The Random stories of Black History thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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A rare Ford and Pullman porters: How a San Antonio family’s car drew the Smithsonian’s interest
Courtney McKinney, right, stands with her mother in front of the 1932 Ford Model B that belonged to her great-grandparents. The car has been donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Credit: Courtesy / Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
A century-old automobile owned by a San Antonio man who worked to organize Black railroad porters and fight discrimination is bound for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
The Ford Model B, a car manufactured between 1932 and 1934, was recently donated to the museum in Washington, D.C., by the descendants of Delbert and Dottie McKinney, the car’s original owners.
The car, which has been stored at their son’s former home on the far East Side for decades, has been transported to a shop in Pennsylvania for restoration and much-needed repairs. It’s expected to be on display at the museum sometime in 2023.
Museum officials called it a glimpse into the life of a railroad porter, 20th-century labor history and the emergence of the Black middle class against an era of broad racial discrimination. The family heirloom is a valuable symbol of a point in time in U.S. history and in auto manufacturing.
But the Model B represented something deeper to the family that inherited it, said Courtney McKinney, great-granddaughter of the original owner. Even without yet knowing much of the owners’ history, she felt the car should be preserved for future generations.
“A lot of people would have gotten rid of this car by now, just by necessity,” McKinney said.
But the large four-cylinder, two-door sedan had become a fixture in the family, having been for many years maintained by Delbert McKinney’s son Alonzo and stored by other family members when Alonzo’s military service took him to Korea and Vietnam.
That shared commitment elevated its worth to the close-knit family, said McKinney, a California resident whose aunt and cousin still live in San Antonio.
“It was always a family affair, and they knew how much it meant to my grandpa [Alonzo] and so that’s how we were able to keep it,” she said.
A history uncovered
Now 32, McKinney was 13 years old the last time her grandfather took her for a ride in the car. Her sentimental attachment to the car only grew when she learned from Smithsonian curators that her great-grandfather, who died in 1956, played a pivotal role in the Black labor movement of the 1920s and ‘30s, she said.McKinney was one of over 20,000 Black men working as Pullman porters and train workers during the railroad’s heydays in the 1920s, according to the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum in Chicago.
Dottie and Delbert McKinney Credit: Courtesy / McKinney Family
But the Pullman Company required porters to work about 400 hours a month or travel 11,000 miles before they could be paid. The pay averaged about $17 a week, plus tips meant to augment the meager salary of a job that involved loading luggage and parcels and helping passengers.
However, the porters spent most of that tip money on required uniforms and shoe polish, according to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Social Welfare History Project.
A porter on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy line) railroad, McKinney worked to organize other porters to fight discrimination. Museum officials uncovered reports of the McKinneys’ labor activism in local newspapers.
With Courtney McKinney’s grandfather gone and her grandmother ailing, her mother needed to find a new home for the car. “It was a pie-in-the-sky thing,” she said of writing a letter to the museum late last year offering to donate the car.
“I saw the Smithsonian had a [Negro Motorist] Green Book exhibit where they were talking about the Green books that allowed African Americans to travel through the United States and go through friendly towns, and I thought, this is really relevant,” McKinney said.
When the museum’s curator responded with interest, the family was quick to agree to turn over the keys, she said. It’s what her great-grandparents would have wanted — returning the car to the service of the country.
A limited run
The McKinney family’s 1932 Ford Model B donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Credit: Courtesy / Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
The original Ford Model B had a short production run in the early 1930s. Only about 5,000 of the cars were made before the company transitioned to the Ford V-8 and other models in the early years of the Great Depression. The car would have sold for less than $500.
McKinney’s great-grandfather used the car for joyrides, according to family lore, which was funny to her because the car’s speed topped out at about 40 mph.
“But they would take it around and he just had so much pride getting the whole family in the car, riding around the neighborhood, and saying hi to people every Sunday,” she said.
Delbert McKinney’s pride was well-placed.
“The car was one of few owned by a Black family during the Great Depression and illuminates automobile history at a time when travel was segregated and even dangerous for Black Americans,” said Kathleen Franz, a San Antonio native and chairwoman of the Smithsonian history museum’s Work and Industry Division and the collecting curator.
After the porters unionized, McKinney served in leadership positions with the Brotherhood of Pullman Car Porters, and his wife served as a secretary for the Brotherhood Local No. 3, according to a report by the Smithsonian. In 1940, the members of Local No. 3 elected McKinney president, and he attended the Texas Federation of Labor as one of 19 Black delegates and worked to enact anti-discrimination practices at the convention.
The car the McKinneys owned made it possible for the couple to attend labor conventions and community meetings.
The Model B will be part of the National Museum of American History’s transportation collections, which exhibits everything from buggies and locomotives to motorcycles and bicycles used throughout American history.
The McKinney family is looking forward to seeing the car again — on display at the museum.
“We’re all going to go to D.C.,” McKinney said.
San Antonio family sends a rare Ford Model B to the Smithsonian
The car offers a glimpse into the life of a railroad porter, labor history and the Black middle class in an era of racial discrimination.
sanantonioreport.org
Joseph “Uncle Joe” Clovese was the last known surviving African soldier of the Union Army in the American Civil War, and lived in Pontiac at the time of his death in 1951. Clovese, who lived to be 107 years old, was born into slavery on a plantation in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, and escaped slavery in his teens to join the Union Army during the Siege of Vicksburg. He stayed with the Northern Army, first as a drummer, later as an infantryman. He was a private in Co. “C”, 63rd Colored Infantry Regiment.
Following the war he worked on Mississippi river steamboats, and he later worked on the crew stringing the first telegraph wires between New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi. At the age of 104, Clovese moved from Louisiana to Pontiac, Michigan to be near family. Once the community learned about “Uncle Joe,” the citizens of Pontiac embraced him. Large gatherings were organized for his 105th, 106th and 107th birthdays on January 30th.
For his funeral, more than 300 people were packed into Newman A.M.E. Church in Pontiac (their former location, in downtown) for the service. Hundreds more gathered at the gravesite in Pontiac’s Perry Mount Park Cemetery. Veterans from the Oakland County Council of Veterans served as pall bearers. A firing party from Selfridge Air Force Base fired the final salute and taps was sounded over the cemetery. Pontiac even named a road in his honor, that ran through the Lakeside Homes complex.
The Destruction of Black Civilization took Chancellor Williams sixteen years of research and field study to compile. The book, which was to serve as a reinterpretation of the history of the African race, was intended to be “"a general rebellion against the subtle message from even the most ‘liberal’ white authors (and their Negro disciples): ‘You belong to a race of nobodies. You have no worthwhile history to point to with pride.’”“ The book was written at a time when many black students, educators, and scholars were starting to piece together the connection between the way their history was taught and the way they were perceived by others and by themselves. They began to question assumptions made about their history and took it upon themselves to create a new body of historical research.
The book is premised on the question: ”“If the Blacks were among the very first builders of civilization and their land the birthplace of civilization, what has happened to them that has left them since then, at the bottom of world society, precisely what happened? The Caucasian answer is simple and well-known: The Blacks have always been at the bottom.”“ Williams instead contends that many elements—nature, imperialism, and stolen legacies— have aided in the destruction of the black civilization.
The Destruction of Black Civilization is revelatory and revolutionary because it offers a new approach to the research, teaching, and study of African history by shifting the main focus from the history of Arabs and Europeans in Africa to the Africans themselves, offering instead ”“a history of blacks that is a history of blacks. Because only from history can we learn what our strengths were and, especially, in what particular aspect we are weak and vulnerable. Our history can then become at once the foundation and guiding light for united efforts in serious[ly] planning what we should be about now.”“ It was part of the evolution of the black revolution that took place in the 1970s, as the focus shifted from politics to matters of the mind. About the Author Chancellor Williams is the author of ”“The Rebirth of African Civilization.”“
Four years before Rosa Parks ignited the Montgomery Bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat in Alabama, there was PFC Sarah Keys from the Keyesville neighborhood of Washington, NC, who when traveling from Fort Dix in NJ back home to Washington, NC on August 1, 1951, was told to relinquish her seat to a white Marine and move to the back of the bus.
Keys refused to move, whereupon the driver emptied the bus, directed the other passengers to another vehicle, and barred Keys from boarding it. When Keys asked why she shouldn’t ride the bus, she was arrested, and spent 13 hours in a cell. Keys was eventually ordered to pay a $25 fine for disorderly conduct, was released, and put on a bus to her hometown. Her case was brought before the Interstate Commerce Commission with Dovey Johnson Roundtree as her lawyer and wasn’t settled until 1955. In Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, the ICC favored Keys, ruling the Interstate Commerce Act forbids segregation.
Paschal Beverly Randolph (October 8, 1825 – July 29, 1875) was an American medical doctor, occultist, spiritualist, trance medium, and writer. He is notable as perhaps the first person to introduce the principles of erotic alchemy to North America, and, according to A. E. Waite, establishing the earliest known Rosicrucian order in the United States.
He was a free black man, a descendant of William Randolph.
I know yall some colonized coli Christians but Black men in this country been on a different wave spiritually. See Bishop C.H Mason.
Eunice Carter was born 1899 in Atlanta, Georgia. Carter graduated from Fordham Law School in 1932 and went on to become an Assistant District Attorney for New York County. She is best remembered for her key role in prosecuting Charlie "Lucky" Luciano. She spearheaded the investigation that proved the mob was running New York City's brothels, and organized the sting that led to Luciano's arrest and prosecution. Carter remained at the District Attorney's Office until 1945, and then went into private practice. She was active with the YWCA, the National Council of Negro Women, and the United Nations.
On August 22, 1843, Henry Highland Garnet, who was a militant abolitionist and early proponent of Black Nationalism, made his monumental “Call to Rebellion” speech at the National Negro Convention. His speech called upon enslaved people of African descent to violently overthrow the system of enslavement by advocating, “Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this and the days of slavery are numbered.”
Mary Wallace, the first female bus driver in Chicago, 1974.
One of the reasons John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln was because Booths slave owner cousin was killed trying to recapture one of his runaways slaves outside of Philadelphia. The family petitioned the govt to help but were ignored. The black man was never captured and fled to Canada untouched with the help of Quakers.
