Essential The Official African American Thread#2

[Black Lightning]

On July 14, 1946, four African American sharecroppers were lynched at Moore’s Ford in northeast Georgia in an event now described as the “last mass lynching in America.” Yet the killers of George Dorsey, Mae Murray Dorsey, Roger Malcolm, and Dorothy Malcolm were never brought to justice. The violence and public outcry surrounding the event reflected growing African American challenges to Jim Crow in the post-World War II years as well the failures of state and federal authorities to address racial inequality and violence in the South.

A fight between Roger Malcolm and his wife Dorothy sparked the crisis that unfolded in mid-July in Walton County, just sixty miles outside of Atlanta. On July 14, Malcolm was arrested by local authorities after stabbing white overseer Barnette Hester who had intervened in the domestic conflict. Hester may have had a sexual relationship with Dorothy Malcolm. Eleven days after this assault on July 25, white landowner J. Loy Harrison drove Dorothy Malcolm and fellow sharecroppers George and Mae Murray Dorsey to the Monroe, Georgia, jail to bail out Roger Malcolm. A large white mob stopped Harrison and the two couples on their return trip near the Moore’s Ford Bridge on the Apalachee River. What happened next was hotly debated by Harrison and other witnesses. Loy Harrison was reputed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as were many others who gathered at Moore’s Ford Bridge. Ultimately, the mob beat the sharecroppers before tying them to a tree and shooting them to death. George Dorsey was a World War II veteran recently returned from service in the Pacific while Dorothy Malcolm was seven months pregnant.

The public nature of this attack gained national press attention. In Georgia, lame-duck Governor Ellis Arnall, recently defeated in a bid for a second term in the 1946 Democratic gubernatorial primary race because of his limited support of African American voting rights, pushed the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to assist local authorities in a search for the killers. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leaders rallied public attention to the crime to force action by the federal government. Ultimately, U. S. President Harry Truman offered a $12,500 reward for information and directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take action in the case. Truman later referenced the Moore’s Ford lynching as influencing his decision to create the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and to integrate the military in 1948.

Despite these actions, there were no prosecutions for the crime committed at Moore’s Ford. FBI investigators gathered shell casings and bullets from the tree where the four sharecroppers were executed but found no witnesses willing to testify as to the identities of the perpetrators, even though at least fifty-five individuals were reported to have participated in the mob action. Walton County convened a grand jury to hear evidence about the crime but no indictments followed. The NAACP, frustrated with the lack of justice and other reports of violence toward servicemen returning from World War II, used the case to promote an anti-lynching bill in Congress but membership in chapters of the NAACP across the South dropped in the 1940s out of fear of retribution from the Klan and the state’s white power structure.

Renewed interest in Georgia’s civil rights struggle brought attention to the Moore’s Ford lynching in the late twentieth century. In the 1960s, civil rights activist Bobby Howard worked with the NAACP to renew calls for justice in the case. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations and the FBI both returned to the case in 2004, questioning many now-elderly witnesses and doing more forensic investigations. These investigations have largely stalled as witnesses maintain their silence about the events of Moore’s Ford.

Yet if the investigations have not produced convictions, ongoing local efforts keep the Moore’s Ford lynchings in public view. In 1997 an interracial group of citizens in Walton County created the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee to establish a historical marker at the bridge site. Public re-enactments of the lynchings have become an annual tradition in the region, starting in 2005.

 

[Black Lightning]

The murder of Mack Charles Parker is considered one of the last civil rights era lynchings. On the night of April 24, 1959, a mob abducted Parker from the Pearl River County Jail in Poplarville, Mississippi, where he was awaiting trial for the alleged crime of rape. They beat Parker, shot him twice in the chest, and then threw his body into the Pearl River.

Mack Charles Parker was a 23-year-old truck driver who had returned to his hometown of Lumberton, Mississippi, after receiving a general discharge following two years in the Army. After the death of his father, he had taken on the responsibility of supporting his mother, Liza, and his two younger siblings, Dolores and Charles.

On the morning of February 24, 1959, Parker was awakened by Marshal Ham Slade and several deputies, who alleged that he had raped a young white woman, June Walters, the night before. Parker and a group of friends were out drinking the previous night and saw a disabled car along the side of Highway 11, between Poplarville and Lumberton. Parker stopped his vehicle, perhaps hoping to steal the tires, and approached the car. After seeing Walters inside the vehicle, however, he returned to his car and drove away.

Jimmy Walters had gone to get a tow truck, leaving his pregnant wife June and their four-year-old daughter Debbie Carol in the car. The police alleged that Parker returned to the disabled vehicle, forcing June Walters and her daughter into the car with him. He then drove to an isolated spot where he raped her.

Walters was clear that a black man had raped her, but she was unable to state with certainty that Parker had been the assailant. Her description of a middle-aged man who was 5’10” and 160-to-170 pounds did not fit the young Parker, who weighed more than 200 pounds. Walters picked Parker out of a line-up, but she later recanted this identification.

On April 13, a grand jury indicted Parker on two counts of kidnapping and one count of rape. On April 17, he pleaded not guilty to the charges, and the trial was set for April 27. Three days before the trial, an eight-to-ten person mob, wielding guns and clubs, dragged Parker from his jail cell. The participants included J. P. Walker, a former deputy sheriff, and Jewell Alford, the jailer, who provided the keys. The men drove Parker to the Bogalusa Bridge. After shooting him, they weighted his body with chains and threw it into the river. Parker’s badly beaten and decomposing body was discovered floating in the Pearl River ten days later.

In the aftermath, Governor James P. Coleman called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Despite the unwillingness of the townspeople to cooperate, the FBI filed a 370-page report which was forwarded to the governor and then the prosecutor. However, those suspected in Parker’s death were never indicted.

In 2009, the FBI reopened investigations in 43 civil rights era hate crime cases in Mississippi, including the Parker case, but it remains unsolved.

 

[Black Lightning]

Mary Turner was a young African American woman whose 1918 lynching in Lowndes County, Georgia, prompted National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) officials to ask Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer to craft the 1922 Dyer Anti Lynching Bill. The bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives but never became the law of the land because it failed repeatedly in the U.S. Senate because of oppositio n from Southern Democratic Senators. .

Turner was born Mary Hattie Graham in December 1899. Her parents, Perry Graham and wife Elizabeth “Betsy” Johnson were a sharecropping family with four children. On February 11, 1917, 17 year old Graham married Hazel “Hayes” Turner in Colquitt County, Georgia. The couple had two children, Ocie Lee and Leaster, before they were married.

Together they moved to Brooks County, Georgia, where they took jobs with plantation owner Hampton Smith. Smith was known for abusing and beating his workers, and for bailing people out of jail and having them work off their debt in his fields. Mary Turner was once severely beaten by Smith and when her husband threatened him, local authorities sentenced Hazel Turner to time on a chain gang.

On the evening of May 16, 1918, Smith was shot and killed by one of his workers. The following week Brooks County saw a mob driven manhunt which resulted in the lynching of 13 people including some who were in the local jail.

Nineteen year old and eight months pregnant Turner publicly denied that her husband had anything to do with the murder of Hampton Smith. He had been arrested among others on the farm. Her remarks further enraged the locals, and the mob turned on her, determined to “teach her a lesson.”

Upon hearing the news Turner fled but was caught the next day, May 19. A mob of several hundred people dragged her to Folsom Bridge, over the Little River, which separated Brooks and Lowndes counties. The mob tied her ankles, strung her upside down, doused her clothes in gasoline and set her on fire. While she was still alive, someone split open her stomach and her unborn baby slid out and fell to the ground. The mob stomped and crushed the baby to death. Turner’s body was riddled with hundreds of bullets. Later that night, the remains of Turner and her baby were buried a few feet away from where they were murdered.

Three days later, the murderer of plantation owner Hampton Smith was caught, and killed in a shootout with police. During the week long rampage, more than 500 African Americans fled from Brooks and Lowndes counties in fear of their lives from the angry mobs.

Although local officials were given names of instigators and 15 specific participants, no one was ever charged or convicted of the murders. A historical marker memorializing Turner was placed near the lynching site and dedicated on May 15, 2010.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Charles Wilbert White (April 2, 1918 – October 3, 1979)

Born in Chicago in 1918, Charles W. White is one of America's most renowned and recognized African-American & Social Realist artists. Charles White worked primarily in black & white or sepia & white drawings, paintings, and lithographs. His artwork encompassed an incredibly skilled draftsmanship and artistic sensitivity and power that has reached and moved millions.

His meticulously executed drawings and paintings speak of and affirm the humanity and beauty of African American people and culture. Common subjects of his artwork included scenes depicting African-American history in the United States, socio-economic struggles, human relationships, and portraits.

Artist Charles White and his wife Frances Barrett moved to California in 1956, which was the beginning of White's career as a Los Angeles artist. He had several shows in Los Angeles, and was represented by the Heritage Gallery. White received numerous honors and awards and has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum, Smithsonian Institution, National Academy of Design, and elsewhere throughout the world. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1972. The Heritage Gallery had represented the artwork of Charles White from the early 1960s, when Mr. Horowitz provided Mr. White his first show in Los Angeles, California.

Charles White came from a poor Chicago family. His mother served as domestic help and because she was unable to take him with her or afford child care services he was often left in the library to busy himself until she could retrieve him at the end of the day. It was his time spent in the library that allowed him to recognize and hone his skill as a young artist. It was then that he realized he could recreate the images he saw in books and magazines and his inspiration sparked. A particularly influential book The New Negro by Alain Locke impacted him profoundly. He remarked, “I had never realized that Negro people had done so much in the world of culture, that they had contributed so much to the development of America, it became a kind of secret life, a new world of facts and ideas.” White studied at the Chicago Art Institute and the Art Students League. By completing the course, White qualified for employment with the Works Project Administration (WPA), it was during these years that he developed the desire to use his craft in altering the preconceived “Black image” in America.

“Goodnight Irene”



(1952)

Inspired by the song, “Goodnight, Irene” by songwriter Lead Belly. The painting portrays a tenderness and compassion. Music, heavily influential in African American culture is seamlessly melded into the painting’s portrayal of indulgence into a refreshing moment. The two figures a man and a woman sink into one another. It seems that they are each other’s solitude able to allow the other to forbear against every assault. With his guitar in hand the man plays the soundtrack to their moment and their love. Singing what could be blues or the founding tunes of Soul music something emotionally rousing yet therapeutic given the audience’s ability to find release in the song. The woman lies on the mans shoulders in a gesture that applies a search for warmth and affection in a trusted lover and friend. The entire painting seems to round off in an urban musical narrative. A groaning against burdens carried and a harmony of movement forward. Simultaneously nostalgic and progressive.

“Two Brothers Have I had on Earth”



(1965)

This painting inspires contemplation. It motivates one to question, which is the stronger voice. The Devil on one shoulder or the angel on the other. “Two Brothers” exudes polarity of conscious, awareness of the tumult of one’s own humanity and a spiritual self. Attempting to balance the fiendish temptations of an earthy countenance and the reach for more celestial refinement, White captures a drama all human beings have a role in. The Brother standing seems to seek ways for his schemes to come to realization. Not one to reconsider the option of underhanded tactics and backward dealings he seems determine to find a way into a path of life more glamorous than the one in which he currently resides. The hand on the shoulder of the righteous brother used to push himself up is surely not depicted by mistake. While the other Brother seemingly content to sit in the rain kept dry by the cave seems meek and docile. A personification of the ideals of a disciple. Innocent even naive the look on the face of the seated figure suggest a far-a-wayness, an out of bodied transaction with the divine. In his conversation with the Lord the seated figure mutes all attention to his earthly surroundings and thereby he disarms any temptation to engage in them.

 

[Black Lightning]

 

[Black Haven]

The first radio station in the United States programmed by and for African Americans, WDIA was one of only six stations broadcasting in Memphis, Tennessee when it hit the airwaves in 1947. Its owners, John Pepper and dikk Ferguson, established the station and located it at 2074 Union Avenue. Initially programmed to appeal to the white demographic with classical, country-western, and various other musical genres, WDIA failed to distinguish itself, and in a last attempt to stave off failure, began to play Blues records. It featured shows by Beale Street legends such as Nat D. Williams, Rufus Thomas, B.B. King, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. King would later attribute his success as a musician to the recognition he received from his early career airtime on WDIA. In 1949 the station was #two in Memphis in terms of audience. It then switched permanently to all-black programming, and quickly moved into first place.
Broadcasting Blues, Gospel, and various talk programs, WDIA became known as a “direct appeal” to advertisers who wished to reach the African American demographic. Acquiring the right to broadcast at a higher wattage, the station moved to 1070 kHz and boosted their signal from 250 watts to 50,000 watts and was now capable of reaching as far north as Missouri and as far south as the Gulf Coast. That range included about 10% of the black population of the United States which in turn garnered substantial advertising revenues. Influencing every black radio station to follow, WDIA assigned itself the moniker “the Mother Station of Negroes.” It earned the nickname “the Goodwill Station” as well because it broadcast public service bulletins announcing employment opportunities, missing children, social service agency information, and the like at the behest of its listening audience.

Though the on-air talent was black, as were the artists whose music they played, ownership remained white. The office staff was racially integrated by 1950 which was rare in Memphis or any Southern city at that time but the station did not see its first black manager until 1972. Ownership of the station first changed hands in 1957. After a series of local owners it was bought by media giant Clear Channel Communication in 1997. Throughout this period, it continued (and continues) to offer content for African Americans by African Americans.

WDIA moved its home to Radio Center, the former home of WMPS, in 1985, then to a suburban office park in 2004. Nat D. Williams’ show ended in 1972 following a stroke. Rufus Thomas maintained his program until his passing in 2001. Today, WDIA’s major playlist offers very little in the way of the Beale Street Blues and Gospel that established the station, but spans the 1960s music to the present day, with significant air time devoted to the classic Soul sounds of the 1970s, and an occasional offering from its early on-air contributors B.B. King and Bobby “Blue” Bland.

Whaaaaaat I'm from Memphis and I didn't even know this. We have the first AA neighborhood and radio station

 

[Poitier]

Do we have a roll call list for all the AAs on here?

We've compiled some of the most beautiful images of our women and we need you all to show out in the Baddest Afro Descent: AA Women edition by making it rain 10s



@KidStranglehold @IllmaticDelta @Elle Driver @Poitier @K.O.N.Y @MR. WEST @BmoreGorilla
@R$G META @Raymond Burrr @calixprynce @SJUGrad13 @levitate @Moreganic
@Ronnie Lott @BmoreGorilla @Black Lightning @videogamestashbox.com @BrothaZay @Black Barbie @The College Dropout @DarrynCobretti @Barnett @kayslay@Donovan Gumby @----- @satam55 @O.T.I.S. @BlackPearl The Empress @Malta @Dak_Brehscott @Mowgli @Lewis Black @ridedolo @Luck @LaughsLikePac @Cadillac @newworldafro @Michael9100

 

[Trapperman Dave]

Im AA sir

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Im AA sir

@Poitier @MoorMe

 

[Remo]

I stopped getting tagged in the afro descent threads but I'm here and got my 10 ready

 

[Bawon Samedi]

I stopped getting tagged in the afro descent threads but I'm here and got my 10 ready

I thought I was tagging you?

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

I'm putting Teyonah parris in every thread about AA women.

 

[DarrynCobretti]

@Poitier add @Critical Distance @The College Dropout to the AA list.
BTW anything less than a 10 from anyone that considered themselves #gang, should get neg trained and ostracized from the community.

 

[Remo]

I thought I was tagging you?

Nah. I still voted in the ones I caught tho.

 

[Poitier]

I'm putting Teyonah parris in every thread about AA women.

She Panamanian