article via jbhe.com
The Pauli Murray Project at the Human Rights Center at Duke University has been working for many years to obtain landmark status for the civil rights activist’s home in Durham, NC. Those efforts have finally reached fruition.
Recently the Landmarks Committee of the National Park Service unanimously voted to recommend that the home at 906 Carroll Street become a National Historic Landmark. The final decision on the matter rests with the Secretary of the Interior and the decision can be made before the change in presidential administrations. The Pauli Murray Project has fully restored the home and it is expected that it will be made into a museum and social justice center.
A native of Baltimore, Pauli Murray was orphaned at age 13. She went to Durham, North Carolina to live with an aunt. After graduating from high school at the age of 16, she enrolled in Hunter College in New York City. She was forced to drop out of school at the onset of the Great Depression. In 1938, she mounted an unsuccessful legal effort to gain admission to the all-white University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1940, 15 years earlier than Rosa Parks, Murray was arrested for refusing to sit in the back of a bus in Virginia.
Murray enrolled at the Howard University in 1941 and earned her degree in 1944. She later graduated from the Boalt Hall Law School at the University of California at Berkeley. She became a leader of the civil rights movement and was critical of its leadership for not including more women in their ranks. In 1977, Murray, at the age of 66, was ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church. She died in Pittsburgh in 1985 after suffering from cancer.
Posts tagged as “civil rights activist”
article via jbhe.com
The University of Virginia has announced that it is creating an endowed professorship to honor the late Julian Bond. Professor Bond, who was a civil rights pioneer and led the NAACP for 12 years, taught at the University of Virginia for 20 years. As a student at Morehouse College, Bond was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He later served as the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and was a member of the Georgia State legislature for 20 years.
The Julian Bond Professorship of Civil Rights and Social Justice has been endowed with more than $3 million by 350 alumni and supporters. Ian B. Baucom, the Dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia notes that ““Julian Bond worked tirelessly to ensure civil rights were extended to all Americans. The Bond Professorship will help us attract the faculty talent we need to continue the civil rights education work that Julian Bond championed throughout his life.”
Teresa A. Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, added that “Julian Bond made significant contributions to the University of Virginia, teaching thousands of our students while serving as a mentor and role model for all of us. As a driving force for social change for more than a half-century, he had an extraordinary impact on our University, our community and our nation.”
article via naacp.org
Yale University is naming a new residential college after African-American Yale alumna and civil rights activist Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray. Pauli Murray is best known as a staunch civil rights and women’s rights advocate, lawyer and ordained Episcopal priest. Ms. Murray’s lifelong commitment to ensuring a fair and just society for everyone serves as an inspiration and role model to NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks as well as many civil rights lawyers.
In 1938, Ms. Murray was denied admission to the University of North Carolina’s law school because she was African American – all schools and public facilities in the state were segregated. Influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and his practice of nonviolent civil disobedience, she joined with Bayard Rustin, George Houser and James Farmer to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). While a student at Howard Law School, she participated in sit-ins to challenge the discriminatory seating policies of area restaurants. These sit-ins preceded the more widespread and well-known sit-ins of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
After graduating from law school, Ms. Murray sought to continue her study of the law at Harvard University but was rejected because of her gender. Her experiences with racism and gender inequality fueled her activism in the civil rights and women’s rights movements. She authored a book, “States Laws on Race and Color” in 1951. Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel at the NAACP, described her book as the Bible for civil rights lawyers. Upon completion of her doctorate in 1965, she became the first African American woman to be awarded a J.D.S from Yale University.
article by Nsenga K. Burton, Ph. D. via theroot.com
Legendary singer and civil rights activist Mavis Staples has been in the business of making music and changing lives for over 60 years. The Chicago-born singer with the signature raspy voice launched her career in 1950 as part of the family gospel group The Staple Singers, comprised of her father (Pops) and three older sisters (Cleotha, Pervis and Yvonne). The “skinny 15-year-old girl with the big voice” was often mistaken for a man or a big woman, surprising fans with her childlike appearance despite her full-bodied voice.
Like many family acts, the Staples honed their craft in the church before taking their show on the road. Having recorded a couple of singles, the Staples Singers hit their stride with the 1957 release of “Uncloudy Day,” on the renowned Vee-Jay Records, which became a mainstream hit. The rest as they say is music history. Staples’ life and times as a singer and activist are chronicled in the HBO documentary Mavis!, directed by Jessica Edwards, who made it her goal to capture the life of a living legend in her words on her terms, having realized that “No one had done the story of her.”
Mavis! chronicles the rise of the Staples Singers and their evolution from gospel to freedom songs to soul music. Staples leads viewers down memory lane recalling the group’s work with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, her romance with the love of her life (musical giant Bob Dylan) and Staples desire to remain humble despite her staying power and overcoming the precariousness of the music business.
The 76-year-old, who still lives in Chicago, is still touring and picking up awards, having recently won a 2016 Grammy for Best Roots Performance for the song, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean.” Staples is proud of her win. “It’s a wonderful feeling for an artist of my generation to be honored and recognized,” says Staples. “It’s very inspiring and it makes me feel like my decision not to retire and to keep making new music was the right one,” she adds.
To read more, go to: http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/03/mavis_staples_tells_her_own_story_in_mavis.html
Mavis! is currently airing on HBO. Check local listings
When Ida B. Wells was 22, she was asked by a conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company to give up her seat on the train to a white man. She refused, and the conductor attempted to forcibly drag her out of her seat. Wells wouldn’t budge.
“The moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn’t try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.”
The year was 1884 — about 70 years before Rosa Parks would refuse to give up her seat on an Alabama bus. Wells’ life was full of such moments of courage and principle. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, Wells was a vocal civil rights activist, suffragist and journalist who dedicated her life to fighting inequality.
On July 16, Wells’ 153rd birthday, Google honored the “fearless and uncompromising” woman with a Doodle of her typing away on typewriter, a piece of luggage by her side.
“She was a fierce opponent of segregation and wrote prolifically on the civil injustices that beleaguered her world. By twenty-five she was editor of the Memphis-based Free Speech and Headlight, and continued to publicly decry inequality even after her printing press was destroyed by a mob of locals who opposed her message,” Google wrote in tribute of Wells.
The journalist would go on to work for Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean and the Chicago Conservator, one of the oldest African-American newspapers in the country. As Google notes, she “also travelled and lectured widely, bringing her fiery and impassioned rhetoric all over the world.”
Wells married Chicago attorney Ferdinand Barrett in 1895. She insisted on keeping her own name, becoming Ida Wells-Barnett — a radical move for the time. The couple had four children. Wells died in Chicago of kidney failure in 1931. She was 68.
Every year around her birthday, Holly Springs celebrates Wells’ life with a weekend festival. Mayor Kelvin Buck said at this year’s event that people often overlook “the historic significance of Ida B. Wells in the history of the civil rights struggle in the United States,” per the South Reporter.
article by Dominique Mosbergen via huffingtonpost.com
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska and known primarily as Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was an African-American minister for the Nation of Islam and a human rights activist who rose to national and international prominence in the 1960s.
He was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans, and one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in U.S. history.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley and published in 1965, remains an important, seminal work to this day, and the Spike Lee-directed feature film Malcolm X garnered critical acclaim as well as an Academy Award nomination for Denzel Washington.
To more fully appreciate the genius of this man, it pays to hear him speak for himself. Even if you just watch the first two minutes of the video below, you will have done yourself an immeasurable favor:
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 10,000 protesters converged on the U.S. capital Saturday to help bring attention to the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police and call for legislative action.
Led by several civil rights organizations, the crowd will march to the Capitol on Saturday afternoon with the families of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed black men who died in incidents with white police officers. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights advocate, also will be part of the march. The groups and marchers — with signs reading “Black Lives Matter” and “Who do you protect? Who do you serve” — are calling for law enforcement reforms after several high-profile cases of what they call police brutality.
At Freedom Plaza, the rally was interrupted briefly by a group of protesters who took the stage with a bullhorn. They announced that they were from Ferguson, Missouri — where Brown died — and demanded to speak.
Rally organizers called the interruption unnecessarily divisive. Speakers were delayed about five minutes as supporters of the interruption chanted, “Let them speak.”
Protests — some violent — have occurred around the U.S. since grand juries last month declined to indict the officers involved in the deaths of 18-year-old Brown and Garner, 43, who gasped “I can’t breathe” while being arrested for allegedly selling loose, untaxed cigarettes in New York. Some protesters held signs and wore shirts that said “I can’t breathe” Saturday.
Politicians and others have talked about the need for better police training, body cameras and changes in the grand jury process to restore faith in the legal system.
At Freedom Plaza, the rally was interrupted briefly by a group of protesters who took the stage with a bullhorn. They announced that they were from Ferguson, Missouri — where Brown died — and demanded to speak.
Rally organizers called the interruption unnecessarily divisive. Speakers were delayed about five minutes as supporters of the interruption chanted, “Let them speak.”
Protests — some violent — have occurred around the U.S. since grand juries last month declined to indict the officers involved in the deaths of 18-year-old Brown and Garner, 43, who gasped “I can’t breathe” while being arrested for allegedly selling loose, untaxed cigarettes in New York. Some protesters held signs and wore shirts that said “I can’t breathe” Saturday.
Politicians and others have talked about the need for better police training, body cameras and changes in the grand jury process to restore faith in the legal system.
The University of California, Santa Barbara, has established a visiting professorship to honor Ella Baker, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its network of Freedom Schools. Baker was born in 1903, the granddaughter of slaves. She was the valedictorian of the Class of 1927 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She joined the NAACP in 1940 as a field secretary and then served as director of branches. She later move the Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Baker died in 1986.
The first holder of the Ella Baker Visiting Professorship is Shana Redmond, an associate professor of American and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. While at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she will teach, lecture, conduct research, and produce a special edition of the BLST Review.
“Shana Redmond perfectly fits our expectations for the Ella Baker Visiting Professor,” said Jeffrey Stewart, professor and chair of Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “She is very enthusiastic about working with undergraduates. Indeed, her personal embrace of the spirit of the Ella Baker Professorship and her sense of the larger possibilities of collaboration with students that the professorship embodies made her a clear choice for the position.”
Dr. Redmond is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York University Press, 2014). She is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in African American and American studies from Yale University.
article via jbhe.com
Ruby Dee, best known for her role in 1961’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and latterly for her Oscar-nominated turn as Denzel Washington’s mother in 2007’s “American Gangster,” died Wednesday in New York. She was 91.
Dee’s Oscar nomination in 2008 for her performance as the feisty mother of a Harlem druglord played by Washington in Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” was particularly impressive because the actress made an impression on the Motion Picture Academy with only 10 minutes of screen time. She won a SAG Award for the same performance. Dee also won an Emmy in 1991 for her performance in the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” movie “Decoration Day.”
She and her husband, Ossie Davis, who often performed together, were among the first generation of African-American actors, led by Sidney Poitier, afforded the opportunity for significant, dignified dramatic roles in films, onstage and on television.
Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), born in Tyron, North Carolina and better known by her stage name Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist widely associated with jazz music. Simone studied at the Julliard School of Music in New York and worked in a broad range of styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel, and pop. Among Simone’s most popular recordings were “My Baby Just Cares For Me”, “I Put A Spell On You”, “I Loves You, Porgy” “Feeling Good” and the civil rights protest song “Mississippi Goddam.” Learn more about this amazing musician’s life and music here and watch her live performance of “Ain’t Got No… I Got Life” below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUcXI2BIUOQ&w=420&h=315]
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson