Posts Tagged African Americans

(Source)

“I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared – but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”

- Spoken by Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights and voting rights leader, on why she put her life in danger when she volunteered to register to vote. She later became a key organizer in Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964 which campaigned to register as many African American voters in Mississippi as possible.

AP Photo

“George Lincoln Rockwell, center, self-styled leader of the American Nazi Party, and his “hate bus” with several young men wearing swastika arm bands, stops for gas in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 23, 1961, en route to Mobile, Alabama.”

A bit of background behind this photo. George Lincoln Rockwell was the founder of the American Nazi Party and a Holocaust denier. Additionally, he was a white supremacist and thus against the Civil Rights Movements. When the Freedom Riders began their journey to desegregate the Deep South’s bus stations, Rockwell bought a Volkswagen van and turned it into a “Hate Bus” by plastering swastikas and pro-white slogans all over it. They drove it around the Deep South, putting on rallies and speaking engagements with the Ku Klux Klan. The photo above was taken on May 23rd, three days after the Freedom Riders were assaulted at the Greyhound Bus Station in Montgomery.

While Rockwell was for racial segregation and believed other races to be inferior, he wanted to form associations with the Nation of Islam. He believed religious leader Elijah Muhammad was the “black people’s Hitler.” Rockwell also admired Malcolm X and believed he (Malcolm X) was the true leader of Black America. Malcolm X did not feel admiration in the slightest for Rockwell. In 1965, while Rockwell was on another “Hate Bus” campaign in the South, Malcolm X sent him the following telegram:

This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense – by any means necessary.

The “Hate Bus” was later repossessed after a loan default.

Photo

Gabriel Benzur—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Members of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ legendary 99th Pursuit Squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen, receive instruction about wind currents from a lieutenant in 1942. The Tuskegee fliers — the nation’s first African American air squadron — served with distinction in the segregated American military during the Second World War.

LIFE

February 1, 1937

African-American flood victims lined up to get food & clothing from the Red Cross relief station in front of billboard extolling, ironically, “World’s Highest Standard of Living/ There’s no way like the American Way.”

(Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Photo Credit: The Seattle Times

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

- Martin Luther King Jr.

By an unknown photographer, unknown location, ca. 1949

Early in the 20th century, Pullman Palace Car employed more African Americans than any other company in the United States. Most held jobs as sleeping car porters, caring for mostly white railroad passengers. Porters worked long hours with little rest, but they were well paid compared to other African Americans. In 1937, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the first African American union to win a labor agreement. Its members often became community leaders and civil rights activists.

(National Archives, Records of the U.S. Information Agency (306-PS-49-1148))

Members of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) pose at Camp Shanks, New York, before leaving from New York Port of Embarkation on Feb. 2, 1945. The women are with the first contingent of Black American WACs to go overseas for the war effort From left to right are, kneeling: Pvt. Rose Stone; Pvt. Virginia Blake; and Pfc. Marie B. Gillisspie. Second row: Pvt. Genevieve Marshall; T/5 Fanny L. Talbert; and Cpl. Callie K. Smith. Third row: Pvt. Gladys Schuster Carter; T/4 Evelyn C. Martin; and Pfc. Theodora Palmer.

via The Atlantic

Dick Gregory interviewed on telephone, 1964. Photo Credit: Herman Hiller/World Telegram & Sun/Library of Congress

“We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.”

Oberlin students of the late 1850's (courtesy Oberlin College Archives)

Oberlin College was the first American college to admit students of color in 1835. Two years later, Oberlin became the first to admit women into the four-year bachelor’s degree program. In 1841, three women (Mary Caroline Rudd, Mary Hosford and Elizabeth Prall) graduated with their bachelor’s degree. In addition, Mary Jane Patterson became the first African American woman to graduate from an established four-year American college. She graduated in 1862 with a B.A. degree and highest honors.

Information
Oberlin College’s History
Mary Jane Patterson’s Biography
Photo via oberlin.edu