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Chock full of helpful resources to help you get ready for tough conversations.

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This is by no means a complete guide to introducing the topics covered by Stamped, but it is intended to provide you with ideas for supplemental materials to make connections to key characters with whom students may not be familiar and to extend learning.

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Our key curriculum resource

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A wealth of information from the National Council of Teachers of English

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What an amazing time we had with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, hearing from them about their latest novel Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You! The discussion was timely and well received, so thank you for your participation, and a special thank-you to our moderator Sonja Cherry-Paul.

Below we've compiled a list of resources to help you continue the conversation within your communities.

IBRAM X. KENDI www.ibramxkendi.com
Facebook - /ibramxkendi
Twitter -@DrIbram
Instagram -@IbramXK

NEW BOOK COMING JUNE 16!

With bold art and thoughtful yet playful text, Antiracist Baby introduces the youngest readers and the grown-ups in their lives to the concept and power of antiracism. Learn more.

DR. SONJA CHERRY-PAUL
Educator's Guide

"This guide suggests a month-long approach to reading and discussing Stamped with middle-school and high-school readers in English, English language arts, social studies, history, and humanities classrooms." Access it here.

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Roads

How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Adapted for Young Readers) by Trevor Noah

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

March by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin

Monster by Walter Dean Myers

We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross

Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women's Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall

All American Boys by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Black Appetite. White Food.: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom by Jamila Lyiscott

Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Dear Martin by Nic Stone

Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race by Jesmyn Ward

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood . . . and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education by Christopher Emdin

The Gold Cadillac by Mildred D. Taylor

The Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys by Eddie Moore, Jr., Ali Michael, and Marguerite W. Penick-Parks

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans by Kadir Nelson

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds

"Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children by Lisa Delpit

Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon

Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom by Matthew R. Kay

Piecing Me Together by Renee Watson

Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist by Eli Saslow

So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Stamped: For our Classrooms, Homes, and Communities from Hachette Book Group

Sulwe by Lupita Nyong'o

Surviving Becky(s): Pedagogies for Deconstructing Whiteness and Gender by Cheryl E. Matias

The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein

Teaching Race: How to Help Students Unmask and Challenge Racism by Steven Brookfield

There, There by Tommy Orange

This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work by Tiffany Jewell

What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families by Julie Olsen Edwards, Louise Derman-Sparks, and Patricia Ramsey

White Rage by Carol Anderson

*These texts were shared by participants within the chat during the live discussion.

What Antiracist Language Teachers Do

Antiracist language teachers consciously work to create safe learning environments for all students. This poster provides a description of what these teachers do.

Qualities of Antiracist ELA Curricula

Antiracist ELA curricula must celebrate and sustain diversity as part of educational justice in a changing world. This poster describes the qualities of such curricula.

Take a look at what we discussed with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi.

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Stamped: Resources for your Classroom - NCTE

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IBRAM X. KENDI www.ibramxkendi.com Facebook - /ibramxkendi Twitter -@DrIbram Instagram -@IbramXK NEW BOOK COMING JUNE 16! With bold art and thoughtful yet playful text, Antiracist Baby introduces the youngest readers and the grown-ups in their lives to the concept and power of antiracism. Learn more.

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A graphic organizer you can use

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More helpful materials on teaching Stamped

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All February Picks For Teen Readers
Using humor and a conversational style, author Jason Reynolds deftly reworks Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, exposing young adult readers to the history of America's racist past that textbooks leave out.

Get This Book

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"Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You" - NEA Read Across America Official Selection

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All February Picks For Teen Readers Using humor and a conversational style, author Jason Reynolds deftly reworks Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, exposing young adult readers to the history of America's racist past that textbooks leave out. Get This Book

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In addition to the resources on the DEI Guide, check out Britannica School in the Galileo folder in MyBackpack. We have access to tons of primary sources through this resource.

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Welcome to Britannica School, a safe, up-to-date, and age-appropriate information resource for Elementary, Middle, and High School.

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Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of many award-winning books, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks and more.

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Resources for the D. T. Howard Middle School school-wide reading of Stamped

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National Ambassador for Young People's Literature:  Write. Right. Rite.

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National Ambassador for Young People's Literature:  Write. Right. Rite.

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Sign up for the Grab the MIC newsletter: https://guides.loc.gov/jason-reynolds/grab-the-mic/newsletter

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Welcome to the "Write. Right. Rite.," a "GRAB THE MIC: Tell Your Story" video series! The "Write. Right. Rite." is meant to be an entertaining and inventive way to engage with the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Jason Reynolds.

According to Reynolds, the "Write. Right. Rite." is all about learning the ritual of "authentic"-not to be confused with "correct" or "exact"-expression. Throughout the series, Reynolds shares his passion for storytelling while discussing topics like creativity, connection, and imagination. At the end of each video, Reynolds shares a prompt that encourages young people to work toward a specific idea. The activities are fun-filled and some are more challenging than others, but Reynolds always makes sure to include brainstorming "get-you-going" questions.

So, what do you say? Are you ready to dive into, try on, and work through all the "Write. Right. Rite." episodes?

Go for it!

Watch the Entire "Write. Right. Rite." Series:

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Research Guides: Jason Reynolds, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature: "Write. Right. Rite." Series

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On January 13, 2020, Jason Reynolds was announced as the seventh National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Learn more about Jason and his activities as National Ambassador through this guide.

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Jason Reynolds Wants Young People’s Stories to be Heard

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Jason Reynolds Wants Young People’s Stories to be Heard

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Award-winning YA Author Jason Reynolds wants kids and teens to have the language they need for constructive conversations about race.

In his new book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, Reynolds remixes Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning into an accessible primer on antiblack racism in America that he calls "not a history book."

Reynolds was recently named the seventh National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress.

In his two-year appointment, Reynolds plans to travel the country and interview children about their lives and hometowns to create what he describes as "proof of life on record."
Produced by Victoria Chamberlin

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Jason Reynolds Wants Young People's Stories To be Heard - The Kojo Nnamdi Show

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Award-winning YA Author Jason Reynolds wants kids and teens to have the language they need for constructive conversations about race. In his new book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, Reynolds remixes Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning into an accessible primer on antiblack racism in America that he calls "not a history book."

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Jason Reynolds is the Bard of Black YA Fiction

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Jason Reynolds is the Bard of Black YA Fiction

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Jason Reynolds arrives for breakfast at the Busboys and Poets on V Street one winter Saturday, he looks, atypically for a writer, like a model-black Saint Laurent coat and boots, black Rag & Bone jeans, silver 1960 Rolex GMT-Master. (Luxury watches are his new collecting obsession.) On his fourth finger, though, is possibly the cheapest and also most constant item in his wardrobe: a wide silver-colored ring.

Reynolds, now 36, bought it for $8 when he was 15 or 16, at a church flea market in Prince George's County. He says that after he left the stand, the seller told police he'd stolen it. Officers questioned him, a confusing and terrifying turn of events. But one of them recognized him from another part of town-the U Street poetry scene-and said he was no thief. Reynolds doesn't remember being angry, only hugely grateful: "Like, Man, that was close.

"I wear it every day as a reminder that true wealth, by definition, is a good name. And my name at that moment had gotten me out of trouble."

Today Reynolds's name is much more widely known, for popularizing stories not so unlike that one: of what it can be like to grow up young and black in America. His young-adult novels-he has published 13 in the last six years-tackle fraught subjects including violence and deeply troubled families, and they typically star a male teenager in a tough city neighborhood, almost always underestimated or misunderstood.

Until recently, these were perspectives rarely seen in YA fiction. While lucrative, the genre was a historically homogeneous corner of the book world. But Reynolds, who grew up in Oxon Hill, has helped expand the pantheon in spectacular fashion. At 2.5 million copies sold, his books are monster bestsellers. He's a two-time National Book Award finalist and a Newbery honoree who headlines dozens of appearances before teenage audiences every year. He wrote Marvel Comics' first novelization of a non-white Spider-Man-the biracial Miles Morales-which earned him a cameo mention in the most recent Spider-Man movie. His novel Long Way Down, about a young man considering retaliation for his brother's murder, has been optioned by Universal and a producer of The Social Network. And in January, the Library of Congress named him the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, an honor that will send him on a cross-country tour.

At this rate, Reynolds could likely carry on easily in YA. With a seven-figure book deal, he has already netted accoutrements of a life he never imagined for himself-collections of Langston Hughes letters, programs from James Baldwin plays, a signed first edition of Toni Morrison's Beloved. Instead, he's making something of a professional swerve.

This month, the publisher Little, Brown released his first attempt at nonfiction, and as you might expect, it's neither a reductive nor comfortable tale. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is an adaptation of the trenchant, highly influential work by American University scholar Ibram X. Kendi. Reynolds's job: to make this history readable for the 11-to-17-year-old set.

How do you distill a 592-page, 400-year account of our country's most painful legacy into something a kid might actually want to read? With a lot of false starts, it turns out. As Reynolds says, "It was the hardest thing I've ever done."

To understand how Reynolds became a literary star whom kids flock to see, maybe all you need to know is that when he was their age, he wasn't a reader. He says he didn't finish a book until he was 17-Richard Wright's Black Boy -because the stuff he was exposed to didn't reflect life in his largely African American patch of Washington.

Not that he didn't love language. As a teenager, he started frequenting U Street spoken-word events designed for adults. Friends would come to see him at the now-defunct Bar Nun. "They'd be like, 'Bro, we don't know what you talkin' about, but we here,' " Reynolds says. " 'We are in the building, and we are going to support you.' "

At the University of Maryland, Reynolds self-published two poetry collections. He and a friend, Jason Douglas Griffin, also spent $30,000 printing a coffee-table book, with Reynolds running up debts on the kind of high-limit credit card no longer available to students. An agent was impressed by their nerve, and from there the two Jasons collaborated on a YA book, heavy on visuals, about a white artist and a black writer trying to make it in New York. It tanked. Reynolds wrote and wrote but couldn't sell anything.

Around 2009, when he was 25, he picked up Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, wanting to see why everyone in publishing made such a fuss about it. He couldn't relate to a girl getting her period, but he was struck by the honesty of Judy Blume's story. Next up was The Young Landlords by Walter Dean Myers, an early YA giant. The 1979 novel follows young black teens who take over a rundown building in Harlem-and speak like Reynolds's childhood friends. It felt like permission to tell stories he knew.

He began laboring over a gritty novel about an African American teen with a price on his head after a small misunderstanding: When I Was the Greatest, his breakout hit. Partly autobiographical, the story was inspired by Reynolds's older brother, a bruiser stabbed in the face at age 16 who came out of surgery to discover an unexpected bond with his younger, mellower sibling. It showed off what would become other hallmarks of a Reynolds novel: layered subplots yoked to supporting characters with rich backstories, dashes of humor (wherein the word "fartleks"-running jargon-becomes "fart licks"), and symbolism you don't discover until a second or third reading. In his most recent novel, there's a friendship handshake that, if you were to see it, would be sign language for "I can hear you even when the world can't."

Reynolds frequently examines friendships and their sustaining power in the lives of teenagers with broken families. (His parents split up when he was ten, and he was raised mostly by his mother, who worked in insurance. He's still so close to his childhood friends that they now have keys to his house.) "Track," a multi-book series, looks at four kids on an elite track team who become unlikely pals. They hail from varied backgrounds-one is albino, another's neighborhood is "not to be played with," a third is motherless-but all share the experience of running to escape something painful.

The point is to render life in its messy, three-dimensional particulars-and bust stereotypes. "There are so many basketball books. So many good ones. You know, because black kids just wanna play basketball," Reynolds says, tongue in cheek. "I'm not going to ever pretend that part of my mission isn't to push back against the stereotype about what black children are. I mean, we do everything like everybody else, we're children like everybody else's children, but we don't often get the opportunity to be that in media."

In 2017, Reynolds released Long Way Down, perhaps his knottiest plot and most daring stylistic treatment yet. Many of his novels read like a performance on the page, in the rhythmic prose of rap. ("The pancakes I had this morning had turned back into batter. A bitter batter, pitter-pattering up my throat," says one narrator who's nervous.) But Reynolds chose to tell this one entirely in verse.

The book takes place over 60 seconds, as a young man descends an elevator, meeting ghosts from his past who help him weigh whether to seek revenge for his brother's death. It's a scene from the author's own life: At age 19, Reynolds got a late-night call saying a friend had been brutally murdered. "There was a moment when I realized that I could completely avenge his death-that I had that kind of anger and that kind of pain," he says. He and some buddies met up to debate whether to retaliate. The novel isn't supposed to vilify youth facing a similar calculation, "or even to make any grandiose statement about gun violence," Reynolds explains. "It's more to humanize those young people who are going through that, who have nowhere else to put that pain."

The story spent 77 weeks on the New York Times YA bestseller list. "I was destroyed," wrote a critic in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Aja Clark, the manager of reading programs for DC libraries, used to teach high-school English and run a book club for African American youth. "I wish we had had his books then," says Clark, who often resorted to helping students analyze rap lyrics. "These boys never had the words to say how it felt walking down the street or experiencing anger and pain. With Mr. Reynolds, it's 'We're seen, we're heard, people can empathize with us.'"

Last year, people checked his books out of the DC libraries 2,028 times-basically, six times a day.

Kendi, the American University prof who founded its Antiracist Research & Policy Center, wasn't that into books in high school, either. So when he had the idea to adapt Stamped From the Beginning for a younger audience, he knew he'd need a partner. He had liked Reynolds's "Track" series; the bonds between such different characters "made me think about what's possible for this country," he says. After meeting Reynolds at the 2016 National Book Awards dinner, he felt the author was plenty intellectual for the job. "He's deeply reflective about his past and about what he's trying to do and why."

Reynolds fended off Kendi's requests. He wasn't much of a scholar, he'd say: "I don't know how to study, you know?"

Many months in, he finally relented-in hopes that a reimagined Stamped might change the conversation. With novels, Reynolds says, "you hope to make somebody laugh or cry-that's pretty much the end of it. Ibram's like, 'We have the opportunity to make a thing that could be a sea change. It's bigger than either one of us.' "

But how? Kendi gave Reynolds an outline of what he thought were the most essential stories, but Reynolds struggled. He filed two drafts that were just slightly edited versions of Kendi's tome-each an unwieldy 300 pages.

His editor reminded him that they wanted a Jason Reynolds book. Were they sure? "I'm gonna have to ruin what he's done," Reynolds remembers replying-ruin "one of the most important race documents of this century." Still, the directive freed him. Out came a chatty, irreverent story, one that's supposed to read, he says, like it's "from your barber who happens to be a history buff."

The book has the same hyper-personal opening as his novels, a character speaking directly to you-"Before we begin, let's get something straight"-who promises that the story won't feel like a list of dates with an occasional war thrown in. While Kendi's version begins with the Great Hurricane of 1635, Reynolds gets straight to race: "Uh-oh. The R-word. Which for many of us still feels rated R. Or can be matched only with another R word-run. But don't." Instead of a winding account of Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the 15th-century biographer who built up Portuguese Prince Henry's evangelical justification for enslaving Africans, Reynolds just dubs him "World's First Racist"-as if it's a senior-class superlative in one very messed-up yearbook-and explains that he's like a cheerleader who "made sure Prince Henry was looked at as a brilliant quarterback making ingenious plays, and that every touchdown was the mark of a superior player."

With its nicknames (Thomas "Contradiction" Jefferson), wordplay ("When the going gets tough, the tough get racist"), and chatty asides (cockamamie is the "best word ever"), the book shares DNA with Reynolds's fiction. The whole manuscript actually sounds as if it could be performed, down to written-in pauses-"P A U S E"-after particularly abhorrent historical ideas. "I'm probably the most proud of it," Reynolds says.

Yet for all the sweat of completing the book, he won't cop to worrying about its reception. "It's coming out of something that already exists, you know? All I was is the translator of the information."

Reynolds sometimes writes at Maketto, the high-concept coffee shop/clothing boutique/restaurant on Northeast DC's H Street, other times at home in nearby Kingman Park. He bought a condo there in 2018, a couple years after moving back from New York to be closer to his mother. He chose the neighborhood where she'd grown up, where his grandmother and cousins had resided for years, and he's been living that head-jerking experience common to Washington natives who leave for a while and return to find a whiter, glossier, bougier city. You can probably see where this story's going: It's all new material.

Reynolds has been working on a novel about a twentysomething who's obsessed with writing eulogies. The setting is a changing city-DC-that's grappling with the relationship between preservation and erasure. But as much as it sounds like a paean to his hometown, the project also scans like a new chance to prove himself: It's his first novel for adults.

"I don't know when this started, I don't know who said something the first time, but there's so much disparaging stuff that's said about people who write for kids," he tells me. "I choose to write for children because I love children, but my abilities are my abilities." He wants the freedom to write for any audience he pleases-and due respect. "You read To Kill a Mockingbird in eighth grade. You read Of Mice and Men in the seventh grade. You read Lord of the Flies in eighth grade. You call those classics. You think they're brilliant pieces of capital-L literature, but what I make is less than?"

His agent, naturally, is betting otherwise. She recently sent an archivist to town to start cataloguing Reynolds's papers-drafts with his editor's handwritten notations (some 20 takes of Long Way Down alone), pieces of Fabriano paper with possible book titles. It's a weird exercise for someone so young to sell rights to his literary estate-authors often do so late in life-but people have been asking, he says. No decisions have been made yet, but Reynolds is pretty sure his papers won't go to the highest bidder.

"I don't need the money," he says. "It's all about who I'm in conversation with. It's like, where's Baldwin? Where's Judy Blume?"

This article appears in the March 2020 issue of Washingtonian.

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Jason Reynolds, the Bard of Black YA Fiction, Just Released a Book on an Impossibly Challenging Topic

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Jason Reynolds arrives for breakfast at the Busboys and Poets on V Street one winter Saturday, he looks, atypically for a writer, like a model-black Saint Laurent coat and boots, black Rag & Bone jeans, silver 1960 Rolex GMT-Master. (Luxury watches are his new collecting obsession.)

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Booklist interview with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

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Booklist interview with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

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Shelf Care Interview: Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds on Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Booklist's Shelf Care Podcast

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Welcome to the Shelf Care Interview, an occasional conversation series where Booklist talks to book people.

This Shelf Care Interview is sponsored by Little Brown Books for Young Readers.

In this episode of the Shelf Care Interview, Maggie Reagan talks to Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds.

Ibram X. Kendi, a professor of history and international relations, is one of America's foremost historians and leading anti-racist voices. He is the New York Times' bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning, and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C.

Jason Reynolds is the New York Times bestselling multi-award winning author of many books for children, including the Track series and the Printz, Newbery, and Coretta Scott King Honor book, Long Way Down. Recently he was appointed the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, Jason's remix for young readers of Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning, comes out in March from Little Brown.

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Such a GREAT presentation on allowing students to interact with materials and show mastery in a way that is culturally relevant.

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Sharing Stories: Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning with Andratesha Fritzgerald

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A helpful visualization of the data on the number of lynchings during Reconstruction

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EJI has now documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings in America between 1865 and 1950. Thousands more Black people have been killed by white mob lynchings whose deaths may never be discovered.

In our 2015 report, Lynching in America, EJI documented 4,500 racial terror lynchings in the period between 1877 and 1950. Our newest report, Reconstruction in America, documents nearly 2,000 additional lynchings between 1865 and 1876, raising the total number of documented lynchings to nearly 6,500.

Thousands more were attacked, sexually assaulted, and terrorized by white mobs and individuals who were shielded from arrest and prosecution.

White perpetrators of lawless violence against formerly enslaved people were almost never held accountable-instead, they were often celebrated. Emboldened Confederate veterans and former enslavers organized a reign of terror that effectively nullified constitutional amendments designed to provide Black people with equal protection and the right to vote.

In a series of devastating opinions, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Congressional efforts to protect formerly enslaved people. The Court ceded control to the same white Southerners who used terror and violence to stop Black political participation, upholding laws and practices that codified racial hierarchy and embracing a new constitutional order defined by "states' rights."

Within a decade after the Civil War, Congress began to abandon the promise of assistance to millions of formerly enslaved Black people. Violence, mass lynchings, and lawlessness enabled white Southerners to create a regime of white supremacy and Black disenfranchisement alongside a new economic order that continued to exploit Black labor.

White officials in the North and West similarly rejected racial equality, codified racial discrimination, and occasionally embraced the same tactics of violent control seen in the South.

We cannot understand our present moment without recognizing the lasting damage caused by allowing white supremacy and racial hierarchy to prevail during Reconstruction.

Bryan Stevenson, Director

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EJI has now documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings in America between 1865 and 1950. Thousands more Black people have been killed by white mob lynchings whose deaths may never be discovered. In our 2015 report, Lynching in America, EJI documented 4,500 racial terror lynchings in the period between 1877 and 1950.

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Biography

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W.E.B. Du Bois: Activist Leader in Niagara Movement & Co-Founder of the NAACP | Biography

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W.E.B. DuBois rivalry with Booker T. Washington

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W.E.B. DuBois rivalry with Booker T. Washington

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W.E.B. Du Bois' Rivalry with Booker T. Washington | Biography

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National Women's History Museum biography

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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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National Park Service video biography

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It's March 3, 1913, Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. The delegation of Illinois suffragists is lining up to participate in the Woman Suffrage Procession on the day before Woodrow Wilson's presidential inauguration. And somehow they get the word. Organizer Alice Paul does not want Black and white women marching together. So the group turns to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, their only Black member, and says, "We're sorry, Ida. We don't want to cause any trouble. You'll have to go to the back of the parade." Ida storms off in tears. But she doesn't go to the back. She waits along the parade route. And when the Illinois delegation appears, she steps out in front. So for the rest of the woman suffrage procession, Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago leads the Illinois suffragists. And that's why at Belmont-Paul, we say you can't spell formidable without Ida.

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Ida B. Wells spent her life fiercely dedicated to truth and equality, including the rights of all to vote. In this Suffrage in 60 Seconds video, hear a story about the way that determination showed up during the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession.

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Biography.com

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Ida B. Wells | Activist for African-American Justice | Biography

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Biography from Tuskegee Institute

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"I have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those...who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite..."
- Booker T Washington

Booker Taliaferro Washington rose from slavery to a position of power and influence. A realist and a man of action, he became one of the most important African-American leaders of his time. He was committed to improving the lives of African-Americans after the Civil War. Washington advocated economic independence through self-help, hard work, and a practical education. His drive and vision built Tuskegee into a major African-American presence and place of learning.

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Booker T. Washington -- Tuskegee Institute

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Booker Taliaferro Washington rose from slavery to a position of power and influence. A realist and a man of action, he became one of the most important African-American leaders of his time. He was committed to improving the lives of African-Americans after the Civil War.

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From the Library of Congress - Part 2

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Established by the NAACP in 1916 to develop an effective program to stamp out lynching, the Anti-lynching Committee developed legislative and public awareness campaigns. In 1919 the NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. This report indicated that 3,224 people were lynched in the thirty-year period. Of these, 702 were white and 2,522 black. Among the justifications given for the lynchings were petty offenses such as "using offensive language, refusal to give up land, illicit distilling."

The Committee also compiled lynching statistics in 1921. It took full-page advertisements on November 23, 1922, in The New York Times, The Atlanta Constitution, and several other leading newspapers entitled "The Shame of America," with the subheading "3436 People Lynched 1889 to 1922."

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African American Odyssey: The Booker T. Washington Era (Part 2)

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Established by the NAACP in 1916 to develop an effective program to stamp out lynching, the Anti-lynching Committee developed legislative and public awareness campaigns. In 1919 the NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. This report indicated that 3,224 people were lynched in the thirty-year period.

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From the Library of Congress - Part I

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African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search Part 1: African American Soldiers |Education, Economic and Social Progress
Part 2

The 1870s to the start of World War I, the period when African American educator Booker T. Washington was gaining prominence, was also a difficult time for African Americans. The vote proved elusive and civil rights began to vanish through court action. Lynching, racial violence, and slavery's twin children peonage and sharecropping arose as deadly quagmires on the path to full citizenship. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, the federal government virtually turned a deaf ear to the voice of the African American populace.

Yet in this era blacks were educated in unprecedented numbers, hundreds received degrees from institutions of higher learning, and a few, like W.E.B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson, went on for the doctorate. While only a small percentage of the black population had been literate at the close of the Civil War, by the turn of the twentieth century, the majority of all African Americans were literate. The Library of Congress houses the papers of three presidents of Tuskegee Institute: Booker T. Washington, Robert Russa Moton, and Frederick Douglass Patterson, and other important manuscripts and photographs relating to the establishment, operations, aspirations, and success of historically black colleges and universities.

Also at this time, African American artistic genius in music, painting, sculpture, literature, and dance became more evident to white society at large. Some of the artists of this period, including poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, won international acclaim. This section of the exhibit demonstrates the progress of blacks in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

This period has been called the "nadir" of black history because so many gains earned after the Civil War seemed lost by the time of World War I, and because racial violence and lynching reached an all time high. However, both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL) were founded by blacks and whites during this time. The papers of both of these major civil rights organizations, which are among the holdings in the Library's Manuscript Division, document the unswerving efforts on the part of blacks and their white allies to insure that the nation provide "freedom and justice to all."

Although this song was written in 1901, it refers to the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War, and to the first African American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, Sergeant William Carney. During the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment's assault on Fort Wagner, he took the American flag from the fatally wounded standard bearer and, although himself wounded, bore it back to the camp. "I never let the dear old flag touch the ground," he said.

In 1901, Bob Cole, James Weldon Johnson, and J. Rosamond Johnson wrote this song commemorating Carney's heroism. The Johnson brothers also wrote, "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing: National Hymn for the Colored People of America" (1900), a piece that enjoyed immediate popularity and has been dubbed the "Negro National Anthem."

[John] Rosamond Johnson.

"The Old Flag Never Touched the Ground."
Words by Bob Cole and J. W. Johnson.
New York: Jos. W. Stern & Co., 1901.
Sheet music.
Music Division. (6-20)

Camp Lincoln.
Cabinet Card photograph.
1897.
Gladstone Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-6162 (6-23)

After the Civil War, African American soldiers who wanted to continue in military service were able to join one of four units, the 9th and 10th Cavalries and the 24th and 25th Infantries. These units were generally employed as peacekeepers in the western territories. They protected settlers, safeguarded stagecoach and freight transportation, hunted down outlaws, and participated in campaigns against Native Americans. During the Spanish American War they served both in Cuba and the Philippines.

This photograph is of an unidentified African American soldier stationed at Camp Lincoln.

Many black men pursued a military career after the Civil War. During the next major conflict--the Spanish-American War--the 9th and 10th Negro Cavalry, known since 1866 as the Buffalo Soldiers, distinguished themselves in the charge of San Juan Hill in Cuba. Additionally, the 25th Negro Infantry took part in the Battle of El Caney, capturing a Spanish fort. Black troops were among the first sent to the war. They participated in campaigns in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. This image depicts the 24th Infantry, stationed at Fort Douglas, near Salt Lake City, Utah, leaving for Tennessee.

24th Infantry Leaving Salt Lake City, Utah, for Chattanooga, Tennessee, April 24, 1898.

Photograph.
Gladstone Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-6174/LC-USZ62-119984 (6-18)

Charles Barthelmess.

Buffalo Soldiers, Ft. Keogh, Missouri, 25th Infantry [thirty-eight soldiers wearing buffalo robes], n.d.
Cabinet card.
Gladstone Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-6161 (6-17)

The federal government disbanded most of the United States Colored Troops after the Civil War although some continued to patrol in the West. Native Americans called African American troops the "Buffalo Soldiers." After the Compromise of 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South, only a few African American units remained, including the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry units and the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry. Many of these troops were mobilized to fight in the Spanish-American War.

In this sermon African American theologian and intellectual Reverend Alexander Crummell comments on the struggles of African Americans to achieve full citizenship in the United States. He notes that although some whites sought to keep African Americans ignorant, "intellectual aspiration has characterized the race in all the lands of their servitude." He notes that "for two hundred years there has been a struggle for the alphabet; the primer; the newspaper; and the Bible." Crummell, born free, had received a B.A. degree at Queen's College in Cambridge, England, in 1853. W. E. B. DuBois wrote an essay lauding Crummell's abilities in Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Booker T. Washington (three-quarter length portrait, seated and facing slightly left, holding newspaper)
ca. 1890.
Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-25624 (6-2)

Born a slave in Virginia in 1856, Booker T. Washington managed to get a primary education that allowed his probationary admittance to Hampton Institute. There he proved such an exemplary student, teacher, and speaker that the principal of Hampton recommended Washington to Alabamans who were trying to establish a school for African Americans in their state.

Washington and his students built the school, named Tuskegee Institute after its location, from the ground up. As a result of his work as an educator and public speaker, Washington became influential in business and politics. His vast collection of personal papers, as well as many early records of Tuskegee Institute, are housed in the Manuscript Division.

Tuskegee Institute was founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881 under a charter from the Alabama legislature for the purpose of training teachers in Alabama. Tuskegee's program provided students with both academic and vocational training. The students, under Washington's direction, built their own buildings, produced their own food, and provided for most of their own basic necessities. The Tuskegee faculty utilized each of these activities to teach the students basic skills that they could share with African American communities throughout the South.

Frances Benjamin Johnston.

Tuskegee History Class.
Copyprint, 1902.
Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-64712 (6-3)

Frances Benjamin Johnston was commissioned to photograph Tuskegee in 1902. This photograph shows a history class learning about Native Americans and Captain John Smith in Virginia.

Paul Laurence Dunbar to Booker T. Washington, January 23, 1902.

Typed letter.
Booker T. Washington Papers, Manuscript Division. (6-7)
Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society, Paul Laurence Dunbar House State Memorial

At the turn of the century, Paul Laurence Dunbar was the most celebrated black writer in America. Although Dunbar's reputation rested on his mastery of dialect verse, he also demonstrated skill as a short story writer, novelist, playwright, and librettist. In 1902 Booker T. Washington commissioned Dunbar to write the school song for Tuskegee Institute. Dunbar wrote his lyrics to the tune of "Fair Harvard." Washington was not pleased with the "Tuskegee Song." He objected to Dunbar's emphasis of "the industrial idea," and the exclusion of biblical references. In this letter to Washington, Dunbar defends his artistic sensibility.

Booker T. Washington was already a popular educator and speaker when he gave this speech in Atlanta. The speech catapulted him into national prominence. In the text he challenged both races to adjust to post-emancipation realities. He stated that the races could work together as one hand while socially remaining as separate as the fingers. At the time, Washington's statement, offering reconciliation between the races, pleased most Americans. Increasingly, however, as racial violence and discrimination against blacks escalated at the turn of the century, African American leaders began to believe that the speech represented not a compromise but a capitulation.

Booker T. Washington. "Atlanta Exposition Speech."

September 18, 1895.
Transcript draft with autograph corrections.
Booker T. Washington Papers, Manuscript Division. (6-5)

W. E. B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington, September 24, 1895.

Autograph letter.
Booker T. Washington Papers, Manuscript Division. (6-6)
Courtesy of Mr. David G. Dubois

Although W. E. B. DuBois would later publish his pointed challenge to Booker T. Washington's educational and political philosophy in his celebrated work, Souls of Black Folk (1903), at the time of Washington's Atlanta speech, DuBois wrote this letter to express his congratulations.

In 1905 W. E. B. DuBois and black militant journalist William Monroe Trotter organized a meeting of black intellectuals and professionals in Niagara Falls, Canada, to demand full citizenship rights for African Americans: freedom of speech, an "unfettered and unsubsidized" press, recognition of the principle of human brotherhood, the right of the best training available for all people, and belief in the dignity of labor. The Niagara Movement later allied with an interracial group to form the NAACP.

This composite of thirteen scenes pertaining to African American history from 1619 to 1897, though not wholly accurate (for example, Attucks' first name was Crispus, not Christopher), provides a brief historical overview of the African American quest for full citizenship, particularly participation in the Revolutionary War and the political arena. This poster was published for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville in 1897. A picture of the "Negro Exposition Building" is on the lower, right-hand side of the poster.

Afro-American Monument.
Color lithograph.
Chicago: Goes Lithograph Company, 1897.
Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LCUSZ62-22397 (6-1)

Horse-drawn carriage in front of corner drugstore.

Georgia, ca. 1900.
Copyprint.
W. E. B. DuBois Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-76771 (6-24)

Included in an award-winning exhibit at the Paris Exposition, this photograph--one of 500--was part of the evidence collected under the direction of W. E. B. DuBois to illustrate the condition, education, and literature of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, only thirty-five years after the abolition of slavery. In his own description of the exhibit, DuBois noted that by 1900 African Americans owned one million acres of land and paid taxes on twelve million dollars worth of property. In addition to photographs about black-owned businesses like this one in Georgia, the exhibit included a number of images related to successful black businesses elsewhere. The related display in the foyer of the Library's John Adams Building features additional photographs of black businesses assembled for the Paris Exposition.

Daniel Alexander Payne Murray was a successful African American businessman, librarian, and historian who worked for the Library of Congress for fifty-two years beginning in 1871. In late 1899 the U.S. commissioner general asked the Library of Congress to organize a display of literature about African Americans for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Murray was assigned to the task and worked swiftly to publish a preliminary list. He also worked with W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington on organizing the full "Negro Exposition" in Paris.

Preliminary List of Books and Pamphlets by Negro Authors for Paris Exposition and Library of Congress.
Compiled by Daniel A. P. Murray. Washington: Library of Congress, 1900.
Pamphlet.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division. (6-13)

First Commencement Exercise. National Training School for Women and Girls.

Lincoln Heights, Washington, D.C., June 9, 1911.
Copyprint.
Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-119986 (6-14)

Nannie Helen Burroughs, an educator, public speaker, and churchwoman, was an ardent follower of Booker T. Washington's philosophy. She worked tirelessly with the National Baptist Convention's Women's Auxiliary, first as recording secretary and then as president, for over fifty years. She established a school for girls in the District of Columbia in 1909 so as to provide them with vocational and missionary training. She stated that in addition to the three R's--reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic, these young women needed the three B's--the Bible, the bath, and the broom. Burroughs often battled men within her denomination about the ownership and administration of her school.

Fire insurance maps provide large-scale surveys of cities and most major towns throughout the U. S. from the last quarter of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th. They often show colleges and other academic institutions, such as Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute, founded in 1868 in Hampton, Virginia. The number, size, shape, and construction of buildings on the campus at the end of the 19th century are portrayed on these two map sheets from January 1891.

Elizabeth City County, Va.
Hand-colored lithograph map.
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, sheet 5.
New York: Sanborn Perris Map Co., 1891.
Geography and Map Division. (6-4a)

Elizabeth City County, Va.
Hand-colored lithograph map.
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, sheet 6.
New York: Sanborn Perris Map Co., 1891.
Geography and Map Division. (6-4b)

Hampton University, as the institute was eventually renamed, and several other historically black colleges and universities, were founded to provide the education and skills that the ex-slave needed to become self-reliant.

While Burroughs represented working class women, Mary Church Terrell was a member of the African American elite. As a speaker, writer, and political activist, she dedicated the lion's share of her talent to the pursuit of full citizenship for both women and blacks. In 1898, Terrell, then president of the National Association of Colored Women, gave this address before the all-white National American Women's Suffrage Association. She pointed out that for black women, access to education and employment were as important as the vote. Terrell's autobiography was called A Colored Woman in a White World (1940); some of her papers, including the manuscript for her autobiography, as well as those of her husband, are in the Library's Manuscript Division.

Botanist George Washington Carver, a former slave, contributed immensely to the understanding and development of the South's economic potential. Carver shared the results of his useful agricultural experiments--especially the peanut and the sweet potato--in pamphlets such as this one. In the preface, Booker T. Washington writes:

"I have asked Professor George W. Carver to make a careful study of the condition and needs of the farmers in Macon and surrounding counties and to publish something that will be of immediate and practical help to the farmers in this section. It will pay, in my opinion, for every man interested in farming...to read carefully the suggestions which Prof. Carver has made."

African American Jack Johnson, defeated Canadian Tommy Burns in 1908 in the World Boxing Championship. This initiated the quest to find a "Great White Hope" to defeat Johnson. James Jeffries, a leading white fighter, came out of retirement to answer the challenge. Johnson won their fight on July 4, 1910. News of Jeffries's defeat ignited numerous incidents of white violence against blacks. However, black poet William Waring Cuney captured the exuberant African American reaction in his poem, "My Lord, What a Morning":

O my Lord
What a morning,
O my Lord,
What a feeling,
When Jack Johnson
Turned Jim Jeffries'
Snow-white face
to the ceiling.

This home was designed in 1918 by an African American architect, Vertner Woodson Tandy, for an African American cosmetics magnate, Madame C. J. Walker, on the Hudson River north of New York City. When Madame Walker was asked why she built such a palatial home, she replied that she had not built it for herself but so that blacks could see what could be accomplished with hard work and determination.

Madame C. J. Walker's House (Villa Lewaro).

Irvington-on-the-Hudson, New York, ca. 1987.
Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: HABS NY,60-IRV,5-1 (6-19a)

Madame C. J. Walker.

Copyprint.
Manuscript Division.
Reproduction Number: LCMS-44669-32 (6-19b)

Villa Lewaro, the name of the estate, has significance for both its architect and original owner. Tandy was New York's first licensed black architect. This building was known as his best work. No one knows Mme. Walker's exact worth, but she was considered to be the nation's first African American woman millionaire.

The Booker T. Washington Era: Part 1 | Part 2
African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search

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African American Odyssey Introduction |Overview |Object List | Search Part 1: African American Soldiers |Education, Economic and Social Progress Part 2 The 1870s to the start of World War I, the period when African American educator Booker T. Washington was gaining prominence, was also a difficult time for African Americans.

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Biography

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Quick Facts

"Civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."

Name

Franz Boas

Birth Date

July 9, 1858

Death Date

December 22, 1942

Education

University of Heidelberg, University of Bonn, University of Kiel

Place of Birth

Minden, Germany

Place of Death

New York, New York

Full Name

Franz Uri Boas

Franz Boas

Franz Boas was a German-born anthropologist who founded the relativistic, culture-centered school of American anthropology that dominated 20th century thought.

Synopsis

Born on July 9, 1858 in Minden, Germany, Franz Boas's first anthropologic fieldwork was among the Eskimo in Baffinland, Canada, beginning in 1883. He later argued against contemporary theories of racial distinction between humans. His work culminated with his theory of relativism, which discredited prevailing beliefs that Western civilization is superior to simpler societies.

Early Life and the Birth of a Career

Franz Boas was born in Minden, in the Westphalia area of Germany, in 1858. From the age of 5, he was interested in the natural sciences, including botany, zoology and geology. While studying at the Gymnasium in Minden, his interest in the history of culture took root. After attending the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel, in 1881 he earned a Ph.D. in physics, with a minor in geography from the University of Kiel.

After a brief stint in the military, Boas continued his studies in Berlin. Soon after, in 1883, he began a yearlong scientific expedition-his first-to Baffin Island in northern Canada. Fascinated by the Inuit culture, Boas collected ethnographic data not directly related to the project at hand, and so began his lifelong interest in and study of the way people lived. Upon his return to Germany, Boas took posts in the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin and at the University of Berlin, where he taught geography. At the museum, he met members of the Nuxalk Nation of British Columbia, sparking a lifelong relationship with the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.

Move to the United States

In 1886, on his way back to Germany from one of his many visits with the tribes of British Columbia, Boas stopped in New York City and decided to live there, taking a position as an editor for Science magazine and his first teaching position at the newly founded Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Also during this time, as part of the Chicago World's Fair, Boas was involved with a project to bring the cultures of Native Americans to the general public. He soon began to formulate theories on anthropological relativism, which he described thusly: "Civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."

In 1896, Boas began lecturing at Columbia University, and three years later, he became the first professor of anthropology there. Nine years after that, he established Columbia's department of anthropology, the first in the United States. Also in 1896, Boas was appointed assistant curator of ethnology and somatology at the American Museum of Natural History, a post he would hold until 1905, when he resigned to focus on anthropological education and research.

Extending Cultural Research and Education

Boas was an innovative and productive researcher, contributing to statistical physical anthropology, linguistics and American Indian ethnology. By the turn of the century, he was the most influential figure in the field of anthropology. His growing reputation in anthropology was equalled by his enormous influence as a teacher and researcher in all four subdisciplines of anthropology (physical anthropology, linguistics, cultural anthropology and archaeology; his work also extended into folklore and art). His first doctoral student was Alfred Kroeber, also a great pioneer of American anthropology, who went on to cofound the anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley, which helped to spread Boas' theories coast to coast.

In 1911, Boas published The Mind of Primitive Man, a series of lectures on culture and race. In it, Boas explored further thoughts on cultural relativism, debunking then-current ideas suggesting the superiority of Western civilization over less-developed societies based on racial criteria. In the 1920s, Boas's book was often referred to by those who opposed new U.S. immigration restrictions based on supposed racial differences. At the other end of the spectrum, in the 1930s his book was burned by the Nazis and his Ph.D. from Germany's University of Kiel was rescinded.

Later Years, Legacy and Influence

Boas enlarged and updated The Mind of Primitive Man in 1937, and published Race, Language and Culture in 1940. After his retirement, in 1936, Boas responded to the steady rise of the Nazis in Germany and Hitler's thoughts on a "master race" by crystallizing his ideas about racism in articles published in popular scientific journals, some of which were collected after his death in Race and Democratic Society (1945). He also lectured widely in an attempt to educate the public on the nature of race and the dangers of Nazi ideology.

To Boas, anthropology was a holistic and eclectic field of study, so to assess theories of cultural differences, one must be familiar with biology, interrelations of humans and their environment and such specific criteria as human migration, nutrition, child-rearing customs and disease, to name a few.

What made Boas's theories truly revolutionary, however, was that while anthropologists have generally believed that humans make up a single species, few scholars of his time believed that different races within the species showed equal ability to achieve cultural development. Because of Boas's influence, anthropologists and other social scientists began to see that differences among the races resulted not from physiological factors, but from historical events and circumstances, and that race itself was a cultural construct.

In the end, Boas contributed to all four branches of anthropology, in studies ranging from racial classification to linguistics. He influenced a wide variety of scholars and researchers that followed, from Margaret Mead to W.E.B. Du Bois, and pioneered the study of anthropology across the United States, both before his death in 1942 and since.

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"Civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."

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This video is a bit dated but really interesting.

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25th Infantry Regiment - Buffalo Soldiers

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25th Infantry Regiment - Buffalo Soldiers

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Bob Marley & The Wailers - Buffalo Soldier (Official Music Video)

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25th Infantry Regiment - Buffalo Soldiers

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25th Infantry Regiment - Buffalo Soldiers

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From the Library of Congress

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Back to Search Results

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
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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.

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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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From the Library of Congress

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Search results for Jack Johnson, Available Online

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Ken Burns movie from PBS

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Jack Johnson - the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World, whose dominance over his white opponents spurred furious debates and race riots in the early 20th century - enters the ring once again in Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, a provocative new PBS documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns.

The two-part film shows the gritty details of Johnson's life through archival footage, still photographs, and the commentary of boxing experts such as Stanley Crouch, Bert Sugar, the late George Plimpton, Jack Newfield, Randy Roberts, Gerald Early and James Earl Jones, who portrayed Johnson in the Broadway play and film based on Johnson's life, "The Great White Hope."

Watch Clips from the Film

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Stream Unforgivable Blackness | Ken Burns | PBS

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Jack Johnson - the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World, whose dominance over his white opponents spurred furious debates and race riots in the early 20th century - enters the ring once again in Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, a provocative new PBS documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns.

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News story on posthumous pardoning by President Trump

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Pardoned boxer Jack Johnson just ‘wanted to live well,’ Ken Burns says

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Sigh... If you really want to watch it, it's on YouTube, but I don't recommend it.

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From the Smithsonian Magazine

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In 1963, the American mathematician Edward Lorenz, taking a measure of the earth's atmosphere in a laboratory that would seem far removed from the social upheavals of the time, set forth the theory that a single "flap of a sea gull's wings" could redirect the path of a tornado on another continent, that it could, in fact, be "enough to alter the course of the weather forever," and that, though the theory was then new and untested, "the most recent evidence would seem to favor the sea gulls."

At that moment in American history, the country had reached a turning point in a fight for racial justice that had been building for decades. This was the year of the killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, of Gov. George Wallace blocking black students at the schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama, the year of the March on Washington, of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." By then, millions of African-Americans had already testified with their bodies to the repression they had endured in the Jim Crow South by defecting to the North and West in what came to be known as the Great Migration. They were fleeing a world where they were restricted to the most menial of jobs, underpaid if paid at all, and frequently barred from voting. Between 1880 and 1950, an African-American was lynched more than once a week for some perceived breach of the racial hierarchy.

"They left as though they were fleeing some curse," wrote the scholar Emmett J. Scott, an observer of the early years of the migration. "They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket and they left with the intention of staying."

The migration began, like the flap of a sea gull's wings, as a rivulet of black families escaping Selma, Alabama, in the winter of 1916. Their quiet departure was scarcely noticed except for a single paragraph in the Chicago Defender, to whom they confided that "the treatment doesn't warrant staying." The rivulet would become rapids, which grew into a flood of six million people journeying out of the South over the course of six decades. They were seeking political asylum within the borders of their own country, not unlike refugees in other parts of the world fleeing famine, war and pestilence.

Until that moment and from the time of their arrival on these shores, the vast majority of African-Americans had been confined to the South, at the bottom of a feudal social order, at the mercy of slaveholders and their descendants and often-violent vigilantes. The Great Migration was the first big step that the nation's servant class ever took without asking.

"Oftentimes, just to go away is one of the most aggressive things that another person can do," wrote John Dollard, an anthropologist studying the racial caste system of the South in the 1930s, "and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it is one of the few ways in which pressure can be put on."

The refugees could not know what was in store for them and for their descendants at their destinations or what effect their exodus would have on the country. But by their actions, they would reshape the social and political geography of every city they fled to. When the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it was over, in the 1970s, 47 percent of all African-Americans were living in the North and West. A rural people had become urban, and a Southern people had spread themselves all over the nation.

Merely by leaving, African-Americans would get to participate in democracy and, by their presence, force the North to pay attention to the injustices in the South and the increasingly organized fight against those injustices. By leaving, they would change the course of their lives and those of their children. They would become Richard Wright the novelist instead of Richard Wright the sharecropper. They would become John Coltrane, jazz musician instead of tailor; Bill Russell, NBA pioneer instead of paper mill worker; Zora Neale Hurston, beloved folklorist instead of maidservant. The children of the Great Migration would reshape professions that, had their families not left, may never have been open to them, from sports and music to literature and art: Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Jacob Lawrence, Diana Ross, Tupac Shakur, Prince, Michael Jackson, Shonda Rhimes, Venus and Serena Williams and countless others. The people who migrated would become the forebears of most African-Americans born in the North and West.

The Great Migration would expose the racial divisions and disparities that in many ways continue to plague the nation and dominate headlines today, from police killings of unarmed African-Americans to mass incarceration to widely documented biases in employment, housing, health care and education. Indeed, two of the most tragically recognizable descendants of the Great Migration are Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy killed in Mississippi in 1955, and Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot to death by police in 2014 in the city where his ancestors had fled. Their fates are a reminder that the perils the people sought to escape were not confined to the South, nor to the past.

The history of African-Americans is often distilled into two epochs: the 246 years of enslavement ending after the close of the Civil War, and the dramatic era of protest during the civil rights movement. Yet the Civil War-to-civil rights axis tempts us to leap past a century of resistance against subjugation, and to miss the human story of ordinary people, their hopes lifted by Emancipation, dashed at the end of Reconstruction, crushed further by Jim Crow, only to be finally, at long last, revived when they found the courage within themselves to break free.

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A little boy boarded a northbound train with his grandmother and extended family, along with their upright piano and the rest of their worldly possessions, stuffed inside wooden crates, to begin their journey out of Mississippi. It was 1935. They were packed into the Jim Crow car, which, by custom, was at the front of the train, the first to absorb the impact in the event of a collision. They would not be permitted into the dining car, so they carried fried chicken and boiled eggs to tide them over for the journey.

The little boy was 4 years old and anxious. He'd overheard the grown-ups talking about leaving their farm in Arkabutla, to start over up north. He heard them say they might leave him with his father's people, whom he didn't know. In the end they took him along. The near abandonment haunted him. He missed his mother, who would not be joining them on this journey; she was away trying to make a stable life for herself after the breakup with his father. He did not know when he would see her again.

His grandfather had preceded them north. He was a hardworking, serious man who kept the indignities he suffered under Jim Crow to himself. In Mississippi, he had not dared stand up to some white children who broke the family's wagon. He told the little boy that as black people, they had no say in that world. "There were things they could do that we couldn't," the boy would say of the white children when he was a grown man with gray hair and a son of his own.

The grandfather was so determined to get his family out of the South that he bought a plot of land sight unseen in a place called Michigan. On the trip north, the little boy and his cousins and uncles and aunts (who were children themselves) did not quite know what Michigan was, so they made a ditty out of it and sang it as they waited for the train. "Meatskin! Meatskin! We're going to Meatskin!"

They landed on freer soil, but between the fears of abandonment and the trauma of being uprooted from his mother, the little boy arrived with a stutter. He began to speak less and less. At Sunday school, the children bellowed with laughter whenever he tried. So instead, he talked to the hogs and cows and chickens on the farm, who, he said years later, "don't care how you sound."

The little boy went mute for eight years. He wrote down the answers to questions he was asked, fearing even to introduce himself to strangers, until a high school English teacher coaxed him out of his silence by having him read poetry aloud to the class. That boy was James Earl Jones. He would go on to the University of Michigan, where he abandoned pre-med for theater. Later he would play King Lear in Central Park and Othello on Broadway, win Tony Awards for his performances in Fences and in The Great White Hope and star in films like Dr. Strangelove, Roots, Field of Dreams and Coming to America.

The voice that fell silent for so long would become among the most iconic of our time-the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars, of Mufasa in The Lion King, the voice of CNN. Jones lost his voice, and found it, because of the Great Migration. "It was responsible for all that I am grateful for in my life," he told me in a recent interview in New York. "We were reaching for our gold mines, our freedom."

**********

The desire to be free is, of course, human and universal. In America, enslaved people had tried to escape through the Underground Railroad. Later, once freed on paper, thousands more, known as Exodusters, fled the violent white backlash following Reconstruction in a short-lived migration to Kansas in 1879.

But concentrated in the South as they were, held captive by the virtual slavery of sharecropping and debt peonage and isolated from the rest of the country in the era before airlines and interstates, many African-Americans had no ready means of making a go of it in what were then faraway alien lands.

By the opening of the 20th century, the optimism of the Reconstruction era had long turned into the terror of Jim Crow. In 1902, one black woman in Alabama seemed to speak for the agitated hearts that would ultimately propel the coming migration: "In our homes, in our churches, wherever two or three are gathered together," she said, "there is a discussion of what is best to do. Must we remain in the South or go elsewhere? Where can we go to feel that security which other people feel? Is it best to go in great numbers or only in several families? These and many other things are discussed over and over."

The door of escape opened during World War I, when slowing immigration from Europe created a labor shortage in the North. To fill the assembly lines, companies began recruiting black Southerners to work the steel mills, railroads and factories. Resistance in the South to the loss of its cheap black labor meant that recruiters often had to act in secret or face fines and imprisonment. In Macon, Georgia, for example, a recruiter's license required a $25,000 fee plus the unlikely recommendations of 25 local businessmen, ten ministers and ten manufacturers. But word soon spread among black Southerners that the North had opened up, and people began devising ways to get out on their own.

Southern authorities then tried to keep African-Americans from leaving by arresting them at the railroad platforms on grounds of "vagrancy" or tearing up their tickets in scenes that presaged tragically thwarted escapes from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. And still they left.

On one of the early trains out of the South was a sharecropper named Mallie Robinson, whose husband had left her to care for their young family under the rule of a harsh plantation owner in Cairo, Georgia. In 1920, she gathered up her five children, including a baby still in diapers, and, with her sister and brother-in-law and their children and three friends, boarded a Jim Crow train, and another, and another, and didn't get off until they reached California.

They settled in Pasadena. When the family moved into an all-white neighborhood, a cross was burned on their front lawn. But here Mallie's children would go to integrated schools for the full year instead of segregated classrooms in between laborious hours chopping and picking cotton. The youngest, the one she had carried in her arms on the train out of Georgia, was named Jackie, who would go on to earn four letters in athletics in a single year at UCLA. Later, in 1947, he became the first African-American to play Major League Baseball.

Had Mallie not persevered in the face of hostility, raising a family of six alone in the new world she had traveled to, we might not have ever known his name. "My mother never lost her composure," Jackie Robinson once recalled. "As I grew older, I often thought about the courage it took for my mother to break away from the South."

Mallie was extraordinary in another way. Most people, when they left the South, followed three main tributaries: the first was up the East Coast from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston; the second, up the country's central spine, from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas to St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and the entire Midwest; the third, from Louisiana and Texas to California and the Western states. But Mallie took one of the farthest routes in the continental U.S. to get to freedom, a westward journey of more than 2,200 miles.

The trains that spirited the people away, and set the course for those who would come by bus or car or foot, acquired names and legends of their own. Perhaps the most celebrated were those that rumbled along the Illinois Central Railroad, for which Abraham Lincoln had worked as a lawyer before his election to the White House, and from which Pullman porters distributed copies of the Chicago Defender in secret to black Southerners hungry for information about the North. The Illinois Central was the main route for those fleeing Mississippi for Chicago, people like Muddy Waters, the blues legend who made the journey in 1943 and whose music helped define the genre and pave the way for rock 'n' roll, and Richard Wright, a sharecropper's son from Natchez, Mississippi, who got on a train in 1927 at the age of 19 to feel what he called "the warmth of other suns."

In Chicago, Wright worked washing dishes and sweeping streets before landing a job at the post office and pursuing his dream as a writer. He began to visit the library: a right and pleasure that would have been unthinkable in his home state of Mississippi. In 1940, having made it to New York, he published Native Son to national acclaim, and, through this and other works, became a kind of poet laureate of the Great Migration. He seemed never to have forgotten the heartbreak of leaving his homeland and the courage he mustered to step into the unknown. "We look up at the high Southern sky," Wright wrote in 12 Million Black Voices. "We scan the kind, black faces we have looked upon since we first saw the light of day, and, though pain is in our hearts, we are leaving."

Zora Neale Hurston arrived in the North along the East Coast stream from Florida, although, as was her way, she broke convention in how she got there. She had grown up as the willful younger daughter of an exacting preacher and his long-suffering wife in the all-black town of Eatonville. After her mother died, when she was 13, Hurston bounced between siblings and neighbors until she was hired as a maid with a traveling theater troupe that got her north, dropping her off in Baltimore in 1917. From there, she made her way to Howard University in Washington, where she got her first story published in the literary magazine Stylus while working odd jobs as a waitress, maid and manicurist.

She continued on to New York in 1925 with $1.50 to her name. She would become the first black student known to graduate from Barnard College. There, she majored in English and studied anthropology, but was barred from living in the dormitories. She never complained. In her landmark 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," she mocked the absurdity: "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry," she wrote. "It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."

She arrived in New York when the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural flowering in the early years of the Great Migration, was in full bloom. The influx to the New York region would extend well beyond the Harlem Renaissance and draw the parents or grandparents of, among so many others, Denzel Washington (Virginia and Georgia), Ella Fitzgerald (Newport News, Virginia), the artist Romare Bearden (Charlotte, North Carolina), Whitney Houston (Blakeley, Georgia), the rapper Tupac Shakur (Lumberton, North Carolina), Sarah Vaughan (Virginia) and Althea Gibson (Clarendon County, South Carolina), the tennis champion who, in 1957, became the first black player to win at Wimbledon.

From Aiken, South Carolina, and Bladenboro, North Carolina, the migration drew the parents of Diahann Carroll, who would become the first black woman to win a Tony Award for best actress and, in 1968, to star in her own television show in a role other than a domestic. It was in New York that the mother of Jacob Lawrence settled after a winding journey from Virginia to Atlantic City to Philadelphia and then on to Harlem. Once there, to keep teenage Jacob safe from the streets, she enrolled her eldest son in an after-school arts program that would set the course of his life.

Lawrence would go on to create "The Migration Series"-60 painted panels, brightly colored like the throw rugs his mother kept in their tenement apartment. The paintings would become not only the best-known images of the Great Migration but among the most recognizable images of African-Americans in the 20th century.

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Yet throughout the migration, wherever black Southerners went, the hostility and hierarchies that fed the Southern caste system seemed to carry over into the receiving stations in the New World, as the cities of the North and West erected barriers to black mobility. There were "sundown towns" throughout the country that banned African-Americans after dark. The constitution of Oregon explicitly prohibited black people from entering the state until 1926; whites-only signs could still be seen in store windows into the 1950s.

Even in the places where they were permitted, blacks were relegated to the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs, barred from many unions and, at some companies, hired only as strike breakers, which served to further divide black workers from white. They were confined to the most dilapidated housing in the least desirable sections of the cities to which they fled. In densely populated destinations like Pittsburgh and Harlem, housing was so scarce that some black workers had to share the same single bed in shifts.

When African-Americans sought to move their families to more favorable conditions, they faced a hardening structure of policies and customs designed to maintain racial exclusion. Restrictive covenants, introduced as a response to the influx of black people during the Great Migration, were clauses written into deeds that outlawed African-Americans from buying, leasing or living in properties in white neighborhoods, with the exception, often explicitly spelled out, of servants. By the 1920s, the widespread use of restrictive covenants kept as much as 85 percent of Chicago off-limits to African-Americans.

At the same time, redlining-the federal housing policy of refusing to approve or guarantee mortgages in areas where black people lived-served to deny them access to mortgages in their own neighborhoods. These policies became the pillars of a residential caste system in the North that calcified segregation and wealth inequality over generations, denying African-Americans the chance accorded other Americans to improve their lot.

In the 1930s, a black couple in Chicago named Carl and Nannie Hansberry decided to fight these restrictions to make a better life for themselves and their four young children. They had migrated north during World War I, Carl from Mississippi and Nannie from Tennessee. He was a real estate broker, she was a schoolteacher, and they had managed to save up enough to buy a home.

They found a brick three-flat with bay windows in the all-white neighborhood of Woodlawn. Although other black families moving into white neighborhoods had endured firebombings and mob violence, Carl wanted more space for his family and bought the house in secret with the help of progressive white real estate agents he knew. He moved the family late in the spring of 1937. The couple's youngest daughter, Lorraine, was 7 years old when they first moved, and she later described the vitriol and violence her family met in what she called a "hellishly hostile 'white neighborhood' in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house." At one point a mob descended on the home to throw bricks and broken concrete, narrowly missing her head.

But not content simply to terrorize the Hansberrys, neighbors then filed a lawsuit, forcing the family to move out, backed by state courts and restrictive covenants. The Hansberrys took the case to the Supreme Court to challenge the restrictive covenants and to return to the house they bought. The case culminated in a 1940 Supreme Court decision that was one of a series of cases that together helped strike a blow against segregation. But the hostility continued.

Lorraine Hansberry later recalled being "spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court."

In 1959, Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, about a black family on Chicago's South Side living in dilapidated housing with few better options and at odds over what to do after the death of the patriarch, became the first play written by an African-American woman to be performed on Broadway. The fight by those who migrated and those who marched eventually led to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made such discriminatory practices illegal. Carl Hansberry did not live to see it. He died in 1946 at age 50 while in Mexico City, where, disillusioned with the slow speed of progress in America, he was working on plans to move his family to Mexico.

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The Great Migration laid bare tensions in the North and West that were not as far removed from the South as the people who migrated might have hoped. Martin Luther King Jr., who went north to study in Boston, where he met his wife, Coretta Scott, experienced the depth of Northern resistance to black progress when he was campaigning for fair housing in Chicago decades after the Hansberrys' fight. He was leading a march in Marquette Park, in 1966, amid fuming crowds. One placard said: "King would look good with a knife in his back." A protester hurled a stone that hit him in the head. Shaken, he fell to one knee. "I have seen many demonstrations in the South," he told reporters. "But I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I've seen here today."

Out of such turmoil arose a political consciousness in a people who had been excluded from civic life for most of their history. The disaffected children of the Great Migration grew more outspoken about the worsening conditions in their places of refuge. Among them was Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, to a lay minister who had journeyed north from Georgia, and a mother born in Grenada. Malcolm was 6 years old when his father, who was under continuous attack by white supremacists for his role fighting for civil rights in the North, died a violent, mysterious death that plunged the family into poverty and dislocation.

Despite the upheaval, Malcolm was accomplished in his predominantly white school, but when he shared his dream of becoming a lawyer, a teacher told him that the law was "no realistic goal for a n-----." He dropped out soon afterward.

He would go on to become known as Detroit Red, Malcolm X and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, a journey from militancy to humanitarianism, a voice of the dispossessed and a counterweight to Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.

At around the same time, a radical movement was brewing on the West Coast. Huey Newton was the impatient son of a preacher and itinerant laborer who left Louisiana with his family for Oakland, after his father was almost lynched for talking back to a white overseer. Huey was a toddler when they arrived in California. There, he struggled in schools ill-equipped to handle the influx of newcomers from the South. He was pulled to the streets and into juvenile crime. It was only after high school that he truly learned to read, but he would go on to earn a PhD.

In college he read Malcolm X and met classmate Bobby Seale, with whom, in 1966, he founded the Black Panther Party, built on the ideas of political action first laid out by Stokely Carmichael. The Panthers espoused self-determination, quality housing, health care and full employment for African-Americans. They ran schools and fed the poor. But they would become known for their steadfast and militant belief in the right of African-Americans to defend themselves when under attack, as had been their lot for generations in the Jim Crow South and was increasingly in the North and West.

Perhaps few participants of the Great Migration had as deep an impact on activism and social justice without earning the commensurate recognition for her role as Ella Baker. She was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, to devout and ambitious parents and grew up in North Carolina. After graduating from Shaw University, in Raleigh, she left for New York in 1927. There she worked as a waitress, factory worker and editorial assistant before becoming active in the NAACP, where she eventually rose to national director.

Baker became the quiet shepherd of the civil rights movement, working alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and W.E.B. DuBois. She mentored the likes of Stokely Carmichael and Rosa Parks and helped to create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee-the network of college students who risked their lives to integrate buses and register blacks to vote in the most dangerous parts of the South. She helped guide almost every major event in the civil rights era, from the Montgomery bus boycott to the march in Selma to the Freedom Rides and the student sit-ins of the 1960s.

Baker was among those who suggested to King, then still in his 20s, that he take the movement beyond Alabama after the success of the bus boycott and press for racial equality throughout the South. She had a keen understanding that a movement would need Southern origins in order for participants not to be dismissed as "Northern agitators." King was at first reluctant to push his followers in the aftermath of the taxing 381-day boycott, but she believed that momentum was crucial. The modern civil rights movement had begun.

Baker devoted her life to working at the ground level in the South to organize the nonviolent demonstrations that helped change the region she had left but not forsaken. She directed students and sharecroppers, ministers and intellectuals, but never lost a fervent belief in the power of ordinary people to change their destiny. "Give light," she once said, "and people will find the way."

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Over time, as the people of the Great Migration embedded themselves in their cities, they aspired to leading roles in civic life. It could not have been imagined in the migration's early decades that the first black mayors of most major cities in the North and West would not be longtime Northerners, as might have been expected, but rather children of the Great Migration, some having worked the Southern fields themselves.

The man who would become the first black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, was born on a cotton plantation in Calvert, Texas, to sharecroppers Crenner and Lee Thomas Bradley. The family migrated to Los Angeles when he was 7 years old. Once there his father abandoned the family, and his mother supported him and his four siblings working as a maid. Bradley grew up on Central Avenue among the growing colony of black arrivals from the South. He became a track star at UCLA and later joined the Los Angeles police force, rising to lieutenant, the highest rank allowed African-Americans in the 1950s.

Seeing limits on his advancement, he went to law school at night, won a seat on the city council, and was elected mayor in 1973, serving five consecutive terms.

His name would become a part of the political lexicon after he ran for governor of California in 1982. Polls had overestimated support for him due to what was believed to be the reluctance of white voters to be truthful with pollsters about their intention to vote for his white opponent, George Deukmejian. To this day, in an election involving a non-white candidate, the discrepancy between polling numbers and final outcomes due to the misleading poll responses of white voters is known as the "Bradley Effect." In the 1982 election that Bradley had been favored to win, he lost by a single percentage point.

Still, he would describe Los Angeles, the place that drew his family out of Texas, as "the city of hope and opportunity." He said, "I am a living example of that."

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The story of African-Americans on this soil cannot be told without the Great Migration. For many of them, the 20th century was largely an era of migrating and marching until freedom, by law and in their hearts, was won. Its mission over, the migration ended in the 1970s, when the South had sufficiently changed so that African-Americans were no longer under pressure to leave and were free to live anywhere they chose. From that time, to the current day, a new narrative took hold in popular thought that has seized primarily on geographical census data, gathered every ten years, showing that since 1975 the South has witnessed a net increase of African-Americans, many drawn (like other Americans) to job opportunities and a lower cost of living, but also to the call of their ancestral homeland, enacting what has come to be called a "reverse migration."

The phrase and phenomenon have captured the attention of demographers and journalists alike who revisit the trend after each new census. One report went so far as to describe it as "an evacuation" from the Northern cities by African-Americans back to the place their forebears had fled. But the demographics are more complex than the narrative often portrayed. While hundreds of thousands of African-Americans have left Northern cities, they have not made a trail to the farms and hamlets where their ancestors may have picked cotton but to the biggest cities of the South-Atlanta, Houston, Dallas-which are now more cosmopolitan and thus more like their Northern counterparts. Many others have not headed South at all but have fanned out to suburbs or smaller cities in the North and West, places like Las Vegas, Columbus, Ohio, or even Ferguson, Missouri. Indeed, in the 40 years since the migration ended, the proportion of the South that is African-American has remained unchanged at about 20 percent-far from the seismic impact of the Great Migration. And so "reverse migration" seems not only an overstatement but misleading, as if relocating to an employer's Houston office were equivalent to running for one's life on the Illinois Central.

Richard Wright relocated several times in his quest for other suns, fleeing Mississippi for Memphis and Memphis for Chicago and Chicago for New York, where, living in Greenwich Village, barbers refused to serve him and some restaurants refused to seat him. In 1946, near the height of the Great Migration, he came to the disheartening recognition that, wherever he went, he faced hostility. So he went to France. Similarly, African-Americans today must navigate the social fault lines exposed by the Great Migration and the country's reactions to it: white flight, police brutality, systemic ills flowing from government policy restricting fair access to safe housing and good schools. In recent years, the North, which never had to confront its own injustices, has moved toward a crisis that seems to have reached a boiling point in our current day: a catalog of videotaped assaults and killings of unarmed black people, from Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, Eric Garner in New York in 2014, Philando Castile outside St. Paul, Minnesota, this summer, and beyond.

Thus the eternal question is: Where can African-Americans go? It is the same question their ancestors asked and answered, only to discover upon arriving that the racial caste system was not Southern but American.

And so it was in these places of refuge that Black Lives Matter arose, a largely Northern- and Western-born protest movement against persistent racial discrimination in many forms. It is organic and leaderless like the Great Migration itself, bearing witness to attacks on African-Americans in the unfinished quest for equality. The natural next step in this journey has turned out to be not simply moving to another state or geographic region but moving fully into the mainstream of American life, to be seen in one's full humanity, to be able to breathe free wherever one lives in America.

From this perspective, the Great Migration has no contemporary geographic equivalent because it was not solely about geography. It was about agency for a people who had been denied it, who had geography as the only tool at their disposal. It was an expression of faith, despite the terrors they had survived, that the country whose wealth had been created by their ancestors' unpaid labor might do right by them.

We can no more reverse the Great Migration than unsee a painting by Jacob Lawrence, unhear Prince or Coltrane, erase The Piano Lesson, remove Mae Jemison from her spacesuit in science textbooks, delete Beloved. In a short span of time-in some cases, over the course of a single generation-the people of the Great Migration proved the worldview of the enslavers a lie, that the people who were forced into the field and whipped for learning to read could do far more than pick cotton, scrub floors. Perhaps, deep down, the enslavers always knew that. Perhaps that is one reason they worked so hard at such a brutal system of subjugation. The Great Migration was thus a Declaration of Independence. It moved those who had long been invisible not just out of the South but into the light. And a tornado triggered by the wings of a sea gull can never be unwound.

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The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration

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When millions of African-Americans fled the South in search of a better life, they remade the nation in ways that are still being felt

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From the NPR show Fresh Air - host Terry Gross interviews the author of a book on the Great Migration

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Chapter 1 Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Late October 1937 Ida Mae Brandon Gladney
The night clouds were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Her husband was settling with Mr. Edd over the worth of a year's labor, and she did not know what would come of it. None of them had been on a train before -- not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where, "by the time you sit down, you there," as Ida Mae put it. None of them had been out of Mississippi. Or Chickasaw County, for that matter.

There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. Things had to look normal, like any other time they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with.

Velma was six. She sat with her ankles crossed and three braids in her hair and did what she was told. James was too little to understand. He was three. He was upset at the commotion. Hold still now, James. Lemme put your shoes on, Ida Mae told him. James wriggled and kicked. He did not like shoes. He ran free in the field. What were these things? He did not like them on his feet. So Ida Mae let him go barefoot.

Miss Theenie stood watching. One by one, her children had left her and gone up north. Sam and Cleve to Ohio. Josie to Syracuse. Irene to Milwaukee. Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away, too. Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter's family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car.

"May the Lord be the first in the car," she prayed, "and the last out."

When the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law's truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae's husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland.
2 Wildwood, Florida, April 14, 1945 George Swanson Starling
A man named Roscoe Colton gave Lil George Starling a ride in his pickup truck to the train station in Wildwood through the fruit-bearing scrubland of central Florida. And Schoolboy, as the toothless orange pickers mockingly called him, boarded the Silver Meteor pointing north.

A railing divided the stairs onto the train, one side of the railing for white passengers, the other for colored, so the soles of their shoes would not touch the same stair. He boarded on the colored side of the railing, a final reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving.

He was getting out alive. So he didn't let it bother him. "I got on the car where they told me to get on," he said years later.

He hadn't had time to bid farewell to everyone he wanted to. He stopped to say good-bye to Rachel Jackson, who owned a little café up on what they called the Avenue and the few others he could safely get to in the little time he had. He figured everybody in Egypt town, the colored section of Eustis, probably knew he was leaving before he had climbed onto the train, small as the town was and as much as people talked.

It was a clear afternoon in the middle of April. He folded his tall frame into the hard surface of the seat, his knees knocking against the seat back in front of him. He was packed into the Jim Crow car, where the railroad stored the luggage, when the train pulled away at last. He was on the run, and he wouldn't rest easy until he was out of range of Lake County, beyond the reach of the grove owners whose invisible laws he had broken.

The train rumbled past the forest of citrus trees that he had climbed since he was a boy and that he had tried to wrestle some dignity out of and, for a time, had. They could have their trees. He wasn't going to lose his life over them. He had come close enough as it was.

He had lived up to his family's accidental surname. Starling. Distant cousin to the mockingbird. He had spoken up about what he had seen in the world he was born into, like the starling that sang Mozart's own music back to him or the starling out of Shakespeare that tormented the king by speaking the name of Mortimer. Only, George was paying the price for tormenting the ruling class that owned the citrus groves. There was no place in the Jim Crow South for a colored starling like him.

He didn't know what he would do once he got to New York or what his life would be. He didn't know how long it would take before he could send for Inez. His wife was mad right now, but she'd get over it once he got her there. At least that's what he told himself. He turned his face to the North and sat with his back to Florida.

Leaving as he did, he figured he would never set foot in Eustis again for as long as he lived. And as he settled in for the twenty-three-hour train ride up the coast of the Atlantic, he had no desire to have anything to do with the town he grew up in, the state of Florida, or the South as a whole, for that matter.
3 Monroe, Louisiana, Easter Monday, April 6, 1953 Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
In the dark hours of the morning, Pershing Foster packed his surgery books, his medical bag, and his suit and sport coats in the trunk, along with a map, an address book, and Ivorye Covington's fried chicken left over from Saturday night.

He said good-bye to his father, who had told him to follow his dreams. His father's dreams had fallen apart, but there was still hope for the son, the father knew. He had a reluctant embrace with his older brother, Madison, who had tried in vain to get him to stay. Then Pershing pointed his 1949 Buick Roadmaster, a burgundy one with whitewall tires and a shark-tooth grille, in the direction of Five Points, the crossroads of town.

He drove down the narrow dirt roads with the ditches on either side that, when he was a boy, had left his freshly pressed Sunday suit caked with mud when it rained. He passed the shotgun houses perched on cinder blocks and hurtled over the railroad tracks away from where people who looked like him were consigned to live and into the section where the roads were not dirt ditches anymore but suddenly level and paved.

He headed in the direction of Desiard Street, the main thorough- fare, and, without a whiff of sentimentality, sped away from the small-town bank buildings and bail bondsmen, the Paramount Theater with its urine-scented steps, and away from St. Francis Hospital, which wouldn't let doctors who looked like him perform a simple tonsillectomy.

Perhaps he might have stayed had they let him practice surgery like he was trained to do or let him walk into the Palace and try on a suit like anyone else of his station. The resentments had grown heavy over the years. He knew he was as smart as anybody else -- smarter, to his mind -- but he wasn't allowed to do anything with it, the caste system being what it was. Now he was going about as far away as you could get from Monroe, Louisiana. The rope lines that had hemmed in his life seemed to loosen with each plodding mile on the odometer.

Like many of the men in the Great Migration and like many emigrant men in general, he was setting out alone. He would scout out the New World on his own and get situated before sending for anyone else. He drove west into the morning stillness and onto the Endom Bridge, a tight crossing with one lane acting like two that spans the Ouachita River into West Monroe. He would soon pass the mossback flatland of central Louisiana and the Red River toward Texas, where he was planning to see an old friend from medical school, a Dr. Anthony Beale, en route to California.

Pershing had no idea where he would end up in California or how he would make a go of it or when he would be able to wrest his wife and daughters from the in-laws who had tried to talk him out of going to California in the first place. He would contemplate these uncertainties in the unbroken days ahead.

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do. Alone in the car, he had close to two thousand miles of curving road in front of him, farther than farmworker emigrants leaving Guatemala for Texas, not to mention Tijuana for California, where a northerly wind could blow a Mexican clothesline over the border.

Excerpted from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. Copyright 2010 by Isabel Wilkerson. Excerpted by permission The Random House Publishing Group of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

Purchase Book"The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson

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Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North

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More than 6 million African-Americans moved from the South to cities in the Northeast and Midwest between 1915 and 1970. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson documents the resulting demographic and social changes in her history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns.

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Census info - really neat visualization

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View Accessibility Data

The Great Migration generally refers to the massive internal migration of Blacks from the South to urban centers in other parts of the country. Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 6 million Blacks left the South. This graphic compares the early migration (1910-1940), sometimes referred to as the First Great Migration, and the later (1940-1970) also known as the Second Great Migration.

In the early 20th century, strict legislation limited immigration into the U.S. and brought about a shortage of labor in many industrial and manufacturing centers in the Northeast and Midwest. These cities became common destinations for Black migrants from the South. Cities that experienced substantial changes in racial composition between 1910 and 1940 include Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia. During and after WWII, Black migrants flooded into many of the cities that were destinations before the war, following friends and relatives that had made the journey earlier. Poor economic conditions in the Jim Crow South spurred a larger migration flow than was the case in the 1910-to-1940 period and resulted in the creation of large Black population centers in many cities across the Northeast, Midwest, and West.

NOTE: Data are from decennial censuses, 1910 through 1970. Population counts are based on unrevised numbers. Data for the Black population for cities in Alaska and Hawaii were not available in 1940 or earlier decades. Cities shown are those that were either in the top 100 cities in the country or top 3 of a state and had a Black population of at least 100 people. These criteria were placed on 1940 data for the First Great Migration and 1970 data for the Second Great Migration.

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View Accessibility Data The Great Migration generally refers to the massive internal migration of Blacks from the South to urban centers in other parts of the country. Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 6 million Blacks left the South.

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Biography from PBS

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Courtesy: The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project

Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association form a critical link in black America's centuries-long struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. As the leader of the largest organized mass movement in black history and progenitor of the modern "black is beautiful" ideal, Garvey is now best remembered as a champion of the back-to-Africa movement. In his own time he was hailed as a redeemer, a "Black Moses." Though he failed to realize all his objectives, his movement still represents a liberation from the psychological bondage of racial inferiority.

Garvey was born on August 17, 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica. He left school at 14, worked as a printer, joined Jamaican nationalist organizations, toured Central America, and spent time in London. Content at first with accommodation, on his return to Jamaica, he aspired to open a Tuskegee-type industrial training school. In 1916 he came to America at Booker T. Washington's invitation, but arrived just after Washington died.

Garvey arrived in America at the dawn of the "New Negro" era. Black discontent, punctuated by East St. Louis's bloody race riots in 1917 and intensified by postwar disillusionment, peaked in 1919's Red Summer. Shortly after arriving, Garvey embarked upon a period of travel and lecturing. When he settled in New York City, he organized a chapter of the U.N.I.A., which he had earlier founded in Jamaica as a fraternal organization. Drawing on a gift for oratory, he melded Jamaican peasant aspirations for economic and cultural independence with the American gospel of success to create a new gospel of racial pride. "Garveyism" eventually evolved into a religion of success, inspiring millions of black people worldwide who sought relief from racism and colonialism.

To enrich and strengthen his movement, Garvey envisioned a great shipping line to foster black trade, to transport passengers between America, the Caribbean, and Africa, and to serve as a symbol of black grandeur and enterprise. The U.N.I.A. incorporated the Black Star Line in 1919. The line's flagship, the "S. S. Yarmouth," made its maiden voyage in November and two other ships joined the line in 1920. The Black Star Line became a powerful recruiting tool for the U.N.I.A., but it was ultimately sunk by expensive repairs, discontented crews, and top-level mismanagement and corruption.

By 1920 the U.N.I.A. had hundreds of chapters worldwide; it hosted elaborate international conventions and published The Negro World, a widely disseminated weekly that was soon banned in many parts of Africa and the Caribbean. Over the next few years, however, the movement began to unravel under the strains of internal dissension, opposition from black critics, and government harassment. In 1922 the federal government indicted Garvey on mail fraud charges stemming from Black Star Line promotional claims and he suspended all BSL operations. Two years later, the U.N.I.A. created another line, the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Co., but it, too, failed. Garvey was sentenced to prison. The government later commuted his sentence, only to deport him back to Jamaica in November 1927. He never returned to America.

In Jamaica Garvey reconstituted the U.N.I.A. and held conventions there and in Canada, but the heart of his movement stumbled on in America without him. While he dabbled in local politics, he remained a keen observer of world events, writing voluminously in his own papers. His final move was to London, in 1935. He settled there shortly before Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia and his public criticisms of Haile Selassie's behavior after the invasion alienated many of his own remaining followers. In his last years he slid into such obscurity that he suffered the final indignity of reading his own obituaries a month before his June 10, 1940 death.

(This biography was provided by The Marcus Garvey and U.N.I.A. Papers Project, UCLA)

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Marcus Garvey | American Experience | PBS

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Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association form a critical link in black America's centuries-long struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. Garvey is now best remembered as a champion of the back-to-Africa movement.

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Biography video

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Marcus Garvey: Strongest Voice for Black Nationalism in History | Biography

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From PBS

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John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal was thwarted, however, by local farmers, militiamen, and Marines led by Robert E. Lee. Within 36 hours of the attack, most of Brown's men had been killed or captured.

John Brown was born into a deeply religious family in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800. Led by a father who was vehemently opposed to slavery, the family moved to northern Ohio when John was five, to a district that would become known for its antislavery views.

During his first fifty years, Brown moved about the country, settling in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, and taking along his ever-growing family. (He would father twenty children.) Working at various times as a farmer, wool merchant, tanner, and land speculator, he never was finacially successful -- he even filed for bankruptcy when in his forties. His lack of funds, however, did not keep him from supporting causes he believed in. He helped finance the publication of David Walker's Appeal and Henry Highland's "Call to Rebellion" speech. He gave land to fugitive slaves. He and his wife agreed to raise a black youth as one of their own. He also participated in the Underground Railroad and, in 1851, helped establish the League of Gileadites, an organization that worked to protect escaped slaves from slave catchers.

In 1847 Frederick Douglass met Brown for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts. Of the meeting Douglass stated that, "though a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery." It was at this meeting that Brown first outlined his plan to Douglass to lead a war to free slaves.

Brown moved to the black community of North Elba, New York, in 1849. The community had been established thanks to the philanthropy of Gerrit Smith, who donated tracts of at least 50 acres to black families willing to clear and farm the land. Brown, knowing that many of the families were finding life in this isolated area difficult, offered to establish his own farm there as well, in order to lead the blacks by his example and to act as a "kind father to them."

Despite his contributions to the antislavery cause, Brown did not emerge as a figure of major significance until 1855 after he followed five of his sons to the Kansas territory. There, he became the leader of antislavery guerillas and fought a proslavery attack against the antislavery town of Lawrence. The following year, in retribution for another attack, Brown went to a proslavery town and brutally killed five of its settlers. Brown and his sons would continue to fight in the territory and in Missouri for the rest of the year.

Brown returned to the east and began to think more seriously about his plan for a war in Virginia against slavery. He sought money to fund an "army" he would lead. On October 16, 1859, he set his plan to action when he and 21 other men -- 5 blacks and 16 whites -- raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

Brown was wounded and quickly captured, and moved to Charlestown, Virginia, where he was tried and convicted of treason, Before hearing his sentence, Brown was allowed make an address to the court.

. . . I believe to have interfered as I have done, . . . in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done."

Although initially shocked by Brown's exploits, many Northerners began to speak favorably of the militant abolitionist. "He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. . . .," said Henry David Thoreau in an address to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts. "No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature. . . ."

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859.

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John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

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Wikipedia biography

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Oswald Garrison Villard (March 13, 1872 - October 1, 1949) was an American journalist and editor of the New York Evening Post. He was a civil rights activist, and along with his mother, Fanny Villard, a founding member of the NAACP. In 1913 he wrote to President Woodrow Wilson to protest his administration's racial segregation of federal offices in Washington, DC, a change from previous integrated conditions. He was a leading liberal spokesman in the 1920s and 1930s, then turned to the right.

Villard was a founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League, favoring independence for territories taken in the Spanish-American War. He provided a rare direct link between the anti-imperialism of the late 19th century and the conservative Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s.

Villard was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, on March 13, 1872, while his parents were living there. He was the son of Henry Villard, an American newspaper correspondent who had been an immigrant from Germany, and Fanny (Garrison) Villard, daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Fanny Villard was a suffragist and one of the founders of the Women's Peace Movement. His father later invested in railroads, and bought and the New York Evening Post in 1881. The family returned to the United States soon after Villard's birth, settling in New York City in 1876.

Villard graduated from Harvard University in 1893 and, after touring Europe with his father for a year, returned to Harvard to earn his graduate degree in American History. He served as a teaching assistant, and could have pursued a career in academia, but desired a more active life. In 1896 he joined the staff ofThe Philadelphia Press, but disliked the paper's pandering to advertisers. He soon joined the staff of his father's Evening Post, serving as the editor of the Saturday features page. He began to write regularly for the New York Evening Post and The Nation, and said that he and his fellow staff members were

... radical on peace and war and on the Negro question; radical in our insistence that the United States stay at home and not go to war abroad and impose its imperialistic will upon Latin-American republics, often with great slaughter. We were radical in our demand for free trade and our complete opposition to the whole protective system.

Villard was also a founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which favored independence for the territories captured in the Spanish-American War. To further the cause, he worked to organize "a third ticket" in 1900 to challenge William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley. He was joined in this effort by several key veterans of the 1896 National Democratic Party. Not surprisingly, Villard made a personal appeal to ex-president Grover Cleveland, a hero of the gold Democrats, urging him to be the candidate. Cleveland demurred, asserting that voters no longer cared what he had to say. Villard also consistently used the editorial page of the Evening Post to argue against imperialism and expansionism.

Villard was a pioneer, and today largely unsung, civil rights leader. In 1910, he donated space in the New York Evening Post for the "call" to the meeting that formally organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Villard became a co-founder of the organization, along with W. E. B. Du Bois and other influential individuals. For many years, Villard served as the NAACP's disbursing treasurer while Moorfield Storey, another Cleveland Democrat, was its president.

Villard supported Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election, and during an interview with the president convinced Wilson to work to improve conditions for African Americans. He protested by writing to Wilson in July 1913 about his administration's segregation of federal offices in the capital, a change from previous practice. Booker T. Washington appealed to Villard to get Wilson to change his policy. Wilson defended these policies and did little to help blacks during his administrations. Although many African Americans had crossed party lines to vote for him, few were appointed to higher level civil service positions. In addition, Wilson did nothing to encourage the end of disenfranchisement of blacks in the South by Democratic-dominated legislatures, which had largely excluded African Americans there from the political system. Consequently, Villard turned against the president, endorsing his opponents and editorializing against him in the Evening Post and the Nation.

In 1910, Villard published John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, which portrayed Brown as an inspiring American hero. It was praised by reviewers for its unbiased tone and use of new information.

Villard also wrote Germany Embattled (1915), in which he urged readers to acknowledge German contributions to American life and described the political divide in Germany. He reminded readers that the Germans believed in their cause, and advocated for continued neutrality in the European conflict. Villard followed this with two further studies of Germany: The German Phoenix: The Story of the Republic (1933) and Inside Germany; with an Epilogue, England at War (1939; reprinted as Within Germany, 1940). Villard used the former to examine postwar German contributions to art, politics, journalism, education and morality. His third book discussed Adolf Hitler's brutal Nazi policies and the plight of German civilians.

Villard wrote many books critical of journalists and newspapers. His stated goal was to improve journalistic standards, which he believed had succumbed to big business and diminishing integrity. He felt that his contemporaries were sacrificing integrity for monetary contributions from businesses and politicians. He also published many of his articles and addresses on a wide range of subjects including militarism, music, the Garrison family, and racial discrimination. Finally, Villard published an account of his father's early obstacles and accomplishments. He also wrote an autobiography entitled Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor, which was well-reviewed and celebrated.

While Villard continued to champion civil liberties, civil rights, and anti-imperialism after World War I, he largely abandoned his previous belief in laissez-faire economics. During the 1930s, he welcomed the advent of the New Deal and called for nationalization of major industries. In 1943, he engaged in a debate with philosopher Ayn Rand on the topic of collectivism versus individualism, sponsored by the American Economic Association, which was published in a number of newspapers.

Always independent-minded, however, he bitterly dissented from the foreign policy of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the late 1930s. He was an early member of the non-interventionist America First Committee which opposed U.S. entry into World War II, and used the editorial page of The Nation to express his views:

No, the truth is that if reason and logic, and not sentiment, hysteria, and self-interest, were applied to this question, the American army and navy would take the lead in advocating disarmament-always provided that we are not going to be so insane as to go to war in Europe again. I am even hoping that my friends the editors of The Nation will now turn about and join me in exposing the needless waste of the terrific military expenditures we are now making, to say nothing of the steady militarization of the country.

He broke completely with The Nation, which he had sold in 1935 because it supported American intervention. At the same time, he became increasingly repelled by the New Deal bureaucratic state, which he condemned as a precursor to American fascism. Also, he deplored the air raids carried out by the allies in the later years of World War II, saying:

What was criminal in Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw and London has now become heroic in Dresden and now Tokyo.

After 1945, Villard made common cause with "old right" conservatives, such as Senator Robert A. Taft, Felix Morley, and John T. Flynn, against the Cold War policies of Harry S. Truman.

Villard suffered a heart attack in 1944 and sustained a stroke five years later. He died on October 1, 1949, in New York City.

His oldest son, Henry Hilgard Villard, was head of the economics department at the City College of New York and the first male president of Planned Parenthood of New York City. His youngest son, Oswald Garrison Villard, Jr., was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. His daughter, Dorothy Villard Hammond, was a member of the American University in Cairo.

On February 21, 2009, the US Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Villard's civil rights work. [1]

David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, "Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900", Independent Review 4 (Spring 2000), pp. 555-75.

Michael A. Lutzker (1996). "Themes and contradictions in the American peace movement, 1895-1917". In Harvey Leonard Dyck (ed.). The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective. University of Toronto Press. p. 320+. ISBN 978-0-8020-0777-3. (discusses Villard)

Humes, Dollena Joy. Oswald Garrison Villard: Liberal of the 1920s (Syracuse UP, 1960).

McWilliams, Carey. "One Hundred Years of The Nation." Journalism Quarterly 42.2 (1965): 189-197.

Ronald Radosh. Prophets on the right: Profiles of conservative critics of American globalism (1978).

Stephan A. Thernstrom (1960), "Owen Garrison Villard and the Politics of Pacifism", Harvard Library Bulletin, 14, archived from the original on 2014-11-23

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Oswald Garrison Villard (March 13, 1872 - October 1, 1949) was an American journalist and editor of the New York Evening Post. He was a civil rights activist, and along with his mother, Fanny Villard, a founding member of the NAACP.

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Founded February 12, 1909, the NAACP is the nation's foremost, largest, and most widely recognized civil rights organization. Its more than half-million members and supporters throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, leading grassroots campaigns for equal opportunity and conducting voter mobilization.
Founding group

In 1908, a deadly race riot rocked the city of Springfield, the capital of Illinois and resting place of President Abraham Lincoln. Such eruptions of anti-black violence - particularly lynching - were horrifically commonplace, but the Springfield riot was the final tipping point that led to the creation of the NAACP. Appalled at this rampant violence, a group of white liberals that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard (both the descendants of famous abolitionists), William English Walling and Dr. Henry Moscowitz issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. Some 60 people, seven of whom were African American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call, which was released on the centennial of Lincoln's birth.

Echoing the focus of Du Bois' Niagara Movement for civil rights, which began in 1905, the NAACP's aimed to secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, the equal protection of the law, and universal adult male suffrage, respectively. Accordingly, the NAACP's mission was and is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of minority group citizens of United States and eliminate race prejudice. The NAACP seeks to remove all barriers of racial discrimination through democratic processes.

The NAACP established its national office in New York City in 1910 and named a board of directors as well as a president, Moorfield Storey, a white constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association. Other early members included Joel and Arthur Spingarn, Josephine Ruffin, Mary Talbert, Inez Milholland, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Sophonisba Breckinridge, John Haynes Holmes, Mary McLeod Bethune, George Henry White, Charles Edward Russell, John Dewey, William Dean Howells, Lillian Wald, Charles Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Fanny Garrison Villard, and Walter Sachs. Despite a foundational commitment to multiracial membership, Du Bois was the only African American among the organization's original executives. He was made director of publications and research and in 1910 established the official journal of the NAACP, The Crisis.

The Crisis

The Crisis
W.E.B. Du Bois founded The Crisis magazine in 1910 as the premier crusading voice for civil rights. Originally subtitled, "A Record of the Darker Races," The Crisis was a groundbreaking outlet for discussing critical issues confronting the African American community and sharing the intellectual and artistic work of people of color. In its first decade, The Crisis focused on vital issues like lynching and World War I. From 1920-1921, Du Bois also published a children's edition of The Crisis, called The Brownies' Book, the first periodical exclusively for black youth in American history.

In time, The Crisis became a voice of the Harlem Renaissance, as Du Bois published works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and other famous African American literary figures. In 1928, expanding the magazine's artistic reach, Du Bois founded Krigwa Players (CRIGWA: Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists) to foster theater production about, by, for, and near the African American community.

Now published quarterly, The Crisis remains the official publication of the NAACP and is the NAACP's articulate partner in the struggle for human rights for people of color. A respected journal of thought, opinion and analysis, The Crisis continues to explore past and present issues concerning race and its impact on educational, economic, political, social, moral, and ethical issues. In addition, each issue is highlighted with a special section, "The NAACP Today" reporting the news and events of the NAACP on a local and national level.

A Period of Growth

By 1913, with a strong emphasis on local organizing, the NAACP had established branch offices in such cities as Boston, MA, Baltimore, MD, Kansas City, MO, St. Louis, MO, Washington, D.C., and Detroit, MI. NAACP membership grew rapidly, from around 9,000 in 1917 to around 90,000 in 1919, with more than 300 local branches.

Joel Spingarn, a professor of literature and one of the NAACP founders formulated much of the strategy that fostered much of the organization's growth. He was elected board chairman of the NAACP in 1915 and served as president from 1929-1939. Writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson became the Association's first black executive secretary in 1920, and Louis T. Wright, a surgeon, was named the first black board chairman in 1934.

A series of early court battles, including a victory against a discriminatory Oklahoma law that regulated voting by means of a grandfather clause ( Guinn v. United States, 1910), helped establish the NAACP's importance as a legal advocate. The fledgling organization also learned to harness the power of publicity through its 1915 battle against D. W. Griffith's inflammatory Birth of a Nation, a motion picture that perpetuated demeaning stereotypes of African Americans and glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

Among the Association's top priorities was eradicating lynching. Throughout its 30-year campaign, the NAACP waged legislative battles, gathered and published crucial statistics, organized mass protests, and produced artistic material all in the name of bringing an end to the violence. After early worries about its constitutionality, the NAACP strongly supported the federal Dyer Bill, which would have punished those who participated in or failed to prosecute lynch mobs. Though the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill, a Senate filibuster defeated it for good in 1922. Despite repeated opportunities in years to follow, such as the Costigan-Wagner Bill, Congress never passed any anti-lynching legislation. Many credit the NAACP report "Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1919" and the public debate that followed with drastically decreasing the incidence of lynching.

In 1930, Walter F. White succeeded Johnson as executive secretary. White was instrumental not only in his research on lynching (in part because, as a very fair-skinned African American, he had been able to infiltrate white groups), but also in his successful block of segregationist Judge John J. Parker's nomination by President Herbert Hoover to the U.S. Supreme Court.

White presided over the NAACP's most productive period of legal advocacy. In 1930 the association commissioned the Margold Report, which became the basis for the successful reversal of the separate-but-equal doctrine that had governed public facilities since Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In 1935, White recruited Charles H. Houston as NAACP chief counsel. Houston was the Howard University law school dean whose strategy on school-segregation cases paved the way for his protégé Thurgood Marshall to prevail in 1954's Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that overturned Plessy.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was disproportionately disastrous for African Americans, the NAACP began to focus on economic justice. After years of tension with white labor unions, the Association cooperated with the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations in an effort to win jobs for black Americans. White, a friend and adviser to First Lady - and NAACP national board member - Eleanor Roosevelt, met with her often in attempt to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to outlaw job discrimination in the armed forces, defense industries, and the agencies created by the New Deal.

Roosevelt ultimately agreed to open thousands of jobs to black workers when labor leader A. Philip Randolph, in collaboration with the NAACP, threatened a national March on Washington movement in 1941. President Roosevelt also set up a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to ensure compliance.

Throughout the 1940s, the NAACP saw enormous growth in membership, recording roughly 600,000 members by 1946. It continued to act as a legislative and legal advocate, pushing for a federal anti-lynching law and for an end to state-mandated segregation.

Civil Rights Era

By the 1950s the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, headed by Marshall, secured the last of these goals through Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed segregation in public schools. The NAACP's Washington, D.C., bureau, led by lobbyist Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., helped advance not only integration of the armed forces in 1948 but also passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964, and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Despite such dramatic courtroom and congressional victories, the implementation of civil rights was a slow, painful, and oft times violent process. The unsolved 1951 murder of Harry T. Moore, an NAACP field secretary in Florida whose home was bombed on Christmas night, and his wife was just one of many crimes of retribution against the NAACP and its staff and members. NAACP Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers and his wife Myrlie also became high-profile targets for pro-segregationist violence and terrorism. In 1962, their home was firebombed and later Medgar was assassinated by a sniper in front of their residence. Violence also met black children attempting to enter previously segregated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, and other southern cities.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s echoed the NAACP's goals, but leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, felt that direct action was needed to obtain them. Although the NAACP was criticized for working too rigidly within the system, prioritizing legislative and judicial solutions, the Association did provide legal representation and aid to members of other protest groups over a sustained period of time. The NAACP even posted bail for hundreds of Freedom Riders in the '60s who had traveled to Mississippi to register black voters and challenge Jim Crow policies.

Led by Roy Wilkins, who succeeded Walter White as secretary in 1955, the NAACP collaborated with A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and other national organizations to plan the historic 1963 March on Washington. The following year, the Association accomplished what seemed an insurmountable task: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Assisting the NAACP throughout the years were many celebrities and well-known leaders, including Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte. As an NAACP director of branches, Ella Baker stressed the importance of young people and women in the organization by recruiting members, raising money, and organizing local campaigns. Daisy Bates served as an NAACP national board member, Arkansas state conference president and advisor to the Little Rock Nine. NAACP stalwart Kivie Kaplan, a businessman and philanthropist from Boston, served as president of the NAACP from 1966 until 1975, personally led nationwide NAACP Life Membership efforts, and fought to keep African Americans away from illegal drugs.

Close of First Century

As de facto racial segregation remained and job discrimination lingered and urban poverty and crime increased, NAACP advocacy and action remained critical for the African American community.

In 1977, Wilkins retired and was replaced by Benjamin L. Hooks - the first leader of the NAACP to be titled "executive director" instead of "executive secretary." During his fifteen year term, Dr. Hooks implemented many NAACP programs that continue today, such as Women in the NAACP and NAACP ACT-SO (Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics) competitions. Additionally, his term included the Bakke case (1978), in which a California court outlawed several aspects of affirmative action.

In the 1990s, the NAACP struggled to find a leader who could replace the prolific Dr. Hooks. In 1993, Benjamin F. Chavis (now Chavis Muhammad) became executive director/CEO. In 1995, Myrlie Evers-Williams (widow of Medgar Evers) became the third woman to chair the NAACP, a position she held until she was succeeded by Chairman Emeritus Julian Bond in 1998. In 1996, the National Board of Directors selected Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman and head of the Congressional Black Caucus, to serve as president and CEO. In doing so, the board changed the name of the leadership position once more and eliminated the elected office of president.

The New Millennium

The NAACP entered the 21 st century reinvigorated and, in 2000, launched a massive get-out-the-vote campaign. As a result, 1 million more African Americans cast their ballots in the 2000 presidential election than in 1996.

The NAACP's initiatives for the 21 st century can best be summarized by its six "Game Changers": economic sustainability, education, health, public safety and criminal justice, voting rights and political representation, and expanding youth and young adult engagement.

Recent leaders have included Bruce S. Gordon, Benjamin Todd Jealous, Dennis Courtland Hayes, and Cornell William Brooks. Presently, Derrick Johnson serves as President and CEO, and Leon W. Russell serves as chairman of the National Board of Directors.

***

Yet the real story of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization lies in the hearts and minds of all those who refused to stand idly while race prejudice tarnished our nation. From bold investigations of mob brutality, protests of mass murders, segregation and discrimination, to testimony before congressional committees on the vicious tactics used to bar African Americans from the ballot box, it was the talent and tenacity of NAACP members that saved lives and made change.

While much of NAACP history is chronicled in books, articles, pamphlets, and magazines, the true movement lies in the faces of the multiracial, multigenerational army of ordinary men and women who united to awaken the consciousness of a people and a nation. With such a powerful membership base, all 2,200 chapters of the Association continue to persevere. Together, the NAACP will remain vigilant in its mission until the promise of America is made real for all Americans.

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NAACP | Nation's Premier Civil Rights Organization

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Founded February 12, 1909, the NAACP is the nation's foremost, largest, and most widely recognized civil rights organization. Its more than half-million members and supporters throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, leading grassroots campaigns for equal opportunity and conducting voter mobilization.

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The Universal Negro Improvement Association & African Communities' League is a social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive spiritual ruling body, and is founded by persons, desiring to the utmost, to work for the general uplift of the Negro peoples of the world. And the members pledge themselves to do all in their power to conserve the rights of their noble race and to respect the rights of all mankind, believing always in the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God.

The motto of the organization is: "One God! One Aim! One Destiny!" Therefore, let justice be done to all mankind, realizing that if the strong oppresses the weak confusion and discontent will ever mark the path of man, but with love, faith and charity towards all the reign of peace and plenty will be heralded into the world and the generations of men shall be called blessed.

Aims and Objectives of the UNIA-ACL

*Seek to establish a Universal Confraternity among the race;
*Promote the spirit of pride and love;
*Reclaim the fallen;
*Administer to and assist the needy;
*Assist in giving right knowledge to the miseducated;
*Assist in developing Independent African Nations and Communities;
*Promote a conscientious Spiritual worship among African people;
*Establish Universities, Colleges, Academies and Schools for the racial
*Education and culture of the people;
*Conduct a worldwide Commercial and Industrial Intercourse for the good of the people;
*Work for better conditions in all African communities

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The Universal Negro Improvement Association & African Communities' League is a social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive spiritual ruling body, and is founded by persons, desiring to the utmost, to work for the general uplift of the Negro peoples of the world.

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Crash Course Literature

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Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Literature 215

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A helpful library guide

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An article from Harlem World Magazine

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The Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived at 267 West 136th Street, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!! (which lasted for one issue in 1926), such as Richard Bruce Nugent (the associate editor of the journal), Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.

At a time when homophobia and sexism were common, and when the African American bourgeoisie sought to distance itself from the slavery of the past and seek social equality and racial integration, the Niggerati themselves appeared to be relatively comfortable with their diversity of gender, skin colour, and background. After producing FIRE!!, which failed because of a lack of funding, Thurman persuaded the Niggerati to produce another magazine, Harlem. This, too, lasted only a single issue.

In his autobiographical novel, Infants of the Spring, Thurman referred to the Harlem literati, whose pretensions he often considered to be spurious and whose achievements he often considered to be second-rate, as the Niggerati. (In the novel, Sweetie May Carr, a character modelled on the real-life Hurston, christens the Harlem rooming house where Dr. Parkes, modelled on the real life Alain Locke, establishes a salon of artists, Niggerati Manor, just as Thurman's own rooming house was in real life.) Thurman himself was infamous amongst that literati, although popular amongst the younger, bohemian, crowd. Thurman rejected what he called "society Negroes". He himself, as many others of the literati did, would hold parties on Saturday nights, which Langston Hughes described in The Big Sea by observing that "at Wallace Thurman's you met the bohemians of both Harlem and the Village." Recalling the days of Niggerati Manor, Theophilus Lewis wrote:

Those were the days when Niggerati Manor was the talk of the town. The story got out that the bathtubs in the house were always packed with sour mash, while gin flowed from all the water taps and the flush boxes were filled with needle beer. It was said that the inmates of the house spent wild nights in tuft hunting and in the diversion of the cities of the plains and delirious days fleeing from pink elephants. [...] Needless to say, the rumours were not wholly groundless; Where there is smoke there must be fire. In the case of Niggerati Manor, a great deal more smoke came out of the windows than was warranted by the size of the fire in the house.
-Theophilus Lewis,

All three of Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman enjoyed the shock value of referring to themselves as the Niggerati. Hurston's biographer Valerie Boyd described it as "an inspired moniker that was simultaneously self-mocking and self-glorifying, and sure to shock the stuffy black bourgeoisie". Hurston was actually the coiner of the name. The quickest wit in what was a very witty group, which encompassed Helene Johnson, Dorothy Peterson, Countee Cullen, Augusta Savage, Dorothy West (then a teacher), Harold Jackman, and John P. Davis (a law student at the time), as well as hangers-on, friends, and acquaintances, Hurston dubbed herself the "Queen of the Niggerati". In addition to Niggerati Manor, the rooming house at 267 West 136th Street where both Thurman and Hughes lived, Niggerati meetings were held at Hurston's apartment, with a pot on the stove, into which attendees were expected to contribute ingredients for stew. She also cooked okra, or fried Florida eel.

Whilst Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman were comfortable with the appellation, others were less so. Cullen, for example, found Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven so offensive that he refused to talk to him for 14 years. Hurston, though, had no trouble with language that challenged the sensibilities of others. She dubbed the well-heeled white liberals who were involved in the Harlem Renaissance "Negrotarians" (c.f. rotarian).

FIRE!! itself represented the aesthetic frustrations of the Niggerati. Its single issue was published in November 1926, a year after the publication of Alain Locke's The New Negro. Whilst The New Negro was viewed by the Niggerati as subtle propaganda, appropriating their talents for racial propagandist purposes, FIRE!! was intended to be "devoted to the younger Negro artists", and was edited, paid for, and published by the Niggerati themselves, with the intention both of being purely aesthetic and of causing outrage amongst black literary critics. The journal's title came from a poem that Hughes had written, which was a sinner's lament in the fashion of a Negro spiritual. In a letter written to Locke, Hurston stated that there needed to be "more outlets for Negro fire", and the Niggerati distanced themselves even from Locke, declining his offer of patronage for the journal.

In addition to Nugent; Bennett, Douglas, Thurman, Hurston, and Hughes formed the journal's editorial board, with Thurman at the head. Davis was the business manager. Each editor was supposed to contribute 50 dollars towards the publication costs, although only three (not including Hurston) actually did. Thurman signed an I.O.U. for the printer, making him personally liable for the bill of nearly $1,000. He borrowed $150 from the Harlem Community Church, and another $150 from the Mutual League, only to be mugged on a street corner in Harlem, losing both all of the money and his clothing. For the next four years, Thurman's pay was attached in order to pay the debt. Hurston solicited subscriptions on a folklore-collecting trip to the South in 1927, in order to help, and both she and Hughes submitted essays to World Tomorrow, which had loaned money to FIRE!, to repay that loan.

This shaky financial foundation was symptomatic of the troubles that beset the journal, one of the most major of which was that none of the Niggerati had time to work on it. By the Autumn of 1926, Hurston had begun a course at Barnard, Hughes had returned to college in Pennsylvania, Davis was at Harvard and occupied with editing Crisis, Bennett was at Howard and occupied with her column for Opportunity, and even Thurman had taken a new job editing World Tomorrow magazine. Nugent and Douglas were artists, not editors. One of Nugent's stories, submitted for publication, was destroyed accidentally whilst stored at Hurston's apartment, and he had to rewrite it. He did so on a roll of toilet paper, which he gave to Thurman. Nugent himself stated that the most amazing thing about FIRE!! was that it was ever published at all.

In a final irony, the printer gave the entire print run of the magazine to the Niggerati, in the hope that they would sell better in quantity, only for several hundred copies to be lost in a fire in the basement in which they were stored. Hurston later commented "I suppose that 'Fire' has gone to ashes quite, but I still think the idea is good."

The one issue of FIRE!! to be published contained stories by several of the Niggerati, most of which had transgressions of moral and aesthetic boundaries as their themes. Thurman's story Cordelia the Crude was a story about a sixteen-year-old black girl becoming a prostitute - an image that would have outraged black critics of the time, whose view of black female sexuality was that images of it should be moral. Nugent's story was Smoke, Lilies and Jade, an overtly homoerotic story with black and Latino protagonists, and the first such story published by an African American. Hurston submitted two stories, one of which, her play Color Struck (a reworked version of what she had won the 1925 ' Opportunity contest with), Thurman had considered printing under a nom de plume, in order to prevent the issue being too "Zoraish". Like the other stories, Color Struck condemned the bourgeois attitude of envying whites, on biological and intellectual grounds, its subject being that of a woman who was so conscious of the colour of her skin that she missed out on the love of a good man. Her other submission was a short story entitled Sweat, which Hemenway praises as being "a remarkable work, her best fiction of the period", and observes that such stories could have led to the magazine's eventual success, had it not suffered from the other problems.

The Niggerati sought to challenge borgeoise attitudes with FIRE!!, and intended it (in Thurman's own words from his solicitiation letters) to be "provocative [...] to provide the shocks necessary to encourage new types of artistic interest and new types of artistic energy". However, their efforts failed. They were not taken very seriously. Most of the negative reactions were little stronger than slaps on the wrist. Locke criticized their "effete echoes of contemporary decadence" and yet praised their anti-Puritanism. The NAACP even handled some of the journal's prepublication publicity. Du Bois, editor of Crisis, simply ignored them.

The way in which the Niggerati thought that FIRE!! was received reveals much about their intent in publishing it. Hughes wrote in The Big Sea that "None of the older Negro intellectuals would have anything to do with FIRE. Dr. Du Bois in Crisis roasted it.". In fact, Du Bois did no such thing. The only mention that FIRE!! received was a brief announcement in the January 1927 issue, calling it "a beautiful piece of printing" that was "strikingly illustrated by Aaron Douglas" and concluding "We bespeak for it wide support." Huges thought that Du Bois panned FIRE!! because he expected him to pan it, that being the reaction that he and the other Niggerati had intended to elicit. Nugent reported that once all initial submissions had been made, Thurman had asked the group for something that would get the journal banned in Boston, which led to the inclusion of Cordelia the Crude and Smoke, Lilies and Jade.

The Niggerati's next magazine, Harlem, published in November 1928, was subtly different in tone to FIRE!!. Whilst still choosing themes that critics considered inappropriate and shocking, the magazine was more politically oriented, was more commercially viable, and had a wider variety of articles, stories, advertisements, and other contents. It also had a different look, and lacked the inter-generational rhetoric of FIRE!!. Thurman himself described it as a "wholly new type of magazine", with a new outlook, celebrating "a new day in the history of the American Negro". Thurman aimed the magazine squarely at the New Negroes envisioned by Locke and others. Unlike FIRE!!, Harlem was not intended solely a vehicle for the Niggerati themselves, but was intended to accept articles from anyone, as long as the authors had skill.

Most of the editors of FIRE!! also contributed to Harlem. They also approached other writers. One such was Nella Larsen, a friend of Peterson. Peterson had wanted no part in another magazine published by Thurman, and had been approached by Nugent and Scholley Alexander, to write a monthly theatrical column, under the pretext that Alexander was the editor. Upon receiving a thank-you letter with Thurman's name as editor on the letterhead, she withdrew, despite pleas from Alexander acknowledging Thurman's "selfish treatment of those who have helped him gain a place in the literary world" and stating that he would not let Thurman run amok. Alexander asked Peterson to ask her friends "to forbear - to with-hold their criticism until they have the first issue at hand to criticize " (original emphasis and underlining). Larsen also declined, on the grounds that she was not going to be paid for her submissions, confessing that her ultimate goal in writing was "money". "I write so slowly and with such great reluctance that it seems a waste of time.", she also observed.

The first issue of Harlem contained essays by Lewis, Locke, Nugent, and Walter Francis White; poems by Helene Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Effie Newsom; stories by Roy de Coverly and George Little; and illustrations. Although intended to be more moderate than FIRE!!, Thurman abandoned this stance in later pages of the issue. His review of Larsen's Quicksand gave closer attention to the review of the novel given by Du Bois than it did to the novel itself, saying that Larsen "no doubt pleases Dr. Du Bois for she stays in her own sphere and writes about the sort of people one can invite to one's home without losing one's social prestige. She doesn't give white people the impression that all Negroes are gin drinkers, cabaret hounds and of the half world. Her Negroes are all of the upper class. And how!"

Like FIRE!!, Harlem also failed, with the readership responding unfavourably. Nugent wrote to Peterson after the publication of the first issue, expressing his disappointment and blaming the failure on "Wally's" editorship. According to Nugent, neither Alexander nor Douglas had been able, nor had had the strength, to counteract Thurman. Nugent himself had been on tour, with the cast of Porgy, whilst the issue was being edited. Nugent distanced himself from the magazine, and wanted it made clear to Van Vechten that he had not been "in any way responsible for the perpetration of Harlem". In December 1928, Thurman resigned from the magazine's editorial board ( Source).
Editor's note: The photograph at the lead of the story is not the Niggerati Manor, but is a new structure built on the location where the Manor once existed.

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The Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived at 267 West 136th Street, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor.

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An interesting fictionalized interview with Zora Neale Hurston

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We have several collections of his work in the library. Also check out resources from the Academy of American Poets.

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James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes's birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.

After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, a launderer, and a busboy. He also traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes's debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who cited Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of Black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Culle n, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of Black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language, alongside their suffering.

The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes

differed from most of his predecessors among black poets... in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read... Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously-though always seriously-to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known "Simple" books: Simple's Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950). He coedited the The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949) with Arna Bontemps, edited The Book of Negro Folklore (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958), and wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940). Hughes also cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed "Langston Hughes Place."

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Langston Hughes - A poet, novelist, fiction writer, and playwright, Langston Hughes is known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties and was important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Here's more from the Poetry Foundation

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Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to…

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And from the Library of Congress

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Credit Line: Library of Congress

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While the Library of Congress created most of the videos in this collection, they include copyrighted materials that the Library has permission from rightsholders to present. Rights assessment is your responsibility. The written permission of the copyright owners in materials not in the public domain is required for distribution, reproduction, or other use of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use or other statutory exemptions.

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"Mr. NAACP" was born in Atlanta.  Here's information from the Library of Congress.

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Kenneth Robert Janken, author of "White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP," told an audience at the Library on Feb. 25 that the accomplishments of Walter White from the 1920s to the 1950s in the fields of civil rights, politics and black culture, though long forgotten, are well worth remembering.

White stemmed the epidemic of mob murders and lynchings, guided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) into prominence, helped to launch the Harlem Renaissance, and participated in the many legal campaigns against segregation, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Janken, associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, used the Library's NAACP records in the Manuscript Division as a major resource for the book, which is the first biography of White. Janken's presentation was part of the Center for the Book's Books & Beyond series of talks that highlight new books based on the Library's collections and programs.

Adrienne Cannon, Afro-American history and culture specialist in the Manuscript Division, introduced Janken and described the significance of the NAACP collection, which consists of approximately 5 million items dating from 1909, the year of the association's inception, to 1995.

"The NAACP records are the largest single collection ever acquired by the Library and, annually, the most heavily used," said Cannon. The collection includes manuscripts, photographs, pamphlets, broadsides, phonograph records, and audio and video tape recordings.

"Every phase of NAACP's many activities to advance the struggle for racial equality is reflected in this rich and diverse collection," she said.

The NAACP collection is the cornerstone of the Library's unparalleled resources for the study of the 20th-century civil rights movement and leaders in the fight for civil liberties. In addition to the materials of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the collection holds the records of the National Urban League, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. The Library also holds the papers of prominent activists, such as Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Arthur Spingarn, A. Philip Randolph and many more.

Janken said that White, throughout his life, reveled in the confusion and opportunities created by his extremely fair complexion. Although White was African American, with parents who were born into slavery, he, nevertheless, looked white. Janken explained, "He was known in his day as a voluntary Negro-an African American who could pass for white, but chose not to."

Instead, he chose to exploit his complexion to advance the rights of African Americans. During the 1920s and 1930s, White, operating incognito at great personal peril, investigated more than 40 lynchings and mob riots. Posing as a white man, he was able to uncover details of the crimes. His findings generated much publicity and eventually led to a stemming of the lynching epidemic in the South.

"He loved to make rednecks look foolish. By doing so, he punctured their pompous racial superiority," said Janken. "He encouraged African Americans to shake off the grip of fear that lynch mobs had on them."

Over the years, White enjoyed discussing his many cases of mistaken identity, hoping to explode myths of racial inferiority and categorization and to encourage whites to rethink preconceptions.

As executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955, White pushed the organization to prominence. "The NAACP lobbying campaigns, which he devised and orchestrated through the 1930s, were textbook cases in effectiveness. By the late 1930s, the NAACP was an organization that politicians had to reckon with and ignore at their own peril," said Janken.

White wrote two novels, "The Fire and the Flint" and "Flight," helped many African American singers and actors, and launched the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Janken said, "After a long day at the office, you could find him club-hopping into the late hours, taking around critics of the New York Evening Post or potential funders for the NAACP."

He and his wife hosted numerous parties at their home as well. Janken said George Gershwin was at one of these parties and premiered his new composition "Rhapsody in Blue" on White's piano.

Janken said White bore the primary responsibility for keeping the NAACP together through the years, of conducting the daily tasks of raising money and insisting on an organization that defended and extended the rights of African Americans.

After World War II, White suggested to President Truman that he establish a commission on civil rights. Truman took his advice, and in 1947 the President's Commission on Civil Rights released a statement that called for the elimination of segregation. Truman endorsed the commission's report, Janken said.

White was intimately involved in the legal campaigns to end the Jim Crow laws. He participated in all the strategy sessions that built up cases against segregation from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Wrapping up his talk, Janken said White had an important and compelling career. "In the nine years I was working on this book, I never, ever got tired of Walter White."

Back to April 2003 - Vol 62, No.4

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Walter White, Mr. NAACP (April 2003) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin

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Kenneth Robert Janken, author of "White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP," told an audience at the Library on Feb. 25 that the accomplishments of Walter White from the 1920s to the 1950s in the fields of civil rights, politics and black culture, though long forgotten, are well worth remembering.

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Biography video

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Photo: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

Quick Facts

"I am not white. There is nothing within my mind and heart which tempts me to think I am."

Name

Walter White

Birth Date

July 1, 1893

Death Date

March 21, 1955

Did You Know?

Walter White is the great-grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States.

Education

Atlanta University

Place of Birth

Atlanta, Georgia

Place of Death

New York, New York

Full Name

Walter Francis White

As a member of the NAACP, Walter White investigated lynchings and worked to end segregation. He was the organization's executive secretary from 1931 to 1955.

Who Was Walter White?

Though Walter White had blonde hair and blue eyes, he embraced his African American heritage and fought to end the discrimination that surrounded African Americans. As a member of the NAACP, White investigated lynchings and worked to end segregation; he later became the organization's executive secretary.

Early Life

Walter Francis White was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 1, 1893. (Before he became president of the United States, William Henry Harrison fathered several children with one of his slaves. One of these children was Walter White's grandmother, making Harrison Walter White's great-grandfather.) In 1906, he was a witness to race riots in Atlanta, and saw his home come close to being destroyed. He only escaped the violence of the day because he was light-complexioned, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Given the discrimination and prejudice that African Americans faced every day of their lives, many with appearances like Walter White's elected to leave their homes and families in order to live as whites. But White--whose parents who had been born as slaves--chose to embrace his African-American heritage.

NAACP Investigator

A 1916 graduate of Atlanta University, White worked in insurance before protesting cuts in funding for African American students in Atlanta. After starting a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he became a member of the organization's national team in 1918, when executive secretary James Weldon Johnson selected White to be an assistant secretary.

White began investigating lynchings in the South, a terrifyingly regular occurrence. His appearance, paired with his Southern accent, meant he was able to obtain responses when he questioned politicians and suspected lynchers. The information he uncovered was then broadcast by the NAACP.

White looked into more than 40 lynchings and eight race riots, and each investigation was a dangerous endeavor. On one occasion in 1919, the fact that White was in fact an African American was discovered. Tipped off to the danger, he quickly fled town to avoid being attacked himself.

Entry Into Writing

In addition to his work with the NAACP, White wrote novels: The Fire in the Flint (1924), about a doctor who returns to the South only to end up being lynched, and Flight (1926), whose protagonist initially passes for white, then re-embraces her racial identity. His 1929 non-fiction work, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, examined the causes and effects of lynching. White also helped encourage Harlem Renaissance writers.

NAACP Leader

Following Johnson's retirement, White became the NAACP's acting executive secretary; he officially took over the position in 1931. He successfully prevented the confirmation of Judge John J. Parker, an avowed segregationist, to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, his attempt to institute a federal anti-lynching law, which had the support of his good friend Eleanor Roosevelt, was quashed by filibustering Southern Senators. However, White's investigations into the practice helped reduce the number of lynchings.

Under White's direction, the NAACP also used legal channels to fight segregation, poll taxes and other discriminatory measures. He was able to see the validation of this strategy with the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

Along with A. Philip Randolph, White encouraged President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to issue 1941's Fair Employment Practices executive order, which forbade racial discrimination in defense industry hiring. After looking into the treatment of African American soldiers during World War II, White wrote A Rising Wind (1945). President Harry Truman's commission for civil rights and his move to desegregate the armed forces were prompted by his contact with White and White's book.

Later Years and Death

In 1948, White's autobiography, A Man Called White, was released. It talked about the role he had played in the NAACP, but his power in the organization had waned with age, health issues and internal strife following his second marriage to a white woman. However, White remained the titular head of the NAACP until he had a heart attack at age 61 and died in New York City on March 21, 1955.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

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"I am not white. There is nothing within my mind and heart which tempts me to think I am." Name Walter White Birth Date July 1, 1893 Death Date March 21, 1955 Did You Know? Walter White is the great-grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States.

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From History.com

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On June 29, 1947, at the closing session of the 38th annual conference for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Walter F. White, the organization's executive secretary, warns that despite progress made in civil rights, true equality can't be achieved with a "separate but equal" mandate.

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NAACP's Walter White Decries Racial Inequality

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On June 29, 1947, at the closing session of the 38th annual conference for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Walter F. White, the organization's executive secretary, warns that despite progress made in civil rights, true equality can't be achieved with a "separate but equal" mandate.

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The Atlanta University Center Consortium, Inc., located in the heart of metropolitan Atlanta, is the world's largest consortia of African American private institutions of higher education. Originally formed in 1929, the Consortium is a nonprofit organization that operates on behalf of its member institutions: Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine and Spelman College.

With very humble beginnings, established at various times in history, primarily to educate newly freed slaves at the end of the Civil War through the Reconstruction era, each member institution has a distinguished legacy of excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. Today, enrolling more than 10,000 students collectively each year, one common goal continues to bind the Consortium members together; to provide the finest undergraduate, graduate and professional training possible to its students.

Atlanta University, founded in 1865 and Clark College founded in 1869, merged to form Clark Atlanta University in 1988, a leading private, historically black doctoral research university. Morehouse College, established in 1867, is the nation's largest private liberal arts college for men. Formed in 1881, Spelman College is a highly selective liberal arts college for women. The Consortium's newest member institution, Morehouse School of Medicine was formed in 1974 and is one of the nation's most widely recognized community based medical schools. Because of the close proximity of the institutions, the boards of trustees and presidents of the colleges began to assess ways in which they could utilize their services and resources more effectively and efficiently. Thus, the Atlanta University Center Consortium was formed to coordinate and manage the cooperative efforts of various programs and services offered by the colleges. While no longer members of the Consortium, Morris Brown College founded in 1881, and the Interdenominational Theological Center founded in 1958, are largely significant to the Consortium's rich legacy.

The long-established history of collaboration that exists among member institutions allows students, faculty and staff to benefit from an expanded and enhanced educational environment. Some distinguishing collaborative efforts of the Consortium include cross-registration, a Dual Degree Engineering Program, center-wide Career Planning and Placement Services, and the AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library. Renovated in 1992 and reorganized in 2003, the library is a modern information and research center designed to meet the diverse needs of the AUC community.

Consortium member schools have graduated a number of distinguished scholars throughout the years. Some of the most notable are Marian Wright Edelman, Esther Rolle, Pearl Cleage and Keisha Knight Pulliam (Spelman College); Martin Luther King, Jr., Julian Bond, Spike Lee, Edwin Moses, and Samuel L. Jackson (Morehouse College); James Weldon Johnson, Amanda Davis, and Emmanuel Lewis (Clark Atlanta University), and Regina Benjamin (Morehouse School of Medicine).

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The Atlanta University Center Consortium, Inc., located in the heart of metropolitan Atlanta, is the world's largest consortia of African American private institutions of higher education. Originally formed in 1929, the Consortium is a nonprofit organization that operates on behalf of its member institutions: Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine and Spelman College.

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From the National World War II Museum

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During World War II, African Americans made tremendous sacrifices in an effort to trade military service and wartime support for measurable social, political, and economic gains. As never before, local black communities throughout the nation participated enthusiastically in wartime programs while intensifying their demands for social progress. The struggle for African American first-class citizenship during this period was primarily waged in the workplace and training facilities throughout the nation. In particular, black colleges and universities made vital contributions to the defense program and, on a state level, directed training facilities and organized the African American war effort. In total, 75 black colleges and universities participated in the National Defense Program in some way.

By 1942, thousands of African Americans had enrolled in pre-employment courses at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) throughout the South. Nearly 30 black colleges offered 50 new courses that covered topics such as mechanical arts, radio engineering, tool engineering, welding, electronics, boat building, nursing, sheet metal work, photography, internal combustion engines, production management, and nutrition. Students received training in occupations that reflected a shortage of personnel in regional areas. Sixty-five black colleges participated in federal programs such as the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT) program. Twelve of those institutions had direct contracts with the federal government and offered a total of 74 courses in physics, mathematics, management, engineering, and chemistry. Overall, about 80 percent of black colleges and universities changed their curricula to offer defense-related courses and training for the war effort.

The federal government also vigorously solicited the support of HBCUs in numerous programs like the War Bond and Stamp Savings program and the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps, which was a precursor to the United States Army Reserve. In addition to thousands of Africans Americans, more than 50,000 non-African-American students throughout the South were registered in defense-related training programs. African Americans received valuable training in skilled and unskilled occupations that qualified them to work in numerous war-related industries. Though African Americans eagerly sought these defense-training program opportunities, many employers in the South avoided hiring blacks for fear of social unrest and mass strikes. In response, the War Manpower Commission regional office in Dallas, Texas, directed black trainees throughout the Southwest to seek employment at shipyards and defense plants located in the North and West.

During the war, Americans routinely sang "God Bless America" and the "Star Spangled Banner" and posted signs and American flags in support of troops and war-related programs. However, fervent displays of patriotism did not include the support of black troops. During this period racial violence against African American soldiers was common near military installations in the South. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, for example, a race riot broke out between African American GIs, civilians, and the local police in Alexandria, Louisiana, when a white military policeman struck a black soldier in front of a crowded movie theater. Because of such incidents, black leaders, educators, and the black press believed that building morale in the black community was even more essential. Not only would the black community benefit socially and politically from training programs and increased employment opportunities, but HBCUs would also receive much-needed financial and technical support from the federal and state governments.

Many black leaders and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were acutely aware and concerned about African American disaffection for the war. Rightly so, black Americans had little to celebrate, considering that many of them were barred from civil defense training programs and jobs, as Jim Crow philosophy permeated the branch services of the Army, Navy, and Marines, and African Americans who suffered from maltreatment and assaults at the hands of whites had no recourse in the justice system. In fact, this attitude was representative of the mood in the black community throughout the nation. To combat this pessimistic atmosphere, the Research Branch of the Special Service Division, US Army Forces, released a report entitled, "Attitudes of the Negro Soldier." The report suggested that special efforts be established to assign black troops to important military duties and that there be an increased flow of news about African American military achievements both in combat and in training. This increase in the flow of information would include a steady focus on enemy racial doctrine. All of these suggestions were intended to emphasize to African Americans the importance of winning the war.

The contradiction between fighting to sustain democracy throughout the world and experiencing the humiliation of Jim Crow laws, second-class citizenship, and exclusion from wartime job training programs at home understandably proved too great for many African Americans. Although antiwar and antimilitary sentiment did not reflect the rhetoric of the general population or mainstream black leaders, the feelings of individuals such as C.L.R. James represented how many black soldiers and civilians felt. James proclaimed:

Many of these individuals resisted supporting the war by refusing to support national defense programs or contribute to the national war chest. At Howard University, many students linked wartime support to the civil rights movement and began to participate in sit-ins and demonstrations that protested segregationist policies of restaurants, department stores, and drugstores throughout the Washington, DC, area. In the minds of many young African Americans, the notion of fighting for freedom and democracy in Europe as second-class citizens only angered and insulted them.

While World War II represents a benchmark in the modern civil rights movement, it also reflects a decisive moment in the personal and collective histories of millions of African Americans throughout the South as they sought to escape white supremacy and oppression in pursuit of employment and enfranchisement opportunities. Thus, the contributions of African Americans to the Home Front during the war became a key factor in America's arsenal of democracy and its ability to defeat its enemies.

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The Double V Victory | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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During World War II, African Americans made tremendous sacrifices in an effort to trade military service and wartime support for measurable social, political, and economic gains. As never before, local black communities throughout the nation participated enthusiastically in wartime programs while intensifying their demands for social progress.

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From the Library of Congress

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This is a guest post by Margaret McAleer, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It appears in the July/August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, one of several articles on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.
As members of America's greatest generation, Jimmie Kanaya, William S.M. Banks Jr. and Charity Adams Earley had a lot in common. They served with the U.S. Army in the European Theater during World War II. They responded with exceptional valor and service to the nation's call for patriotism, courage and ingenuity. They were among more than 30,000 Japanese Americans and one million African Americans who served in segregated units during the war, fighting fascism abroad and for an end to brutal discrimination at home. It was the "Double V" campaign, fighting for victories on two fronts.

Kanaya was a medic with the Japanese American 442 nd Regimental Combat Team. He was awarded a Silver Star for tending to wounded men under heavy enemy fire near Castellina, Italy. Banks, an officer with the 92 nd Infantry Division (known as the "Buffalo Soldiers"), also received a Silver Star in Italy when his company held out for a week against repeated enemy assaults. Adams commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only African American Women's Army Corps battalion deployed overseas. Her unit cleared a six-month backlog of mail and packages in only three months after arriving in England in early 1945.

In the European Theater where Kanaya, Banks and Adams served, Japanese American combat units - the 442 nd Regimental Combat Team and 100 th Battalion - were among the most decorated of the war. African Americans in the theater flew 15,000 sorties as famed Tuskegee airmen, transported thousands of tons of supplies daily in truck convoys known as the "Red Ball Express" and advanced with the Third Army as members of the 761 st Tank Battalion, among other achievements.

They accomplished the impossible against a strong headwind of racism.

Kanaya faced the painful task of helping his parents move from their home in Oregon to an internment camp in Idaho. "With our parents incarcerated," Kanaya said, he and other Japanese American soldiers felt the need to prove themselves.

When word came that his company would be deployed overseas, Banks' white commanding officer predicted it would be sent to heavy fighting in the Pacific in order to increase the percentage of African American causalities. Banks found the statement "nauseating."

Despite her rank, Adams recounted "salutes were slow in coming, and, frequently, returned with great reluctance." Yet she never ceased to use her rank to fight against the discrimination experienced by women in her command. She was aided occasionally by white military personnel who stood up against racism. While traveling in uniform, she was barred from entering the dining car on her train until a white officer standing behind her thundered at the steward: "What in the world are we fighting this damned war for?"

His question was among the most important of the war. Indeed, service men and women of color fought on two fronts - against fascism and oppression overseas and against racism and discrimination at home. They achieved impossible feats despite demoralizing racism, violent encounters stateside, senseless inefficiencies created by segregation policies and training, housing and resources that were often substandard.

Their heroism in this dual war is told in oral histories and collections of personal papers and organizational records preserved in the Library's Veterans History Project and Manuscript Division.

"In a thousand subtle ways, in a thousand brutal ways, we were taught we were no part of American culture and history," observed Nelson Peery, who served with the African American 93rd Infantry Division. "Here we were making history."
to the blog- it's free! - and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

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This is a guest post by Margaret McAleer, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It appears in the July/August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, one of several articles on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. As members of America's greatest generation, Jimmie Kanaya, William S.M.

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A video explaining the case and its importance

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Shelley v. Kraemer Case Brief Summary | Law Case Explained

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A great resource from the Federal Courts

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Main content

<iframe width="550" height="350" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" frameborder="0" src="https://www.uscourts.gov/audio/brown-v-board-education-podcast" title=" Brown v. Board of Education Podcast "></iframe>

Decision Date: May 17, 1954

Background:

In the 1950s segregation laws in many states prohibited African American children and white children from attending the same schools. Linda Brown, an African American girl, could not attend a less-crowded white school a few blocks from her home in Topeka, Kan. Instead, she had to ride a bus across town to attend an African American school. In 1951, Linda Brown's father and several parents from her school filed suit against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. He argued that separate schools were unconstitutional because they violated equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court ruled in favor of the Board of Education citing the "separate but equal" precedent established by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. The Brown case, along with four other similar segregation cases, was appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall, an NAACP attorney, argued the case before the Court.

Decision:

The Supreme Court first heard arguments for the case in December 1952. Because of its controversial nature and anticipated resistance from southern states, no decision was reached. During the Court's recess, Chief Justice Vinson died and Chief Justice Warren was appointed. In December 1953, the Court heard the case again and on May 17, 1954, unanimously ruled segregation unconstitutional. The Court said "separate is not equal," and segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

DISCLAIMER: These resources are created by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts for educational purposes only. They may not reflect the current state of the law, and are not intended to provide legal advice, guidance on litigation, or commentary on any pending case or legislation.

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Main content Decision Date: May 17, 1954 In the 1950s segregation laws in many states prohibited African American children and white children from attending the same schools. Linda Brown, an African American girl, could not attend a less-crowded white school a few blocks from her home in Topeka, Kan.

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Another great resource from the State Bar of Georgia

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Brown v. Board of Education (1954) | Separate Is NOT Equal

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From the Library of Congress

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The Murder of Emmett Till | Articles and Essays | Civil Rights History Project | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 brought nationwide attention to the racial violence and injustice prevalent in Mississippi. While visiting his relatives in Mississippi, Till went to the Bryant store with his cousins, and may have whistled at Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and…

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A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

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A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

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We have this incredible book of poetry in the library.  Written as an heroic crown of sonnets, the book is beautifully illustrated.

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A Wreath for Emmett Till is a sophisticated and thought-provoking poem written by Connecticut's poet laureate and award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson. This book combines emotion, history, and social commentary to bring the life and death of Emmett Louis Till back to our nation's consciousness. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy murdered in 1955 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at or speaking to a white woman. Though two men were tried for the crime, they were acquitted; no one has been convicted for Emmett's murder. In 2004 the U.S. Justice Department reopened the case based on new evidence brought to light by two documentary films.

With beautiful language that turns chilling at times, Nelson asks readers to face the atrocity of lynching and its role in our nation's history. Her poem calls readers to bear witness and speak out against such hatred and violence. A Wreath for Emmett Till invites readers to explore its layers for meaning, symbolism, and connections between past, present, and future. This powerful work lends itself to group discussion, individual study, teaching extensions and activities, and further research.

To prepare students for the serious and disturbing themes in A Wreath for Emmett Till have them gather and share information about the history and events contained in the poem. Divide the class into groups and assign them one of the following topics to research:
Have the groups report back to the class on the five most important pieces of information they find about their topic.

Have students read Nelson's introduction, "How I Came to Write This Poem." What do they think she means when she says "the strict form became a kind of insulation." How does Nelson's explanation of her approach to writing the poem make students feel about reading it?

Questions for group discussion:

* How did this poem make you feel? Have students identify lines or words that stood out for them and explain why these selections were meaningful. Nelson explains why she used the heroic crown of sonnets form. How did this form of poetry affect students as readers? What was it like to read this form?

* Who is the narrator of the poem? The narrator's voice changes in the third stanza. Who is the speaker in this stanza and how do you know? Why do you think the voice changes here?

* What is the significance of the parallel universe in Stanza VI? What is the meaning of the last two lines? The word terrorists appears in this stanza. Do you think Till's killers were terrorists? Why or why not?

* Who is the blind girl in Stanza VIII? How does she relate to Emmett Till?

* How does this poem relate the past to the present and future? Which lines in the poem support these connections? Is it important to know about what happened in the past? Why or why not?

* What is the overall message of this poem? Is it ultimately about hope, despair, or something else? Ask students to back up their ideas with lines or words from the poem.

* Is this poem controversial? Why or why not? In the spring of 2004, Marilyn Nelson and other poets were invited to a poetry day at the White House. However, the event was cancelled, reportedly due to concerns that it would become a forum for protest against the war in Iraq. How do students interpret A Wreath for Emmett Till as a comment on current events? What sections, lines, or words in the poem support their interpretations?

* What is the meaning of the title, A Wreath for Emmett Till? Discuss the symbolism of flowers and plants in the poem and art.

* After students have read and discussed A Wreath for Emmett Till, have them listen to Marilyn Nelson's reading of it. How was listening to the poem different from reading it? Did their understanding of any part of the poem change after hearing the poet read?

* Philippe Lardy provided editorial illustration for the poem. What is editorial illustration? How is it different from narrative or standard picture book illustration? Ask students to study the illustrations. How does the art affect them as they turn the pages? How do the colors, shapes, and images contribute to the tone and moods of the poem?

1. Music. Stanza II mentions "strange fruit." Introduce students the lyrics to "Strange Fruit," written by Abel Meeropol, which was recorded as a song in 1939 by Billie Holiday. Students can write a brief paper comparing and contrasting the song with A Wreath for Emmett Till.

2. Poetry. There is a long history of poets using their craft to draw attention to social problems or to protest local or national events. Have students write poems to express their opinions, thoughts, and feelings about a current social situation.

3. History. Engage students in a research project about the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men arrested for kidnapping and killing Emmett Till. (See resources section.) What were the conditions of the trial? Do students feel that justice was served? Ask students to send a letter to one person involved in the trial. The students should express their opinion on that person's role in the trial.

4. History. Stanzas IV and V and the corresponding endnotes refer to Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Mobley. Students can use the Web sites in the resources section to find out more about Mamie Till Mobley's decisions and actions after her son's death. Provide students with the opportunity to respond to her courage through writing or art.

5. Current Events. At the time of this book's publication, no one had been convicted of Emmett Till's murder. However, in 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice reopened the case based on new information presented in two documentaries about Emmett Till. Have students find out more about the Department of Justice's announcement and then write letters to the editor of the local newspaper making the case for why or why not this matter should be pursued so many years later.

6. Activism. Students can research to learn what social conditions existed that allowed Emmett Till to be murdered in 1955. Ask students to reflect on their own time and place, then ask them to write essays about whether and why Emmett Till's murder could happen today. Ask them to reread and reflect on Stanza XIV and to include in their essays their ideas on what they can do to prevent or stop hate and racism.

7. Writing. Have students write an obituary for Emmett Till. What is important for people to know and remember about him and his fate?

8. Personal Connections. Ask students to think back to before they read A Wreath for Emmett Till. Have students write about the most important things they've learned from reading this poem. What aspects of Emmett Till's story will stay with them for the next fifty years?

Note: Many of these resources contain graphic descriptions or pictures of racism and/or lynchings.

Web sites:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/
This Web site accompanies the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till and provides teaching resources.

http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/home.htm and http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/
Companion Web sites for the video and PBS series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow offering resources and teaching ideas.

Books:
Crowe, Chris. Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. Dial, 2003.

Crowe, Chris. Mississippi Trial, 1955. Dial, 2002.

Till Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. Random House, 2003.

Videos:
The Murder of Emmett Till, produced by Stanley Nelson. PBS Home Video, 2003.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, produced by Bill Jersey and William R. Grant. California Newsreel, 2002.

Marilyn Nelson the author of Carver: A Life in Poems, won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, a Newbery Honor Award, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Award. Her poetry collection The Fields of Praise won the 1998 Poet's Prize and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, lives in Storrs, Connecticut.

Philippe Lardy is an award-winning illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and the Boston Globe. Lardy lives in Paris and exhibits his work in the United States and Europe.

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Teacher's Guide for A Wreath for Emmett Till published by Houghton Mifflin Company

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A Wreath for Emmett Till is a sophisticated and thought-provoking poem written by Connecticut's poet laureate and award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson. This book combines emotion, history, and social commentary to bring the life and death of Emmett Louis Till back to our nation's consciousness.

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A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

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A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

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This video is a recording of one of the poems from the book set to music.

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A Wreath for Emmett Till. From "Dialogues on Race." Music by Gregg August. Text by Marilyn Nelson

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(Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)

Written by Charlie Cobb, SNCC Field Secretary 1962-1967

Julian Bond's History of SNCC, Volume 1, "Opening Plenary," SNCC 50th Anniversary Conference, 2010, California Newsreel

Young activists and organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced "SNICK"), represented a radical, new unanticipated force whose work continues to have great relevance today. For the first time, young people decisively entered the ranks of civil rights movement leadership. They committed themselves to full-time organizing from the bottom-up, and with this approach empowered older efforts at change and facilitated the emergence of powerful new grassroots voices. Before SNCC, with only a few exceptions, notably the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) during the 1930s and '40s, civil rights leadership always meant grownups.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded in 1942, grew during the 1960s because of a significant influx of young leadership into its ranks; but in that decade, there were more SNCC field secretaries working full time in southern communities than any civil rights organization before or since. Speaking on February 16, 1960 at the White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. acknowledged the emerging importance of young people: "What is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students."

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The Story of SNCC - SNCC Digital Gateway

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(Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Written by Charlie Cobb, SNCC Field Secretary 1962-1967 Julian Bond's History of SNCC, Volume 1, "Opening Plenary," SNCC 50th Anniversary Conference, 2010, California Newsreel Young... Read More

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A pamphlet that published the letter

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From the King Institute

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

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As the nation's most visible proponent of Black Nationalism, Malcolm X's challenge to the multiracial, nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King, Jr., helped set the tone for the ideological and tactical conflicts that took place within the black freedom struggle of the 1960s. Given Malcolm X's abrasive criticism of King and his advocacy of racial separatism, it is not surprising that King rejected the occasional overtures from one of his fiercest critics. However, after Malcolm's assassination in 1965, King wrote to his widow, Betty Shabazz: "While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem" (King, 26 February 1965).

Malcolm Little was born to Louise and Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on 19 May 1925. His father died when he was six years old-the victim, he believed, of a white racist group. Following his father's death, Malcolm recalled, "Some kind of psychological deterioration hit our family circle and began to eat away our pride" (Malcolm X, Autobiography, 14). By the end of the 1930s Malcolm's mother had been institutionalized, and he became a ward of the court to be raised by white guardians in various reform schools and foster homes.

Malcolm joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) while serving a prison term in Massachusetts on burglary charges. Shortly after his release in 1952, he moved to Chicago and became a minister under Elijah Muhammad, abandoning his "slave name," and becoming Malcolm X (Malcolm X, "We Are Rising" ). By the late 1950s, Malcolm had become the NOI's leading spokesman.

Although Malcolm rejected King's message of nonviolence, he respected King as a "fellow-leader of our people," sending King NOI articles as early as 1957 and inviting him to participate in mass meetings throughout the early 1960s (Papers 5:491). Although Malcolm was particularly interested that King hear Elijah Muhammad's message, he also sought to create an open forum for black leaders to explore solutions to the "race problem" (Malcolm X, 31 July 1963). King never accepted Malcolm's invitations, however, leaving communication with him to his secretary, Maude Ballou.

Despite his repeated overtures to King, Malcolm did not refrain from criticizing him publicly. "The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy," Malcolm told an audience in 1963, "is the Negro revolution ... That's no revolution" (Malcolm X, "Message to the Grassroots," 9).

In the spring of 1964, Malcolm broke away from the NOI and made a pilgrimage to Mecca. When he returned he began following a course that paralleled King's-combining religious leadership and political action. Although King told reporters that Malcolm's separation from Elijah Muhammad "holds no particular significance to the present civil rights efforts," he argued that if "tangible gains are not made soon all across the country, we must honestly face the prospect that some Negroes might be tempted to accept some oblique path [such] as that Malcolm X proposes" (King, 16 March 1964).

Ten days later, during the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, King and Malcolm met for the first and only time. After holding a press conference in the Capitol on the proceedings, King encountered Malcolm in the hallway. As King recalled in a 3 April letter, "At the end of the conference, he came and spoke to me, and I readily shook his hand." King defended shaking the hand of an adversary by saying that "my position is that of kindness and reconciliation" (King, 3 April 1965).

Malcolm's primary concern during the remainder of 1964 was to establish ties with the black activists he saw as more militant than King. He met with a number of workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), including SNCC chairman John Lewis and Mississippi organizer Fannie Lou Hamer. Malcolm saw his newly created Organization of African American Unity (OAAU) as a potential source of ideological guidance for the more militant veterans of the southern civil rights movement. At the same time, he looked to the southern struggle for inspiration in his effort to revitalize the Black Nationalist movement.

In January 1965, he revealed in an interview that the OAAU would "support fully and without compromise any action by any group that is designed to get meaningful immediate results" (Malcolm X, Two Speeches, 31). Malcolm urged civil rights groups to unite, telling a gathering at a symposium sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality: "We want freedom now, but we're not going to get it saying 'We Shall Overcome.' We've got to fight to overcome" ( Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 38).

In early 1965, while King was jailed in Selma, Alabama, Malcolm traveled to Selma, where he had a private meeting with Coretta Scott King. "I didn't come to Selma to make his job difficult," he assured Coretta. "I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King" (Scott King, 256).

On 21 February 1965, just a few weeks after his visit to Selma, Malcolm X was assassinated. King called his murder a "great tragedy" and expressed his regret that it "occurred at a time when Malcolm X was ... moving toward a greater understanding of the nonviolent movement" (King, 24 February 1965). He asserted that Malcolm's murder deprived "the world of a potentially great leader" (King, "The Nightmare of Violence"). Malcolm's death signaled the beginning of bitter battles involving proponents of the ideological alternatives the two men represented.

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As the nation's most visible proponent of Black Nationalism, Malcolm X's challenge to the multiracial, nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King, Jr., helped set the tone for the ideological and tactical conflicts that took place within the black freedom struggle of the 1960s.

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From the Smithsonian Magazine

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A new Smithsonian Channel film, "The Lost Tapes," challenges misconceptions about the charismatic leader

smithsonianmag.com

The voice of Malcolm X is like a baritone saxophone-powerful, full, and deep with a gravely gravitas that demands your attention. What better instrument for a man whose forceful, fiery speeches transfixed the nation in the midst of the 1960s civil rights movement-and made tangible the anger and frustration of African-Americans who were simply catching hell.

"We're not brutalized because we're Baptists. We're not brutalized because we're Methodists. We're not brutalized because we're Muslims. We're not brutalized because we're Catholics," Malcolm X tells a rapt audience. "We're brutalized because we are black people in America."

That is the opening quote in the Smithsonian Channel documentary " The Lost Tapes: Malcolm X." The one-hour film takes viewers on a journey through some of the pivotal years of an activist some thought of as a militant who preached hate against white people at a time when blacks across the nation were being economically, emotionally and physically oppressed. But Malcolm X's views evolved after taking the traditional Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Hajj in 1964, after which he changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. This film tells his story through interviews and speeches, and includes some footage from Nation of Islam rallies that has never been seen before. There is no narrator-and that pleases his third daughter, Ilyasah Al Shabazz.

"We finally have the opportunity to hear directly from our father's mouth," Shabazz said at a recent screening of "The Lost Tapes" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she told the audience how she began to learn in college about the inaccurate portrayals of her father's character and work. "I was overwhelmed with emotion when I first saw it and I thought that it was a great piece of work."

The first half of the film takes viewers through some of the best known moments in Malcolm X's life-from his time as a minister and spokesman for the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Muhammad to his intellectual battles with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr over their opposing views on how best to obtain civil rights for African-Americans. King favored non-violent protests while Malcolm X lobbied for separation of blacks from white society. But the second half looks at a Malcolm X whose views change after his Hajj, and Shabazz says many people aren't familiar with that side of her father. She's been thinking about whether there's enough context in the film for the things he does and says-and the familiar image of Malcolm X carrying a rifle and explaining why he does so.

"When we show Malcolm we usually just show his reaction-without 'O.K. I have a rifle. Someone bombs my house. I have a rifle.' Everybody laughs at that instead of the fact that his house was firebombed. The fire bomb was thrown into the nursery where his children slept, where his pregnant wife lived, while he was looking for solutions to the human condition," Shabazz explains. "They don't take into consideration that he was a young man when he committed himself . . . threw himself into the civil rights movement and it was Malcolm who introduced a human rights agenda to the civil rights movement. . . . He was a compassionate man. He was caring, loving, kind. All of the words that we don't use when we describe Malcolm, instead of realizing here you have a young man who had a profound reaction because of his compassion."

Malcolm X grew up in extreme poverty, and spent years as a hustler and pimp on the streets of Roxbury and Harlem before ending up in Norfolk State Prison in Massachusetts where he converted to Islam in 1947. He met the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad in 1952, and began organizing Muslim Temples from New York to the South and the West Coast. He founded the Nation's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and rapidly rose through the ranks to eventually become the Nation's national representative. But tensions arose between Malcolm X and Muhammad, which erupted after he violated orders to stay quiet after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Malcolm X left the Nation the next year, and revealed sexual misconduct by its former leader. He formed his own organizations, the Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization for Afro-American Unity. On June 28, 1964, Malcolm X spoke at the founding rally for the latter group, urging blacks to defend themselves "by any means necessary." He was assassinated on February 21, 1965 by three gunmen who rushed the stage at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem where he was preparing to give a speech. The documentary includes rarely heard recordings of the aftermath of the shooting.

"The Lost Tapes" has been screened in several cities across the nation including New York and Washington D.C., and those behind the movie think it is important for it to be seen right now, in the midst of the racial turmoil that continues to divide the nation.

"People tend to stereotype Malcolm X and he's seen as just a radical rabble rouser. And when you watch him in this film, which really lets him speak for himself, you see a much more nuanced, a much more thoughtful, a much more charismatic and just highly intelligent man," says David Royle, executive vice president for production and programming at the Smithsonian Channel. "You see how his thoughts are evolving and my biggest takeaway was the great sense of loss at the end. This was a person who was on a journey and you may criticize various stages of that journey but where he was heading was really interesting and very important."

The film's producer, Tom Jennings, who also did the Peabody Award-winning "MLK: The Assassination Tapes," says it was a tremendous honor to tell this story that could have been 12 times longer about this amazing speaker and human being. He says it was also a challenge, partly because of the time constraints and partly because he was telling the story of an iconic leader for a general audience that might not know much about him.

"This is for people that don't necessarily know much about Malcolm X, perhaps just his name," Jennings explains. "This is not a feature film. This will go on television. You know we're all poised to change the channel and so we had to take his words and make them entertaining-not in a "Star Wars" sense but we had to make them so . . . people will stop and listen. . . . I like making these kinds of films using historical archive because it almost holds a mirror up to ourselves and it allows us to look at who we are, whether it's this event or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, where we've been and have we changed or have we not changed at all."

Jennings says there is a lot of historical Malcolm X-related film footage out there; including Nation of Islam color footage from some of their rallies that had not been seen before. Some of that came from Washington University in St. Louis, and there was even film belonging to Elijah Muhammad's dentist, but the producers weren't able to get permission to use some of it because they couldn't verify the owners. There were also things he learned that surprised him in "The Lost Tapes," such as the fact that Muhammad Ali had to break his friendship with Malcolm X to receive his personal Muslim name from Elijah Muhammad.

"It was a complicated relationship," explained Damion Thomas, a curator at the African American Museum at the Institution's screening of the film. "When Malcolm X leaves the Nation he tries to get Muhammad Ali to come with him and it becomes a battle between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad for the allegiance of Muhammad Ali who at the time is the most well-known athlete in the world. What's interesting is one of the reasons why Muhammad Ali decides to stay with Elijah Muhammad is that he felt like Malcolm X was trying to politicize this."

"I thought that was a disservice to my father . . . to say that he politicized his friendship with Muhammad Ali," Ilyasah Al Shabazz says forcefully, adding that Ali later said he regretted having turned his back on Malcolm X.
"The Lost Tapes: Malcolm X," premieres on the Smithsonian Channel on February 26 at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Curator Thomas says it is important that this film was made at this time because there are many misconceptions about Malcolm X and there are many ways that he has been interpreted. He adds that it is important to have competing notions about the charismatic leader because then people have an opportunity to think through complex issues.

"The reason people really have to understand Malcolm X, whether you agree with him or not, he was committed to the upliftment of black people, and I think that's the most important thing that we should know about Malcolm X," Thomas says.

About Allison Keyes

Allison Keyes is an award-winning correspondent, host and author. She can currently be heard on CBS Radio News, among other outlets. Keyes, a former national desk reporter for NPR, has written extensively on race, culture, politics and the arts.

Read more from this author | Follow @allisonradio

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Is It Time for a Reassessment of Malcolm X?

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smithsonianmag.com The voice of Malcolm X is like a baritone saxophone-powerful, full, and deep with a gravely gravitas that demands your attention. What better instrument for a man whose forceful, fiery speeches transfixed the nation in the midst of the 1960s civil rights movement-and made tangible the anger and frustration of African-Americans who were simply catching hell.

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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From the King Institute

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

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On 28 August 1963, more than 200,000 demonstrators took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in the nation's capital. The march was successful in pressuring the administration of John F. Kennedy to initiate a strong federal civil rights bill in Congress. During this event, Martin Luther King delivered his memorable "I Have a Dream" speech.

The 1963 March on Washington had several precedents. In the summer of 1941 A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the exclusion of African Americans from positions in the national defense industry. This job market had proven to be closed to blacks, despite the fact that it was growing to supply materials to the Allies in World War II. The threat of 100,000 marchers in Washington, D.C., pushed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which mandated the formation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate racial discrimination charges against defense firms. In response, Randolph cancelled plans for the march.

Civil rights demonstrators did assemble at the Lincoln Memorial in May 1957 for a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom on the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and in October 1958, for a Youth March for Integrated Schools to protest the lack of progress since that ruling. King addressed the 1957 demonstration, but due to ill health after being stabbed by Izola Curry, Coretta Scott King delivered his scheduled remarks at the 1958 event.

By 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, most of the goals of these earlier protests still had not been realized. High levels of black unemployment, work that offered most African Americans only minimal wages and poor job mobility, systematic disenfranchisement of many African Americans, and the persistence of racial segregation in the South prompted discussions about a large scale march for political and economic justice as early as 1962. On behalf of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Randolph wrote a letter on 24 May 1962 to Secretary Stewart Udall of the Department of the Interior regarding permits for a march culminating at the Lincoln Memorial that fall. Plans for the march were stalled when Udall encouraged the groups to consider the Sylvan Theater at the Washington Monument due to the complications of rerouting traffic and the volume of tourists at the Lincoln Memorial.

In March 1963 Randolph telegraphed King that the NALC had begun planning a June march "for Negro job rights," and asked for King's immediate response (Randolph, 26 March 1963). In May, at the height of the Birmingham Campaign, King joined Randolph, James Farmer of CORE, and Charles McDew of SNCC in calling for such an action later that year, declaring, "Let the black laboring masses speak!" (King et al., 7 May 1963) After notifying President Kennedy of their intent, the leaders of the major civil rights organizations set the march date for 28 August. The stated goals of the protest included "a comprehensive civil rights bill" that would do away with segregated public accommodations; "protection of the right to vote"; mechanisms for seeking redress of violations of constitutional rights; "desegregation of all public schools in 1963"; a massive federal works program "to train and place unemployed workers"; and "a Federal Fair Employment Practices Act barring discrimination in all employment" ("Goals of Rights March").

As the summer passed, the list of organizations participating in and sponsoring the event expanded to include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and many others.

The March on Washington was not universally embraced. It was condemned by the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X who referred to it as "the Farce on Washington," although he attended nonetheless (Malcolm X, 278). The executive board of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations declined to support the march, adopting a position of neutrality. Nevertheless, many constituent unions attended in substantial numbers.

The diversity of those in attendance was reflected in the event's speakers and performers. They included singers Marian Anderson, Odetta, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan; Little Rock civil rights veteran Daisy Lee Bates; actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee; American Jewish Congress president Rabbi Joachim Prinz; Randolph; UAW president Walter Reuther; march organizer Bayard Rustin; NAACP president Roy Wilkins; National Urban League president Whitney Young and SNCC leader John Lewis.

A draft of John Lewis' prepared speech, circulated before the march, was denounced by Reuther, Burke Marshall, and Patrick O'Boyle, the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C., for its militant tone. In the speech's original version Lewis charged that the Kennedy administration's proposed Civil Rights Act was "too little and too late," and threatened not only to march in Washington but to "march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We will pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy" (Lewis, 221; 224). In a caucus that included King, Randolph, and SNCC's James Forman, Lewis agreed to eliminate those and other phrases, but believed that in its final form his address "was still a strong speech, very strong" (Lewis, 227).

The day's high point came when King took the podium toward the end of the event and moved the Lincoln Memorial audience and live television viewers with what has come to be known as his "I Have a Dream" speech. King commented that "as television beamed the image of this extraordinary gathering across the border oceans, everyone who believed in man's capacity to better himself had a moment of inspiration and confidence in the future of the human race," and characterized the march as an "appropriate climax" to the summer's events (King, " I Have a Dream," 125; 122).

After the march, King and other civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House, where they discussed the need for bipartisan support of civil rights legislation. Though they were passed after Kennedy's death, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 reflect the demands of the march.

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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On 28 August 1963, more than 200,000 demonstrators took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in the nation's capital. The march was successful in pressuring the administration of John F. Kennedy to initiate a strong federal civil rights bill in Congress.

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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From the National Park Service

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View of crowds on the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, August 28, 1963
Photo by Warren K. Leffler, LOC, LC-U9- 10360-5

A Powerful, Peaceful Protest

With that many people converging on the city, there were concerns about violence. The Washington, D.C. police force mobilized 5,900 officers for the march and the government mustered 6,000 soldiers and National Guardsmen as additional protection. President Kennedy thought that if there were any problems, the negative perceptions could undo the civil rights bill making its way through Congress. In the end, the crowds were calm and there were no incidents reported by police.

While the March was a peaceful occasion, the words spoken that day at the Lincoln Memorial were not just uplifting and inspirational such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream"speech, they were also penetrating and pointed. There was a list of "Ten Demands" from the sponsors, insisting on a fair living wage, fair employment policies, and desegregation of school districts. John Lewis in his speech said that "we do not want our freedom gradually but we want to be free now" and that Congress needed to pass "meaningful legislation" or people would march through the South. Although the SNCC chairman had toned down his remarks at the request of white liberals and moderate black allies, he still managed to criticize both political parties for moving too slowly on civil rights. Others such as Whitney Young and Joachim Prinz spoke of the need for justice, for equal opportunity, for full access to the American Dream promised with the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. They spoke of jobs, and of a life free from the indifference of lawmakers to people's plights.

In the end, after all of the musical performances, speeches, and politics, it was the people that truly made the March on Washington a success. They brought box lunches, having spent all they could spare to get to Washington; some dressed as if attending a church service while others wore overalls and boots; veterans of the Civil Rights Movement and individuals new to the issues locked arms, clapped and sang and walked. Many began without their leaders, who were making their way to them from meetings on Capitol Hill. They could no longer be patient and they could no longer be held back, and so they started to march - Black, White, Latino, American Indian, Jewish, Christian, men, women, famous, anonymous, but ultimately all Americans, all marching for their civil rights.

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (U.S. National Park Service)

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t was the largest gathering for civil rights of its time. An estimated 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, arriving in Washington, D.C. by planes, trains, cars, and buses from all over the country.

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The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in 1942 as the Committee of Racial Equality by an interracial group of students in Chicago-. Many of these students were members of the Chicago branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization seeking to change racist attitudes.

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Why Are There SO Many Confederate Monuments?

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Also relevant in the Civil Rights Movement period

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Why Are There SO Many Confederate Monuments?

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A great TED-Ed video

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How one journalist risked her life to hold murderers accountable - Christina Greer

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This NYT article includes information on the Double V Campaign

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The author's maternal great-grandfather, Joe Humphrey, around 1950. Credit... From the author

For Black Americans, loving the country and criticizing it have always been inseparable - something other Americans have often struggled to understand.

The author's maternal great-grandfather, Joe Humphrey, around 1950. Credit... From the author

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The month after the surprise December 1941 military strike that left the Pearl Harbor naval station smoldering and Americans filled with anger and patriotic fervor, a letter to the editor arrived at The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most-circulated Black weekly newspapers. Its author was James G. Thompson, a 26-year-old cafeteria worker at a factory in Wichita, Kan., that manufactured aircraft for the military.

"Like all true Americans," Thompson wrote, "my greatest desire at this time, this crucial point of our history, is a desire for a complete victory over the forces of evil, which threaten our existence today." But Thompson, pointing out the hypocrisy of the United States' expecting its Black citizens to help defeat tyranny abroad while being subjected to racism at home, also posed a question: "Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?"

Thompson continued, "I suggest that while we keep defense and victory in the forefront, that we don't lose sight of our fight for democracy at home." Building off the popular "V for victory" hand gesture of the day, he proposed that Black Americans initiate a "Double V" campaign for double victory: "The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within."

The campaign proposed by Thompson - who would be drafted the following year - took off with Black Americans across the country. Each week, The Courier ran photos documenting its popularity: Black school children posing with the index and middle fingers on each hand in a V; a Black soldier forming the sign with flags on a military base; a recurring feature spotlighting Black women's beauty playfully titled the "Double V Girl of the Week." The campaign's logo featured a bald eagle with wings spread over a blazing sun. It also featured a Double Victory pennant and a proclamation for "Democracy: At Home - Abroad."

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A man making the "Double V" sign outside a railroad station in Pittsburgh, about 1943. Credit... Charles (Teenie) Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art/Getty Images

In less than a generation, the Double V's origins would be largely forgotten; the two-handed gesture is now probably most closely associated with Richard Nixon, a president whose campaign's so-called Southern strategy, designed to appeal to white conservatives disgruntled with the civil rights movement, accelerated Black Americans' estrangement from the Republican Party. This national amnesia suggests how difficult it is to square the patriotism of Thompson with the dominant conception of patriotism in the United States, what could be called blind patriotism: a kind of quasi-religious national reverence discomfited by the idea that a love for country entails holding it to its own standards.

"I love America more than any other country in the world," James Baldwin wrote in "Notes of a Native Son," "and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Or, as Thompson concluded in his letter to The Courier, "I love America and am willing to die for the America I know will someday become a reality." This is the crux of Black patriotism, an expression of national praise and chastening drawn from the same well. It cannot know only uncritical adoration because history and lived experience remind us the nation has often been too cruel, and it cannot be only sharp tongues and elbows because our work and faith have had a hand in America's existence and evolution.

Because the patriotism that is intolerant of criticism is increasingly the province of Donald Trump's Republican Party, while practitioners of Black patriotism are mostly bunched in the Democratic Party, the complicated nature of Black patriots' civic pride is inevitably an object of partisan suspicion. When Colin Kaepernick, at the time the San Francisco 49ers' quarterback, refused to stand for the national anthem in 2016, it didn't matter that he adjusted his method of protest from sitting to kneeling after being advised to do so by a military veteran, or that he explicitly declared after the game: "I'm not anti-American. I love America." He was labeled a "son of a bitch" by President Trump and unceremoniously ushered out of professional football; angry fans played the national anthem as they burned their Kaepernick jerseys.

It is hard to think of a year in recent memory in which the unreconcilability of Black patriotism with the other kind has been as central to the American story as it has been this year. In the spring and summer, after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, protests against racial injustice and inequality, led by Black Americans, occurred in every state. The differing versions of patriotism found their avatars in the clashes between militarized police forces and peaceful protesters. Since then, Trump's enormous deficit among Black voters and his refusal to acknowledge a loss that was delivered to him largely by those voters exercising their franchise - perhaps the most elemental expression of Black patriotism - has extended this conflict. The bloc's overwhelming support for Democrats and its high turnout this year, with Kamala Harris's historic candidacy for the vice presidency on the ballot, have been portrayed by the president and his circle as a subversion of the democratic process, subjected to baseless accusations of fraud. The state, which had charged them with ungratefulness in protest, is now seeking ways to reject the group's fidelity to the foundation of democracy.

During the first presidential debate, Trump encouraged his supporters to act as poll watchers during early voting at satellite sites in Philadelphia - an illegal activity, as Pennsylvania law permits observers only on Election Day - and charged that voter fraud was occurring because "bad things happen in Philadelphia," a city where Black Americans are the plurality. His campaign declared there were voting irregularities in Wisconsin, and the Republican State Assembly speaker there tied the claim to Milwaukee, where nearly two-thirds of the state's Black population resides. At a postelection rally in Michigan four years ago, President Trump thanked Black voters for helping him win these battleground states by voluntarily sitting out the election; this time around his lawyers looked to forcibly remove these voters from final counts to improve his chances of holding onto the White House.

In Atlanta, Black voters, some of whom waited more than 10 hours just to cast a ballot, turned out at high levels and in extremely lopsided fashion in favor of Democratic candidates, leading Trump and the state's Republican senatorial candidates to cry voter fraud. The president at first took to social media to falsely claim he had won Michigan, then declared there was voter fraud in Detroit, a city where Black Americans are more than three-quarters of the population, after it became clear that he was losing. But residents were hip to the planned attempt to have their votes challenged. "The Black vote in Detroit is higher than it's ever been," the Rev. Steve Bland Jr. of Liberty Temple Baptist Church in Detroit told a TV reporter, "and we will determine the outcome, because we've gone from picking cotton to picking presidents."

March on Washington participants, 1963. Credit... Steve Schapiro/Corbis, via Getty Images

In August 1777, a year after the United States declared its independence, a Black man named Jehu Grant escaped enslavement in Rhode Island to join the Continental Army to serve in the Revolutionary War. He made his way to Danbury, Conn., where he was put to work in a unit responsible for managing supply wagons and the animals that hauled them. Ten months into his military service, the man who had enslaved Grant showed up at his outpost and ordered his return, a demand to which the Army readily acceded. Grant was returned to slavery.

When a law was passed in 1832 to provide pensions to those who served in the Revolutionary War, Grant - by now free but also elderly, blind and penniless - applied and had to wait two years for the heartbreaking response from the federal government: His petition was denied, because his "services while a fugitive from [his] master's service" were "not embraced." Writing to appeal the decision, he acknowledged breaking the law to fight for the nation's independence in hopes he would realize his own, but he said he simply couldn't resist "the songs of liberty that saluted my ear, thrilled through my heart."

Grant's experience suggests why a unique Black patriotism has always been necessary. Its formation was demanded by the historical exclusion of Black Americans from more traditional conceptions of patriotism, even when they went to lengths as extraordinary as Grant's to practice it. During the eras of slavery and Jim Crow, the nation wasted little effort in reminding Black Americans that this country was not theirs; that they could not earn inclusion through service, assimilation or respectability.

One of the most popular songs in America in 1901 was "Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon," written by a pair of white Tin Pan Alley songwriters working in the era's exceptionally racist genre of music known as the "coon song." The song made explicit the link between race and national identity. The Stars and Stripes belonged to whites; for Black Americans, the song proposed a banner of social and moral depravity decorated with a possum gnawing a pork chop and a chicken with poker dice for eyes over a banjo and a slip to play the numbers.

Little wonder, then, that for a people who loved a nation that did not love them back, a new brand of patriotism was required - expansive enough for anger and questioning of the nation as well as adoration and respect. Political psychologists refer to this as constructive patriotism, and have found that it leads to increased civic participation, at times in demonstration of dissatisfaction with the country and at times in reclamation of its principles.

The early 20th century had an explosion of Black civic engagement. Civil rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. sprang to life; Black churches became even more central to political and social power; cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance injected intellectual and artistic challenges to racism in America. Black military service members distinguished themselves in war, and brave Black citizens across the South and destinations of the Great Migration organized to challenge racism in their communities. In a 2017 journal article, the University of South Florida sociologist Micah E. Johnson suggests this conscious patriotism remains a common orientation in Black America, being "equally connected to both America as a homeland and the realities of Black oppression in America."

Eric Reid, Colin Kaepernick and Eli Harold on CenturyLink Field, Seattle, 2016. Credit... Steve Dykes/Getty Images

The fact that Black patriotism is practiced by a bloc that has, for almost six decades, given an average of nearly 90 percent of its votes to Democratic presidential candidates renders it immediately suspect to the right, but has also magnified its influence on the left; it informs Democratic politicians' increasing willingness to point out how structural racism shapes the nation. But a forthcoming study from More in Common, an organization that explores political polarization in advanced democracies, suggests that its relationship to partisanship is more complicated than this polarization suggests. The report to be released later this month, titled "American Fabric: Finding Our Shared Identity," contains the results of a 4,000-person survey and finds the real gap in patriotism is not among the races but between political ideologies. For example, there was very little differentiation among Black, white and Hispanic Americans when respondents were asked if they were proud to be American, if they were grateful to be American and if being American was important to their identity.

Answers vary much more by ideology, with the most liberal and conservative groups identified in the survey diverging by 66, 43 and 53 percentage points, respectively, on those questions. When slavery, Jim Crow and segregation were raised, only 4 percent of the most conservative respondents thought it was necessary to acknowledge those wrongs, compared with 98 percent of the most liberal respondents. Over all, the study finds that conservatives tend to define America by its perceived strengths and that progressives tend to emphasize its perceived weaknesses.

Black Americans, of course, do both. Black patriotism does not hold that America is irredeemably racist - it asks if America is interested in redemption. It is forward-looking and informed by history, meshing optimism about the nation's prospects with a realism about its struggles with racial equality. And it is rooted in the task of helping the nation reconcile "Black" with "American." As Joe Biden put it last month in a speech at Gettysburg that nodded at the promise of America without shying away from its troubles: "I think about what it takes for a Black person to love America. That is a deep love for this country."

The speech made me think of an image from my childhood, an old photograph that hung on the wall of my grandparents' farmhouse in rural Georgia. It was a black-and-white portrait of my grandmother's sharecropping father, Joe Humphrey, whom the family called Daddy Joe. In the photograph he is dressed in a white shirt beneath a canvas jacket, standing with his hands in his pockets, the cuffs of his trousers stuffed into unlaced work boots, and a pipe seated neatly in the corner of his mouth. American flags are angled over each shoulder as if they were wings.

My great-grandfather lived long enough to see the Supreme Court find school segregation unconstitutional (in Brown v. Board of Education) and President Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but not long enough to vote in a presidential election or see any of his grandchildren attend a desegregated school. My family isn't exactly sure of the date, but suspects the photograph was taken at some point between when Black activism led to the desegregation of the military in 1948 and the Brown ruling in 1954. In other words, it is a portrait of a Black man in Jim Crow's United States. And what stands out is how patriotism and defiance are commingled: a glint in his eyes, a daring smirk.

I have been thinking of this image alongside another more recent, and much more famous, photograph: a picture of a woman named Ieshia Evans, taken by a freelance photographer for Reuters after she silently stepped into a street in Baton Rouge during a July 2016 Black Lives Matter protest and was confronted by armored police officers for refusing to comply with their directive to remain off the road. The photograph captures the moment the officers descended on Evans, a nurse and mother from Pennsylvania, her billowing sundress and slightly extended arm transforming her into a calm yet unyielding Lady Justice under siege by the state. Across decades of time and worlds away, the two photos record the seemingly paradoxical but in fact harmonious nature of Black patriotism - devotion and dissent together, bound up in a people who, against all odds, have found a way unite the two.

The protester Ieshia Evans being detained in Baton Rouge, La., on July 9, 2016. Credit... Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

Delivering an address to a Boston audience in 1865, Frederick Douglass accused the United States of considering Black people to be Americans only when their bodies and braveries were needed for war, not when the nation betrayed their loyalty by allowing their oppression. "In time of trouble we are citizens," Douglass told the gathering, as the Civil War neared its conclusion. "Shall we be citizens in war, and aliens in peace? Would that be just?"

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For Black Americans, loving the country and criticizing it have always been inseparable - something other Americans have often struggled to understand. The author's maternal great-grandfather, Joe Humphrey, around 1950. Credit... From the author To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android .