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John Robert Lewis, the son of sharecroppers who survived a brutal beating by police during a landmark 1965 march in Selma, Alabama, to become a towering figure of the civil rights movement and a longtime US congressman, has died after a six-month battle with cancer. He was 80.

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John Lewis (born February 21, 1940, near Troy, Alabama, U.S.-died July 17, 2020, Atlanta, Georgia) was an American civil rights leader and politician best known for his chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and for leading the march that was halted by police violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, a landmark event in the history of the civil rights movement that became known as "Bloody Sunday."

Lewis was the son of Alabama sharecroppers. He attended segregated schools and was encouraged by his parents not to challenge the inequities of the Jim Crow South. As a teenager, however, he was inspired by the courageous defiance of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., to whose attention Lewis came when he indicated his desire to desegregate Troy State College (now Troy University). Dissuaded from doing so by his parents, Lewis instead was educated in Nashville at the American Baptist Theological Institute and Fisk University (B.A. in religion and philosophy, 1967).

There Lewis undertook the study of nonviolent protest and became involved in sit-ins at lunch counters and other segregated public places. In 1961, while participating in the Freedom Rides that challenged the segregation of Southern interstate bus terminals, Lewis was beaten and arrested-experiences he would repeat often. In 1963 he was elected to replace Chuck McDew as the chairman of SNCC, a position he held until 1966, when he was succeeded by Stokely Carmichael, as the organization took a more-militant direction. Also in 1963 Lewis played a key role in the historic March on Washington. Indeed, by that point, Lewis, though still in his early 20s, had already become such a prominent figure that he was considered one of the civil rights movement's "Big Six" leaders, along with King, James Farmer, A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. In 1964 Lewis headed the SNCC's efforts to register African American voters and organize communities in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer project.

On March 7, 1965, Lewis played a pivotal role in one the most important events in the history of the American civil rights movement when he and King lieutenant Hosea Williams led some 600 peaceful demonstrators on a march in support of voting rights that departed from Selma, with the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, as its destination. At the beginning of the march, while still in Selma, as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, the protestors were confronted by a large force of sheriff's deputies, state troopers, and deputized "possemen" (some on horseback) who had been authorized by Alabama's segregationist governor George Wallace to "take whatever means necessary" to prevent the march. Given two minutes to disperse, the marchers were almost immediately set upon. They were quickly doused with tear gas, overrun by horses, and attacked with bullwhips and billy clubs. As a result of the brutal assault, more than 50 marchers were hospitalized, including Lewis, whose skull was fractured but who spoke to television reporters before going to the hospital, and called on Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson to take action in Alabama. Millions of American television viewers witnessed the event, which became known as "Bloody Sunday," and within 48 hours demonstrations in support of the marchers had taken place in some 80 American cities. The resulting heightened awareness would contribute mightily to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act , which was signed into law by Johnson on August 6, 1965.

After leaving the SNCC, Lewis, who had made his home in Atlanta, remained active in the civil rights movement, most notably as the director of the Voter Education Project. In 1977 a fellow Georgian, Pres. Jimmy Carter, put Lewis in charge of ACTION, the umbrella federal volunteer agency that included the Peace Corps and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). Lewis entered elective office as an Atlanta city councilman in 1981 and in 1986 began representing a district that included Atlanta in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In addition to numerous other honours he received, Lewis was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize in 1975, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) Spingarn Medal in 2002. In 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His memoirs are Walking with the Wind (1998; cowritten with Michael D'Orso) and the March trilogy (2013, 2015, and 2016; all cowritten with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell), a graphic novel series for young adults that was based on Lewis's experiences in the civil rights movement. The final installment in the series received numerous honours, including the National Book Award (2016), and Lewis and Aydin shared a Coretta Scott King Book Award (2017). The documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble (2020) chronicles his life and career.

In July 2020, after a battle with pancreatic cancer, Lewis died. Called the "conscience of Congress," he became the first African American lawmaker to lie in state in the rotunda of the U.S. capitol. At his funeral at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (King's home parish), Lewis was eulogized by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, pioneer of nonviolent resistance James Lawson, and three former U.S. presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Obama, for whom Lewis was an inspiration and a hero, called Lewis a man of "unbreakable perseverance" and said that he embodied "that most American of ideas- that idea that any of us ordinary people, without rank or wealth or title or fame, can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation and come together and challenge the status quo and decide that it is in our power to remake this country that we love until it more closely aligns with our highest ideals."

At Lewis's request, on the day of his funeral, The New York Times published a valedictory essay in which Lewis lauded the Black Lives Matter movement and provided marching orders for future activists, saying in part:

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

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John Lewis | Biography, Accomplishments, & Facts

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John Lewis, American civil rights leader and politician best known for his chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and for leading the landmark Selma March in 1965. In 1986 he began representing a Georgia district that includes Atlanta in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met at Merritt College in Oakland. It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality. It was part of the Black Power movement, which broke from the integrationist goals and nonviolent protest tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The BPP name was inspired by the use of the black panther as a symbol that had recently been used by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent Black political party in Alabama.

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Search the Catalog for Records on the Black Panther Party Social Networks and Archival Context - Black Panther Party

Prominent Black Panther Party Members

Resources

Selected Records Relating to the Black Panther Party

Black Panther Party Introduction, continued

The BPP's philosophy was influenced by the speeches of Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam, the teachings of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung of the Communist Party of China, and the anti-colonialist book The Wretched of the Earth ( Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961) by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The BPP's practice of armed self-defense was influenced by African American activist Robert Williams, who advocated this practice against anti-black aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in his book Negroes with Guns (1962). Newton and Seale canvassed their community asking residents about issues of concern. They compiled the responses and created the Ten Point Platform and Program that served as the foundation of the Black Panther Party. The ten points are:

We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

We want full employment for our people.

We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.

We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.

We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.

We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.

We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

Because of its practice of armed self-defense against police, as well as its Communistic and revolutionary elements, the BPP was frequently targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program as well as by state and local law enforcement groups. However, despite its militant stance, the BPP also provided free breakfast for school children, sickle cell anemia screening, legal aid, and adult education.

The National Archives and Records Administration contains over 2,400 records relating to the Black Panther Party. Most of these records are textual records, but there are also motion pictures, sound recordings, and photographs.

Barbara Easley

Barbara Easley-Cox began working with the Black Panther Party as a student at San Francisco State University. She met and married Donald L. Cox, the Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, and immediately became more closely affiliated with the Party. In addition to leading the Oakland chapter, they also worked in the New York and Philadelphia chapters as well. After Donald was accused of conspiracy to murder a Panther who was found to be an informant, the couple fled to Algeria and then to North Korea. Easley is credited with helping to spread the international reach of the Party. She later moved to Germany, where she published the newspaper Voice of the Lumpen, worked with soldiers, and lived there until 1973. Upon her return to the United States, Easley moved to Philadelphia where she focused on community development work. After her retirement from social work, Easley continued to consult and volunteer in a variety of community-based capacities which she continues today.

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The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met at Merritt College in Oakland. It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality.

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Original name:

Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

What was the Black Panther Party?

Who started the Black Panther Party?

Why is the Black Panther Party important?

Who were notable members of the Black Panther Party?

What was the FBI's response to the Black Panther Party?

Black Panther Party, African American revolutionary party, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The party's original purpose was to patrol African American neighbourhoods to protect residents from acts of police brutality. The Panthers eventually developed into a Marxist revolutionary group that called for the arming of all African Americans, the exemption of African Americans from the draft and from all sanctions of so-called white America, the release of all African Americans from jail, and the payment of compensation to African Americans for centuries of exploitation by white Americans. At its peak in the late 1960s, Panther membership exceeded 2,000, and the organization operated chapters in several major American cities.

Origin and political program

Despite passage of the 1960s civil rights legislation that followed the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), African Americans living in cities throughout North America continued to suffer economic and social inequality. Poverty and reduced public services characterized these urban centres, where residents were subject to poor living conditions, joblessness, chronic health problems, violence, and limited means to change their circumstances. Such conditions contributed to urban uprisings in the 1960s (such as those in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965, among others) and to the increased use of police violence as a measure to impose order on cities throughout North America.

It was in this context, and in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, that Merritt Junior College students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense on October 15, 1966, in West Oakland (officially "Western Oakland," a district of the city of Oakland), California. Shortening its name to the Black Panther Party, the organization immediately sought to set itself apart from African American cultural nationalist organizations, such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Nation of Islam, to which it was commonly compared. Although the groups shared certain philosophical positions and tactical features, the Black Panther Party and cultural nationalists differed on a number of basic points. For instance, whereas African American cultural nationalists generally regarded all white people as oppressors, the Black Panther Party distinguished between racist and nonracist whites and allied themselves with progressive members of the latter group. Also, whereas cultural nationalists generally viewed all African Americans as oppressed, the Black Panther Party believed that African American capitalists and elites could and typically did exploit and oppress others, particularly the African American working class. Perhaps most importantly, whereas cultural nationalists placed considerable emphasis on symbolic systems, such as language and imagery, as the means to liberate African Americans, the Black Panther Party believed that such systems, though important, are ineffective in bringing about liberation. It considered symbols as woefully inadequate to ameliorate the unjust material conditions, such as joblessness, created by capitalism.

From the outset, the Black Panther Party outlined a Ten Point Program, not unlike those of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and Nation of Islam, to initiate national African American community survival projects and to forge alliances with progressive white radicals and other organizations of people of colour. A number of positions outlined in the Ten Point Program address a principle stance of the Black Panther Party: economic exploitation is at the root of all oppression in the United States and abroad, and the abolition of capitalism is a precondition of social justice. In the 1960s this socialist economic outlook, informed by a Marxist political philosophy, resonated with other social movements in the United States and in other parts of the world. Therefore, even as the Black Panther Party found allies both within and beyond the borders of North America, the organization also found itself squarely in the crosshairs of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. In fact, in 1969 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered the Black Panther Party the greatest threat to national security.

Impact and repression

The Black Panther Party came into the national spotlight in May 1967 when a small group of its members, led by its chair, Seale, marched fully armed into the California state legislature in Sacramento. Emboldened by the view that African Americans had a constitutional right to bear arms (based on the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), the Black Panther Party marched on the body as a protest against the pending Mulford Act. The Black Panther Party viewed the legislation, a gun control bill, as a political maneuver to thwart the organization's effort to combat police brutality in the Oakland community. The images of gun-toting Black Panthers entering the Capitol were supplemented, later that year, with news of Newton's arrest after a shoot-out with police in which an officer was killed. With this newfound publicity, the Black Panther Party grew from an Oakland-based organization into an international one with chapters in 48 states in North America and support groups in Japan, China, France, England, Germany, Sweden, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uruguay, and elsewhere.

In addition to challenging police brutality, the Black Panther Party launched more than 35 Survival Programs and provided community help, such as education, tuberculosis testing, legal aid, transportation assistance, ambulance service, and the manufacture and distribution of free shoes to poor people. Of particular note was the Free Breakfast for Children Program (begun in January 1969) that spread to every major American city with a Black Panther Party chapter. The federal government had introduced a similar pilot program in 1966 but, arguably in response to the Panthers' initiative, extended the program and then made it permanent in 1975-undoubtedly to the chagrin of Hoover.

Notwithstanding the social services the Black Panther Party provided, the FBI declared the group a communist organization and an enemy of the U.S. government. Hoover had pledged that 1969 would be the last year of the Black Panther Party and devoted the resources of the FBI, through COINTELPRO, toward that end. In a protracted program against the Black Panther Party, COINTELPRO used agent provocateurs, sabotage, misinformation, and lethal force to eviscerate the national organization. The FBI's campaign culminated in December 1969 with a five-hour police shoot-out at the Southern California headquarters of the Black Panther Party and an Illinois state police raid in which Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed. The measures employed by the FBI were so extreme that, years later when they were revealed, the director of the agency publicly apologized for "wrongful uses of power."

In the early 1970s radical scholar and activist Angela Davis became widely associated with the Black Panthers, though it seems likely that she never actually became a standing member of the party. Davis did, however, have strong connections with the party and taught political education classes for it. She initially gained notoriety in 1970 when then governor of California Ronald Reagan led the Board of Regents in refusing to renew Davis's appointment as lecturer in philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of her politics and her association with communists. At about the same time, Davis became involved in the case of three African American inmates at Soledad Prison who had been accused of murdering a guard. She became deeply involved with one of the inmates, George Jackson, whose younger brother's attempt on August 7, 1970, to win Jackson's release by taking hostages in the Marin county courthouse went violently awry. Four deaths resulted, and when at least one of the guns proved to be registered to Davis, she fled charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder, going underground and entering the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list before being captured some eight weeks later after becoming a cause célèbre for the radical Left. Ultimately she was acquitted of all the charges against her by an all-white jury.

From the mid-1970s through the '80s, the activities of the Black Panther Party all but ceased. Although COINTELPRO contributed to its demise, the dissolution of the party's leadership also contributed to the downfall of the organization. Kathleen Cleaver earned a law degree and took an appointment as a professor. After returning from exile in Cuba, Newton was killed in a drug dispute in August 1989, perishing in an alley in West Oakland, not far from where he and Seale had founded the first Black Panther Party chapter. Eldridge Cleaver designed clothes in the 1970s and '80s before joining the anticommunist Unification Church en route to becoming a born-again Christian and a registered member of the Republican Party.

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Black Panther Party | History, Ideology, & Facts

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Black Panther Party, African American revolutionary party, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Created to patrol African American neighborhoods to protect residents from acts of police brutality, the Panthers eventually developed into a Marxist revolutionary group.

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American civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s broke the pattern of public facilities' being segregated by "race" in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865-77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")

Abolitionism to Jim Crow

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country's inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the "People of the United States" who established the Constitution in order to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights-such as the right to own land or serve on juries-were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called "free Blacks" endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means-protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements-to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography-one of many slave narratives-and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country's founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." This ruling-by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories-ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country's political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln's victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860-61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property. After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the " Jim Crow" system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that " separate but equal" facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage).

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American civil rights movement | Definition, Protests, Activists, & Facts

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American civil rights movement, mass protest against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern U.S. that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. Its roots were in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to abolish slavery and resist racial oppression.

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Jim Crow Laws

During Reconstruction, Black people took on leadership roles like never before. They held public office and sought legislative changes for equality and the right to vote.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they'd once enslaved were now on a more-or-less equal playing field.

To marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they'd made during Reconstruction, " Jim Crow " laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Black people couldn't use the same public facilities as white people, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most Black people couldn't vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests.

Jim Crow laws weren't adopted in northern states; however, Black people still experienced discrimination at their jobs or when they tried to buy a house or get an education. To make matters worse, laws were passed in some states to limit voting rights for Black Americans.

Moreover, southern segregation gained ground in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that facilities for Black and white people could be "separate but equal."

World War II and Civil Rights

Prior to World War II, most Black people worked as low-wage farmers, factory workers, domestics or servants. By the early 1940s, war-related work was booming, but most Black Americans weren't given better-paying jobs. They were also discouraged from joining the military.

After thousands of Black people threatened to march on Washington to demand equal employment rights, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It opened national defense jobs and other government jobs to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans were met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a stark contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with-to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. These events helped set the stage for grass-roots initiatives to enact racial equality legislation and incite the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks found a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus after work. Segregation laws at the time stated Black passengers must sit in designated seats at the back of the bus, and Parks complied.

When a white man got on the bus and couldn't find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested.

As word of her arrest ignited outrage and support, Parks unwittingly became the "mother of the modern-day civil rights movement." Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr., a role which would place him front and center in the fight for civil rights.

Parks' courage incited the MIA to stage a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. On November 14, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional.

Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the civil rights movement gained momentum when the United States Supreme Court made segregation illegal in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for volunteers from all-Black high schools to attend the formerly segregated school.

On September 4, 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by the Arkansas National Guard (on order of Governor Orval Faubus) and a screaming, threatening mob. The Little Rock Nine tried again a couple of weeks later and made it inside, but had to be removed for their safety when violence ensued.

Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened and ordered federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to and from classes at Central High. Still, the students faced continual harassment and prejudice.

Their efforts, however, brought much-needed attention to the issue of desegregation and fueled protests on both sides of the issue.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

Even though all Americans had gained the right to vote, many southern states made it difficult for Black citizens. They often required prospective voters of color to take literacy tests that were confusing, misleading and nearly impossible to pass.

Wanting to show a commitment to the civil rights movement and minimize racial tensions in the South, the Eisenhower administration pressured Congress to consider new civil rights legislation.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.

Sit-In at Woolworth's Lunch Counter

Despite making some gains, Black Americans still experienced blatant prejudice in their daily lives. On February 1, 1960, four college students took a stand against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina when they refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter without being served.

Over the next several days, hundreds of people joined their cause in what became known as the Greensboro sit-ins. After some were arrested and charged with trespassing, protesters launched a boycott of all segregated lunch counters until the owners caved and the original four students were finally served at the Woolworth's lunch counter where they'd first stood their ground.

Their efforts spearheaded peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations in dozens of cities and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to encourage all students to get involved in the civil rights movement. It also caught the eye of young college graduate Stokely Carmichael, who joined the SNCC during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power."

Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, 13 " Freedom Riders"-seven Black and six white activists-mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C., embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional.

Facing violence from both police officers and white protesters, the Freedom Rides drew international attention. On Mother's Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, where a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The Freedom Riders escaped the burning bus but were badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the group could not find a bus driver to take them further. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother to President John F. Kennedy) negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson to find a suitable driver, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort on May 20. But the officers left the group once they reached Montgomery, where a white mob brutally attacked the bus. Attorney General Kennedy responded to the riders-and a call from Martin Luther King Jr.-by sending federal marshals to Montgomery.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi. Though met with hundreds of supporters, the group was arrested for trespassing in a "whites-only" facility and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the convictions. Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued.

In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals

March on Washington

Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington. It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 200,000 people of all races congregated in Washington, D. C. for the peaceful march with the main purpose of forcing civil rights legislation and establishing job equality for everyone. The highlight of the march was King's speech in which he continually stated, "I have a dream..."

King's " I Have a Dream" speech galvanized the national civil rights movement and became a slogan for equality and freedom.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964-legislation initiated by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination -into law on July 2 of that year.

King and other civil rights activists witnessed the signing. The law guaranteed equal employment for all, limited the use of voter literacy tests and allowed federal authorities to ensure public facilities were integrated.

Bloody Sunday

On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as " Bloody Sunday." Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions.

It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.

Part of the Act was walked back decades later, in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated.

Civil Rights Leaders Assassinated

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders in the late 1960s. On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam leader and Organization of Afro-American Unity founder Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room's balcony. Emotionally-charged looting and riots followed, putting even more pressure on the Johnson administration to push through additional civil rights laws.

Fair Housing Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act became law on April 11, 1968, just days after King's assassination. It prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.

The civil rights movement was an empowering yet precarious time for Black Americans. The efforts of civil rights activists and countless protesters of all races brought about legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory employment and housing practices.

Sources

A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation.
Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library.
Document for June 25th: Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. National Archives.
Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. African American Odyssey.
Little Rock School Desegregation (1957). The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford.
Rosa Marie Parks Biography. Rosa and Raymond Parks.
Selma, Alabama, (Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965). BlackPast.org.
The Civil Rights Movement (1919-1960s). National Humanities Center.
The Little Rock Nine. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site.
Turning Point: World War II. Virginia Historical Society.

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Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events & Leaders | HISTORY

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The civil rights movement was a struggle for justice and equality for African Americans that took place mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. Among its leaders were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Little Rock Nine, Rosa Parks and many others.

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When a student at Spring Valley High School, South Carolina captured a cellphone video of a police officer flipping over a student and her desk, then throwing the student across the room, the video quickly got national attention: people were alarmed that a police officer in a school would do that to a teenager who didn't pose a threat.

But to others, it was less surprising that a police officer would behave so aggressively in a school: because school discipline and the criminal justice system have already been intertwined, in a phenomenon civil-rights advocates call the "school-to-prison pipeline." Especially for older students, trouble at school can lead to their first contact with the criminal justice system. And in many cases, schools themselves are the ones pushing students into the juvenile justice system - often by having students arrested at school by School Resource Officers like the one in Spring Valley.

Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the juvenile incarceration rate dropped 41 percent between 1995 and 2010. But school discipline policies are moving in the opposite direction: out-of-school suspensions have increased about 10 percent since 2000. They have more than doubled since the 1970s. And it's hardly racially balanced: Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, according to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, and research in Texas found students who have been suspended are more likely to be held back a grade and drop out of school entirely.

Here's how the current state of school discipline developed and why some districts and federal officials are working to change the status quo.

1) Concerns about crime led schools to adopt 'zero tolerance' policies

In the 1970s, keeping students out of school as a punishment was relatively rare: fewer than 4 percent of students were suspended in 1973, according to an analysis of Education Department data by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But growing concern about crime and violence in schools led states and districts to adopt policies that required students to be suspended.

The Gun-Free Schools Act, passed in 1994, mandated a yearlong out-of-school suspension for any student caught bringing a weapon to school. And as states began adopting these zero-tolerance policies, the number of suspensions and expulsions increased. The suspension rate for all students has nearly doubled since the 1970s, and has increased even more for black and Hispanic students.

Zero-tolerance policies have been widely criticized when schools have interpreted "weapon" very broadly, expelling students for making guns with their fingers or chewing a Pop-Tart into a gun shape or bringing a camping fork for Cub Scouts to class.

But they're not the only reason schools suspended students more frequently. At the same time as zero-tolerance policies for violence were growing, school districts adopted their own version of the broken windows theory of policing. The broken windows theory emphasizes the importance of cracking down on small offenses in order to make residents feel safer and discourage more serious crimes; in schools, it translated into more suspensions for offenses that previously hadn't warranted them - talking back to teachers, skipping class, or being otherwise disobedient or disruptive.

At the same time, administrators started relying more heavily on actualpolice - in the form of School Resource Officers (SROs) stationed in schools. From 1997 to 2007, the number of SROs increased by nearly a third. Ostensibly, they were there to prevent mass school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1998 - in other words, to protect students, not to police them.

But as often happens with law enforcement, resources that are supposed to be used for a rare occurrence often get used for more common occurrences simply because they're there. About 92,000 students were arrested in school during the 2011-2012 school year, according to US Department of Education statistics. And most of those are low-level violations: 74 percent of arrests in New York City public schools in 2012, according to a report published by the state courts, were for misdemeanors or civil violations.

2) Schools have outsourced discipline to juvenile courts and officers in schools

When a school allows a School Resource Officer to arrest a student - or, less drastically and more commonly, refers a student to law enforcement or juvenile court as a form of discipline - they're turning that student over to the juvenile justice system. That makes it that much easier for a student to get a juvenile record (so even if punishment for a first offense is light, punishment for a second offense is likely to be much harsher).

This happens way more at schools with officers. A report by the Justice Policy Institute found that, even controlling for a school district's poverty level, schools with officers had five times as many arrests for "disorderly conduct" as schools without them.

This isn't something that the juvenile court system is calling for - quite the opposite. The chief judge of the juvenile court in Clayton County, Georgia has become an outspoken opponent of police in schools and the school-to-prison pipeline after placing cops on school grounds resulted in eleven times as many students getting sent to juvenile court. He told Congress at a 2012 hearing that "the prosecutor's attention was taken from the more difficult evidentiary and 'scary' cases-burglary, robberies, car thefts, aggravated assaults with weapons - to prosecuting kids that are not 'scary,' but made an adult mad."

The Department of Education only started collecting detailed data on arrests and referrals for the last two iterations of its Office for Civil Rights report. So it's hard to be confident about trends. But there's some evidence that arrests and referrals are on the decline; referrals to law enforcement of students without disabilities, for example, went down about 9 percent between 2009-10 and 2011-12.

3) Black students are more likely to be disciplined

Black students are suspended or expelled three times more frequently than white students. And while black children made up 16 percent of all enrolled children in 2011-12, according to federal data, they accounted for 31 percent of all in-school arrests.

The disparity begins in preschool: 48 percent of preschool children suspended more than once are black. And students with disabilities are also suspended more frequently than students without disabilities. This, too, can have a racial component. One 2014 study by a Columbia University researcher found that five-year-old boys whose fathers had been incarcerated were substantially less behaviorally "ready" for school than five-year-olds whose fathers hadn't been incarcerated - making them more likely to be placed in special-education classes for their behavioral disabilities.

Several studies have looked at the relationship between race, behavior, and suspension, and none have them have proven that black students misbehave at higher rates. A study in 2002 found that white students were more likely to be disciplined for provable, documentable offenses - smoking, vandalism, and obscene language - while black students were more likely to be disciplined for more subjective reasons, such as disrespect.

Schools with more black students tend to have higher rates of suspension, researchers have found. There's a 2010 study by researchers at Villanova University that showed the punitiveness of a school's discipline policy was positively correlated with the percentage of its students that were black. It wasn't correlated with students' rates of juvenile delinquency or drug use.

A landmark study of Texas discipline policies found that 97 percent of school suspensions were the choice of school administrators. Only 3 percent of students had broken rules that made suspension a required punishment, such as carrying a weapon to school. And those discretionary suspensions fell particularly hard on black students: they were 31 percent more likely to receive a discretionary suspension, even after controlling for 83 other variables.

Many discretionary suspensions and arrests are for tough-to-define offenses, like "insubordination" or "willful defiance," which can just mean a student has challenged the authority of a teacher or school administrator. In California, for example, 40 percent of all suspensions during the 2010-11 school year were for "willful defiance" - which a US Department of Education official defined in 2012 as "any behavior that disrupts a classroom." "Insubordination" was the most common cause of suspension in New York City public schools in 2013-14.

Unsurprisingly, there's a racial disparity in suspensions for nebulous offenses like these: in 2006-2007 (the last year data appears to be readily available) in New York City, 51 percent of students suspended for "profanity" were black, and 57 percent of students suspended for "insubordination." Even arrests by SROs are often for vague reasons: in New York in 2012, one of every six arrests in schools was for "resisting arrest" or "obstructing governmental administration" after the student had been in a conflict with an officer.

4) Even when schools aren't deliberately sending children into the juvenile justice system, disciplining them makes it more likely they'll end up there

Students who are suspended are more likely to repeat a grade or drop out than students who were not. The Texas study, considered the most thorough analysis of school discipline policies and their effects, looked at data from every seventh-grader in the state in 2000, 2001, and 2002, then tracked their academic and disciplinary records for six years. They found that 31 percent of students who were suspended or expelled repeated a grade, compared with only 5 percent of students who weren't.

It's hard to prove causation; it's possible that students who misbehave would have ended up in academic trouble no matter how they were punished. But the Texas study found that students who had been suspended or expelled were twice as likely to drop out compared to students with similar characteristics at similar schools who had not been suspended.

Students who are disciplined by schools are also more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system. The Texas study found that, of students disciplined in middle or high school, 23 percent of them ended up in contact with a juvenile probation officer. That figure stands at 2 percent among those not disciplined. And students who have been suspended or expelled are three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile probation system the following year than one who wasn't.

It's hard to prove that suspensions causedelinquency in the same way they cause poor educational outcomes. But researchers argue that just as out-of-school suspensions or expulsions don't do anything to improve a student's academic standing, they don't do anything to monitor his behavior or improve his safety, either.

5) The Education Department is pushing schools to change their discipline policies

The Obama administration has opened investigations into the civil rights implications of schools' discipline policies, and urged schools to restructure their discipline systems so that expulsion and suspension are a last resort.

But this effort, by the Education Department and the Department of Justice, has been controversial because the guidance is based on "disparate impact." Even if a policy doesn't mention race and is applied equally to students of all races, the federal government says schools shouldn't use it if the consequences fall disproportionately on students of a particular race. For example, if a school had a policy that all students who were caught using cell phones in class got an out-of-school suspension, and that school ended up suspending a disproportionate number of Latino students as a result of the policy, the federal government would urge the school to figure out if there was another way to achieve the same goal (a cell phone-free classroom) without removing students from the classroom.

Some conservatives argue that schools will become disorderly if teachers and administrators feel that they aren't able to remove disruptive students from the classroom.

6) Some school districts are taking the matter into their own hands

Even before the Obama administration issued that guidance, though, some school districts were acting on their own. Some of the nation's largest districts are working to punish students in ways that don't involve suspension, trying to reform discipline so that students aren't referred to police, or both.

In Clayton County, Georgia, for example, where referrals from schools were overwhelming juvenile prosecutors, the juvenile courts made an agreement with the police force and the school district, restricting the cases in which police were allowed to arrest students in school or refer them to court. The agreement had a huge impact in schools: the high-school graduation rate increased by 24 percent from 2004 to 2010, beating the national average.

Meanwhile, some large school districts are moving away from zero tolerance policies. Broward County, Florida, one of the largest school districts in the country, decided in 2013 that schools, not police, would deal with students' nonviolent misdemeanors. The Chicago Public Schools are trying to reduce the number of suspensions, softening a policy under which students could be suspended for using a cell phone in school and ending suspensions for children younger than second grade, among other changes. In Los Angeles, children under 13 won't be referred to police for minor offenses, after police issued 552 tickets to preteens during the 2013-14 school year.

New York City schools are taking a more targeted approach. The city recently unveiled proposals to overhaul its school discipline code. If the changes go into effect, school principals will have to get the city Department of Education's permission to suspend any student for "insubordination," or for any suspension of a student in third grade or younger. And it would no longer be possible to give "superintendent's suspensions" (a more serious level of suspension) to students involved in "minor physical altercations."

Other schools are exploring restorative justice programs, which focus on forming relationships between teachers, students, and administrators and giving students an opportunity to resolve problems by talking about them. The Oakland School District has been testing this approach for 10 years and recently decided to expand it districtwide after schools using restorative justice reported that their suspension rates were cut in half.

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Police officers in classrooms are just the tip of the iceberg

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The ACLU is committed to challenging the "school-to-prison pipeline," a disturbing national trend wherein youth are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Many of these youth are Black or Brown, have disabilities, or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, and would benefit from additional supports and resources. Instead, they are isolated, punished, and pushed out.

"Zero-tolerance" policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in schools lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline. Related Resources

The ACLU believes that children should be educated and supported in schools, not incarcerated. We are working to challenge numerous policies and practices within public school systems and the juvenile justice system that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.

For a growing number of students, the path to incarceration includes the "stops" below.

Failing Public Schools
For most students, the pipeline begins withinadequate resources in public schools. Overcrowded classrooms, a lack of qualified teachers, and insufficient funding for "extras" such as counselors, special education services, and even textbooks, lock students into second-rate educational environments. This failure to meet educational needs increases disengagement and dropouts, increasing the risk of later court involvement. (1) Even worse, schools may actually encourage dropouts in response to pressures from test-based accountability regimes such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which create incentives to push out low-performing students to boost overall test scores. (2)
Zero-Tolerance and Other School Discipline

Lacking resources, facing incentives to push out low-performing students, and responding to a handful of highly-publicized school shootings, schools have embraced zero-tolerance policies that automatically impose severe punishment regardless of circumstances. Under these policies, students have been expelled for bringing nail clippers or scissors to school. Rates of suspension have increased dramatically in recent years-from 1.7 million in 1974 to 3.1 million in 2000 (3) - and have been most dramatic for children of color.

Overly harsh disciplinary policies push students down the pipeline and into the juvenile justice system. Suspended and expelled children are often left unsupervised and without constructive activities; they also can easily fall behind in their coursework, leading to a greater likelihood of disengagement and drop-outs. All of these factors increase the likelihood of court involvement. (4)

As harsh penalties for minor misbehavior become more pervasive, schools increasingly ignore or bypass due process protections for suspensions and expulsions. The lack of due process is particularly acute for students with disabilities, who are disproportionately represented in the pipeline despite the heightened protections afforded to them under law.

Policing School Hallways

Many under-resourced schools become pipeline gateways by placing increased reliance on police rather than teachers and administrators to maintain discipline. Growing numbers of districts employ school police officers to patrol school hallways, often with little or no training in working with youth. As a result, children are far more likely to be subject to school-based arrests-the majority of which are for non-violent offenses, such as disruptive behavior-than they were a generation ago. The rise in school-based arrests, the quickest route from the classroom to the jailhouse, most directly exemplifies the criminalization of school children.

Disciplinary Alternative Schools

In some jurisdictions, students who have been suspended or expelled have no right to an education at all. In others, they are sent to disciplinary alternative schools.

Growing in number across the country, these shadow systems-sometimes run by private, for-profit companies-are immune from educational accountability standards (such as minimum classroom hours and curriculum requirements) and may fail to provide meaningful educational services to the students who need them the most. As a result, struggling students return to their regular schools unprepared, are permanently locked into inferior educational settings, or are funneled through alternative schools into the juvenile justice system.

Court Involvement and Juvenile Detention

Youth who become involved in the juvenile justice system are often denied procedural protections in the courts; in one state, up to 80% of court-involved children do not have lawyers. (5) Students who commit minor offenses may end up in secured detention if they violate boilerplate probation conditions prohibiting them from activities like missing school or disobeying teachers.

Students pushed along the pipeline find themselves in juvenile detention facilities, many of which provide few, if any, educational services. Students of color - who are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended, expelled, or arrested for the same kind of conduct at school (6) - and those with disabilities are particularly likely to travel down this pipeline. (7)

Though many students are propelled down the pipeline from school to jail, it is difficult for them to make the journey in reverse. Students who enter the juvenile justice system face many barriers to their re-entry into traditional schools. The vast majority of these students never graduate from high school.

Endnotes:
1. American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on School Health, "Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion," PEDIATRICS (Vol. 112 No. 5, Nov. 2003), p. 1207. See also: Johanna Wald & Dan Losen, "Defining and Re-directing a School-to-Prison Pipeline," NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT (No. 99, Fall 2003), p. 11.
2. David N. Figlio "Testing, Crime and Punishment," JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS (Vol. 90 Iss. 4-5, May 2006).
3. Advancement Project, EDUCATION ON LOCKDOWN: THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO JAILHOUSE TRACK (Mar. 2005), p. 15.
4. American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on School Health, "Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion," PEDIATRICS (Vol. 112 No. 5, Nov. 2003), p. 1207. See also: Johanna Wald & Dan Losen, "Defining and Re-directing a School-to-Prison Pipeline," NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT (No. 99, Fall 2003), p. 11.
5. ACLU, The Children's Law Center & The Office of the Ohio State Public Defender, A CALL TO AMEND THE OHIO RULES OF JUVENILE PROCEDURE TO PROTECT THE RIGHT TO COUNSEL (Jan. 2006), p. 1.
6. Russel J. Skiba, ZERO TOLERANCE, ZERO EVIDENCE (2000), pp. 11-12; The Advancement Project & The Civil Rights Project, OPPORTUNITIES SUSPENDED: THE DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES OF ZERO TOLERANCE AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE POLICIES (June 2000), pp. 7-9; Russell J. Skiba, et al., THE COLOR OF DISCIPLINE: SOURCES OF RACIAL AND GENDER DISPROPORTIONALITY IN SCHOOL PUNISHMENT (2000).
7. David Osher et al., "Schools Make a Difference: The Overrepresentation of African American Youth in Special Education and the Juvenile Justice System," RACIAL INEQUITY IN SPECIAL EDUCATION (Daniel J. Losen & Gary Orfield eds., 2002), p. 98.

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School-to-Prison Pipeline | American Civil Liberties Union

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The ACLU works in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.

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Police brutality in the United States | Definition, History, Causes, & Examples

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Police brutality in the United States, the unwarranted or excessive and often illegal use of force against civilians by U.S. police officers. Forms of police brutality have ranged from assault and battery (e.g., beatings) to mayhem, torture, and murder.

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1. Edwards, F., Hedwig, L. & Esposito, M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116, 16793-16798 (2019).

2. Knox, D., Lowe, W. & Mummolo, J. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000039 (2020).

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5. Baude, W. 106 California Law Review 45; University of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 610 (2018).

6. Stephens, D. W. Officer Involved Shootings: Incident Executive Summary (National Police Foundation, 2019).

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7. Braga, A., Coldren, J. R., Sousa, W., Rodriguez, D. & Alper, O. The Benefits of Body-Worn Cameras: New Findings from a Randomized Controlled Trial at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (National Criminal Justice Reference Service, 2017).

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What the data say about police brutality and racial bias - and which reforms might work

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Some interventions could help to reduce racism and rein in the use of unnecessary force in police work, but the evidence base is still evolving. Some interventions could help to reduce racism and rein in the use of unnecessary force in police work, but the evidence base is still evolving.

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Frederick Douglass (born February 1818, Talbot county, Maryland, U.S.-died February 20, 1895, Washington, D.C.) was an African American abolitionist, orator, newspaper publisher, and author who is famous for his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. He became the first Black U.S. marshal and was the most photographed American man of the 19th century.

Early life and enslavement

Douglass was born enslaved as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on Holme Hill Farm in Talbot county, Maryland. Although the date of his birth was not recorded, Douglass estimated that he had been born in February 1818, and he later celebrated his birthday on February 14. (The best source for the events in Douglass's life is Douglass himself in his oratory and writings, especially his three autobiographies, the details of which have been checked when possible and have largely been confirmed, though his biographers have contributed corrections and clarifications.) Douglass was owned by Capt. Aaron Anthony, who was the clerk and superintendent of overseers for Edward Lloyd V (also known as Colonel Lloyd), a wealthy landowner and slaveholder in eastern Maryland. Like many other enslaved children, Douglass was separated from his mother, Harriet Bailey, when he was very young. He spent his formative years with his maternal grandmother, Betsey Bailey, who had the responsibility of raising young enslaved children.

Harriet Bailey worked as a field hand on a neighbouring plantation and had to walk more than 12 miles (about 19 km) to visit her son, whom she met with only a few times in his life. He described her as "tall and finely proportioned, of dark, glossy complexion, with regular features, and amongst the slaves was remarkably sedate and dignified." She died when he was about seven years old. As an adult, Douglass learned that his mother had been the only Black person in what was then Talbot county who could read, an extraordinarily rare achievement for a field hand.

When Douglass was age five or six, he was taken to live on Colonel Lloyd's home plantation, Wye House. Lloyd's plantation functioned like a small town. Young Douglass found himself among several other enslaved children competing for food and other comforts. In 1826 at approximately age eight, he was sent to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld at Fells Point, Baltimore. Hugh's brother Capt. Thomas Auld was the son-in-law of Douglass's owner, Aaron Anthony. Douglass's responsibility in Baltimore was to care for Hugh and Sophia's young son, Thomas. Sophia began teaching Douglass how to read, along with her son. The lessons ended abruptly, however, when Hugh discovered what had been going on and informed Sophia that literacy would "spoil" a slave. According to Douglass, Hugh stated that if a slave were given an inch, he would "take an ell [a unit of measure equal to about 45 inches]." In Maryland, as in many other slaveholding states, it was forbidden to teach enslaved people how to read and write. Douglass continued his learning in secret, by exchanging bread for lessons from the poor white boys he played with in the neighbourhood and by tracing the letters in Thomas's old schoolbooks.

In March 1832 Douglass was sent from Baltimore to St. Michaels, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. After both Aaron Anthony and his daughter Lucretia died, her husband, Capt. Thomas Auld, became Douglass's owner. Teenage Douglass experienced harsher living conditions with Auld, who was known for his abusive practices.

In January 1833 Douglass was leased to local farmer Edward Covey. Leasing or hiring out enslaved persons was a common revenue-generating practice. Farmers would pay slaveholders a monthly fee for enslaved people and take responsibility for their care, food, and lodging. Covey was known as a "slave breaker," someone who abused slaves physically and psychologically in order to make them more compliant. According to Douglass, Covey's abuse led to a climactic confrontation six months into Douglass's time with the farmer. One day Covey attacked Douglass, and Douglass fought back. The two men engaged in an epic two-hour-long physical struggle. Douglass ultimately won the fight, and Covey never attacked him again. Douglass emerged from the incident determined to protect himself from any physical assault from anyone in the future.

In January 1834 Douglass was sent to William Freeland's farm. Living and working conditions were better under Freeland; however, Douglass still desired his freedom. While living with Freeland, he started a Sabbath school at which he taught area Blacks how to read and write. Along with four other enslaved men, Douglass plotted to escape north by taking a large canoe up the coast of Maryland and to proceed to Pennsylvania, but their plot was discovered. Douglass and the other participants were arrested. Captain Auld then sent Douglass back to Baltimore to live again with Hugh and Sophia Auld and to learn a trade.

Hugh Auld hired out Douglass to local shipyards as a ship caulker. Now working as a skilled tradesman, Douglass was paid by the shipyards for his efforts. He would then submit his earnings to Auld, who gave Douglass a small percentage of the wages. Douglass would eventually hire out his own time, which meant that he paid Auld a set amount every week but was responsible for maintaining his own food and clothing. During this time, Douglass became more involved in Baltimore's Black community, which led him to meet Anna Murray, a freeborn Black woman, whom he would eventually marry.

Escape from slavery, life in New Bedford, and work with the American Anti-Slavery Society

Douglass moved about Baltimore with few restrictions, but that privilege came to an end when he decided to attend a religious meeting outside of Baltimore on a Saturday evening and postpone paying Auld his weekly fee. The following Monday, when Douglass returned, Auld threatened him. After that encounter, Douglass was determined to escape his bondage. He escaped in September 1838 by dressing as a sailor and traveling from Baltimore to Wilmington, Delaware, by train, then on to Philadelphia by steamboat, and from there to New York City by train. Black sailors in the 19th century traveled with documents granting them protection under the American flag. Douglass used such documents to secure his passage north with the help of Anna, who, according to family lore, had sold her feather bed to help finance his passage.

New York City was a dangerous place for enslaved people seeking freedom. Numerous slave catchers traveled to the city to track down those who had escaped. Many locals, Black and white, were willing, for money, to tell the authorities about people trying to escape enslavement. For his own protection, Douglass (still months from assuming that name) changed his name from Frederick Bailey to Frederick Johnson. A chance meeting with Black abolitionist David Ruggles led Douglass to safety. Anna arrived in New York several days later, and the two were married by the Reverend J.W.C. Pennington.

At Ruggles's recommendation, the couple quickly left New York City for New Bedford, Massachusetts. Ruggles had determined that New Bedford's shipping industry would offer Douglass the best chance to find work as a ship caulker. In New Bedford the couple stayed with a local Black married couple, Nathan and Polly Johnson. Because many families in New Bedford had the surname Johnson, Douglass chose to change his name again. Nathan Johnson suggested the name Douglass, which was inspired by the name of an exiled nobleman in Sir Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake. The newly minted Frederick Douglass earned money for the first time as a free man. However, despite Douglass's previous work experience, racial prejudice in New Bedford prevented him from working as a ship caulker (white caulkers refused to work with Black caulkers). Consequently, Douglass spent his first years in Massachusetts working as a common labourer.

Douglass remained an avid reader throughout his adult life. When he escaped to New York, he carried with him a copy of The Columbian Orator. In New Bedford he discovered William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Inspired by it, Douglass attended a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention in Nantucket in the summer of 1841. At the meeting, abolitionist William C. Coffin, having heard Douglass speak in New Bedford, invited him to address the general body. Douglass's extemporaneous speech was lauded by the audience, and he was recruited as an agent for the group.

As an agent of both the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass traveled the country promoting abolition and the organizations' agenda. He and other persons who had escaped conditions of enslavement frequently described their own experiences under those conditions. The American Anti-Slavery Society supported "moral suasion" abolition, the belief that slavery was a moral wrong that should be resisted through nonviolent means. Douglass strongly promoted this philosophy during the early years of his abolitionist career. In his speech at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, Black abolitionist and minister Henry Highland Garnet proposed a resolution that called for enslaved people to rise up against their masters. The controversial resolution ignited a tense debate at the convention, with Douglass rising in firm opposition. His belief in moral suasion would repeatedly place him at odds with other Black abolitionists during this phase of his career. Work as an agent provided Douglass with the means to support his family. He and Anna had five children: Rosetta (born 1839), Lewis (born 1840), Frederick, Jr. (born 1842), Charles (born 1844), and Annie (born 1849).

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, European travel, and The North Star

In 1845 Douglass published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Prior to its publication, audiences at Douglass's lectures had questioned his authenticity as an ex-slave because of his eloquence, refusal to use "plantation speak," and unwillingness to provide details about his origins. The Narrative settled these disputes by naming people and locations in Douglass's life. The book also challenged the conventional employment of ghostwriters for slave narratives by boldly acknowledging that Douglass wrote it himself. Douglass would publish two additional autobiographies: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). The Narrative quickly became popular, especially in Europe, but the book's success contributed to Hugh Auld's determination to return Douglass to the conditions of enslavement.

The threat of capture, as well as the book's excellent performance in Europe, prompted Douglass to travel abroad from August 1845 to 1847, and he lectured throughout the United Kingdom. His English supporters, led by Ellen and Anna Richardson, purchased Douglass from Hugh Auld, giving him his freedom. In the spring of 1847, Douglass returned to the United States a free man with the funding to start his own newspaper.

Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, to publish his newspaper, The North Star, despite objections from Garrison and others. Basing the newspaper in Rochester ensured that The North Star did not compete with the distribution of The Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New England. The North Star's first issue appeared on December 3, 1847. In 1851 the paper merged with the Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass' Paper, which ran until 1860. Douglass would publish two additional newspapers during his life, Douglass' Monthly (1859-63) and New National Era (1870-74).

The move to Rochester surrounded Douglass with political abolitionists such as Gerrit Smith. During his first few years in Rochester, Douglass remained loyal to Garrison's philosophy, which promoted moral suasion, stated that the U.S. Constitution was an invalid document, and discouraged participation in American politics because it was a system corrupted by slavery. In 1851, however, Douglass announced his split from Garrison when he declared that the Constitution was a valid legal document that could be used on behalf of emancipation. Consequently, Douglass became more engaged in American politics and constitutional interpretation.

Involvement with John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony

The country's tension around slavery rapidly increased in the 1850s. Douglass's Rochester home was part of the Underground Railroad and hosted numerous fellow abolitionists. In 1859 Douglass met with abolitionist John Brown in a quarry in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Brown invited Douglass to participate in the planned raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), which Brown hoped would inspire a massive uprising by enslaved people. Douglass declined the invitation. Shortly after the raid (October 16-19), Douglass received word that the authorities were looking to arrest him as an accomplice. He quickly fled to Canada before heading to Europe for a scheduled lecture tour. Douglass returned home in April 1860 after learning that his youngest daughter, Annie, had died.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Douglass strongly advocated for inclusion of Black soldiers in the Union army. He became a recruiter for the Massachusetts 54th, an all-Black infantry regiment in which his sons Lewis and Charles served. In 1863 Douglass visited the White House to meet with Pres. Abraham Lincoln to advocate for better pay and conditions for the soldiers. Lincoln then invited Douglass to the White House in 1864 to discuss what could be done for Blacks in the case of a Union loss. Douglass would meet with Lincoln a third time, after the president's second inauguration and about a month before his assassination.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Union's victory presented a new reality: millions of Black people were free. Douglass dedicated himself to securing the community's rights to this new freedom. He strongly supported the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted Blacks citizenship, but he realized that this new citizenship status needed to be protected by suffrage. Initially Douglass supported a constitutional amendment supporting suffrage for all men and women. Having attended the 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, he was a longtime supporter of women's rights, joining Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in this stance. Reconstruction politics, however, indicated that a universal suffrage amendment would fail. Douglass then supported Black male suffrage with the idea that Black men could help women secure the right to vote later. This placed him at odds with Stanton and Anthony. Douglass hoped that the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment would encourage African Americans to stay in the South to consolidate their power as a voting bloc, but the region's high levels of violence against African Americans led him to support Black migration to safer areas of the country.

Move to Washington, D.C., the Freedman's Bank, government office-holding, and later years

After a fire destroyed his Rochester home, Douglass moved in 1872 to Washington, D.C., where he published his latest newspaper venture, New National Era. The newspaper folded in 1874 because of its poor fiscal health. That same year Douglass was appointed president of the Freedman's Savings & Trust, also known as the Freedman's Bank. The bank failed four months after he became president because of the years of corruption that predated his association with the bank. The bank's failure harmed his reputation, but Douglass worked with the U.S. Congress to remedy the damage caused by the bank.

After the Freedman's Bank debacle, Douglass held numerous government appointments. He became the first Black U.S. marshal in 1877 when he was appointed to that post for the District of Columbia by Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes. He served in that capacity until 1881, when Pres. James A. Garfield appointed him to the high-paying position of recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. In 1889 Pres. Benjamin Harrison selected Douglass as the U.S. minister resident and consul general to the Republic of Haiti. The major controversy during Douglass's tenure was the quest by the United States to acquire the port town of Môle Saint-Nicolas as a refueling station for the U.S. Navy. Douglass disagreed with the Harrison administration's approach, preferring to promote the autonomy of the Haitian government. He resigned the position in 1891 and returned to his home in Washington, D.C.

Douglass spent the last 17 years of his life at Cedar Hill, his home in the Anacostia neighbourhood of Washington, D.C., to which he had moved in 1878. On August 4, 1882, Anna Murray Douglass died in the home after suffering a stroke. In 1884 Douglass married Helen Pitts, his white secretary, who was about 20 years younger than her husband. The marriage was controversial for its time, and it resulted in Douglass's temporary estrangement from some friends and family.

During the latter years of his life, Douglass remained committed to social justice and the African American community. His prominence and work resulted in his being the most photographed American man in the 19th century. His distinguished photographs were deliberate contradictions to the visual stereotypes of African Americans at the time, which often exaggerated their facial features, skin colour, and physical bodies and demeaned their intelligence. He served on Howard University's board of trustees from 1871 to 1895. Douglass cultivated relationships with younger activists, most notably Ida B. Wells, who featured his letter to her in her book Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. He also contributed to her pamphlet protesting the exclusion of exhibits dedicated to African American culture from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.

Douglass died in his Cedar Hill home on February 20, 1895. After his death, Helen Pitts Douglass established the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association to preserve his legacy. She bequeathed the home and its belongings to the organization in her will. Cedar Hill became part of the National Park system in 1962, and it was designated the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in 1988. The U.S. Library of Congress digitized its holdings of Douglass's papers, which include letters, speeches, and personal documents.

At the end of his life, Douglass, an American icon who fought for social justice and equity, became known as the "Lion of Anacostia." Through his writings, speeches, and photographs, he boldly challenged the racial stereotypes of African Americans. Douglass's contributions to the Black American community and American history were recognized in the early 20th century during Negro History Week, the predecessor of Black History Month, which many communities anchored to the day on which his birthday was celebrated, February 14. Today Douglass is renowned not just for his rise from slavery to the highest levels of American society but also for his dedication to challenging the country to recognize the rights of all people and be consistent with its ideals.

Noelle Trent

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Frederick Douglass | Biography, Accomplishments, & Facts

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Frederick Douglass, African American abolitionist, orator, newspaper publisher, and author who is famous for his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. He became the first Black U.S. marshal and was the most photographed American man of the 19th century.

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Who Was Frederick Douglass?

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in or around 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. Douglass himself was never sure of his exact birth date.

His mother was an enslaved Black women and his father was white and of European descent. He was actually born Frederick Bailey (his mother's name), and took the name Douglass only after he escaped. His full name at birth was "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey."

After he was separated from his mother as an infant, Douglass lived for a time with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. However, at the age of six, he was moved away from her to live and work on the Wye House plantation in Maryland.

From there, Douglass was "given" to Lucretia Auld, whose husband, Thomas, sent him to work with his brother Hugh in Baltimore. Douglass credits Hugh's wife Sophia with first teaching him the alphabet. With that foundation, Douglass then taught himself to read and write. By the time he was hired out to work under William Freeland, he was teaching other enslaved people to read using the Bible.

As word spread of his efforts to educate fellow enslaved people, Thomas Auld took him back and transferred him to Edward Covey, a farmer who was known for his brutal treatment of the enslaved people in his charge. Roughly 16 at this time, Douglass was regularly whipped by Covey.

Frederick Douglass Escapes from Slavery

After several failed attempts at escape, Douglass finally left Covey's farm in 1838, first boarding a train to Havre de Grace, Maryland. From there he traveled through Delaware, another slave state, before arriving in New York and the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles.

Once settled in New York, he sent for Anna Murray, a free Black woman from Baltimore he met while in captivity with the Aulds. She joined him, and the two were married in September 1838. They had five children together.

From Slavery to Abolitionist Leader

After their marriage, the young couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they met Nathan and Mary Johnson, a married couple who were born "free persons of color." It was the Johnsons who inspired the couple to take the surname Douglass, after the character in the Sir Walter Scott poem, "The Lady of the Lake."

In New Bedford, Douglass began attending meetings of the abolitionist movement. During these meetings, he was exposed to the writings of abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison.

The two men eventually met when both were asked to speak at an abolitionist meeting, during which Douglass shared his story of slavery and escape. It was Garrison who encouraged Douglass to become a speaker and leader in the abolitionist movement.

By 1843, Douglass had become part of the American Anti-Slavery Society's "Hundred Conventions" project, a six-month tour through the United States. Douglass was physically assaulted several times during the tour by those opposed to the abolitionist movement.

In one particularly brutal attack, in Pendleton, Indiana, Douglass' hand was broken. The injuries never fully healed, and he never regained full use of his hand.

In 1858, radical abolitionist John Brown stayed with Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, as he planned his raid on the U.S. military arsenal at Harper's Ferry, part of his attempt to establish a stronghold of formerly enslaved people in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia. Brown was caught and hanged for masterminding the attack, offering the following prophetic words as his final statement: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass'

Two years later, Douglass published the first and most famous of his autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. (He also authored My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass).

In it Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he wrote: "From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom."

He also noted, "Thus is slavery the enemy of both the slave and the slaveholder."

Frederick Douglass in Ireland and Great Britain

Later that same year, Douglass would travel to Ireland and Great Britain. At the time, the former country was just entering the early stages of the Irish Potato Famine, or the Great Hunger.

While overseas, he was impressed by the relative freedom he had as a man of color, compared to what he had experienced in the United States. During his time in Ireland, he met the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, who became an inspiration for his later work.

In England, Douglass also delivered what would later be viewed as one of his most famous speeches, the so-called "London Reception Speech."

In the speech, he said, "What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of its humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?... I need not lift up the veil by giving you any experience of my own. Every one that can put two ideas together, must see the most fearful results from such a state of things..."

Frederick Douglass' Abolitionist Paper

When he returned to the United States in 1847, Douglass began publishing his own abolitionist newsletter, the North Star. He also became involved in the movement for women's rights.

He was the only African American to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, a gathering of women's rights activists in New York, in 1848.

He spoke forcefully during the meeting and said, "In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world."

He later included coverage of women's rights issues in the pages of the North Star. The newsletter's name was changed to Frederick Douglass' Paper in 1851, and was published until 1860, just before the start of the Civil War.

Frederick Douglass Quotes

In 1852, he delivered another of his more famous speeches, one that later came to be called "What to a slave is the 4th of July?"

In one section of the speech, Douglass noted, "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."

For the 24th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1886, Douglass delivered a rousing address in Washington, D.C., during which he said, "where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

Frederick Douglass During the Civil War

During the brutal conflict that divided the still-young United States, Douglass continued to speak and worked tirelessly for the end of slavery and the right of newly freed Black Americans to vote.

Although he supported President Abraham Lincoln in the early years of the Civil War, Douglass fell into disagreement with the politician after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which effectively ended the practice of slavery. Douglass was disappointed that Lincoln didn't use the proclamation to grant formerly enslaved people the right to vote, particularly after they had fought bravely alongside soldiers for the Union army.

It is said, though, that Douglass and Lincoln later reconciled and, following Lincoln's assassination in 1865, and the passage of the 13th amendment, 14th amendment, and 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which, respectively, outlawed slavery, granted formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal protection under the law, and protected all citizens from racial discrimination in voting), Douglass was asked to speak at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Park in 1876.

Historians, in fact, suggest that Lincoln's widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, bequeathed the late-president's favorite walking stick to Douglass after that speech.

In the post-war Reconstruction era, Douglass served in many official positions in government, including as an ambassador to the Dominican Republic, thereby becoming the first Black man to hold high office. He also continued speaking and advocating for African American and women's rights.

In the 1868 presidential election, he supported the candidacy of former Union general Ulysses S. Grant, who promised to take a hard line against white supremacist-led insurgencies in the post-war South. Grant notably also oversaw passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which was designed to suppress the growing Ku Klux Klan movement.

Frederick Douglass: Later Life and Death

In 1877, Douglass met with Thomas Auld, the man who once "owned" him, and the two reportedly reconciled.

Douglass' wife Anna died in 1882, and he married white activist Helen Pitts in 1884.

In 1888, he became the first African American to receive a vote for President of the United States, during the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, though, Benjamin Harrison received the party nomination.

Douglass remained an active speaker, writer and activist until his death in 1895. He died after suffering a heart attack at home after arriving back from a meeting of the National Council of Women, a women's rights group still in its infancy at the time, in Washington, D.C.

His life's work still serves as an inspiration to those who seek equality and a more just society.

Sources

Frederick Douglas, PBS.org.
Frederick Douglas, National Parks Service, nps.gov.
Frederick Douglas, 1818-1895, Documenting the South, University of North Carolina, docsouth.unc.edu.
Frederick Douglass Quotes, brainyquote.com.
"Reception Speech. At Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, England, May 12, 1846." USF.edu.
"What to the slave is the 4th of July?" TeachingAmericanHistory.org.
Graham, D.A. (2017). "Donald Trump's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass." The Atlantic.

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Frederick Douglass - Narrative, Quotes & Facts | HISTORY

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Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement, which sought to end the practice of slavery, before and during the Civil War.

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W.E.B. Du Bois, (born February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, U.S.-died August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana), American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934. His collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a landmark of African American literature.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois' Britannica essay on African American literature.)

The Souls of Black Folk, the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP

Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of Blacks. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of Blacks in America, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914 at Atlanta University in Georgia, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), the first case study of a Black community in the United States.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")
Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential Black leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged Blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of whites. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington's strategy, rather than freeing the Black man from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many Black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the Black community into two wings-the "conservative" supporters of Washington and his "radical" critics.

Two years later, in 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, which was dedicated chiefly to attacking the platform of Booker T. Washington. The small organization, which met annually until 1909, was seriously weakened by internal squabbles and Washington's opposition. But it was significant as an ideological forerunner and direct inspiration for the interracial NAACP, founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association's director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class Blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the Black protest from 1910 until 1934.

Both in the Niagara Movement and in the NAACP, Du Bois acted mainly as an integrationist, but his thinking always exhibited, to varying degrees, separatist-nationalist tendencies. In The Souls of Black Folk he had expressed the characteristic dualism of Black Americans:

One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder....He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Du Bois's Black nationalism took several forms-the most influential being his pioneering advocacy of Pan-Africanism, the belief that all people of African descent had common interests and should work together in the struggle for their freedom. Du Bois was a leader of the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the architect of four Pan-African Congresses held between 1919 and 1927. Second, he articulated a cultural nationalism. As the editor of The Crisis, he encouraged the development of Black literature and art and urged his readers to see "Beauty in Black." Third, Du Bois's Black nationalism is seen in his belief that Blacks should develop a separate "group economy" of producers' and consumers' cooperatives as a weapon for fighting economic discrimination and Black poverty. This doctrine became especially important during the economic catastrophe of the 1930s and precipitated an ideological struggle within the NAACP.

He resigned from the editorship of The Crisis and the NAACP in 1934, yielding his influence as a race leader and charging that the organization was dedicated to the interests of the Black bourgeoisie and ignored the problems of the masses. Du Bois's interest in cooperatives was a part of his nationalism that developed out of his Marxist leanings. At the turn of the century, he had been an advocate of Black capitalism and Black support of Black business, but by about 1905 he had been drawn toward socialist doctrines. Although he joined the Socialist Party only briefly in 1912, he remained sympathetic with Marxist ideas throughout the rest of his life.

Upon leaving the NAACP, he returned to Atlanta University, where he devoted the next 10 years to teaching and scholarship. In 1940 he founded the magazine Phylon, Atlanta University's "Review of Race and Culture." In 1945 he published the "Preparatory Volume" of a projected Encyclopedia Africana, for which he had been appointed editor in chief and toward which he had been working for decades. He also produced two major books during this period. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935) was an important Marxist interpretation of Reconstruction (the period following the American Civil War during which the seceded Southern states were reorganized according to the wishes of Congress), and, more significantly, it provided the first synthesis of existing knowledge of the role of Blacks in that critical period of American history. In 1940 appeared Dusk of Dawn, subtitled An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In this brilliant book, Du Bois explained his role in both the African and the African American struggles for freedom, viewing his career as an ideological case study illuminating the complexity of the Black-white conflict.

Following this fruitful decade at Atlanta University, he returned once more to a research position at the NAACP (1944-48). This brief connection ended in a second bitter quarrel, and thereafter Du Bois moved steadily leftward politically. Identified with pro-Russian causes, he was indicted in 1951 as an unregistered agent for a foreign power. Although a federal judge directed his acquittal, Du Bois had become completely disillusioned with the United States. In 1961 he applied to, and was accepted as a member of, the Communist Party. That same year he left the United States for Ghana, where he began work on the Encyclopedia Africana in earnest, though it would never be completed, and where he later became a citizen.

Du Bois also wrote several novels, including the trilogy The Black Flame (1957-61). The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois was published in the United States in 1968.
Elliott Rudwick The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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W.E.B. Du Bois | Biography, Education, Books, & Facts

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W.E.B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist. He was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a landmark of African American literature.

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Before becoming a founding member of NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois was already well known as one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era. The first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, Du Bois published widely before becoming NAACP's director of publicity and research and starting the organization's official journal, The Crisis, in 1910.

Leading Intellectual

Du Bois, a scholar at the historically Black Atlanta University, established himself as a leading thinker on race and the plight of Black Americans. He challenged the position held by Booker T. Washington, another contemporary prominent intellectual, that Southern Blacks should compromise their basic rights in exchange for education and legal justice. He also spoke out against the notion popularized by abolitionist Frederick Douglass that Black Americans should integrate with white society. In an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1897, "Strivings of the Negro People," Du Bois wrote that Black Americans should instead embrace their African heritage even as they worked and lived in the United States.

Du Bois published his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. In this collection of essays, Du Bois described the predicament of Black Americans as one of "double consciousness": "One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." The term "double consciousness" has come to be widely used as a theoretical framework to apply to other dynamics of inequality.

Editor of The Crisis, NAACP's monthly journal

Du Bois became the editor of the organization's monthly magazine, , using his perch to draw attention to the still widespread practice of lynching, pushing for nationwide legislation that would outlaw the cruel extrajudicial killings. A 1915 article in the journal gave a year-by-year list of more than 2,700 lynchings over the previous three decades.

Du Bois, who considered himself a socialist, also published articles in favor of unionized labor, although he called out union leaders for barring Black membership. Under Du Bois's guidance, the journal attracted a wide readership, reaching 100,000 in 1920, and drew many new supporters to NAACP. With Du Bois as its mouthpiece, NAACP came to be known as the leading protest organization for Black Americans.
"One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
Du Bois served as editor of The Crisis until 1934, when he resigned following a rift with NAACP leadership over his controversial stance on segregation. He viewed the "separate but equal" status as an acceptable position for Blacks. Du Bois also resigned from the NAACP board and returned to Atlanta University.

Global citizen

After a ten-year hiatus, Du Bois came back to NAACP as the director of special research from 1944 to 1948. In this role, he attended the founding convention for the United Nations, channeling his energies toward lobbying the global body to acknowledge the suffering of Black Americans. He wrote the famous NAACP publication, "An Appeal to the World," a precursor to a report charging the United States with genocide for its ugly history of state-sanctioned lynchings. Du Bois also turned a spotlight onto the injustices of colonialism, urging the United Nations to use its influence to take a stand against such exploitative regimes.

Throughout his life, Du Bois was active in the Pan-Africanism movement, attending the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. He later organized a series of Pan-African Congress meetings around the world in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927, bringing together intellectuals from Africa, the West Indies, and the United States.

At the end of his life, Du Bois embarked on an ambitious project to create a new encyclopedia on the African diaspora, funded by the government of Ghana. A citizen of the world until the end, the 93-year-old Du Bois moved to Ghana to manage the project, acquiring citizenship of the African country in 1961. Du Bois died in Ghana on Aug. 27, 1963, the day before the historic March on Washington.

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One of the premier Black scholars of his time, W.E.B. Du Bois was a founding member of the NAACP.

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Thurgood Marshall (born July 2, 1908, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.-died January 24, 1993, Bethesda) lawyer, civil rights activist, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1967-91), the Court's first African American member. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which declared unconstitutional racial segregation in American public schools.

Marshall was the son of William Canfield Marshall, a railroad porter and a steward at an all-white country club, and Norma Williams Marshall, an elementary school teacher. He graduated with honours from Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) in 1930. After being rejected by the University of Maryland Law School because he was not white, Marshall attended Howard University Law School; he received his degree in 1933, ranking first in his class. At Howard he was the protégé of Charles Hamilton Houston, who encouraged Marshall and other law students to view the law as a vehicle for social change.

Upon his graduation from Howard, Marshall began the private practice of law in Baltimore. Among his first legal victories was Murray v. Pearson (1935), a suit accusing the University of Maryland of violating the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws by denying an African American applicant admission to its law school solely on the basis of race. In 1936 Marshall became a staff lawyer under Houston for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); in 1938 he became the lead chair in the legal office of the NAACP, and two years later he was named chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Throughout the 1940s and '50s Marshall distinguished himself as one of the country's top lawyers, winning 29 of the 32 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. Among them were cases in which the Court declared unconstitutional a Southern state's exclusion of African American voters from primary elections ( Smith v. Allwright [1944]), state judicial enforcement of racial " restrictive covenants" in housing (Shelley v. Kraemer [1948]), and "separate but equal" facilities for African American professionals and graduate students in state universities (Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents [both 1950]).

Without a doubt, however, it was Marshall's victory before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that established his reputation as a formidable and creative legal opponent and an advocate of social change. Indeed, students of constitutional law still examine the oral arguments of the case and the ultimate decision of the Court from both a legal and a political perspective; legally, Marshall argued that segregation in public education produced unequal schools for African Americans and whites (a key element in the strategy to have the Court overrule the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson [1896]), but it was Marshall's reliance on psychological, sociological, and historical data that presumably sensitized the Court to the deleterious effects of institutionalized segregation on the self-image, social worth, and social progress of African American children.

In September 1961 Marshall was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President John F. Kennedy, but opposition from Southern senators delayed his confirmation for several months. President Lyndon B. Johnson named Marshall U.S. solicitor general in July 1965 and nominated him to the Supreme Court on June 13, 1967; Marshall's nomination was confirmed (69-11) by the U.S. Senate on August 30, 1967.

During Marshall's tenure on the Supreme Court, he was a steadfast liberal, stressing the need for equitable and just treatment of the country's minorities by the state and federal governments. A pragmatic judicial activist, he was committed to making the U.S. Constitution work; most illustrative of his approach was his attempt to fashion a "sliding scale" interpretation of the equal protection clause that would weigh the objectives of the government against the nature and interests of the groups affected by the law. Marshall's sliding scale was never adopted by the Supreme Court, though in several major civil rights cases of the 1970s the Court echoed Marshall's views. He was also adamantly opposed to capital punishment and generally favoured the rights of the national government over the rights of the states.

Marshall served on the Supreme Court as it underwent a period of major ideological change. In his early years on the bench, he fit comfortably among a liberal majority under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren. As the years passed, however, many of his closest allies, including Warren, either retired or died in office, creating opportunities for Republican presidents to swing the pendulum of activism in a conservative direction. By the time he retired in 1991, he was known as "the Great Dissenter," one of the last remaining liberal members of a Supreme Court dominated by a conservative majority.

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Thurgood Marshall | Biography, Legal Career, & Supreme Court Tenure

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Thurgood Marshall, lawyer and civil rights activist who was the first African American member of the U.S. Supreme Court, serving as an associate justice from 1967 to 1991. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Supreme Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).

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Thurgood Marshall founded LDF in 1940 and served as its first Director-Counsel. He was the architect of the legal strategy that ended the country’s official policy of segregation and was the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court.

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Early life

Obama's father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a teenage goatherd in rural Kenya, won a scholarship to study in the United States, and eventually became a senior economist in the Kenyan government. Obama's mother, S. Ann Dunham, grew up in Kansas, Texas, and Washington state before her family settled in Honolulu. In 1960 she and Barack Sr. met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii and married less than a year later.

When Obama was age two, Barack Sr. left to study at Harvard University; shortly thereafter, in 1964, Ann and Barack Sr. divorced. (Obama saw his father only one more time, during a brief visit when Obama was 10.) Later Ann remarried, this time to another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, with whom she had a second child, Maya. Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his half sister, mother, and stepfather. While there, Obama attended both a government-run school where he received some instruction in Islam and a Catholic private school where he took part in Christian schooling.

He returned to Hawaii in 1971 and lived in a modest apartment, sometimes with his grandparents and sometimes with his mother (she remained for a time in Indonesia, returned to Hawaii, and then went abroad again-partly to pursue work on a Ph.D.-before divorcing Soetoro in 1980). For a brief period his mother was aided by government food stamps, but the family mostly lived a middle-class existence. In 1979 Obama graduated from Punahou School, an elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu.

Obama attended Occidental College in suburban Los Angeles for two years and then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where in 1983 he received a bachelor's degree in political science. Influenced by professors who pushed him to take his studies more seriously, Obama experienced great intellectual growth during college and for a couple of years thereafter. He led a rather ascetic life and read works of literature and philosophy by William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Toni Morrison, and others. After serving for a couple of years as a writer and editor for Business International Corp., a research, publishing, and consulting firm in Manhattan, he took a position in 1985 as a community organizer on Chicago's largely impoverished Far South Side. He returned to school three years later and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard University's law school, where he was the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. While a summer associate in 1989 at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, Obama had met Chicago native Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer at the firm. The two married in 1992.

After receiving his law degree, Obama moved to Chicago and became active in the Democratic Party. He organized Project Vote, a drive that registered tens of thousands of African Americans on voting rolls and that is credited with helping Democrat Bill Clinton win Illinois and capture the presidency in 1992. The effort also helped make Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois state legislator, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. During this period, Obama wrote his first book and saw it published. The memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), is the story of Obama's search for his biracial identity by tracing the lives of his now-deceased father and his extended family in Kenya. Obama lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago and worked as an attorney on civil rights issues.

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Barack Obama | Biography, Parents, Education, Presidency, Books, & Facts

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Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, broke barriers as the first African-American president and implemented significant healthcare reforms during his tenure.

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Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story - values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he became the first African American to hold the office. The framers of the Constitution always hoped that our leadership would not be limited to Americans of wealth or family connections. Subject to the prejudices of their time-many of them owned slaves-most would not have foreseen an African American president. Obama's father, Barack Sr., a Kenyan economist, met his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, when both were students in Hawaii, where Barack was born on August 4, 1961. They later divorced, and Barack's mother married a man from Indonesia, where he spent his early childhood. Before fifth grade, he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents and attend Punahou School on scholarship.

In his memoir Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama describes the complexities of discovering his identity in adolescence. After two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he transferred to Columbia University, where he studied political science and international relations. Following graduation in 1983, Obama worked in New York City, then became a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, coordinating with churches to improve housing conditions and set up job-training programs in a community hit hard by steel mill closures. In 1988, he went to Harvard Law School, where he attracted national attention as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. Returning to Chicago, he joined a small law firm specializing in civil rights.

In 1992, Obama married Michelle Robinson, a lawyer who had also excelled at Harvard Law. Their daughters, Malia and Sasha, were born in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, and then to the U.S. Senate in 2004. At the Democratic National Convention that summer, he delivered a much acclaimed keynote address. Some pundits instantly pronounced him a future president, but most did not expect it to happen for some time. Nevertheless, in 2008 he was elected over Arizona Senator John McCain by 365 to 173 electoral votes.

As an incoming president, Obama faced many challenges-an economic collapse, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continuing menace of terrorism. Inaugurated before an estimated crowd of 1.8 million people, Obama proposed unprecedented federal spending to revive the economy and also hoped to renew America's stature in the world. During his first term he signed three signature bills: an omnibus bill to stimulate the economy, legislation making health care more accessible and affordable, and legislation reforming the nation's financial institutions. Obama also pressed for a fair pay act for women, financial reform legislation, and efforts for consumer protection. In 2009, Obama became the fourth president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2012, he was reelected over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney by 332 to 206 electoral votes. The Middle East remained a key foreign policy challenge. Obama had overseen the killing of Osama bin Laden, but a new self-proclaimed Islamic State arose during a civil war in Syria and began inciting terrorist attacks. Obama sought to manage a hostile Iran with a treaty that hindered its development of nuclear weapons. The Obama administration also adopted a climate change agreement signed by 195 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming.

In the last year of his second term, Obama spoke at two events that clearly moved him-the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, and the dedication of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. "Our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer," he said in Selma. "And that's why we celebrate," he told those attending the museum opening in Washington, "mindful that our work is not yet done."

Learn more about Barack Obama's spouse, Michelle Obama.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama pose with their daughters, Malia and Sasha

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Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story - values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

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MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) - It's been almost two years since the murder of George Floyd. It sparked protests, rioting, and conversations around racial justice.

Regina McCombs, a photojournalism and visual communications senior fellow at the University of Minnesota Hubbard School of Journalism, was tasked with helping to narrow down 500 photographs from that time to 54 of them for an exhibit called Documenting a Reckoning: The Murder of George Floyd.

"They all have these moments that just grab you," McCombs said.

The idea for the exhibit first came from a freelance photographer who was there the days after George Floyd's death.

The exhibit shows the hours leading up to Floyd's murder, all the way to the trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin.

Some of the images are taken by award-winning photographers from national publications. Others by people in the community.

"We've got a photographer from National Geographic right next to a photo from a community photographer," McCombs said.

McCombs says she hopes people leave with a sense of how that time changed the community and also change that still needs to happen.

The exhibit, put on by the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Historical Society, at Mill City Museum runs March 17 through June 5. It is free to the public.

There will also be an opening reception on April 1 from 6-8 p.m. that will include a panel discussion led by photographers featured in the exhibit.

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New George Floyd Exhibit Opens At Mill City Museum

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MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) - It's been almost two years since the murder of George Floyd. It sparked protests, rioting, and conversations around racial justice. Regina McCombs, a photojournalism and visual communications senior fellow at the University of Minnesota Hubbard School of Journalism, was tasked with helping to narrow down 500 photographs from that time to 54 of them for an exhibit called Documenting a Reckoning: The Murder of George Floyd.

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EXPLAINER: Federal charges against 3 cops in Floyd killing

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Three former officers who were with Derek Chauvin during the arrest that led to George Floyd’s killing are on trial on charges they violated the Black man’s civil rights.

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Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His mother was the National recording secretary for the Marcus Garvey Movement which commanded millions of followers in the 1920s and 30s. His father was a Baptist minister and chapter president of The Universal Negro Improvement Association who appealed to President Hoover that Marcus Garvey was wrongfully arrested. Earl's civil rights activism prompted death threats from the white supremacist organization Black Legion, forcing the family to relocate twice before Malcolm's fourth birthday.

Regardless of the Little's efforts to elude the Legion, in 1929 their Lansing, Michigan home was burned to the ground. Two years later, Earl's body was found lying across the town's trolley tracks.

Police ruled both incidents as accidents, but the Little's were certain that members of the Black Legion were responsible. Louise suffered emotional breakdown several years after the death of her husband and was committed to a mental institution. Her children were split up amongst various foster homes and orphanages.

Eventually Malcolm and his buddy, Malcolm "Shorty" Jarvis, moved back to Boston. In 1946 they were arrested and convicted on burglary charges, and Malcolm was sentenced to 10 years in prison. (He was paroled after serving seven years.) 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, New York. 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 week-long 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. Racial tensions ran increasingly high during the early 1960s. 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 the deception of Muhammad, whom he had considered 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, Saudi Arabia. The trip proved life altering. 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.

The legacy of Malcolm X 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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Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His mother was the National recording secretary for the Marcus Garvey Movement which commanded millions of followers in the 1920s and 30s. His father was a Baptist minister and chapter president of The Universal Negro Improvement Association who appealed to President Hoover that Marcus Garvey was wrongfully arrested.

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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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ketanji brown jackson: the personal and legal record of the front-runner for the scotus job - cnnpolitics

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Ketanji Brown Jackson: The personal and legal record of the Supreme Court nominee

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Editor's note: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will be President Joe Biden's nominee to the Supreme Court. Click here for updates.

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Since Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, President Biden has conducted a rigorous process to identify his replacement. President Biden sought a candidate with exceptional credentials, unimpeachable character, and unwavering dedication to the rule of law. And the President sought an individual who is committed to equal justice under the law and who understands the profound impact that the Supreme Court's decisions have on the lives of the American people.

That is why the President nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve as the next Justice on the Supreme Court. Judge Jackson is one of our nation's brightest legal minds and has an unusual breadth of experience in our legal system, giving her the perspective to be an exceptional Justice.

About Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

Judge Jackson was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Miami, Florida. Her parents attended segregated primary schools, then attended historically black colleges and universities. Both started their careers as public school teachers and became leaders and administrators in the Miami-Dade Public School System. When Judge Jackson was in preschool, her father attended law school. In a 2017 lecture, Judge Jackson traced her love of the law back to sitting next to her father in their apartment as he tackled his law school homework-reading cases and preparing for Socratic questioning-while she undertook her preschool homework-coloring books.

Judge Jackson stood out as a high achiever throughout her childhood. She was a speech and debate star who was elected "mayor" of Palmetto Junior High and student body president of Miami Palmetto Senior High School. But like many Black women, Judge Jackson still faced naysayers. When Judge Jackson told her high school guidance counselor she wanted to attend Harvard, the guidance counselor warned that Judge Jackson should not set her "sights so high."

That did not stop Judge Jackson. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, then attended Harvard Law School, where she graduated cum laude and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Judge Jackson lives with her husband, Patrick, and their two daughters, in Washington, DC.

Experience

Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit

Judge Jackson was one of President Biden's first judicial nominees. She was confirmed with bipartisan support to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2021.

Judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

President Obama nominated Judge Jackson to be a district court judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2012. She was confirmed with bipartisan support in 2013.

Vice Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission

President Obama nominated Judge Jackson to serve as the Vice Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2009, and she was confirmed with bipartisan support in 2010. Prior to serving as a judge, Judge Jackson followed in the footsteps of her mentor Justice Breyer by working on the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The Commission, which President Biden fought to create as a member of the U.S. Senate, is bipartisan by design. Her work there focused on reducing unwarranted sentencing disparities and ensuring that federal sentences were just and proportionate.

Public defender

Judge Jackson represented defendants who did not have the means to pay for a lawyer. She would be the first former federal public defender to serve on the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Clerk

Judge Jackson served as Justice Breyer's law clerk, and learned up close how important it is for a Supreme Court Justice to build consensus and speak to a mainstream understanding of the Constitution.

Perspective on the Legal System

Because of her diverse and broad public service, Judge Jackson has a unique appreciation of how critical it is for the justice system to be fair and impartial. With multiple law enforcement officials in her family, she also has a personal understanding of the stakes of the legal system. After serving in the U.S. Army and being deployed to Iraq and Egypt, Jackson's brother served as a police officer in Baltimore and two of her uncles were police officers in Miami.

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Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court | The White House

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On April 7, 2022, a bipartisan group of Senators confirmed Judge Jackson's nomination to become the 116th Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

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Amanda Gorman and Michelle Obama in Conversation

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The poet and former First Lady discuss poetry, activism and the pressures Black women face in the spotlight

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Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology. She has written for the New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, she began writing at only a few years of age. Now her words have won her invitations to the Obama White House and to perform for Lin-Manuel Miranda, Al Gore, Secretary Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, and others. Amanda has performed multiple commissioned poems for CBS This Morning and she has spoken at events and venues across the country, including the Library of Congress and Lincoln Center. She has received a Genius Grant from OZY Media, as well as recognition from Scholastic Inc., YoungArts, the Glamour magazine College Women of the Year Awards, and the Webby Awards. She has written for the New York Times newsletter The Edit and penned the manifesto for Nike's 2020 Black History Month campaign. In 2017, Amanda Gorman was appointed the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate by Urban Word - a program that supports Youth Poets Laureate in more than 60 cities, regions and states nationally. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and is the youngest board member of 826 National, the largest youth writing network in the United States.

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Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology. She has written for the New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

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Download Official Portrait Download the Vice President's Biography
Kamala D. Harris is the Vice President of the United States of America. She was elected Vice President after a lifetime of public service, having been elected District Attorney of San Francisco, California Attorney General, and United States Senator.
Vice President Harris was born in Oakland, California to parents who emigrated from India and Jamaica. She graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of Law.

Vice President Harris with her mother, Shyamala

"My mother would look at me and she'd say, 'Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.'"
Kamala Harris, January 28, 2019

Vice President Harris and her sister, Maya Harris, were inspired by their mother, Shyamala Gopalan. Gopalan, a breast cancer scientist and pioneer in her own right, received her doctorate the same year Vice President Harris was born.

Her parents were activists, instilling Vice President Harris with a strong sense of justice. They brought her to civil rights demonstrations and introduced role models-ranging from Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to civil rights leader Constance Baker Motley-whose work motivated her to become a prosecutor.

Growing up, Vice President Harris was surrounded by a diverse community and extended family. In 2014, she married Douglas Emhoff. They have a large blended family that includes their children, Ella and Cole.

Vice President Harris at the Pride Parade in San Francisco, California

Throughout her career, the Vice President has been guided by the words she spoke the first time she stood up in court: Kamala Harris, for the people.

In 1990, Vice President Harris joined the Alameda County District Attorney's Office where she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases. She then served as a managing attorney in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and later was chief of the Division on Children and Families for the San Francisco City Attorney's Office.

She was elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 2003. In that role, Vice President Harris created a ground-breaking program to provide first-time drug offenders with the opportunity to earn a high school degree and find employment. The program was designated as a national model of innovation for law enforcement by the United States Department of Justice.

In 2010, Vice President Harris was elected California's Attorney General and oversaw the largest state justice department in the United States. She established the state's first Bureau of Children's Justice and instituted several first-of-their-kind reforms that ensured greater transparency and accountability in the criminal justice system.

As Attorney General, Vice President Harris won a $20 billion settlement for Californians whose homes had been foreclosed on, as well as a $1.1 billion settlement for students and veterans who were taken advantage of by a for-profit education company. She defended the Affordable Care Act in court, enforced environmental law, and was a national leader in the movement for marriage equality.

Vice President Harris speaking at an event

"At every step of the way, I've been guided by the words I spoke from the first time I stood in a courtroom: Kamala Harris, For the People."
Kamala Harris, August 19, 2020

In 2017, Vice President Harris was sworn into the United States Senate. In her first speech, she spoke out on behalf of immigrants and refugees. As a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, she fought for better protections for DREAMers and called for better oversight of substandard conditions at immigrant detention facilities.

On the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, she worked with members of both parties to keep the American people safe from foreign threats and crafted bipartisan legislation to assist in securing American elections. She visited Iraq, Jordan, and Afghanistan to meet with servicemembers and assess the situation on the ground. She also served on the Senate Judiciary Committee. During her tenure on the committee, she participated in hearings for two Supreme Court nominees.

As Senator, Vice President Harris championed legislation to combat hunger, provide rent relief, improve maternal health care, and address the climate crisis as a member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Her bipartisan anti-lynching bill passed the Senate in 2018. Her legislation to preserve Historically Black Colleges and Universities was signed into law, as was her effort to infuse much-needed capital into low-income communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vice President Harris embraces a young supporter

On August 11, 2020, Vice President Harris accepted President Joe Biden's invitation to become his running mate and help unite the nation. She is the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected Vice President, as was the case with other offices she has held. She is, however, determined not to be the last.

As Vice President, Kamala Harris has worked in partnership with President Joe Biden to get America vaccinated, rebuild our economy, reduce child poverty, and pass an infrastructure law that will lift up communities that have been left behind. She has led the Administration's efforts in rallying broad coalitions to protect the freedom to vote, expand workers' rights to organize and collectively bargain, and stand up for women's rights - supporting women in our workforce, addressing the maternal health crisis, and defending reproductive rights. The Vice President has also played a key role in engaging world leaders and strengthening our nation's alliances and partnerships. In everything she does, she remains focused on the people of our nation-and our collective future.

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Kamala D. Harris is the Vice President of the United States of America. She was elected Vice President after a lifetime of public service, having been elected District Attorney of San Francisco, California Attorney General, and United States Senator.

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Photo of Huey P. Newton seated in a rattan chair by Blair Stapp (Library of Congress) Huey Percy Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana. His parents moved to Oakland, California during Newton's childhood. He graduated from high school without having acquired literacy, but he later taught himself to read.

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Stacey Abrams is a political leader, voting rights activist and New York Times bestselling author. After serving for eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Democratic Leader, in 2018, Abrams became the Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia, winning at the time more votes than any other Democrat in the state's history. Abrams was the first black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in the United States, and she was the first black woman and first Georgian to deliver a Response to the State of the Union. After witnessing the gross mismanagement of the 2018 election by the Secretary of State's office, Abrams launched to ensure every American has a voice in our election system through programs such as Fair Fight 2020, an initiative to fund and train voter protection teams in 20 battleground states. Over the course of her career, Abrams has founded multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, training and hiring young people of color, and tackling social issues at both the state and national levels. In 2019, she launched to ensure accuracy in the 2020 Census and greater participation in civic engagement, and the Southern Economic Advancement Project , a public policy initiative to broaden economic power and build equity in the South.

Abrams is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where she serves on the Subcommittee on Diversity. As a Next Generation Fellow of the American Assembly on U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions, she also served as a discussion leader, editor, and essay contributor. As the top-ranking Democrat in Georgia, she traveled to and met with leaders in South Korea, Israel and Taiwan, and she worked closely with several members of the consular corps. Abrams is a member of former Secretary of State John Kerry's World War Zero bipartisan coalition on climate change. She has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ministers Forum, the Kerry Initiative-Yale Jackson Institute of Global Affairs, the National Security Action Forum and The German Marshall Fund, as well as a contributor to Foreign Affairs Magazine.

She currently serves on the boards of several organizations including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Women's National Basketball Players Association.

Abrams is the author of Lead from the Outside, Our Time is Now, While Justice Sleeps, in addition to eight eight romantic suspense novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery.

Abrams received degrees from Spelman College, the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and Yale Law School. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, she and her five siblings grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi and were raised in Georgia.

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Meet Our Founder Stacey Abrams is a political leader, voting rights activist and New York Times bestselling author. After serving for eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Democratic Leader, in 2018, Abrams became the Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia, winning at the time more votes than any other Democrat in [...]

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Bayard Rustin, c.1950s
Human Rights Campaign

Bayard Rustin was a brilliant strategist, pacifist, and forward-thinking civil rights activist during the middle of the 20th century. In 1947 as a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Rustin planned the "Journey of Reconciliation", which would be used as a model for the Freedom Rides of the 1960's. He served as a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the practice of nonviolent civil resistance, and was an intellectual and organizational force behind the burgeoning civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. He organized protests in England and studied Ghandian principles in India. His life as an openly gay man, however, put him at odds with the cultural norms of the larger society and left him either working behind the scenes or outside of the movement for stretches of time.

Born 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Rustin was raised a Quaker and his family was engaged in civil rights activism. He attended Wilberforce University, Cheney State Teachers College, and City College of New York. A charismatic man, he earned a living as a spiritual singer in nightclubs while living in New York City. He took a brief interest in the Communist movement and was a life-long pacifist, due to his Quaker upbringing. His commitment to civil and human rights came at a personal cost. He was arrested multiple times and twice went to jail.

In the 1940s h e met A. Philip Randolph and worked with him on various proposed marches on Washington, D.C. to protest segregation in the armed forces and the defense industry. Because of their experiences together, when Randolph was name to head the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, he appointed Rustin as Deputy Director and overall logistical planner. In 1947, Rustin and George Houser, executive secretary of CORE, organized the Journey of Reconciliation which was the first of the Freedom Rides. The Rides were intended to test the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on racial discrimination in interstate travel. Rustin was arrested for violating state laws regarding segregated seating on public transportation and served twenty-two days on a chain gang.

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his talents and tireless work were transferred to human rights and the gay rights movement. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked as a human rights and election monitor for Freedom House and also testified on behalf of New York State's Gay Rights Bill. Bayard Rustin died from a ruptured appendix on August 24, 1987 at the age of 75.

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Bayard Rustin - Civil Rights (U.S. National Park Service)

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Bayard Rustin was a brilliant strategist, pacifist, and forward-thinking civil rights activist during the middle of the 20th century. In 1947 as a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Rustin planned the "Journey of Reconciliation", which would be used as a model for the Freedom Rides of the 1960's.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name:
Bobby Seale

Born:
October 22, 1936, Dallas, Texas

Education:
Merritt College, Oakland, California

Position:
Chairman, Black Panther Party

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

Copyright 2002 Luna Ray Films, LLC. All Rights Reserved

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

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

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Colin Kaepernick, (born November 3, 1987, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.), American gridiron football player and social activist who had success as a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers (2011-16) of the NFL but was better known for kneeling during the national anthem before games to protest racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans.

Kaepernick was raised mostly in Turlock, California, by his adoptive parents. There he attended Pitman High School, where he was a multisport athlete, excelling in football, basketball, and baseball. He earned a scholarship to play football at the University of Nevada, and he became the school's starting quarterback during his freshman season. A prolific passer who was also adept at running the ball, Kaepernick was named the Western Athletic Conference Offensive Player of the Year in both 2008 and 2010. He was selected by the 49ers in the second round of the 2011 NFL draft.

Kaepernick appeared in only three games during his rookie season in the NFL. During the 2012 season, however, the 49ers' starting quarterback, Alex Smith, suffered a concussion in week 10. Head coach Jim Harbaugh chose Kaepernick to fill the position. With the 6-foot 4-inch (1.93-metre), 225-pound (102-kg) Kaepernick at quarterback, the 49ers finished the regular season with an 11-4-1 record and advanced to the Super Bowl for the first time in 18 years. Although Kaepernick threw for 302 yards and rushed for 62, San Francisco lost by a score of 34-31 to the Baltimore Ravens.

In 2013 Kaepernick led the 49ers to a 12-4 regular-season record. The team came up short in the playoffs, however, losing to the Seattle Seahawks in the National Football Conference championship game. The following season Kaepernick set career highs with 3,369 passing yards and 639 yards gained by rushing, though the 49ers dropped to an 8-8 record. Harbaugh departed the 49ers at the end of the 2014 season. Under Harbaugh's successor, former defensive line coach Jim Tomsula, Kaepernick's production declined. At midseason in 2015 he was replaced in the starting lineup by Blaine Gabbert and later suffered a season-ending shoulder injury.

It was during the 2016 NFL preseason that Kaepernick began his protests, first by sitting during the playing of the national anthem and later by kneeling when the song was played. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football," Kaepernick commented at the time. One of his teammates, safety Eric Reid, soon joined him in kneeling. As the 2016 season progressed, other NFL players-as well as athletes in other sports-emulated their actions.

The protests made national headlines and elicited strong reactions from supporters and critics alike. Prominent politicians weighed in on the controversy, including U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, who defended Kaepernick's "constitutional right to make a statement." In a television appearance in September, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump (the eventual winner of the 2016 presidential election) denounced the players for their "lack of respect" for the United States and suggested they leave the country. Kaepernick reportedly received death threats. On October 3 Time magazine featured a kneeling Kaepernick on its cover and cited him for prompting a national debate "about privilege, pride, and patriotism."

Kaepernick continued his protests throughout the 2016 season and in interviews spoke out frequently against police brutality. On the field, he played well enough to reclaim his role as starting quarterback for the 49ers, but the team struggled to a 2-14 record. Kaepernick opted to enter the NFL free-agent market when the season was over. After no team offered to sign him, he filed a formal grievance accusing NFL team owners of conspiring to keep him out of the league. His filing claimed that the owners were retaliating for Kaepernick's "advocacy for equality and social justice and his bringing awareness to peculiar institutions still undermining racial equality in the United States." In May 2018 Reid, who had also gone unsigned after entering free agency, filed a similar grievance against the NFL. (The Carolina Panthers eventually signed Reid for the 2018 season.) In February 2019 both Kaepernick and Reid reached settlements with the NFL resolving their grievance cases. Because of confidentiality agreements, the terms of the settlements were not disclosed.

With an eye toward a potential return to the NFL, Kaepernick accepted the league's invitation to participate in a private workout in November 2019 in front of representatives from all 32 NFL teams. Partly because of objections to an injury waiver he was asked to sign, Kaepernick abruptly moved the proposed workout venue from an Atlanta Falcons training facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia, to the football field of a local high school. Reportedly only eight NFL teams sent personnel to observe the workout, and no offers were made. Facing criticism that Kaepernick remained a player without a team-and amid massive demonstrations following the death of an African American man, George Floyd, while in police custody-NFL commissioner Roger Goodell issued an apology in June 2020, saying that the league should have listened to the concerns of Kaepernick and other protesters. Goodell later said that he would welcome Kaepernick's return to the NFL and encouraged teams to find a spot for him.

Kaepernick received a number of honours for his efforts to raise awareness of racial inequality and discrimination, including Sports Illustrated's Muhammad Ali Legacy Award (2017) and Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience Award (2018). In July 2020 Kaepernick signed a partnership deal with the Disney Company to develop documentaries and other projects that focus on social justice issues.

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Colin Kaepernick | Biography, Taking the Knee, Activism, Stats, & Facts

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Colin Kaepernick, American gridiron football player and social activist who had success as a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers (2011-16) of the NFL but was better known for kneeling during the national anthem before games to protest racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans.