Category: Civil Rights Activists

January 11 1961- Hamilton Holmes And Charlayne Hunter

GM – FBF – It is incumbent upon all of us to build communities with the educational opportunities and support systems in place to help our youth become successful adults.

Remember – Is Georgia going to go down in history as another Alabama or Missassippi or are you going to do the right thing. – Charlayne Hunter

Today in our History – January 11, 1961 – The 1961 desegregation of the University of Georgia by Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter is considered a defining moment in civil rights history, leading to the desegregation of other institutions of higher education in Georgia and throughout the Deep South. When the two students walked on to North Campus on January 9 to register for classes, the event marked the culmination of a legal battle that had begun a decade earlier when Horace Ward unsuccessfully sought admission to the law school. Holmes and Hunter were represented by a legal team headed by Atlanta civil rights attorney Donald Hollowell and Constance Baker-Motley of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. They were joined by Ward, who had earned his law degree at Northwestern, and by Vernon Jordan, a young Atlantan who had just graduated from Howard University Law School.

Holmes and Hunter had both attended all-black Turner High School in Atlanta where Holmes had been valedictorian, senior class president, and co-captain of the football team. Hunter had finished third in her graduating class, had edited the school paper, and had been crowned Miss Turner. Nevertheless, for a year and a half university officials gave a variety of reasons for denying their applications. While the court fight was being waged, the two students started their college careers at other institutions: Holmes at Morehouse and Hunter at integrated Wayne State University in Detroit.

On January 6, 1961, federal judge William Bootle handed down his finding that “the two plaintiffs are fully qualified for immediate admission” and “would already have been admitted had it not been for their race and color.”

On Monday, January 9, as the two students arrived on North Campus, they were met by a crowd of reporters and fellow students, the latter chanting “Two-four-six-eight! We don’t want to integrate!” Still, relative calm prevailed until the third evening after their arrival, when a mob of students descended on Myers Hall, where Hunter resided. The crowd hurled bricks and bottles before finally being dispersed by Athens police, who arrived with tear gas, and Dean of Men William Tate, who waded into the crowd demanding student IDs.

Later that night, Holmes and Hunter were escorted back to Atlanta by state troopers. They were informed by Dean of Students J. A. Williams that he was withdrawing them from UGA “in the interest of your personal safety and for the safety and welfare of more than 7,000 other students at the University of Georgia.” The riot and the suspension decision sparked an outcry, and more than 400 faculty members immediately signed a resolution calling for the return of Holmes and Hunter to campus. Within days, a new court order brought them back. Research more about this event in our history and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

December 26 1849 – David Ruggles

GM – FBF – Our story today is about an African-American abolitionist in Manhattan, New York who resisted slavery by his participation in a Committee of Vigilance and the Underground Railroad to aid fugitive slaves reach free states.

He was a printer in New York City during the 1830s, who also wrote numerous articles, and “was the prototype for black activist journalists of his time.” He claimed to have led more than 600 fugitive slaves to freedom in the North, including Frederick Douglass, who became a friend and fellow activist.

He is also credited with opening the first African American bookstore in the United States. Did you know those things? Enjoy!

Remember – “A man is sometimes lost in a dust of his own raising” – David Ruggles

Today in our History – December 26, 1849 – David Ruggles dies.

David Ruggles (March 15, 1810 – December 26, 1849) was an African-American abolitionist in Manhattan, New York who resisted slavery by his participation in a Committee of Vigilance and the Underground Railroad to aid fugitive slaves reach free states. He was a printer in New York City during the 1830s, who also wrote numerous articles, and “was the prototype for black activist journalists of his time.” He claimed to have led more than 600 fugitive slaves to freedom in the North, including Frederick Douglass, who became a friend and fellow activist. Ruggles is also credited with opening the first African American bookstore in the United States.

Ruggles was born free in Lyme, Connecticut in 1810. His parents were David, Sr. and Nancy Ruggles, both free blacks. The family moved to Norwich, when David was very young and set up home in Bean Hill, a wealthy suburb. They lived in a small hut owned by his maternal aunt, Sylvia. His father David Sr. was a blacksmith and woodcutter, while his mother Nancy was a noted caterer, whose cakes were sought after for local social events. They were devout Methodists. David was the oldest of eight children. He was educated at Sabbath Schools, and was so bright that Bean Hill residents paid for a tutor from Yale to teach him Latin.

In 1826, at the age of sixteen, Ruggles moved to New York City, where he worked as a mariner before opening a grocery store. Nearby, other African-Americans ran grocery businesses in Golden Hill (John Street east of William Street), such as Mary Simpson (1752-March 18, 1836). After 1829, abolitionist Sojourner Truth (born Isabella (“Bell”) Baumfree; c. 1797 – November 26, 1883) also lived in lower Manhattan. At first, he sold liquor, then embraced temperance. He became involved in anti-slavery and the free produce movement. He was a sales agent for and contributor to The Liberator and The Emancipator, abolitionist newspapers.

After closing the grocery, Ruggles opened the first African American-owned bookstore in the United States. He edited a New York journal called The Mirror of Liberty, and also published a pamphlet called The Extinguisher. He also published “The Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment” in 1835, an appeal to northern women to confront husbands who kept enslaved black women as mistresses.

Ruggles was secretary of the New York Committee of Vigilance, a radical biracial organization to aid fugitive slaves, oppose slavery, and inform enslaved workers in New York about their rights in the state. New York had abolished slavery and stated that slaves voluntarily brought to the state by a master would automatically gain freedom after nine months of residence. On occasion, Ruggles went to private homes after learning that enslaved blacks were hidden there, to tell workers that they were free. In October 1838, Ruggles assisted Frederick Douglass on his journey to freedom, and reunited Douglass with his fiance Anna Murray.

Rev. James Pennington, a self-emancipated slave, married Murray and Douglass in Ruggles’ home shortly thereafter. Douglass’ autobiography ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’ explains “I had been in New York but a few days, when Mr. Ruggles sought me out, and very kindly took me to his boarding-house at the corner of Church and Lespenard Streets.
Mr. Ruggles was then very deeply engaged in the memorable Darg case, as well as attending to a number of other fugitive slaves, devising ways and means for their successful escape; and, though watched and hemmed in on almost every side, he seemed to be more than a match for his enemies.”

Ruggles was especially active against “kidnappers,” bounty hunters who made a living by capturing escaped slaves. With demand high for slaves in the Deep South, there was also risk from men who kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery, as was done to Solomon Northup of Saratoga Springs, New York in 1841. With the Vigilance committee, Ruggles fought for fugitive slaves to have the right to jury trials and helped arrange legal assistance for them.

His activism earned him many enemies. Ruggles was physically assaulted and his business was destroyed through arson. He quickly reopened his library and bookshop. There were two known attempts to kidnap him and sell him into slavery in the South. His enemies included fellow abolitionists who disagreed with his tactics. He was criticized for his role in the well-publicized Darg case of 1838 involving a Virginia slaveholder named John P. Darg and his slave, Thomas Hughes.

Ruggles suffered from ill health, which intensified following the Darg case. In 1841, his father died, and Ruggles was ailing and almost blind. In 1842, Lydia Maria Child, a fellow abolitionist and friend, arranged for him to join a radical utopian commune called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, in the present-day village of Florence, Massachusetts.

Applying home treatment upon hydropathic principles, he regained his health to some degree, but not his eyesight. He began practicing hydrotherapy, and by 1845, had established a “water cure” hospital in Florence. This was one of the earliest in the United States. Joel Shew and Russell Thatcher Trall (R.T. Trall) had preceded him in using this type of therapy. Ruggles died in Florence in 1849, due to a bowel infection. Research more about this great American and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

22Dec

December 22 1924- Arthur A. Fletcher

GM – GBF – Today’s story is about a person who was called the “Father of affirmative action,” who headed the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in the 1990s and advised four Republican presidents had many Kansas ties.

Remember – “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” – Arthur A. Fletcher

Today in our History – December 22, 1924 – Arthur A. Fletcher was born.

Arthur A. Fletcher organized his first civil rights protest at the Junction City Junior/Senior High School in 1943: he refused to allow his high school picture and those of the other African American students in his class to appear at the back of the school yearbook. He Fletcher continued to fight for civil rights by devising and implementing strategies to move America’s social culture to one of inclusion. He served under two U.S. presidents, in government positions at all levels, as head of nonprofit organizations, and was the highest-ranking African American official in President Richard Nixon’s administration.

Born in 1924 in Phoenix, Arizona, the Fletcher family moved frequently until Fletcher graduated from high school in Junction City, Kansas. Fletcher graduated from Washburn University, Topeka, with a degree in political science and sociology. Football was Fletcher’s sport and he excelled on Washburn’s team before joining the Los Angeles Rams in 1950. He went on to play for the Baltimore Colts as their first African American team member. Following a short stint on a Canadian football team, Fletcher retired from the sport and turned his attention to social change.

Fletcher’s political career began in Kansas where he worked on Fred Hall’s campaign for governor in 1954. His first position in state government was with the Kansas Highway Commission. By learning how government contracts were awarded, Fletcher encouraged African American business to compete.

In 1969 President Nixon appointed Fletcher to the post of assistant secretary of wage and labor standards in the Department of Labor. Here he developed and administered the “Philadelphia Plan” to enforce equal employment and opportunity for minority businesses pursuing government-funded contracts. Fletcher believed that without economic security all of the social gains made by African Americans would be meaningless. Later Fletcher was appointed by President Gerald Ford as deputy advisor of Urban Affairs. Here Fletcher became known as the father of the Affirmative Action Enforcement Movement.

In 1972, following his career with the federal government, Fletcher took the position of executive director of the United Negro College Fund and helped coin the phrase “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Fletcher later operated a business that trained companies to comply with the governmental equal opportunity regulations. He died July 12, 2005 in Washington, D.C. Research more about black people who served in government and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

14Dec

December 14 1859- John Brown

GM – FBF – Today, I want to take you back to a time where our ancestors were still in bondage. It looked like all of the work that Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Processor and Nat Brown wasn’t working to assist our people from obtaining freedom. This man would go down in American History as the one who will start the civil war and using the slave as the centerpiece. Enjoy!

Remember – “I want you to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed [to deny other the rights or liberty] by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone” John Brown

Today in our History – December 14, 1859 – The U.S. Senate appointed a bipartisan committee to investigate the Harpers Ferry raid and to determine whether any citizens contributed arms, ammunition or money to John Brown’s men. The Democrats attempted to implicate the Republicans in the raid; the Republicans tried to disassociate themselves from Brown and his acts.

John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut, on May 9, 1800. His father, Owen Brown, was an early abolitionist who was accused in 1798 of forcibly freeing slaves belonging to a clergyman from Virginia. He spent most of his youth in Hudson, Ohio, where he worked mainly for his father and developed skills as a farmer and tanner.

He married the widow Dianthe Lusk in 1820, and had seven children by her. Within a year of her death in 1832, he married again and had 13 more children. He experienced inconsistent results in business, trying his hand at sheep raising, farming, tanning, and the wool trade. From 1849 to 1854, he lived in a black community near North Elba, New York. With tensions rising in Kansas following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Brown sent his five sons – all thoroughly indoctrinated as abolitionists – westward while he attempted to settle his debts.

Brown, driving a wagonload of guns, later joined his sons in Kansas. Proclaiming himself the servant of the Lord, Brown led an attack in the spring of 1856, that resulted in the murders of five proslavery settlers. The incident became known as the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre. This event was part of widespread violence then occurring in Bleeding Kansas.

Brown’s uncompromising stand against slavery won him numerous supporters in the North, where many abolitionists were frustrated by their lack of progress. In particular, encouragement and financial support were extended by the “Secret Six,” a group of influential New England aristocrats. With their help, Brown was able to establish a base in western Virginia where he hoped to spark a general slave rebellion in the South.

His raid on the U.S. Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859, was part of that plan. With a band of 18 men, 13 white and 5 black, Brown seized the town. A number of persons died during the raid. He expected that slaves would join his “army of emancipation” as it continued further into slave-holding territory, but the support did not materialize.

By the following night, federal troops commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee reached the town and surrounded the raiders. Brown would not surrender, so they were attacked. Two of Brown’s sons died in the fighting and Brown himself was seriously wounded. He was taken to Charles Town, then in Virginia and now in West Virginia, where he was tried on charges of inciting a slave insurrection, murder and treason.

After conducting his own defense, he was convicted, and hanged on December 2, 1859. Research more about this American hero and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

29Nov

November 29 2000- Marvel Cooke

GM – FBF – Today’s story is close to my heart because journalism is what I studied in school. The Black woman that we honor today was one of the best. Enjoy!

Remember – “ People of color need all of the things and opportunity that the white culture enjoys.” – Marvel Cooke

Today in our History – November 29, 2000: Marvel Cooke passed away, aged 97. She was a pioneering American journalist, writer, and civil rights activist. She was the first African-American woman to work at a mainstream white-owned newspaper.

*On this date in 1903, Marvel Cooke was born. She was an African American journalist, writer, and civil rights activist.
From Mankato, Minnesota, Marvel Jackson Cooke was the daughter of Amy Wood Jackson and Madison Jackson. Her family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1907 and in 1925, Jackson graduated from the University of Minnesota at the age of 22. When she got out of college, she moved to Harlem in New York City and was hired as editorial assistant at the Crisis, the NAACP publication. Jackson then went to the Amsterdam News where she was secretary to the women’s editor and a general assignment reporter.

While at the Amsterdam News, Jackson helped organize the first Newspaper Guild unit at a Black-owned newspaper while being the first woman reporter in the Amsterdam News’ 40-year history. She broke her engagement to Roy Wilkins and soon Married Cecil Cooke, internationally famous athlete. The Cookes moved to Greensboro, North Carolina where Marvel taught history, English and Latin in the high school department of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College. Moving back to New York City she returned to the Amsterdam News.

In 1935, she was part of the successful eleven-week Guild strike against the newspaper. She then became assistant managing editor at the People’s Voice, a Harlem-based weekly owned by Adam Clayton Powell.

“I was part of the Bronx Slave Market long enough to experience all the viciousness and indignity of a system which forces women to the streets in search of work,” she once said. Her five-part series for the Daily Compass on the abuse suffered by black domestic workers was a result of this research. Cooke also worked as a reporter and feature writer at the Compass, a short-lived white-owned New York City daily newspaper where she was the first black woman to work at a mainstream white-owned newspaper and the only Black and the only woman reporter. Cooke loved immersing herself in the arts. She read, listened to music, studied art, and went to plays. She felt that Black people in the arts contributed things that were lacking in the regular arts, because the stories and art and music of Black people reflected their life experience.

In the early fifties, Cooke devoted herself to political activism. In 1953, she was New York director of the Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions and appeared before a hearing instigated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy New York and Washington, D.C., defending un-American accusations.

Cooke was national legal defense secretary of the Angela Davis Defense Committee in the late sixties and early seventies. Her husband died in 1978. In her later years, she was national vice chairman of the American-Soviet Friendship Committee. Marvel Cooke died in December 2000 in Harlem, N.Y. Research more about black journalist and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

06Nov

November 6, 1900- James Weldon Johnson

GM – FBF – Today’s story is about a man who we should know about and one of the most basic black theme songs that was introduced to you when you were young, in school or church. Some of you may have never heard the song but that is alright. He was a composer, diplomat, social critic and civil rights activist. He started a newspaper and studied law but when asked to compose a song for the late United States President Abraham Lincoln that is where his fame came from as the Father of Negro National Anthem. Enjoy!

Remember – “ I was hoping that this song would be sung by every black man woman and child and never forgotten in order that they would be proud of their race” – James Weldon Johnson

Today in our History – November 6, 1900 – James Weldon Johnson composed the song “Life Ev’ry Voice & Sing.”

James Weldon Johnson, composer, diplomat, social critic, and civil rights activist, was born of Bahamian immigrant parents in Jacksonville, Florida on June 17, 1871. Instilled with the value of education by his father, James, a waiter, and teacher-mother, Helen, Johnson excelled at the Stanton School in Jacksonville. In 1889 he entered Atlanta University in Georgia, graduating in 1894.

In 1896, Johnson began to study law in Thomas Ledwith’s law office in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1898, Ledwith considered Johnson ready to take the Florida bar exam. After a grueling two hour exam, Johnson was given a pass and admitted to the bar. One examiner expressed his anguish by bolting from the room and stating “Well, I can’t forget he’s a nigger; and I’ll be damned if I’ll stay here to see him admitted.” In 1898, Johnson became one of only a handful of black attorneys in the state.
Johnson, however, did not practice law. Instead he became principal at the Stanton School in Jacksonville where he improved the curriculum and added ninth and tenth grades.

Johnson also started the first black newspaper, the Daily American, in Jacksonville. With his brother Rosamond, who had been trained at the New England Conservatory of Music in Massachusetts, James W. Johnson’s interests turned to songwriting for Broadway.

Rosamond and James migrated to New York in 1902 and soon were earning over twelve thousand dollars a year by selling their songs to Broadway performers. Upon a return trip to Florida in 1900, the brothers were asked to write a celebratory song in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The product, a poem set to music, became “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” now known as the Negro National Anthem.

In 1906, Johnson became United States consul to Puerto Cabello in Venezuela. While in the foreign service he met his future wife, Grace Nail, daughter of the influential black New York city real estate speculator, John E. Nail. The couple’s first year was spent in Corinto, Nicaragua, Johnson’s new diplomatic post.

While in the diplomatic service, Johnson had begun to write his most famous literary work, The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man. This novel, published in 1912, became a work of note during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In 1914 Johnson became an editor for the New York Age. He soon gained notoriety when W.E.B. DuBois published Johnson’s critique of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) publication The Crisis.

In 1916, Johnson became Field Secretary for the NAACP and dramatically increased NAACP membership and the number of branches. In 1917 he organized the famous “Silent March” down 5th Avenue to protest racial violence and lynching. The march, which numbered approximately ten thousand participants, was the largest protest organized by African Americans to that point. Johnson’s participation in the campaign against lynching continued for the next two decades.

Although he was a nationally recognized civil rights leader, Johnson continued to write and critique poetry in a column for the New York Age. His “Poetry Corner” column, published in 1922 as The Book of American Negro Poetry, became an important contribution to the emerging Harlem Renaissance particularly because of its inclusion of Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die.” Johnson’s other Harlem Renaissance contributions included The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), God’s Trombones(1927), and Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927).

In 1930 Johnson published Black Manhattan, a Social History of Black New York, and three years later (in 1933) his autobiography, Along This Way, appeared.
Johnson resigned from the NAACP in 1930 and accepted a faculty position in creative writing and literature at Fisk University. He maintained an active life in teaching and public speaking until he died in an automobile accident in Maine in 1938. Research more about black artists and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

October 29- 1862- William Dominick Mattews

GM – FBF – Today’s story is about a Black business man, part of the Underground Railroad and Civil War Officer. He had a lot of obstacles in his way in trying to help our people but he never gave up. Enjoy!

Remember – Our people need help In all parts of the United Sates, it is my mission to do them as much as I can. – William Dominick Marlon Matthews
Today in our History – October 29, 1862 – Black troops under Matthews’s command fought and defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri. This battle is generally recognized as the first known engagement that black troops participated in during the Civil War.

William Dominick Matthews was a Civil War officer in the Union Army and is best known for leading the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry. Matthews was born a free man in October 25th, 1827, on the eastern shore of Maryland to parents who were interracially married. His father Joseph was a native of Delaware and of African ancestry. Matthews’s mother was the bi-racial slave daughter of a Frenchman, but she eventually gained her freedom when her father passed away.

In 1840 thirteen-year-old Matthews moved to Baltimore and labored as a sailor until he acquired a commercial ship of his own in 1854, which he sailed on both Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River. He left Maryland for Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1856 because the discriminatory laws in his home state made it difficult for him to earn a living.

In Leavenworth, Matthews soon became a successful businessman. He was also involved in helping escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad in that region of the nation. In 1860 Matthews converted his home into a station for the railroad to help fugitive slaves escaping from neighboring Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory. Because he had to worry about retaliation by pro-slavery forces across the river in Missouri, Matthews organized one hundred mostly African American men to protect the home when fugitive slaves were hiding there.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Matthew attempted to offer his men to the national government to fight in the Union Army, but they were turned away because they were African American. In 1862 U. S. Senator James H. Lane of Kansas ignored federal regulations in regard to African-Americans in the federal army and allowed black men to enlist in the war effort in Kansas.

Matthews took this opportunity to establish his own company of soldiers and convinced a number of ex-slaves to enlist. He was soon made captain of the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry, a regiment that soon totaled six hundred men. Matthews was, at that point, the highest-ranking black officer in the Union Army. On October 29, 1862, troops under Matthews’s command fought and defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri. This battle is generally recognized as the first known engagement that black troops participated in during the Civil War.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 signaled the formal acceptance of black soldiers into the United States Army. Unfortunately, Matthews was stripped of his captain’s rank and replaced by a white officer who was made captain of the First Kansas Colored Infantry. Matthews served as a non-commissioned officer with the First Kansas Colored almost until the end of the war but was finally promoted in 1865 to the rank of first lieutenant in the Independent Colored Kansas Battery, also known as the Independent Battery, U.S. Colored Light Artillery. That unit was commanded by another black Kansan, H. Ford Douglas.

Matthews returned home to Leavenworth in October 1865 after the Civil War. He and his wife Fanny raised four children. He became involved in local politics and became an important figure on the Kansas State Republican Central Committee. Very little is known about Matthews after 1870. In 1906 William Matthews passed away quietly in Leavenworth, Kansas. Research more about Blacks in the civil war and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

25Oct

October 25 1892- Irene McCoy

GM – FBF – Today our story centers around a civil rights activist, who like some others who left the streets and moved into the political field. While in politics she had an opportunity to really make a change for her and her people. Enjoy!

Remember – ” Helping others in time of need is the best that anyone of us can do” – Irene McCoy Gains.

Today in our History – Irene McCoy Gaines was born October 25, 1892.

Irene McCoy Gaines was a civil rights activist and a community leader. Born October 25, 1892, in Ocala, Florida, to Charles and Mamie McCoy, she had one older sister who died while Gaines was a child. Her family moved to Chicago, Illinois when she was an infant. In 1903, Gaines’s mother became a single parent after a divorce. After she graduated from Wendell Phillips High in Chicago in 1908, Gaines attended Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee) from 1908 to 1910, and then the University of Chicago from 1910 to 1912. She studied civics and social work at both campuses.

When she returned to Chicago in 1910, Gaines began working at the Cook County Juvenile Court as a stenographer, which helped her become aware of the problems affecting the youth in her community. After World War I started, she found a new job with the US Department of Labor’s War Camp Community Service Program as an organizer for the girls division.

On October 7, 1914, McCoy married Harris Barrett Gaines, a law student at the time. They had two sons, Harris Barrett, Jr., in 1922, and Charles Ellis in 1924. Her children’s public school education offered a window into the desperate inequality between segregated schools.

In 1920, Gaines became the industrial secretary for the first African American branch of the YWCA in Chicago, and during the 1920s, she became involved with and took leadership positions in many different activist groups. Because of her association with groups such as the Chicago Urban League, Woman’s City Club, Woman’s Trade Union League, Illinois Women’s Voters’ League, the District Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, University Society, and Household of Ruth, she quickly gained a great reputation in Chicago’s African American community for her extensive social work. Beginning in 1930, Gaines began working for the welfare department of Cook County, where she would remain until 1945.

In 1939, Gaines founded the Chicago Council of Negro Organizations and remained its first president until 1953, and used her position to protest the inequality caused by segregated schooling. She was able to secure improved facilities and establish one of the first integrated nursery schools.

In 1940 Gaines became the first African American woman to run for the Illinois State Legislature. Although she lost that election, she became one of the organizers of the first march on Washington in 1941, and led 50 Chicago-area protesters to Washington, D.C., to meet with other demonstrators from across the nation. They formed committees that visited heads of government agencies to protest discrimination against blacks in employment. The national March on Washington Movement eventually resulted in President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 which banned discrimination in companies which received federal funds.

She also championed the condition of women, and in 1947 she testified before the United Nations about discrimination and oppression of women of color in the US, becoming one of the first individuals in the world to address that issue before this international body.

In 1958, at the age of 66, Gaines received the George Washington Medal of Honor for her lifelong efforts in improving her community. In the following year, she received the Fisk University Distinguished Alumni Service Award, and in 1962 Wilberforce University awarded her an honorary degree.
Irene McCoy Gaines died of cancer on April 7, 1964, in Chicago at the age of 72. Research more about civil rights workers and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

18Sep

September 18 1866- Mary Burnett

GM – FBF – The story that I would like to share with you today is about a Black woman who was a civil rights leader, a college graduate, educator and a high school principal. She was involved with the Niagara movement and the N.A.A.C.P. Enjoy her story!

Remember – “The greatness of nations is shown by their strict regard for human rights, rigid enforcement of the law without bias, and just administration of the affairs of life.” -Mary Burnett Talbert

Today, in our History – September 18, 1866 – Mary Burnett Talbert was born.

Mary Burnett Talbert, clubwoman and civil rights leader, was originally born Mary Burnett on September 18, 1866 in Oberlin, Ohio, to Cornelius and Caroline Nicholls Burnett. Mary Burnett graduated from Oberlin High School at the age of sixteen and in 1886 graduated from Oberlin College with a literary degree at nineteen. Shortly afterwards, Burnett accepted a teaching position at Bethel University in Little Rock, Arkansas and quickly rose in the segregated educational bureaucracy of the city.

In 1887, after only a year at Bethel University, Burnett became the first African American woman to be selected Assistant Principal of Little Rock High School. Four years later in 1891, however, Burnett married William H. Talbert, an affluent business man for Buffalo, New York and resigned her position at Little Rock High School and moved to her husband’s hometown. One year later Mary B. and William Talbert gave birth to their only child, a daughter, Sarah May Talbert.

Over the next thirty years Mary Talbert established herself as an accomplished public and civic leader in Buffalo. In 1899 she became one of the founding members of the Phyllis Wheatley Club of Colored Women, Buffalo’s first affiliate of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Six years later in 1905, Mary B. Talbert secretly hosted black political activists including W.E.B Du Bois, John Hope and nearly thirty others around her dining room table for the first meeting of what would eventually become the Niagara Movement, a forerunner to the National Association of Advancement for Colored People (NAACP). Talbert became one of the first women to join the NAACP after its founding in 1909. In 1916, Talbert was elected President of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the Vice President of the NAACP. In 1917 Talbert became one of a handful of black Red Cross nurses to serve on the Western Front of Europe after the United States entered World War I.

After the war Talbert returned to Europe to lecture on the importance of women’s rights and race relations. She also became a dedicated advocate of the Dyer Anti–Lynching Bill introduced in 1919 by Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer. In 1921 she became chair of the NAACP’s Anti–Lynching Committee. The next year, Mary B. Talbert became the first African American Women to win the NAACP’s Spingarn Award, the organization’s most significant honor for civil rights activity. Mary Burnett Talbert died in Buffalo, New York on October 15, 1923 at the age of 57. Research more about Black women and civil rights and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

30Aug

August 30 1843- Henry Highland Garnet

GM – FBF – This has been a busy week for me and I am sorry that I haven’t had time to respond to your posts. I will on the weekend. Today I want to share with you a story about one of the most forgotten men when it comes to leaders speaking of Black freedom during the 1800’s. David Walker you should know just like Nate Turner,s Gabriel Prosser,Denmark Vesey and Fredrick Douglass. All great men of their time who spoke truth to power. I want to share with you a man who you may have never heard of and before the Civil War he preached and spoke about freedom. Enjoy!

Remember – “I had better die freemen, than live to be slaves. Let your motto be reisstance!” – Henry Highland Garnet

Today in our History – August 30, 1843 The National Negro Convention meets in Buffalo, New York. The African American abolitionist and activist Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882) was a religious man. And on this day, he was raising Hell.
Garnet was all of 27 years old when, in August of 1843, he addressed the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York. The meeting was part of the decades long National Negro Convention Movement, in which northern free blacks met to discuss strategies for achieving racial equality and civil rights for freemen in the North, and emancipation and liberty for enslaved blacks in the South. These discussions often centered on the benefits of using “moral suasion versus political action” – that is, whether or not blacks and whites should use moral persuasion to convince American society to end racial prejudice, or, engage in direct political action to gain liberty and equality for people of African descent. (The influential white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was among those who eschewed political activism.)

Garnet had a much more radical approach to the problems of those in bondage. The son of a fugitive slave (one source indicates his grandfather was a Mandingo warrior prince), the youthful Garnet and his family were always fearful of being taken by slave catchers; his father once made a narrow escape from slave hunters, and his sister was taken into slavery for a time. His life experiences may have made him more open to solutions that went beyond suasion and politics, because in August of 1843, Garnet was openly calling for a slave rebellion.

Garnet’s speech was not just some angry rant. He grew up in New York City, with acquaintances such as Alexander Crummell, Samuel Ringgold Ward, James McCune Smith, Ira Aldridge, and Charles Reason, men who are among a who’s who of early 19th century northern black leaders. He attended a free school in New York, and sailed on ships to Cuba as a cabin boy. He had theological training and served as a Presbyterian pastor. Garnet was educated and worldly, and his speech reflected that, with references to pride in African heritage, slavery policy in the colonial and Revolutionary War eras, and the global context of abolitionism. This was in addition to his speech’s major themes that slavery was anti-Christian, and resistance to slavery pro-Christian; and that manhood and honor dictated that (male) slaves use “every means” necessary to liberate themselves.

It’s probably too much to say that in tone, Garnet sounded to his contemporaries like Malcolm X did to his. But Garnet’s righteous and religious anger, and his open call for manhood-based armed resistance, was surely uncomfortable to the more pacifist natures of current day black and white abolitionists. Fellow convention attendee Frederick Douglass, who was associated with William Lloyd Garrison, made a rebuttal to Garnet’s speech; unfortunately, Douglass’ speech did not survive for us to read it today.

His words may be Garnet’s lasting legacy. It is believed that Garnet’s “Call to Rebellion” helped inspire others in the abolitionist movement to take action, including John Brown who led the 1859 attack on the arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia).

There is an abridged version of Garnet’s speech to the 1843 National Negro Convention, which is often referred to as his “Address to the Slaves”. Please research it and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!