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The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you - Anthony Hazard - YouTube

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The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you - Anthony Hazard - YouTube

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The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you - Anthony Hazard

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African Americans in the Revolutionary War - Wikipedia

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African Americans in the Revolutionary War - Wikipedia

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African Americans in the Revolutionary War - Wikipedia

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Prior to the revolution, many free African Americans supported the anti-British cause, most famously Crispus Attucks, believed to be the first person killed at the Boston Massacre. At the time of the American Revolution, some blacks had already enlisted as Minutemen.

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Doctor Selig received his Ph.D. in history cum laude from Universität Würzburg, 1988
He has most recently been Visiting Professor of History and German at Hope College in Michigan.
Recipient of many awards and grants, his articles have appeared in American Heritage, Colonial Williamsburg (where this work first appeared in Summer 1997), Military History Quarterly, William and Mary Quarterly, and others. Other fine articles by him include Franz Ludwig Michel , the story of an early visitor to America, Georg Daniel Flohr's Journal, soon to be expanded into a book, and Deux-Ponts Germans, as well as articles on Admiral DeGrasse at Yorktown and Lauzun's Legion.
He is available to lecture on the present topic. He may be contacted by clicking on his name above, or visit Dr. Selig's website by clicking here.

John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, in April 1772 expressed his conviction to Lord Dartmouth, Bntish secretary of state for the colonies, that "in case of a War" the slaves, "attached by no tye to their Master or to the Country" would "join the first that would encourage them to revenge themselves by which means a Conquest of this Country would inevitably be effected in a very short time." Dunmore's fears were shared by many white Virginians, though none expected that three years later Dunmore himself would attempt "a Conquest of this Country" with the help of African-American slaves.

The early 1770s were a period of slave unrest in Virginia, prompting the city of Williamsburg to establish a night watch in July 1772 to apprehend "disorderly People, Slaves as well as others." Slave restiveness increased when news of the Somersett case reached the colonies in September 1772. James Somersett, a slave taken to England by his master Charles Steuart, had run away. Recaptured and in chains in the hull of a ship bound for Jamaica, he sued for his freedom. In June 1772, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, held that slavery "is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law." As "the law of England" neither "allowed" nor "approved" of slavery, Mansfield ruled that "the black must be discharged."

Mansfield's decision outlawed slavery only in England; it did not apply to British colonies. But that was immaterial to American slaves. In January 1773, the General Court in Boston received the first of three petitions in which slaves pleaded their freedom with the argument that Mansfield's decision should indeed apply to the colonies, where they were "held in a state of Slavery within a free and christian Country."

By September 1773, the first of Virginia's 250,000 slaves were also trying to get "out of the Colony, particularly to Britain" - so noted John Austin Finnie's advertisement for runaways Bacchus and Amy - "where they imagine they will be free." The king was on their side - or so slaves thought - and against their masters, who feared a British-instigated slave revolt. Following the discovery in November 1774 of slaves conspiring to desert "when the English troops should arrive," James Madison wrote to William Bradford of his conviction that "If america & Britain come to an hostile rupture I am afraid an Insurrection among the slaves may & will be promoted" in an attempt to preserve Virginia for the crown of King George III.

When tensions between Dunmore and Virginia's ruling elite increased in early 1775, the ground was well prepared for his lordship to "arm all my own Negroes and receive all others that will come to me who I shall declare free," as he wrote to Dartmouth on March 1. Dunmore could argue that since the colonists were clamoring for English law, they could get a taste of it, Somersett and all. The slaves, on the other hand, considered the government in London and its local representatives to be sympathetic to their cause, and they were only waiting for the sign to take up arms to "reduce the refractory people of this Colony to obedience."

Armed conflict was looming, and Dunmore ordered Royal Marines to seize the gunpowder stored in the Williamsburg Magazine during the night of April 20-21. When Virginia threatened to erupt in open violence, Dunmore backed down. Forced to pay restitution for the powder, Dunmore lost his temper in front of the town leaders. Williamsburg resident Dr. William Pasteur heard the governor say that he would "declare freedom to the slaves and reduce the City of Williamsburg to ashes." He boasted he would have "all the slaves on the side of the government". By mid-May, rumors of Dunmore's plans had spread all the way to Boston, from where General Thomas Gage, Governor of Massachusetts, informed Dartmouth: "We hear that a Declaration his Lordship has made, of proclaiming all the Negroes free, who should join him, has Startled the Insurgents."

Gage was jumping the gun but not by much. On June 8, Dunmore fled Williamsburg for the safety of the man-of-war Fowey at Yorktown. The Virginia Convention quickly assured the governor of his own personal safety but expressed its extreme displeasure of this "most diabolical" scheme "meditated, and generally recommended, by a Person of great Influence, to offer Freedom to our slaves, and turn them against their Masters." But Dunmore felt that he had no alternative. His ranks reduced to some 300 soldiers, sailors, and loyalists, he let it be known that he welcomed supporters of any skin color. As word spread along the coast, about 100 black runaways reached Dunmore's fleet during the fall of 1775. In early November his troops routed a corps of Virginia militia at Kemp's Landing. That was the signal for the publication of Dunmore's long-anticipated proclamation to American slaves.

Dated November 7, it declared "all indented Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining his MAJESTY'S Troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to his MAJESTY'S Crown and Dignity" This was not a general emancipation of slaves and indentured servants. Dunmore invited only those slaves to his banner who were owned by rebels, and of those, only males could bear arms.

The response was overwhelming. By December 1, about 300 runaways were carrying muskets and wearing the garb of Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, the words "Liberty to Slaves" emblazoned on their chests. During the Battle of Great Bridge on December 9, they accounted for about half of Dunmore's 600 men. After losing 17 killed and 49 wounded, he retreated to his fleet.

The Virginia Convention decreed death to "all Negro or other Slaves, conspiring to rebel or make insurrection." Those who laid down their arms and returned within ten days would be pardoned; all others would be sold in the West Indies. To set an example, 32 black runaways taken at Great Bridge were ordered sold in the Caribbean in January 1776.

Despite a fever epidemic and reports of "Hungry bellies, naked backs, and no fuel... the most cruel and inhuman treatment," runaways were lured to the coast. On March 30, 1776, Dunmore informed Lord Germain: "I have been endeavoring to raise two regiments here - one of white people, the other of black. The former goes on very slowly, but the latter very well."

By the summer of 1776, at least 800 blacks "willing to bear arms" had joined Dunmore's force now quartered on Gwynn's Island. When he left Virginia for good on August 7, only about 300 were still alive; all others had died of fevers. Once Dunmore had cast anchor in New York seven days later, the regiment was dissolved, and the former soldiers left to fend for themselves.

Dunmore's proclamation had been driven as much by political as by military considerations, but his early attempt at using blacks as soldiers never became general policy. Sir William Howe, who had replaced Gage in September 1775, was personally opposed to their use and dismissed blacks wherever he could find them. Provincial forces wore ordered to "be put on the most Respectable Footing [and] all Negroes, Molattoes and other Improper Persons who have been admitted into these Corps be immediately discharged." King George's army would remain a white army.

It is hard to estimate how many free blacks and slaves served in the Royal Army, but whatever the number; it is only a fraction of those who were willing to wear red coats-if only the British had let them. It is not that the blacks were necessarily pro-British; first and foremost they were pro-black, prepared to support the side that held out the greatest hope for them to improve their lot. That side was the British, as their response to Dunmore's proclamation showed. But freedom, the price for black help in the war, was a price neither the British nor their loyalist allies were prepared to pay.

As black soldiers were becoming a rarity in the British army, their numbers were increasing on the American side. When Congress instructed the states in September 1776 to raise 88 infantry battalions, few African-Americans were left in the Continental Army. Southern opposition had resulted in the exclusion of most black men. However, the realities of war forced Congress and the states to reevaluate their policies.

Despite bonuses and bounties, recruits were slow to sign up. To bring the Continental Army up to strength, Congress ordered the states in January 1777 to fill their units "by drafts, from their militia, or in any other way." As Virginia was unable to meet her quota of 10,200 men with volunteers, a draft based on the existing militia lists had to be considered. The Militia Act of the summer of 1775 had required that "all free male persons, hired servants, and apprentices between the ages of 16 and 50 years . . . be enrolled or forced into companies." This excluded slaves by definition, but free blacks were registered to serve, though "without arms."

Registration on a militia list was one thing, serving in the Continental Army quite another. The militia usually served short-term and hardly ever outside state boundaries. The Continental Army wanted long-term soldiers who served wherever needed, an unappealing prospect for Virginians at a time of heightened slave unrest and the threat of wholesale desertion of their black property to the British.

The lottery-based draft law enacted in May 1777 greatly increased the number of blacks in the Virginia Line. Free blacks were the first to be called up, as Virginia tightened the enforcement of the draft. "It was thought that they could best be spared," Governor Thomas Nelson informed George Washington.

Very few free blacks were as wealthy as James Harris of Charles City County, who was able to afford a substitute to fight in his place in 1780; most had no choice but to join up. But slave owners could afford substitutes and, when faced with a draft notice, many a master presented a slave to the recruiting officer for a freeman and a substitute. Many a runaway told the nearest recruiter that he was a freeman, anxious to fight.

More often than not, he was accepted without too many questions; the army was always short of men. General Washington himself had opened the door for African-Americans in his general orders of January 12, 1777, in which he instructed recruiters to "enlist none but Freemen," the implication being that the recruit could be black just as long as he was free. To put an end to such unpatriotic behavior on the part of some masters and to stop the self-emancipation of slaves, the Virginia Legislature amended the 1775 Militia Law in June 1777 by "forbidding any recruiting officers within this Commonwealth to enlist any negro or mulatto into the service of this, or either of the United States, until such Negro shall produce a certificate ... that he is a freeman."

During the winter of 1777-78, dozens of black Virginians served in every one of the state regiments, freezing, starving, and dying at Valley Forge. By February 1778, the survivors were marching with white comrades through the snow, practicing Baron von Steuben's as yet unfamiliar drill. When the Steuben-trained army proved its mettle at Monmouth in June, about 700 blacks fought side-by-side with whites. Eight weeks later, an army report listed 755 blacks in the Continental Army, including 138 Blacks in the Virginia Line.

Partially in response to Monmouth, Sir Henry Clinton, who had replaced Howe in May 1778, shifted the theater of war to the South. On June 30, 1779, Clinton promised in his Philippsburg Declaration that "every NEGRO who shall desert the Rebel Standard, [is granted] full security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper." In response, tens of thousands of slaves fled behind British lines.

In May 1780 Charleston fell, and most of the Virginia Line were taken prisoners. When General Horatio Gates lost at Camden in August, Virginia lay virtually defenseless before Lord Cornwallis. The military situation was serious enough that a debate concerning the arming of slaves began in the new capital of Richmond. There was ample precedence for such a step.

New Jersey's Militia Act of May 1777 permitted masters to enlist slaves as substitutes. New Hampshire opened the door to the recruitment of slaves to fill the state's Continental quota in the fall of that year, and Connecticut soon followed suit. In October 1780 an all black unit, the 2nd Company, 4th Connecticut Regiment, was formed. That company, some 48 black privates and NCOs under four white officers, existed until November 1782.

In January 1778, General Washington had given his approval to Rhode Island's plan to raise slaves. Over the next five years 250 former slave and freedmen served in the an entire regiment of black 1st Rhode Island Regiment. Massachusetts' all-black unit, the Bucks of America under Samuel Middleton, the only black commissioned officer in the Continental Army, probably also had its origins early in 1778. Similar to Rhode Island, the state bought and emancipated slaves willing to become soldiers. In October 1780, even Maryland accepted "any able-bodied slave between 16 and 40 years of age, who voluntarily enters into service . . . with the consent and agreement of his master." New York would begin to recruit slaves in March 1781.

Although the white sails of Major General Alexander Leslie's fleet with 2,500 British troops on board had already appeared in Hampton Roads, the Virginia Legislature refused to arm slaves. Instead it voted in October 1780 to grant every recruit who enlisted for the duration of the war 300 acres of land and the choice between a healthy black male slave between the ages of 10 and 30 years or £60 in specie. The slave bonus would be raised by a special tax on planters who owned more than 20 slaves. The use of slaves as bounties later became known as "Sumter's Law," after General Thomas Sumter, who began offering Tory slaves as enlistment bonuses in South Carolina in April 1781.

Military necessity made the Continental Army and the Virginia State Line an integrated force. Observed a Hessian officer: "The Negro can take the field instead of his master, and therefore no regiment is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in abundance, and among them are able-bodied and strong fellows." What the diarist did not report was that every Hessian regiment contained black soldiers as well.

Britain's German auxiliaries had disembarked in New York during the early summer of 1776; by March 1777 they had hegun to recruit black volunteers. Facing manpower shortages as severe as those of the British, they quickly tapped the labor pool of runaways. Hundreds served as laborers or servants, but the Germans readily put blacks in uniform as well.

Most of the 115 African-Americans on Hessen-Cassel and Hessen-Hanau regimental rosters came from southern states. Many were very young, mere children of 11, 12, 13 years, who served as drummers and fifers, freeing up older, taller whites for service with the musket. Hessian records from 1777 to 1783 show 83 black drummers as well as 3 fifers.

On the eve of departure for Europe, the Hessians discharged some two dozen black men who wanted to stay in America. About 30 soldiers plus an unknown number of officer servants not on regimental rosters, some with their wives and children, crossed the Atlantic for Cassel, where they arrived in late 1783.

A contingent of Brunswick troops under Baron Friedrich Adolf von Riedesel that had been captured at Saratoga spent four years as part of the Convention Army interned around Charlottesville. In February 1781 the exchanged Baron Riedesel encouraged his officers to recruit black soldiers from among the refugees in New York. Among them was James Barkes of Williamsburg, possibly a former slave of Norfolk merchant James Parker and a survivor of Dunmore's regiment.

In France, Africans had served in the armed forces since the late 17th century. When the Comte de Rochambeau's expeditionary corps stepped ashore in Newport in 1780, it counted at least one black soldier in its ranks: Jean-Baptiste Pandoua from Madagascar, who had joined the Bourbonnais regiment as a musician in 1777. He deserted in June 1782, while his regiment was quartered in Virginia . Unlike other participants in the war; the French did not, could not, recruit American blacks. After all, they had come to aid the Americans, not to steal their property.

In June 1781, the French and American armies joined forces at White Plains. Baron Closen, a German officer in the French Royal Deux-Ponts, estimated the American army to be about one fourth black, about 1,200 --1,500 men out of less than 6,000 Continentals! On the eve of its decisive victory over Lord Cornwallis, the Continental Army had reached a degree of integration it would not achieve again for another 200 years. Among the troops at White Plains was the Rhode Island Regiment (the two bataillons had been consolidated on 1 January 1781) with its high percentage of African-Americans, which Closen considered the best American unit: "the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvres.

In July it was off for Virginia, where the Marquis de Lafayette had been shadowing Cornwallis for months. His success in avoiding the earl was due partly to James Armistead (portrait at left shows Armistead in later life), the slave of William Armistead of New Kent County. Born around 1760, the young black man had approached Lafayette in Williamsburg or during the journey to Annapolis, where he arrived on April 3, 1781. Armistead had permission from his master to serve with the marquis as a servant. But Lafayette had other plans for him: Use him to gain reliable intelligence about Cornwallis's plans.

Lafayette's attempts at infiltrating British headquarters were futile until the first week of July, when Cornwallis hired James Armistead to spy on the Americans. Though Lafayette had to inform Washington on July 31 that "His lordship is So Shy of His papers that My Honest friend Says He Cannot get at them," the written and oral reports of the unlikely double agent kept the allies apprised of British plans. On August 25, Lafayette could report that Cornwallis had begun "fortifing at York." On September 28, the siege began.

The First Rhode Island Regiment, the only all-black American unit at the siege, formed part of Major General Benjamin Lincoln's division. The soldiers were among the 4,300 men who dug the first parallel on the evening of October 6 about 550 yards from the enemy. They were in the trenches on the 9th, when the first American artillery shells hit Yorktown. And they were in the trenches again on the night of the 15th, when Lord Cornwallis made his only serious sortie against the Franco-American siege lines.

Two days later, surrender negotiations began; in the early afternoon of the 19th the defeated British army and German allies laid down their arms. Yorktown lay in ruins. Death and destruction were everywhere. "All over the place and wherever you looked," Private Georg Daniel Flohr of the Royal Deux-Ponts saw "corpses... lying about that had not been buried; the larger part of these were Mohren." They were the corpses of black Hessians and black Frenchmen, black Englishmen and black Americans. They all had fought each other at Yorktown.

Among the survivors, a few black Hessians made it to Germany, and a smaller number was spirited away by the French. Black patriots numbering some 5,000, including about 500 black Virginians, soon went home, too.

In 1782, Virginia had passed a law permitting manumission with the stipulation that former owners remain responsible for manumitted slaves unable to support themselves. Between 1782 and 1792, about 1,000 slaves, undoubtedly including some who had fought for their masters, were manumitted by them. But more were returned to slavery, so that even a legislature such as Virginia's, dominated as it was by slave owners, spoke out against the obvious injustice.

In the fall of 1783, the Assembly passed a bill condemning owners who "contrary to principles of justice and to their own solemn promise" kept their soldier substitutes as slaves. They were freed by legislative decree with instructions to the attorney general of Virginia to act on behalf of any former slave held in servitude despite his enlistment. how many slaves received their freedom as a result of this bill is not known, since a slave could not himself initiate legal proceedings for his own manumission.

But if the number of slaves freed by the legislature as a reward for nonmilitary service is any indication, they were few. Eight slaves are known to have been granted freedom by the legislature for service in the Revolutionary War.

Among them was James Armistead, who had slipped out of Yorktown before the siege began and returned to Lafayette's service. When Cornwallis paid a courtesy call on the marquis, he was surprised to encounter a black man there he considered to be in his pay.

In October 1784, Lafayette (in the picture on the left with Armistead holding his horse) penned a certificate declaring that James Armistead had done "Essential Service" in collecting "Intelligence from the Ennemy's Camp" and was therefore "Entitled to Every Reward His Situation Can Admit of." The document in hand, Armistead hurried to the legislature, where his manumission request came up in December. But more than two years would pass until his emancipation on January 9, 1787.

"At the peril of his life" he had "found means to frequent the British camp" and collect information essential to the American cause. Now he was free, while his master was compensated at the going auction-block figure.

In 1816, he bought 40 acres of land in New Kent County, where he raised his family. In 1819, Virginia granted him $60 relief money and put him on the regular pension roll at $40 a year. In 1824, the marquis and James Lafayette - as he now called himself - met one last time in Richmond, during Lafayette's triumphant tour of the United States.

Colonial militias were typically composed of most adult men capable of bearing arms in a community. Unlike a standing army, militias served primarily as a manpower pool from which soldiers were drawn as needed in emergencies and for expeditions against Indians. Originally militias were very inclusive, but as the 17th century neared its end, they became more selective. Indentured servants, free blacks, and slaves were the first to he purged.

Virginia led the way among the colonies in excluding blacks from militia service, when the House of Burgesses required in January 1639 that only white Virginians arm themselves. Yet, in a pattern that was to repeat itself into the 18th century, both sides armed slaves and promised them freedom in exchange for military service in 1676 during Bacon's Rebellion.

The year 1705 brought the first true slave code to Virginia. Under this code, slaves were - and remained - excluded from military service. Skin color rather than legal status determined the role of free blacks as well. In many ways they, too, were subject to the slave code.

The code of 1705 denied the few free blacks living in the colony the right to serve in the militia on an equal footing with whites. The code of 1723, confirmed in 1748, assigned free blacks only a role as drummers or trumpeters. But in emergencies such as invasion, insurrection, or rebellion, they could "march with the militia and . . . do the duty of pioneers or such other servile labor as they shall be directed to perform."

After 1723, "no negro, mulatto, or indian whatsoever" was allowed to carry a firearm under penalty of up to 39 lashes. Only a black slave who lived on the frontier and who had a license from the justice of the peace, or if he was a free man and "enlisted in the militia... may be permitted to keep one gun, powder and shot."

This was the law in 1754, when Virginia prepared for yet another war with France and her Indian allies. In a move that did not endear him to white Virginians, General Edward Braddock seized upon this provision and in mid-March 1755 wrote Robert Napier from Williamsburg: "There are here a number of mulattoes and free Negroes of whom I shall make bat men, whom the province are to furnish with pay and frocks." In July, Braddock's expedition ended in disaster at the Monongahela River, despite last-minute orders that batmen carry firearms and ready themselves for combat.

To ward off the expected Franco-Indian invasion, Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie pressured the House of Burgesses for a new militia law. But the assembly only authorized the enlistment of free blacks as drummers, trumpeters, or pioneers. The following year, 1756, the legislature increased the authorized strength of Colonel George Washington's Virginia Regiment to 1,500 men. But when white recruits did not join up in sufficient numbers, free blacks took their places. Yet the Militia Law of 1757 still denied free blacks the right to carry arms. On the frontier, however, military necessity voided legislative intent. Some 36 black soldiers formed part of Washington's force ready to attack Fort Duquesne in October 1758.

What kept crown officials and Virginia planters from using the black manpower potential of the colony was fear. They were afraid that in an insurrection, free and freed blacks might make common cause with their own slaves. In July 1755, Governor Robert Dinwiddie wrote to Charles Carter that "the villany of the Negroes on an emergency of govt is w't I always fear."

Twenty years later, in early 1775, frightened Virginians sold back into slavery a freed black named Sam, "when it was discovered he was attempting to inveigle away a number of negroes to the new or Indian country." Sam had purchased his freedom in 1772 and served with Lord Dunmore against the Indians in the late summer and fall of 1774.

When Sam ran away from his new master in May 1775, a new militia law was being debated in Richmond, which sounded inclusive enough when it assigned the right to serve in the militia to "all free male persons, hired servants, and apprentices between the ages of 16 and 50 years." Blacks, even if free and male, had to register for militia duty but could only serve "without arms." Lord Dunmore's proclamation of November 1775 and the manpower needs of the war on the American side soon rendered that restriction obsolete.

Aptheker, Herbert. "A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States." New York, 1962.

Buckley, Robert N., "Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795-1815". New Haven: Yale U, 1979.

Crow, Jeffrey J. "The Black Experience in Revolutionary North Carolina." North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1996.

Davis, Lenwood G. and George Hill. "Blacks in the American Armed Forces, 1776-1983: A Bibliography." Forewords by Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. and Percy E. Johnston. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut. 1985.

Eicholz, Alice and James M. Rose, comps. Free Black Heads of Household in the New York State Federal Census, 1790-1830. Gale Genealogy and Local History Series, vol. 14. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1981.

Frey, Sylvia R. "Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age." Princeton, NJ, 1991.

Garrison, William L., et al. "The Negro Soldier: A Select Compilation". NY: Negro U, 1970; orig pub 1861. Guide to articles on blacks in American wars, 1641-1815.

Glasrud, Bruce A. and Smith, Alan M. (Eds) "Race Relations in British North America, 1607-1783." Chicago, 1982.

Greene, Robert Ewell. "Black Courage, 1775-1783." NSDAR. 1984.

Guthrie, James M. "Camp-Fires of the Afro-American", Phila: Afro-American, 1899. See Chaps 3-13.

Johnson, Jesse J. (Editor). "A Pictorial History of Black Soldiers (1619-1969) in Peace and War." Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia. 1969.

MacLeod Duncan J. "Slavery, Race and the American Revolution." New York, 1974.

Moore, Frank. Diary of the American Revolution From Newspapers and Original Documents. 2 vols. NY: Scribner, 1860. See index "Negroes."

Moss, Bobby. "The Patriots at the Cowpens." A roster of the patriots who fought at the Battle of Cowpens. Paperback, 338 pages. Contains entries for several individual free blacks.

Mullen, Robert F. "Blacks in America's Wars: The Shift in Attitudes from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam." Monad Press. 1974.

Nalty, Bernard C. Strength for the Fight: a History of Black Americans in the Military. New York: Free Press, 1986.

, with Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons, to Which Is Added a Brief Survey of the Condition and Prospects of Colored Americans. Boston: R.F. Wallcut, 1855. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1968. Nell, William Cooper. The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution
This is one of the first scholarly works to document the contributions of blacks in the patriotic cause. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wendell Phillips, the famed abolitionists, wrote introductions to this book.

Opinions of the Early Presidents and of the Fathers of the Republic upon Slavery and upon Negroes as Men and Soldiers. Pamphlets, Loyal Publication Society, vol. 18. New York: C. Bryant & Co., Printers, 1863.

Quarles, Benjamin and Fishell, Leslie H. Jr. "The Black American." Glenview, Ill., 1970.

Quarles, Benjamin. "The Negro in the Making of America." Collier Books, New York. 1964.

Smith, James Avery "The History of the Black Population of Amherst, MA, 1728-1870", New England Historic Genealogical Society, 160 North Washington St., Boston, MA 02114-2120

Sterling, Dorothy, ed. Speak Out in Thunder Tones: Letters and Other Writings by Black Northerners, 1787-1865. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.

Wilkes, Laura E. Missing "Pages in American History, Revealing the Services of Negroes in the early Wars of the United States of America, 1641-1815." (In "The Negro Soldier: A Select Compilation." Reprint. Negro University Press, New York. Originally Published1861, Robert F. Walcutt, Boston.) 1970.

Williams, George W. "History of the Negro Race in American From 1619 to 1880", 2 vols., See Vol 1, Chaps 26-31, NY,Putnams, 1883.

Wilson, Joseph T. "The Black Phalanx, A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States in the wars of 1775-1812, 1861-1865." Reprint. Arno Press, New York. (Originally Published1885, Robert F. Walcutt, Boston.) 1968.

Woodson, Carter G. "The Negro in Our History." Washington DC, 1962.

U.S. Army Military History Research Collection. The U.S. Army and the Negro. Carlisle Barracks, Pa: U.S. Army Military History Research Collection, 1971.

Bowman, Larry G. "Virginia's Use of Blacks in the French and Indian War." Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 53:57-63. 1970.

Greene, Lorenzo J. "The Negro in the Armed Forces of the United States, 1619- 1783." Negro History Bulletin 14:123-127. 1951.

Jones, George Fenwick. "The Black Hessians: Negroes Recruited by the Hessians in South Carolina and Other Colonies." SC Hist Mag 83 (Oct 1982): pp. 287-302.

McElroy, Guy C. "Facing History: the Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940". Essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Contributions by Janet Levine, Francis Martin, Jr., and Claudia Vess. Edited by Christopher C. Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990.

Norton, Mary Beth, "The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the American Revolution." Journal of Negro History, Vol. LVIII, pp. 402-426. 1973.

Quarles, Benjamin. "The Colonial Militia and Negro Manpower." MS Valley Hist Rev 45 (Mar 1959): pp. 643-652.

Reddick, L.D. The Negro Policy of the United States Army, 1775-1945. Journal of Negro History 34:9-29. 1949.

Additionally, The Journal of Negro History from the 1910's through the 1970's has a number of articles on the subject from all over the colonies.

Ansel, Colonel Raymond. "From Segregation to Desegregation: Blacks In the U.S. Army 1703-1954." Thesis, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. 1990.

Aptheker, Herbert. The Negro in the American Revolution. NY: International, 1940. 47 p.

Moore, George H. Historical Notes on the Employment of Negroes in the American Army of the Revolution. NY: Evans, 1862. 24 p.

U.S. Army War College. Hist Sec. The Attempts of Rhode Island to Raise a Regiment of Slaves for Service in the War of the Revolution - The So-Called "Rhode Island Black Regiment" of 1778. Report, 10 p. File #127-23F/W, Arch. Incl 2 clippings.

The Clements Library at the University of Michigan is a nationally renowned archive of American Military History. This archive specializes in Early Americana with extensive holdings on British Military correspondence. Within these documents, researchers can find accounts of enslaved and freed African Americans who supported the British effort.

The Clements Library also holds the papers of Thomas Clarkson, a leading British abolitionist who worked with Black Loyalists to found the Sierra Leone Colony. The Schoff Collection specializes in Civil War manuscripts and lists accounts of blacks who served in the Union army.

The Black Cultural Center of Nova Scotia has some holdings about Black Loyalists who settled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution. Most of the collections on this subject, however, are held at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia and the National Archives of Canada

Colored Patriots of the American Revolution
The entire 1855 classic by Nell in electronic form

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Doctor Selig received his Ph.D. in history cum laude from Universität Würzburg, 1988 He has most recently been Visiting Professor of History and German at Hope College in Michigan. Recipient of many awards and grants, his articles have appeared in American Heritage, Colonial Williamsburg (where this work first appeared in Summer 1997), Military History Quarterly, William and Mary Quarterly, and others.

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Black Soldiers in the Revolutionary War | Article | The United States Army

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Black Soldiers in the Revolutionary War | Article | The United States Army

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(Editor's note: This story uses the term black as opposed to African-American. America itself was only beginning to emerge as an identity during the Revolution. Most people thought of themselves as Virginians or New Yorkers or citizens of any of the other 11 colonies. No one would have used the term African-American, and as Revolutionary-era names for black Americans would be considered offensive today, Soldiers has settled on black as a compromise.)

FORT MEADE, Md. (Feb. 27, 2013) -- It's the winter of 1777-1778. Under Gen. George Washington, the Continental Army is waiting out the winter at Valley Forge, Penn. Just one year earlier, they had led lighting-fast, surprise attacks against the British at Trenton and Princeton, N.J. But now, many of the Soldiers are without shoes and blankets. They're starving. They're suffering from exposure, typhus, dysentery and pneumonia. They're dying and they're deserting and Washington has no way to replace them. States aren't meeting their militia quotas. There simply aren't enough willing and able men to left to fight -- willing and able white men, that is.

At the start of the war, Washington had been a vocal opponent of recruiting black men, both free and especially slaves. He wasn't alone: Most southern slave owners (and many northern slave owners), found the idea of training and arming slaves and thereby abetting a possible slave rebellion far more terrifying than the British. Black men had long served in colonial militias and probably even saw action during the French and Indian War, explained retired Maj. Glenn Williams, a historian at the U.S. Army Center for Military History, but they had usually been relegated to support roles like digging ditches. In fact, he continued, most southern militias had been created precisely to fight off slave insurrections.

As war with Britain broke out in the spring of 1775, however, Massachusetts patriots needed every man they could get, and a number of black men -- both slave and free -- served bravely at Lexington and Concord and then at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In fact, according to documents archived on www.fold3.com, a former slave named Salem Poor performed so heroically at Bunker Hill -- exactly what he did has been lost to history -- that 14 officers wrote to the Massachusetts legislature, commending him as a "brave and gallant Soldier" who deserved a reward. Valor like this wasn't enough, however, and shortly after his appointment as commander in chief, Washington signed an order forbidding the recruitment of all blacks.

The British saw an opportunity to divide the colonies, however, and the royal governor of Virginia offered freedom to any slave who ran away to join British forces. Thousands took him up on it, and Washington relented almost immediately. In fact, the famous picture of him crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day, 1776, also features a black Soldier who many historians, according to "Come all you Brave Soldiers" by Clinton Cox, believe is Prince Whipple, one of Washington's own bodyguards, who had been kidnapped into slavery as a child and was serving in exchange for freedom. Another black Soldier, Primus Hall, reportedly tracked down and single-handedly captured several British soldiers after the battle of Princeton a week later.

These were freemen, however, freemen and slaves who were serving in place of their masters, fighting for freedom they would never see for themselves. (In many cases, their enlistment bonuses or even their pay went straight to their masters.) Washington still wasn't prepared to go as far as recruiting and freeing slaves, but many northerners had begun to question how they could call for freedom and enslave others. As that terrible winter at Valley Forge dragged on, the state of Rhode Island learned it needed to raise more troops than it could supply. State legislators not only promised to free all black, Indian and mulatto slaves who enlisted in the new 1st Rhode Island Regiment, but offered to compensate their owners. Desperate for manpower, Washington reluctantly agreed, and more than 140 black men signed up for what was better known as the "Black Regiment," according to Williams, and served until Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Va., in 1781.

In fact, they fought so bravely and inflicted so many casualties on Hessian mercenaries during the battle of Newport, R.I., in the summer of 1778, that Williams said one Hessian officer resigned his commission rather than lead his men against the 1st Rhode Island after the unit had repelled three fierce Hessian assaults. He didn't want his men to think he was leading them to slaughter.

The 1st Rhode Island was a segregated unit, with white officers and separate companies designated for black and white Soldiers. It was the Continental Army's only segregated unit, though. In the rest of the Army, the few blacks who served with each company were fully integrated: They fought, drilled, marched, ate and slept alongside their white counterparts. There was never enough food or clothes or even pay for anyone, but they shared these hardships equally.

After watching a review of the Continental Army in New York, one French officer estimated that as much as a quarter of the Army was black. He may have been looking at the 1st Rhode Island or units from Connecticut and New Jersey, which also had high rates of black enlistment, Williams explained. Many muster roles have been destroyed so there isn't an exact count, but Williams said most historians believe that 10 to 15 percent is a more accurate representation of black Soldiers who served in the Revolution. They served in almost every unit, in every battle from Concord to Fort Ticonderoga to Trenton to Yorktown.

"I've heard one analysis say that the Army during the Revolutionary War was the most integrated that the Army would be until the Korean War," Williams said. "World War

I and World War II both, and of course in the Civil War, there were lots of blacks in uniform, but the men were segregated into separate units. Even the Rhode Island regiment was half black, half white, and the men were segregated into their own companies, but in the rest of the Army, they were integrated throughout the regiments."

It was a war for freedom, not only for their country, but for themselves. After the men of the1st Rhode Island and other black Soldiers served bravely at Yorktown alongside southern militiamen whose jobs it had been to round up runaway slaves, the war gradually drew to a close. Soldiers began to trickle home. Some black Soldiers like those in the 1st Rhode Island, went on to new lives as freemen. Far too many, however, returned to the yoke of slavery, some for a few years until their masters remembered promising to free them if they served, but others, having fought for freedom, were doomed to remain slaves forever.

And then they were forgotten. The new Congress passed laws forbidding blacks to serve in the military, and by the time it offered pensions to the veterans of the Revolutionary War, Williams said that most of the black heroes were already dead.

He calls their service and their heroism "invaluable." It "came at a time when the new United States needed it very badly and they stepped up and they took their place in the ranks. If they were misrepresented in our histories before, then we owe it to them to make sure we include it now, because they certainly did their part to earn not only their own freedom, but ours as well. We should never forget that for them, it was a double fight for liberty: their own and their country's."

Related Links:
Army.mil: African Americans in the U.S. Army

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As war with Britain broke out in the spring of 1775, however, Massachusetts patriots needed every man they could get, and a number of black men -- both slave and free -- served bravely at Lexington and Concord and then at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

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African Americans and the American Revolution - History Is Fun

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African Americans and the American Revolution - History Is Fun

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Here's how an Alabama newspaper marked the opening of the nation's first lynching memorial - CNN

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Here's how an Alabama newspaper marked the opening of the nation's first lynching memorial - CNN

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The names go on and on, 313 in all, printed in white against a dark backdrop, each a testament to a whole life stolen through the horrific American legacy of lynching.

The stunning presentation graced the front page of Thursday's Montgomery Advertiser to mark the opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the nation's first memorial to lynching victims, alongside a new museum in Alabama's capital that chronicles America's history of racism.

The newspaper's front-page design was weeks in the making, Advertiser executive editor Bro Krift said, and aims to honor people whose stories were snuffed out violently and often without any public recognition of what was lost.

"What we need this community to see is the names of the victims. I wanted it to go back to the names," Krift told CNN. "There's something that's really important about a name on a printed page that will never go away."

Also striking is a short message of contrition beneath the register of victims. In it, the editorial board of the nearly 200-year-old paper takes responsibility for being "careless in how it covered mob violence and the terror foisted upon African-Americans from Reconstruction through the 1950s."

The staff editorial, which references a separate staff review of the paper's coverage so many decades ago, begins simply, "We were wrong."

"We dehumanized human beings," the piece states. "Too often we characterized lynching victims as guilty before proven so and often assumed they committed the crime."

"I wanted ... to have us own our responsibility," Krift said of the open message. "And if we could do it, hopefully others could, too."

'It's too important,' the reader said

The page's dual-pronged design grew out of a conversation with Advertiser reporter Melissa Brown and Krift's recollection of a front page he oversaw years ago as editor of another paper, he said. Gannett Newspapers design team manager Take Uda, in the media company's Phoenix design center, then got involved and brought it to life.

Not everyone in the Montgomery community has embraced it.

"There are some people who think the past is in the past, and we should move on," Krift said.

But others have praised the approach, the editor said, including one reader whose home-delivered issue got ruined in Thursday's morning storms.

"'My paper's wet. It's too important. I want it, I need it,'" Krift recalled her telling him by phone of this particular edition. "So, I said, 'OK, what's your address?'"

Between the 1955 bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks, the Martin Luther King, Jr.-led march from Selma in 1965 and other events, Montgomery has a rich history as a center of the civil rights movement.

With the lynching memorial now part of its city and the veil lifted on The Advertiser's own legacy, Krift said his staff of journalists will continue to cover their hometown, now with a deeper understanding of what it means to seek the truth.

"We have to have conversations and be conscious about the words we use to describe people, such as people accused of crimes, even victims of crimes, public officials," he told CNN. "Words in our business can hurt for a very, very long time, and I think we've learned that from this experience."

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here's how an alabama newspaper marked the opening of the nation's first lynching memorial - cnn

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Here's how an Alabama newspaper marked the opening of the nation's first lynching memorial

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The names go on and on, 313 in all, printed in white against a dark backdrop, each a testament to a whole life stolen through the horrific American legacy of lynching.

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Confederate monuments debate heads to the courts - National Constitution Center

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Confederate monuments debate heads to the courts - National Constitution Center

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Do local governments have the ability to remove monuments in public spaces that commemorate the Confederacy, its military or its leaders? The heated debate is now heading through the legal system after a very public controversy last year.

At least four lawsuits about the monuments involve alleged conflicts with state and local laws about the protection of war memorials and property rights. But another one is in federal court, and several scholars believe the monuments' existence touches on broader constitutional issues.

Last August, violence at protests in Charlottesville, Virginia about a Robert E. Lee statute left one person dead. Two police officers also died in a helicopter crash related to the protests. The Charlottesville Lee statue is still unsettled in Virginia state court.

Judge Richard Moore issued an injunction in the lawsuit over the statue in October 2017 that kept the monument in place, but under a shroud, until arguments are heard in court next month. The lawsuit filed last March by the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc. and the Monument Fund, Inc. claims that the Lee statue is a war memorial for veterans and protected by a state law.

That law, which goes back to 1950, makes it illegal to remove a war memorial related to "the War Between the States." The suit also claims the deed that granted the land to the city for the park where the statue resides bars its removal. Judge Moore did issue a preliminary ruling last October that he believed the statue could be a war memorial, but he wanted both sides to present more evidence.

In Birmingham, Alabama, another lawsuit involves a 52-foot-high pillar in a park that was dedicated in 1905 to Confederate veterans and funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Last August, Birmingham's mayor ordered inscriptions on the monument covered after the violence in Charlottesville. Alabama's attorney general is contesting that move, saying it violates a recently passed state monument protection law. Arguments are scheduled in state court this April about the controversy.

In Memphis, the fight is about the removal statues from a park that portray Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, President Jefferson Davis and a Confederate war correspondent. The Sons of Confederate Veterans and Forrest's descendants claim Memphis city council wrongfully sold the park where the statues sat to a private party, and that the Forrest statue was part of his grave, and illegally removed.

There is also a case in federal court in the Western District of Louisiana about the Caddo Parish Confederate Monument in Shreveport. Last week, Judge Robert James ruled against the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which claims Parish commissioners illegally removed the monument because the courthouse land under it had been given by the city to the group in 1903 and the action violated the group's First Amendment free speech rights. Judge James didn't believe the claim would prevail in court.

In the past years, some scholars have argued that the existence of Confederate monuments presents unique, broader constitutional questions. Last August, Micah Schwartzman and Nelson Tebbe argued on the Slate website that officials in Charlottesville had rights under the Constitution to ignore the Virginia state law protecting Confederate war memorials. "While private citizens may engage in hate speech under existing law, the government may not demean racial or religious minorities without running afoul of the guarantee of equal protection contained in the 14 th Amendment," they claimed. "City council members have a sworn obligation to uphold the Constitution, and if they believe that the monuments violate equal protection as guaranteed by the Constitution, they have an obligation to take them down"

So far, the Supreme Court has stayed out of the debate. Last November, it denied an appeal from a Mississippi attorney, Carlos Moore, who wanted the state flag altered to remove a section containing a Confederate battle flag. Moore believed the emblem violated the 14 th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. A divided Supreme Court did rule in June 2015 that the state of Texas had a right to deny an application to display a Confederate flag on a specialty license plate, on government speech grounds.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

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Confederate monuments debate heads to the courts

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Do local governments have the ability to remove monuments in public spaces that commemorate the Confederacy, its military or its leaders? The heated debate is now heading through the legal system after a very public controversy last year. At least four lawsuits about the monuments involve alleged conflicts with state and local laws about the protection of war memorials and property rights.

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Confederate statues and memorials to be removed across US - CNN

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Confederate statues and memorials to be removed across US - CNN

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"By relocating these statues we are not destroying, hiding or sanitizing history. We are honoring and learning our history through this relocation," Lexington Mayor Jim Gray wrote on Twitter.

Gray had announced his intent to relocate the statues in a series of tweets just after the Charlottesville attack.

Manatee County commissioners on August 22 approved by a 4-3 vote a resolution to temporarily move a Confederate memorial from its spot in Bradenton, said county spokesman Nicholas Azzara. No timeline for the move was set.

This motion was approved: "Based on concerns for public safety of the citizens of Manatee County, I move to remove the Confederate memorial from the courthouse grounds, until a decision can be made, with public input, as to an equally prominent and respectful replacement location, and among those replacement locations to be considered shall be the Veterans Memorial Park adjacent to the Manatee River, and including considering Gamble Plantation."

In another case, Hillsborough County Board of Commissioners voted in July to remove the Memoria In Aeterna monument, which honors Confederate soldiers, from a county courthouse. The board recently voted that the monument would only be removed if donations could be raised to cover half the cost, estimated to be as high as $280,000.

By Friday, more than $52,000 in donations had been raised via GoFundMe. In a joint statement, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Lightning and Rays said the sports teams also had donated an undisclosed amount of money. The GoFundMe site now says the necessary money has been raised.

"Now more than ever before, we must stand united and committed to diversity and inclusion as we all attempt to heal from the tragedy in Charlottesville," the teams' statement said.

The monument will be relocated to a private cemetery. It is expected to come down as soon as September 4.

The board is also expected to relocate the Hillsborough County Civil War Veterans Monument.

The Missouri Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy has requested that a monument be moved from its current location on Ward Parkway to prevent further vandalism. The 9-foot tall monument was dedicated in 1934 to honor the "Loyal Women of the Old South," according to city's parks and recreaction website. The monument was boarded up after vandals spray painted it, according to CNN affiliate WDAF.

Busts of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and Lt. Gen. Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the City University of New York's Hall of Fame for Great Americans because "New York stands against racism," Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted Wednesday. "There are many great Americans, many of them New Yorkers worthy of a spot in this great hall," Cuomo tweeted. "These two Confederates are not among them."

Also Wednesday, Cuomo requested that the acting US secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, reconsider his refusal to rename General Lee Avenue and Stonewall Jackson Drive at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn.

The Charlottesville City Council voted in April to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at the newly renamed Emancipation Park, CNN affiliate WVIR reported. The violence there over the weekend came after this decision. The removal is on hold pending litigation.

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin announced Thursday that two Confederate memorials at the Forest Hill Cemetery will be removed. In a statement, Soglin said taking down the "monuments will not erase our shared history. The Confederacy's legacy will be with us, whether we memorialize it in marble or not."

"There should be no place in our country for bigotry, hatred or violence against those who seek to unite our communities and our country," the mayor's statement said.

The removal had "minimal or no disruption to the cemetery itself."

Considering removing

Birmingham Mayor William Bell ordered plastic draped over a Confederate monument at Linn Park and a plywood structure built around it while officials decide what to do. State law prohibits a city from taking down the monument, he said, but not covering it up. "This country should in no way tolerate the hatred that the KKK, neo-Nazis, fascists and other hate groups spew," he said. "The God I know doesn't put one race over another."

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said he will sue Bell and the city, citing state law that prohibits the "relocation, removal, alteration, or other disturbance of any monument on public property that has been in place for 40 years or more."

Jacksonville City Council President Anna Lopez Brosche said she asked city officials for an inventory of all Confederate monuments and markers. Brosche said in a statement that she plans to submit legislation to relocate the monuments to museums for "appropriate historical context."

The city of Atlanta said it is currently reviewing options for the Peace Monument in Piedmont Park. Mayor Kasim Reed asked the public art commission to review the city's art and determine which pieces have ties to racism and slavery, but hasn't asked to remove any.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings called for the formation of a task force Tuesday to determine the fate of Confederate statues in city parks during the next 90 days, including the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park and the Confederate War Memorial in downtown Dallas, CNN affiliate KTVT reported. "This is simple. We could remove them, the question is, how do we heal on this issue? To do that we have to talk and listen to one another," Rawlings said.

In San Antonio, two City Council members have pushed for the removal of a Confederate monument at Travis Park, CNN affiliate KSAT reported. Councilmen Roberto Treviño and William "Cruz" Shaw jointly filed a consideration to relocate the monument where it could be used in an "educational context."

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner asked city staff to compile an inventory of Confederate statues and make recommendations about whether they should be removed from city property. Members of the public urged the council to take down the statues. "It is my hope that we can, in a very positive and constructive way, move forward," Turner said.

Officials in Richmond, the one-time capital of the Confederacy, have started to hold public meetings for community input on the future of the city's many Civil War monuments and statues. According to local reports, the first meeting was civil, with spirited debate on both sides. The city hopes to have a plan in place later this fall.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray wants to remove a monument to Confederate soldiers in Lake View Cemetery. The cemetery is on private property, but Murray said in a statement that his office called the cemetery operator to express his concerns about the monument. Murray said the move would send a "strong message by taking these archaic symbols down."

"We must remove statues and flags that represent this country's abhorrent history of slavery and oppression based on the color of people's skin. It is the right thing to do," Murray's statement said.

Not removing

Gov. Doug Ducey told CNN affiliate KTVK that he will not remove any Confederate monuments or memorials and will instead leave that decision up to the public.

"It's not my desire or mission to tear down any monuments or memorials. We have a public process for this. If the public wants to be engaged on this, I'd invite them to get engaged in it," Ducey said.

Officials with Gettysburg National Military Park said they have no plans to remove any of the park's 1,300-plus monuments, markers or plaques.

The Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles removed a Confederate monument Wednesday morning, spokesman Theodore Hovey told CNN. The monument memorialized more than 30 Confederate veterans and their families who are buried in the cemetery. It was erected in 1925.

The Long Beach chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the owners of the monument, asked the cemetery to remove it after it was featured in an August 4 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Hovey said. A CNN request for comment from that group was not immediately answered. "It was a mutual decision on the part of the cemetery and the monument's owner that it is best for it to be removed," Hovey said. The graves around the monument were not affected, he said.

In San Diego, a Confederate marker commemorating the Jefferson Davis Highway was removed Wednesday, according to CNN affiliate KGTV. The marker was installed in Horton Plaza in 1927.

An online petition asking Mayor Kevin Faulconer, City Councilman Chris Ward and Scarlett Stahl, president of the California division of United Daughters of the Confederacy, to remove the monument was started earlier Wednesday. It had received more than 160 signatures by Thursday morning.

In a Facebook statement, Ward praised the decision to remove the marker, saying, "Monuments to bigotry have no place in San Diego."

A Confederate statue called "Old Joe" was removed Monday in Gainesville, Florida. The statue sat outside the Alachua County Administration Building for more than 100 years. The Alachua County Board of Commissioners made the decision to remove the statue in May after two years of debate. It will be relocated by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Four Confederate statues were removed in New Orleans earlier this year. The city started removing them in late April after the City Council's vote in 2015 to take down the four Confederate markers.

The city was able to start the process to relocate the monuments after court rulings cleared the way following heated public debate and legal fights.

The Louisiana Legislature was considering a measure that would allow local governments to take down a war memorial only if voters approve the action at "an election held for that purpose."

Baltimore removed four Confederate statues early Wednesday after the City Council voted unanimously to take down the monuments immediately, CNN affiliate WBAL reported. Mayor Catherine Pugh defended her decision to remove the monuments "quickly and quietly" overnight, saying it was the best thing for Baltimore.

"The city charter says, according to our city attorney, if the mayor wants to protect or feels like she needs to protect the public or keep her community safe, she has the right to keep her community safe. I felt the best way to remove the monuments was to remove them overnight," Pugh said.

In Annapolis, the statue of former Chief Justice Roger Taney was removed from the grounds of the Maryland State House, according to CNN affiliate WBAL.

Taney wrote the majority opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that slaves were not citizens of the United States and therefore were not protected under the Constitution.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan had called for the statue's removal on Tuesday.

"While we cannot hide from our history -- nor should we -- the time has come to make clear the difference between properly acknowledging our past and glorifying the darkest chapters of our history," Hogan said in a statement.

And a Confederate memorial was removed late Monday from outside the Howard County Circuit Courthouse in Ellicott City.

"It has become increasingly clear in recent weeks that memorials such as this are hurtful to many residents in our community and elsewhere," said Howard County Executive Allan H. Kittleman. "Given these feelings and the tragedy in Charlottesville, I felt compelled to remove this memorial from public property."

Kittleman received permission from a historic preservation commission to remove the monument after a five-day public notice. The monument will be donated to a local museum.

"We can't forget that this symbol and symbols like this represent hate and cause many people pain," County Council Chair Jon Weinstein said. "The monument is not representative of who we are as a community today and does not belong on grounds of a building that represents justice."

The Confederate Memorial in St. Louis was removed in July after an agreement between the city and the Missouri Civil War Museum.

The museum agreed to pay for the monument's removal and storage until a permanent new location could be found. The museum must find a Civil War museum, battlefield or cemetery outside St. Louis as the monument's new home, the city said.

Protesters toppled over a Confederate statue Monday in front of the old Durham County Courthouse. The monument depicted a soldier holding a gun and had an engraving that said "in memory of the boys who wore gray." The protest was held in response to the Charlottesville violence.

Also in Durham, the president of Duke University authorized the removal Saturday of a Robert E. Lee statue that was defaced earlier in the week. The statue adorned the entrance of Duke Chapel. It sat between figures of Thomas Jefferson and Sidney Lanier, a Georgia poet who served in the Confederate Army.

Duke President Vincent E. Price said he had authorized the Lee statue's removal to ensure the safety of those who worship in the chapel and "to express the deep and abiding values of our university." A commission will be created to determine how to "navigate the role of memory and history" and how to memorialize historic figures on campus, he said.

A monument of Lee was removed late Wednesday night from a highway in Franklin, Ohio, said Jonathan Westendorf, acting city manager. The monument was affixed to a rock formation to mark the Dixie Highway. It was erected and dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1927.

Westendorf said the monument was removed overnight "to assure the safety of the crews performing the work, as well as to secure the monument from potential damage," according to a statement. It is intact and has been returned to Franklin Township, Westendorf told CNN.

The University of Texas in Austin has removed four Confederate statues, according to campus police spokeswoman Cindy Posey. A small crowd watched as statues of Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, John Reagan and James Stephen Hogg were removed from the university's Main Mall. "The Lee, Johnston and Reagan statues will be added to the collection of the Briscoe Center for scholarly study," university president Greg Fenves. The statue of Hogg (who was governor of Texas from 1891 to 1895) will be considered for re-installation elsewhere on campus. Two statues -- one of Jefferson Davis and one of former President Woodrow Wilson -- were removed in 2015 following the Charleston church shooting. The Davis statue is now part of a scholarly exhibition, according to the university.

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confederate statues and memorials to be removed across us - cnn

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Here are the Confederate memorials that will be removed after Charlottesville

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"By relocating these statues we are not destroying, hiding or sanitizing history. We are honoring and learning our history through this relocation," Lexington Mayor Jim Gray wrote on Twitter. Gray had announced his intent to relocate the statues in a series of tweets just after the Charlottesville attack.

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Which Confederate statues were removed? A running list | Fox News

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Which Confederate statues were removed? A running list | Fox News

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More than 25 cities across the United States have removed or relocated Confederate statues and monuments amid an intense nationwide debate about race and history.

After a "Unite the Right" rally in Virginia in August to protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee resulted in the death of a woman who was demonstrating against white supremacy, other cities have decided to remove Confederate statues.

Many of the controversial mouments were dedicated in the early twentieth century or during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Discussions are under way about the removal of monuments in Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, Pensacola, Florida, Jacksonville, Florida, Richmond, Virginia, Birmingham, Alabama, and Charlottesville, Virginia.

Here is a running list of all the monuments and statues that have been removed and the cities that have taken them down:
Annapolis, Md.
Under cover of darkness, city workers removed a statue on Aug. 18 of former Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney that had been on the State House's front lawn for 145 years. Taney authored the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that African-Americans could not be U.S. citizens. The city's Republican mayor said through a spokesman that it was removed "as a matter of public safety."
Austin, Texas
The statues of four people with ties to the Confederacy - Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnson, John H. Reagan and former Texas Gov. James Stephen Hogg - were removed from pedestals on the University of Texas campus late Sunday night. UT's president said in a written statement the deadly clashes in Charlottesville made it clear "Confederate monuments have become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism." Separately, a 1,200-pound bronze statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis that was removed from UT's campus in 2015 has now returned to the campus, at the Briscoe Center for American History.
Baltimore, Md.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh told reporters she wanted to move "quickly and quietly" to take down four Confederate statues or monuments - statues of Lee and Thomas, J. "Stonewall" Jackson and monuments for Confederate Soldiers and Sailors and Confederate Women - from the city's public spaces. Although the plan had been in the works since June, the Baltimore City Council approved it only two days after the deadly events in Charlottesville. On March 10, the space where the Confederate statues had stood was rededicated to abolitionist and civil rights pioneer Harriet Tubman.
Bradenton, Fla.
Mantee County removed a Confederate soldiers memorial obelisk on Aug. 24 after the city commission voted 4-3 to take it down and place it in storage. The monument, which had stood there for more than 90 years, was accidentally broken into two pieces when city workers removed it. The removal came after days of protests from residents and activists, most of whom were in favor of taking it down, and it cost $12,700 to remove.
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Plaques honoring Lee were removed from an episcopal church's property on Aug. 16 and the governor called on the Army to remove the names of Lee and another Confederate general from the streets around a nearby fort. "It was very easy for us to say, 'OK, we'll take the plaques down,'" said Bishop Lawrence Provenzano, of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, who called them "offensive to the community." New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for a review of all the city's public art to identify "symbols of hate" for possible removal.
Dallas, Texas
A bronze statue of Robert E. Lee, formally called the Robert Edward Lee Sculpture, was removed Sept. 14 from Robert E. Lee Park, which was also named in honor of the Confederate general. The Dallas City Council voted 13-1 to remove the statue, which has stood in Lee Park for 81 years.

The park was dedicated to Lee by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 during a renaming ceremony of the park.
Daytona Beach, Fla.
Three Confederate monuments were removed from a city park Friday morning. A city spokesperson said the plaques were going to be cleaned up and taken to a nearby museum. The decision to remove them did not require public input, the spokesperson told FOX35, because they were donated and not purchased with taxpayer funds.
Durham, N.C.
A nearly-century old statue of a Confederate soldier was toppled not long after Charlottesville by protesters associated with the Workers World party. North Carolina Central University student Takiyah Thompson, along with three others, were arrested and charged with felonies in the days following. As the bronze statue lay crumpled on the ground, protesters could be seen kicking it on social media. A Worthington assistant city manager said the community seeks to be one that "promotes tolerance, respect and inclusion."

A statute of Lee was removed from the entrance to Duke University Chapel on Aug. 19 not long after it had been defaced and is set to be preserved in some way to study the university's "complex past."

"I took this course of action to protect Duke Chapel, to ensure the vital safety of students and community members who worship there, and above all to express the deep and abiding values of our university," university President Vincent Price wrote in statement to the school.
Franklin, Ohio
A monument to Lee was removed Aug. 17 by Franklin workers.
Gainesville, Fla.
A chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy paid for the removal of a monument to Confederate soldiers known locally as "Old Joe" that stood in front a building in downtown Gainesville for 113 years. It was moved to a private cemetery outside the city.
Helena, Mont.
The state's capital city on Aug. 18 removed a memorial to Confederate soldiers that had been in a public park since 1916. the granite fountain, which was dismantled, had been donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. City Parks and Recreation Director Amy Teegarden told the Spokesman-Review that the fountain initially will be stored in a city warehouse -- but it could be reassembled at a future date.
Kansas City, Mo.
A Confederate monument was boxed up Sunday and is slated to be removed. The Missouri division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy had asked Kansas City Parks and Recreation to find a new home for it.
Lexington, Ky.
Two 130-year-old Confederate statues were removed from downtown Lexington on October 18 after the state's attorney general issued an opinion giving the city permission to take them down and move them to a private cemetery. Lexington used private funds to take the statues, of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan and John Breckinridge, a former U.S. Vice President and the last Confederate Secretary of War. Private funds will cover the cost of their upkeep in the cemetery.
Los Angeles, Calif.
A large stone monument commemorating Confederate veterans was taken down Aug. 16 from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery after hundreds of people demanded its removal. The 6-foot granite marker was loaded into a pickup truck and taken to a storage facility. A petition calling for it to be taken down had garnered 1,300 signatures.
Louisville, Ky.
A statue of a Confederate soldier was removed from the University of Louisville campus after a legal battle between the city residents, the mayor and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It was relocated to Brandenburg, Kentucky, which hosts Civil War reenactments.
Madison, Wis.
A plaque honoring Confederate soldiers was removed Aug. 17 from a cemetery not long after residents and city leaders began calling for it to be taken down. "The Civil War was an act of insurrection and treason and a defense of the deplorable practice of slavery," said Mayor Paul Soglin in a statement. "The monuments in question were connected to that action and we do not need them on city property."
Memphis, Tenn.
Crews removed two Confederate statues from Memphis parks on Dec. 20 after the city sold them to a private entity. The City Council voted unanimously earlier in the day to sell both Health Sciences and Fourth Bluff Parks where the Confederate statues, of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, were located.
Nashville, Tenn.
The legendary Ryman Auditorium, where stars like Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn made their Grand Ole Opry debuts, quietly moved a sign on Sept. 21 hanging from the venue's upper level that read "1897 Confederate Gallery." Honoring an 1897 reunion of Confederate veterans at the Ryman, the sign had been shrouded over the years but has now been permanently removed from the main auditorium and added to a museum exhibit that explains the history of the 125-year-old music hall.
New Orleans, La.
New Orleans city workers removed four monuments in April dedicated to the Confederacy and opponents of Reconstruction. The city council had declared the monuments a public nuisance. The monuments removed were of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, Davis and Lee. Also removed was the Liberty Place Monument, which commemorated a Reconstruction Era white supremacist attack on the city's integrated police force. The mayor plans to replace them with new fountains and an American flag.
New York, N.Y.
Busts of Lee and Jackson were removed overnight on Aug. 17 from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at Bronx Community College. Prior to its removal, Bronx Borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. had said "there is nothing great about two men who committed treason against the United States to fight to keep the institution of slavery in tact."
Orlando, Fla.
A Confederate statue known as "Johnny Reb" was moved in June by officials from Lake Eola Park to Greenwood Cemetery in response to public outcry about it being symbolic of hate and white supremacy. A spokesperson for Orlando's mayor told Fox News that city officials are working with historians on a new inscription to put the monument "in proper historical perspective."
Rockville, Md.
A 13-ton bronze Confederate statue that had stood for decades next to Rockville's Red Brick Courthouse was relocated in July next to a privately run Potomac River ferry named for a Confederate general. The relocation cost about $100,000, according to the Washington Post.
San Diego, Calif.
A plaque honoring Davis was quietly removed Aug. 16 from a downtown park. "This morning I ordered the immediate removal of a plaque honoring the Confederacy at Horton Plaza Park," Mayor Kevin Faulconer told the Los Angeles Times. "San Diegans stand together against Confederate symbols of division."
San Antonio, Texas
A Confederate statue was removed from Travis Park overnight Sept. 1 after the City Council voted 10-1 in favor of taking it down the previous day. There were no protesters during or after the removal, according to local media reports. "This is, without context, a monument that glorifies the causes of the Confederacy, and that's not something that a modern city needs to have in a public square," said San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg following the council vote.
St. Louis, Mo.
The Missouri Civil War Museum oversaw the removal in late June of a 32-foot granite and bronze monument from Forest Park, where it had stood for 103 years. It shouldered the costs of removal and will hold the monument in storage until a new home can be found for it. The agreement stipulates the monument can be re-displayed at a Civil War museum, battlefield or cemetery. In Boone County, a rock with a plaque honoring Confederate soldiers that had been removed from the University of Missouri campus was relocated a second time after the Charleston AEM church massacre to a historic site commemorating a nearby Civil War battle.
St. Petersburg, Fla.
St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman ordered city workers to remove a bronze Confederate marker at noon on Aug. 15 after determining that it was on city property. It's being held in storage until a new home can be found for it. "The plaque recognizing a highway named after Stonewall Jackson has been removed and we will attempt to locate its owner," Kriseman said in a statement to the Tampa Bay Times.
Washington, D.C.
The stewards of the National Mall announced this week that the exhibit alongside the Thomas Jefferson Memorial will be updated to showcase his status as both one of the country's founders and a slaveholder. "We can reflect the momentous contributions of someone like Thomas Jefferson, but also consider carefully the complexity of who he was," an official with the Trust told the Washington Examiner. "And that's not reflected right now in the exhibits."

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker plans to introduce a bill to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol Building.

The National Cathedral voted Sept. 5 to take down two stained-glass windows of Confederate generals. The removal could take a few days and workers seen putting up scaffolding around the windows to start the process.
Worthington, Ohio
Worthington removed a historic marker Aug. 18 outside the former home of a Confederate general.
Email christopher.carbone@foxnews.com if you learn new information about the removal of Confederate monuments. Fox News' Nicole Darrah contributed to this report.
Christopher Carbone is a reporter for FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @christocarbone.

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Which Confederate statues were removed? A running list

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More than 25 cities across the United States have removed or relocated Confederate statues and monuments amid an intense nationwide debate about race and history. Here is a running list of all the monuments that have been removed and the cities that have removed them.

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Dallas City Council delays decisions on Confederate War Memorial, Lee statue's fate | Dallas City Council | Dallas News

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Dallas City Council delays decisions on Confederate War Memorial, Lee statue's fate | Dallas City Council | Dallas News

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The council also voted Wednesday not to sell the statue of Robert E. Lee that was removed last year from what is now Oak Lawn Park. But the 10-5 vote, which was taken without discussion, did not specify what the council will do with the Alexander Phimister Proctor sculpture.

The council did take some action. They directed the city manager to appoint a "working group" to add historical context to Confederate symbols at Fair Park and commemorate the Hall of Negro Life. The council also supported leaving alone streets named after Confederate officials and the creation of a memorial of the 1910 mob lynching of Allen Brooks near Main and Akard streets downtown.

Those provisions received only brief discussions. Council member Philip Kingston criticized the street-name decision, and a few public speakers took issue with the Brooks memorial. But they passed with relative ease.

The speakers and the council were primarily focused on the statues from Pioneer Park Cemetery outside the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. A group called This is Texas Freedom Force showed up with many of the public speakers. And twenty of the total 51 registered speakers did not live in Dallas or did not provide an address at all.

The speakers ultimately had only a minute each to speak. Activist John Fullinwider said the statues remaining up would leave the city "spellbound by white supremacy and the ghosts of the past."

Others in favor of keeping the statues in place accused the council of trying to erase history, acting racist, yielding to anarchists and also acting as Orwellian authoritarians controlling thought. One woman, Rhonda Tarr, called the mayor and Caraway "snakes in the grass."

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Dallas City Council delays decisions on Confederate War Memorial, Lee statue's fate

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The council also voted Wednesday not to sell the statue of Robert E. Lee that was removed last year from what is now Oak Lawn Park. But the 10-5 vote, which was taken without discussion, did not specify what the council will do with the Alexander Phimister Proctor sculpture.

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Why Were Confederate Monuments Built? : NPR

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Why Were Confederate Monuments Built? : NPR

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast

As President Trump doubled down on his defense of Confederate statues and monuments this week, he overlooked an important fact noted by historians: The majority of the memorials seem to have been built with the intention not to honor fallen soldiers, but specifically to further ideals of white supremacy.

More than 30 cities either have removed or are removing Confederate monuments, according to a list compiled by The New York Times, and the president said Thursday that in the process, the history and culture of the country was being "ripped apart."

Groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans defend the monuments, arguing they are an important part of history. One of the leaders of that group, Carl V. Jones, wrote a letter on Aug. 14 condemning the violence and "bigotry" displayed in Charlottesville, but he also denounced "the hatred being leveled against our glorious ancestors by radical leftists who seek to erase our history."

That letter to "compatriots" was signed the day before Trump's raucous press conference, in which he also cast blame on what he called the "alt-left" - comments for which he faced criticism from business leaders, nonprofits and members of his own party, among others.

Yet many historians say the argument about preserving Southern history doesn't hold up when you consider the timing of when the "beautiful" statues, as Trump called them, went up.

"Most of the people who were involved in erecting the monuments were not necessarily erecting a monument to the past," said Jane Dailey, an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago."But were rather, erecting them toward a white supremacist future."

The most recent comprehensive study of Confederate statues and monuments across the country was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center last year. A look at this chart shows huge spikes in construction twice during the 20th century: in the early 1900s, and then again in the 1950s and 60s. Both were times of extreme civil rights tension.

In the early 1900s, states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise black Americans. In the middle part of the century, the civil rights movement pushed back against that segregation.

James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, says that the increase in statues and monuments was clearly meant to send a message.

"These statues were meant to create legitimate garb for white supremacy," Grossman said. "Why would you put a statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson in 1948 in Baltimore?"

Grossman was referencing the four statues that came down earlier this week in the city. After the violence in Charlottesville, Va., when a counterprotester was killed while demonstrating, and the action in Durham, N.C., where a crowd pulled down a Confederate statue themselves, the mayor of Baltimore ordered that city to remove its statues in the dead of night.

"They needed to come down," said Mayor Catherine Pugh, according to The Baltimore Sun. "My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could."

Thousands of Marylanders fought in the Civil War, as NPR's Bill Chappell noted, but nearly three times as many fought for the Union as for the Confederacy.

Still, in 1948, the statues went up.

"Who erects a statue of former Confederate generals on the very heels of fighting and winning a war for democracy?" writes Dailey, in a piece for HuffPost, referencing the just-ended World War II. "People who want to send a message to black veterans, the Supreme Court, and the president of the United States, that's who."

Statues and monuments are often seen as long-standing, permanent fixtures, but such memorabilia take effort, planning and politics to get placed, especially on government property. In an interview with NPR, Dailey said it's impossible to separate symbols of the Confederacy from the values of white supremacy. In comparing Robert E. Lee to Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on Tuesday, President Trump doesn't seem to feel the same.

Dailey pointed to an 1861 speech by Alexander Stephens, who would go on to become vice president of the Confederacy.

"[Our new government's] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man," Stevens said, in Savannah, Ga. "That slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."

To build Confederate statues, says Dailey, in public spaces, near government buildings, and especially in front of court houses, was a "power play" meant to intimidate those looking to come to the "seat of justice or the seat of the law."

"I think it's important to understand that one of the meanings of these monuments when they're put up, is to try to settle the meaning of the war" Dailey said. "But also the shape of the future, by saying that elite Southern whites are in control and are going to build monuments to themselves effectively."

"And those monuments will endure and whatever is going around them will not."

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Confederate Statues Were Built To Further A 'White Supremacist Future'

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast As President Trump doubled down on his defense of Confederate statues and monuments this week, he overlooked an important fact noted by historians: The majority of the memorials seem to have been built with the intention not to honor fallen soldiers, but specifically to further ideals of white supremacy.

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Is Removing Confederate Monuments Like Erasing History?

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Is Removing Confederate Monuments Like Erasing History?

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Almost two years after New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the removal of four Confederate statues from public spaces around the city, the process finally got underway shortly after 1 a.m. Monday morning.

The Liberty Monument, which paid tribute to vigilantes who sought to overthrow the city's interracial Reconstruction era government, was the first to go - and in the coming days and weeks, the three remaining Confederate statues honoring Generals Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate President Jefferson Davis will also be removed.

Similar debates about the appropriateness of honoring Confederate legends with memorials, eponymous roads, streets and buildings are taking place nationwide.

This issue resurfaced, in large measure, following the June 2015 murder of nine African Americans parishioners by white supremacist Dylann Roof in Charleston. South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds in the wake of the massacre.

Several other Southern cities have taken similar measures and/or began debating the removal of their Civil War monuments. In Richmond, Virginia residents have long called for the Monument Avenue to be cleared free of Confederate statues, but without success. Statues of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee have been vandalized numerous, the latest during anti-Trump protests after the election.

Earlier this year, the Charlottesville, Virginia City council voted 3-2 to take away the statue of Robert E. Lee and rename Lee Park.

Alfred L. Brophy, the Judge John J. Parker distinguished professor of law at UNC Chapel Hill, warns against the rush to rid the country of these tactile reminders of Jim Crow and the codification of white supremacy.

"My initial thought is that removing these monuments leads to forgetting," says Brophy. "We need to be aware that people in power at that time thought it was appropriate to celebrate slavery and Jim Crow."

Brophy believes that making these artifacts disappear allows certain people to rewrite history, whereas, keeping them in place stands as a salient reminder of the times.

Kirk von Daacke, Associate Professor and Assistant Dean Department of History at the University of Virginia, agrees that, as a society, we benefit from learning about our own past in all its complexity. Nonetheless, he believes that removing Confederate statues and memorials, often erected several decades after the Civil War is a way to reject a history of Lost Cause glorification of the Confederate cause and the history of muscular white supremacy that went hand in hand with the Lost Cause.
Related: Harriet Tubman National Historical Park Becomes Reality
He also points out that many of these memorials lack context and are inscribed to glorify or deny the brutality of that period. "Rethinking the memorial landscape-whether that involves moving memorials, adding new memorials, and/or reshaping how the memorials are viewed-is a necessary step in creating a more inclusive history and more inclusive public spaces," said von Daacke.

The Historical Marker Database lists more than 13,000 monuments and memorials across the county however it's hard to know precisely how many of these pay tribute to Confederates. What is not in dispute, however, is that commemorations to the Secessionist cause can be found in every former Confederate state.

The overwhelming majority were installed following the collapse of Reconstruction and during the rise of the Jim Crow era. But not all fall into these categories. Arizona wasn't even a state, let alone part of the Confederacy, during the Civil War. Yet, it boasts three Confederate statues, the last of which was erected in 2010. Getting rid of them is more than a notion.

After the New Orleans City Council voted overwhelmingly to remove the city's Confederate statues, the City spent nearly 18 months embroiled in costly litigation brought by three historical societies and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The planned removal-estimated to cost $600,000-only moved forward after the Fifth Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling and rejected their claims as lacking "legal viability or support." Charlottesville's government-approved removal carries a price tag of $400,000 and is also mired in a court battle with the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Related: Georgetown Apologizes, Renames Halls After Slaves
Four states have made it impossible to remove or alter their historic structures, regardless of the desires of local municipalities. After a protracted fight to take down the Confederate flag from the state's Capitol dome in 2000, South Carolina passed the Heritage Protection Act to prohibit the removal of Confederate monuments from public property. Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee quickly followed suit.

If and when these structures are removed, what will become of them?

Charlottesville elected to sell and relocate its Confederate relics. Mayor Landrieu said that the New Orleans statutes will be stored and preserved until they can be displayed in a more appropriate place.

"We can remember these divisive chapters in our history in a museum or other facility where they can be put in context - and that's where these statues belong," he said.
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Removing monuments that glorify the confederacy is more complicated than you think

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Almost two years after New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the removal of four Confederate statues from public spaces around the city, the process finally got underway shortly after 1 a.m. Monday morning.

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Where Will the Removal of Confederate Monuments Stop? - The Atlantic

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Where Will the Removal of Confederate Monuments Stop? - The Atlantic

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An eminent historian explains why taking down Civil War statues doesn't erase history-and why statues to slaveholding Founding Fathers aren't next.

Cheryl Gerber / Reuters

Perhaps not since the collapse of the Soviet Union has there been such a vogue for tearing down statues. And just as the removal of images of Lenin and Stalin rubbed nerves across the former Soviet Socialist Republics, the effacing of statutes in the United States has become an acrimonious debate.

The most recent flashpoint came in New Orleans, where Mayor Mitch Landrieu ordered the removal of statutes of several Confederate generals. In the face of massive protests, Landrieu was forced to resort to both heavy police presence and unannounced nighttime removal to get the statues down. But there are plenty of other examples, beginning with South Carolina's decision to quit flying the Confederate battle flag at the state capitol and running through more recent skirmishes from St. Louis to Charlottesville, Virginia.

Some of those who oppose the removal of those statues are racist-some proudly so, others less openly. (One need only read quotes from those rallying at sites in New Orleans, or the white supremacists organizing in Charlottesville, to see this.) But others bring different objections to the debate. Some objections, for example, are borne out of a sense that removing monuments is a rebuke to the memory of ancestors who fought bravely for the Confederacy. And a final group sees some wisdom in removing some statutes, but worries about a slippery slope-foreseeing a future in which even statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are torn down.

The first group cannot, and should not, be accommodated. But the others raise questions that are at least worth answering, and a panel Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-presented by Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, wrestled with how to do that.

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Where Will the Removal of Confederate Monuments Stop?

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An eminent historian explains why taking down Civil War statues doesn't erase history-and why statues to slaveholding Founding Fathers aren't next. Perhaps not since the collapse of the Soviet Union has there been such a vogue for tearing down statues.

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Killed For Taking Part In 'Everybody's Fight' : Code Switch : NPR

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Killed For Taking Part In 'Everybody's Fight' : Code Switch : NPR

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For the past few months, NPR has been commemorating the monumental summer of 1963 by looking at watershed moments in the civil rights movement. In this three-part series, Karen Grigsby Bates talks with the children of civil rights leaders who lost their lives in the battle for racial equality.
In an obscure corner of Detroit, there's a battered playground honoring a civil rights martyr. It has an overgrown baseball field, some missing swings and on a broken fence, a worn, wooden sign.

"It's all tore up and definitely could use at least a paint job," says Sally Liuzzo-Prado. She is referring to the sign with her mother's name on it.

Liuzzo-Prado was 6 when her mother, Viola Liuzzo, was killed by Ku Klux Klan members following a voting rights march in Alabama in 1965. Liuzzo was the only white female protester to die in the civil rights movement.

The housewife and mother of five had been an active NAACP member in Detroit and was horrified at the violence she saw inflicted upon black protesters on television. So when she heard of a four-day, 54-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to support voting rights, she packed a bag. Liuzzo told her husband: "It's everybody's fight." She kissed her children goodbye and began the drive south.

"She called us every night. I learned how to cursive write and she was so excited. She told me to write my name and put it on her dresser and she'd see it when she got home," says Liuzzo-Prado.

Led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Viola Liuzzo and thousands of other marchers walked to Montgomery, where King spoke on the Capitol steps, telling the crowd that freedom was imminent:

"How long? Not Long! Because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long!" King said in a now-famous speech.

That night, Liuzzo, tired but exhilarated, shuttled local marchers back to their homes. A car filled with Ku Klux Klan members tried to force her off the road. Finally, they pulled alongside Liuzzo's car and shot her in her head. The 39-year-old died instantly.

King attended Liuzzo's funeral and comforted her family, but not everyone agreed that she was a hero. A group of people tried to break down the Liuzzos' door, and a cross was burned on their lawn. What Sally Liuzzo-Prado remembers most vividly is the morning she returned to first grade after her mother's death.

She was wearing her saddle shoes, which her older sister, Penny, had polished.

"It was pouring rain that day. And I looked down at my saddle shoes and the white polish was coming off," she says. "These people - grown-ups - lined the street and were throwing rocks at me, calling me 'N-lover's baby.' I didn't know what that meant. I thought it was because of my shoes."

Anthony Liuzzo, a Teamsters union official, withdrew his daughter from the school and had her transferred. For years, he drove her to and from school every day. Liuzzo-Prado says her father also hired two armed guards to watch their house day and night for two years.

Then, there were the rumors: After Viola Liuzzo's death, there were newspaper reports that Liuzzo had gone south to meet and have sex with black men. Another rumor claimed she was a drug addict. And the July 1965 issue of The Ladies' Home Journal published a poll that asked if readers thought Liuzzo was a good mother. Fifty-five percent didn't. ("I feel sorry for what happened," said one woman in a focus group convened to talk about the Liuzzo story, "but I feel she should have stayed home and minded her own business.")

The family couldn't figure out why anyone would say such things. Then, when the Klansmen were put on trial for Liuzzo's death, they learned that a key witness was a paid FBI informant who had been in the Klansmen's car. Years later, the family sought to have Liuzzo's FBI file opened. They finally succeeded, and that's when they discovered that the rumors about her had come directly from J. Edgar Hoover. The family believes the FBI director was desperate to divert attention from the agency by smearing her.

The smears took an awful toll. Anthony Liuzzo became a heavy drinker and later died. The Liuzzo children all moved away. Sally Liuzzo-Prado, the youngest, was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. But two years ago, Liuzzo-Prado elected to return to her hometown.

"The older I got, the more I realized there was a lot of work to be done in Detroit still," she says. "And, you know, it's not so much just for her to have recognition. It's to right the wrongs done to her by J. Edgar Hoover."

In May, Liuzzo-Prado accepted the Ford Freedom Humanitarian Award in her mother's name, an honor given only to one other person - Nelson Mandela. For Liuzzo-Prado, it was a deeply satisfying moment. But even more satisfying for her was a conversation she remembers having with another martyr's child - Martin Luther King III - when both attended the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery.

"He pulled me aside, said, 'I wanted you to know something: 30 years ago, my dad couldn't be in this ballroom. And today you and I are here together, and it's because of your mother.' And I've never forgotten that."

Sally Liuzzo-Prado holds tight to that memory. She hopes that eventually, her mother will be honored with a new park in a more central place, so everyone can appreciate the Viola Liuzzo her family cherished. And she hopes there's a statue there, based on the last photo that was taken of her mother: It shows a determined woman, walking purposefully, shoes in hand.

The g randson of Viola Liuzzo, TJ Herrington, wrote music for a play, which was based on the family's recollections of Viola. The play is titled The Marker: Reflections of Viola Greg Liuzzo.

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Killed For Taking Part In 'Everybody's Fight'

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For the past few months, NPR has been commemorating the monumental summer of 1963 by looking at watershed moments in the civil rights movement. In this three-part series, Karen Grigsby Bates talks with the children of civil rights leaders who lost their lives in the battle for racial equality.

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Viola Gregg Liuzzo - Activist, Civil Rights Activist - Biography

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Viola Gregg Liuzzo - Activist, Civil Rights Activist - Biography

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Viola Gregg Liuzzo was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. She was murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan for her efforts.

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Enjoy the best Malcolm X Quotes at BrainyQuote. Quotations by Malcolm X, American Activist, Born May 19, 1925. Share with your friends.

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Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam [ushistory.org]

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Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam [ushistory.org]

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Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam [ushistory.org]

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Yet although three members of the Nation of Islam were tried and found guilty for the killing, two of them maintained their innocence and decades of research has since cast doubt on the outcome of the case. Tens of thousands of declassified pages documenting government surveillance, infiltration and disruption of black leaders and organizations -- including Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam -- suggest the conclusions drawn by law enforcement were self-serving. Furthermore, irregularities in how investigators and prosecutors handled the case reflect at best gross negligence, and at worst something more sinister.

At the time of his death, Time magazine remembered Malcolm X unsympathetically as "a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief" and "an unashamed demagogue." But for those who had been paying closer attention to him, Malcolm X was an uncompromising advocate for the urban poor and working-class black America. Instead of advocating integration, he called for self-determination; instead of nonviolence in the face of violent anti-black attacks, he called for self-defense. He reserved moral appeals for other people committed to social justice; the government, on the other hand, he understood in terms of organized power -- to be challenged, disrupted and/or dismantled -- and sought to leverage alliances with newly independent African states to challenge that power.

It was his challenge to the organized power of the state that appealed to growing numbers of African-Americans, and it was this challenge that also attracted a close following among federal, state and local law enforcement. Under Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover's watch, the FBI kept close tabs on Malcolm's every move through the use of informants and agents. Even before Malcolm began attracting large audiences and widespread media coverage in the late 1950s and early '60s, the FBI reported on his efforts to organize Nation of Islam mosques around the country. One organizing meeting in a private home in Boston in 1954 had maybe a dozen or so people present; one of them reported to the FBI.

After Malcolm left the Nation of Islam in March 1964, agents pondered the prospect of a depoliticized more religious Malcolm, but still perceived him as a threat. On June 5, 1964, Hoover sent a telegram to the FBI's New York office that simply and plainly instructed, "Do something about Malcolm X enough of this black violence in NY." One wonders, what that "something" was.

In New York, the FBI's actions were complemented by, if not coordinated with, the New York Police Department's Bureau of Special Services, which regularly logged license plates of cars parked outside mosques, organizational meetings, business and homes. The actions of the police on the day of Malcolm's assassination are particularly noteworthy. Normally up to two dozen police were assigned at Malcolm X's rallies, but on February 21, just a week after his home had been firebombed, not one officer was stationed at the entrance to the Audubon ballroom where the meeting took place. And while two uniformed officers were inside the building, they remained in a smaller room, at a distance from the main event area.

The lack of a police presence was unusual and was compounded by internal compromises on the part of Malcolm's own security staff, which included at least one Bureau of Special Services agent who had infiltrated his organization. Reportedly at Malcolm's request, his security had abandoned the search procedure that had been customary at both Nation of Islam and Muslim Mosque/Organization of Afro-American Unity meetings. Without the search procedure, his armed assassins were able to enter the ballroom undetected. When the assassins stood up to shoot Malcolm, his security guards stationed at the front of the stage moved not to secure him, but to clear out of the way.

These anomalies, in and of themselves, could have been inconsequential. But combined, even if just by coincidence, they proved to be deadly, and allowed for one of the most prophetic revolutionary voices of the 20th century to be silenced. The investigation that followed was just as careless. The crime scene was not secured for extensive forensic analysis -- instead, it was cleaned up to allow for a scheduled dance to take place that afternoon, with bullet holes still in the wall!

For activists, of course, Malcolm X's death took on greater significance than law enforcement publicly expressed. Congress of Racial Equality Chairman James Farmer was among the first to suggest that Malcolm's murder was more than just an act of sectarian violence between two rival black organizations. "I believe this was a political killing," he asserted, in response to Malcolm's growing national profile within the civil rights movement. He called for a federal inquiry -- unbeknownst to Farmer, an ironic request given the level of covert federal oversight that was already in place.

Slowly, Farmer's doubts gained considerable traction. Author and journalist Louis Lomax, who had covered Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam on several occasions, put Malcolm X's assassination in context with Martin Luther King Jr.'s in "To Kill a Black Man" (1968). More than four decades ago, activist George Breitman was among the first to challenge the police version of who was responsible for Malcolm X's death. More recently, the work done at Columbia University's Malcolm X Project, culminating in Manning Marable's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," echoed these doubts and put at the forefront these unanswered questions about Malcolm X's murder.

These questions deserve answers. They call upon us to revisit not just the political significance of Malcolm X's life, but the implications of his murder. Our government especially deserves scrutiny for its covert information gathering, disinformation campaigns, and even violence waged against its own citizens. Fifty years later, we still have more to learn from Malcolm X's life, and his death, and our government's actions toward him.

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Yet although three members of the Nation of Islam were tried and found guilty for the killing, two of them maintained their innocence and decades of research has since cast doubt on the outcome of the case.

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Recalling his days in school, he used the time to further his education. It was during this period of self-enlightenment that Malcolm's brother Reginald would visit and discuss his recent conversion to the Muslim religion. Reginald belonged to the religious organization the Nation of Islam (NOI).

Intrigued, Malcolm began to study the teachings of NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad taught that white society actively worked to keep African-Americans from empowering themselves and achieving political, economic, and social success. Among other goals, the NOI fought for a state of their own, separate from one inhabited by white people. By the time he was paroled in 1952, Malcolm was a devoted follower with the new surname "X" (He considered "Little" a slave name and chose the "X" to signify his lost tribal name.).

Intelligent and articulate, Malcolm was appointed as a minister and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad also charged him with establishing new mosques in cities such as Detroit, Michigan, and Harlem. Malcolm utilized newspaper columns, as well as radio and television, to communicate the NOI's message across the United States. His charisma, drive, and conviction attracted an astounding number of new members. Malcolm was largely credited with increasing membership in the NOI from 500 in 1952 to 30,000 in 1963.

The crowds and controversy surrounding Malcolm made him a media magnet. He was featured in a weeklong television special with Mike Wallace in 1959, called The Hate That Hate Produced. The program explored the fundamentals of the NOI, and tracked Malcolm's emergence as one of its most important leaders. After the special, Malcolm was faced with the uncomfortable reality that his fame had eclipsed that of his mentor Elijah Muhammad. In addition to the media, Malcolm's vivid personality had captured the government's attention. As membership in the NOI continued to grow, FBI agents infiltrated the organization (one even acted as Malcolm's bodyguard) and secretly placed bugs, wiretaps, cameras, and other surveillance equipment to monitor the group's activities.
Malcolm's faith was dealt a crushing blow at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963. He learned that his mentor and leader, Elijah Muhammad, was secretly having relations with as many as six women within the Nation of Islam organization. As if that were not enough, Malcolm found out that some of these relationships had resulted in children.

Since joining the NOI, Malcolm had strictly adhered to the teachings of Muhammad, which included remaining celibate until his marriage to Betty Shabazz in 1958. Malcolm refused Muhammad's request to help cover up the affairs and subsequent children. He was deeply hurt by Muhammad's actions, because he had previously considered him a living prophet. Malcolm also felt guilty about the masses he had led to join the NOI, which he now felt was a fraudulent organization built on too many lies to ignore.

Shortly after his shocking discovery, Malcolm received criticism for a comment he made regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. "[Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon," said Malcolm. After the statement, Elijah Muhammad "silenced" Malcolm for 90 days. Malcolm, however, suspected he was silenced for another reason. In March 1964, Malcolm terminated his relationship with the NOI. Unable to look past Muhammad's deception, Malcolm decided to found his own religious organization, the Muslim Mosque, Inc.

That same year, Malcolm went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, which proved to be life altering for him. For the first time, Malcolm shared his thoughts and beliefs with different cultures and found the response to be overwhelmingly positive. When he returned, Malcolm said he had met "blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers." He returned to the United States with a new outlook on integration and a new hope for the future. This time when Malcolm spoke, instead of just preaching to African-Americans, he had a message for all races.

After Malcolm resigned his position in the Nation of Islam and renounced Elijah Muhammad, relations between the two had become increasingly volatile. FBI informants working undercover in the NOI warned officials that Malcolm had been marked for assassination-one undercover officer had even been ordered to help plant a bomb in Malcolm's car.

After repeated attempts on his life, Malcolm rarely traveled anywhere without bodyguards. On February 14, 1965 the home where Malcolm, Betty, and their four daughters lived in East Elmhurst, New York was firebombed. Luckily, the family escaped physical injury.

One week later, however, Malcolm's enemies were successful in their ruthless attempt. At a speaking engagement in the Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, three gunmen rushed Malcolm onstage. They shot him 15 times at close range. The 39-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Fifteen hundred people attended Malcolm's funeral in Harlem on February 27, 1965 at the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ (now Child's Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ). After the ceremony, friends took the shovels away from the waiting gravediggers and buried Malcolm themselves.

Later that year, Betty gave birth to their twin daughters.

Malcolm's assassins, Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson, were convicted of first-degree murder in March 1966. The three men were all members of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X's legacy has moved through generations as the subject of numerous documentaries, books, and movies. A tremendous resurgence of interest occurred in 1992 when director Spike Lee released the acclaimed movie, Malcolm X. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Denzel Washington) and Best Costume Design.

Malcolm X is buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

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Recalling his days in school, he used the time to further his education. It was during this period of self-enlightenment that Malcolm's brother Reginald would visit and discuss his recent conversion to the Muslim religion. Reginald belonged to the religious organization the Nation of Islam (NOI).

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Who Was Malcolm X?

Malcolm X was a minister, human rights activist and prominent Black nationalist leader who served as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam during the 1950s and 1960s. Due largely to his efforts, the Nation of Islam grew from a mere 400 members at the time he was released from prison in 1952 to 40,000 members by 1960.

A naturally gifted orator, Malcolm X exhorted Black people to cast off the shackles of racism "by any means necessary," including violence. The fiery civil rights leader broke with the Nation of Islam shortly before his assassination in 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, where he had been preparing to deliver a speech.

Early Life and Family

Malcolm X was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska. He was the fourth of eight children born to Louise, a homemaker, and Earl Little, a preacher who was also an active member of the local chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and avid supporter of Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey.

Due to Earl Little's civil rights activism, the family was subjected to frequent harassment from white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan and one of its splinter factions, the Black Legion. In fact, Malcolm Little had his first encounter with racism before he was even born.

"When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, 'a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home,'" Malcolm later remembered. "Brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out."

The harassment continued when Malcolm was four years old, and local Klan members smashed all of the family's windows. To protect his family, Earl Little moved them from Omaha to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1926 and then to Lansing, Michigan, in 1928.

However, the racism the family encountered in Lansing proved even greater than in Omaha. Shortly after the Littles moved in, a racist mob set their house on fire in 1929, and the town's all-white emergency responders refused to do anything.

"The white police and firemen came and stood around watching as the house burned to the ground," Malcolm X later remembered. Earl Little moved the family to East Lansing where he built a new home.

Two years later, in 1931, Earl Little's dead body was discovered lying across the municipal streetcar tracks. Although Malcolm X's family believed his father was murdered by white supremacists from whom he had received frequent death threats, the police officially ruled Earl Little's death a streetcar accident, thereby voiding the large life insurance policy he had purchased in order to provide for his family in the event of his death.

Malcolm X's mother never recovered from the shock and grief over her husband's death. In 1937, she was committed to a mental institution where she remained for the next 26 years. Malcolm and his siblings were separated and placed in foster homes.

Education

In 1938, Malcolm was kicked out of school and sent to a juvenile detention home in Mason, Michigan. The white couple who ran the home treated him well, but he wrote in his autobiography that he was treated more like a "pink poodle" or a "pet canary" than a human being.

He attended Mason High School where he was one of only a few Black students. He excelled academically and was well-liked by his classmates, who elected him class president.

A turning point in Malcolm Little's childhood came in 1939 when his English teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he answered that he wanted to be a lawyer. His teacher responded, "One of life's first needs is for us to be realistic ... you need to think of something you can be ... why don't you plan on carpentry?"

Having thus been told in no uncertain terms that there was no point in a Black child pursuing education, Malcolm X dropped out of school the following year, at the age of 15.

After quitting school, Malcolm X moved to Boston to live with his older half-sister, Ella, about whom he later recalled, "She was the first really proud Black woman I had ever seen in my life. She was plainly proud of her very dark skin. This was unheard of among Negroes in those days."

Ella landed Malcolm a job shining shoes at the Roseland Ballroom. However, out on his own on the streets of Boston, Malcolm X became acquainted with the city's criminal underground and soon turning to selling drugs.

He got another job as kitchen help on the Yankee Clipper train between New York and Boston and fell further into a life of drugs and crime. Sporting flamboyant pinstriped zoot suits, he frequented nightclubs and dance halls and turned more fully to crime to finance his lavish lifestyle.

Time in Jail

In 1946, Malcolm X was arrested on charges of larceny and sentenced to 10 years in jail. To pass the time during his incarceration, he read constantly, devouring books from the prison library in an attempt make up for the years of education he had missed by dropping out of high school.

Also while in prison, Malcolm was visited by several siblings who had joined the Nation of Islam, a small sect of Black Muslims who embraced the ideology of Black nationalism - the idea that in order to secure freedom, justice and equality, Black Americans needed to establish their own state entirely separate from white Americans.

He changed his name to Malcolm X and converted to the Nation of Islam before his release from prison in 1952.

Nation of Islam

Now a free man, Malcolm X traveled to Detroit, Michigan, where he worked with the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, to expand the movement's following among Black Americans nationwide.

Malcolm X became the minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem and Temple No. 11 in Boston, while also founding new temples in Hartford and Philadelphia. In 1960, he established a national newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, in order to further promote the message of the Nation of Islam.

Articulate, passionate and an inspirational orator, Malcolm X exhorted Black people to cast off the shackles of racism "by any means necessary," including violence. "You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-cheek revolution," he said. "There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution."

His militant proposals - a violent revolution to establish an independent Black nation - won Malcolm X large numbers of followers as well as many fierce critics. Due primarily to the efforts of Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam grew from a mere 400 members at the time he was released from prison in 1952, to 40,000 members by 1960.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S MALCOLM X FACT CARD

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

By the early 1960s, Malcolm X had emerged as a leading voice of a radicalized wing of the civil rights movement, presenting a dramatic alternative to Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a racially-integrated society achieved by peaceful means.

Dr. King was highly critical of what he viewed as Malcolm X's destructive demagoguery. "I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice," King once said.

Becoming a Mainstream Sunni Muslim

A rupture with Elijah Muhammad proved much more traumatic. In 1963, Malcolm X became deeply disillusioned when he learned that his hero and mentor had violated many of his own teachings, most flagrantly by carrying on many extramarital affairs; Muhammad had, in fact, fathered several children out of wedlock.

Malcolm's feelings of betrayal, combined with Muhammad's anger over Malcolm's insensitive comments regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, led Malcolm X to leave the Nation of Islam in 1964.

That same year, Malcolm X embarked on an extended trip through North Africa and the Middle East. The journey proved to be both a political and spiritual turning point in his life. He learned to place the American civil rights movement within the context of a global anti-colonial struggle, embracing socialism and pan-Africanism.

Malcolm X also made the Hajj, the traditional Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, during which he converted to traditional Islam and again changed his name, this time to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

After his epiphany at Mecca, Malcolm X returned to the United States less angry and more optimistic about the prospects for a peaceful resolution to America's race problems. "The true brotherhood I had seen had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision," he said. "America is the first country ... that can actually have a bloodless revolution."

Assassination

Just as Malcolm X appeared to be embarking on an ideological transformation with the potential to dramatically alter the course of the civil rights movement, he was assassinated.

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X took the stage for a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. He had just begun addressing the room when multiple men rushed the stage and began firing guns.

Struck numerous times at close range, Malcolm X was declared dead after arriving at a nearby hospital. Three members of the Nation of Islam were tried and sentenced to life in prison for murdering the activist.
READ MORE: The Assassination of Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

In the early 1960s, Malcolm X began working with acclaimed author Alex Haley on an autobiography. The book details Malcolm X's life experiences and his evolving views on racial pride, Black nationalism and pan-Africanism.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published in 1965 after his assassination to near-universal praise. The New York Times called it a "brilliant, painful, important book," and Time magazine listed it as one of the 10 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.

Movies

Malcolm X has been the subject of numerous movies, stage plays and other works, and has been portrayed by actors like James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman and Mario Van Peebles.

In 1992, Spike Lee directed Denzel Washington in the title role of his movie Malcolm X. Both the film and Washington's portrayal of Malcolm X received wide acclaim and were nominated for several awards, including two Academy Awards.

Wife and Children

Malcolm X married Betty Shabazz in 1958. The couple had six daughters.

Legacy

In the immediate aftermath of Malcolm X's death, commentators largely ignored his recent spiritual and political transformation and criticized him as a violent rabble-rouser.

But especially after the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, he will be remembered for underscoring the value of a truly free populace by demonstrating the great lengths to which human beings will go to secure their freedom.

"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression," he said. "Because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action."

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Malcolm X was a minister, human rights activist and prominent Black nationalist leader who served as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam during the 1950s and 1960s. Due largely to his efforts, the Nation of Islam grew from a mere 400 members at the time he was released from prison in 1952 to 40,000 members by 1960.

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Malcolm X: Children, Assassination & Quotes | HISTORY

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Malcolm X, a civil rights leader and a Nation of Islam minister, was assassinated in 1965, the same year “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” was published.

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In 1861, the Confederate War Department had established a "River Defense Fleet" in New Orleans, consisting of fourteen commercial riverboats converted into rams by strengthening their bows and stacking cotton bales on their decks as a form of armor (giving birth to the term "cottonclad").

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Civil War: Battle of the Ironclads: Monitor and Merrimack

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Civil War: Battle of the Ironclads: Monitor and Merrimack

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Civil War: Battle of the Ironclads: Monitor and Merrimack

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Kids learn about the Battle of the Ironclads: Monitor and Merrimack during the Civil War including the commanders, dates, before the fight, results, and facts.

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American Civil War Ironclad warship CSS Merrimack in RC - YouTube

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American Civil War Ironclad warship CSS Merrimack in RC - YouTube

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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American Civil War Ironclad warship CSS Merrimack in RC

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Ironclad warships were another innovation of the American Civil War. Like submarines and balloons, the ironclad war ship wasn't invented during the Civil War, but the Civil War was the first time ironclads saw widespread, effective use.

In 1592, the Korean Royal Navy launched what some believe to be the first ironclad warship. It was what is known as a "turtle ship," because of its rounded "shell" decking which protected the crew. While it is known that the deck was covered with iron spikes to repel boarders, it is still argued whether there was iron plating on the deck or not.

Other ships sometimes referred to as the "first ironclad" include the Dutch Finis Bellis (1585, meaning: End of War) and the Santa Anna (1522) of the Knights Hospitaller. These claims have problems as well. The Finis Bellis was a complete failure which just ran aground, and it is not certain whether it even had iron plating or not. The Santa Anna on the other hand was a very successful ship, but it had lead plating not iron plating. Therefore it cannot really be called an ironclad warship. Also, it is not clear if the lead was intended as armor or if it was simply a means of ensuring water-tightness.

(Click any photo on this page to enlarge .)

While these ship's status as ironclads is in dispute, there is no doubt that there were ironclad warships built and in use before the American Civil War. In 1859, the French Navy launched the first true ironclad warship, the La Gloire. The British Royal Navy responded by launching the ironclad HMS Warrior in 1860. Both nations had at least 16 ironclads either in service or under construction by 1862.

The first actual use of an ironclad warship in battle was not seen until October 12, 1861, when the CSS Manassas (left) participated in the Battle of the Head of Passes on the Mississippi River delta.

The success of ironclads during the American Civil War showed that the age of the wooden battleship had passed. For the final nail in the coffin of the world's wooden navies we can look to the first battle between two ironclads at the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862. Wooden warships were now obsolete.

At the outbreak of the war, the US Navy did not have any ironclad warships, but most of the US Navy remained loyal to the Union. To overcome this disadvantage, the Confederacy decide to pursue the construction and purchase of ironclads as a way to gain some sort of naval advantage.

In response to this effort, the Union began building their own ironclads. This included two main styles, the ocean-going Monitor class ironclads and City class ironclads used for river warfare.

The Confederacy made a number of ironclads by armoring wooden ships. A couple of the most famous were the CSS Manassas and the CSS Virginia. The Manassas was converted from the old ice-breaking steamer Enoch Train, and was the first ironclad to engage an enemy in battle on October 12, 1861. She went on to face Union ships on their way to New Orleans. In this fight, she inflicted damage on a couple of ships, but ran aground and was sunk in April 1862. The Virginia was converted from the old USS Merrimack at Norfolk, Virginia. She wreaked havoc on the Union's wooden warships in the Battle of Hampton Roads, sinking both the USS Cumberland and the USS Congress. The arrival of the USS Monitor led to the first meeting of two ironclads on March 9, 1862, which resulted in a draw. In May 1862, the Virginia was stranded alone in the James river due to her deep draft and was scuttled to prevent her from falling into Union hands.

The Confederacy also built a number of ironclads from the keel up. My favorite among these was the CSS Albemarle (right). The Albemarle was built in North Carolina on the Roanoke River by nineteen-year-old Gilbert Elliott. Her first action was in April 1864. The Albemarle was moving down the Roanoke when she was attacked by two Union steamers. She rammed and sank the first one. The second steamer retired after her first shot rebounded off the Albemarle's armour and killed the Union commander. In May the Albemarle bolstered her image of being unsinkable...

On this occasion, she withstood the attack of four Union ships mounting more than sixty guns total. She disabled one Union ship and absorbed more than 500 shots before steaming back home. She was finally sunk in October by a steamer with a spar torpedo during a Union night raid made for that purpose.

Confederates also tried to buy ironclads from the European powers, but it never worked very well. Most were seized before they could ever be delivered. In a secret deal one ironclad, the CSS Stonewall, was purchased without the knowledge of the French government, but this ship was not purchased until January 1865 and did not arrive before the end of the war.

The Union's first ironclad warship was of the City class built by James B. Eads for operation on the rivers of the western front of the Civil War. One of those first ships was the USS Cairo (left) launched January 25,1862. Not only was the Cairo one of the first Union ironclads, she was also the first armored warship to be destroyed by a naval mine. The Cairo was sunk on the Yazoo River while clearing mines in preparation for the attack on Haines Bluff, Mississippi. Eads' City class ironclads participated in almost every naval engagement in the west from February 1862 until the end of the war.

After Union spies revealed the fact that the Confederacy was working on the CSS Virginia in Norfolk, the Union Navy flew into action. Union Navy leaders knew that if they did not have a counter for the , it would be able to travel with impunity. Therefore, an ironclad was built according to the design of Mr. John Ericsson. This ship was called the USS Monitor and was launched on January 30,1862.

The Monitor's duty was to race to Hampton Roads and prevent the Virginia from destroying the Union blockade there. When she arrived she participated in the first battle between two ironclad warships; although the battle was a draw, she was successful in saving the remainder of the blockade.

The was so successful, that the Union built a fleet of fifty Monitor class ironclads. These ships served a major role in the Union Navy for the remainder of the war.

While the first ironclad warships may predate the American Civil War, the Union and Confederate navies pioneered both the use and design of these powerful ships.

The exploits of ironclad warships, on both sides, proved without a doubt that the age of the wooden ship-of-war was over. The Battle of Mobile Bay (right) really drives that point home. Despite having 11 wooden ships, the Union needed its Monitor class ironclads to take a large confederate ironclad, the CSS Tennessee. Even though they weren't invented during the war, Civil War ironclad warships ushered in a new era in naval warfare.

By the end of the Civil War, the rest of the world had taken notice. Everyone was tying to bring their navies up to date as the old wooden ships became obsolete, and 1864 marked the last major naval engagement between squadrons of wooden ships.
American Civil War Story-Home Civil War Inventions

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Ironclad warships were another innovation of the American Civil War. Like submarines and balloons, the ironclad war ship wasn't invented during the Civil War, but the Civil War was the first time ironclads saw widespread, effective use. In 1592, the Korean Royal Navy launched what some believe to be the first ironclad warship.

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A brief description of the developments in naval technology during the Civil War Era.

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By using the PBIS Assessment application to enter data into our databases, you are giving approval to share all entered data with your local and state coordinators, and in anonymous format, with the University of Oregon Technical Assistance Center projects for evaluation and research purposes.

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6 Year Old Ruby Bridges "Forgive Them Father" - Very Moving Testimony - YouTube

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6 Year Old Ruby Bridges "Forgive Them Father" - Very Moving Testimony - YouTube

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6 Year Old Ruby Bridges "Forgive Them Father" - Very Moving Testimony

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CONNECT / CONTACT: Email me at - endtimesnewsministry@hotmail.com Twitter - @datpastord Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/endtimesnewsministry Write to Pastor D: End Times News Ministry 349b Prince Regent Lane London, E16 3JL TO DONATE: To donate towards the ministry please use one of the following methods: (All donations, unless otherwise specified, are used to feed, clothe and educate the Roma children in the gypsy ghetto in Bulgaria, where 80% are illiterate, and living conditions are abysmal.

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Ruby Bridges Biography | Classroom Video for Kids - YouTube

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Ruby Bridges Biography | Classroom Video for Kids - YouTube

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Facts about Ruby Bridges for Kids | Biography Video

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The First Black Student Ever at an All-White Public School in the South (1999) - YouTube

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The First Black Student Ever at an All-White Public School in the South (1999) - YouTube

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The First Black Student Ever at an All-White Public School in the South (1999)

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Ruby Bridges was the first African American child to integrate an all-white public elementary school in the South. She later became a civil rights activist.

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Reconstruction and 1876: Crash Course US History #22 - YouTube

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Reconstruction and 1876: Crash Course US History #22 - YouTube

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Reconstruction and 1876: Crash Course US History #22

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The Atlantic Slave Trade: Crash Course World History #24 - YouTube

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The Atlantic Slave Trade: Crash Course World History #24 - YouTube

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The Atlantic Slave Trade: Crash Course World History #24

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The Civil War, Part I: Crash Course US History #20 - YouTube

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The Civil War, Part I: Crash Course US History #20 - YouTube

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The Civil War, Part I: Crash Course US History #20

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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Black History Timeline
Timeline Description: An important part of American history is black history. Many of the first black people that came to America were slaves and even those that were free were not treated fairly. However, many black people overcame that discrimination and contributed important achievements to history.

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An important part of American history is black history. Many of the first black people that came to America were slaves and even those that were free were not treated fairly. However, many black people overcame that discrimination and contributed important achievements to history.

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Black History Milestones - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Black History Milestones - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Black history in the United States is a rich and varied chronicle of slavery and liberty, oppression and progress, segregation and achievement. Though captive and free Africans were likely present in the Americas by the 1400s, the kidnapped men, women and children from Africa who were sold first to European colonists in 1619, and later to American citizens, became symbolic of the early years of Black history in the United States.

Slavery Comes to North America, 1619

To satisfy the labor needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labor source: enslaved Africans. After 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 Africans ashore at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, slavery spread quickly through the American colonies. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of its most valuable resource-its healthiest and ablest men and women.

Many northern states had abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, but the institution was absolutely vital to the South, where Black people constituted a large minority of the population and the economy relied on the production of crops like tobacco and cotton. Congress outlawed the import of new enslaved people in 1808, but the enslaved population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years, and by 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Rise of the Cotton Industry, 1793

In the years immediately following the Revolutionary War, the rural South-the region where slavery had taken the strongest hold in North America-faced an economic crisis. The soil used to grow tobacco, then the leading cash crop, was exhausted, while products such as rice and indigo failed to generate much profit. As a result, the price of enslaved people was dropping, and the continued growth of slavery seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of spinning and weaving had revolutionized the textile industry in England, and the demand for American cotton soon became insatiable. Production was limited, however, by the laborious process of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers, which had to be completed by hand.

In 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney came up with a solution to the problem: The cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds, could be hand-powered or, on a large scale, harnessed to a horse or powered by water. The cotton gin was widely copied, and within a few years the South would transition from a dependence on the cultivation of tobacco to that of cotton.

As the growth of the cotton industry led inexorably to an increased demand for enslaved Africans, the prospect of slave rebellion-such as the one that triumphed in Haiti in 1791-drove slaveholders to make increased efforts to prevent a similar event from happening in the South. Also in 1793, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal crime to assist an enslaved person trying to escape. Though it was difficult to enforce from state to state, especially with the growth of abolitionist feeling in the North, the law helped enshrine and legitimize slavery as an enduring American institution.

Nat Turner's Revolt, August 1831

In August 1831, Nat Turner struck fear into the hearts of white Southerners by leading the only effective slave rebellion in U.S. history. Born on a small plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner inherited a passionate hatred of slavery from his African-born mother and came to see himself as anointed by God to lead his people out of bondage.

In early 1831, Turner took a solar eclipse as a sign that the time for revolution was near, and on the night of August 21, he and a small band of followers killed his owners, the Travis family, and set off toward the town of Jerusalem, where they planned to capture an armory and gather more recruits. The group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black people, killed some 60 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them just outside Jerusalem. Some 100 enslaved people, including innocent bystanders, lost their lives in the struggle. Turner escaped and spent six weeks on the run before he was captured, tried and hanged.

Oft-exaggerated reports of the insurrection-some said that hundreds of white people had been killed-sparked a wave of anxiety across the South. Several states called special emergency sessions of the legislature, and most strengthened their codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people. While supporters of slavery pointed to the Turner rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them, the increased repression of southern Black people would strengthen anti-slavery feeling in the North through the 1860s and intensify the regional tensions building toward civil war.

Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad, 1831

The early abolition movement in North America was fueled both by enslaved people's efforts to liberate themselves and by groups of white settlers, such as the Quakers, who opposed slavery on religious or moral grounds. Though the lofty ideals of the Revolutionary era invigorated the movement, by the late 1780s it was in decline, as the growing southern cotton industry made slavery an ever more vital part of the national economy. In the early 19th century, however, a new brand of radical abolitionism emerged in the North, partly in reaction to Congress' passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the tightening of codes in most southern states. One of its most eloquent voices was William Lloyd Garrison, a crusading journalist from Massachusetts, who founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and became known as the most radical of America's antislavery activists.

Antislavery northerners-many of them free Black people-had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s called the Underground Railroad.

Dred Scott Case, March 6, 1857

Upon his return to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom on the basis that his temporary removal to free soil had made him legally free. The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was an enslaved person and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue.

According to the Court, Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights when dealing with enslaved people in the territories. The verdict effectively declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states.

While much of the South rejoiced, seeing the verdict as a clear victory, antislavery northerners were furious. One of the most prominent abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, was cautiously optimistic, however, wisely predicting that-"This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the whole slave system."

John Brown's Raid, October 16, 1859

On the night of October 16, 1859, he led a small band of less than 50 men in a raid against the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Their aim was to capture enough ammunition to lead a large operation against Virginia's slaveholders. Brown's men, including several Black people, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. His trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause. Just as Brown's courage turned thousands of previously indifferent northerners against slavery, his violent actions convinced slave owners in the South beyond doubt that abolitionists would go to any lengths to destroy the "peculiar institution." Rumors spread of other planned insurrections, and the South reverted to a semi-war status. Only the election of the anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 remained before the southern states would begin severing ties with the Union, sparking the bloodiest conflict in American history.

Civil War and Emancipation, 1861

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts that had been intensifying between North and South over the course of four decades erupted into civil war, with 11 southern states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America. Though President Abraham Lincoln 's antislavery views were well established, and his election as the nation's first Republican president had been the catalyst that pushed the first southern states to secede in late 1860, the Civil War at its outset was not a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln sought first and foremost to preserve the Union, and he knew that few people even in the North-let alone the border slave states still loyal to Washington-would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

By the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer. Five days after the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation; on January 1, 1863, he made it official that enslaved people within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure, and as such he did not go so far as to free enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists.

The Post-Slavery South, 1865

The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied-on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." During Reconstruction, Black Americans won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress. Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt control slipping ever further away from them. The white protective societies that arose during this period-the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)-sought to disenfranchise Black voters by using voter suppression and intimidation as well as more extreme violence. By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, Black Americans had seen dishearteningly little improvement in their economic and social status, and what political gains they had made had been wiped away by the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region.

'Separate But Equal,' 1896

As Reconstruction drew to a close and the forces of white supremacy regained control from carpetbaggers (northerners who moved South) and freed Black people, Southern state legislatures began enacting the first segregation laws, known as the "Jim Crow" laws. Taken from a much-copied minstrel routine written by a white actor who performed often in blackface, the name "Jim Crow" came to serve as a general derogatory term for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. By 1885, most southern states had laws requiring separate schools for Black and white students, and by 1900, "persons of color" were required to be separated from white people in railroad cars and depots, hotels, theaters, restaurants, barber shops and other establishments. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case that represented the first major test of the meaning of the 14th Amendment's provision of full and equal citizenship to African Americans.

By an 8-1 majority, the Court upheld a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars. By asserting that the equal protection clause was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups, the Court established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would thereafter be used for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. Plessy vs. Ferguson stood as the overriding judicial precedent in civil rights cases until 1954, when it was reversed by the Court's verdict in Brown v. Board of Education.

Washington, Carver & Du Bois, 1900

As the 19th century came to an end and segregation took ever stronger hold in the South, many African Americans saw self-improvement, especially through education, as the single greatest opportunity to escape the indignities they suffered. Many Black people looked to Booker T. Washington, the author of the bestselling Up From Slavery (1900), as an inspiration. As president of Alabama's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Washington urged Black Americans to acquire the kind of industrial or vocational training (such as farming, mechanics and domestic service) that would give them the necessary skills to carve out a niche for themselves in the U.S. economy. George Washington Carver, another formerly enslaved man and the head of Tuskegee's agriculture department, helped liberate the South from its reliance on cotton by convincing farmers to plant peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes in order to rejuvenate the exhausted soil.

By 1940, peanuts had become the second cash crop in the South. Like Washington, Carver had little interest in racial politics, and was celebrated by many white Americans as a shining example of a modest, industrious Black man. While Washington and Carver represented a philosophy of accommodation to white supremacy, another prominent Black educator, the Harvard-trained historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, became a leading voice in the growing Black protest movement during the first half of the 20th century. In his 1903 book Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois spoke strongly against Washington's advocacy of industrial education, which he saw as too narrow and economically focused, and stressed the importance of higher education for African Americans.

NAACP Founded, 1909

First established in Chicago, the NAACP had expanded to more than 400 locations by 1921. One of its earliest programs was a crusade against lynching and other lawless acts. Those efforts-including a nationwide protest of D.W. Griffiths' silent film Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan-would continue into the 1920s, playing a crucial role in drastically reducing the number of lynchings carried out in the United States. Du Bois edited the NAACP's official magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934, publishing many of the leading voices in African American literature and politics and helping fuel the spread of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, 1916

Born in Jamaica, the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) there in 1914; two years later, he brought it to the United States. Garvey appealed to the racial pride of African Americans, exalting blackness as strong and beautiful. As racial prejudice was so ingrained in white civilization, Garvey claimed, it was futile for Black people to appeal to white peoples' sense of justice and democratic principles. Their only hope, according to him, was to flee America and return to Africa to build a country of their own. After an unsuccessful appeal to the League of Nations to settle a colony in Africa and failed negotiations with Liberia, Garvey announced the formation of the Empire of Africa in 1921, with himself as provisional president.

Other African American leaders, notably W.E.B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), criticized Garvey and his "Back to Africa" movement; he was openly contemptuous of them in return. There was no denying the movement's appeal, however. Garvey's boast of 6 million followers in 1923 was probably exaggerated, but even his critics admitted that the UNIA had some 500,000 members. In 1923, the U.S. government successfully prosecuted and convicted Garvey for mail fraud in connection with selling stock in his Black Star Line shipping company. After serving a two-year jail sentence, Garvey was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and immediately deported; he died in London in 1940.

Harlem Renaissance, 1920

In the 1920s, the great migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North sparked an African American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities throughout the North and West. Also known as the Black Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics turned their attention seriously to African American literature, music, art and politics. Blues singer Bessie Smith, pianist Jelly Roll Morton, bandleader Louis Armstrong, composer Duke Ellington, dancer Josephine Baker and actor Paul Robeson were among the leading entertainment talents of the Harlem Renaissance, while Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were some of its most eloquent writers.

There was a flip side to this greater exposure, however: Emerging Black writers relied heavily on white-owned publications and publishing houses, while in Harlem's most famous cabaret, the Cotton Club, the preeminent Black entertainers of the day played to exclusively white audiences. In 1926, a controversial bestseller about Harlem life by the white novelist Carl von Vechten exemplified the attitude of many white urban sophisticates, who looked to Black culture as a window into a more "primitive" and "vital" way of life. W.E.B. Du Bois, for one, railed against Van Vechten's novel and criticized works by Black writers, such as McKay's novel Home to Harlem, that he saw as reinforcing negative stereotypes of Black people. With the onset of the Great Depression, as organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League switched their focus to the economic and political problems facing Black Americans, the Harlem Renaissance drew to a close. Its influence had stretched around the world, opening the doors of mainstream culture to Black artists and writers.

African Americans in WWII, 1941

During World War II, many African Americans were ready to fight for what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the "Four Freedoms"-freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear-even while they themselves lacked those freedoms at home. More than 3 million Black Americans would register for service during the war, with some 500,000 seeing action overseas. According to War Department policy, enlisted Black and white people were organized into separate units. Frustrated Black servicemen were forced to combat racism even as they sought to further U.S. war aims; this became known as the "Double V" strategy, for the two victories they sought to win.

The war's first African American hero emerged from the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Dorie Miller, a young Navy steward on the U.S.S. West Virginia, carried wounded crew members to safety and manned a machine gun post, shooting down several Japanese planes. In the spring of 1943, graduates of the first all-Black military aviation program, created at the Tuskegee Institute in 1941, headed to North Africa as the 99th Pursuit Squadron. Their commander, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., later became one of the first African American generals (his father- General Benjamin O. Davis Sr.-was the first). The Tuskegee Airmen saw combat against German and Italian troops, flew more than 3,000 missions, and served as a great source of pride for many Black Americans.

Aside from celebrated accomplishments like these, overall gains were slow, and maintaining high morale among black forces was difficult due to the continued discrimination they faced. In July 1948, President Harry S. Truman finally integrated the U.S. Armed Forces under an executive order mandating that "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin."

Jackie Robinson, 1947

By 1900, the unwritten color line barring Black players from white teams in professional baseball was strictly enforced. Jackie Robinson, a sharecropper's son from Georgia, joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945 after a stint in the U.S. Army (he earned an honorable discharge after facing a court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus). His play caught the attention of Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had been considering bringing an end to segregation in baseball. Rickey signed Robinson to a Dodgers farm team that same year and two years later moved him up, making Robinson the first African American player to play on a major league team.

Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947; he led the National League in stolen bases that season, earning Rookie of the Year honors. Over the next nine years, Robinson compiled a .311 batting average and led the Dodgers to six league championships and one World Series victory. Despite his success on the field, however, he encountered hostility from both fans and other players. Members of the St. Louis Cardinals even threatened to strike if Robinson played; baseball commissioner Ford Frick settled the question by threatening to suspend any player who went on strike.

After Robinson's historic breakthrough, baseball was steadily integrated, with professional basketball and tennis following suit in 1950. His groundbreaking achievement transcended sports, and as soon as he signed the contract with Rickey, Robinson became one of the most visible African Americans in the country, and a figure that Black people could look to as a source of pride, inspiration and hope. As his success and fame grew, Robinson began speaking out publicly for Black equality. In 1949, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discuss the appeal of Communism to Black Americans, surprising them with a ferocious condemnation of the racial discrimination embodied by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the South: "The white public should start toward real understanding by appreciating that every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he's going to use every bit of intelligence...to stop it..."

Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment's mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in the case, was one of almost 200 people from five different states who had joined related NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court since 1938.

The landmark verdict reversed the "separate but equal" doctrine the Court had established with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which it determined that equal protection was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups. In the Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren famously declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Though the Court's ruling applied specifically to public schools, it implied that other segregated facilities were also unconstitutional, thus striking a heavy blow to the Jim Crow South. As such, the ruling provoked serious resistance, including a "Southern manifesto" issued by southern congressmen denouncing it. The decision was also difficult to enforce, a fact that became increasingly clear in May 1955 when the Court remanded the case to the courts of origin due to "their proximity to local conditions" and urged "a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance." Though some southern schools moved towards integration relatively without incident, in other cases-notably in Arkansas and Alabama-enforcing Brown would require federal intervention.

Emmett Till, August 1955

In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till had recently arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit relatives. While in a grocery store, he allegedly whistled and made a flirtatious remark to the white woman behind the counter, violating the strict racial codes of the Jim Crow South. Three days later, two white men-the woman's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam-dragged Till from his great uncle's house in the middle of the night. After beating the boy, they shot him to death and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The two men confessed to kidnapping Till but were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white, all-male jury after barely an hour of deliberations. Never brought to justice, Bryant and Milam later shared vivid details of how they killed Till with a journalist for Look magazine, which published their confessions under the headline "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi."

Till's mother held an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago, hoping to bring public attention to the brutal murder. Thousands of mourners attended, and Jet magazine published a photo of the corpse. International outrage over the crime and the verdict helped fuel the civil rights movement: just three months after Emmett Till's body was found, and a month after a Mississippi grand jury refused to indict Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges, a citywide bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama would begin the movement in earnest.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, December 1955

On December 1, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man. Parks refused and was arrested for violating the city's racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that Black passengers sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats were full. Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, was also the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. As she later explained: "I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen."

Four days after Parks' arrest, an activist organization called the Montgomery Improvement Association-led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. -spearheaded a boycott of the city's municipal bus company. Because African Americans made up some 70 percent of the bus company's riders at the time, and the great majority of Montgomery's Black citizens supported the bus boycott, its impact was immediate.

About 90 participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, including King, were indicted under a law forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business. Found guilty, King immediately appealed the decision. Meanwhile, the boycott stretched on for more than a year, and the bus company struggled to avoid bankruptcy. On November 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision declaring the bus company's segregation seating policy unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. King, called off the boycott on December 20, and Rosa Parks-known as the "mother of the civil rights movement"-would be one of the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Central High School Integrated, September 1957

Although the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools illegal in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the decision was extremely difficult to enforce, as 11 southern states enacted resolutions interfering with, nullifying or protesting school desegregation. In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful 1956 reelection campaign. The following September, after a federal court ordered the desegregation of Central High School, located in the state capital of Little Rock, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the school. He was later forced to call off the guard, and in the tense standoff that followed, TV cameras captured footage of white mobs converging on the " Little Rock Nine " outside the high school. For millions of viewers throughout the country, the unforgettable images provided a vivid contrast between the angry forces of white supremacy and the quiet, dignified resistance of African American students.

After an appeal by the local congressman and mayor of Little Rock to stop the violence, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the state's National Guard and sent 1,000 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School. The nine Black students entered the school under heavily armed guard, marking the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had provided protection for Black Americans against racial violence. Not done fighting, Faubus closed all of Little Rock's high schools in the fall of 1958 rather than permit integration. A federal court struck down this act, and four of the nine students returned, under police protection, after the schools were reopened in 1959.

Loving v. Virginia Ruling, 1958

Mildred and Richard Loving were one of the first interracial couples legally married in the United States and their union marked a pivotal moment in marriage rights for mixed-race families. At 2 a.m. on July 11, 1958, Mildred Jeter was lying next to her husband Richard Loving, when police began knocking on their door, demanding to know about the nature of their relationship. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia and the newly-wed couple was guilty of breaking the law.

Richard spent the night in prison, and his sister had to pay a $1,000 bond for his release. Mildred, however, spent three nights in a small women's cell and was released to her father. The couple was then given a choice: spend 25 years in prison or leave Virginia. They chose exile and abandoned the state for nine years, making periodic trips back to visit family while trying to avoid being detected.

Amidst the civil rights movement, ACLU lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop decided to take on the couple's case. They tried to have the case vacated and the ruling overturned without success. They then tried appealing the decision to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, but the court ultimately stuck to the original ruling. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where a majority of members decided on June 12, 1967, that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

Sit-In Movement and Founding of SNCC, 1960

On February 1, 1960, four Black students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter in a local branch of Woolworth's and ordered coffee. Refused service due to the counter's "whites-only" policy, they stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with other students. Heavily covered by the news media, the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people engaged in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, on beaches, in hotels and other establishments. Though many protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate impact, forcing Woolworth's-among other establishments-to change their segregationist policies.

To capitalize on the sit-in movement's increasing momentum, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. Over the next few years, SNCC broadened its influence, organizing so-called "Freedom Rides" through the South in 1961 and the historic March on Washington in 1963; it also joined the NAACP in pushing for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later, SNCC would mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War. As its members faced increased violence, SNCC became more militant, and by the late 1960s it was advocating the "Black Power" philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC's chairman from 1966-67) and his successor, H. Rap Brown. By the early 1970s, SNCC was effectively disbanded.

CORE and Freedom Rides, May 1961

Founded in 1942 by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE) sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action. In its early years, CORE staged a sit-in at a Chicago coffee shop (a precursor to the successful sit-in movement of 1960) and organized a "Journey of Reconciliation," in which a group of Black and white activists rode together on a bus through the upper South in 1947, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel.

Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort the riders to Jackson, Mississippi, but images of the bloodshed made the worldwide news, and the freedom rides continued. In September, under pressure from CORE and other civil rights organizations, as well as from the attorney general's office, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that all passengers on interstate bus carriers should be seated without regard to race and carriers could not mandate segregated terminals.

Integration of Ole Miss, September 1962

By the end of the 1950s, African Americans had begun to be admitted in small numbers to white colleges and universities in the South without too much incident. In 1962, however, a crisis erupted when the state-funded University of Mississippi (known as "Ole Miss") admitted a Black man, James Meredith. After nine years in the Air Force, Meredith had studied at the all-Black Jackson State College and applied repeatedly to Ole Miss with no success. With the aid of the NAACP, Meredith filed a lawsuit alleging that the university had discriminated against him because of his race. In September 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Meredith's favor, but state officials including Governor Ross Barnett vowed to block his admission.

When Meredith arrived at Ole Miss under the protection of federal forces including U.S. marshals, a mob of more than 2,000 people formed on the Oxford, Mississippi campus. Two people were killed and close to 200 injured in the ensuing chaos, which ended only after President Kennedy's administration sent some 31,000 troops to restore order. Meredith went on to graduate from Ole Miss in 1963, but the struggle to integrate higher education continued. Later that year, Governor George Wallace blocked the enrollment of a Black student at the University of Alabama, pledging to "stand in the schoolhouse door." Though Wallace was eventually forced by the federalized National Guard to integrate the university, he became a prominent symbol of the ongoing resistance to desegregation nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education.

Birmingham Church Bombed, 1963

Governor George Wallace was a leading foe of desegregation, and Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Birmingham had become a leading focus of the civil rights movement by the spring of 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation.

While in jail, King wrote a letter to local white ministers justifying his decision not to call off the demonstrations in the face of continued bloodshed at the hands of local law enforcement officials, led by Birmingham's police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was published in the national press even as images of police brutality against protesters in Birmingham-including children being attacked by police dogs and knocked off their feet by fire hoses-sent shock waves around the world, helping to build crucial support for the civil rights movement.

'I Have a Dream,' 1963

On August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people-both Black and white-participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest demonstration in the history of the nation's capital and the most significant display of the civil rights movement's growing strength. After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation.

The last leader to appear was the Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who spoke eloquently of the struggle facing Black Americans and the need for continued action and nonviolent resistance. " I have a dream," King intoned, expressing his faith that one day white and Black people would stand together as equals, and there would be harmony between the races: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

King's improvised sermon continued for nine minutes after the end of his prepared remarks, and his stirring words would be remembered as undoubtedly one of the greatest speeches in American history. At its conclusion, King quoted an "old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'" King's speech served as a defining moment for the civil rights movement, and he soon emerged as its most prominent figure.

Civil Rights Act of 1964, July 1964

At its most basic level, the act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures and authorized the U.S. Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school desegregation. In a televised ceremony on July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law using 75 pens; he presented one of them to King, who counted it among his most prized possessions.

Freedom Summer and the 'Mississippi Burning' Murders, June 1964

In the summer of 1964, civil rights organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) urged white students from the North to travel to Mississippi, where they helped register Black voters and build schools for Black children. The organizations believed the participation of white students in the so-called "Freedom Summer" would bring increased visibility to their efforts. The summer had barely begun, however, when three volunteers-Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a Black Mississippian-disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive FBI investigation (code-named "Mississippi Burning") their bodies were discovered on August 4 buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Although the culprits in the case-white supremacists who included the county's deputy sheriff-were soon identified, the state made no arrests. The Justice Department eventually indicted 19 men for violating the three volunteers' civil rights (the only charge that would give the federal government jurisdiction over the case) and after a three-year-long legal battle, the men finally went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. In October 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the defendants guilty and acquitted the other nine. Though the verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory-it was the first time anyone in Mississippi had been convicted for a crime against a civil rights worker-the judge in the case gave out relatively light sentences, and none of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.

Selma to Montgomery March, March 1965

In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register Black voters in the South. Alabama's governor, George Wallace, was a notorious opponent of desegregation, and the local county sheriff had led a steadfast opposition to Black voter registration drives: Only 2 percent of Selma's eligible Black voters had managed to register. In February, an Alabama state trooper shot a young African American demonstrator in nearby Marion, and the SCLC announced a massive protest march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.

On March 7, 600 marchers got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma when they were attacked by state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing civil rights and religious leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest. King himself led another attempt on March 9, but turned the marchers around when state troopers again blocked the road; that night, a group of segregationists fatally beat a protester, the young white minister James Reeb.

On March 21, after a U.S. district court ordered Alabama to permit the Selma-Montgomery march, some 2,000 marchers set out on the three-day journey, this time protected by U.S. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces under federal control. "No tide of racism can stop us," King proclaimed from the steps of the state capitol building, addressing the nearly 50,000 supporters-Black and white-who met the marchers in Montgomery.

Malcolm X Shot to Death, February 1965

In 1952, the former Malcolm Little was released from prison after serving six years on a robbery charge; while incarcerated, he had joined the Nation of Islam (NOI, commonly known as the Black Muslims), given up drinking and drugs and replaced his surname with an X to signify his rejection of his "slave" name. Charismatic and eloquent, Malcolm X soon became an influential leader of the NOI, which combined Islam with Black nationalism and sought to encourage disadvantaged young Black people searching for confidence in segregated America.

As the outspoken public voice of the Black Muslim faith, Malcolm challenged the mainstream civil rights movement and the nonviolent pursuit of integration championed by Martin Luther King Jr. Instead, he urged followers to defend themselves against white aggression "by any means necessary." Mounting tensions between Malcolm and NOI founder Elijah Muhammad led Malcolm to form his own mosque in 1964. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca that same year and underwent a second conversion, this time to Sunni Islam. Calling himself el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, he renounced NOI's philosophy of separatism and advocated a more inclusive approach to the struggle for Black rights.

On February 21, 1965, during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and shot Malcolm some 15 times at close range. After Malcolm's death, his bestselling book The Autobiography of Malcolm X popularized his ideas, particularly among Black youth, and laid the foundation for the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Voting Rights Act of 1965, August 1965

Less than a week after the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers were beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal legislation to ensure protection of the voting rights of African Americans. The result was the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in August 1965.

The Voting Rights Act sought to overcome the legal barriers that still existed at the state and local levels preventing Black citizens from exercising the right to vote given them by the 15th Amendment. Specifically, it banned literacy tests as a requirement for voting, mandated federal oversight of voter registration in areas where tests had previously been used and gave the U.S. attorney general the duty of challenging the use of poll taxes for state and local elections.

Along with the Civil Rights Act of the previous year, the Voting Rights Act was one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, and it greatly reduced the disparity between Black and white voters in the U.S. In Mississippi alone, the percentage of eligible Black voters registered to vote increased from 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 60 percent in 1968. In the mid-1960s, 70 African Americans were serving as elected officials in the South, while by the turn of the century there were some 5,000. In the same time period, the number of Black people serving in Congress increased from six to about 40.

Rise of Black Power

After the heady rush of the civil rights movement's first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality-social, economic and political-still eluded them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this frustration fueled the rise of the Black Power movement. According to then-SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, who first popularized the term "Black Power" in 1966, the traditional civil rights movement and its emphasis on nonviolence, did not go far enough, and the federal legislation it had achieved failed to address the economic and social disadvantages facing Black Americans.

Black Power was a form of both self-definition and self-defense for African Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America-which were believed to be inherently racist-and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education. Also in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, college students in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther Party.

While its original mission was to protect Black people from white brutality by sending patrol groups into Black neighborhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full employment, decent housing and control over their own communities. Clashes ensued between the Panthers and police in California, New York and Chicago, and in 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after killing a police officer. His trial brought national attention to the organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s boasted some 2,000 members.

Fair Housing Act, April 1968

The Fair Housing Act of 1968, meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. After the bill passed the Senate by an exceedingly narrow margin in early April, it was thought that the increasingly conservative House of Representatives, wary of the growing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement, would weaken it considerably.

On the day of the Senate vote, however, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Pressure to pass the bill increased amid the wave of national remorse that followed, and after a strictly limited debate, the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10. President Johnson signed it into law the following day. Over the next years, however, there was little decrease in housing segregation, and violence arose from Black efforts to seek housing in white neighborhoods.

From 1950 to 1980, the total Black population in America's urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million; during this same time period, white Americans steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking with them many of the employment opportunities Black people needed. In this way, the ghetto-an inner city community plagued by high unemployment, crime and other social ills-became an ever more prevalent fact of urban Black life.

MLK Assassinated, April 4, 1968

On April 4, 1968, the world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike. King's death opened a huge rift between white and Black Americans, as many Black people saw the killing as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed. In more than 100 cities, several days of riots, burning and looting followed his death.

The accused killer, a white man named James Earl Ray, was captured and tried immediately; he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in prison; no testimony was heard. Ray later recanted his confession, and despite several inquiries into the matter by the U.S. government, many continued to believe that the speedy trial had been a cover-up for a larger conspiracy. King's assassination, along with the killing of Malcolm X three years earlier, radicalized many moderate African American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party.

The success of conservative politicians that year-including Richard Nixon 's election as president and the third-party candidacy of the ardent segregationist George Wallace, who won 13 percent of the vote-further discouraged African Americans, many of whom felt that the tide was turning against the civil rights movement.

Shirley Chisholm Runs for President, 1972

By the early 1970s, the advances of the civil rights movement had combined with the rise of the feminist movement to create an African American women's movement. "There can't be liberation for half a race," declared Margaret Sloan, one of the women behind the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973. A year earlier, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became a national symbol of both movements as the first major party African American candidate and the first female candidate for president of the United States.

A former educational consultant and a founder of the National Women's Caucus, Chisholm became the first Black woman in Congress in 1968, when she was elected to the House from her Brooklyn district. Though she failed to win a primary, Chisholm received more than 150 votes at the Democratic National Convention. She claimed she never expected to win the nomination. It went to George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in the general election.

The outspoken Chisholm, who attracted little support among African American men during her presidential campaign, later told the press: "I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black. When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being Black. Men are men."

The Bakke Decision and Affirmative Action, 1978

Beginning in the 1960s, the term "affirmative action" was used to refer to policies and initiatives aimed at compensating for past discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion or national origin. President John F. Kennedy first used the phrase in 1961, in an executive order calling on the federal government to hire more African Americans. By the mid 1970s, many universities were seeking to increase the presence of minority and female faculty and students on their campuses. The University of California at Davis, for example, designated 16 percent of its medical school's admissions spots for minority applicants.

After Allan Bakke, a white California man, applied twice without success, he sued U.C. Davis, claiming that his grades and test scores were higher than those of minority students who were admitted and accusing UC Davis of "reverse discrimination." In June 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and that Bakke should be admitted; on the other hand, it held that institutions of higher education could rightfully use race as a criterion in admissions decisions in order to ensure diversity.

In the wake of the Bakke verdict, affirmative action continued to be a controversial and divisive issue, with a growing opposition movement claiming that the so-called "racial playing field" was now equal and that African Americans no longer needed special consideration to overcome their disadvantages. In subsequent decisions over the next decades, the Court limited the scope of affirmative action programs, while several U.S. states prohibited racially based affirmative action.

Jesse Jackson Galvanizes Black Voters, 1984

As a young man, Jesse Jackson left his studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary to join Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its crusade for Black civil rights in the South; when King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, Jackson was at his side. In 1971, Jackson founded PUSH, or People United to Save Humanity (later changed to People United to Serve Humanity), an organization that advocated self-reliance for African Americans and sought to establish racial parity in the business and financial community.

He was a leading voice for Black Americans during the early 1980s, urging them to be more politically active and heading up a voter registration drive that led to the election of Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983. The following year, Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president. On the strength of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he placed third in the primaries, propelled by a surge of Black voter participation.

He ran again in 1988 and received 6.6 million votes, or 24 percent of the total primary vote, winning seven states and finishing second behind the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Jackson's continued influence in the Democratic Party in the decades that followed ensured that African American issues had an important role in the party's platform.

Throughout his long career, Jackson has inspired both admiration and criticism for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Black community and his outspoken public persona. His son, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois in 1995.

Oprah Winfrey Launches Syndicated Talk Show, 1986

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the success of the long-running sitcom The Cosby Show-featuring popular comedian Bill Cosby as the doctor patriarch of a close-knit middle-class African American family-helped redefine the image of Black characters on mainstream American television. Suddenly, there was no lack of educated, upwardly mobile, family-oriented Black characters for TV viewers to look to, both in fiction and in life. In 1980, entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television (BET), which he later sold to entertainment giant Viacom for some $3 billion. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon, however, was the rise of Oprah Winfrey.

Born in rural Mississippi to a poor unwed teenage mother, Winfrey got her start in television news before taking over a morning talk show in Chicago in 1984. Two years later, she launched her own nationally syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, which would go on to become the highest rated in TV history. Celebrated for her ability to talk candidly about a wide range of issues, Winfrey spun her talk show success into a one-woman empire-including acting, film and television production and publishing.

She notably promoted the work of Black female writers, forming a film company to produce movies based on novels like The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, and Beloved, by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. (She starred in both.) One of the most influential individuals in entertainment and the first Black female billionaire, Winfrey is also an active philanthropist, giving generously to Black South Africans and to the historically Black Morehouse College, among other causes.

Los Angeles Riots, 1992

In March 1991, officers with the California Highway Patrol attempted to pull an African American man named Rodney King over for speeding on a Los Angeles freeway. King, who was on probation for robbery and had been drinking, led them on a high-speed chase, and by the time the patrolmen caught up to his car, several officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were on the scene. After King allegedly resisted arrest and threatened them, four LAPD officers shot him with a TASER gun and severely beat him.

Caught on videotape by an onlooker and broadcast around the world, the beating inspired widespread outrage in the city's African American community, who had long condemned the racial profiling and abuse its members suffered at the hands of the police force. Many demanded that the unpopular L.A. police chief, Daryl Gates, be fired and that the four officers be brought to justice for their use of excessive force. The King case was eventually tried in the suburb of Simi Valley, and in April 1992 a jury found the officers not guilty.

Rage over the verdict sparked the four days of the L.A. riots, beginning in the mostly Black South Central neighborhood. By the time the riots subsided, some 55 people were dead, more than 2,300 injured, and more than 1,000 buildings had been burned. Authorities later estimated the total damage at around $1 billion. The next year, two of the four LAPD officers involved in the beating were retried and convicted in a federal court for violating King's civil rights; he eventually received $3.8 million from the city in a settlement.

Million Man March, 1995

In October 1995, hundreds of thousands of Black men gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March, one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the capital's history. Its organizer, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had called for "a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired Black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement." Farrakhan, who had asserted control over the Nation of Islam (commonly known as the Black Muslims) in the late 1970s and reasserted its original principles of Black separatism, may have been an incendiary figure, but the idea behind the Million Man March was one most Black-and many white-people could get behind.

The march was intended to bring about a kind of spiritual renewal among Black men and to instill in them a sense of solidarity and of personal responsibility to improve their own condition. It would also, organizers believed, disprove some of the stereotypical negative images of Black men that existed in American society.

By that time, the U.S. government's "war on drugs" had sent a disproportionate number of African Americans to prison, and by 2000, more Black men were incarcerated than in college. Estimates of the number of participants in the Million Man March ranged from 400,000 to more than 1 million, and its success spurred the organization of a Million Woman March, which took place in 1997 in Philadelphia.

Colin Powell Becomes Secretary of State, 2001

In 2001, George W. Bush appointed Powell as secretary of state, making him the first African American to serve as America's top diplomat. Powell sought to build international support for the controversial U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003, delivering a divisive speech to the United Nations regarding that country's possession of weapons material that was later revealed to be based on faulty intelligence. He resigned after Bush's reelection in 2004.

In another history-making appointment, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's longtime foreign policy adviser and the former head of the National Security Council, succeeded Powell, becoming the first African American woman to serve as secretary of state. Though he largely stayed out of the political spotlight after stepping down, Powell remained an admired figure in Washington and beyond.

Though he continued to brush off any speculation of a possible future presidential run, Powell made headlines during the 2008 presidential campaign when he broke from the Republican party to endorse Barack Obama, the eventual winner and the first African American to be elected president of the United States.

Barack Obama Becomes 44th US President, 2008

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; he is the first African American to hold that office. The product of an interracial marriage-his father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother in Kansas-Obama grew up in Hawaii but discovered his civic calling in Chicago, where he worked for several years as a community organizer on the city's largely Black South Side.

After studying at Harvard Law School and practicing constitutional law in Chicago, he began his political career in 1996 in the Illinois State Senate and in 2004 announced his candidacy for a newly vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. He delivered a rousing keynote speech at that year's Democratic National Convention, attracting national attention with his eloquent call for national unity and cooperation across party lines. In February 2007, just months after he became only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

After withstanding a tight Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, Obama defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona in the general election that November. Obama's appearances in both the primaries and the general election drew impressive crowds, and his message of hope and change-embodied by the slogan "Yes We Can"-inspired thousands of new voters, many young and Black, to cast their vote for the first time in the historic election. He was reelected in 2012.

The Black Lives Matter Movement

The term "Black lives matter" was first used by organizer Alicia Garza in a July 2013 Facebook post in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Florida man who shot and killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Martin's death set off nationwide protests like the Million Hoodie March. In 2013, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi formed the Black Lives Matter Network with the mission to "eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes."

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first appeared on Twitter on July 13, 2013, and spread widely as high-profile cases involving the deaths of Black civilians provoked renewed outrage.

A series of deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police officers continued to spark outrage and protests, including Eric Garner in New York City, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland Ohio and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Black Lives Matter movement gained renewed attention on September 25, 2016, when San Francisco 49ers players Eric Reid, Eli Harold, and quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem before the game against the Seattle Seahawks to draw attention to recent acts of police brutality. Dozens of other players in the NFL and beyond followed suit.

George Floyd Protests

The movement swelled to a critical juncture on May 25, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic when 46-year-old George Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin.

Chauvin was filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd had been accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a local deli in Minneapolis. All four officers involved in the incident were fired. In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. In February 2022, the three other officers were found guilty of depriving Floyd of his civil rights when they helped with the restraint that led to his death.

Floyd's killing came on the heels of two other high-profile cases in 2020. On February 23, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was killed while out on a run after being followed by three white men in a pickup truck. And on March 13, 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor was shot eight times and killed after police broke down the door to her apartment while executing a nighttime warrant.

On May 26, 2020, the day after Floyd's death, protestors in Minneapolis took to the streets to protest Floyd's killing. Police cars were set on fire and officers released tear gas to disperse crowds. After months of quarantine and isolation during a global pandemic, protests mounted, spreading across the country in the following days and weeks.

Kamala Harris Becomes the First Woman and First Black US Vice President, 2021

In January 2021, Kamala Harris became the first woman and first woman of color to become vice president of the United States. Then-candidate Joe Biden had nominated Harris in August 2020 during the Democratic party's "remote" national convention. Harris, whose mother immigrated to the United States from India and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, was the first person of African or Asian descent to become a major party's vice presidential candidate-and the first to win the office.

In her victory speech in November 2020, Harris said that she was thinking "about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women-who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment tonight-women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all."

Sources

Ferguson shooting victim Michael Brown. BBC.
George Floyd Protests: A Timeline. The New York Times.
Tamir Rice. PBS.org.
The Matter of Black Lives. The New Yorker.
The Hashtag Black Lives Matter. Pew Research.
The Path to Eric Garner's death. The New York Times.
Timeline of Murder Trial of Amber Guyger. ABC.

Fact Check

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Black History Milestones: Timeline | HISTORY

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Newsela - African-American and Native American Resistance in 1800

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Newsela - The Missouri Compromise and Slavery in the Western U.S.

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Newsela - The Missouri Compromise and Slavery in the Western U.S.

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Newsela | The Missouri Compromise and Slavery in the Western U.S.

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Missouri crisis exposed a problematic area of American politics

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(3) Newsela - Primary Sources: A Free Man’s Letter to a Former Slaveowner, 1865

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(3) Newsela - Primary Sources: A Free Man’s Letter to a Former Slaveowner, 1865

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Newsela | Primary Sources: A Free Man's Letter to a Former Slaveowner, 1865

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Freed slave sends letter to former "master" in 1865.

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(3) Newsela - A History of the 15th Amendment

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(3) Newsela - A History of the 15th Amendment

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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(3) Newsela - Black Leaders During Reconstruction

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(3) Newsela - Black Leaders During Reconstruction

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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(3) Newsela - Racial and Religious Hatred: A History of the Ku Klux Klan

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(3) Newsela - Racial and Religious Hatred: A History of the Ku Klux Klan

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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(3) Newsela - Presidential and Radical Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War

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(3) Newsela - Presidential and Radical Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War

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Newsela | Presidential and Radical Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War

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Three new changes to the Constitution gave African-Americans more rights after the Civil War: the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

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(3) Newsela - 5 things you may not know about Lincoln, slavery and emancipation

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(3) Newsela - 5 things you may not know about Lincoln, slavery and emancipation

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Newsela | 5 things you may not know about Lincoln, slavery and emancipation

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(3) Newsela - Before sanctuary cities, how black Americans protected fugitive slaves

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(3) Newsela - Before sanctuary cities, how black Americans protected fugitive slaves

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Newsela | Before sanctuary cities, how black Americans protected fugitive slaves

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The law criminalized helping or harboring a runaway slave.

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From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream - History Extra

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From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream - History Extra

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This article was first published in the December 2005 issue of BBC History Magazine
Rosa Louise Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress in a department store in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, boarded her bus home as usual after work on 1 December 1955. As the bus became crowded, white driver J Fred Blake told Parks and other black passengers to vacate their seats. Segregation laws dictated that white passengers had priority. The blacks duly moved. Except for Parks. She sat silently still. "If you don't stand up, I'm going to call the police and have you arrested," Blake shouted at her. "You may do that," Parks calmly replied. Blake left the bus and returned with two policemen. "Why don't you stand up?" one of the officers asked Parks. "Why do you push us around?" Parks answered. "I do not know," said the officer, "but the law is the law and you are under arrest". She was taken off to the city jail.

Parks's arrest would have major ramifications. It led to a 13-month boycott of city buses in one of the longest mass mobilisations of a black population ever witnessed in the United States. The boycott's church-based community activism and ministerial leadership, together with its spirit of non-violence, would become hallmarks of the civil rights movement over the next decade. Moreover, by thrusting 26-year-old Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr into the national spotlight, it provided a new leader for a new era of black activism.

Parks's act of defiance and the bus boycott were not without historical precedent. When segregation ordinances were passed in southern cities in the late 19th and early 20th century, a number of southern black populations, including Montgomery's, had organised short-lived boycotts of public transport. Since the 1940s, the growing population of southern cities had increased the amount of inter-racial contact and conflict on city buses. In 1953, blacks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, boycotted buses for about a week until whites agreed to modify existing segregation practices. But the Parks case was different. It unfolded in the aftermath of a lawsuit brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1954, in which the US Supreme Court had handed down a landmark ruling. In Brown v Board of Education, the court outlawed segregation in schools and thereby undermined its legal legitimacy in other areas. The initiative swung decisively towards blacks. Yet southern whites were determined not to give in. Many vowed a campaign of massive resistance to desegregation through legal and even extra-legal measures. In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy, Emmett Till, was brutally murdered by whites in Mississippi for allegedly answering back to a white woman. Till's murder was indicative of the charged post-Brown racial climate and caused national outrage by graphically illustrating the terror and violence that underpinned segregation.

Brown polarised southern race relations. In the past, there had been limited room for manoeuvre and negotiation over segregation practices at a local level. Brown largely put an end to that by raising the stakes. To blacks, it signalled that the time was right to press their case for racial reform. To whites, it signalled the need not to concede one inch of the segregated order. It was within this changing context of race relations that the Montgomery bus boycott unfolded.

Two people in Montgomery's black community were responsible for the bus boycott. One was Edgar Daniel (ED) Nixon, a train porter, union leader, and social and political activist. He had been a friend of Parks's for a number of years and he was the one who arranged to bail her out of jail. The other was Jo Ann Robinson, a college teacher and head of the city's Women's Political Council. Nixon and Robinson agreed to organise a one-day bus boycott to protest Parks's treatment. Robinson took charge of publicising the boycott and Nixon arranged a mass meeting to rally support.

A reluctant host

Martin Luther King was drawn into developments when Nixon requested the use of his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the meeting. Yet, initially, the man who was to become arguably the most celebrated civil rights leader of the 20th century, was reluctant to become involved. He had been pastor at Dexter for little over a year, his wife Coretta had just had their first child, Yolanda Denise, and becoming embroiled in a controversial protest risked putting his family in harm's way. So, at first, he told Nixon he would think it over. Soon after, Rev Ralph Abernathy, another young black pastor, called King to seek his help. When Nixon phoned back, King agreed to host the meeting.

King's involvement quickly snowballed. When black leaders in the city sought a leader for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) - an organisation they had established to orchestrate the bus boycott - King quickly became their first choice. Some candidates feared incurring the wrath of angry whites and drew back; others were willing to serve, but existing black leaders did not want to see any of their rivals take such an important position. King's relative youth, inexperience, and newcomer status, made him the perfect man for the position. Under pressure of nomination, he agreed to take the job.

King's position as a church minister played a vital role in his choice. Ministers were among the few blacks whose jobs were not financially dependent on whites. They were therefore economically less vulnerable to reprisals. Black churches provided crucial community focal points and information networks as they were among the few institutions entirely owned and controlled by blacks. Black churches formed bases for mass meetings and added religious sanction and resolve to collective action.

With the NAACP increasingly becoming the focus of a white backlash after the Brown decision and branch membership declining under sustained white harassment, the emergence of black church leadership in Montgomery was a timely new development. Just as the momentum was moving its way, local NAACP branches were at their weakest, and so the responsibility of sustaining the movement now fell to the clergy. Following the bus boycott, King became president of a new civil rights organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose aim it was to combine and co-ordinate black church networks across the South.

The rift grows

When King and MIA leaders met with white officials they were disappointed. The MIA issued only three modest demands: a modified system of segregation on buses, which meant that black passengers would not be forced to stand; better treatment from white bus drivers; and the hiring of black bus drivers on predominantly black routes. White officials rejected their proposals outright. From that point the boycott spiralled. As blacks became more determined not to concede their demands, whites became even more determined not to give in to them.

King increasingly became the focus of attention. On 26  January 1956, he was arrested by city police for allegedly driving 30 miles per hour in a 25 miles per hour speed zone. Although he only spent a short time in jail before making bail, the arrest shook him. He had become a marked man. "Almost every day," King recalled, "someone warned me that he had overheard white men making plans to get rid of me". Later that night, unable to sleep, King went to his kitchen to make coffee. He prayed for the strength to continue. Then, he heard a voice telling him to, "Stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever". The moment had a profound impact on King. His leadership was no longer just a matter of civic responsibility; it had become a religious calling.

King's faith was tested a few nights later when segregationists bombed his home with his wife and baby daughter inside it. He rushed to the scene to find that no-one had been seriously injured. A growing crowd of angry blacks surveyed the scene, yet King eased tensions by telling them, "I want you to love your enemies... what we are doing is just. And God is with us". Most observers agreed that only King's words prevented a riot.

The day after the bombing the MIA filed a lawsuit demanding the desegregation of city buses in Montgomery. Withlittle sign of compromise the dispute had escalated from modest demands for reform to an all-out strike on segregation. As the dispute was played out in the courts, the boycott continued. Blacks were determined not to return to the buses until the courts ruled in their favour, and their stance began to attract national attention. The country's newspapers and television stations were particularly intrigued with King and his championing of non-violent protest.

It's true that, from an early stage, King insisted that the bus boycott would be a peaceful protest. However, his account of the "pilgrimage to non-violence" in his 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, was wildly exaggerated. To be sure, King had encountered the idea of non-violence in his academic studies prior to the boycott, yet as a representative from a national civil rights organisation reported at the time, King admitted to knowing "very little" about non-violent tactics. Another visitor to his home was shocked to find armed men standing guard and loaded weapons lying around.

United they sat

In truth, the Montgomery bus boycott was just the beginning of King's understanding of non-violence. Historian David Garrow has argued that this understanding evolved in two stages. After Montgomery and up until 1963, King's focus was mainly on "non-violent persuasion" and trying to convince whites of the righteousness of the civil rights cause. However, beginning in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, King started to adopt a tactic of "non-violent coercion". This placed pressure on segregation through direct action tactics such as sit-ins and demonstrations. King would continually develop the idea of non-violence and its practical uses throughout his life.

The legal process in the Montgomery case took almost a year to reach its conclusion. The US Supreme Court finally ruled an end to segregation on city buses in November 1956. After white city officials had exhausted the appeals process, they were served with papers to desegregate on 20 December.

The next morning, King was one of the first passengers to board an integrated bus. "I believe you are Reverend King, aren't you?" asked the white bus driver. King said that he was. "We are very glad to have you this morning," came the reply.

The story did not end there. Whites waged a campaign of violence to try to dissuade black passengers from travelling on integrated buses. But blacks held firm. There was no going back. As one black janitor told a white northern reporter, "We got our heads up now and we won't ever bow down again!".

The end of the bus boycott was only the beginning of an embryonic civil rights movement. King may be remembered as an inspirational figurehead, but he looked upon his role with some trepidation. "People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of the hat for the rest of my life," he wrote to a family friend. Indeed, it would take time for King to become an experienced leader. It would take other leaders, other organisations, and the efforts of thousands of black people working for change in their own localities, to transform the segregated South.

But Montgomery was an important start. With its church-based mass mobilisation, its black ministerial leadership, its cultivation of the idea of non-violence, and its projection of Martin Luther King, Jr, onto the national stage, the Montgomery bus boycott provided the blueprint for what would follow. Not least, it proved that segregation could be overcome by black action, a fact that inspired many others. "Somewhere in the universe," Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver later wrote, "a gear in the machinery had shifted".

Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-68)
Born 15 January 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, King attended Atlanta's Morehouse College before studying at two predominantly white northern institutions: Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania for his divinity degree and Boston University for his PhD. At Boston, King met his wife Coretta Scott. After the Montgomery bus boycott, King helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and became its president. It was in Birmingham in 1963 that King and the SCLC made their distinctive contribution to the movement - the short-term mass mobilisation of a black population in non-violent direct action demonstrations. Such tactics soon became their hallmark. King and the civil rights movement were most successful between 1963 and 1965. Mass demonstrations in various localities helped to forge a national consensus for racial change. This crystallised in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. From 1965 until his 1968 assassination, King's attention moved from civil rights to human rights. He criticised US foreign policy in Vietnam and campaigned against poverty. In the US, the third Monday in January is now recognised as the Martin Luther King, Jr National Holiday in his honour.
Rosa Louise Parks (1913-2005)
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Alabama in 1913 and her parents separated when she was a child. She moved to Montgomery with her mother. She married Raymond Parks and both became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In August 1955, Parks attended classes at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, including one on "Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision". Because of her role in the bus boycott, Parks was fired from her job and suffered death threats from whites in Montgomery. She moved to Detroit in 1957, working for black congressman John Conyers. Awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, the highest civilian award in the US, she lived in Detroit until her death on 24 October 2005. Parks will always be remembered as the mother of the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King, Jr by John A Kirk (Pearson Longman, 2005);

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King, Jr (Harper and Row, 1958, also available in various reprints);

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Life of Rosa Parks by Douglas Brinkley (Viking Press, 2000)

Dr John A Kirk is senior lecturer in US history at Royal Holloway, University of London. His book, Martin Luther King, Jr, was published in Pearson Longman's Profiles in Power series in 2005

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From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream

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A simple act of defiance more than 60 years ago triggered one of the most celebrated civil rights campaigns in history. John  Kirk examines how the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 launched the career of Martin Luther King, Jr and changed the face of modern America...

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Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin : NPR

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Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin : NPR

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Few people know the story of Claudette Colvin: When she was 15, she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person - nine months before Rosa Parks did the very same thing.

Most people know about Parks and the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that began in 1955, but few know that there were a number of women who refused to give up their seats on the same bus system. Most of the women were quietly fined, and no one heard much more.

Colvin was the first to really challenge the law.

Now a 69-year-old retiree, Colvin lives in the Bronx. She remembers taking the bus home from high school on March 2, 1955, as clear as if it were yesterday.

The bus driver ordered her to get up and she refused, saying she'd paid her fare and it was her constitutional right. Two police officers put her in handcuffs and arrested her. Her school books went flying off her lap.

"All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily," Colvin says.

It was Negro history month, and at her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman, the runaway slave who led more than 70 slaves to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist.

The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws, like not being able to eat at a lunch counter.

"We couldn't try on clothes," Colvin says. "You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up."

Colvin also remembers the moment the jail door closed. It was just like a Western movie, she says.

"And then I got scared, and panic come over me, and I started crying. Then I started saying the Lord's Prayer," she says.
'Twice Toward Justice'
Now her story is the subject of a new book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

Author Phil Hoose says that despite a few articles about her in the Birmingham press and in USA Today, and brief mentions in some books about the civil rights movement, most people don't know about the role Colvin played in the bus boycotts.

Hoose couldn't get over that there was this teenager, nine months before Rosa Parks, "in the same city, in the same bus system, with very tough consequences, hauled off the bus, handcuffed, jailed and nobody really knew about it."

He also believes Colvin is important because she challenged the law in court, one of four women plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the court case that successfully overturned bus segregation laws in Montgomery and Alabama.

There are many reasons why Claudette Colvin has been pretty much forgotten. She hardly ever told her story when she moved to New York City. In her new community, hardly anyone was talking about integration; instead, most people were talking about black enterprises, black power and Malcolm X.

When asked why she is little known and why everyone thinks only of Rosa Parks, Colvin says the NAACP and all the other black organizations felt Parks would be a good icon because "she was an adult. They didn't think teenagers would be reliable."

She also says Parks had the right hair and the right look.

"Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile."

David Garrow, a historian and the author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says people may think that Parks' action was spontaneous, but black civic leaders had been thinking about what to do about the Montgomery buses for years.

After Colvin's arrest, she found herself shunned by parts of her community. She experienced various difficulties and became pregnant. Civil rights leaders felt she was an inappropriate symbol for a test case.

Parks was the secretary of the NAACP. She was well-known and respected and, says Garrow, Parks had a "natural gravitas" and was an "inherently impressive person."

At the same time, Garrow believes attention to Colvin is a healthy corrective, because "the real reality of the movement was often young people and often more than 50 percent women." The images you most often see are men in suits.

Hoose says he believes Colvin understands the pragmatism that pushed Parks to the fore, but "on the other hand, she did it."

Hoose says the stories of Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. are wonderful, but those are the stories of people in their 30s and 40s. Colvin was 15. Hoose feels his book will bring a fresh teen's perspective to the struggle to end segregation.

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Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin

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Most people know about Rosa Parks and the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. Nine months earlier, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the same bus system.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Montgomery Bus Boycott - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Contents

1. Rosa Parks' Bus

2. Montgomery's African Americans Mobilize

3. Integration At Last

4. Bus Boycott Meets With Violence

5. Boycott Puts Martin Luther King Jr. in Spotlight

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating. The boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. Four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested and fined for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered Montgomery to integrate its bus system, and one of the leaders of the boycott, a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr., emerged as a prominent leader of the American civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks' Bus

In 1955, African Americans were still required by a Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance to sit in the back half of city buses and to yield their seats to white riders if the front half of the bus, reserved for whites, was full.

But on December 1, 1955, African American seamstress Rosa Parks was commuting home on Montgomery's Cleveland Avenue bus from her job at a local department store. She was seated in the front row of the "colored section." When the white seats filled, the driver, J. Fred Blake, asked Parks and three others to vacate their seats. The other Black riders complied, but Parks refused.

She was arrested and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. This was not Parks' first encounter with Blake. In 1943, she had paid her fare at the front of a bus he was driving, then exited so she could re-enter through the back door, as required. Blake pulled away before she could re-board the bus.

Did you know? Nine months before Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery for the same act. The city's Black leaders prepared to protest, until it was discovered Colvin was pregnant and deemed an inappropriate symbol for their cause.

Although Parks has sometimes been depicted as a woman with no history of civil rights activism at the time of her arrest, she and her husband Raymond were, in fact, active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), and Parks served as its secretary.

Upon her arrest, Parks called E.D. Nixon, a prominent Black leader, who bailed her out of jail and determined she would be an upstanding and sympathetic plaintiff in a legal challenge of the segregation ordinance. African American leaders decided to attack the ordinance using other tactics as well.

The Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of Black women working for civil rights, began circulating flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system on December 5, the day Parks would be tried in municipal court. The boycott was organized by WPC President Jo Ann Robinson.

Montgomery's African Americans Mobilize

As news of the boycott spread, African American leaders across Montgomery (Alabama's capital city) began lending their support. Black ministers announced the boycott in church on Sunday, December 4, and the Montgomery Advertiser, a general-interest newspaper, published a front-page article on the planned action.

Approximately 40,000 Black bus riders-the majority of the city's bus riders-boycotted the system the next day, December 5. That afternoon, Black leaders met to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The group elected Martin Luther King Jr., the 26-year-old-pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its president, and decided to continue the boycott until the city met its demands.

Initially, the demands did not include changing the segregation laws; rather, the group demanded courtesy, the hiring of Black drivers, and a first-come, first-seated policy, with whites entering and filling seats from the front and African Americans from the rear.

Ultimately, however, a group of five Montgomery women, represented by attorney Fred D. Gray and the NAACP, sued the city in U.S. District Court, seeking to have the busing segregation laws totally invalidated.

Although African Americans represented at least 75 percent of Montgomery's bus ridership, the city resisted complying with the protester's demands. To ensure the boycott could be sustained, Black leaders organized carpools, and the city's African American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents-the same price as bus fare-for African American riders.

Many Black residents chose simply to walk to work or other destinations. Black leaders organized regular mass meetings to keep African American residents mobilized around the boycott.

Integration At Last

On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, adopted in 1868 following the U.S. Civil War, guarantees all citizens-regardless of race-equal rights and equal protection under state and federal laws.

The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's decision on December 20, 1956. Montgomery's buses were integrated on December 21, 1956, and the boycott ended. It had lasted 381 days.

Bus Boycott Meets With Violence

Integration, however, met with significant resistance and even violence. While the buses themselves were integrated, Montgomery maintained segregated bus stops. Snipers began firing into buses, and one shooter shattered both legs of a pregnant African American passenger.

In January 1957, four Black churches and the homes of prominent Black leaders were bombed; a bomb at King's house was defused. On January 30, 1957, the Montgomery police arrested seven bombers; all were members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group. The arrests largely brought an end to the busing-related violence.

Boycott Puts Martin Luther King Jr. in Spotlight

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was significant on several fronts. First, it is widely regarded as the earliest mass protest on behalf of civil rights in the United States, setting the stage for additional large-scale actions outside the court system to bring about fair treatment for African Americans.

Second, in his leadership of the MIA, Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a prominent national leader of the civil rights movement while also solidifying his commitment to nonviolent resistance. King's approach remained a hallmark of the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s.
READ MORE: The MLK Graphic Novel That Inspired Generations of Civil Rights Activists
Shortly after the boycott's end, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a highly influential civil rights organization that worked to end segregation throughout the South. The SCLC was instrumental in the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, and the March on Washington in August of that same year, during which King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The boycott also brought national and international attention to the civil rights struggles occurring in the United States, as more than 100 reporters visited Montgomery during the boycott to profile the effort and its leaders.

Rosa Parks, while shying from the spotlight throughout her life, remained an esteemed figure in the history of American civil rights activism. In 1999, the U.S. Congress awarded her its highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.

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Rosa Parks' Bus Montgomery's African Americans Mobilize Integration At Last Bus Boycott Meets With Violence Boycott Puts Martin Luther King Jr. in Spotlight The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating.

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Greensboro Sit-In - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Greensboro Sit-In - Black History - HISTORY.com

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The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The sit-in movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South. Though many of the protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate and lasting impact, forcing Woolworth's and other establishments to change their segregationist policies.
READ MORE: 'Good Trouble': How Civil Rights Crusaders Expected Arrests
Greensboro Four

The Greensboro Four were four young Black men who staged the first sit-in at Greensboro: Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil. All four were students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College.

They were influenced by the nonviolent protest techniques practiced by Mohandas Gandhi, as well as the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress for Racial Equality ( CORE) in 1947, in which interracial activists rode across the South in buses to test a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate bus travel.

The Greensboro Four, as they became known, had also been spurred to action by the brutal murder in 1955 of a young Black boy, Emmett Till, who had allegedly whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi store.

Did you know? The former Woolworth's in Greensboro now houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which features a restored version of the lunch counter where the Greensboro Four sat. Part of the original counter is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Sit-In Begins

Blair, Richmond, McCain and McNeil planned their protest carefully, and enlisted the help of a local white businessman, Ralph Johns, to put their plan into action.

On February 1, 1960, the four students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro, where the official policy was to refuse service to anyone but whites. Denied service, the four young men refused to give up their seats.

Police arrived on the scene but were unable to take action due to the lack of provocation. By that time, Johns had already alerted the local media, who had arrived in full force to cover the events on television. The Greensboro Four stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with more students from local colleges.
READ MORE: The MLK Graphic Novel That Inspired Generations of Civil Rights Activists
Sit-Ins Spread Nationwide

By February 5, some 300 students had joined the protest at Woolworth's, paralyzing the lunch counter and other local businesses. Heavy television coverage of the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a sit-in movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Blacks and whites joined in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, beaches, hotels and other establishments.

By the end of March, the movement had spread to 55 cities in 13 states. Though many were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, national media coverage of the sit-ins brought increasing attention to the civil rights movement.

In response to the success of the sit-in movement, dining facilities across the South were being integrated by the summer of 1960. At the end of July, when many local college students were on summer vacation, the Greensboro Woolworth's quietly integrated its lunch counter. Four Black Woolworth's employees-Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones and Charles Best-were the first to be served.

SNCC

To capitalize on the momentum of the sit-in movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960.

Over the next few years, SNCC served as one of the leading forces in the civil rights movement, organizing Freedom Rides through the South in 1961 and the historic March on Washington in 1963, at which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his seminal " I Have a Dream " speech.

SNCC worked alongside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) to push passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and would later mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War.

As its members faced increased violence, however, SNCC became more militant, and by the late 1960s it was advocating the "Black Power" philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC's chairman from 1966-67) and his successor, H. Rap Brown. By the early 1970s, SNCC had lost much of its mainstream support and was effectively disbanded.

Greensboro Sit-In: Impact

The Greensboro Sit-In was a critical turning point in Black history and American history, bringing the fight for civil rights to the national stage. Its use of nonviolence inspired the Freedom Riders and others to take up the cause of integration in the South, furthering the cause of equal rights in the United States.

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The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The sit-in movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South.

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March on Washington - Black History - HISTORY.com

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March on Washington - Black History - HISTORY.com

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The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Also known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. It was also the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.'s now-iconic "I Have a Dream" speech.

Lead-Up to the March on Washington

In 1941, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and an elder statesman of the civil rights movement, had planned a mass march on Washington to protest Black soldier's exclusion from World War II defense jobs and New Deal programs.

But a day before the event, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Randolph and agreed to issue an executive order forbidding discrimination against workers in defense industries and government and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to investigate charges of racial discrimination. In return, Randolph called off the planned march.

In the mid-1940s, Congress cut off funding to the FEPC, and it dissolved in 1946; it would be another 20 years before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was formed to take on some of the same issues.

Meanwhile, with the rise of the charismatic young civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid-1950s, Randolph proposed another mass march on Washington in 1957, hoping to capitalize on King's appeal and harness the organizing power of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP).

In May 1957, nearly 25,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and urge the federal government to follow through on its decision in the trial.

SCLC and the March on Washington

In 1963, in the wake of violent attacks on civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, momentum built for another mass protest on the nation's capital.

With Randolph planning a march for jobs, and King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) planning one for freedom, the two groups decided to merge their efforts into one mass protest.

That spring, Randolph and his chief aide, Bayard Rustin, planned a march that would call for fair treatment and equal opportunity for Black Americans, as well as advocate for passage of the Civil Rights Act (then stalled in Congress).

President John F. Kennedy met with civil rights leaders before the march, voicing his fears that the event would end in violence. In the meeting on June 22, Kennedy told the organizers that the march was perhaps "ill-timed," as "We want success in the Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol."

Randolph, King and the other leaders insisted the march should go forward, with King telling the president: "Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct-action movement which did not seem ill-timed."

JFK ended up reluctantly endorsing the March on Washington, but tasked his brother and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, with coordinating with the organizers to ensure all security precautions were taken. In addition, the civil rights leaders decided to end the march at the Lincoln Memorial instead of the Capitol, so as not to make members of Congress feel as if they were under siege.
READ MORE: Why MLK's Right-Hand Man, Bayard Rustin, Was Nearly Written Out of History
Who Was at the March on Washington?

Officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the historic gathering took place on August 28, 1963. Some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, and more than 3,000 members of the press covered the event.

Fittingly, Randolph led off the day's diverse array of speakers, closing his speech with the promise that "We here today are only the first wave. When we leave, it will be to carry the civil rights revolution home with us into every nook and cranny of the land, and we shall return again and again to Washington in ever growing numbers until total freedom is ours."

Other speakers followed, including Rustin, NAACP president Roy Wilkins, John Lewis of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC), civil rights veteran Daisy Lee Bates and actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. The march also featured musical performances from the likes of Marian Anderson, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Mahalia Jackson.

MLK's 'I Have a Dream' Speech

King agreed to speak last, as all the other presenters wanted to speak earlier, figuring news crews would head out by mid-afternoon. Though his speech was scheduled to be four minutes long, he ended up speaking for 16 minutes, in what would become one of the most famous orations of the civil rights movement-and of human history.

Though it has become known as the "I Have a Dream" speech, the famous line wasn't actually part of King's planned remarks that day. After leading into King's speech with the classic spiritual "I've Been 'Buked, and I've Been Scorned," gospel star Mahalia Jackson stood behind the civil rights leader on the podium.

At one point during his speech, she called out to him, "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin, tell 'em about the dream!" referring to a familiar theme he had referenced in earlier speeches.

Departing from his prepared notes, King then launched into the most famous part of his speech that day: "And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream." From there, he built to his dramatic ending, in which he announced the tolling of the bells of freedom from one end of the country to the other.

"And when this happens...we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"
READ MORE: 7 Things You May Not Know About MLK's 'I Have a Dream' Speech
Sources

Kenneth T. Walsh, Family of Freedom: Presidents and African Americans in the White House.
JFK, A. Philip Randolph and the March on Washington, White House Historical Association.
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Freedom Struggle.

Photos

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The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans and was also where Martin Luther King Jr.

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Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961 : NPR

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Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961 : NPR

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In 1961, the Freedom Riders set out for the Deep South to defy Jim Crow laws and call for change. They were met by hatred and violence - and local police often refused to intervene. But the Riders' efforts transformed the civil rights movement.

Raymond Arsenault is the author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. The book details how volunteers - both black and white - traveled to Mississippi and Alabama to fight segregation in transit systems.

Despite being backed by recent federal rulings that it was unconstitutional to segregate bus riders, the Freedom Riders met with obstinate resistance - as in Birmingham and Montgomery, where white supremacists attacked bus depots themselves.

In Freedom Riders, Arsenault details how the first Freedom Rides developed, from the personal level to the legal maneuvering involved. His narrative touches on elements from the jails of Alabama to the Kennedy White House.

Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. His previous writing includes Land of Sunshine,State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida and Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of Rights, which he edited.

Read an excerpt from Freedom Riders:
Alabama Bound We had most trouble, it turned into a struggle,
Half way 'cross Alabam,

And that 'hound broke down, and left us all stranded,

In downtown Birmingham.

-- Chuck Berry

Jim Farmer's unexpected departure placed a heavy burden on Jim Peck, who suddenly found himself in charge of the Freedom Ride. As Farmer left for the Atlanta airport, Peck could not help wondering if he would ever see his old friend again. They had been through a lot together - surviving the depths of the Cold War and CORE's lean years, not to mention the first ten days of the Freedom Ride. Now Peck had to go on alone, perhaps to glory, but more likely to an untimely rendezvous with violence, or even death. When Peck phoned Fred Shuttlesworth, the outspoken pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church and the leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, to give him the exact arrival times of the two "Freedom Buses," the normally unflappable minister offered an alarming picture of what the Freedom Riders could expect once they reached Birmingham. The city was alive with rumors that a white mob planned to greet the Riders at the downtown bus stations. Shuttlesworth was not privy to FBI surveillance and did not know any of the details, but he urged Peck to be careful. Peck, trying to avoid a last-minute panic, relayed Shuttlesworth's warning to the group in a calm and matter-of-fact fashion. He also repeated Tom Gaither's warning about Anniston, a rest stop on the bus route to Birmingham. But he quickly added that he had no reason to believe the Riders would encounter any serious trouble prior to their arrival in downtown Birmingham. Barring any unforeseen problems, the four-hour ride would give them plenty of time to prepare a properly nonviolent response to the waiting mob - if, in fact, the mob existed.

Faced with staggered bus schedules, the two groups of Freedom Riders left Atlanta an hour apart. The Greyhound group, with Joe Perkins in charge, was the first to leave, at 11:00 A.M. The bus was more than half empty, unusual for the Atlanta-to-Birmingham run. Fourteen passengers were on board: five regular passengers, seven Freedom Riders - Genevieve Hughes, Bert Bigelow, Hank Thomas, Jimmy McDonald, Mae Frances Moultrie, Joe Perkins, Ed Blankenheim - and two journalists, Charlotte Devree and Moses Newson. Among the "regular" passengers were Roy Robinson, the manager f the Atlanta Greyhound station, and two undercover plainclothes agents of the Alabama Highway Patrol, Corporals Ell Cowling and Harry Sims. Both Cowling and Sims sat in the back of the bus, several rows behind the scattered Freedom Riders, who had no inkling of who these two seemingly innocuous white men actually were. Following the orders of Floyd Mann, the director of the Alabama Highway Patrol, Cowling carried a hidden microphone designed to eavesdrop on the Riders. Unsure of the Freedom Ride's itinerary, Mann - and Governor John Patterson - wanted Cowling to gather information on the Riders and their plans.

During the ninety-minute trip to Tallapoosa, the last stop in Georgia, on Highway 78, none of the passengers said very much, other than a few words of nervous small talk. Around one o'clock the bus crossed the Alabama line and followed the road in a southwesterly arc to Heflin, a small country town on the edge of the Talladega National Forest. After a brief rest stop in Heflin, the Greyhound continued west through De Armanville and Oxford before turning north on Highway 21 toward Anniston. The largest city in Calhoun County and the second largest in east-central Alabama, Anniston as a no-nonsense army town that depended on nearby Fort McClellan and a sprawling ordnance depot for much of its livelihood. Known for its hard-edged race relations, Anniston boasted a relatively large black population (approximately 30 percent in 1961), a well-established NAACP branch, and some of the most aggressive and violent Klansmen in Alabama.

Just south of Anniston, the driver of a southbound Greyhound motioned to the driver of the Freedom Riders' bus, O. T. Jones, to pull over to the side of the road. A white man then ran across the road and yelled to Jones through the window: "There's an angry and unruly crowd gathered at Anniston. There's a rumor that some people on this bus are going to stage a sit-in. The terminal has been closed. Be careful." With this message the Riders' worst fears seemed to be confirmed, but Joe Perkins - hoping that the warning was a bluff, or at least an exaggeration - urged the driver to keep going. A minute or two later, as the bus passed the city limits, several of the Riders couldn't help but notice that Anniston's sidewalks were lined with people, an unusual sight on a Sunday afternoon in a Deep South town. "It seemed that everyone in the town was out to greet us," Genevieve Hughes later commented.

Amazingly enough, Hank Thomas did not recall seeing anyone on the streets. He did remember the strange feeling that he and the other Riders experienced as the bus eased into the station parking lot just after 1:00 P.M. The station was locked shut, and there was silence - and then suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a screaming mob led by Anniston Klan leader William Chappell rushed the bus. Thomas thought he heard Jones encourage the attackers with a sly greeting. "Well, boys, here they are," the driver reportedly said with a smirk. "I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers." But it all happened so fast that no one was quite sure who was saying what to whom.

As the crowd of about fifty surrounded the bus, an eighteen-year-old Klansman and ex-convict named Roger Couch stretched out on the pavement in front of the bus to block any attempt to leave, while the rest - carrying metal pipes, clubs, and chains - milled around menacingly, some screaming, "Dirty Communists" and "Sieg heil!" There was no sign of any police, even though Herman Glass, the manager of the Anniston Greyhound station, had warned local officials earlier in the day that a potentially violent mob had gathered around the station. After the driver opened the door, Cowling and Sims hurried

to the front to prevent anyone from entering. Leaning on the door lever, the two unarmed investigators managed to close the door and seal the bus, but they could not stop several of the most frenzied attackers from smashing windows, denting the sides of the bus, and slashing tires. "One man stood on the steps, yelling, and calling us cowards," Hughes noticed, but her attention soon turned to a second man who "walked by the side of the bus, slipped a pistol from his pocket and stared at me for some minutes." When she heard a loud noise and shattering glass, she yelled, "Duck, down everyone," thinking that a bullet had hit one of the windows. The projectile turned out to be a rock, but another assailant soon cracked the window above her seat with a fist full of brass knuckles. Joe Perkins's window later suffered a similar fate, as the siege continued for almost twenty minutes. By the time the Anniston police arrived on the scene, the bus looked like it had been in a serious collision. Swaggering through the crowd with billy clubs in hand, the police officers examined the broken windows and slashed tires but showed no interest in arresting anyone. After a few minutes of friendly banter with members of the crowd, the officers suddenly cleared a path and motioned for the bus to exit the parking lot.

A police car escorted the battered Greyhound to the city limits but then turned back, once again leaving the bus to the mercy of the mob. A long line of cars and pickup trucks, plus one car carrying a news reporter and a photographer, had followed the police escort from the station and was ready to resume the assault. Once the entourage reached an isolated stretch of Highway 202 east of Bynum, two of the cars (one of which was driven by Roger Couch's older brother Jerome) raced around the front of the bus and then slowed to a crawl, forcing the bus driver to slow down. Trailing behind were thirty or forty cars and trucks jammed with shrieking whites. Many, like Chappell and the Couches, were Klansmen, though none wore hoods or robes. Some, having just come from church, were dressed in their Sunday best - coats and ties and polished shoes - and a few even had children with them. The whole scene was darkly surreal and became even more so when a pair of flat tires forced the bus driver to pull over to the side of the road in front of the Forsyth and Son grocery store six miles southwest of town, only a few hundred yards from the Anniston Army Depot. Flinging open the door, the driver, with Robinson trailing close behind, ran into the grocery store and began calling local garages in what turned out to be a futile effort to find replacement tires for the bus. In the meantime, the passengers were left vulnerable to a swarm of onrushing vigilantes. Cowling had just enough time to retrieve his revolver from the baggage compartment before the mob surrounded the bus. The first to reach the Greyhound was a teenage boy who smashed a crowbar through one of the side windows. While one group of men and boys rocked the bus in a vain attempt to turn the vehicle on its side, a second tried to enter through the front door. With gun in hand, Cowling stood in the doorway to block the intruders, but he soon retreated, locking the door behind him. For the next twenty minutes Chappell and other Klansmen pounded on the bus demanding that the Freedom Riders come out to take what was coming to them, but they stayed in their seats, even after the arrival of two highway patrolmen. When neither patrolman made any effort to disperse the crowd, Cowling, Sims, and the Riders decided to stay put.

Eventually, however, two members of the mob, Roger Couch and Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, decided that they had waited long enough. After returning to his car, which was parked a few yards behind the disabled Greyhound, Lewallyn suddenly ran toward the bus and tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window. Within seconds the bundle exploded, sending dark gray smoke throughout the bus. At first, Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought the bomb-thrower was just trying to scare the Freedom Riders with a smoke bomb, but as the smoke got blacker and blacker and as flames began to engulf several of the upholstered seats, she realized that she and the other passengers were in serious trouble. Crouching down in the middle of the bus, she screamed out, "Is there any air up front?" When no one answered, she began to panic. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled to the others, who were lost in a dense cloud of smoke. Making her way forward, she finally found an open window six rows from the front and thrust her head out, gasping for air. As she looked out, she saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree, who had also found open windows. Seconds later, all three squeezed through the windows and dropped to the ground. Still choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the street. Gazing back at the burning bus, they feared that the other passengers were still trapped inside, but they soon caught sight of several passengers who had escaped through the front door on the other side.

They were all lucky to be alive. Several members of the mob had pressed against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn niggers," and the Freedom Riders had been all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the mob that the whole bus was about to explode. As the frightened whites retreated, Cowling pried open the door, allowing the rest of the choking passengers to escape. When Hank Thomas, the first Rider to exit the front of the bus, crawled away from the doorway, a white man rushed toward him and asked, "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man's concerned look turned into a sneer as he struck the astonished student in the head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and was barely conscious as the rest of the exiting Riders spilled out onto the grass.

By this time, several of the white families living in the surrounding Bynum neighborhood had formed a small crowd in front of the grocery store. Most of the onlookers remained safely in the background, but a few stepped forward to offer assistance to the Riders. One little girl, twelve-year-old Janie Miller, supplied the choking victims with water, filling and refilling a five-gallon bucket while braving the insults and taunts of Klansmen. Later ostracized and threatened for this act of kindness, she and her family found it impossible to remain in Anniston in the aftermath of the bus bombing. Even though city leaders were quick to condemn the bombing, there was little sympathy for the Riders among local whites. Indeed, while Miller was coming to the Riders' aid, some of her neighbors were urging the marauding Klansmen on.

At one point, with the Riders lying "on the ground around the bus, coughing and bleeding," the mob surged forward. But Cowling's pistol, the heat of the fire, and the acrid fumes wafting from the burning upholstery kept them away. Moments later a second fuel tank explosion drove them back even farther, and eventually a couple of warning shots fired into the air by the highway patrolmen on the scene signaled that the would-be lynching party was over. As the disappointed vigilantes slipped away, Cowling, Sims, and the patrolmen stood guard over the Riders, most of whom were lying or sitting in a daze a few yards from the burned-out shell of the bus. But no one in a position of authority showed any interest in identifying or arresting those responsible for the assault. No one wrote down the license numbers of the Klansmen's cars and pickup trucks, and no one seemed in any hurry to call an ambulance. Several of the Riders had inhaled smoke and fumes and were in serious need of medical attention, but it would be some time before any of them saw a doctor. One sympathetic white couple who lived nearby allowed Hughes to use their phone to call for an ambulance, and when no one answered, they drove her to the hospital. For the rest of the stricken Riders, getting to the hospital proved to be a bit more complicated. When the ambulance called by one of the state troopers finally arrived, the driver refused to transport any of the injured black Riders. After a few moments of awkward silence, the white Riders, already loaded into the ambulance, began to exit, insisting they could not leave their black friends behind. With this gesture - and a few stern words from Cowling - the driver's resolve weakened, and before long the integrated band was on its way to Anniston Memorial Hospital.

Unfortunately, the scene at the hospital offered the Riders little solace. The first to arrive, Hughes found the medical care in Anniston almost as frightening as the burning bus:

There was no doctor at the hospital, only a nurse. They had me breathe pure oxygen but that only burned my throat and did not relieve the coughing. I was burning hot and my clothes were a wet mess. After awhile Ed and Bert were brought in, choking. We all lay on our beds and coughed. Finally a woman doctor came in - she had to look up smoke poisoning before treating us. They brought in the Negro man who had been in the back of the bus with me. I pointed to him and told them to take care of him. But they did not bring him into our emergency room. I understand that they did not do anything at all for Hank. Thirteen in all were brought in, and three were admitted: Ed, the Negro man and myself. They gave me a room and I slept. When I woke up the nurse asked me if I could talk with the FBI. The FBI man did not care about us, but only the bombing.

Hughes's general distrust of the FBI's attitude toward civil rights activists was clearly warranted, but - unbeknownst to her - the FBI agent on the scene had actually intervened on the Freedom Riders' behalf. At his urging, the medical staff agreed to treat all of the injured passengers, black and white, though in the end they failed to do so. When the ambulance full of Freedom Riders arrived at the hospital, a group of Klansmen made an unsuccessful attempt to block the entrance to the emergency room. Later, as the crowd outside the hospital grew to menacing proportions, hospital officials began to panic, especially after several Klansmen threatened to burn the building to the ground. With nightfall approaching and with no prospect of adequate police protection, the superintendent ordered the Riders to leave the hospital as soon as possible.

Hughes and several other Riders were in no shape to leave, but Joe Perkins, the leader of the Greyhound group, had no choice but to comply with the evacuation order. Struggling to conceal his rage, he told the Riders to be ready to leave in twenty minutes, though it actually took him well over an hour to arrange safe passage out of the hospital. After both the state troopers and the local police refused to provide the Riders with transportation - or even an escort - Bert Bigelow called friends in Washington in a vain effort to get help from the federal government. A few minutes later Perkins placed a frantic call to Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham. A native of the Alabama Black Belt, Shuttlesworth knew enough about towns like Anniston to know that the Freedom Riders were in serious danger. Mobilizing a fleet of eight cars, he planned to lead the rescue mission himself until his longtime bodyguard, Colonel Stone "Buck" Johnson, persuaded him to remain in Birmingham with the Trailways Riders, who had arrived in the city earlier in the afternoon. Just before the cars left for Anniston, Shuttlesworth reminded Johnson and the other volunteers that this was a nonviolent operation. "Gentlemen, this is dangerous," he admitted, "but... you mustn't carry any weapons. You must trust God and have faith." All of the "deacons" nodded in assent, but as soon as they were safely out of sight, several of the faithful pulled out shotguns from beneath their seats. Checking triggers and ammunition, they made sure they would be able to defend themselves if the going got rough.

While the Riders waited for Shuttlesworth's deacons to make their way across the back roads of the Alabama hill country, the Anniston hospital superintendent grew impatient and reminded Perkins that the interracial group would not be allowed to spend the night in the hospital. Perhaps, he suggested with a wry smile, they could find refuge in the bus station. Fortunately, the superintendent's mean-spirited suggestion became moot a few minutes later when the rescue mission pulled into the hospital parking lot. With the police holding back the jeering crowd, and with the deacons openly displaying their weapons, the weary but relieved Riders piled into the cars, which promptly drove off into the gathering dusk. "We walked right between those Ku Klux," Buck Johnson later recalled. "Some of them had clubs. There were some deputies too. You couldn't tell the deputies from the Ku Klux."

As the convoy raced toward Birmingham, the Riders peppered their rescuers with questions about the fate of the Trailways group. Perkins's conversation with Shuttlesworth earlier in the afternoon had revealed that the other bus had also run into trouble, but few details had been available. The deacons themselves knew only part of the story, but even the barest outline was enough to confirm the Riders' worst fears: The attack on the bus in Anniston could not be dismissed as the work of an unorganized mob. As the deacons described what had happened to the Trailways group, the true nature of the Riders' predicament came into focus: With the apparent connivance of law enforcement officials, the organized defenders of white supremacy in Alabama had decided to smash the Freedom Ride with violence, in effect announcing to the world that they had no intention of letting the law, the U.S. Constitution, or anything else interfere with the preservation of racial segregation in their sovereign state.

The Trailway Riders' ordeal began even before the group left Atlanta. As Peck and the other Riders waited in line to purchase their tickets, they couldn't help noticing that several regular passengers had disappeared from the line after being approached by a group of white men. The white men themselves - later identified as Alabama Klansmen - eventually boarded the bus, but only a handful of other regular passengers joined them. The Klansmen were beefy, rough-looking characters, mostly in their twenties or thirties, and their hulking presence gave the Riders an uneasy feeling as the bus pulled out. There were seven Freedom Riders scattered throughout the bus: the Bergmans, Jim Peck, Charles Person, Herman Harris, Jerry Moore, and Ike Reynolds. Simeon Booker and his Jet magazine colleague, photographer Ted Gaffney, were also on board. Seated in the rear of the bus, the two journalists had a close-up view of the entire harrowing journey from Atlanta to Birmingham. "It was a frightening experience," Booker later reported, "the worst encountered in almost 20 years of journalism."

He was not exaggerating. The bus was barely out of the Atlanta terminal when the Klansmen began to make threatening remarks. "You niggers will be taken care of once you get in Alabama," one Klansman sneered. Once the bus passed the state line, the comments intensified, giving the Riders the distinct impression that something might be brewing in Anniston. Arriving at the Anniston Trailways station approximately an hour after the other Riders had pulled into the Greyhound station, Peck and the Trailways Riders looked around warily before leaving the bus. The waiting room was eerily quiet, and several whites looked away as the unwelcome visitors walked up to the lunch counter. After purchasing a few sandwiches, the Riders walked back to the bus. Later, while waiting nervously to leave, they heard an ambulance siren but didn't think much of it until the bus driver, John Olan Patterson, who had been talking to several Anniston police officers, vaulted up the steps. Flanked by eight "hoodlums," as Peck later called them, Patterson gave them the news about the Greyhound riot. "We have received word that a bus has been burned to the ground and passengers are being carried to the hospital by the carloads," he declared, with no hint of compassion or regret. "A mob is waiting for our bus and will do the same to us unless we get these niggers off the front seats." His bus wasn't going anywhere until the black Freedom Riders retreated to the back of the bus where they belonged.

After a few moments of silence, one of the Riders reminded Patterson that they were interstate passengers who had the right to sit wherever they pleased. Shaking his head in disgust, he exited the bus without a word. But one of the white "hoodlums" soon answered for him: "Niggers get back. You ain't up north. You're in Alabama, and niggers ain't nothing here." To prove his point, he suddenly lunged toward Person, punching him in the face. A second Klansman then struck Harris, who was sitting next to Person in the front section of the bus. Both black Freedom Riders adhered to Gandhian discipline and refused to fight back, but this only encouraged their attackers. Dragging the defenseless students into the aisle, the Klansmen started pummeling them with their fists and kicking them again and again. At this point Peck and Walter Bergman rushed forward from the back to object. As soon as Peck reached the front, one of the attackers turned on him, striking a blow that sent the frail, middle-aged activist reeling across two rows of seats. Within seconds Bergman, the oldest of the Freedom Riders at sixty-one, suffered a similar blow, falling to the floor with a thud. As blood spurted from their faces, both men tried to shield themselves from further attack, but the Klansmen, enraged by the white Riders' attempt to protect their "nigger" collaborators, proceeded to pound them into a bloody mass. While a pair of Klansmen lifted Peck's head, others punched him in the face until he lost consciousness. By this time Bergman was out cold on the floor, but one frenzied assailant continued to stomp on his chest. When Frances Bergman begged the Klansman to stop beating her husband, he ignored her plea and called her a "nigger lover." Fortunately, one of the other Klansmen - realizing that the defenseless Freedom Rider was about to be killed - eventually called a halt to the beating. "Don't kill him," he said coolly, making sure that no one on the bus mistook self-interested restraint for compassion.

Although Walter Bergman's motionless body blocked the aisle, several Klansmen managed to drag Person and Harris, both barely conscious, to the back of the bus, draping them over the passengers sitting in the backseat. A few seconds later, they did the same to Peck and Bergman, creating a pile of bleeding and bruised humanity that left the rest of the passengers in a momentary state of shock. Content with their brutal handiwork, the Klansmen then sat down in the middle of the bus to block any further attempts to violate the color line. At this point a black woman riding as a regular passenger begged to be let off the bus, but the Klansmen forced her to stay. "Shut up, you black bitch," one of them snarled. "Ain't nobody but whites sitting up here. And them nigger lovers . . . can just sit back there with their nigger friends."

Moments later, Patterson, who had left during the melee, returned to the bus, accompanied by a police officer. After surveying the scene, both men appeared satisfied with the restoration of Jim Crow seating arrangements. Turning toward the Klansmen, the police officer grinned and assured them that Alabama justice was on their side: "Don't worry about no lawsuits. I ain't seen a thing." The officer then exited the bus and motioned to Patterson to head out onto the highway. Realizing that there was a mob waiting on the main road to Birmingham, the driver kept to the back roads as he headed west. When none of the Klansmen objected to this detour, the Freedom Riders were puzzled but relieved, thinking that perhaps there were limits to the savagery of the segregationists after all, even in the wilds of eastern Alabama. What they did not know, of course, was that the Klansmen were simply saving them for the welcoming party already gathering in the shadows of downtown Birmingham.

During the next two hours, as the bus rolled toward Birmingham, the Klansmen continued to taunt and torment the Riders. One man brandished a pistol, a second threatened the Riders with a steel pipe, and three others served as "sentries," blocking access to the middle and front sections of the bus. As Booker recalled the scene, one of the sentries was "a pop-eyed fellow who kept taunting: 'Just tell Bobby [Kennedy] and we'll do him in, too.'" When one of the Klansmen approached Booker threateningly, the journalist nervously handed him a copy of Jet that featured an advance story on CORE's sponsorship of the Freedom Ride. Over the next few minutes, as the article was passed from Klansman to Klansman, the atmosphere became increasingly tense. "I'd like to choke all of them," one Klansman confessed, while others assured the Riders that they would get what was coming to them when they arrived in Birmingham. By the time the bus reached the outskirts of the city, Peck and the other injured Riders had regained consciousness, but since the Klansmen would not allow any of the Riders to leave their seats or talk among themselves, there was no opportunity for Peck to prepare the group for the impending onslaught. He could only hope that each Rider would be able to draw upon some combination of inner strength and past experience, some reservoir of courage and responsibility that would sustain the Freedom Ride and protect the viability and moral integrity of the nonviolent movement.

Though battered and bleeding, and barely able to walk, Peck was determined to set an example for his fellow Freedom Riders. As the designated testers at the Birmingham stop, he and Person would be the first to confront the fully assembled power of Alabama segregationists. The terror-filled ride from Atlanta was a clear indication that they could expect some measure of violence in Birmingham, but at this point Peck and the other Trailways Riders had no detailed knowledge of what had happened to the Greyhound group in Anniston two hours earlier. They thought they were prepared for the worst. In actuality, however, they had no reliable way of gauging what they were up against, no way of appreciating the full implications of challenging Alabama's segregationist institutions, and no inkling of how far Birmingham's ultra-segregationists would go to protect the sanctity of Jim Crow. This was not just the Deep South - it was Birmingham, where close collaboration between the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement officials was a fact of life. The special agents in the Birmingham FBI field office, as well as their superiors in Washington, possessed detailed information on this collaboration and could have warned the Freedom Riders. But they chose to remain silent.

The dire consequences of the bureau's refusal to intervene were compounded by the active involvement of FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe. In the final minutes before the Trailways group's arrival, Rowe helped ensure that the plot to "welcome" the Freedom Riders would actually be carried out. The plan called for Rowe and the other Klansmen to initiate the attack at the Greyhound station, where the first group of Freedom Riders was expected to arrive, but news of the Anniston bombing did not reach Birmingham until midafternoon, just minutes before the arrival of the Trailways bus. A frantic call from police headquarters to Rowe, who quickly spread the word, alerted the Klansmen waiting near the Greyhound station that a bus of Freedom Riders was about to arrive at the Trailways station, three blocks away. The "welcoming committee" had just enough time to regroup at the Trailways station. Years later Rowe recalled the mad rush across downtown Birmingham: "We made an astounding sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham on Sunday afternoon carrying chains, sticks, and clubs. Everything was deserted; no police officers were to be seen except one on a street corner. He stepped off and let us go by, and we barged into the bus station and took it over like an army of occupation. There were Klansmen in the waiting room, in the rest rooms, in the parking area."

By the time Peck and company arrived, the Klansmen and their police allies were all in place, armed and ready to do what had to be done to protect the Southern way of life. Police dispatchers, following the agreed-upon plan, had cleared the "target" area: For the next fifteen minutes there would be no police presence in or near the Trailways station. The only exceptions were two plainclothes detectives who were in the crowd to monitor the situation and to make sure that the Klansmen left the station before the police arrived.

Since it was Sunday, and Mother's Day, there were few bystanders, aside from a handful of news reporters who had been tipped off that something big was about to happen at the Trailways station. Despite the semisecret nature of the operation, the organizers could not resist the temptation to let the outside world catch a glimpse of Alabama manhood in action.

One of the reporters on hand was Howard K. Smith, a national correspondent for CBS News who was in Birmingham working on a television documentary titled "Who Speaks for Birmingham?". Smith and his CBS colleagues were investigating New York Times columnist Harrison Salisbury's charges that Alabama's largest city was consumed by lawlessness and racial oppression. "Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground," wrote Salisbury in April 1960, "has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state's apparatus." After several days of interviews, Smith was still trying to decide if Salisbury's claims were exaggerated. A Louisiana native with considerable experience in the Deep South, Smith was more than intrigued when he received a Saturday night call from Dr. Edward R. Fields, the president of the ultra-conservative National States Rights Party (NSRP), an organization known to promote a virulent strain of white supremacist and anti-Semitic extremism. Identifying himself simply as "Fields," the arch segregationist urged Smith to hang around the downtown bus stations "if he wanted to see some real action."

A gun-toting Birmingham chiropractor with close ties to the infamous Georgia extremist J. B. Stoner, Fields himself had every intention of taking part in the action. Along with Stoner, who had driven over from Atlanta for the occasion, and several other NSRP stalwarts, Fields showed up at the Greyhound station on Sunday afternoon armed and ready for the bloodletting - even though Klan leader Hubert Page warned him to stay away. Page and his police accomplices were having enough trouble controlling their own forces without having to worry about Fields and his crew of professional troublemakers.

With Police Chief Jamie Moore out of the city and Connor lying low in an effort to distance himself from the impending violence, Detective Tom Cook was in charge of the operation, but Cook did not share Page's concern. When Rowe called Cook to complain that the NSRP was complicating the Klan's plans, the detective told him to relax. "You boys should work together," Cook suggested.

Connor - who spent Sunday morning at city hall, barely a stone's throw away from the Greyhound station - was probably the only man in Birmingham with the power to call the whole thing off. But he was not about to do so. Resisting the entreaties of several friends, including his Methodist pastor, John Rutland, who warned him that joining forces with the Klan was a big mistake, he cast his lot with the extremists. He knew that the welcoming party might backfire - that it could complicate the mayoral campaign of his political ally Art Hanes, that Birmingham might even become a second Little Rock, a city besieged by federal troops - but he simply could not bring himself to let the Freedom Riders off the hook. He had been waiting too long for an opportunity to confront the Yankee agitators on his own turf. It was time to let Earl Warren, the Kennedys, the Communists, and all the other meddling Southhaters know that the loyal sons of Alabama were ready to fight and die for white supremacy and states' rights. It was time for the blood to flow.

At 4:15 on Sunday afternoon, Connor got all the blood he wanted - and then some. As soon as the bus pulled into the Trailways terminal, the Klansmen on board raced down the aisle to be near the front door. Following a few parting taunts - one man screamed, "You damn Communists, why don't you go back to Russia. You're a shame to the white race" - they hustled down the steps and disappeared into the crowd. They had done their job; the rest was up to their Klan brethren, several of whom were waiting expectantly in front of the terminal. The Klansmen's hurried exit was a bit unnerving, but as Peck and the other Freedom Riders peered out at the crowd there was no sign of any weapons. One by one, the Riders filed off the bus and onto the unloading platform, where they began to retrieve their luggage. Although there were several rough-looking men standing a few feet from the platform, there was no clear indication that an attack was imminent. After a few moments of hesitation, Peck and Person walked toward the white waiting room to begin testing the terminal's facilities. In his 1962 memoir, Peck recalled the intensity of the scene, especially his concern for the safety of his black colleague. "I did not want to put Person in a position of being forced to proceed if he thought the situation was too dangerous," he remembered, but "when I looked at him, he responded by saying simply, 'Let's go.'" This bravery was not born of ignorance: Person had grown up in the Deep South; he had recently served sixteen days in jail for his part in the Atlanta sit-ins, and he had already been beaten up earlier in the day. Nevertheless, neither he nor Peck was fully prepared for what was about to happen.

Moments after the two Freedom Riders entered the waiting room and approached the whites-only lunch counter, one of the waiting Klansmen pointed to the cuts on Peck's face and the caked blood on his shirt and screamed out that Person, who was walking in front of Peck, deserved to die for attacking a white man. At this point, Peck tried to explain that Person was not the man who had attacked him, adding: "You'll have to kill me before you hurt him." This blatant breach of racial solidarity only served to incite the crowd of Klansmen blocking their path. After an Eastview Klansman named Gene Reeves pushed Person toward the colored waiting room, the young black Freedom Rider gamely continued walking toward the white lunch counter but was unable to sidestep a second Klansman who shoved him up against a concrete wall. Standing nearby, NSRP leader Edward Fields pointed toward Peck and yelled: "Get that son of a bitch." Several burly white men then began to pummel Person with their fists, bloodying his face and mouth and dropping him to his knees. When Peck rushed over to help Person to his feet, several Klansmen grabbed both men by the shoulders and pushed them into a dimly lit corridor leading to a loading platform. In the corridor more than a dozen whites, some armed with lead or iron pipes and others with oversized key rings, pounced on the two Riders, punching and kicking them repeatedly. Before long, the assault turned into a chaotic free-for-all with "fists and arms... flying everywhere." In the ensuing confusion, Person managed to escape. Running into the street, he staggered onto a city bus and eventually found his way to Fred Shuttlesworth's parsonage. In the meantime Peck bore the brunt of the attack, eventually losing consciousness and slumping to the floor in a pool of blood.

The fracas had been moved to the back corridor in an effort to avoid the reporters and news photographers roaming the white waiting room, but several newsmen, including Howard K. Smith, witnessed at least part of the attack. Smith, who had only been in Birmingham for a few days, could hardly believe his eyes as the rampaging Klansmen and NSRP "storm troopers" swarmed over the two Freedom Riders. But he soon discovered that this was only the beginning of one of the bloodiest afternoons in Birmingham's history.

While Peck and Person were being assaulted in the corridor, the other Riders searched for a refuge. Jerry Moore and Herman Harris avoided detection by losing themselves in the crowd and slipping away just before the assaults began. Frances Bergman, at her husband's insistence, boarded a city bus moments after their arrival, but Walter himself was unable to escape the mob's fury. Still woozy from his earlier beating, with blood still caked on his clothing, he bravely followed Peck and Person into the white waiting room.

After witnessing the initial assault on his two colleagues, he searched in vain for a policeman who could help them, but soon he too was knocked to the floor by an enraged Klansman. When Simeon Booker entered the terminal a few seconds later, he saw the bloodied and defenseless professor crawling on his hands and knees. Recoiling from the grisly scene, Booker retreated to the street, where he found a black cabdriver who agreed to whisk him and Ted Gaffney away to safety.

Others were less fortunate. Several white men attacked Ike Reynolds, kicking and stomping him before heaving his semiconscious body into a curbside trash bin. In the confusion, the mob also attacked a number of bystanders misidentified as Freedom Riders. One of the victims was actually a Klansman named L. B. Earle, who had the misfortune of coming out of the men's room at the wrong time. Attacked by fellow Klansmen who failed to recognize him, Earle suffered several deep head gashes and ended up in the hospital. Another victim of the mob, a twenty-nine-year-old black laborer named George Webb, was assaulted after he entered the baggage room with his fiancée, Mary Spicer, one of the regular passengers on the freedom bus from Atlanta. The last person to leave the bus, Spicer was unaware of the melee inside the station until she and Webb encountered a group of pipewielding rioters in the baggage area. One of the men, undercover FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, told Spicer to "get the hell out of here," and she escaped harm, running into the street for help. But Rowe and three others, including an NSRP member, immediately surrounded Webb and proceeded to pummel him with everything from their fists to a baseball bat. Webb fought back but was soon overwhelmed as several more white men joined in. Dozens of others looked on, some yelling, "Kill the nigger." But moments later the assault was interrupted by Red Self, one of the plainclothes detectives on the scene, who grabbed Rowe by the shoulder and told him it was time to go. "Get the boys out of here," he ordered. "I'm ready to give the signal for the police to move in."

During the allotted fifteen minutes, the violence had spread to the sidewalks and streets surrounding the Trailways station, making it difficult to get the word to all of the Klansmen and NSRP members involved in the riot. But by the time the police moved in to restore order, virtually all of the rioters had left the area. Despite Self's warning, Rowe and those attacking Webb were among the last to leave. "Goddamn it, Tom," Self finally screamed at Rowe, "I told you to get out of here! They're on the way." Rowe and

several others, however, were preoccupied with Webb and continued the attack until a news photographer snapped a picture of Rowe and the other Klansmen. As soon as the flashbulb went off, they abandoned Webb and ran after the photographer, Tommy Langston of the Birmingham Post-Herald, who made it to the station parking lot before being caught. After one man grabbed Langston's camera and smashed it to the ground, Rowe and several others, including Eastview klavern leader Hubert Page, kicked and punched him and threatened to beat him with the same pipes and baseball bats used on Webb. In the meantime, Webb ran into the loading area, where he was recaptured by a pack of Klansmen led by Gene Reeves. With the police closing in, Webb, like Langston, was released after a few final licks, though by this time both men were bleeding profusely. Stumbling into the parking lot, Webb somehow managed to find the car where his terrified fiancée and aunt had been waiting. As they drove away to safety, Langston, whose life had suddenly become intertwined with the beating of a man whom he had never met, staggered down the street to the Post-Herald building, where he collapsed into the arms of a shocked colleague. Later in the afternoon, another Post-Herald photographer returned to the scene of the assault and retrieved Langston's broken camera, discovering to his and Langston's amazement that the roll of film inside was undamaged.

The graphic picture of the Webb beating that appeared on the front page of the Post-Herald the next morning, though initially misidentified as a photograph of the attack on Peck, turned out to be one of the few pieces of documentary evidence to survive the riot. Immediately following the attack on Langston, Rowe and Page grabbed Birmingham News photographers Bud Gordon and Tom Lankford and promptly destroyed all of the unexposed film in their cameras. Neither photographer was beaten, but Clancy Lake, a reporter for WAPI radio, was not so lucky. As Rowe and two other Eastview Klansmen, Billy Holt and Ray Graves, walked toward the Greyhound station parking lot to retrieve their cars, they spied Lake sitting in the front seat of his car broadcasting an eyewitness account of the riot. Convinced that Lake had a camera and had been taking photographs of the scene at the Trailways station, the Klansmen smashed the car's windows with a blackjack, ripped the microphone from the dashboard, and dragged the reporter onto the pavement. Although Lake noticed a passing police car and screamed for help, the officer drove on, leaving him at the mercy of attackers. At one point the three men pushed him into a wall, but after Holt swung at him with a pipe and missed, Lake bolted into the Trailways station, where he was relieved to discover that a squad of police had just arrived. With the police on the scene, the gritty reporter was able to resume his broadcast via telephone, as Rowe and his companions called off the pursuit and once again headed toward their cars.

Along the way, they encountered a smiling Bobby Shelton, who congratulated them for a job well done and offered them a ride to the Greyhound parking lot in his Cadillac. Upon their arrival, the Imperial Wizard and his passengers were shocked to discover several local black men writing down the license plate numbers of the Klansmen's cars. Following a brief struggle - at least one of the overmatched blacks was in his mid-sixties - the Klansmen ripped up the pages with the incriminating numbers before heading to Rowe's house for a victory celebration. Arriving at the house around five o'clock, they stayed there only a few minutes before a phone call from Sergeant Tom Cook sent them back downtown to intercept another bus full of Freedom Riders. The Greyhound freedom bus, having been burned in Anniston, never actually arrived, but Rowe and Page had too much blood lust to return home without getting some action. Wandering into a black neighborhood on the north side of downtown, they picked a fight with a group of young blacks who gave as good as they got. The battle put one Klansman in the hospital and left Rowe with a knife wound in the neck serious enough to require immediate attention from a doctor. None of this, however, dampened the sense of triumph among the Klansmen and their police collaborators.

At a late-night meeting with Rowe, Red Self suggested that the shedding of a little blood was a small price to pay for what they had accomplished. After weeks of anticipation and careful planning, they had done exactly what they set out to do. Carried out in broad daylight, the assault on the Freedom Riders had turned a bus station into a war zone, and the Klansmen involved had come away with only minor injuries and little likelihood of criminal prosecution. In the coming days and weeks, the publication of Langston's photograph would be a source of concern for those who were identifiable as Webb's attackers - and for Rowe's FBI handlers, who were furious that one of their informants had allowed himself to be captured on film during a criminal assault. But as Self and Rowe congratulated each other in the waning hours of May 14, there was no reason to believe that anything had gone wrong. Backing up words with action, the white supremacists of the Eastview klavern and their allies had demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they were ready to use any means necessary to halt the Freedom Rides.

The late-afternoon scene at the Trailways station testified to the success of the operation. Within twenty minutes of the Freedom Riders' arrival, the mob had vanished, leaving surprisingly little evidence of the riot and few witnesses with a clear sense of what had just happened. When Peck regained consciousness a few minutes after the assault, he was alone in the corridor.

Excerpted from Freedom Riders by Raymond Arsenault. Copyright © 2005 by Raymond Arsenault. Excerpted by permission of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Get On the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961

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In 1961, the Freedom Riders set out for the Deep South to defy Jim Crow laws and call for change. Their efforts transformed the civil rights movement. Raymond Arsenault is the author of 'Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice'.

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Freedom Riders - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Freedom Riders - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. Freedom Riders tried to use "whites-only" restrooms and lunch counters at bus stations in Alabama, South Carolina and other Southern states. The groups were confronted by arresting police officers-as well as horrific violence from white protestors-along their routes, but also drew international attention to their cause.

Activists Test Supreme Court Decision

The 1961 Freedom Rides, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), were modeled after the organization's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. During the 1947 action, African-American and white bus riders tested the 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Morgan v. Virginia that found segregated bus seating was unconstitutional.

The 1961 Freedom Rides sought to test a 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that segregation of interstate transportation facilities, including bus terminals, was unconstitutional as well. A big difference between the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation and the 1961 Freedom Rides was the inclusion of women in the later initiative.

In both actions, black riders traveled to the American South-where segregation continued to occur-and attempted to use whites-only restrooms, lunch counters and waiting rooms.

John Lewis

The original group of 13 Freedom Riders-seven African Americans and six whites-left Washington, D.C., on a Greyhound bus on May 4, 1961. Their plan was to reach New Orleans, Louisiana, on May 17 to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled that segregation of the nation's public schools was unconstitutional.

The group traveled through Virginia and North Carolina, drawing little public notice. The first violent incident occurred on May 12 in Rock Hill, South Carolina. John Lewis, an African-American seminary student and member of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), white Freedom Rider and World War II veteran Albert Bigelow, and another African-American rider were viciously attacked as they attempted to enter a whites-only waiting area.

The next day, the group reached Atlanta, Georgia, where some of the riders split off onto a Trailways bus.

Did you know? John Lewis, one of the original group of 13 Freedom Riders, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1986. Lewis, a Democrat, has continued to represent Georgia's 5th Congressional District, which includes Atlanta, into the early part of the 21st century.

Bloodshed in Alabama

On May 14, 1961, the Greyhound bus was the first to arrive in Anniston, Alabama. There, an angry mob of about 200 white people surrounded the bus, causing the driver to continue past the bus station.

The mob followed the bus in automobiles, and when the tires on the bus blew out, someone threw a bomb into the bus. The Freedom Riders escaped the bus as it burst into flames, only to be brutally beaten by members of the surrounding mob.

The second bus, a Trailways vehicle, traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, and those riders were also beaten by an angry white mob, many of whom brandished metal pipes. Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor stated that, although he knew the Freedom Riders were arriving and violence awaited them, he posted no police protection at the station because it was Mother's Day.

Photographs of the burning Greyhound bus and the bloodied riders appeared on the front pages of newspapers throughout the country and around the world the next day, drawing international attention to the Freedom Riders' cause and the state of race relations in the United States.

Following the widespread violence, CORE officials could not find a bus driver who would agree to transport the integrated group, and they decided to abandon the Freedom Rides. However, Diane Nash, an activist from the SNCC, organized a group of 10 students from Nashville, Tennessee, to continue the rides.

U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy, began negotiating with Governor John Patterson of Alabama and the bus companies to secure a driver and state protection for the new group of Freedom Riders. The rides finally resumed, on a Greyhound bus departing Birmingham under police escort, on May 20.

Federal Marshals Called In

The violence toward the Freedom Riders was not quelled-rather, the police abandoned the Greyhound bus just before it arrived at the Montgomery, Alabama, terminal, where a white mob attacked the riders with baseball bats and clubs as they disembarked. Attorney General Kennedy sent 600 federal marshals to the city to stop the violence.

The following night, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. led a service at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, which was attended by more than one thousand supporters of the Freedom Riders. A riot ensued outside the church, and King called Robert Kennedy to ask for protection.

Kennedy summoned the federal marshals, who used teargas to disperse the white mob. Patterson declared martial law in the city and dispatched the National Guard to restore order.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders departed Montgomery for Jackson, Mississippi. There, several hundred supporters greeted the riders. However, those who attempted to use the whites-only facilities were arrested for trespassing and taken to the maximum-security penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi.

During their hearings, the judge turned and looked at the wall rather than listen to the Freedom Riders' defense-as had been the case when sit-in participants were arrested for protesting segregated lunch counters in Tennessee. He sentenced the riders to 30 days in jail.

Attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), a civil rights organization, appealed the convictions all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed them.

Relief at Last

The violence and arrests continued to garner national and international attention, and drew hundreds of new Freedom Riders to the cause.

The rides continued over the next several months, and in the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals.

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Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. Freedom Riders tried to use "whites-only" restrooms and lunch counters at bus stations in Alabama, South Carolina and other Southern states.

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Little Rock at 60: Student Remembers School Integration Case | Time

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Little Rock at 60: Student Remembers School Integration Case | Time

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'I Had a Right to Be at Central': Remembering Little Rock's Integration Battle

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Sixty years ago, a group of nine students walked into a school and changed America. "I had a right to be at Central," one of them tells TIME

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Little Rock Nine - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Little Rock Nine - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Civil War Exclusive Videos & Features - HISTORY.com

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Civil War Exclusive Videos & Features - HISTORY.com

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Contents

1. Causes of the Civil War

2. Outbreak of the Civil War (1861)

3. The Civil War in Virginia (1862)

4. After the Emancipation Proclamation (1863-4)

5. Toward a Union Victory (1864-65)

6. PHOTO GALLERIES

The Civil War in the United States began in 1861, after decades of simmering tensions between northern and southern states over slavery, states' rights and westward expansion. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 caused seven southern states to secede and form the Confederate States of America; four more states soon joined them. The War Between the States, as the Civil War was also known, ended in Confederate surrender in 1865. The conflict was the costliest and deadliest war ever fought on American soil, with some 620,000 of 2.4 million soldiers killed, millions more injured and much of the South left in ruin.
WATCH: Civil War Journal on HISTORY Vault
Causes of the Civil War

In the mid-19th century, while the United States was experiencing an era of tremendous growth, a fundamental economic difference existed between the country's northern and southern regions.

In the North, manufacturing and industry was well established, and agriculture was mostly limited to small-scale farms, while the South's economy was based on a system of large-scale farming that depended on the labor of Black enslaved people to grow certain crops, especially cotton and tobacco.

Growing abolitionist sentiment in the North after the 1830s and northern opposition to slavery's extension into the new western territories led many southerners to fear that the existence of slavery in America -and thus the backbone of their economy-was in danger.

Did you know? Confederate General Thomas Jonathan Jackson earned his famous nickname, "Stonewall," from his steadfast defensive efforts in the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas). At Chancellorsville, Jackson was shot by one of his own men, who mistook him for Union cavalry. His arm was amputated, and he died from pneumonia eight days later.

In 1854, the U.S. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which essentially opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict. Pro- and anti-slavery forces struggled violently in " Bleeding Kansas," while opposition to the act in the North led to the formation of the Republican Party, a new political entity based on the principle of opposing slavery's extension into the western territories. After the Supreme Court's ruling in the Dred Scott case (1857) confirmed the legality of slavery in the territories, the abolitionist John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry in 1859 convinced more and more southerners that their northern neighbors were bent on the destruction of the "peculiar institution" that sustained them. Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860 was the final straw, and within three months seven southern states- South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas -had seceded from the United States.
EXPLORE: Ulysses S. Grant: An Interactive Map of His Key Civil War Battles
Outbreak of the Civil War (1861)

Even as Lincoln took office in March 1861, Confederate forces threatened the federal-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. On April 12, after Lincoln ordered a fleet to resupply Sumter, Confederate artillery fired the first shots of the Civil War. Sumter's commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered after less than two days of bombardment, leaving the fort in the hands of Confederate forces under Pierre G.T. Beauregard. Four more southern states- Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee -joined the Confederacy after Fort Sumter. Border slave states like Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland did not secede, but there was much Confederate sympathy among their citizens.

Though on the surface the Civil War may have seemed a lopsided conflict, with the 23 states of the Union enjoying an enormous advantage in population, manufacturing (including arms production) and railroad construction, the Confederates had a strong military tradition, along with some of the best soldiers and commanders in the nation. They also had a cause they believed in: preserving their long-held traditions and institutions, chief among these being slavery.

In the First Battle of Bull Run (known in the South as First Manassas) on July 21, 1861, 35,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson forced a greater number of Union forces (or Federals) to retreat towards Washington, D.C., dashing any hopes of a quick Union victory and leading Lincoln to call for 500,000 more recruits. In fact, both sides' initial call for troops had to be widened after it became clear that the war would not be a limited or short conflict.

The Civil War in Virginia (1862)

George B. McClellan-who replaced the aging General Winfield Scott as supreme commander of the Union Army after the first months of the war-was beloved by his troops, but his reluctance to advance frustrated Lincoln. In the spring of 1862, McClellan finally led his Army of the Potomac up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers, capturing Yorktown on May 4. The combined forces of Robert E. Lee and Jackson successfully drove back McClellan's army in the Seven Days' Battles (June 25-July 1), and a cautious McClellan called for yet more reinforcements in order to move against Richmond. Lincoln refused, and instead withdrew the Army of the Potomac to Washington. By mid-1862, McClellan had been replaced as Union general-in-chief by Henry W. Halleck, though he remained in command of the Army of the Potomac.

Lee then moved his troops northwards and split his men, sending Jackson to meet Pope's forces near Manassas, while Lee himself moved separately with the second half of the army. On August 29, Union troops led by John Pope struck Jackson's forces in the Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas). The next day, Lee hit the Federal left flank with a massive assault, driving Pope's men back towards Washington. On the heels of his victory at Manassas, Lee began the first Confederate invasion of the North. Despite contradictory orders from Lincoln and Halleck, McClellan was able to reorganize his army and strike at Lee on September 14 in Maryland, driving the Confederates back to a defensive position along Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg.

On September 17, the Army of the Potomac hit Lee's forces (reinforced by Jackson's) in what became the war's bloodiest single day of fighting. Total casualties at the Battle of Antietam (also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg) numbered 12,410 of some 69,000 troops on the Union side, and 13,724 of around 52,000 for the Confederates. The Union victory at Antietam would prove decisive, as it halted the Confederate advance in Maryland and forced Lee to retreat into Virginia. Still, McClellan's failure to pursue his advantage earned him the scorn of Lincoln and Halleck, who removed him from command in favor of Ambrose E. Burnside. Burnside's assault on Lee's troops near Fredericksburg on December 13 ended in heavy Union casualties and a Confederate victory; he was promptly replaced by Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker, and both armies settled into winter quarters across the Rappahannock River from each other.

After the Emancipation Proclamation (1863-4)

Lincoln had used the occasion of the Union victory at Antietam to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all enslaved people in the rebellious states after January 1, 1863. He justified his decision as a wartime measure, and did not go so far as to free the enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union. Still, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some 186,000 Black Civil War soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives.

In the spring of 1863, Hooker's plans for a Union offensive were thwarted by a surprise attack by the bulk of Lee's forces on May 1, whereupon Hooker pulled his men back to Chancellorsville. The Confederates gained a costly victory in the Battle of Chancellorsville, suffering 13,000 casualties (around 22 percent of their troops); the Union lost 17,000 men (15 percent). Lee launched another invasion of the North in June, attacking Union forces commanded by General George Meade on July 1 near Gettysburg, in southern Pennsylvania. Over three days of fierce fighting, the Confederates were unable to push through the Union center, and suffered casualties of close to 60 percent.

Meade failed to counterattack, however, and Lee's remaining forces were able to escape into Virginia, ending the last Confederate invasion of the North. Also in July 1863, Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg (Mississippi) in the Siege of Vicksburg, a victory that would prove to be the turning point of the war in the western theater. After a Confederate victory at Chickamauga Creek, Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, in September, Lincoln expanded Grant's command, and he led a reinforced Federal army (including two corps from the Army of the Potomac) to victory in the Battle of Chattanooga in late November.

Toward a Union Victory (1864-65)

In March 1864, Lincoln put Grant in supreme command of the Union armies, replacing Halleck. Leaving William Tecumseh Sherman in control in the West, Grant headed to Washington, where he led the Army of the Potomac towards Lee's troops in northern Virginia. Despite heavy Union casualties in the Battle of the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania (both May 1864), at Cold Harbor (early June) and the key rail center of Petersburg (June), Grant pursued a strategy of attrition, putting Petersburg under siege for the next nine months.

Sherman outmaneuvered Confederate forces to take Atlanta by September, after which he and some 60,000 Union troops began the famous "March to the Sea," devastating Georgia on the way to capturing Savannah on December 21. Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, fell to Sherman's men by mid-February, and Jefferson Davis belatedly handed over the supreme command to Lee, with the Confederate war effort on its last legs. Sherman pressed on through North Carolina, capturing Fayetteville, Bentonville, Goldsboro and Raleigh by mid-April.

Meanwhile, exhausted by the Union siege of Petersburg and Richmond, Lee's forces made a last attempt at resistance, attacking and captured the Federal-controlled Fort Stedman on March 25. An immediate counterattack reversed the victory, however, and on the night of April 2-3 Lee's forces evacuated Richmond. For most of the next week, Grant and Meade pursued the Confederates along the Appomattox River, finally exhausting their possibilities for escape. Grant accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9. On the eve of victory, the Union lost its great leader: The actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14. Sherman received Johnston's surrender at Durham Station, North Carolina on April 26, effectively ending the Civil War.

PHOTO GALLERIES

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The Civil War in the United States began in 1861, after decades of simmering tensions between northern and southern states over slavery, states' rights and westward expansion. Eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy. Ultimately more than 620,000 Americans' lives were lost in the four-year war that ended in a Confederate defeat.

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Slavery in America Exclusive Videos & Features - HISTORY.com

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Slavery in America Exclusive Videos & Features - HISTORY.com

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Slavery in America Exclusive Videos & Features - HISTORY.com

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Check out exclusive Slavery in America videos and features. Browse the latest Slavery in America videos and more on HISTORY.com.

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Forms of Rebellion Video - Slavery in America - HISTORY.com

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Forms of Rebellion Video - Slavery in America - HISTORY.com

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Under threat of punishment, enslaved families found small ways to rebel against an oppressive system.

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Slavery in America | Explore Black History | PBS

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Slavery in America | Explore Black History | PBS

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Slavery in America | Explore Black History | PBS

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Slavery in America | Explore Black History | PBS

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Revisit America's arduous journey through slavery with this special collection of videos and web-exclusive features by trusted producers across PBS.

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The History of Slavery In America (FULL) - YouTube

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The History of Slavery In America (FULL) - YouTube

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The History of Slavery In America (FULL)

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10 “Must Watch” Black History Documentaries | PBS

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10 “Must Watch” Black History Documentaries | PBS

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10 "Must Watch" Black History Documentaries | PBS

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Documentaries can open windows to our past. Through the lens of talented filmmakers, we can re-live iconic moments in history like the 1963 March on Washington or climb aboard a Greyhound bus to join the Freedom Riders on their journey through the Jim Crow South. Documentaries offer rich insight into our society and culture, connect us to some of our proudest and most shameful moments in American history, and remind us of how far we've come. What follows is a list of powerful documentaries exploring Black history and culture in America.

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

This Emmy Award-winning series premiered in 2013 and looks at more than just Black history, it explores Black identity and what it means to be an African American in the U.S. today. Unveiling different religious and social perspectives, a multiplicity of cultural perspectives, and the evolution of the African American people, this series spans five hundred years and two continents as Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes viewers on a journey of the Black experience throughout the United States. On the way, he visits historic sites, engages in passionate debates with America's top historians on African American history, and interviews eyewitnesses who have been on the frontlines of change.

Throughout the series, Dr. Gates highlights tragedies, triumphs and contradictions throughout Black history, revealing that the African American community has never been a uniform entity and sheds new light on what it means to be African American.

Learn more about The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

Based on Raymond Arsenault's book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, this two-hour documentary tells the story of the summer of 1961 when more than 400 Black and white Americans risked their lives traveling together in the segregated South to protest segregation. Committed to the cause of justice and determined to attract attention to the pursuit of civil rights, they boarded buses and trains, calling themselves "Freedom Riders." Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders were met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way. Still, they continued to ride and find new ways to sustain and expand the movement.

Featuring testimony from the Freedom Riders themselves, government officials, and journalists who witnessed the Rides firsthand, this documentary gives viewers a front row seat to the Rides that changed history. "The lesson of the Freedom Rides is that great change can come from a few small steps taken by courageous people," says filmmaker Stanley Nelson, "And that sometimes to do any great thing, it's important that we step out alone."

Learn more about Freedom Riders.

Slavery by Another Name

Did Slavery really end with the Civil War? The documentary Slavery by Another Name explores how in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation, systematic approaches were taken to re-enslave newly freed Blacks in the United States. This system included new brutal methods of forced labor in which men were arrested and forced to work without pay, bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters.

Spanning the 60 years following the Civil War, this 90-minute documentary includes interviews with key Black history scholars like Khalil Muhammad, Mary Ellen Curtin, Risa Goluboff and Adam Green, in addition to moving reactions from descendants of both victims and perpetrators of the forced labor system. Giving voice to the thousands of victims from this period, Slavery by Another Name will challenge assumptions that slavery ended 150 years ago.

Learn more about Slavery by Another Name.

For the preeminent documentary series on the Civil Rights Movement, look no further than Eyes on the Prize. When it premiered on television in 1987, The Los Angeles Times called it "an exhaustive documentary that shouldn't be missed." This award-winning series covers all of the major events of the Civil Rights Movement from 1954-1985, including the Montgomery bus boycott in 1954, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the birth of the Black Power Movement, and the courageous acts of the crusaders that contributed along the way.

Narrated by political and civil rights leader Julian Bond, the 14-hour series combines historical footage and contemporary interviews with key figures of the period; Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Coretta Scott King, Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael), and George Wallace have died since its release. Not only does this series serve as a comprehensive resource in this extensive history, it acts to preserve their testimonials for future generations.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

The Black Power Mixtape tells the story of the Black Power Movement through the eyes of Swedish journalists. Drawn to America in the late 1960s by stories of revolution and urban unrest, the journalists recorded interviews with activists like Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Steale, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver. Thirty years later, this interview footage was found in the basement of Swedish Television and was brought to life by Director Göran Olsson and co-producer Danny Glover.

Set to music by Questlove and Om'Mas Keith, the filmmakers use the original interviews mixed with images and commentary from African-American artists and activists who were influenced by the struggle such as Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli and Melvin Van Peebles. Together they tell the story of The Black Power Movement and how it not only changed the Civil Rights Movement, but how it changed America - forever.

Soundtrack for a Revolution

Taking a fresh approach to the story of the American Civil Rights Movement, Soundtrack for a Revolution features the powerful music from the movement. Focusing on the freedom songs sung by protesters on picket lines, in mass meetings, in paddy wagons and in jail cells, this film celebrates the vitality of the music and the infectious energy that it provided.

Freedom songs evolved from slave chants, the labor movement, and from the Black church, and were a vital tool as protestors stood up against adversity. They energized and empowered them, enabled them to sing the things they couldn't say, and allowed them to meet aggression with dignity and non-violence. Written and directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, this 2009 documentary brings songs of the movement back to life again through new performances by top artists, including John Legend, Joss Stone, Wyclef Jean, and The Roots.

Dark Girls is an emotional exposé on what it means to be dark skinned in America. Filmmakers D. Channsin Berry and Bill Duke capture moving interviews with women who open up about their experiences being dark, Black women in America. They share painful stories about things their mothers, sisters and friends have said, in addition to what they've taken away from mass media. Overwhelmingly these interviews reveal the same thing: To them, Black is not beautiful.

In an effort to learn more about the concept of Black beauty, the filmmakers reach both in and outside the Black community to seed conversations that reveal deep-rooted biases about race. Combining these emotional interviews with historical context and well-known psychological studies, the film sheds light on the perceived biases of "dark versus light," and its ultimate aim to help people see that Black is beautiful.

The Black List: Volume One

The Black List: Volume One features interviews from a variety of voices in contemporary Black America using a technique where the interviewer is never seen or heard on camera. The result is a living portrait of stories from leading voices across a variety of disciplines including arts, sports, politics, business and government. The vision of portrait photographer/filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders with acclaimed journalist and public radio host Elvis Mitchell, was to create a film in response to the negative connotations associated with the word "Black" in western culture.

The interviews created an HBO documentary, a museum exhibition of photographic portraits, a book of those portraits, and an interactive educational program.

Breaking The Huddle: The Integration of College Football
The HBO documentary Breaking the Huddle explores civil rights through the lens of football. Looking at the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and football programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the story culminates with the historic September 1970 game when the all-white University of Alabama Crimson Tide faced off against the fully integrated University of Southern California Trojans. Alabama's crushing defeat under legendary head coach Paul "Bear" Bryant by USC's star African American running back, Sam "Bam" Cunningham, is considered the game that changed college football in the South.

In this 2012 documentary, African American filmmaker Shukree Hassan Tilghman sets off on a journey across America asking the question "Should Black History Month be ended?" Tilghman searches to learn more about race and power in contemporary America by interviewing experts at revered organizations around the country in addition to everyday people he meets along the way during his journey.

Using cinema verité, man-on-the-street interviews, and dramatizations to understand the implications of Black History Month, More Than a Month is both an amusing and thought-provoking look at what the treatment of history tells us about race and power in the United States. Through all this, Tilghman explores what it means to be an American and the universal endeavor to find one's self.

BONUS | Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People

Inspired by the book Reflections in Black by Deborah Willis, Through a Lens Darkly explores the Black experience through photographs. Cameras have been used for over a hundred years as tools for social change, but in this documentary filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris explores how they have affected Blackness in America.

Using his only family album, historical images and photographs from Black luminaries like Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Anthony Barboza, Harris investigates the way Black photographers and their subjects have used the tool to both demean and empower African Americans. A powerful look at the history of race relations, representation, and popular culture, this documentary illustrates the powers of creativity through the lens of talented photographers.
Learn More about Through a Lens Darkly
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10 "Must Watch" Black History Documentaries | PBS

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Documentaries can open windows to our past. Through the lens of talented filmmakers, we can re-live iconic moments in history like the 1963 March on Washington or climb aboard a Greyhound bus to join the Freedom Riders on their journey through the Jim Crow South.

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10 Little Known Black History Facts | PBS

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10 Little Known Black History Facts | PBS

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10 Little Known Black History Facts | PBS

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History is often reduced to a handful of memorable moments and events. In Black history, those events often include courageous stories like those of The Underground Railroad and historic moments like the famous "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But these are only a few of the significant and important events to know and remember.

In an effort to honor this expansive and growing history, Black History Month was established by way of a weekly celebration in February known as "Negro History Week" by historian Carter G. Woodson. But just as Black history is more than a month, so too are the numerous events and figures that are often overlooked during it. What follows is a list of some of those "lesser known" moments and facts in Black history.

Before there was Rosa Parks, there was Claudette Colvin.

Most people think of Rosa Parks as the first person to refuse to give up their seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. There were actually several women who came before her; one of whom was Claudette Colvin.

It was March 2, 1955, when the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl refused to move to the back of the bus, nine months before Rosa Parks' stand that launched the Montgomery bus boycott. Claudette had been studying Black leaders like Harriet Tubman in her segregated school, those conversations had led to discussions around the current day Jim Crow laws they were all experiencing. When the bus driver ordered Claudette to get up, she refused, "It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up."

Claudette Colvin's stand didn't stop there. Arrested and thrown in jail, she was one of four women who challenged the segregation law in court. If Browder v. Gayle became the court case that successfully overturned bus segregation laws in both Montgomery and Alabama, why has Claudette's story been largely forgotten? At the time, the NAACP and other Black organizations felt Rosa Parks made a better icon for the movement than a teenager. As an adult with the right look, Rosa Parks was also the secretary of the NAACP, and was both well-known and respected - people would associate her with the middle class and that would attract support for the cause. But the struggle to end segregation was often fought by young people, more than half of which were women.

Image: Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose
Martin Luther King Jr. improvised the most iconic part of his "I Have a Dream Speech."
On Wednesday, August 28, 1963, 250,000 Americans united at the Lincoln Memorial for the final speech of the March on Washington. As Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the podium, he eventually pushed his notes aside.

The night before the march, Dr. King began working on his speech with a small group of advisers in the lobby of the Willard Hotel. The original speech was more political and less historic, according to Clarence B. Jones, and it did not include any reference to dreams. After delivering the now famous line, "we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," Dr. King transformed his speech into a sermon.

Onstage near Dr. King, singer Mahalia Jackson reportedly kept saying, "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin," and while no one will know if he heard her, it could likely have been the inspiration he needed. Dr. King then continued, "Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream...." And then the famous Baptist preacher preached on, adding repetition and outlining the specifics of his dream. And while this improvised speech given on that hot August day in 1963 was not considered a universal success immediately, it is now recognized as one of the greatest speeches in American history. For more information on the 1963 March on Washington, visit pbs.org/marchonwashington.

Image: National Archives and Records Administration

Inoculation was introduced to America by a slave.

Few details are known about the birth of Onesimus, but it is assumed he was born in Africa in the late seventeenth century before eventually landing in Boston. One of a thousand people of African descent living in the Massachusetts colony, Onesimus was a gift to the Puritan church minister Cotton Mather from his congregation in 1706.

Onesimus told Mather about the centuries old tradition of inoculation practiced in Africa. By extracting the material from an infected person and scratching it into the skin of an uninfected person, you could deliberately introduce smallpox to the healthy individual making them immune. Considered extremely dangerous at the time, Cotton Mather convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to experiment with the procedure when a smallpox epidemic hit Boston in 1721 and over 240 people were inoculated. Opposed politically, religiously and medically in the United States and abroad, public reaction to the experiment put Mather and Boylston's lives in danger despite records indicating that only 2% of patients requesting inoculation died compared to the 15% of people not inoculated who contracted smallpox.

Onesimus' traditional African practice was used to inoculate American soldiers during the Revolutionary War and introduced the concept of inoculation to the United States.

The earliest recorded protest against slavery was by the Quakers in 1688.

Quakers, also known as "The Society of Friends," have a long history of abolition. But it was four Pennsylvania Friends from Germantown who wrote the initial protest in the 17 th century. They saw the slave trade as a grave injustice against their fellow man and used the Golden Rule to argue against such inhumane treatment; regardless of skin color, "we should do unto others as we would have done onto ourselves." In their protest they stated, "Pray, what thing in the world can be done worse towards us, then if men should robb or steal us away, & sell us for slaves to strange Countries, separating housband from their wife and children...."

Their protest against slavery and human trafficking was presented at a "Monthly Meeting at Dublin" in Philadelphia. The Dublin Monthly Meeting reviewed the protest but sent it to the Quarterly Meeting, feeling it to be too serious an issue for their own meeting to decide. The four Friends continued their efforts and presented at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, but it wasn't until 88 years later that the Society of Friends officially denounced slavery.

Over the centuries, this rare document has been considered lost twice. Most recently it was rediscovered in 2005 and is now at Haverford College Special Collections.

Photo: 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery

Of the 12.5 million Africans shipped to the New World during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, fewer than 388,000 arrived in the United States.

In the late 15 th century, the advancement of seafaring technologies created a new Atlantic that would change the world forever. As ships began connecting West Africa with Europe and the Americas, new fortunes were sought and native populations were decimated. With the native labor force dwindling and demand for plantation and mining labor growing, the transatlantic slave trade began.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was underway from 1500-1866, shipping more than 12 million African slaves across the world. Of those slaves, only 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage. Over 400 years, the majority of slaves (4.9 million) found their way to Brazil where they suffered incredibly high mortality rates due to terrible working conditions. Brazil was also the last country to ban slavery in 1888.

By the time the United States became involved in the slave trade, it had been underway for two hundred years. The majority of its 388,000 slaves arrived between 1700 and 1866, representing a much smaller percentage than most Americans realize.

Image:African Renaissance Monument, Senegal

The diverse history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

While Jewish and African American communities have a tumultuous shared history when it comes to the pursuit of civil rights, there is a chapter that is often overlooked. In the 1930s when Jewish academics from Germany and Austria were dismissed from their teaching positions, many came to the United States looking for jobs. Due to the Depression, xenophobia and rising anti-Semitism, many found it difficult to find work, but more than 50 found positions at HBCUs in the segregated South.

Originally established to educate freed slaves to read and write, the first of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities was Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, established in 1837. By the time Jewish professors arrived, the number of HBCUs had grown to 78. At a time when both Jews and African Americans were persecuted, Jewish professors in the Black colleges found the environment comfortable and accepting, often creating special programs to provide opportunities to engage Blacks and whites in meaningful conversation, often for the first time.

In the years that followed, the interests of Jewish and African American communities increasingly diverged, but this once-shared experience of discrimination and interracial cooperation remains a key part of the Civil Rights Movement.

Image: Melrose Cottage, built in 1805, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania.
One in four cowboys was Black, despite the stories told in popular books and movies.
In fact, it's believed that the real "Lone Ranger" was inspired by an African American man named Bass Reeves. Reeves had been born a slave but escaped West during the Civil War where he lived in what was then known as Indian Territory. He eventually became a Deputy U.S. Marshal, was a master of disguise, an expert marksman, had a Native American companion, and rode a silver horse. His story was not unique however.

In the 19 th century, the Wild West drew enslaved Blacks with the hope of freedom and wages. When the Civil War ended, freedmen came West with the hope of a better life where the demand for skilled labor was high. These African Americans made up at least a quarter of the legendary cowboys who lived dangerous lives facing weather, rattlesnakes, and outlaws while they slept under the stars driving cattle herds to market.

While there was little formal segregation in frontier towns and a great deal of personal freedom, Black cowboys were often expected to do more of the work and the roughest jobs compared to their white counterparts. Loyalty did develop between the cowboys on a drive, but the Black cowboys were typically responsible for breaking the horses and being the first ones to cross flooded streams during cattle drives. In fact, it is believed that the term "cowboy" originated as a derogatory term used to describe Black "cowhands."

Image: Bass Reeves, The first African-American US Deputy Marshal
Esther Jones was the real Betty Boop!
The iconic cartoon character Betty Boop was inspired by a Black jazz singer in Harlem. Introduced by cartoonist Max Fleischer in 1930, the caricature of the jazz age flapper was the first and most famous sex symbol in animation. Betty Boop is best known for her revealing dress, curvaceous figure, and signature vocals "Boop Oop A Doop!" While there has been controversy over the years, the inspiration has been traced back to Esther Jones who was known as "Baby Esther" and performed regularly in the Cotton Club during the 1920s.

Baby Esther's trademark vocal style of using "boops" and other childlike scat sounds attracted the attention of actress Helen Kane during a performance in the late 1920s. After seeing Baby Esther, Helen Kane adopted her style and began using "boops" in her songs as well. Finding fame early on, Helen Kane often included this "baby style" into her music. When Betty Boop was introduced, Kane promptly sued Fleischer and Paramount Publix Corporation stating they were using her image and style. However video evidence came to light of Baby Esther performing in a nightclub and the courts ruled against Helen Kane stating she did not have exclusive rights to the "booping" style or image, and that the style, in fact, pre-dated her.

Baby Esther's "baby style" did little to bring her mainstream fame and she died in relative obscurity but a piece of her lives on in the iconic character Betty Boop.

Image: Esther Jones ("Baby Esther"), late 1920s by James VanDerZee
The first licensed African American Female pilot was named Bessie Coleman.
Born in Atlanta, Texas in 1892, Bessie Coleman grew up in a world of harsh poverty, discrimination and segregation. She moved to Chicago at 23 to seek her fortune, but found little opportunity there as well. Wild tales of flying exploits from returning WWI soldiers first inspired her to explore aviation, but she faced a double stigma in that dream being both African American and a woman.

She set her sights on France in order to reach her dreams and began studying French. In 1920, Coleman crossed the ocean with all of her savings and the financial support of Robert Abbott, one of the first African American millionaires. Over the next seven months, she learned to fly and in June of 1921, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale awarded her an international pilot's license. Wildly celebrated upon her return to the United States, reporters turned out in droves to greet her.

Coleman performed at numerous airshows over the next five years, performing heart thrilling stunts, encouraging other African Americans to pursue flying, and refusing to perform where Blacks were not admitted. When she tragically died in a plane accident in 1926, famous writer and equal rights advocate Ida B. Wells presided over her funeral. An editorial in the "Dallas Express" stated, "There is reason to believe that the general public did not completely sense the size of her contribution to the achievements of the race as such."

Image: Bessie Coleman and her plane in 1922, Monash University
Interracial marriage in the United Sates was banned in 1664 and not overturned until 1967.
During the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the growing number of interracial marriages (also known as miscegenation) between Blacks and whites led to the passage of this new law. The first anti-miscegenation law enacted was in the colony of Maryland in 1664 and additional colonies quickly followed suit. These marriages were prohibited and penalties included the enslavement, exile or imprisonment of the white perpetrators. These laws grew and evolved over the years and attempts were even made to modify the Constitution to ban interracial marriage in all states.

It would take three hundred years for this law to be overturned. In 1967, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, were married in the District of Columbia. When they returned home to Virginia, they were arrested and convicted of violating the state's anti-miscegenation law. They each faced a year in jail and their case went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found in favor of the Lovings in the famous trial Loving v. Virginia. They ruled that prohibiting interracial marriage on state and local levels was unconstitutional; this meant that marriages between the races were legal in the country for the first time since 1664.

In 2000, Alabama became the last state to officially legalize interracial marriage by removing the unenforceable ban that was still contained in their state constitution. Read more famous cases about interracial relationships that changed history.

Image © Bettmann/CORBIS

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10 Little Known Black History Facts | PBS

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History is often reduced to a handful of memorable moments and events. In Black history, those events often include courageous stories like those of The Underground Railroad and historic moments like the famous "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.