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Posts tagged as “Southern Christian Leadership Conference”

Maya Angelou to Appear on U.S. Quarter as Part of the 2022 American Women Series

Maya Angelou to Appear on U.S. Quarter as Part of the 2022 American Women Series

By goodblacknews on October 11, 2021

The Maya Angelou Quarter will be the first coin to be issued from in the American Women Quarters™ Program in 2022.

Other women being honored in the series include Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Nina Otero-Warren, a leader in New Mexico’s suffrage movement and the first female superintendent of Santa Fe public schools, Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood and Dr. Sally Ride, physicist, astronaut, educator, and the first American woman in space.

Each woman will appear on the reverse (tails) side of the quarter, with George Washington’s image remaining on the obverse (heads) side of the coin.

A celebrated writer, performer, and social activist, Maya Angelou rose to international prominence  after the publication of her groundbreaking 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou’s published works of verse, non-fiction, and fiction include more than 30 bestselling titles.

Angelou’s remarkable career encompasses dance, theater, journalism, and social activism. She appeared in Broadway and off-Broadway plays, including Cabaret for Freedom, which she wrote with Godfrey Cambridge.

At the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Angelou served as northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning” at the 1992 inauguration of President Clinton. Angelou’s reading marked the first time an African American woman wrote and presented a poem at a presidential inauguration.

Angelou received more than 30 honorary degrees and was inducted into the Wake Forest University Hall of Fame for Writers. In 2010, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

She was also the 2013 recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community.

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BHM: Good Black News Celebrates Daisy Bates, Civil Rights Activist, Newspaper Publisher, Little Rock Nine Organizer

BHM: Good Black News Celebrates Daisy Bates, Civil Rights Activist, Newspaper Publisher, Little Rock Nine Organizer

By goodblacknews on February 5, 2021

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

This is Daisy Bates.

President of the NAACP Arkansas chapter during the civil rights movement and co-publisher of The Arkansas State Press, a newspaper dedicated to advocacy journalism for African-Americans.

Bates is best known for organizing and shepherding the Little Rock Nine as they desegregated Central High in 1957 in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Ed. U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Bates regularly drove the students to and from school, hosted them in her home after school and worked tirelessly to ensure they were protected from violent crowds.

One of her most successful protection strategies was to get local ministers to escort the students to school, daring the white Christians protesting and hurling threats to attack men of the cloth. Bates’ plan worked, but she started to receive threats herself.

Rocks were thrown into her home, crosses were burned on her property, and bullet shells were sent to her in the mail. White advertisers boycotted her newspaper and eventually she had to shut it down.

Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine (Credit: Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo)
Bates received support from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who assured her, “World opinion is with you. The moral conscience of millions of white Americans is with you.” Bates was also elected to the executive committee of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
In 1960, Bates moved to New York City and wrote her memoir The Long Shadow of Little Rock, then later moved to Washington D.C., and worked for the Democratic National Committee.

Bates was also the only woman who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington during the official program, pledging that women would fight just as hard and long as the men until all Black people were free and had the vote.

Bates later served in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson and worked on anti-poverty programs. In 1968 she moved to the rural black community of Mitchellville, Arkansas and worked there to improve the lives of her neighbors by establishing a self-help program which was responsible for new sewer systems, paved streets, a water system, and community center.

SCLC to Lead Campaign to Help Jacob Blake Secure Support for Long-Term Recovery and Care

SCLC to Lead Campaign to Help Jacob Blake Secure Support for Long-Term Recovery and Care

By goodblacknews on August 31, 2020

[Jacob Blake III’s father Jacob Blake Jr, left and Dr. Charles Steele, Jr., right; photo courtesy SCLC]

Dr. Charles Steele, Jr., president and CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization co-founded and first led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., announced today that the Atlanta-based civil rights organization will lead a campaign to help the family of Jacob Blake secure support for his long term recovery and care.   

Dr. Steele made the announcement after a meeting with Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Jr., and other family members at a location in Wauwatosa, a city just west of Milwaukee, where the younger Blake is in a hospital receiving treatment.

Family members have traveled to the Milwaukee area from other regions of the country after receiving news last Sunday of Jacob Blake III being shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha, a city of approximately 100,000 residents about one hour south of Milwaukee.

Blake, 29, is African American and the unjustified shooting has left him paralyzed. The officer has been placed on leave from the department. The shooting has led to numerous protests around the nation. Blake’s father said the family is receiving overwhelming support from Americans to get them from day to day, but now the family is concerned about his son’s long-term recovery after his release from the hospital.

“As the president and CEO of the SCLC, and in the spirit of our founder, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I am here with Mr. Blake to let him and his family know that the SCLC will lead a campaign to secure support for your son’s long term care,” said Dr. Steele during the Saturday afternoon meeting with the father and family.

After a telephone conversation earlier in the week, Dr. Steele said he traveled to the Milwaukee area to personally meet with the father to determine the son’s needs.

Unedited “Eyes on the Prize” Interviews with John Lewis and C.T. Vivian Available to Stream at American Archive of Public Broadcasting (WATCH)

Unedited “Eyes on the Prize” Interviews with John Lewis and C.T. Vivian Available to Stream at American Archive of Public Broadcasting (WATCH)

By goodblacknews on July 18, 2020

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) has made John Lewis’ unedited interview for Eyes on the Prize (1987) and for Eyes on the Prize: They Loved You Madly (1979), available to stream on its website, along with Rev. C.T. Vivian’s unedited interview for Eyes on the Prize. 

Lewis’ discussions center on the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, his friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the relationship between Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), his view on the philosophy of nonviolence and his involvement in the March on Washington.

Vivian and his interviewer discuss in detail over the course of an hour the Nashville sit-in campaign, the Freedom Rides, the Selma campaign and more.

Eyes on the Prize is the groundbreaking 1987 PBS documentary series that tells the definitive story of the civil rights movement.

These interviews are part of a collection of 127 raw interviews from Eyes on the Prize available to stream via AAPB due to a collaboration between Boston public media producer WGBH and the Library of Congress to preserve and make accessible culturally significant public media from across the country.

The AAPB also contains a two-part raw interview conducted with Vivian in 2011 from American Experience’s Freedom Riders. Part 1, Part 2.

R.I.P. Rev. C.T. Vivian, 95, Civil Rights Movement Activist and MLK Adviser

By goodblacknews on July 17, 2020
Rev. C.T. Vivian receives 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama (photo: commons.wikipedia.org)

According to nytimes. com, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a civil rights organizer and adviser for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the struggle for racial justice a half-century ago, died at the age of 95 today at his home in Atlanta. Kira Vivian and Denise Morse, two of Vivian’s daughters, confirmed his passing.

C.T. Vivian was a Baptist minister and member of MLK’s inner circle of advisers, alongside the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and other civil rights luminaries such as Julian Bond and Rev. Jesse Jackson.

To quote nytimes.com:

Vivian was the national director of some 85 local affiliate chapters of the S.C.L.C. from 1963 to 1966, directing protest activities and training in nonviolence as well as coordinating voter registration and community development projects.

In Selma and Birmingham, Ala.; St. Augustine, Fla.; Jackson, Miss.; and other segregated cities, Mr. Vivian led sit-ins at lunch counters, boycotts of businesses, and marches that continued for weeks or months, raising tensions that often led to mass arrests and harsh repression.

Televised scenes of marchers attacked by police officers and firefighters with cattle prods, snarling dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks shocked the national conscience, legitimized the civil rights movement and led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“Nonviolence is the only honorable way of dealing with social change, because if we are wrong, nobody gets hurt but us,” Mr. Vivian said in an address to civil rights workers, as recounted in “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68” (2006), by Taylor Branch. “And if we are right, more people will participate in determining their own destinies than ever before.”

Cordy Tindell Vivian was born in Boonville, Mo., on July 30, 1924, the only child of Robert and Euzetta Tindell Vivian. His family moved to Macomb, Ill., when he was 6, and he later graduated from Macomb High School in 1942. He studied history at Western Illinois University in Macomb, but he dropped out and became a recreation worker in Peoria, Ill., where he joined his first protest, in 1947, helping to desegregate a cafeteria.

In 1945, Mr. Vivian married Jane Teague, who worked at a hardware store, and they had one daughter, Jo Anna Walker, who survives him. The couple separated amicably in the late 1940s and divorced later so that Mr. Vivian could marry Octavia Geans, in 1952. She was the author of “Coretta” (1970), the first biography of Dr. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. She died in 2011.

In addition to his daughters Kira, Denise and Jo Anna, Mr. Vivian is survived by another daughter, Anita Charisse Thornton; two sons, Mark Evans Vivian and Albert Louis Vivian; nine grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; 28 great-great-grandchildren; and two great-great-great-grandchildren. Another son, Cordy Jr., died in 2010.

To read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/ct-vivian-dead.html

Civil Rights Activist Rev. James Lawson Honored with New Scholarship at Vanderbilt University

By goodblacknews on July 7, 2018
Rev. James Lawson (l) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (photo via ocregister.com)

via jbhe.com

A new scholarship fund has been established at Vanderbilt University to honor James M. Lawson Jr., a leading figure in the civil rights movement and an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The new scholarship was made possible by a gift from Doug Parker, an alumnus of the Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt, the CEO of American Airlines, and a new trustee of the university, and his wife Gwen.

The new scholarships will be given to students from underrepresented groups who have shown a commitment to civil rights and social justice.

Lawson, enrolled at the Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1958. While a student he helped organize sit-ins at lunch counters in downtown Nashville. In 1960, he was expelled from the university for his participation in civil rights protests.

Lawson completed his divinity studies at Boston University and then served as director of nonviolent education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1974 to 1999, Rev. Lawson was the pastor of the Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles.

Lawson returned to Vanderbilt as a distinguished visiting professor form 2006 to 2009. An endowed chair at the Divinity School was named in his honor in 2007.

Source: https://www.jbhe.com/2018/07/new-scholarship-at-vanderbilt-university-honors-rev-james-lawson/

Happy 80th Birthday, Former U.N. Ambassador, Congressman and Mayor Andrew Young

By goodblacknews on March 12, 2013

Andrew Young Birthday
Andrew Young (pictured throughout) has not been in public office since 1990, but his contributions as a politician to the Civil Rights Movement and his service as an elected official have catapulted him to legendary status. Even after a failed gubernatorial bid, Young has gone on to do amazing work as a private citizen. Today, NewsOne celebrates another milestone of Young as he reaches the rich age of 80 today.
Born in 1932 in New Orleans to parents Andrew Sr., a dentist, and Daisy Fuller, a schoolteacher, Young benefited from a middle-class upbringing that was rare for many African Americans during the Great Depression. By Young’s own admission, he didn’t take advantage of his good fortunes and nearly failed out of Howard University but eventually graduated in 1951. It was expected that Young would enter the dentistry field, but he went on to obtain a divinity degree from Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut.
Young’s path to becoming the pastor of Bethany Congregational Church in Thomasville, Ga., in 1955 also placed him squarely in the mix of the burgeoning fight for equal rights. Although the times were turbulent, Young organized voting registration drives and other activities centered on civil rights despite the obstacles faced.