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Reynolds describes Barack Obama’s speech “A More Perfect Union” as one that “teetered back and forth between both painful assimilationist thought and
bold antiracism” (p. 239).
Listen to and read this speech. An-
notate where both assimilationist and antiracist ideas are revealed. What does it mean to be truly antiracist?

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Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race

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Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race

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The following is a transcript of the remarks of Democratic Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, delivered March 18, 2008, in Philadelphia at the Constitution Center. In it, Obama addresses the role race has played in the presidential campaign. He also responds to criticism of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an unpaid campaign adviser and pastor at Obama's Chicago church. Wright has made inflammatory remarks about the United States and has accused the country of bringing on the Sept. 11 attacks by spreading terrorism.

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union ..." - 221 years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars, statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggles, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this presidential campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for president at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together, unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - toward a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional of candidates. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African-Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in this campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every single exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, and that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy and, in some cases, pain. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in the church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's efforts to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change - problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television sets and YouTube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than 20 years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another, to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a United States Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over 30 years has led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I describe the experience of my first service at Trinity:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters. And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else: At the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival and freedom and hope - became our stories, my story. The blood that spilled was our blood, the tears our tears, until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black. In chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a meaning to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about - memories that all people might study and cherish, and with which we could start to rebuild."

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing and clapping and screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing to do would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have not yet made perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care or education or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist between the African-American community and the larger American community today can be traced directly to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were and are inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education. And the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions or the police force or the fire department - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between blacks and whites, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persist in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pickup, building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continues to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late '50s and early '60s, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way, for those like me who would come after them.

For all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and, increasingly, young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race and racism continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful. And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that, working together, we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care and better schools and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who has been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old - is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know - what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed, not just with words, but with deeds, by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more and nothing less than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the O.J. trial - or in the wake of tragedy - as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time, we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time, we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the emergency room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care, who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time, we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time, we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time, we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together and fight together and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged. And we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them and their families, and giving them the benefits that they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, 23-year-old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, S.C. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was 9 years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches - because that was the cheapest way to eat. That's the mind of a 9-year-old.

She did this for a year until her mom got better. So she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents, too.

Now, Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and different reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the 221 years since a band of patriots signed that document right here in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

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Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race

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The following is a transcript of the remarks of Democratic Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, delivered March 18, 2008, in Philadelphia at the Constitution Center. In it, Obama addresses the role race has played in the presidential campaign. He also responds to criticism of the Rev.

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Before Barack Obama’s historic and
victorious election, there was Charlene Mitchell, Shirley Chisholm, and Jesse Jackson. Learn more about the pioneering work
of these leaders. In what ways were
their actions groundbreaking and controversial? How did they work to amplify the voices of those who have been excluded from American society?

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Charlene Mitchell, Candidate for President, 1968

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Charlene Mitchell, Candidate for President, 1968

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By Maura Reilly
Register today, for the Seneca Falls Revisited virtual celebration, hosted by Civically Re-Engaged Women (CREW), if you are passionate about women's equality. The virtual festival will include women leaders addressing the significance of the many women who have come before us, the work still to be done to achieve equal opportunity for women and the importance of an intersectional feminist movement. There are only 14 days so act NOW!
This week we celebrate the 52nd anniversary of Charlene Mitchell running for president; with her nomination on the Communist Party ticket during the 1968 election, Mitchell became the first African-American woman to run for president. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Mitchell was a leading member of the American Communist Party, progressing connections with Black labor activists and early Civil Rights groups.

At the time of her nomination, many contemporary media commentators believed Charlene Mitchell's nomination and the Communist ticket as a whole, was what the Chicago Tribune described as an attempt to "dramatize what the Communists perceive to be the nation's major discontents." The media narrative surrounding Mitchell's presidential run was a common narrative which plagued the many women who ran for the presidency throughout our country's history, portraying the women running as under qualified protest candidates.

Despite the coverage of Charlene Mitchell's presidential run, the scaled-down campaign operation which ran out of a bookstore in Cambridge, MA, and only winning 1,075 votes nationally, Mitchell remains one of a handful of women of color who have run for president and the only to receive her party's nomination. And although Mitchell was the first woman of color to run, she was not the first woman.

In 1872, 50 years before women won the right to vote, Victoria Woodhull, a contemporary of many of the famed suffragists, was nominated to run for president by the Equal Rights Party. Not only was Woodhull barred from being able to vote in the election she was running in, on Election day Woodhull was only 34 and too young to hold the office of president. Despite the many institutional barriers Woodhull faced, she began a long history of women running for president in the U.S.

In 1920, Laura Clay and Cora Wilson Stewart became the first women to seek the nomination of a major party. During the 1920 Democratic National Convention, Clay and Stewart campaigned for the nomination which eventually went to James Cox and his vice presidential pick Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Cox/Roosevelt ticket lost the 1920 election to their Republican competitors Warren G. Harding and Vice President Calvin Coolidge.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith, was the first woman running for president to win primary delegates. Smith won a total of 27 delegates across three state primary races. Smith had the second highest delegate count at the Republican Convention, losing only to the Republican nominee Senator Barry Goldwater, who went on to lose in the general election to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Maura is a RepresentWomen Research Fellow from the Washington, D.C. area. She graduated from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in May 2019 with an honors degree in Social Anthropology. Follow Maura on Twitter, @further_maura.
In 1972, Representative Shirley Chisholm became the second African-American woman to run for president, and the first to win primary delegates. Although the Democratic National Committee barred Chisholm from the primary debates and was only allowed on the ballot in 12 states, by the time of the Convention, Chisholm had 152 delegates backing her.

Between Secretary Hillary Clinton's 2008 run in which she won 1,920 delegates and her 2016 campaign which amassed 2,814 delegates, Clinton has garnered the most primary delegates of any woman running for president. Clinton also remains the only woman in U.S. history to win the presidential nomination of a major political party.

The 2020 Democratic primary was the most diverse field in terms of both gender and race, however across the six women who ran only three earned delegates. The total delegate count for women in the 2020 primary was only 81. Women have been running for president for 148 years, we have had the right to vote for a century, and yet not one woman has managed to break glass ceiling that is the Oval Office. Perhaps because the onus is put on women to alter themselves and their character to attempt to fit into and lead a system which from its inception has sought to exclude them. If we hope to see our first woman president and many more after that, we must address the systemic barriers which women face up and down the ballot and in everyday life.

If you are interested in women's equality join the celebration of the 100th Anniversary of women's right to vote which will be hosted by CREW on July 23rd-25th and will feature speakers, spoken word and amazing visual experiences! Visit Crewomen.com and purchase your tickets for the virtual festival for women's equality TODAY!

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Charlene Mitchell and the History of Women Running for President

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By Maura Reilly Register today, for the Seneca Falls Revisited virtual celebration, hosted by Civically Re-Engaged Women ( CREW ), if you are passionate about women's equality. The virtual festival will include women leaders addressing the significance of the many women who have come before us, the work still to be done to achieve equal opportunity for women and the importance of an intersectional feminist movement.

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Charlene Mitchell on Presidential Election Laws (1968)

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Charlene Mitchell on Presidential Election Laws (1968)

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Charlene Mitchell on Presidential Election Laws (1968)

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MLA - Michals, Debra. "Shirley Chisholm." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2015. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra. "Shirley Chisholm." National Women's History Museum. 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/shirley-chisholm.

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Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was the first African American woman in Congress (1968) and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties (1972).

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A Look at the First Black Woman in Congress

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A Look at the First Black Woman in Congress

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A look at the first black woman in congress - CNN Video

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Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman in Congress, is being honored with a statue commemorating her legacy.

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The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute

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Bob Fitch photography archive, © Stanford University Libraries

In 1966, Jesse Jackson began to lead Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) program in Chicago. Often seen as Martin Luther King's protégé, Jackson quickly earned a place among King's inner circle. Although King found Jackson's ambition troubling at times, SCLC executive vice president Andrew Young called Jackson "a natural-born leader" ( Frontline, "Interview with Andrew Young").

Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on 8 October 1941 to an unmarried, teenage mother. Jackson was both an honor student and class president in high school, and he received an athletic scholarship to the University of Illinois in 1959. He moved back to South Carolina after one year, however, transferring to Greensboro's North Carolina A & T College. In Greensboro, he became active in the civil rights movement, joining the local Congress of Racial Equality chapter and participating in sit-ins and demonstrations. Aware of SCLC's work at the time, a precocious Jackson wrote King: "Dear Sir, I don't think you'll ever bring God to Albany, Georgia. For He's wise enough to wait till E=MC² brings change there. Best of luck, though" (Jackson, 7 August 1962).

In 1964, Jackson graduated from college and moved to Chicago on a Rockefeller grant to study at Chicago Theological Seminary. In March 1965, he organized a group of fellow students to drive down to Selma, Alabama, answering King's call for supporters of the local voting rights campaign. Before returning to Chicago, Jackson asked Ralph Abernathy for a staff position with SCLC in order to lay the groundwork for a Chicago Campaign. Although King hardly knew Jackson, he took a chance and hired him.

In January 1966, King moved to Chicago to launch SCLC's northern movement. Jackson soon dropped out of seminary to help King full time, becoming the Chicago coordinator of SCLC's economic development and empowerment program, Operation Breadbasket. King was impressed by Jackson's ability to lead Breadbasket, saying, "We knew he was going to do a good job, but he's done better than a good job." Jackson was soon promoted to national leader of Operation Breadbasket. King told a Chicago audience that no one could be "more effective" than Jackson (King, 6 January 1968).

Despite King's praises of Jackson's work, a few days before King's assassination he criticized Jackson for following his own agenda rather than supporting the group. Jackson, hurt by his mentor's disapproval, told him, "Everything's going to be all right" (Frady, 225). King angrily replied that everything was not going to be alright and that he needed Jackson and all of the SCLC staff to work toward a common vision for America. King and Jackson reconciled in Memphis, Tennessee, after King called Jackson in Chicago and asked him to join him. Jackson was talking with King from below the balcony of the Lorraine Motel when King was killed.

After King's death in April 1968, Jackson continued to run Operation Breadbasket. Following in King's footsteps, he was ordained a Baptist minister. Newspaper articles after King's death called him "King's successor," and wrote of him as "the most persuasive black leader on the national scene" ("Emerging Rights Leader"). Despite tensions among the SCLC leadership, Jackson stayed with SCLC until 1971, when he formed his own organization, People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). In 1984, Jackson founded the National Rainbow Coalition, a social justice organization, and sought the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, winning 3.5 million votes and helping to register a million new voters. In his second bid for the nomination in 1988, Jackson won several primaries before being defeated by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. In 1996, the National Rainbow Coalition merged with PUSH to form the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Jackson's latest organization, the Wall Street Project, continues Operation Breadbasket's mission to create economic opportunity for minorities.

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In 1966, Jesse Jackson began to lead Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) program in Chicago. Often seen as Martin Luther King's protégé, Jackson quickly earned a place among King's inner circle. Although King found Jackson's ambition troubling at times, SCLC executive vice president Andrew Young called Jackson "a natural-born leader" (Frontline, "Interview with Andrew Young").

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Jesse Jackson - 1984 Presidential Campaign

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Jesse Jackson - 1984 Presidential Campaign

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Jesse Jackson - 1984 Presidential Campaign | Biography

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In many history books, the monumental contributions of Black women and their work are either minimized or missing. How did pivotal Black women leaders
such as Angela Davis and Audre Lorde help shape the meaning of the word revolution? Learn about their principles and the goals they worked toward to advance antiracism in America.

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Angela Davis is Beloved, Detested, Misunderstood. What Can a Lifelong Radical Reach the Resistance Generation?

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Angela Davis is Beloved, Detested, Misunderstood. What Can a Lifelong Radical Reach the Resistance Generation?

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Biography: Audre Lorde - Radical Feminist, Writer, and Civil Rights Activist 

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Biography: Audre Lorde - Radical Feminist, Writer, and Civil Rights Activist 

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Audre Lorde described herself as a "poet, warrior, feminist, mother, pioneer, lover, survivor". She devoted her life to advocating that women could be all of those things and more.

Words had an energy and power and I came to respect that power early. Pronouns, nouns, and verbs were citizens of different countries, who really got together to make a new world.

Audre was born in New York City on 18 February, 1934. The youngest of three children born to immigrant parents from the West Indies, Audre was so nearsighted that she was legally blind and had a condition known as "tongue-tie" which inhibited her speech development. That, combined with the fact that she was growing up in Harlem during the Great Depression, meant Audre had a childhood that could not have been easy. Her mother, a great lover of words, taught Audre to read and write when she was four years old. She passed her love of words on to Audre, and this love became her salvation.

I used to speak in poetry... People would say, well what do you think, Audre?... And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry.

Audre's passion for words was crystallised in poetry, and she found poems to be a useful way to express her thoughts, feelings, emotions, and experiences. However, as Audre approached her teen years, she soon found that some of the things she wanted to say couldn't be expressed by the poems she was reading. It was then that she decided to write her own. She wrote her first poem in the eighth grade, and by the time she graduated high school, she'd already had a poem published in Seventeen Magazine. Audre continued writing poetry throughout her time at Hunter College, where she received her bachelors degree, and throughout her time at Columbia University, where she received her masters in Library Science in 1961.

The year after completing her master's degree, Audre's poetry was featured in Langston Hughes' New Negro Poets. That same year, she also married Edwin Rollins, and together, they had two children before divorcing in 1970. During their marriage, Audre's poetry was published in a number of journals and anthologies. During this time Audre also worked as a librarian, and devoted much of herself to political activism. As an activist, she protested the war and participated in both the civil rights and feminist movements.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

By the end of the 1960s, Audre's career as a poet had begun to take off. In 1968, she was named a poet in residence at Tougaloo College, where she also discovered a love for teaching. That same year, her first collection of poems was published. The book was well-received, and two years later, she released her second collection, Cables to Rage. Cables to Rage was her first foray into protest poetry, and it was also the book where she came out as a lesbian. Audre wrote five other books of poetry after the publication of Cables, skilfully exploring everything from lesbian relationships to parenting, violence, racism and homophobia. Her work earned her a National Book award nomination and a reputation as a visionary.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

In addition to her prolific work as a poet, Audre also made significant contributions to feminist criticism. She did this by highlighting the fact that feminism, at the time, was looking exclusively at the white, heterosexual experience, and in doing so, was othering lesbians and women of colour and becoming an exclusionary force as a result. In order to truly be effective, she argued, feminism needed to look at, and value, the experiences of all women, not just one type of woman, and it needed to acknowledge what she dubbed the "hierarchy of oppression." This argument, beautifully depicted, among other places, in her book Sister Outsider, became a shaping influence in the development of both feminist theory and intersectionality.

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain.

Audre died on 17 November 1992, at the age of 58, following a courageous 14-year battle with breast cancer. She dealt with her illness as she did every other battle in her life-with strength, courage, and exceptional writing. She chronicled her illness in her first prose book, Cancer Journals, inspiring women everywhere in the process.

References include The Huffington Post, Biography.com, Poetry Foundation, and Modern American Poetry. ©The Heroine Collective 2015 - Present, All Rights Reserved.

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BIOGRAPHY: Audre Lorde - Radical Feminist, Writer & Civil Rights Activist - The Heroine Collective

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Audre Lorde described herself as a "poet, warrior, feminist, mother, pioneer, lover, survivor". She devoted her life to advocating that women could be all of those things and more. Words had an energy and power and I came to respect that power early. Pronouns, nouns, and verbs were citizens of different countries, who really got together ...

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(1981) Audre Lorde - "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism"

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(1981) Audre Lorde - "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism"

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Examine the life and influence of Audre Lorde, a Black feminist lesbian poet who believed that naming our full identities was an essential part of radical social change. Utilizing video from First Person: Classroom, discussion questions, and teaching tips, students will learn about intersectionality, and how to speak one's own truth.

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For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

seeking a now that can breed

like bread in our children's mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother's milk

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

this instant and this triumph

We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid

when the sun sets we are afraid

it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are full we are afraid

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

when we are loved we are afraid

when we are alone we are afraid

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

we were never meant to survive.

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A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde | Poetry Foundation

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For those of us who live at the shoreline

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Reynolds writes, “Oakland, California. Two frustrated young men started their own two-man movement. They called themselves the Black Panther Party” (p. 182).
Learn about the philosophy of the Black Panthers and the two founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. What strategies did they use to work toward Black liberation? What does the BPP reveal about the resistance that occurs when
those who are oppressed stand up to their oppressors?

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Fifty years ago, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party; photographer Stephen Shames provides an intimate look at the black nationalist group

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On October 15, 1966, Newton & Bobby Seale drafted the Ten-Point Program [or Ten-Point Party Platform]. It established the direction and goals of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

NUMBER ONE
WE WANT FREEDOM; we want the power to determine the destiny of our black community.

NUMBER TWO
WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE. That's what the brothers and sisters out on the block tell me. I say whats happening? They say, I need a job, that's what's happening. I say right on, so do I, maybe we can work together.

NUMBER THREE
WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE WHITE MAN OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY. Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right. Not everybody ripping off the black community is white, A lot of them are black. We're not anti-white, we're anti-wrong. Let's do a little revision on number three and just say that WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE CAPITALISTS OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY. Capitalists, can you put that in upper case? I'm not sure how you spell it; I think it stats with an A C.

NUMBER FOUR
WE WANT HOUSING; WE WANT SHELTER, WHICH IS FIT FOR HUMAN BEINGS. A lot of people running around town don't have a roof over their heads. The rain comes down they get all wet up. It's a simple human need, to have a roof over your head when the hard rain fall and the hard rain is definitely gonna fall just like the Bob Dylan song say.

NUMBER FIVE
Any suggestions? You want education? What kind of education do you want? An education which what? Reveals the true nature of this decadent American society? That's what I thought you said. WE WANT AN EDUCATION WHICH TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT DAY AMERICAN SOCIETY. Put a semi-colon in between the first part and the second part cause a lot of young people will be reading the ten points; we don't want to be accused of bad punctuation.

NUMBER SIX
I think we should deal with Vietnam cause thats going on and just say straight up - WE WANT ALL BLACK MEN TO BE EXEMPT FROM MILITARY SERVICE. How can you have a black man going over there to fight a yellow man for the white man who stole his land from the red man? That makes a nice rhyme but no political sense whatsoever.

NUMBER SEVEN
We dealt with Vietnam, I think we should deal with Oakland and just say - the murder of black people. STOP THE MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE. I got vamped on by some pigs on my way over here this evening. That's right, I call them pigs cause a pig is a rather lowlifeted animal. Pig had the audacity to ask me what I'm doing with my gun, I said pig what you doing with yours? You know, tonight's pig is tomorrow mornings bacon. That's why I could never be a black Muslim - I love my bacon to much.

NUMBER EIGHT
WE WANT ALL BLACK MEN IMMEDIATELY RELEASED FROM FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, CITY JAILS AND PENITENTIARIES. That's right, because their constituitional right have been violated. They have no been tried by a jury of their peers, so let them go free.

Let's elaborate on this for NUMBER NINE
AND JUST SAY THAT WHEN BLACK PEOPLE ARE BROUGHT TO TRIAL IN THIS COUNTRY WE WANT THEM TRIED IN A COURT OF LAW NOT OUT ON THE STREET BY SOME PIG BUT IN A COURT OF LAW BY A JURY OF THEIR PEERS AS SPECIFIED BY THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. It's a simple constitutional right to be tried by your peers.

NUMBER TEN
Let's do a summation; this will be the last one, ten out of ten. Now what do we want? WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING. I know you want, a black leather jacket; don't worry we gonna get you one. LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE? Always looking for justice. Went to death row looking for justice, and that's just what I found, just us. LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, AND WE WANT SOME PEACE. Yeah, I got your peace; rest in peace.

Bobby Seale delivering the 10 Point Party Platform in his speech at the Huey Newton Birthday Rally in Oakland, CA, February 17, 1968.

Copyright 2002 Luna Ray Films, LLC. All Rights Reserved

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A Huey P. Newton Story - Actions - BPP Platform | PBS

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A companion website to the feature film on the founder of the Black Panther party

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Reflections on the Black Panther Party 50 Years Later

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Reflections on the Black Panther Party 50 Years Later

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Fifty years ago this month, a small group of African-American activists in Oakland got together and decided to take a different kind of strategy in the fight for civil rights. They formed what was initially called the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense (ph), and it did look like an army of sorts. Members wore berets and black leather jackets. They carried rifles. To the communities they served, the Black Panthers were seen as vigilantes. But to law enforcement, they were a threat.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: The Oakland Police have had more than their share of racial difficulties. The Black Panthers are their sworn enemies and this latest bloodshed...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, today, asserted that the Black Panthers represent the greatest internal threat to the nation. Hoover said the Panthers have perpetrated numerous assaults on police and have engaged in violent confrontations throughout the country.

MARTIN: Bobby Seale was one of the founders of the group.

BOBBY SEALE: If you know the history and understand what our principles and our policies was, media and politicians and the counterintelligence program took everything totally out of context of what we were about.

MARTIN: Seale has tried to put his movement into context in a new book called "Power To The People: The World Of The Black Panthers." It's a compilation of photographs of the movement back in the '60s and '70s taken by Stephen Shames. The white college kid from Berkeley was given insider access to the Panthers. He and Bobby Seale formed a friendship that lasts to this day. And I got to talk with both of them recently about the legacy of the Black Panthers 50 years later.

STEPHEN SHAMES: You know, there was a movement going, a student movement against the war in Vietnam. And all the things I grew up with started to get questioned by the - you know, Martin Luther King was a hero of mine. And I just saw the courageous workers that - you know, in the civil rights movement, people were getting killed.

So when I went to Berkeley - you know, it was the year after the Free Speech Movement - I became part of the movement. I got introduced to the Panthers. So basically, I was against the war. I thought of myself as a young revolutionary, and the Panthers were really on the - at the vanguard of that movement. If you look at it, the Panthers, with their 10 points, really delineated the issues, most of which we still face today.

MARTIN: Let me just pick up on that and ask you, Bobby, the Black Panthers, as Stephen references, had this platform, this 10-point plan. And this was about specific things. The overarching mission was to be able to make legislative change, change laws to further equality. But also...

SEALE: That was my goal objective.

MARTIN: It was also about social programs, about making real change in people's day-to-day lives. What did that look like?

SEALE: The making of change - trying to make change in day-to-day lives is still connected with the political organizing - was part of a political-organizing strategy that I had. What I did is I added programs to demonstrate. The Free Breakfast for Children program was connected with a voter registration drive, the free sickle cell anemia testing program, the free preventative medical health care clinics, later on the other programs with the free ambulance program, the free pest control program, etc., etc.

So we had 50-some odd programs over the years that evolved, and we set those programs up in the community. Well, with those programs, we unite the people, and we constantly are registering people to vote. By the end of 1968, I had 5,000 members in 49 chapters and branches throughout the United States of America. And in those chapters - I would go there. I would teach these brothers and sisters the fine particulars in the methodology of grassroots community organizing centered around the programs in the community.

MARTIN: I want to ask you, Stephen, about one particular photo that's included in this book. This is one you snapped of health care workers who were working for a free clinic that the Black Panthers had set up. Can you describe this photo?

SHAMES: There's an older woman and a younger girl, and they're doing the sickle cell test where you actually prick the finger and take a blood sample. And then they would take that to the lab and see if the people had sickle cell anemia. And then they, you know, if the people did, then they would get the appropriate medicines and whatever they needed. The idea behind this was, you know, at the time, the government really wasn't spending - really dealing with sickle cell anemia, which is a disease which primarily affects African-Americans, and so it was really ignored.

And part of the reason for these programs was, number one, to highlight what the Panthers would call a contradiction. In the richest nation in the world, we can't provide - you know, kids could go to school hungry. In the richest nation in the world, people aren't getting decent medical care. So that's a contradiction. Secondly, the Panthers provided a solution.

SEALE: And the sickle cell anemia testing program took off all across the country. And as my organization grew, there was a movement in itself. And it was quiet, but it evolved over a five-year period.

SHAMES: And if I can add to what I said before about the picture, one of the things I didn't say is that this picture is taken out in the street. What was unique about the Panthers is they didn't make - you know, people had to come to the clinic to get tested. The Panthers would send workers out into neighborhoods and go door to door and talk to people in the street and test them right into - in the street. And that outreach, to me, was unique.

MARTIN: The director of the FBI at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, did target the Black Panthers. He called the group a terrorist organization. He set up a special unit within the FBI to monitor you and other members. How did the Panthers respond to that?

SEALE: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI said that the Black Panthers is the black community's Klu Klux Klan. That's what he put out. Then he puts out that the only reason the Black Panthers had guns is to go into the white community and shoot and kill white people. Now, here we are, we are in coalition with thousands of young, white, left radicals and liberals and others who support us. We protest together, etc., and he's saying that we only - we got guns just to kill white folk. And that's just a bold-faced lie. This was the targeting he did. This was the stereotyping he did, etc.

MARTIN: If I can, Bobby, the Panthers weren't a nonviolent, unarmed organization. I mean, your people were armed.

SEALE: We were nonviolent as anybody.

MARTIN: At the time, the Black Panthers stood in contrast to other civil rights groups. Martin Luther King and his pledge of nonviolence, John Lewis - that generation of civil rights leaders were taking a different tack. And I guess my question is, why did you see that as insufficient?

SHAMES: I think that what's taken out of context is that the Panthers did peaceful protests, which is what most Americans believe. If someone comes into your house and threatens your family and your children, you have a right to self-defense. That's basically what was, I think, misrepresented by the government and the media.

MARTIN: Clearly, we are living through another inflection point today, right now, in the civil rights struggle. How do you see the legacy of the Panthers shaping what's happening today?

SEALE: A new generation's, etc. - young black lives movement, I support them, etc. - are evolving. Protests, moving frameworks are cross-supporting them, etc., etc.

SHAMES: I think the Panthers have a very broad legacy. You know, just to summarize, the Panthers were about race and about racial prejudice. But they were also about economic justice. And there's a place where the two of them intersect. And the Panthers were very progressive about that. The Panthers were among the first to be really - organizations in the movement to be really progressive about women's rights and involving women and also gay rights. There's a broad legacy there.

MARTIN: Could each of you identify what you think has been the biggest mischaracterization of the Panthers over the years? I mean, what do you want people to understand about the Black Panthers with this book all these years later?

SHAMES: The biggest misconception was not seeing the Panthers as a broad-based political party that was really trying to make legislative change. So I think that's the biggest misconception, to see them as kind of a narrow group. The Panthers made coalitions with whites, with Asians, with Native Americans, with Latinos. So that's the biggest misconception.

SEALE: The gun - it's like a nemesis. And it's a nemesis because people misinterpret and don't like and didn't like - and the racist power structure didn't care - about black folks saying we have a right to defend themselves. We had peaceful protests. I remember the times - I tell people - I tell the youth today, ever since Rodney King, I says today, you don't need guns. Let's use the technology to observe the police. We went out there with law books, tape recorders and guns to defend ourselves, just in case, to observe the police. And that technology has - is paying off in terms of the ability of the people to educate people in the community about the viciousness of police brutality as one issue. But yes, ours was about constitutional, democratic civil human rights.

(SOUNDBITE OF MARVIN GAYE SONG, "FUNKY NATION")

MARTIN: That was co-founder of the Black Panther Party Bobby Seale with photographer Stephen Shames. They are the authors of "Power To The People: The World Of The Black Panthers"

(SOUNDBITE OF MARVIN GAYE SONG, "FUNKY NATION")

MARTIN: And if you're missing 2016 election coverage, don't. Coming up - NPR's Mara Liasson. We'll talk to her next.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Reflections On The Black Panther Party 50 Years Later

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Fifty years ago this month, a small group of African-American activists in Oakland got together and decided to take a different kind of strategy in the fight for civil rights. They formed what was initially called the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense (ph), and it did look like an army of sorts.

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On Feb. 17, 1942, Huey P. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana.

Newton went on to become co-founder of The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. He often visited the Panther schools and breakfast programs. Read how Newton's story is connected to the Great Migration in this post by Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party and one of the disenchanted and revolutionary sons of the Great Migration, was born February 17, 1942, to sharecroppers Walter and Armelia Newton in Monroe, Louisiana. His father, a Baptist minister, was almost lynched for talking back to a white overseer. The family fled to Oakland, California, in the mid-1940s when Huey was a toddler.

There, Newton, the youngest of seven, met with difficulty in schools ill-equipped to handle the influx of newcomers from the South. He got pulled to the streets and into juvenile crime. It was only after high school that he truly learned to read. He would ultimately attend law school and earn a Ph.D. It was at Merritt College in Oakland that he read Malcolm X and met classmate Bobby Seale. In 1966, he and Seale founded the Black Panther Party, built on the ideas of political action first posited by civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael.

Learn more about photo on this page from one of the children who wrote to tell us her story.

The Zinn Education Project offers lessons and readings on the Black Panthers, including "What We Want, What We Believe': Teaching with the Black Panthers' Ten Point Program," " What We Don't Learn About the Black Panther Party - but Should," and more below.

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Feb. 17, 1942: Huey P. Newton Born - Zinn Education Project

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On Feb. 17, 1942, Huey P. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana. Newton went on to become co-founder of The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. He often visited the Panther schools and breakfast programs. Read how Newton's story is connected to the Great Migration in this post by Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration .

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Bobby Seale was the co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense along with Huey P. Newton. After serving for three years in the US Air Force, he was court-martialed and received a bad conduct discharge. He soon entered Merritt College in Oakland, California where he met Newton. It was in October 1966 when Seale and Newton created the BPP and wrote the Ten-Point Program.

Over the course of his life, Seale was arrested multiple times, the most major charges being his involvement at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In 1969, Seale was indicted in Chicago for conspiracy to incite riots. The court refused to allow him to have his choice of lawyer. When Seale continually rose to speak out for his constitutional rights, specifically to choose his own counsel, the judge ordered him bound and gagged. He was convicted of 16 counts of contempt and sentenced to four years in prison, which was later reversed. In 1970-71 he and a codefendant were tried for the 1969 murder of a Black Panther suspected of being a police informer. The six-month-long trial ended with a hung jury.

Bobby Seale continues today speaking of his involvement with the Black Panthers and is an advocate for civil rights and social change.

October 15, 1966
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale draft the first version of the Ten-Point Program, which established the primary goals of the party.

May 2, 1967
Seale and 26 Black Panthers march on the State Capitol in Sacramento to protest the new gun bill and are arrested.

May 22, 1967
Seale attempts to bail Newton out of jail but is arrested himself under an 1887 law banning guns near jails.

February 25, 1968
Seale are arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder after a raid on their home; charges are later dropped for lack of evidence.

June 8, 1968
Seale convicted of previous charge on carrying a gun near a jail and receives 3 years probation.

August 16, 1968
Seale is in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, speaking to crowds in protest. Seale is indicted and charged with planning riots and flees the US.

March 24, 1969
Seale returns to the US to face the planning riot charges.

Name:
Bobby Seale

Born:
October 22, 1936, Dallas, Texas

Education:
Merritt College, Oakland, California

Position:
Chairman, Black Panther Party

Bobby Seale on Dealing with the Revolution, at the Huey Newton Birthday Rally in Oakland, February 17, 1968.

Copyright 2002 Luna Ray Films, LLC. All Rights Reserved

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A Huey P. Newton Story - People - Bobby Seale | PBS

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Bobby Seale was the co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense along with Huey P. Newton. After serving for three years in the US Air Force, he was court-martialed and received a bad conduct discharge. He soon entered Merritt College in Oakland, California where he met Newton.

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Reynolds calls the Voting Rights Act “the most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed by the Congress of the United States of America” (p. 177). Find out why. How does the right to vote continue to be challenged today for Black and Brown Americans?

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Reynolds writes that “Black people
owning and controlling their own neighborhoods and futures, free of white supremacy” is what antiracist Stokely Carmichael meant by Black Power (p.181). Learn about key leaders from the Black Power movement such as Malcolm X
and Stokely Carmichael. What were
their core beliefs for achieving liberation for Black Americans? How did the rally cry “Black Power” create a shift in the consciousness of Black people?

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Reynolds states, “There was a youthful energy to the movement” (p. 160) as young activists organized sit-ins in efforts to desegregate southern lunch counters and businesses. Learn about SNCC and some of these young activists such as Ella Baker and Congressman John Lewis.
What was their philosophy and what strategies and approaches did SNCC use to advance the work of social justice?

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Reynolds calls King’s “I Have a Dream” speech “the most iconic speech of all time” (p. 164). And yet, most schools provide students with only a filtered-down version of this speech that primarily focuses on the idealism found in the last few pages. Read and listen to the entire speech and annotate it to spotlight the social, economic, and political conditions for Black Americans that King addresses.
Also, note the techniques King uses in this call to action to convince his audience of the “fierce urgency of now.”

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Reynolds writes, “Just as Du Bois had done in 1903, and later regretted, in his letter King erroneously conflated two opposing groups: the antiracists
who hated racial discrimination and
the Black separatists who hated White people (in groups like the Nation of Islam). King later distanced himself from both, speaking to a growing split within
the civil rights movement” (p. 162).
Read and annotate this letter to identify the conflation Reynolds explains. Also, note the techniques King uses in this call to action to convince his audience that they must fight for equality and do
so nonviolently.

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When discussing Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) Reynolds writes, “What’s really interesting about this case, though, something rarely discussed, is that it’s actually a pretty racist idea” (p. 159).
Learn more about Brown vs. Board of Education and the racist ideas Reynolds describes. What were some of the benefits and consequences of this landmark
legislation?

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Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Jacob Lawrence were some of the influential poets, writers, musicians, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
Conduct research about the Harlem
Renaissance and some of the leaders of this social movement. Learn about how these individuals and others spoke truth to power about life in America for Black
people. In what ways were they active agents in this social movement? How did their work affirm Black people and culture as well as raise the conscious-
ness of others about race and racism?

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In Stamped, readers gain insight into the lives of flawed leaders, Black and White, throughout the history of America.
Learn about Marcus Garvey. How do Garvey and the Garvey Movement contribute to and influence the legacy of the Black radical tradition and Black nationalism?

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About the 25th Infantry Regiment, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, Reynolds writes, “These soldiers...were a point of pride for Black America. For them to be mistreated, as fighters for a country
that had been fighting them their entire lives, was a blow to the Black psyche” (p. 126–127). Listen to “Buffalo Soldier” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. How does the lyric “Fighting on arrival, fighting for
survival” connect to Reynolds’s words? Research and learn more about these soldiers. When we think of the image of an American soldier, who does that im-
age tend to reflect? How might learning about the Buffalo Soldiers in the history books of our schools matter?

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Throughout Stamped, Reynolds ex-
poses the complex and at times racist thinking of Black men such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass. He asserts that it
took Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “a young
Black antiracist woman to set these
racist men straight.” Despite the historical ways that Black
women have been marginalized and limited by the social constructions of race and gender, how did Wells-Barnett specifically and intentionally work to speak out against racial terror and racial
injustice?

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Research the origins of HBCUs and their essential role in resisting racism. In what ways have Black people built their own institutions and spaces to, as Reynolds asserts, “survive and thrive”?

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Black women have always risen. Black women have always led the resistance. Learn about the life and work of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Despite the historical ways that Black
women have been marginalized and limited by the social constructions of race and gender, how have they specifically and intentionally worked to interrupt both whiteness and patriarchy in their leadership?

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Reynolds names abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as a central figure in the conversation around race and abolitionism. Learn more about the life and work of
William Lloyd Garrison, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass and their specific ideas about liberation.
How did abolitionists and antiracists use literature, writing, and language to advance the liberation of Black people? How effective were their approaches?

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Throughout history, Black people have fought for liberation. Yet resistance is seldom taught in connection with slavery beyond the canned narratives of a few individuals.Learn about some of the important revolutions, rebellions, and resisters that are often minimized or silenced in
history books.What surprises you about the information you’ve researched and read so far?Why do you think this information is not included in most social studies/his-
tory textbooks? How might this information shape students’ thinking and understanding about racism if it were included?

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Learn about the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, including the three intellectual movements she founded: the Black Literary Tradition, the American Poetic
Tradition, and the Women’s Literary
Tradition. Read the poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America.”
In what ways are Wheatley and her
poetry a disruption of the social constructions of race and gender as well as an interruption of whiteness and patriarchy?

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Reynolds asserts that “there’s an obvious backdrop we need to discuss”regarding the history of racism in America: “The misinterpreted, misrepresented owners of this terrain—the Native Americans” whose land was “taken from them forcefully” (p. 24). Explore this online lesson created by the National Museum of the American Indian to learn about the removal of Native Americans. As you access this comprehensive les-
son to learn about several Native American nations, make note of the ways interactions with Europeans brought accelerated and often devastating changes to American Indian cultures, as well as of the resistance and resilience of Native Americans past and present.

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Reynolds explains that a Spanish ship called the San Juan Bautista, carrying enslaved Angolans, arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, in August 1619. Read about Nikole Hannah-Jones
and her acclaimed work on The 1619 Project. In what ways does the 1619 Project reframe American history to make explicit that slavery is the foundation on which
America is built?

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Reynolds writes about the planters and missionaries of early America. Although they had conflicting approaches, their goal was the same: to control, exploit, and ultimately destroy the Black body.
Read and research about racist events that demonstrate evidence of this. How do these events spotlight the ways White people and institutions work to control Black bodies?

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Tracing the Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks

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Tracing the Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks

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PROLOGUE The Woman in the Photograph
There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It's the late 1940s and she hasn't yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her - a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is "Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson."

No one knows who took that picture, but it's appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She's usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She's simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world's first immortal human cells - her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

I've spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she'd think about cells from her cervix living on forever --bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I've tried to imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she - like most of us - would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.

There's no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta's cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons - an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they'd wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.

I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988, thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to me they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and circles with words I didn't understand, like "MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of Protein Activations."

I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I'd transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking Defler's class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost.

"Do we have to memorize everything on those diagrams?" one student yelled.

Yes, Defler said, we had to memorize the diagrams, and yes, they'd be on the test, but that didn't matter right then. What he wanted us to understand was that cells are amazing things: There are about one hundred trillion of them in our bodies, each so small that several thousand could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. They make up all our tissues - muscle, bone, blood - which in turn make up our organs.

Under the microscope, a cell looks a lot like a fried egg: It has a white (the cytoplasm) that's full of water and proteins to keep it fed, and a yolk (the nucleus) that holds all the genetic information that makes you you. The cytoplasm buzzes like a New York City street. It's crammed full of molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes and sugars from one part of the cell to another, pumping water, nutrients, and oxygen in and out of the cell. All the while, little cytoplasmic factories work 24/7, cranking out sugars, fats, proteins, and energy to keep the whole thing running and feed the nucleus. The nucleus is the brains of the operation; inside every nucleus within each cell in your body, there's an identical copy of your entire genome. That genome tells cells when to grow and divide and makes sure they do their jobs, whether that's controlling your heartbeat or helping your brain understand the words on this page.

Defler paced the front of the classroom telling us how mitosis - the process of cell division - makes it possible for embryos to grow into babies, and for our bodies to create new cells for healing wounds or replenishing blood we've lost. It was beautiful, he said, like a perfectly choreographed dance.

All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for cells to start growing out of control, he told us. Just one enzyme misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could have cancer. Mitosis goes haywire, which is how it spreads.

"We learned that by studying cancer cells in culture," Defler said. He grinned and spun to face the board, where he wrote two words in enormous print: HENRIETTA LACKS.

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta's were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

"Henrietta's cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it," Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we'd probably find millions - if not billions - of Henrietta's cells in small vials on ice.

Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease; and they've been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta's cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.

"HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years," Defler said.

Then, matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, he said, "She was a black woman." He erased her name in one fast swipe and blew the chalk from his hands. Class was over.

As the other students filed out of the room, I sat thinking, That's it? That's all we get? There has to be more to the story.

I followed Defler to his office.

"Where was she from?" I asked. "Did she know how important her cells were? Did she have any children?"

"I wish I could tell you," he said, "but no one knows anything about her."

After class, I ran home and threw myself onto my bed with my biology textbook. I looked up "cell culture" in the index, and there she was, a small parenthetical:

In culture, cancer cells can go on dividing indefinitely, if they have a continual supply of nutrients, and thus are said to be "immortal." A striking example is a cell line that has been reproducing in culture since 1951. (Cells of this line are called HeLa cells because their original source was a tumor removed from a woman named Henrietta Lacks.)

That was it. I looked up HeLa in my parents' encyclopedia, then my dictionary: No Henrietta.

As I graduated from high school and worked my way through college toward a biology degree, HeLa cells were omnipresent. I heard about them in histology, neurology, pathology; I used them in experiments on how neighboring cells communicate. But after Mr. Defler, no one mentioned Henrietta.

When I got my first computer in the mid-nineties and started using the Internet, I searched for information about her, but found only confused snippets: most sites said her name was Helen Lane; some said she died in the thirties; others said the forties, fifties, or even sixties. Some said ovarian cancer killed her, others said breast or cervical cancer.

Eventually I tracked down a few magazine articles about her from the seventies. Ebony quoted Henrietta's husband saying, "All I remember is that she had this disease, and right after she died they called me in the office wanting to get my permission to take a sample of some kind. I decided not to let them." Jet said the family was angry - angry that Henrietta's cells were being sold for twenty-five dollars a vial, and angry that articles had been published about the cells without their knowledge. It said, "Pounding in the back of their heads was a gnawing feeling that science and the press had taken advantage of them."

The articles all ran photos of Henrietta's family: her oldest son sitting at his dining room table in Baltimore, looking at a genetics textbook. Her middle son in military uniform, smiling and holding a baby. But one picture stood out more than any other: in it, Henrietta's daughter, Deborah Lacks, is surrounded by family, everyone smiling, arms around each other, eyes bright and excited. Except Deborah. She stands in the foreground looking alone, almost as if someone pasted her into the photo after the fact. She's twenty-six years old and beautiful, with short brown hair and catlike eyes. But those eyes glare at the camera, hard and serious. The caption said the family had found out just a few months earlier that Henrietta's cells were still alive, yet at that point she'd been dead for twenty-five years.

All of the stories mentioned that scientists had begun doing research on Henrietta's children, but the Lackses didn't seem to know what that research was for. They said they were being tested to see if they had the cancer that killed Henrietta, but according to the reporters, scientists were studying the Lacks family to learn more about Henrietta's cells. The stories quoted her son Lawrence, who wanted to know if the immortality of his mother's cells meant that he might live forever too. But one member of the family remained voiceless: Henrietta's daughter, Deborah.

As I worked my way through graduate school studying writing, I became fixated on the idea of someday telling Henrietta's story. At one point I even called directory assistance in Baltimore looking for Henrietta's husband, David Lacks, but he wasn't listed. I had the idea that I'd write a book that was a biography of both the cells and the woman they came from - someone's daughter, wife, and mother.

I couldn't have imagined it then, but that phone call would mark the beginning of a decadelong adventure through scientific laboratories, hospitals, and mental institutions, with a cast of characters that would include Nobel laureates, grocery store clerks, convicted felons, and a professional con artist. While trying to make sense of the history of cell culture and the complicated ethical debate surrounding the use of human tissues in research, I'd be accused of conspiracy and slammed into a wall both physically and metaphorically, and I'd eventually find myself on the receiving end of something that looked a lot like an exorcism. I did eventually meet Deborah, who would turn out to be one of the strongest and most resilient women I'd ever known. We'd form a deep personal bond, and slowly, without realizing it, I'd become a character in her story, and she in mine.

Deborah and I came from very different cultures: I grew up white and agnostic in the Pacific Northwest, my roots half New York Jew and half Midwestern Protestant; Deborah was a deeply religious black Christian from the South. I tended to leave the room when religion came up in conversation because it made me uncomfortable; Deborah's family tended toward preaching, faith healings, and sometimes voodoo. She grew up in a black neighborhood that was one of the poorest and most dangerous in the country; I grew up in a safe, quiet middle-class neighborhood in a predominantly white city and went to high school with a total of two black students. I was a science journalist who referred to all things supernatural as "woo-woo stuff"; Deborah believed Henrietta's spirit lived on in her cells, controlling the life of anyone who crossed its paths. Including me.

"How else do you explain why your science teacher knew her real name when everyone else called her Helen Lane?" Deborah would say. "She was trying to get your attention." This thinking would apply to everything in my life: when I married while writing this book, it was because Henrietta wanted someone to take care of me while I worked. When I divorced, it was because she'd decided he was getting in the way of the book. When an editor who insisted I take the Lacks family out of the book was injured in a mysterious accident, Deborah said that's what happens when you piss Henrietta off.

The Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race. Ultimately, this book is the result. It's not only the story of HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks, but of Henrietta's family - particularly Deborah - and their lifelong struggle to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible.

Excerpted from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Copyright 2010 by Rebecca Skloot. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved.

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Tracing The 'Immortal' Cells Of Henrietta Lacks

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In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died after a long battle with cervical cancer. Doctors cultured her cells without permission from her family. The story of those cells and of the medical advances that came from them, is told in Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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Philadelphia Starbucks Arrests, Outrageous to Some, Are Everyday Life for Others

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Philadelphia Starbucks Arrests, Outrageous to Some, Are Everyday Life for Others

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White Yale student calls police on black coed sleeping in a dorm's common area

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Referee's Questionable Call for Wrestler to Cut Dreadlocks

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Referee's Questionable Call for Wrestler to Cut Dreadlocks

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Referee's questionable call for wrestler to cut dreadlocks

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Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine and creator of the landmark 1619 Project.

The New York Times's 1619 Project commemorates the 400th anniversary of the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States by examining slavery's modern legacy and reframing the way we understand this history and the contributions of black Americans to the nation. Nikole's lead essay, "Our Democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true," was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.

Nikole also has written extensively about school resegregation across the country and chronicled the decades-long failure of the federal government to enforce the landmark 1968 Fair Housing Act.

In 2016, Nikole Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a training and mentorship organization dedicated to increasing the ranks of investigative reporters of color.

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The New York Times's 1619 Project commemorates the 400th anniversary of the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States by examining slavery's modern legacy and reframing the way we understand this history and the contributions of black Americans to the nation.

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American slavery began 400 years ago this month. This is referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin.

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The 1619 Audio Series: Introduction and Episodes 1-5

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The 1619 Audio Series: Introduction and Episodes 1-5

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In August of 1619, a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th an…

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American Indian Removal: What Does It Mean to Remove a People?

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American Indian Removal: What Does It Mean to Remove a People?

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Dr. Mark Hirsh National Museum of the American Indian

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Native Knowledge 360°—American Indian Removal Digital Lesson

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What does it mean to remove a people? This inquiry-based lesson for grades 7–12 explores the scope and effects of American Indian removal. Native American perspectives, documents, images, and digital activities help students and teachers understand an important chapter in US history. #NK360

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MLA - Michals, Debra. "Phillis Wheatley." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2015. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra. "Phillis Wheatley." National Women's History Museum. 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/phillis-wheatley.

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Despite spending much of her life enslaved, Phillis Wheatley was the first African American woman to publish a book of poems.

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"On Being Brought from Africa to America" (Teaching Tolerance)

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"On Being Brought from Africa to America" (Teaching Tolerance)

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'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refined and join the angelic train.

1. What is Wheatley referring to when she writes of her "Pagan land"?

2. What does this poem tell the reader about Phillis Wheatley's religious identity and beliefs?

She converted to Christianity upon coming "from Africa to America." She believes she has been redeemed and that her Christian faith does not discriminate against "Negroes."

3. In what way does Wheatley use Christianity to make a statement against racism?

Speaking to people who hold racist views, she says, "Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,/ May be refined and join the angelic train." In this way, she emphasizes the Christian message of equality.

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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Phillis Wheatley- Clip from Great African American Authors Series

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Phillis Wheatley- Clip from Great African American Authors Series

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Phillis Wheatley clip from series "Great African American Authors"

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How Two Centuries of Slave Revolts Shaped American History (National Geographic)

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How Two Centuries of Slave Revolts Shaped American History (National Geographic)

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The beginning of chattel slavery in North America birthed something else: Rebellion. Enslaved people didn't just engage in passive resistance against slaveholders-they planned and participated in armed revolts. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, enslaved Africans and African Americans in British North America and the United States staged hundreds of revolts.

Fed by a longing for freedom and occasionally inspired by slave actions in other parts of the region- especially the Caribbean-slave uprisings in the United States were daring, desperate, and inevitably doomed. Along the way, the organizers and participants of the rebellions shattered stereotypes of compliant, contented slaves, and challenged the institution of slavery itself.

Revolts evolved alongside slavery. The first known slave rebellion in one of England's American colonies took place in Gloucester County, Virginia in 1663, 44 years after the first slaves arrived in the British colony. The Servants Plot, as it was known, involved white and black indentured servants who rebelled against the colony's exploitative tobacco cultivation industry. Their plot failed and at least four men were hanged.

The incident unsettled planters. At the time, the tobacco economy relied on white and black indentured servants with finite contracts and some rights under the law. The uprising convinced many to trade their reliance on indentured servants and embrace race-based slavery instead. Planters increasingly purchased and enslaved Africans who had been kidnapped and brought to America by Dutch and English slavers; unlike indentured servants, these laborers had no contracts and their bondage was passed on to their children. ( These were the first enslaved people to arrive in the American colonies in 1619.)

As more enslaved Africans arrived in American colonies, they continued to rebel. A 1712 slave rebellion in New York City killed at least nine white slave holders, while in 1739, up to 100 black people in colonial South Carolina participated in the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in British North America. The revolt resulted in some laws intended to discourage uprisings and rein in brutal slaveholders, but fomented fear of black rebellion. The colonies already had strict slave codes designed to govern the behavior of enslaved people. In response to the Stono Rebellion, laws became increasingly draconian.

Terrified of enslaved Africans, white slaveholders reduced their reliance on African-born slaves and stoked a growing trade in African American chattel. In all 14 slave states and the District of Columbia that were part of the newly born United States, laws restricted enslaved people's assembly, travel, worship, literacy and more. ( Watch divers uncover the history of slave shipwrecks.)

Many slave codes were based on similar laws in the Caribbean. Ironically, the 1791-1803 Haitian Revolution, a massive uprising in which enslaved and free black people joined together to overthrow French slaveholders on Saint-Domingue, inspired enslaved people in the United States to participate in the exact kind of resistance slave codes were designed to prevent. The uprising sowed a fear of insurrection in slaveholders, who passed the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that required every state to return runaway slaves to slaveholders, in response to the revolution.

But that law did not keep enslaved laborers from running away-or fighting back against those who sold, purchased, and exploited them. In 1811, more than 500 enslaved people armed with knives, guns, and farm tools rebelled on Louisiana's German Coast. Fueled by the success of the Haitian Revolution, the highly organized group planned to establish an independent black state. They were felled by a local militia and U.S. troops, who brutally punished the fighters. The German Coast Uprising was the largest slave revolt in United States history.

The 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, organized by an enslaved preacher in Virginia, was the bloodiest to both white and black people. During a day-long rampage, Turner and his followers killed at least 55 white people. During the aftermath, at least 30 men were executed after trials before a panel of judges who were themselves slaveowners. White people attacked, tortured, and killed at least 36 more enslaved people they suspected of rebellion. Martial law was eventually declared and the uprising stoked even more fear and mistrust between white slaveholders and black people in bondage. ( Historians are still making new discoveries about the enslaved preacher and his rebels.)

As abolitionists challenged the institution of slavery from the North, enslaved people kept resisting in the South. In 1859, John Brown planned to arm up to 500 enslaved people after an attack on the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia. Brown's plan did not succeed and he was executed along with several co-conspirators. Nonetheless, the revolt has been called "a dress rehearsal for the Civil War," and increasing tensions over slavery tipped the nation into chaos less than two years later.

"The revolts were all doomed from the start," writes historian Joseph E. Holloway, "and yet slaves still revolted against insurmountable odds in the fight for their personal freedom and liberty." Slave rebellions in British North America and the United States were all unsuccessful, but they underscored the cruelty of the institution-and fueled a sense of unease among those whose fortunes depended on the forced labor of others.

Significant slave rebellions in British North America and the United States include:

1663: Servants Plot, Gloucester County, Virginia (four or more executed)

1739: Stono Rebellion, Stono, South Carolina (44 executed)

1741: New York City Conspiracy (over 100 executed or otherwise punished)

1811: German Coast Uprising (at least 84 killed in battle or executed)

1831: Nat Turner's Revolt (30 executed)

1859: Harper's Ferry Raid (five executed)

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How two centuries of slave revolts shaped American history

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The beginning of chattel slavery in North America birthed something else: Rebellion. Enslaved people didn't just engage in passive resistance against slaveholders-they planned and participated in armed revolts. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, enslaved Africans and African Americans in British North America and the United States staged hundreds of revolts.

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Forging Freedom: The Story of Gabriel's Rebellion

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Forging Freedom: The Story of Gabriel's Rebellion

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15-Minute History: Episode 11: The Haitian Revolution

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Read Transcript...
What is the Significance of the Haitian Revolution?
The Haitian Revolution, which took place between 1791-1804, is significant because Haiti is the only country where slave freedom was taken by force. It was the only successful slave revolt in modern times. In addition, Haiti was the first country in Latin America to gain independence, second only to the United States in the Americas as a whole. It's important to discuss Haiti because of its significance within the narrative of the political revolutions of the 18th century.
Where does this story begin?
In 1492, Christopher Columbus "discovered" the island of Hispaniola. The island was known at the time by the Taíno Indians as Hay-ti, which meant "mountainous place." In the 1500s, the Spaniards began to settle the eastern part of the island, where they began sugar production in 1516. They introduced slavery at about the same time; the first slave revolt in the New World happened on the island in 1522, which seems to foreshadow what would happen a few centuries later.

In the 1660s, the French began to settle in the west part of the island, and they established a colony. After a few decades of fighting, in 1697 the Spanish ceded the western part of the island to the French, who named their colony Saint-Domingue. For purposes of simplicity, we're going to refer to the colony as "Haiti" here.
Once the French got control of Haiti [St-Domingue], what was life like in the colony?
In the early years, the population was primarily comprised of a few white planters, engagés -these were indentured servants who would work for seven years and then earn their freedom-and a small community of slaves. All of these groups were near equal in number, working together. The economy was based on small multi-crop ventures. They grew cotton, tobacco, indigo, a few subsistence crops, but they were small farms with very few slaves, and everyone working side by side.

Then sugar was introduced. 100 plantations were established between 1700 and 1704. Sugar is a labor-intensive crop, which requires more slaves. It's also highly profitable, so more and more plantations were established, and more and more slaves were imported. Soon, large-scale crop production would dominate the landscape, and the only people you would see working the farms were the slaves.
What was life like for the slaves?
Haiti rapidly transformed from a society comprised of small farms with everyone working side by side to one in which each plantation essentially formed its own industry. There were far more Africans than Europeans, so they would separate out the slaves. Slave quarters were built on the lowest part of the property where there was no wind or ventilation, and there was excessive heat and it was very crowded. All of the slaves worked the land, men and women alike. Only the less robust-the newly arrived Africans, women in their seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, or nursing infants, and children-got the "lighter jobs." Everyone else was working the land from five a.m. until well after dark, with working hours even longer during harvest times.

The French were particularly cruel to their slaves. King Louis issued the Code Noir in 1685 to regulate slavery and punishment, but it was never really followed in the colony. It had little influence over life there. They didn't ration food like they were supposed to. The Code Noir required 2 1/2 pounds of manioc and either two pounds of salt beef or three pounds of fish every week, but generally most slaves only got a few potatoes and a little bit of water every day. In addition, the French employed cruel punishment techniques. If someone misbehaved-ran away and got caught-they were usually put to death in a fairly extreme fashion. The average life span of a slave in Haiti was 7 years. Essentially, the owners were OK with working their slaves to death, or punishing them with death, and buying more slaves.
Given that, what was the social and economic landscape of Haiti in the years leading up to the revolution?
In the colony, there were various groups vying for power and influence. The most powerful group was the grand blancs, or the "Big Whites." These were the plantation owners and the elite. Then there were the petit blancs, or the "Little Whites." These were tradespeople: shopkeepers, merchants, overseers, the former indentured servants who had gotten their freedom and now worked in smaller aspects of the economy. There was a growing population of affranchis, which were freed blacks or freed slaves, and then what were called gens de couleur, or people of color.

The gens de couleur are interesting: they were the products of white plantation owner fathers and slave mothers. What's interesting is that they had their freedom, and they were recognized by their fathers, which we don't frequently see in other parts of the new world, and sent by their fathers to be educated in France. Then they would come back to Haiti and own plantations and slaves of their own. The gens de couleur looked like the grand blancs, they dressed like them, and for the most part they lived like them, but there were still restrictions on the work they could do, and even on the way that they could dress.The gens de couleur had a pretty good life, but they still wanted the rights and privileges of their planter parents.

In addition to all of these groups, there were the slaves, who were by far the majority of the population. Blacks outnumbered whites fifteen times over. In 1789, there was a population of 40,000 whites and 500,000 slaves. Nearly two thirds of those slaves were African born. They still practiced traditions and religions that they brought with them from Africa, and that influenced the revolution as well.
This seems like an incredibly volatile situation to begin with. What was the spark that finally lit the fire?
It seems to have been a rather slow burning spark between 1789 and 1791. In 1789 the French Revolution began with a cry for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Everyone in the colony was paying attention to what was going on in France. Also, on the French side, none of the colonies were making as much money as Haiti, so they were trying to maintain control even while there was a lot of turmoil in France. There was a lot of tension between the grand blancs and the petit blancs who were vying for power and control in the colony. And then, with the beginning of the revolution, the grand blancs started seeking local autonomy. They wanted to get out of the exclusive trade agreement that they had with France and sell their sugar to the highest bidder.

The gens de couleur were seeing their chance for citizenship and equality because they couldn't practice certain professions and had to be separate in public spaces, and they also couldn't marry whites. They were hoping to have those freedoms. The petit blancs were eager to protect their position in the color-based class system. And all of these groups were against the slaves.

Also in 1789, there was a major drought in Haiti and a food shortage. In this kind of situation, the last priority for food distribution is the slaves, and as a result, there was a large population of slaves that was not well-fed and mistreated. In addition, in early 1791, some of the gens de couleur tried to use force to get their citizenship and equality of rights. Two representatives went to France to try to demand these rights, and when they came back to Haiti, they were beaten to death in the town square. This was a special, public punishment dealt out because the whites in Haiti didn't want to extend full rights to the gens de couleur. So this further inflamed things.

Finally, in August 1791, the slaves organized. They held a voodoo ceremony where they called for their liberty. From that ceremony, they set out and attacked plantations, burn them down, and kill all of the white planters they came across. For months, they just went across the island burning the plantations and infrastructure.
Haiti was France's wealthiest colony, as you mentioned, so, presumably the government in France did not react well to this uprising.
No, they did not. The unrest in Haiti moved France to send various agents there to try to quell the uprising. There's a wonderful quote from a French colonist in 1792 that summarizes the French attitude:

There can be no agriculture in Saint-Domingue without slavery. We did not go to fetch half a million savage slaves from off the coast of Africa to bring them to the colony as French citizens.

France was not going to let this happen. They temporarily abolished slavery in parts of Haiti to deal with their own problems because they were being attacked by the British and the Spanish, who wanted into the colony as well. So, they abolished slavery for a little while so that the former slaves would fight the British and Spanish on their behalf, however they had no intention of allowing the slaves to be free.
As you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the Haitian revolution is considered the only successful slave revolt in modern times, so we know that the slaves were able to gain the upper hand. How were they able to successfully fight off one of the world's strongest military powers?
When the uprising started, it was basically guerilla warfare. They weren't very organized, and they weren't very well equipped. Within the first couple of years, Toussaint L'Ouverture arose as a leader. He was a former slave; he had been a coachman for the manager of a plantation. By the time the revolution erupted in 1791 he'd been a free man for over a decade, meaning he was able to circulate around the island and get a sense of what was going on more broadly. In 1793, he arrived on the scene, taking a leadership position. He sent a letter to slaves all over the island introducing himself. In the letter, he emphasized that he was fighting for liberty, equality, and fraternity-picking up these concepts directly from the French revolution.

He was able to start organizing armies of former slaves and defeat the Spanish and British forces that had invaded Haiti. By 1801, he'd actually conquered Santo Domingo, which was the Spanish part of the island and had made serious inroads into the French part of the island. By this point, his armies had made great strides.

Finally, in 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte decided that the rebellion in Haiti-now having dragged on for a decade-needed to be put down once and for all. His theory was that if French forces were able to capture Toussaint L'Ouverture everything else would fall apart afterward. I find this to be a really interesting perspective given the number of slaves that were rebelling at this point, that Napoleon thought that taking out one man would end the revolution. And it did not. He sent a general, who tricked Toussaint L'Ouverture, arrested him, and shipped him off to France where he eventually died in prison, but the revolution did not end. It struggled a little bit, but Napoleon's plan ultimately failed.

In 1803, Napoleon stated:

Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!

In November 1803 slaves managed to defeat the greatest European military power. On January 1, 1804, Haiti declared its independence, and in the proclamation, they used the expression "Live free or die," which they had taken from the American revolution.

In terms of looking at the revolution as a whole, we should consider the case of Haiti because it is important in the broader context of the American and French revolutions. They were very important predecessors to the Haitian revolution, and they were heavy influences on Haiti's freedom fighters.

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Read Transcript... What is the Significance of the Haitian Revolution? The Haitian Revolution, which took place between 1791-1804, is significant because Haiti is the only country where slave freedom was taken by force. It was the only successful slave revolt in modern times.

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When Enslaved People Commandeered a Ship and Hightailed It to Freedom in the Bahamas (Smithsonian magazine)

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On this day in 1841, a shipboard rebellion led to 128 enslaved people gaining their freedom in the Bahamas.

The Creole case made headlines in its own time, but despite being the most successful revolt of enslaved people in U.S. history, it's less well known today.

The Creole was transporting 135 enslaved people from Richmond, Virginia to the slave markets in New Orleans. On November 7, 1841, 18 of the slaves attacked the crew, killing one of the slave traders aboard and wounding the ship's captain, Robert Ensor. "With great coolness and presence of mind" they gathered up all the ship's weapons and the documents related to their enslavement, writes Michael Paul Williams for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. After some debate about where they should now go on the ship, writes BlackPast.org, they settled on the British colony of the Bahamas, forcing one of the crew members to navigate for them.

After landing in the Bahamas, because slavery was illegal in the British colonies, the Bahamians considered the majority of the enslaved people on the ship free. However, the remaining people who had been involved in overtaking the ship were held and charged with mutiny-at the request of the American consulate.

Among those people was Madison Washington, an enslaved cook who had previously escaped to Canada, writes BlackPast.org. He "was later captured and sold when he returned to Virginia in search of his wife Susan." The website writes:

The British took Washington and eighteen conspirators into custody under charges of mutiny, while the rest of the enslaved were allowed to live as free people. Five people, which included three women, a girl, and a boy, decided to stay aboard the Creole and sailed with the ship to New Orleans, returning to slavery. On April 16, 1842, the Admiralty Court in Nassau ordered the surviving seventeen mutineers to be released and free including Washington.

Then-Secretary of State Daniel Webster was furious, writes Williams: he "demanded the insurrectionists' return for 'mutiny and murder.'" But there wasn't much he could do. Britain had outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1833, writes scholar Walter Johnson, and the U.S. and Britain didn't have a treaty explaning if or how they would respect each other's laws. So the people went free.

"The exploit of the slaves under the intrepid Madison Washington is a guarantee of what can be done by colored Americans in a just cause," one 1850 account said, according to Williams, "and foreshadows that a brighter day for slaves is at hand."

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When Enslaved People Commandeered a Ship and Hightailed it to Freedom in the Bahamas

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It's been called the most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history

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The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
Special | 2m 59s

Learn about the Nat Turner Rebellion, and how it affected Southern slaveholders. This video is an excerpt from Episode Two, The Age of Slavery, from the series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Aired: 10/29/13

Rating: NR

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The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross | Classroom | Nat Turner Rebellion

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The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross Special | 2m 59s Learn about the Nat Turner Rebellion, and how it affected Southern slaveholders. This video is an excerpt from Episode Two, The Age of Slavery, from the series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, the week before Gabriel was hanged. While still a young child, Nat was overheard describing events that had happened before he was born. This, along with his keen intelligence, and other signs marked him in the eyes of his people as a prophet "intended for some great purpose." A deeply religious man, he "therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped [him]self in mystery, devoting [his] time to fasting and praying."

In 1821, Turner ran away from his overseer, returning after thirty days because of a vision in which the Spirit had told him to "return to the service of my earthly master." The next year, following the death of his master, Samuel Turner, Nat was sold to Thomas Moore. Three years later, Nat Turner had another vision. He saw lights in the sky and prayed to find out what they meant. Then "... while laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn, as though it were dew from heaven, and I communicated it to many, both white and black, in the neighborhood; and then I found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens."

On May 12, 1828, Turner had his third vision: "I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first... And by signs in the heavens that it would make known to me when I should commence the great work, and until the first sign appeared I should conceal it from the knowledge of men; and on the appearance of the sign... I should arise and prepare myself and slay my enemies with their own weapons."

At the beginning of the year 1830, Turner was moved to the home of Joseph Travis, the new husband of Thomas Moore's widow. His official owner was Putnum Moore, still a young child. Turner described Travis as a kind master, against whom he had no complaints.

Then, in February, 1831, there was an eclipse of the sun. Turner took this to be the sign he had been promised and confided his plan to the four men he trusted the most, Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam. They decided to hold the insurrection on the 4th of July and began planning a strategy. However, they had to postpone action because Turner became ill.

On August 13, there was an atmospheric disturbance in which the sun appeared bluish-green. This was the final sign, and a week later, on August 21, Turner and six of his men met in the woods to eat a dinner and make their plans. At 2:00 that morning, they set out to the Travis household, where they killed the entire family as they lay sleeping. They continued on, from house to house, killing all of the white people they encountered. Turner's force eventually consisted of more than 40 slaves, most on horseback.

By about mid-day on August 22, Turner decided to march toward Jerusalem, the closest town. By then word of the rebellion had gotten out to the whites; confronted by a group of militia, the rebels scattered, and Turner's force became disorganized. After spending the night near some slave cabins, Turner and his men attempted to attack another house, but were repulsed. Several of the rebels were captured. The remaining force then met the state and federal troops in final skirmish, in which one slave was killed and many escaped, including Turner. In the end, the rebels had stabbed, shot and clubbed at least 55 white people to death.

Nat Turner hid in several different places near the Travis farm, but on October 30 was discovered and captured. His "Confession," dictated to physician Thomas R. Gray, was taken while he was imprisoned in the County Jail. On November 5, Nat Turner was tried in the Southampton County Court and sentenced to execution. He was hanged, and then skinned, on November 11.

In total, the state executed 55 people, banished many more, and acquitted a few. The state reimbursed the slaveholders for their slaves. But in the hysterical climate that followed the rebellion, close to 200 black people, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were murdered by white mobs. In addition, slaves as far away as North Carolina were accused of having a connection with the insurrection, and were subsequently tried and executed.

The state legislature of Virginia considered abolishing slavery, but in a close vote decided to retain slavery and to support a repressive policy against black people, slave and free.

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Africans in America/Part 3/Nat Turner's Rebellion

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Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, the week before Gabriel was hanged. While still a young child, Nat was overheard describing events that had happened before he was born. This, along with his keen intelligence, and other signs marked him in the eyes of his people as a prophet "intended for some great purpose."

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Garrison Publishes the Liberator

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American Experience
Clip: Season 25 Episode 12 | 2m 21s

William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of "The Liberator" on January 1, 1831 with financial support from both black and white abolitionists. "There shall be no neutrals," he declared. "Men shall either like or dislike me."

Aired: 01/08/13

Rating: NR

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American Experience | Garrison Publishes "The Liberator" | Season 25 | Episode 12

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American Experience Clip: Season 25 Episode 12 | 2m 21s William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of "The Liberator" on January 1, 1831 with financial support from both black and white abolitionists. "There shall be no neutrals," he declared. "Men shall either like or dislike me."

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William Lloyd Garrison and the Liberator

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Anti-abolitionist handbills sometimes led to violent clashes between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions.

Every movement needs a voice.

For the entire generation of people that grew up in the years that led to the Civil War, William Lloyd Garrison was the voice of Abolitionism. Originally a supporter of colonization, Garrison changed his position and became the leader of the emerging anti-slavery movement. His publication, The Liberator, reached thousands of individuals worldwide. His ceaseless, uncompromising position on the moral outrage that was slavery made him loved and hated by many Americans.

Although The Liberator was Garrison's most prominent abolitionist activity, he had been involved in the fight to end slavery for years prior to its publication.

In 1831, Garrison published the first edition of The Liberator. His words, "I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - AND I WILL BE HEARD," clarified the position of the new Abolitionists. Garrison was not interested in compromise. He founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society the following year. In 1833, he met with delegates from around the nation to form the American Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison saw his cause as worldwide. With the aid of his supporters, he traveled overseas to garner support from Europeans. He was, indeed, a global crusader. But Garrison needed a lot of help. The Liberator would not have been successful had it not been for the free blacks who subscribed. Approximately seventy-five percent of the readers were free African-Americans.

The Liberator wasn't the only abolitionist manifesto during the 1800s. Pamphlets like this one were disseminated widely throughout the North, although many were banned in the South.

Garrison saw moral persuasion as the only means to end slavery. To him the task was simple: show people how immoral slavery was and they would join in the campaign to end it. He disdained politics, for he saw the political world as an arena of compromise. A group split from Garrison in the 1840s to run candidates for president on the Liberty Party ticket. Garrison was not dismayed. Once in Boston, he was dragged through the streets and nearly killed. A bounty of $4000 was placed on his head. In 1854, he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution because it permitted slavery. He called for the north to secede from the Union to sever the ties with the slaveholding south.

William Lloyd Garrison lived long enough to see the Union come apart under the weight of slavery. He survived to see Abraham Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. Thirty-four years after first publishing The Liberator, Garrison saw the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution go into effect, banning slavery forever. It took a lifetime of work. But in the end, the morality of his position held sway.

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william lloyd garrison and the liberator

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William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator [ushistory.org]

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Anti-abolitionist handbills sometimes led to violent clashes between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions. Every movement needs a voice. For the entire generation of people that grew up in the years that led to the Civil War, William Lloyd Garrison was the voice of Abolitionism.

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The David Walker Memorial Project

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This site has detailed information about David Walker and his work. You can read about his life, his famous anti-slavery pamphlet, Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, and his influence on the abolitionist movement. You can also learn what life was like for Black people in Boston, Massachusetts where Walker spent his most influential years.

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David Walker's "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World"

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David Walker's "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World"

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Frederick Douglass: Orator, Abolitionist, Editor, and Statesman

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"The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" (speech read by actor Danny Glover)

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"The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," a speech given by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852, is read by Danny Glover.

In this famous speech, Douglass says:

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour." Read full speech here.

Excerpt from Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's book Voices of a People's History of the United States. Reading by Glover on October 5, 2005 at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center George and Sakaye Aratani Japan America Theatre, Los Angeles, California.

Also see a reading by James Earl Jones, introduced by Howard Zinn, in a segment on Democracy Now!

More video clips can be found at the Voices of a People's History website and in the film The People Speak.

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Frederick Douglass: "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" - Zinn Education Project

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"The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," a speech given by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852, is read by Danny Glover. In this famous speech, Douglass says: "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?

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Harriet Tubman's Road to Freedom

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Explore - Harriet Tubman (PBS)

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1. Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross. She would later adopt the name "Harriet" after her mother: Harriet Ross. The surname Tubman comes from her first husband, John Tubman, who she married in 1844.

2. Harriet was born a slave and raised on Maryland's Eastern Shore where the lines between slavery and freedom were often blurred. It was not unusual for families in this area to include both free and enslaved members. Harriet's own husband, John Tubman was a free black man. Her status, however, remained unchanged until she fled to Pennsylvania - a free state - in 1849. Her husband did not make the journey and ultimately re-married after Harriet's departure.

3. Harriet would return to Maryland many times over the next decade to rescue both family and non-famly members from the bondages of slavery.

4. Harriet earned the nickname "Moses" after the prophet Moses in the Bible who led his people to freedom. In all of her journeys she "never lost a single passenger."

5. Tubman's work was a constant threat to her own freedom and safety. Slave holders placed a bounty for her capture and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was an ever-present danger, imposing severe punishments on any person who assisted the escape of a slave.

6. Harriet wore many hats: She was an active proponent of women's suffrage and worked alongside women such as side Susan B. Anthony. During the civil war, Harriet also worked for the Union Army as a cook, a nurse and even a spy.

7. Harriet was acquainted with leading abolitionists of the day, including John Brown who conferred with "General Tubman" about his plans to raid Harpers Ferry.

8. Harriet had one daughter, Gertie, whom she and her second husband (Nelson Davis) adopted after the Civil war.

9. Harriet suffered life-long headaches, seizures and had vivid dreams as a result of a traumatic head injury she suffered as a teenager while trying to stand up for a fellow field hand. These same symptoms gave her powerful visions that she ascribed to God and helped guide her on many trips to the North while leading others to freedom.

10. Just before Harriet's death in 1913 she told friends and family, "I go to prepare a place for you." She was buried with military honors in Fort Hill Cemetery in New York.

BONUS FACT: In 2016, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that the countenance of Harriet Tubman will appear on a new $20 bill.

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10 Interesting Facts about Harriet Tubman | PBS

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The Underground Railroad was a lifeline for slaves escaping to freedom, and Harriet Tubman was undoubtedly one of its most famous "conductors." Over one hundred years since her passing (March 10, 1913), we invite you to revisit the life and legacy of Harriet Tubman.

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The Sojourner Truth Project

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Why is there more than one version of Sojourner Truth's famous 1851, "Ain't I a Woman" speech?

Most people are familiar with the 1863 popular version of Sojourner Truth's famous, "Ain't I a woman" speech but they have no idea that this popular version, while based off of Sojourner's original 1851 speech, is not Sojourner's speech and is vastly different from Sojourner's original 1851 speech. I must acknowledge Nell Irvin Painter, a professor at Princeton University, specializing in American history and notable for her works on southern history of the nineteenth century. Professor Painter was the scholar who first rang the bell on this historical mistake. This site would not be possible with out relying on her brilliant work.

The popular but inaccurate version was written and published in 1863, (12 years after Sojourner gave the "Ain't I a woman" speech), by a white abolitionist named Frances Dana Barker Gage. Curiously, Gage not only changed all of Sojourner's words but chose to represent Sojourner speaking in a stereotypical 'southern black slave accent', rather than in Sojourner's distinct upper New York State low-Dutch accent. Frances Gage's actions were well intended and served the suffrage and women's rights movement at the time; however, by today's standards of ethical journalism, her actions were a gross misrepresentation of Sojourner Truth's words and identity. By changing Truth's words and her dialect to that of a stereotypical southern slave, Frances Gage effectively erased Sojourner's Dutch heritage and her authentic voice. As well as unintentionally adding to the oversimplification of the American slave culture and furthering the eradication of our nations Northern slave history. Frances Gage admitted that her amended version had "given but a faint sketch" of Sojourner's original speech but she felt justified and believed her version stronger and more palatable to the American public then Sojourner's original version.

The most authentic version of Sojourner Truth's, "Ain't I a woman," speech was first published in 1851 by Truth's good friend Rev. Marius Robinson in the Anti-Slavery Bugle and was titled, " On Woman's Rights ". This website is dedicated to re-introducing this original transcription of the speech and Sojourner's authentic voice.

Why it's important to hear both speeches?

The question of why there is more than one version of Sojourner's speech is a fascinating story. It is also one that underlies our nation's multiple perspectives; connecting the issues of gender and race addressed in the speech to contemporary social issues and the politics of language.

For many reasons Gage's "faint sketch of the truth" version of the speech persists as Truth's "truth" while the more authentic version, by Marius Robinson, is largely unknown. I believe Marius Robinson's transcription of Sojourner Truth's speech should be heard along side of Frances Gage's version. If you are going to teach one version you must also present the other. They both have a place in American history.

The purpose of this website is:

(1) to provide a platform for the original 1851 Marius Robinson transcription of Sojourner Truth's "On Woman's Rights" speech".

(2) to rectify this historical oversight and to dispel the many misconceptions due to Francis Gage's inaccurate portrayal of Sojourner.

(3) to offer a more truthful picture of Sojourner's words, her accent, her heritage and her distinct voice.

How can we honor Sojourner Truth's heritage?

In an 1851 issue of the Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph, an article states that Truth prided herself on "fairly correct English, which is in all senses a foreign tongue to her. . .. People who report her often exaggerate her expressions, putting in to her mouth the most marked southern dialect, which Sojourner feels is rather taking an unfair advantage of her". (qtd. in Fitch and Mandziuk 1997: 129)

In 1851the technology to record sound had not yet been invented and speeches were transcribed by reporters who did their best to record accurately. Thus, we will never know exactly what Sojourner said on that day in 1851 or exactly what her dialect sounded like, but the videos on this site help us move in the direction of truth. Truth, unable to read or write, could not offer her own rhetoric in the written form. Her words (as we read them today) are not her words, but a representation of her words by people who transcribed them.

It is important to note Sojourner's specific Dutch dialect is officially lost and is not rediscovered. Because of this, I have chosen to represent the speech in many different contemporary Afro-Dutch dialects. These women and their readings do not claim to embody Sojourner in any way, in fact, none of them may be correct, but all of them are a nod to Sojourner's authentic voice and her heritage. The intent of these videos is to counter the hundreds of popular but inaccurate Gage versions of Sojourner's speech on the internet that portray Sojourner with a southern slave dialect. Gage's version effectively erases Sojourner's identity and heritage, adding to the oversimplification of American slave culture and furthers the eradication of our nations Northern slave history.

Why we should care?

I hope these speeches will become a reference point for people researching Sojourner Truth; and, that they will offer a more historically correct and dignified perspective that will pay long overdue respect to the author of these profound words.

How can we honor Sojourner Truth's legacy?

Sojourner's story is the ultimate American story and deserves a more in-depth exploration than this site offers. The more we examine her life with all its complexities, the more we understand our nation's history. Sojourner Truth exists today in many forms; as a person, as a symbol and as a myth. The preference for the Gage version of Truth's speech speaks to our nations need for symbolism and mythology in our historical narrative. However, to only see Sojourner through this lense is an oversimplification of her identity and minimizes her real life struggles and hard won human accomplishments. It is important to see her as a real person who, despite starting life enslaved, rose-up and fought tirelessly with incredible conviction, faith and courage for human rights and personal freedoms.

Throughout her adult life, she worked against a society that thought of her as less than human. Sojourner's struggle to establish her identity is reflected in the efforts by others to control her. And she is still struggling. Her struggle to define herself as a person, a woman, a woman of color, and a citizen did not end with her speech in Akron. At a time when we are fighting for the principles of liberty and justice around the world it is fitting that we honor the memory of one who fought her whole life for the realization of personal freedoms and human rights. Sojourner Truth's bold assertion of her own identity, "I am a woman's rights," serves as a timely reminder that the fight for equality has always been, and will continue to be, a constant challenge and an ongoing rhetorical and physical process within our democratic society.

Professor Nell Irvin Painter

Professor Nell Irvin Painter brilliantly explored the varied and numerous implications of this incident and how it can help to inform us about ourselves and our nations complexities. Knowledge of Painter's work mainly exists in academia. Noting the absence of anything online regarding Sojourner's original 1851 speech, I was inspired by Professor Painter's work to create a user friendly site for children and adults to quickly access and investigate this historical incident as well as introduce concepts of the deeper implications that Painter uncovered. This site is built upon Professor Nell Irvin Painter's work which I have cited on the reference page. I hope this site inspires you to investigate further into her brilliant work as I can not do it justice.

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Most people are familiar with the 1863 popular version of Sojourner Truth's famous, "Ain't I a woman" speech but they have no idea that this popular version, while based off of Sojourner's original 1851 speech, is not Sojourner's speech and is vastly different from Sojourner's original 1851 speech.

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Sojourner Truth (PBS)

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She Inspires
Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) was born into slavery in Ulster County, New York around 1797. After escaping slavery, Truth went to court and fought to get back her son who was illegally sold to an owner in Alabama. She became the first black woman to go to court against a white man and win the case. Sojourner is remembered today as one of the nations first feminists & foremost abolitionists.

Aired: 01/10/19

Rating: NR

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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She Inspires | Sojourner Truth | Season 2018

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She Inspires Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) was born into slavery in Ulster County, New York around 1797. After escaping slavery, Truth went to court and fought to get back her son who was illegally sold to an owner in Alabama. She became the first black woman to go to court against a white man and win the case.

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Sojourner Truth: Abolistionist and Women's Rights Activist

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Sojourner Truth | Abolitionist and Women's Rights Activist Video | PBS LearningMedia

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An abolitionist and feminist during the nineteenth century, Sojourner Truth demanded not less discrimination, but no discrimination. Truth escaped enslavement and, despite being unable to read or write, rose to be a leader in the fight for equality and fair treatment for both women and African Americans.

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Historically black colleges and universities--commonly called "HBCUs"--are defined by the Higher Education Act of 1965 as, "...any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans, and that is accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association determined by the Secretary [of Education]..."

History

1. The first colleges for African Americans were established largely through the efforts of black churches with the support of the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen's Bureau. The second Morrill Act of 1890 required states-especially former confederate states-to provide land-grants for institutions for black students if admission was not allowed elsewhere. As a result, many Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were founded.

2. Between 1861 and 1900 more than 90 institutions of higher learning were established. Shaw University--founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1865--was the first black college organized after the Civil War. Other schools include: Talladega College, Howard University, Morehouse College and Hampton University.

Scholarship

3. Early HBCUs were established to train teachers, preachers and other community members. During the 20th century, many HBCUs shifted their focus to promote scholarship among African Americans. Academic councils, conferences and founded scholastic journals to showcase black intellectual thought. Such notable figures as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. attended a historically black college or university.

Culture

4. HBCUs opened the door of educational opportunity for many African Americans who were once legally denied an education. Additionally, these schools, provided African American students with a nurturing environment to explore their collective identities and cultures.

5. Today, HBCUs uphold a history of scholarship pursued by African Americans in the face of adversity.

Related Stories

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Historically black colleges and universities--commonly called "HBCUs"--are defined by the Higher Education Act of 1965 as, "...any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans, and that is accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association determined by the Secretary [of Education]..."

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New PBS Documentary Explores Evolution of Black Colleges and Universities of America

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New PBS Documentary Explores Evolution of Black Colleges and Universities of America

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New PBS documentary explores evolution of black colleges & universities in America

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Though much of its history was eclipsed by the explosiveness of the 1960s, the essential role the nation's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) played in shaping black life, creating a black middle class and dismantling segregation cannot be overstated.

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S19 E11: Tell Them We Are Rising | Independent Lens

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Though much of its history was eclipsed by the explosiveness of the 1960s, the essential role the nation's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) played in shaping black life, creating a black middle class and dismantling segregation cannot be overstated.

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Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a prominent journalist, activist, and researcher, in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. In her lifetime, she battled sexism, racism, and violence. As a skilled writer, Wells-Barnett also used her skills as a journalist to shed light on the conditions of African Americans throughout the South.

Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16 th, 1862. She was born into slavery during the Civil War. Once the war ended Wells-Barnett's parents became politically active in Reconstruction Era politics. Her parents instilled into her the importance of education. Wells-Barnett enrolled at Rust College but was expelled when she started a dispute with the university president. In 1878, Wells-Barnett went to visit her grandmother. While she was there Wells-Barnett was informed that a yellow fever epidemic had hit her hometown. The disease took both of Wells-Barnett's parents and her infant brother. Left to raise her brothers and sister, she took a job as a teacher so that she could keep the family together. Eventually, Wells-Barnett moved her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee. There she continued to work as an educator.

In 1884, Wells-Barnett filed a lawsuit against a train car company in Memphis for unfair treatment. She had been thrown off a first-class train, despite having a ticket. Although she won the case on the local level, the ruling was eventually overturned in federal court. After the lynching of one of her friends, Wells-Barnett turned her attention to white mob violence. She became skeptical about the reasons black men were lynched and set out to investigate several cases. She published her findings in a pamphlet and wrote several columns in local newspapers. Her expose about an 1892 lynching enraged locals, who burned her press and drove her from Memphis. After a few months, the threats became so bad she was forced to move to Chicago, Illinois.

In 1893, Wells-Barnett, joined other African American leaders in calling for the boycott of the World's Columbian Exposition. The boycotters accused the exposition committee of locking out African Americans and negatively portraying the black community. In 1895, Wells-Barnett married famed African American lawyer Ferdinand Barnett. Together, the couple had four children. Throughout her career Wells-Barnett, balanced motherhood with her activism.

Wells-Barnett traveled internationally, shedding light on lynching to foreign audiences. Abroad, she openly confronted white women in the suffrage movement who ignored lynching. Because of her stance, she was often ridiculed and ostracized by women's suffrage organizations in the United States. Nevertheless, Wells-Barnett remained active the women's rights movement. She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women's Club which was created to address issues dealing with civil rights and women's suffrage. Although she was in Niagara Falls for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), her name is not mentioned as an official founder. Late in her career Wells-Barnett focused on urban reform in the growing city of Chicago. She died on March 25 th, 1931.

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Pioneering journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett battled sexism, racism, and violence, particularly working to shed light on the conditions of African Americans throughout the South. Read her story on womenshistory.org.

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The Citizenship Project
Ida B. Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She came of age during Reconstruction, was educated and became a school teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. While teaching, Wells began writing under a pen name for literary and religious publications. By age 27, she made headlines herself -- suing a railroad company for discriminatory seating.

Aired: 04/18/17

Rating: NR

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The Citizenship Project | Ida B. Wells | The Early Black Press | NPT | PBS

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The Citizenship Project Ida B. Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She came of age during Reconstruction, was educated and became a school teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. While teaching, Wells began writing under a pen name for literary and religious publications.

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Reconstruction: Ida B. Wells - Pioneer of Civil Rights | PBS LearningMedia

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Long before Rosa Parks there was Ida B. Wells, a Civil Rights pioneer. At the end of the 19th century, Jim Crow laws were enacted widely throughout the Southern United States. These state and local laws sought to mandate and enforce racial segregation in public transportation, schools, public places, restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains.

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Learn How Buffalo Soldiers Fought on the American Frontier and Protected Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks

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Learn How Buffalo Soldiers Fought on the American Frontier and Protected Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks

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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Transcript

NARRATOR: African American military men known as buffalo soldiers played a significant role in the story of the American frontier and United States western expansion. These men filled the ranks of two black regiments-the 9th and 10th cavalries. Black soldiers forming the 24th and 25th infantries were also sometimes called buffalo soldiers. The black cavalry and infantry regiments were authorized by an 1866 law, which required them to be under the leadership of white officers. The regiments were based primarily on the frontier, in the states and territories of the Plains and the Southwest.

The regiments' main objectives were to protect travel routes and to control American Indian populations. In 30 years of service on the frontier, buffalo soldiers were involved in almost 200 major and minor engagements. The buffalo soldiers exhibited great courage and discipline, and their regiments had the lowest percentage of desertion and court-martial among the U.S. Army.

The men of these regiments received their "buffalo soldier" nickname from the Plains Indians. There are many theories about its meaning, but it is generally believed to have been a sign of respect, as Native Americans revered the buffalo and the buffalo soldiers had proven themselves to be worthy opponents.

Buffalo soldiers also played a strong role in another fixture of the frontier: the national park system. Buffalo soldiers served as some of the first park rangers in the western United States. At the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, the U.S. Army was the official administrator of national parks, such as Yosemite and Sequoia. About 500 buffalo soldiers were stationed in these two parks during this time. They brought law and order to the wilderness lands, protecting the parks' animals and trees from thieves and forest fires.

Throughout their tenure, buffalo soldiers also participated in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, and the 1916 army expedition to capture Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

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African American buffalo soldiers of the frontier

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Who Were the Buffalo Soldiers?

No one knows for certain why, but the soldiers of the all-Black 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments were dubbed "buffalo soldiers" by the Native Americans they encountered.

One theory claims the nickname arose because the soldiers' dark, curly hair resembled the fur of a buffalo. Another assumption is the soldiers fought so valiantly and fiercely that the Indians revered them as they did the mighty buffalo.

Whatever the reason, the name stuck, and African American regiments formed in 1866, including the 24th and 25th Infantry (which were consolidated from four regiments) became known as buffalo soldiers.

The 9th Cavalry Regiment

The mustering of the 9th Cavalry took place in New Orleans, Louisiana, in August and September of 1866. The soldiers spent the winter organizing and training until they were ordered to San Antonio, Texas, in April 1867. There they were joined by most of their officers and their commanding officer, Colonel Edward Hatch.

Training the inexperienced and mostly uneducated soldiers of the 9th Calvary was a challenging task. But the regiment was willing, able and mostly ready to face anything when they were ordered to the unsettled landscape of West Texas.

The soldiers' main mission was to secure the road from San Antonio to El Paso and restore and maintain order in areas disrupted by Native Americans, many of whom were frustrated with life on Indian reservations and broken promises by the federal government. The Black soldiers, facing their own forms of discrimination from the U.S. government, were tasked with removing another minority group in that government's name.

The 10th Cavalry Regiment

The 10th Cavalry was based in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and commanded by Colonel Benjamin Grierson. Mustering was slow, partly because the colonel wanted more educated men in the regiment and partly because of a cholera outbreak in the summer of 1867.

In August 1867, the regiment was ordered to Fort Riley, Kansas, with the task of protecting the Pacific Railroad, which was under construction at the time.

Before they left Fort Leavenworth, some troops fought hundreds of Cheyenne in two separate battles near the Saline River. With the support of the 38th Infantry Regiment-which was later consolidated into the 24th Infantry Regiment-the 10th Cavalry pushed back the hostile Indians.

The cavalry lost just one man and several horses despite having inferior equipment and being greatly outnumbered. It was just one of many battles to come.

Indian Wars

Both the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments participated in dozens upon dozens of skirmishes and larger battles of the Indian Wars as America became obsessed with westward expansion.

For instance, the 9th Cavalry was critical to the success of a three-month, unremitting campaign known as the Red River War against the Kiowas, the Comanches, the Cheyenne and the Arapahoe. It was after this battle that the 10th Cavalry was sent to join them in Texas.

Troops H and I of the 10th Cavalry were part of a team that rescued wounded Lieutenant-Colonel George Alexander Forsyth and what remained of his group of scouts trapped on a sand bar and surrounded by Native Americans in the Arikaree River. A couple of weeks later, the same troops engaged hundreds of Indians at Beaver Creek and fought so gallantly that they were thanked in a field order by General Philip Sheridan.

By 1880, the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments had minimized Indian resistance in Texas and the 9th Cavalry was ordered to Indian Territory in modern-day Oklahoma, ironically to prevent white settlers from illegally settling on Indian land. The 10th Cavalry continued to keep the Apache in check until the early 1890s when they relocated to Montana to round up the Cree.

About 20 percent of U.S. Cavalry troops that participated in the Indian Wars were buffalo soldiers, who participated in at least 177 conflicts.

Buffalo Soldiers Protect National Parks

Buffalo soldiers didn't only battle Native Americans. They also fought wildfires and poachers in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks and supported the parks' infrastructure.

According to the National Park Service, buffalo soldiers billeted at the Presidio army post in San Francisco during the winter and served as park rangers in the Sierra Nevada in the summer.

Buffalo Soldiers in Other Conflicts

In the late 1890s, with the "Indian problem" mostly settled, the 9th and 10th Calvary and the 24th and 25th Infantry headed to Florida at the start of the Spanish-American War.

Even facing blatant racism and enduring brutal weather conditions, buffalo soldiers earned a reputation for serving courageously. They fought heroically in the Battle of San Juan Hill, the Battle of El Caney and the Battle of Las Guasimas.

The 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments served in the Philippines in the early 1900s. Despite proving their military worth time and again, they continued to experience racial discrimination. During World War I, they were mostly relegated to defending the Mexican border.

Both regiments were integrated into the 2nd Cavalry Division in 1940. They trained for overseas deployment and combat during World War II. The 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments were deactivated in May 1944.

Mark Matthews

In 1948, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 eliminating racial segregation in America's armed forces. The last all-black units were disbanded during the 1950s.

Mark Matthews, the nation's oldest living buffalo soldier, died in 2005 at age 111 in Washington, D.C.

Buffalo soldiers had the lowest military desertion and court-martial rates of their time. Many won the Congressional Medal of Honor, an award presented in recognition of combat valor that goes above and beyond the call of duty.

Buffalo Soldiers Legacy

Today, visitors can attend the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston, Texas, a museum dedicated to the history of their military service. Bob Marley and The Wailers immortalized the group in the reggae song " Buffalo Soldier," which highlighted the irony of formerly enslaved people and their descendants "stolen from Africa" taking land from Native Americans for white settlers.

Sources

9th Cavalry Regiment. 1st Cavalry Division Association.
Who Are The Buffalo Soldiers? Buffalo Soldier Museum.
9th Cavalry Regiment (1866-1944). Blackpast.org.
10th Cavalry Regiment (1866-1944). Blackpast.org.
Buffalo Soldiers. National Park Service.
Buffalo Soldiers and the Spanish-American War. National Park Service.
Exploring the Life and History of the "Buffalo Soldiers." National Archives.
Ninth United States Cavalry. Texas State Historical Association.
The Ninth Regiment of Cavalry. U.S. Army Center of Military History.
The Tenth Regiment of Cavalry. U.S. Army Center of Military History.
World War I and the Buffalo Soldiers. National Park Service.

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No one knows for certain why, but the soldiers of the all-Black 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments were dubbed "buffalo soldiers" by the Native Americans they encountered. One theory claims the nickname arose because the soldiers' dark, curly hair resembled the fur of a buffalo.

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About this Item

Title

Other Title

Twenty-fifth Infantry

Twenty-fifth Inf. returning from Mt. Ariat

25th Infantry returning from Mt. Arayat

Back from battle

Back from the battle

25th Infantry returning from Mt. Ariat, 1898

Summary

"Gen. Frederick D. Grant and Gen. A.S. Burt [commander of the 25th Infantry Regiment] returning from Mt. Ariat [sic], at the head of the famous 25th Infantry, colored"--American Mutoscope & Biograph picture catalogue.

Names

Ackerman, Raymond, camera.

American Mutoscope and Biograph Company.

Theodore Roosevelt Association Collection (Library of Congress)

Paper Print Collection (Library of Congress)

Created / Published

United States : American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, [1900].

Headings

- United States.--Army.--Infantry Regiment, 25th

- Grant, Frederick Dent,--1850-1912

- Burt, Andrew,--1839-1915

- Philippines--History--Philippine American War, 1899-1902--Participation, African American

- United States.--Army--African American troops

- African American soldiers--Philippines

- United States.--Army--Officers

Genre

Actualities (Motion pictures)

Silent films

Short films

Nonfiction films

Notes

- H17963 U.S. Copyright Office

- Copyright: American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.; 21May1902; H17963.

- Original main title lacking.

- Titles added to Paper Print Collection films during restoration.

- Probable release date from AFI cat.: film beginnings, 1893-1910, 1995.

- Camera, Raymond Ackerman.

- Duration: 0:51 at 16 fps.

- Filmed January, 1900, in the Philippine Islands, following the 25th Infantry's participation at the battle of Mt. Arayat.

- Biograph production no. 1401.

- Paper print shelf number (LC 0799) was changed when the paper prints were rehoused.

- Additional holdings for this title may be available. Concact reference librarian.

- The Theodore Roosevelt Association film catalog entry states that the location of this film is probably Cuba, and gives possible production dates of June-Aug., 1898. Mt. Arayat is in the Philippines, and according to Niver's Biograph bulletins, 1896-1908, p. 48, this film was taken in the Philippines in March, 1900. However, according to sources, the 25th Infantry was engaged in a battle near Mt. Arayat on January 5, 1900. This film was probably taken shortly after the battle.

- Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as digital files.

- Sources used: Copyright catalog, motion pictures, 1894-1912; Niver, K. Early motion pictures, p. 340; The Theodore Roosevelt Association film collection...catalog, p. 3; American Mutoscope & Biograph picture catalogue, Nov. 1902, p. 180; American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. prod. records (Biograph production log), p. 48; Niver's Biograph bulletins 1896-1908, p. 66 and 425; Nankivell, John H. History of the Twenty-fifth Regiment, United States Infantry, 1869-1926, p. 90, 100-103.

- Early motion pictures : the Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress / by Kemp R. Niver. Library of Congress. 1985.

- The Theodore Roosevelt Association film collection : a catalog / prepared by Wendy White-Henson and Veronica M. Gillespie. Library of Congress, 1986.

Medium

viewing print 1 film reel of 1 (22 ft.) : si., b&w ; 16 mm.

viewing print 1 film reel of 1 (51 ft.) : si., b&w ; 35 mm.

viewing print (copy 2) 1 film reel of 1 (51 ft.) : si., b&w ; 35 mm.

dupe neg pic 1 film reel of 1 (22 ft.) : si., b&w ; 16 mm.

paper pos 1 roll of 1 (ca. 50 ft.) : b&w ; 35 mm.

paper pos (copy 2) 1 roll of 1 (ca. 50 ft.) : b&w ; 35 mm.

Call Number/Physical Location

FLA 3813 (viewing print)

FEA 7323 (viewing print)

FEB 9497 (viewing print, copy 2)

FRA 2856 (dupe neg pic)

Box 0842A (paper pos)

Box 5193A (paper pos, copy 2)

Repository

Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA dcu

Digital Id

Library of Congress Control Number

Online Format

Rights & Access

Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is providing access to the Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures for educational and research purposes. The Library is not aware of any copyrights or other rights associated with this Collection. However, users should note that the written permission of the copyright owners and/or other rights holders (such as publicity and/or privacy rights) is required for distribution, reproduction, or other use of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use or other statutory exemptions. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

U.S. Troops Landing at Daiquirí, Cuba; Troops Making Military Road in Front of Santiago; Pack Mules with Ammunition on the Santiago Trail, Cuba; and 25th Infantry are reproduced here courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

Credit Line: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.

More information about American Memory and Copyright.

Cite This Item

Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate.

Chicago citation style:

Ackerman, Raymond, Camera, American Mutoscope And Biograph Company, Theodore Roosevelt Association Collection, and Paper Print Collection. 25th Infantry. [United States: American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1900] Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/98500744/.

APA citation style:

Ackerman, R., American Mutoscope And Biograph Company, Theodore Roosevelt Association Collection & Paper Print Collection. (1900) 25th Infantry. [United States: American Mutoscope and Biograph Company] [Video] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/98500744/.

MLA citation style:

Ackerman, Raymond, Camera, et al. 25th Infantry. [United States: American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1900] Video. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/98500744/>.

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"Gen. Frederick D. Grant and Gen. A.S. Burt [commander of the 25th Infantry Regiment] returning from Mt. Ariat [sic], at the head of the famous 25th Infantry, colored"--American Mutoscope & Biograph picture catalogue.

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Marcus Garvey's Early Years

Marcus Moziah Garvey was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, to Marcus Garvey Sr. and Sarah Jane Richards. His father was a stonemason and his mother was a household servant. Though the couple had 11 children, only Marcus and one other sibling survived into adulthood.

Garvey attended school in Jamaica until he was 14, when he left St. Ann's Bay for Kingston, the island nation's capital, where he worked as an apprentice in a print shop. He later said he first experienced racism in grade school in Jamaica, primarily from white teachers.

While working in the print shop, Garvey became involved in the labor union for print tradesmen in Kingston. This work would set the stage for his activism later in life.

Garvey spent time in Central America, where he had relatives, before moving to London in 1912. While in Britain, he attended the University of London's Birkbeck College, where he studied law and philosophy.

He also worked for a Pan-Africanism newspaper and led debates at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, London, a famous spot in the city for public discourse and debate, even today.
WATCH VIDEO: Marcus Garvey's Movement
Universal Negro Improvement Association

After two years in London-where he received an education that would likely have been unavailable to him in the Americas because of the color of his skin-Garvey returned to Jamaica. It was during this time that he started the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Garvey also began corresponding with Booker T. Washington, the Black American leader, author and activist who had been born into slavery. In 1916, Garvey boarded a ship bound for the United States, where-as a dramatic and invigorating public speaker-he intended to go on a lecture tour.

He ended up settling in New York City, where he first spoke at St. Mark's Church before embarking on a 38-city speaking tour. He also took on work in a print shop to make ends meet.

While in New York, he authored the "Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World," which was ratified at the convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association at Madison Square Garden in 1920. It was during this meeting that Garvey was also elected "Provisional President" of Africa.

Marcus Garvey Quotes

In many of his lectures, Garvey summarized his views on the rights of African Americans by noting, "The first dying that is to be done by the Black man in the future will be done to make himself free. And then when we are finished, if we have any charity to bestow, we may die for the white man. But as for me, I think I have stopped dying for him."

He also told members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1921, "If you want liberty you yourselves must strike the blow. If you must be free, you must become so through your own effort ... Until you produce what the white man has produced you will not be his equal."

Black Star Line

Garvey established the first U.S. chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1917 in Harlem, and began publishing the Negro World newspaper. Soon, his speaking engagements took on an angry tone, in which he questioned how the United States could call itself a democracy when across the country people of color were still oppressed.

By 1919, he and his associates set up the shipping company Black Star Line under the auspices of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which by then had grown to include more than four million members.

Not long after the Black Star Line had purchased its first ship, the S.S. Yarmouth, and rechristened it the S.S. Frederick Douglass, the company began its "African Redemption" Liberia program, with the idea of establishing a nation on the west coast of Africa for Black Americans, for those who were born into slavery or who were the descendants of enslaved people.

Garvey was married twice: His first marriage to Amy Ashwood, who was a fellow activist in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, ended in divorce in 1922.

Later that year, Garvey married Amy Jacques, who was also active in social causes. The couple had two sons together, Marcus Mosiah Garvey III and Julius Winston Garvey.
READ MORE: How a Movement to Send Formerly Enslaved People to Africa Created Liberia
J. Edgar Hoover Spies on Marcus Garvey

Because of his outspoken activism and Black nationalism, Garvey became a target of J. Edgar Hoover at the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), a precursor to the FBI.

The BOI began investigating Garvey on charges of mail fraud in connection with a brochure for the Black Star Line that included a photo of a ship before the company actually had a vessel in its fleet. Hoover, who referred to Garvey as a "notorious negro agitator," even hired the first Black FBI agent in 1919 to spy on Garvey.

In 1923, after a controversial trial, Garvey was found guilty of these charges and sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison. He blamed a Jewish judge and Jewish jurors for his conviction, saying that they sought retribution against him after he had agreed to meet with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (K.K.K.) several months prior to the trial.

Garvey believed he and the K.K.K. shared similar views on segregation, given that he sought a separate state for Black Americans.

He began serving his sentence at Atlanta Prison in 1925. It's from there that he authored his famous paper "First Message to the Negroes of the World from Atlanta Prison."

In it, he wrote, "After my enemies are satisfied, in life or death I shall come back to you to serve even as I have served before. In life I shall be the same; in death I shall be a terror to the foes of Negro liberty. If death has power, then count on me in death to be the real Marcus Garvey I would like to be. If I may come in an earthquake, or a cyclone, or plague, or pestilence, or as God would have me, then be assured that I shall never desert you and make your enemies triumph over you."

Marcus Garvey After Prison

When he was released from prison in 1928 after serving three years of his sentence, Garvey travelled to Geneva, Switzerland, to speak to the League of Nations on issues of race and the worldwide abuse of people of color.

A few months later, he returned to Jamaica where he established the People's Political Party, that nation's first modern political organization. Its platform focused on workers' rights and the poor.

Death of Marcus Garvey

In 1935, Garvey returned to London where he lived and worked until his death at age 52. Marcus Garvey died on June 10, 1940 from complications brought on by two strokes.

Due to World War II travel restrictions, he was originally buried in St. Mary's Roman Catholic cemetery in Kensal Green, London. But on November 13, 1964, his body was exhumed and buried beneath the Marcus Garvey Memorial in National Heroes Park in Kingston, Jamaica.

Legacy of Marcus Garvey

While in London, Garvey continued to write and coordinated the establishment of the School of African Philosophy in Toronto to train future leaders of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. By then, the organization had more than a thousand chapters worldwide.

Although his legacy as a leader and activist lives on, Garvey's separatist and Black Nationalist views were not embraced by many of his peers. In fact, W.E.B. Du Bois of the NAACP famously said, "Marcus Garvey is the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world."

However, Garvey's supporters prefer to focus on his key message, which was steeped in Black pride. He is credited with coining the phrase "Black is beautiful."

His philosophy is perhaps best exemplified in the following quote: "We must canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs, and elevate to positions of fame and honor Black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history ... I am the equal of any white man; I want you to feel the same way."

Sources

Marcus Garvey: Civil Rights Activist. Biography.com.
Van Leeuwen, D. "Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association." National Humanities Center. humanitiescenter.org.
Friedman, J. (2018). "From Jamaica's Marcus Garvey came an African vision of freedom." USAToday.com.
Garvey, M. (1925). "First Message to the Negroes of the World from Atlanta Prison." hartford-hwp.com.

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Marcus Garvey: Quotes, Books & Death - HISTORY

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Marcus Garvey was a Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement, which sought to unify and empower people of African descent worldwide.

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Marcus Garvey: Black Nationalism - Fast Facts | History

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An Introduction to the Harlem Renaissance

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An Introduction to the Harlem Renaissance

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We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.
-Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"

In the 1920's, creative and intellectual life flourished within African American communities in the North and Midwest regions of the United States, but nowhere more so than in Harlem. The New York City neighborhood, encompassing only three square miles, teemed with black artists, intellectuals, writers, and musicians. Black-owned businesses, from newspapers, publishing houses, and music companies to nightclubs, cabarets, and theaters, helped fuel the neighborhood's thriving scene. Some of the era's most important literary and artistic figures migrated to or passed through "the Negro capital of the world," helping to define a period in which African American artists reclaimed their identity and racial pride in defiance of widespread prejudice and discrimination.

The origins of the Harlem Renaissance lie in the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when hundreds of thousands of black people migrated from the South into dense urban areas that offered relatively more economic opportunities and cultural capital. It was, in the words of editor, journalist, and critic Alain Locke, "a spiritual coming of age" for African American artists and thinkers, who seized upon their "first chances for group expression and self-determination." Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson explored the beauty and pain of black life and sought to define themselves and their community outside of white stereotypes.

Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance reflected a diversity of forms and subjects. Some poets, such as Claude McKay, used culturally European forms-the sonnet was one--melded with a radical message of resistance, as in "If We Must Die." Others, including James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, brought specifically black cultural creations into their work, infusing their poems with the rhythms of ragtime, jazz, and blues.

The collection that follows offers a sampling of poetry published during this period, along with essays by and about Harlem Renaissance writers and audio recordings and discussions of their work. You can also browse all of our Harlem Renaissance poets here.

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The Harlem Renaissance | Poetry Foundation

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An introduction tracing the groundbreaking work of African Americans in this pivotal cultural and artistic movement.

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Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . .
He did a lazy sway. . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.

- Langston Hughes, " The Weary Blues "

When considering essential movements in American poetry, no conversation would be complete without a discussion of the Harlem Renaissance. With a lyricism seated in the popular blues and jazz music of the time, an awareness of Black life in America, its assertion of an independent African American identity, and its innovation in form and structure, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is unmistakable.

Though the exact dates of the movement are debatable, most consider its beginnings to be rooted in the end of the Reconstruction era, when legal segregation made living conditions for African Americans in the South unbearable. The lack of economic opportunities, and, more importantly, the prevalence of prejudice, lynching, and segregation in public spaces all contributed to the intolerable conditions of African Americans. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, jobs previously held by white males suddenly became available, and industrial expansion in the North provided opportunities for African Americans to seek a new lifestyle. They settled in various northern cities during this Great Migration, though New York City was the most popular, particularly the district of Harlem. African Americans of all social classes joined together in Harlem, which became the focal point of a growing interest in African American culture: jazz, blues, dance, theater, art, fiction, and poetry. Harlem and New York also became the home of many seminal African American institutions, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Crisis, and more.

The Harlem Renaissance ushered in a time of many renewed firsts for African Americans in publishing: Langston Hughes, a central figure of the movement, published his first poem, " The Negro Speaks of Rivers," in the June 1921 of The Crisis; two years later, Jean Toomer's Cane was the first book of fiction (though it is more accurate to deem it a hybrid text, as it also contains dramatic dialogue and poetry) by an African American writer to appear from a New York publisher since Charles Chestnutt's The Colonel's Dream (Doubleday, Page, 1905); and Countee Cullen's first poetry collection, Color (Harper & Brothers, 1925), was the first book of poetry written by an African American to be published by a major American publisher since Dodd, Mead published Paul Laurence Dunbar.

These writers sought to examine and celebrate their experiences. In his preface to his anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), editor, author, and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson writes that African American artists need to find "a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos" of their experience. Another important anthology of the time appeared three years later: The New Negro, edited by sociologist and critic Alain Locke. The anthology collected essays, stories, poems, and artwork by a diversity of artists old and young, Black and white. Locke's term "The New Negro" became popularized during the Harlem Renaissance, promoting a sense of pride and advocacy in the African American community, and a refusal to submit to the injustices they were subjected to. In fact, the Harlem Renaissance is alternately referred to as the "New Negro Renaissance."

The same year The New Negro appeared, Cullen's Color, a collection of poems that addressed racial injustice in the style of the English Romantics, was published. In his book, Cullen discussed his own and the collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. His book was soon followed by Hughes's The Weary Blues, a lyrical text whose sounds and cadences moved with the rhythms of the jazz and blues he was exposed to in his daily life in Harlem.

Other major writers of the time included Arna Bontemps, Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimké, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrant's nostalgia and the Black man's pride and rage. Toomer remains a mystery; light enough to "pass" and alone constituting the generation's symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a follower of the mystic Gurdijeff, and disappeared into the white world.

Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and Black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In many of Brown's poems, strong men and women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.

By 1928, the literary tides seemed to shift away from poetry and more toward fiction, with the publication of such texts as Nella Larsen's Quicksand, McKay's Home to Harlem, and Bontemps's God Sends Sunday, among others.

The Harlem Renaissance, which was sparked by industrial expansion and prosperity in the art fields, began its decline with the crash of Wall Street in 1929. Harlem became affected by rising unemployment and crime, and the neighborhood erupted in the Harlem Riot of 1935. Still, the immediate effects of the movement would echo into the Negritude movement of the 1930s and beyond.

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. After the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a Black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Many of the poets who would follow the Cullens and the Hugheses, these descendents of the Harlem Renaissance and the subsequent cultural, social, and literary trends, would also bring in the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties, which similarly sought to promote social change and a uniquely self-crafted African American identity.
read more about poets from the harlem renaissance

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Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . He did a lazy sway. . .

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Langston Hughes: Leading Voice of the Harlem Renaissance

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Langston Hughes: Leading Voice of the Harlem Renaissance

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I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100

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I, Too by Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation

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Zora Neale Hurston Was Criticized for Writing in the "Black Voice", Now Her Novels Are Classics

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Zora Neale Hurston Was Criticized for Writing in the "Black Voice", Now Her Novels Are Classics

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Her childhood in an all-black town shaped her worldview

Zora Neale Hurston, acclaimed writer of the Harlem Renaissance, was maligned by many black leaders for writing in the colloquial voice of the black, rural townspeople she grew up with in Eatonville, Florida. But it was her unique childhood in an all-black town that shaped her ideas, which defied the focus on racial "uplift" popular among figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois.

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Watch: Zora Neale Hurston was criticized for writing in the 'black voice.'

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Zora Neale Hurston, acclaimed writer of the Harlem Renaissance, was maligned by many black leaders for writing in the colloquial voice of the black, rural townspeople she grew up with in Eatonville, Florida. But it was her unique childhood in an all-black town that shaped her ideas, which defied the focus on racial "uplift" popular among figures such as W.E.B.

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Zora Neale Hurston - American Folklorist

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Zora Neale Hurston - American Folklorist

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Revisiting the Great Migration Through Paintings and Poetry

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The Great Migration of 6 million African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North was a shift that reshaped America forever. Artist Jacob Lawrence captured that story in an epic work of art known as the Migration Series. Now all 60 of Lawrence's small paintings are on show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with new reflections by 10 poets. Jeffrey Brown reports.

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Revisiting the Great Migration through paintings and poetry

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The Great Migration of 6 million African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North was a shift that reshaped America forever. Artist Jacob Lawrence captured that story in an epic work of art known as the Migration Series.

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Why the Works of Visionary Artist Jacob Lawrence Still Resonate a Century After His Birth

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Why the Works of Visionary Artist Jacob Lawrence Still Resonate a Century After His Birth

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At an early age, Jacob Lawrence knew something was missing from his education. "I've always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools. Sometimes they mentioned it in history clubs, but I never liked that way of presenting it. It was never studied seriously like regular subjects," the prominent black artist once said.

It was this absence of black stories and black history-and his desire for them to be considered essential to understanding the American experience-that inspired his life's work: from simple scenes to sweeping series, his art told the stories of everyday life in Harlem, stories of segregation in the South, and stories of liberation, resistance and resilience that were integral to African American and American history.

Lawrence was born in Atlantic City 100 years ago on September 7, 1917. Raised for a time in Philadelphia, he came of age in 1930s New York, heavily inspired by the cultural and artistic ethos of the Harlem Renaissance. A number of his works are among the collections of the Smithsonian's museums.

At a time when the mainstream art world wasn't open to black artists, Lawrence immersed himself in everything his neighborhood had to offer: he trained at the Harlem Art Workshop, studied under and shared a workspace with painter Charles Alston and was mentored, among others, by sculptor Augusta Savage, who helped him gain work through the WPA Federal Art Project.

"He was a quiet individual who listened, looked, watched, absorbed all of what was going on around him," according to Virginia Mecklenburg, chief curator at Smithsonian American Art Museum, home to nearly a dozen of Lawrence's works.

Lawrence's subjects and style were deliberate, conscientious choices. He formed his practice during a period when black artists were carefully considering their role and responsibility in depicting African American history and contemporary life.

In Harlem, Lawrence was surrounded and educated by progressive artists who "admired the historical rebels who had advocated revolutionary struggle to advance the cause of the oppressed," writes art historian Patricia Hill in her book Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence. From them, he was inspired to tell historical epics centered around major figures, all of whom have once been enslaved. His early series told the stories of Toussaint L'Ouverture (1938), who led the struggle for Haiti's independence, Frederick Douglass (1939), the great abolitionist and statesman, and Harriet Tubman (completed 1940), the celebrated conductor of the Underground Railroad.

And how he told those stories mattered as much as choosing to tell them. Throughout his career, Lawrence painted with vibrant and bold colors and remained dedicated to an expressive figurative style, one that lent itself to visual narration. Jacquelyn Serwer, chief curator at National Museum of African American History and Culture, which features Lawrence's (1948) in its exhibition "Visual Art and the American Experience," says he wanted to make sure "that important aspects of African American history were documented in a way that could be appreciated and understood by a very broad audience." If he adhered too closely to the modernist, abstract trends of the mid-20th century, he risked limiting those who could connect with his art. Certainly, "the commitment to figuration was a political one," says Evelyn Hankins, senior curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which counts Lawrence's Vaudeville (1951) among its collections.

For his most renowned work, Lawrence turned to an event that had defined his own life. The son of parents who moved during the Great Migration-when millions of African Americans escaped the Jim Crow South to seek better lives in the North and West-he painted the stories he'd been told. Across 60 panels, he showed, and spelled out in the titles, the harsh racial injustice and economic difficulty African Americans faced in the South and the opportunities that brought them to places of greater hope.

The Phillips Memorial Gallery (now known as the Phillips Collection) and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) purchased the Migration Series (1941) the year following its completion. While each museum took half of the series for their permanent collections-dividing it by even and odd numbered panels-the full series has been exhibited a number of times, most recently in 2016 at the Phillips Collection. Not only had Lawrence achieved a major personal success at 24, the sale was important for another reason: it marked the first time that MOMA had purchased artwork by an African American artist.

Much of his prodigious output was in genre paintings and in the portrayal of everyday scenes; he drew what he knew from his life in Harlem. One example, The Library (1960), depicts a few black figures reading books that reference African artwork. Curators speculate that the reading room "may show the 135th Street Library-now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture-where the country's first significant collection of African American literature, history and prints opened in 1925." It was at that library Lawrence spent hours researching his historical epics, poring over black history and heritage. In painting this scene, he spotlighted the discovery and learning catalyzed by the Harlem Renaissance.

If The Library offers a view of a comparative oasis in the North, a look at Lawrence's Bar and Grill (1941) illustrates a sense of the stark reality in the South. The artist first visited the region when he and his wife, fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight, traveled to New Orleans in 1941. Although he'd depicted Jim Crow segregation in his Migration Series, the personal exposure to the harsh Southern laws left Lawrence shaken, and he went on to explore the experience in a number of works.

Emphasizing the artificial barrier between the two races, Bar and Grill puts in plain view the falsehood of separate but equal: the white customers are kept comfortable and cool on their side, attended to by the bartender, while the black patrons are relegated to a less spacious, overlooked section, emblematic of their second-class status in the South.

World War II again brought Lawrence in close contact with Southern racism: drafted into the Coast Guard in 1943, he trained in St. Augustine, Florida. He was later assigned to the Navy's first integrated ship, where he was able to paint as part of his deployment.

Lawrence and Knight would later return to the South in 1946 where he taught a summer course at Black Mountain College, a liberal arts school in North Carolina. Invited there by the head instructor, German abstract artist Josef Albers, he and Gwendolyn steered clear of nearby Asheville, aware of the racism they might encounter there. On their journey down, Albers even reserved a private train car for the couple to avoid having to make the "humiliating move from integrated train cars to Jim Crow cars once they passed the Mason-Dixon Line."

Having documented historic liberation struggles, Lawrence soon turned to explore the contemporary civil rights movement. As art historian Ellen Harkins Wheat wrote, "responding to this era of turmoil and antiwar upheaval. . . Lawrence produced a body of work that manifests his most overt social protest." Involved in fundraising for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lawrence painted scenes of counter sit-ins, freedom riders and protestors clashing with the police.

During his six decades as a practicing painter, Lawrence influenced a number of other artists. He began teaching at Pratt Institute in 1956 and, when the Lawrences lived in Nigeria in the early 60s, he offered workshops to young artists in Lagos. After stints teaching at the New School, Art Students League and Brandeis University, his final move was to Seattle in 1971 for a professorship at University of Washington. Lawrence's celebrated career was filled with further milestones: he was a representative for the United States at 1956 Venice Biennale and he was awarded both the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1970 and the National Medal of Arts in 1990. Until his death in 2000, he continued to paint and exhibit his work, even during a brief period spent in a psychiatric institution recovering from stress and exhaustion.

A century after his birth, his work remains relevant and resonant, thanks to his remarkable storytelling. "The human dimension in his art makes people who have no interest in art, or no experience with, or real knowledge of art, look at Lawrence's work and. . . see stories that they could find in their own lives," says Mecklenburg.

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Why the Works of Visionary Artist Jacob Lawrence Still Resonate a Century After His Birth

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At an early age, Jacob Lawrence knew something was missing from his education. "I've always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools. Sometimes they mentioned it in history clubs, but I never liked that way of presenting it.

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Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images

Quick Facts
"People do not retire. They are retired by others.""You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it."

Armstrong Technical High School

An originator of big-band jazz, Duke Ellington was an American composer, pianist and bandleader who composed thousands of scores over his 50-year career.

Who Was Duke Ellington?

A major figure in the history of jazz music, Duke Ellington's career spanned more than half a century, during which time he composed thousands of songs for the stage, screen and contemporary songbook. He created one of the most distinctive ensemble sounds in Western music and continued to play what he called "American Music" until shortly before his death in 1974.

Early Life

Born on April 29, 1899, Ellington was raised by two talented, musical parents in a middle-class neighborhood of Washington, D.C. At the age of seven, he began studying piano and earned the nickname "Duke" for his gentlemanly ways. Inspired by his job as a soda jerk, he wrote his first composition, "Soda Fountain Rag," at the age of 15. Despite being awarded an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Ellington followed his passion for ragtime and began to play professionally at age 17.

Duke Ellington's Band

In the 1920s, Ellington performed in Broadway nightclubs as the bandleader of a sextet, a group which in time grew to a 10-piece ensemble. Ellington sought out musicians with unique playing styles, such as Bubber Miley, who used a plunger to make the "wa-wa" sound, and Joe Nanton, who gave the world his trombone "growl." At various times, his ensemble included the trumpeter Cootie Williams, cornetist Rex Stewart and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. Ellington made hundreds of recordings with his bands, appeared in films and on radio, and toured Europe on two occasions in the 1930s.

Songs

Ellington's fame rose to the rafters in the 1940s when he composed several masterworks, including "Concerto for Cootie," "Cotton Tail" and "Ko-Ko." Some of his most popular songs included "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing," "Sophisticated Lady," "Prelude to a Kiss," "Solitude" and "Satin Doll." A number of his hits were sung by the impressive Ivie Anderson, a favorite female vocalist of Ellington's band.

'Take the A Train'

Perhaps Ellington's most famous jazz tune was "Take the A Train," which was composed by Billy Strayhorn and recorded for commercial purposes on February 15, 1941. "Take the A Train," the "A" referring to a subway line in New York City, took the place of Ellington's previous signature tune "Sepia Panorama."

It was Ellington's sense of musical drama that made him stand out. His blend of melodies, rhythms and subtle sonic movements gave audiences a new experience-complex yet accessible jazz that made the heart swing. Ellington's autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, was published in 1973. Ellington earned 12 Grammy awards from 1959 to 2000, nine while he was alive.

Death

At the age of 19, Ellington married Edna Thompson, who had been his girlfriend since high school, and soon after their marriage, she gave birth to their only child, Mercer Kennedy Ellington.

On May 24, 1974, at the age of 75, Ellington died of lung cancer and pneumonia. His last words were, "Music is how I live, why I live and how I will be remembered." More than 12,000 people attended his funeral. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

Fact Check

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"People do not retire. They are retired by others." "You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it." Armstrong Technical High School An originator of big-band jazz, Duke Ellington was an American composer, pianist and bandleader who composed thousands of scores over his 50-year career.

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A short biography of Duke Ellington, the American jazz legend known for his hits like "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" and "Take the A Train." His career reignited at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival.

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A short biography of Duke Ellington, the American jazz legend known for his hits like "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" and "Take the A Train." His career reignited at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival.

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Duke Ellington's Melodies Carried His Message of Social Justice

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Duke Ellington's Melodies Carried His Message of Social Justice

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At a moment when there is a longstanding heated debate over how artists and pop culture figures should engage in social activism, the life and career of musical legend Edward Kennedy " Duke" Ellington offers a model of how to do it right.

Ellington was born on April 29, 1899 in Washington, D.C. His tight-knit black middle-class family nurtured his racial pride and shielded him from many of the difficulties of segregation in the nation's capital. Washington was home to a sizable black middle class, despite prevalent racism. That included the racial riots of 1919's Red Summer, three months of bloody violence directed at black communities in cities from San Francisco to Chicago and Washington D.C.

Ellington's development from a D.C. piano prodigy to the world's elegant and sophisticated "Duke" is well documented. Yet a fusion of art and social activism also marked his more than 56-year career.

Ellington's battle for social justice was personal. Films like the award-winning "Green Book" only hint at the costs of segregation for black performing artists during the 1950s and 60s.

Duke's experiences reveal the reality.

Cotton Club to Scottsboro Boys

Ellington first rose to fame at Harlem's "whites only" Cotton Club in the 1920s. There, the only mingling of black and white happened on the piano keyboard itself, as black performers entered through back doors and could not interact with white customers.

Ellington quietly devoted his services to the NAACP and its racial equality activities in the 1930s. Whether it was demanding that black youth have equal entrance rights to segregated dance halls or holding benefit concerts for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black adolescents falsely imprisoned for rape in 1931, Ellington used his growing fame as a prominent band leader for a greater good.

In our literary and historical research on African American entertainment, Ellington's ability to travel and perform across national boundaries stands out.

After success in Harlem's night spots, Ellington composed, recorded and appeared in film shorts like 1935's "Symphony in Black" as himself. He traveled the world with his orchestra, at first performing in the U.K. in the 1930s. Later, Ellington continued to perform on behalf of the U.S. State Department as a "jazz ambassador" in the 1960s and 70s. Audiences in such places as India, Syria, Turkey, Ethiopia and Zambia were given the opportunity to hear and dance to Ellington's compositions.

However, not even international popularity ensured that hotels would host Ellington's all-black ensemble during a tour in the U.K. in June 1933. Members scrambled to find boarding homes in London's Bloomsbury neighborhood when mainstream hotels turned them away on account of their race.

Despite success, racism

Ellington's 1932 " It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing" was the soundtrack for the nation's swing era of the 1930s and 40s. The tune stayed on the Billboard charts for six weeks in 1932 and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008.

But when Ellington traveled in the South, he still had to hire a private rail car to avoid crowded, poorly maintained "colored only" train seating, or hotels and restaurants that refused service to black Southerners.

Northern or western engagements in the 1930s and 1940s often proved no better. While there were no "white only" signs on the doors of these hotels or restaurants, establishments enforced segregation by telling black customers to enter through back doors or purchase their meals to go.

Bassist Milt Hinton recalled that Ellington and fellow band leader Count Basie often stayed at black-owned boarding houses rather than risk being thrown out or ignored.

White band managers attempted to protect the black bands they managed from these racist practices, but this still did not prevent Ellington from being denied service in a Salt Lake City hotel's cafe in the 1940s.

Subtle style

Once the civil rights movement of the 1950s began to fight for racial equality through direct-action techniques like mass protests, boycotts and sit-ins, activists in the early 1950s criticized the older Ellington. His subtle activism style had focused on benefit concerts, and not "in the streets" protests.

But as the movement continued, Ellington included a non-segregation clause in his contracts and refused to play before segregated audiences by 1961. He maintained in an interview in the Baltimore Afro American newspaper that he had always been devoted to "the fight for first class citizenship."

This was a devotion best seen in his music.

Ellington used his creative musical talents against racist beliefs that African Americans were inferior or unintelligent.

His diverse and wide-ranging catalog of music demanded the kind of serious attention and respect that had previously only been reserved for elite, white composers of classical music.

Songs such as " Black and Tan Fantasy" completely challenged what was then called " jungle music," a negative term used to reference music inspired by the African diaspora. As a fusion of sacred and secular black culture, both the "Black and Tan Fantasy" composition and film combined the speaking traditions of black preachers with the humor and rhythms of black life.

Modern black variety shows such as "Wild 'N Out" and "In Living Color" share a lineage with Ellington's major stage production of 1941, " Jump for Joy."

"Jump for Joy" combined comedy skits and music into a revue that featured African American stars of the mid-20th century, including actress, singer and dancer Dorothy Dandridge and poet Langston Hughes.

Ellington claimed that his production " would take Uncle Tom out of the theater and say things that would make the audience think."

He used his music to showcase black excellence as a resistance tactic against the negative stereotypes of African Americans made popular in American blackface minstrelsy.

Ellington also used "Jump for Joy" to call out those who borrowed from black music without any credit or financial compensation to its creators.

Melody's other purpose

One of Ellington's most powerful works is the orchestral piece "Black, Brown and Beige."

This work shows his ability to infuse the blues into classical music and his commitment to tell the history of black America through song.

From the spirituals developed through the trials of slavery to the fight for civil rights and the modern rhythms of big band swing music, Ellington sought to tell a story about black life that was both beautiful and complex.

For Ellington, melody became message.

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Duke Ellington's melodies carried his message of social justice

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At a moment when there is a longstanding heated debate over how artists and pop culture figures should engage in social activism, the life and career of musical legend Edward Kennedy " Duke" Ellington offers a model of how to do it right. Ellington was born on April 29, 1899 in Washington, D.C.

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Billie Holiday - Bio, Music, Media, Timeline, Quotes

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Billie Holiday - Bio, Music, Media, Timeline, Quotes

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Billie Holiday, born April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a superstar of her day. She first rose to prominence in the 1930's with a unique style that reinvented the conventions of modern singing and performance. More than 80 years after making her first recording Billie's legacy continues to embody what is elegant and cool in contemporary music. Holiday's complicated life and her genre-defining autobiography "Lady Sings the Blues" made her a cultural icon. The evocative, soulful voice which she boldly put forth as a force for good, turned any song she sang into her own. Today, Billie Holiday is remembered for her musical masterpieces, her songwriting skills, creativity and courageous views on inequality and justice.

Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan Gough) grew up in jazz-soaked Baltimore of the 1920s. In her early teens, the beginning part of her "apprenticeship" was spent singing along with the records of iconoclasts Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. In 1929 Billie's mother Sadie Fagan moved to New York in search of better jobs. Young Eleanora soon joined her there and began showing up at jazz clubs to audition and sing with resident pianists. She made debuts in obscure Harlem nightclubs, sharing tips with other dancers and comedians on the bill. Around this time she borrowed her professional name Billie Holiday from screen actress Billie Dove. Although she never received technical training and never learned how to read music, Holiday quickly became an active participant in what was then the most vibrant jazz scene in the country - as the Harlem Renaissance transitioned into the Swing Era.

At age 18, after gathering more life experience than most adults, Holiday was spotted by producer John Hammond with whom she cut her first record as part of a studio group led by clarinetist Benny Goodman - then on the verge of his own superstardom. From 1935 to 1941 Holiday's career accelerated, recording hit after hit with pianist/arranger Teddy Wilson. Simultaneously, in 1936 she began a legendary string of collaborations with tenor sax giant Lester Young, who's complimentary tone was a perfect trading partner for Billie. They became the best of friends and inseparable, legendary musical partners, even living together with Billie's mother for a time. Lester would famously christen her "Lady Day" as she would him "The Prez". By the time Holiday joined Kansas City's phenomenal Count Basie Orchestra for tours in 1937 she was an unstoppable force, suited for top billing across the United States. In 1938 Artie Shaw invited her to front his Orchestra, making Billie the first black women to work with a white band - an impressive and courageous accomplishment.

In the 1930's, during her epic run at Barney Josephson's Cafe Society in Manhattan, she was introduced to the poem "Strange Fruit," a horrific depiction of lynching in the Southern United States. The music was written just for Billie and it became the hallmark of her concerts. It's considered by scholars to be the first protest song of the civil rights era. The lyric was so controversial that her record label wouldn't record it. So she jumped over to the independent Commodore Records where she could record and sing as she pleased. "Strange Fruit" immediately became a cultural spark-point and a hit record too.

In 1939, with Arthur Herzog, Jr., she wrote "God Bless The Child", a composition that transcends the ages and is now part of the great American songbook and jazz lexicon. In 1944 she signed with prestigious Decca Records, cutting still more classics and even a couple duets with her first musical hero Louis Armstrong - with whom she'd later star in the Hollywood film "New Orleans" (1949).

Starting in 1952 Billie began a five year run with Norman Granz' Clef/Verve label. Granz was the entrepreneur behind the "Jazz At The Philharmonic" series and he was very sensitive to the needs of artists. He put Billie back into small group settings from which her genius had originally grown. Together they made roughly 100 new recordings, constituting Billie's first forays into the high-fidelity album era. Her voice became more rugged and shockingly intimate. She put this new signature sound on scores of stirring ballads such as her self-reflecting composition "Lady Sings The Blues". During this period she expanded her repertoire while also re-recording many of her 1930's classics in her new style. Redefining herself as the "Torch Singer", she appeared twice on TV's "Tonight Show with Steve Allen", on CBS's historic "The Sound Of Jazz" program and also toured Europe.

In 1958, she signed to Columbia Records, the longtime home base of A&R man John Hammond, who had been instrumental in her early career. For Columbia she created her swan song masterpiece album "Lady In Satin". Final studio recordings were made for MGM in March 1959 and were released posthumously.

Billie Holiday, died at the age of 44 and is buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in Bronx County, NY. Her music and life continue to inspire tributes. Whether it's Nina Simone covering "Strange Fruit"; Diana Ross starring as Lady Day in the film "Lady Sings the Blues"; U2 penning their hit "Angel Of Harlem"; her image on a United States postage stamp; Time Magazine's "Song Of The Century" Award; scores of biographies and a dozen Grammy Awards, her emotive voice, innovative technique and touching songs will forever be a hallmark of genius.

Despite her lack of technical training, Holiday's uncanny syncopations, her inimitable phrasing and her dramatic intensity made her the outstanding jazz singer of her day. White gardenias, worn in her hair, were her trademark.

Ever combining her typical humor with profound gravitas, she wrote in her autobiography, "Singing songs like the 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck. I've lived songs like that."

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Bio - The Official Website of Billie Holiday

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Billie Holiday, born April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a superstar of her day. She first rose to prominence in the 1930's with a unique style that reinvented the conventions of modern singing and performance. More than 80 years after making her first recording Billie's legacy continues to embody what is elegant and cool in contemporary music.

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Billie Holiday: Emotional Power Through Song

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Billie Holiday: Emotional Power Through Song

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Billie Holiday has one of the most distinctive voices of all time; her very personal style continues to inspire singers decades after her death in 1959. Holiday herself was inspired by great musicians she heard growing up, and it's those influences that helped her become one of the most beloved singers ever.

Holiday became famous after she recorded "Strange Fruit," a 1939 protest song about lynchings of African-Americans. The haunting vocal offers a stark illustration of her greatest gift - the ability to convey emotion.

Phil Schaap, curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center, says Holiday "speaks to your heart. She catches your ear. She reaches your mind, and she does this with an emotional power that, of course, is genius and is beyond words."

The emotional power of Holiday's vocals comes from the way she sings the melodies. It's about rhythm and phrasing, which Holiday learned from listening to the best.

Holiday was born in Philadelphia in 1915, and was raised in Baltimore. As a girl, she loved music, and her idols were Louis Armstrong and blues singer Bessie Smith.

To hear those 1920s records, Holiday needed a Victrola, and the only place she had access to one was Alice Dean's whorehouse, where as a girl Billie worked scrubbing floors.

"A Victrola was a big deal in those days, and there weren't any parlors around that had one except Alice's," Holiday wrote in in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. "I spent many a wonderful hour there listening to Pops and Bessie. I remember Pops' recording of 'West End Blues' and how it used to gas me. It was the first time I ever heard anybody sing without using any words."

Holiday's real vocal influence is Louis "Pops" Armstrong. She heard his Hot Five vocal numbers, and is clearly an Armstrong-inspired singer.

Schaap has studied Armstrong's influence on Billie Holiday closely. He's been demonstrating how Holiday mimics Armstrong's phrasing on his radio shows at Columbia University's WKCR for some 30 years.

"You really have to hear it, is what you have to do," Schaap says. "My telling you that the phrasing over the rhythm that Louis Armstrong has is reprised and utilized in Billie Holiday's concept isn't telling you anything unless you actually go hear their records. I'd like you to hear Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday take a chorus of 'Yours and Mine.' "

Like a scientist in his laboratory, Schaap, in a WKCR studio, takes Armstrong's and Holiday's versions of the same song, recorded in the same year, 1937. Then he adjusts the turntable pitch controls to speed up Armstrong's vocals and slow down Billie's, so that their voices are closer in pitch.

Schaap says if you listen closely, you can hear how similar the phrasing is - how Holiday literally learned how to sing and swing at the same time from Armstrong.

"Well, that was Billie Holiday doing Louis Armstrong," Schaap says. "And I think you can hear it. She gets so much from Pops."

In 1949, she actually got to sing with him.

Just as Holiday learned from listening to older singers, generations of younger singers have learned from listening to Holiday - from Frank Sinatra to Shelby Lynne.

Singer Joni Mitchell says her two favorite singers are Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday because of the way they use their technical gifts as singers to tell meaningful stories.

"I think I took this from Billie and Piaf, that many of the so-called great singers love their notes more than their text," Mitchell says. "And those women never forgot what they were singing about, so that the note almost played second position to the text. Not that there was anything wrong with the chosen notes. There was still beauty to them, but the emphasis was on telling the story from the heart."

Holiday had plenty of stories to tell, and enough heartache to fill a songbook: years of heroin addiction, a stint in federal prison and a series of abusive relationships with men. She was just 44 years old when she died.

Schaap says too much emphasis has been placed on the tragic aspects of Holiday's life, and not enough on the glorious aspects of her voice.

"She swings and invents," he says. "She innovates. She can compose on the fly, she can make you hear the rhythm section if it's not there, and make them play better if they are. And I think that's it. I think Billie Holiday is the greatest."

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Billie Holiday: Emotional Power Through Song

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Holiday became famous after she recorded "Strange Fruit," a 1939 protest song about lynchings of African-Americans. The haunting vocal offers a stark illustration of her greatest gift -- the ability to convey emotion.

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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School Segregation on the Rise 65 Years After Brown v. Board of Education

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School Segregation on the Rise 65 Years After Brown v. Board of Education

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School segregation is on the rise 65 years after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, according to the co-author of a new report. At the time of the ruling in1954, schools were legally segregated under the "separate but equal" doctrine, and the court ordered schools to start integrating.

Gary Orfield, a professor at UCLA and the co-founder of The Civil Rights Project, joined CBSN's Kenneth Craig to explain how Supreme Court decisions made in the 1990s caused schools to start becoming resegregated. Orfield co-authored a report on the issue for The Civil Rights Project, which is noted for being the nation's leading research center on issues of civil rights and racial inequality.

"In 1991, the Supreme Court, in a case from Oklahoma City, said that desegregation was a temporary punishment, not a long-term requirement," he said. "And a lot of school districts returned to segregated neighborhood schools and put pressure on court judges to end desegregation. Ever since that time, segregation has been increasing."

White students are becoming a minority in the public school system, but they are also seeing increasingly fewer students of color in their classrooms, according to the report.

The report found that the average white student attends schools that are 69 percent white. The average Hispanic student attends schools that are 55 percent Hispanic or that have a 66 percent mix of black and Hispanic. And similarly, the average black student attends schools that are 47 percent black or that have a 67 percent mix of black and Hispanic. Asian American students, on average, attend schools that are 24 percent Asian American.

In Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were "inherently unequal" and students being forced to attend these schools were being denied equal rights under the 14th Amendment. A year later, the Supreme Court clarified that schools must be desegregated with "all deliberate speed."

But now, Orfield said schools with majority brown students often lack resources and opportunities provided at predominantly white schools.

"African Americans and Latinos are in schools that are overwhelmingly poor," he said. "On the other hand, whites and Asians are at schools that are middle class."

More integrated schools would help combat racial inequity, giving all students an equal opportunity to achieve academic, career and overall life success.

Elementary school education "makes a difference in how well you do," Orfield said. "Not only how well you do in college but when you finish, what type of job you get, what kind of income you have, and what your health conditions are as adults ... that relates to being in a school that is competitive and where there are experienced teachers and administrators who get you into college. Most of our impoverished schools don't do that and it's a tragic loss of talent, a real dangerous loss."

The report includes recommendations for ending school segregation: regional desegregation, implementing fair housing policies, educating the school community and staff on the importance of desegregation, training school staff in handling diversity and accountability in serving all students when executing school choice programs.

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School segregation on the rise 65 years after Brown v. Board of Education

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School segregation is on the rise 65 years after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, according to the co-author of a new report. At the time of the ruling in1954, schools were legally segregated under the "separate but equal" doctrine, and the court ordered schools to start integrating.

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Revisionist History - Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment 

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Revisionist History - Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment 

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(Malcolm Gladwell's Podcast)

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Skip to Main Content Gain access to ad-free versions of 20+ podcasts from the Pushkin library along with exclusive bonus episodes and other member benefits. Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell's journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood.

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Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

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Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

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Images above: King is ready for a mug shot (left) in Montgomery, Alabama, after his 1956 arrest while protesting the segregation of the city's buses. His leadership of the successful 381-day bus boycott brought him to national attention. Right: In 1967, King serves out the sentence from his arrest four years earlier in Birmingham, Alabama.
In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court's injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for "constructive, nonviolent tension" to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century.

The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue, under the headline "The Negro Is Your Brother."
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century b.c. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants-for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.
"Wait" has almost always meant "Never."
Then it occurred to us that the March election [for Birmingham's mayor] was ahead, and so we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that Mr. Connor [the commissioner of public safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor] was in the runoff, we decided again to postpone action so that the demonstration could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

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One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"-then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

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 well 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."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

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I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens' Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?
In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do-nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.

If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies-a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on Freedom Rides-and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal ..." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime-the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some-such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Anne Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle-have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty nigger-lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful-in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent-and often even vocal-sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation-and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of non-violence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King Jr.
This article appears in the special MLK issue print edition with the headline "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and was published in the August 1963 Atlantic as "The Negro Is Your Brother." © 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., © renewed 1991 Coretta Scott King. All works by Martin Luther King Jr. have been reprinted by arrangement with the Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., care of Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, New York.

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leadership of the successful 381-day bus boycott

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terminology of the jewish philosopher martin buber

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landmark document of the civil-rights movement

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part of the work of the nonviolent-resister

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Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'Letter From Birmingham Jail'

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Images above: King is ready for a mug shot (left) in Montgomery, Alabama, after his 1956 arrest while protesting the segregation of the city's buses. His leadership of the successful 381-day bus boycott brought him to national attention. Right: In 1967, King serves out the sentence from his arrest four years earlier in Birmingham, Alabama.