The 23rd ANNUAL Dr. MARTIN LUTHER , JR. HOLIDAY in Hawai’I

2011, International Year for People of African Descent

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition-Hawaii www.mlk-hawaii.com 1988-2011

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition – Hawai`i 2011 Officers: Patricia Anthony ...... President Lee Gordon ...... 1st Vice President Juliet Begley ...... Secretary William Rushing ...... Treasure

Co-Sponsor: City & County of Honolulu,

Event Chairs: Candlelight Bell Ringing Ceremony: Marsha Joyner & Rev. Charlene Zuill Parade Chairs: William Rushing & Pat Anthony Unity Rally: Jewell McDonald Vendors: Juliet Begley Webmaster : Lee Gordon

Coalition Support Groups:

African American Association Hawaii Government Employees Association Hawaii National Guard Hawaii State AFL-CIO Hawaiian National Communications Corporation Headquarters US Pacific Command ‘Olelo: The Corporation for Community Television Kapa Alpha Phi Fraternity State of Hawai`i United Nations Association of Hawaii – Hawaii Division Military University of Hawaii Professional Assembly

Booklet Editor: Marsha Joyner Copyright: Hawaiian National Communications Corporation, 2011. All rights reserved. Message from Mayor

2 Mayor’s Message

3 Table of Contents Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition – Hawai`i 2011 ...... 1 Table of Contents...... 4 THE DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. COALITION – HAWAI’I...... 7 Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution...... 10 Justice is Indivisible ...... 12 James Arthur Baldwin ...... 14 Literary career...... 14 Social and political ...... 15 Inspirations ...... 16 Legacy ...... 16 The Martin Luther King You Don't See On TV...... 18 - A stalwart of the ...... 22

Langston Hughes ...... 36 The Women of the Civil Rights Movement...... 37 Women had key roles in Civil Rights Movement...... 38 Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry ...... 41 Madame C.J. Walker ...... 42 Remembering ...... 46 (Rackley) ...... 49 Evangeline Jennings Hall ...... 50 Dorie Ann Ladner...... 51 Carole Simpson's Network Battle Scars ...... 53 Carlotta Walls LaNier...... 56 Azira Gonzalez Sanchez Hill...... 57 Audrey Grevious ...... 58 Victoria Jackson Gray Adams...... 59 ...... 60 Naomi King...... 61 ...... 62 Katie Booth...... 63 Katherine Elizabeth Butler Jones ...... 64 Juanita Jackson Mitchell...... 65 Race & The Tea Party ...... 67

4 2011, International Year for People of African Descent

"My People":

“The night is beautiful, So the faces of my people. The stars are beautiful, So the eyes of my people Beautiful, also, is the sun. Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.”

Langston Hughes

5 The History of Martin Luther King Day It took 15 years to create the federal Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday. Congressman , Democrat from , first introduced legislation for a commemorative holiday four days after King was assassinated in 1968. After the bill became stalled, petitions endorsing the holiday containing six million names were submitted to Congress.

Conyers and Rep. , Democrat of New York, resubmitted legislation each subsequent legislative session. Public pressure for the holiday mounted during the 1982 and 1983 civil rights marches in Washington.

Congress passed the holiday legislation in 1983, which was then signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. A compromise moving the holiday from Jan. 15, King's birthday, which was considered too close to Christmas and New Year's, to the third Monday in January helped overcome opposition to the law. National Consensus on the Holiday

A number of states resisted celebrating the holiday. Some opponents said King did not deserve his own holiday—contending that the entire civil rights movement rather than one individual, however instrumental, should be honored. Several southern states include celebrations for various Confederate generals on that day. Arizona voters approved the holiday in 1992 after a tourist boycott. In 1999, New Hampshire changed the name of Civil Rights Day to Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

MLK Holiday Timeline

1968 - Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated; Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., introduces legislation for federal holiday to commemorate King 1973 - Illinois is first state to adopt MLK Day as a state holiday 1983 - Congress passed, President Reagan signed, legislation creating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 1986 - Federal MLK holiday goes into effect 1987 - Arizona governor Evan Mecham rescinds MLK Day as his first act in office, setting off a boycott of the state. 1988 - Hawaii Passes legislation adopting Holiday 1989 - State MLK holiday adopted in 44 states 1991 - The NFL moves the 1993 Super Bowl site from Phoenix, Ariz., to Pasadena, Calif., because of the MLK Day boycott. 1992 - Arizona citizens vote to enact MLK Day. The Super Bowl is held in Tempe, Ariz. in 1996. 1993 - For the first time, MLK Day is held in some form—sometimes under a different name, and not always as a paid state holiday—in all fifty states. 1999 - New Hampshire becomes the last state to adopt MLK Day as a paid state holiday, replacing its optional Civil Rights Day. 2000 - Utah becomes the last state to recognize MLK Day by name, renaming its Human Rights Day state holiday. becomes the last state to make MLK Day a paid holiday for all state employees. Until now, employees could choose between celebrating it or one of three Confederate-related holidays.

6 THE DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. COALITION – HAWAI’I

2011 is the 23rd anniversary of the Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday in Hawai`i. The Celebration has grown a lot over these years. The Holiday was officially proclaimed by the state legislature to be the 3 rd Monday of January. Beginning January 16, 1989. During the heady days of the 80s when the state had lots of money the Martin Luther King commission was formed by the state. The interim commission was formed July 1, 1989 to June 30 1990. Then a permanent commission was formed. The State of Hawai`i Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission, (with commissioners from many different ethnic groups), won National awards for its scope and depth of the holiday celebrations. In 1995 as the state’s money dried up the commission was sunset. The remaining money was transferred to the Civil Rights Commission.

To continue the work of the Commission, The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Coalition was incorporated in 1995 by a group of dedicated African-American residents of Honolulu. The coalition is a non-profit organization, which performs many community service events that carry on Dr. King's principles of peace for all mankind. To assist the fledging organization in 1996 the Civil Rights Commission stepped in with financial aid and expertise.

Since that time the Coalition has coordinated the Holiday and other community events, which grow larger every year. At the request of Mayor Jeremy Harris, since 1998 the City & County of Honolulu has been the co-sponsor of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday.

7

There is a powerful poem by the young man who was only in his twenties when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Carl Wendell Hines. Long after the long-searching bullet had finally located King, Hines wrote,

“Now that he is safely dead Let us praise him build monuments to his glory sing hosannas to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes: They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. And besides, it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”

Congratulations, Your dedication and volunteering efforts are making a better world.

8 2011, International Year for People of African Descent

On 18 December 2009, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the year beginning on 1 January 2011 The International Year for People of African Descent

The Year aims at strengthening national actions and regional and international cooperation for the benefit of people of African descent in relation to their full enjoyment of economic, cultural, social, civil and political rights, their participation and integration in all political, economic, social and cultural aspects of society, and the promotion of a greater knowledge of and respect for their diverse heritage and culture.

9

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

You have read the little story by Washington Irving entitled "Rip Van Winkle." The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years. But there is another point in that little story that is almost completely overlooked. It was the sign in the end, from which Rip went up in the mountain for his long sleep.

When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign had a picture of King George the Third of England. When he came down twenty years later the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George Washington—and looking at the picture he was amazed—he was completely lost. He knew not who he was.

This reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history—and Rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep

Yes, he slept through a revolution. And one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “We are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation. I must say that racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame”.

“It is an unhappy truth that is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic.”, Dr. King continued.

“We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.”

Now in the 21 st Century, we refer to basic human rights like the freedom of speech and association, liberty, and equal treatment in court as civil rights, because they

10 are fundamental rights that each and every citizen should not be denied on the basis of their sex, race, or religious belief.

History has also shown that gay people have always been discriminated against. Not only were gay people denied of equal treatment in court ("de jure"), but they also have been victims of violence and harassment in our own society on the base of their sexual orientation ("de facto").

Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, homosexuals (of all races’) in America began to organize themselves and to fight for the equality and the justice they did not have yet. With the rise of gay rights activists, gay-rights opponents appeared, and the issue about homosexuals' rights turned into a controversial, legal battle, which today is still fought however, we have witnessed the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.

“Why is she writing Gays in relationship to the Martin Luther King, Jr Holiday, you ask?

Well I’ll tell you! Some of the stalwarts of the Civil Rights Movement were gays & lesbians. People who we perceive are not like us cannot be excluded from our history. We who have been discriminated in every form possible cannot pretend that gays & lesbians are not a vital part of our revolution.

No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution.

John Donne wrote: "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." And he goes on toward the end to say, "Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through this great revolution.

11 Justice is Indivisible

“For too long, our nation has tolerated the insidious form of discrimination against this group of Americans, who have worked as hard as any other group, paid their taxes like everyone else, and yet have been denied equal protection under the law.... I believe that freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. My husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

On another occasion he said, “ I have worked too long and hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concern. Justice is indivisible.” Like Martin, I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others .

So I see this bill as a step forward for freedom and human rights in our country and a logical extension of the Bill of Rights and the civil rights reforms of the 1950’s and ‘60’s. The great promise of American democracy is that no group of people will be forced to suffer discrimination and injustice. - , remarks, press conference on the introduction of ENDA, Washington, DC, June 23, 1994.

Make Room At The Table for Lesbian and Gay People

Coretta Scott King, speaking four days before the 30th anniversary of her husband's assassination, said Tuesday the civil rights leader's memory demanded a strong stand for gay and lesbian rights.

"I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice," she said. "But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'" "I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people, " she said. - Reuters, 31, 1998

12

"History does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do."

-

13 James Arthur Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist.

Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved

When Baldwin was an infant, his mother, Emma Berdis Joynes, moved to Harlem, New York, where she married a preacher, David Baldwin, who adopted James. The family was poor, and James and his adoptive father had a tumultuous relationship. James Baldwin attended the prestigious DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the school magazine together with . At the age of 14, he joined the Pentecostal Church and became a Pentecostal preacher.

When he was 17 years old, Baldwin turned away from his religion and moved to Greenwich Village, a neighborhood, famous for its artists and writers. Here, he studied at The New School, finding an intellectual community within the university. Supporting himself with odd jobs, he began to write short stories, essays, and book reviews, many of which were later collected in the volume Notes of a Native Son (1955).

During his teenage years in Harlem and Greenwich Village, Baldwin began to recognize his own homosexuality. In 1948, disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and homosexuals, Baldwin left the United States and departed to Paris, France. His flight was not just a desire to distance himself from American prejudice. He fled in order to see himself and his writing beyond an African American context and to be read as not "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer".Also, he left the United States desiring to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and flee the hopelessness that many young African American men like himself succumbed to in New York.

In Paris, Baldwin was soon involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank. His work started to be published in literary anthologies, notably Zero , which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by . He would live as an expatriate in France for most of his later life. He would also spend some time in Switzerland and Turkey. During his life and after it, Baldwin would be seen not only as an influential African American writer but also as an influential exile writer, particularly because of his numerous experiences outside of the United States and the impact of these experiences on Baldwin's life and his writing.

Literary career

14 Baldwin with Shakespeare by Allan Warren

In 1953, Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , an autobiographical bildungsroman, was published. Baldwin's first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two years later. Baldwin continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.

Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room , stirred controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin was again resisting labels with the publication of this work: despite the reading public's expectations that he would publish works dealing with the African American experience, Giovanni's Room is exclusively about white characters. Baldwin's next two novels, Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone , are sprawling, experimental works dealing with black and white characters and with heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual characters. These novels struggle to contain the turbulence of the 1960s: they are saturated with a sense of violent unrest and outrage. Baldwin's lengthy essay Down at the Cross (frequently called The Fire Next Time after the title of the book in which it was published) similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. The essay was originally published in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while Baldwin was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights movement. The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. Baldwin's next book-length essay, No Name in the Street , also discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically the assassinations of three of his personal friends: , , and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Baldwin's writings of the 1970s and 1980s have been largely overlooked by critics. The assassinations of black leaders in the 1960s, 's vicious homophobic attack on Baldwin in Soul on Ice, and Baldwin's return to southern France contributed to the sense that he was not in touch with his readership. Always true to his own convictions rather than to the tastes of others, Baldwin continued to write what he wanted to write. His two novels written in the 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk and , placed a strong emphasis on the importance of black families, and he concluded his career by publishing a volume of poetry, Sonny's Blues , as well as another book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen , which was an extended meditation inspired by the Child Murders of the early 1980s. [

Social and political activism After his return to the United States from France and a subsequent trip to the South in 1962, Baldwin aligned himself more closely with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to locations like Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King Jr..

15 At this time, Baldwin threw himself into the civil rights movement. In 1963, along with prominent figures like and and other civil rights figures, Baldwin met with then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to discuss the moral implications of the civil rights movement. Although most of the attendees of this meeting left feeling "devastated," was an important one in voicing the concerns of the civil rights movement and it provided exposure of the civil rights issue not just as a political issue but also as a moral issue. Baldwin also made a prominent appearance at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, also with Belafonte, as well as with long time friends and Marlon Brando

Inspirations One source of support came from an admired older writer Richard Wright, whom he called "the greatest black writer in the world". Wright and Baldwin became friends for a short time and Wright helped him to secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin titled a collection of essays Notes of a Native Son , in clear reference to Wright's novel Native Son . However, Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" ended the two authors' friendship because Baldwin asserted that Wright's novel Native Son, like 's Uncle Tom's Cabin , lacked credible characters and psychological complexity. However, during an interview with Julius Lester, Baldwin explained that his adoration for Wright remained: "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself".

Another major influence on Baldwin's life was the African-American painter Beauford Delaney. In The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin describes Delaney as "the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow".

Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist and civil rights activist . Together with Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin was responsible for making Simone aware of the civil rights movement that was forming at that time to fight racial inequality. He also provided her with literary references that influenced her later work. Baldwin also had an influence on the work of the French painter Philippe Derome, whom he met in Paris at the beginning of the 1960s.

Maya Angelou called Baldwin her "friend and brother", and credited him for "setting the stage" for the writing of her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings .

Legacy Baldwin's influence on other writers has been profound: edited the Library of America two volume editions of Baldwin's fiction and essays, and a recent collection of critical essays links these two writers.

16 In 1987, Kevin Brown, a photo-journalist from Baltimore, founded the National James Baldwin Literary Society. The group organizes free public events celebrating Baldwin's life and legacy. In 1992, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, established the James Baldwin Scholars program, an urban outreach initiative, in honor of Baldwin, who taught at Hampshire in the early 1980s. The JBS Program provides talented students of color from underserved communities an opportunity to develop and improve the skills necessary for college success through coursework and tutorial support for one transitional year, after which Baldwin scholars may apply for full matriculation to Hampshire or any other four-year college program.

In 2002, scholar listed James Baldwin on his list of 100 Greatest . In 2005 the USPS created a first-class postage stamp dedicated to him which featured him on the front, and on the back of the peeling paper had a short biography. One of Baldwin's richest short stories, "Sonny's Blues", appears in many anthologies of short fiction used in introductory college literature classes.

Early on December 1, 1987 (some sources say late on November 30 Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

17 The Martin Luther King You Don't See On TV By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In

18 his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

As 1995 gets underway, in this nation of immense wealth, the and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it's no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon are syndicated columnists and authors of Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits ( Courage Press).

19 Lifelong civil rights activist the Reverend was born in Memphis, , on January 31, 1925. At an early age, Hooks was inspired to excel in his education, largely due to the influence of his grandmother. She was the second black woman in the United States to graduate from college. Hooks' education took him to LeMoyne College in Tennessee from 1941 to 1943 . That year, he transferred to and joined the Army, where he guarded Italian prisoners of war. Graduating from Howard in 1944 , he went to DePaul University in Chicago for his J.D., completing the program in 1948 .

Facing racism everywhere he went, Hooks began to fight to change the problems. He returned to Memphis after law school and set up his own practice, quickly establishing a reputation for himself. After joining the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , Hooks was ordained as a minister in 1956 and began preaching in addition to his duties as a lawyer. In 1965 , after a few failed election bids, Hooks was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Tennessee criminal court judicial bench, becoming the first African American to serve on the criminal court in Tennessee. Never one to slow down, Hooks also produced several television shows in the area, and his support of President Richard Nixon brought about his appointment as the first African American on the Federal Communications Commission in 1972 . When he left the FCC , he was almost immediately voted in to serve as the executive director of the NAACP , where he served from 1977 until 1992 . In the early 1990s, Hooks and his family were among the targets of a series of racially motivated bombings. This, combined with the difficult task of managing an organization the size of the NAACP, led him to retire. Following his departure from the NAACP, Hooks taught at Fisk University as a professor of social justice.

In recent years, the University of Memphis established the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, which houses symposia and archives on civil rights. Hooks has been the recipient of several honorary degrees and human rights awards, and has been honored by Congress. He and his wife, Frances , were married in 1951 , and together they have one child. Hooks passed away on April 15, 2010 .

20 2011, International Year for People of African Descent

Angel Wings- Laverne Ross

On 18 December 2009, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the year beginning on 1 January 2011 The International Year for People of African Descent The Year aims at strengthening national actions and regional and international cooperation for the benefit of people of African descent in relation to their full enjoyment of economic, cultural, social, civil and political rights, their participation and integration in all political, economic, social and cultural aspects of society, and the promotion of a greater knowledge of and respect for their diverse heritage and culture.

21 Bayard Rustin- A stalwart of the Civil Rights Movement

Bayard Rustin (March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was a Civil Rights Activist, important largely behind the scenes in the civil rights movement He is credited as the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

He was a close friend to/and counseled Martin Luther King, Jr. on the techniques of . He became an advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian causes in the latter part of his career. Homosexuality was criminalized at the time, which made him a target of suspicion and compromised some of his effectiveness.

Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Janifer and Julia Rustin. Julia Rustin was a Quaker, although she attended her husband's African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was also a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). NAACP leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and were frequent guests in the Rustin home. With these influences in his early life, in his youth Rustin campaigned against racially discriminatory .

After completing an activist training program conducted by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Rustin moved to Harlem in 1937 and began studying at City College of New York. There he became involved in efforts to defend and free the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men in Alabama who were accused of raping two white women. He joined the Young Communist League in 1936. Soon after coming to New York City, he became a member of Fifteenth Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

Rustin was an accomplished tenor vocalist, which earned him admissions to both Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College with music scholarships. In 1939 he was in the chorus of a short-lived musical that starred . Blues singer was also a cast member, and later invited Rustin to join his band, "Josh White and the Carolinians". This gave Rustin the opportunity to become a regular performer at the Café Society nightclub in Greenwich Village, which widened his social and intellectual contacts.

Evolving affiliations The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was originally a strong supporter of the civil rights movement for African Americans. In 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin ordered the CPUSA to abandon civil rights work and focus supporting U.S. entry into World War II. Disillusioned, Rustin began working with anti-Communist Socialists such as A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and A. J. Muste, leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR).

The three of them proposed a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the armed forces. They cancelled the march after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (the Fair Employment Act), which banned discrimination in defense industries and federal

22 agencies. Rustin traveled to California to help protect the property of Japanese Americans, who had been imprisoned in internment camps. Impressed with Rustin's organizational skills, Muste appointed him as FOR's secretary for student and general affairs.

In 1942, Rustin assisted two other staffers, George Houser and James L. Farmer, Jr., and activist Bernice Fisher as they formed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rustin was not a direct founder but was "an uncle of CORE," Farmer and Houser said later. CORE was conceived as a pacifist organization based on the writings of . It was modeled after Mohandas Gandhi's non-violent resistance against British rule in India.

As declared pacifists, Rustin, Houser, and other members of FOR and CORE were arrested for violating the Selective Service Act. From 1944 to 1946, Rustin was imprisoned in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where he organized protests against segregated dining facilities. During his incarceration, Rustin also organized FOR's Free India Committee. After his release from prison, he was frequently arrested for protesting against British colonial rule in India and Africa. Just before a trip to Africa while college secretary of the FOR, Rustin recorded a 10" LP for "Fellowship Records." He sang and Elizabethan songs, accompanied on the harpsichord by Margaret Davison. [from liner notes, Fellowship Records 102] Influence on the Civil Rights Movement

Rustin and Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. This was the first of the Freedom Rides to test the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel ( v. Commonwealth of ). The NAACP opposed CORE's Gandhian tactics. Participants in the Journey of Reconciliation were arrested several times. Arrested with Jewish activist Igal Roodenko, Rustin served twenty-two days on a chain gang in North Carolina for violating Jim Crow laws regarding segregated seating on public transportation.

In 1948, Rustin traveled to India to learn techniques directly from the leaders of the Gandhian movement. The conference had been organized before Gandhi's assassination earlier that year. Between 1947 and 1952, Rustin met with leaders of Ghana's and Nigeria's independence movements.

Rustin and Cleveland Robinson of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 7, 1963

In 1951, he formed the Committee to Support South African Resistance, which later became the American Committee on Africa. In 1953, Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California for homosexual activity. Originally charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pleaded guilty to a single, lesser charge of "sex perversion" (as consensual sodomy was officially referred to in California then) and served 60 days in jail. This was the first time that his homosexuality had come to public attention. He had been and remained candid about his sexuality, although homosexuality was still criminalized throughout the United States. After his conviction, he was fired from FOR. He became the executive secretary of the War Resisters League.

23 Rustin served as an unidentified member of the American Friends Service Committee's task force to write "Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence,"published in 1955. This was one of the most influential and widely commented upon pacifist essays in the United States. Rustin had wanted to keep his participation quiet, as he believed that his known sexual orientation would be used by critics as an excuse to compromise the 71-page pamphlet when it was published. It analyzed the Cold War and the American response to it and recommended non-violent solutions.

Rustin took leave from the War Resisters League in 1956 to advise Martin Luther King Jr. on Gandhian tactics. King was organizing the public transportation boycott in Montgomery, Alabama known as the .

The following year, Rustin and King began organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Many African-American leaders were concerned that Rustin's sexual orientation and past Communist membership would undermine support for the civil rights movement. U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who was a member of the SCLC's board, forced Rustin's resignation from the SCLC in 1960 by threatening to discuss Rustin's morals charge in Congress. Although Rustin was open about his sexual orientation and his conviction was a matter of public record, the events had not been discussed widely outside the civil rights leadership.

When Rustin and Randolph organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a "Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual." He produced an FBI photograph of Rustin talking to King while King was bathing, to imply that there was a same-sex relationship between the two. Both men denied the allegation of an affair. Despite King's support, NAACP chairman did not want Rustin to receive any public credit for his role in planning the march.

Rustin, 1965 He did become quite well-known. After the March on Washington, Rustin organized the New York City School Boycott. When Rustin was invited to speak at the University of Virginia in 1964, school administrators tried to ban him, out of fear that he would organize another school boycott there. After passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, Rustin advocated closer ties between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party and its labor activist base. He was the founder of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, and a regular columnist for the AFL-CIO newspaper. He wrote an influential article called "From Protest to Politics." Staughton Lynd, another civil rights activist, responded with an article entitled, "Coalition Politics or Nonviolent Revolution?" In the early years, Rustin supported President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy. As the war escalated and began to supersede Democratic programs for racial reconciliation and labor reform, Rustin returned to his pacifist roots. The new generation in the burgeoning movement accused Rustin of being a "sell out". He rejected its identity politics, although he liked to point out that he wore an early "Afro" style haircut.

During the early 1970s Rustin served on the board of trustees of the University of Notre Dame. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a human rights and election monitor for 24 Freedom House. He also testified on behalf of New York State's Gay Rights Bill. In 1986, he gave a speech "The New Niggers Are Gays," in which he asserted, Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new "niggers" are gays. . . . It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. . . . The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.

Rustin speaks with civil rights activists before a demonstration, 1964

Legacy Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities (formerly Humanities High School and Charles Evans Hughes High School), located in the Chelsea section of New York City, was named for him. Bayard Rustin High School is located in his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Bayard Rustin Library at the Affirmations Gay/Lesbian Community Center in Ferndale, Michigan. Bayard Rustin Social Justice Center in Conway, Arkansas. Biographical feature of Bayard Rustin in the movie Out of the Past ,

In July 2007, with the permission of the Estate of Bayard Rustin, a group of San Francisco Bay Area African American LGBT community leaders formed the Bayard Rustin LGBT Coalition (BRC), to promote greater participation in the electoral process, advance civil and human rights issues, and promote the legacy of Mr. Rustin.

Great men and women have too often been erased from the history books for being minorities or deviants in some way or another. Bayard Rustin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s friend and adviser, should be commended for his selfless, important role in the Black civil rights movement. May he never be forgotten again!

Rustin died on August 24, 1987, of a perforated appendix. An obituary in reported, "Looking back at his career, Mr. Rustin, a Quaker, once wrote: 'The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.'"

25

26

“When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” Bayard Rustin

“[Bigotry's] birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.” Bayard Rustin

27 James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best-known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "Harlem was in vogue".

Ancestry and childhood Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and her husband James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). Both parents were mixed race, and Langston Hughes was of African American, European American and Native American descent. He grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Both his paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African American, and both his paternal and maternal great-grandfathers were white: one of Scottish and one of Jewish descent. Hughes was named after both his father and his grand-uncle, John Mercer Langston who, in 1888, became the first African American to be elected to the United States Congress from Virginia. Hughes' maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attend , she first married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixed race. He joined the men in 's Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 and died from his wounds.

In 1869 Mary Patterson Leary married again, into the elite, politically active Langston family. Her second husband was Charles Henry Langston, of African American, Native American, and Euro-American ancestry. He and his younger brother John Mercer Langston worked for the abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.

Charles Langston later moved to Kansas where he was active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for African Americans. Charles and Mary's daughter Caroline Mercer Langston was the mother of Langston Hughes. Hughes' father left his family and later divorced Carrie. He went to Cuba, and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.

After the separation of his parents, while his mother travelled seeking employment, young Langston was raised mainly by his maternal grandmother Mary Patterson Langston in Lawrence, Kansas. Through the black American oral tradition and drawing from the activist experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in the young Langston Hughes a lasting sense of racial pride. He spent most of childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. After the death of his grandmother, he went to live with family friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. Because of the unstable early life, his childhood was not an entirely happy one, but it was one that heavily influenced the poet he would become. Later, Hughes lived again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois, who had remarried when he was still an adolescent, and eventually in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school. The Hughes' home in Cleveland was sold in foreclosure in 1918; the 2.5- story, wood-frame house on the city's east side was sold at a sheriff's auction in February for $16,667. While in grammar school in Lincoln, Illinois, Hughes was elected class poet. Hughes stated in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype that African Americans have rhythm. "I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows,

28 except us, that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet." During high school in Cleveland, Ohio, he wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, "'When Sue Wears Red", was written while he was still in high school. It was during this time that he discovered his love of books. From this early period in his life, Hughes would cite as influences on his poetry the American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg.

Relationship with father and Columbia Hughes had a very poor relationship with his father. He lived with his father in Mexico for a brief period in 1919. Upon graduating from high school in June 1920, Hughes returned to live with his father, hoping to convince him to provide money to attend . Hughes later said that, prior to arriving in Mexico again: "I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much.

Initially, his father had hoped for Hughes to attend a university abroad, and to study for a career in engineering. On these grounds, he was willing to provide financial assistance to his son. James Hughes did not support his son's desire to be a writer. Eventually, Hughes and his father came to a compromise and Hughes would study engineering, so long as he could attend Columbia. His tuition provided, Hughes left his father after more than a year of living with him. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice within the institution, and his interests revolved more around the neighborhood of Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry. .

Adulthood Hughes worked various odd jobs, before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a temporary stay in Paris.

During his time in England in the early 1920s, Hughes became part of the black expatriate community. In November 1924, Hughes returned to the U. S. to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. Hughes again found work doing various odd jobs before gaining white-collar employment in 1925 as a personal assistant to the historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Not satisfied with the demands of the work and its time constraints that limited his writing, Hughes quit to work as a busboy in a hotel. It was while working as a busboy that Hughes would encounter the poet Vachel Lindsay. Impressed with the poems Hughes showed him, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet. By this time, Hughes' earlier work had already been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry. The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, a historically black university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. There he became a member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, a black fraternal organization founded at Howard University in Washington, D.C. , who later became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was an alumnus and classmate of Langston Hughes during his undergraduate studies at Lincoln University. 29

Hughes earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929. He then moved to New York. Except for travels to the Soviet Union and parts of the Caribbean, Hughes lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life. Some academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to , whose work Hughes cited as another influence on his poetry. Hughes' story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and queerness. To retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted.

Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African-American men in his work and life. However, Rampersad denies Hughes' homosexuality in his biography as well. Rampersad comes to the conclusion that Hughes was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships. He did, however show a respect and love for his fellow white man (and woman). Still, others argue for Hughes' homosexuality: his love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover. Death On May 22, 1967, Langston Hughes died from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer leading to the auditorium named for him within the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The design on the floor covering his cremated remains is an African cosmogram titled Rivers . The title is taken from the poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Hughes. Within the center of the cosmogram and precisely above the ashes of Hughes are the words My soul has grown deep like the rivers .

Career First published in The Crisis in 1921, the verse that would become Hughes' signature poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", appeared in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues in 1926: Hughes' life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s alongside those of his contemporaries, , Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas, who, collectively (with the exception of McKay), created the short-lived magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists . in The Weary Blues (1926) Hughes and his contemporaries were often in conflict with the goals and aspirations of the black middle class, and of those considered to be the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain LeRoy Locke, whom they accused of being overly fulsome in accommodating and assimilating eurocentric values and culture for social equality. A primary expression of this conflict was the former's depiction of the "low-life", that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata and the superficial divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. Hughes wrote what would be considered the manifesto for him and his contemporaries published in The Nation in 1926,

30

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.

Hughes was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé, and he didn’t go much beyond the themes of black is beautiful as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths. His main concern was the uplift of his people, of whom he judged himself the adequate appreciator, and whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience. Thus, his poetry and fiction centered generally on insightful views of the working class lives of blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind," Hughes is quoted as saying. Therefore, in his work he confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality. An expression of this is the poem "My People":

The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes, 1934 Moreover, Hughes stressed the importance of a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate that united people of African descent and Africa across the globe and encouraged pride in their own diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Langston Hughes was one of the few black writers of any consequence to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, such as Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. With Senghor and Césaire and other French- speaking writers of Africa and of African descent from the Caribbean like René Maran from Martinique and Léon Damas from French Guiana in South America, the works of Hughes helped to inspire the concept that became the Négritude movement in France where a radical black self- examination was emphasized in the face of European colonialism. Langston Hughes was not only a role model for his calls for black racial pride instead of assimilation, but the most important technical influence in his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.

In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter , won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. The protagonist of the story is a boy named Sandy whose family must deal with a variety of struggles imposed upon them due to their race and class in society in addition to relating to one another. Hughes's first collection of short stories came in 1934 with The Ways of White Folks . These stories provided a series of vignettes revealing the humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks. Overall, these stories are marked by a general pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935.

31 The same year Hughes established his theater troupe in Los Angeles, his ambition to write for the movies materialized when he co-wrote the screenplay for Way Down South . Further hopes by Hughes to write for the lucrative movie trade were thwarted because of racial discrimination within the industry. Through the black publication Chicago Defender, Hughes in 1943 gave creative birth to Jesse B. Semple , often referred to and spelled Simple , the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day. He received offers to teach at a number of colleges, but seldom did. In 1947, Hughes taught at Atlanta University. Hughes, in 1949, spent three months at University of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a visiting lecturer. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, , essays, works for children, and, with the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend, , two autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander , as well as translating several works of literature into English.

During the mid− and −1960s, Hughes' popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied as his reputation increased worldwide. With the gradual advancement toward racial integration, many black writers considered his writings of black pride and its corresponding subject matter out of date. They considered him a racial chauvinist. He in turn found a number of writers like James Baldwin lacking in this same pride, overintellectualizing in their work, and occasionally vulgar.

Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race, but not to scorn it or flee it. He understood the main points of the of the 1960s, but believed that some of the younger black writers who supported it were too angry in their work. Hughes's work Panther and the Lash was posthumously published in 1967 and was intended to show solidarity and understanding with these writers, but with more skill and devoid of the most virile anger and terse racial chauvinism some showed toward whites.

Hughes still continued to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers, whom he often helped by offering advice and introducing them to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities. This latter group, including Alice Walker, whom Hughes discovered, looked upon Hughes as a hero and an example to be emulated in degrees and tones within their own work. One of these young black writers observed of Hughes, "Langston set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got from him, 'I am the Negro writer,' but only 'I am a Negro writer.' He never stopped thinking about the rest of us."

Political views Hughes, like many black writers and artists of his time, was drawn to the promise of Communism as an alternative to a segregated America. Many of his lesser-known political writings have been collected in two volumes published by the University of Missouri Press and reflect his attraction to Communism. An example is the poem "A New Song".

In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of blacks who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. The film was never made, but

32 Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. While there, he met African-American Robert Robinson, living in Moscow and unable to leave. In Turkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian polymath Arthur Koestler. Hughes also managed to travel to China and Japan before returning to the States.

Hughes' poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys. Partly as a show of support for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 Hughes traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. Hughes was also involved in other Communist- led organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. He was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. He signed a statement in 1938 supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 working to keep the U.S. from participating in World War II.

Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the persistence of discriminatory U.S. Jim Crow laws existing while blacks were encouraged to fight against Fascism and the Axis powers. He came to support the war effort and black American involvement in it after deciding that blacks would also be contributing to their struggle for civil rights at home.

Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Following his appearance, he distanced himself from Communism and was subsequently rebuked by some who had previously supported him on the Radical Left. Over time, Hughes would distance himself from his most radical poems. In 1959 his collection of Selected Poems was published. He excluded his most controversial work from this group of poems.

Stage and film depictions Hughes' life has been depicted in many stage and film productions. Hannibal of the Alps by Michael Dinwiddie and Paper Armor by Eisa Davis are plays by African-American playwrights which deal with Hughes' sexuality. In the 1989 film, Looking for Langston , British filmmaker Isaac Julien claimed Hughes as a black gay icon, Julien thought that Hughes' sexuality had historically been ignored or downplayed. In the film Get on the Bus , directed by , a black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, invokes the name of Hughes and punches a homophobic character while commenting, "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes." Film portrayals of Hughes include Gary LeRoi Gray's role as a teenage Hughes in the 2003 short subject film Salvation (based on a portion of his autobiography The Big Sea ) and Daniel Sunjata

33 as Hughes in the 2004 film Brother to Brother . Hughes' Dream Harlem , a documentary by Jamal Joseph, examines Hughes' works and environment.

Literary archives The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University holds the Langston Hughes papers (1862–1980) and the Langston Hughes collection (1924–1969) containing letters, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the life of Hughes. The Langston Hughes Memorial Library on the campus of Lincoln University, as well as at the James Weldon Johnson Collection within the Yale University also hold archives of Hughes' work.

Honors and awards 1943, Lincoln University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt.D. 1960, the NAACP awarded Hughes the for distinguished achievements by an African American. 1961 National Institute of Arts and Letters. 1963 Howard University awarded Hughes an honorary doctorate. 1973, the first Langston Hughes Medal was awarded by the City College of New York. 1979, Langston Hughes Middle School was created in Reston, Virginia. 1981, New York City Landmark status was given to the Harlem home of Langston Hughes at 20 East 127th Street by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and 127th St. was renamed Langston Hughes Place . 2002 The United States Postal Service added the image of Langston Hughes to its Black Heritage series of postage stamps. 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Langston Hughes on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Bibliography Poetry collections The Weary Blues , Knopf, 1926 Fine Clothes to the Jew , Knopf, 1927 The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations , 1931 Dear Lovely Death , 1931 Keeper and Other Poems , Knopf, 1932 Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play , Golden Stair Press, N.Y., 1932 Let America Be America Again , 1938 Shakespeare in Harlem , Knopf, 1942 Freedom's Plow , 1943 Fields of Wonder , Knopf, 1947 One-Way Ticket , 1949 Montage of a Dream Deferred , Holt, 1951 Selected Poems of Langston Hughes , 1958 Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz , Hill & Wang, 1961 The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times , 1967 34 The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes , Knopf, 1994 Novels and short story collections Not Without Laughter . Knopf, 1930 The Ways of White Folks . Knopf, 1934 Simple Speaks His Mind . 1950 Laughing to Keep from Crying , Holt, 1952 Simple Takes a Wife . 1953 Sweet Flypaper of Life , photographs by Roy DeCarava. 1955 Tambourines to Glory 1958 The Best of Simple . 1961 Simple's Uncle Sam . 1965 Something in Common and Other Stories . Hill & Wang, 1963 Short Stories of Langston Hughes . Hill & Wang, 1996 Non-fiction books The Big Sea . New York: Knopf, 1940 Famous American Negroes . 1954 I Wonder as I Wander . New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956 A Pictorial History of the Negro in America , with Milton Meltzer. 1956 Famous Negro Heroes of America . 1958 Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP . 1962 Major plays by Hughes Mule Bone , with Zora Neale Hurston. 1931 Mulatto . 1935 (renamed The Barrier, an , in 1950) Troubled Island , with William Grant Still. 1936 Little Ham . 1936 Emperor of . 1936 Don't You Want to be Free? 1938 Street Scene , contributed lyrics. 1947 Tambourines to glory . 1956 Simply Heavenly . 1957 Black Nativity . 1961 Five Plays by Langston Hughes . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Jericho-Jim Crow . 1964 Works for children Popo and Fifina, with Arna Bontemps . 1932 The First Book of the Negroes . 1952 The First Book of Jazz . 1954 Marian Anderson: Famous Concert Singer . with Steven C. Tracy 1954 The First Book of Rhythms . 1954 The First Book of the West Indies . 1956 First Book of Africa . 1964 Further reading The Langston Hughes Reader . New York: Braziller, 1958. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes . Lawrence Hill, 1973. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes . Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2001.

35 2011, International Year for People of African Descent

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers .

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I danced in the Nile when I was old I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

“"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1920)

Langston Hughes

On 18 December 2009, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the year beginning on 1 January 2011

36

Essence – Frank Morgan

The Women of the Civil Rights Movement January 24, 2004 on the SNCC list I wrote:

Aloha,

Since history is written by the "winners" and they are usually male, very little is written about All of the women and the important part they have played in our struggle. Everyone knows about and , , etc.

It was the Black women who made the most sacrifices in the bus boycott. The women who worked in the basements of the churches to move this movement along; the women who walked picket lines in the rain, mud and snow; the women who rode the freedom rides; the women who did logistics for every event; the women who did voter registration, worked in the summer of '64; women who were secretaries, receptionists who had to deal with the foul mouth whites on the phone, who did the dirty work that was not recalled, the women who are written out of the history books.

Throughout our history there have been women, the backbone of our race. I would like as many of their names as possible. It is to the workers in the vineyard who give so much and get so little that I dedicate this.

Thank you very much. MarshaRose Joyner

37 Women had key roles in Civil Rights Movement But few achieved prominence with public

There’s a Chinese saying, ’Women hold up half the world,”’ said. “In the case of the civil rights movement it’s probably three-quarters of the world.”

Ella Baker. . Fannie Lou Hamer. They and others risked their lives and worked tirelessly, demanding a social revolution — but history has often overlooked them. They were the women of the civil rights movement.

Though historians now acknowledge that women, particularly African-Americans, were pivotal in the critical battles for racial equality, Rosa Parks’ death highlights the fact that she was one of the very few female civil rights figures who are widely known. Most women in the movement played background roles, either by choice or due to bias, since being a women of color meant facing both racism and sexism.

“In some ways it reflects the realities of the 1950s: There were relatively few women in public leadership roles,” said Julian Bond, a civil rights historian at the University of Virginia and chair of the NAACP. “So that small subset that becomes prominent in civil rights would tend to be men. But that doesn’t excuse the way some women have just been written out of history.”

For many, the wives of the movement’s prominent male leaders, including Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers Williams, were among the most visible women in the struggle.

Visible, but unsung But scan historical images of the most dramatic moments of the civil rights movement — protesters blasted by fire hoses and dogs lunging at blacks — and women and girls are everywhere.

There is a 1964 image of Mississippi beautician Vera Piggy styling hair and educating her customers on voter registration. And there’s a 1963 photo of students at Florida A&M University, a historically black college, in which hundreds of people, mostly women, answer court charges for protesting segregated movie theaters. Six of the so-called , black teenagers whose lives were threatened when they integrated the Arkansas city’s high schools in 1957, were young women.

In 1955, Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., sparking a mass boycott by thousands, mainly black women domestic workers who had long filled the buses’ back seats. Immediately, black women activists who had for years urged city officials to integrate the buses rallied to her cause, said Lynne Olson, author of “Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970.”

38 The women arranged car pools and sold cakes and pies to raise money for alternate transportation. The boycott lasted more than a year until the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling in favor of four black Montgomery women who had, months before Parks, refused to comply with bus segregation.

Men took the helm Though women had spearheaded that campaign and many others, when their efforts began to bear fruit prominent men often took the helm, Olson said. “After the bus boycott got going and (Martin Luther) King got involved, they wouldn’t even let Rosa Parks speak at the first mass meeting,” she said. “She asked to speak, and one of the ministers said he thought she had done enough.”

Olson added that Parks is often depicted as a deferential woman who defied segregation laws at the urging of movement leaders, but in fact she had for years quietly pushed for racial justice — and she had carefully planned the actions that led to her arrest.

“She was not just a symbol,” Olson said. “She was an agent.”

Mrs. Parks was not the first person to challenge the segregated bus system. In March 1955 , a Black teenage girl was handcuffed and taken to jail for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Martha Kate Walker told of her blind husband’s leg was hurt when a bus driver shut a door on him and drove off. Stella Brooks said her husband had been shot to death for disobeying a bus driver. Richard Jordan said his pregnant wife had been forced to give her seat to a white woman saying “come on nigger, give me that seat”. “I remember this was a very bad year. Things happened that most people never heard about” wrote Mrs. Parks “because they were never reported in the newspaper.”

Jo Ann Robinson taught English at Alabama State College & president of the Women’s Political Council. At the risk of losing her job, Ms. Robinson drove to the College and thru the night ran off thirty-five thousand copies of a flyer, which she began to distribute with the aid of her students.

The flyers read “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit . . .Negroes have rights too . . We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the busses Monday in protest.”

In 1963, tens of thousands of women who joined the March on Washington witnessed a tribute to prominent women, songs by several women, and brief remarks by the entertainer Josephine Baker, but no woman made a speech .

Countless women in the movement could have spoken : Ella Baker was a charismatic labor organizer and longtime leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She believed the movement should not place too much emphasis on leaders.

39 Septima Poinsette Clark , often called the “queen mother” of civil rights, was an educator and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People activist decades before the nation’s attention turned to racial equality.

Fannie Lou Hamer , a Mississippi sharecropper, was beaten and jailed in 1962 for trying to register to vote. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and gave a fiery speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Vivian Malone Jones defied segregationist Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace to enroll in the in 1963 and later worked in the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department.

Still unknown But most women in the movement were not well-known then or now, said Katherine J. Kennedy, director of Boston University’s Howard Thurman Center, which organizes human rights programs on campus.

Most were “volunteers women in the churches who cooked the meals and made sure all the preparations were made, the ones who cleaned up after the rallies and got ready for the next one,” Kennedy said. “Most women who are sincerely interested in making a difference are not looking for the publicity for it. ... Making a true difference doesn’t always come with fanfare.”

Even today, Bond said most NAACP members and most local branch presidents are women.

40 Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry By Tiffany M. Gill University of Illinois Press

In Beauty Shop Politics , Tiffany M. Gill documents the central role that Black beauticians played in the struggle against Jim Crow laws. Beauty shops were one of the few industries that offered Black women some economic stability and upward mobility in the face of segregation. The industry also offered Black women a respectable alternative to domestic labor, as well as a chance to not work for White people. As political tensions rose, civil rights organizers increasingly turned to Black beauticians for disseminating social and political information.

Initially, White English and French men dominated the hair care industry. Black men slowly worked their way in, serving as hairdressers for White women, but that period was short-lived, as the stereotype of Black men as sexual predators began to emerge. During the antebellum period, Black women began to emerge as hairdressers in greater numbers; the early twentieth century saw the emergence of Black female entrepreneurs, namely Annie Malone and Madame C.J. Walker, who played an integral role in expanding Black beauty culture.

Through hard work and sheer perseverance, the women fought for beauticians to gain the respect of the general public. The women had to fight charges that they were inhibiting racial uplift, particularly because their products appeared to straighten Black women’s hair at a time when it was culturally looked down upon. Still, the women fought to have beautician courses established at Black colleges, arguing that the industry provided Black women economic stability. They also fiercely promoted themselves to the public by contributing to various philanthropic causes.

In times of economic hardship, the beauty industry offered Black women an opportunity to enter a respectable profession that entailed a steady income and entrepreneurial opportunities. On the national level, women worked to create a national organization that would legitimize their profession. In 1912, Madame Walker argued that “hairdresser” was a derogatory term, and insisted on the use of the term “beauty culturist.” With their economic and professional status now in 41 place, beauty culturists were quickly gaining a strong foothold and establishing their place within their communities.

Because the Black beauty industry was owned and supplied by Blacks, and catered to the Black community, Black beauticians had some insulation from the economic hardships that their peers faced. Thus, they were able to participate in civil rights activism without the fear of losing their jobs or their customer base. Some, for instance, established literacy schools so that their students would be able to pass voter registration tests. Others distributed information through their beauty shops, which had become central locations for community organizing. Gill also extends her research to the present day, noting how the focus has now shifted from civil rights to women’s health initiatives.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is its accessibility to a wide audience. Gill writes in a clear and engaging style that makes the book an excellent choice for a non-academic reader who is interested in the subject. She includes noted figures in Black women’s history such as Madame Walker, Annie Malone, and Septima Clark, and uses compelling anecdotes about women such as and Anne Moody, author of Coming of Age in Mississippi . Most importantly, Gill introduces the reader to a roster of lesser-known figures who also played important roles during this period. The book is an invaluable resource for women’s history and African American history scholars.

**** ***** **** ***** **** ****

Madame C.J. Walker

After the civil war, many African Americans began to straighten their hair. Madame C.J. Walker invented a system for straightening hair without the damage caused by other methods. She became the first woman millionaire in America, and donated thousands of dollars to the NAACP and similar groups. But while adults' hair was often straightened, children’s hair continued to be a place where the cornrow tradition could be carried on: "Little girls received their first simple pigtails or cornrows at Mother's or Grandmother's knee. Brushing, oiling, and braiding the hair encouraged it to grow..

42 Hands on the Freedom Plow Five of the book's six editors joined the panel-- Betty Garman Robinson , Faith Holsaert, Judy Richardson (first row, left to right) and Martha Prescod Norman Noonan (2nd row, 1st on left) and Dorothy Zellner (2nd row, on right). They spent 15 years creating HANDS on the FREEDOM PLOW, so that the real role of women in the civil rights movement can never be forgotten. They worked as a collective of three African American women and three white women to locate, nurture, contextualize, and publish the stories of 52 women who worked with SNCC. FINALLY, the women of SNCC get to speak to history on their own terms and in their own voices. This book is miraculous! --a very, very important historical document and a gift to future generations.

Here are three reasons it is so IMPORTANT that HANDS ON THE FREEDOM PLOW exists: 1) We need these stories to create an accurate historical record. As contributor historian Bernice Johnson Reagan has written, the civil rights movement was “the borning struggle” that inspired many other movements, including the women’s movement. As the civil rights movement's radical conscience, SNCC helped to end segregation, make voting rights real for African Americans, and challenge the country to genuinely end discrimination based on race and gender.

2) We need to broaden our ideas about leadership, so young people can have new role models SNCC women’s stories democratize our ideas about leadership, bringing women into sharper focus. Some women like Ella Baker stayed out of the spotlight to promote nonviolent group-centered leadership.

Others, like , was one of the few women to lead a citywide movement in Cambridge, . In one famous photograph, Richardson fiercely faces down a national guardsman pushing away the gun he has aimed at her. Richardson was among the SNCC women who believed in self-defense. HANDS showcases the political and philosophical diversity among SNCC women.

After the first buses of the 1961 Freedom Rides were violently attacked, Nashville Student Movement leader shamed the older male civil rights leaders into continuing the Freedom Rides, which helped end segregation in inter-state travel. In 1962, Diane Nash was sentenced to prison for encouraging delinquency by teaching young people about nonviolence. She chose to go to jail four months pregnant, and said, “This will be a black baby born in Mississippi and thus wherever he is born, he will be in prison. If I go to jail now it may hasten the day when my child and all children will be free.”

43 3) We need these stories for sustenance and inspiration One of the themes of HANDS and a fundamental ethic of SNCC is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. SNCC started with almost no resources but the wisdom of its elders, the brilliance of its strategists, and the courage of its front-line organizers. It invigorated and challenged the civil rights movement.

Sadly, we are not living in a post-racial, sexually egalitarian society. After this election, we need hope more than ever. These stories in HANDS on the FREEDOM PLOW can help keep alive a vision of a transformed, genuinely inclusive and compassionate society.

HAD SHE BEEN a man, Ella Baker's name might be as recognizable as Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X.

But Julian Bond, a protege of Baker's and a pioneer himself, felt that being a woman, and an outspoken one at that, nudged Baker from the head table of the movement. And it was their loss, Bond said.

The pursuit of social justice meant the real possibility of mob violence, bodily injury, and the near-constant fear that those threats inspired. Women who chose this work often deferred their education and defied their families. , the daughter of a Baptist minister from , was a recent college graduate when she joined the movement. She wrote plaintively about her commitment: “We had been warned in orientation sessions not to go into the field unless we were prepared to die.” Hall’s faith was tested in southwest , one of the most notorious and resistant sites of movement activity. Although she was shot and wounded by sniper fire, she continued her work in the movement. Her assailants were never identified or charged. Hall died before Hands was published

One of the book’s co-editors, Judy Richardson —currently a documentary film producer in Cambridge, Massachusetts—left Swarthmore College in the second half of freshman year in 1963 to go south to work for freedom in Cambridge, Maryland, then Atlanta, and later in Mississippi during 1964. Richardson is a tiny, enthusiastic, and determined woman, who, when asked what she most valued about her movement experience, cited “working as a team and consensus decision making,” valuable lessons she continues to use in her work. Only recently has Richardson understood the emotional cost of her activism for her mother, who never acknowledged her own fear or being afraid for her daughter. She did not she ask her to come home–something Richardson considers a gift, a tremendous act of restraint on her mother’s part.

Richardson’s closest friends were made in the movement, and they remain friends to this day. 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the founding of SNCC, and Richardson was there with her colleagues to mark the occasion. The anniversary conference was held this past April at Shaw 44 University in Raleigh, North Carolina, site of the organization’s founding. Attorney General , Harry Belafonte, actor Danny Glover, singer , (a founder of the group Sweet Honey in the Rock and a former Freedom Singer who contributed to this collection), were among the approximately 1,000 people who assembled for speeches, workshops, and remembrances.

Another Hands co-editor, Dorothy M. (Dottie) Zellner , joined the movement in 1960 after finishing at Queens College. A self-described daughter of leftists who at seventeen read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for pleasure, Zellner was inspired by the activism of the Greensboro student sit-ins. She went to Miami to challenge segregation in its restaurants, and for her efforts was arrested and placed in a segregated jail. “I get weepy when I think about this,” Zellner says. Like Richardson, she believes strongly in the community that arose from the movement. For her, the Civil Rights movement was “average women doing heroic things. I don’t think they sprang full-blown from the head of Zeus,” she says, adding that heroes rarely think they are heroic. Zellner, who has been an activist and writer all her life, has worked as publications manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights and at the City University of New York School of Law as director of institutional advancement and publications. She lectures frequently about her work in the Civil Rights movement. Zellner’s hope is that the stories collected in this volume will inspire others to activism. She notes that just as she grew up hearing stories of people who challenged power and braved the consequences, others may be called to action as well. She has no doubt that her colleagues in the movement share her continued sense of commitment. “No one,” she says firmly, “would not not do it again.”

Septima Poinsette Clark

The Avery Research Center for the Preservation of African-American History and Culture on the campus of the recently secured the rights to the scrapbook of Septima Poinsette Clark, an icon of the civil rights movement. The center was able to purchase the scrapbook at auction for $1,000.

Clark was born in Charleston in 1898. Septima translates into “sufficient” in the language of Haiti where her mother was reared. Septima Clark’s name greatly understated the achievements of this remarkable woman.

Clark completed high school in 1916 and took a job teaching the children of black plantation workers in a John’s Island log cabin schoolhouse. There, in place of a blackboard, students wrote their assignments on used dry-cleaner bags. Later in Charleston she organized a petition drive that resulted in a law that allowed blacks to teach in the public school system. The mother of two children, Clark received a B.A. from in 1942 at the age of 44. She earned a master’s degree from Hampton Institute in 1945. In 1956, after being dismissed from the Charleston school system for refusing to renounce her membership in the NAACP, Clark became director of workshops for the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. There, “Mama Seppie,” as she was familiarly known, became expert in nonviolent civil disobedience. In 1954, one year before the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks enrolled in Clark’s workshop on civil disobedience.

45 Clark later worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When King won the Noble Peace Prize, Clark accompanied him to Oslo, Norway, for the award ceremony. In 1975, at the age of 77, she was elected to the school board in Charleston.

Fannie Lou Hamer , known as the lady who was "sick and tired of being sick and tired," was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the granddaughter of slaves. Her family were sharecroppers - a position not that different from slavery. Hamer had 19 brothers and sisters. She was the youngest of the children. In 1962, when Hamer was 44 years old, SNCC volunteers came to town and held a voter registration meeting. She was surprised to learn that African- Americans actually had a constitutional right to vote. When the SNCC members asked for volunteers to go to the courthouse to register to vote, Hamer was the first to raise her hand. This was a dangerous decision. She later reflected, "The only thing they could do to me was to kill me, and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember."

When Hamer and others went to the courthouse, they were jailed and beaten by the police. Hamer's courageous act got her thrown off the plantation where she was a sharecropper. She also began to receive constant death threats and was even shot at. Still, Hamer would not be discouraged. She became a SNCC Field Secretary and traveled around the country speaking and registering people to vote.

Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In 1964, the MDFP challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Hamer spoke in front of the Credentials Committee in a televised proceeding that reached millions of viewers. She told the committee how African-Americans in many states across the country were prevented from voting through illegal tests, taxes and intimidation. As a result of her speech, two delegates of the MFDP were given speaking rights at the convention and the other members were seated as honorable guests. Hamer was an inspirational figure to many involved in the struggle for civil rights. She died on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59.

Dr. Dorothy Heights Civil rights leader, former National Council of Negro Women chairwoman dead at 98 Dr. Dorothy Heights always says: "We must lift as we climb because Black women know how to get it done Dorothy Height, a leading figure of the civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice spanned more than six decades,. She was 98.

Remembering Dorothy Height

46 By: Gwen Ifill I was always thoroughly intimidated in Dorothy Height's presence. It's not because she was regal or holier-than-thou. It's that she was neither of those things. And somehow, she should have been. Could easily have been.

In the news business, we typically refer to people by the title "Doctor" only if they are physicians. But for Dr. Height, I will have to make an exception. That's all any of us ever called her. And she referred to us as Miss or Mrs. as well. It would be disrespectful to stop now. Much of what was so amazing about Dr. Height was her sheer indefatigability and her grace. She may have witnessed the worst and the best of how America grappled with race and gender conflict during her near century-long life span, but she always managed to say what she had to without sounding bitter.

Instead she simply demanded what she declared was due - for women and children and African Americans. Equal pay, housing and education. She didn't mind calling herself a feminist, but she refused to fall into the trap of having others define her. She was a lady from head to toe. I never saw her head uncovered. She wore elaborate; beautiful hats everywhere - the kind with huge brims, bows and flowers that matched her suits. (The story of her life was once produced for the stage with the title "If This Hat Could Talk.") She managed to be old-fashioned, even as she demanded new-fashioned justice.

Perhaps it was that genteel, almost prim outward presence that allowed her to get audiences with presidents, and to get a seat at the civil rights table at a time when so many of the movement's other female leaders were relegated to supporting roles.

But Dr. Height had a will of steel, and this too; she passed on to the many who admired her - from and to Ronald Reagan and . The world viewed through her life experience (captured in her 2003 autobiography "Open Wide the Freedom Gates") was a remarkable one.

She won a scholarship to Barnard College for her oratorical skills, but was turned away because the school had already filled the two slots set aside for African Americans. (She went to New York University instead, graciously returning to Barnard to accept an apology and the college's medal of distinction in 1980.)

She watched "Raisin in the Sun" author Lorraine Hansberry demand an apology from Malcolm X after he criticized her for marrying a white man. She met a 15-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., who impressed her even though he was 10 years away from the Montgomery bus boycott that would catapult him onto the national stage.

When Dr. Height called, you answered. I don't know anyone who had the nerve to turn her down. And although she spent many of the final years of her life largely unable to walk, it would be inaccurate to say she was "confined" to a wheelchair. Whether it was making her way around the for the annual Black Family Reunion or ascending - yes, regally - to the stage for her Uncommon Heights fund-raising galas, she just did not stop.

47 Donna Brazile , the political analyst and activist, probably said it best when I talked to her today: "We're never going to replicate this woman, ever again in life."

**** **** ****

Bethany Norwood (1982-2006)

On January 14, 2004, Bethany Norwood, a cheerleader at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, fell during an unsupervised practice. She broke her neck in six places and was paralyzed from the neck down. The accident caused universities all over the nation to reexamine the safety of their cheerleading programs. With physical therapy Norwood slowly regained the use of her hands. Mentally tough, Norwood vowed to return to school to earn her degree. Unable to walk, Norwood’s mother quit her job in order to accompany her to classes. Norwood received her diploma in political science 2006. Norwood has died from complications due to her fall. An inspiration to the entire Prairie View University community, a scholarship has been established in her name.

48 Gloria Blackwell (Rackley) Educator and civil rights activist, was born on March 11, 1927 in Little Rock, South Carolina. Her father, Harrison Benjamin Blackwell, was a barber and her mother, Lurline Olivia Thomas Blackwell, taught at the Little Rock Colored School. Blackwell attended Mather Academy in Camden, South Carolina, graduated from high school in Sumter, South Carolina in 1943 and then enrolled in Claflin College in Orangeburg, South Carolina. There, she was a favorite of President Randolph. Blackwell volunteered for NAACP Youth and was president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. Leaving school to get married in 1944, Blackwell lived for a time in Chicago . She earned her B.S. degree in education from Claflin College in 1953 and taught in the segregated public schools of Orangeburg. In 1956, Blackwell obtained her M.A. degree in education from South Carolina State University, also in Orangeburg.

In the 1950s, Blackwell served as a recruiter for the Dillon County chapter of the NAACP. Visited often by Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins, the Dillon County NAACP chapter made school integration their top priority. Inspired by the Brown v. the Board of Education decision, Blackwell, known to history as Gloria Rackley, began to participate and lead nonviolent demonstrations to desegregate the schools, hospitals and other public accommodations. In March of 1963 , Blackwell joined more than 400 student demonstrators from Claflin College and South Carolina State University led by Charles McDew who marched to desegregate the downtown area. Supported by the community, but arrested countless times, Blackwell served time in prison and was fired from her job by white school officials in the spring of 1963. Blackwell's daughter, Lurma, an honor middle school student, was arrested some sixteen times by the time she was thirteen years old. Blackwell and her daughter missed a court date when they were arrested for using the White Ladies Only restroom in the courthouse. The civil rights activities in Orangeburg attracted national attention, including a visit from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and an invitation for Blackwell to speak to the National Teachers Union in New York City. Ably defended by Matthew Perry and encouraged by the passage of the , Blackwell accepted a job at Norfolk State University in Virginia in 1964.

At Norfolk, Blackwell served as a professor in the English Department and advised local civil rights efforts from 1964 to 1968. She was director of African American Studies at American International University from 1968 to 1970. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from in 1973 and went on to teach at Clark College until her retirement in 1993 .

Blackwell, the mother of two grown daughters and two adopted boys, lived in Peachtree City, Georgia. She was featured along with the other heroes of the Orangeburg movement in the civil rights annals of black photographer Cecil J. Williams. Blackwell passed away on December 7, 2010.

49 Evangeline Jennings Hall Civil rights activist was born September 6, 1915 , in DeLand, Florida. Her mother, Minnie Brooks Jennings, was a teacher before giving birth to her seven children. William Jennings, Hall's father, worked three jobs every day to feed his family.

Hall attended segregated schools but does not remember experiencing racial tension. She had a gift for playing the piano and served as her church's organist. Hall attended Bethune-Cookman College and, in her thirties, Hall and her husband moved to Bradenton, Florida, and separated. Discovering Bradenton was terribly prejudiced, Hall and four other activists formed the Biracial Committee with the support of Mayor A. Sterling Hall. Mayor Hall worked to end some of Bradenton's Jim Crow laws, including separate water fountains, and swore that no lynchings would occur during his administration. Even with the mayor's assistance, however, the group was largely unable to integrate business establishments.

Hall spent forty-seven years working in the insurance industry for Central Life Insurance. She became an agent and an assistant manager before becoming the company's first female African American manager. She was also the first black woman to serve as the president of the local Democratic Party. As a member of the League of Women Voters, Hall registered people to vote for many years. Mayor Hall awarded Evangeline Hall the key to the city in recognition of her accomplishments.

50 Dorie Ann Ladner Civil rights activist was born on June 28, 1942 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi . As an adolescent, she became involved in the NAACP Youth Chapter where served as advisor. Ladner got involved in the Civil Rights Movement and wanted to be an activist after hearing about the murder of Emmitt Till. After graduating from Earl Travillion High School as salutatorian, alongside her sister, Joyce Ladner , she went on to enroll at Jackson State University. Dedicated to the fight for civil rights, during their freshmen year at Jackson State, she and her sister attended state NAACP meetings with Medgar Evers and Eileen Beard. That same year, Ladner was expelled from Jackson State for participating in a protest against the jailing of nine students from Tougaloo College.

In 1961 , Ladner enrolled at Tougaloo College where she became engaged with the . During the early 1960s, racial hostilities in the caused Ladner to drop out of school three times to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ). In 1962 , she was arrested along with Charles Bracey, a Tougaloo College student, for attempting to integrate the Woolworth's lunch counter. She joined with SNCC Project Director Robert Moses and others from SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE ) to register disenfranchised black voters and integrate public accommodations. Ladner's civil rights work was exemplified when she became one of the founding members of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in Clarksdale, Mississippi (COFO), which included: NAACP, CORE, SNCC, and SCLC .

Then, in 1964 , Ladner became a key organizer in the Freedom Summer Project sponsored by the COFO. Throughout her years of working with SNCC, she served on the front-line of the Civil Rights Movement in various capacities including participating in every civil rights march between 1963 and 1968 including the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965 and the Poor People's March in 1968. She was the SNCC project director in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1964 until 1966 , and lectured at universities, churches and other institutions to raise money for the organization. In addition, Ladner was also a supporter of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement and worked in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. She went on to serve as a community organizer for the Anti Poverty Program in St. Louis, Missouri and was an advocate for civil rights in housing and employment. Ladner has also worked for the Martin Luther King Library Documentation Center to help collect the history of people who were participants in the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1973 , after her marriage and the birth of her only child, Yodit, Ladner earned her B.A. degree from Tougaloo College. In 1974 , she moved to Washington, D.C. and enrolled at Howard University School of Social Work where she earned her M.S.W. degree in 1975 . Ladner has served as a clinical social worker in both the Washington, D.C. General Emergency Room and Psychiatry Department for thirty years. Since her retirement, she has continued her work as a social activist by participating in genealogical research, public speaking, anti-war activities (marches against the war in Iraq ), traveling and volunteering in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama .

51 Eugenia Fortes Civil rights activist was born in Brava, in the Cape Verde Islands, on November 14, 1911 . Her father, Antonio, traveled to America, and Fortes had to wait until she was nine years old before being able to join her father. After a journey of thirty-one days, Fortes arrived in Whaling City, New Bedford, Massachusetts.

In 1928 , Fortes found work at the artificial pearl company in Hyannis, and two years later, became a housekeeper for a family in Hyannisport. She remained in that position for the next twenty-seven years, and in 1957 , she became a cook at a local school until her retirement in 1968 . An outspoken activist for the poor and racial equality, in 1945 , Fortes and a friend visited East Beach in Hyannisport, which was then segregated . Asked by the police to leave, Fortes refused. The following year, a group attempted to buy the beach and privatize it, but Fortes stepped forward in a town council meeting and lambasted the idea, telling of the discrimination she faced.

Fortes founded the Cape Cod chapter of the NAACP in 1961 , but by then, she was already well steeped in the Civil Rights Movement . One of the tenants who rented her cottage from her was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall , and in 1955 , Reverend Martin Luther King , Jr., spent Thanksgiving and Christmas on the island. In 1961, when the Freedom Riders came through Hyannis, Ted Kennedy came to get a report from her to be delivered to the White House. As a fighter for the poor, Fortes sent food and clothing to impoverished counties in the Deep South for twenty-five years.

Fortes was a member of the Hyannis library board of directors for forty years, and was on the United States Civil Rights Commission for fourteen years. She also received numerous awards for her civil rights work. In 2004 , the beach Fortes refused to leave in 1945, East Beach, was renamed Fortes Beach.

52 Carole Simpson's Network Battle Scars by Howard Kurtz

53 She was the first black woman hired by NBC’s D.C. bureau, and became an ABC anchor. Her new book chronicles a career marred by racist and sexist attacks. Howard Kurtz on TV’s undercovered story.

Carole Simpson got her first big break from Martin Luther King.

She was a rookie radio reporter in 1966 when she conducted an all-night stakeout of the visiting civil-rights leader, blurted out that “I’m the only Negro female reporter in Chicago” and got him to tell her why he was there (to challenge Mayor Daley—the original Mayor Daley—on segregated housing).

A drunken NBC producer told her at the Republican convention: “You think because you’re black and you’re a woman you can get anything you want. And you slut, you don’t deserve it.”

Race has always loomed large for the scrappy South Side native—larger than we knew, in fact, according to her new memoir News Lady. Simpson reveals a slew of race-related battles with ABC News, including her account that she was pushed out the door after a 25-year career.

What’s most striking about the book is that some of the most cringe-inducing incidents occurred not just in the early phase of her career, when black women were a rarity in the senior ranks of television news, but years after you would assume that the fried-chicken jokes had stopped. Even if Simpson is enlarging these episodes through the mists of memory, her anger—and sometimes her tears—shows they left an indelible mark.

Her troubles began at NBC in 1974 when she became the first black woman to work in the Washington bureau. After a long stint when she couldn’t get on the air, word got back to Simpson that she was deemed “lazy.”

“To me that was a racial epithet,” she writes. “Black people—to ignorant people—don’t want to work, are stupid, and unqualified.” After threatening to quit—and go public about the racial and gender reasons—Simpson was suddenly back on NBC Nightly News.

Two years later, a drunken NBC producer—the likely culprit for her earlier problems—told her at the Republican convention: “You think because you’re black and you’re a woman you can get anything you want. And you slut, you don’t deserve it.” Searing words that would affect anyone’s outlook on life, and yet, Simpson has to admit that she has also benefited from affirmative action.

A few pages later, recounting her decision to leave NBC, she writes: “My color and gender may have played a role in ABC’s strong interest, but I also had the experience and the skills.”

The impact of the anecdotes is blunted a bit by Simpson’s decision not to name the offenders. She reports, for instance, that she left NBC because the news division president removed her from Capitol Hill—saying he needed more "heft" on the beat—and exiled her to the Energy Department. It’s not hard to figure out that the NBC News chief in question—who was forced out soon after she left the network—was William Small. We expect hard-hitting journalists to name names.

54 Given her testy relations with management, it would be easy to label Simpson a troublemaker. In 1985, ticked off that no woman in the bureau had a top beat and that the executive ranks were all male, Simpson led a delegation that seized upon a ceremonial luncheon in New York to protest to Roone Arledge. To his credit, the news division president told her that “I never really thought about it”—but ruined the moment, for Simpson at least, by repeatedly telling her, “You are so articulate.” That is a loaded phrase for blacks, as Joe Biden learned when he used it in a clumsy attempt to compliment his 2008 campaign rival, Barack Obama.

It often seems, in this retelling, that Simpson can’t catch a break. Although she covered Vice President Bush through the 1988 primaries, she had to read in The Washington Post that she was being bounced from the campaign in favor of Brit Hume. Her consolation prize: She would anchor the Saturday edition of World News Tonight, and get a raise. But even that felt tainted: To her colleagues, Simpson writes, she got the job “because of affirmative action and my big mouth.”

Despite the book’s strong racial theme, Simpson says the sexual harassment was actually worse, describing male colleagues brushing against her breasts, pulling down a dress zipper, commenting on her butt or saying, in one case, “The way you’re looking I could fuck you on the spot.”

Simpson’s professional high point was moderating a 1992 presidential debate between Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, and Bush (whom she liked although “I personally didn’t care for his policies”). She got some hate mail afterward, some of it using the N-word.

Her low point was when the network suspended her for two weeks for telling a luncheon, after the 2001 anthrax attacks, that an ABC producer had been hospitalized with a case of suspected poisoning; the information was not public and Simpson misstated one of the facts. The next year, ABC refused to extend her as an anchor, offering instead a contract as a roving ambassador to work with young people. She signed, left in 2005, and now teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

Interestingly, Simpson is bringing out the book through the self-publishing firm AuthorHouse. She says she began sending her proposal to literary agents before leaving ABC. “All of them turned me down over a three-year period and said things like, ‘it wasn't sexy enough,’ ‘I could get sued and publishers are fearful of that,’ and similar rejections… I think there was concern about the people and institutions I criticized.” So she decided to do it herself.

Despite the setbacks, slights, and outright racism, Simpson had a remarkably successful career. The obstacles she faced have not entirely disappeared; there are still no black hosts in primetime cable news, and the only African American to have broken the barrier on the network evening newscasts, Max Robinson, was part of an ABC triumvirate in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

A more insidious legacy lingers as well. There are black journalists who are promoted too quickly for racial reasons; some survive and others sink. There are also tremendously talented African Americans who don’t deserve the whispers that accompany their rapid rise, and still others who can’t get a crack at jobs for which they’re well qualified.

55

Carlotta Walls LaNier the oldest of three daughters, was born on December 18, 1942 , in Little Rock, Arkansa to Juanita and Cartelyou Walls. LaNier made history as the youngest member of the Little Rock Nine , the nine courageous African American students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957 . The world watched as these children and their families braved constant intimidation and threats. This defiant act followed the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education .

Inspired by Rosa Parks and the desire to get the best education available, LaNier enrolled in Central High School. White students called her names and spat on her and armed guards escorted her to classes, but LaNier concentrated on her studies and protected herself throughout the school year. Governor Orval Faubus stopped the public schools from opening in September of 1958 , and after a year of closure and controversy, the schools re-opened in 1959 . LaNier returned to Central High, graduating in 1960 .

LaNier attended Michigan State University for two years before moving with her family to Denver. In 1968 , she earned a B.S. from Colorado State College (now the University of Northern Colorado) and began working at the YWCA as a program administrator for teens. In 1977 , she founded LaNier and Company, a real estate brokerage company. Her experience in real estate extends from constructing and remodeling properties to marketing and selling them. Cherry Creek Realtors hired her in 1987 .

LaNier was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1958. She has been a member of the Colorado Aids Project, Jack and Jill of America, the Urban League and the NAACP, as well as the president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation, a scholarship organization dedicated to ensuring equal access to education for African Americans. She has also served as a trustee for the Iliff School of Theology. In 1999 , President Bill Clinton bestowed the nation's highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the members of the Little Rock Nine. In 2009 , LaNier completed her book, A Mighty Long Way , a biography with forward by Bill Clinton. LaNier and her husband, Ira (Ike) LaNier, have two children, Whitney and Brooke.

56 Azira Gonzalez Sanchez Hill was born in Holguin, Cuba on October 28, 1923 to a large working class family of eight siblings. As a young woman, Hill worked diligently as a student to provide opportunities that would enable her to flourish outside of Cuba. She was afforded the opportunity because of academic achievement to come to the United States to study through her church. Hill is referred to as, "Atlanta 's Angel" because of her work as a civil rights activist and nurse.

Hill attended Bethune Cookman, Morris Brown, and Grady Hospital School of Nursing, and received her registered nurse licensing from the State of Georgia. Hill married Jesse Hill, a prominent civil rights figure. She is the mother of two daughters and is close to many in the civil rights struggle, including the late, Coretta Scott King. Her record of service in Atlanta as a civil rights activist is renowned. She supported her husband's work at the All Citizen Registration committee and became a registrar. Hill attended many meetings for the integration of Georgia's public schools and the University of Georgia.

Hill worked as a nurse at Grady Hospital Educational Department, Price High School, and Middle School. Hill is currently retired and remains an active member of Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church , the Azalea Links, Inc., the Inquirer Literary Club, the Circlelets, and the Quettes. She is the founder and life board member for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Talent Development Program, which named a scholarship fund in her honor. Hill also formerly served on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King , Jr. Center's Board of Advisors. She is also on the Board of Directors of the Center for Puppetry Arts, the Southeastern Flower Show, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and St. Joseph's Mercy Care. She formerly served on the NAACP and the Fulton County Art Council.

Hill has received awards from the Association of the National Negro Musicians for promoting Black music and musicians, and the Martin Luther King Federal Commission for her service. She also received the Golden Rule Award for community service from J.C. Penny, the Ralph Bunche Middle School Medal, the School Nurses Association for Merit and Distinction, the Lexus Leader of the Arts Award, and a Mercy Care Award for Service.

57 Audrey Grevious social activist was born in Lexington, Kentucky , in 1930 and has remained there most of her life. After graduating from Dunbar High School, she attended Kentucky State University in Frankfort, earning a B.A. in elementary education, and later earned a master's in administration from Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond.

After graduating, Grevious first taught at, and later became principal of Kentucky Village, a state reformatory for delinquent boys. Following the closing of the school, she taught in Fayette County Public Schools, where she remained until she retired. More than a teacher, Grevious also became active with the NAACP in the late . She also became active with the Congress on Racial Equality ( CORE ). As the civil rights movement heated up, Grevious rose to become the president of the Lexington chapter of the NAACP while her friend and vice president Julia Lewis became the president of CORE. The two brought the two organizations together, organizing protests , pickets and sit-ins, and successfully and peacefully achieved their objectives. This marked the first time that the NAACP and CORE had worked together, as ideological differences at the national level had previously kept the groups apart.

Over the years, Grevious has remained involved with the NAACP. Since her retirement, she has become involved in a number of organizations. She currently serves on the board of directors of The Humanitarium, an organization devoted to celebrating diversity. She is also a member of the board of the Community Reinvestment Housing Project, which provides counseling to first-time homebuyers, a member of the board and the former president of Kentucky Tech, and the secretary of her church, Pilgrim Baptist. She is also the president of the Elder Crafters, an organization of senior citizens who make crafts. As a group, they enjoy bowling, and Grevious' home is filled with trophies from the sport

58 Victoria Jackson Gray Adams was born Victoria Jackson on November 5, 1926 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi . Her mother died when Adams was just three years old, and she was raised on her paternal grandparents' farm. In 1945 , she earned her high school diploma from Depriest Consolidated School and went on to attend Wilberforce University from 1945 until 1946 , but had to return home to Mississippi when the family could no longer afford tuition.

Despite not having a degree, Adams was able to find work as a teacher in Mississippi. This led to her civil rights activities when she began teaching voter registration classes in the early 1960s. In 1962 , Adams became a full time civil rights activist when she became field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ). Her efforts would enable her to lead a boycott against Hattiesburg businesses and prepare the city for Freedom Summer 1964 . Although married with three small children, Adams helped organize the alternative Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party(MFDP). In 1964, Adams, along with fellow activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Annie Devine, were chosen as the national spokespersons for the MFDP and attended the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Although they were not seated, their efforts did lead to the Democratic Party integrating its ranks. In 1968 , the three women were seated guests on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Adams was also the first woman to run for national office in Mississippi. In 1968, Adams left the country with her second husband and moved to Thailand where she continued to fight against racism and discrimination against African American soldiers and their families.

Adams has received numerous awards and honors for her activism. She was featured in the award-winning documentary and several books. She was active in the SCLC and several other human rights organizations. Adams was also an adjunct professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Adams passed away on August 12, 2006 at the age of 79.

59 Patricia Stephens Due has been a lifelong civil rights activist. For over forty years, she has been steadfast in her commitment to the modern civil rights movement and in teaching younger generations about the history of the Black freedom struggles during the second half of the 20th century. Due was the leading force in the nation's first "Jail-In", as a college student at Florida A&M University in 1960 , she chose a jail cell rather than paying a fine for sitting at the "Whites Only" lunch counter at a Woolworths store in Tallahassee, Florida.

Due was born on December 9, 1939 in Quincy, Florida to Lottie Mae Powell Stephens and Horace Walter Stephens. She was a middle child of three. Her sister, Priscilla, was born in 1937 and her brother Walter in 1941 . Her childhood years were spent in an area of Quincy called St. Hebron (a rural family community) and in Miami and Belle Glade in southern Florida. At age thirteen, she and her sister defied segregationist laws in Quincy when they stood in the line at a Dairy Queen marked WHITE ONLY, ignoring the COLORED WINDOW. Due graduated from high school in Belle Glade and entered Florida A&M University (FAMU) in Tallahassee in the fall of 1957 .

During the summer of 1959 , Due and her sister attended an interracial workshop on non-violent civil disobedience sponsored by CORE The Congress of Racial Equality . After that, she organized FAMU students and led her sister and five others in a lunch counter sit-in. Thus began Due's life- long commitment to the civil and human rights struggles of black Americans.

In 1963 , Patricia Stephens married FAMU law student, John D. Due, Jr., a prominent civil rights attorney. In 1964 , Due was selected by CORE to serve as Field Secretary for the organization's first voter education and registration project in North Florida. Due's North Florida CORE Project registered more Blacks than any other region of the South.

Due continued to be involved with protest marches and boycotts after her successful voting rights work. Although, she was suspended several times from FAMU for her activism, her speaking and fund-raising tours also interfered with her studies. Due did not receive her degree until 1967.

60 Naomi King Civil rights activist was born in Dothan, Alabama , on November 17, 1931 to a single mother, Bessie Barber. Her mother, a cook in a prominent Atlanta home, taught her social graces. King, educated in Atlanta public schools, excelled in French and English. As a young woman, King was often selected by local clothing stores as a preferred fashion model, at times featured in shop windows. King and her mother belonged to the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King , Sr. served as senior pastor. At the church, King became acquainted with the pastor's children, and she caught the eye of his youngest son, Alfred Daniel Williams King, Sr., affectionately known as A.D.

In 1949 , King entered Spelman College , where she spent a year studying French before marrying A.D. Williams King, Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and youngest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., in 1950 . She later attended the University of Alabama and studied interior design. She would have five children: Alfred D.W. King III; ; Esther Darlene King; Reverend Vernon King of Charlotte, North Carolina ; and Reverend Derek B. King of Indianapolis, Indiana . King lived most of her life as a mother and . She brought musical concerts, women's enrichment programs, and tools for living to her husband's congregations. Together, she and her husband supported Martin Luther King, Jr., when, in 1955 , Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama; at the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ( SCLC ) in 1957 ; when students in Greensboro, North Carolina, launch the sit-in movement in 1960 ; through the of 1963 ; during 1963's "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom"; and throughout 1965 's campaign to vote in Selma. Toward the end of the campaign in Birmingham, on May 11, 1963, a bomb destroyed the Gaston Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was staying, and another damaged the home of Naomi and A.D. King.

On April 4, 1968 , Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee . This tragedy was soon followed by the death of King's husband, A.D., in 1969 ; on July 21, King and her children were vacationing in Nassau when A.D. mysteriously drowned in their home swimming pool. On July 30, 1974 , King's mother-in-law, Alberta Christine Williams King, was murdered by deranged gunman Marcus Chenault as she played the Lord's Prayer at Ebenezer Church. In 1976 , King's younger daughter, Darlene died while jogging from an apparent heart attack, and ten years later, her son Al died in the same manner. In 1984 , King's father-in-law, Martin Luther King, Sr., passed away from a heart attack, and in 2006 , she lost her sister-in-law, Coretta Scott King, to advanced stage ovarian cancer. Despite these losses, King has kept her husband's memory alive through her establishment of the A.D. King Foundation in 2008 . She received the SCLC Rosa Parks Freedom Award in January 2008 and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Living Legend Award in 2009

61 Marian Wright Edelman founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, was born on June 6, 1939 , in Bennettsville, South Carolina . Edelman was the youngest of five children and credits her father with instilling in her an obligation to right wrongs. When African Americans in Bennettsville were not allowed to enter city parks, her father built a park for African American children behind his church.

Edelman is a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School. While working as director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi , she became the first African American female admitted to the Mississippi Bar. She also became nationally recognized as an advocate for Head Start at this time. In 1968 , Edelman moved to Washington, D.C., and subsequently became counsel to the Poor People's Campaign organized by Dr. Martin Luther King , Jr. She founded the Washington Research Project, where she lobbied Congress for child and family nutrition programs and expanding Head Start. In 1973 , the Washington Research Project became the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), the United States' leading advocacy group for children. As president of the CDF, Edelman has worked to decrease teenage pregnancy, increase Medicaid coverage for poor children and secure government funding for programs like Head Start.

Edelman has served as director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University and is the first African American female on the board of Yale University. Edelman has written many articles and books, including the autobiographical New York Times bestseller, The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours . Edelman's awards include the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award, the Ella J. Baker Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.

62 Katie Booth Civic activist and biomedical chemist was born on May 23, 1907 , in Gulfport, Mississippi. Booth developed an early passion for chemistry but had access to few resources to pursue her interest. In 1929 , Booth was part of the first class of blacks to graduate from high school in her hometown, receiving her degree from the Gulfport School for Coloreds; later that year she moved to Arkadelphia, Arkansas, to work for the Presbyterian Board of Education. Booth later received a scholarship to study at Philander in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she earned a basic education degree in 1940.

At the outbreak of World War II, Booth moved north to Chicago to work in the war industry; she took a job as a chemist at Doeh-Jarvis, a die casting company, and took classes at the Damen Institute of Technology, where she received a degree in industrial chemistry after the war. After earning her degree, Booth took a job in the Department of Pharmacology at the Chicago Medical School, researching preventative health measures. Few women worked in chemistry at the time, making Booth a trailblazer in her field; she was keenly interested in children's health and prenatal care, and also worked on treatments for sickle cell anemia.

In the 1970s Booth retired from chemistry, but remained an active civic leader on Chicago's West Side. Since the 1940s, Booth had served as chairperson of the West Side YWCA, and held the position until after her professional retirement. Booth was also one of the first members of the Chicago Housing Board's West Side District, and served as chairperson of the board of Sears Roebuck for the West Side area. In the 1960s, Booth worked with Operation PUSH and cautioned civil rights leaders against fragmenting following Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death. During the 1980s, Booth helped a voter registration drive that led to the election of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor.

In the 1990s, Booth returned home to Magnolia Grove, the subdivision of Gulfport where she had been an original resident. Staying active into her nineties, Booth worked to expand the Magnolia Grove Community Center and its children's programming; in recognition of her work, the facility was renamed the Katie Patterson Booth Community Center in May 2003.

Katie Booth was married during World War II to Robert Booth. Eight years later he died from his war injuries. They had no children. Booth passed away on August 26, 2006.

63 Katherine Elizabeth Butler Jones was born on March 19, 1936 , the only child of Meme, a hairdresser, and Theodore, a postal clerk. Jones grew up at 409 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem 's Sugar Hill neighborhood, an address that W.E.B. DuBois , Walter White, Thurgood Marshall , and Madame St. Clair also called home. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1957 with a B.A. in economics and sociology and married Hubie Jones later that year. After working as a teacher in the Boston Public Schools, Katherine became a mother to Karen in 1959 . Daughters Lauren, Renee, Lisa, Cheryl, and Tanya, and sons Harlan and Hamilton would follow.

In 1961, she and her husband bought a home in Newton, Massachusetts , where only two realtors would show a house to a black family. They subsequently became active in the Newton Fair Housing and Equal Rights Committee.

In 1964 , Jones served as a founding director of the Roxbury/Newton Freedom School, an after- school program. In 1966 , she founded the Newton Public Schools' Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunities (METCO) Program, which still enrolls students of color from Boston in Newton schools. She served as METCO's director through 1976 .

In 1967 , Jones received her M.A. in Urban Education at Simmons College, and continued to promote integration by working for the Cambridge and Boston Public Schools during Boston's turbulent desegregation efforts in the late 1970s. Jones was elected to the Newton School Committee in 1978 for the first of four terms, making history as the first successful African American candidate. In 1980 , she earned her Ed.D. in Administration and Social Policy from Harvard University .

In 1989 , Jones discovered that black abolitionist Bishop Henry Highland Garnet had certified her great-great grandparents' 1843 marriage. Upon further investigation, she found that her great- grandfather, Edward Weeks, brought slaves to Canada through an Underground Railroad station in the Adirondacks, where he had purchased land for a dollar from abolitionist . Edward named his homestead Timbucto, and John Brown moved to the area to support the settlers. Jones has shared this research in multiple museum exhibits and journal articles. In 1996 , she received the New England PEN Discovery Author Award for her historical writing. In 2002 , she co-authored The Civil Rights Movement in Newton, 1960 -1980 . Jones has also taught pedagogy and African American history at Simmons College, Wheelock College, and Boston University. She is currently working on her memoir, Deeper Roots: An American Odyssey . An excerpt, "409 Edgecombe Avenue, Baseball and Madame St. Clair," was published in 's The Harlem Reader in 2003 and inspired a play that was staged in Boston in 2004 .

The Joneses live in Newton and have five grandchildren.

64 Juanita Jackson Mitchell was the first black female to practice law in Maryland. That is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the extraordinary life this woman led. Born on January 2, 1913 in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

In 1938 she married Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. who was known nationally for being a civil rights activist, being dubbed "the 101st Senator. Mitchell was the mother of two Maryland State Senators and the grandmother of a third. She was the daughter of Dr. Lillie Jackson, who was also a major civil rights leader and who also was president of the NAACP Baltimore branch and was known as “Mother of Freedom.” Juanita Jackson Mitchell came from a long line of civil activists and continued the line. She was the mother of former state senators Michael B. Mitchell and Clarence M. Mitchell, III. Her grandson, Keiffer J. Mitchell, Jr., was a member of the Baltimore City Council and ran for Mayor of Baltimore in 2007.

In her earlier years, Mitchell traveled extensively throughout the U. S. for the Bureau of Negro Work and the Methodist church, speaking and teaching courses in race relations. From 1935 to 1938, she was special assistant to Walter White, NAACP Executive Secretary, serving as National Youth Director. There she organized and developed programs for the organization's Youth and College Division. Mitchell was the president of Maryland’s NAACP Baltimore City branch when she advocated for Baltimore school desegregation and after the case in 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education, she was a major campaigner for making Maryland the first southern state to have integration. She also filed many other cases to desegregate numerous other aspects of segregated life including restaurants, parks and swimming pools. Mitchell also ran voter registration drives in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s to help influence and rally African Americans in Baltimore to vote.

Mitchell was also recognized in the political arena for being a crusader and leader. She was named to the White House Conference on "Women and Civil Rights" by John F. Kennedy and in 1966 she was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the White House Conference “To Fulfill These Rights” which dealt with finding solutions concerning African Americans in relation to economic security, education and justice. In 1987 Mitchell was inducted, along with her mother, into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame. The NAACP has also recognized Juanita Jackson Mitchell for her accomplishments and has created a “Juanita Jackson Mitchell Award for Legal Activism” to honor her feats as a black woman in the legal field.

Mitchell taught in Baltimore high schools. She was special assistant to Walter White and was the National Youth Director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Committed to teaching and inspiring Maryland youth, Mitchell founded the Baltimore City-Wide Young People's Forum in 1931, and the NAACP Youth Movement in 1935. In 1942, she directed a march on Maryland's Capitol with 2,000 citizens as well as the first citywide "Register and Vote" campaign. The campaign resulted in 11,000 new voter registrations on the books. In 1958, she directed the NAACP's "Register to Vote" campaign, which resulted in over 20,000 new registrations.

65 Over the years, Mitchell fought discrimination in the courts. She served as counsel in suits to eliminate segregation in municipal recreation facilities, restaurants and public schools in Baltimore City and other jurisdictions in Maryland. She also advocated the prevention of mass searches of private homes without warrants. The school desegregation suits, championed by Mitchell, made Maryland the first southern state to integrate its school system after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

Juanita Mitchell was rendered a quadriplegic in November 1989 after falling down a flight of stairs. While undergoing therapy for that injury, she suffered a stroke, her second since 1985; she was 79. Juanita Jackson Mitchell died in Baltimore of a heart attack and stroke in July 1992

NOTE: Mitchell is credited with filing the suits that made Maryland the first southern state to desegregate its school system after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Along with Thurgood Marshall and two other black attorneys representing the NAACP, Mitchell filed a lawsuit that led to the acceptance of two black teenagers into the Baltimore City School, Mergenthaler (Mervo) School of Printing. She also filed a suit that integrated Baltimore's Western High School.

Mrs. Mitchell was a friend of my family and in 1954 she made it possible for me to be one of the first “colored girls” to attend Western High School in Baltimore. Also my former husband, Bud German, was one of the two teenagers to attend Baltimore City School, Mergenthaler in 1953.

Being one of the first to attend an integrated school was not fun – and that is another story. MarshaRose

66 Race & The Tea Party

Pulitzer-Prize winning historian has written about the way history and myth-making impede progress.

“Race is a powerful engine of dangerous myth in American history. To some degree, it is today: a lot of the Tea Party animus is undigested 1960’s resentment that people are called upon to act outside their comfort level with people from different backgrounds and races, and that government is forcing them to do this. And this is why they don’t like the government. And because it is subliminal and emotional, it’s not ever said directly. A fantasy is being fed to them: that if it weren’t for the government, they could be totally comfortable, would be wealthy and not have problems. It has a lot of a success-church mythology sprinkled with an awful lot of federal-government-is-the-instrument-of-scary-minorities-and- foreigners, and to that degree that kind of mythology. Some of those same people are totally blind to all the benefits – even to the white southerners – that the Civil Rights movement brought to them”.

Taylor Branch (born January 14, 1947, in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American author and historian best known for his award-winning trilogy of books chronicling the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and some of the history of the American civil rights movement. The third and final volume of the 2,912- page trilogy collectively called America in the King Years

67 MAHALO TO THE Co-Sponsor: City & County of Honolulu

MAYOR’S OFFICE OFFICE OF CULTURE & THE ARTS MANAGING DIRECTOR OFFICE ROYAL HAWAIIAN BAND DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION SERVICES EMERGENCY SERVICES DEPARTMENT HONOLULU TRANSIT SERVICES, INC. “THEBUS” HONOLULU POLICE DEPARTMENT PARKS AND RECREATION DEPARTMENT REFUSE DEPARTMENT

The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition-Hawai`i www.mlk-hawaii.com January 2011

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