popular black comedy on CBS, presented lowbrow characters. Black newspapers and civil rights organizations, led by the NAACP, had begun protesting antiblack films in 1915.
Their struggle against “unfair representation” continued. Editorializing, picketing, and creating black cinema, they prodded Hollywood toward fairness. Caught in the crossfire of protests were actors such as Lincoln Perry, who played the minstrel Stepin Fetchit, and Hattie McDaniel, the first black Academy Award winner. She won Best Supporting Actress “as a strong and resolute Mammy” in Gone with the Wind. Also, from 1915 to 1945, blacks produced more than 200 “race movies,” featuring doctors, lawyers, ministers, soldiers, cowboys, or gangsters. Oscar Micheaux made more than thirty, including The Symbol of the Unconquered (1921), which condemned lynching, and Birthright (1939), starring a northern college graduate who confronted southern Jim Crow.
Black casting changed. In 1942 Lena Horne signed a long-term contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Unprecedented, it stipulated “that she would not be cast in stereotypical black roles.” Horne appeared in Stormy Weather (1943), singing her hit song of the same name. A speaking role in Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) raised her profile and helped dignify the black female image. Between The Negro Soldier (1943), a government-backed documentary, and Lilies of the Field (1963), featuring Sidney Poitier and a racially mixed cast, blacks began appearing in dignified roles. Poitier received the 1963 Academy Award for Best Actor, the first for a black actor.
Change persisted. Films such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1968), which starred Poitier as a highly accomplished doctor and showed “blacks as working and middle-class people in normal, loving relationships,” saw a growing audience.
Micheaux, Oscar
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 185-186
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Born: January 24, Metropolis, IL
Education: Metropolis public schools
Died: March 25, 1951, Charlotte, NC
A pioneer filmmaker, Micheaux produced Race Movies during the Jim Crow era. He left Illinois at seventeen to be a writer, but worked as a Pullman porter and lived on a South Dakota farm.
Eventually, he began writing and self-publishing books and operating a film company, which issued The Homesteader (1919). Based on his novel, it showed blacks “in dignified roles” and was the first silent race movie. Micheaux made “44 of the 82 all-Negro pictures” advertised from 1920 to 1950, though most of his are lost. He financed production primarily with book sales, paid previews, and companies in New York City and Chicago, the large movie markets.
Micheaux's films captured the black experience. Some reviewers charged that he glorified elite and ignored poor blacks, but Micheaux exposed lived realities, including blacks’ light-skin prejudice and whites’ racist violence. A lynching witness inspired Within Our Gates (1919), which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan's wartime revival. Birthright (1924) depicted a black teacher's successful battle to build a school in the segregated South, while Body and Soul (1924) unveiled a hypocritical black preacher. The Exile (1931) became the first black sound film. Fittingly, the US Postal Service issued a Micheaux commemorative stamp (2010).
Miscegenation
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 191-191
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Derived from genus and miscere, Latin for race and mix, miscegenation historically evoked white fear. Democrats, charging Republicans with “the sexual mixing of races, particularly of whites and blacks,” perpetrated anti-miscegenation laws in at least twenty, mostly southern states, from the end of the Civil War to Loving v. Virginia (1967). Anti-miscegenation ideology also fueled collective terror, such as black lynching, against “interracial domestic relationships.” Loving overruled Virginia and all states’ statutes banning white–black marriage.
Comparatively few interracial unions have occurred since that decision. For every 100,000 married couples in 1960, there were 126 white–black marriages and 396 by 1990. But attitudes were changing. In the mid-1990s, only 18 percent of whites said yes to this National Research Opinion Center query: “Do you think there should be laws against marriages between Blacks and Whites?” In addition, 97 and 99 percent of black men and women, respectively, preferred marriage in their racial group.
Wagner Act (1935)
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 289-289
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Proposing this measure, known as the National Labor Relations Act, Senator Robert F. Wagner (Dem–NY) argued that the government must ensure democracy in industry and workers the right to organize and bargain collectively through their representatives.
While eyeing such ends, the Wagner Act did not prohibit racial discrimination in hiring or cover farm and domestic labor. It formed a National Labor Relations Board with the authority to regulate interstate commercial work and employer–employee relations. It banned blacklisting or other reprisals against employees who joined unions, picketed, and participated in strikes. It required employers to recognize and negotiate with workers’ spokesmen. In short, it aimed to elevate working conditions, increase wages, and secure a peaceful workplace. Employers widely rejected the law, as did many in the press and legal community. Even so, the Supreme Court upheld it in 1937. Workers continued to unionize, sometimes across the color line, in the steel, auto, tobacco, coal, meatpacking, railroad, and shipping industries, among others.
Back-to-Africa Movement
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 25-25
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
African repatriation for ex-slaves and free blacks from North America and other Western societies began during the eighteenth century. For example, Job Ben Solomon of Senegal was captured, sold to a slave trader, and shipped to Maryland. Literate in Arabic, Job wrote a letter to his father that fell into the hands of a white official, who had it translated. He then helped to buy and liberate Job, who returned to his homeland in 1734. Approximately 1,200 slaves, among the thousands who were emancipated and evacuated by the British after the Revolutionary War, repatriated to Sierra Leone in 1791.
Black emigration to Africa grew in the wake of northern slave emancipation (1780–1846). Free black Boston shipowner Paul Cuffee transported 38 ex-slaves to Sierra Leone in 1815, which foreshadowed a meeting of Presbyterian ministers in Philadelphia the next year. They organized the American Colonization Society (ACS), whose wealthy members included southern masters who pushed to relocate freed blacks. Black opposition to and support for ACS increased. ACS received a $100,000 federal subsidy and founded the African colony of Liberia (1821). It resettled probably 13,000 blacks prior to the Civil War and a total of 20,000 by its closing in 1910. Blacks also emigrated by means of independent black programs despite slavery and post–Civil War segregation. Vital to emigrationism ca. 1900–1945 were Pan-African congresses and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, pursuing Back-to-Africa, freedom, independence, and justice for blacks in Africa and its Diaspora. Many civil rights and Black Power activists later pursued the same goals.
Convict-Lease System
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 70-71
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Reinventing the Black Codes, which incarcerated and hired out ex-slaves for vagrancy before Congress repealed the codes in 1866–67, convict leasing evolved as Democrats overthrew Reconstruction and “committed to using black convicts for internal southern development” (Cohen, 1991, p. 222).
Leasing became the New Slavery. Operating in an environment of limited tax revenues, states allowed private and public contractors to lease convicts. This helped reduce the cost of state and county prisons, collect revenue, and maintain white control. Planters and industrialists usually leased black prisoners, men and women. Lessees had sole custody of prisoners’ rations, hours in the fields or mines, and health. Abuses were rampant. Many inmates died from brutality, exposure, and illness, or in work accidents and escape attempts. They also served longer sentences for insubordination, ensuring that imprisoned laborers always would be available. State officials contended that habitually criminal blacks deserved their lot. Civil rights and penal reformers challenged that argument in the early twentieth century.
Loving v. Virginia (1967)
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 174-175
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Virginia citizens Richard Loving (white) and Mildred Jeter (black) married in Washington, DC in 1958. Their state prohibited interracial marriage by laws dating from slavery and endured during Jim Crow. State authorities arrested, indicted, and convicted the couple in 1959 for violating the Racial Integrity Act (1924). But a judge voided the one-year prison sentence for twenty-five years if they would leave Virginia.
They moved to the District of Columbia and found legal counsel. In 1963 the American Civil Liberties Union filed their petition against Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute. However, after three years of litigation, the Virginia Court of Appeals ruled to sustain it. But the US Supreme Court invalidated that ruling 9–0 in 1967. “Virginia is now one of 16 States which prohibit and punish marriages on the basis of racial classifications,” the Court concluded, and it set aside such statutes in all states. It defined marriage as a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Hamer, Fannie Lou
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 120-121
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Born: October 6, 1917, Montgomery County, MS
Education: Sunflower County elementary school
Died: March 14, 1977, Ruleville, MS
Documentaries often capture Mrs. Hamer singing “This Little Light of Mine” at the Democratic National Convention (1964). Cofounder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), she testified in a nationally televised hearing on its challenge for official seats. Such images depict the activism that underlay her induction to the National Women's Hall of Fame (1993).
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) recruited Hamer from a plantation timekeeping job to register black voters. “Nobody never come out into the country and talked to real farmers” before SNCC came, she stated. Yet “it was these kids what broke a lot of this down. They treated us like we were special and we loved ‘em... We trusted ‘em” (Jones-Brown, Frazier, and Brooks, 2014, p. 539).
Enlarging the trust, Hamer pursued blacks’ right to vote, for which she was shot at and beaten; engaged in electoral politics through MFDP; ran for Congress; cofounded the National Women's Political Caucus (1971); and established Freedom Farm (1969–74), a nonprofit venture to provide food, social services, educational assistance, and job training. Despite suffering with cancer during her final years, she remained active in civil, human, and women's rights causes. Indeed, she represented the long struggle for human dignity and social justice in America.
Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 165-165
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
During the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Birmingham campaign (1963), police brutally attacked nonviolent demonstrators, including hundreds of schoolchildren. They used firemen with high-pressure water hoses and attack dogs, as media reported and televised race brutality to the nation and world. Among the protest leaders arrested, King was held in City Jail. A Post-Herald statement by eight white clergy criticized him for the civil disorders, which particularly put children at risk.
King answered them. He began drafting a reply in the margins of the newspaper, continued on scraps of paper “supplied by a friendly Negro trusty,” and finished “on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me.” Writing to his critics in the New Testament tradition of the Apostle Paul, King gave biblical and philosophical reasons for why he must “carry the gospel of freedom to all communities and states.” He defended the use of nonviolence and direct action, its timing, and its call to justice. King also deplored the moral fence-sitting of “the white moderate” and commended the “still too few” antiracist whites. Finally, he expressed hope “to meet each of you ... as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother.”
Negro History Movement
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 210-211
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Formal study of the black past followed History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (1882), by ex-Union soldier and pastor George Washington Williams, and A School History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1890 (1890), by North Carolina educator Edward A. Johnson.
Negro history evolved as a field in the early 1900s. Atlanta University professor W. E. B. Du Bois hosted annual research conferences, publishing sixteen historical and sociological Studies of the Negro Problem (ca. 1899–1910) that inspired much inquiry. Carter G. Woodson, the “Father of Negro History,” made recovery of the black experience his lifework. He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915 and the Journal of Negro History (JNH) in 1916. Woodson critically defined black historiography and mentored its noted researchers and scholars. To promote race pride as well as “to convince all that we have a heritage,” he established “Negro History Week” (1926) and the Negro History Bulletin for juvenile readers (1937). His scholarly contributions helped lay the groundwork for Black Studies in the 1960s. Afro-American replaced Negro in ASNLH's official name by 1972. African American is used in the names of its Journal and Bulletin today.
Affirmative Action
- from Entries
- Raymond Gavins, Duke University, North Carolina
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Guide to African American History
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2016, pp 3-3
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Executive Order 10925 (1961) created the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which required federal contractors to “take affirmative action” against discrimination. The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex (later including sexual identity and physical condition). It also formed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); affirmative action became shorthand for ensuring equal economic, educational, and political opportunities.
African Americans pursued equality in education, employment, housing, and more. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and National Women's Law Center, among other groups, provided crucial assistance. In the meantime, federal courts began a retreat from remedies for inequalities such as de facto segregated schools. In 1974 the Supreme Court disallowed a lower court's order requiring that suburban school districts bus students as part of an adjacent urban district's desegregation plan. Opponents called affirmative action “reverse discrimination” or “race preferences” as it saw growing opposition. However, the second Clinton administration “vowed to ‘mend not end’ affirmative action.” It did so largely by reducing cash payments and job-training programs that crucially helped welfare recipients. In a 1997 Gallup Poll, 79 percent of whites believed black applicants had an equal opportunity to be hired, compared to 51 percent of blacks.
See also Bakke v. Board of Regents of California (1978) ; Civil Rights Act of 1964.