Character Education Black History Month
Civil Rights in America A publication of the Afro-American Newspapers The Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper 2519 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218 (410) 554-8200 The Washington Afro-American Newspaper 1917 Benning Road NE Washington, DC 20002 (202) 332-0080 John J. Oliver Jr. Chairman/Publisher Avis Thomas-Lester Executive Editor Diane Hocker Character Education Project Manager Dorothy Boulware Project Editor Zenitha Prince Contributing Writer Vickie Johnson Denise Dorsey Graphic Designers
Table of Contents
4 Character Education Profile: Marcus Walker BGE
5 Civil Rights in America
Black History Month 2014
7 Unsung Heroes of Civil Rights
Solomon Northrup: Author and Abolitionist Mary Church Terrell: Educator and Activist
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: Pioneer of the Black Clubwomen’s Movement Robert F. Williams: N.C. NAACP – Negroes with Guns Claudette Colvin: Teenager, Alabama Sit-Ins Gloria Richardson: Revolutionary Elaine Brown: Black Panther Party Leader George Jackson: Soledad Brother
Cover Images: Clippings from the AFRO Archives
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Welcome to Character Education 2014
T
he Afro-American Newspapers’ Character Education program is designed to promote positive character traits in our public school students. Each year, several corporate professionals and business leaders join our effort and share stories that illustrate how the building of their character not only helps them personally but also in the workplace. During Black History Month, the AFRO is delivered to public middle schools across the region including Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City and Baltimore County, Howard County, Montgomery County, Prince George’s County and Washington, D.C. Each publication contains the testimonies of our corporate partners. How does it work? During the AFRO’s Black History Month series – the newspaper’s most active and sought after series each year– we feature a Black History and Character Education publication that profiles diverse corporate professionals, their success stories and helpful strategies for planning a successful career. Each week, eighth graders from Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City and Baltimore County, Howard Afro-American Newspapers
County, Montgomery County, Prince George’s County and Washington, D.C. Public Schools receive the publication at no cost. The goal is for students to read the featured profiles and Black history content and submit an essay connecting what they’ve learned from a particular profile to the importance of character building. Winners of the essay contest are awarded valuable prizes to further their education and an opportunity to meet the corporate professional they chose to write about. Why eighth graders? Our research shows that by the eighth grade, most students have started to seriously think about their career goals and are more receptive to the information shared by the business community. How can the schools help? • Allow the AFRO to deliver Character Education to your school on a weekly basis throughout the month of February. In addition, provide the AfroAmerican Newspapers in your school’s media center or library on a weekly basis for the current calendar year. • Assist in coordinating the distribution of the publication within February 1, 2014
participating school districts. • Identify a liaison to advise us on information concerning character education that can be included in each edition. • Encourage teachers and students to participate in the essay contest. How do schools benefit? • The AFRO encourages staff and students of participating schools to submit stories, columns, photos, etc., about the importance of education and good character. • During February, all participating schools receive the Character Education publication to assist students in their learning of Black history and to further promote literacy.
Partnership opportunity Corporations, nonprofits and other organizations are invited to become strategic partners with this campaign. By becoming a partner, your company will help provide the AFRO as an educational tool to eighth graders throughout the region. In addition, your company will illustrate its support for professional development among today’s youth. Character Education/Black History Month
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Set Goals in Writing Growing up, my parents and grandparents constantly demonstrated strong work ethics. So at an early age, I learned the importance of hard work and setting challenging goals for myself. In middle school, I enjoyed math and science because it allowed me to unravel complicated problems from beginning to end. One of the ways I documented my journey was through writing in a journal– something I still practice today. At the start of each year, I define my short- and long term-goals in writing. This practice limits outside distractions and allows me to focus and reflect both on what I have accomplished and the areas in which I can improve. When I was a teenager, I became interested in information technology. I attended Mount Saint Joseph High School, an institution that stressed character development, exposed me to diverse groups of people and gave me the right tools to succeed in sports and academics. Afterward, I earned a degree in business information systems from Morgan State University, and master’s in business administration from University of Maryland University College. I then began working in BGE’s customer care department, creating new business processes to improve customer satisfaction. Today, I use my math, technology and problem-solving skills as a product manager in BGE’s smart grid initiatives team. I provide customers with innovative tools to manage their energy usage—which involves data analysis, budget management and quality assurance. Throughout my life, I’ve been blessed with a strong support system. My parents and grandparents encouraged me to always be an individual, set goals and work hard. My wife and children remind me that growth isn’t just important professionally, but personally, too. I am motivated by them to continue capturing thoughts and ideas in my journal and setting goals that our family can accomplish together.
Marcus Walker
Product Manager, Smart Initiatives
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Civil Rights in America Black History Month 2014 The AFRO examined its own coverage of Civil Rights in America with the research that culminated in the August 2013 special publication, Why We March. We became convinced that such a comprehensive task was totally impossible so we focused on particular decades, 1901-1963, highlighting the March on Washington on the 50th commemoration of the monumental event. The return to the subject with this year’s Black History Month theme, “Civil Rights in America,” affords us another opportunity, with no less limitation. The real struggle for justice began, not on a specific date with a specific event, but the moment kidnapped Africans found themselves haplessly deposited on land occupied by people who considered the Africans to be less than themselves; who felt the God-ordained position for the Africans was to be permanent servitude and labor for the benefit of their “owners.” Despite assertions to the contrary, there
was never a peaceful resignation that life should be thus. As the moth wriggles to exit the cocoon, as the fetus pushes to extricate itself from the womb, Africans pushed against the new framework that forced them into a permanent underclass – something inappropriate for people who’d been told there was nothing greater than themselves under the heavens. So they pooled their human resource as they learned each other’s dialects and languages; they pulled together to hide their native worship gatherings; and they performed their duties with determination despite the inborn knowledge that freedom was
Pages from AFRO American Newspaper ‘Why We March’ Issue Aug. 2013
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more than a gift, but a right of their very existence. Even after the law mandated the justice that was long overdue, previous owners enticed them to return with promises of freedom later on, regaling them with tales of unknown and unseen dangers that awaited them beyond the constraints of the familiar environment they’d occupied during their enslavement. They fought individually. They fought collectively. And in the late 1800s, early 1900s they began to organize with the first meetings of the Niagara Movement that evolved into the NAACP. They owned businesses. They earned degrees. They found careers. They opened schools and churches. The demand was never quieted. The shout is still heard. Civil Rights in America has its own history and culture, its own heroes and sheroes, its own footprint and fingerprint and has been the seed of justice seekers throughout the world. During these four weeks, we’ll talk about the unsung heroes, whose names may never be called during Black History Month commemorations but whose selfless sacrifices reverberate through the ages. We’ll discuss the culture that evolved almost surreptitiously. Not everyone who participated in the struggle professed to be a Christian, but the faith of the movement derived its energy from the words of Jesus – the “turn the other cheek” manifesto that fueled demonstrations and weeded out ineligible candidates.
A distinctive lingo. Words took on new meaning when they were used in the freedom fight. Fighting words became melodious. “I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus” morphed into the mind being stayed on freedom. “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” penned by Methodist Bishop Charles Albert Tindley, became “We Shall Overcome.” The spiritual that served as a work song as well as a worship theme became the voice of determined fighters – “I Shall Not Be Moved.” There even emerged a uniform. Determination morphed into militancy. The naturals of the ‘50s grew into the afros of the ‘60s. Clothing became more relaxed – less like “Sunday go-tomeeting” clothes for church; more like clothes for work. We will also look at how the word was transported, the media for the message: how the news of the struggle traveled, how the media evolved from beginning through social media, with its hashtags, memes and selfies-along the way highlighting key journalists. Most poignantly we’ll focus on the key legislation and the legislators who championed their enactment in the areas of education, public accommodations, voting and much more. All this will offer little more than a glimpse into the history of a struggle that propelled its participants into a just space and continues to fight for the maintenance of that justice in all spheres of influence for all people.
Wikimedia Commons Images clockwise from top left: Diagram of a slave ship from the Atlantic slave trade. 1790 Niagara Movement leaders W. E. B. Du Bois (seated), and (left to right) J. R. Clifford, L. M. Hershaw and F. H. M. Murray at Harpers Ferry
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Bishop Charles Albert Tindley Original six members of the Black Panther Party, top l to r: Elbert “Big Man” Howard; Huey P. Newton, Sherman Forte, Bobby Seale. Bottom: Reggie Forte and Little Bobby Hutton. Nov. 1966 Slaves Waiting for Sale painting by Etre Crowe, 186
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Unsung Heroes of Civil Rights By Zenitha Prince Special to the AFRO
Images: Solomon Northrup and Mary Church Terrell
Afro-American Newspapers
Everyone has a part in the struggle for civil rights. Every voter. Everyone who fights for fairness for themselves or for others. Everyone who’s appalled when justice is denied to anyone. Some of the names we know. James Brown. Sojourner Truth. Frederick Douglass. Harriett Tubman. A Phillip Randolph. But there are so many names we would never recognize: The bus drivers who placed the Freedom Riders in the right place at the right time. The jurors who voted righteously in spite of racial differences. The preachers who demanded their parishioners vote and actively participate in their own governance. The householders who offered food and shelter to travelling freedom fighters. The householders who sequestered travelers along the Underground Railroad. Faceless, nameless throngs who sweat, bled and even died for the just causes of liberty, equality and justice. February 1, 2014
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“For every Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Ralph Abernathy there were thousands of unnamed people who fought for civil rights in America,” said Molefi Kete Asante, a professor of African American Studies at Temple University. “This was a mass movement.” And so the AFRO highlights a few of those foot soldiers; supporting—still crucial—actors in the Civil Rights Movement.
Solomon Northrup: Author and Abolitionist
strongly as if I had been a white man, that it would have been an inward comfort had I dared to have given him a parting kick.” And that irrepressible spirit was alive in other Blacks tricked and otherwise forced into slavery, Northup warned. “They are deceived who flatter themselves that the ignorant and debased slave has no conception of the magnitude of his wrongs,” he wrote. “They are deceived who imagine that he arises from his knees, with backs lacerated and bleeding, cherishing only a spirit of meekness and forgiveness. A day may come—it will come, if his prayer is heard—a terrible day of vengeance, when the master in turn will cry in vain for mercy.”
The critically-acclaimed success of the recent film 12 Years a Slave has reintroduced a new generation to the horrors of Black enslavement in America and, for some, reignited the fiery determination to pursue just causes. Back when Solomon Northup – the real-life American upon whom the film was based – wrote his slave narrative/memoir, which was also named Twelve Years a Slave, it too served as inspiration and fuel for the abolitionist cause. Northup was born in July 1808 and grew up in Minerva, N.Y., as a free Black. Husband to Anne Northup nee Hampton and father to three, Northup was a farmer and musician, according to Biography.com. In March 1841 Northup met two White men who offered him a job as a violinist to accompany their alleged circus act. Northup was convinced to go past their original goal of New York City and on to Washington, D.C. There he was drugged by the men, severely beaten, imprisoned and sold into slavery in Louisiana. For the next 12 years, particularly after he was sold to Edwin Epps in 1843, Northup endured barbaric, dehumanizing and brutally violent conditions. Samuel Bass, an anti-slavery Canadian carpenter who befriended Northup while visiting Epps’ Bayou Beouf plantation, and later attorney Henry B. Northup, a member of the family from which Northup got his name, facilitated Solomon’s release in 1853. Despite the horrors he had experienced and numerous attempts to break his will, Northup remained unbroken. In his memoir, which was published in 1853 upon his release, he wrote in response to Epps’ derogatory statements as he walked off the plantation: “I was only a ‘n---er’ and knew my place, but felt as 8
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Mary Church Terrell: Educator and Activist
In her time, Mary Church Terrell was one of the leading colored educators of the country, a published writer and international lecturer, and an agitator on behalf of Black and women’s rights. For example, in 1906, Terrell bravely confronted then Secretary of War William H. Taft on behalf of three companies of African-American soldiers in Brownsville, Texas, who were dismissed without honor and without a hearing and was successful in her appeal for justice. Born Mary Eliza Church in Memphis, Tenn., on Sept. 23, 1863, she was the eldest child of Louisa (Ayers) Church and Robert Reed Church, both former slaves, and the granddaughter of her father’s former master. A light-skinned mulatto, who was wealthy, well-travelled and well-connected, Terrell eschewed a life of privilege—and the opportunity to “pass” as White—to pursue careers in teaching and, later, activism. “During Mary Church Terrell’s long and notable life, it seemed that there was very little she did not attempt in order to improve the social, economic, and political conditions of African Americans,” wrote Morgan State University history professor Debra Newman Ham in an essay on Terrell. Terrell was a graduate of Oberlin College and one of the first African-American women to obtain a college degree. She used her credentials to teach Black students in Washington, D.C., where she was appointed, in 1895, to the District of Columbia Board of Education, becoming the first Black woman in the United States to hold such a position.
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In 1892, Terrell became head of a District-based group, the Colored Women’s League, which sought to improve the living conditions of Black women, including earning them the right to vote. In 1896, the group merged with others to form the National Association of Colored Women, and Terrell stood at its helm. Even in her older years, Terrell--who was one of the charter members of the NAACP—fought for civil rights. “My views have not changed through the years,” Terrell told the AFRO in an August 1947 interview. “I still believe that we should be recognized as first class citizens [and] that we as a race should have all the rights and privileges of citizens.” In 1953, at the age of 90, Terrell she led a successful drive to end the segregation of public facilities in Washington, D.C. She died on July 24, 1954, barely two months after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which ended segregation in public education, something for which she had long fought.
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: Pioneer Image: Josephine Ruffin of the Black Clubwomen’s Movement
Abolitionist. Suffragist. Journalist. Philanthropist. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was that and so much more. Ruffin was born Aug. 31, 1842 into one of Boston’s leading Black families and at age 15 became the wife of George Lewis Ruffin, the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law Afro-American Newspapers
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School and the first to become a municipal judge, according to PBS.org and the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She was a civil rights activist, who recruited Black soldiers to fight for the North during the Civil War. She was also heavily involved in charity work: For example, in 1879 she established the Boston Kansas Relief Association, which provided food and clothing to Black Bostonians migrating to Kansas. Ruffin’s defining causes and achievements, however, resided in the women’s rights movement. For example, from 1890 to 1897, Ruffin served as the editor and publisher of Woman’s Era. It was the first newspaper published by and for African-American women and it served as a vehicle to highlight and champion the rights of Black women. Ruffin was also a pioneer of the Black women’s club movement. In 1894 she organized the Women’s Era Club, an advocacy group for Black women. In 1895, she facilitated the formation of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, which later merged with the Colored Women’s League of Washington to form the National Association of Colored Women, of which Ruffin was elected first vice-president. She also led in the creation of the Boston branch of the NAACP and the League of Women for Community Service.
Robert F. Williams: N.C. NAACP – Negroes with Guns
Fight violence with violence, was the philosophy of Robert F. Williams, the first U.S. civil rights leader to advocate armed resistance to racial oppression and author of Negroes with Guns. Born Feb. 26, 1925, Williams grew up in Monroe, N.C., under the dark shadow of Jim Crow and its junta, the Klu Klux Klan. After returning from the Marines in 1956, Williams took leadership of the crippled local NAACP chapter, eventually expanding the branch from only six to more than 200 members. The group led campaigns to transform the segregated town. First they integrated the public library. Then in 1957, they pursued an ongoing fight to desegregate the public swimming pools. In 1958, Williams entered a world-size spotlight when he successfully won a gubernatorial pardon for two Black boys, ages 7 and 9, who were jailed after kissing a White girl during a game in a controversy known as “The Kissing Case.” Character Education/Black History Month
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At demonstrations and at their homes, Williams and other Blacks in Monroe were often attacked by White segregationists— and authorities did nothing. Williams successfully obtained a charter from the National Rifle Association and formed the Black Guard, whose members Williams armed and trained to protect Monroe’s Black population from Klu Klux Klan tormentors. He recalled in Negroes with Guns: “The racists would come through the colored community at night and fire guns and we had an exchange of gunfire on a number of occasions. One night an armed attack was led on my house by a sergeant of the State National Guard. He was recognized, but no action was taken against him. And the chief of police denied that an attack had taken place. We kept appealing to the Federal government. It was necessary to keep a guard of about twenty volunteers going every night; men who volunteered to sleep at my house and to walk guard. This was the only way that we could ward off attacks by the racists.” In May 1959, according to an AFRO article at the time, things came to a head after three events: a White man was acquitted after assaulting a Black woman and kicking her down a flight of stairs; a grand jury refused to indict another White man accused of raping a Black woman; and a Black man with epilepsy was sentenced to two years for the supposed attempted rape of a White woman, even though the judge admitted that the charge had not been established. As he left the Union County Courthouse, Williams infamously told a White journalist, as he later confirmed to the AFRO: “We can see, it is obvious that there is no need to take the White violators into court. There’s no possible chance in the world of a conviction. “Since we can get no justice in the courts, it becomes necessary for colored persons to punish these attackers on the spot—we must try and convict them wherever they attack us,” he continued. “We must defend ourselves, our women 10
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and our children even if it becomes necessary to die or to kill.” The incendiary comments ignited a firestorm, leading to Williams’ suspension by the NAACP. In 1961, the Freedom Writers came to Monroe to demonstrate Dr. King’s model of nonviolent protest. A slavering mob of White Klansmen and their racist supporters attacked the demonstrators with the aid of local law enforcement. Williams’ Black Guard had to rescue the Riders. In the escalating mayhem, Williams sheltered a White couple, known racist provocateurs, from an AfricanAmerican mob, only to be accused later on of kidnapping them. Williams and his family were forced to flee to Cuba, where he was granted political asylum. For the next five years, Williams and his wife, Mabel continued activism through their news and music radio program, “Radio Free Dixie,” and the publication of Williams’ pamphlet, The Crusader, which reached an influential underground audience. In 1966, Williams moved his family to China during the height of the Cultural Revolution. He and his family enjoyed a celebrity status in the Asian nation, and fraternized with Mao Zedong and Chou En Lai. In 1969, Williams was vindicated when all charges against him were dropped and he returned to America on a flight chartered by the federal government. He advised the State Department on normalizing relations with China but he never returned to leadership in the Movement. Williams deserves much more acclaim than he has received, many believe. “He has to go down in history as one of the true heroes of the movement, but he has not been given his proper due,” said Professor Molefi Kete Asante, author of almost 100 books on Image: Robert Williams
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From the ‘AFRO’ Archives
Mar. 4, 1916, Civic League at Luncheon
Feb. 12, 1963, Bob Williams
Aug. 2, 1947, The Eternal Feminist
Feb. 8, 1969, Mournful Slave Trade Scene
Nov. 2, 1957, Robert Williams photo clipping
July 23, 1960, Rights Crusader Clashes with Newsman in Cuba Afro-American Newspapers
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Feb.6, 1954, Two Great Women Character Education/Black History Month
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Black history and culture.
Claudette Colvin: Teenager, Alabama Sit-Ins
Throughout the Civil Rights Movement in America, it was the children that led. Hundreds—possibly thousands—of young people stood in picket lines, faced down vicious dogs and ice-cold water hoses, sat unmoved at segregated lunch counters and sang behind jailhouse bars. “The movement was really a student movement, a youth movement,” said Professor Asante. “The energy of the movement came from the youth. They were the inspiration.” Claudette Colvin was one of those dauntless young warriors, standing up to segregation months before the morerevered Rosa Parks did the same. On March 2, 1955 the 15-year-old Alabama teen was arrested, beaten and convicted after refusing to give up her bus seat to a White passenger. She later became one of four Images: Claudette Colvin and Gloria Richardson plaintiffs 12
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in the landmark legal case Browder v. Gayle, which deemed the practice of segregation on Montgomery public buses unconstitutional. “We doff hats to courageous Little Miss Colvin,” wrote the AFRO editorial team in a March 26, 1955 brief titled, “Cheers for Claudette.” It continued, “Unless other kids and their parents, too, take a determined stand as she did, segregation laws are going to be enforced for a long time in the South, in spite of the Constitution.” In an Aug. 25, 1956 AFRO article, Colvin spoke about the central role of ordinary Blacks in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and, it can be argued, the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. “The Rev. Mr. King didn’t start it. The people decided to stay off the buses after Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested,” she said. “The Rev. Mr. King was picked as a spokesman because he was an intelligent man. “There are many of who don’t like segregation,” she added. “Many people who can’t read and write don’t like segregation on the buses but can’t express themselves like the Rev. Mr. King. We only ask that we be treated right, and I don’t think we will be treated right until segregation is ended.”
Gloria Richardson: Revolutionary
Gloria Richardson was one of the more controversial local figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Born in Baltimore, Richardson grew up in an environment of wealth and privilege on Maryland’s Eastern Shore: her grandfather, Herbert M. St. Clair, was one of the town’s wealthiest citizens and was also the sole African-American member of the Cambridge
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Image: Elaine Brown
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City Council through most of the early 20th century, according to Blackpast. org. At first the Howard University graduate and stay-at-home mother stood on the sidelines of the movement. It was her teenage daughter, Donna, who became involved with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) effort to desegregate public accommodations after the Freedom Riders came through Cambridge in 1961. When the young activists became dispirited by the lack of response to their efforts, however, Richardson and other parents created the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), the only adult-led SNCC affiliate in the civil rights organization’s history. The group expanded the list of demands to include ending housing and employment discrimination and improving health care. And, it eschewed the national movement’s accepted tactic of nonviolent protest, making their campaigns much more combative and violent. “We weren’t [an] MLK model,” said the then 91-year-old in an August 2013 interview with Democracy Now. “We weren’t going to stop until we got it (desegregation) and if violence occurred then we [were willing] to accept that.” For months, CNAC brought pressure on the powers-that-be by protesting, boycotting and enduring multiple imprisonments and other brutalities. Cambridge was in the news “almost nightly,” during the spring and summer of 1963, Richardson said, as the tension mounted and finally came to a head, as protestors ignored curfew warnings and rioting erupted in the streets, prompting then-Gov. J. Millard Tawes to send in the Maryland National Guard. Richardson, who in a famous photo angrily shoves a National Guardsman’s bayonet aside during a protest, explained in a June 22, 1963 AFRO article, what had brought things to such a state. “Things were fine – the white man thought – until we started asking for what we have been entitled to all along—our God-given rights,” said Richardson, who had a friend and supporter in Malcolm X. “Here in Cambridge race relations have always been based on the ‘slave and master’ attitude. Our ancestors and our ‘leaders’ of yesterday and today have always been happy to accept it. “We are not.” Cambridge remained under martial law for nearly a year. During that time, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and other Justice Department and housing officials brokered a five-point February 1, 2014
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Treaty of Cambridge that was signed in July 1963 by both Blacks and Cambridge officials. By the autumn, integration had officially begun. Though Richardson led a march in May 1964 in protest of an appearance by Gov. George C. Wallace at the Fireman’s Arena, by that summer she was burned out from nearly two years of unrelenting protest. She resigned from CNAC, married freelance photographer Frank Dandridge and moved to New York.
The Party instituted a number of community social programs, some of which Brown helped facilitate, such as the Free Breakfast for Children program in Los Angeles, Free Busing to Prisons Program and Free Legal Aid Program. Brown rose through the ranks. In 1968 and 1973 she recorded her songs under direction from the BPP leadership, creating the albums Seize the Time and Until We’re Free. She eventually became editor of the Black Panther publication in the Southern California Branch of the Party. In 1971, Brown became a member the Party’s Central Committee as minister of information. In Elaine Brown: Black Panther Party Leader of 1973, under orders from Newton, Brown unsuccessfully ran for “I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand the Oakland city council, getting 30 percent of the vote. She ran challenge from without and from within…. again in 1975, losing again with 44 percent of the vote. “It is possible some of you may balk at the idea of a woman as In 1974, Newton fled for Cuba under the shadow of attempted the leader of the Black Panther Party. If this is your attitude, you’d murder charges leaving Brown in charge. Under her leadership better get out of the Black Panther Party. Now.” the BPP became involved in conventional politics and continued With these words of warning issued to a crowd of her its community service. In 1976 the BPP successfully supported “comrades” in August 1974, Elaine Brown assumed leadership of Lionel Wilson, who became the first Black mayor of Oakland. the Black Panther Party, making her the first woman to lead the Brown also established the BPP’s Liberation School. militant, male-dominated organization. In her 1992 memoir, A Taste of Power, Brown recalled Brown grew up poor in a Philadelphia ghetto. Despite their the experience, including her challenging first words to the economic circumstances, however, Brown’s single mother, a dress assemblage of the Party’s leadership in August 1974. factory worker, worked to provide her daughter with private “A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at education at a predominantly-White school, piano lessons and best, irrelevant,” she wrote. “A woman asserting herself was a more. pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was After a short stint at Temple University, Brown moved to Los said to be eroding Black manhood, to be hindering the progress Angeles in 1965, where she entered an affair with married fiction of the Black race. She was an enemy of the Black people.... I knew writer Jay Kennedy, a member of the American Communist I had to muster something mighty to manage the Black Panther Party. Through his influence, Brown became interested in radical Party.” politics and started working for the radical newspaper Harambee Eventually, that patriarchal, misogynistic side of the BPP and got involved in the Black Liberation Movement. caused Brown to step down from its helm--shortly after Newton In April 1968, Brown joined the Black Panther Party. The returned from Cuba in 1977, he authorized the beating of the organization was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seales in female administrator of the Liberation School, Brown said in her 1966 with the primary goal of protecting Black neighborhoods memoir, and she left in disgust. from police brutality. But eventually leaders saw it as a vehicle to After living in Paris for some years, Brown returned to the usher in a socialist, Marxist revolution, and it made alliances with United States and the Black liberation struggle, particularly White revolutionary groups in the interest of working class unity. prison reform. She continues her activism to this day. “…We saw ourselves – as soldiers in the army, and an army that was about bringing a revolution, a vanguard army, as we George Jackson: Soledad Brother considered ourselves, to introduce socialist revolution into the To adherents of radical left-wing politics and the prison United States of America,” Brown told PBS.org. 14
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February 1, 2014
Afro-American Newspapers
movement, George Jackson was a true revolutionary, brilliant were clearly a function of the state’s response to his outspoken writer and inspiration. To many, however he was a troublemaker criticism of the capitalist structure.” of the highest order. Jackson used his time in solitary confinement to study and “(The state) labels me brigand, thief, burglar, gambler, hobo, write letters to family and supporters which were later compiled drug addict, gunman, escape artist, Communist, revolutionary into the books Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye, which and murderer,” Jackson himself once wrote in Soledad Brother. became bestsellers and classics of Black literature and political Born in the Black ghetto of Chicago on Sept. 23. 1941, philosophy. Jackson first got into trouble with the law at the age of 15. He In January 1969, Jackson and Nolen were transferred to spent some time in and out of reform school. At the age of 18, Soledad Prison. On Jan. 13, 1970, according to an AFRO however, he was accused of stealing $70 from a gas station in Los account, Nolen and two other Black prisoners were shot dead Angeles. Jackson said he was shanghaied: his court-appointed when prison guards opened fire on a so-called “racial brawl.” Four lawyer advised him to plead guilty and he would receive a light days later, Jackson was charged along with Fleeta Drumgo and sentence at the county jail. Instead, he received an indeterminate John Clutchette in the death of a White guard John V. Mills, who sentence of one year to life to be served at San Quentin State was beaten and thrown from a third-floor balcony. The arrests, Prison. the AFRO article stated, set off a “sequence of terror, death It was in prison, however, where he said, “I met Marx, Lenin, and racial hatred” that resulted in several deaths. And the case Trotsky, Engels, and Mao…and they redeemed me.” became a cause célèbre, catapulting the three so-called “Soledad In keeping with his new anti-capitalist ideology, Brothers” to international fame and hero status among Jackson joined the Black Panther Party, another the revolutionary left. Black group devoted to a socialist revolution. On Aug. 7, 1970, Jackson’s 17-year-old brother He and fellow inmate W.L. Nolen also Jonathan Jackson—bodyguard to renowned Black founded The Black Guerrilla Family, Communist and revolutionary Angela Davis— which was devoted to eradicating racism, smuggled guns into a Marin County courtroom, uplifting prisoners and overthrowing the freed several prisoners and kidnapped several U.S. government and through which, hostages, including Judge Harold Haley to Jackson said, “we attempted to transform demand the release of the “Soledad Brothers.” the black criminal mentality into a black Jackson and three others, including the judge, revolutionary mentality.” died in the ensuing melee. The threat posed by Jackson’s radical On Aug. 21, 1971, just two days before Jackson’s beliefs is what kept him in prison, and earned trial, he was shot in the back and killed by a San him further punishment, supporters say— Quentin prison guard in an alleged escape. though prison authorities would argue it was Supporters say it was a setup, as writer James his alleged attacks on guards and inmates. Baldwin reflected in an oft-used quote in which “Nothing is more dangerous to a he said, “No Black person will ever believe that system that depends on misinformation George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.” than a voice that obeys its own dictates According to a Sep 4, 1971 AFRO article, the and has the courage to speak out,” wrote 30-year-old Jackson was eulogized as a martyr Jackson’s nephew Jonathan Jackson Jr., in Aug. 28, 1971, at the St. Augustine’s Episcopal the foreword to the 1994 reissue of Soledad Church in Oakland, Calif., under the shadows Brother. “George Jackson’s imprisonment and of a large Black Panther flag and the hundreds of Image: George Jackson further isolation within the prison system fists raised to the air in a final salute. Afro-American Newspapers
February 1, 2014
Character Education/Black History Month
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From the ‘AFRO’ Archives
Aug. 26, 1970, Panthers Heighten Campaign
April 26, 1956, Why Do We Have to Get Kicked Around? Oct. 26, 1963, Cambridge Story
April 23, 1964, Cambridge Freedom Fighters
Aug. 28, 1971, Jackson a Hero to Many
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Mar. 22, 1975, Black Panthers updated
Dec. 3, 1977, Elaine Brown quits Panthers April 6, 1963, 17 Students Jailed in Cambridge Protest
Character Education/Black History Month
Sept. 25, 1971, Coaltion seeks investigation
February 1, 2014
June 3, 1972, Liberation Day Afro-American Newspapers