On This Day – “25,000 Go to Alabama’s Capitol”

On March 25, 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks.

(Source)

On This Day – “Alabama Police Use Gas and Clubs to Rout Negroes”

On March 7, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.

Alabama state troopers and volunteer officers of the Dallas County sheriff’s office tore through a column of Negro demonstrators with tear gas, nightsticks and whips to enforce Gov. George C. Wallace’s order against a protest march from Selma to Montgomery.

At least 17 Negroes were hospitalized with injuries and about 40 more were given emergency treatment for minor injuries and tear gas effects.

The Negroes reportedly fought back with bricks and bottles at one point as they were pushed back into the Negro community, far away from most of a squad of reporters and photographers who had been restrained by the officers.

[In Washington the Justice Department announced that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Selma had been directed to make a full and prompt investigation and to gather evidence whether “unnecessary force was used by law officers and others” in halting the march.]

Read the article in it’s entirety here: (Source)

On This Day – “Decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case”

On March 6, 1857, in its Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court held that Scott, a slave, could not sue for his freedom in a federal court.

The opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case was delivered by Chief Justice Taney. It was a full and elaborate statement of the views of the Court. They have decided the following important points:

First – Negroes, whether slaves or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.

Second – The Ordinance of 1787 had no independent constitutional force or legal effect subsequently to the adoption of the Constitution, and could not operate of itself to confer freedom or citizenship within the Northwest Territory on negroes not citizens by the Constitution.

Third – The provisions of the Act of 1820, commonly called the Missouri Compromise, in so far as it undertook to exclude negro slavery from, and communicate freedom and citizenship to, negroes in the northern part of the Louisiana cession, was a Legislative act exceeding the powers of Congress, and void, and of no legal effect to that end.

(Source)

“I’m Sorry But We Don’t Serve Colored Here”

On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they’d been refused service.

Excerpt from The New York Times article chronicling the sit-in protests:

The spark that touched off the protests was provided by four freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro. Even Negroes class Greensboro as one of the most progressive cities in the South in terms of race relations.

On Sunday night, Jan. 31, one of the students sat thinking about discrimination.

“Segregation makes me feel that I’m unwanted,” McNeil A. Joseph said later in an interview. ‘I don’t want my children exposed to it.’

The 17-year-old student from Wilmington, N. C., said that he approached three of his classmates the next morning and found them enthusiastic over a proposal that they demand service at the lunch counter of a downtown variety store.

About 4:45 P.M. they entered the F. W. Woolworth Company store on North Elm Street in the heart of Greensboro. Mr. Joseph said he bought a tube of tooth paste and the others made similar purchases. Then they sat down at the lunch counter.

The students asked a white waitress for coffee.

“I’m sorry but we don’t serve colored here,” they quoted her.

“I beg your pardon,” said Franklin McCain, 18, of Washington, “you just served me at a counter two feet away. Why is it that you serve me at one counter and deny me at another. Why not stop serving me at all the counters.”

The four students sat, coffee-less, until the store closed at 5:30 P. M. Then, hearing that they might be prosecuted, they went to the executive committee of the Greensboro N.A.A.C.P. to ask advice.

The Greensboro demonstrations and the others that it triggered were spontaneous.

The protests generally followed similar patterns. Young men and women and, in one case, high school boys and girls, walked into the stores and requested food service. Met with refusals in all cases, they remained at the lunch counters in silent protest.

Read the article in it’s entirety here: (Source)

On This Day – “High Court Rules Bus Segregation Unconstitutional”

On Nov. 13, 1956, the Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses.

“The Court affirmed a ruling by a three-judge Federal court that held the challenged statutes ‘violate the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.’

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law nor deny to any citizen the equal protection of the laws.

[Officials of several Southern states indicated they would continue to enforce bus segregation laws despite the court’s decision. Segregationist leaders were bitter in their denunciations of the court and its ruling.]”

(Source)

On This Day – “Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls “

On Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, as the country chose him as it’s first black chief executive.

Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term senator from Illinois, defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, 72, a former prisoner of war who was making his second bid for the presidency.

(Source)

On This Day – “2 Black Power Advocates Ousted From Olympics”

On Oct. 18, 1968, the United States Olympic Committee suspended two black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, for giving a “black power” salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City.

“The two Negro sprinters were told by Douglas F. Roby, the president of the committee, that they must leave the Olympic Village. Their credentials also were taken away, which made it mandatory for them to leave Mexico within 48 hours.”(Source)

On This Day – Martin Luther King Wins Nobel Prize For Peace

On Oct. 14, 1964, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

“The 35-year-old civil rights leader is the youngest winner of the prize that Dr. Alfred Nobel instituted since the first was awarded in 1901.

The prize honors acts ‘for the furtherance of brotherhood among men and to the abolishment or reduction of standing armies and for the extension of these purposes.’

Dr. King said that “every penny” of the prize money, which amounts to about $54,000, would be given to the civil rights movement.”

(Source)

On This Day – “Birmingham Bomb Kills 4 Negro Girls”

On Sept. 15, 1963, four black girls were killed when a bomb went off during Sunday services at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, in the deadliest act of the civil rights era.

Parents of 3 of the Girls Are Teachers

Both parents of each of three of the victims teach in the city’s schools. The dead were identified by University Hospital officials as:

Cynthia Wesley, 14, the only child of Claude A. Wesley, principal of the Lewis Elementary School, and Mrs. Wesley, a teacher there.

Denise McNair, 11, also an only child, whose parents are teachers.

Carol Robertson, 14, whose parents are teachers and whose grandmother, Mrs. Sallie Anderson, is one of the Negro members of a biracial committee established by Mayor Boutwell to deal with racial problems.

Addie Mae Collins, 14, about whom no information was immediately available.

You can read the article in it’s entirety, as it was reported in 1963 by clicking on the following link: (Source)

On This Day – “New Negro Riots Erupt on Coast”

On Aug. 11, 1965, deadly rioting and looting broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles. Officials called it the worst racial incident in the city’s history.

The corner of Imperial and Avalon in the Watts section, the center of the rioting, is a typical Los Angeles intersection: with gas stations, Taco stands and small shops.

It was shortly before 8 o’clock when a white Californian Highway Patrol officer stopped a Negro motorist on suspicion of drunken driving.

The suspect, Marquette Frye, 21 years old, was with his brother Ronald.

Some 25 persons were watching the incident when their mother, Mrs. Rena Frye, arrived on the scene and began berating her son, who in turn berated the police.

The crowd grew, new police units arrived and the rock-throwing began. By 10 P.M. crowds were stoning passing city buses. Over 80 police officers rushed to the scene and sealed off a 16-block area in an effort to contain the violence.

The rioting took place only a little over a mile from the Watts towers, three 100-foot high-stacks of bottles and metal scrap created by the late Simon Rodia, an eccentrist Italian tile-setter.

The Watts neighborhood, despite the low income of most of its residents, nonetheless retains a pleasantly suburban aura.

The streets are generally clean and tree-lined. Some of the single-family homes are in decay but most are well kept with green, well-tended small lawns. Many two-story apartment buildings have been added and children play around their entrances.

Residents of the area offered conflicting interpretations of the rioting. “The cops, they keep coming in here and busting heads,” said a neatly dressed young man selling a Black Muslim newspaper. “They had it coming.”

Mrs. M. J. Ellis, who describes herself as a missionary, blamed restless teenagers. “Their parents can’t seem to do anything and the police can’t do anything either”, she said.

Officials were at a loss to explain the cause of the rioting. The unusually hot, smoggy weather was doubtless a contributing factor.

(Source: New York Times)

On this Day: “Althea Gibson Becomes First Negro to Take Wimbledon Tennis”

On July 6, 1957: Wimbledon, England, Althea Gibson fulfilled her destiny at Wimbledon and became the first member of her race to rule the world of tennis. Reaching a high note at the start, the New York Negro routed Darlene Hard, the Montebello (Calif.) waitress, 6-3, 6-2, for the all-England crown.

(Source)

“Freedom Riders” attacked on this day in 1961

On May 20, 1961, a mob of white persons attacked a racially mixed group of bus riders in Montgomery, Ala. The disorders lasted two hours. At least twenty of the riders were beaten, prompting the federal government to send in United States marshals to restore order.

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy announced the Federal action in a telegram to Alabama officials. He said it was necessary to “guarantee safe passage in interstate commerce.”

Mr. Kennedy disclosed also that he would ask the Federal Court in Montgomery “to enjoin the Ku Klux Klan, the National States Rights Party, certain individuals and all persons acting in concert with them from interfering with peaceful interstate travel by buses.”

(Source)