Official Black History Month Thread (2015)

[J-Nice]

Martin Delany

Martin Robison Delany was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician and writer. He was born free in Charles Town, W.Va. (then part of Virginia, a slave state). Delany was an outspoken Black nationalist, arguably the first; and is considered by some to be the grandfather of Black nationalism.

He was also one of the first three Blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School. Trained as an assistant and a physician, he treated patients during the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, when many doctors and residents fled the city.

Active in recruiting Blacks for the United States Colored Troops, he was commissioned as a major, the first African-American field officer in the United States Army during the American Civil War.

 

[J-Nice]

Doris Miller

Doris Miller, known as "Dorie" to shipmates and friends, was born in Waco, Texas, on 12 October 1919, to Henrietta and Conery Miller. He had three brothers, one of which served in the Army during World War II. While attending Moore High School in Waco, he was a fullback on the football team and he worked on his father's farm.

On 16 September 1939, he enlisted in the U.S Navy as Mess Attendant, Third Class, at Dallas, Texas, so he could travel, and earn money for his family. He later was commended by the Secretary of the Navy, was advanced to Mess Attendant, Second Class and First Class, and subsequently was promoted to Ship's Cook, Third Class.

Following training at the Naval Training Station, Norfolk, Virginia, Miller was assigned to the ammunition ship USS Pyro (AE-1) where he served as a Mess Attendant.

On 2 January 1940 was transferred to USS West Virginia (BB-48), where he became the ship's heavyweight boxing champion.

In July 1940 he had temporary duty aboard USS Nevada (BB-36) at Secondary Battery Gunnery School.

On August 3 1940, he returned to West Virginia, and was serving in that battleship when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

On 7 December 1941, Miller had arisen at 6 a.m., and was collecting laundry when the alarm for general quarters sounded. He headed for his battle station, the antiaircraft battery magazine amidship, only to discover that torpedo damage had wrecked it, so he went on deck. Because of his physical prowess, he was assigned to carry wounded fellow Sailors to places of greater safety.

Then an officer ordered him to the bridge to aid the mortally wounded Captain of the ship.

He subsequently manned a 50 caliber Browning anti-aircraft machine gun until he ran out of ammunition and was ordered to abandon ship.

Miller described firing the machine gun during the battle, a weapon which he had not been trained to operate: "It wasn't hard. I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine. I had watched the others with these guns. I guess I fired her for about fifteen minutes. I think I got one of those Jap planes. They were diving pretty close to us."

During the attack, Japanese aircraft dropped two armored piercing bombs through the deck of the battleship and launched five 18-inch aircraft torpedoes into her port side. Heavily damaged by the ensuing explosions, and suffering from severe flooding below decks, the crew abandoned ship while West Virginia slowly settled to the harbor bottom. Of the 1,541 men on West Virginia during the attack, 130 were killed and 52 wounded. Subsequently refloated, repaired, and modernized, the battleship served in the Pacific theater through to the end of the war in August 1945.

Miller was commended by the Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox on 1 April 1942, and on 27 May 1942 he received the Navy Cross, which Fleet Admiral (then Admiral) Chester W. Nimitz, the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet personally presented to Miller on board aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) for his extraordinary courage in battle. Speaking of Miller, Nimitz remarked:

This marks the first time in this conflict that such high tribute has been made in the Pacific Fleet to a member of his race and I'm sure that the future will see others similarly honored for brave acts.
On 13 December 1941, Miller reported to USS Indianapolis (CA-35), and subsequently returned to the west coast of the United States in November 1942. Assigned to the newly constructed USS Liscome Bay (CVE-56) in the spring of 1943, Miller was on board that escort carrier during Operation Galvanic, the seizure of Makin and Tarawa Atolls in the Gilbert Islands. Liscome Bay's aircraft supported operations ashore between 20-23 November 1943. At 5:10 a.m. on 24 November, while cruising near Butaritari Island, a single torpedo from Japanese submarine I-175 struck the escort carrier near the stern. The aircraft bomb magazine detonated a few moments later, sinking the warship within minutes. Listed as missing following the loss of that escort carrier, Miller was officially presumed dead 25 November 1944, a year and a day after the loss of Liscome Bay. Only 272 Sailors survived the sinking of Liscome Bay, while 646 died.

In addition to the Navy Cross, Miller was entitled to the Purple Heart Medal; the American Defense Service Medal, Fleet Clasp; the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal; and the World War II Victory Medal.

Commissioned on 30 June 1973, USS Miller (FF-1091), a Knox-class frigate, was named in honor of Doris Miller.
On 11 October 1991, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority dedicated a bronze commemorative plaque of Miller at the Miller Family Park located on the U.S. Naval Base, Pearl Harbor.

 

[J-Nice]

Sam Lacy

Sam Lacy was a pioneer in the field of sports reporting, giving a voice to the hopes, thoughts and dreams of Black athletes and fans across the United States.

Samuel Harold “Sam” Lacy was born on October 23, 1903, the son of Samuel Erskine Lacy, a legal researcher and Rose Lacy, a full-blooded Shinnecock Native American. His family moved to Washington, D.C. when Sam was young and his father was an avid fan of the Washington Senators baseball team (the Senators played just five blocks from the Lacy’s home). Sam was very precocious and would often run errands for the players and shagged fly balls for them during batting practice.

Unfortunately, Sam saw early, and up close, how pervasive racism was in the south when his father was spat upon by one of the Senators players during a parade for the team. “Back then, there was always a parade of players to the ballpark on Opening Day,”Sam would later recall. “Fans like my father would line up for hours to watch their heroes pass by. And so there he was, age 79, out there cheering with the rest of them, calling all the players by name, just happy to be there. And then it happened. One of the white players—I won’t say which one—just gave him this nasty look and, as he passed by, spat right in his face. Right in that nice old man’s face. That hurt my father terribly. And you know, as big a fan as he had been, he never went to another game as long as he lived, which was seven more years.”
Sam, however, worked for the stadium in which they played (Griffith Stadium), selling popcorn and peanuts in the Black seating section of the segregated park. He also worked in other areas of sports, including serving as a caddie for golfers. During the 1921 U.S. Open which was held at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland (where he worked), Sam caddied for “Long” Jim Barnes, a British golfer who would go on to win the tournament. Barnes rewarded Lacy with a $200.00 tip.

His love of sports carried over to high school where he played baseball, football and basketball at Armstrong Technical High School. He attended Howard University from which he graduated in 1923 with a degree in education. While in school he gained a part-time position with the Washington Tribune, a popular Black newspaper.

After college he went on to coach various youth teams while also playing semi-pro baseball for the LeDroit Tigers (who billed him as an Algonquin Indian) as a pitcher. He also continued working at the Tribune, and bolstered his income as a sports commentator with local D.C. radio stations WINX and WOL. He began working full-time for the Tribune in 1926 and being gainfully employed decided to marry his girlfriend Alberta Robinson in 1927. The couple would eventually have two children, a son, Samuel and a daughter, Michaelyn.

At this time in his life, he decided to give baseball another shot and in 1929 quit his job with the Tribune and moved up to Connecticut and joined another semi-pro baseball team. Things did not work out the way he had hoped and he rejoined his family a year later, returning to the Tribune and was named sports editor in 1933. He covered a number of high profile events including Jesse Owens’ performance in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Joe Louis’ victory over Max Schmeling.

Sam’s career and family life was going very well for him and he could have coasted on the success he was enjoying but he looked at racial injustice in the sports world and saw almost no one speaking out against it. He therefore began a campaign to try to get Major League Baseball to integrate. He met with Clark Griffith, the owner of the Senators ball club, and talked to him about integrating the Senators, especially with players from the hometown Homestead Grays (the Grays played at Griffith Park when the Senators were not using the ballpark). Griffith was not receptive to the idea, arguing that the Southern-born players on the team would refuse to play with Black ballplayers and that there would be “clashes on the field” with other teams. Griffith also argued that integrating the Major Leagues would prove harmful to the Negro Leagues, thus presenting a potential loss of revenue for him if the Grays did not rent the stadium from him. Griffith said that integration might put “400 coloured guys out of work.” Lacy argued in his column “when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he put 400,000 black people out of jobs,” and added “the Negro Leagues were an institution, but they were the very thing we wanted to get rid of because they were a symbol of segregation.” Griffith’s refusal frustrated Lacy but it also lit a fire under him and he became more and more determined.

 

[J-Nice]

Bayard Rustin

Rustin grew up in West Chester, Pa. In college in the 1930s, he joined the Communist Youth League for a few years, attracted by the group's anti-racist efforts. He later embraced socialism.

He was a gay black man, tall, with high cheekbones, and a gifted singer. He played a bit part in a Broadway musical alongside Paul Robeson, and Rustin often sang for his audiences as he toured the country, conducting race-relations workshops.

Rustin was considered a master organizer, a political intellectual and a pacifist; he served time in prison for refusing to register for the draft. He created the first Freedom Rides, which challenged segregation on interstate buses. Along with King, Rustin was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

He had two strong mentors. A.J. Muste, the head of the pacifist organization the Fellowship of Reconciliation, hired Rustin as a youth secretary to conduct workshops and demonstrations against war and segregation. Rustin's other mentor was A. Philip Randolph, the head of the first predominantly black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

"What Rustin took away from Randolph, especially, is the recognition that economic issues and racial justice issues are completely intertwined," says his biographer, John D'Emilio.

Despite his extensive involvement in the civil rights movement, Rustin was content to remain behind the scenes, D'Emilio says.

"I think of it as part of the Quaker heritage that he internalized. You don't push yourself forward," D'Emilio says. "It doesn't matter if you don't get the credit for it. What is important is this notion of speaking truth to power."

A Matter Of Orientation

In 1953, Rustin's homosexuality became a public problem after he was found having sex in a parked car with two men. He was arrested on a morals charge. Later, when he was chosen to organize the 1963 march, some civil rights activists objected. In an effort to discredit the march, segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond took to the Senate floor, where he derided Rustin for being a communist, a draft dodger and a homosexual. Ironically, author D'Emilo says, it became a rallying point — for the civil rights leaders.

"Because no one could appear to be on the side of Strom Thurmond, he created, unwittingly, an opportunity for Rustin's sexuality to stop being an issue," he says.

The march was a success, and at its end, a triumphant Rustin stepped up to the microphone to read the demands that the leaders of the civil rights movement would take to President John F. Kennedy.

First on the list: "effective Civil Rights legislation — no compromise, no filibuster — and that it include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, [fair employment], and the right to vote."

Rustin wanted to move the civil rights agenda from protesting to politics and to work within the system — blacks and whites together — to create jobs and other opportunities. His effort fell flat, stymied by a more militant generation and the dominant issue of the times, the Vietnam War. Rustin said, "It has split the civil rights movement down the middle. It has caused many white people who were in it to say, 'That must wait now until we stop Vietnam.' "

'A Visionary'

In his later years, Rustin continued to speak out on a variety of fronts, and his personal life also changed: He met Walter Naegle.

Naegle, Rustin's surviving partner, says that in the final years of his life, Rustin became more involved in gay rights.

"He saw this as another challenge, another barrier that had to be broken down — a larger struggle for human rights and for individual freedoms," Neagle says.

Or, as Rustin put it:

"The barometer for judging the character of people in regards to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian. The judgment as to whether you can trust the future, the social advancement, depending on people, will be judged on where they come out on that question."

Activist Mandy Carter says Rustin was a visionary, understanding the parallels in the civil rights struggle and the gay rights movement. Carter is on the leadership council the National Black Justice Coalition, an LGBT civil rights group.

"For me and for a lot of us who are black, and gay and lesbian, bi, trans, who see ourselves as social justice advocates as well, to have this person — such an amazing role model," she says.

Carter says there was just no one like him, and she is delighted such a key individual in the civil rights movement is now being recognized with the nation's highest honor.

Rustin died in 1987 in New York. He was 75.

 

[J-Nice]

Ella Baker

civil rights organizer, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of Blake Baker, a waiter on the ferry between Norfolk and Washington, D.C., and Georgianna Ross. In rural North Carolina where Ella Baker grew up she experienced a strong sense of black community. Her grandfather, who had been a slave, acquired the land in Littleton on which he had slaved. He raised fruit, vegetables, cows, and cattle, which he shared with the community. He also served as the local Baptist minister. Baker's mother took care of the sick and needy.
After graduating in 1927 from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Baker moved to New York City. She had dreamed of doing graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago, but it was 1929, and times were hard. Few jobs were open to black women except teaching, which Baker refused to do because "this was the thing that everybody figures you could do" (Cantarow and O'Malley, p. 62). To survive, Baker waitressed and worked in a factory. During 1929-1930 she was an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News and in 1932 became an editorial assistant for George Schuyler's Negro National News, for which she also worked as office manager. In 1930 she was on the board of directors of Harlem's Own Cooperative and worked with the Dunbar Housewives' League on tenant and consumer rights. In 1930 she helped organize and in 1931 became the national executive director of the Young Negroes' Cooperative League, a consumer cooperative. Baker also taught consumer education for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s and, according to a letter written in 1936, divided her time between consumer education and working at the public library at 135th Street. She married Thomas J. Roberts in 1940 or 1941; they had no children.

Beginning in 1938 Baker worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and from 1941 to 1946 she traveled throughout the country but especially in the South for the NAACP, first as field secretary and then as director of branches to recruit members, raise money, and organize local campaigns. She became "something of a legend for her prowess in organizing youth chapters in the South" (Branch, p. 231). Among the issues in which she was involved were the antilynching campaign, the equal-pay-for-black-teachers movement, and job training for black workers. Baker's strength was the ability to evoke in people a feeling of common need and the belief that people together can change the conditions under which they live. Her philosophy of organizing was "you start where the people are" and "strong people don't need strong leaders." In her years with the NAACP, Baker formed a network of people involved with civil rights throughout the South that proved invaluable in the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. She resigned from her leadership role in the national NAACP in 1946 because she felt it was too bureaucratic. She also had agreed to take responsibility for raising her niece. Back in New York City, she worked with the NAACP on school desegregation, sat on the Commission on Integration for the New York City Board of Education, and in 1952 became president of the New York City NAACP chapter. In 1953 she resigned from the NAACP presidency to run unsuccessfully for the New York City Council on the Liberal party ticket. To support herself, she worked as director of the Harlem Division of the New York City Committee of the American Cancer Society.

In January 1958 Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison persuaded Baker to go to Atlanta to set up the office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to organize the Crusade for Citizenship, a voter registration program in the South. Baker agreed to go for six weeks and stayed for two and a half years. She was named acting director of the SCLC and set about organizing the crusade to open simultaneously in twenty-one cities. She was concerned, however, that the SCLC board of preachers did not sufficiently support voter registration. Baker had increasing difficulty working with Martin Luther King, Jr., whom she described as "too self-centered and cautious" (Weisbrot, p. 33). Because she thought that she would never be appointed executive director, Baker persuaded her friend the Reverend John L. Tilley to assume the post in April, and she became associate director. After King fired Tilley in January 1959, he asked Baker once again to be executive director, but his board insisted that her position must be in an acting capacity. Baker, however, functioned as executive director and signed her name accordingly. In April 1960 the executive director post of SCLC was accepted by the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker.

After hundreds of students sat in at segregated lunch counters in early 1960, Baker persuaded the SCLC to invite them to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend. From this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was eventually formed. Although the SCLC leadership pressured Baker to influence the students to become a youth chapter of SCLC, she refused and encouraged the students to beware of SCLC's "leader-centered orientation." She felt that the students had a right to decide their own structure. Baker's speech "More Than a Hamburger," which followed King's and James Lawson's speeches, urged the students to broaden their social vision of discrimination to include more than integrating lunch counters. Julian Bond described the speech as "an eye opener" and probably the best of the three. "She didn't say, 'Don't let Martin Luther King tell you what to do,' " Bond remembers, "but you got the real feeling that that's what she meant" (Hampton and Fayer, p. 63). James Forman, who became director of SNCC a few months later, said Baker felt SCLC "was depending too much on the press and on the promotion of Martin King, and was not developing enough indigenous leadership across the South" (Forman, p. 216).

After the Easter conference weekend, Baker resigned from the SCLC, and after having helped Walker learn his job she went to work for SNCC in August. To support herself she worked as a human relations consultant for the Young Women's Christian Association in Atlanta. Baker continued as the "ever-present mentor" (Garrow, p. 518) to SNCC civil rights workers. At a rancorous SNCC meeting at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in August 1961, Baker mediated between one faction advocating political action through voter registration and another faction advocating nonviolent direct action. She suggested that voter registration would necessitate confrontation that would involve them in direct action. Baker believed that voting was necessary but did not believe that the franchise would cure all problems. She also understood the appeal of nonviolence as a tactic, but she did not believe in it personally: "I have not seen anything in the nonviolent technique that can dissuade me from challenging somebody who wants to step on my neck. If necessary, if they hit me, I might hit them back" (Cantarow and O'Malley, p. 82).

After the 1964 Mississippi summer in which northern students went south to work in voter registration, SNCC decided to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP) as an alternative to the regular Democratic party in Mississippi. Thousands of people registered to vote in beauty parlors and barber shops, churches, or wherever a registration booth could be set up. Baker set up the Washington, D.C., office of the MFDP and delivered the keynote speech at its Jackson, Mississippi, state convention. The MFDP delegates were not seated at the Democratic National Convention in Washington, D.C., but their influence helped to elect many local black leaders in Mississippi in the following years and forced a rules change in the Democratic party to include more women and minorities as delegates to the national convention.

From 1962 to 1967 Baker worked on the staff of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), dedicated to helping black and white people work together. During that time she organized a civil liberties conference in Washington, D.C., and worked with Carl Braden on a mock civil rights commission hearing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In her later years in New York City she served on the board of the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, founded and was president of the Fund for Education and Legal Defense, which raised money primarily for scholarships for civil rights activists to return to college, and was vice chair of the Mass Party Organizing Committee. She was also a sponsor of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners, a consultant to both the Executive Council and the Commission for Social and Racial Justice of the Episcopal church, and a member of the Charter Group for a Pledge of Conscience and the Coalition of Concerned Black Americans. Until her death in New York City she continued to inspire, nurture, scold, and advise the many young people who had worked with her during her career of political activism.

Ella Baker's ideas and careful organizing helped to shape the civil rights movement from the 1930s through the 1960s. She had the ability to listen to people and to inspire them to organize around issues that would empower their lives. At a time when there were no women in leadership in the SCLC, Baker served as its executive director. Hundreds of young people became politically active because of her respect and concern for them.

 

[J-Nice]

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was a civil rights activist whose passionate depiction of her own suffering in a racist society helped focus attention on the plight of African-Americans throughout the South. In 1964, working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Hamer helped organize the 1964 Freedom Summer African-American voter registration drive in her native Mississippi. At the Democratic National Convention later that year, she was part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated group of activists who openly challenged the legality of Mississippi’s all-white, segregated delegation.

 

[KOohbt]

D'Angelo kicked it off last night

simply beautiful.


#blackexcellence

 

[KOohbt]

We lost an icon in 1998 and unfortunately most of the younger generation will not even know his name.

One of my main inspirations. Truly brilliant man.

 

[J-Nice]

Susie King Taylor

Taylor is the only African-American woman who is confirmed to have published a wartime memoir about the Civil War. Born into slavery, Taylor taught herself to read and when she escaped to St. Simon’s Island in Georgia, she founded a school. Taylor’s husband served in the Union Army, and she was both a nurse and laundress to the Union forces.

 

[J-Nice]

William Wells Brown

Many regard Brown as the first-ever African American to publish a novel. Born to an enslaved black mother and her master, Brown escaped slavery in 1834 and became a well-known anti-slavery speaker, activist and writer. He is best known for his controversial novel “Clotel: or The President’s Daughter,” which traced mixed-race female descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

 

[↓R↑LYB]

I never knew a black man made the ice cream scoop. I'm about to eat some cookies in cream in his honor

#RNS

 

[↓R↑LYB]

Dr. Mark Dean

As a child, Mark Dean excelled in math. In elementary school, he took advanced level math courses and, in high school, Dean even built his own computer, radio, and amplifier. Dean continued his interests and went on to obtain a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee, a masters degree in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford. He is one of the most prominent black inventors in the field of computers.

Dr. Mark Dean started working at IBM in 1980 and was instrumental in the invention of the Personal Computer (PC). He holds three of IBM's original nine PC patents and currently holds more than 20 total patents. The famous African-American inventor never thought the work he was doing would end up being so useful to the world, but he has helped IBM make instrumental changes in areas ranging from the research and application of systems technology circuits to operating environments. One of his most recent computer inventions occurred while leading the team that produced the 1-Gigahertz chip, which contains one million transistors and has nearly limitless potential.

 

[*L*E*G*A*C*Y*]

Just listen to this y'all...


#IAMBLACKHISTORY
#YOUAREBLACKHISTORY
#WEAREBLACKHISTORY

(sidenote: I remember when I first bought this record in 2002...I heard all of the names that were said on this track and it immediately made me research the ones I haven't heard...)

 

[call_me_step_daddy]

MLK was saying some real shyt right here..@1:20

 

[JBoy]

MLK was saying some real shyt right here..@1:20

great video