Ralph Abernathy
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Abernathy was born the son of a farmer in Linden, Alabama. After serving in the army during World War II, he enrolled at Alabama State University, in Montgomery, Alabama, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1950. His involvement in political activism began in college while he was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, when he led demonstrations protesting the lack of heat and hot water in his dormitory and the dreadful food served in the cafeteria. In 1951 he earned a M.A. in sociology from Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University) and then became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. While living in Montgomery he formed a close and enduring partnership with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr..
In 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, Abernathy and King organized the bus boycott in Montgomery. After a year of the boycott, it finally ended when the United States Supreme Court affirmed the U.S. District Court's ruling that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.
Abernathy, who held the official title of Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was with Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee when King was assassinated. In fact, they shared Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel the night before. Abernathy introduced King before he made his last public address and King said at the beginning that "Ralph is the best friend I have in the world".
Abernathy assumed the presidency of the SCLC after King's death. Less than a week after the assassination, Abernathy led a march to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. In May 1968 he, among others including Jesse Jackson, organized the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) March on Washington, D.C. Hoping to bring attention to the plight of the nation's impoverished, he constructed huts in the nation's capital, precipitating a showdown with the police. The settlement was named "Resurrection City". (Abernathy himself slept in a hotel during the campaign.) On June 19 he held a speech at the Lincoln Memorial, in front of tens of thousands of black and white citizens.
The PPC campaign at Resurrection City had a hard time achieving its objectives and maintaining morale among the residents of the "city." Its demands were seen as unreasonable, and many saw the campaign it as fundamentally challenging the capitalist system of the U.S.. Weeks of rainy weather, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy on June 5th, contributed to a decline in the morale and an increase in civil disorder and crime within the settlement. On June 24, the federal government brought bulldozers in, using force to disband the protesters and demolish Resurrection City. Abernathy was jailed for nearly three weeks for refusing to comply with orders to voluntarily disband the protest.
On June 15, 1969, the eve of the launch of Apollo 11, Abernathy arrived at Cape Canaveral together with several hundred members of the Poor People's Campaign to protest the money being spent on space exploration, while so many people remained poor. He was met by Thomas O. Paine, the administrator of NASA, whom he told that in the face of such suffering, space flight represented an inhuman priority and funds should be spent instead to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, and house the homeless. Paine told Abernathy that the advances in space exploration were child's play compared to the tremendously difficult human problems of the society, and told him that "if we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing the button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push that button." On the day of the launch, Abernathy led a small group of protesters in the restricted guest viewing area of the space center, chanting, "We are not astronauts, but we are people." The protest, which had originally been planned by Martin Luther King, failed to generate any support for Abernathy's cause.
Abernathy resigned in 1977 to run unsuccessfully for a Georgia congressional seat.
In 1980, Abernathy was the most prominent African American to endorse Ronald Reagan, along with Hosea Williams and Charles Evers. Abernathy later said he was very disappointed with the Reagan administration's civil rights policies, and he did not endorse him for reelection in 1984.
In the 1980s Abernathy co-founded the American Freedom Coalition, with Robert Grant. The AFC received major funding from Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and works in partnership with The Washington Times, CAUSA, the American Constitution Committee, and other Unification Church related organizations.[1] Abernathy served as Vice President of American Freedom Coalition until his death in 1990.
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Abernathy received many awards, most notably honorary degrees from Long Island University in New York, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and his alma mater, Alabama State University.
Interstate 20 and Abernathy Road, in Atlanta, are named in his honor.
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Abernathy and his wife, Juanita, had four children. His younger son, Ralph David served as a Georgia State representative. His son Kwame Abernathy studied law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia, and he graduated in 2000. His youngest daughter, Donzaleigh, is an actress and writer.
Abernathy died on April 17, 1990 in Atlanta. He was entombed in Lincoln Cemetery.
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Victoria Gray Adams
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In the 1960 elections she taught classes in voter registration. In 1962, she became field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and she led a boycott against Hattiesburg businesses .
In 1964, Mrs. Gray Adams, a teacher, door-to-door saleswoman of Beauty Queen cosmetics and leader of voter education classes decided to take on Senator John Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat who at the time had been in the Senate for 16 years. She announced that she and others from the tiny Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, of which she was a founding member, along with Fannie Lou Hamer and Annie Devine, would challenge the power of the white segregationist politicians, like Mr. Stennis, who represented her state in the U.S. Congress. The time had come, she said, to pay attention “to the Negro in Mississippi, who had not even had the leavings from the American political table.”
During the Freedom Summer of 1964, Adams helped open the Freedom Schools that pushed for civil rights in Mississippi. She went to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Mississippi Democratic Party had withdrawn support for President Lyndon Johnson because of Johnson's work to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and sent an all-white delegation to the convention. The three women fought to be seated among the delegation, but were unsuccessful. The incident, however, led to racial integration reforms within the party.
The same three women were honored guests in 1968, and were seated on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Adams moved to Thailand with her second husband and worked on behalf of African-American U.S. servicemen for several years.
Mrs. Gray Adams said she learned in 1964 that there were two kinds of people in grass-roots politics, “those who are in the movement and those who have the movement in them.” “The movement is in me”, she said, “and I know it always will be.”
Her first marriage, to Tony Gray, produced three children, Georgie, Tony Jr. (who died in 1997) and Cecil, and ended in divorce in 1964. Other survivors include her second husband, Reuben Earnest Adams Jr. (to whom she had been married for 40 years) and their son, Reuben III; a brother, Glodies Jackson; and eight grandchildren.
She died at her son Cecil's home in Baltimore on August 12, 2006 of cancer, aged 79.
Her papers are at the McCain Library and Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi.
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Ella Baker
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Early life and career
Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia and raised by Georgiana and Blake Baker. When she was nine, her family moved to her mother's hometown of Littleton in rural North Carolina. As a girl, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. As a slave, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner. Baker attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduating as class valedictorian in 1927 at the age of 24. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating, she moved to New York City.[1] During 1929 - 1930 she was an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News, going on to take the position of editorial assistant at the Negro National News. In 1930 George Schuyler, then a black journalist and anarchist (and later an arch-conservative), founded the Young Negroes' Cooperative League (YNCL), which sought to develop black economic power through collective planning. Having befriended Schuyler, Baker joined in 1931 and soon became the group’s national director.[2]
She also worked for the Worker's Education Project of the Works Progress Administration, where she taught courses in consumer education, labor history and African history. Baker immersed herself in the cultural and political milieu of Harlem in the 1930s. She protested Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and supported the campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants in Alabama, a group of young black men falsely accused of raping a white woman. She also founded the Negro History Club at the Harlem Library and regularly attended lectures and meetings at the YWCA. She befriended the future scholar and activist, John Henrik Clark and the future writer and civil rights lawyer, Pauli Murray, and many others who would become lifelong friends.
"Participatory Democracy"
In the 1960's, the idea of "Participatory Democracy" was created. The meaning of this was bringing together a new formulation for the traditional appeal of democracy with an innovative tie to broader participation. There were three primary emphases to this new movement: (1) an appeal for grass roots involvement of people throughout society, while making their own decisions, (2) the minimization of hierarchy(leaders) and the associated emphasis on expertise and professionalism as a basis for leadership, and (3) a call for direct action as an answer to fear isolation and intellectual detachment.[4] Ella Baker said herself,
You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders.[5]
She believed in a sense of social responsibility and social reform but the only way this could happen would be through the determination of every citizen who wanted change.
Work with prominent organizations
NAACP (1938-1953)
In 1938 she began her long association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Baker was hired in 1941 as a secretary. She traveled widely, especially in the South, recruiting members, raising money, and organizing local campaigns. She was named director of branches in 1943,[6] making her the highest ranking woman in the organization. She was an outspoken woman with a strong belief in egalitarian ideals. She pushed the organization to decentralize its leadership structure and to aid its membership in more activist campaigns on the local level. She especially stressed the importance of young people and women in the organization. Baker formed a network of people in the south who would go on to be important for the fight for civil rights. Whereas some organizers tended to talk down to rural southerners, Baker’s ability to treat everyone with respect helped her in her recruiting. Baker fought to make the NAACP more democratic and in tune with the needs of the people. She tried to find a balance between voicing her concerns and maintaining a unified front. When the opportunity arose in 1946 to return to New York City to care for her niece, she left her position with the national association, but remained a volunteer. She soon joined the New York branch of the NAACP to work on school desegregation and police brutality issues, and became its president in 1952.[7] She resigned in 1953 to run unsuccessfully for the New York City Council on the Liberal Party ticket.[8]
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957-1960)
In January 1957, Baker went to Atlanta, Georgia to attend a conference aimed at developing a new regional organization to build on the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. After a second conference in February, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed. The conference’s first project was the Crusade for Citizenship, a voter registration campaign. Baker was hired as the first staffperson for the new organization. Along with Bayard Rustin, one of her close allies, she was co-organizer of the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage which brought thousands of activists to Washington D.C. Because she was neither a man nor a minister, she was not seriously considered for the post of executive director, but she worked with the SCLC ministers to hire Reverend John Tilley in that capacity. Baker worked closely with southern civil rights activists in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and was highly respected for her organizing abilities. She helped initiate voter registration campaigns and identify other local grievances. After Tilley resigned, she remained in Atlanta for two and a half years as interim executive director of the SCLC until the post was taken up by Wyatt Tee Walker in April 1960.[9]
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960-1966)
That same year, on the heels of regional desegregation sit-ins led by black college students, Baker persuaded the SCLC to invite southern university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend. At this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed. The SNCC became the the most active organization in the Delta, and it was relatively open to women.[10] Following the conference Baker resigned from the SCLC and began a long and intimate relationship with SNCC (pronounced "snick")[11]. Along with Howard Zinn, Baker was one of SNCC's highly revered adult advisors. It was with Baker’s help that SNCC (along with Congress of Racial Equality) coordinated the region-wide freedom rides of 1961 and began to work closely with black sharecroppers and others throughout the South. Ella Baker insisted that "strong people don't need strong leaders," and criticized the notion of a single charismatic leader at the helm of movements for social change. Ella Baker pushed the idea of "Participatory Democracy", therefore, she wanted each person to get involved individually.[12]She also argued that "people under the heel," referring to the most oppressed sectors of any community, "had to be the ones to decide what action they were going to take to get (out) from under their oppression." She was a teacher and mentor to the young people of SNCC, highly influencing the thinking of such important figures as Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Curtis Muhammad, Bob Moses, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who wrote a song in Baker's honor, called "Ella's Song." Through SNCC, Baker’s ideas of group-centered leadership and the need for radical democratic social change spread throughout the student movements of the 1960s. Her ideas influenced the philosophy of participatory democracy put forth by Students for a Democratic Society, the major antiwar group of the day. These ideas also influenced a wide range of radical and progressive groups that would form in the 60s and 70s.[13]
Southern Conference Education Fund (1962-1967)
From 1962 to 1967 Baker worked on the staff of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), which aimed to help black and white people work together for social justice. In SCEF Baker worked closely with her friend, longtime white anti-racist activist Anne Braden, who had been accused of being a communist during the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Baker viewed socialism as a more humane alternative to capitalism but she had mixed feelings about communism. Still, she became a staunch defender of Anne Braden and her husband Carl and encouraged SNCC to reject red-baiting because she viewed it as divisive and unfair. During the 1960s Baker participated in a speaking tour and co-hosted several meetings on the importance of linking civil rights and civil liberties.[14]
In 1964 she helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. She worked as the coordinator of the Washington office of the MFDP and accompanied a delegation of the MFDP to the National Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1964. The group's aim was to challenge the national party to affirm the rights of African Americans to participate in party elections in the South. When MFDP delegates challenge the pro-segregationist, all-white official delegation, a major conflict ensued. The MFDP delegation was not seated, but their influence on the Democratic Party helped to elect many black leaders in Mississippi and forced a rule change to allow women and minorities to sit as delegates at the Democratic National Convention.[15]
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Final years
That same year, Ella Baker returned to New York, where she continued her activism. She later collaborated with Arthur Kinoy and others to form the Mass Party Organizing Committee, a socialist organization. In 1972 she traveled the country in support of the "Free Angela" campaign demanding the release of Angela Davis. She lent her voice to the Puerto Rican independence movement, spoke out against apartheid in South Africa and allied herself with a number of women's groups, including the Third World Women's Alliance and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She remained an activist until her death in 1986.[16]
It is widely written that Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as other SCLC members, differed in opinion and philosophy. She once claimed that the "movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement." Another speech she made, in which she urged activists to take control of the movement themselves, rather than rely on a leader with "heavy feet of clay," was widely interpreted as a denunciation of King.
Ella Baker was a notoriously private person. People close to her did not know that she was married for twenty years.[17] She left no diaries.
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James Bevel
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Early life and education
Born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, James Bevel grew up and worked on a plantation, received schooling in Mississippi and Cleveland, Ohio, and served in the Navy for a time. He attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee from 1957 to 1961, [1] and while attending college re-read Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You (first read while in the Navy and which directly led to his decision to leave the military). Bevel also read several of Mohandas Gandhi's books and newspapers while taking workshops on Gandhian Nonviolence taught by Reverend James Lawson. Bevel also attended workshops at the Highlander Institute taught by its founder, Myles Horton.
Nashville Student Movement, SNCC involvement, 1962 Bevel/King agreement
In 1960, with several of James Lawson's and Myles Horton's other students — Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis, Diane Nash and others — Bevel participated in the 1960 Nashville Sit-In Movement, which desegregated the city's lunch counters. After the success of this early movement action, James Bevel directed the 1961 Nashville Open Theater Movement, and then coordinating the Nashville students continuation of the 1961 Freedom Rides, organized and led by Nash.
While in jail in Mississippi at the end of the Freedom Rides, Bevel and Lafayette initiated the Mississippi Voting Rights Movement, and they, Nash, and others stayed in Mississippi to work on what soon became known as the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Earlier the Nashville students and others developed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Bevel, Nash, Lafayette and his wife Colia Lidell opened a project in Selma, Alabama, to assist the work of local organizers like Amelia Boynton.
In 1962, after several successful years working on and organizing within the Nashville Student Movement, James Bevel was invited to meet with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta. At that meeting the two of them agreed to work together, on an equal basis, on projects under the auspices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which would end segregation, obtain voting rights, and assure quality education for all American children. They agreed to not stop until these steps occurred, and also to ask for funding for SCLC only if it was involved in organizing a movement. Bevel soon became SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education, and King remained SCLC's chairman and spokesperson.
1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade and its planned March on Washington
In 1963, after SCLC agreed to assist one of its founders, Reverend Fred Suttlesworth, and others in their work on a movement in Birmingham, Alabama, James Bevel came up with the idea of using children to "stand-up" for their own freedom. He spent weeks strategizing, organizing and educating Birmingham's elementary and high school students in the philosophy and techniques of nonviolence, and then directed them to meet at and march from Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to Birmingham's City Hall to talk to its Mayor about segregation in the city. This action culminated in international public outrage over the cities use of fire hoses and dogs to stop the children from marching to City Hall.
During the Birmingham Children's Crusade, President John F. Kennedy asked King to stop involving children in the campaign. King told Bevel to not use the students anymore, but instead, Bevel told King he would not stop the action, went directly to the children, and asked them to prepare to take to the highways on a march to Washington to question Kennedy about correcting the problem of segregation in America. The Kennedy administration, hearing of this plan, asked SCLC's leaders what they would want to see in a comprehensive civil rights bill, which was then written-up and agreed to by SCLC's leadership, thus ending the need for the children of Birmingham to march the highways to Washington.
Shortly thereafter, in August 1963, SCLC participated in what has become known as the March on Washington, an event organized by labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who had been the original planners (with A. J. Muste) of the 1941 March on Washington. Just as the "threat" of the children marching along the highway from Birmingham to Washington led directly to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the threat of the 1941 march led President Franklin Roosevelt to sign the Fair Employment Act, and neither march was actually held.
The Alabama Project and the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement
Weeks after the March On Washington, in September 1963, a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four young girls attending Sunday School. James Bevel responded by proposing the Alabama Voting Rights Project, co-wrote the project proposal with his then wife, Diane Nash, and the two soon moved to Alabama and began to implement the project with Birmingham student activist James Orange. Starting in late 1963 they organized Alabama until, in late 1964, SCLC and Dr. King (SCLC's Board and King had opposed and did not work on the Alabama Project) came to Selma to work alongside the ongoing Bevel/Nash Alabama Voting Rights Project and the SNCC's Voting Rights Project — which was headed at that time by Reverend Prathia Hall and Worth Long (Bernard Lafayette had been its first chairman). The Alabama Project and its SNCC counterpart then became collectively known as the Selma Voting Rights Movement.
The Selma Voting Rights Movement officially began in early January, 1965, grew, and had some successes. Then, on February 16, 1965, a young man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, went with his mother and grandfather to participate in a nighttime march led by Reverend C. T. Vivian to free James Orange, who was being held in jail in Marion, Alabama. After the street lights were turned off Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot in the stomach while defending his mother from an attack by the Alabama State Troopers, and he died a few days later. When James Bevel heard of the death he called for a march from Selma to Montgomery to talk to Governor George Wallace about the attack in which Jackson was shot. During the first march a group of marchers — including SNCC Chairman John Lewis and Amelia Boynton — were bludgeoned and tear-gassed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what then became known as "Bloody Sunday". After a court order cleared the way for the march, hundreds of religious, labor and civic leaders and many celebrities and citizens alike walked the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery. Before this final march occurred, President Lyndon Johnson had gone on national television to address a joint session of Congress and demanded that it pass a comprehensive Voting Rights Act.
Because of the unprecedented success of the 1963-1965 Alabama Project, in 1965 SCLC gave its highest honor — the Rosa Parks Award —- to James Bevel and Diane Nash.
The 1966 Chicago Open Housing Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
In 1966, Bevel chose Chicago as the site of SCLC's long-awaited Northern Campaign. There he strategized and directed the Chicago Open Housing Movement. As that movement neared its conclusion A.J. Muste, David Dellinger, representatives of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and others asked Rev. Bevel to take over the directorship of the Spring Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam. After researching the war, and after getting Dr. King's agreement to work with him on this project, Bevel agreed to lead the antiwar effort. He renamed the organization the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, brought many diverse groups into the movement, and strategized and organized the April 15, 1967 march from Central Park to the United Nations Building. It became the largest demonstration in American history to that date. During his speech to the crowd that day, Rev. Bevel called for a larger march in Washington D.C., a plan which evolved into the October 1967 March on the Pentagon.
Bevel, who witnessed King's assassination on April 4, 1968, reminded SCLC's executive board and staff that evening that King had left "marching orders" that if anything should happen to him Rev. Ralph Abernathy should take his place as SCLC's Chairman. Bevel opposed SCLC's next action, the 1969 Poor People's Campaign, but in order to handle any problems which may have occurred he took on the role of its Director of Non-Violent Education.
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Later life
After leaving SCLC in 1969, Bevel went on to found the Making of a Man Clinic in 1970 and the Students for Education and Economic Development (SEED) in the early 1980s. He co-initiated the 1995 Day of Atonement/Million Man March in Washington, D.C.[2], again the largest demonstration in American history as of that date.
Politically, Bevel ran as the Republican candidate for Illinois' 7th Congressional District in 1984, and later ran as the vice presidential candidate in 1992 on Lyndon LaRouche's ticket while that perennial candidate was serving a prison sentence for mail fraud and tax evasion.[3] He engaged in LaRouche seminars on issues like "Is the Anti Defamation League the new KKK?"[4] When he introduced LaRouche to a convention of the National African American Leadership Summit in 1996, both men were booed off the stage and a fight broke out between LaRouche supporters and black nationalists.[5] One of the campaigns on which Bevel collaborated with the LaRouche organization was a campaign claiming a huge Republican child molestation ring based in Nebraska — the subject of the book The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, written by former Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp and published in its first edition by the LaRouche organization.
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Criminal charges
In late May 2007, James Bevel was arrested in Alabama on charges of incest committed sometime between October 1992 and October 1994 in Loudoun County, Virginia; Bevel was living in Leesburg, Virginia at the time and working with LaRouche's group, whose international headquarters was a few blocks from Bevel's apartment. The accuser, one of his daughters, was 13-15 years old at the time, and was living with her father in the Leesburg apartment. Three of his other daughters also allege that Bevel sexually abused them. Charged with this unlawful fornication in Virginia, which has no statute of limitations for incest, Bevel pleaded innocent and continued to deny the main accusation of a one-time fornication. His four-day trial in April 2008 included "testimony about Bevel's philosophies for eradicating lust, and parents' duties to sexually orient their children". During the trial, the accusing daughter testified that she was repeatedly molested beginning when she was six years old.[6][7][8]
During the trial, prosecutors used as key evidence against Bevel a 2005 police-sting telephone call recorded by the Leesburg, Virginia police without his knowledge. During that 90 minute call, Bevel's daughter asked him why he had sex with her during her teen years, and she asked him why he wanted her to use a vaginal douche afterward. Bevel's response to his daughter was that he had no interest in getting her pregnant. Bevel's statements were used against him during the trial after he denied committing sexual acts with his daughter.
On April 10, 2008, after a three-hour deliberation, the jury found Bevel guilty, his bond was revoked, and he was taken into custody.[9] The judge sentenced him on October 15, 2008, to 15 years in prison and fined him $50,000. After the verdict, Bevel claimed that the charges were part of a conspiracy to destroy his reputation, added that he might appeal, received an appeal bond on November 4, 2008 and was released from prison three days later, six weeks before his death.
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Elaine Brown
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Brown grew up in poverty in North Philadelphia. She attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls, the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, and, briefly, Temple University. At 22, Elaine moved to Los Angeles alone to pursue a career in music. Gradually, Brown's interest in politics grew and began she working for the radical newspaper Harambee.[3] Brown soon became the first representative of the Black Student Alliance to the Black Congress in California.
In 1967, Brown joined the Black Panther Party, as rank-and-file, studying revolutionary literature, selling Party newspapers, cleaning guns, and cooking breakfeast for community children. In 1968, Brown was commissioned by, then Chairman, David Hilliard to record her songs, resulting in "Seize the Time". She eventually assumed the role of editor of the Black Panther in the Southern California Branch of the Party. In 1971, Brown became a member of the Party's Central Committee as Minister of Information, replacing the expelled Eldridge Cleaver. In 1973 Brown was commissioned to record more songs by national party Chairman, founder,and Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton. These songs resulted in the album "Until We're Free." Brown unsuccessfully ran for the Oakland city council in 1973, gaining around 30% of the vote. In 1974 Newton fled to Cuba, facing murder charges, he appointed Brown as his replacement. Elaine Brown was Chairman of the Black Panther Party from 1974 until 1977. In her 1992 memoir A Taste of Power, she wrote about of experience:
"A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of the black people.... I knew I had to muster something mighty to manage the Black Panther Party."[4]
During Brown's leadership of the party, she focused on radical electoral politics and community service. Attempting to seize assets in Califoria and redirect profits to the poor. Also, Brown developed the Panther's Liberation School, which was recognized by the state of California as a model school. Former liberal activist, David Horowitz, has accused Brown of ordering the killing of Betty Van Patter, an accountant, in 1974.[5] Horowitz alleges that Van Patter intended to go public with illegalities she had uncovered in the Black Panthers' account books, and that Brown had Van Patter killing because these allegations would have hindered Brown's city council bid.[6][7]
Brown recorded two albums, Seize the Time! (Vault, 1969) and Until We're Free (Motown Records, 1973).[8] Seize the Time includes "The Meeting," the anthem of the Black Panther Party.
From 1990 to 1996, she lived in France.[9] In 2005, she was a Green Party candidate for Mayor of Brunswick, Georgia but was disqualified from running and voting in Brunswick because she failed to establish residency in the city.[10][11]
Besides A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (Doubleday, 1992), Brown is the author of The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (Beacon, 2002). In an appendix to the latter book, Brown labels many Black leaders and celebrities, including Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, Chris Rock, Russell Simmons, Sean "Diddy" Combs, and Oprah Winfrey, as "New Age House Negroes" and "New Age House Negresses."[12]
Brown is the mother of a grown daughter, Ericka Abram.
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Mary Fair Burks
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Burks, Mary Fair. "Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott." Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941-1965. Ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 71-83.
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Stokely Carmichael
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Carmichael participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, serving as a regional director for SNCC workers and helping to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). He was deeply disillusioned with the national Democratic Party when the party refused to seat the multi-racial MFDP delegation in place of the official all-white, pro-segregation Mississippi Democratic Party during the 1964 Democratic Party National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.[2] This incident led him to seek alternative means for the political empowerment of African-Americans and to become increasingly influenced by the ideologies of Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah.
In 1966 Carmichael journeyed to Lowndes County, Alabama, where he brought together the county's African-American residents to form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The organization was an effort to form a political party that would bring black residents of Lowndes — who were a majority in the county, but held no elected offices and were locked out of local politics — into power. The organization chose a black panther as its emblem, ostensibly in response to the Alabama Democratic Party's use of a White Rooster. In the press the LCFO became known as the "Black Panther Party" – a moniker that would eventually provide inspiration for the more-well known Black Panther Party later founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California.[3] Carmichael often satirically made references to the media's one-sided renaming of the party:
“ In Lowndes County, we developed something called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. It is a political party. The Alabama law says that if you have a Party you must have an emblem. We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people...Now there is a Party in Alabama called the Alabama Democratic Party. It is all white. It has as its emblem a white rooster and the words "white supremacy - for the right". Now the gentlemen of the Press, because they're advertisers, and because most of them are white, and because they're produced by that white institution, never called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization by its name, but rather they call it the Black Panther Party. Our question is, Why don't they call the Alabama Democratic Party the "White Cock Party"? It's fair to us...[4] ”
While he was in Lowndes, the number of registered black voters rose from 70 to 2,600 — 300 more than the number of registered white voters.[5]
Carmichael became chairman of SNCC later in 1966, taking over from John Lewis. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James Meredith was attacked with a shotgun during his solitary "March Against Fear". Carmichael joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Cleveland Sellers and others to continue Meredith's march. He was arrested once again during the march and, upon his release, he gave his first "Black Power" speech, using the phrase to urge black pride and socio-economic independence:
“ It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations. ”
While Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael's speech brought it into the spotlight and it became a rallying cry for young African Americans across the country. Heavily influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon and his landmark book Wretched of the Earth, along with others such as Malcolm X, under Carmichael's leadership SNCC gradually became more radical and focused on Black Power as its core goal and ideology. This became most evident during the controversial Atlanta Project in 1966. SNCC, under the local leadership of Bill Ware, engaged in a voter drive to promote the candidacy of Julian Bond for the Georgia State Legislature in an Atlanta district. However, unlike previous SNCC activities — like the 1961 Freedom Rides or the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer — Ware excluded Northern white SNCC members from the drive. Initially, Carmichael opposed this move and voted it down, but he eventually changed his mind.[6] When - at the urging of the Atlanta Project - the issue of whites in SNCC came up for a vote, Carmichael ultimately sided with those calling for the expulsion of whites. The goal was to encourage whites to begin organizing poor white southern communities while SNCC would continue to focus on promoting African American self reliance through Black Power.[7]
Carmichael saw nonviolence as a tactic as opposed to a principle, which separated him from moderate civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.. Carmichael became critical of civil rights leaders who simply called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle class mainstream. Carmichael believed that in order to genuinely integrate, Blacks first had to unite in solidarity and become self-reliant.
“ Now, several people have been upset because we’ve said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was a subterfuge, an insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy. Now we maintain that in the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a "thalidomide drug of integration," and that some Negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people; and that that does not begin to solve the problem; that when we went to Mississippi we did not go to sit next to Ross Barnett; we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark; we went to get them out of our way; and that people ought to understand that; that we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy. Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom. No man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after they’re born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.[4] ”
According to Bearing the Cross (1986), David J. Garrow's Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Civil Rights movement, a few days after Carmichael used the "Black Power" slogan at the "Meredith March Against Fear," he reportedly told King, "Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum and force you to take a stand for Black Power." King responded, "I have been used before. One more time won't hurt."
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In 1967, Carmichael stepped down as chairman of SNCC and was replaced by H. Rap Brown. The SNCC, which was a collective and, in keeping with the spirit of the times, worked by group consensus rather than hierarchically, was displeased with Carmichael's celebrity status. SNCC leaders had begun to refer to him as "Stokely Starmichael" and criticize his habit of making policy announcements independently, before achieving internal agreement, and gave him a formal letter of expulsion in 1967.[8]
After his time with the SNCC, Carmichael attempted to clarify his politics by writing the book Black Power (1967) with Charles V. Hamilton and became a strong critic of the Vietnam War. During this period he traveled and lectured extensively throughout the world; visiting Guinea, North Vietnam, China, and Cuba. After his expulsion from the SNCC, Carmichael became more clearly identified with the Black Panther Party as its "Honorary Prime Minister."[8] During this period he became more of a speaker than an organizer, traveling throughout the country and internationally advocating for his vision of "black power.
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Death and legacy
After two years of treatment at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, he died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 in Conakry, Guinea. He claimed that his cancer "was given to me by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them."[5] He claimed that the FBI had introduced the cancer to his body as an attempt at assassination.[12] After his diagnosis in 1996, benefits were held in Denver; New York; Atlanta;[13] and Washington, D.C.,[8] to help defray his medical expenses; and the government of Trinidad and Tobago, where he was born, awarded him a grant of $1,000 a month for the same purpose.[13]
In 2007, the publication of previously secret Central Intelligence Agency documents revealed that Carmichael had been tracked by the CIA as part of their surveillance of black activists abroad, which began in 1968 and continued for years.[14]
In a final interview given to the Washington Post, he spoke with contempt for the economic and electoral progress made during the past thirty years. He acknowledged that blacks had won election to major mayorships, but stated that the power of mayoralty had been diminished and that such progress was essentially meaningless.[cite this quote] Stokely Carmichael is credited with coining the phrase "institutional racism", which is defined as a form of racism that occurs in institutions such as public bodies and corporations, including universities. In the late 1960s Carmichael defined "institutional racism" as "the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnic origin".[15]
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson gave a speech celebrating Carmichael's life, stating: "He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa. He was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He helped to bring those walls down".[16]
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Stokely Carmichael on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[17]
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Self-imposed exile
However, Carmichael soon began to distance himself from the Panthers. The Panthers and Carmichael disagreed on whether white activists should be allowed to help the Panthers. The Panthers believed that white activists could help the movement, while Carmichael thought as Malcolm X, saying that the white activists needed to organize their own communities first. In 1969, he and his then-wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, moved to Guinea-Conakry where he became an aide to Guinean prime minister Ahmed Sékou Touré and the student of exiled Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah.[10] Makeba was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the United Nations.[11] Three months after his arrival in Africa, in July 1969, he published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning the Panthers for not being separatist enough and their "dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals".[5]
It was at this stage in his life that Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor the African leaders Nkrumah and Touré who had become his patrons. At the end of his life, friends still referred to him interchangeably by both names, "and he doesn't seem to mind."[8]
Carmichael remained in Guinea after separation from the Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and speak out in support of international leftist movements and in 1971 collected his work in a second book Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. This book expounds an explicitly socialist, Pan-African vision, which he seemingly retained for the rest of his life. From the late 1970s until the day he died, he answered his phone by announcing "Ready for the revolution!"[5]
While in Guinea, he was arrested one more time. Two years after Touré's death in 1984, the military regime which took his place arrested Carmichael and jailed him for three days on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the government. Despite common knowledge that President Touré engaged in torture of his political opponents, Carmichael had never criticized his namesake.[5]
Carmichael and Makeba separated in 1973. After they divorced, he entered a second marriage with Marlyatou Barry, a Guinean doctor whom he also divorced. By 1998, his second wife and their son, Bokar, born in 1982, were living in Arlington, Virginia. Relying on a statement from the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party, his 1998 obituary in the New York Times referenced two sons, three sisters, and his mother as survivors but without further details.[5]
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Claudette Colvin
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Bus incident
In 1955 Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery.[1] Colvin's family didn't own a car, so she relied on the city's gold-and-green buses to get to school. On March 2, 1955, she boarded a public bus and, shortly thereafter, refused to give up her seat to a white man. Colvin was coming home from school that day when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown at the same place Parks boarded another bus months later. Colvin was sitting about two seats from the emergency exit when four whites boarded. The bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, ordered her along with three other black passengers to get up. She refused and was removed from the bus by two police officers, who took her to jail.
When she refused to get up, she was still thinking about a school paper that she wrote that day. It was about the prohibition for black people to try on white clothes in department stores.[2]
"The bus was getting crowded and I remember him (the bus driver) looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn't," said a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. "She didn't say anything. She just continued looking out the window. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move."
Price testified on Colvin's behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault. "There was no assault," Price said.
Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was active in the NAACP's Youth Council, and she was actually being advised by Rosa Parks.
Community response
E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then came the second-guessing: Colvin came from a very poor background where her father mowed lawns, her mother was a maid and they lived in King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery. The police, who took her to the city hall and then jail, also accused the teenager of spewing curse words, which Colvin denied, saying that in fact the obscenities were leveled at her.
A number of black leaders, including Parks, raised money for Colvin's defense. At the time, local black leaders believed that Colvin's case was an appropriate one to litigate all the way to the United States Supreme Court, as part of a broader effort to overturn segregation laws in the South. Colvin's lawyers wanted a new arrangement on the city's bus. Mainly, they wanted white people to take the front and black to take the back and the middle of the bus would be available to everyone. Therefore, they sent a petition to the bus company and to the city officials. To everyone's surprise, David Birmingham, a Police and Fire Commissioner, agreed to the petition. But the city bus company refused.[2]
Soon after her arrest, however, Colvin became pregnant by a much older, married man, having been raped. Local black leaders felt that this moral transgression would not only scandalize the deeply religious black community, but also make Colvin suspect in the eyes of sympathetic whites. In particular, they felt that the white press would manipulate Colvin's illegitimate pregnancy as a means of undermining Colvin's victim status and any subsequent boycott of the bus company. Rosa Parks stated that "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance. So the decision was made to wait until we had a plaintiff who was more upstanding before we went ahead and invested any more time, effort, and money."[2] She was ultimately sentenced to probation for the ordinance violation, but a boycott never materialized from the event.
Some historians have argued that civil rights leaders, who were predominantly middle class, were uneasy with Colvin's lower class background. Indeed, before Colvin, the NAACP had considered and rejected several protesters deemed unsuitable or unable to withstand the pressures of cross-examination during a legal challenge to racial segregation laws.
Court trial
On May 11, 1956, Colvin testified in a Montgomery federal court hearing about her actions on the bus in a case called Browder v. Gayle. During the trial, Claudette Colvin described her arrest. "I kept saying, 'He has no right... this is my constitutional right... you have no right to do this.' And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person."[2]
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Storyteller-actress Awele Makeba wrote, directed and starred in a one-woman drama, Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing!, in which Makeba relates the story of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott through the eyes of Colvin following her arrest.
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In 1956, Colvin gave birth to a son Raymond, who was so fair-skinned (like his father) that people frequently accused her of having a white baby. She left Alabama for New York in 1958, and for over 30 years worked the night shift at a Catholic nursing home. Colvin retired in 2004 after 35 years of working as a nurse's assistant in the nursing home.
Raymond became addicted to drugs and alcohol. At 37, he died of a heart attack in Colvin's apartment.[citation needed] About her life, her dreams of becoming a lawyer, she says, "Yes, I’m disappointed. But then again, no one knows what’s in store for them. At least my grandkids don’t have to suffer what I had to suffer."
According to the Montgomery Advertiser, Colvin said that she would not change her decision to remain seated. "I feel proud of what I did. I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on... I'm not disappointed," Colvin said. "Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. But also let them know that the attorneys took four other women to the Supreme Court to challenge the law that led to the end of segregation."
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Annie Bell Robinson Devine
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Doris Derby
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Ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941-1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 71-83.
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Marian Wright Edelman
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Early years
Edelman was born the youngest of five children to Arthur Jerome Wright and Maggie Leola Brown in Bennettsville, South Carolina. Her father, a Baptist minister who instilled in her that Christianity obligates one to service, died when she was fourteen, urging in his last words, "Don't let anything get in the way of your education."[1]
She attended Marlboro Training High School there, and went on to Spelman College and travelled the world on a Merrill scholarship and studied in the Soviet Union as a Lisle fellow. She became involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and after being arrested for her activism, she decided to become a lawyer and entered Yale Law School in 1963, joining the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1968.
Activism
Edelman was the first African American admitted to the Mississippi Bar when she began practicing law out of the LDF's Mississippi office. During her time in Mississippi, she worked on racial justice issues connected with the civil rights movement and represented activists throughout the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. She also helped get a Head Start program established in her community.
Edelman moved in 1968 to Washington, D.C. where she continued her work and contributed to the organizing of the Poor People's Campaign of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and also became interested in issues related to childhood development and poverty-stricken children.
In 1973, she founded the Children's Defense Fund as a voice for poor, minority and handicapped children. The organization has served as an advocacy and research center for children's issues, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need. To keep the agency independent, she saw that it was financed entirely with private funds.[1]
As founder, leader and principal spokesperson for the CDF, Mrs. Edelman worked to persuade Congress to overhaul foster care, support adoption, improve child care and protect children who are handicapped, homeless, abused or neglected. A philosophy of service absorbed during her childhood undergirds all her efforts. As she expresses it, “If you don’t like the way the world is, you have an obligation to change it. Just do it one step at a time.” [2]
She continues to advocate youth pregnancy prevention, child-care funding, prenatal care, greater parental responsibility in teaching values and curtailing children’s exposure to the barrage of violent images transmitted by mass media.[2]
Edelman serves on the board of the New York City based Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to the elimination of poverty and its scourge.
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* 1985 MacArthur Fellowship
* 1985 Barnard Medal of Distinction
* 1986 Doctor of Laws, honoris causa Bates College
* 1988 Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism
* 1992 Boy Scouts of America, Silver Buffalo Award
* 1995 Community of Christ International Peace Award
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It was in 1967, during a tour by Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark of Mississippi's poverty-ridden Delta slums, that she met Peter Edelman, an assistant to Kennedy. They would marry the following year on 14 July 1968. Edelman and husband, currently a Georgetown law professor, have have three sons; Joshua, Jonah, and Ezra.
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Medgar Evers
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Early life
Medgar Evers was born on July 2, 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi. In 1943, Evers, then 17, dropped out of high school to enlist in the army with his older brother Charlie.[1] Evers fought in France, the European Theatre of WWII and was honorably discharged in 1945 as a Sergeant. In 1946, having returned to his hometown, Evers, along with his brother and four friends, registered to vote in a local election. On voting day, however, local white citizens used intimidation to prevent Evers and the others from casting their votes. He recounts this moment in his autobiography:
When we got to the courthouse, the clerk said he wanted to talk with us. When we got into his office, some 15 or 20 armed white men surged in behind us, men I had grown up with, had played with. We split up and went home. Around town, Negroes said we had been whipped, beaten up and run out of town. Well, in a way we were whipped, I guess, but I made up my mind then that it would not be like that again—at least not for me. I was committed, in a way, to change things.[1]
In 1948, Evers enrolled at Alcorn State University, majoring in business administration. In college he was on the debate team, played football and ran track, sang in the school choir and served as president of his junior class.
He married classmate Myrlie Beasley on December 24, 1951, and completed work on his degree the following year. The couple moved to Mound Bayou, MS, where T.R.M. Howard had hired him to sell insurance for his Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company.
Activism
Evers was also the president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a civil rights and pro self-help organization. Involvement in the RCNL gave Evers crucial training in activism. He helped to organize the RCNL's boycott of service stations that denied blacks use of their restrooms. The boycotters distributed bumper stickers with the slogan "Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom." Along with his brother, Charles Evers, he also attended the RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954 which drew crowds of ten thousand or more.
Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954. When his application was rejected, Evers became the focus of a NAACP campaign to desegregate the school, a case aided by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 that segregation was unconstitutional.
NAACP Field Secretary
He was involved in a boycott campaign against white merchants and was instrumental in eventually desegregating the University of Mississippi when that institution was finally forced to enroll James Meredith in 1962.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Evers found himself the target of a number of threats. His public investigations into the murder of Emmett Till and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard made him a prominent black leader and therefore vulnerable to attack. On May 28, 1963, a molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. Five days before his death, Evers was nearly run down by a car after he emerged from the Jackson NAACP office. Civil rights demonstrations accelerated in Jackson during the first week of June 1963. A local television station granted Evers time for a short speech, his first in Mississippi, where he outlined the goals of the Jackson movement. Following the speech, threats on Evers' life increased.
Assassination
On June 12, 1963, Evers pulled into his driveway after just returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go," Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917.303 rifle that ricocheted into his home. He staggered 30 feet before collapsing. He died at a local hospital 50 minutes later. Evers was murdered just hours after President John F. Kennedy's speech on national television in support of civil rights.[2]
House where Evers was shot.
Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, where he received full military honors in front of a crowd of more than three thousand people. It was the largest funeral at Arlington since the interment of John Foster Dulles, former U.S. Secretary of State in 1959. The past chairman of the American Veterans' Committee, Mickey Levine, said at the services, "No soldier in this field has fought more courageously, more heroically than Medgar Evers."
Medgar Evers grave in Arlington National Cemetery in 2007.
On June 23, 1964, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens' Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers' murder. During the course of his first trial in 1964, De La Beckwith was visited by former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and one time Army Major General Edwin A. Walker.
All-white juries twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith's guilt.
The murder and subsequent trials caused an uproar. Musician Bob Dylan wrote his 1963 song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about Evers and his assassin. The song's lyrics included: "Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught/They lowered him down as a king." Nina Simone took up the topic in her song "Mississippi Goddam". Phil Ochs wrote the songs "The Ballad of Medgar Evers" and "Another Country" in response to the killing. Matthew Jones and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers paid tribute to Evers in the haunting "Ballad of Medgar Evers." Eudora Welty's short story "Where is the Voice Coming From," in which the speaker is the imagined assassin of Medgar Evers, was published in The New Yorker.
In 1965, Jackson C. Frank included the lyrics "But there aren't words to bring back Evers" in his tribute to the Civil Rights Movement, "Don't Look Back," found on his only, self-titled, album. Malvina Reynolds mentioned "the shot in Evers' back" in her song "It Isn't Nice". More recently, rapper Immortal Technique asks if a diamond is "worth the blood of Malcolm and Medgar Evers?" in the song "Crossing the Boundary". The Rza sang on "I Can't Go to Sleep" by Wu-Tang Clan, "Medgar Took One To The Skull For Intergrating College".
In 1994, 30 years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence, and Bobby DeLaughter took on the job as the attorney. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly good state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for the three decades following the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001.
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Legacy
Evers' legacy has been kept alive in a variety of ways. Minrose Gwin notes that after his death, Medgar Evers was memorialized by the authors Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Margaret Walker and Anne Moody. In 1970, Medgar Evers College was established in Brooklyn, New York as part of the City University of New York. In 1983, a made-for-television movie, For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story starring Howard Rollins Jr. and Irene Cara as Myrlie Evers was aired, celebrating the life and career of Medgar Evers. On June 28, 1992, the city of Jackson, MS erected a statue in honor of Evers. All of Delta Drive (part of U.S. Highway 49) in Jackson was renamed in Evers' honor. In December 2004, the Jackson City Council changed the name of the city's airport to Jackson-Evers International Airport in honor of Evers. The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi directed by Rob Reiner tells the story of the 1994 retrial of Beckwith, in which prosecutor Robert DeLaughter of the District Attorney's office secured a conviction. Beckwith and DeLaughter were played by James Woods and Alec Baldwin, respectively; Whoopi Goldberg played Myrlie Evers. Phil Ochs tells his story in the song "Too Many Martyrs."
Evers' widow, Myrlie, became a noted activist in her own right later in life, eventually serving as chair of the NAACP. Medgar's brother Charles returned to Jackson in July 1963 and served briefly in his slain brother's place. Charles Evers remained involved in Mississippi Civil Rights for years to come. He resides in Jackson.
Early in 2007, comedian Chris Rock appeared as a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. Regarding a recent incident in which comedian Michael Richards had repeatedly called an African-American man in the audience "nigger" during a performance, Bill Maher asked Chris Rock if Rock considered Richards racist. Rock responded "He stood up for two minutes and shouted 'nigger'! What do you have to do? Shoot Medgar Evers?" The 2009 album "Gutter Tactics" by experimental Hip-Hop group Dälek contains a song titled 'Who Medgar Evers Was...".
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On February 18, 2001, Myrlie and Medgar's oldest son, Darrell Kenyatta Evers (b. 1953 - d. 2001), died, leaving a wife and son.[3] Their two surviving children are Reena Denise Evers (b. 1954) and James Van Dyke Evers (b. January 10, 1960).
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Myrlie Evers-Williams
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Myrlie Evers-Williams (born March 17, 1933, nee Myrlie Beasley in Vicksburg, Mississippi) is an American activist. She was the first full-time chairman of the NAACP and is the former widow of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers. She met him when they were students at Alcorn A&M College in 1950. They married on December 24, 1951 and she left school before finishing her degree.
They moved to Mound Bayou where her husband sold insurance for Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights activist. She worked for Howard as a typist until the couple moved to Jackson in 1954.
She and Evers had three children before his murder. In 2001, their oldest son, Darrell Kenyatta Evers, died of colon cancer.[1] Their two surviving children are Reena Denise and James Van.
Evers-Williams went back to school after Evers' death and graduated from Pomona College, in 1968, with a degree in sociology. She served as director of consumer affairs for Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), where she developed the concept for the first corporate booklet on women in non-traditional jobs. This booklet, Women at ARCO, was in great demand throughout many printings and revisions.
She twice ran for congress from California's 24th district. Both times (in a June 1970 special election and the general election later that November) she lost to Republican John Rousselot. In 1971 she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus.
In 1975, Evers-Williams married her second husband, Walter Williams. He died in 1995 of prostate cancer.
In 1987, Evers-Williams was the first African-American woman appointed to serve as commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. Evers-Williams was chairman of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998. She is credited with spearheading the operations that restored the association to its original status as the premier civil rights organization in America. She is the author of For Us, the Living (1967) and Watch Me Fly: What I Learned On the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be (1999). In the best seller, I Dream A World: Black Women Who Changed America, Evers-Williams states that she "greets today and the future with open arms."
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James L. Farmer, Jr.
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Born in 1920 in Marshall, Texas to James L. Farmer, Sr. (American author, theologian, educator, and the first African-American Texan to earn a doctorate), James L. Farmer Jr. was a kind of child prodigy. At the age of 14, he was attending college and was on the debate team of Wiley College. This has been portrayed in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, directed by and starring Denzel Washington.
During the 1950s, Farmer served as national secretary of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy. SLID later became Students for a Democratic Society.
In 1961 Farmer, who was working for the NAACP at the time, returned to CORE to become its national director at a time when the civil rights movement was gaining power. He immediately planned a repeat of CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a trip of eight white and eight black men challenging segregation in transportation in the upper South. This time, however, the group would journey to the Deep South, and Farmer coined a new name for the trip: the Freedom Ride. On May 4, participants, this time including women as well as men, journeyed to the deep South and challenged segregated bus terminals as well as seating on the vehicles. The riders were met with severe violence and garnered national attention, sparking a summer of similar rides by other Civil Rights leaders and thousands of ordinary citizens. Although the Freedom Rides were attacked by whites, they became recognized as an effective strategy, and the Congress of Racial Equality received nationwide attention. Farmer himself became a well-known civil rights leader. The Freedom Rides captured the imagination of the nation through photographs, newspaper accounts, and motion pictures and inspired Erin Gruwell's teaching techniques and the Freedom Writers Foundation.
Growing disenchanted with emerging militancy and black nationalist sentiments in CORE, Farmer resigned as director in 1976. He took a teaching position at Lincoln University and continued to lecture. In 1968 Farmer ran for U.S. Congress as a Republican, but lost to Shirley Chisholm. However his defeat was not total; the recently elected President, Richard Nixon, offered him the position of Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Farmer retired from politics in 1971 but remained active, lecturing and serving on various boards and committees. In 1975 he co-founded Fund for an Open Society, which has as its vision a nation in which people live in stably integrated communities, where political and civic power is shared by people of different races and ethnicities. He led this organization until 1999.
He published his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, in 1985, and lived to see CORE move closer to its centrist roots in the 1980s and 1990s. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. From 1984 through 1998, Farmer taught at Mary Washington College (now The University of Mary Washington) in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
He died in 1999 of complications from diabetes.
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Publications
* Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement. James Farmer, Penguin-Plume, 1986 ISBN 0-452-25803-0
There is much discussion by Farmer and Houser on the founding of CORE in several issues of Fellowship magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1992 (Spring, Summer and Winter issues) and a conference on Oct. 22 that year, "Erasing the Color Line in the North," on CORE and the origins of the Civil Rights Movement at Bluffton College in Bluffton, Ohio, attended by both Houser and Farmer. Academics and the participants themselves unanimously agreed that the founders of CORE were Jim Farmer, George Houser and Bernice Fisher. The conference has been preserved on videotape available from Bluffton College.
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Karl Fleming
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Books by Flemming include:
* Son Of The Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir (2005) ISBN 1-58648-296-3
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James Forman
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Forman spent his youth growing up mostly in Chicago and spending summers with family in Mississippi. After finishing high school, he served in the Air Force in Okinawa during the Korean War. [1]
Discharged from the Air Force in 1952, he enrolled at the University of Southern California before an incident of police brutality involving two Los Angeles Police Department officers led to an emotional breakdown. He returned to Chicago and ultimately finished his undergraduate studies at Roosevelt University graduating in 1957. Forman spent most of the late 1950s and early 1960s working as a graduate student, journalist and teacher. [1]
Activism within the SNCC
In 1961, Forman joined and became the executive secretary of the then newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. From 1961 to 1965 Forman, a decade older and more experienced than most of the other members of SNCC, became responsible for providing organizational support to the young, loosely affiliated activists by paying bills, radically expanding the institutional staff and planning the logistics for programs. Under the leadership of Forman and others, SNCC became an important political player at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. [1]
In 1964, Forman, expressing his frustration with the gradualist approach of some Civil Rights leaders, made one of his best known quips: "If we can't sit at the table [of democracy], let's knock the fucking legs off!" [2]
Post-SNCC work
After being replaced by Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson as executive secretary, Forman remained close to the leadership of SNCC helping to negotiate the ill-fated "merger" of SNCC and the Black Panther Party in 1967 and even briefly taking a leadership position within the Panthers. [3] In 1969, after the failure of the merger and the decline of SNCC as an effective political organization, Forman began associating with other Black political radical groups. In Detroit he participated in the Black Economic Development Conference, where his "Black Manifesto" was adopted. He also founded a nonprofit organization called the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee. [4]
As a part of his Black Manifesto, on a Sunday morning in May, 1969, Forman interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the centuries. Although Riverside's preaching minister, the Rev. Ernest T. Campbell, termed the demands "exorbitant and fanciful," he was in sympathy with the impulse, if not the tactic. Later, the church agreed to donate a fixed percentage of its annual income to anti-poverty efforts.[1]
On May 30, 1969 Forman made plans to puruse a similar course at a Jewish Synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York. Members of the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL), led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, showed up carrying chains and clubs promising to confront Forman if he attempted to enter the synagogue. Kahane and the JDL forewarned Forman and the public about their intended actions and Forman never showed up at the Synagogue. [1]
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Later life
During the 1970s and 1980s, Forman completed graduate work at Cornell University in African and African-American Studies and in 1982, he received a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies.[1]
James Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing Black and disenfranchised people around issues of progressive economic and social development and equality. He also taught at American University in Washington, DC. He wrote several books documenting his experiences within the movement and his evolving political philosophy including "Sammy Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement" (1969), "The Making of Black Revolutionaries" (1972 and 1997) and "Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African American People" (1984).[1]
He died on January 10, 2005 of colon cancer, aged 76, at the Washington House, a hospice in Washington, DC.
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Forman's marriages to Mary Forman and Mildred Thompson ended in divorce. He was married to Mildred Thompson Forman (now Mildred Page) from 1959 to 1965, during the most active period of SNCC. Mildred Forman moved to Atlanta with James and worked at the Atlanta SNCC office as well as working as coordinator for tours of the SNCC Freedom Singers.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Forman lived with Constancia ("Dinky") Romilly, the second and only surviving child of a British-born journalist and anti-fascist activist, the Hon. Jessica Mitford, and her first husband and second cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was a nephew-by-marriage of Winston Churchill (Although Jessica had four children in all). Though obituaries and other posthumous articles about Forman have stated that he and Romilly were married, correspondence between Romilly's mother and aunts state that the couple were not legally husband and wife.[5]
Forman and Romilly (who later became an emergency-room nurse and married, in 1980, schoolteacher Edwin "Terry" Weber) had two sons:
* James Robert Lumumba Forman (born 1967 and uses the name James Forman Jr. to differentiate him from his father), an associate professor at Georgetown Law School[4][5]
* Chaka Esmond Fanon Forman (born 1970), an actor
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Frankie Muse Freeman
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Born to William Brown Muse and Maude Beatrice Smith Muse, came from college-educated families. Freeman grew up in Danville where she attended Westmoreland School and learned to play the piano. At age sixteen, Freeman enrolled in her mother's alma mater, Hampton Institute, which she attended between 1933 and 1936. In 1944, she was admitted to Howard University Law School and received a law degree in 1947.
In 1948, after writing to several law firms and not hearing back from them, Freeman decided to establish her own private practice. She began her practice with pro bono, divorce and criminal cases. After two years, Freeman began her work in civil rights when she became legal counsel to the NAACP legal team that filed suit against the St. Louis Board of Education in 1949. In 1954, Freeman was the lead attorney for the landmark NAACP case Davis et al v. the St. Louis Housing Authority, which ended legal racial discrimination in public housing with the city. Freeman worked as staff attorney for the St. Louis Land Clearance and Housing Authorities from 1956 until 1970, first as associate general counsel and later as general counsel of the St. Louis Housing Authority.
In March 1964, she was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson as a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. On September 15, 1964, the Senate approved Freeman’s nomination and she was officially the first black female on the civil rights commission. Freeman was subsequently reappointed again by Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and held the position until July 1979. She became Inspector General for the Community Services Administration during Jimmy Carter's Administration in 1979. However, a little more than a year after she became inspector general, Ronald Reagan was elected president. The day after his inauguration in 1981 Freeman visited the office of the CSA administrator and was handed an envelope from the White House that she — along with all inspectors of the other agencies — had been dismissed effective the day before. She returned to St. Louis, where she has practiced law ever since. In 1982, Freeman joined 15 other former high federal officials who formed a bipartisan Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, a group committed to ending racial discrimination and devising remedies that would counteract its harmful effects.[2]
Freeman is a Trustee Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of Howard University,[3] past Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Council on Aging, Inc. and the National Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis. She is also a board member of the United Way of Greater St. Louis, the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District and the St. Louis Center for International Relations. In 2003, she published her memoirs, A Song of Faith and Hope. She is past national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and has received several honorary doctorate degrees from institutions that include Hampton University, University of Missouri–St. Louis, Saint Louis University,[4] Washington University in St. Louis and Howard University.[5] She was also inducted into the National Bar Association's Hall of Fame in 1990.
At age 90, she's still practicing law with Montgomery Hollie & Associates, L.L.C. in St. Louis, a three-attorney firm, volunteer activities, such as adult Sunday school classes she teaches at Washington Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church. Currently on the board of the World Affairs Councils of America, St. Louis, with the mission that promotes understanding, engagement, relationships, and leadership in world affairs.
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Fannie Lou Hamer
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Beginnings of activism
Hamer attended several annual conferences of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The RCNL was led by businessman, Dr. T.R.M. Howard, and was a combination civil rights and self-help organization. The annual RCNL conferences featured entertainers, such as Mahalia Jackson, speakers, such as Thurgood Marshall and Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan, and panels on voting rights and other civil rights issues. Without her knowledge or consent, she was sterilized in 1961 by a white doctor as a part of the state of Mississippi's plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state.[2]
On August 23, 1962, Rev. James Bevel, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and an associate of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon in Ruleville, Mississippi and followed it with an appeal to those assembled to register to vote. Black people who registered to vote in the South faced serious hardships at that time due to institutionalized racism, including harassment, the loss of their jobs, physical beatings, and lynchings; nonetheless, Hamer was the first volunteer. She later said, "I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been scared - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they [white people] could do was rape me, and it seemed they'd been trying to do that a little at a time since I could remember."
On August 31, she traveled on a rented bus with other attendees of Rev. Bevel's sermon to Indianola, Mississippi to register. In what would become a signature trait of Hamer's activist career, she began singing Christian hymns, such as "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "This Little Light of Mine," to the group in order to bolster their resolve. The hymns also reflected Hamer's belief that the civil rights struggle was a deeply spiritual one.
Hamer's courage and leadership in Indianola came to the attention of SNCC organizer Bob Moses, who dispatched Charles McLaurin from the organization with instructions to find "the lady who sings the hymns". McLaurin found and recruited Hamer, and though she remained based in Mississippi, she began traveling around the South doing activist work for the organization.
On June 9, 1963, Hamer was on her way back from Charleston, South Carolina with other activists from a literacy workshop. Stopping in Winona, Mississippi, the group was arrested on a false charge and jailed by white policemen. Once in jail, Hamer and her colleagues were beaten savagely by the police, almost to the point of death.
Released on June 12, she needed more than a month to recover. Though the incident had profound physical and psychological effects, Hamer returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives, including the "Freedom Ballot Campaign", a mock election, in 1963, and the "Freedom Summer" initiative in 1964. She was known to the volunteers of Freedom Summer - most of whom were young, white, and from northern states - as a motherly figure who believed that the civil rights effort should be multi-racial in nature.
Hamer at The Democratic National Convention
In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or "Freedom Democrats" for short, was organized with the purpose of challenging Mississippi's all-white and anti-civil rights delegation to the Democratic National Convention of that year as not representative of all Mississippians. Hamer was elected Vice-Chair.
The Freedom Democrats' efforts drew national attention to the plight of African-Americans in Mississippi, and represented a challenge to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for reelection; their success would mean that other Southern delegations, who were already leaning toward Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, would publicly break from the convention's decision to nominate Johnson — meaning in turn that he would almost certainly lose those states' electoral votes in the election. Hamer, singing her signature hymns, drew a great deal of attention from the media, enraging Johnson, who referred to her in speaking to his advisors as "that illiterate woman".
Hamer was invited, along with the rest of the MFDP officers, to address the Convention's Credentials Committee. She recounted the problems she had encountered in registration, and the ordeal of the jail in Winona, and, near tears, concluded:
"All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America?"
In Washington, D.C., President Johnson called an emergency press conference in an effort to divert press coverage away from Hamer's testimony; but many television networks ran the speech unedited on their late news programs. The Credentials Committee received thousands of calls and letters in support of the Freedom Democrats.
Johnson then dispatched several trusted Democratic Party operatives to attempt to negotiate with the Freedom Democrats, including Senator Hubert Humphrey (who was campaigning for the Vice-Presidential nomination), Walter Mondale, Walter Reuther, and J. Edgar Hoover. They suggested a compromise which would give the MFDP two seats in exchange for other concessions, and secured the endorsement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for the plan. But when Humphrey outlined the compromise, saying that his position on the ticket was at stake, Hamer, invoking her Christian beliefs, sharply rebuked him:
"Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important than four hundred thousand black people's lives? Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote. I had to leave the plantation where I worked in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Now if you lose this job of Vice-President because you do what is right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take [the nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you talk about. Senator Humphrey, I'm going to pray to Jesus for you."
Future negotiations were conducted without Hamer, and the compromise was modified such that the Convention would select the two delegates to be seated, for fear the MFDP would appoint Hamer. In the end, the MFDP rejected the compromise, but had changed the debate to the point that the Democratic Party adopted a clause which demanded equality of representation from their states' delegations in 1968.
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Later activism
Hamer continued to work in Mississippi for the Freedom Democrats and for local civil rights causes. She ran for Congress in 1964 and 1965, and was then seated as a member of Mississippi's legitimate delegation to the Democratic National Convention of 1968, where she was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War.
She continued to work on other projects, including grassroots-level Head Start programs, the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign.
Hamer died of breast cancer on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59 at a hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi and is buried in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi. Her tombstone reads, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired".
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QUOTES - We did come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we’d gotten here. We did come all this way for no two seats, 'cause all of us is tired."
"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." (This quote was later employed as her epitaph.)
"Nobody's free until everybody's free."
"I have a dream."
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Myles Horton
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Highlander co-founder
A poor white from Savannah in West Tennessee, Horton's social and political views were strongly influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, under whom he studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Along with educator Don West and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski of New Orleans, Horton founded the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center) in his native Tennessee in 1932. He remained its director until 1973, traveling with it to reorganize in Knoxville after the state shut it down in 1961.
Horton and West had both traveled to Denmark to study its folk schools, centers for adult education and community empowerment. The resulting school in Monteagle, Tennessee was based on a concept originating in Denmark: "that an oppressed people collectively hold strategies for liberation that are lost to its individuals . . . The Highlander School had been a haven for the South's handful of functional radicals during the thirties and the essential alma mater for the leaders of the CIO's fledgling southern organizing drives." (McWhorter) The school was created to educate and empower adults for social change.
In their 1985 documentary You Got to Move, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver prominently featured Horton and the Highlander School. Horton also inspired the founding of the Myles Horton Organization at the University of Tennessee in 1986. The group organized numerous protests and events in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, including demonstrations to counter the Ku Klux Klan, and the construction of a shantytown on campus to encourage the university to divest from South Africa.
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Myles Horton married Zilphia Mae Johnson in 1935. Zilphia Horton was a constant collaborator with Horton until her death in 1956. Zilphia and Myles Horton had two children. In 1962, Myles Horton married Aimee Isgrig.
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T. R. M. Howard
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Early years
Howard was born in Murray, Kentucky to Arthur Howard, a tobacco twister, and Mary Chandler,a cook for Will Mason, a prominent local white doctor and member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Mason took note of the boy’s work habits, talent, ambition, and charm. He put him to work in his hospital and eventually paid for much of his medical education. Howard later showed his gratitude by adding Mason as one of his middle names.
Howard attended three Adventist colleges; the historically black Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama, the then nearly all-white Union College of Lincoln, Nebraska, and the College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University) in Loma Linda, California. While at Union College, he won the Anti-Saloon League of America’s national contest for best orator in 1930.
During his years in medical school in California, Howard took part in civil rights and political causes and wrote a regular column for the California Eagle, the main black newspaper of Los Angeles. He was also the president of the California Economic, Commercial, and Political League. Through the League and his columns, he championed black business ownership, the study of black history, and opposed local efforts to introduce segregation. In 1935, he began a forty-one year marriage with prominent black socialite, Helen Nela Boyd. After a residency at Homer G. Phillips Hospital (in St. Louis, Missouri), Howard became the medical director of the Riverside Sanitarium, the main Adventist health care institution to serve blacks.
Career
In 1942, Howard took over as the first chief surgeon at the hospital of the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor, a fraternal organization, in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. While there, he founded an insurance company, restaurant, hospital, home construction firm, and a large farm where he raised cattle, quail, hunting dogs, and cotton. He also built a small zoo and a park as well as the first swimming pool for blacks in Mississippi.
In 1947, he broke with the Knights and Daughters, organized the rival United Order of Friendship, and opened the Friendship Clinic.
Howard rose to prominence as a civil rights leader after founding the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) in 1951. His compatriots in the League included Medgar Evers, who Howard had hired as an agent for his Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company and Aaron Henry, a future leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The RCNL mounted a successful boycott against service stations that denied restrooms to blacks and distributed twenty thousand bumper stickers with the slogan, "Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom."
The RCNL organized yearly rallies in Mound Bayou for civil rights. Sometimes as many as ten thousand attended including such future activists as Fannie Lou Hamer and Amzie Moore. Some of the speakers were Rep. William L. Dawson of Chicago, Alderman Archibald J. Carey, Jr. of Chicago, Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan, and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall. One of the entertainers was Mahalia Jackson.
In 1954, Howard hatched a plan to fight a credit squeeze by the White Citizens Councils against civil rights activists in Mississippi. At his suggestion, the NAACP under Roy Wilkins encouraged businesses, churches, and voluntary associations to transfer their accounts to the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis. The funds were made available for loans to victims of the squeeze.
Emmett Till afair
Howard moved into the national limelight as never before after the murder of Emmett Till in August 1955 and the trial of his killers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant in September. He was heavily involved in the search for evidence and gave over his home to be a “black command center” for witnesses and journalists.
Visitors noticed the high level of security, including armed guards and a plethora of weapons. He also evaded Mississippi’s discriminatory gun control laws by hiding a pistol in a secret compartment of his car.
Mamie Till Bradley (Emmett’s mother) stayed at his home when she came to testify as did Charles Diggs. Like many black journalists and political leaders, Howard alleged that more than two people took part in the crime.
After an all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant, Howard gave dozens of speeches around the country on the Till killing and other violence in Mississippi, typically to crowds of several thousand. One of them was to an overflow crowd on November 27 in Montgomery, Alabama, at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. His host for the event was Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks was in the audience. Many years later, she singled out Howard’s appearance as the “first mass meeting that we had in Montgomery” following Till’s death. Only four days after his speech, Parks made history by refusing to give her seat on a city bus to a white man in violation of a segregation ordinance.
Howard's speaking tour culminated in rally for twenty thousand at Madison Square Garden where he was the featured speaker. He shared the stage with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Autherine Lucy.
In the final months of 1955, Howard and his family were increasingly subjected to death threats and economic pressure. He sold most of his property and moved permanently in Chicago, Illinois. His national reputation as a civil rights leader still seemed secure. He also had a highly visible public dispute with J. Edgar Hoover who he accused of slowness to find the killers of blacks in the South.
In early 1956, the Chicago Defender gave Howard the top spot on its annual national honor role. He founded the profitable Howard Medical Center on the South Side and served for one year as president of the National Medical Association, the black counterpart of the AMA. Howard also became medical director of S.B. Fuller Products Company. Samuel B. Fuller was probably the richest black man in the country.[1]
Politics
In 1958, Howard ran for Congress as a Republican against the powerful incumbent black Democrat, Rep. William L. Dawson, a close ally of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Although he received much favorable media publicity, and support from leading black opponents of the Daley machine, Dawson overwhelmed him at the polls. Howard was unable to counter Dawson's efficient political organization and rising voter discontent from the economic recession and the slowness of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to back civil rights in the South.
Shortly before the election, Howard helped to found the Chicago League of Negro Voters. The League generally opposed the Daley organization and promoted the election of black candidates in both parties. It nurtured the black independent movement of the 1960s and 1970s which eventually propelled four of Howard’s friends to higher office: Ralph Metcalfe, Charles Hayes, and Gus Savage to Congress and Harold Washington as mayor.
In the two decades after the election, Howard had little role as a national leader but he remained important locally. He chaired a Chicago committee in 1965 to raise money for the children of the recently assassinated leader, Malcolm X. Later, he was an early contributor to the Chicago chapter of the SCLC's Operation Breadbasket under Jesse Jackson. In 1971, Operation PUSH was founded in Howard's Chicago home and he chaired the organization's finance committee.
Friendship Medical Center
In 1972, Howard founded the multimillion dollar Friendship Medical Center on the South Side, the largest privately owned black clinic in Chicago. The staff of about one hundred and sixty included twenty-seven doctors in such fields as pediatrics, dental care, a pharmacy, ear, nose, and throat, and psychological and drug counseling. Friendship Medical Center fell into scandal when the Chicago Sun-Times, along with the Better Government Association, investigated Chicago abortion practices. The Sun-Times reported the deaths of three Friendship Medical Center abortion patients, including one who died in 1973 after an abortion that her survivors alleged had been performed by Howard himself.[2][3] Howard countered that the FMC had per¬formed 1,500 legal abortions thus far, more than any other Illinois provider. Given such numbers, he concluded, only six major complications were not unusual. A lack of detailed comparative statistics makes it almost impossible to determine if he was right. To Howard, the hue and cry was a smokescreen by the medical and political establishment to quash their lower-priced competitors. He had a basis for this belief. An abortion at the FMC cost about fifty dollars less than at hospitals.[4]
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During his years in Chicago, Howard attention increasingly focused on big game hunting, and made several trips to Africa for this purpose. His Chicago mansion included a “safari room” filled with trophies that was often made available for public tours. His New Year’s Eve parties, co-hosted by Helen Howard, were a regular stop for the Chicago’s black social set. He also became well-known as a leading abortion provider and was arrested in 1964 and 1965 but never convicted. Howard regarded this work as complementary to his earlier civil rights activism.
Howard died in Chicago after many years of deteriorating health. The Reverend Jesse Jackson officiated at the funeral.
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Winson Hudson
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Winson Hudson (1916-2004) was a civil rights activist born and raised in Harmony, Mississippi. She was involved in several lawsuits against Mississippi authorities in her fight to keep black schools open. As a result of her involvement with the civil rights movement, she and her family were often the target of white violence.
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Jesse Jackson
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Early life
Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns in Greenville, South Carolina, to Helen Burns. Helen Burns was a 16-year old single mother when he was born. His biological father, Noah Louis Robinson, a former professional boxer and a prominent figure in the black community, was married to another woman when Jesse was born. He was not involved in his son's life. In 1943, two years after Jesse's birth, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, who would adopt Jesse 14 years later. Jesse went on to take the surname of his stepfather.
Education
Jackson attended Sterling High School, a segregated high school in Greenville, where he was a student-athlete. Upon graduating in 1959, he rejected a contract from a professional baseball team so that he could attend the racially integrated University of Illinois on a football scholarship.[2] However, one year later, Jackson transferred to North Carolina A&T located in Greensboro, North Carolina. There are differing accounts for the reasons behind this transfer. Jackson claims that the change was based on the school's racial biases which included his being unable to play as a quarterback despite being a star quarterback at his high school as well as being demoted by his speech professor as an alternate in a public speaking competition team despite the support of his teammates who elected him a place on the team for his superior abilities.[2] ESPN.com reports a different story, however. Claims of racial discrimination on the football team may be exaggerated because Illinois's starting quarterback that year was an African American. In addition, Jackson left Illinois at the end of his second semester after being placed on academic probation.[3] Following his graduation from A&T, Jackson attended the Chicago Theological Seminary with the intent of becoming a minister, but dropped out in 1966 to focus full-time on the civil rights movement.[4] He was ordained in 1968, without a theological degree; awarded an honorary theological doctorate from Chicago in 1990; and received his Master of Divinity Degree based on his previous credits earned, plus his life experience and subsequent work, in 2000. Civil rights activism
Jesse Jackson in 1983.
Jackson speaks on a radio broadcast from the headquarters of Operation PUSH, (People United to Save Humanity) at its annual convention. July 1973. Photograph by John H. White.
Jackson speaks on a radio broadcast from the headquarters of Operation PUSH, (People United to Save Humanity) at its annual convention. July 1973. Photograph by John H. White.
Jackson surrounded by marchers carrying signs advocating support for the Hawkins-Humphrey Bill for full employment, January 1975.
Jackson surrounded by marchers carrying signs advocating support for the Hawkins-Humphrey Bill for full employment, January 1975.
In 1965, he participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches organized by James Bevel, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders in Alabama. When Jackson returned from Selma, he threw himself into SCLC's effort to establish a beachhead of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Chicago.
In 1966, King and Bevel selected Jackson to be head of the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, and SCLC promoted him to be the national director in 1967. Following the example of Reverend Leon Sullivan of Philadelphia, a key goal of the new group was to foster “selective buying” (boycotts) as a means to pressure white businesses to hire blacks and purchase goods and services from black contractors. One of Sullivan's precursors was Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a wealthy South Side doctor and entrepreneur and key financial contributor to Operation Breadbasket. Before he moved to Chicago from Mississippi in 1956, Howard, as the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, had successfully organized a boycott against service stations that refused to provide restrooms for blacks
When King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, the day after his famous "I’ve been to the mountaintop" speech at the Mason Temple, Jackson was in the parking lot one floor below. Jackson's appearance on NBC's Today Show, wearing the same blood-stained turtleneck that he had worn the day before, drew criticism from several King aides; some King associates also dispute Jackson's description of his personal involvement and also of the sequence of events surrounding the assassination.[13]
Jackson has been known for commanding public attention since he first started working for King in 1966. His primary goal for this attention has been to give blacks a sense of self-worth.[14]
Beginning in 1968, Jackson increasingly clashed with Ralph Abernathy, King's successor as chairman of SCLC. In December, 1971, they had a complete falling out. Abernathy suspended Jackson for “administrative improprieties and repeated acts of violation of organizational policy.” Jackson resigned, called together his allies, and Operation PUSH was born during the same month. The new group was organized in the home of Dr. T.R.M. Howard who also became a member of the board of directors and chair of the finance committee.
In 1984, Jackson organized the Rainbow Coalition, which later merged, in 1996, with Operation PUSH. The newly formed Rainbow PUSH organization brought his role as an important and effective organizer to the mainstream. Al Sharpton also left the SCLC in protest to follow Jackson and formed the National Youth Movement.[15]
In March 2006, an African-American woman accused three white members of the Duke University men's lacrosse team of raping her. Jackson stated that his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition would pay for the rest her college tuition regardless of the outcome of the case. The case against the three men was later thrown out and the players were declared innocent by the North Carolina Attorney General.[16]
Jackson took a key role in the scandal caused by comedic actor Michael Richards' racially charged comments in November 2006. Richards called Jackson a few days after the incident to apologize; Jackson accepted Richards' apology [17]and met with him publicly as a means of resolving the situation. Jackson also joined black leaders in a call for the elimination of the "N-word" throughout the entertainment industry. [18]
International activism
During the 1980s, he achieved wide fame as an African American leader and as a politician, as well as becoming a well-known spokesman for civil rights issues. His influence extended to international matters in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1983, Jackson traveled to Syria to secure the release of a captured American pilot, Navy Lt. Robert Goodman who was being held by the Syrian government. Goodman had been shot down over Lebanon while on a mission to bomb Syrian positions in that country. After a dramatic personal appeal that Jackson made to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Goodman was released. Initially, the Reagan administration was skeptical about Jackson's trip to Syria. However, after Jackson secured Goodman's release, United States President Ronald Reagan welcomed both Jackson and Goodman to the White House on January 4, 1984[19]. This helped to boost Jackson's popularity as an American patriot and served as a springboard for his 1984 presidential run. In June 1984, Jackson negotiated the release of twenty-two Americans being held in Cuba after an invitation by Cuban president Fidel Castro.[20]
He traveled to Kenya in 1997 to meet with Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi as United States President Bill Clinton's special envoy for democracy to promote free and fair elections. In April 1999, during the Kosovo War, Jackson traveled to Belgrade to negotiate the release of three U.S. POWs captured on the Macedonian border while patrolling with a UN peacekeeping unit. He met with the then-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, who later agreed to release the three men.[21]
His international efforts continued into the 2000s. On February 15, 2003, Jackson spoke in front of over an estimated one million people in Hyde Park, London at the culmination of the anti-war demonstration against the imminent invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and the United Kingdom. In November 2004, Jackson visited senior politicians and community activists in Northern Ireland in an effort to encourage better cross-community relations and rebuild the peace process and restore the governmental institutions of the Belfast Agreement. In August 2005, Jackson traveled to Venezuela to meet Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, following controversial remarks by televangelist Pat Robertson in which he implied that Chávez should be assassinated. Jackson condemned Robertson's remarks as immoral. After meeting with Chávez and addressing the Venezuelan Parliament, Jackson said that there was no evidence that Venezuela posed a threat to the U.S. Jackson also met representatives from the Afro Venezuela and indigenous communities.[22]
In 2005, he was enlisted as part of the United Kingdom's "Operation Black Vote", a campaign to encourage more of Britain's ethnic minorities to vote in political elections ahead of the May 2005 General Election.[23]
Political activism
1984 presidential campaign
Main article: Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, 1984
On November 3, 1983, he announced his campaign for presidency.[24] In 1984, Jackson became the second African American (after Shirley Chisholm) to mount a nationwide campaign for President of the United States, running as a Democrat.
In the primaries, Jackson, who had been written off by pundits as a fringe candidate with little chance at winning the nomination, surprised many when he took third place behind Senator Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale, who eventually won the nomination. Jackson garnered 3,282,431 primary votes, or 18.2 percent of the total, in 1984,[25] and won five primaries and caucuses, including Louisiana, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Virginia, and one of two separate contests in Mississippi.[26]
As he had gained 21% of the popular vote but only 8% of delegates, he afterwards complained that he had been handicapped by party rules. While Mondale (in the words of his aides) was determined to establish a precedent with his vice presidential candidate by picking a woman or visible minority, Jackson criticized the screening process as a "p.r. parade of personalities". He also mocked Mondale, saying that Hubert Humphrey was the "last significant politician out of the St. Paul–Minneapolis" area. [27]
Remarks about Jews
Jackson referred to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York City as "Hymietown" in January 1984 during a conversation with Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman. Jackson at first denied the remarks, then accused Jews of conspiring to defeat him. When he finally did acknowledge that it was wrong to use the term, he said he did so in private to a reporter.[28] Finally, Jackson apologized during a speech before national Jewish leaders in a Manchester, New Hampshire synagogue, but continuing suspicions have led to an enduring split between Jackson and many Jews.[28]
Among Jackson's other remarks were that Richard Nixon was less attentive to poverty in the U.S. because "four out of five [of Nixon's top advisors] are German Jews and their priorities are on Europe and Asia"; that he was "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust"; and that there are "very few Jewish reporters that have the capacity to be objective about Arab affairs". In 1979, Jackson said on a trip to the Middle East that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was a "terrorist," and Israel was a "theocracy."[29] Jackson has since apologized for at least some of these remarks and was later invited to speak in support of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.[30]
1988 presidential campaign
Main article: Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, 1988
Four years later, in 1988, Jackson once again offered himself as a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. This time, his successes in the past made him a more credible candidate, and he was both better financed and better organized. Although most people did not seem to believe he had a serious chance at winning, Jackson once again exceeded expectations as he more than doubled his previous results, prompting R.W. Apple of the New York Times to call 1988 "the Year of Jackson".[31]
He captured 6.9 million votes and won 11 contests; seven primaries (Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico and Virginia) and four caucuses (Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont).[32] Jackson also scored March victories in Alaska's caucuses and Texas's local conventions, despite losing the Texas primary.[33] [34] Briefly, after he won 55% of the vote in the Michigan Democratic caucus, he was considered the frontrunner for the nomination, as he surpassed all the other candidates in total number of pledged delegates.
Jackson with Maryland's Sen. Decatur Trotter and Del. Curt Anderson during a Maryland Legislative Black Caucus meeting in Annapolis, Maryland (1988)
In early 1988, Jackson organized a rally at the former American Motors assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, approximately two weeks after new owner Chrysler announced it would close the plant by the end of the year. In his speech, Jackson spoke out against Chrysler's decision, stating "We have to put the focus on Kenosha, Wisconsin, as the place, here and now, where we draw the line to end economic violence!" and compared the workers' fight to that of the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama. As a result, the UAW Local 72 union voted to endorse his candidacy, even against the rules of the UAW.[35] However, Jackson's campaign suffered a significant setback less than two weeks later when he was defeated handily in the Wisconsin primary by Michael Dukakis. Jackson's showing among white voters in Wisconsin was significantly higher than in his 1984 run, but was also noticeably lower than pre-primary polling had indicated it would be. The discrepancy has been cited as an example of the so-called "Bradley effect."[citation needed]
Jackson's campaign had also been interrupted by allegations regarding his half-brother Noah Robinson, Jr.'s criminal activity.[36] Jackson had to answer frequent questions about his brother, who was often referred to as "the Billy Carter of the Jackson campaign". [37]
On the heels of Jackson's narrow loss to Dukakis the day before in Colorado, Dukakis' comfortable win in Wisconsin terminated Jackson's momentum. The victory established Dukakis as the clear Democratic frontrunner, and he went on to claim the party's nomination, but lost the general election in November.[38]
Campaign platform
In both races, Jackson ran on what many considered to be a very liberal platform. Declaring that he wanted to create a "Rainbow Coalition" of various minority groups, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Arab-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, family farmers, the poor and working class, and homosexuals, as well as European American progressives who fit into none of those categories, Jackson ran on a platform that included:
* creating a Works Progress Administration-style program to rebuild America's infrastructure and provide jobs to all Americans,
* reprioritizing the War on Drugs to focus less on mandatory minimum sentences for drug users (which he views as racially biased) and more on harsher punishments for money-laundering bankers and others who are part of the "supply" end of "supply and demand"
* reversing Reaganomics-inspired tax cuts for the richest ten percent of Americans and using the money to finance social welfare programs
* cutting the budget of the Department of Defense by as much as fifteen percent over the course of his administration
* declaring Apartheid-era South Africa to be a rogue nation
* instituting an immediate nuclear freeze and beginning disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union
* giving reparations to descendants of black slaves
* supporting family farmers by reviving many of Roosevelt's New Deal–era farm programs
* creating a single-payer system of universal health care
* ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment
* increasing federal funding for lower-level public education and providing free community college to all
* applying stricter enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and
* supporting the formation of a Palestinian state.
With the exception of a resolution to implement sanctions against South Africa for its apartheid policies, none of these positions made it into the party's platform in either 1984 or 1988.
Stand on abortion
Although Jackson was one of the most liberal members of the Democratic Party, his views on abortion were originally more in line with anti-abortion views. Jackson once endorsed the Hyde Amendment, which bars the funding of abortions for low-income women through the federal Medicaid program. He wrote an article published in a 1977 National Right to Life Committee News report:
"There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of [a] higher order than the right to life... that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned. What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person and what kind of a society will we have twenty years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth."
However, since then, Jackson has adopted an openly pro-choice view, believing the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy is fundamental and should not be infringed in any way by the government.[39]
Later political activities
He ran for office as "shadow senator" for the District of Columbia when the position was created in 1991,[40] and served as such through 1997, when he did not run for re-election. This unpaid position was primarily a post to lobby for statehood for the District of Columbia.[41]
In the mid-1990s, he was approached about being the United States Ambassador to South Africa but declined the opportunity in favor of helping his son, Jesse Jackson, Jr., run for the United States House of Representatives.[42]
While Jackson was initially critical of the "Third Way" or more moderate policies of Bill Clinton, he became a key ally in gaining African American support for Clinton and eventually became a close advisor and friend of the Clinton family. Clinton awarded Jackson the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor bestowed on civilians. His son, Jesse Jackson, Jr., also emerged as a political figure, becoming a member of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Jesse Jackson on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[43] In 2003, Jackson surprised many observers by declining to endorse the campaigns of either Al Sharpton or former Senator Carol Moseley Braun, the two African American candidates, in the race for the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nomination. Instead, Jackson remained largely silent about his preference in the race until late in the primary season, when he allowed Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, another presidential candidate, to speak at a Rainbow/PUSH forum on March 31, 2004. Although he did not explicitly voice an endorsement of Rep. Kucinich, Jackson described Kucinich as "assuming the burden of saying 'you make the most sense, but you can't win.'" He also writes for The Progressive Populist.
2004 presidential election
Jackson gathered information and support to investigate the 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy, particularly the voting results in Ohio and its recount. He called for a congressional debate on the matter, asking for a fair count and national voting standards, saying that the elections in the United States are each run with different standards by different states with partisan tricks, racial bias, and widespread incompetence and are an open scandal.
Jackson said that he held some hope that the election could be overturned, although he admitted that that was very doubtful. Jackson compared the voting irregularities of Ohio to that of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, saying that if Ohio were Ukraine, the U.S. presidential election would not have been certified by the international community. Jackson called Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell inappropriately partisan and said that Blackwell may have been pressured by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney to deliver Ohio to the Republican Party.
Based on information obtained in hearings held by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and discovered during a flawed recount of the Ohio presidential vote called for by Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik, Jackson suggested that the Ohio voting machines were "rigged" and that some African-Americans were forced to stand in line for six hours in the rain before voting. When asked for evidence, Jackson did not give facts, but replied, "Based on distrusting the system, lack of paper trails, the anomaly of the exit polls."
On January 6, 2005, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff released a 100 page report on the Ohio election. This challenge to the Ohio election was rejected by a vote of 74-1 by the United States Senate and 267-31 in the House. Many high-ranking Democrats chose to distance themselves from this debate, including John Kerry, despite Jesse Jackson personally asking Kerry for help. The call for election reform legislation and voting rights protection nonetheless continued.
Terri Schiavo case
In early 2005, Jackson visited the parents in the Terri Schiavo case; he supported their unsuccessful bid to keep her alive.[44]
Firearms protest and arrest
On June 23, 2007 Jackson was arrested in connection with a protest at a gun store in Riverdale, a poor suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Jackson and others were protesting the fact that the gun store allegedly had been selling firearms to local gang members and was contributing to the decay of the community. According to police reports, Jackson refused to stop blocking the front entrance of the store and let customers pass. He was charged with one count of criminal trespass to property. [45]
2008 presidential election
In March 2007, Jackson declared his support for then-Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 democratic primaries.[46] Jackson later criticized Barack Obama in 2007 for "acting like he's white," in response to the Jena 6 beating case.[47]
On July 6, 2008, during an interview with Fox News, a microphone picked up Jackson whispering to a fellow guest: "See, Barack's been, ahh, talking down to black people on this faith-based... I want to cut his nuts out..."[48] Jackson was expressing his disappointment in Obama's Father's Day speech chastisement of Black fathers.[49] Only a portion of Jackson's comments were released on video. A spokesman for Fox News stated that Jackson had "referred to blacks with the N-word" in his comments about Obama; Fox News did not release the entire video or a complete transcript of his comments.[50] Subsequent to his Fox News interview, Jackson apologized and reiterated his support for Obama.[48]
On November 4, 2008, Jackson was present at the Obama victory rally, waiting for Obama to appear. In the several moments before Obama spoke, Jackson was in tears.[51]
Electoral history
New York State Right to Life Party Presidential convention, 1980[52]:
* Ellen McCormack - 79,609 (67.33%)
* Ronald Reagan - 34,293 (29.00%)
* No candidate - 2,729 (2.31%)
* Jesse Jackson - 1,606 (1.36%)
1984 Democratic presidential primaries[53]
* Walter Mondale - 6,952,912 (38.32%)
* Gary Hart - 6,504,842 (35.85%)
* Jesse Jackson - 3,282,431 (18.09%)
* John Glenn - 617,909 (3.41%)
* George McGovern - 334,801 (1.85%)
* Unpledged - 146,212 (0.81%)
* Lyndon LaRouche - 123,649 (0.68%)
* Reubin O'Donovan Askew - 52,759 (0.29%)
* Alan Cranston - 51,437 (0.28%)
* Ernest Hollings - 33,684 (0.19%)
1984 Democratic National Convention[54]:
* Walter Mondale - 2,191 (56.41%)
* Gary Hart - 1,201 (30.92%)
* Jesse Jackson - 466 (12.00%)
* Thomas F. Eagleton - 18 (0.46%)
* George McGovern - 4 (0.10%)
* John Glenn - 2 (0.05%)
* Joe Biden - 1 (0.03%)
* Martha Kirkland
1988 Democratic presidential primaries[55]:
* Michael Dukakis - 9,898,750 (42.47%)
* Jesse Jackson - 6,788,991 (29.13%)
* Al Gore - 3,185,806 (13.67%)
* Dick Gephardt - 1,399,041 (6.00%)
* Paul M. Simon - 1,082,960 (4.65%)
* Gary Hart - 415,716 (1.78%)
* Unpledged - 250,307 (1.07%)
* Bruce Babbitt - 77,780 (0.33%)
* Lyndon LaRouche - 70,938 (0.30%)
* David Duke - 45,289 (0.19%)
* James Traficant - 30,879 (0.13%)
* Douglas E. Applegate - 25,068 (0.11%)
1988 Democratic National Convention[56]:
* Michael Dukakis - 2,877 (70.09%)
* Jesse Jackson - 1,219 (29.70%)
* Richard H. Stallings - 3 (0.07%)
* Joe Biden - 2 (0.05%)
* Dick Gephardt - 2 (0.05%)
* Lloyd Bentsen - 1 (0.02%)
* Gary Hart - 1 (0.02%)
Shadow Senator from District of Columbia, 1990[57]
Two candidates who won the highest number of vote takes two shadow seats.
* Jesse Jackson (D) - 105,633 (46.80%)
* Florence Pendleton (D) - 58,451 (25.89%)
* Harry T. Alexander (I) - 13,983 (6.19%)
* Milton Francis (R) - 13,538 (6.00%)
* Joan Gillison (R) - 12,845 (5.69%)
* Keith M. Wilkerson (D.C. Statehood) - 4,545 (2.01%)
* Anthony W. Peacock (D.C. Statehood) - 4,285 (1.90%)
* John West (I) - 3,621 (1.60%)
* David L. Whitehead (I) - 3,341 (1.48%)
* Sam Manuel (Socialist Workers) - 2,765 (1.23%)
* Lee Black (I) - 2,728 (1.21%)
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Jackson married Jacqueline Lavinia Brown (born 1944) on, December 31, 1962,[7][8] and they had five children: Santita (1963), Jesse Jr. (1965), Jonathan Luther (1966), Yusef DuBois (1970), and Jacqueline Lavinia (1975).[9]
In 2001, Jackson was shown to have had an affair with a staffer, Karin Stanford, that resulted in the birth of a daughter, Ashley, in May 1999. According to CNN, in August 1999, The Rainbow Push Coalition had paid Stanford $15,000 in moving expenses and $21,000 in payment for contracting work. A promised advance of an additional $40,000 against future contracting work was rescinded once the affair became public.[10] This incident prompted Jackson to withdraw from activism for a short time.[11] Separate from the 1999 Rainbow Coalition payments, Jackson pays $4,000 a month in child support.[12]
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Jimmie Lee Jackson
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Personal background
Jimmie Lee Jackson was a deacon of the St. James Baptist Church in Marion, Alabama, ordained in the summer of 1964.[2] Jackson had tried to register without success for four years.[2] Jackson was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who had touched of a campaign against Alabama restrictions on Negro voting and attended meetings several nights per week at Zion's Chapel Methodist Church.[2] This desire to vote, led to his death at the hands of an Alabama State Trooper.[2]
Non-violent protest
On the night of February 18, 1965, around 500 people left Zion United Methodist Church in Marion and attempted a peaceful walk to the Perry County Jail about a half a block away where young Civil Rights worker James Orange was being held.[3] The marchers planned to sing hymns and return to the church. Police later stated they believed the crowd was planning a jailbreak.[3]
Police violence
They were met at the Post Office[3] by a line of Marion City police officers, sheriff's deputies and Alabama State Troopers.[1] In the standoff, streetlights were abruptly turned off (some sources[3] say they were shot out by the police) and the police began to beat the protestors.[3][1] Two United Press International photographers were beaten by the police and their cameras were smashed and NBC News correspondent Richard Valeriani was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized.[3] The marchers turned and scattered back towards the church.
Twenty-six-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, his mother Viola Jackson, and his 82-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, ran into Mack's Café behind the church, pursued by Alabama State Troopers. Police clubbed Cager Lee to the floor[1] in the kitchen. The police continued to beat the cowering octogenarian Lee and when his daughter Viola attempted to pull the police off, she was also beaten.[4] When Jimmie Lee attempted to protect his mother, one trooper threw him against a cigarette machine. A second trooper shot Jimmie Lee twice in the abdomen.[4] James Bonard Fowler later admitted to being that trooper.[1] Although shot twice, Jimmie Lee fled the café amid additional blows from police clubs and collapsed in front of the bus station.[3] Jackson made a statement to a lawyer, Oscar Adams of Birmingham in the presence of FBI officials stating he was "clubbed down" by State Troopers after he was shot and had run away from the café.[5]
Jimmie Lee Jackson died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma, on February 26, 1965.[3][1] After his death, Sister Michael Anne, and administrator at Good Samaritan, said there were powder burns on Mr. Jackson's abdomen, indicating that he was shot at very close range.[5]
Burial
Jackson was buried in Heard Cemeterey, an old slave burial ground, next to his father.[3] His headstone was financed by the Perry County Civic league and since his burial, his headstone has been vandalized, bearing the marks of at least one shotgun blast.[3]
Criminal charges agianst killer
A grand jury declined to indict Fowler in September 1965, identifying him only by his surname: Fowler.[1]
On 10 May 2007, 42 years after the crime, Fowler was charged with first degree and second degree murder for the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson[6] and surrendered to authorities. Fowler's trial is set for the week of Oct 20, 2008.[7]
Significance
This incident provided the primary catalyst for the first Selma to Montgomery march that occurred a few days later on “Bloody Sunday”, 7 March 1965.
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Gloria Johnson-Powell
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She grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her B.A. in economics and sociology from Mount Holyoke College in 1958 and her M.D. in 1962 from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her residency at UCLA and was on the faculty there for fifteen years before joining the Harvard Medical School (where she was on the faculty for ten years).
She is currently the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health associate dean for cultural diversity and a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics [2].
Civil Rights Movement
In his 1999 book, The Children, David Halberstam includes her as one of the key figures in the civil rights movement
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Scholarship
Her text, Black Monday's Children, discusses the effect of desegregation on southern black children and she has continued working with minority children. Johnson-Powell has also published a book about the impact of sexual abuse on children. In addition, with her daughter, she wrote the biography of her mother.
Works
* Black Monday's Children: A Study Of The Effects Of School Desegregation On The Self-Concepts Of Southern Children
* The Psychosocial Development of Minority Children editor Brunner/Mazel New York 1983 ISBN 0-87630-277-0
* Lasting Effects of Child Sexual Abuse co-editor with Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, Sage Publications 1998 Newbury Park ISBN 0-8039-3256-1
* The House On Elbert Street: The Biography Of A Welfare Mother
* Transcultural Child Development: Psychological Assessment and Treatment co-editor with Joe Yamamoto Wiley New York 1997 ISBN 0-471-17479-3
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Clyde Kennard
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Early years
Kennard was born in Mississippi in 1927, moving to Chicago at the age of 12 to aid his injured sister, Sarah. He then stayed and graduated from Wendell Phillips High School, then entered the U.S. Army. After serving as a paratrooper during the Korean War, he returned to the United States. In 1955, at the end of his junior year at the University of Chicago, Kennard returned to Mississippi because his stepfather became disabled. Kennard purchased land in Eatonville to start a chicken farm.[citation needed] He taught Sunday school at the Mary Magdalene Baptist Church.[citation needed]
The fight for education
On three separate occasions (1956, 1957 and 1959), Kennard sought to enroll at Mississippi Southern College, one of Mississippi's premier educational institutions, whose student body was exclusively white. Despite offers from Mississippi governor James P. Coleman to pay for his tuition anywhere else in the state where he could gain acceptance, Kennard declined, stating that the school was closest to his home, a major factor given his family situation.
At the behest of Zack Van Landingham of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, J. H. White, the African-American president of Mississippi Vocational College, tried to persuade Kennard to end his quest to break the color barrier at Mississippi Southern College. When Kennard could not be dissuaded, Van Landingham and Hattiesburg, Mississippi lawyer Dudley Connor worked together to exact revenge on him for his stand. Files from the Sovereignty Commission that were opened in 1998 showed that members considered a variety of options, including forcing Kennard into an accident or bombing his car.[2]
Imprisonment
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission instead conspired to have Kennard framed for a crime. On September 15, 1959, Kennard was arrested for reckless driving upon returning to his car from a meeting with Mississippi Southern College President William D. McCain. After he was jailed, police officers claimed to have found five half pints of whiskey, along with other liquor, under the seat of his car. Mississippi was a "dry" state, and possession of liquor was illegal until 1966, when Mississippi became the last state to repeal prohibition. Kennard was subsequently cited for illegal liquor possession.
He was convicted and fined $600 for the latter offense, and soon became the victim of an unofficial local boycott whereby his credit was cut off. He was then arrested again on September 25, 1960 with an alleged accomplice for the theft of $25 worth of feed from the Forrest County Cooperative warehouse. Kennard went to trial, with the accomplice, Johnny Lee Roberts testifying that Kennard paid him to steal the feed.[3] On November 21, 1960, an all-white jury deliberated only 10 minutes before finding Kennard guilty. He was sentenced to seven years in prison to be served in Parchman Penitentiary, a high-security facility. Despite his alleged role in the crime, Roberts was given five years' probation and freed. Years later Roberts testified under oath that Kennard was innocent "Kennard did not ask me to steal, Kennard did not ask me to break into the co-op, Kennard did not ask me to do anything illegal."[4]
Just after the conclusion of the trial, Mississippi NAACP official Medgar Evers was cited for contempt after issuing a statement stating that the conviction was "a mockery of judicial justice." Evers was fined $100 and sentenced to 30 days in jail, but on June 12, 1961, the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the conviction.
Cancer and death
While imprisoned in 1961, Kennard was diagnosed with colon cancer and taken to the University of Mississippi hospital for surgery. The medical staff recommended that Kennard either be put in their custody or that they be allowed to make regular visits to check on his condition. Instead, authorities sent him back to Parchman Prison, where he worked as a laborer.
Civil rights leaders in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, embarked on a campaign to secure Kennard's release. After the story gained national attention in 1963, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett gave Kennard an "indefinite suspended sentence."
Kennard was released on January 30, with comedian Dick Gregory's paying for his flight back to Chicago. He twice underwent surgery at Billings Hospital on the University of Chicago campus over the next five months, but died of cancer 10 days after the latter procedure.
On July 7, a funeral service for Kennard was held at Metropolitan Funeral Parlor in Chicago, with an April 16, 1962 poem written by Kennard read to the congregation. Sensing his limited lifespan, he titled the poem, "Ode to the Death Angel:"
Oh here you come again
Old chilly death of Ol'
To plot out life
And test immortal soul
I saw you fall against the raging sea
I cheated you then and now you'll not catch me
I know your face
It's known in every race
Your speed is fast
And along the way
Your shadow you cast
High in the sky
You thought you had me then
I landed safely
But here you are again
I see you paused upon that forward pew
When you think I'm asleep
I'm watching you
Why must you hound me so everywhere I go?
It's true my eyes are dim
My hands are growing cold
Well take me on then, that
I might at last become my soul
Three days later, he was buried in his family's plot at Mary Magdelene Cemetery in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Pardon efforts
In an interview with award-winning reporter Jerry Mitchell published December 31, 2005, the informant Roberts asserted that his testimony in 1960 was false, and Kennard had no connection to the crime.[5] Mitchell, who had been investigating the case for many years, had previously helped close several other infamous "cold cases" from the Civil Rights Era.
In 2006, three high school students from Illinois: Mona Ghadiri, Agnes Mazur, and Callie McCune, working with their teacher, Barry Bradford (renowned for helping reopen the "Mississippi Burning" case) and Professor Steven A. Drizin of the Northwestern University School of Law, Center On Wrongful Convictions, spearheaded a movement to convince Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to issue Kennard a full pardon.[5][6] Standing alone against the advice of leading Mississippi politicians, academics, and media outlets, Barbour declined the opportunity to do so. He stated there was no precedent for a posthumous pardon.[2] He ignored the fight led by U.S. Senator Trent Lott which resulted in a posthumous pardon for Jefferson Davis. Instead he designated March 30 as Clyde Kennard Day, saying that it was the appropriate way to honor Kennard.
African-American students from the University of Southern Mississippi joined the fight, collecting more than 1,500 signatures in support of the pardon. The students noted that the school then had more than 2,000 blacks attending, the acceptance Kennard had wanted. Despite pleas from four former Mississippi governors, on May 10, 2006, the Mississippi State Parole Board refused to recommend a pardon. The Board's vote was split according to racial lines, with all of the white members' voting to oppose a pardon recommendation.
Every major newspaper in Mississippi denounced the decisions of the Governor and the Board. Kennard's brother-in-law, Rev. Willie Grant, expressed disappointment over the Board's decision. He stated the state appeared to be looking to avoid any potential litigation damages over wrongful imprisonment.[citation needed] The Kennard family had already stated publicly that they had no interest in seeking damages.
Resolution
Faced with the setback on the pardon request, Bradford and the students from Illinois shifted their efforts to using the courts to secure a reversal of the conviction. They contacted former Federal judge Charles Pickering and former Mississippi governor William Winter, who fashioned precedent-making legal strategy.
Using the historical research done by Bradford and the students, and the exhaustive legal research prepared by Professor Drizin and Bobby Owens, a Northwestern University law student from Mississippi, the effort to clear Kennard's name finally paid off. After arguments by Pickering and Winter, heading a blue-ribbon legal team, on May 17, 2006, Judge Bob Helfrich threw out Kennard's original burglary conviction, stating, "To me, this is not a black and white issue; it's a right and wrong issue. To correct that wrong, I am compelled to do the right thing."[7]
Even with this conclusion, the Kennard case still stirs emotions on both sides of the issue. Six days after Helfrich's decree, white supremacist Richard Barrett filed documents to throw out the decision. Barrett was a vocal supporter of Edgar Ray Killen, the man convicted in June 2005 of manslaughter in the killing of three civil rights workers in 1964. Barrett's motion was later summarily dismissed by Judge Helfrich. Barrett's appeal to the Mississippi State Supreme Court was likewise dismissed, thus ending the legal saga.
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In February 1993, the University of Southern Mississippi renamed its campus Student Services Building Kennard-Washington Hall in honor of Clyde Kennard and Dr. Walter Washington (then president of Alcorn State University).[8]
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Coretta Scott King
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Childhood and education
Coretta Scott King was the second of three children born to Obediah "Obie" Scott (1899-1998) and Bernice McMurray Scott (1904-1996) in Perry County, Alabama. She had an older sister named Edythe, born in 1925, and a younger brother named Obediah Leonard, born in 1930. The Scotts owned a farm, which had been in the family since the American Civil War, but were not particularly wealthy. During the Great Depression the Scott children picked cotton to help earn money.[1] Obie was the first black in their neighborhood to own a truck. He had a barber shop in their home. He also owned a lumber mill, which was burned down by white neighbors.
Though uneducated themselves, King's parents intended for all of their children to be educated. King quoted her mother as having said, "My children are going to college, even if it means I only have but one dress to put on."[2] The Scott children attended a one room elementary school 5 miles (8 km) from their home and were later bussed to Lincoln Normal School, a high school in Marion, Alabama, 9 mi (14 km) from their home. The bus was driven by Bernice Scott, who bussed all the local black teenagers to the Marion high school, as it was the closest black high school.[1]
King graduated valedictorian of Lincoln Normal School in 1945 and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Edythe Scott already attended Antioch as part of the Antioch Program for Interracial Education, which recruited non-white students and gave them full scholarships in an attempt to diversify the historically white campus. King said of her first college:
Antioch had envisioned itself as a laboratory in democracy, but had no black students. (Edythe) became the first African American to attend Antioch on a completely integrated basis, and was joined by two other black female students in the fall of 1943. Pioneering is never easy, and all of us who followed my sister at Antioch owe her a great debt of gratitude.[2]
She studied music with Walter Anderson, the first non-white chair of an academic department in a historically white college. King also became politically active, due largely to her experience of racial discrimination by the local school board. She became active in the nascent civil rights movement; she joined the Antioch chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the college's Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. The board denied her request to perform her second year of required practice teaching at Yellow Springs public schools, for her teaching certificate King appealed to the Antioch College administration, which was unwilling or unable to change the situation in the local school system and instead employed her at the college's associated laboratory school for a second year.
King transferred out of Antioch when she won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met Martin Luther King, Jr.[3] In her early life King was as well known as a singer as she was as a civil rights activist, and often incorporated music into her civil rights work. In 1964, the Time profile of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was chosen as Time's "Man of the Year", referred to her as "a talented young soprano."[4]
Family life
Dr. and Mrs. King in 1964.
Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr., were married on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her mothers' house; the ceremony was performed by King's father, Martin Luther King, Sr.. After completing her degree in voice and violin at the New England Conservatory, she moved with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama in September 1954.
The Kings had four children:
* Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955 – May 15, 2007)
* Martin Luther III (born October 23, 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama)
* Dexter Scott (born January 30, 1961 in Atlanta Georgia)
* Bernice Albertine (born March 28, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia)
All four children later followed in their parents' footsteps as civil rights activists.
Civil rights movement
Congressman J. J. Pickle of Texas hands King a promotional "squeaky pickle" at a campaign rally in Austin, Texas, 1976.
Coretta Scott King played an extremely important role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Martin wrote of her that, "I am indebted to my wife Coretta, without whose love, sacrifices, and loyalty neither life nor work would bring fulfillment. She has given me words of consolation when I needed them and a well-ordered home where Christian love is a reality." However, Martin and Coretta did conflict over her public role in the movement. Martin wanted Coretta to focus on raising their four children, while Coretta wanted to take a more public leadership role.
Coretta Scott King took part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and took an active role in advocating for civil rights legislation. Most prominently, perhaps, she worked hard to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Not long after her husband's death, Coretta approached the African American entertainer and activist Josephine Baker to take her husband's place as leader of The Civil Rights Movement. After many days of thinking it over Baker declined, stating that her twelve adopted children (known as the "rainbow tribe") were " ... too young to lose their mother."[5]
Coretta Scott King decided to take the helm of the movement herself after her husband's assassination in 1968, although she broadened her focus to include women's rights, LGBT rights, economic issues, world peace, and various other causes. As early as December 1968, she called for women to "unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war," during a Solidarity Day speech.[6]
As leader of the movement, Scott King founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She served as the center's president and CEO from its inception until she passed the reigns of leadership to son Dexter Scott King.
She published her memoirs, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1969.
Coretta Scott King was also under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1968 until 1972. Her husband's activities had been monitored during his lifetime. Documents obtained by a Houston, Texas television station show that the FBI worried that King would "tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement."[7] A spokesman for the King family said that they were aware of the surveillance, but had not realized how extensive it was.
Later life
Martin Luther King Day
Coretta Scott King, along with Rosalynn Carter, Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter, and other civil rights leaders during a visit to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, January 14, 1979.
After her husband was assassinated on April 4, 1968, she began attending a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to mark her husband's birth every January 15 and fought for years to make it a national holiday. Murray M. Silver, an Atlanta attorney, made the appeal at the services on January 14, 1979. Coretta Scott King later confirmed that it was the "...best, most productive appeal ever..." King was finally successful in this in 1986, when Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.
Coretta Scott King attended the state funeral of Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1973, as a very close friend of the former president, himself a contributor to civil rights. She was also present when President Ronald Reagan signed legislation establishing Martin Luther King Day.
Opposition to apartheid
During the 1980s, King reaffirmed her long-standing opposition to apartheid, participating in a series of sit-in protests in Washington, D.C. that prompted nationwide demonstrations against South African racial policies.
In 1986, she traveled to South Africa and met with Winnie Mandela, while Mandela's husband Nelson Mandela was still a political prisoner on Robben Island. She declined invitations from Pik Botha and moderate Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.[8] Upon her return to the United States, she urged Reagan to approve economic sanctions against South Africa.
Peace, veganism and other political positions
A long-time advocate for world peace, in 1957, King was one of the founders of The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (now called Peace Action.
King called her adoption of a vegan diet in 1995 a blessing. Her son, Dexter, had been vegan since 1988, saying that an appreciation for animal rights is the "logical extension" of his father's philosophy of nonviolence.
King was vocal in her opposition to capital punishment and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, thus drawing criticism from conservative groups. She was also an advocate of feminism, LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS prevention.
LGBT equality
King with President George W. Bush.
On April 1, 1998 at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, King called on the civil rights community to join in the struggle against homophobia and anti-gay bias. "Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood", King stated. "This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group."
In a speech in November 2003 at the opening session of the 13th annual Creating Change Conference, organized by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, King made her now famous appeal linking the Civil Rights Movement to the LGBT agenda: "I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. ... But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people."
King's support of LGBT rights was strongly criticized by some black pastors. She called her critics "misinformed" and said that Martin Luther King's message to the world was one of equality and inclusion.
In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to take part in observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. It was the first time that an LGBT rights group had been invited to a major event of the African American community.
On March 23, 2004, she told an audience at Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, that same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. King denounced a proposed amendment advanced by President George W. Bush to the United States Constitution that would ban equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. In her speech King also criticized a group of black pastors in her home state of Georgia for backing a bill to amend that state's constitution to block gay and lesbian couples from marrying. King is quoted as saying "Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriage."
The King Center
Established in 1968 by Coretta Scott King, The King Center is the official memorial dedicated to the advancement of the legacy and ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of a nonviolent movement for justice, equality and peace. She handed the reins as CEO and president of the King Center down to her son, Dexter Scott King, who still runs the center today.[9]
Final days
Coretta Scott King's temporary gravesite in Atlanta, Georgia.
By the end of her 77th year, King began experiencing health problems. Hospitalized in April 2005, she was diagnosed with a heart condition and was discharged on her 78th and final birthday. Later, King suffered several small strokes. On August 16 2005, she was hospitalized after suffering a stroke and a mild heart attack. Initially, she was unable to speak or move her right side. She was released from Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta on September 22, 2005, after regaining some of her speech and continued physiotherapy at home. Due to continuing health problems, King cancelled a number of speaking and traveling engagements throughout the remainder of 2005. On January 14, 2006, King made her last public appearance in Atlanta at a dinner honoring her husband's memory.
Death
King died in the late evening of January 30, 2006[10] at a rehabilitation center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, where she was undergoing holistic therapy for her stroke and advanced stage ovarian cancer. The main cause of King's death, however, is believed to be respiratory failure due to complications from ovarian cancer.[11] The clinic at which she died was called the Hospital Santa Monica, but was licensed as Clinica Santo Tomas. Newspaper reports indicated that it was not legally licensed to "perform surgery, take X-rays, perform laboratory work or run an internal pharmacy, all of which it was doing." It was also founded, owned, and operated by San Diego resident, and highly controversial alternative medicine figure, Kurt Donsbach.[12][13] Days after Mrs. King's death, the Baja California, Mexico state medical commissioner, Dr. Francisco Vera, shut down the clinic.
Funeral oration
President Jimmy Carter and Rev. Joseph Lowery provided funeral orations. With President George W. Bush seated a few feet away, Rev. Lowery, referencing King's vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, noted the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. President Carter, referencing King's lifelong struggle for civil rights, noted that her family had been the target of secret government wiretapping. Their comments were met with thunderous applause and standing ovations.
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King was the recipient of various honors and tributes both before and after her death. She received honorary degrees from many institutions, including Princeton University, Duke University, and Bates College. She was honored by both of her alma maters in 2004, receiving a Horace Mann Award from Antioch College[2] and an Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory of Music.[15]
In 1970, the American Library Association began awarding a medal named for Coretta Scott King to outstanding African American writers and illustrators of children's literature.[16]
Many individuals and organizations paid tribute to King following her death, including U.S. President George W. Bush,[17] the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,[18] the Human Rights Campaign,[19] the National Black Justice Coalition,[20] her alma mater Antioch College.[21]
In 2004, Coretta Scott King was awarded the prestigious Gandhi Peace Prize by the Government of India.
Congressional resolutions
Upon the news of her death, moments of reflection, remembrance, and mourning began around the world. In the United States Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist presented Senate Resolution 362 on behalf of all U.S. Senators, with the afternoon hours filled with respectful tributes throughout the U.S. Capitol.
On January 31, 2006 following a moment of silence in memoriam to the death of King, the United States House of Representatives presented House Resolution 655 in honor of King's legacy. In an unusual action, the resolution included a grace period of five days in which further comments could be added to it.
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Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Early life
Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the son of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King.[2] King's father was born "Michael King", and Martin Luther King, Jr., was originally named "Michael King, Jr.", until the family traveled to Europe in 1934 and visited Germany. His father soon changed both of their names to Martin in honor of the German Protestant leader Martin Luther.[3] He had an older sister, Willie Christine King, and a younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams King.[4] King sang with his church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie Gone with the Wind.[5]
Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. He skipped ninth and twelfth grade, and entered Morehouse College at age fifteen without formally graduating from high school.[6] In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology,[7] and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951.[8] King then began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Doctor of Philosophy on June 5, 1955. A 1980s inquiry concluded portions of his dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly but that his dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship".[9][10]
King married Coretta Scott, on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama.[11] King and Scott had four children; Yolanda King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice King.[12] King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama when he was twenty-five years old in 1954.[13]
Influences
Populist tradition and Black populism
Harry C. Boyte, a self-proclaimed populist, field secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and white civil rights activist describes an episode in his life that gives insight on King's influences:
My first encounter with deeper meanings of populism came when I was nineteen, working as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964. One day I was caught by five men and a woman who were members of the Klu Klux Klan. They accused me of being a “communist and a Yankee.” I replied, “I’m no Yankee – my family has been in the South since before the Revolution. And I’m not a communist. I’m a populist. I believe that blacks and poor whites should join to do something about the big shots who keep us divided.” For a few minutes we talked about what such a movement might look like. Then they let me go.
When he learned of the incident, Martin Luther King, head of SCLC, told me that he identified with the populist tradition and assigned me to organize poor whites.[14]
Thurman
Civil rights leader, theologian, and educator Howard Thurman was an early influence on King. A classmate of King's father at Morehouse College,[15] Thurman mentored the young King and his friends.[16] Thurman's missionary work had taken him abroad where he had met and conferred with Gandhi.[17] When he was a student at Boston University, King often visited Thurman, who was the dean of Marsh Chapel.[18] Walter Fluker, who has studied Thurman's writings, has stated, "I don't believe you'd get a Martin Luther King, Jr. without a Howard Thurman".[19]
Gandhi and Rustin
Inspired by Gandhi's success with non-violent activism, King visited the Gandhi family in India in 1959, with assistance from the Quaker group the American Friends Service Committee.[20] The trip to India affected King in a profound way, deepening his understanding of non-violent resistance and his commitment to America’s struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, “Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”[21] African American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who had studied Gandhi's teachings,[22] counseled King to dedicate himself to the principles of non-violence,[23] served as King's main advisor and mentor throughout his early activism,[24] and was the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.[25] Rustin's open homosexuality, support of democratic socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin.
Throughout his career of service, King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his experience as a preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a "passionate" statement of his crusade for justice.[27] On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the United States.[28]
Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955
Main article: Montgomery Bus Boycott
In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old school girl, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in compliance with the Jim Crow laws. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; Edgar Nixon and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue.[29] On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat.[30] The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed.[31] The boycott lasted for 385 days,[32] and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed.[33] King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses.[34]
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King led the SCLC until his death.[35] In 1958, while signing copies of his book Strive Toward Freedom in a Harlem department store, he was stabbed in the chest by Izola Curry, a deranged black woman with a letter opener, and narrowly escaped death.[36]
Gandhi's nonviolent techniques were useful to King's campaign to correct the civil rights laws implemented in Alabama.[37] King applied non-violent philosophy to the protests organized by the SCLC. In 1959, he wrote The Measure of A Man, from which the piece What is Man?, an attempt to sketch the optimal political, social, and economic structure of society, is derived.[38]
The FBI, under written directive from then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, began telephone tapping King in 1963.[39] J. Edgar Hoover feared Communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, but when no such evidence emerged, the bureau used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years in attempts to force King out of the preeminent leadership position.[40]
King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the Civil Rights Movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.[41]
King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights.[42] Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.[43]
King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent.[44]
Albany movement
Main article: Albany movement
The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia in November, 1961. In December King and the SCLC became involved. The movement mobilized thousands of citizens for a broad-front nonviolent attack on every aspect of segregation within the city and attracted nationwide attention. When King first visited on December 15, 1961, he "had planned to stay a day or so and return home after giving counsel."[45] But the following day he was swept up in a mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators, and he declined bail until the city made concessions. "Those agreements", said King, "were dishonored and violated by the city," as soon as he left town.[45] King returned in July 1962, and was sentenced to forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine. He chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Chief Pritchett discreetly arranged for King's fine to be paid and ordered his release. "We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools ... ejected from churches ... and thrown into jail ... But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail."[45]
After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible results, the movement began to deteriorate. King requested a halt to all demonstrations and a "Day of Penance" to promote non-violence and maintain the moral high ground. Divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts.[46] However, it was credited as a key lesson in tactics for the national civil rights movement.[47]
Birmingham campaign
Main article: Birmingham campaign
The Birmingham campaign was a strategic effort by the SCLC to promote civil rights for African Americans. Many of its tactics of "Project C" were developed by Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, Executive Director of SCLC from 1960-1964. Based on actions in Birmingham, Alabama, its goal was to end the city's segregated civil and discriminatory economic policies. The campaign lasted for more than two months in the spring of 1963. To provoke the police into filling the city's jails to overflowing, King and black citizens of Birmingham employed nonviolent tactics to flout laws they considered unfair. King summarized the philosophy of the Birmingham campaign when he said, "The purpose of ... direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation".[48]
Protests in Birmingham began with a boycott to pressure businesses to sales jobs and other employment to people of all races, as well as to end segregated facilities in the stores. When business leaders resisted the boycott, King and the SCLC began what they termed Project C, a series of sit-ins and marches intended to provoke arrest. After the campaign ran low on adult volunteers, it recruited children for what became known as the "Children's Crusade". During the protests, the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, used high-pressure water jets and police dogs to control protesters, including children. Not all of the demonstrators were peaceful, despite the avowed intentions of the SCLC. In some cases, bystanders attacked the police, who responded with force. King and the SCLC were criticized for putting children in harm's way. By the end of the campaign, King's reputation improved immensely, Connor lost his job, the "Jim Crow" signs in Birmingham came down, and public places became more open to blacks.[49]
Augustine and Selma
King and SCLC were also driving forces behind the protest in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964.[50] The movement engaged in nightly marches in the city met by white segregationists who violently assaulted them. Hundreds of the marchers were arrested and jailed.
King and the SCLC joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, in December 1964, where SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months.[51] A sweeping injunction issued by a local judge barred any gathering of 3 or more people under sponsorship of SNCC, SCLC, or DCVL, or with the involvement of 41 named civil rights leaders. This injunction temporarily halted civil rights activity until King defied it by speaking at Brown Chapel on January 2 1965.[52]
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
March on Washington, 1963
Main article: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
King, representing SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were: Roy Wilkins from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young, National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James L. Farmer, Jr. of the Congress of Racial Equality.[53] The primary logistical and strategic organizer was King's colleague Bayard Rustin.[54] For King, this role was another which courted controversy, since he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march.[55] Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation, but the organizers were firm that the march would proceed.[56]
The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the southern United States and a very public opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Organizers intended to excoriate and then challenge the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks, generally, in the South. However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone.[57] As a result, some civil rights activists felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X called it the "Farce on Washington," and members of the Nation of Islam were not permitted to attend the march.[57][58]
King is perhaps most famous for his "I Have a Dream" speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public school; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee.[59] Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington's history.[60] King's "I Have a Dream" speech electrified the crowd. It is regarded, along with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Infamy Speech, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory.[61]
Stance on compensation
King giving a lecture on March 26, 1964
Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of US$50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils".[62] He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races".[63]
"Bloody Sunday", 1965
Main article: Selma to Montgomery marches
King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, attempted to organize a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, for March 7, 1965. The first attempt to march on March 7 was aborted because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day has since become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. King, however, was not present. After meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, he decided not to endorse the march, but it was carried out against his wishes and without his presence on March 7 by local civil rights leaders. Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused national public outrage.[64]
King next attempted to organize a march for March 9. The SCLC petitioned for an injunction in federal court against the State of Alabama; this was denied and the judge issued an order blocking the march until after a hearing. Nonetheless, King led marchers on March 9 to the Edmund Pettus bridge, then held a short prayer session before turning the marchers around and asking them to disperse so as not to violate the court order. The unexpected ending of this second march aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement.[65] The march finally went ahead fully on March 25.[66] At the conclusion of the march and on the steps of the state capitol, King delivered a speech that has become known as "How Long, Not Long".[67]
Chicago, 1966
King with President Lyndon Johnson in 1966
In 1966, after several successes in the South, King and others in the civil rights organizations tried to spread the movement to the North, with Chicago as its first destination. King and Ralph Abernathy, both from the middle classes, moved into the slums of North Lawndale[68] on the west side of Chicago as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor.[69]
The SCLC formed a coalition with CCCO, Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an organization founded by Albert Raby, and the combined organizations' efforts were fostered under the aegis of The Chicago Freedom Movement.[70] During that spring, several dual white couple/black couple tests on real estate offices uncovered the practice (now banned in the U.S.) of racial steering. These tests revealed the racially selective processing of housing requests by couples who were exact matches in income, background, number of children, and other attributes, with the only difference being their race.[71]
The needs of the movement for radical change grew, and several larger marches were planned and executed, including those in the following neighborhoods: Bogan, Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park, Evergreen Park (a suburb southwest of Chicago), Gage Park and Marquette Park, among others.[72]
In Chicago, Abernathy later wrote that they received a worse reception than they had in the South. Their marches were met by thrown bottles and screaming throngs, and they were truly afraid of starting a riot.[73] King's beliefs mitigated against his staging a violent event, and he negotiated an agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley to cancel a march in order to avoid the violence that he feared would result from the demonstration.[74] King, who received death threats throughout his involvement in the civil rights movement, was hit by a brick during one march but continued to lead marches in the face of personal danger.[75]
When King and his allies returned to the south, they left Jesse Jackson, a seminary student who had previously joined the movement in the South, in charge of their organization.[76] Jackson continued their struggle for civil rights by organizing the Operation Breadbasket movement that targeted chain stores that did not deal fairly with blacks.[77]
Opposition to the Vietnam War
Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 appearance at the New York City Riverside Church—exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam".[78] In the speech, he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony"[79] and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today".[80] He also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes:
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just."[81]
King also was opposed to the Vietnam War on the grounds that the war took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare services like the War on Poverty. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. He summed up this aspect by saying, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death".[81]
Many white southern segregationists vilified King; moreover, this speech soured his relationship with many members of the mainstream media. Life magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi",[78] and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."[82]
King stated that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands".[83] King also criticized the United States' resistance to North Vietnam's land reforms.[84] He accused the United States of having killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children."[85]
The speech was a reflection of King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with whom King was affiliated.[86] King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Toward the end of his life, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice.[87] Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."[88]
King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected "traditional capitalism," he also rejected Communism because of its "materialistic interpretation of history" that denied religion, its "ethical relativism," and its "political totalitarianism."[89]
King also stated in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech that "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar....it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring".[90] King quoted a United States official, who said that, from Vietnam to South America to Latin America, the country was "on the wrong side of a world revolution"[90] King condemned America's "alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and said that the United States should support "the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution.[91]
Poor People's Campaign, 1968
Main article: Poor People's Campaign
In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created a bill of rights for poor Americans.[92][93]
However, the campaign was not unanimously supported by other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Rustin resigned from the march stating that the goals of the campaign were too broad, the demands unrealizable, and thought these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.[94] Throughout his participation in the civil rights movement, King was criticized by many groups. This included opposition by more militant blacks and such prominent critics as Nation of Islam member Malcolm X.[95] Stokely Carmichael was a separatist and disagreed with King's plea for racial integration because he considered it an insult to a uniquely African-American culture.[96] Omali Yeshitela urged Africans to remember the history of violent European colonization and how power was not secured by Europeans through integration, but by violence and force.[97]
King and the SCLC called on the government to invest in rebuilding America's cities. He felt that Congress had shown "hostility to the poor" by spending "military funds with alacrity and generosity". He contrasted this with the situation faced by poor Americans, claiming that Congress had merely provided "poverty funds with miserliness".[93] His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of "racism, poverty, militarism and materialism", and argued that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced".[98]
Assassination
Main article: Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination
The Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated, is now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum
On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee in support of the black sanitary public works employees, represented by AFSCME Local 1733, who had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. In one incident, black street repairmen received pay for two hours when they were sent home because of bad weather, but white employees were paid for the full day.[99][100]
On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address at Mason Temple, the World Headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane.[101] In the close of the last speech of his career, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:
And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.[102]
King was booked in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, owned by Walter Bailey, in Memphis. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King's close friend and colleague who was present at the assassination, swore under oath to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed at room 306 at the Lorraine Motel so often it was known as the 'King-Abernathy suite.'[103] King was shot at 6:01 p.m. April 4, 1968 while he was standing on the motel's second floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek smashing his jaw and then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder.[104] According to Jesse Jackson, who was present, King's last words on the balcony were to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was attending: "Ben, make sure you play Take My Hand, Precious Lord in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."[105] Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor.[106] The events following the shooting have been disputed, as some people have accused Jackson of exaggerating his response.[107]
After emergency surgery, King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m.[108] According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only thirty-nine years old, he had the heart of a sixty-year-old, perhaps a result of the stress of thirteen years in the civil rights movement.[109]
The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 100 cities.[110] Presidential nominee Robert Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King's death. He gave a short yet empowering speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and asking them to continue King's idea of non-violence.[111] President Lyndon B. Johnson declared April 7 a national day of mourning for the civil rights leader.[112] Vice-President Hubert Humphrey attended King's funeral on behalf of Lyndon B. Johnson, as there were fears that Johnson's presence might incite protests and perhaps violence.[113] At his widow's request, King's last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church was played at the funeral.[114] It was a recording of his "Drum Major" sermon, given on February 4, 1968. In that sermon, King made a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity".[115] His good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, "Take My hand, Precious Lord", at the funeral.[116] The city of Memphis quickly settled the strike on terms favorable to the sanitation workers.[117][118]
Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd.[119] Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, though he recanted this confession three days later.[120] On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray pleaded guilty to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty. Ray was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.[120][121] Ray fired Foreman as his attorney, from then on derisively calling him "Percy Fourflusher".[122] He claimed a man he met in Montreal, Quebec with the alias "Raoul" was involved and that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy.[123][124] He spent the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.[121] On June 10, 1977, shortly after Ray had testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he did not shoot King, he and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee. They were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison.[125]
Allegations of conspiracy
Ray's lawyers maintained he was a scapegoat similar to the way that alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is seen by conspiracy theorists.[126] One of the claims used to support this assertion is that Ray's confession was given under pressure, and he had been threatened with the death penalty.[121][127] Ray was a thief and burglar, but he had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon.[124]
Those suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point out the two separate ballistics tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster recovered by police had neither conclusively proved Ray had been the killer nor that it had even been the murder weapon.[121][128] Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house - which had been inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination - and not from the rooming house window.[129]
Martin Luther King's & Coretta Scott King's tomb, located on the grounds of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site
Developments
In 1997, King's son Dexter Scott King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a new trial.[130] Two years later, Coretta Scott King, King's widow, along with the rest of King's family, won a wrongful death claim against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that government agencies were party to the assassination.[131] William F. Pepper represented the King family in the trial.[132] King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King.[133] He is supported by author Gerald Posner who has researched and written about the assassination.[134]
In 2000, the United States Department of Justice completed the investigation about Jowers' claims but did not find evidence to support allegations about conspiracy. The investigation report recommended no further investigation unless some new reliable facts are presented.[135] The New York Times reported a church minister, Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson — not James Earl Ray — assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way."[136]
King's friend and colleague, James Bevel, disputed the argument that Ray acted alone, stating, "There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man."[137] In 2004, Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted:
The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. And within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. …I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray.[138]
FBI and wiretapping
King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the FBI, especially its director, J. Edgar Hoover.[139] The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1957;[40] its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was New York City lawyer Stanley Levison. The FBI found Levison had been involved with the Communist Party USA,[140] though the FBI considered him an inactive party member.[141] Another King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked to the Communist Party by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).[142] The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison's and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country.[143][144] The Bureau received authorization to proceed with wiretapping from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963[145] and informed President John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison.[143] For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to Communism, stating in a 1965 Playboy interview that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida";[146] Hoover did not believe the statement and replied by saying that King was "the most notorious liar in the country."[147] After King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, the FBI described King as "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country".[144]
The attempt to prove that King was a Communist was in keeping with the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were happy with their lot but had been stirred up by "communists" and "outside agitators".[148] Lawyer-advisor Stanley D. Levison did have ties with the Communist Party in various business dealings, but the FBI refused to believe its own intelligence bureau reports that Levison was no longer associated in that capacity.[149] In response to the FBI's comments regarding communists directing the civil rights movement, King said that "the Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals—the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations."[150]
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, March 26, 1964.
Later, the focus of the Bureau's investigations shifted to attempting to discredit King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, attempted to demonstrate that he also engaged in numerous extramarital affairs.[144] Further remarks on King's lifestyle were made by several prominent officials, such as Lyndon Johnson, who once said that King was a “hypocritical preacher”.[151] One incident that caught the FBI's attention was purported recording of a sexual encounter that took place at a 1964 party King was attending at the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C.[144] The FBI presumed it was King who they heard engaged in a sexual encounter.[152] Ralph Abernathy, a close associate of King's, stated in his 1989 autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down that King had a "weakness for women".[153][154] In a later interview, Abernathy said he only wrote the term "womanizing", and did not specifically say King had extramarital sex.[155] Arguments that King possibly engaged in sexual affairs have been detailed by history professor David Garrow.[156]
The FBI distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family.[157] The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he did not cease his civil rights work.[158] One anonymous letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part, "The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there, is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation."[159] King interpreted this as encouragement for him to commit suicide,[160] although William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the time, argued that it may have only been intended to "convince Dr. King to resign from the SCLC."[161] King refused to give in to the FBI's threats.[152]
In January 31, 1977, United States district Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.[162]
Across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the rooming house in which James Earl Ray was staying, was a fire station. Police officers were stationed in the fire station to keep King under surveillance.[163] Using papered-over windows with peepholes cut into them, the agents were watching the scene while Martin Luther King was shot.[164] Immediately following the shooting, officers rushed out of the station to the motel, and Marrell McCollough, an undercover police officer, was the first person to administer first-aid to King.[165] The antagonism between King and the FBI, the lack of an all points bulletin to find the killer, and the police presence nearby have led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination.
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King's main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in the United States, which has enabled more Americans to reach their potential. He is frequently referenced as a human rights icon today. His name and legacy have often been invoked since his death as people have debated his likely position on various modern political issues.
On the international scene, King's legacy included influences on the Black Consciousness Movement and Civil Rights Movement in South Africa.[167] King's work was cited by and served as an inspiration for Albert Lutuli, another black Nobel Peace prize winner who fought for racial justice in that country.[168] The day following King's assassination, school teacher Jane Elliott conducted her first "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise with her class of elementary school students in Riceville, Iowa. Her purpose was to help them understand King's death as it related to racism, something they little understood from having lived in a predominately white community.[169]
King's wife, Coretta Scott King, followed her husband's footsteps and was active in matters of social justice and civil rights until her death in 2006. The same year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, Mrs. King established the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to preserving his legacy and the work of championing nonviolent conflict resolution and tolerance worldwide.[170] His son, Dexter King, currently serves as the center's chairman.[171] Daughter Yolanda King is a motivational speaker, author and founder of Higher Ground Productions, an organization specializing in diversity training.[172]
There are opposing views even within the King family — regarding the slain civil rights leader's religious and political views about homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people. King's widow Coretta said publicly that she believed her husband would have supported gay rights. However, his daughter Bernice believed he would have been opposed to them.[173] The King Center includes discrimination, and lists homophobia as one of its examples, in its list of "The Triple Evils" that should be opposed.[174]
In 1980, the Department of Interior designated King's boyhood home in Atlanta and several nearby buildings the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. In 1996, United States Congress authorized the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity to establish a foundation to manage fund raising and design of a Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC.[175] King was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established by and for African Americans.[176] King was the first African American honored with his own memorial in the National Mall area and the first non-President to be commemorated in such a way.[177] The sculptor chosen was Lei Yixin.[178] The King Memorial will be administered by the National Park Service.[179]
King's life and assassination inspired many artistic works. In 1969 Maya Angelou published her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.[180] In spring of 2006, a stage play about King was produced in Beijing, China with King portrayed by Chinese actor, Cao Li. The play was written by Stanford University professor, Clayborne Carson.[181]
George H. W. Bush signs Martin Luther King Jr. Day Proclamation
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Main article: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
At the White House Rose Garden on November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it is called Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Following President George H. W. Bush's 1992 proclamation, the holiday is observed on the third Monday of January each year, near the time of King's birthday.[182] On January 17, 2000, for the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all fifty U.S. states.[183]
Awards and recognition
King was awarded at least fifty honorary degrees from colleges and universities in the U.S. and elsewhere.[184][9] Besides winning the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, in 1965 King was awarded the American Liberties Medallion by the American Jewish Committee for his "exceptional advancement of the principles of human liberty".[184][185] Reverend King said in his acceptance remarks, "Freedom is one thing. You have it all or you are not free".[186] King was also awarded the Pacem in Terris Award, named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII calling for all people to strive for peace.[187]
In 1966, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America awarded King the Margaret Sanger Award for "his courageous resistance to bigotry and his lifelong dedication to the advancement of social justice and human dignity."[188] King was posthumously awarded the Marcus Garvey Prize for Human Rights by Jamaica in 1968.[9]
In 1971, King was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for his Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.[189] Six years later, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to King by Jimmy Carter.[190] King and his wife were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.[191]
King was second in Gallup's List of Widely Admired People in the 20th century.[192] In 1963 King was named Time Person of the Year and in 2000, King was voted sixth in the Person of the Century poll by the same magazine.[193] King was elected third in the Greatest American contest conducted by the Discovery Channel and AOL.[194]
More than 730 cities in the United States have streets named after King.[195] King County, Washington rededicated its name in his honor in 1986, and changed its logo to an image of his face in 2007.[196] The city government center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is named in honor of King.[197] King is venerated as a saint by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (feast day April 4)[198] and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (feast day January 15).[199]
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Martin Luther King, Jr. on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
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Bernard Lafayette
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Early life
His parents were Bernard Lafayette Sr. and Verdell Lafayette. Lafayette spent much of his childhood in Tampa, Florida, but also lived in several other places as his father was an itinerant laborer. His family spent two years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which gave young Bernard his first exposure to integration. [1]
Early career
As a young man, Lafayette enrolled in the American Baptist Theological Seminary. During this time he took classes in nonviolence at the Highlander Folk School, run by Myles Horton. Soon after that he was exposed to the in-depth philosophy of Gandhian nonviolence while taking seminars from activist James Lawson. Lafayette went on to co-initiate and participate in the 1960 Lunch Counter Sit-In as a member of the Nashville Student Movement. [2]
Freedom rides
In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) initiated a movement to enforce federal integration laws on interstate bus routes. This movement, known as the Freedom Rides, had African American and white volunteers ride together on bus routes through the segregated south. When a group of Freedom Riders organized by CORE was violently attacked in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, the Nashville Student Movement, of which Lafayette was a member, vowed to take over the journey. In May 1961, Lafayette and two other riders narrowly escaped being killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan when their group was attacked in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. [3]
Selma
In the summer of 1962, Lafayette accepted a position with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to do organizing work in Selma, Alabama. Upon arriving in the city, he began leading meetings at which he spoke about the condition of African Americans in the South, and encouraged local African Americans to share their experiences. [1] On the night of June 12, 1963 (the same night that Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi), Lafayette was severely beaten by a white assailant. While badly injured, he was not deterred from continuing his work. [1] In late 1964 the board of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) decided to join the ongoing Alabama Project and chose Selma as the focal point to gain voting rights for African Americans. In early 1965 Lafayette, James Bevel, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Orange, Diane Nash and others organized a series of public demonstrations that finally--with the march from Selma-to-Montgomery--put enough pressure on the federal government to take action, and gave enough support to President Lyndon Johnson, so Johnson could demand the drafting and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Life after Selma
Lafayette went on to work on the 1966 Chicago Open Housing Movement (he had worked in Chicago earlier with Kale Williams and other leaders of the American Friends Service Committee), and later became president of the American Baptist Theological Seminary. [4] He now holds the post of Senior Fellow at the University of Rhode Island, where he heads the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies. The Center promotes nonviolence education using a curriculum based on the principles and methods of Martin Luther King Jr. [5]
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James Lawson
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Background
Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Lawson grew up in Massillon, Ohio. While a freshman at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an organization founded by A.J. Muste, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization affiliated with FOR. Both FOR and CORE advocated nonviolent resistance to racism; CORE conducted sit-ins in some northern cities in the late 1940s and embarked on a freedom ride more than a decade before the more famous ones of the early 1960s.
Consistent with those principles of nonviolence, Lawson declared himself a conscientious objector and refused to report for the draft in 1951. He served fourteen months in prison after refusing to take either a student or ministerial deferment.
After his release from prison, Lawson went as a Methodist missionary to Nagpur, India, where he studied satyagraha, the principles of nonviolence resistance that Mahatma Gandhi and his followers had developed. He returned to the United States in 1955, entering the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Work with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1957-68)
One of his Oberlin professors introduced him to Martin Luther King, Jr., who had led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama and had also embraced Gandhi's principles of nonviolent resistance. King urged Lawson to come South, telling him "Come now. We don't have anyone like you down there."
Lawson moved to Nashville, Tennessee and enrolled at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, where he served as the southern director for FOR and began conducting nonviolence training workshops for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. While in Nashville, Lawson met and mentored a number of young students at Vanderbilt, Fisk University, and other area schools in the tactics of nonviolent direct action.[2] Lawson trained many of the future leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, among them Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Bernard Lafayette and John Lewis.
In 1959 and 1960 these and other Lawson-trained activists then launched the Nashville sit-ins to challenge segregation in downtown stores. Along with activists from Atlanta, Georgia and elsewhere in the South, they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960. SNCC and Lawson's students played a leading role in the Open Theater Movement, the Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Birmingham Children's Crusade, the Selma Voting Rights Movement, and the Chicago Open Housing Movement over the next few years. Lawson's expulsion from Vanderbilt as a result of these activities became one of the celebrated incidents of the era and eventually a source of deep embarrassment to the university. During the 2006 graduation ceremony Vanderbilt apologized for its treatment of Lawson; he is now a member of its faculty.
In 1962 Lawson brought Dr. King and James Bevel together for a meeting which resulted in the two agreeing to work together as equals. Bevel was then named SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education.
Lawson became pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee in 1962. In 1968, when black sanitation workers went on strike for higher wages and union recognition after two of their co-workers were accidentally crushed to death, Reverend Lawson served as chairman of their strike committee. (See Memphis Sanitation Strike)
Reverend Lawson invited Dr. King to Memphis in April 1968 to dramatize their struggle, which had adopted the slogan I am a Man. Dr. King delivered his famous "Mountaintop" speech in support of the strike in Memphis on 1968-04-03, the day before his assassination.
Continued advocacy of nonviolent struggle
Reverend Lawson moved to Los Angeles in 1974 to lead Holman United Methodist Church[1] where he served for 25 years before retiring in 1999. He has continued to train activists in nonviolence and to work in support of a number of causes, including immigrants' rights in the United States and the rights of Palestinians, opposition to the war in Iraq, and workers' rights to a living wage. In 2004, he received the Community of Christ International Peace Award.
Reverend Lawson took part in a well-publicized 3 day Freedom Ride commemorative program sponsored by Vanderbilt University's Office of Active Citizenship and Service in January 2007. The program included an educational bus tour to Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama. Participants also included fellow Civil Rights activists Jim Zwerg, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, Rev. C.T. Vivian as well as John Seigenthaler, journalists and approximately 180 students, faculty and administrators from Vanderbilt, Fisk, Tennessee State University and American Baptist College.
Controversial comments
Conservative commentators Sean Hannity and World Net Daily's Kevin McCullough[3] criticized Lawson's remarks at a September 11, 2006 panel discussion at Vanderbilt University entitled "9/11: A Time for Reflection". He had called Christianity "the most violent religion in the world" and in addition referred to the United States as the "number one enemy of peace and justice in the world".[4] Fox News' Hannity & Colmes broadcast these comments September 26, 2006 and interviewed Vanderbilt student Chris Donnelly who had attended the panel discussion.
See also
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John Lewis
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Early life and activism
Born in Troy, Alabama, the son of Meline Thas, Lewis was educated at the American Baptist Theological Seminary and at Fisk University, both in Nashville, Tennessee, where he became active in the local sit-in movement. He participated in the Freedom Rides to desegregate the South, and was a national leader in the struggle for civil rights.[1]
Lewis was instrumental in organizing student sit-ins, bus boycotts and non-violent protests in the fight for voter and racial equality. He endured brutal beatings by angry mobs and suffered a fractured skull at the hands of Alabama State police as he led a march of 600 people in Selma, Ala. in 1965.[1][2]
Lewis became nationally known during his prominent role in the Selma to Montgomery marches. During the first march police attacked the peaceful demonstrators and beat Lewis mercilessly in public, leaving head wounds that are still visible today. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963, Lewis, a representative of [SNCC], the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the youngest speaker.[2]
Historian Howard Zinn wrote: "At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?’ That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence."[3]
Lewis (far right) with Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, William Fitts Ryan, and James L. Farmer, Jr.
"John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but did nothing itself, except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a 'cooling-off period,' a moratorium on Freedom Rides.[3]
Lewis at meeting of American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1964
In February 2009, forty-eight years after he had been bloodied by the Klu Klux Klan during civil rights marches, Lewis received an apology on national television from a white southerner, former Klansman Elwin Wilson.[3] [4]
"I'm so sorry about what happened back then," Wilson said breathlessly. "It's OK. I forgive you," Lewis responded. (On national television, both men recalled the incident.) "[I remember] going directly to the Greyhound bus station," Lewis said. "We tried to enter a so-called 'white' waiting room and the moment we started through the door, a group of young men attacked us." Wilson was in the group, but said he "did more than help." He said he was the main attacker. The outburst, Wilson said, was just part of a life of hate he led for years. "I had a black baby doll in this house, and I had a little rope, and I tied it to a limb and let it hang here," he said.[5] [6]
After leaving SNCC in 1966, Lewis worked with community organizations and was named community affairs director for the National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta.
Lewis has cited former Florida Senator and Congressman Claude Pepper, a staunch supporter of the New Deal and an outspoken liberal during his half-century in politics, as being the colleague that he has most admired.[4]
Political career — U.S. Congress
Lewis first ran for elective office in 1977, when a vacancy occurred in Georgia’s 5th District. A special election was called after President Jimmy Carter appointed incumbent Congressman Andrew Young to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Lewis lost the race to Atlanta City Councilman and future Senator Wyche Fowler.
After his unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1977, Lewis was without a job and in debt from his campaign. He accepted a position with the Carter administration as associate director of ACTION, responsible for running the VISTA program, the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, and the Foster Grandparent Program. He held that job for two and a half years, resigning as the 1980 election approached.[5] In 1981, Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council.
In 1986, when Fowler ran for the United States Senate, Lewis defeated fellow civil rights leader Julian Bond in the Democratic primary to succeed Fowler in the 5th District. This win was tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic, majority-black 5th District. Lewis was the second African-American to represent Georgia in Congress since Reconstruction. Young was the first. Lewis has been re-elected ten times without serious opposition, often with over 70 percent of the vote. He has been unopposed for reelection since 2002 but faced two primary opponents in 2008.
Since 1991, Lewis has been senior chief deputy whip in the Democratic caucus. He is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.. He was an influential aide for the Clinton Cabinet, and had regular meetings with the administration.
Lewis is, according to the Associated Press, "the first major House figure to suggest impeaching George W. Bush," arguing that the president "deliberately, systematically violated the law" in authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps without a warrant. Lewis said, "He is not King, he is president."[6]
Lewis, an outspoken liberal and staunch opponent of the Iraq War, endorsed Joe Lieberman for re-election to the Senate in 2006, despite Lieberman's loss to Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary.[7]
He was one of the 31 who voted in the House to not count the electoral votes from Ohio in the 2004 presidential election.[8]
Lewis delivered the Commencement Address at the University of Massachusetts Lowell on Sunday June 3, 2007 at Edward A. LeLacheur Park.
In September 2007, Lewis was awarded the Dole Leadership Prize from the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.[9]
On October 1, 2007 Lewis paid tribute to James Meredith at the dedication of The University of Mississippi's James Meredith Monument. The speech and the monument commemorated civil rights pioneer James H. Meredith, who enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1962, forcing its integration, and later led the 1966 James Meredith March Against Fear. After Meredith was wounded in an assassination attempt, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael continued the march that started the chant "Black Power!"
On October 21, 2007, Lewis helped to welcome the Dalai Lama of Tibet to Atlanta and Emory University.
Congressional committee assignments
* Ways & Means Committee
o Subcommittee on Oversight (Chairman)
o Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support
* Co-chair of the Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Caucus
* Bipartisan Taskforce on Nonproliferation
2008 Presidential election
Democratic candidate support
On October 12, 2007, Lewis endorsed the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton.[10]
On February 14, 2008, Lewis announced he was considering withdrawing his support from Clinton and might instead cast his superdelegate vote for Barack Obama: "Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap."[11] On February 27, 2008, Lewis formally changed his support and endorsed Obama.[12][13]
After Obama clinched the Democratic nomination for president, Lewis said “If someone had told me this would be happening now, I would have told them they were crazy, out of their mind, they didn’t know what they were talking about ... I just wish the others were around to see this day. ... To the people who were beaten, put in jail, were asked questions they could never answer to register to vote, it’s amazing.”[14]
Despite switching his support to Obama, Lewis' support of Clinton for several months led to criticism from his constituents. One of his challengers in the House primary election set up campaign headquarters inside the building that served as Obama's Georgia office.[15]
Views about McCain's campaign
Lewis accused Republican presidential nominee John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin of organizing a racially charged campaign to attack Obama. He accused McCain and Palin of "sowing the seeds of hatred and division" and compared the feelings at McCain's campaign rallies to those of late segregationist Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace. Lewis said, "George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional right."[16] He went on to say "As public figures with power to influence and persuade, Senator McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all." [17]
Inauguration Day, 2009
Lewis was present on the stage during the inauguration of Barack Obama, as the only living speaker from the rally at the March on Washington. Obama signed a commemorative photograph for Lewis with the words, “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.
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Viola Liuzzo
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Family life
Viola Gregg was born in California, Pennsylvania, later moving with her family to Chattanooga, Tennessee at the age of six. After just one year of high school, she dropped out, was married in 1941 at the age of 16, then divorced within a year. In 1943, she married George Argyris, with this marriage lasting seven years and producing two children. She later married husband number three: Anthony Liuzzo, a Teamsters union business agent.
While raising a family that added three more children, Liuzzo sought to return to school, attending the Carnegie Institute in Detroit, Michigan. She then enrolled part-time at Wayne State University in 1962, and was considered an average student who was academically still in her freshman year at the time of her death.
In 1964, Liuzzo was cited and pleaded guilty to violating state law by keeping two of her children, 13-year-old Thomas and 10-year-old Anthony, out of school for more than 40 days. Liuzzo's basis for her actions was to protest raising the state's dropout age to 18. She was fined $50 and given a year's probation.
The murder and funeral
Liuzzo was horrified by the images of the aborted march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7. Nine days later, she took part in a protest at Wayne State, then called her husband to tell him she would be traveling to Selma, saying the struggle, "was everybody's fight."
After the march concluded on March 25, Liuzzo, assisted by Leroy Moton, a 19-year-old African American, helped drive local marchers home in her 1963 Oldsmobile. After they dropped off their second load of people, a car full of Klan members in a blue Ford spotted Liuzzo's car at traffic lights, then gave chase for 20 miles. The Klan members then pulled up alongside Liuzzo's car and shot directly at her, hitting her twice in the head, killing her instantly.
Moton was unharmed, but lay motionless when the Klansmen reached the car to check on their victims. After that car left, he began running, but was soon being chased by a red sports car before diving into a gully. Running back toward Montgomery for the next half hour, Moton eventually flagged down a truck driven by Rev. Leon Riley that was bringing civil rights workers back to Selma.
On March 30, Liuzzo's funeral was held at Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic church in Detroit, with many prominent members of both the civil rights movement and government there to pay their respects. Included in this group were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins; Congress on Racial Equality national leader James Farmer; Michigan lieutenant governor William G. Milliken; Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa; and United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther.
Less than two weeks after her death, a charred cross was found in front of four Detroit homes, including the Liuzzo residence.
Arrest and legal proceedings
The four Klan members in the car, Collie Wilkins (21), FBI informant Gary Rowe (34), William Eaton (41) and Eugene Thomas (42) were quickly arrested: within 24 hours President Lyndon Johnson appeared personally on national television to announce their arrest.
The remaining three suspects were indicted for Liuzzo's death on April 22, with defense lawyer Matt Murphy quickly attempting to have the case dismissed on the grounds that President Johnson had violated the suspects' civil rights when he named them in his televised announcement. Murphy also indicated he would call Johnson as a witness during the upcoming trial.
On May 3, an all-white jury was selected for Wilkins' trial, with Rowe the key witness. Three days later, Murphy made blatant racist comments during his final arguments, including calling Liuzzo a "white nigger," in order to sway the jury. The tactic was successful enough to result in a mistrial the following day (10-2 in favor of conviction), and on May 10, the three accused killers were part of a Klan parade which closed with a standing ovation for them.
Before the new trial got underway, Murphy was killed in an automobile accident, on August 20, when he fell asleep while driving and crashed into a gas tank truck. The former mayor of Birmingham, Alabama Art Hanes agreed to take over representation for all three defendants one week later. Hanes was a staunch segregationist who served as mayor during the tumultuous 1963 period in which police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor used fire hoses on African-American protesters.
After another all-white jury was selected on October 20, the end result two days later saw the panel take less than two hours to acquit Wilkins in Liuzzo's slaying.
The next phase of the lengthy process began when a federal trial that charged the defendants with conspiracy under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction civil rights statute. The charges did not specifically refer to Liuzzo's murder, but on December 3, the trio was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
While out on appeal, Wilkins and Thomas were each found guilty of firearms violations and sent to jail for those crimes. During this period, bad taste was on display when the January 15, 1966 edition of the Birmingham News published an ad offering Liuzzo's bullet-ridden car for sale. Asking $3,500, the ad read, "Do you need a crowd-getter? I have a 1963 Oldsmobile two-door in which Mrs. Viola Liuzzo was killed. Bullet holes and everything intact. Ideal to bring in crowds."[citation needed]
Eaton, the only defendant who remained out of jail, died of a heart attack on March 9. Thomas was the only remaining member of the trio who had not gone to trial, with that case getting underway on September 26, 1966. The prosecution built a strong circumstantial case in the trial that included an FBI ballistics expert testifying that the bullet removed from the woman's brain was fired from a revolver owned by Thomas. Two witnesses testified they had seen Wilkins drinking beer at a VFW Hall near Birmingham, 125 miles from the murder scene, an hour or less after Liuzzo was shot. Despite the presence of eight African-Americans on the jury, Thomas was acquitted of murder the following day after just 90 minutes of deliberations. State attorney general Richmond Flowers criticized the verdict, deriding the black members of the panel, who had been carefully screened, as "Uncle Toms."
On April 27, 1967, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld the convictions of the surviving defendants, with Thomas serving six years in prison for the crime.
Due to threats from Klan, both before and after his testimony, Gary Thomas Rowe went into the federal witness protection program. See Rowe v. Griffin, 676 F.2d 524 (1982).
Aftermath
It is thought by some people (civil rights activists, her children, etc.) that her death helped with the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which removed barriers to voting such as literacy tests and poll taxes. President Lyndon B. Johnson also ordered investigation immediately after the death.
Shortly after his retirement in 1975, Anthony Liuzzo, who never remarried, was one of three suburban Detroit men charged with seven counts of conspiracy to burn down a supermarket for insurance money.[citation needed] He died on December 10, 1978.
On December 28, 1977 the Liuzzo family, filed a lawsuit against the FBI, charging that Rowe, as an employee of the FBI, had failed to prevent Liuzzo's death and had in effect conspired in the murder. Then, on July 5, 1979, the American Civil Liberties Union, filed another lawsuit on behalf of the family.
Rowe was indicted in 1978 and tried for his involvement in the murder,[2] but the first trial ended in a hung jury, and the second trial ended in his acquittal. See Rowe v. Griffin, 497 F. Supp. 610 (1980) for a complete description of the case.
On May 27, 1983, a judge rejected the claims in the Liuzzo family lawsuit, saying there was "no evidence the FBI was in any type of joint venture with Rowe or conspiracy against Mrs. Liuzzo. Rowe's presence in the car was the principal reason why the crime was solved so quickly." In August 1983, the FBI was awarded US$79,873 in court costs[citation needed], but costs were later reduced to $3,645 after the ACLU appealed on behalf of the family. See Liuzzo v. US, 565 F. Supp. 640 (1983).
The family's oldest son, Thomas, moved to Alabama in 1978 and legally changed his last name to Lee in 1982 after constant questions about whether he was related to the civil rights martyr.[3]
Liuzzo was the subject of a 2004 documentary Home of the Brave. She was featured in "Free at Last (part 3)."
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Joseph Lowery
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Early life
Joseph E. Lowery was born to LeRoy and Dora Lowery on October 6, 1921. He attended middle school in Chicago while staying with relatives, returning to Huntsville to complete high school. He then attended Knoxville College and Payne College and Theological Seminary, earning his doctorate of divinity at Chicago Ecumenical Institute.[2] He married Evelyn Gibson in 1950, a civil rights activist and leader in her own right. She is the sister of the late Rev. Dr. Harry Gibson an activist, and Elder member of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church, Chicago Area.
Family
He has three daughters: Yvonne, Karen and Cheryl. Cheryl is married to William Osborne Jr. and they have three children: Justice Osborne, Blake Osborne,and Maya Osborne.
Dr. Lowery is also the grandfather of actor and model Vaughn Lowery.
American civil rights career
Lowery was pastor of the Warren Street United Methodist Church, in Mobile, Alabama from 1952 until 1961. His career in the civil rights movement began in the early 1950s in Mobile, Alabama. After Rosa Parks' arrest in 1955, Lowery helped lead the Montgomery bus boycott. He headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, an organization devoted to the desegregation of buses and public places. In 1957, with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and subsequently led the organization as its president from 1977 to 1997.
His property was seized in 1959 along with that of other civil rights leaders by the State of Alabama as part of a libel suit. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the suit reversed. At the request of Martin Luther King Jr., Lowery led the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. Lowery is a co-founder and former president of the Black Leadership Forum, a consortium of black advocacy groups. The Forum protested Apartheid in South Africa in the mid 1970s until the election of Nelson Mandela. Joseph Lowery was among the first five African Americans to get arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington D.C. during the Free South Africa movement. Lowery served as pastor of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta from (1986-92), adding over a thousand members and leaving the church with 10 acres (40,000 m2) of land. He is now retired but remains active in the civil rights movement.
To honor Reverend Lowery, the City of Atlanta renamed Ashby Street for him. Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard is just west of downtown Atlanta and runs north-south beginning at West Marietta Street near the campus of Georgia Tech and stretching to White Street in the West End neighborhood, running past Atlanta's Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Morris Brown College. Perhaps not coincidentally, the street intersects both Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive and Ralph David Abernathy Freeway.
Reverend Lowery has advocated for LGBT civil rights,[3] including civil unions, but is more hesitant on same-sex marriage.
Coretta Scott King's funeral and controversy
In 2006, at Coretta Scott King's funeral, Dr. Lowery received a standing ovation when he remarked before four U.S. Presidents in attendance:
We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor!
Conservative observers claimed his comments were inappropriate in a setting meant to honor the life of Mrs. King, especially considering Mr. Bush was present at the ceremony.[5][6] None of Mrs. King's family has objected to Lowery's words.[7]
President Barack Obama's inauguration benediction
On January 20, 2009, Dr. Lowery delivered the benediction at the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. He opened with lines from "Lift Every Voice and Sing," also known as "The Negro National Anthem," by James Weldon Johnson. He concluded with the following, an interpolation of Big Bill Broonzy's "Black, Brown and White":
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get [in] back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen! Say Amen! And Amen! [8]
This final passage drew criticism for being "divisive",[9] or "racialist",[10] from some conservative commentators.[11] [12] Reporters in attendance called the passage a mocking of racial sterotypes, and said that the crowd received it with good humor
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Reverend Joseph E. Lowery has received several awards. The NAACP gave him an award at its 1997 convention for, "dean of the civil rights movement," and Lifetime Achievement Award. He has also received the Martin Luther King Jr. Center Peace Award and the National Urban League's Whitney M. Young, Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. Ebony Magazine has named him one of the 15 greatest black preachers, describing him as, "the consummate voice of biblical social relevancy, a focused voice, speaking truth to power.” Lowery has also received several honorary doctorates from colleges and universities including, Dillard University, Morehouse College, Alabama State University and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
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He has three daughters: Yvonne, Karen and Cheryl. Cheryl is married to William Osborne Jr. and they have three children: Justice Osborne, Blake Osborne,and Maya Osborne.
Dr. Lowery is also the grandfather of actor and model Vaughn Lowery.
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Thurgood Marshall
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Education
Marshall graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore in 1926 and from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930. Afterward, Marshall wanted to apply to his hometown law school, the University of Maryland School of Law, but the dean told him that he would not be accepted due to the school's segregation policy. Later, as a civil rights litigator, he successfully sued the school for this policy in the case of Murray v. Pearson. As he could not attend the University of Maryland Marshall sought admission and was accepted at Howard University. He was influenced by its new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, who instilled in his students the desire to apply the tenets of the Constitution to all Americans. Marshall was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Black Greek-letter fraternity, established by African American students in 1906.
Law career
Main article: Murray v. Pearson
Marshall received his law degree from the Howard University School of Law in 1933 where he graduated first in his class.[3] He then set up a private practice in Baltimore. The following year, he began working with the Baltimore NAACP. He won his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, 169 Md. 478 (1936). This involved the first attempt to chip away at Plessy v. Ferguson, a plan created by his co-counsel on the case Charles Hamilton Houston. Marshall represented Donald Gaines Murray, a black Amherst College graduate with excellent credentials who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of its separate but equal policies. This policy required black students to accept one of three options, attend: Morgan College, the Princess Anne Academy, or out-of-state black institutions. In 1935, Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Murray, showing that neither of the in-state institutions offered a law school and that such schools were entirely unequal to the University of Maryland. Marshall and Houston expected to lose and intended to appeal to the federal courts. However, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled against the state of Maryland and its Attorney General, who represented the University of Maryland, stating "Compliance with the Constitution cannot be deferred at the will of the state. Whatever system is adopted for legal education now must furnish equality of treatment now". While it was a moral victory, the ruling had no real authority outside the state of Maryland.
George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall (center), and James Nabrit, congratulating each other, following Supreme Court decision declaring segregation in public education unconstitutional
Chief Counsel for the NAACP
Marshall won his very first U.S. Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940), at the age of 32. That same year, he was appointed Chief Counsel for the NAACP. He argued many other cases before the Supreme Court, most of them successfully, including Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944); Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950); and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950). His most famous case as a lawyer was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" public education was unconstitutional because it could never be truly equal. In total, Marshall won 29 out of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court.
During the 1950s, Thurgood Marshall developed a ugly relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1956, for example, he privately praised Hoover's campaign to discredit T.R.M. Howard, a maverick civil rights leader from Mississippi. During a national speaking tour, Howard had criticized the FBI's failure to seriously investigate cases such as the 1955 killers of George W. Lee and Emmett Till. Ironically, two years earlier Howard had arranged for Marshall to deliver a well-received speech at a rally of his Regional Council of Negro Leadership in Mound Bayou, Mississippi only days before the Brown decision.
President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. A group of Democratic Party Senators led by Mississippi's James Eastland held up his confirmation, so he served for the first several months under a recess appointment. Marshall remained on that court until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Solicitor General.
U.S. Supreme Court
On June 13, 1967, President Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice Tom C. Clark, saying that this was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall was confirmed as an Associate Justice by a Senate vote of 69-11 on August 31, 1967.[4] He was the 96th person to hold the position, and the first African-American. President Johnson confidently predicted to one biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, that a lot of black baby boys would be named "Thurgood" in honor of this choice (in fact, Kearns's research of birth records in New York and Boston indicates that Johnson's prophecy did not come true).[5]
Marshall served on the Court for the next twenty-four years, compiling a liberal record that included strong support for Constitutional protection of individual rights, especially the rights of criminal suspects against the government. His most frequent ally on the Court (indeed, the pair rarely voted at odds) was Justice William Brennan, who consistently joined him in supporting abortion rights and opposing the death penalty. Brennan and Marshall concluded in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was, in all circumstances, unconstitutional, and never accepted the legitimacy of Gregg v. Georgia, which ruled four years later that the death penalty was constitutional in some circumstances. Thereafter, Brennan or Marshall dissented from every denial of certiorari in a capital case and from every decision upholding a sentence of death.[citation needed]
Although he is best remembered for his jurisprudence in the fields of civil rights and criminal procedure, Marshall made significant contributions to other areas of the law as well. In Teamsters v. Terry he held that the Seventh Amendment entitled the plaintiff to a jury trial in a suit against a labor union for breach of duty of fair representation. In TSC Industries, Inc. v. Northway, Inc. he articulated a formulation for the standard of materiality in United States securities law that is still applied and used today. In Cottage Savings Association v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, he weighed in on the income tax consequences of the Savings and Loan crisis, permitting a savings and loan association to deduct a loss from an exchange of mortgage participation interests. In Personnel Administrator MA v. Feeney, Marshall wrote a dissent saying that a law that gave hiring preference to veterans over non-veterans was unconstitutional because of its inequitable impact on women.
Among his many law clerks were Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals; Judge Ralph Winter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; well-known law professors Dan Kahan, Cass Sunstein, Eben Moglen, Susan Low Bloch, Martha Minow, Rick Pildes, and Mark Tushnet (and editor of Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions and Reminiscences, cited hereafter); Law Schools Deans Paul Mahoney of University of Virginia School of Law, Richard Revesz of New York University School of Law, and Elena Kagan of Harvard Law School. See, List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Death and Legacy
Marshall died of heart failure at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, at 2:58 p.m. on January 24, 1993 at the age of 84. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.[6] His second wife and their two sons survived him.
Marshall left all of his personal papers and notes to the Library of Congress. The Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, opened Marshall's papers for immediate use by scholars, journalists and the public, insisting that this was Marshall's intent. The Marshall family and several of his close associates disputed this claim.[7] The decision to make the documents public was supported by the American Library Association.[8] A list of the archived manuscripts is available.[9]
There are numerous memorials to Justice Marshall. One is near the Maryland State House. The primary office building for the federal court system, located on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., is named in honor of Justice Marshall and contains a statue of him in the atrium. In 2000, the historic Twelfth Street YMCA Building located in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. was renamed the Thurgood Marshall Center. The major airport serving Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, was renamed the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on October 1, 2005.
Thurgood Marshall Award
The Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico instituted[10] in 1993 the annual Thurgood Marshall Award, given to the top student in civil rights at each of Puerto Rico's four law schools. The awardees are selected by the United States territory's Attorney General and includes a $500 monetary award.
Timeline of Marshall's life
Marshall in 1957
* 1930 - Thurgood graduates with honors from Lincoln University, PA (cum laude).
* 1934 - Thurgood receives law degree from Howard University (magna cum laude); begins private practice in Baltimore, Maryland.
* 1934 - Begins to work for Baltimore branch of NAACP.
* 1935 - Worked with Charles Houston, wins first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson.
* 1936 - Becomes assistant special council for NAACP in New York.
* 1940 - Wins Chambers v. Florida, the first of twenty-nine Supreme Court victories.
* 1943 - Won case for integration of schools in Hillburn, New York.
* 1944 - Successfully argues Smith v. Allwright, overthrowing the South's "white primary".
* 1946 - Thurgood Marshall received a medal from the NAACP.
* 1948 - Wins Shelley v. Kraemer, in which Supreme Court strikes down legality of racially restrictive covenants.
* 1950 - Wins Supreme Court victories in two graduate-school integration cases, Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents.
* 1951 - Visits South Korea and Japan to investigate charges of racism in U.S. armed forces. He reported that the general practice was one of "rigid segregation."
* 1954 - Wins Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, landmark case that demolishes legal basis for segregation in America.
* 1956 - Wins Browder v. Gayle, ending the practice of segregation on buses and ending the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
* 1957 - Founds and becomes the first president-director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., a nonprofit law firm separate and independent of the NAACP
* 1961 - Defends civil rights demonstrators, winning Supreme Court victory in Garner v. Louisiana; nominated to Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President J.F. Kennedy.
* 1961 - Appointed circuit judge, makes 112 rulings, none of them reversed on certiorari by Supreme Court (1961-1965).
* 1965 - Appointed United States Solicitor General by President Lyndon B. Johnson; wins 14 of the 19 cases he argues for the government (1965-1967).
* 1967 - Becomes first African American elevated to U.S. Supreme Court (1967-1991).
* 1991 - Retires from the Supreme Court.
* 1992 - Receives the Liberty Medal recognizing Marshall's long history of protecting individual rights under the Constitution.
* 1993 - Dies at age 84 in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.
For more, see Bradley C. S. Watson, "The Jurisprudence of William Joseph Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall" in Frost, Bryan-Paul and Jeffrey Sikkenga. eds. History of American Political Thought (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2003). ISBN 0739106236; ISBN 978-0739106235; ISBN 9780393928860.
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Books authored
* Marshall, Thurgood; Tushnet, Mark V. (Editor); and Kennedy, Randall (Forward by). (2001). Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions and Reminiscences. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, Incorporated -- Lawrence Hill Books. ISBN 9781556523861..
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James Meredith
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Time at the University of Mississippi
Many students harassed Meredith during his first two semesters on campus. Though the majority of students accepted Meredith's presence, according to first person accounts chronicled in Nadine Cohodas's book The Band Played Dixie, students living in Meredith's dorm bounced basketballs on the floor just above his room through all hours of the night. When Meredith walked into the cafeteria for meals, the students eating would all turn their backs. If Meredith sat at a table with other students, all of whom were white, the students would immediately get up and go to another table.
Life after graduation
Meredith continued his education at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He received an LL.B (law degree) from Columbia University in 1968. Meredith ceased being a civil rights activist in the late 1960s and found employment as a stockbroker.
He led a civil rights march, the March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi in 1966 and was wounded by sniper Aubrey James Norvell on June 6.[4] The photograph of Meredith after being shot won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1967.[5] J. B. Lenoir sings about this incident in the song Shot on James Meredith.
As an author Meredith wrote a memoir of his days at the University of Mississippi entitled Three Years in Mississippi, published by the Indiana University Press in 1966, and also self-published several books. He was an active Republican and served for several years as a domestic advisor on the staff of United States Senator Jesse Helms. Faced with harsh criticism from the Civil Rights community, Meredith said that he wrote every member of the Senate and House offering his services to them in order to gain access to the Library of Congress, and that only Helms replied.
Meredith made several attempts to be elected to Congress as a Republican. He became increasingly conservative and in 1988 accused liberal whites of being "the greatest enemy" of African Americans.[6] He also opposed economic sanctions against South Africa and making the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. a national holiday.[6]
In 2002, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his desegregation of the University of Mississippi, at the age of 69, Meredith was the proprietor of a small used car lot in Jackson, Mississippi. On the celebration activities surrounding the anniversary he said, "It was an embarrassment for me to be there, and for somebody to celebrate it, oh my God."[7] Around this same time, Meredith was the special guest speaker for a seminar at Mississippi State University. Among other topics, Meredith spoke of his experiences at the University of Mississippi. During a question and answer session, a young white male in attendance stood up and asked Meredith if he had participated in a formal Rush program while during his historic tenure at the University of Mississippi. Meredith replied, "Doesn't that have something to do with being in a fraternity?" The young man replied "Yes," and Meredith did not dignify the question with any further response. The audience found humor in Meredith's dismissal of the idea that he, who was accompanied by armed military personnel in order to safely attend the university, would be either allowed to or interested in gaining membership into a fraternity at that time.
Earlier that same year, Mr. Meredith watched his son, Joseph Meredith, graduate from Ole Miss with a doctorate in Business Administration. Joseph, who had previously earned degrees from Harvard University and Millsaps College, graduated as the most outstanding doctoral student in the School of Business Administration. The elder Meredith said, "I think there's no better proof that White supremacy was wrong than not only to have my son graduate, but to graduate as the most outstanding graduate of the school," Meredith says. "That, I think, vindicates my whole life."[8]
James Meredith views himself as an individual American citizen who demanded and got the rights properly extended to any American, not as a participant in the U.S. civil rights movement. There is considerable enmity between James Meredith and the organized Civil Rights Movement. Meredith once said that "Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind."[9]
In an interview for CNN, Meredith stated, "I was engaged in a war. I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government – the Kennedy administration at that time – into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen."[10]
On February 8, 2008 James Meredith's son, Joseph Howard Meredith, died at age 39 from complications arising from lupus. At the time of his death he was an assistant professor of finance in the College of Business Administration, Division of International Banking and Finance Studies at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, TX. He was preceded in death by his mother Mary June Wiggins Meredith and left behind a daughter, Jasmine Victoria.
James Meredith is currently living in Jackson, Mississippi with his wife, Judy Alsobrook Meredith. He has one daughter, Jessica Meredith Knight and two surviving sons, James Meredith and John Meredith.
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Loren Miller
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Loren Miller was born 1903, in Pender, Nebraska, to John Bird Miller (born a slave), and to Nora Herbaugh. His family moved to Kansas when he was a boy, and he graduated from high school in Highland, Kansas. Later, he attended the University of Kansas; Howard University; and Washburn University, in Topeka, Kansas, where he earned his bachelor of laws degree in 1928. He was admitted to the Kansas bar the same year, and practiced law there before moving to California to pursue his first interest, journalism.
In early 1930s, Miller moved to Los Angeles, California, where he began to publish in the California Eagle, a black weekly newspaper.[1] Miller returned to the field of law and was admitted to the California State Bar in 1933. Miller whose fiery Depression-era journalism had earned wide respect in Los Angeles's black community. As an attorney, Miller brought the same keen intellect and incisive rhetorical style to the courtroom. Longtime friend and client Don Wheeldin remembered that Miller was so dynamic that other lawyers would actually postpone their own cases just to hear him.[2]
By the 1940s, he was raising his voice in protest over policies and practices that discriminated against African Americans. In the wake of World War II, many blacks had left their rural and southern homes to seek economic opportunity in California, only to face discrimination and bias, particularly in housing. In the ensuing struggle for housing restrictive covenants were used to keep the migrants from spreading out beyond the area of original Negro settlement. The war workers had to find living space somewhere, and the middle class began to look around for better homes. The result was wholesale violations of racial covenants and a vigorous counter-attack. A staggering number of lawsuits were brought, approximately two hundred were filed in Los Angeles in a four year period, and other cities had much the same experience.[3] Miller won the court case Fairchild v. Rainers (1944), a decision for a black Pasadena, California family that had bought a nonrestrictive lot but was sued by white neighbors anyway. In 1945, Miller became the attorney for the restrictive covenant case representing Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Ethel Waters, and others of the stars that had moved to what was called the "Sugar Hill" section of Los Angeles.[4] But some whites, refusing to be comforted, had drawn up a racial restriction covenant among themselves. For seven years they had tried to sell it to the other whites, but failed. Then they went to court. Superior Judge Thurmond Clarke decided to visit the disputed ground—popularly known as "Sugar Hill." Next morning, Judge Clarke threw the case out of court. His reason: "It is time that members of the Negro race are accorded, without reservations or evasions, the full rights guaranteed them under the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution. Judges have been avoiding the real issue too long."[5]
By 1947, Miller had represented more than one hundred plaintiffs seeking to invalidate housing covenants that prevented blacks from purchasing or renting housing in certain areas. The son of a slave, Miller found that housing discrimination was among the most explosive social problems in the nation and spent years representing the interests of low income clients. As a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he became a well-known spokesman for the rights of minorities to enjoy equal access to housing and education. He was openly critical of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), declaring that FHA policies fostered a Jim Crow policy that kept blacks confined to "tight ghettos" and provoked racial tension. In 1948, Miller wrote in The Nation, ". . . the federal government through FHA furnished it model race-restrictive clause for builders and subdividers from 1935 to 1947, and during that period the FHA refused to guarantee home construction loans unless race restriction were inserted in subdivision deeds. Racial covenants became the fashion, almost a passion, in conveyancing, and were demanded by banks and lending institutions in all real-estate developments."[6] Commenting on the effect of racially restrictive covenants, he noted that contrary to the claims of those who supported the covenants, residential segregation did not preserve public peace and general welfare but rather resulted in "nothing but bitterness and strife."[7] Miller was one of the first to recognize that bias in housing would be an explosive social issue in the United States. The greatest tension, he predicted, would exist where an all-white area adjoined an all-black area, because "there white Americans stand eternal guard to keep their Negro fellow Americans out." He denounced as "money lenders" and "hucksters of prejudice" the owners of slum properties where many members of minorities are forced to live under substandard conditions because of the "artificial housing shortages . . . in the Negro community."[7] Perhaps the most celebrated case Miller and partner Thurgood Marshall was involved in, Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, 68 S. Ct. 836, 92 L. Ed. 1161 (1948), in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that racial covenants on property cannot be enforced by the courts.[8]
Later, Miller was named cochair of the West Coast legal committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In that capacity, he became the first U.S. lawyer to win an unqualified verdict outlawing residential restrictive covenants in real estate sales that involved Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or Veterans Administration (VA) financing. With the rise of private corporate litigators like the NAACP to bear the expense, civil suits have become the pattern in modem civil rights litigation.
Charlotta Bass sold the newspaper California Eagle in 1951 to Loren Miller, the former city editor of the Eagle, and began writing for the Eagle, which earned him a reputation in the black community as an articulate and outspoken defender of African Americans. He was a civil liberties lawyer, had a particular interest in discrimination and housing. In the ensuing years under Loren Miller's stewardship, The California Eagle continued to press for the complete integration of African Americans in every sector of society, and to protest all forms of Jim Crow. Among Miller's primary civil rights concerns were housing discrimination, police brutality, and discriminatory hiring practices in the police and fire departments. He also contributed numerous articles to such journals as The Crisis, The Nation, and Law in Transition.
In 1953, Miller represented the case Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249, Los Angeles, California. In this racially restrictive covenant case, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded upon Shelley v. Kraemer by disallowing damage awards when racial covenants were violated. Barrows had been awarded damages when she sued Jackson for violation of a restrictive covenant that barred the sale of Jackson’s property in Los Angeles to a “non-Caucasian.” The Court upheld a decision by a California District Court of Appeals that determined the awarding of damages a state action that discriminated against African Americans. With the rise of private corporate litigators like the NAACP to bear the expense, civil suits have become the pattern in modem civil rights litigation.
In 1964, former governor Edmund G. Brown of California appointed Miller to the Superior Court of California, where he served until his death.
[edit] The Petitioners
In 1966, Judge Miller wrote The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro,[9] a book that recounts the vital role of the U.S. Supreme Court in shaping the lives of African Americans in the United States.
"This is a chronicle of what the Supreme Court has said and done in respect of the rights of Negroes, slave and free, between 1789 and 1965. As a "ward" of the U. S. Supreme Court for the last 100 years, the Negro has had to solicit assistance in order to exercise the rights and privileges taken for granted by other citizens, from riding on Pullman cars to voting in primary elections. Historically, the Supreme Court's response to the Negro's plea for redress of grievances has been uneven. For a 60-year period following enaction of the Civil War Amendments, the Negro petition met with rebuff and evasion, when, in the mid-1930s, the Court began to return to the original meaning of those amendments, "it overturned or ignored its own strangling precedents and even assumed an amazing leadership in the area of civil rights." Here, then, is an original work of American history that presents a picture of our changing society as seen from the viewpoint of those who were systematically excluded from it, and who had to become petitioners to change its course."[10]
[edit] Death
The Honorable Loren Miller died in Los Angeles on July 14, 1967. Obituary: Judge Miller, Civil Rights Figure, Dies: "Municipal Judge Loren Miller, one of the most prominent figures in the history of the civil rights movement in California, died Friday night at Temple hospital in Los Angeles. He was 61. Dr. Rea Schneider, the attending physician, said Judge Mill died of emphysema, a severe respiratory illness, complicated by pneumonia. The time of death was 9:53 p.m. Dr. Schneider said the judge was admitted to the hospital late last Sunday and was immediately transferred to the intensive care unit. "He had a history of progressive shortness of breath," she said, "but worked with it against great odds until last week." Before his appointment to the bench by former Governor Brown in 1964, Judge Miller argued some of the most historic civil rights cases ever heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was chief counsel before the court in the decision that led to the outlawing of racial covenants. Last year, Judge Miller published The Petitioners, a book outlining the history of the high court's civil rights actions. In addition to his legal duties, Miller for years was publisher of the California Eagle, the West's oldest Negro weekly newspaper. A native of Nebraska, he was educated in public schools there and in Kansas. He was graduated from the Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas. He was a vice president of the National Association of Colored People, a member of the NAACP's legal committee, a member of the Civil Rights Committee of the State Bar Association. Miller's wife, Juanita Ellsworth, is a social worker. He is also survived by two sons, Loren Jr. and Edward."
Third-generation judge
With her judicial appointment in 2003 to the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, Robin Miller Sloan became the first linear third-generation judge in the history of the California court system, according to legal researchers. Judge Sloan’s father, Loren Miller, Jr., served on the bench in Los Angeles County from 1975 to 1997 and continues to sit by assignment. Judge Sloan’s grandfather, Loren Miller, a famed civil rights attorney before his appointment to the bench, served in Los Angeles from 1964 until his death in 1967.[15]
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Legacy and honors
In 1968, Loren Miller Elementary School, a new $1,200,000 in South Central Los Angeles, was named after Judge Miller.[12]
Loren Miller Bar Association (LMBA) was founded in August 1968, Seattle, Washington. At its core, the LMBA is first and foremost a civil rights organization. From its infancy, LMBA adopted a vigorous platform of confronting institutionalized racism and the myriad social and economic disparities affecting the African-American community.[13]
Created in 1977 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the State Bar of California, the prestigious Loren Miller Legal Services Award is given annually to a lawyer who has demonstrated long-term commitment to legal services and who has personally done significant work in extending legal services to the poor.
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Anne Moody
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Born Essie Mae Moody, she was the eldest of nine children of Fred and Elmira Moody. After her parents split up, she grew up with her mother in Centreville, Mississippi, while her father lived in nearby Woodville, Mississippi. At a young age she began working for white families in the area, cleaning their houses and helping their children with homework for only a few dollars a week, while earning perfect grades in school and helping at church. In the community she often heard stories of interracial sexual abuse, miscegenation, lynching, arson and other acts of racial intimidation. After graduating with honors from a segregated, all-black high school, she attended Natchez Junior College (also all black) in 1961 under a basketball scholarship.
Then she moved on to Tougaloo College on an academic scholarship to get full degree. At Tougaloo, she became involved with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After graduating, Moody became a full-time worker in the Civil Rights Movement, participating in a Woolworth's lunchcounter sit-in and protests in Jackson, Mississippi. During Freedom Summer, she worked for CORE in the volatile town of Canton, Mississippi.
Her autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi is acclaimed for its realistic portrayal of life for a young African American before and during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
In the memoir, Moody gradually developed a position of leadership. Though she faced male dominance and terror from white supremacists during her days in the struggle, Anne refused the idea of being sheltered and worked as hard as any man did for independence. She fought for the freedom of her race demonstrating that liberation was as important to black women as it was to black men. She made herself known as an activist and stood out as a woman who had her own significant voice. Moody worked in dangerous areas in Mississippi and as her position of power grew, the more threatening her work became. She even sacrificed seeing her family for the sake of the movement. Since she was so well known, she could not return to her hometown without putting her family in danger of being abused by the white law enforcement officials. She used her prominent position to educate others on important racial issues. She worked to help young children receive an education so that when they grew up they would have more opportunities available to them. She worked with teenagers as well, for she believed that they were the ones who were going to make significant changes. The work she did with adults was particularly hard because they were either so set in their ways or too afraid to change the things that Anne questioned. Those who tried to vote or join the civil rights movement were often fired from their jobs or suffered beatings or abuse from white people.
Moody's philosophy as an activist prefigured the black power ideologies that emerged from the nonviolent civil rights. She wanted to take power from the whites and she wanted to encourage other members of the black community to do so as well. She understood though that male dominance was prevalent in the Black Power Movement which would not have allowed her to participate as much as she would have liked. In the non-violent Civil Rights Movement, women were allowed much larger roles than in the Black Power Movement. Anne did not agree with the passivity of the non-violent movement. What she dreamed of was a coupling of the rights women had in the non-violent Civil Rights Movement with the strength of the Black Power movement. Anne did not want any man to take credit for the work that she did. She set a strong example for the women who came after her to follow as they faced continual oppression in the form of the male dominance of the black race.
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Robert Parris Moses
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Moses graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1952[1] and received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1956. He studied philosophy at Harvard and obtained a teaching certificate, then began teaching at the Horace Mann School in Manhattan in 1958.
Civil Rights Movement
He began working with civil rights activists in 1960, becoming field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As director of the SNCC's Mississippi Project, Moses traveled to the South to try to register black voters. He faced nearly relentless violence and official intimidation. He and other organizers had asked for federal protection from the John F. Kennedy administration.
By 1964 Moses had become Co-Director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella organization for the major civil rights groups then working in Mississippi. He was a leading SNCC figure, and the main organizer of COFO's Freedom Summer project, which was intended to end racial disfranchisement. Mississippi's 1890 constitution included requirements for voter registration, such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests, which had long made it nearly impossible for blacks to register and vote. Because the literacy tests were subjectively administered by white voter registrars, even well-educated blacks had often been refused registration on literacy grounds. By the 1960s, many blacks did not bother to try to register. Moses was instrumental in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a group that challenged the regular Democratic Party delegates from the state at the party's 1964 convention.
When Stokely Carmichael became SNCC president in 1966, the organization turned toward advocating black power. A disillusioned Moses quit the group. He then temporarily changed his name to Bob Parris and moved to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. After getting remarried, Moses moved to Eastern Africa. From 1969-1975, Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania. In 1976 he returned to Harvard and completed a doctorate in philosophy, after which he taught high school math in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Algebra Project
In 1982 he received a MacArthur Fellowship, and used the money to create the Algebra Project, a foundation devoted to improving minority education in math. Moses taught math for a time at Lanier High School in Jackson, Mississippi, and used the school as a laboratory school for Algebra Project methods.
In 2005, Moses was selected as one of twelve inaugural Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellows by the Fletcher Foundation, which awards substantial grants to scholars and activists working on civil rights issues.[2] In 2006, Moses was named a Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor at Cornell University.[3]
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* War Resisters League Peace Award (1997)
* 6th Heinz Award in the Human Condition (2000)
* The Nation/Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship (2001)
* The Mary Chase Smith Award for American Democracy (2002)
Books
* Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project ISBN 0-8070-3127-5
* The James Bryant Conant Award from the Education Commission of the States (2002)
* Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship (2005)
* Honorary Degree, Swarthmore College (2007)
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Diane Nash
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Early life
Nash was raised on the south-side of grape land. She attended public and Catholic schools,and one day dreamed of becoming a nun. However, she went on to study English at Howard University in Washington, DC before transferring to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1959.
Nash felt degraded by the racial prejudice she experienced in Nashville, but did not know what she could do about it. She began attending non-violent civil disobedience workshops led by Rev. James Lawson. In 1960 at age 22, she became the leader of the Nashville sit-ins. The Nashville sit-ins lasted from February to May 1960, and led to the desegregation of the cities lunch counters.
After being arrested, Nash, with John Lewis, led the protesters in a policy of refusing to pay bail, on principle. Sentenced to pay a $50 fine for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter, Nash was chosen to represent her fellow activists when she told the judge, "We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants." When Nash provocatively asked the mayor on the steps of City Hall, "Do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?", the mayor admitted that he did. Within a few weeks, six lunch counters in Nashville were serving blacks.
SNCC
In April 1960 Nash helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and quit school to lead its direct action wing. In 1961, she took over responsibility for the Freedom Rides from Birmingham, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi. The rides had been conceived by the Congress of Racial Equality, but after severe attacks, CORE's leader James L. Farmer, Jr. wanted to cancel them. Nash talked with the students compromising the Nashville Student Movement and argued that, "We can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead." John Lewis, who had just returned from participating in the Freedom Ride, agreed with her, as did the rest of the students, and they continued the rides to a successful conclusion.
Nash also designed portions of the strategy used by SNCC in the Selma, Alabama "Right to Vote" campaign, and was an important organizer for the 1963 campaign in Birmingham. Originally fearful of jail, Nash was arrested dozens of times for her activities. She spent 30 days in a South Carolina jail after protesting segregation in Rock Hill in February 1961. In 1962, although she was four months pregnant, she was sentenced to two years in prison for teaching nonviolent tactics to children in Jackson, Mississippi, where she and husband James Bevel were living, but was released on appeal after serving a shorter term.
President, John F. Kennedy, appointed her to a national committee that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others from 1961 to 1965, serving as an organizer, strategist, field staff person, race-relations staff person and workshop instructor. Nash later questioned the SCLC because of its dominance by males, especially clergymen.
In 1965, SCLC gave it's highest award, the Rosa Parks Award, to Diane Nash and James Bevel. In 2003, Nash received the "Distinguished American Award" from the John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation. In 2004, she received the LBJ Award for Leadership in Civil Rights from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. In October 2008 Nash was awarded the National Freedom Award presented by the National Civil Rights Museum located in Memphis,TN.
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Nash and James Bevel had two children before their divorce, Sherri and Douglass. Returning to Chicago, Nash worked in fair housing advocacy and real estate, and as an educator and lecturer. She appears in the award-winning documentary film series Eyes on the Prize and is featured in David Halberstam's book The Children.
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Denise Nicholas
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Early life
Nicholas was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Louise Carolyn and Otto Nicholas.[1] She spent her early years in Detroit. With the remarriage of her mother to Robert Burgen, she then moved to Milan, Michigan, a small town south of Ann Arbor, graduating from Milan High School, in 1961. Nicholas is the middle child of three, an older brother, Otto, and a younger sister, Michele, now deceased. She attended the University of Michigan for two years then joined the Free Southern Theater, during the turbulent days of the civil rights movement. After spending two years touring the deep south with the FST, Nicholas went to New York and joined the Negro Ensemble Company participating in its rigorous training program and working in all productions during the first season of that acclaimed theater ensemble. From the stage of the St. Marks Playhouse in New York, Nicholas was cast as, "Liz McIntyre," the Guidance Counselor on the soon to be very popular and innovative ABC series, "Room 222." Nicholas received her BA in Drama, from the University of Southern California, after living in Southern California for a number of years.
Career
Nicholas began her television acting career in 1968, with an episode of It Takes a Thief. She has since appeared in many popular movies and television shows. She is probably best known for her role as, "Liz McIntyre," on the show Room 222 (1969-1974), as well as her role as, "Harriet DeLong," on In the Heat of the Night (1988-1994). Nicholas wrote six episodes of the dramatic show, "In the Heat of the Night," and thus began her second career as a writer. When that show was cancelled, she enrolled in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, eventually finding her way to the Journeymen's Writing Workshop under the tutelage of author Janet Fitch. She worked with Fitch for five years. Nicholas also attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, and the Natalie Goldberg Workshop, in Taos, New Mexico.
Her first novel, Freshwater Road, was published by Agate Publishing, in August 2005, to critical acclaim, including a starred review in Publisher's Weekly. It was selected as one of the best books of 2005 by The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Newsday and The Chicago Tribune. The novel won the Zora Neal Hurston/Richard Wright Award for debut fiction in 2006, as well as the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for debut fiction the same year. Freshwater Road is currently available in paperback from the Pocketbooks division of Simon & Schuster.
Brown University commissioned Nicholas to write a staged adaptation of Freshwater Road, which was presented in May 2008.
She continues to do book events and speaking engagements around the country and is at work on her second novel.
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Filmography
* Room 222
* Baby I'm Back
* Let's Do It Again
* A Piece of the Action
* In the Heat of the Night (TV series)
* Ghost Dad
* Blacula
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Nicholas was married to singer Bill Withers, but they are now divorced. She has no children and continues to make her home in southern California.
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James Orange
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Personal life
Orange was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but moved to Atlanta, Georgia in the early 1960s.[3] Orange, at over 6'3" tall[3][2] and over 300 pounds,[4] was physically impressive but deeply committed to non-violence. In his attempts to convert gang members in Chicago to adopt the same principles, he endured nine beatings without resistance.[2] He was also known for preaching and singing in a strong baritone voice.[4]
Orange had a large family, several of whom were active in the civil rights movement. He was the third of his parents' seven children.. His father worked in the large ASIPCO foundry in Birmingham, but was fired in 1957 for union activity. Orange's mother was very active in the civil rights movement and also attended the Monday night mass meetings at the Sixteenth Street church. Still, he told an interviewer in on January 15, 2000, "I was afraid to go home and tell my mamma that her daughters, one 17 and the other 14, were in jail. But that's the way it was in those days, as we waged — and won — a non-violent campaign against police clubs and police dogs."[5]
At the time of his death in February, 2008, at Atlanta's Crawford Long Hospital,[2] Orange was recovering from gallbladder surgery.[3][4] Orange had had a triple heart bypass operation about six years before his death, and his health had declined over the years, despite his robust physique.[6]
Orange's wife of 39 years, Cleophas,[3] known as Cleo,[7] survived him, as did three daughters and a son.[6][8] His youngest daughter, Pamela Aquica Orange, died on March 11, 2007.[citation needed] His daughter Jamida Orange spoke to the press on behalf of the family at the time of his death.[3]
Civil rights era
Speaking in July 1993, Andrew Young called Orange one of the "real soldiers of the movement ... a gentle giant."[3] Quoted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at Orange's death, Young said that when Orange was hired as a field organizer in the early 1960s, "He couldn't afford to go to college and was working as a chef. He quit his job and started going with us, although we were only paying $10 a week. And he never left."[4]
In 1962, when Orange was only a year out of high school, he attended went to one of the weekly Monday night mass meetings at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and was transfixed by a speech on equality by Reverend Ralph Abernathy. In a meeting in the church basement later that night, he volunteered to risk arrest picketing a local store the next day. He was arrested, the first of at least 104 arrests for picketing or acts of civil disobedience.[5]
As part of his early civil rights work for the SCLC in Alabama, he was arrested and jailed prior to conviction in 1965 for contributing to the delinquency of minors by enlisting them to work in voter registration drives.[8] His detention in Perry County, Alabama, sparked fears that he would be lynched and a protest march was organized to support him.
During that march on February 18, 1965, an Alabama state trooper fatally shot a young man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, in the stomach.[8] In 2007, a former trooper named James B. Fowler, 74 years old, was indicted for the death of Jackson. Living witnesses and tapes of the day of the killing were expected to be used at his trial.[8]
The 1965 uproar over Jackson's shooting during Orange's incarceration ultimately led to the famed Selma to Montgomery marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr., including the infamous police brutality on Bloody Sunday and passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year.[2]
Later work
Orange was a project coordinator at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1965 to 1970, then later became a regional coordinator with the AFL-CIO in Atlanta, Georgia.[8] He worked on at least 300 labor-organizing campaigns in that role.[4]
In 1977, Orange worked on the organizing campaign of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and won union representation and benefits for the workers at J.P. Stevens textile and clothing factories. After that success, Orange was assigned to the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department until 1996, when he joined their Atlanta field office.[5]
In 2006, Orange worked on Cynthia McKinney's attempt to regain her congressional seat, and appeared at the April 1, 2006 rally against the Iraq War in Atlanta.[6]
Since 1995, Orange had served as the founder and general coordinator for the Martin Luther King, Jr. March Committee-Africa/African American Renaissance Committee, Inc., which coordinated commemorative events honoring King and promoted commercial ties between Atlanta and other United States locations and South Africa.[8]
In 2004, Orange protested the interruption of Atlanta's King commemorations due to an uninvited appearance by George W. Bush. Secret Service agents had initially planned to force organizers to cut their agenda short to accommodate Bush, whose plans included a photo opportunity of laying a wreath in honor of King before attending a major Republican Party fundraiser. After black leaders threatened to lock themselves into the site in question, an historic black church, the Secret Service permitted their symposium to go on, but with limited public access.[9]
I feel disrespected by the administration and the Secret Service. On Dr. King's birthday last year, his administration initiated plans to gut affirmative action. Here we are a year later, and the same person who tried to turn back the clock on me wants to use Dr. King's birthday because it's an election year.
– Rev. James Orange, New York Times, January 15, 2005
According to a fellow activist speaking shortly after his death, "He stayed active right up until the end... The Martin Luther King celebration this year fell on the 21st [of January, 2008]. He was still conducting it from his hospital bed. If you wanted something... he was still calling the shots."[
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Rosa Parks
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Early years
Rosa Parks was born as Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama on February 4, 1913, to James McCauley and Leona Edwards, respectively a carpenter and a teacher, and was of African-American, Cherokee-Creek,[2] and Scots-Irish[3] ancestry. Rosa Parks's great grandfather was a Scottish-Irishman. She was small, even for a child, and she suffered poor health and had chronic tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, just outside Montgomery, Alabama. There she grew up on a farm with her maternal grandparents, mother, and younger brother Sylvester, and began her lifelong membership in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was homeschooled by her mother until she was eleven, then enrolled at the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery where she took academic and vocational courses. Parks then went on to a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary education but was forced to drop out to care for her grandmother, and later for her mother, after they became ill.
Under Jim Crow laws, black and white people were segregated in virtually every aspect of daily life in the South, including public transportation. Bus and train companies did not provide separate vehicles for the different races but did enforce seating policies that allocated separate sections for blacks and whites. School bus transportation was unavailable in any form for black schoolchildren in the South. Parks recalled going to elementary school in Pine Level, where school buses took white students to their new school and black students had to walk to theirs: "I'd see the bus pass every day... But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world."[4]
Although Parks' autobiography recounts that some of her earliest memories are of the kindness of white strangers, her situation made it impossible to ignore racism. When the Ku Klux Klan marched down the street in front of her house, Parks recalls her grandfather guarding the front door with a shotgun. The Montgomery Industrial School, founded and staffed by white northerners for black children, was burned twice by arsonists, and its faculty was ostracized by the white community.
In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery, at her mother's house. Raymond was a member of the NAACP, at the time collecting money to support the Scottsboro Boys, a group of black men falsely accused of raping two white women. After her marriage, Rosa took numerous jobs, ranging from domestic worker to hospital aide. At her husband's urging, she finished her high school studies in 1933, at a time when less than 7% of African Americans had a high school diploma. Despite the Jim Crow laws that made political participation by black people difficult, she succeeded in registering to vote on her third try.
In December 1943, Parks became active in the Civil Rights Movement, joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and was elected volunteer secretary to its president, Edgar Nixon. Of her position, she later said, "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no." She continued as secretary until 1957. In the 1940s, Parks and her husband were also members of the Voters' League. Sometime soon after 1944, she held a brief job at Maxwell Air Force Base, a federally owned area where racial segregation was not allowed, and rode on an integrated trolley. Speaking to her biographer, Parks noted, "You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up." Parks also worked as a housekeeper and seamstress for a white couple, Clifford and Virginia Durr. The politically liberal Durrs became her friends and encouraged Parks to attend—and eventually helped sponsor her—at the Highlander Folk School, an education center for workers' rights and racial equality in Monteagle, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955.
Like many black people, Parks was deeply moved[citation needed] by the brutal murder[5] of Emmett Till in August 1955. On November 27, 1955—only four days before she refused to give up her seat—she later recalled that she had attended a mass meeting in Montgomery which focused on this case as well as the recent murders of George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. The featured speaker at the meeting was T.R.M. Howard, a black civil rights leader from Mississippi who headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership.
Civil rights activism
Events leading up to boycott
See also: Homer Plessy and Plessy v. Ferguson
In 1944, athletic star Jackie Robinson took a similar stand in a confrontation with a United States Army officer in Fort Hood, Texas, refusing to move to the back of a bus. Robinson was brought before a court-martial, which acquitted him.[6] The NAACP had accepted and litigated other cases before, such as that of Irene Morgan ten years earlier, which resulted in a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court on Commerce Clause grounds. That victory, however, overturned state segregation laws only insofar as they applied to travel in interstate commerce, such as interstate bus travel, and Southern bus companies immediately circumvented the Morgan ruling by instituting their own Jim Crow regulations. In November, 1955, just three weeks before Parks' defiance of Jim Crow laws in Montgomery, the Interstate Commerce Commission, in response to a complaint filed by WAC Sarah Keys, closed the legal loophole left by the Morgan ruling in a landmark case known as Keys v. Carolina Coach Company. The ICC prohibited individual carriers from imposing their own segregation rules on interstate travelers, declaring that to do so was a violation of the anti-discrimination provision of the Interstate Commerce Act. But neither the Supreme Court's Morgan ruling nor the ICC's Keys ruling addressed the matter of Jim Crow travel within the individual states.
Black activists had begun to build a case to challenge state bus segregation laws around the arrest of a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin, a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from a public bus when she refused to give up her seat to a white man. She claimed that her constitutional rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was active in the NAACP's Youth Council, a group to which Rosa Parks served as Advisor.
Seat layout on the bus where Parks sat, December 1, 1955.
Colvin recollected, "Mrs. Parks said, 'do what is right.'" Parks was raising money for Colvin's defense, but when E.D. Nixon learned that Colvin was pregnant, it was decided that Colvin was an unsuitable symbol for their cause. Soon after her arrest she had conceived a child with a much older married man, a moral transgression that scandalized the deeply religious black community. Strategists believed that the segregationist white press would use Colvin's pregnancy to undermine any boycott. The NAACP also had considered, but rejected, earlier protesters deemed unable or unsuitable to withstand the pressures of cross-examination in a legal challenge to racial segregation laws. Colvin was also known to engage in verbal outbursts and cursing. Many of the legal charges against Colvin were dropped. A boycott and legal case never materialized from the Colvin case, and legal strategists continued to seek a complainant beyond reproach.[7]
In Montgomery, the first four rows of bus seats were reserved for white people. Buses had "colored" sections for black people—who made up more than 75% of the bus system's riders—generally in the rear of the bus. These sections were not fixed in size but were determined by the placement of a movable sign. Black people also could sit in the middle rows, until the white section was full. Then they had to move to seats in the rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Black people were not allowed to sit across the aisle from white people. The driver also could move the "colored" section sign, or remove it altogether. If white people were already sitting in the front, black people could board to pay the fare, but then had to disembark and reenter through the rear door. There were times when the bus departed before the black customers who had paid made it to the back entrance.
For years, the black community had complained that the situation was unfair, and Parks was no exception: "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest...I did a lot of walking in Montgomery." Parks had her first run-in on the public bus on a rainy day in 1943, when the bus driver, James F. Blake, demanded that she get off the bus and reenter through the back door. As she began to exit by the front door, she dropped her purse. Parks sat down for a moment in a seat for white passengers to pick up her purse. The bus driver was enraged and barely let her step off the bus before speeding off. Rosa walked more than five miles (8 km) home in the rain.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Main article: Montgomery Bus Boycott
Fingerprint card of Rosa Parks.
After a day at work at Montgomery Fair department store, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus at around 6 p.m., Thursday, December 1, 1955, in downtown Montgomery. She paid her fare and sat in an empty seat in the first row of back seats reserved for blacks in the "colored" section, which was near the middle of the bus and directly behind the ten seats reserved for white passengers. Initially, she had not noticed that the bus driver was the same man, James F. Blake, who had left her in the rain in 1943. As the bus traveled along its regular route, all of the white-only seats in the bus filled up. The bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, and several white passengers boarded.
In 1900, Montgomery had passed a city ordinance for the purpose of segregating passengers by race. Conductors were given the power to assign seats to accomplish that purpose; however, no passengers would be required to move or give up their seat and stand if the bus was crowded and no other seats were available. Over time and by custom, however, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the practice of requiring black riders to move whenever there were no white only seats left.
So, following standard practice, bus driver Blake noted that the front of the bus was filled with white passengers and there were two or three men standing, and thus moved the "colored" section sign behind Parks and demanded that four black people give up their seats in the middle section so that the white passengers could sit. Years later, in recalling the events of the day, Parks said, "When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night."[8]
By Parks' account, Blake said, "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats."[9] Three of them complied. Parks said, "The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn't move at the beginning, but he says, 'Let me have these seats.' And the other three people moved, but I didn't."[10] The black man sitting next to her gave up his seat. Parks moved, but toward the window seat; she did not get up to move to the newly repositioned colored section.[11] Blake then said, "Why don't you stand up?" Parks responded, "I don't think I should have to stand up." Blake called the police to arrest Parks. When recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television series on the Civil Rights Movement, Parks said, "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.'"[12]
During a 1956 radio interview with Sydney Rogers in West Oakland several months after her arrest, when asked why she had decided not to vacate her bus seat, Parks said, "I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen."[13]
She also detailed her motivation in her autobiography, My Story:
“ People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.[14] ”
Booking photo of Rosa Parks.
Police report on Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, page 1.
When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her. As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you push us around?" The officer's response as she remembered it was, "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest." She later said, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind."[15]
Parks was charged with a violation of Chapter 6, Section 11 segregation law of the Montgomery City code,[16] even though she technically had not taken up a white-only seat—she had been in a colored section.[17] E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail the evening of December 2.[18]
That evening, Nixon conferred with Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson about Parks' case. Robinson, a member of the Women's Political Council (WPC), stayed up all night mimeographing over 35,000 handbills announcing a bus boycott. The Women's Political Council was the first group to officially endorse the boycott.
On Sunday, December 4, 1955, plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were announced at black churches in the area, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser helped spread the word. At a church rally that night, attendees unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until they were treated with the level of courtesy they expected, until black drivers were hired, and until seating in the middle of the bus was handled on a first-come basis.
Four days later, Parks was tried on charges of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. The trial lasted 30 minutes. Parks was found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs.[10] Parks appealed her conviction and formally challenged the legality of racial segregation. In a 1992 interview with National Public Radio's Lynn Neary, Parks recalled:
“ I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time... there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.[9] ”
Police report on Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, page 2.
On Monday, December 5, 1955, after the success of the one-day boycott, a group of 16 to 18 people gathered at the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to discuss boycott strategies. The group agreed that a new organization was needed to lead the boycott effort if it were to continue. Rev. Ralph David Abernathy suggested the name "Montgomery Improvement Association" (MIA).[19] The name was adopted, and the MIA was formed. Its members elected as their president a relative newcomer to Montgomery, a young and mostly unknown minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.[20]
That Monday night, 50 leaders of the African American community gathered to discuss the proper actions to be taken in response to Parks' arrest. E.D. Nixon said, "My God, look what segregation has put in my hands!"[21] Parks was the ideal plaintiff for a test case against city and state segregation laws. While the 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, unwed and pregnant, had been deemed unacceptable to be the center of a civil rights mobilization, King stated that Mrs. Parks was regarded as "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery—not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery."[22] Parks was securely married and employed, possessed a quiet and dignified demeanor, and was politically savvy.
Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey fingerprints Parks during her February 22, 1956 indictment for organizing a boycott.
The day of Parks' trial — Monday, December 5, 1955 — the WPC distributed the 35,000 leaflets. The handbill read, "We are...asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial ... You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday."[23]
It rained that day, but the black community persevered in their boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in black-operated cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents. Most of the remainder of the 40,000 black commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles (30 km). In the end, the boycott lasted for 381 days. Dozens of public buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit company's finances, until the law requiring segregation on public buses was lifted.
Some segregationists retaliated with terrorism. Black churches were burned or dynamited. Martin Luther King's home was bombed in the early morning hours of January 30, 1956, and E.D. Nixon's home was also attacked. However, the black community's bus boycott marked one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation. It sparked many other protests, and it catapulted King to the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. In so doing, it created fertile ground for the enforcement of the Supreme Court's 1946 ruling in Morgan v. Virginia and the Interstate Commerce Commission's 1955 ruling in Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, which governed travel across state lines.
Through her role in sparking the boycott, Rosa Parks played an important part in internationalizing the awareness of the plight of African Americans and the civil rights struggle. King wrote in his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom that Parks' arrest was the precipitating factor, rather than the cause, of the protest: "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."[24] He also stated, "Actually, no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.'"[25]
The Montgomery bus boycott was also the inspiration for the bus boycott in the township of Alexandria, Eastern Cape of South Africa which was one of the key events in the radicalization of the black majority of that country under the leadership of the African National Congress.
Browder v. Gayle
Main article: Browder v. Gayle
Immediately after the initiation of the bus boycott, legal strategists began to discuss the need for a federal lawsuit to challenge city and state bus segregation laws, and approximately two months after the boycott began, they reconsidered Claudette Colvin's case. Attorneys Fred Gray, E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr (a white lawyer who, with his wife, Virginia, was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement and a former employer of Parks) searched for the ideal case law to challenge the constitutional legitimacy of city and state bus segregation laws. Parks' case was not used as the basis for the federal lawsuit because, as a criminal case, it would have had to make its way through the state criminal appeals process before a federal appeal could have been filed. City and state officials could have delayed a final rendering for years. Furthermore, attorney Durr believed it possible that the outcome would merely have been the vacating of Parks' conviction, with no changes in segregation laws.[26]
Gray researched for a better lawsuit, consulting with NAACP legal counsels Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall, who would later become U.S. Solicitor General and a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Gray approached Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, all women who had had disputes involving the Montgomery bus system the previous year. They all agreed to become plaintiffs in a civil action law suit. Browder was a Montgomery housewife, Gayle the mayor of Montgomery. On February 1, 1956, the case of Browder v. Gayle was filed in U.S. District Court by Fred Gray. It was Browder v. Gayle that brought segregation to an end on public buses.[27]
On June 19, 1956, the U.S. District Court's three-judge panel ruled that Section 301 (31a, 31b and 31c) of Title 48, Code of Alabama, 1940, as amended, and Sections 10 and 11 of Chapter 6 of the Code of the City of Montgomery, 1952, "deny and deprive plaintiffs and other Negro citizens similarly situated of the equal protection of the laws and due process of law secured by the Fourteenth Amendment" (Browder v. Gayle, 1956). The court essentially decided that the precedent of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) could be applied to Browder v. Gayle. On November 13, 1956, the United States Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation on buses operating within the individual states, deeming it unconstitutional. The court order arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 20, 1956, and the bus boycott ended the next day. However, more violence erupted following the court order, as snipers fired into buses and into King's home, and terrorists threw bombs into churches and into the homes of many church ministers, including Martin Luther King Jr.,'s friend Ralph Abernathy.[20][28]
Later years
Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus on December 21, 1956, the day Montgomery's public transportation system was legally integrated. Behind Parks is Nicholas C. Chriss, a UPI reporter covering the event.
After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement but suffered hardships as a result. She lost her job at the department store, and her husband quit his job after his boss forbade him from talking about his wife or the legal case. Parks traveled and spoke extensively. In 1957, Raymond and Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Hampton, Virginia; mostly because she was unable to find work, but also because of disagreements with King and other leaders of Montgomery's struggling civil rights movement. In Hampton, she found a job as a hostess in an inn at black Hampton Institute. Later that year, after the urging of her brother and sister-in-law, Sylvester & Daisy McCauley, Rosa Parks, her husband Raymond, and her mother Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit, Michigan.
Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965 when African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers hired her as a secretary and receptionist for his congressional office in Detroit. She held this position until she retired in 1988.[22] In a telephone interview with CNN on October 24, 2005, Conyers recalled, "You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene—just a very special person.... There was only one Rosa Parks".[29] Later in life, Parks also served as a member of the Board of Advocates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Rosa Parks and Elaine Eason Steele co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in February 1987, in honor of Rosa's husband, who died from cancer in 1977. The institute runs the "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours, which introduce young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country.
Rosa Parks in 1964.
In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography aimed at younger readers which details her life leading up to her decision not to give up her seat. In 1995, she published her memoirs, titled Quiet Strength, which focuses on the role that her faith had played in her life.
On August 30, 1994, Joseph Skipper, an African-American drug addict, attacked 81-year-old Parks in her home. The incident sparked outrage throughout America. After his arrest, Skipper said that he had not known he was in Parks' home but recognized her after entering. Skipper asked, "Hey, aren't you Rosa Parks?" to which she replied, "Yes." She handed him $3 when he demanded money, and an additional $50 when he demanded more. Before fleeing, Skipper struck Parks in the face.[30] Skipper was arrested and charged with various breaking and entering offenses against Parks and other neighborhood victims. He admitted guilt and, on August 8, 1995, was sentenced to eight to 15 years in prison.[31]
A comedic scene in the 2002 film Barbershop featured a cantankerous barber, played by Cedric the Entertainer, arguing with co-workers and shop patrons that other African Americans before Parks had resisted giving up their seats in defiance of Jim Crow laws, and that she had received undeserved fame because of her status as an NAACP secretary. Activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton launched a boycott against the film, contending it was "disrespectful", but NAACP president Kweisi Mfume stated he thought the controversy was "overblown."[32] The scene also offended Parks, who boycotted the NAACP 2003 Image Awards ceremony, which Cedric hosted. Barbershop received nominations in four awards categories that, including a "Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture" nomination for Cedric. He did not win in that category, however, but won an award for his work as a supporting actor in the television series The Proud Family.
OutKast lawsuit
In March 1999, a lawsuit was filed on Parks' behalf against American hip-hop duo OutKast and LaFace Records, claiming that the group had illegally used Rosa Parks' name without her permission for the song "Rosa Parks", the most successful radio single of OutKast's 1998 album Aquemini. The song's chorus, which Parks' legal defense felt was disrespectful to Parks, is as follows: "Ah ha, hush that fuss / Everybody move to the back of the bus / Do you want to bump and slump with us / We the type of people make the club get crunk."[33]
The case was dismissed in November 1999 by U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Hackett. In August 2000, Parks hired attorney Johnnie Cochran to help her appeal the district court's decision. Cochran argued that the song did not have First Amendment protection because, although its title carried Parks' name, its lyrics were not about her. However, U.S. District Judge Barbara Hackett upheld OutKast's right to use Parks' name in November 1999, and Parks took the case to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where some charges were remanded for further trial.
Parks' attorneys and caretaker, Elaine Steele, refiled in August 2004, and named BMG, Arista Records and LaFace Records as the defendants, asking for $5 billion in damages. (Also named as defendants were several parties not directly connected to the songs, including Barnes & Noble and Borders Group for selling the songs, and Gregory Dark and Braddon Mendelson, the director and producer, respectively, of the 1998 music video. The judge dismissed the music video producers from the case by the reason of "fraudulent joinder," as these defendants had no connection to the case and there was no justifiable reason for the plaintiff's attorneys to add them to the lawsuit.)
In October 2004, U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh appointed Dennis Archer, a former mayor of Detroit and Michigan Supreme Court justice, as guardian of legal matters for Parks after her family expressed concerns that her caretakers and her lawyer were pursuing the case based on their own financial interests.[34] "My auntie would never, ever go to this length to hurt some young artists trying to make it in the world," Parks' niece Rhea McCauley said in an Associated Press interview. "As a family, our fear is that during her last days Auntie Rosa will be surrounded by strangers trying to make money off of her name."[35]
The lawsuit was settled April 15, 2005. In the settlement agreement, OutKast and their producer and recorded labels paid Parks an undisclosed cash settlement and agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in creating educational programs about the life of Rosa Parks. The record labels and OutKast admitted to no wrongdoing. It is not known whether Parks' legal fees were paid for from her settlement money or by the record companies.[36]
Rosa Parks Highway
Main Article: Rosa Parks Highway
In 1994 the Ku Klux Klan applied to sponsor a portion of United States Interstate 55 in Saint Louis County and Jefferson County, near St. Louis, Missouri for clean up (which allowed them to have signs stating that this section of highway was maintained by the organization). Since the state could not refuse the KKK's sponsorship, the Missouri legislature voted to name the highway section the "Rosa Parks Highway." When asked how she felt about this honor, she is reported to have commented, "It is always nice to be thought of."[37][38]
Death and funeral
Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until she died at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005, about 7:00PM EDT, in her apartment on the east side of the city. She had been diagnosed the previous year with progressive dementia.
City officials in Montgomery and Detroit announced on October 27, 2005 that the front seats of their city buses would be reserved with black ribbons in honor of Parks until her funeral. Parks' coffin was flown to Montgomery and taken in a horse-drawn hearse to the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, where she lay in repose at the altar, dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess, on October 29, 2005. A memorial service was held there the following morning, and one of the speakers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said that if it had not been for Rosa Parks, she would probably have never become the Secretary of State. In the evening the casket was transported to Washington, D.C., and taken, aboard a bus similar to the one in which she made her protest, to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda (making her the first woman and second African American ever to receive this honor). An estimated 50,000 people viewed the casket there, and the event was broadcast on television on October 31, 2005. This was followed by another memorial service at a different St. Paul AME church in Washington on the afternoon of October 31, 2005. For two days, she lay in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit.
Parks' funeral service, seven hours long, was held on Wednesday, November 2, 2005, at the Greater Grace Temple Church. After the funeral service, an honor guard from the Michigan National Guard laid the U.S. flag over the casket and carried it to a horse-drawn hearse, which had been intended to carry it, in daylight, to the cemetery. As the hearse passed the thousands of people who had turned out to view the procession, many clapped and released white balloons. Rosa was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery in the chapel's mausoleum. (The chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel just after her death.)[39] Parks had previously prepared and placed a headstone on the selected location with the inscription "Rosa L. Parks, wife, 1913–."
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Awards and honors
Parks received most of her national accolades very late in life, with relatively few awards and honors being given to her until many decades after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1979, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal,[40] its highest honor,[41] and she received the Martin Luther King Jr. Award the next year. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1983 for her achievements in civil rights.[42] In 1990, she was called at the last moment to be part of the group welcoming Nelson Mandela, who had just been released from his imprisonment in South Africa. Upon spotting her in the reception line, Mandela called out her name and, hugging her, said, "You sustained me while I was in prison all those years."[43] In 1992, she received the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award along with Dr. Benjamin Spock and others at the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.
On September 9, 1996, President Bill Clinton presented Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the U.S. executive branch. In 1998, she became the first recipient of the International Freedom Conductor Award given by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The next year, Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch and also received the Detroit-Windsor International Freedom Festival Freedom Award. Parks was a guest of President Bill Clinton during his 1999 State of the Union Address. Also that year, Time magazine named Parks one of the 20 most influential and iconic figures of the twentieth century.[23] In 2000, her home state awarded her the Alabama Academy of Honor, as well as the first Governor's Medal of Honor for Extraordinary Courage. She was also awarded two dozen honorary doctorates from universities worldwide, and was made an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.
Rosa Parks and U.S. President Bill Clinton
The Rosa Parks Library and Museum on the campus of Troy University in Montgomery, was dedicated to her on December 1, 2000. It is located on the corner where Parks boarded the famed bus. The most popular items in the museum are the interactive bus arrest of Mrs. Parks and a sculpture of Parks sitting on a bus bench. The documentary Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks received a 2002 nomination for Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. She also collaborated that year in a TV movie of her life starring Angela Bassett.
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Rosa Parks on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[44]
On October 28, 2005, the House of Representatives approved a resolution passed the previous day by the United States Senate to honor Parks by allowing her body to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Since the founding of the practice of lying in state in the Rotunda in 1852, Parks was the 31st person, the first woman, the first American who had not been a U.S. government official, and the second non-government official (after Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant). She was also the second black person to lie in honor, after Jacob Chestnut, one of the two United States Capitol Police officers who were killed in the 1998 Capitol shooting. The 30th and 32nd persons so honored were former presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, respectively.
On October 30, 2005, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation ordering that all flags on U.S. public areas both within the country and abroad be flown at half-staff on the day of Parks' funeral.
The No. 2857 bus on which Rosa Parks was riding before she was arrested (a GM "old-look" transit bus, serial number 1132), is now a museum exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum.
Metro Transit in King County, Washington placed posters and stickers dedicating the first forward-facing seat of all its buses in Parks' memory shortly after her death,[45] and the American Public Transportation Association declared December 1, 2005, the 50th anniversary of her arrest, to be a "National Transit Tribute to Rosa Parks Day".[46] On that anniversary, President George W. Bush signed H. R. 4145, directing that a statue of Parks be placed in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. In signing the resolution directing the Joint Commission on the Library to do so, the President stated:
“ By placing her statue in the heart of the nation's Capitol, we commemorate her work for a more perfect union, and we commit ourselves to continue to struggle for justice for every American.[47] ”
Interior of The No. 2857 bus which Rosa Parks was riding on.
On February 5, 2006, at Super Bowl XL, played at Detroit's Ford Field, Coretta Scott King and Parks, who had been a long-time resident of "The Motor City", were remembered and honored by a moment of silence. It was noted that the honor was to show respect for two women who had "helped make the nation as a whole great." The Super Bowl was dedicated to their memory.
As part of an effort to shed the image left after the disastrous 1967 riot, in 1976 Detroit renamed 12th Street "Rosa Parks Boulevard."
In the Los Angeles County MetroRail system, the Imperial Highway/Wilmington station, where the Blue Line connects with the Green Line, has been officially named the "Rosa Parks Station".
Nashville, Tennessee renamed MetroCenter Boulevard (8th Avenue North) (US 41A and TN 12) in September 2007 as Rosa L. Parks Boulevard.
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John M. Perkins
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John M. Perkins is an American civil rights activist. He has worked extensively in the realm of reconciliation and development centered around the Christian Gospel message. He currently serves and founder and president of the John M. Perkins Foundation in Jackson, Mississippi. He is also a member of the Board of Advisors of the Bible Literacy Project, publishers of the curriculum The Bible and Its Influence for public high school literature courses.
Born June 16th, 1930 John grew up on a plantation as a sharecropper in the 1940s. Despite dropping out of school in the third grade, John Perkins has been recognized for his work by being awarded nine honorary doctorates from Wheaton College, Gordon College, Huntington College, Spring Arbor College, Geneva College, Northpark College, Whitworth College, Belhaven College and Nyack College. He is the author of nine books including A Quiet Revolution, Let Justice Roll Down, With Justice For All, Beyond Charity, He’s My Brother, Resurrecting Hope, and A Time to Heal, and has written numerous chapters in others. John Perkins formally served on the Board of Directors of World Vision, Prison Fellowship, National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Spring Arbor College, and fifteen other boards. He is an international speaker and a teacher on the issues of racial reconciliation, indigenous leadership development, and community development. He has founded such organizations as the John M. Perkins Foundation and Voice of Calvary Ministry in Jackson, Mississippi; Mendenhal Ministries in Mendenhall, Mississippi; Harambee Christian Family Center and Preparatory School in Pasadena, California and many other ministry projects.
John Perkins and his family have ministered among the poor for the past 40 years. In 1947 he moved from Mississippi on the urging of his family, who worried that he might be in danger following the fatal shooting of his brother, Clyde, by a police officer. He settled in southern California where he became acquainted with the gospel, after his son, Spencer, convinced him to attend a local church.
In 1960 John Perkins, his wife, Vera Mae, and their children left a "successful" life in California and moved back to Mendenhall with his five children, Spencer, Jonie, Phillip, Derek, and Deborah. There he and Vera Mae, begin a Christian community development ministry in the rural Mississippi community. In 12 years, John Perkins helped start a day-care center, youth program, church, cooperative farm, thrift store, housing repair ministry, a health center, and an adult education program. Today, Mendenhall Ministries thrives under the leadership of Artis Fletcher and Ernestine Skiffer.
In 1972, the Perkinses now with eight children, moved to Jackson, where they founded Voice of Calvary Ministries - another Christian community development ministry. Voice of Calvary Ministries started a church, health center, leadership development program, thrift store, low-income housing development, and training center. From this ministry, other development projects started in the neighboring Mississippi towns of Canton, New Hebron and Edwards. In 1982, the Perkins family moved to Pasadena and founded Harambee Christian Family Center in Northwest Pasadena, a neighborhood that had one of the highest daytime crime rates in California. Harambee is running numerous programs including after school tutoring, Good News Bible Clubs, an award-winning technology center, summer day camp, youth internship programs, and a college scholarship program. Rudy Carrasco now serves as executive director of this organization.
In 1989, John Perkins called together a group of Christian leaders from across America that was bonded by one significant commitment-expressing the love of Christ in America's poor communities, not at arms length, but at the grass-roots level. An association was formed and Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) held its first annual conference in Chicago in 1989. CCDA has grown from 37 founding members to 6,800 individuals and 600 churches, ministries, institutions and businesses in more than 100 cities and townships across the country.
In 1992 John Perkins began publishing URBAN FAMILY magazine in response to the breakdown of the urban family, the breakdown of the community, and the increasing violence within the inner city. The mission of URBAN FAMILY is to be a voice of hope and progress, offering solutions that emphasize responsibility, affirm dignity, build moral character, and encourage reconciliation. The circulation quickly rose from 13,000 to 35,000 nationally. This magazine name was changed to a more appropriate reconciliation title, the RECONCILERS FELLOWSHIP. Unfortunately, after the untimely death of the Dr. Perkins' eldest son, Spencer, in January 1998 (who also served as editor-in-chief of this magazine), its publication was discontinued in the fall of 1998.
Shortly after getting the magazine "up and running," Perkins returned to Pasedena, where in the fall of 1995, he founded the Harambee Preparatory School (HPS), an elementary school providing quality education to prepare neighborhood children for college. HPS desires to see the children of poverty level homes receive a quality academic training in a secure and loving environment.
The tragic death of his son, Spencer, brought Perkins to Mississippi once again. Vowing to keep Spencer's hopes and dreams alive and well in the West Jackson Community, in 1998 Perkins bought the property once owned by Spencer and his Antioch Community and established the Spencer Perkins Center which operates under the banner of the John M. Perkins Foundation. Today he serves as the number one cheerleader for the John M. Perkins Foundation where his youngest daughter, Elizabeth Perkins, serves as the Executive Director. Over the past nine years they have worked together to establish the Spencer Perkins Center (SPC) which is the youth arm of JMPF. Through the SPC, the Foundation's staff has developed youth programs such as After School Tutorial, Summer Arts Camp, Junior and College Internship Program, Good News Bible Club, Young Life and Jubilee Youth Garden. JMPF also has a housing arm called Zechariah 8 which provides affordable housing for low-to moderate-income families with a focus on single mothers.
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Gloria Richardson
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Childhood
Richardson lived in a tightly knit community where her immediate and extended family lived within blocks of each another and everyone got together on holidays and for outings. Richardson appreciated her family’s intellectualism. The young Gloria was taught by her parents to critically interrogate and analyze all sorts of social, economic, and political issues of the day. Richardson's socialization process was also carried out by the teachers at her racially segregated schools, and both her family and teachers taught Richardson to appreciate and respect African-Americans' resistance to the idea of white supremacy. Richardson was taught about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Her family took her to important sites in American history such as the nearby Eastern Shore town of Salisbury where a black man was lynched in the early 1930s, as well as to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia where the abolitionist of lore, John Brown, led an unsuccessful interracial assault on the town's arsenal in an attempt to overthrow the nation's racist hierarchy.
Howard University
In 1938, aged 16, Richardson graduated from high school. In the fall of that same year, she enrolled at Howard University, an historically black institution in Washington, D.C. She received a B.A. in sociology in 1942. Some of her professors at Howard were among the nation’s most accomplished academics and intellectuals. These included historian Rayford Logan, literary scholar Sterling Brown, and eminent sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Frazier would gain fame for, among other things, publishing the influential polemic, The Black Bourgeoisie. Under the tutelage of Logan, Brown, and especially Frazier, Richardson learned to more fully appreciate her African ancestry, as well as how to hone her analytical skills in order to fight bigotry and discrimination.
Post-university
After graduating from Howard, Richardson stayed in Washington, D.C., working as a civil servant in the expanding federal government, but moved back to Cambridge to be with her family. Upon her return to Cambridge, she quickly met and then married a local school teacher, Harry Richardson. They had two daughters, Donna and Tamara, however, the marriage ended in divorce by the end of the 1950s.
The Cambridge Movement
Gloria Richardson's elder daughter, Donna, helped get her mother involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Donna was a high school student in the early 1960s and she worked with civil rights organizations including Baltimore's Civic Interest Group (CIG), led by Clarence Logan, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which targeted Cambridge for a desegregation campaign of public accommodations.
Gloria Richardson and other parents of local children decided to take matters into their own hands by organizing the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC). CNAC was the only adult-led affiliate in SNCC's history. CNAC was group-centered and member driven. Shortly after its creation, Richardson was asked to join Enez Grubb as the organization's executive committee co-chair. Richardson accepted the job because she felt strongly that she owed her fellow black residents a great debt because they were the people who had provided her and her family with a comfortable life through their patronage of her family's businesses.[citation needed]
While desegregation of public accommodations was the original goal of the Cambridge Movement, activists quickly learned by way of survey information gathered in the Second Ward that Black residents cared more about social justice issues, such as jobs that paid a living wage, adequate housing, and health care. Throughout the height of the Cambridge Movement, CNAC and its opponents engaged in demonstrations and counter-demonstrations which often became volatile. Some of these encounters resulted in fist-fights and gun battles which prompted Maryland’s governor to send in the National Guard in the middle of June 1963, where it remained for more than one year.
Civil strife in Cambridge was put at bay in July 1963, when CNAC and its entrenched opposition signed off on a non-binding agreement that became known as the “Treaty of Cambridge”. The “Treaty” was negotiated by U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) members including Robert F. Kennedy, and was signed in his office at the Justice Department. The “Treaty” contained a list of actions to be taken by the Cambridge City Council and other local elected officials, including the creation of a bi-racial “Human Relations Commission”, the ending of de facto segregation in the city’s primary schools, and building a public housing project. The document also pointed out that Cambridge's City Council passed an amendment to the city's charter to desegregate public accommodations. However this charter amendment could be put up for referendum by city voters if enough signed a petition to do so, and that was what happened. A sufficient number of white voters supported the challenge to the charter amendment and the amendment was put up for a popular vote on October 1, 1963.
Richardson boycotted the vote and her decision to do so drew heavy criticism. Her rationale for a boycott of the polls rested on her belief that people’s human rights were not something that should be voted upon by the general population, especially one that was so hostile to Black people.[citation needed] Richardson and many others stayed away from the polls and the charter amendment went down to defeat, to the ire of the charter’s supporters. National civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that all eligible black voters in Cambridge should go to the polls especially when so many blacks in the Deep South were struggling to get the right to vote. Richardson, however, argued that when your fellow citizenry put up your rights for popular vote it's best to stay out of that process because while it may be legal, it is nevertheless an immoral and therefore illegitimate exercise of power.[citation needed]
Increasingly radicalized, Richardson went on to meet with Malcolm X and began collaborating with him in the creation of the civil rights organization, ACT (not an acronym). Richardson met Malcolm X a number of weeks after the referendum vote when she traveled to Detroit to participate in a Southern Christian Leadership Conference workshop. While she was in town she decided to attend a speech by Malcolm X. It was during this event, in which X gave his “Message to the Grass Roots” speech, that Richardson and Malcolm X met. They struck up a friendship and collaborated with Chicago school boycott leader Lawrence Landry, among others, to build the new civil rights organization ACT, whose focus was “to counteract the ‘paralyzing’ effect that mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and SCLC” were having on the Black liberation movement. Richardson also worked with Malcolm X in his Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) until his assassination on February 21, 1965.
Leaving Cambridge
By the summer of 1964, Richardson resigned from the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee. She gave three main reasons for her decision. First, she did not want to become an icon who would serve as a retardant to the rise of other local leaders.[citation needed] Second, she was completely exhausted by the years of non-stop nerve-racking activism in which she confronted, among other things, weapon wielding police and National Guardsmen.[citation needed] Finally, she resigned from CNAC because she had married freelance photographer Frank Dandridge and moved with him and her daughter, Tamara, to his home in New York City. Richardson remained active and volunteered at the SNCC office near her new home. Gloria and Frank Dandridge were divorced by the late 1960s. Gloria continued to live in New York with her younger daughter, Tamara Richardson.
In the following years, Richardson held various jobs at places such as the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), and the anti-poverty program Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and Associated Community Teams (HARYOU-ACT). It was at these jobs that Richardson utilized her extensive organizing and leadership experience to deliver goods and services to the organizations’ target populations.
By the mid-1970s, Richardson landed a job with the City of New York where she has worked ever since. Currently, she works in the City's Department for the Aging. She is active as a labor union delegate.
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Amelia Boynton Robinson
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Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson (born August 18, 1911) was a figure in the American Civil Rights Movement and later became a leader in the Schiller Institute founded by Lyndon LaRouche.
Born in Georgia, she became involved as a young woman in campaigning for women's suffrage. She and her husband, Bill Boynton, knew George Washington Carver at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1934 she registered to vote, a privilege which later became a right. A few years later she wrote a play, "Through the Years", which told the story of creation of Spiritual music, in order to help fund a community center in Selma, Alabama. The Robinsons met Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in 1954 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was the pastor.
In 1963, Bill Boynton died and Robinson's home and office in Selma became the center of Selma's civil rights battles, used by King and his lieutenants, by Congressmen and attorneys from around the nation, to plan the demonstrations known as the "Selma to Montgomery marches". One of them, held March 7, 1965, became known as Bloody Sunday. Robinson was among the marchers tear-gassed and beaten by Alabama State Troopers. The horror of that event helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Robinson was a guest of honor when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
Robinson ran for the Congress from Alabama in 1964, the first female African-American ever to do so and the first female of any race to run for the ticket of the Democratic Party in Alabama. She received 10% of the vote.
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Robinson was awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation Medal of Freedom on July 21, 1990, by the New York State Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation. In the preface to her autobiography, Bridge Across Jordan (see references), there are many tributes from friends and colleagues, including J.L. Chestnut, Jr. (author, Black in Selma), Coretta Scott King, and Andrew Young. Mrs. King wrote:
In Bridge Across Jordan, Amelia Boynton Robinson has crafted an inspiring, eloquent memoir of her more than five decades on the front lines of the struggle for racial equality and social justice. This work is an important contribution to the history of the black freedom struggle, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who cares about human rights in America. [1]
Robinson met Lyndon LaRouche in 1983 and a year later served as a founding board member of the Schiller Institute. She is now the Vice Chair of the Institute, which she says is "following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King", according to the Schiller Institute website.
In 2004 Robinson sued The Walt Disney Company for defamation, asking for between $1 and $10 million in damages. She contended that the 1999 TV movie "Selma, Lord, Selma", a docudrama based on a book written by two young participants in Bloody Sunday, falsely depicted her as a stereotypical "black Mammy" whose key role was to "make religious utterances and to participate in singing spirituals and protest songs." She lost the case. [2] [3][4]
During Fall of 2007, Robinson toured the nations of Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and Italy in her capacity as Vice President of the Schiller Institute, during which she spoke with European youth about her support for LaRouche, Martin Luther King, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as the continuing problem of racism in the United States, which she said was illustrated by the recent events in Jena, Louisiana.
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Jo Ann Robinson
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Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1912-1992) was a civil rights activist and educator in Montgomery, Alabama. Born near Culloden, Georgia, she was the youngest of twelve children. She attended Fort Valley State College and then became a public school teacher in Macon, where she was married to Wilbur Robinson for a short time. Five years later, she went to Atlanta, where she earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. She then accepted a position at Alabama State College in Montgomery. It was there that she joined the Women's Political Council, which Mary Fair Burks had founded three years earlier. In 1949, Robinson was verbally attacked by a bus driver and she decided that something had to change. In late 1950, she succeeded Burks as president of the WPC and helped focus the group's efforts on bus abuses.
On Thursday, December 1, 1955,Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus from the neutral section on the bus. That night, with Mrs. Parks' permission, Mrs. Robinson stayed up all night mimeographing 35,000 handbills calling for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The boycott was initially planned to be for just the following Monday. She passed out the leaflets at a Friday afternoon meeting of AME Zionist clergy among other place and Reverend L. Roy Bennett told other ministers to themselves attend a meeting that Friday night and to urge their congregations to take part in the boycott. Reverend Ralph Abernathy then helped Robinson pass out the handbills to high school students leaving school that afternoon. He wanted to help her so that she would not be solely blamed.
After the success of the one-day boycott, black citizens decided to continue the boycott and established the Montgomery Improvement Association to focus on the boycott. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was elected president. Jo Ann Robinson became a member of this group. She served on its executive board and edited their newsletter. In order to protect her position at Alabama State College and to protect her colleagues, Robinson purposely stayed out of the limelight even though she worked diligently with the MIA. Robinson and other WPC members also helped sustain the boycott by providing transportation for boycotters.
The boycott lasted over a year because the bus company would not give into any of their demands for rights.
Robinson left Alabama State College and moved out of Montgomery in 1960. She taught at Grambling College in Louisiana for one year and then moved to Los Angeles and taught English in the public school system. In LA, she continued to be active in local women’s organizations. She taught in the LA schools until she retired from teaching in 1976[1]. Though Robinson’s name is often glossed over in history lessons, her hard work and passion helped make possible one of the greatest boycotts of our time. Robinson's memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, edited by David J. Garrow, was published in 1987 by the University of Tennessee Press.
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Cleveland Sellers
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Early life
In 1960, in response to the Greensboro sit-ins, Sellers organized a sit-in protest at a Denmark, South Carolina lunch counter. At age 15, he was active for the first time with the Civil Rights movement.[3] During his boyhood, Sellers joined the Boy Scouts of America and attended the 1960 National Scout jamboree in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Although Sellers completed the requirements necessary to become an Eagle Scout, "his paperwork was lost" and he was not formally recognized with the honor until December 3, 2007 at 64 years of age, more than four decades after it was earned.[4][5]
[edit] Civil rights activism
In 1962 Sellers enrolled in Howard University. After the 1960 protest, Sellers' father had forbade his son's jeopardizing himself by becoming an activist.[6] However, during his sophomore year, Sellers became involved with SNCC.[3] He worked on voter registration drives in Mississippi, and was the director of the Holly Springs COFO office during Mississippi Freedom Summer. A significant amount of material on this period may be found in the Mississippi Digital Library. In 1965 became the became the program director of SNCC.[3] In the summer of 1966, when Sellers heard of the attempted murder of James Meredith, he joined other civil rights campaigners, including SCLC's Martin Luther King, SNCC's Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick in the march across Mississippi.[6][3][7]
After the march, Sellers was with Carmichael when the term “black power” was first used. He was also one of the first member of SNCC members to refuse to be drafted into the U.S. military as a protest against the Vietnam War.[3] The leadership of SNCC thought that the Johnson Administration was trying to silence SNCC by drafting its leadership. [8] Sellers graduated from Howard in 1967. After graduation, he returned to South Carolina.[9]
[edit] Orangeburg Massacre
The main article for this section is Orangeburg Massacre.
On February 8, 1968, approximately 200 protesters gathered on the campus of South Carolina State University (in the city of Orangeburg) to protest the segregation of the All Star Bowling Lane. Now called All-Star Triangle Bowl, it was a bowling alley on Russell Street, owned by local businessman Harry K. Floyd.[8] Police officers panicked when they thought they were being attacked (so they claimed) and fired into the crowd, killing three young men: Samuel Hammond, all-state basketball player Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith, and wounding 27 others.[8]
Then Governor Robert Evander McNair blamed "outside Black Power agitators", but subsequent investigations showed this allegation was without basis.[8]
The ensuing trial, billed as the first federal trial of police officers for using excessive force at a campus protest, led to the acquittal of all nine defendants. Sellers was the only individual imprisoned as a result of the incident. He served seven months in prison after a conviction for inciting to riot.[10]
During his imprisonment he wrote his autobiography, The River of No Return, chronicling his involvement with the civil rights movement. [3] Sellers received a full pardon 25 years after his conviction, but he chose not to have his record expunged, keeping it as a "badge of honor." [11]
[edit] Later life
After his release from prison, Sellers earned a Master's degree in education from Harvard University in 1970.[8] He ran unsuccessfully for office in Greensboro, North Carolina while aiding the 1984 presidential campaign of Reverend Jesse Jackson. Sellers earned his Ed.D. in History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1987.[12][3]
He is the Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina.[3] His scholarly interests include recording the history of protest tradition, civil rights history, and the experiences of Africans in the Diaspora. He focuses on the oral history of African Americans who shaped the history of South Carolina, including cultural groupings and the languages of Gullah, Creole, and Ghegee. He also has studied the survival experiences of African Americans, sometimes recorded in folklore but often unrecorded).[12]
In 2008, Sellers was selected as president of Voorhees College in South Carolina.
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Sellers and his wife Gwen have three children, two sons and a daughter.
His youngest son is South Carolina state Rep. Bakari T. Sellers. At age 24 (DOB September 18, 1984), B.T. Sellers is one of the youngest state lawmakers in the United States. Elected in November 2006, he is still completing his law degree at the University of South Carolina.[11]
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Fred Shuttlesworth
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Early life
Born in Mount Meigs, Alabama, Shuttlesworth became pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953 and was Membership Chairman of the Alabama state chapter of the NAACP in 1956, when the State of Alabama formally outlawed it from operating within the state. In May, 1956 Shuttlesworth and Ed Gardner established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to take up the work formerly done by the NAACP.
The ACMHR raised almost all of its funds from local sources at mass meetings. It used both litigation and direct action to pursue its goals. When the authorities ignored the ACMHR's demand that the City hire black police officers, the organization sued. Similarly, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in December, 1956 that bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama was unconstitutional, Shuttlesworth announced that the ACMHR would challenge segregation laws in Birmingham on December 26, 1956.
On December 25, 1956, unknown persons tried to kill Shuttlesworth by placing sixteen sticks of dynamite under his bedroom window. Shuttlesworth somehow escaped unhurt even though his house was heavily damaged. A police officer, who also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, told Shuttlesworth as he came out of his home, "If I were you I'd get out of town as quick as I could". Shuttlesworth told him to tell the Klan that he was not leaving and "I wasn't saved to run."
Fred Shuttlesworth led a group that integrated Birmingham's buses the next day, then sued after police arrested twenty-one passengers. His congregation built a new parsonage for him and posted sentries outside his house.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
In 1957 Shuttlesworth, along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy from Montgomery, Rev. Joseph Lowery from Mobile, Alabama, Rev. T.J. Jemison from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Rev. C.K. Steele from Tallahassee, Florida, Rev. A.L.Davis from New Orleans, Louisiana and Bayard Rustin founded the Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, later renamed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC adopted a motto to underscore its commitment to nonviolence: "Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed."
Shuttlesworth embraced that philosophy, even though his own personality was combative, headstrong and sometimes blunt-spoken to the point that he frequently antagonized his colleagues in the movement as well as his opponents. He was not shy in asking King to take a more active role in leading the fight against segregation and warning that history would not look kindly on those who gave "flowery speeches" but did not act on them. He alienated some members of his congregation by devoting as much time as he did to the civil rights movement, at the expense of weddings, funerals and other ordinary church functions.
As a result, in 1961 Rev. Shuttlesworth moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to take up the pastorage of the Revelation Baptist Church. He remained intensely involved in the Birmingham struggle after moving to Cincinnati and frequently returned to help lead actions.
Shuttlesworth was apparently personally fearless, even though he was aware of the risks he ran. Other committed activists were scared off or mystified by his willingness to accept the risk of death. Shuttlesworth himself vowed to "kill segregation or be killed by it".
1957 attempt on his life
That nearly came true in 1957. When Shuttlesworth and his wife attempted to enroll their children in a previously all-white public school in Birmingham, a mob of Klansmen attacked them, with the police nowhere to be seen. His assailants beat him with chains and brass knuckles in the street while someone stabbed his wife. Shuttlesworth lost consciousness but was dragged to safety and driven away.
When the doctor attending him expressed surprise that he had not suffered a concussion, Shuttlesworth replied, "Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head."[citation needed] His wife, for her part, expressed regret that modesty would not allow her to show other church members the scar she had gained.
In 1958 Shuttlesworth survived another attempt on his life. A church member standing guard saw a bomb and quickly moved it to the street before it went off.
Freedom Rides and Project C
Shuttlesworth participated in the sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in 1960 and took part in the organization of the Freedom Rides in 1961.
He invited King to come to Birmingham in 1963 to lead the campaign to desegregate it through mass demonstrations–what Shuttlesworth called "Project C", the "C" standing for "confrontation". While Shuttlesworth was willing to negotiate with political and business leaders for peaceful abandonment of segregation, he believed, with good reason, that they would not take any steps that they were not forced to take. He suspected their promises could not be trusted on until they acted on them.
One of the 1963 demonstrations he led resulted in Shuttlesworth's being convicted of parading without a permit from the City Commission. On appeals the case reached the US Supreme Court. In its 1969 decision of Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, the Supreme Court reversed Shuttlesworth's conviction. They determined circumstances indicated that the parade permit was denied not to control traffic, as the state contended, but to censor ideas.
In 1963 Shuttlesworth was set on provoking a crisis that would force the authorities and business leaders to recalculate the cost of segregation. He was helped immeasurably by Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety and most powerful public official in Birmingham, who used Klan groups to heighten violence against blacks in the city. Even as the business class was beginning to see the end of segregation, Connor was determined to maintain it. While Connor's direct police tactics intimidated black citizens of Birmingham, they also created a split between Connor and the business leaders. They resented both the damage Connor was doing to Birmingham's image around the world and his high-handed attitude toward them.
Similarly, while Connor may have benefited politically in the short run from Shuttlesworth's determined provocations, that also fit Shuttleworth's long-term plans. The televised images of Connor's directing handlers of police dogs to attack unarmed demonstrators and firefighters' using hoses to knock down children had a profound effect on American citizens' view of the civil rights struggle. This helped galvanize Congress into passing meaningful civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.
Greater New Light Baptist Church
Shuttlesworth organized the Greater New Light Baptist Church in 1966 and founded the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation in 1988 to assist families who might otherwise be unable to buy their own homes.
Named President of the SCLC in August, 2004, he resigned later in the year, complaining that "deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization".
Retirement
In January 2006, Rev. Shuttlesworth announced his retirement from the ministry. Prompted by the removal of a non-cancerous brain tumour in August of the previous year, he gave his final sermon in front of 300 people at the Greater New Light Baptist Church on the 19th March 2006—the weekend of his 84th birthday.
He and his second wife, Sephira, moved to downtown Birmingham where he is receiving medical treatment.
On July 16, 2008, the Birmingham, Alabama Airport Authority approved changing the name of the Birmingham International Airport (U.S.) in honor of Rev. Shuttlesworth. On October 27, 2008, the airport was offically changed to Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.
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Modjeska Monteith Simkins
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In 1931, Simkins entered the field of public health as the Director of Negro Work for the South Carolina Tuberculosis Association, and became the state's only full-time, statewide African American public health worker. For decades prior to the 1930s, southern racism and poverty had created an alarming increase in deaths among African Americans due to tuberculosis, pellagra, and other illnesses. By creating alliances with influential white and African American groups and raising funds, Simkins made a substantial impact on the health of African Americans in South Carolina.
In 1942, Simkins lost her position with the Tuberculosis Association, partly due to her increasing involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1939, when the South Carolina NAACP was formed, Simkins was already a member of the executive board of the local Columbia NAACP branch and chair of its program committee. Simkins became one of the founders of the state conference, elected to the first executive board, and the first chair of the state programs committee. In 1941, she was elected Secretary of the state conference, the only woman to serve as an officer. During her tenure as Secretary (1941-1957), her work helped the State move towards racial equality. From 1943 to 1945, she was instrumental in gaining teacher approval and support for teacher equalization lawsuits in Sumter and Columbia. Perhaps her most significant work took place in 1950 with the South Carolina federal court case of Briggs v. Elliott. Working with the Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine, president of the Clarenden County NAACP, she helped write the declaration for the school lawsuit that asked for the equalization of Clarenden County black and white schools. The Clarenden County case was eventually reworked to become one of several individual cases set up to directly challenge the “separate but equal” doctrine in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka in 1954.
Because her activism was at times controversial, her life and home became targets of violence. An unknown person shot at her house during the time she was active with the NAACP. In the late 1950s, many began to accuse Simkins of being a communist. Some of her friends were members of the American Communist Party, and she was accused of subversive activities by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Furthermore, accusations against civil rights activists for being communists intensified after the Brown decision was passed down. In 1957, Simkins was not nominated as a candidate for secretary by the Nominations Committee of the South Carolina NAACP. It was the first time in sixteen years that she did not get nominated. Some NAACP officials have suggested that her associations with communists and supposedly subversive groups were the cause of this.
Modjeska Monteith Simkins House in Columbia, South Carolina
She was able to serve in leadership positions that were traditionally unavailable to women in the civil rights movement. In 1981, she was honored by a coalition of civil rights groups, who established an endowment in her name to provide income for activists working for the causes of the underprivileged. Hundreds of people attended a memorial service following her death on April 5, 1992, and Judge Matthew J. Perry stated,
"she probably will be remembered as a woman who challenged everyone. She challenged the white political leadership of the state to do what was fair and equitable among all people and she challenged black citizens to stand up and demand their rightful place in the state and the nation."
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C. T. Vivian
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Background
As a small boy he migrated with his mother to Macomb, Illinois, where he attended Lincoln Grade School and Edison Junior High School. Rev. Vivian graduated from Macomb High School in 1942 and went on to attend Western Illinois University in Macomb, where he worked as the sports editor for the school newspaper. His first professional job was recreation director for the Carver Community Center in Peoria, Illinois. There, Rev. Vivian participated in his first sit-in demonstrations, which successfully integrated Barton's Cafeteria in 1947.
Studying for the ministry at American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee in 1959, Rev. Vivian met Rev. James Lawson, who was teaching Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent direct action strategy to the Student Central Committee. Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, James Forman, John Lewis and other students from American Baptist, Fisk University and Tennessee State University executed a systematic nonviolent campaign for justice. On April 19, 1960, 4,000 demonstrators marched on City Hall where Rev. Vivian and Diane Nash challenged Nashville Mayor Ben West. As a result, Mayor West publicly agreed that racial discrimination was morally wrong. Many of those students became part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Author
Dr. C. T. Vivian wrote the book "Black Power & the American Myth" in 1970, a powerfully insightful book about the failings of the civil rights movement. The book was published by Fortress Press of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The telling prophetic citing of an ongoing challenge between Chritians and Muslims judges the previous generation's negligence on working toward peace. "Christians and Muslims can find common ground in the necessity to create new alternatives. Anyone who starts to struggle at any place can go all the way to achieve the changes all desire. p. 125"
Work with Martin Luther King and SCLC
In 1961, Rev. Vivian, now a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) participated in Freedom Rides replacing injured members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
He founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, organizing the first sit-ins there in 1960 and the first civil rights march in 1961. Rev. Vivian was a rider on the first "Freedom Bus" into Jackson, Mississippi, and went on to work alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his Executive Staff in Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, Nashville, the March on Washington; Danville, Virginia, and St. Augustine, Florida. During the summer following the Selma Movement, Rev. Vivian conceived and directed an educational program, Vision, and put 702 Alabama students in college with scholarships (this program later became Upward Bound). His 1970 Black Power and the American Myth was the first book on the Civil Rights movement by a member of King's staff.
More recent work and appearances
In the 1970s he moved to Atlanta, and in 1977 founded the Black Action Strategies and Information Center (BASICS), a consultancy on multiculturalism and race relations in the workplace and other contexts. In 1979 he co-founded, with Anne Braden, the Center for Democratic Renewal (initially as the National Anti-Klan Network), an organization where blacks and whites worked together in response to white supremacist activity. [1] In 1984 he served in Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign, as the national deputy director for clergy. In 1994 he helped to establish, and served on the board of Capitol City Bank and Trust Co., a black-owned Atlanta bank.[2] He serves currently on the board of Every Church a Peace Church. [3]
Rev. Vivian continues to speak publicly and offer workshops, and has done so at many conferences around the country and the world, including with the United Nations.[4] He was featured as an activist and an analyst in the civil rights documentary, Eyes on the Prize, and has been featured in a PBS special, The Healing Ministry of Dr. C. T. Vivian. He has made numerous appearances on Oprah as well as the Montel Williams Show and Donahue. He is the focus of the biography, Challenge and Change by Lydia Walker.
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Wyatt Tee Walker
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Career
Virginia
After earning his degree, in 1953 Walker was called as pastor at historic Gillfield Baptist Church, the second oldest black church in Petersburg, Virginia and one of the oldest in the nation. In his leadership for social justice and against desegregation, he was arrested numerous times, the first for leading an African-American group into the "white" library in Petersburg. His "flamboyant" and cheeky style was shown as he "caused a stir" by trying to "check out Douglas Southall Freeman's admiring biography of Robert E. Lee."[1] In 1953 Walker worked with citizens who filed suit in Federal court for access to a public pool in Lee Park. The city closed the park in 1954 rather than integrate. The park later reopened, but the city never operated the pool again.
Walker's leadership extended to two major civil rights organizations in Virginia: he served as president for five years of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and as state director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which he co-founded in 1958.[2] Walker was also a founder of the Petersburg Improvement Association (PIA), modeled after the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) in Alabama. It worked to develop strategies against segregation and to ensure publicity for its activities.[3][4] By May 1960 the PIA had 3,000 members.[5] By conducting sit-ins in 1960 at the Trailways bus terminal, Walker and PIA members gained agreement by the president of the Bus Terminal Restaurants to desegregate lunch counters in Petersburg and several other Virginia cities. This was achieved before Freedom Riders arrived in 1961.[6]
Through these years Walker became increasingly close to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. He later served as his Chief of Staff. In 1957 Walker helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).[7] In 1958 King chose Walker for the board of SCLC.[8] [3] Walker spent the next two years building the organization in Virginia by capitalizing on his network of relationships with clergy throughout the state from his activities with NAACP and CORE.[3] He also worked on continuing demonstrations and actions intended to highlight, challenge and end segregation.
Atlanta, Georgia
At King's invitation, Walker moved to Atlanta as the first full-time Executive Director of the SCLC. During his leadership of 1960-1964, he brought the organization to "national power" in its efforts to bring about an end to legal segregation of African Americans.[9] He used his management strengths to improve administration and fundraising, and coordinated the far-ranging activities of the staff. Walker was aided by two close assistants whom he brought from the PIA, Dorothy Cotton and James Wood.[3]
"According to historian Taylor Branch, Walker preached 'dazzling sermons' in support of the student sit-ins that sparked the second phase of civil rights organizing after 1960."[10] In addition, Walker was the chief strategist and tactician for "Project C". He developed the detailed plan for confrontation with local police and city officials that was the heart of the Birmingham Campaign in 1963.[9] It was meticulously figured out, as Walker timed the walking distance from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, headquarters for the campaign, to the downtown area; surveyed the segregated lunch counters of department stores; and listed federal buildings as secondary targets should police block the protesters' entrance into primary targets such as stores, libraries, and all-white churches. He ensured the campaign would receive national attention and build support for the cause.[11] The events captured important national media attention and coverage. This was critical for gaining national support among American citizens and the Kennedy administration for the movement and its goals.[3] Walker also helped organize and participated in the 1963 March on Washington. In 1964 and 1965 he could celebrate the movement's successes when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
From 1964-1966 Walker worked with a new publishing venture, the Negro Heritage Library, which he headed as president in 1966. He worked with school boards and systems to expand curricula to improve coverage of African-American history and literature, and to add appropriate books to school libraries.[3]
Harlem, New York
In 1967 Walker was called as Senior Pastor of the influential Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, New York, where he commanded a major pulpit in the struggle for tolerance and social justice. He also continued to compose sacred music. He connected his studies of other traditions to the use of music in the black church and social movements.[9] Walker helped teach people about the relationship between movements around the world. During the years in which Africans sought independence, Walker hosted numerous leaders from the continent, including Nelson Mandela of South Africa, who were active in struggles against colonialism and apartheid.
During the 1970s Walker served as Urban Affairs Specialist to Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, helping advise in a volatile social environment. In 1975 he managed to complete his doctorate at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. In his graduate studies and research, Walker also studied at the University of Ife in Nigeria and the University of Ghana.[12] During these years in Harlem, he wrote and published books on the relation of music and social movements, and community development.[13]
Walker was increasingly active in the anti-apartheid movement, which had a strong base in the African-American community. In 1978 he founded the International Freedom Mobilization to draw attention to the abuses of apartheid in South Africa.[9] He served on the National Committee on the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) (since 2001 called Africa Action). In the 1980s he served on the ACOA Board, including as President.
In 1988 Walker was co-founder of the Religious Action Network (RAN) of the ACOA, together with Canon Frederick B. Williams of the Church of the Intercession in Harlem. This was during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. RAN is a network of over 300 congregations throughout the U.S.
Walker also used the church's leadership in local economic and community development. He wrote about that in The Harvard Paper: The African-American Church and Economic Development (1994). He was chair of the Central Harlem Local Development Corporation, to generate affordable housing units in Harlem to fill a critical need.
Because of Walker's leading role in the Civil Rights Movement, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library collected his papers from the period of 1963-1982. They include both personal and official correspondece, papers and lectures on a wide variety of topics, and are available for research.[14]
Since college, Walker has been a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established by and for African Americans. [15]
Return to Virginia
After 37 years as Senior Pastor, Walker retired in 2004 with the title of Pastor Emeritus of Canaan Baptist Church. He lives in Virginia and teaches at the School of Theology at his alma mater Virginia Union University in Richmond.
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Selected books
Walker has long been interested in the relationship between music, the black religious tradition, and social change, and published several books on this topic. This topic was also the center of his doctoral work for his PhD in 1975.[18] These include:
* 1979 - Somebody’s Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change (Judson Press)
* 1984 - The Soul of Black Worship: A Trilogy - Preaching, Praying, Singing (Self-published)
* 1985 - Road to Damascus: A Journey of Faith, New York: Martin Luther King Fellows Press
* 1986 - Common Thieves: A Tithing Manual for Christians and Others, New York: Martin Luther King Fellows Press
* 1991 - Gospel in the Land of the Rising Sun, New York: Martin Luther King Fellows Press
* 1994 - The Harvard Paper: The African-American Church and Economic Development, New York: Martin Luther King Fellows Press
* 1997 - A Prophet from Harlem Speaks: Sermons & Essays, New York: Martin Luther King Fellows Press
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He married Theresa Ann Walker before 1963.[16] They had four children together
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Malcolm X
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Biography
Early years
Malcolm Little was born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Earl and Louise Little (née Louisa Norton).[9] His father was an outspoken Baptist lay speaker; he supported Marcus Garvey and was a local leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Three of Earl Little's brothers, one of whom was lynched, died violently at the hands of white men.[10]
Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Earl Little was a local leader of the UNIA.
Earl Little had three children (Ella, Mary, and Earl, Jr.) by a previous marriage before he married Malcolm's mother. From his second marriage he had seven children, of whom Malcolm was the fourth. Earl and Louise Little's children's names were, in order, Wilfred (who was born in Pennsylvania); Hilda, Philbert and Malcolm (who were born in Nebraska); Reginald (who was born in Wisconsin); and Yvonne and Wesley (who were born in Michigan).[11] Several years after her husband's death, Louise had her youngest son, Robert Little, by an unnamed partner.[12]
Louise Little had been born in Grenada, and Malcolm said she looked like a white woman. Her Scottish father was a white man of whom Malcolm Little knew nothing except what he described as his mother's shame.[13] Malcolm inherited his light complexion from his mother and grandfather. Initially he felt it was a status symbol to be light-skinned, but later he would say that he "hated every drop of that white rapist's blood that is in me."[14] As Malcolm Little was the lightest child in the family, he felt that his father favored him; however, he thought his mother treated him harshly for the same reason.[15] One of Little's nicknames, "Red", derived from the tinge of his hair. According to one biographer, at birth he had "ash-blonde hair ... tinged with cinnamon", and at four "reddish-blonde hair".[16] His hair darkened as he aged but he also resembled his paternal grandmother, whose hair "turned reddish in the summer sun".[9]
In his autobiography, Little said his mother had been threatened by Ku Klux Klansmen while she was pregnant with him. His mother recalled the Klansmen warned the family to leave Omaha, because Earl Little's activities with UNIA were "stirring up trouble".[17]
The family relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1926, and to Lansing, Michigan, shortly thereafter. In 1931, Earl Little was run over by a streetcar in Lansing. Authorities ruled his death an accident. The police reported that Earl Little had been conscious when they arrived on the scene, and he told them he had slipped and fallen under the streetcar's wheels.[18] In his autobiography, Malcolm X said that the black community disputed the cause of death; his family had frequently found themselves the target of harassment by the Black Legion, a white supremacist group which his father accused of burning down their home in 1929. Some blacks believed the Black Legion had killed Earl Little. They doubted that he could "bash himself in the head, then get down across the streetcar tracks to be run over."[19]
Though Little's father had two life insurance policies, his mother received death benefits solely from the smaller policy. Little wrote that the insurance company of the larger policy claimed that his father had committed suicide and refused to issue the benefit.[19] Louise Little had a nervous breakdown and was declared legally insane in December 1938. The Little siblings were split up and sent to different foster homes. Louise Little was formally committed to the state mental hospital at Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she remained until Little and his siblings secured her release 26 years later.[20]
Little was one of the best students in his junior high school, but he dropped out after an eighth-grade teacher told him that his aspirations of being a lawyer were "no realistic goal for a nigger".[21] After enduring a series of foster homes, Little moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to live with his older half-sister, Ella Little Collins, in February 1941.[22]
Young adult years
In Boston Little held a variety of jobs and intermittently found employment with the New Haven Railroad.[23] For a while, he worked as a shoeshiner at a Lindy Hop nightclub. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, he said that he once shined the shoes of Duke Ellington and other notable African-American musicians.[24] Between 1943 and 1946, when he was arrested and jailed in Massachusetts, Little drifted from city to city and job to job.[25] He left Boston to live for a short time in Flint, Michigan.[26] He moved to New York City in 1943. Living in Harlem, he became involved in drug dealing, gambling, racketeering, robbery, and steering prostitutes.[27] During this time, his friends and acquaintances called him "Detroit Red".[28]
When Little was examined in 1943 for the draft, military physicians classified him as "mentally disqualified for military service".[29] He explained in his autobiography that he put on a display to avoid the draft by telling the examining officer that he could not wait to "steal us some guns, and kill us [some] crackers."[30] His approach worked; his classification ensured he would not be drafted.[29]
In late 1945, Little returned to Boston. With a group of associates, he began a series of elaborate burglaries targeting the residences of wealthy white families.[31] On January 12, 1946, Little was arrested for burglary trying to pick up a stolen watch he had left for repairs at a jewelry shop.[32] The shop owner had called the police because the watch seemed too expensive for the average Roxbury resident. Little told the police that he had a gun on his person and surrendered so the police would treat him more leniently.[33] Two days later, Little was indicted for carrying firearms. On January 16, he was charged with larceny and breaking and entering. Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in Massachusetts State Prison.[34]
On February 27, Little began serving his sentence at the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown. While in prison, Little earned the nickname of "Satan" because of his hostility toward religion.[35] In prison, Little met a self-educated man named John Elton Bembry (referred to as "Bimbi" in The Autobiography of Malcolm X), who convinced him to educate himself.[36][37] Little developed a voracious appetite for reading, much of it after the prison lights had been turned off.[38]
In 1948, Little's brother Philbert wrote, telling him about the Nation of Islam. Little was not interested in joining until his brother Reginald wrote, saying, "Malcolm, don't eat any more pork and don't smoke any more cigarettes. I'll show you how to get out of prison."[39] For the remainder of his incarceration, Little maintained regular correspondence with Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Black Muslims.[40]
In February 1948, mostly through his sister's efforts, Little was transferred to an experimental prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts, a facility that had a much larger library.[41] He later reflected on his time in prison: "Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I had never been so truly free in my life."[42] On August 7, 1952, Little received parole and was released from prison.[34]
Nation of Islam
Part of a series on
Nation of Islam
Famous leaders
Wallace Fard Muhammad · Elijah Muhammad · Malcolm X · Warith Deen Mohammed · Louis Farrakhan
History and beliefs
Savior's Day · Nation of Islam and antisemitism · Yakub · Million Man March
Publications
The Final Call · How to Eat to Live · Message to the Blackman in America · Muhammad Speaks
Subsidiaries and offshoots
Fruit of Islam · The Nation of Gods and Earths · New Black Panther Party · United Nation of Islam · Your Black Muslim Bakery
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Further information: Nation of Islam
In 1952, after his release from prison, Little visited Elijah Muhammad in Chicago, Illinois.[43] Then, like many members of the Nation of Islam, he changed his surname to "X". He explained the name by saying, "The Muslim's 'X' symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my 'X' replaced the white slavemaster name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears."[44]
The FBI opened a file on Malcolm X in March 1953 after hearing that he had described himself as a Communist. Soon the FBI turned its attention from concerns about possible Communist Party association to Malcolm's rapid ascent in the Nation of Islam.[45]
In June 1953, Malcolm X was named assistant minister of the Nation of Islam's Temple Number One[46] in Detroit.[47] By late 1953, he established Boston's Temple Number Eleven.[48] In March 1954, Malcolm X expanded Temple Number Twelve in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[49] Two months later he was selected to lead the Nation of Islam's Temple Number Seven in Harlem.[50] He rapidly expanded its membership.[51] After a 1959 television broadcast in New York City about the Nation of Islam, The Hate that Hate Produced, Malcolm X became known to a much wider audience. Representatives of the print media, radio, and television frequently asked him for comments on issues. He was also sought as a spokesman by reporters from other countries.[52]
Malcolm X criticized the 1963 March on Washington, which he called "the farce on Washington".[53] He said he did not know why black people were excited over a demonstration "run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn't like us when he was alive."[54][55]
From his adoption of the Nation of Islam in 1952 until he left the organization in 1964, Malcolm X promoted the Nation's teachings. He referred to whites as "devils" created in a misguided program by a black scientist, and predicted the inevitable and imminent return of blacks to their natural place at the top of the social order.[56]
Malcolm X has been widely considered the second most influential leader of the movement after Elijah Muhammad.[57] He was largely credited with increasing membership in the Nation of Islam from 500 in 1952 to 25,000 in 1963.[58][59] He inspired the boxer Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) to join the Nation of Islam.[60] Ali later left the Nation of Islam and joined mainstream Islam, as did Malcolm X.
Meeting Castro and other world leaders
In September 1960, Fidel Castro arrived in New York to attend the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. He and his entourage stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. Malcolm X was a prominent member of a Harlem-based welcoming committee made up of community leaders who met with Castro.[69] Castro was so impressed by Malcolm X that he requested a private meeting with him.[70] During the General Assembly meeting, Malcolm X was also invited to many official embassy functions sponsored by African nations, where he met heads of state and other leaders, including Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, and Kenneth Kaunda of the Zambian African National Congress.[71]
Leaving the Nation of Islam
In early 1963, Malcolm X started collaborating with Alex Haley on The Autobiography of Malcolm X.[72] The book was not finished when he was assassinated in 1965. Haley completed it and published it later that year.[73][74]
On December 1, 1963, when he was asked for a comment about the assassination of President Kennedy, Malcolm X said that it was a case of "chickens coming home to roost". He added that "chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad."[75] He described the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, as some of the chickens that had come home to roost.[75]
The remarks prompted a widespread public outcry. The Nation of Islam, which had issued a message of condolence to the Kennedy family and ordered its ministers not to comment on the assassination, publicly censured their former shining star.[76] Although Malcolm X retained his post and rank as minister, he was prohibited from public speaking for 90 days.[77]
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, March 26, 1964
On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X publicly announced his break from the Nation of Islam. He said that he was still a Muslim, but he felt the Nation of Islam had "gone as far as it can" because of its rigid religious teachings.[78] Malcolm X said he was going to organize a black nationalist organization that would try to "heighten the political consciousness" of African Americans.[78] He also expressed his desire to work with other civil rights leaders and said that Elijah Muhammad had prevented him from doing so in the past.[78]
Writing in his Autobiography, Malcolm X said that one reason for the separation was growing tension between him and Elijah Muhammad because of his dismay about rumors of Muhammad's extramarital affairs with young secretaries. Such actions were against the teachings of the Nation. Although at first Malcolm X ignored the rumors, he spoke with Muhammad's son and the women making the accusations. He came to believe that they were true, and Muhammad confirmed the rumors in 1963. Muhammad tried to justify his actions by referring to precedents by Biblical prophets.[79]
Another reason was jealousy. Malcolm X had become a favorite of the media, and many in the Nation's Chicago headquarters felt that he was over-shadowing Muhammad.[80] Louis Lomax's 1963 book about the Nation of Islam, When the Word Is Given, featured a picture of Malcolm X on its cover and included five of his speeches, but only one of Muhammad's, which greatly upset Muhammad.[81] Muhammad was also jealous that a publisher was interested in Malcolm X's autobiography.[81]
After leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X founded Muslim Mosque, Inc., a religious organization,[82] and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a secular group that advocated black nationalism.[83] On March 26, 1964, he met Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, D.C., after a press conference which followed both men attending the Senate to hear the debate on the Civil Rights bill. This was the only time the two men ever met; their meeting lasted only one minute,[84] just long enough for photographers to take a picture.[85][86]
In April, Malcolm X made a speech titled "The Ballot or the Bullet" in which he advised African-Americans to exercise their right to vote wisely.[87] Several Sunni Muslims encouraged Malcolm X to learn about Islam. Soon he converted to Sunni Islam, and decided to make his pilgrimage to Mecca.[88]
Pilgrimage to Mecca
On April 13, 1964, Malcolm X departed JFK Airport in New York for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. His status as an authentic Muslim was questioned by Saudi authorities because of his United States passport and his inability to speak Arabic. Since only confessing Muslims are allowed into Mecca, he was separated from his group.[89] He spent about 20 hours wearing the ihram, a traditional two-piece garment comprising two white unhemmed sheets.[90]
According to his Autobiography, Malcolm X saw a telephone and remembered the book The Eternal Message of Muhammad by Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, which had been presented to him with his visa approval. He called Azzam's son, who arranged for his release. At the younger Azzam's home, he met Azzam Pasha, who gave Malcolm his suite at the Jeddah Palace Hotel. The next morning, Muhammad Faisal, the son of Prince Faisal, visited and informed Malcolm X that he was to be a state guest. The deputy chief of protocol accompanied Malcolm X to the Hajj Court, where he was allowed to make his pilgrimage.[91]
On April 19, Malcolm X completed the Hajj, making the seven circuits around the Kaaba, drinking from the Zamzam Well and running between the hills of Safah and Marwah seven times.[92] According to Malcolm X's Autobiography, this trip allowed him to see Muslims of different races interacting as equals. He came to believe that Islam could transcend racial problems.[93]
International travel
Africa
Pan-African topics
General
Pan-Africanism
Afro-Latino
African American
Kwanzaa
Colonialism
Africa
Maafa
Black people
African philosophy
Black conservatism
Black leftism
Black nationalism
Black orientalism
Afrocentrism
African Topics
Art
FESPACO
African art
PAFF
People
George Padmore
Walter Rodney
Patrice Lumumba
Thomas Sankara
Frantz Fanon
Ahmed Sékou Touré
Kwame Nkrumah
Marcus Garvey
Malcolm X
W. E. B. Du Bois
C. L. R. James
Cheikh Anta Diop
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Malcolm X visited Africa on three separate occasions, once in 1959 and twice in 1964. During his visits, he met officials, gave interviews to newspapers, and spoke on television and radio in Egypt, Ethiopia, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Sudan, Senegal, Liberia, Algeria, and Morocco.[94] Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt ,and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria invited Malcolm X to serve in their governments.[95]
In 1959, Malcolm X traveled to Egypt (then known as the United Arab Republic), Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana to arrange a tour for Elijah Muhammad.[96] The first of the two trips Malcolm X made to Africa in 1964 lasted from April 13 until May 21, before and after his Hajj.[97] On May 8, following his speech at the University of Ibadan, Malcolm X was made an honorary member of the Nigerian Muslim Students' Association. During this reception the students bestowed upon him the name "Omowale", which means "the son who has come home" in the Yoruba language. Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography that he "had never received a more treasured honor."[98]
On July 9, 1964, Malcolm X returned to Africa.[99] On July 17, he was welcomed to the second meeting of the Organization of African Unity in Cairo as a representative of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.[100] By the time he returned to the United States on November 24, 1964, Malcolm had met with every prominent African leader and established an international connection between Africans on the continent and those in the diaspora.[95]
France and the United Kingdom
On November 23, 1964, on his way home from Africa, Malcolm X stopped in Paris, where he spoke at the Salle de la Mutualité.[101][102] A week later, on November 30, Malcolm X flew to the United Kingdom, where he participated in a debate at the Oxford Union on December 3. The topic of the debate was "Extremism in the Defense of Liberty is No Vice; Moderation in the Pursuit of Justice is No Virtue", and Malcolm X argued the affirmative. Interest in the debate was so high that it was televised nationally by the BBC.[103][104]
On February 5, 1965, Malcolm X went to Europe again.[105] On February 8, he spoke in London, before the first meeting of the Council of African Organizations.[106] Malcolm X tried to go to France on February 9 but he was refused entry.[107] On February 12, he visited Smethwick, near Birmingham, which had become a byword for racial division after the 1964 general election, when the Conservative Party won the parliamentary seat after rumors that their candidates supporters had used the slogan "If you want a nigger for your neighbour, vote Labour."[108]
In the United States
After leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X spoke before a wide variety of audiences in the United States. He spoke at regular meetings of Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He was one of the most sought-after speakers on college campuses,[109] and one of his top aides later wrote that he "welcomed every opportunity to speak to college students."[110] Malcolm X also spoke before political groups such as the Militant Labor Forum.[111]
Malcolm X holding an M1 Carbine and peering out of a window. The photo illustrated his intention to defend himself against the death threats he was receiving.
Tensions increased between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. As early as February 1964, a member of Temple Number Seven had been given orders by the Nation of Islam to wire explosives to Malcolm X's car.[112] On March 20, 1964, Life published a photograph of Malcolm X holding an M1 Carbine and peering out a window. The photo was intended to illustrate his determination to defend himself and his family against the death threats he was receiving.[113]
The Nation of Islam and its leaders began making threats against Malcolm X both in private and in public. On March 23, 1964, Elijah Muhammad told Boston minister Louis X (later known as Louis Farrakhan) that hypocrites like Malcolm should have "their heads cut off".[114] The April 10 edition of Muhammad Speaks featured a cartoon in which his severed head was shown bouncing.[115] On July 9, John Ali, a top aide to Muhammad, answered a question about Malcolm X by saying that "anyone who opposes the Honorable Elijah Muhammad puts their life in jeopardy."[116] The December 4 issue of Muhammad Speaks included an article by Louis X that railed against Malcolm X and said that "such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death."[117]
Some threats were made anonymously. During the month of June 1964, FBI surveillance recorded two such threats. On June 8, a man called Malcolm X's home and told Betty Shabazz to "tell him he's as good as dead."[118] On June 12, an FBI informant reported getting an anonymous telephone call from somebody who said "Malcolm X is going to be bumped off."[119]
In June 1964, the Nation of Islam sued to reclaim Malcolm X's residence in Queens, New York, which they claimed to own. The suit was successful, and Malcolm X was ordered to vacate.[120] On February 14, 1965, the night before a scheduled hearing to postpone the eviction date, the house burned to the ground. Malcolm X and his family survived. No one was charged with any crime.[121]
Death
Assassination
Malcolm X in March 1964
On February 21, 1965, in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X began to speak to a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity when a disturbance broke out in the crowd of 400.[122] A man yelled, "Nigger! Get your hand outta my pocket!"[123][124] As Malcolm X and his bodyguards moved to quiet the disturbance,[125] a man rushed forward and shot Malcolm X in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun.[126] Two other men charged the stage and fired handguns, hitting him 16 times.[124] Angry onlookers caught and beat one of the assassins as the others fled the ballroom.[127][128] Malcolm X was pronounced dead shortly after he arrived at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.[122]
Talmadge Hayer, a Black Muslim also known as Thomas Hagan, was arrested on the scene.[128] Eyewitnesses identified two more suspects, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, also members of the Nation of Islam. The city charged all three men in the case.[129] At first Hayer denied involvement, but during the trial he confessed to having fired shots into Malcolm X's body. He testified that Butler and Johnson were not present and were not involved in the assassination, but he declined to name the men who had joined him in the shooting.[130] Nonetheless, all three men were convicted.[131]
Butler, now known as Muhammad Abdul Aziz, was paroled in 1985. He became the head of the Nation of Islam's Harlem mosque in New York in 1998. He continues to maintain his innocence.[132] Johnson, now known as Khalil Islam, was released from prison in 1987. During his time in prison, he rejected the teachings of the Nation of Islam and converted to Sunni Islam. He, too, maintains his innocence.[133] Hayer, now known as Mujahid Halim, was paroled in 1993.[134]
Funeral
The number of mourners who came to the public viewing in Harlem's Unity Funeral Home from February 23 through February 26 was estimated to be between 14,000 and 30,000.[135] The funeral of Malcolm X was held on February 27 at the Faith Temple, Church of God in Christ, in Harlem. The Church was filled to capacity with more than 1,000 people.[136] Loudspeakers were set up outside the Temple so the overflow crowd could listen[137] and a local television station broadcast the funeral live.[138]
Among the civil rights leaders in attendance were John Lewis, Bayard Rustin, James Forman, James Farmer, Jesse Gray, and Andrew Young.[136][139] Actor and activist Ossie Davis delivered the eulogy, describing Malcolm X as "our shining black prince".
There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee, even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain—and we will smile. Many will say turn away—away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man—and we will smile. They will say that he is of hate—a fanatic, a racist—who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle! And we will answer and say to them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him.[140]
Malcolm X is buried in Ferncliff Cemetery.
Malcolm X was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.[138] At the gravesite after the ceremony, friends took the shovels away from the waiting gravediggers and completed the burial themselves.[141] Actor and activist Ruby Dee (wife of Ossie Davis) and Juanita Poitier (wife of Sidney Poitier) established the Committee of Concerned Mothers to raise funds to buy a house and pay educational expenses for Malcolm X's family.[142]
Responses to assassination
Reactions to Malcolm X's assassination were varied. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to Betty Shabazz, expressing his sadness over "the shocking and tragic assassination of your husband."
While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and the root of the problem. He was an eloquent spokesman for his point of view and no one can honestly doubt that Malcolm had a great concern for the problems we face as a race.[143]
Elijah Muhammad told the annual Savior's Day convention on February 26, "Malcolm X got just what he preached."[144]
The New York Times wrote that Malcolm X was "an extraordinary and twisted man" who had "turn[ed] many true gifts to evil purpose" and that his life was "strangely and pitifully wasted".[3] The New York Post wrote that "even his sharpest critics recognized his brilliance—often wild, unpredictable and eccentric, but nevertheless possessing promise that must now remain unrealized."[145]
The international press, particularly that of Africa, was sympathetic. The Daily Times of Nigeria wrote that Malcolm X "will have a place in the palace of martyrs."[4] The Ghanaian Times likened him to John Brown and Patrice Lumumba among "a host of Africans and Americans who were martyred in freedom's cause".[146]
Guangming Daily, published in Beijing, stated that "Malcolm was murdered because he fought for freedom and equal rights."[147] In Cuba, El Mundo described the assassination as "another racist crime to eradicate by violence the struggle against discrimination".[5]
Allegations of conspiracy
Within days of the assassination, questions were raised about who bore ultimate responsibility. On February 23, James Farmer, the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, announced at a news conference that local drug dealers, and not the Black Muslims, were to blame.[148] Others accused the New York Police Department, the FBI, or the CIA, citing the lack of police protection and the ease with which the assassins had entered the Audubon Ballroom.[149]
In the 1970s, the public learned about COINTELPRO and other secret FBI programs directed towards infiltrating and disrupting civil rights organizations during the 1950s and 1960s.[150] John Ali, national secretary of the Nation of Islam, was identified as an FBI undercover agent.[151] Malcolm X had confided in a reporter that Ali had exacerbated tensions between him and Elijah Muhammad. He considered Ali his "archenemy" within the Nation of Islam leadership.[151] On February 20, 1965, the night before the assassination, Ali met with Talmadge Hayer, one of the men convicted of killing Malcolm X.[152]
In 1977 and 1978, Talmadge Hayer submitted two sworn affidavits re-asserting his claim that Butler and Johnson were not involved in the assassination. In his affidavits Hayer named four men, all members of the Nation of Islam's Newark Temple Number 25, as having participated with him in the crime. Hayer asserted that a man, later identified as Wilbur McKinley, shouted and threw a smoke bomb to create a diversion. Hayer said that another man, later identified as William Bradley, had a shotgun and was the first to fire on Malcolm X after the diversion. Hayer asserted that he and a man later identified as Leon David, both armed with pistols, fired on Malcolm X immediately after the shotgun blast. Hayer also said that a fifth man, later identified as Benjamin Thomas, was involved in the conspiracy.[153][154] Hayer's statements failed to convince authorities to reopen their investigation of the murder.[155]
Some, including the Shabazz family, have accused Louis Farrakhan of being involved in the plot to assassinate Malcolm X.[156][157][158] In a 1993 speech, Louis Farrakhan seemed to boast of the assassination:
Was Malcolm your traitor or ours? And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours? A nation has to be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats.[159][160]
In a 60 Minutes interview that aired during May 2000, Farrakhan stated that some of the things he said may have led to the assassination of Malcolm X. "I may have been complicit in words that I spoke", he said. "I acknowledge that and regret that any word that I have said caused the loss of life of a human being."[161] A few days later Farrakhan denied that he had "ordered the assassination" of Malcolm X, although he again acknowledged that he "created the atmosphere that ultimately led to Malcolm X's assassination."[162] No consensus on who was responsible has been reached.[163]
Philosophy
Except for his autobiography, Malcolm X left no writings. His philosophy is known almost entirely from the myriad speeches and interviews he gave between 1952 until his death in 1965.[164] Many of those speeches, especially from the last year of his life, were recorded and have been published.[165]
Beliefs of the Nation of Islam
Further information: Beliefs and theology of the Nation of Islam
Before he left the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm X taught its beliefs in his speeches. His speeches were peppered with the phrase "The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that ...".[166] It is virtually impossible to discern whether Malcolm X's beliefs diverged from the teachings of the Nation of Islam.[167][168] Malcolm X once compared himself to a ventriloquist's dummy who could only say what Elijah Muhammad had told him.[166]
Malcolm X taught that black people were the original people of the world,[169] and that white people were a race of devils who were created by an evil scientist named Yakub.[170] The Nation of Islam believed that black people were superior to white people, and that the demise of the white race was imminent.[171]
When he was questioned concerning his statements that white people were devils, Malcolm X said that "history proves the white man is a devil."[172] He enumerated some of the historical reasons that, he felt, supported his argument: "Anybody who rapes, and plunders, and enslaves, and steals, and drops hell bombs on people... anybody who does these things is nothing but a devil."[173]
Malcolm X said that Islam was the "true religion of black mankind" and that Christianity was "the white man's religion" that had been imposed upon African Americans by their slave-masters.[174] He said that the Nation of Islam followed Islam as it was practiced around the world, but the Nation's teachings varied from those of other Muslims because they were adapted to the "uniquely pitiful" condition of black people in America.[175] He taught that Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of the Nation, was Allah,[176] and that Elijah Muhammad was his Messenger, or prophet.[177]
While the civil rights movement fought against racial segregation, Malcolm X advocated the complete separation of African Americans from white people. The Nation of Islam proposed the establishment of a separate country for black people in the Southern United States[178] as an interim measure until African Americans could return to Africa.[179] Malcolm X also rejected the civil rights movement's strategy of nonviolence and instead advocated that black people use any necessary means of self-defense to protect themselves.[180]
Independent views
Malcolm X at a 1964 press conference
After he left the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X began to articulate his own views. During the final year of his life, his philosophy was flexible, and it is difficult to categorize his views on some subjects. Some of the themes to which Malcolm X frequently returned in his speeches demonstrate a relative consistency of thought.[181]
After leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X announced his willingness to work with leaders of the civil rights movement.[78] However, he felt that the civil rights movement should change its focus to human rights. So long as the movement remained a fight for civil rights, its struggle remained a domestic issue. By framing the African American struggle for equal rights as a fight for human rights, it would become an international issue and the movement could bring its complaint before the United Nations. Malcolm X said the emerging nations of the world would add their support to the cause of African Americans.[182]
Malcolm X continued to hold the view that African-Americans were right to defend themselves from aggressors, arguing that if the government was unwilling or unable to protect black people, they should protect themselves "by whatever means necessary".[183] He also continued to reject nonviolence as the only means for securing equality, declaring that he and the other members of the Organization of Afro-American Unity were determined to win freedom, justice, and equality "by any means necessary".[184]
Malcolm X stressed the global perspective he had gained from his international travels. He emphasized the "direct connection" between the domestic struggle of African Americans for equal rights with the liberation struggles of Third World nations.[185] He said that African Americans were wrong when they thought of themselves as a minority; in a global context, black people were a majority, not a minority.[186]
Although he no longer called for the separation of black people from white people, Malcolm X continued to advocate black nationalism, which he defined as self-determination for the African American community.[187] In the last months of his life, however, Malcolm X began to reconsider his support of black nationalism after meeting northern African revolutionaries who, to all appearances, were white.[188]
After his Hajj, Malcolm X articulated a view of white people and racism that represented a deep change from the philosophy he articulated as a minister of the Nation of Islam. In a famous letter from Mecca, he wrote that the white people he had met during his pilgrimage had forced him to "rearrange" his thinking about race and "toss aside some of [his] previous conclusions".[189]
In a 1965 conversation with Gordon Parks, two days before his assassination, Malcolm said:
[L]istening to leaders like Nasser, Ben Bella, and Nkrumah awakened me to the dangers of racism. I realized racism isn't just a black and white problem. It's brought bloodbaths to about every nation on earth at one time or another.
Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn't a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I've lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years.
That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I'm glad to be free of them.[
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Legacy
Malcolm X in 1964
Malcolm X has been described as one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.[6][7][8] He is credited with raising the self-esteem of black Americans and reconnecting them with their African heritage.[191] He is responsible for the spread of Islam in the black community in the United States.[192]
Many African Americans, especially those who lived in cities in the Northern United States, felt that Malcolm X articulated their complaints concerning inequality better than the mainstream civil rights movement did.[193] One biographer says that by giving expression to their frustration, Malcolm X "made clear the price that white America would have to pay if it did not accede to black America's legitimate demands."[194]
In the late 1960s, as black activists became more radical, Malcolm X and his teachings were part of the foundation on which they built their movements. The Black Power movement,[195] the Black Arts Movement,[196] and the widespread adoption of the slogan "Black is beautiful"[197] can all trace their roots to Malcolm X.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a resurgence of interest in Malcolm X among young people fueled, in part, by his use as an icon by hip hop groups such as Public Enemy.[198] Images of Malcolm X could be found on T-shirts and jackets.[199] This wave peaked in 1992 with the release of Malcolm X, a much-anticipated film adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.[200]
Portrayals in film and on stage
The 1992 film Malcolm X was directed by Spike Lee and based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It starred Denzel Washington, with Angela Bassett as Betty Shabazz and Al Freeman, Jr., as Elijah Muhammad.[201] Critic Roger Ebert and director Martin Scorsese both named the film one of the ten best of the 1990s.[202]
Washington had previously played the part of Malcolm X in the 1981 Off Broadway play When the Chickens Came Home to Roost.[203] Other actors who have portrayed Malcolm X include:
* James Earl Jones, in the 1977 film The Greatest.[204]
* Dick Anthony Williams, in the 1978 television miniseries King [205] and the 1989 American Playhouse production of the Jeff Stetson play The Meeting.[206]
* Al Freeman, Jr., in the 1979 television miniseries Roots: The Next Generations.[207]
* Morgan Freeman, in the 1981 television movie Death of a Prophet.[208]
* Ben Holt, in the 1986 opera X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X).[209]
* Gary Dourdan, in the 2000 television movie King of the World.[210]
* Joe Morton, in the 2000 television movie Ali: An American Hero.[211]
* Mario Van Peebles, in the 2001 film Ali.[212]
Memorials
The Malcolm X House Site, at 3448 Pinkney Street in North Omaha, Nebraska, marks the place where Malcolm Little first lived with his family. The house where the Little family lived was torn down in 1965 by owners who did not know of its connection with Malcolm X.[213] The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and a historic marker identifies the site because of the importance of Malcolm X to American history and national culture.[214][215] In 1987 the site was added to the Nebraska register of historic sites and marked with a state plaque.[216]
Malcolm X Boulevard in New York City
There have been dozens of schools named after Malcolm X, including Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark, New Jersey,[217] Malcolm Shabazz City High School in Madison, Wisconsin,[218] and Malcolm X College in Chicago, Illinois.[219]
Many cities have renamed streets after Malcolm X. In New York City, Lenox Avenue was renamed Malcolm X Boulevard in the late 1980s.[220] The name of Reid Street in Brooklyn, New York, was changed to Malcolm X Boulevard in 1985.[221] In 1997, Oakland Avenue in Dallas, Texas, was renamed Malcolm X Boulevard.[222]
In 2005, Columbia University announced the opening of the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. The memorial is located in the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated.
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In 1958, Malcolm X married Betty X (née Sanders) in Lansing, Michigan.[62] The two had been friends for about a year, although Betty X suspected that he was interested in marriage. Then one day he called and asked her to marry him.[63]
The couple had six daughters. Their names were Attallah, born in 1958 and named after Attila the Hun;[64] Qubilah, born in 1960 and named after Kublai Khan;[65] Ilyasah, born in 1962 and named after Elijah Muhammad;[66] Gamilah Lumumba, born in 1964 and named after Patrice Lumumba;[67] and twins, Malaak and Malikah, born in 1965 after their father's assassination and named for him
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Andrew Young
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Early life
Young was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to Daisy Fuller Young, a school teacher, and Andrew Jackson Young, Sr., a dentist. Young's father hired a professional boxer to teach Andrew and his brother how to fight, so they could defend themselves. From that, Andrew decided that violence was not the path he would choose to follow.[citation needed]
Education
After beginning his higher education at Dillard University, Young transferred to Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1947, and received his Bachelor of Science in Pre-dentistry degree there in 1951. He originally had planned to follow his father's career of dentistry, but then felt a religious calling. He entered the Christian ministry and earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1955.
Young is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first inter-collegiate Greek-letter fraternities established for African American students. On April 1, 2008, Young was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa from the Bridgewater College during the 11 a.m. convocation in the Carter Center for Worship and Music led by Bridgewater President Phillip C. Stone.[1]
Civil rights
Young was appointed to serve as pastor of a church in Marion, Alabama. It was there in Marion that he met Jean Childs, who later became his wife. In 1957, Andrew was called to the Youth Division of The National Council of Churches in New York City. He produced a television program for youth called, Look Up and Live, travelled to Geneva for meetings of the World Council of Churches around the United States. Also while in Marion, Young began to study the writings of Mohandas Gandhi. Young became interested in Gandhi's concept of non-violent resistance as a tactic for social change. He encouraged African-Americans to register to vote in Alabama, and sometimes faced death threats while doing so. He became a friend and ally of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at this time. In 1957, Young moved to New York City to accept a job with the National Council of Churches. However, as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, Young decided that his place was back in the South. He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and again worked on drives to register black voters. In 1960 he joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Young was jailed for his participation in civil rights demonstrations, both in Selma, Alabama, and in St. Augustine, Florida. Young played a key role in the events in Birmingham, Alabama, serving as a mediator between the white and black communities. In 1964 Young was named executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), becoming, in that capacity, one of Dr. King's principal lieutenants. As a colleague and friend to Martin Luther King Jr. he was a key strategist and negotiator during the Civil Rights Campaigns in Birmingham (1963) and Selma (1965) that resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.He was with King in Memphis, Tennessee, when King was assassinated in 1968.
In 2005, to honor the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Ambassador Young, William Wachtel and Norman Ornstein founded Why Tuesday?, a nonpartisan group dedicated to increasing voter participation. He was a good man.
Career in Congress
In 1970 Andrew Young ran as a Democrat for Congress from Georgia, but was unsuccessful. After his defeat, Rev. Fred C. Bennette, Jr., introduced him to Murray M. Silver, Esq., Atlanta, Georgia, Attorney, who served as his campaign finance chairman, promoted concerts featuring top entertainers including Harry Belafonte and Bill Withers. He ran again in 1972 and won. He later was re-elected in 1974 and in 1976. During his four-plus years in Congress he was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and he was involved in several debates regarding foreign relations including the decision to stop supporting the Portuguese attempts to hold on to their colonies in southern Africa. Young also sat on the powerful Rules committee and the Banking and Urban Development committee. Andrew opposed the Vietnam War, enacted legislation that established a U.S. Institute for peace, established the Chattahoochee River National Park and negotiated federal funds for MARTA and the Atlanta Highways.
UN Ambassador
Ambassador Young, calling from New York City on an STU-I secure phone during the Israel-Egypt peace talks. (NSA museum)
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Young to serve as Ambassador to the UN, the first African-American to serve in the position. Young's controversial statements made headlines almost from the start. In August 1979, he appeared on Meet the Press and said that Israel was "stubborn and intransigent."[2] Young met secretly for meetings, in violation of American law, with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which culminated in Carter asking for Young's resignation.[3] Jimmy Carter denied any complicity in The Andrew Young Affair.
As UN Ambassador, Young played a leading role in advancing a settlement in Zimbabwe with Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo.
Atlanta mayor
In 1981, Young was elected mayor of Atlanta, succeeding Maynard Jackson. As mayor of Atlanta, he brought in $70 billion of new private investment, including the 1996 Olympic Games- making Atlanta the engine of prosperity for Georgia that it remains today.[citation needed] He continued and expanded Maynard Jackson's programs for including minority and female-owned businesses in all city contracts. Atlanta hosted the 1988 Democratic National Convention, and the Mayor's Task Force on Education established the Dream Jamboree College Fair that tripled the college scholarships given to Atlanta public school graduates. He also revamped the Atlanta Zoo, making ecological habitats specific to different animals.[citation needed] Young was re-elected as Mayor in 1985 with more than 80% of the vote.
Private citizen
Young ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Georgia in 1990, losing in the Democratic primary run-off to future Governor Zell Miller. However, while running for the Statehouse, he simultaneously was serving as a co-chairman of a committee which, at the time, was attempting to bring the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta. Young played a significant role in the success of Atlanta's bid to host the Summer Games.
In 1996, Young wrote A Way Out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young, published by Thomas Nelson.
Young is currently co-chairman of Good Works International, a consulting firm "offering international market access and political risk analysis in key emerging markets within Africa and the Caribbean." The company's Web site also notes that "GWI principals have backgrounds in human rights and public service. The concept of enhancing the greater good is intrinsic to our business endeavors." Nike is one of Good Works' most visible corporate clients. In the late 1990s, at the height of controversy over the company's labor practices, Young led a delegation to report on Nike operations in Vietnam. Anti-sweatshop activists derided the report as a whitewash and raised concerns that Nike was trading on Young's background as a civil-rights activist to improve Nike's corporate image. Young also has been a director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, and also is the chairman of the board for the Global Initiative for the Advancement of Nutritional Therapy.[4]
In 2004 Young briefly considered running for U.S. Senate after the incumbent, Zell Miller, announced his retirement, but decided not to re-enter public life.
On January 22, 2008, Young appeared as a guest on the Comedy Central talk show parody The Colbert Report. Host Stephen Colbert invited Young to appear during the writer's strike, because, many years earlier, Young and Colbert's father had worked together, but on opposite sides, to mediate a Charleston, South Carolina hospital workers' strike.
Young made another appearance on the The Colbert Report on November 5, 2008 to talk about the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.
Young had four children with his first wife, Jean Childs, who died of cancer in 1994. He married his second wife, Carolyn, in 1996.
Community Development
The Andrew Young Foundation was founded to support and promote education, health, leadership and human rights in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean. Formed in the context of a philosophy of nonviolent social change and a belief that to unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required, the foundation works to support, promote and develop global institutions and leaders with the capacity and knowledge to improve and enhance social and economic justice and human rights through faith, nonviolent action, democratic institutions and socially responsible for-profit corporations.
The Andrew Young School For Policy Studies,Georgia State University is one of the country's best schools of public policy. The school offers degrees in public policy, urban studies and economics. Affiliated centers provide vital research on local, national and international issues, including areas such as health, public finance and tax policy. AYSPS students come from 40 countries and the United States pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics, public administration and public policy.
Andrew Young Center for International Affairs, Morehouse College provides overall leadership to the college's international education objectives and assists in creating an institutional culture of internationalism. Central to its mission is the preparation of students for service in the global community. The vision is to help students to realize their leadership potential with the full understanding of this country's role in global affairs and national civic improvements.
Andrew and Walter Young YMCA is the only full service "Y" operating in Southwest Atlanta. Community programs include a newly renovated child care center, summer youth programs, a teen mom's program, as well as health and fitness programs for every age-children to seniors.
Jean Childs Young Institute for Youth Leadership improves the quality of life for youth through leadership, collaboration, advocacy and service in partnerhip with adults, and supports them in identifying and implementing solutions to the problems they face in the community. The Institute is unique because the teens, themselves, set the agenda.
Ambassador Young also funds several film projects encouraging and supporting Americans to explore African countries.
The Southern Africa Enterprise Development Fund (SAEDF) established in October 1994, is an initiative of the Former President William Jefferson Clinton of the United States, Former President Nelson Mandela of the Republic of South Africa, and the US Congress for the specific purpose of providing funding to stimulate the creation and expansion of small and medium-size indigenous businesses throughout southern Africa.The Honorable Andrew Young, former congressman, Mayor, United Nations Ambassador and Civil rights leader, was appointed as Chairman by President Clinton. SAEDF is an enterprise fund whose primary objective is to assist the countries of the southern African region with the specific purpose of providing funding to stimulate the creation and expansion of small and medium-size indigenous businesses throughout southern Africa.The promotion of enterprise development is expected to stimulate social development and have economic impact in the region. SAEDF provides wholesale and retail long-term risk capital to promising enterprises from the indigenous groups that might otherwise have been ignored by potential investors in the general marketplace. It also co-invests with other institutions or organizations that share the same investment objectives.
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`Books and Awards
An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. (Jan 1998)
A Way Out of No Way. (June 1996)
Andrew Young at the United Nations. (Jan 1978)
Andrew Young, Remembrance & Homage. (Jan 1978)
The History of the Civil Rights Movement/9 volumes. (Sept 1990)
Trespassing Ghost: A Critical Study of Andrew Young. (Jan 1978)
The History of the Civil Rights Movement. (Sep 1990)
Repairing the breach: Keys ways to support Family life, Reclaim out streets, and Rebuild Civil Society in America's communitie Report of the National Task Force on Africa.
AWARDS
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
France's Legion d'Honneur.
NAACP's Springarn Medal.
More than 45 honorary degrees from Universities such as Yale, Notre Dame, Clark Atlanta, Emory and University of Georgia.
Documentary producer
"Rwanda Risin |