On August 28, 1963, about a quarter-million people participated in the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom gathering near the Lincoln Memorial.More than 3,000 members of the press covered this historic march, in which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the exalted “I Have a Dream” speech.Originally conceived by renowned labor leader A. Phillip Randolph and Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, the March on Washington evolved into a collaborative effort amongst major civil rights groups and icons of the day.Stemming from a rapidly growing tide of grassroots support and outrage over the nation’s racial inequities, the rally drew over 260,000 people from across the nation.
Celebrated as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—speech of the 20th century, Dr. King’s celebrated speech, “I Have a Dream,” was carried live by television stations across the country.
Leaders of the six prominent civil rights groups at the time joined forces in organizing the march.
The group included Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP; Dr. King, Chairman of the SCLC; James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); John Lewis, President of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and Whitney Young, Executive Director of the National Urban League.It didn’t take long for King’s dream to come to fruition — the legislative aspect of the dream, that is.
After a decade of continued lobbying of Congress and the President led by the NAACP, plus other peaceful protests for civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
One year later, he signed the National Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Together, these laws outlawed discrimination against blacks and women, effectively ending segregation, and sought to end disenfranchisement by making discriminatory voting practices illegal.
Ten years after King joined the civil rights fight, the campaign to secure the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had achieved its goal – to ensure that black citizens would have the power to represent themselves in government.
For many African Americans growing up in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries, the threat of lynching was commonplace. The popular image of an angry white mob stringing a black man up to a tree is only half the story. Lynching, an act of terror meant to spread fear among blacks, served the broad social purpose of maintaining white supremacy in the economic, social, and political spheres.
Author Richard Wright, who was born near Natchez in southwest Mississippi, knew of two men who were lynched -- his step-uncle and the brother of a neighborhood friend. In his book Black Boy, he wrote:
"The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen as more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew."
Lynchings (in many forms) were daily threats the kept African Americans in oppressed positions as they navigate daily life in the 20th century. However, during the reconstruction era, southerners began to reach for all reason to kill who they could no longer hold as property. Although the practice of lynching had existed since before slavery, it gained momentum during the Reconstruction Era, when viable black towns sprang up across the South and African Americans began to make political and economic inroads by registering to vote, establishing businesses, and running for public office. Many whites -- landowners and poor whites -- felt threatened by this rise in black prominence. Foremost on their minds was a fear of sex between the races. Some whites espoused the idea that black men were sexual predators and wanted integration to be with white women. This leads to the depiction of black men as ‘white women ravishing beast’. Although rape is often cited as a rationale, statistics now show that only about one-fourth of lynchings from 1880 to 1930 were prompted by an accusation of rape. In fact, most victims of lynching were political activists, labor organizers, or black men and women who violated white expectations of black deference, and were deemed "uppity" or "insolent." Though most victims were black men, women were by no means exempt.
Lynchings were frequently committed with the most flagrant public display. Like executions by guillotine in medieval times, lynchings were often advertised in newspapers and drew large crowds of white families. Lynchings were covered in local newspapers with headlines spelling out the horrific details. Photos of victims, with exultant white observers, posed next to them, were taken for distribution in newspapers or on postcards. Body parts, including genitalia, were sometimes distributed to spectators or put on public display. Most infractions were for petty crimes, like theft, but the biggest one of all was looking at or associating with white women. Many victims were black businessmen or black men who refused to back down from a fight.
Growing up, I was told of the strange fruit that hung from our southern trees. Billie Holiday song the beautiful song that rings in my mind as we travel across the south. Most don’t realize that sundown towns still exist and people still get lynched. I always say northern blacks only had to fear the government and Southern blacks had to fear the white man next door and the government. White militants terrorize southern blacks outside of the metropolitan areas and no one speaks on it. It may shock you, however, one wrong move in some parts of the south could land a rope around your neck.
The following are the lynching stories told to me as a child:
Mary Turner was a 21-year-old pregnant woman who was hung upside down from a tree and set on fire. Her unborn child was cut from her stomach and stomped to death by the angry mob. After insisting her husband, who was also lynched, did not kill his boss. Valdosta, GA (1918)
The 17year oldJesse Washington was coerced into signing a confession to raping and murdering his white boss's wife, Lucy Fryer. After pleading guilty to the crime and sentenced to death, he was dragged out of the courtroom by an angry mob. The mob proceeded to drag him through the streets by a chain wrapped around his neck. He was beaten, stabbed, dismembered, castrated, hung, and hung up on a tree where he was burned alive on May 15, 1916. This tragedy was watched by an estimated 20,000 people. The images of Washington’s murder was later sold as postcards and prints. Waco, TX (1916)
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy for Chicago, who was dragged out of his family’s home in Money, Mississippi after a white woman accused him of whistling at her. Her husband and brother made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. Mamie Bradley, Till’s mother, demanded an open casket funeral after seeing what happened to her son. Bradley wanted the world to see what had happened to her baby.Money, Mississippi (1955)
This is a history of hate in America — not the natural discord that characterizes a democracy, but the wild, irrational, killing hate that has led men and women throughout our history to extremes of violence against others simply because of their race, nationality, religion or lifestyle.
Since 1865, the Ku Klux Klan has provided a vehicle for this kind of hatred in America, and its members have been responsible for atrocities that are difficult for most people to even imagine. Today, while the traditional Klan has declined, there are many other groups which go by a variety of names and symbols and are at least as dangerous as the KKK.
Some of them are teenagers who shave their heads and wear swastika tattoos and call themselves Skinheads; some of them are young men who wear camouflage fatigues and practice guerrilla warfare tactics; some of them are conservatively dressed professionals who publish journals filled with their bizarre beliefs — ideas which range from denying that the Nazi Holocaust ever happened to the contention that the U.S. federal government is an illegal body and that all governing power should rest with county sheriffs.
The Klan itself has had three periods of significant strength in American history — in the late 19th century, in the 1920s, and during the 1950s and early 1960s when the civil rights movement was at its height. The Klan had resurgence again in the 1970s, but did not reach its past level of influence. Since then, the Klan has become just one element in a much broader spectrum of white supremacist activity.Released in 1915, Birth of a Nation was a cinematic masterpiece that set new standards for the fledgling film industry. The story it tells fits perfectly into the version of history the Klan preaches. A romantic version of the Klan was depitced as heroes protect White America from the ‘beast’ that were the negro. Birth of a Nation lead to the boom in Klans members as immigrants came in hoards.
The Klan launched a campaign of terrorism in the early and mid-1920S, and many communities found themselves firmly in the grasp of the organization. Lynching’s, shootings and whippings were the methods employed by the Klan. Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Mexicans and various immigrants were usually the victims.However, not infrequently, the Klan’s targets were whites, Protestants and females who were considered “immoral” or “traitors” to their race or gender. In Alabama, for example, a divorcee with two children was flogged for the “crime” of remarrying and then given a jar of Vaseline for her wounds. In Georgia, a woman was given 60 lashes for a vague charge of “immorality and failure to go to church”; when her 15-year-old son ran to her rescue, he received the same treatment. In both cases, ministers led the Klansmen responsible for the violence. But such instances were not confined to the South. In Oklahoma, Klansmen applied the lash to girls caught riding in automobiles with young men, and very early in the Klan revival, women were flogged and even tortured in the San Joaquin Valley of California.
In a period when many women were fighting for the vote, for a place in the job market and for personal and cultural freedom, the Klan claimed to stand for “pure womanhood” and frequently attacked women who sought independence.
In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that a university's use of racial "quotas" in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school's use of "affirmative action" to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances. The case involved the admissions practices of the Medical School of the University of California at Davis. The medical school reserved 16 out of 100 seats in its entering class for minorities, including "Blacks," "Chicanos," "Asians," and "American Indians." The rigid admissions quota was administered by a special school committee.
Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was twice denied admission to the medical school even though his MCAT scores, GPA, and benchmark scores were "significantly higher" than those of some minority applicants recently admitted. Bakke sued the University of California in a state court, alleging that the medical school's admission policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The California Supreme Court agreed, finding that the quota system explicitly discriminated against racial groups and holding that "no applicant may be rejected because of his race, in favor of another who is less qualified, as measured by standards applied without regard to race." The medical school, ordered to shut down its quota system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed the case in 1978.
The Court held that the medical school racially discriminated against whites because it excluded them from 16 out of 100 spots solely by virtue of their race. The fact that blacks have historically had been discriminated against more than whites was irrelevant to this case, because racial quota systems, whether applied against whites or blacks, are always "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." Indeed, because the school's quota was designed to redress past discrimination against racial minorities, the Court stated, it was intended to prefer "one group for no other reason other than race or ethnic origin." Thus, the Court ruled that the school's quota system "must be rejected ... as racially invalid" under the Equal Protection Clause.
On October 15, 1966, College students Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and Elbert Howard founded “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense” in Oakland, California. Like Malcolm X, the Black Panthers believed that nonviolent protests could not truly liberate black Americans or give them power over their own lives, leading them to become the most influential black militant movement of the era, with reigns in similar movements in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Disappointed in the failure of the civil rights movement to improve the condition of blacks outside the South, the young men began to organized young, poor, disenfranchised African Americans into the Black Panther Party. They saw brutality against civil rights protesters as part of a long tradition of police violence and state oppression and felt it was something they no longer could stand. As the group began to immerse themselves in Black History; the idea of self-survival was implicated.
The BPP chose to teach, protect, and serve the Black communities around them while also lending a hand to all they saw as oppressed as the belief, all oppressed people are our people, took a hand. The Yellow Peril, the BPP’s Asian counterparts even found support and solidarity within the Black Community.
Women-led chapters focused their attention on community “survival programs.” They organized a free breakfast program for 20,000 children each day as well as a free food program for families and the elderly. They sponsored schools, legal aid offices, clothing distribution, local transportation, and health clinics, and sickle-cell testing centers in several cities. They campaigned for prison reform, held voter registration drives, and created Freedom Schools in nine cities including the noteworthy Oakland Community School, led by Ericka Huggins from 1973 to 1981. They also assisted in Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union boycott against Safeway. These activities provided concrete aid to low-income communities and drew support for the Panthers.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws—and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.By a vote of 7-1 (one justice did not participate), the Court approved the principle of separate but equal, which for the next half-century and more was used to justify laws mandating segregation in every area of life in the South, from transportation to education to public accommodations. The one lonely, courageous dissenter against the Plessy v. Ferguson decision was a Kentuckian, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan.
At issue was a Louisiana law compelling segregation of the races in rail coaches. To test the law's constitutionality, Homer Plessy, a Louisianan of mixed race, made a point of getting arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of a train car. When his case reached the Supreme Court, Plessy argued that enforced segregation in theoretically separate-but-equal accommodations compromised the principle of legal equality and marked blacks as inferior. The Court majority disagreed, declaring the law constitutional while saying it stamped blacks with "a badge of inferiority" only if "the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."
But if his fellow justices found no objections to the Louisiana law, John Harlan could find little else. He wrote:
"In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. "Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."
Furthermore, argued Harlan, the decision would poison relations between the races.
"What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation."
The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them.
In the early 1900s, a few middle-class black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.
American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history. Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, participants sought to reconceptualize “the Negro” apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced Black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs. Never dominated by a particular school of thought but rather characterized by intense debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent Black literature and consciousness worldwide. While the renaissance was not confined to the Harlem district of New York City, Harlem attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent and served as the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening.
The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs. Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles such as New York City and Paris after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.
The Harlem Renaissance is unusual among literary and artistic movements for its close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations. Crucial to the movement were magazines such as The Crisis, published by the NAACP; Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; and The Messenger, a socialist journal eventually connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black labor union. Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, also played a role, but few of the major authors or artists identified with Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, even if they contributed to the paper.
The renaissance had many sources in Black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean, and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give the “New Negroes” visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere.
Several icons including Claude McKay, W.E.B DuBois, James Wheldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and many more.
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