Category: Female

07Jul

July 7 1915- Margaret Walker

GM – FBF – Today, I would like to remind you of a great American poet and writer. She also taught on the University level and she was sued in court by the wife of Richard Wright and she sued Alex Haley in court. If you never heard of her or if you fogotten this is a great read. Enjoy!

Remember – “When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.” – Margaret Walker

Today in our History – July 7,1915 –

Margaret Walker (Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander by marriage; July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include the award-winning poem For My People (1942) and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.

Walker was born in Texas, Alabama, to Sigismund C. Walker, a minister, and Marion (née Dozier) Walker, who helped their daughter by teaching her philosophy and poetry as a child. Her family moved to New Orleans when Walker was a young girl. She attended school there, including several years of college, before she moved north to Chicago.

In 1935, Walker received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Northwestern University. In 1936 she began work with the Federal Writers’ Project under the Works Progress Administration of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression. She was a member of the South Side Writers Group, which included authors such as Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson, Theodore Ward, and Frank Marshall Davis.

In 1942, she received her master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In 1965, she returned to that school to earn her Ph.D.

Walker married Firnist Alexander in 1943 and moved to Mississippi to be with him. They had four children together and lived in the capital of Jackson.

Walker became a literature professor at what is today Jackson State University, a historically black college, where she taught from 1949 to 1979. In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Center) and her personal papers are now stored there. In 1976, she went on to serve as the Institute’s director.

In 1942, Walker’s poetry collection For My People won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition under the judgeship of editor Stephen Vincent Benet, thus making her the first black woman to receive a national writing prize. Her For My People was considered the “most important collection of poetry written by a participant in the Black Chicago Renaissance before Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville.” Richard Barksdale says: “The [title] poem was written when “world-wide pain, sorrow, and affliction were tangibly evident, and few could isolate the Black man’s dilemma from humanity’s dilemma during the depression years or during the war years.” He said that the power of resilience presented in the poem is a hope Walker holds out not only to black people, but to all people, to “all the Adams and Eves.”

Walker’s second published book (and only novel), Jubilee (1966), is the story of a slave family during and after the Civil War, and is based on her great-grandmother’s life. It took her thirty years to write. Roger Whitlow says: “It serves especially well as a response to white ‘nostalgia’ fiction about the antebellum and Reconstruction South.”

This book is considered important in African-American literature and Walker is an influential figure for younger authors. She was the first of a generation of women who started publishing more novels in the 1970s.

In 1975, Walker released three albums of poetry on Folkways Records – Margaret Walker Alexander Reads Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes; Margaret Walker Reads Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes; and The Poetry of Margaret Walker.

Walker received a Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1989. In 1978, Margaret Walker sued Alex Haley, claiming that his 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family had violated Jubilee’s copyright by borrowing from her novel. The case was dismissed.

In 1991 Walker was sued by Ellen Wright, the widow of Richard Wright, on the grounds that Walker’s use of unpublished letters and an unpublished journal in a just-published biography of Wright violated the widow’s copyright. Wright v. Warner Books was dismissed by the district court, and this judgment was supported by the appeals court.

Walker died of breast cancer in Chicago, Illinois, in 1998, aged 83. Walker was inducted into The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. Research more about this great American poet and writer. Please share with your babies and make it a champion day!

30Jun

June 30 2010- Recy Corbitt Taylor

GM – FBF – Today, I want to share a story with you, Recy Corbitt Taylor was a 24-year-old sharecropper who was gang-raped in September 1944 in Abbeville, Alabama. Her attackers were local white teenagers who were never indicted, despite the efforts of Rosa Parks (then an investigator for the NAACP), a nationwide campaign that brought attention to this miscarriage of justice and even a confession from one assailant. The case received renewed public attention with a 2010 book, a 2017 documentary and when Taylor was mentioned by Oprah Winfrey during her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2018 Golden Globes. The movie comes on your stations next week July 2nd. Please watch and share with your babies.

Remember – “The people who done this to me … they can’t do no apologizing. Most of them is gone.” – Recy Taylor

Today in our History – June 30, 2010 – Taylor’s case, despite the involvement of Rosa Parks and the NAACP, faded from public attention as the 1940s progressed. But with the publication of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance — a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (June 30, 2010), historian Danielle L. McGuire brought fresh attention to Taylor’s ordeal. McGuire was able to unearth primary documents and linked activist work on Taylor’s case to the Civil Rights Movement.

Director Nancy Buirski read McGuire’s book, which inspired her to make the documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor (2017). The movie contains interviews with Taylor, her brother and sister, as well as talks with family members of the accused rapists, to shine a light on both the attack and what caused such a miscarriage of justice.

Taylor’s attack began on the night of September 3, 1944, as she was walking home from a church revival meeting with two companions. A car that had been following the threesome stopped, and the occupants — seven white teenagers armed with guns and knives — accused Taylor of an attack that had taken place earlier in the day. Held at gunpoint, Taylor had no choice but to get into the car.

Instead of taking her to the police station, as they’d said, the teens took Taylor to a secluded area. Though she begged for mercy, they forced her to undress, and at least six raped her for several hours (one kidnapper would later say he did not participate in the sexual assault because he knew Taylor). Taylor said they threatened to kill her if she spoke out about what had happened before leaving her blindfolded at the side of a lonely road.

Taylor’s father, who’d been informed of the abduction, found her making her way home. Despite the warning, Taylor related details of the attack to her father, husband and the sheriff. She couldn’t name her rapists, but told the sheriff the car she’d been in was a green Chevrolet; he recognized the vehicle and brought Hugo Wilson to Taylor, who identified him as one of her assailants.

Wilson named the others who’d been with him: Herbert Lovett, Dillard York, Luther Lee, Willie Joe Culpepper, Robert Gamble and Billy Howerton (Howerton was the one who said he didn’t take part in the rape). However, Wilson also claimed that they had paid Taylor to have sex. (Though Taylor was known to be a diligent worker and dedicated churchgoer, the sheriff and others would eventually make false claims that Taylor had been jailed and had a history of venereal disease.)

Taylor’s house was soon firebombed, so she, her husband and daughter had to move in with her father and younger siblings. To protect his family, Taylor’s father maintained an armed vigil at night and slept during the day.

Rosa Parks (a victim of attempted rape herself who documented such crimes against black women) came from the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP to talk with Taylor. The official investigation didn’t even include a lineup for Taylor to try to identify her attackers. The grand jury met in early October, but only Taylor and her associates testified, and no indictments were issued.

Parks and other activists formed the “Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor” to bring attention to the case. There were committee branches in multiple states, and well-known people such as W.E.B. DuBois, Mary Church Terrell and Langston Hughes got involved. Alabama Governor Chauncey Sparks received numerous telegrams, postcards and petitions calling for justice.

An article in the Chicago Defender highlighted how Taylor and her husband had been offered money to “forget” the rape. And some writers drew attention to the fact that America was fighting fascism abroad during World War II while taking no steps to ensure that every citizen at home would be treated fairly and equally under the law.

Governor Sparks did order a private investigation; Willie Joe Culpepper even corroborated Taylor’s version of her ordeal, admitting, “She was crying and asking us to let her go home to her husband and baby.” Yet a second grand jury still failed to provide indictments in February 1945 (like the first, the members were all white and male, and some had family connections to the accused).

Sadly, after Taylor’s attack there was a consistent supply of new crimes — from black women who were sexually assaulted to black men lynched following unfounded accusations of sexual crimes — to draw activist attention, and her case faded from public view.

With help from Rosa Parks, Taylor spent a few months in Montgomery before returning to an area filled with people who’d contributed to her case passing without justice. Taylor ended up moving to Florida in 1965, where she found work picking oranges. She remained in Florida until her health worsened and relatives brought her back to Abbeville.

Through the years, the memory of her assault lingered for Taylor. But she was thankful she hadn’t been killed, telling NPR’s Michel Martin in 2011, “They was talking about killing me … but the Lord is just with me that night.”
Recy Corbitt Taylor (1919-2017). Make it a champion day!

28Jun

June 28 1900- Harriet E. Wilson

GM – FBF – I know that most of us have read or listened to an Ida B. Wells speach but did you know that their was a black lady auther long before her? Today, I will share that story with you. Enjoy!

Remember – “I wrote the book to tell my story and what I went through growing up in this new land. Now they want me to go to different cities speaking about it. I don’t do that good. I hear tell that a young negro girl is doing that, I hope one day I can listen to her speak about lynchings and civil rights. They say she is really good. God bless that child”

Today in our History – June 28, 1900 – Harriet E. Wilson (The first Black female to publish an article in the United States dies)

Harriet E. Wilson is considered the first female African-American novelist, as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts; and sunk into literary obscurity until 1983 when Henry Louis Gates republished the novel and documented it as the first African-American novel published in the United States.

The novel’s discovery forced literary historians to restructure the chronology of Black literature, displacing William Wells Brown from his previously accepted position as the first African American novelist. His Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States was originally published in London in 1853, but did not appear in the United States until 1864, when it was published in Boston as Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States. Also, the novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, published for the first time in 2002, may have been written before Wilson’s book,
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Born Harriet E. “Hattie” Adams in Milford, New Hampshire, Wilson was the mixed-race daughter of Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry, and Joshua Green, an African-American “hooper of barrels.” After her father died when she was young, her mother abandoned her at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a well-to-do Milford farmer “connected to the Hutchinson Family Singers”. Wilson’s mother died aged twenty-seven in Boston, after a violent and intoxicated quarrel with her Black partner. As an orphan, Wilson was bound by the courts as an indentured servant to the Hayward family until the age of 18. They overworked her mercilessly and ruined her health.

Wilson struggled to make a living after gaining her freedom. She married twice and her only son died at age seven in the poor house, where she had placed him while trying to survive as a widow.

On October 6, 1851, Wilson married Thomas Wilson in Milford. Their son, George Mason Wilson, was likely born in May or June of 1852. George, who was probably their first and only child was born at Goffstown, New Hampshire. As Gates explained in his introduction to the second edition of Our Nig, “One of the letters appended to Our Nig states that, abandoned by her husband, the author…was forced…to go to the ‘County House,’ where she gave birth to a child.”After the death of her husband, Wilson married a French apothecary named John Gallatin Robinson, who was 18 years her junior.
Wilson wrote only one novel, Our Nig. On August 18, 1859, she copyrighted it, and deposited a copy of the novel in the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.

On September 5, 1859, the novel was published anonymously by George C. Rand and Avery, a publishing firm in Boston. She wrote her novel in an attempt to raise enough money to be reunited with her child. In her preface, Wilson wrote, “In offering to the public the following pages, the writer confesses her inability to minister to the refined and cultivated, the pleasure supplied by abler pens. It is not for such these crude narrations appear. Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.” Toward that end, Wilson asked, “I sincerely appeal to my colored brethren universally for patronage, hoping that they will not condemn this attempt of their sister to be erudite, but rally around me a faithful band of supporters and defenders.”
Unfortunately, the hoped-for patronage did not materialize, and tragically, George died of fever less than six months after her novel was published.

By the 1860s, Wilson had come to be known as “the colored medium” and was available for seances and readings. She was associated with the Spiritualist church and was listed in the Banner of Light as a trance reader and lecturer. A newspaper reported her lecturing on the topic throughout New England, including the towns of Lynn, Stoughton, Stoneham, and Worcester, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut. One report counts an audience of 2,500 at one of these gatherings. Wilson also delivered lectures on labor reform, and children’s education. Although the texts of her talks have not survived, newspaper reports imply that she often spoke about her life experiences.

When she was not pursuing Spiritualistic activities, Wilson was employed as a nurse and healer (“clairvoyant physician”). For nearly 20 years from 1879 to 1897, she was the housekeeper of a boarding house in a two-story dwelling at 15 Village Street (near the present corner of Dover [now East Berkeley Street] and Tremont Streets in the South End.) She rented out rooms, collected rents and provided basic maintenance.

Despite Wilson’s active and fruitful life after Our Nig, there is no evidence that she ever wrote anything else for publication.
On June 28, 1900, Hattie E. Wilson died in the Quincy Hospital in Quincy, Massachusetts. She was buried in the Cobb family plot in that town’s Mount Wollaston Cemetery. Her plot number is listed as 1337, “old section.” Reserch more about woman authers and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!.

27Jun

June 27 1972- Patricia Roberts Harris

GM – FBF – Today I will share with you a person who has broken the glass ceiling in everything that she had faced. Women are rising in the political process.Patricia Roberts Harris, the first African American U.S. Ambassador is named permanent chairman of the Democratic National Convention. She will later be appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services and Secretary of Housing and Urban development. June 27, 1972 Enjoy!

Temember – “Senator, I am one of them. You do not seem to understand who I am. I am a black woman, the daughter of a dining-car worker … If my life has any meaning at all, it is that those who start out as outcasts can wind up as being part of the system.” – Patricia Roberts Harris.

Today in our History – Junen 27, 1972 –

Patricia Roberts Harris (May 31, 1924 – March 23, 1985) served in the American administration of President Jimmy Carter as United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (which was renamed the Secretary of Health and Human Services during her tenure). She was the first African American woman to serve in the United States Cabinet, and the first to enter the line of succession to the Presidency. She previously served as United States Ambassador to Luxembourg under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was the first African-American woman to represent the United States as an ambassador.
In 1971, Harris was named to the board of directors of IBM. In addition she served on the boards of Scott Paper Co. and Chase Manhattan Bank.

She continued making an impact on the Democratic Party when, in 1972, she was appointed chairman of the credentials committee and a member-at-large of the Democratic National Committee in 1973. A testimony to her effectiveness and her commitment to excellence came when President Jimmy Carter appointed her to two cabinet-level posts during his administration.

Harris was appointed to the cabinet of President Jimmy Carter when he took office in 1977. At her confirmation hearing, Senator William Proxmire questioned whether Harris came from a background of too much wealth and power to be an effective Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Harris responded “I am a black woman, the daughter of a Pullman (railroad) car waiter. I am a black woman who even eight years ago could not buy a house in parts of the District of Columbia. I didn’t start out as a member of a prestigious law firm, but as a woman who needed a scholarship to go to school. If you think I have forgotten that, you are wrong.” Once confirmed, Harris became the first African American woman to enter the Presidential line of succession, at number 13. Between 1977 and 1979 she served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and in 1979, she became Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, the largest Cabinet agency.

After the Department of Education Organization Act came into force on May 4, 1980, the educations functions of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare were transferred to the Department of Education. Harris remained as Secretary of the renamed Department of Health and Human Services until Carter left office in 1981. Because the department had merely changed names, as opposed to disbanding with new department being created, she did not face Senate confirmation again after the change.
Harris unsuccessfully ran for Mayor of Washington, D.C. in 1982, losing the September 14 primary election to incumbent mayor Marion Barry .That year, she was appointed a full-time professor at the George Washington National Law Center.In 1967, Lord Snowdon photographed Harris for Vogue at the United Nations. In her spare time, Harris enjoyed cooking and baking.

Patricia married William Beasley Harris in 1955 after only three months of dating. Her husband William died in November of 1984. She died of breast cancer at age 60 on March 23, 1985. She was interred at the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Patricia Roberts Harris, the first African American U.S. Ambassador is named permanent chairman of the Democratic National Convention. She will later be appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services and Secretary of Housing and Urban development. June 27, 1972. Research more about women in politic in real time and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

23Jun

June 23 1997- Betty Shabazz

GM – FBF – Today I will take you to a women who suffered a lot when her husband was killed which was a tragedy. The hard thing is that she will pass in a most horrific fashion. PEACE!

Remember – “One of the things Malcolm always said to me is, ‘Don’t be bitter. Remember Lot’s wife when they kill me, and they surely will. You have to use all of your energy to do what it is you have to do,'” – Betty Shabazz

Today in our History – June 23,1997

Betty Shabazz, the widow of civil rights leader Malcolm X, died Monday, three weeks after being severely burned in a fire allegedly set by her 12-year-old grandson.

Shabazz, 61, had suffered third-degree burns over 80 percent of her body in the June 1 incident at her home in Yonkers, just north of New York City. She had remained in extremely critical condition, undergoing several operations as doctors struggled to replace damaged skin and save her life.

“Millions of people look to her for some kind of understanding of the history of the struggle,” said black activist and poet Amiri Baraka. “She’s the wife of one of the greatest African-American leaders of history.”

Within hours of the fire, Shabazz’s grandson was arrested and accused of setting the blaze, reportedly because he was unhappy he had been sent to live with his grandmother. He is being held in juvenile custody.

Doctors had said Shabazz might linger for weeks in critical condition but that patients with her severity of injuries usually have less than a 10 percent chance of survival.

Future Betty Shabazz went to Tuskegee, New York
As a young woman, Shabazz left the comfortable home of her adoptive parents in Detroit to study at the Tuskegee Institute, a well-known historically black college in Alabama. She later went to New York, where she became a registered nurse.

In New York, friends invited her to lectures by Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. He gave all of his followers the last name “X,” representing the African family name they would never know.

It was in 1956 that Betty X met Malcolm X, then a rising star in the Nation of Islam. Two years later they married, and within five years they had four daughters.

After splitting from Muhammad in 1964, Malcolm and Betty X adopted the Muslim surname Shabazz. In early 1965, Malcolm was gunned down while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Betty Shabazz, pregnant with twins, was in the audience and covered her girls on the floor as the bullets flew.

“Sister Betty came through the people, herself a nurse, and people recognizing her moved back; she fell on her knees, looking down on his bare, bullet-pocked chest, sobbing, ‘They killed him!'” wrote Alex Haley in the book “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

Betty Shabazz was left to bring up six daughters alone.

“Betty was fortunate enough to have the wisdom to raise several individuals in her family, to give them their own personality, their own motivation, their own skills,” said Wilbert Tatum, publisher of The Amsterdam News, an African-American newspaper in New York. “She did a superb job in raising those children.”

After assassination, Shabazz earned doctorate
After her husband’s death, Shabazz returned to school, eventually earning a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1975. She went to work as an administrator at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and traveled widely, speaking on topics such as civil rights and racial tolerance.

“One of the things Malcolm always said to me is, ‘Don’t be bitter. Remember Lot’s wife when they kill me, and they surely will. You have to use all of your energy to do what it is you have to do,'” Shabazz said in a May 1995 speech.

In 1994, Shabazz spoke publicly about the long-held suspicion that Louis Farrakhan, the current leader of the Nation of Islam, had been behind the assassination of her husband.

A year later, her daughter Qubilah Shabazz was charged in Minneapolis with trying to hire a hit man to kill Farrakhan. Betty Shabazz stood behind her daughter, insisting that an FBI informant entrapped her.

Qubilah Shabazz made a deal with prosecutors in which they agreed to drop charges if she completed treatment for alcohol and psychiatric problems. She signed an affidavit accepting responsibility for her conduct but maintained her innocence.

It is Qubilah Shabazz’s son who now stands accused of starting the fire that killed Betty Shabazz.

Betty Shabazz eventually reconciled with Farrakhan, shaking his hand on the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater as 1,400 people cheered at a fund-raiser for her daughter’s defense. She also spoke at Farrakhan’s Million Man March in October 1995. Research more about this American and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

14Jun

June 14 1977- Ethel Waters Dies

GM – FBF – Today as we are honoring Black Music Month, I have been with people who would say that Nate King Cole was the first black to have a T.V. show in the 1950″s and I would have to educate them. Let’s take a better look, Enjoy!

Remember – “One day, I pray that there will be more negros who will be on the small screen to tell are stories. – Ethel Waters ( Thank God she did live long enough to see her prayer come true)

Today in our History – June 14,1977 – Ethel Waters Dies

Ethel Waters, one of the most influential jazz and blues singers of her time, popularised many song classics including “Stormy Weather”. Waters was also the first African-American woman to be given equal billing with white stars in Broadway shows, and to play leading roles in Hollywood films. Once she had established herself as one of America’s highest paid entertainers she demanded, and won, dramatic roles.

Single-handedly Waters shattered the myth that African-American women could perform only as singers. In the early 1950s, for example, she played a leading role in the stage and screen versions of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding. Ethel played a Southern mammy, but demonstrated with a complex and moving performance that it was possible to destroy the one-dimensional Aunt Jemima image of African American women in American theater and cinema.
In a career that spanned almost sixty years, there were few openings for an African-American woman of her class, talent and ability. She appeared on television as early as 1939 when she made two experimental programmes for NBC: The Ethel Waters Show and Mamba’s Daughters.

The Ethel Waters Show was a one-hour American television variety special that ran in the earliest days of NBC, on June 14,1939, and was hosted by actress and singer Ethel Waters. Waters was the first black performer, male or female, to have her own TV show and may very well have been the first black person to appear on television.The special was transmitted from the NBC Studios in New York over W2XBS.

The special included Waters performing a dramatic sequence from her most recent Broadway play Mamba’s Daughters, along with two actresses from the production, Georgette Harvey and Fredi Washington. The cast also included Joey Faye and Philip Loeb, performing skits.
But it was her regular role as the devoted, cheerful maid in ABC’s popular situation comedy Beulah (1950-52) that established her as one of the first African-American stars of the small screen.

Waters’ dramatic roles on television were also stereotyped. Throughout the 1950s she made appearances in such series as Favorite Playhouse, Climax, General Electric Theater, Playwrights ’56 and Matinee Theater. Without exception, Waters was typecast as a faithful mammy or suffering mother. In 1961 she gave a memorable performance in a Route 66 episode, “Good Night, Sweet Blues,” as a dying blues singer whose last wish is to be reunited with her old jazz band. Consequently Ethel became the first black actress nominated for an Emmy award. She later appeared in The Great Adventure (“Go Down Moses”), with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee in 1963; Daniel Boone (“Mamma Cooper”) in 1970; and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law (“Run, Carol, Run”) in 1972.

But, says African-American film and television historian
Donald Bogle in Blacks in American Films and Television (1988): “Waters’ later TV appearances lack the vitality of her great performances (she has little to work with in these programs and must rely on her inner resources and sense of self to get by), but they are part of her evolving image: now she’s the weathered, ailing, grand old woman of film, whose talents are greater than the projects with which she’s involved.”

In the late 1950s ill-health forced Waters into semi- retirement. A deeply religious woman, most of her public appearances were restricted to Billy Graham’s rallies. She died in 1977 at the age of 80. Resarch more about this great ‎American shero and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

12Jun

June 12 or 13 1893- Amanda America Dickson

GM- FBF – Today I will examine one of the great American History Stories. The story you are about to read is part my own DNA. Although on my Father’s side of the family many people say that is part of my family tree. Amanda American Dickerson Toomer had a lot challanges in her life. Enjoy!

Remember – I had to go to all of the courts, just to keep the money my Father left me. – Amanda America Dickson

Today in our History – June 12 or 13,1893 – Amanda America Dickson: Mixed Experience History Month. Amanda America Dickson Toomer dies (1849 – 1893).

Heiress and socialite Amanda America Dickson Toomer was, in her time, the wealthiest African Aerican woman in Georgia, and one of the wealthiest women in the United States.

Born November 20, 1849, on the Dickson Plantation, near Sparta, Georgia (Hancock County), Amanda America was the product of her 12-year-old mother, an enslaved house servant, Julia Francis Lewis, and 40-year-old David Dickson, a well-known agricultural reformer of that era and one of the wealthiest planters in the area. In her youth, Amanda was taken into the Dickson family home and raised by her paternal grandmother where she was taught to read, write, and play the piano. According to Dickson family tradition, David Dickson eventually doted on his only daughter.

In 1866, 17-year-old Amanda married her white first cousin, Charles Eubanks, a recently returned Confederate Army veteran and together they had two children, Julian Henry and Charles Green. It was an unhappy marriage, and in 1870, Amanda left her husband, and returned to the Dickson Plantation, where she was legally given the surname of Dickson for herself and her sons. Eubanks died two years later.

Dickson left home briefly again between the years of 1876 and 1878, to attend the Normal School of Atlanta University. When her father David Dickson died in 1885, and his will was read, it was revealed that he left all of his property, over 15,000 acres of land in Hancock and Washington Counties as well as his personal possessions, and money, together estimated at slightly over $300,000, to his daughter Amanda Dickson and her two sons. Although the will specifically warned Dickson family members not to contest his wishes, 79 relatives filed a lawsuit to prevent Amanda Dickson from inheriting the property.

The Superior Court of Hancock County upheld her claim and the family appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court. That court ruled in 1887 that Amanda Dickson was legally entitled to the inheritance under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states that property rights are equal for blacks and whites, including the offspring of black and white citizens.

On July 15, 1886, before the Georgia Supreme Court ruling, pressure from other family members forced Dickson to leave the family plantation where she had spent most of her life. She moved to Augusta, Georgia before the town mandated residential segregation by race and purchased a large brick home at 484 Telfair Street, in the most prominent neighborhood in the city.

On July 14, 1892, Amanda married Nathan Toomer of Perry, Georgia. Born in 1839 in Chatham County, North Carolina, Toomer had been the slave of Richard Pilkinson of Chatham County, North Carolina but was later sold to John Toomer of Houston County, Georgia. When John Toomer died, he became the property of Colonel Henry Toomer, John’s brother.
Amanda and Nathan were married about a year when Amanda America Dickson Toomer died on June 11or 12 1893, in Augusta from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, considered to be caused by an unbearably hot train ride home from a month’s stay in Baltimore, Maryland for her health.

She was only 43 years old. Amanda America Dickson Toomer was buried in her wedding dress, in a metallic coffin, which was lined in rose colored plush fabric. The funeral was held at Trinity Colored Methodist Church, and she is buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery, Richmond County, Georgia. Nathan Toomer later married Nina Pinchback. The couple had one son, the prominent Harlem (New York) Renaissance author Jean Toomer.

Dickson’s biography titled Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson 1849-1893, Dickson defined herself as a “no nation” among both her black relatives and white relatives. When her father died in 1885, he left the bulk of his estate to Dickson (estimated at more than $300,000 plus land). White relatives contested the will, but ultimately lost their lawsuit in the Georgia Supreme Court which ruled: the “rights of each race were controlled and governed by the same enactment on principles of the law.” In 1892, Dickson married Nathan Toomer, a wealthy man of color, who fathered Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer later in life (with Nina Pinchback). The movie A House Divided, starring Jennifer Beals, is based on Dickson’s life.

Research more about great woman of American History and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

06Jun

June 6 1966- James Meredith

GM – FBF – I have not forgotten about “The greatest generation” and how they gave their lives on this day in Normandy, France. Our generation still delt with a war in our streets from wanting to be free to get an education and vote. This story below – We should never Forget!

Remember – ” If I can’t walk in America, down her streets from stste to state something is wrong with this we call America” – James Meredith

Today in our History – June 6, 1966 –

One sweltering morning in June 1966, James Meredith set out from Memphis with an African walking stick in one hand, a Bible in the other and a singular mission in mind. The 32-year-old Air Force veteran and Columbia University law student planned to march 220 miles to the Mississippi state capital of Jackson, to prove that a black man could walk free in the South. The Voting Rights Act had been passed only the year before, and his goal was to inspire African-Americans to register and go to the polls. “I was at war against fear,” he recalls. “I was fighting for full citizenship for me and my kind.”

It wasn’t the first time Meredith had charged into hostile territory all but alone. Four years earlier, he’d become the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, despite vehement protests from Gov. Ross Barnett and campus riots that left 2 people dead and more than 160 wounded, including dozens of federal marshals. When Meredith graduated from Ole Miss in 1963, he wore a segregationist’s “Never” button upside down on his black gown.

On the second day of his self-described “walk against fear,” a handful of reporters, photographers and law enforcement officials awaited his arrival in the late afternoon heat near Hernando, Mississippi. Jack Thornell, a 26-year-old cub photographer for the Associated Press in New Orleans, was sitting in a parked car along with a colleague from arch-rival United Press International, waiting for a Life photographer to bring them Cokes, when Meredith and a few followers came into view.

All of a sudden, a man started shouting, “I just want James Meredith!” Shotgun blasts rang out across the highway, striking Meredith in the head, neck, back and legs. Thornell jumped out of the vehicle and started clicking away, taking two rolls of pictures with his pair of cameras. He then drove back to Memphis in a panic, convinced he would be fired for failing to photograph both the assailant and the victim. Meanwhile, minutes passed before an ambulance reached Meredith, who lay in the road alone. “Isn’t anyone going to help me?” he remembers shouting.

Of the many photographs that Thornell made of the incident, one shows the fallen man on dusty Highway 51 screaming in agony. It was published in newspapers and magazines nationwide and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The image suggests the very pain and frustration of being black in the Deep South of the 1960s. “When people saw scenes like this in newspapers and on TV—when they saw what was actually happening down South—they couldn’t believe it,” says Thornell, who is 65 and retired and lives in Metairie, Louisiana. He says his one lasting regret about that day four decades ago is that he didn’t put his camera down to help the wounded Meredith.

As it happens, Thornell took one picture of the incident in which the gunman can be seen. But it wasn’t needed for evidence. An unemployed hardware clerk from Memphis named Aubrey James Norvell was apprehended at the scene of the shooting and pleaded guilty before the case went to trial. He served 18 months of a five-year prison sentence, then all but dropped out of sight. Now 79, Norvell lives in Memphis. He declined to discuss the past.

After Meredith was shot, civil rights leaders gathered in his hospital room, among them Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick. The civil rights movement had lately been strained by internal dissent, with leaders such as King calling for nonviolence and integration and others such as Carmichael promoting a more radical black power stance. But for now the leaders put aside their differences to carry on Meredith’s pilgrimage.

While Meredith recuperated from his wounds, scores of people gathered in Hernando to resume what was now called the “Meredith March.” Led by King, Carmichael and McKissick, the marchers walked for nearly three weeks, helping to register thousands of African-American voters along the way. Meredith himself rejoined the pilgrimage on June 26, its final day, as some 12,000 triumphant protesters entered Jackson surrounded by cheering crowds. Looking back, he says he was inspired by people on both sides of the color divide. “You can’t forget that whites in the South were as unfree as any black,” he explains. “White supremacy was official and legal—it was enforced by judges and the law people—and a white that failed to acknowledge and carry out the mandate of white supremacy was as subject to persecution as any black.”

Meredith would graduate from Columbia law school, run (unsuccessfully) for Congress in New York and Mississippi, and work as a stockbroker, professor and writer. Then, in the late 1980s, the former civil rights icon shocked many admirers when he joined the staff of the ultraconservative North Carolina senator Jesse Helms and endorsed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s campaign to become governor of Louisiana. Meredith, still fiery at 71, defends those choices, saying he was “monitoring the enemy.” Married with five children and five grandchildren, Meredith lives in Jackson and still occasionally addresses groups on civil rights issues.

“He helped make significant strides in the overall struggle for civil and human rights, and none of that is diminished by what happened later,” says Horace Huntley, director of the Oral History Project at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, in Alabama. “Those accomplishments are etched in stone.”

04Jun

June 4 1972- Angela Davis

GM – FBF – This is one of the most wanted Individuals in the USA back in the 60’s and 70′. Enjoy!

Remember – “Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.” – Angela Davis

Today in our History – June 4, 1972 – Angela Davis acquitted.

Angela Yvonne Davis, a black militant, former philosophy professor at the University of California, and self-proclaimed communist, is acquitted on charges of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping by an all-white jury in San Jose, California.

In October 1970, Davis was arrested in New York City in connection with a shootout that occurred on August 7 in a San Raphael, California, courtroom. She was accused of supplying weapons to Jonathan Jackson, who burst into the courtroom in a bid to free inmates on trial there and take hostages whom he hoped to exchange for his brother George, a black radical imprisoned at San Quentin Prison. In the subsequent shoot-out with police, Jonathan Jackson was killed along with Superior Court Judge Harold Haley and two inmates.

Davis, who had championed the cause of black prisoners and was friends with George Jackson, was indicted in the crime but went into hiding. One of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most wanted criminals, she was apprehended only two months later. Her trial began in March 1972 and drew international attention because of the weakness of the prosecution’s case and obvious political nature of the proceedings. In June 1972, she was acquitted of all charges.

After leaving the criminal justice system, she returned to teaching and writing and in 1980 was the vice-presidential candidate of the U.S. Communist Party. In 1991, she became a professor in the field of the history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Four years later, she was appointed a presidential chair at the university amid controversy that stemmed from her communist and black militant background. Her writings include Angela Davis: An Autobiography and Women, Race, and Class. Though no longer a member of the Communist Party, Davis continues to be active in politics, most notably speaking out against the death penalty. Reserch more about other great Black women in history and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

02Jun

June 2 1863- Tubman And Montgomery

GM – FBF – Today, I want you to look at one of the shero’s of all time Harriet Tubman, not for the Underground Railroad but during the Civil War she was a spy for the Union Army. Her most talked about success was “The Combahee River Raid”. Enjoy!

Remember – “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.” – Harriet Tubman

Today in our History – June 2,1863 –

One hundred and fifty – five years ago today, Union forces led by Harriet Tubman and Colonel James Montgomery engaged in a daring and wildly successful raid up the Combahee River in South Carolina.

The Combahee River Raid crippled local Confederate infrastructure, liberated 756 enslaved blacks, and earned Tubman well-deserved accolades as the first woman in U.S. history to plan and lead a military raid.

Tubman and Montgomery had set out the night before from Beaufort in three U.S. Navy gunboats. Montgomery commanded a detachment of soldiers from the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, an all-black infantry regiment, while a company from the 3rd Rhode Island Heavy Artillery manned the ships’ guns. Tubman, who had scouted the area and received widespread credit for planning the raid, accompanied Montgomery and was widely seen as jointly leading the operation.

The two Union gunboats which reached the Combahee on the morning of June 2, 1863 proceeded up the river, landing troops as they went. One gunboat, the Harriet A. Weed, anchored near a plantation, while the other, the John Adams, continued upriver, eventually destroying a pontoon bridge and shelling Confederate troops.

The Commonwealth, a Boston newspaper, reported on July 10 that the expedition’s successes included “destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton, and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom,” all “without losing a man or receiving a scratch.” The raid was also intended to remove mines (“torpedoes”) placed by Confederate forces along the river, and thanks to Tubman’s intelligence efforts, this, too, was accomplished.

The raid had one final objective: to confiscate valuable Confederate property, what Union forces still tended to refer to as “contraband.”

This goal proved rather simple for Tubman and Montgomery. As word spread of the operation moving along the river, slaves began leaving their work in the fields and rushing to the riverbanks to board the gunboats, overwhelming overseers and soldiers trying to stop them.

Tubman described the chaotic scene as follows:

“I nebber see such a sight … we laughed, an’ laughed, an’ laughed. Here you’d see a woman wid a pail on her head, rice a smokin’ in it jus as she’d taken it from de fire, young one hangin’ on behind, one han’ roun’ her forehead to hold on, ‘tother han’ diggin’ into de rice-pot, eatin’ wid all its might; hold of her dress two or three more; down her back a bag wid a pig in it. One woman brought two pigs, a white one, an’ a black one; we took ’em all on board; named de white pig Beauregard, an’ de black pig Jeff Davis. Sometimes de women would come wid twins hangin’ roun’ der necks; ‘pears like I nebber see so many twins in my life; bags on der shoulders, baskets on der heads, and young ones taggin’ behin’, all loaded; pigs squealin’, chickens screamin’, young ones squallin”

In all, Tubman reported that the raid liberated 756 enslaved blacks along the Combahee (or, perhaps more precisely, gave them the opportunity to liberate themselves), and that nearly all of the able-bodied male slaves promptly joined the Union’s colored regiments.

The raid’s success, and the role of blacks in leading and conducting it, as well as the hundreds of slaves who rose up at the first sight of Union troops, made a deep impact on the Union public. At the same time, it was frightening and demoralizing for the Confederate side, all the more so because of what the raid implied about what the South’s enslaved population wanted, and was capable of.

In fact, in an effort to minimize the impact on morale and ideology, the official Confederate report was forced to lay the blame for the raid on:

a parcel of negro wretches, calling themselves soldiers, with a few degraded whites.

The broader significance of the Combahee River Raid, I think, is that it shattered two persistent myths which had long impeded the arrival of emancipation for black Americans. First, the raid demonstrated very publicly that black troops were not merely fit as laborers or cannon fodder, but were every bit as capable as their white brethren at executing complex military operations under the most challenging circumstances. Second, the raid’s success in liberating hundreds of blacks (or, in allowing them to liberate themselves) electrified the northern and southern publics and defied the Confederacy’s insistence on the quiet loyalty of its enslaved population. The raid showed convincingly that enslaved blacks were, in fact, eager for freedom and willing to rise up on a moment’s notice, if given the opportunity, and to then join Union forces in droves and fight back.

Together, these two powerful truths helped to show the necessity and rightness of emancipation, at a time when the northern public, in particular, was only beginning to wrestle with that very issue. Research more about this great American and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!