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Posts tagged as “Civil Rights Movement”

Rosa Parks' Statue Unveiled Today on Capitol Hill

By goodblacknews on February 27, 2013
 
Black History Month is coming to a close with a historic moment honoring the late Rosa Parks.  The unveiling for Parks’ statue at Capitol Hill’s Statuary Hall took place today.  President Barack Obama spoke at the ceremony.
“This morning, we celebrate a seamstress slight in stature but mighty in courage,” the president said. “In a single moment, with the simplest of gestures, she helped change America and change the world.”
Parks is the first African-American woman to have a statue placed in the hall.  “As the first African-American woman to be honored in Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol, Mrs. Parks’ dedication to ensuring no human being is treated like a second class citizen in this country will be remembered and discussed for generations to come,” said Congressional Black Caucus Chair Marcia Fudge. 
Each state donates two statues of their most prominent citizens to Statuary Hall. The 109th Congress authorized this tribute in 2005.   Parks will represent the state of Alabama, where she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and became the “mother of the civil rights movement.”
Related Articles:  Rosa Parks Stamp on American History
Rosa Parks Statue to be Added to Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill
original article via bet.com

Whitney Young Documentary On PBS Tells Story Of Unsung Civil Rights Leader

By goodblacknews on February 24, 2013

 Whitney Young Documentary

WASHINGTON — Just before the March on Washington in 1963, President John F. Kennedy summoned six top civil rights leaders to the White House to talk about his fears that civil rights legislation he was moving through Congress might be undermined if the march turned violent.
Whitney Young Jr. cut through the president’s uncertainty with three questions: “President Kennedy, which side are you on? Are you on the side of George Wallace of Alabama? Or are you on the side of justice?”  One of those leaders, John Lewis, later a longtime congressman from Georgia, tells the story of Young’s boldness in “The Powerbroker: Whitney Young’s Fight for Civil Rights,” a documentary airing during Black History Month on the PBS series “Independent Lens” and shown in some community theaters.

Rosa Parks' Stamp on American History

By goodblacknews on February 4, 2013

George Bridges/Getty Images
Today, to honor the Feb. 4 centennial of the birth of Rosa Parks, the United States Postal Service has issued a Rosa Parks stamp. Last year, a stone carving of Parks was added to the National Cathedral. In 2005, she became the first woman and second African American to lie in honor in the nation’s Capitol and, through a special act of Congress, a statue of her was ordered placed in the Capitol.
Yet these tributes to Rosa Parks rest on a narrow and distorted vision of her legacy. As the story goes, a quiet Montgomery, Ala., seamstress with a single act challenged Southern segregation, catapulted a young Martin Luther King Jr. into national leadership and ushered in the modern civil rights movement. Parks’ memorialization promotes an improbable children’s story of social change — one not-angry woman sat down, the country was galvanized and structural racism was vanquished.
This fable diminishes the extensive history of collective action against racial injustice and underestimates the widespread opposition to the black freedom movement, which for decades treated Parks’ political activities as “un-American.” Most important, it skips over the enduring scourge of racial inequality in American society — a reality that Parks continued to highlight and challenge — and serves contemporary political interests that treat racial injustice as a thing of the past.

"Betty & Coretta" Premieres on Lifetime Tonight

By goodblacknews on February 2, 2013

bettycoretta_575se
“Betty & Coretta,” the Lifetime original movie focussing on the unlikely friendship between Malcolm X’s wife Betty Shabazz and  Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., premieres tonight at 8pmEST/7pmCST.  The movie stars Academy-Award nominee Angela Bassett as Mrs. King and Grammy-Award winner Mary J. Blige as Mrs. Shabazz. Check out the movie’s official site here for more information, trailers and interviews, or watch tonight and share your thoughts below.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson

50 Years Later: Remembering Female Civil Rights Activist Pauli Murray

By goodblacknews on January 30, 2013

Attorney Pauli Murray

Harvard Law School professor Kenneth W. Mack writes at the Huffington Post that it’s an African-American woman, attorney Pauli Murray, who deserves credit for expanding the language of civil rights in 1963 to include women’s rights — and even LGBT rights.

“President Obama’s unprecedented endorsement of gay rights in his inauguration address last week — delivered on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday — marks the beginning of a year when Americans will celebrate the 50th anniversary of so many groundbreaking events of 1963: children defying dogs and firehoses in Birmingham, President Kennedy’s endorsement of civil rights as a moral cause, the church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls in Alabama, and the March on Washington. As the nation remembers these important milestones, it is important not to forget the work of a long-forgotten activist who emerged publicly that year to link civil rights to women’s rights, and ultimately to her own closeted sexual identity. In doing so, an African American woman lawyer named Pauli Murray strongly criticized the leadership of the civil rights movement for excluding women as it was planning for the march that would bring 250,000 protesters to Washington that fall. More than any other individual, it is Murray who deserves credit for expanding the language of civil rights beyond the African American struggle for equality to women’s rights, and ultimately to what she later called “human rights” — and for paving the way for a President of the United States to claim that it included gays and lesbians as well. 
In 1963, Pauli Murray was working hard to make Americans aware of an idea she had come up with two decades earlier — one that influenced people as different from one another as Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Wright Edelman — and which would help change the meaning of equality. She called it Jane Crow. Alongside the system of Jim Crow race segregation, Murray argued, there was an equally wrong system of sex segregation. Sex discrimination should be against the law for the same reasons as race discrimination. This was a radical idea at the time …”

Read Kenneth W. Mack’s entire piece at the Huffington Post.
article via theroot.com

Eight Fascinating Facts About Martin Luther King Jr.

By goodblacknews on January 21, 2013

The Martin Luther King Memorial is seen
At this time of year there are many different posts about Martin Luther King Jr.  Here are eight facts that are not commonly discussed:
Fact 1:  He was born Michael Luther King, Jr. January 15, 1929 in  Atlanta, Georgia.
Fact 2:  His father, Michael King, Sr., changed their names to Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. when Martin Jr. was about five.
Fact 3: King was the youngest person, at the time, to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Fact 4:  King authored six books published from 1958 through 1968, works on American race relations and collections of his sermons and lectures.
Fact 5: King stood behind President Lyndon B. Johnson as Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
Fact 6: Senate investigations revealed that the FBI illegally bugged King’s hotel rooms and home phone from 1962-1968.
Fact 7:  An ongoing controversy over the inscription on the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial which says “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”, is taken from a 1968 King sermon, “If you want to say I was a drum major, say I was a drum major for justice, say I was a drum major for peace, I was a drum major for righteousness and all the other shallow things will not matter.”, at issue is also the cost to repair, change or delete the inscription.
Fact 8:  King met with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Lester Grange on problems affecting black Americans. Making it an  interesting  fact that he actually met with two presidents about Civil Rights at different times.
article by Oretha Winston via theurbandaily.com

R.I.P. James Hood, Student Activist Who Fought Segregation at University of Alabama

By goodblacknews on January 21, 2013
FILE - In this June 9, 1963 file photo, James A. Hood and Vivian J. Malone of Alabama pose in New York. Alabama Gov. George Wallace said he would personally bar them from registering at the University of Alabama despite a restraining order. (AP Photo/John Lindsay, File)
In this June 9, 1963 file photo, James A. Hood and Vivian J. Malone of Alabama pose in New York. Alabama Gov. George Wallace said he would personally bar them from registering at the University of Alabama despite a restraining order. (AP Photo/John Lindsay, File)

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — One of the first black students who enrolled at the University of Alabama a half century ago in defiance of racial segregation has died. James Hood of Gadsden was 70.  Officials at Adams-Buggs Funeral Home in Gadsden said they are handling arrangements for Hood, who died Thursday.
Then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace made his infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” in a failed effort to prevent Hood and Vivian Malone from registering for classes at the university in 1963.  Hood and Malone were accompanied by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach when they were confronted by Wallace as they attempted to enter the university’s Foster Auditorium to register for classes and pay fees.

Black Arts Movement Works Acquired by Brooklyn Museum

By goodblacknews on January 18, 2013
UrbanWallSuitJae Jarrell’s “Urban Wall Suit,” from 1969, recently bought by the Brooklyn Museum.

As the curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum began work on an exhibition to coincide with next year’s anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, she happened on a trove of works from the Black Arts Movement, the cultural arm of the black power movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the New York Times reported.

Noticing that the collection bridged two generations of works already among the museum’s holdings — by earlier African-American artists like John Biggers, Sargent Johnson and Lois Mailou Jones, and by their contemporary successors — the curator, Teresa A. Carbone, persuaded the museum to acquire it.

“Even at a time when people are more aware of the established canon of black artists,” Ms. Carbone said, “these artists are only now gaining the recognition they deserve.”

The collection — 44 works by 26 artists — was assembled by David Lusenhop, a former Chicago dealer now living in Detroit, and his colleague Melissa Azzi. About a dozen years ago the two began buying pieces they felt were prime examples of the Black Arts Movement.

Born On This Day in 1929: Reverend and Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

By goodblacknews on January 15, 2013

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oehry1JC9Rk&w=420&h=315]
Martin-Luther-King-Jr-9365086-2-402Although Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday will not be nationally observed until January 21st this year, we want to honor King today as well, on his actual day of birth.  Learn more about this monumental agent of change, his life and work on biography.com, and watch his famous last speech “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” above.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson

Medgar Evers' Widow to Deliver Inauguration Prayer

By goodblacknews on January 9, 2013

Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers (Michael Caulfield/Wire Image/Getty Images)
Medgar Evers’ widow to deliver inauguration prayer: President Obama has chosen Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain civil rights icon Medgar Evers, to deliver the invocation at his public swearing-in later this month, the Washington Post reports. This will be the first time a woman, and a layperson rather than a clergy member, has been chosen to perform the invocation.
item by Jenée Desmond-Harris via theroot.com