African American History Profiles

1. African American History Profiles PART III

2. Asa Philip Randolph A. Philip Randolph, during the 1920s was declared to be “the most dangerous Negro in America” by then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. He was the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union for African-American men who worked on trains as ticket collectors and ushers, among many other things. Palmer might have done better to have worried about more dangerous men. Randolph was committed to non-violence, and always lived his life – and organized his protests with that in mind. You many not realize how familiar you are with his work.

3. Asa Philip Randolph During World War II, Philip Randolph became the leader of all African-Americans seeking work within the defense industry. Many of these high paying jobs were closed to African-American applicants. Randolph threatened several time to organize a million man protest march on Washington, D.C. to register displeasure about the obstacles to African-American workers. The tactic worked. In fact, not only were African-Americans allowed jobs within the defense industry, but also, after World War II, he used the threat of protest marches to help convince President Harry S Truman to integrate the United States military.

4. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963 This, however, was perhaps Asa Philip Randolph’s finest hour. After decades of “threatening” a March on Washington, the march finally took place in August of 1963. It was here that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

5. The Norfolk 17 and Massive Resistance in Virginia

6. The Norfolk 17 and Massive Resistance in Virginia n 1954, the political organization of U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., controlled Virginia politics. Senator Byrd promoted the "Southern Manifesto" opposing integrated schools, which was signed in 1956 by more than one hundred southern officeholders. On February 25, 1956, he called for what became known as Massive Resistance. This was a group of laws, passed in 1958, intended to prevent integration of the schools. Pupil Placement Boards were created with the power to assign specific students to particular schools. Tuition grants were to be provided to students who opposed integrated schools. The linchpin of Massive Resistance was a law that cut off state funds and closed any public school that agreed to integrate. In September 1958 several schools in Warren County, Charlottesville, and Norfolk were about to integrate under court under. They were seized and closed, but the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals overturned the school-closing law. The General Assembly promptly repealed the compulsory school attendance law, making the operating of public schools a matter of local choice. But a simultaneous federal court verdict against the school-closing law based on the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could not be evaded. Speaking to the General Assembly a few weeks later, Governor J. Lindsay Almond conceded defeat. Beginning on February 2, 1959, a few courageous black students integrated the schools that had been closed. Still, hardly any African American students in Virginia attended integrated schools.

7. Massive Resistance and “White Flight” By 1964, five years after the end of Massive Resistance, only 5 percent of black students in Virginia were attending integrated schools. The chief reason for this lack of progress was the Pupil Placement Board. In theory, the board could assign pupils to specific schools for any of a variety of reasons, not including race or color. "In actuality," writes historian Robert A. Pratt, "race was the only criterion considered; the Pupil Placement Board assigned very few black students to white schools in Virginia while it remained in operation." Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the national NAACP said, "Virginia has the largest and most successful token integration program in the country.” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 denied federal funds to schools determined to be resisting integration. This resulted in a bit more compliance by Virginia schools. The Pupil Placement Boards gave way to freedom-of-choice plans that enabled each student to select his or her school. The hope of state officials was that most students would choose to stay where they were. Virtually no white students chose to go to mostly black schools. Another form of passive resistance was white flight, either to private schools, or out of cities with large black populations to outlying, mostly-white suburbs. In Richmond, for example, the percentage of white students plummeted from 45 to 21 percent between 1960 and 1975. It was hard to have integrated schools in a district that was 80 percent black. SOURCE: http://www.vahistorical.org/collections-and-resources/virginia-history-explorer/civil-rights-movement-virginia/passive

8. “A Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of us associate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with his ability as an organizer of men, a leader, a minister, and a public speaker. His “I Have A Dream” speech has motivated generations of people to aspire towards greater equality and dignity for all people. But Martin Luther King, Jr. was also a philosopher, in many ways, and one of his most important contributions to the Civil Rights Movement was his consistent use of non-violent, civil disobedience in order to achieve goals. Non-violent civil disobedience was by no means passive or without consequences. Events like sit-ins and marches were practiced and organized so as to achieve maximum effect; and all of these activities required that participants be willing to suffer undeserved punishments without resorting to violence. As King stated in his “I Have a Dream Speech,” The notion that undeserved suffering was redemptive was essential to the movement, and must be used to motivate people to continue working towards justice despite the many obstacles they would face.

9. “A Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to jail on numerous occasions. He was once booked and jailed for speeding in Montgomery, Alabama, and he spent many days in a Birmingham Jail during the summer of 1963. King expressed his belief in post-conventional morality during these periods in prison, arguing that when the law itself is unjust and immoral – when the law itself goes against God, in his terms – then it would be immoral to follow the law! In the summer of 1963, King was imprisoned in Birmingham, AL for leading a protest march without a permit. He organized marches of schoolchildren during that summer, and mass arrests in the city caused tensions to escalate. Police dogs and fire hoses were turned on children and non-violent marches, inflicting serious injuries. When King was imprisoned, he was publically criticized by both black and white ministers in Birmingham, who complained that his tactics were causing more harm than good, and giving young men and women criminal records – whether the laws they broke were moral or immoral notwithstanding. King answered these complaints with his famous, “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

10. “A Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr. “You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may want to ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

11. “A Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr. It was after King’s release from prison in the summer of 1963 that he delivered the famous “I Have a Dream” Speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The speech, in many ways, transformed a nation, and the peaceful march caused President John F. Kennedy to meet with the leaders of SCLC and begin to propose major Civil Rights reforms. Sadly, Kennedy himself would not live to see these reforms enacted. But in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.

12. “A Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr. The summer of 1963 was one of the most critical seasons of the Civil Rights Movement. In Birmingham, schools were preparing to integrate in the fall of the year. After a tumultuous summer of marches; after King had spent much of the summer in a Birmingham prison cell; after the “I Have a Dream Speech” and the promise of Civil Rights legislation, the fall brought a horrifying and bitter loss. The weekend before the newly integrated schools were set to open, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Below the church, five little girls were preparing a Sunday School lesson when the bomb blew. Four of the girls died. The arbitrary violence of white supremacists in Alabama was unrivaled anywhere… The city was nicknamed “Bombingham.” But this treacherous act brought the condemnation of the country.

13. Author James Baldwin James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, in 1924. Although at the time the Harlem Renaissance was at it’s peak, Baldwin grew up in a world that was largely divorced from the literary movement of the day. His family was quite poor, and he was always under the strict influence of his step-father, a minister in a local church. For a brief period during his teenage years, Baldwin took to the pulpit. But he decided that the Church was not for him. When he turned eighteen, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and tried to make it as a writer. Noticed by the already well accomplished Richard Wright. After Wright helped him to get a grant from a publishing company, Baldwin wen t to Paris to complete his work. He would live abroad for the majority of his life, spending long periods in both Paris and in Istanbul.

14. James Baldwin Baldwin’s writing was often at least part biographical. He described the difficulties of growing up as a black man in a nation that was dominated largely by powerful whites. He also continually discussed the equality of man, and advocated for many reforms – such as equality for and tolerance of homosexuals and interracial marriage – generations before the issue became mainstream topics of discussion. His novel The Fire Next Time put him on the cover of Time magazine during the 1960s. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster…”

15. Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 In 1965, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King, Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference began a fifty mile march from Selma, AL to Montgomery to protest the obstacles to voter registration in the state for African-American voters. As the marchers, led by John Lewis, approached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were attacked by Alabama State Troopers and savagely beaten. John Lewis, pictured to the right, had his skull fractured by a billy club. The incident was reported to the nation late in the evening of “Bloody Sunday” – March 7, 1965. Many Americans were watching a primetime movie at the time of the special report: “Judgment at Nuremburg.”

16. Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 When Americans saw the brutality being used against non-violent protesters on a Sunday Morning in March of 1965, they were outraged and sought to make changes to the white supremacist system in the South. The President of the United States at the time, Lyndon Baines Johnson, introduced a bill to guarantee voting rights for African-Americans in the South. Before Congress, he stated “Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome…” The Voting Rights Act was passed into law in 1965.

17. Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 The Voting Rights Act prevented states from arbitrarily denying African-Americans the ballot by changing voting locations or placing any unfair restrictions on access to voter registration. This act, coupled with the ratification of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in 1964 which ended the poll tax, allowed much greater access to the ballot for African-Americans in Southern States.

18. The Case of Loving V. Virginia https://www.aclu.org/racial-justice/loving-v-virginia-case-over-interracial-marriage

19. The Case of Loving V. Virginia Until the year 1967, interracial marriage was against the law in Virginia – and in various other states around the nation. The so-called “miscegenation” laws of the state were challenged in 1967 in this extraordinary case. Few cases were more aptly named than Loving v. Virginia, which pitted an interracial couple – 17-year-old Mildred Jeter, who was black, and her childhood sweetheart, 23-year-old white construction worker, Richard Loving – against Virginia's "miscegenation" laws banning marriage between blacks and whites. After marrying in Washington, D.C. and returning to their home state in 1958, the couple was charged with unlawful cohabitation and jailed. According to the judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents.... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." Judge Bazile sentenced the Lovings to a year in prison, to be suspended if the couple agreed to leave the state for the next 25 years. The Lovings left Virginia and went to live with relatives in Washington, D.C. When they returned to visit family five years later, they were arrested for traveling together. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Mildred Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for help. The couple was referred to the ACLU, which represented them in the landmark Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia (1967). The Court ruled that state bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

20. Muhammad Ali Muhammad Ali was the greatest heavyweight champion of the world to ever put on boxing gloves. But he was much larger than that. Ali was born Cassius Clay, in Louisville, KY. Upset that he had had his bicycle stolen by a neighborhood bully, he began taking boxing lessons. By the time he was twenty, he had won both the Golden Gloves tournament of Champions and a gold medal with the United States Olympic team in Athens, Greece.

21. Muhammad Ali Muhammad Ali would go on to become the heavyweight champion of the world, and he participated in some of the most dramatic bouts in the history of fisticuffs: The Rumble in the Jungle – against George Foreman, and the Thrilla in Manila – his third match against Joe Frazier, who had defeated him in Madison Square Garden in New York City. But Ali’s most noteworthy accomplishments in terms of personal development may not have been in the ring at all.

22. Muhammad Ali – Anti War Activist In 1964, Muhammad Ali was drafted into the United States Army. He refused to serve, however, claiming “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” Having recently converted to Islam, joining Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam, Ali claimed conscientious objector status and refused to serve. In his own words, “The heavyweight champion of the world claimed, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” He was stripped of his heavyweight championship title, banned from fighting in the United States, and had his visa revoked, so he could not travel abroad either. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFMyrWlZ68

23. Ella Baker and the SNCC: “Come Let Us Build A New World Together” “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed… It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system. That is easier said than done.” – Ella Baker

24. Ella Baker and the SNCC: “Come Let Us Build A New World Together” It may not be readily apparent to everyone, but the role of African-American women in the Civil Rights movement was twice as difficult as that of men. African-American women were often considered second class soldiers in the Movement. For every Rosa Parks or Ruby Bridges who came to prominence, there were a dozen African-American women who’s sacrifices were not registered. Jo Ann Robinson, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, and many other women are left out of the popular narrative of the Movement. Ella Baker falls into this category. And in some ways, that would be fine with her. She believed in the collective good rather than in individual recognitions. Indeed, one of her most popular quotations is “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

25. Ella Baker and the SNCC: “Come Let Us Build A New World Together” Born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, Ella Baker would go on to become a leading organizer of three of the most influential organizations of the 20th Century: The NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which she helped to found. Inspired by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Baker started local organization of her own to encourage the non-violent protest against “Jim Crow” laws and to encourage voter registration. After helping to found the SCLC but finding that her voice was little acknowledged within the organization, Ella Baker left the organization in 1960 to help to organize the new student movements growing in the American South after the Greensboro Four’s sit-ins of February, 1960. In that year, Baker helped to found SNCC, a student run organization which made local reforms and constant activism their mantra. In 1964, it was Ella Baker’s organization that lead the dramatic voter registration drive known as “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi. As the Civil Rights Movement splintered during the late 1960s and throughout the end of the 20th Century, Ella Jo Baker continued to encourage local reforms, and always considered herself a teacher of the young.

26. Ella Baker: Local Activist with A National Influence

27. Ella Baker and the SNCC: “Come Let Us Build A New World Together” “Until the killing of black men – black mothers’ sons – becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son – we, who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens!” - Ella Baker