“The hour has come in America for every woman, white and black, to save the name of her beloved country from shame by demanding that the barbarous custom of lynching and burning at the stake be stopped now and forever."
Mary Burnett Talbert was born September 18, 1866 in Oberlin, Ohio and graduated from Oberlin College in 1886 with a degree in literature. She taught at Bethel University in Little Rock for one year and then became assistant prinicipal of Little Rock's Union High School, the first African American woman in the country to be an assistant principal.
In 1891 she married William Talbert and moved with him to his home town of Buffalo. She was a founding member of Buffalo's Phyllis Wheatley Club in 1899, the city's first affiliate with the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, which organized efforts to include an African American exhibit in the Buffalo's Pan American Exhibition of 1901 and to protest a plantation exhibit.
Meetings to organize the Niagara Movement were held in Talbert's home in 1905. She was also a founding member of the NAACP in 1909, forming a Buffalo chapter the next year and later serving as a national board member and anti-lynching committee chair. She was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1921, the first woman to receive this honor.
Talbert also worked to stop lynchings through the NACWC, which she served as national president from 1916 to 1920. During this time she was a delegate to the International Council of Women in Norway, and spoke throughout Europe about the conditions facing African Americans in the United States. Other priorities of the NACWC under her leadership were women's suffrage, prison reform, and restoration of the Frederick Douglass Home.
In addition to public speaking, Talbert wrote essays on a variety of topics, including the Achievements of African Americans in Twentieth Century Negro Literature. She died on October 15, 1923 at the age of 57.
"The blood of our little children is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder." ~ Martin Luther King Jr. in a telegram to Alabama Governor George Wallace
On September 15, 1963 at 10:22 AM an explosion at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama killed four young girls in a basement ladies' room while they were preparing to take part in a special youth service. Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were fourteen years old; Denise McNair was eleven. Twenty-three others were injured. Klansman Robert Chambliss was identified as having placed a box under the steps of the church earlier that morning. A month later Chambliss was found not guilty of murder, and fined $100 for having dynamite in his possession.
Johnny Robinson, 16, was shot and killed by police later that day after throwing rocks at a car driven by whites waving the Confederate battle flag. Virgil Ware, 13, died after being shot by white teenagers while riding his bike.
The bombing drastically increased support of the civil rights movement, both nationally and abroad as the public could no longer accept the violence shown by opponents of the movement. Less than a year later on July 2, 1964 President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.
In the 1970's Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, and found evidence in FBI files not presented at the original trial. In November 1977 Chambliss was convicted of first-degree murder at age 73 and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 1985. In 2000 the FBI announced that other suspects were Thomas Blanton, Bobby Cherry and Herman Cash. Blanton and Cherry were both convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Cash had died in 1994.
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, 2005
The church was often a meeting place for civil rights organizations, such as CORE and SNCC which met there earlier in the year to plan and train for integration efforts and voter registration. After demonstrators had been met with fire hoses and police dogs, and two thousand including Dr. King were jailed, an agreement with city leaders had been reached in May to begin integration of public places.
The Children Who Died
Johnny Robinson, age 16
Shot in the back by police officer Jack Parker firing from a squad car. Others in the car said the driver going over a bump or hitting his brakes could have caused Parker to fire. Other witnesses heard two shots. Robinson's family never talked about his death, and his brother and sister went to school the next day. "They shouldn't have just focused on them little girls," said Robinson's sister, Diane Robinson Samuels.
No photograph or information is available for Virgil Ware, age 13
Addie Mae Collins (4/18/1949 - 9/15/1963)
She and her sisters sold their mother's handmade aprons and potholders door-to-door after school. Liked playing hopscotch, singing in the church choir, drawing portraits and wearing bright colors. The youth center at an Ishkooda Road church in Birmingham is named for her.
Denise McNair (11/17/1951 - 9/15/1963)
Held tea parties, was in the Brownies, and liked to play baseball. Organized a neighborhood talent show in her garage every year to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy. Always smiled in pictures even when she lost her baby teeth.
Carole Robertson 4/24/1949 - 9/15/1963
Took tap, ballet and jazz dancing lessons on Saturday mornings. Avid reader and made straight A's. Member of Jack and Jill, Girl Scouts, marching band, science club. Wanted to be a history teacher when she grew up.
Cynthia Wesley (4/30/1949 - 9/15/1963)
Wore a size two and her mother made all her clothes. Liked to have parties in her back yard. She had invited a friend, Ricky Powell, to the youth service. He had agreed to come but instead had to attend a funeral with his family.
Information about the girls is from a Birmingham News article by Chanda Temple. Click here for the entire article, along with background on the bombing and Dr. King's eulogy for them.
"A lioness who braved great danger to use the laws of this land to fight racial bigotry" ~ DeWayne Wickham
Constance Baker Motley was born September 14, 1921 in New Haven, Conneticut, where her father was the chef at Yale's Skull & Bones Club and her mother was a founding member of the NAACP chapter. At the age of 15 she decided to become a civil rights attorney after being turned away from a whites-only swimming pool. While in high school she was president of the NAACP Youth Council and secretary of the Adult Community Center. Unable to afford college, her community service background led to a job with the National Youth Commission after having spent several months after graduation as a domestic worker.
While speaking at the Dixwell Community House, a local African American center, she came to the attention of local philanthropist Clarence Blakeslee, the primary donor of the center. Impressed by her intelligence and commitment, he offered to pay for her education. Motley first enrolled in Fisk University in Memphis, then transferred to New York University where she earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1943. She then attended the Columbia University School of Law, graduating in 1946.
With James Meredith
While still in law school, Motley began clerking for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Her early duties centered on discrimination in the military during and after World War II, and she worked on hundreds of court-martial cases brought to the NAACP. As the LDEF began focusing on education, she worked on Sweatt v. Painter, and wrote the briefs for Brown v. Board of Education.
After the successful Brown decision, she continued to work on school desegregation cases including those of Autherine Lucy, Charlayne Hunter Gault, and James Meredith. In Meredith v. Fair she became the first African American woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. Throughout her twenty-year career with the LDEF she appeared before the Supreme Court ten times, winning nine and having the tenth -- a case involving minority representation on juries -- overturned in her favor twenty years later.
Motley was elected to the New York State Senate in 1964, and a year later was chosen by the New York City Council to fill a one-year vacancy as Manhattan Borough President. President Johnson appointed her U. S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York in 1966. She was the first African American woman on the Federal bench, and became Chief Judge in 1982 and Senior Judge in 1986. President Clinton gave her the Presedential Citizens' Medal in 2001, and she received the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 2003. She died in New York city on September 28, 2005 at the age of 84.
"For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well.... In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source."
Alain Locke was born September 13, 1886 in Philadelphia. His grandfather, Ishmael Locke, had studied at Cambridge and established schools in Liberia before becoming the headmaster of a school in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude with degrees in History and philosophy in three years as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and became the first African American Rhodes Scholar, studying at Hertford College of Oxford University. He then attended the University of Berlin and the College de France.
In 1912 Locke began teaching English at Howard University, where W.E.B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson were also on the faculty. In 1917 he returned to Harvard, earning a doctorate in philosophy. His dissertation was on the premise that prejudices are not objectively true or false, and therefore are not universal. This was the beginning of his theory of "cultural pluralism", the view that the uniqueness of different styles and values within a culture are to be maintained and appreciated.
Locke returned to Howard as a full professor of philosophy but his desire for a curriculum including African American studies led to conflicts with the university president and all-white board of directors, and he was dismissed in 1925. Protests by students, alumni and the African American press led to his reinstatement but he did not return until three years later when an African American, Mordecai Johnson, was named president.
During this three-year period Locke firmly established his reputation as the leading authority on African American culture with the publication of The New Negro, an anthology of poems and prose, linked together by his essays about the increased race-consciousness, self-determination and sophistication of young, urban African Americans. He brought the Harlem Renaissance to the attention of white America, and mentored writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Throughout his lifetime he published over 300 books and articles, including an annual list of books relevant to African American culture.
Locke was never able to promote African American studies at Howard, but he was successful in creating a department of social sciences in 1935 and a Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1953. He died in New York City on June 9, 1954 at the age of 67. He was a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.
"Any black who strives to achieve in this country should think in terms of not only himself but also how he can reach down and grab another black child and pull him to the top of the mountain where he is. This is what a gold medal does to you."
James Cleveland (Jesse) Owens was born September 12, 1913 in Oakville, Alabama and moved to Cleveland at the age of 9. His talent came to the attention of a junior high track coach who allowed him to train for the team in the mornings because of his after-school job at a shoe-repair shop. At Cleveland East Technical High School he set records in the 100-yard dash (9.4 seconds), 200-yard dash (20.7 seconds) and broad jump (24 feet, nine and five-eighths inches).
Although he wasn't given a scholarship, his coaches encouraged Owens to attend Ohio State University. They helped his father find a job, and Owens himself worked three part-time jobs to pay for school and support himself, his wife Minnie Ruth, whom he married in 1931, and their daughter. While at OSU he had eight NCAA championships, four each in 1935 and 1936. At a Big Ten track meet in May 1935 he set three world records and tied a fourth. Despite this success, he was not allowed to live on campus, and when travelling with the team would be forced to stay in segregated hotels and eat on the team bus instead of in restaurants with the rest of the team.
Adolph Hitler intended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to be a showcase for the Nazi regime and Aryan superiority, but Owens' performance was a victory for America and for people of color around the world. He won four gold medals, including setting a record in the long jump of 26 feet, five and one-quarter inches. This record stood for 25 years, and the feat of four gold medals was unequaled until Carl Lewis did the same in 1984.
Writing in Ebony magazine, Lerone Bennett, Jr., said that the Berlin games
"...would become a legend and would be passed on from generation to generation, growing in the telling, the story of an incredible moment of truth when the son of a sharecropper and the grandson of slaves temporarily derailed the Nazi juggernaut and gave the lie to Hitler's theories on Aryan (read White) supremacy.... [Owens's] story, which will be told as long as men and women celebrate grace and courage, was more than a sports story. It was politics, history even, played out on an international stage with big stakes riding on every contest."
Nevertheless, Owens returned to a segregated America. President Roosevelt ignored his triumph, and after a ticker-tape parade in New York City, he had to take the freight elevator to attend the reception in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria. While the rest of the Olympic track team went on to compete in Sweden, he followed up endorsement offers. These caused his amateur status to be revoked, and without the possibility of future competition the offers were withdrawn. To support his family and earn money to finish college, Owens ran exhibition races against horses, trucks, cars and motorcycles.
"People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals."
He invested in a dry-cleaning store and the West Coast (Negro) Baseball League but neither did well, and he filed for bankruptcy and was later prosecuted for back taxes. In 1942 he became the director of minority employment for the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, and in 1950 moved to Chicago as a salesman for the Leo Rose Sporting Goods Co.
Owens became involved in youth activities in Chicago, joining the board of the South Side Boys Club and organizing the Junior Olympics, as well as serving on the Illinois Youth Commission. He started his own PR firm in 1955, and became a prominent speaker for businesses and youth organizations. In an obituary in the New York Times, William Oscar Johnson is quoted as calling him a "professional good example".
During the 1968 Olympics Owens drew criticism from African Americans for not supporting the black power salute of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos. In his 1970 autobiography Blackthink he said, "The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers – weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there's money inside. There's where the power lies." Another, more militant, book was published in 1972 entitled I Have Changed My Mind.
Owens received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ford in 1976 and the Living Legend Award from President Carter in 1979, with Carter saying "Perhaps no athlete better symbolized the human struggle against tyranny, poverty and racial bigotry." He died March 31, 1980 in Tucson, Arizona. Due to the efforts of Rep. Louis Stokes of Cleveland the Congressional Gold Medal was presented to his widow in 1990. The track and field stadium at Ohio State was named in his honor, as was the annual award for the outstanding athlete of the USA Track and Field Association.
"I always loved running -- it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs."
high/yellow/black/girl
walken like the sun u be.
move on even higher.
those who
laugh at yo/color
have not moved
to the blackness we be about
cuz as Curtis Mayfield be sayen
we people be darker than blue
and quite a few
of us be yellow
all soul/shades of
blackness.
yeah. high/yellow/black/girl
walk yo/black/song
cuz some of us
be hearen yo/sweet/music.
Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother died when she was a baby and she lived with various relatives, including her grandmother who died when Sanchez was six. She then went to live with her father and stepmother in Harlem, and began writing poetry as a young child. She attended New York City public schools and earned a BA in Political Science from Hunter College in 1955. She then did graduate work at NYU, studying writing under Louise Bogan.
Sanchez moved to California in the mid-sixties, and taught at San Francisco State University from 1967 to 1969, where she was instrumental in creating a department of Black Studies. Returning to the east coast, she taught at the University of Pittsburgh where she created the first course on black women and literature in the United States. In 1977 she became a professor of English and Women's Studies at Temple University, a position she held until her retirement in 1999.
Sanchez's first published book of poetry was Homecoming in 1969, followed by We a BaddDDD People in 1970. Another, Homegirls and Hand Grenades, won the American Book Award in 1985. Much of her work is written in urban Black English, with deliberate misspellings and a creative use of punctuation and layout similar that that of e e cummings. She has written a total of 13 books of poetry, along with six plays and three children's books. She has recorded much of her work and is known for the jazz-like feel of her readings.
A Love Poem Written for Sterling Brown
(after reading a New York Times article re
a mummy kept preserved for about 300 years)
I'm gonna get me some mummy tape for your love
preserve it for 3000 years or more
I'm gonna let the world see you
tapping a blue shell dance of love
I'm gonna ride your love bareback
on totem poles
bear your image on mountains
turning in ocean sleep
string your sighs thru the rainbow
of old age.
In the midst of desert people and times
I'm gonna fly your red/eagle/laughter 'cross the sky.
Ballad
(after the spanish)
forgive me if i laugh
you are so sure of love
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.
the rain exploding
in the air is love
the grass excreting her
green wax is love
and stones remembering
past steps is love,
but you. you are too young
for love
and i too old.
once. what does it matter
when or who, i knew
of love.
i fixed my body
under his and went
to sleep in love
all trace of me
was wiped away
forgive me if i smile
young heiress of a naked dream
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.
A Love Poem Written for Sterling Brown
(after reading a New York Times article re
a mummy kept preserved for about 300 years)
I'm gonna get me some mummy tape for your love
preserve it for 3000 years or more
I'm gonna let the world see you
tapping a blue shell dance of love
I'm gonna ride your love bareback
on totem poles
bear your image on mountains
turning in ocean sleep
string your sighs thru the rainbow
of old age.
In the midst of desert people and times
I'm gonna fly your red/eagle/laughter 'cross the sky.
Please God, forgive these people because even if they say those mean things they don't know what they're doing. So you can forgive them just like you did those folks along time ago when they said terrible things about you.
Ruby Bridges Hall was born September 8, 1954 near Tylerton, Mississippi and moved to New Orleans with her family when she was four. In 1960 she was one of six African American children chosen to integrate the New Orleans school system and the only one to attend William Frantz Elementary. The first day of court-ordered desegregation was November 14, and U. S. Marshals took her to school. She recalls that day, "Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras."
White parents removed their children from the school, and teachers refused to have Bridges in their classroom. She spent her first-grade year as the only student of Barbara Henry, a newly-hired teacher from Boston. The marshals continued to escort her amid threats, and her mother suggested that she pray on the way to school. Her father lost his job for sending her to the all-white school, although supporters found him another one, and her grandparents in Mississippi were evicted from the farm where they sharecropped.
Norman Rockwell painted "The Problem We All Live With", showing Bridges dressed in white and surrounded by the marshals. The painting has been on loan to the White House from the Norman Rockwell Museum since June. It was also the cover of the January 1964 Look magazine. A White House blog said that Rockwell
" ...was a longtime supporter of the goals of equality and tolerance. In his early career, editorial policies governed the placement of minorities in his illustrations (restricting them to service industry positions only). However, in 1963 Rockwell confronted the issue of prejudice head-on with this, one of his most powerful paintings.”
Bridges is the subject of a children's biography, The Story of Ruby Bridges, by Robert Coles (the child psychologist who counseled her in first grade), a 1998 TV movie, and the song Ruby's Shoes by Lori McKenna. She currently lives in New Orleans and has four grown sons as well as four nieces she raised after their father's death. She worked as a travel agent and is the chair of the Ruby Bridges Foundation which has the slogan "Racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it."
