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History > USA > Civil rights > Activists
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Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs (...) spent much of her life advocating for civil rights and labor rights, became such a noted figure in Detroit's Black Power movement that people assumed she must be partially black.
In some of her FBI files, Boggs, who is Chinese-American, was described as "probably Afro Chinese."
(...)
A few years later, in the 1940s, she moved to Detroit to help edit the radical newsletter Correspondence.
There, she met a charismatic auto worker and activist named James Boggs.
Grace and James Boggs married in 1953.
"When he rose to speak his mind, he would speak with such passion, challenging all within hearing to stretch their humanity ... he would often bring down the house," Boggs wrote in 1998 in her autobiography, Living For Change.
They married in 1953.
Together, the couple became two of the city's most noted activists, tackling issues related to labor and civil rights, feminism, Black Power, Asian Americans and the environment.
In 1974, they wrote Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century;
in 1998, she published an autobiography, Living For Change;
and in 2011, she co-wrote The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism For The Twenty-First Century with Scott Kurashige, a professor and author.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/27/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/27/
Clarence B Jones
Jones takes notes as King gives a press conference in Birmingham, Alabama, in February 1963.
Photograph: Ernst Haas
Getty Images
‘Martin Luther King told me I wouldn’t see 50’: the long, momentous life of Clarence B Jones Jones was 29 when he went to work for the civil rights leader.
As King’s friend, adviser and speechwriter, he was at the heart of the attempt to reform the US. Six decades on, he remembers their battles and their triumphs G Tue 29 Aug 2023 10.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/29/
In February 1960, Clarence B Jones heard a knock at the door.
What followed would change his life for ever.
Then 29 years old, a talented and meticulous copyright lawyer who had recently moved to California for a job in the entertainment industry, Jones was beginning to enjoy the material rewards of his success:
a modern home, a fast car, tailored suits and cocktail lunches.
Earlier that week, however, he had received a phone call from a mentor in New York named Hubert Delany, asking if he would be willing to join him on the legal defence of a civil rights campaigner and preacher in Alabama who was embroiled in a spurious legal action over his tax affairs. Jones politely declined, but Delany warned him to expect a visit from the preacher within 48 hours.
He was not one to give up easily.
Now Martin Luther King stood before him, there to make the request in person.
King complimented Jones on his beautiful home, and asked questions about his childhood, and the death of his mother, whom he was still grieving.
He told him he needed a skilled Black attorney to help coordinate his defence team of mostly white lawyers.
By the end of their meeting, Jones had politely refused again, mildly offended that King had expected him to decamp from his career on the coast and travel to the deep south to work for nothing.
As a courtesy, however, he agreed to go and watch King preach that Sunday in Los Angeles.
I was mesmerised.
I have never heard any human being who could speak like Dr King spoke.
It was spellbinding
It was the sermon that changed everything.
Jones, now 92, remembers it as if it were yesterday.
The rhythm of his speech.
The tapestry of his words.
The stillness as King spoke.
“I was mesmerised,” he says.
“I have never heard any human being who could speak like Dr King spoke.
I sat there, like: ‘Oh. My. God.’
It was spellbinding.”
The subject quickly turned to Jones himself, although not by name.
King referenced a talented Black lawyer who had refused to join the movement.
What might his late mother think of her son’s decision?
He read from Langston Hughes’ poem Mother to Son, about a mother’s life’s journey through hardship.
Tears fell from Jones’s eyes.
“When do you want me in Montgomery?” he later asked King.
Within days he was on a train down south. “It was the making of a disciple,” he says.
“There was more to my life than Martin Luther King, but that was a defining experience for me.”
Jones would soon prove his worth, helping to secure an acquittal on the tax charges, and quickly becoming King’s personal attorney, adviser, draft speech writer and fundraiser.
Present at some of the pivotal moments in the civil rights movement’s later history, and now one of the last living members of King’s inner circle, he has only recently begun to share his story in full.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/29/
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/29/
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/28/
Thomas Gaither ? - 2025
caption and credit in next edition
Thomas Gaither, Who Chose Jail After Civil Rights Sit-ins, Dies at 86 When he and other Black protesters were arrested at a whites-only lunch counter in 1961, they tried a new strategy — ‘Jail No Bail’ — and energized a movement. NYT January 24, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/
When he and other Black protesters were arrested at a whites-only lunch counter in 1961, they tried a new strategy — ‘Jail No Bail’ — and energized a movement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/
James Morris Lawson Jr. 1928-2024
Top Strategist for Dr. King
After studying Gandhi’s principles of civil disobedience in India, he joined the 1960s civil rights movement and became an architect of it as a nonviolent struggle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/
David S. Johnson USA 1926-2024
"Boy and Lincoln, 1963"
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Photographer David Johnson, who chronicled San Francisco's Black culture, dies at 97 NPR MARCH 17, 2024 5:00 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/17/
David Johnson generally wasn't interested in people posing for his camera.
As the photographer and civil rights activist put it in a 2017 interview at the University of California, Berkeley: "A big smiling photograph? That wasn't my style."
(...)
Johnson was the first Black student of the famous nature photographer Ansel Adams and became known as one of the foremost chroniclers of San Francisco's Black urban culture.
(...)
Johnson was born in 1926 in Jacksonville, Fla., to an impoverished single mother who handed her baby off to be raised by a cousin.
In a 2013 interview with San Francisco member station KQED, Johnson said he got his first camera by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door.
"I just started snapping pictures around the neighborhood. And I got kind of fascinated with that," he said.
Johnson was drafted into the U.S. Navy right out of high school.
He was stationed in San Francisco, falling in love with the city, and was then sent to the Philippines for the remainder of World War II.
After returning, he wanted to develop his photography skills in college.
It was 1946, and budding photographers were clamoring to get into the program that master lensman Adams= had just launched at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
Its star-studded faculty included Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange.
Johnson wanted in.
So he sent Adams a letter. "I wrote to Ansel and said, 'I'm interested in studying photography. I have the GI Bill. And I would like for you to evaluate my [application].'
Ansel wrote me back and said, 'There are no vacancies in the class,' " he told KQED.
But a student dropped out, making room for Johnson.
He hopped on a segregated train that took him from Jacksonville to San Francisco.
After living in Adams' house for a while, he eventually found a low-rent room in the city's Fillmore District and started taking lots of photos.
(...)
And he used his camera to spark conversations about civil rights.
"There's one really iconic photograph of a woman listening to a speech and she's got kind of a dubious look on her face, but in her glasses are reflected the American flag," Hult-Lewis said.
"There's another incredible photograph of a young African American boy sitting, holding an American flag in the embrace of a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln."
Johnson also often participated in direct political action.
He attended the 1963 March on Washington, and organized the first Black caucus at the University of California, San Francisco.
"He was part of a group that successfully sued the San Francisco Unified School District to compel them to more fully desegregate the schools," Hult-Lewis said.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/17/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/17/
Dorie Ann Ladner USA 1942-2024
Dorie Ladner, left, and her sister Joyce at the March on Washington in 1963.
Ms. Ladner participated in virtually every major civil rights march of the 1960s.
Photograph: Danny Lyon Magnum Photos
Dorie Ladner, Unheralded Civil Rights Heroine, Dies at 81 She risked arrest and worse in pursuit of her goals of integration and voting rights from the time she was a teenager. NYT Published March 15, 2024 Updated March 16, 2024, 9:49 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/
Ms. Ladner carried an American flag when she attended the funeral of the four girls killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.
Photograph: Danny Lyon Magnum Photos
Dorie Ladner, Unheralded Civil Rights Heroine, Dies at 81 She risked arrest and worse in pursuit of her goals of integration and voting rights from the time she was a teenager. NYT Published March 15, 2024 Updated March 16, 2024, 9:49 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/
largely unsung heroine on the front lines of the 1960s civil rights movement in the South, a crusade that shamed the nation into abolishing some of the last vestiges of legal segregation
(...)
in racially segregated Mississippi by a mother who taught her to take no guff, Ms. Ladner joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a teenager;
left college three times to organize voter-registration campaigns and promote integration;
packed a gun on occasion, as some of her prominent colleagues were shot or blown up;
befriended the movement’s most celebrated figures;
and participated in virtually every major civil rights march of the decade.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/
James Nathaniel Brown / Jim Brown 1936-2023
Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns on the sidelines during a game at Cleveland Stadium in the early 1960s.
Photograph: Tony Tomsic via Associated Press
Jim Brown, Football Great and Civil Rights Champion, Dies at 87 After a Hall of Fame career in the N.F.L., he pursued social activism and Hollywood stardom, but his image was stained by accusations of abuse toward women. NYT May 19, 2023 3:48 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/
Jim Brown appears with a group of top Black athletes at a meeting at the Negro Industrial and Economic Union to hear Cassius Clay’s view for rejecting Army induction.
News conference shows (front row): Bill Russell, Boston Celtics; Cassius Clay; Jim Brown and Lew Alcindor;
back row (left to right): Carl Stokes, Democratic state representative; Walter Beach, Cleveland Browns; Bobby Mitchell, Washington Redskins; Sid Williams, Cleveland Browns; Curtis McClinton, Kansas City Chiefs; Willie Davis, Green Bay Packers; Jim Shorter, former Brown and John Wooten, Cleveland Browns.
Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Jim Brown, all-time NFL great running back and social activist, dies aged 87 Titan of sports, movies and civil rights activism dead at 87 G Fri 19 May 2023 20.31 BST Last modified on Fri 19 May 2023 21.36 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/may/19/
Jim Brown, seated third from left, invited Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) and other leading Black athletes to support Ali in 1967.
Photograph: Tony Tomsic Associated Press
Jim Brown Should Be Seen Fully, Flaws and All Brown, who died on Thursday, demanded that people see more to him than strong athletic performances. In the 1960s, that was unusual for athletes. NYT May 20, 2023 Updated 11:16 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/
When the modern civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s, few elite athletes spoke out on racial issues.
But Brown had no hesitation.
Working to promote economic development in Cleveland’s Black neighborhoods while playing for the Browns, he founded the Negro Industrial and Economic Union (later known as the Black Economic Union) as a vehicle to create jobs.
It facilitated loans to Black businessmen in poor areas — what he called Green Power — reflecting his long-held belief that economic self-sufficiency held more promise than mass protests.
In June 1967, Brown invited other leading Black athletes, most notably Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), to the office of his Economic Union to hear Muhammad Ali’s account of his religious and moral convictions at a time when Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and faced imprisonmen for refusing to be drafted in protest over the Vietnam War.
In what came to be called the Ali Summit, viewed as a watershed for the development of racial awareness among athletes, Brown and the others at the session publicly voiced their support for Ali.
By the early 1970s, Brown’s Economic Union had largely faded.
But in the late 1980s he founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation to teach basic life skills to gang members and prisoners, mainly in California, and steer them away from continued senseless violence.
The foundation expanded nationally and remains active.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2023/may/19/
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/may/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/
William Hodding Carter III 1935-2023
As a journalist in Mississippi, he championed civil rights.
(...)
William Hodding Carter III, who did not use his first name, was born on April 7, 1935, in New Orleans, the eldest of three sons of Hodding Jr. and Betty Werlein Carter.
He and his brothers, Philip and Thomas, grew up in Greenville, a river town where their father had founded The Delta Star and merged it with The Democrat-Times in the 1930s.
The newspaper ran a weekly book page in the heartland of William Faulkner, Walker Percy and Shelby Foote.
For decades, The Democrat, as it was known locally, stood for racial moderation in the South — steady, nonviolent progress toward justice, although it considered public school integration unwise and federal anti-lynching laws unnecessary.
It condemned the Ku Klux Klan, and it covered the news of racial outrages with an accuracy and impartiality that was lacking in most Southern newspapers.
Hodding Carter Jr., the publisher, who won a Pulitzer in 1946 for his editorials, was revered by many liberals and members of the journalistic fraternity but widely regarded as the most hated man in Mississippi.
There were obscene calls and death threats, effigy hangings, burning crosses and boycotts against the newspaper.
The brothers sometimes saw their father sitting out on the porch with a shotgun at night, awaiting an attack that never came.
(...)
In 1959, after two years in the Marine Corps, Mr. Carter gave up plans to go into the Foreign Service and returned to Greenville.
“We felt that we owed it to Dad and the paper to go back there and give it one year,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1977.
It turned into 17 years.
He began as a reporter but was soon writing editorials.
He eventually became editor and publisher, taking over from his father, who was losing his eyesight, the result of a detached retina and an old Army injury that had left him blind in one eye.
The son’s early editorials were expressions of moderation similar to his father’s. But as the civil rights struggle spread across the South in the 1960s, they became more strident, condemning the brutality of police officers who attacked nonviolent demonstrators and politicians who upheld white supremacy.
They were his words, but his father’s legacy.
(...)
Mr. Carter became increasingly active in Mississippi politics, a participant as well as a chronicler of the struggle for full Black participation.
In 1964, he worked for Lyndon B. Johnson’s successful presidential campaign.
He later co-founded the Mississippi Loyalist Democrats, an amalgam of civil rights advocates that edged out the state’s white party regulars at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/
Sandra Cason USA 1937-2023
(she later adopted the first name Casey)
important organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during its push for civil rights in the early 1960s and the co-author of two papers that called out sexism within that organization and in society in general — documents that are credited with helping to inspire second-wave feminism —
(...)
Ms. Hayden, a native Texan, was a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin in early 1960 when she joined Black students in anti-segregation protests.
According to newspaper accounts at the time, she was one of the first white students to do so.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/
Israel Seymour Dresner 1929-2022
Robert Parris Moses 1935-2021
Mr. Moses developed a reputation for extraordinary calm in the face of violence as he helped to register thousands of voters and trained a generation of activists in Mississippi in the early 1960s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/25/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/02/
Gloria Richardson Dandridge 1922-2021
Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr. 1935-2021
Cordy Tindell Vivian 1924-2020
Joseph Lowery 1921-2020
The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, second from left, helped lead a 1970 march in Atlanta against war and racial oppression.
Also present was Coretta Scott King, fourth from left.
Photograph: Associated Press
Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, Civil Rights Leader and Aide to King, Dies at 98 A lieutenant to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Lowery helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott and gave the benediction at President Barack Obama’s inauguration. NYT March 28, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/
Joseph Lowery helped start the influential Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/28/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/
Hunter Pitts O’Dell 1923-2019
By mid-1963, Jack O’Dell had been working for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for about 18 months, raising funds and helping to register voters.
He brought a diverse résumé to the job, having worked as a merchant seaman, union activist and insurance salesman.
But he had also been a member of the Communist Party, which alarmed President John F. Kennedy and the director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/
Theresa Burroughs ? - 2019
Voting rights activist
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/24/
https://storycorps.org/stories/
Samuel Moon Snipes 1919-2019
white lawyer who held off a mob of protesters while representing the first black family to move into the all-white development of Levittown, Pa.
(...)
Mr. Snipes represented Daisy and Bill Myers when they and their three young children moved into Levittown in 1957.
He handled the closing on the home purchase and informed the police that an African-American family would be moving into the development, knowing that controversy would follow, said David Kushner, the author of the 2009 book “Levittown,” which explored the family’s ordeal.
“He felt they had every right to live there,” Mr. Kushner said.
The Myers family’s arrival on Aug. 13, 1957, sparked weeks of unrest, harassment and cross burnings.
Threats were made by phone, by mail and by screaming, spitting protesters outside the family’s home.
At one point, Mr. Snipes held off a mob until the police arrived.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/
Rosanell Eaton (born Johnson) 1921-2018
resolute African-American woman who was hailed by President Barack Obama as a beacon of civil rights for her role as a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against a restrictive North Carolina voting law that reached the Supreme Court in 2016.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/09/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/09/
Dovey Johnson Roundtree 1914-2018
Ms. Roundtree, right foreground, on the steps of the Supreme Court in 1955.
Standing behind her is her first law partner, Julius Winfield Robertson.
Photograph: via Dovey Johnson Roundtree
Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Barrier-Breaking Lawyer, Dies at 104 NYT May 21, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/
born Dovey Mae Johnson
Ms. Roundtree graduated from law school in 1950.
Admitted to the District of Columbia bar the next year, she went into practice with a classmate, Julius Winfield Robertson.
In 1962, despite a storm of protest from its members, she became the first African-American admitted to the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia.
There was little remunerative work for Robertson & Roundtree at first.
Committed to helping disenfranchised clients, the partners were often paid, Ms. Roundtree recalled in a 1994 interview, with “two dozen eggs, a bag of greens and leftover poundcake.”
Mr. Robertson moonlighted on the night shift at the post office.
Ms. Roundtree served as an Army recruiter in Ohio during World War II.
She was one of the first 40 black women selected for officer training in the newly created Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.
Then, in 1952, they took on a case that would quietly become a landmark: Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company.
Sarah Louise Keys was a young black private in the Women’s Army Corps.
Earlier that year, in uniform, she had traveled by bus from Fort Dix, in New Jersey, to her home in North Carolina.
In Roanoke Rapids, N.C., a new driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white Marine, just as Ms. Roundtree had been told to do years before.
Ms. Keys demurred and was arrested and jailed for disorderly conduct.
Ms. Keys’s lawsuit sought to challenge the country’s longstanding “separate but equal” doctrine.
Confirmed by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson — a seminal decision of 1896 that has long been considered one of the court’s least felicitous — the doctrine enfranchised the separation of the races in public facilities.
In early 1953, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the Keys suit on jurisdictional grounds.
But because Ms. Keys’s journey had involved the crossing of state lines, Ms. Roundtree and Mr. Robertson realized that they might profitably plead the case before the Interstate Commerce Commission.
A federal agency, the commission was charged with regulating railroads, buses and the like.
In 1954, the commission rejected their case.
But by then, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, handed down that year, had outlawed segregation in public schools.
Ms. Roundtree and Mr. Robertson approached the commission again, arguing that the Brown decision should apply equally to transportation.
On Nov. 7, 1955, the commission issued its decision, banning segregation on interstate bus travel.
Though the ruling would not be enforced for six years — in 1961, amid the violence against Freedom Riders in the South, the United States attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, pressured the commission to do so — it was a civil rights watershed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/
Daniel James Charles 1938-2017
first black photographer to be hired by The New York Times, and (...) drew acclaim for his evocative shots of the civil rights movement and everyday life in New York
(...)
In more than four decades at The Times, Mr. Charles photographed a wide range of subjects, from local hangouts to celebrities to fashion to the United Nations.
But he may be best remembered for the work that earned him early acclaim:
his photographs of key moments and figures of the civil rights era.
In 1964, he took a now-famous photograph, for Ebony magazine, of Malcolm X holding a rifle as he peered out of the window of his Queens home.
In 1968, for The Times, he photographed Coretta Scott King, her gaze fixed in the distance, at the funeral of her husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/
https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2017/12/25/
Richard Claxton Gregory 1932-2017
Roger Wilkins 1932-2017
Roger Wilkins (...) championed civil rights for black Americans for five decades as an official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a foundation executive, a journalist, an author and a university professor
(...)
A black lawyer in the corridors of power, Mr. Wilkins was an assistant United States attorney general, ran domestic programs for the Ford Foundation, wrote editorials for The Washington Post and The New York Times, taught history at George Mason University for nearly 20 years and was close to leading lights of literature, music, politics, journalism and civil rights.
Roy Wilkins, who led the N.A.A.C.P. from 1955 to 1977, was his uncle.
Roger Wilkins’s early mentor was Thurgood Marshall, the renowned civil rights lawyer who became the Supreme Court’s first black associate justice.
And he organized Nelson Mandela’s triumphant eight-city visit to the United States in 1990 as millions turned out to see that living symbol of resistance to apartheid after his release from 27 years in prison in South Africa. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/roger-wilkins-died-civil-rights-advocate.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/
Leonard Burke Solomon 1928-2016
a federal judge in New York who presided over a 27-year landmark case in which he found that city officials in Yonkers had intentionally segregated public housing and schools along racial lines
(...) which received national attention, was hardly the only lawsuit in which local governments in the Northeast had been charged with racial discrimination, but it was one of the most bitterly contested.
The charges against Yonkers were brought in a lawsuit that the Justice Department filed in 1980 in Federal District Court in Manhattan. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/nyregion/judge-leonard-sand-dead-yonkers-housing.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/nyregion/
Thomas Emmet Hayden 1939-2016
Tom Hayden (...) burst out of the 1960s counterculture as a radical leader of America’s civil rights and antiwar movements, but rocked the boat more gently later in life with a progressive political agenda as an author and California state legislator
(...)
During the racial unrest and antiwar protests of the ’60s and early ’70s, Mr. Hayden was one of the nation’s most visible radicals.
He was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, a defendant in the Chicago Seven trial after riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and a peace activist who married Jane Fonda, went to Hanoi and escorted American prisoners of war home from Vietnam.
As a civil rights worker, he was beaten in Mississippi and jailed in Georgia.
In his cell he began writing what became the Port Huron Statement, the political manifesto of S.D.S. and the New Left that envisioned an alliance of college students in a peaceful crusade to overcome what it called repressive government, corporate greed and racism.
Its aim was to create a multiracial, egalitarian society.
Like his allies the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who were assassinated in 1968, Mr. Hayden opposed violent protests but backed militant demonstrations, like the occupation of Columbia University campus buildings by students and the burning of draft cards.
He also helped plan protests that, as it happened, turned into clashes with the Chicago police outside the Democratic convention.
In 1974, with the Vietnam War in its final stages after American military involvement had all but ended, Mr. Hayden and Ms. Fonda, who were by then married, traveled across Vietnam, talking to people about their lives after years of war, and produced a documentary film, “Introduction to the Enemy.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/tom-hayden-dead.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/24/
Robert Melvin Adelman 1930-2016
Quentin David Young 1923-2016
Dr. Quentin D. Young at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in the 1970s.
Photogreaph: Health & Medicine Policy Research Group
Dr. Quentin D. Young, Public Health and Civil Rights Advocate, Dies at 92 NYT MARCH 17, 2016
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/
tenacious advocate for public health care and social justice, and a personal physician to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/us/
Claude Fox Sitton 1925-2015
son of the South whose unwavering coverage of the civil rights movement for The New York Times through most of that tumultuous era was hailed as a benchmark of 20th-century journalism
(...)
won a Pulitzer Prize as a columnist for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., where he was also the editor.
But it was in the crucible of the Jim Crow South that he forged his most enduring legacy.
Roaming the region as a reporter from May 1958 to October 1964, Mr. Sitton was an eyewitness to one of the most wrenching but consequential episodes in American history, often spending weeks on the road, flying home to Atlanta for a night, then heading out again the next day.
By the end of those six and a half years he had written almost 900 articles, some analytical and steeped in his knowledge of the South, many drawn from on-the-scene reporting.
They recounted the strategizing by civil rights leaders in the courts and on the ground, explored the political dynamics of race in the statehouses and at the White House, and opened readers’ eyes to the violence with which the movement was often met — the beatings, bombings and church burnings.
He often portrayed the struggle through the individuals who gave it flesh:
the demonstrators, freedom riders and ordinary Southern blacks who braved white mobs, brutal police officers and segregationist public officials simply to get an education or to vote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/us/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/us/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/us/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/us/
Charles Leon Aurthello Bibb 1922-2015
actor turned folk singer whose powerful, elegant baritone voice made him a prominent figure in the folk-music revival and a stirring performer at the landmark civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, including the third march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965
(...)
Mr. Bibb became involved in the civil rights movement early on, taking part in voter-registration drives in the South and performing at the 1963 March on Washington.
In 1965 he performed in front of the statehouse in Montgomery with Joan Baez, Oscar Brand and Harry Belafonte, whom he had known since their acting days at the American Negro Theater in Harlem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/
William Donlon Edwards 1915-2015
former president of the California Young Republicans who became one of the most liberal Democrats in Congress, drafting every civil rights bill in the House for two decades
(...)
Mr. Edwards, an F.B.I. agent in the 1940s, was also an early opponent of the Vietnam War and a champion of civil liberties who took on the F.B.I. on domestic surveillance and budget issues.
He entered Congress in 1963, in time to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After becoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights, he managed the Equal Rights Amendment on the House floor in 1971 and was the floor manager for all other civil rights bills.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/us/
William Henry Grier 1926-2015
psychiatrist whose book “Black Rage,” written with his colleague Price M. Cobbs, drew widespread attention to the psychic damage inflicted by racism and the causes of black anger, a topic of intense interest in the aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/
Mary Lynn Jones 1946-2015
lawyer who was deeply involved in a wide spectrum of civil rights cases and causes, including capital punishment, race relations and employment discrimination
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/07/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/07/us/
Amelia Boynton Robinson 1911-2015
D’Army Bailey 1941-2015
lifelong civil rights crusader who successfully campaigned to transform the forlorn motel where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 into a civil rights museum
(...) Dr. King’s legacy had been honored in shrines and street signs across the country.
But Mr. Bailey considered the derelict Lorraine Motel in Memphis singularly sacred.
Calling the motel “the site of the crucifixion,” Mr. Bailey said the National Civil Rights Museum would “signal to the world that Memphis has come to grip with the tragedy of Dr. King’s death here, and has drawn from it the tools to mold a unique educational tool.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/us/
Arthur Louis Powell 1937-2015
star receiver for the New York Titans and the Oakland Raiders of the American Football League in the 1960s and a persistent voice protesting the segregation encountered by the pro football players of his time
(...)
After his rookie season in 1959, when he was a reserve defensive back and a kick returner for the Philadelphia Eagles of the N.F.L., Powell refused to play in a 1960 preseason game against the Washington Redskins in Norfolk, Va., upon learning that the Eagles’ black players would not be given rooms at the team’s hotel.
Because Powell’s black teammates did not join in his boycott, he feared that it would effectively end his N.F.L. career.
Soon afterward, he signed with the A.F.L.’s Titans, the predecessors of the Jets, and teamed with Don Maynard in a brilliant pass-catching combination.
When the Titans faced the Houston Oilers in a 1961 preseason game in Greenville, S.C., and housed their black players at a run-down hotel in a black neighborhood, Powell again staged a one-man boycott.
After he joined the Raiders in 1963, racial issues arose once more.
The Raiders scheduled a preseason game with the Jets in Mobile, Ala., where the seating would be segregated, and Powell and three black teammates raised objections with Al Davis, the team’s coach and general manager.
He moved the game to Oakland.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/
Evelyn Virginia Starks 1922-2015
Evelyn Starks Hardy (...) founded the Original Gospel Harmonettes, a pioneering all-female black singing group that performed at Carnegie Hall and the Apollo and made its voice heard in the civil rights movement
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/
Rev. Willie T. Barrow 1924-2015
Edward William Brooke III 1919-2015
Edward W. Brooke III (...) in 1966 became the first African-American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote, winning as a Republican in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/
George Edward Barrett 1927-2014
tenacious Nashville lawyer who represented unions, consumers, a strip club and the Democratic Party but was best known for his victorious 38-year campaign to desegregate Tennessee universities
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/us/
Vincent Gordon Harding 1931-2014
Vincent Harding wrote a key anti-Vietnam War speech for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Photograph: Joe Amon The Denver Post
Vincent Harding, 82, Civil Rights Author and Associate of Dr. King, Dies By MARGALIT FOX NYT MAY 21, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/us/
historian, author and activist who wrote one of the most polarizing speeches ever given by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in which Dr. King expressed ardent opposition to the Vietnam War
(...)
For more than half a century, Dr. Harding worked at the nexus of race, religion and social responsibility.
Though he was not as high-profile a figure as some of his contemporaries — he preferred to work largely behind the scenes — he was widely considered a central figure in the civil rights movement.
A friend, adviser and sometime speechwriter to Dr. King, Dr. Harding was a member of the cohort that helped carry on his mission after his assassination in 1968.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/us/
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
Lee Lorch 1915-2014
Lee Lorch, 95, a leader of an effort 60 years ago to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, at his home in Toronto.
Photograph: Steve Payne for The New York Timez
Lee Lorch, Desegregation Activist Who Led Stuyvesant Town Effort, Dies at 98 By DAVID MARGOLICK NYT MARCH 1, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/nyregion/
soft-spoken mathematician whose leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, the gargantuan housing development on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, helped make housing discrimination illegal nationwide
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/nyregion/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/nyregion/
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/
http://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/1248069152993/
Franklin Eugene McCain 1941-2014
Theodore Judson Jemison 1918, in Selma, Ala. - 2013
civil rights pioneer who organized a 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge, La., that foreshadowed the one set off by Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Ala., and who went on to lead the nation’s largest black Baptist organization into liberal political activism
(...)
Mr. Jemison was one of a handful of black clergymen recognized as a leader of the first generation of the civil rights movement.
He was a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/
Julius LeVonne Chambers 1936-2013
civil rights lawyer who endured firebombings of his house, office and car in winning case after case against racial segregation, including one that led to a landmark Supreme Court decision allowing forced busing
(...)
In 1965, his second year in private practice, Mr. Chambers was working alongside the legal defense fund when he took on 35 school desegregation suits and 20 suits charging discrimination in public accommodations.
One court victory that year barred the Shrine Bowl of the Carolinas, a charity football game, from excluding black players.
Another, far-reaching 1965 case was filed on behalf of a 6-year-old, James Swann, and nine other families alleging that school district policies had put black students in segregated schools.
Mr. Chambers and the legal defense fund persuaded a federal judge, James B. McMillan, to order busing to promote integration of public schools.
The case went to the Supreme Court, and in 1971, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the justices upheld the judge’s ruling, granting federal courts the power to order busing to force racial integration.
The ruling had the effect of ending government- sanctioned segregation in Southern schools.
In 2002, the Supreme Court allowed Charlotte, like many other cities, to end busing as a means to achieve integration, saying the goal had been achieved.
Mr. Chambers opposed the ruling, arguing that blacks continued to receive an inferior education in racially imbalanced schools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/
Leo Branton Jr. 1922-2013
California lawyer whose moving closing argument in a racially and politically charged murder trial in 1972 helped persuade an all-white jury to acquit a black communist, the activist and academic
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/
James Madison Nabrit III 1932-2013
civil rights lawyer who fought school segregation before the Supreme Court and helped ensure that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., was allowed to go forward http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/us/james-m-nabrit-a-fighter-for-civil-rights-dies-at-80.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/us/
Eugene Corbett Patterson 1923-2013
Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The Atlanta Constitution during the civil rights conflicts of the 1960s and later the managing editor of The Washington Post and editor of The St. Petersburg Times in Florida
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/us/
Lawrence Thomas Guyot Jr. 1939-2012
Lawrence Guyot (...) in the early 1960s endured savage beatings as a young civil rights worker in Mississippi fighting laws and practices that kept blacks from registering to vote
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/us/
Mervyn Malcolm Dymally 1926-2012
Mervyn M. Dymally (...) broke barriers as a black lawmaker in California and in Congress after moving to the United States from his native Trinidad at age 19
(...)
Mr. Dymally became California’s first black state assemblyman when he was elected in 1962, its first black state senator four years later and, in 1974, its first black lieutenant governor.
In 1980 he became one of the first foreign-born blacks elected to the House of Representatives, where he served six terms representing Compton and other heavily black, low-income areas.
He also led the Congressional Black Caucus for a time.
His success in winning office was rooted in his work organizing a new black Democratic base in areas around Los Angeles beginning in the 1950s and 1960s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/
Carroll Frye Johnson 1913-2012
Southern-born educator who was one of the first superintendents to voluntarily use busing to integrate an urban school district, doing so in White Plains in the 1960s
(...)
to equal educational opportunities for minorities took root in the Jim Crow South of 1941, his son said.
At the time, Dr. Johnson had just received a master’s degree in education from the University of Georgia when he watched as Gov. Eugene Talmadge stacked its board of regents with allies to force the ouster of Walter Cocking, the dean of the education school.
The governor said Dr. Cocking needed to be removed because he planned to create an integrated demonstration school.
The firing drew national attention, and it was not far from his mind, his son said, when he went to Westchester County in 1954 to run the White Plains schools.
The Supreme Court had just issued its Brown v. ending legal segregation in the public schools.
The White Plains system’s student body was about 20 percent black then, with black students largely concentrated in a few neighborhood schools because of housing patterns.
Dr. Johnson saw this as de facto school segregation, and he tried to redress it through a number of remedies, including building schools with special amenities to attract both white and black children.
By 1964, however, he had decided that the effort was too piecemeal and that black and white students remained largely isolated from one another.
He put together what he called the White Plains Racial Balance Plan, which essentially called for busing hundreds of children so that no school had less than 10 percent minority enrollment or more than 30 percent.
He also closed one school that had been overwhelmingly black.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/
Thelma McWilliams 1916-2012
the last surviving member of a black women’s group that in 1955 organized a yearlong bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., after the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man
(...)
Ms. Glass, a professor of geography at Alabama State University, was the secretary of the Women’s Political Council, which leapt to action within hours of Ms. Parks’s arrest on Dec. 1, 1955.
The women’s group, realizing that three-quarters of the bus riders in Montgomery were black, called on blacks to boycott the buses to put pressure on the city, the state and the bus company to stop forcing them to ride in the back and surrender their seats to white passengers.
The group urged people to walk or car-pool instead of taking the bus, and Ms. Glass was among those who drove others to work and helped pass out fliers to alert the community to the boycott.
By Monday, Dec. 5, the buses were empty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/us/
Louis Heilprin Pollak 1922-2012
Federal judge and former dean of two prestigious law schools who played a significant role in major civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, including the landmark
(...)
For 28 years, before President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Judge Pollak had volunteered his services to the NAACP Legal Defens and Educational Fund.
He did so even during his tenures as dean of the Yale and University of Pennsylvania law schools.
Recruited in 1950 by the defense fund’s director, Thurgood Marshall, who later became an associate justice of the Supreme Court, Mr. Pollak was a member of the legal team that spent several years preparing the plaintiff’s briefs for Brown v. Board of Education.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in that case, handed down in May 1954, stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and a violation of the 14th Amendment.
The decision, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that permitted state-sponsored segregation, is considered a cornerstone of the modern civil rights movement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/
Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach 1922-2012
Nicholas deB. Katzenbach (...) helped shape the political history of the 1960s, facing down segregationists, riding herd on historic civil rights legislation and helping to map Vietnam War strategy as a central player in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/us/
Gilbert Edward Noble 1932-2012
television journalist who hosted “Like It Is,” an award-winning Sunday morning public affairs program in New York, one of the longest-running in the country dedicated to showcasing black leadership and the African-American experience
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/
Robert Lee Carter 1917-2012
as a lawyer, Robert Lee Carter was a leading strategist and a persuasive voice in the legal assault on racial segregation in 20th-century America
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/nyregion/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/nyregion/
Fred Shuttlesworth / Freddie Lee Robinson 1922-2011
Baptist minister and civil rights leader http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/07/the-rev-fred-shuttlesworth-obituary
storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought against racial injustice alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/07/
David Marshall French 1924-2011
Dr. David M. French helped found an organization of doctors that provided medical care to marchers during the civil rights era and later organized health care programs in 20 African nations http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/us/06french.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/us/
William Manning Marable 1950-2011
leading scholar of black history and a leftist critic of American social institutions and race relations, who wrote a biography of Malcolm X
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/04/
John Logan Cashin Jr. 1928-2011
civil rights campaigner who was the first black candidate for governor of Alabama since Reconstruction, mounting an unsuccessful challenge in 1970 to the arch-segregationist http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/politics/27cashin.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/
Juanita W. Goggins 1935-2010
Trailblazer of US civil rights
http://www.bvblackspin.com/2010/03/11/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/12/
Charles Lee Moore 1931-2010
photographer who braved physical peril to capture searing images — including lawmen using dogs and fire hoses against defenseless demonstrators — that many credit with helping to propel landmark civil rights legislation http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/arts/16moore.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/03/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/mar/16/
https://everyday-i-show.livejournal.com/136142.html
Benjamin Lawson Hooks 1925-2010
civil rights leader
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/
Dorothy Irene Height 1912-2010
African-American and women’s rights movements leader
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/us/
Lena Calhoun Horne 1917-2010
First black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/
Raymond Victor Haysbert 1920-2010
Baltimore civic leader and businessman
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/
John Woolman Douglas 1921-2010
champion of civil and human rights
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/
Ronald William Walters 1938-2010
Ronald W. Walters organized one of the nation’s first lunch-counter sit-ins to protest segregation as a young man and went on to become a leading scholar of the politics of race
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/us/
Michael Aloysius Tabor 1946-2010
one of 13 Black Panther Party members acquitted in 1971 of conspiring to bomb public buildings and murder police officers in New York City
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/nyregion/
The President’s RoundTable
a Baltimore-based networking organization of African-American chief executives and other leaders
http://www.presidentsroundtable.net/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/
Margaret Taylor Burroughs 1915-2010
a founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, one of the first museums devoted to black history and culture in the United States
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/
Odetta Holmes 1930-2008
singer whose resonant voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement
(...)
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger led to the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her.
“All of the songs Odetta sings,” she replied.
One of those songs was “I’m on My Way,” sung during the pivotal civil-rights March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.
In a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word,” Odetta recalled the sentiments of another song she performed that day, “Oh Freedom,” which is rooted in slavery:
“Oh freedom, Oh freedom, Oh freedom over me/ And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave/ And go home to my Lord and be free.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/04/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/05/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/04/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/dec/03/
https://www.npr.org/2008/12/04/
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Rev. Abraham Lincoln Woods Jr. 1928-2008
civil rights campaigner who in the days of crowd-throttling fire-hosings and snarling police dogs led the first lunch-counter sit-ins in Birmingham, Ala., and three decades later played a pivotal role confronting racial discrimination by country clubs
(...)
Mr. Woods attended Morehouse with Dr. King in the late 1940s.
He later received a bachelor’s degree in theology from Birmingham Baptist College;
a bachelor’s in sociology from Miles College, in Birmingham;
and a master’s in American history from the University of Alabama.
In the 1950s, he helped organize voter registration drives in Alabama.
Then, in the spring of 1963, he led the first black demonstration at a whites-only lunch counter, at Newberry’s department store in downtown Birmingham.
During the demonstrations that followed, Dr. King arrived in the city to confront the tactics of its public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, who had turned dogs and fire hoses on protesters.
Dr. King, Mr. Woods, other civil rights leaders and hundreds of additional protesters were arrested. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/us/13woods.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/us/
Mildred Delores Loving 1940-2008
black woman whose anger over being banished from Virginia for marrying a white man led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06loving.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/07/usa.
Irene Morgan Kirkaldy 1917-2007
Irene Morgan Kirkaldy ('s) defiance of white supremacy while traveling through the Upper South in the summer of 1944 led to a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated seating on interstate bus lines
(...)
Mrs. Morgan, a worker in a plant that made World War II bombers and the mother of two small children, was returning to her home in Baltimore aboard a Greyhound bus in July 1944 after a visit to her mother in Gloucester County, Va.
When the bus grew crowded, the driver told her to give her seat to a white person.
Mrs. Morgan refused, and when a sheriff’s deputy tried to take her off the bus in Saluda, Va., she resisted.
(...)
Mrs. Morgan was arrested and pleaded guilty the next October to resisting arrest, paying a $100 fine.
But she refused to pay a $10 fine for violating a Virginia law requiring segregated seating in public transportation. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/us/13kirkaldy.html
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/
Ernest C. Withers 1922-2007
one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era - and a paid F.B.I. informer
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/us/
Shirley Anita Chisholm 1924-2005
Joanne Grant Rabinowitz 1930-2005
Reporter and participant in the US civil rights struggle
Reporting from the perspective of ordinary people breaking down the barriers of segregation, Joanne Grant (...) covered the American civil rights movement of the 1960s for the old-leftist New York weekly, National Guardian.
She was not just at mass demonstrations, she was there in isolated communities where black students, conducting voter registration drives, were often rewarded with bloody beatings.
Grant visited small towns in rural Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia in the early 1960s, at a time when assaults, killings and lynchings were common.
As a black reporter this took courage, but Grant faced those dangers, filed her dispatches, got herself arrested, and became a member of the most militant of the civil rights groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jan/26/pressandpublishing.usnews
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jan/26/
Claiborne Paul Ellis 1927-2005
A reformed white racist, he fought for black workers
The remarkable journey of CP Ellis, (...) took him from leadership within the Ku Klux Klan to lifelong friendship with an African-American activist and welfare mother, who once took a knife to him after hearing his racial obscenities.
His relationship with Ann Atwater, who attended his funeral, became the subject of a book and a documentary film, and was the favourite of all the interviews conducted by Studs Terkel.
Terkel included his discussion with Ellis in two of his books, describing it as confirmation of his optimism about the human condition.
"It showed we can change our minds," he said. http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/nov/18/guardianobituaries.usa
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/nov/18/
Shirley Anita St Hill Chisholm 1924-2005
The first black woman elected to Congress, she was an outspoken advocate against discrimination
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jan/04/
Mrs. Chisholm was an outspoken, steely educator-turned-politician who shattered racial and gender barriers as she became a national symbol of liberal politics in the 1960's and 1970's.
Over the years, she also had a way of making statements that angered the establishment, as in 1974, when she asserted that "there is an undercurrent of resistance" to integration "among many blacks in areas of concentrated poverty and discrimination" - including in her own district in Brooklyn. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/obituaries/03chisholm.html?_r=0
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jan/04/
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/
Ossie Davis 1917-2005
prominent figure in the U.S. civil rights movement
https://www.npr.org/series/4486027/
Constance Baker Motley 1921-2005
lawyer and judge
[ Constance Baker Motley and ] James Meredith face pickets on their way to court in New Orleans in 1962
Constance Baker Motley Pioneering black woman lawyer at the forefront of the civil rights struggle in America Godfrey Hodgson The Guardian p. 33 Saturday October 1, 2005
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/oct/01/
In the 1940s and 50s, when Constance Baker Motley walked into a courtroom in the Deep South to try a case, people stared.
And then they stared some more.
For one thing, women lawyers were pretty rare at that time.
For another, it was a safe bet that no one —regardless of race— had ever seen a Negro woman lawyer, let alone one with such imposing height and regal carriage.
Add to that the fact that Motley was always impeccably turned out in a well-cut dress, high heels and a matching handbag, and often draped in her signature pearl necklace.
She was, quite simply, a unicorn— one battling (genteely, but insistently) for civil rights.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2022/02/03/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2022/02/03/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/oct/01/
https://www.npr.org/2005/09/29/
Kenneth Bancroft Clark 1914-2005
When, in 1954, the US supreme court ruled unlawful the notion of "separate but equal" education - thus officially ending segregation in American schools - the judges not only cited psychological research by Kenneth Clark, (...), but borrowed his language.
Clark's classic "doll study" was reflected in Chief Justice Earl Warren's opinion that separating black and white children "solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone". http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/may/06/guardianobituaries.usa
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/may/06/
James Forman 1928-2005
civil rights pioneer who brought a fiercely revolutionary vision and masterly organizational skills to virtually every major civil rights battleground in the 1960's
(...)
As executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1961 to 1966, Mr. Forman was at the barricades of the civil rights movement from Selma to Birmingham to the Mississippi Delta to the March on Washington.
Few outside the movement knew the extent to which he choreographed the now-legendary demonstrations and campaigns.
Known by its initials SNCC, pronounced "snick," the group viewed itself as the shock troops of the civil rights movement.
In many Southern towns, its field organizers were the first professional civil rights workers to arrive.
Mr. Forman's job was to keep a haphazard organization of idealistic young leftists functioning.
He raised money, paid the bills, mapped strategy and insisted on keeping records.
Mr. Forman set up a research department and a print shop in the group's office and made the decision to move the office to Jackson, Miss., in the summer of 1964, the "freedom summer" when volunteers went to Mississippi to campaign for voting rights for blacks.
He and Bob Moses, another SNCC organizer, were the principal organizers of the operation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jan/14/
https://www.npr.org/2005/01/12/
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/
Black radio stations
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/02/27/
Nina Simone 1933-2003
born Eunice Waymon
singer whose distinctively emotional style blended elements of jazz, gospel, blues, European art song and other influences
(...)
Ms. Simone had only one Top 20 hit in her long career — her very first single, "I Loves You, Porgy," released in 1959 — but her following was large and loyal and her impact deep and lasting.
Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack and Laura Nyro were among the singers who were influenced by her.
(...)
Ms. Simone was as famous for her social consciousness as she was for her music.
In the 1960's no musical performer was more closely identified with the civil right movement.
Though she was best known as an interpreter of other people's music, she eloquently expressed her feelings about racism and black pride in those years in a number of memorable songs she wrote herself.
"Mississippi Goddam" was an angry response to the killing of the civil rights advocate Medgar Evers.
"Young, Gifted and Black," written with the keyboardist Weldon Irvine Jr., became something of an anthem, recorded by Aretha Franklin and many others.
"Four Women" painted a subtle but stinging picture of the suffering and the strength of African-American women. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/obituaries/22SIMO.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Lq_yasEgo
Will Counts 1931-2001
(Ira Wilmer Counts Jr.)
Will Counts ('s) photograph of a black student being jeered became an enduring image of the Little Rock, Ark., desegregation crisis of 1957,
(...)
at Indiana University for 32 years, retiring in 1995.
Before turning to teaching, Mr. Counts worked as a photographer-editor for The Arkansas Democrat in Little Rock and for The Associated Press in Chicago and Indianapolis.
He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for photographs he took during the September 1957 desegregation battle at Central High School in Little Rock.
Despite a court order, Gov. Orval E. Faubus ordered the National Guard in to prevent black students from entering.
Mr. Faubus's action prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to dispatch federal troops to permit desegregation of the school.
One of the photographs showed a 15-year-old black student, Elizabeth Eckford, outside the school with a white girl jeering in her wake.
It was named by The Associated Press as one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th century.
Mr. Counts visited Little Rock in 1997 for the events marking the 40th anniversary of the crisis.
He said something had touched him when Ms. Eckford walked to the school alone.
''From the time Elizabeth first approached the National Guard, you knew this was a major confrontation between the governor and the federal government,'' Mr. Counts recalled.
''She became a symbol for the Little Rock crisis.''
''I felt empathy, but this is a job,'' he said.
''That's what you're trained to do.
You just hope you have film.''
The white teenager jeering at Ms. Eckford in the photograph, later apologized to Ms. Eckford and spoke out publicly against racism.
In 1997, Mr. Counts took a picture of the two women together in front of the school.
Ms. Eckford told her, ''I think you're very brave to face the cameras again.''
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/10/
https://www.npr.org/2011/10/02/
James Farmer 1920-1999
civil rights leader
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/10/
Stokely Carmichael Carmichael 1941-1998
Black Power activist
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
http://www.cnn.com/US/9811/15/carmichael.obit/
Lawrence Reddick
1910-1995 On 5 December 1955, Lawrence Reddick attended the first mass meeting of the Montgomery bus boycott.
Although he recalled feeling ‘‘baffled’’ by what was taking place, he did ‘‘realize that something socially significant was happening’’ and began to take copious notes (Reddick, 235).
Throughout 1956 and 1957, as his notes materialized into a manuscript for a book, Reddick became friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., while conducting interviews with the bus boycott leader.
In his biography of King, Crusader without Violence (1959), Reddick called King a ‘‘national asset,’’ claiming that King ‘‘symbolizes an idea that meets a fundamental need of our times.
His way is needed in the painful transition through which the South is presently passing, and his way is needed by the American nation in a divided world’’ (Reddick, 233–234).
For more than a decade, Reddick chronicled the events of the civil rights movement and assisted King in writing many of his public statements and speeches.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/16/
Barbara Rose Johns Powell 1935-1991
Mollie Moon 1912-1990
When we think of the Civil Rights Movement, opulent parties are probably not the first thing that come to mind.
But it turns out, they were a big part of the fight for racial justice — especially the events organized by Black socialite Mollie Moon in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.
Known as one of the most influential women of the civil rights era, Moon served as president of the fundraising arm of the National Urban League and is credited with raising millions to build economic and racial equality in the U.S.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/30/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/30/
Bayard Rustin 1912-1987
American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, pictured in 1964, as spokesman for the Citywide Committee for Integration, at the organization's headquarters, Silcam Presbyterian Church in New York City.
Photograph: Patrick A. Burns New York Times Co./Getty Images
In Newly Found Audio, A Forgotten Civil Rights Leader Says Coming Out 'Was An Absolute Necessity' NPR January 6, 2019 5:17 PM ET
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/06/
‘He understood that history is like a pendulum: it swings back and forth and you’re going to have some defeats but it doesn’t mean you give up and walk away’ …
Bayard Rustin in 1963.
Photograph: Eddie Adams AP
‘He never hid himself’: the incredible life of gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin Netflix’s Oscar-tipped biopic tells the story of an activist whose significant work was often discounted because of his sexuality G Tue 21 Nov 2023 10.33 CET Last modified on Tue 21 Nov 2023 10.35 CET
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/21/
Why A Gay, Black Civil Rights Hero Opposed Affirmative Action NYT 28 February 2019
Why A Gay, Black Civil Rights Hero Opposed Affirmative Action Video The New York Times 28 February 2019
Bayard Rustin was a chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and thought reparations, and even separate African-American studies departments, were a bad idea.
Many of his beliefs would be antithetical to today’s social justice advocates.
In the video above, Coleman Hughes argues that by cherry-picking our heroes, and focusing on small parts of their legacy, we are merely paying lip service to their mission.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fybq5UQn8M8
Mr. Rustin (...) helped plan the Montgomery bus boycott and the March on Washington, but his legacy was tarnished by a 1953 conviction under laws targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/21/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/02/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/26/
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/22/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/05/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/
https://www.youtube.com/
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/06/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/15/
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/25/
https://www.nytimes.com/1969/05/09/
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/10/
Richard Durham 1917-1984
Just after the Second World War, at a time when segregation remained firmly ensconced in the U.S., African-American writer Richard Durham was taking on racism, inequality and social justice — and he was doing it all on the radio.
From 1948 through 1950, Durham and a small troupe of black and white actors produced elaborate radio dramas that helped undermine the stereotypes of the day.
Every Sunday morning at 10, on Chicago's WMAQ, listeners of Destination Freedom would get to hear about figures like Louis Armstrong, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells and Jackie Robinson.
https://www.npr.org/2015/10/10/
https://www.npr.org/2015/10/10/
Bayard Rustin 1912-1987
adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and the organizer behind the 1963 March on Washington.
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/06/
Why A Gay, Black Civil Rights Hero Opposed Affirmative Action NYT 28 February 2019
Why A Gay, Black Civil Rights Hero Opposed Affirmative Action Video NYT Opinion The New York Times 28 February 2019
Bayard Rustin was a chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and thought reparations, and even separate African-American studies departments, were a bad idea.
Many of his beliefs would be antithetical to today’s social justice advocates.
In the video above, Coleman Hughes argues that by cherry-picking our heroes, and focusing on small parts of their legacy, we are merely paying lip service to their mission.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fybq5UQn8M8
https://www.youtube.com/
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/06/
William Moore McCulloch 1901-1980
there is a good case to be made that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have become law without him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/
Ashton Bryan Jones 1896-1979
American Quaker minister active from the 1930s to 1970s as an advocate of Civil Rights for African Americans in the United States.
Though White and from the deeply segregated state of Georgia, Jones was arrested dozens of times throughout the American South for preaching equality between all people.
He was a close associate of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton_Jones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Marion Palfi Germany, USA 1907-1978
Ms. Palfi set out to document racism and segregation in Irwinton, Ga., the small town where Caleb Hill, in the first reported lynching of 1949, was murdered.
Later that year, Ms. Palfi spent two weeks in Irwinton documenting its residents, both black and white
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/
John Wesley Carlos
The man who raised a black power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games
When John Carlos raised his fist in a black power salute at the 1968 Olympics, it changed 20th-century history – and his own life – for ever. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/30/black-power-salute-1968-olympics
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/30/
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/07/
https://www.npr.org/2008/10/16/
https://www.npr.org/2010/10/18/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/17/
Martin Luther King Jr. 1929-1968
Malcolm X 1925 - February 22, 1965
Malcolm X by Gordon Parks 1963 Kodak legend
civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
The Ku Klux Klan's May 2, 1964, abduction and slayings of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore
Klansman James Seale
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-24
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper 1858-1964
Cooper was one of the first black women in the country to earn a Ph.D.
Before that, she headed the first public high school for black students in the District of Columbia — Washington Colored High School.
https://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/12/
https://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/12/
"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is a topical song written by the American musician Bob Dylan.
Recorded on October 23, 1963, the song was released on Dylan's 1964 album 'The Times They Are a-Changin' and gives a generally factual account of the killing of 51-year-old barmaid Hattie Carroll by the wealthy young tobacco farmer from Charles County, Maryland, William Devereux "Billy" Zantzinger (whom the song calls "William Zanzinger"), and his subsequent sentence to six months in a county jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonesome_Death_of_Hattie_Carroll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Harry Belafonte 1927-2023
Sidney Poitier 1927-2022
(L-R) Actor Sidney Poitier and singer Harry Belafonte chatting during the March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom.
Location: Washington, DC, US
Date taken: August 28, 1963
Photograph: Francis Miller
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/0b61fef0f1baca44.html
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/nyregion/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/
Medgar Wiley Evers 1925-June 12,1963
James Alexander Hood 1942-2013
James A. Hood (...) integrated the University of Alabama in 1963 together with his fellow student Vivian Malone after Gov. George C. Wallace capitulated to the federal government in a signature moment of the civil rights movement known as the “stand in the schoolhouse door”
(...)
On the morning of June 11, 1963, Mr. Hood and Ms. Malone, backed by a federal court order, sought to become the first blacks to successfully pursue a degree at Alabama.
A black woman, Autherine Lucy, had been admitted in 1956 but was suspended three days later, ostensibly for her safety, when the university was hit by riots.
She was later expelled.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/us/
Edwin Pratt 1930-1969
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/22/
28 May 1963
Hunter Gray is attacked at a civil rights protest in Jackson, Mississippi
Hunter Gray, seated left.
Photograph: Wisc Hist Everett/Rex Features
That’s me in the picture: Hunter Gray is attacked at a civil rights protest in Jackson, Mississippi, 28 May 1963 G Friday 27 March 2015 16.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/27/
William Edward Burghardt DuBois 1868-1963
writer and sociologist, co-founder of The National Association for The Advancement of Colored People http://www.pbs.org/blackpress/news_bios/newbios/nwsppr/Biogrphs/webdubois/webdubois.html
Author, journalist, social reformer, activist, poet, philosopher, and educator W.E.B. Du Bois wielded one of the most influential pens in African-American history.
For sixty-six years he functioned not only as a mentor, model, and spokesman for generations of black Americans but also as the conscience of black and white Americans alike who yearned for racial equality and social justice. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/dubois.html - broken link
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/
https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/
William Lewis Moore 1927-1963
postal worker and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) member who staged lone protests against racial segregation.
He was assassinated in Keener, Alabama, during a protest march from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi, where he intended to deliver a letter to Governor Ross Barnett, supporting civil rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
In April 1963, William L. Moore had enough vacation days saved up to take a civil-rights-inspired journey.
The white civil rights activist planned to walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to hand-deliver a letter to Mississippi’s governor Ross Barnett, urging Barnett to rethink racist state policies.
Moore was a Baltimore postal worker who had a history of activism, fighting for the rights of Black people and those with mental illness, according to reporting by The Baltimore Sun.
A former Marine, Moore was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and had participated in a number of protests.
On April 21, Moore arrived by bus in Chattanooga, where he began what he thought would be a 400-mile trip.
Often barefoot, Moore wore a sandwich board that read, on one side, “End Segregation in America — Black or White, Eat at Joe’s,” and on the other read, “Equal Rights for All. Mississippi or Bust.”
His one-man protest attracted local media coverage and the curiosity of residents in towns he passed through.
Moore was on the third day of his journey when he was shot and killed.
The Alabama Highway Patrol found his body on the side of the road, with two .22 caliber bullet wounds to his head and neck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interactive/
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/24/
https://www.npr.org/2013/08/14/
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/
1962
University of Mississippi / Ole Miss
James Meredith
So a new historical marker now serves as the physical reminder of the night of Sept. 30, 1962, when hundreds of federal marshals and thousands of Army and National Guard troops met a violent mob of segregationists from all over the South and the campus became a battleground.
Two people were killed, hundreds were wounded and the vicious realities of a racist society were broadcast around the world.
The following morning, James Meredith enrolled in classes, and Ole Miss was racially integrated.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/
https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/26/
six-year-old Ruby Bridges Hall became the first African American child
to desegregate an elementary school.
George Washington Lee 1903 - May 7, 1955
For most of his 51 years, George Lee kept a low profile outside church; he is believed to have sat for only one photograph in his lifetime.
But sometime in the early 1950s, he decided to register to vote — no small undertaking for a black man in the South back then, especially in the Delta.
Somehow, he succeeded; then he managed to get his wife, Rosebud, registered.
And then he went out and got other African-Americans in Belzoni and Humphreys County registered, too — nearly 100 of them.
(...)
Lee, (...), also co-founded the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. and served as vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership.
In April 1955, he spoke before a crowd of thousands at the council’s annual meeting, urging everyone present to register and vote.
The crowd, Jet magazine reported, was “electrified.”
Local whites were, too, though not in a good way.
(...)
“the white leadership in the town and county” converged upon Reverend Lee’s house — twice.
“They basically said, ‘stop trying to register people to vote, and we’ll leave you and your wife alone,’” (...).
“He didn’t go for the deal.”
On May 7, 1955, as Lee was driving home on Church Street, just a block from Green Grove, a car pulled up alongside his; someone fired several shots, one at the minister’s tires and the rest at his head, blasting away his jawbone and part of his face.
Mortally wounded, he crashed his car into a house.
There were eyewitnesses, but the white sheriff refused to investigate, much less arrest anyone, calling it a car accident and going so far as to declare that the lead pellets extracted from the victim’s head were actually dental fillings that had gotten knocked loose in the crash.
According to Jet, in an attempt to keep news of the slaying contained, “Belzoni telephone operators refused to take long-distance calls from Negroes.”
It didn’t work.
Word spread; more than 2,000 people showed up for Reverend Lee’s funeral, which was held at Green Grove because White Star was too small to accommodate them.
Rosebud Lee insisted her husband have an open casket.
“She wanted people to see,” (...), “what they had done to her husband.”
Jet published a photo of it — three months before Emmett Till was murdered.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune 1875-1955
Mary McLeod (later Bethune) was the daughter of former slaves, born into a family of seventeen children.
She graduated from Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College) in Concord, North Carolina, in 1893 and from the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in 1895.
She married Albertus L. Bethune in 1898, and taught in a succession of small Southern schools, one of which was the Haines School, run by Lucy Laney.
In 1904 Bethune, who had moved to Florida, decided to open her own school on the east coast of that state. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people_beth.html
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/
https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/
On 2 March 1955 —nine months before the arrest of Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott — a fifteen-year-old, high-school student named Claudette Colvin challenged bus segregation in Montgomery.
Shortly after Colvin boarded a bus across the street from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the driver asked her to relinquish her seat to a white passenger.
When Colvin refused, the police removed her from the bus and arrested her for assault, disorderly conduct, and violating segregation laws.
Despite early support from the Women’s Political Council (WPC) and the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Colvin’s case failed to unite the black community in the early struggle against segregation.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/
Few people know the story of Claudette Colvin:
When she was 15, she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person — nine months before Rosa Parks did the very same thing.
Most people know about Parks and the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that began in 1955, but few know that there were a number of women who refused to give up their seats on the same bus system.
Most of the women were quietly fined, and no one heard much more.
Colvin was the first to really challenge the law.
Now a 69-year-old retiree, Colvin lives in the Bronx.
She remembers taking the bus home from high school on March 2, 1955, as clear as if it were yesterday.
The bus driver ordered her to get up and she refused, saying she'd paid her fare and it was her constitutional right.
Two police officers put her in handcuffs and arrested her.
Her school books went flying off her lap.
"All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily," Colvin says. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101719889
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/25/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/27/
https://www.npr.org/2005/01/12/
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/
Harry Tyson Moore 1905-1951
one of the first civil rights leaders of the modern era was killed in a bombing in Florida.
Harry T. Moore isn't as well known as civil rights icons Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King Jr.
Moore's activism began earlier, in the 1930s.
His work in Florida investigating lynchings and registering African Americans to vote cost him his life.
(...)
Moore was at home in Mims with his wife and oldest daughter on Christmas night when a bomb went off under his bedroom.
He and his wife died from the blast.
His daughter survived.
The FBI sent a dozen agents to Florida.
Their investigation took over a year.
But neither the bureau nor a grand jury identified who was responsible, and no one was ever charged for the murders.
News about Moore's murder and the investigation quickly disappeared from Florida papers.
Green says, "Florida wanted this story to go away.
They wanted to get this story off the front pages.
It was hurting tourism, all those bombings in Miami and Orlando."
It was 1951, three years before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, which sparked a new era in the civil rights movement.
Moore's story and accomplishments were largely forgotten in Florida.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/01/
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/01/
November 1948
Robert Mallard 1910 or 1911 - November 20, 1948
Robert Childs "Big Duck" Mallard was an African American traveling casket salesman and landowner, who was shot and lynched by a group of about 20 members of the Ku Klux Klan in Lyons, Toombs County, Georgia.
The people charged with his murder were acquitted by an all-white jury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://books.google.fr/books
April 10, 1947
Jack Roosevelt Robinson breaks the color barrier in major league baseball
Related > Anglonautes > History
20th century > USA > Civil rights
17th, 18th, 19th, 20th century
Related > Anglonautes > Vocapedia
Anglonautes > Arts > Photographers > 20th century > USA > Civil rights
James "Spider" Martin 1939-2003
Ralph Waldo Ellison USA 1913-1994
Related > Anglonautes > Arts > Books > 20th century > USA
James Arthur Baldwin 1924-1987
Related > Anglonautes > Arts > Music > Jazz > 20th century > USA
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