Black History Appreciation!!!

[Deadpool1986]

Fact #116
Because he worked during the height of segregation, most of the homes designed by African-American architect Paul R. Williams had deeds that barred blacks from buying them.

Fact #117

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Musician Stevie Wonder recorded the cries of his newborn daughter, Aisha Morris, for his popular song, "Isn't She Lovely?"

Fact #118
In 1926, Carter Godwin Woodson established Negro History Week, which later became Black History Month. The month of February was chosen in honor of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who were both born in that month.

Fact #119
Explorers Lewis and Clark were accompanied by York, an African American enslaved by Clark, when they made their 1804 expedition from Missouri to Oregon. York was an invaluable member of the expedition, connecting with the Native American communities they encountered. He is considered the first African-American man to cross what would become U.S. territory.

Fact #120
The Selma to Montgomery marches marked the peak of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama. Of the three marches, only the last made it all the way to the capital of Montgomery, Alabama, which paved the way for 1965's Voting Right Act. The path is now a U.S. National Historic Trail.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Sojourner Truth

Nonviolent responses to racism did not start with Martin Luther King, but instead began in the mid-19th century championed by both Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. One can say that the word “truth” combined with Sojourner, which connotes traveler, embodies the life work of Sojourner Truth as an activist for social reform in American history.

Sojourner Truth was born in slavery in 1797 to James and Elizabeth Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, then a Dutch settlement, as Isabella Baumfree. She was one of 13 children. As a young child, she spoke only Dutch until she was sold at the age of nine years and subsequently forced to speak English. Her second owner, Charles Hardenbergh, died in 1808, and she was sold to John Neely for $100 along with a herd of sheep. While with Neely, Isabella was beaten and harshly treated for mispronouncing terms in English. In her own words, it was at this early age that she began to embrace religion through fervent prayer.

Between the years 1808 and 1810, Isabella was sold twice more. She was purchased by Martinus Schryver for $105, then only a year later she was sold to John Dumont in 1810. She remained with the Dumonts from 1810 to 1827. While in the Dumont home, Isabella endured harsh punishments that also may have involved sexual abuse and harassment. In 1815, Isabella entered a forbidden relationship with a slave called Robert who had a different owner. One night, after Robert managed a secret visit with Isabella, he was savagely beaten, never to be heard from again. He never knew that he and Isabella had a baby daughter from their secret love affair.

John Dumont forced Isabella to marry in 1817 to an older slave named Thomas, and they had four children together. Isabella eventually ran away from the Dumont home in 1827, leaving with her daughter Sophia. Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen helped her and they paid twenty dollars to her owner to allow her to stay with them. Through the aid of Quaker abolitionists Isabella was able to retrieve her son Peter from a plantation in Alabama, becoming the first African American to sue successfully in court over the issue of slavery, proving he had been sold in an illegal sale. Isabella left Ulster County with a white evangelical teacher by the name of Miss Gear in 1829 after claiming to have undergone a serious religious conversion.

Between the years 1829 and 1834, Isabella Baumfree began to develop her skills as a public speaker and as a dynamic preacher. She began to preach regularly at camp meetings in the late 1820s and through the 1830s. During this time, she met the religious reformer Elijah Pierson, who advocated a strict following of the Old Testament. He led a small group in his home where Isabella came to serve as the housekeeper. Isabella embraced this religious revivalism and along with it, the utopian cooperative ideal because she was seen as a spiritual equal. It was at this time that she also met Prophet Robert Matthias.

Isabella moved to New York City with little or no possessions, eventually becoming an itinerant preacher. In 1843, she formally changed her name to Sojourner Truth, informing friends that she was “called” by the Holy Spirit on June 1, or the day of Pentecost. Sojourner Truth joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts in 1844, thereby broadening her role in American reform. The Northampton Association of Education and Industry was founded by abolitionists and consisted of 210 members living on 500 acres of farmland. They promoted women’s rights, antislavery activities, and cooperative labor through the running of saw mills, operating a silk factory, and raising livestock. Sojourner Truth became acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles while at Northampton.

On the eve of the Civil War and during the war, Sojourner Truth became a popular supporter and orator for the antislavery cause, women’s rights, spiritualism, and nonviolence. She attended the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, where she delivered her now famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. In 1853, Sojourner Truth spoke at a suffragist convention and met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sojourner was also influenced by the Progressive Friends, a splinter sect of the Quakers, and she eventually sold her home in Northampton in 1857 to relocate near the Progressive Friends in Harmonia, Michigan.

In 1858, when challenged about her gender, Truth reportedly bared her breasts before a crowd of spectators. She continued to speak out against slavery and supported the Union’s cause during the Civil War by calling for the enlistment of African American troops. Taking his grandmother's stance, her grandson James Caldwell served with the all black 54th Regiment of Massachusetts.

After the War, Sojourner Truth continued to fight for civil rights. She was a powerful voice in favor of universal suffrage in the years immediately after the Civil War, insisting that to give black men, but not black women, the vote, would establish dangerous inequalities within the African American community. “There is a great deal of stir about colored men getting their rights,” Truth affirmed in one speech, “but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and colored women not theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as before.”

Sojourner Truth worked for the National Freedman’s Relief Association, a government camp for refugee slaves, and the Freedman’s Hospital. She also worked to assist the Freedmen’s Bureau in relocating refugee slaves from Washington to Ohio and Michigan. While in Washington, she was instrumental in calling for the desegregation of streetcars. After the war, she moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1867. She continued to preach, teach, and advocate for reform through the 1870s. In 1871, she was one of the first women to vote in a Michigan election.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Angela Davis

Angela Davis is an activist, educator and author. She is the author of eight books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Davis gained her international reputation in the early 1970s, when she was tried for conspiracy and imprisoned, and later fully acquitted, after being implicated in a shootout in front of a California courthouse. As a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center, Davis focused on exposing racism that is endemic to the US prison system, and exploring new ways to de-construct oppression and race hatred.

Angela Davis, the daughter of an automobile mechanic and a school teacher, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 26, 1944. The area where the family lived became known as Dynamite Hill because of the large number of African American homes bombed by the Ku Klux Klan. Her mother was a civil rights campaigner and had been active in the NAACP before the organization was outlawed in Birmingham.

Davis attended the segregated Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School, and Parker Annex, a middle-school branch of Parker High School in Birmingham. By her junior year, she had applied to and was accepted at an American Friends Service Committee program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North. She chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village in New York City. There she was introduced to socialism and communism and was recruited by a Communist youth group, meeting children of some of the leaders of the Communist Party, including her lifelong friend, Bettina Aptheker.

Davis was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three black students in her freshman class. Feeling alienated by the isolation of the campus, Angela Davis worked part time to earn enough money to travel to France and Switzerland before she went on to attend the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland. She returned home in 1963 to an FBI interview about her attendance at the Communist-sponsored festival. Angela Davis would go on to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and later the University of Frankfurt finally earning her master's degree from the University of California San Diego campus and her doctorate in philosophy from Humboldt University in East Berlin.

In 1969 Angela Davis was known as a radical feminist and activist, a member of the Communist Party, and an associate of the Black Panther Party. She was working as an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at UCLA. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the California Board of Regents, that Davis was a member of the American Communist Party, they terminated her contract in 1970.

Angela Davis became active in the campaign to improve prison conditions. She became particularly interested in the case of George Jackson and W. L. Nolen, two African Americans who had established a chapter of the Black Panthers in California's Soledad Prison. On the 13th of January 1970, Nolan and two other black prisoners were killed by a prison guard. A few days later the Monterey County Grand Jury ruled that the guard had committed "justifiable homicide." When a guard was later found murdered, Jackson and two other prisoners were indicted for his murder. It was claimed that Jackson had sought revenge for the killing of his friend, W. L. Nolan.



On August 7, 1970, Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, along with several other hostages, was abducted from his Marin County, California, courtroom by gunpoint and murdered by 17 year old Jonathon Jackson during his effort to free his brother George Jackson. The firearms used in the attack were purchased by Angela Davis, including the shotgun used to kill Haley, which had been purchased only two days prior and sawed-off. Numerous letters written by Angela Davis were found in the prison cell of George Jackson as well. The California warrant issued for Davis charged her as an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide. On August 18, 1970, Davis became the third woman to appear on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List.

Davis became a fugitive and fled California. She evaded the police for more than two months before being captured in New York City. John Abt, general counsel of the Communist Party, was one of the first attorneys to represent Davis for her alleged involvement in the shootings. While being held in the Women's Detention Center there, she was initially segregated from the general population, but with the help of her legal team soon obtained a federal court order to get out of the segregated area.

In 1972, she was tried and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The mere fact that she owned the guns used in the crime was not sufficient to establish her responsibility for the plot. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, wrote the song "Angela" on their 1972 studio album Some Time In New York City to show their support. and Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, wrote the song "Sweet Black Angel" in her support. The song was released in 1972 on the album Exile on Main Street.

In 1979 Davis visited the Soviet Union where she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize and made a honorary professor at Moscow State University. In 1980 and 1984 Davis was the Communist Party's vice-presidential candidate.

Angela Davis has been an activist and writer promoting women's rights and racial justice while pursuing her career as a philosopher and teacher at the University of Santa Cruz and San Francisco University. She achieved tenure at the University of California at Santa Cruz despite the fact that former Governor Ronald Reagan swore she would never teach again in the University of California system.

An author of eight books, a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination.

Angela Davis is a member of the executive board of the Women of Color Resource Center, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that emphasizes education of and about women who live in conditions of poverty. She also works with Justice Now, which provides legal assistance to women in prison and engages in advocacy for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant strategy for addressing social problems. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, a similar organization based in Queensland, Australia.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Dr. Ernest Everett Just

Dr. Ernest Just was a pioneering African American biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. In his work within marine biology, cytology and parthenogenesis, he advocated the study of whole cells under normal conditions, rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting.

Ernest Everett Just was born August 14, 1983 in South Carolina to Charles Frazier Just Jr. and Mary Matthews Just. When Ernest was four years old, both his father and grandfather died, and his mother became the sole supporter of him, his younger brother, and his younger sister, teaching at an African American school in Charleston. During the summer, Mary Just worked in the phosphate mines on James Island. Noticing that there was much vacant land near the island, Mary persuaded several black families to move there to farm. The town they founded, now incorporated in the West Ashley area of Charleston, was eventually named Maryville in her honor.

Ernest Just prepared for college at Kimball Hall Academy, New Hampshire, where he completed the four-year course of study in only three years. In the graduating Dartmouth College class of 1907, Ernest Just was the only person to be graduated magna cum laude. He won special honors in both botany and history.

In 1907, Dr. Just began to teach at Howard University where he was appointed head of the Department of Zoology in 1912. At Howard, he also served as a professor in the medical school and head of the Department of Physiology until his death. The first Spingarn Medal was awarded to the reluctant and modest Ernest Just by the NAACP in 1915 for his accomplishments as a pure scientist.

Beginning in 1909, Dr. Ernest Just began to conduct research as a research assistant during the summer months for Professor Frank Lillie, at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Ernest Just produced ground-breaking research in cell biology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Conducting thousands of experiments studying the fertilization of the marine mammal cell, Dr. Just was able to successfully challenge Jaacque Loeb's theory of artificial parthenogenesis in 1922. Using his research conducted at Wood's Hole, Ernest Just published his first book entitled, Basic Methods for Experiments on Eggs of Marine Mammals. Despite his part-time appointment, Ernest Just published over seventy scientific papers during his studies there.

In 1916, Ernest Just received the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy magna cum laude from the University of Chicago in experimental embryology, with a thesis on the mechanics of fertilization.

In 1924 Dr. Just was selected from among the biologists of the world by a group of German biologist to contribute to a monograph on fertilization, one of a series of monographs by specialists working on fundamental problems of the function and structure of the cell. He is a contributor to Volume Two of Dr. Jerome Alexander's three-volume series on Colloid Chemistry. From 1920-1931 Dr. Just was the Julius Rosenwald Fellow in Biology of the National Research Council. Under this grant program he engaged in research as an adjunct researcher of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin, working under Professor Max Hartman's department. He also worked at the marine biological laboratories in Naples and in Sicily. In 1930, Dr. Just lectured at the Eleventh International Congress of Zoologists, held at Padua, Italy. The lecture was entitled The Role of Cortical Cytoplasm in Vital Phenomena., which was based on fifty published papers written by Dr. Ernest Just.

Although Dr. Just was considered a leader and authority for his work with cell development, as an African American, he continued to experience racism and prejudice. For this reason, Dr. Just decided to study in Europe in 1930. It was in Europe that he published his second book, The Biology of the Cell Surface. While in Europe in 1938 he published a number of papers and lectured on the topic of cell cytoplasm.

Dr. Just died October 27, 1941 in Washington D.C. In her eulogy, Dr Lillie Dr. Frank Lillie, his old friend and teacher, alludes to prejudges Just faced in his career: "His death was premature and his work unfinished; but his accomplishments were many and worthy of remembrance. That a man of his ability, scientific devotion and of such strong personal loyalties as he gave and received should have been wasted in the land of his birth must remain a matter of regret."

 

[Deadpool1986]

Alexander Miles

Alexander Miles was an African-American inventor who was best known for being awarded a patent for an automatically opening and closing elevator door design in 1887. Contrary to many sources, Miles was not the original inventor of this device. In 1874, 13 years before Miles' patent was awarded, John W. Meaker was awarded U.S. Patent 147,853 for the invention of the first automatic elevator door system.

Alexander Miles was born in 1838 Duluth, Minnesota. He moved to Waukesha, Wisconsin where he earned a living as a barber in the 1860s. After a move to Winona, Minnesota in 1870, he met his wife, Candace J. Dunlap, a white woman born in New York City in 1834. Together they had a daughter named Grace who was born in April 1879. Shortly after her birth, the family relocated to Duluth, Minnesota.

While in Duluth, Alexander operated a barbershop in the four-story St. Louis Hotel and purchased a real estate office. His wife found work as a dress maker. Miles became the first black member of the Duluth Chamber of Commerce. In 1884, Miles built a three-story brownstone building at 19 West Superior Street in Duluth. This area became known as the Miles Block. It was at this time that Miles was inspired to work on elevator door mechanisms.

While riding in an elevator in with his young daughter, Alexander Miles saw the risk associated with an elevator shaft door carelessly left ajar. This led him to draft his design for automatically opening and closing elevator doors and apply for a patent. When the elevator would arrive or depart from a given floor, the doors would move automatically. Previously, the opening and closing of the doors of both the shaft and the elevator had to be completed manually by either the elevator operator or by passengers, contributing greatly to the hazards of operating an elevator.

Miles attached a flexible belt to the elevator cage, and when the belt came into contact with drums positioned along the elevator shaft just above and below the floors, it allowed the elevator shaft doors to operate at the appropriate times. The elevator doors themselves were automated through a series of levers and rollers.

Before working on elevator engineering, Miles experimented with the creation of hair products. The influence of his elevator patent is still seen in modern designs, since the automatic opening and closing of elevator and elevator shaft doors is a standard feature.

By 1900, Alexander, Candace, and Grace had moved to Chicago. In Chicago, Alexander created an insurance agency with the goal of eliminating discriminatory treatment of blacks. In his own words, Miles stated that insurance companies "persist in holding out discriminative rates to these colored people...". In 1900, it was believed that Alexander Miles was the "wealthiest colored man in the Northwest."

Alexander Miles died sometime after 1905 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Alice Walker

Alice Walker is one of the most admired African American writers working today. She has written at length on issues of race and gender, and is most famous for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Born in Eatonton Georgia, on February the 9th, 1944, just before the end of World War Two, Alice Malsenior Walker was the eighth of eight children to Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Winnie Lee Walker. Her father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible farmer," earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming, while her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid. Her mother worked 12 hours a day for $17 a week. After a childhood accident blinded her in one eye, she went on to become valedictorian of her local school, and attend Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College on scholarships, graduating in 1965.

After college, Alice Walker worked in the Welfare Department in New York City. She also became a teacher and lecturer. Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 1960s. Walker credits King for her decision to return to the South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. She attended the famous 1963 March on Washington. As a young adult she volunteered her time registering voters in Georgia and Mississippi in 1966 Alice Walker fell in love with Jewish civil rights lawyer Melvyn Laventhal. They married in New York the following year. Despite prejudges over their inter-racial marriage the moved to the deep south of Jackson Mississippi. The couple was harassed regularly and were even threatened by the Klu Klux Klan.

Walker resumed her writing career, returning to New York where she joined Ms. magazine as an editor before moving to northern California in the late 1970s. An article she published in 1975 was largely responsible for the renewal of interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who was a large source of inspiration for Walker's writing and subject matter. In 1973, Walker and fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered Hurston's unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Both women paid for a modest headstone for the gravesite.

In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. Alice Walker and her husband had one child, a daughter, before divorcing in 1976. She retained her maiden name, falling in love with fellow editor Robert Allen and published Meridian to universal acclaim. Walker’s next project was another book of short stories: You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down, which only received a lukewarm response.

Nothing however prepared the critics for Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple. The story chronicles the life of a black African American girl called Celie, growing up in the Deep South. The novel was later made into a feature-length motion picture, directed by Steven Spielberg and later into a Broadway play. The Color Purple placed Alice Walker in the spotlight and she was both praised and criticized. Many critics were disheartened with the negative portrayals of men in The Color Purple, though most admitted that the movie presented more simplistic negative pictures than the book's more nuanced portrayals.

Walker published her autobiography In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens in 1983 and her attitudes towards the female circumcision rituals in Africa led her to co-produce the shocking documentary Warrior Marks with Pratibha Parmar.

Alice Walker followed the book up with two volumes of poetry called Horses Make A Landscape More Beautiful and Goodnight Willie Lee I’ll See You in the Morning. Her second book of essays entitled Living by the Word and her epic novel The Temple of My Familiar followed in 1988 and 1989 respectively.



Alice Walker's works typically focus on the struggles of blacks, particularly women, and their struggle against a racist, sexist, and violent society. Her writings also focus on the role of women of color in culture and history. Walker is a respected figure in the liberal political community for her support of unconventional and unpopular views as a matter of principle.

Additionally, Walker has published several short stories, including the 1973 Everyday Use, in which she discusses feminism, racism against blacks, and the issues raised by young black people who leave home and lose respect for their parents' culture.

In 2007, Walker gave 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In addition to drafts of writings such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and writings, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple that was never used, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15 entitled "Poems of a Childhood Poetess".

In 2009, Alice Walker was one of over 50 signers of a letter protesting the Toronto Film Festival's "City to City" spotlight on Israeli filmmakers, condemning Israel as an "apartheid regime.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Nat Turner

Nat Turner (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) was an African American slave who led a slave rebellion in Virginia on August 21, 1831 that resulted in 55 white deaths. Whites responded with at least 200 black deaths.[2] He gathered supporters in Southampton County, Virginia. Turner was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged. In the aftermath, the state executed 56 blacks accused of being part of Turner's slave rebellion. Two hundred blacks were also killed after being beaten by white militias and mobs reacting with violence.[3] Across Virginia and other southern states, state legislators passed new laws prohibiting education of slaves and free blacks, restricting rights of assembly and other civil rights for free blacks, and requiring white ministers to be present at black worship services.

In the 19th century, Southern slave owners developed an understanding of their “peculiar institution” of slavery as a benevolent system; in speeches and writings, they portrayed themselves not so much as ruthless businessmen exploiting a people for their labor but as kind and well-intentioned masters tutoring a people--African Americans--in civilization and religion. A pervasive white Southern fear of rebellion, however, belied their own arguments that slaves were in fact happy. One rebellion in particular, Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, made white Southerners fear for their lives.

Nat Turner, Prophet

Turner was born into slavery on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, on slaveholder Benjamin Turner’s farm. He recounts in his confession (published as The Confessions of Nat Turner) that even when he was young, his family believed he “surely would be a prophet, as the Lord had shewn me things that had happened before my birth. And my father and mother strengthened me in this my first impression, saying in my presence, I was intended for some great purpose, which they had always thought from certain marks on my head and breast.”
By his own account, Turner was a deeply spiritual man. He spent his youth praying and fasting, and one day, while taking a prayer break from ploughing, he heard a voice: “the spirit spoke to me, saying ‘Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you.’”

Turner was convinced throughout his adulthood that he had some great purpose in life, a conviction that his experience at the plough confirmed. He searched for that mission in life, and starting in 1825, he began receiving visions from God. The first occurred after he had run away and bade him return to slavery--Turner was told that he shouldn’t indulge his earthly wishes for freedom, but rather he was to serve the “kingdom of Heaven,” from bondage.

From then on, Turner experienced visions that he believed meant he was to attack directly the institution of slavery. He had a vision of a spiritual battle--of black and white spirits at war--as well as a vision in which he was instructed to take up the cause of Christ. As the years passed, Turner waited for a sign that it was time for him to act.

The Rebellion

A startling eclipse of the sun in February of 1831 was the sign that Turner had been awaiting. It was time to strike against his enemies. He didn’t hurry--he gathered followers and planned. In August of that same year, they struck. At 2:00 in the morning on August 21, Turner and his men killed the family of Joseph Travis on whose farm he had been a slave for over a year.

Turner and his group then moved through the county, going from house to house, killing whites they encountered and recruiting more followers. They took money, supplies, and firearms as they travelled. By the time the white inhabitants of Southampton had become alerted to the rebellion, Turner and his men numbered approximately 50 or 60 and included five free black men.

A battle between Turner’s force and white Southern men ensued on August 22, around mid-day near the town of Jerusalem. Turner’s men dispersed in the chaos, but a remnant remained with Turner to continue the fight. The state militia fought Turner and his remaining followers on August 23, but Turner eluded capture until October 30. He and his men had managed to kill 55 white Southerners.

The Aftermath of Nat Turner’s Rebellion

According to Turner, Travis had not been a cruel master, and that was the paradox that white Southerners had to face in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s Rebellion. They attempted to delude themselves that their slaves were content, but Turner forced them to confront the innate evil of the institution. White Southerners responded brutally to the rebellion. They executed 55 slaves for participating or supporting the revolt, including Turner, and over angry whites killed over 200 African Americans in the days after the rebellion.

Turner's rebellion not only pointed to the lie that slavery was a benevolent institution but also showed how white Southerners' own Christian beliefs supported his bid for freedom. Turner described his mission in his confession: “the Holy Ghost had revealed itself to me, and made plain the miracles it had shown me—For as the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended to heaven for the salvation of sinners, and was now returning to earth again in the form of dew—and as the leaves on the trees bore the impression of the figures I had seen in the heavens, it was plain to me that the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the great day of judgment was at hand.”

Capture and execution


Nat Turner captured by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer
The rebellion was suppressed within two days, but Turner eluded capture until October 30, when he was discovered hiding in a hole covered with fence rails. On November 5, 1831, he was tried for "conspiring to rebel and making insurrection", convicted and sentenced to death.[22] Turner was hanged on November 11 in Jerusalem, Virginia. His body was flayed, beheaded and quartered.[23] Turner received no formal burial; his headless remains were either buried unmarked or kept for scientific use. His skull is said to have passed through many hands, last being reported in the collection of a planned civil rights museum for Gary, Indiana despite calls for its burial.[24]

In the aftermath of the insurrection there were 45 slaves, including Turner, and 5 free blacks tried for insurrection and related crimes in Southampton. Of the 45 slaves tried, 15 were acquitted. Of the 30 convicted, 18 were hanged, while 12 were sold out of state. Of the 5 free blacks tried for participation in the insurrection, one was hanged, while the others were acquitted.[25]

Soon after Turner's execution, a local lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, took it upon himself to publish "The Confessions of Nat Turner", derived partly from research done while Turner was in hiding and partly from jailhouse conversations with Turner before trial. This work is the primary historical document regarding Nat Turner.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Consequences
In total, the state executed 56 blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising. In the aftermath, close to 200 blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were murdered.

Before the Nat Turner Revolt, there was a small but ineffectual antislavery movement in Virginia, largely on account of economic trends that made slavery less profitable in the Old South in the 1820s and fears among whites of the rising number of blacks, especially in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. The push for abolition in 1831 represented the interests of 'herrenvolk' democracy and white male suffrage. Enraged poor whites condemned the slave-owning aristocracy for endangering their families and retaining an unfair advantage in elections as a result of the 3/5th clause. Most of the movement's members, including acting governor John Floyd, supported resettlement of blacks to Africa for these reasons. The enlightenment thinking of Virginia's forefathers played little part in the Emancipation's Debates of 1831-2. Considerations of white racial and moral purity also influenced many of these antislavery Virginians. These concerns illustrated that Virginia position towards slavery was no longer 'apologetic'. The fear caused by Nat Turner's insurrection and the concerns raised in the emancipation debates that followed laid foundation for politicians and writers who regarded slavery as a 'positive good'.[citation needed] Such authors included Thomas Roderick Dew, a William and Mary professor who published a pamphlet in 1832 opposing emancipation on economic and other grounds.[27]

Nevertheless, fears of repetitions of the Nat Turner Revolt polarized moderates and slave owners across the South. Municipalities across the region instituted repressive policies against blacks. Rights were taken away from those who were free. The freedoms of all black people in Virginia were tightly curtailed. Socially, the uprising discouraged whites' questioning the slave system from the perspective that such discussion might encourage similar slave revolts. Manumissions had decreased by 1810. The shift away from tobacco had made owning slaves in the Upper South an excess to the planters' needs, so they started to hire out slaves. With the ending of the slave trade, the invention of the cotton gin, and opening up of new territories in the Deep South, suddenly there was a growing market for the trading of slaves. Over the next decades, more than a million slaves would be transported to the Deep South in a forced migration as a result of the domestic slave trade.

In terms of public response and loss of white lives, slaveholders in the Upper South and coastal states were deeply shocked by the Nat Turner Rebellion. While the 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana involved a greater number of slaves, it resulted in only two white fatalities. Events in Louisiana did not receive as much attention in those years in the Upper South and Low country. Because of his singular status, Turner is regarded as a hero by many African Americans and pan-Africanists worldwide.

Turner became the focus of historical scholarship in the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker was publishing the first serious scholarly work on instances of slave resistance in the antebellum South. Aptheker wrote that the rebellion was rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances, though none of them reached the scale of Nat Turner's Revolt.

Legacy
Interpretations
Looking back, Nat Turner remains an "enigmatic and controversial figure", according to former University of Massachusetts Amherst history professor Stephen B. Oates, given that Turner fought for the just anti-slavery cause but he proceeded in acts of violence against women and children that would today be considered as war crimes or terrorism. Among many, perhaps most, African-Americans in the antebellum period up to today, Turner's legacy takes on a heroic status as someone willing to make slave-owners pay for the hardships that they enacted upon the millions of children, women and men they enslaved. Black church historical writer James H. Harris has argued that the revolt "marked the turning point in the black struggle for liberation" since, in his view, "only a cataclysmic act could convince the architects of a violent social order that violence begets violence.

Shortly after the revolt, Turner's motives and ideas were generally seen as opaque and too unclear to either support or condemn by most American whites. Ante-bellum slave-holding whites clearly experienced a major psychological shock and lived in greater fear of future rebellions, with Turner's name working as "a symbol of terrorism and violent retribution". Turner eventually received praise in a seminal Atlantic Monthly article in 1861 by Thomas Higginson, who called him a man "who knew no book but the Bible, and that by heart-- who devoted himself soul and body to the cause of his race". However, writing after the September 11 attacks, William L. Andrews drew analogies between Turner and modern “religio-political terrorists”, and suggested that the “spiritual logic” explicated in Confessions of Nat Turner warrants study as “a harbinger of the spiritualizing violence of today’s jihads and crusades”.[21] Most historical commentary tended to sympathize with Turner after the U.S. civil war ended.

 

[Deadpool1986]

February 28 - In 1932, Richard Spikes invents the automatic gear shift. Also Musician and entertainer Michael Jackson wins eight Grammy Awards. His album, "Thriller", broke all sales records to-date, and remains one of the top-grossing albums of all time.

 

[BlackMajik]

Nat Turner the Gawd

 

[Deadpool1986]

Fact #121
Wilberforce University is one of the first historically African-American institutions of higher learning. Located in Wilberforce, Ohio, and named after British abolitionist William Wilberforce, the school's notable graduates include famed composer William Grant Still and James H. McGee, the first African-American mayor of Dayton, Ohio.

Fact #122
Owned by African-American designer, entrepreneur and television personality Daymond John, the popular FUBU clothing line has won various awards, including an Advertising Age award, an NAACP award, the Pratt Institute Award, the Essence Achievement Award, the Asper Award for social entrepreneurship and a citation of honor from the Queens Borough President.

Fact #123
According to the American Community Survey, in 2005, there were 2.4 million black military veterans in the United States—the highest of any minority group.

Fact #124
In the 1800s, Philadelphia was known as the "Black Capital of Anti–Slavery" because of its strong abolitionist presence, which included groups like the Philadelphia Anti–Slavery Society.

 

[Blackking]

i didn't contribute to this thread
damn.

 

[Deadpool1986]

i didn't contribute to this thread
damn.

that's ok, I hope you enjoyed the thread.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

Matt Baker is often considered the first known successful African-American artist in the comic-book industry.


Clarence Matthew Baker was born on December 10, 1921 in Forsyth County, North Carolina. The son of Clarence and Ethel baker, Matt and his brothers Robert and John, moved with their parents to Pittsburgh, PA. Somewhere around 1940 he graduated from high school and moved to Washington, DC where he found a job working for the government. While many of his contemporaries were being drafted into the military over next year, Baker was not eligible for military service as he was found to be suffering from a heart ailment, the result of a childhood bout with rheumatic fever. He moved to to New York City to study art at the Cooper Union School of Engineering, Art, and Design, a privately funded college located in the East Village. He had been an avid drawer and found inspiration from many of his artistic heroes such as magazine illustrator Andrew Loomis, and comic book artists Will Eisner, Reed Crandall, Alex Blum and Lou Fine.




He began his art career in 1944 joining the S.M. Igor Studio as a background artist. The Igor Studio was a comics packager which produced ready-to-print feature material for comic book publishers. Igor recalled Baker coming in for a job interview. “[Baker] came to my studio in the early ’40s; handsome and nattily dressed, ‘looking for a job’, as he put it. His only sample was a color sketch of—naturally—a beautiful gal! On the strength of that and a nod from my associate editor Ruth Roche, he was hired as a background artist. … When given his first script, he showed originality and faithfully executed its story line. His drawing was superb. His women were gorgeous!”


His first assignment was to work as a penciller and the inker on the 12 page Sheena, Queen of the Jungle story in Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics #69. In the comic book industry, a penciller provides a rough draft of the visual view of the storyline, providing a layout of the scenes. These scenes were drawn in pencil because they would go through several drafts after being presented to the editor. As defined by Wikipedia, an inker Inker - Wikipedia “outlines, interprets, finalizes, retraces this drawing by using a pen or a brush.” During this period of time which historians refer to as the “Golden Age of Comic Books,” Baker did work through Iger’s studio for Fox Comics, Fiction House, Quality Comics and St. John Publications. In his earliest days he pencilled the backgrounds as well as the female form for other artists. Thus, much of his work was inked over by other artists who got credit for the artistic work. He developed a reputation early on as one of the best “Good Girl” artists in the business, a master at drawing the female form. He paid attention to the smaller details that allowed his comic book heroine to come alive as a more robust character.

Good Girl Art, as defined by American science fiction and mystery author Richard Lupoff is “a cover illustration depicting an attractive young woman, usually in skimpy or form-fitting clothing, and designed for erotic stimulation. The term does not apply to the morality of the “good girl”, who is often a gun moll, tough cookie or wicked temptress.

In 1944 Baker took over as the principle artist on “Sky Girl”, a regular feature in Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. Sky Girl told the story of an Irish Redhead named Ginger McGuire who worked as a ferry pilot in the Pacific theater of World War II, helping to fight against the Japanese. He drew for this series until its last issue in August 1948. In December 1946 Matt illustrated the popular character Lorna Dorne for Classic Comics. At about the same time, he was assigned to a Fiction House Fight Comics feature called “Tiger Girl.” Tiger Girl was a blonde bombshell with a magic amulet and a Shakespearean vocabulary. Baker worked on her comic for three years.




His most well known character was Phantom Lady. Phantom Lady was much like any other female character in those days. She was a Washington socialite who wanted to fight crime, designed a super-heroine outfit and use a “Blackout Ray” invented by a friend of her father. When Victor Fox of Fox Features Syndicate asked the Iger Studios to furnish him with a sexy female costumed hero, Iger sent him Phantom Lady and assigned Baker to the artistry. Baker immediately made changes to the character and her costume. He put her in blue short-shorts with slits up the sides and a matching halter top. He gave her a her belt in front and a dramatically plunging neckline along with a scarlet cape. This look became her most popular version and premiered in Fox’sPhantom Lady #13 in August 1947. He pencilled and inked the character through 1949.


Baker’s personal life was somewhat of a mystery, with some describing him as a serious ladies man and others suggesting that he was a homosexual, the proverbial confirmed bachelor. What is known is that he lived in a five story building in Manhattan, in which he worked all hours of the night. He often worked for days on end before collapsing into several days of sleep. He was described by everyone as a very handsome man, standing 5’ 10” and as one of the coolest, hippest dressers in all of New York City, jetting around town in a canary yellow convertible Oldsmobile. He thoroughly enjoyed his life in the Big Apple, burning the candle at both ends, enjoying jazz music and working hard as one of the most prolific artists in the comic book industry. Unfortunately, he still had the weakened heart, which ailed him whenever he had to take the stairs to his apartment or make a brisk walk on the street, leaving him breathing heavily and exhausted.



"Matt Baker’s unique contribution to the field of GOLDEN-AGE COMIC BOOK ART sustains a growing popularity for the books he illustrated."

— Richard Muchin
Golden Age Comic Book Expert, TomorrowsTreasures.com


Matt did not talk openly about his position as a Black man in an almost all white field, but instead let his talent talk for him. As fellow artist Al Feldstein said “he was a rare phenomenon in an industry almost totally dominated by white males. However, he was extremely talented, and it was his talent that overcame any resistance to his presence based on racial bias. But I feel that Matt, personally, was acutely aware of the perceived chasm that separated him from the rest of us. And it may be that because of that perceived problem there is little known about Matt Baker, aside from his stunning artwork that speaks for himself.”


He began working for St. John Publications in 1948 and became the company’s lead artist. He pencilled the groundbreaking picture novel “It Rhyme With Lust,” in 1950, which many consider the earliest form of the modern graphic novel. He also produced “Flamingo” from 1952 to 1954 as a syndicated comic strip for Phoenix Features.

Baker went on to work on other characters which he popularized over the next decade. One of his first endeavors for St. John Publications was “Canteen Kate”. Baker drew all 22 installments of the series focused on the kooky Korean Wartime cutie and her morale-boosting screwball antics. He then began a long string of work on romance titles such as Teen-Age Romances, Diary Secrets, Teen-Age Temptations, Pictorial Romance and Wartime Romances. Over the years, because of his expertise in the female form, these would become some of the most popular and sought after titles that he provided artwork for.

While his depiction of sexy women would be viewed as groundbreaking in modern times, the risque drawings drew the ire of conservative organizations back in the 1950s. Dr. Fredric Wertham, the anti-comic book propagandist, featured Baker’s artwork from the cover of Phantom Lady #17 in his book “Seduction of the Innocent” in 1954, a book that created alarm among parents and prompted them to push the comic book industry to establish the the Comics Code Authority in order to voluntarily self-censor their titles.

Later in the decade, Baker worked as a freelancer for Atlas Comics, a company that would eventually evolve into Marvel Comics. His first assignment in December 1955 was working on a five-page anthological story titled “Showdown at Sunup” in Gunsmoke Western #32, which he pencilled and inked alongside a script presumed to have been authored by comic book legend Stan Lee. He would continue drawing westerns during this period, drawing for Atlas’ Western Outlaws, Quick Trigger Action, Frontier Western, and Wild Western. He even extended his work to the realm of science fiction anthologies such as Strange Tales, World of Fantasy, and Tales to Astonish (“I Fell to the Center of the Earth!” in issue #2, March 1959). Baker’s last confirmed work was on a six-page story titled “I Gave Up the Man I Love!” in the Atlas/Marvel’s My Own Romance #73,published in January 1960.

In the end, Baker’s weakened heart would betray him. After suffering a stroke in 1957 which affected his artistic abilities, Matt Baker died on August 11, 1959 in New York City, the victim of a heart attack. As one of, if not the first, Black artists in the world of comic books, much of Baker’s career and life was lived under the radar and thus like many men of mystery, his legend has grown over the years. His ability to move from drawing super-heroines, to war themed stories to romance stories to the exploits of cowboys demonstrated his wide artistic range and willingness to take on challenges. He is now very well regarded as an artist and many wonder what levels of success he would have enjoyed had he been a white artist and not been betrayed by a bad heart.

Baker was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009, leaving behind a legacy that should prove to be a model for young Black artists following in his path.

Lost Art of Matt Baker : The Complete Canteen Kate [BOOK]

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

Ellie Dahmer and Bettie Dahmer


Ellie Dahmer and Bettie Dahmer


During the mid-1960s, Vernon Dahmer was a successful black farmer and businessman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was also a civil rights leader and had served as the head of his local NAACP chapter. This work often made his family a target of threats by the Ku Klux Klan. Despite the danger, Vernon worked to help register black voters in the community.

Although the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave racial minorities equal access to the right to vote, the state of Mississippi still required residents to pay a poll tax when registering, impeding many potential black voters. And so on January 9, 1966, Vernon publicly offered to pay the poll tax for blacks who wanted to register but could not afford it.

That night, the KKK firebombed his home while he was inside with his wife, Ellie Dahmer, and three of their children—Bettie, Dennis, and Harold. Vernon exchanged gunfire with the attackers and held them off so he and his family could escape. He later died from injuries he sustained in the fire.

Ellie went on to serve as an election commissioner in Hattiesburg for more than a decade, continuing the work that she and her husband had started. It took more than 30 years for Samuel Bowers, the Klan leader who ordered the attack, to be convicted of Vernon’s murder.

At StoryCorps, Ellie and Bettie, who was 10 years old at the time, remembered the night Vernon was killed.




Transcript
Ellie Dahmer (ED) and Bettie Dahmer (BD)

ED: We didn’t think anybody would bother the children, but we were wrong. They intended to get all of us January the 10th, 1966. That night, when I waked up, the house was on fire, and it was so bright and so hot. You was screaming to the top of your voice, “Lord have mercy. We’re going to get burned up in this house alive.” I raised the windows up, and then your father was handing you out the window to me.

BD: We escaped to the barn to hide, and I can remember us sitting on the bales of hay. I had burns over a good portion of my body, and I was screaming and crying because I was in pain. Daddy was burned so much worse than I was. When he held up his arm the skin just hung down. But Daddy never did complain. He was just concerned about me. I remember us going to the hospital.

ED: You was in the room with your father. I was sitting between the two beds. And he yelled my name real loud, and then he was gone. He knew that he might get killed, and he was willing to take the risk, but it was not worth it to me. I miss him so much.

BD: Daddy wasn’t a man that wore a suit, he wore overalls. In Daddy’s world everybody had a job to do. Black people couldn’t vote, so I do understand why he did what he did. It meant a lot to him.

ED: Some of the last words he said was, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” That’s on his tombstone.

We made a tremendous sacrifice, Bettie. I try to go on and live my life without thinking about it, but it’s a night I can never forget. It’s been over 50 years, and seems like it was yesterday.