Repost: Black History Month: Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry was just twenty-eight years old when her first play, A Raisin In The Sun, opened on Broadway to rave reviews and instant success. Capturing the spirit of the civil rights movement, Raisin won the 1959 New York Drama Critics Circle Award and made Hansberry the first Black person to win that prize, the youngest person to win that prize, and fifth woman to win that prize. A Raisin In The Sun was also the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway; it has gone on to become a classic of the American theater and enjoy numerous revivals.

The roots of Lorraine Hansberry's artistic vision and activism were born, as she was, in Chicago, into a family of substantial means. Hansberry was the youngest of four children, and her father, Carl, was known as the “kitchenette king” in Chicago. Carl Hansberry would subdivide large homes vacated by whites moving to the suburbs and then sell these small apartments or kitchenettes to African American migrants from the South. Her mother, Nannie Perry, was a schoolteacher and, later, ward committeewoman. When Lorraine was born, Nannie Perry Hansberry was already an influential society matron, hosting cultural and literary figures such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Joe Louis.

Although Lorraine and her siblings enjoyed privileges unknown to their working-class friends and schoolmates, Nannie and Carl Hansberry instilled in their children a sense of racial pride, a sense of Black history, and civic responsibility. They created the Hansberry Foundation—designed to inform African Americans of their civil rights—encouraged their children to challenge the exclusionary policies of local restaurants and stores.

Carl and Nannie Hansberry themselves challenged restrictive real estate covenants of the day by moving into an all-white neighborhood. But shortly after settling in, a mob of whites gathered in front of the house and threw a brick through the front window, narrowly missing eight-year-old Lorraine and forcing the family to move out. Carl Hansberry won a narrow victory over restrictive covenants from the Supreme Court, but the decision failed to set precedent on this issue.

Lorraine Hansberry attended public schools, where she encountered the children of the working class whose independence and courage she came to admire; that struggle would become the subject of her first major play.

Departing from the family tradition of attending Black colleges, Hansberry enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, a predominantly white university, to study journalism, but was equally attracted to the visual arts. She integrated an all-white women's dormitory and became active in the campus chapter of the Young Progressive Association, a national left-wing student organization, serving as its president during her sophomore year.

After seeing a moving performance of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, Hansberry decided to become a writer and to capture the authentic voice of the African American working class. She left Wisconsin after two years and moved to New York City in 1950, taking a job with Freedom, a newspaper founded by Paul Robeson. She was soon promoted to associate editor, and, in 1952, she replaced Robeson at a controversial, international peace conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. Lorraine Hansberry subsequently spoke at public rallies and meetings, often critiquing U.S. policy.

Her association with Freedom placed Hansberry in the midst of Harlem's rich cultural, artistic, and political life. She was an avid reader of African American history and culture, politics, philosophy, and the arts, heavily influenced by the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, William Shakespeare, and Langston Hughes.

While participating in a demonstration at New York University, she met Robert Nemiroff, son of progressive Russian Jewish immigrants, and after a short courtship, married him on 20 June 1953. The young couple moved to Greenwich Village and Hansberry began to write extensively about the people and lifestyles that she observed around her.

When her husband co-wrote “Cindy Oh Cindy” in 1956, a ballad that became an instant hit, the revenue freed Hansberry to devote her full energies to a play about a struggling, working-class Black family, like the families who rented her father's properties on Chicago's South Side; A Raisin in the Sun depicts the frustrations of a Black family whose dreams of economic progress have been thwarted.

After a pre-Broadway tour, it opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York in March 1959 to instant critical and popular success. In 1961, it was produced as a film with most of the original cast and won a special award at the Cannes Film Festival. During this period, Hansberry was much in demand as a public speaker.

She articulated her belief that art is social and that Black writers must address all issues of humankind. As the civil rights movement intensified, she helped to organize fund-raising activities in support of organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, called for the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and declared that President Kennedy had endangered world peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

During the last four years of her life, Hansberry worked hard on several plays. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window was produced on Broadway in 1964, but critics were less receptive to this play that challenged the ennui of Greenwich Village intellectuals. During its short run, Hansberry battled pancreatic cancer, diagnosed in 1963.

Lorraine Hansberry died on 12 January 1965, the same night that her play closed.

She left a number of finished and unfinished writings that indicate the breadth of her social and artistic vision. Robert Nemiroff, whom she had divorced in 1964 but designated as her literary executor, adapted some of her writings for the stage under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a show that became the longest-running drama of the 1968–1969 Off-Broadway season.

Nemiroff also edited and published an anthology of her work that included Les Blancs, a play about liberation movements; The Drinking Gourd, a television play commissioned by NBC but shelved as too controversial to produce; and What Use Are Flowers?, a fantasy on the consequences of nuclear holocaust.

In recent years, a feminist revisioning of her plays and some of her unpublished writings affirm her politically progressive views, her sophistication about gender issues, and her sensitivity to homosexuality and opposition to homophobia. As more of her work is made accessible, the full extent of Hansberry's vision and contribution to American letters will be revealed.

Meme Dump

Repost: Black History Month: Icons

African American abolitionist Harriet Tubman was born into slavery, but escaped to Philadelphia in 1849, and subsequently became one of the most successful “conductors” on the Underground Railroad. 

Returning to the South more than a dozen times, she is generally credited with leading more than 300 slaves--including her parents and brother--to freedom, sometimes forcing the timid ahead with a loaded revolver. She became a speaker on the anti-slavery lecture circuit and a friend of the principal abolitionists; John Brown almost certainly confided his Harpers Ferry plan to her.

During the Civil War, Tubman attached herself to the Union forces in coastal South Carolina, serving as a nurse, cook, laundress, scout, and spy, and in 1863 she played an important part in a raid that resulted in the freeing of more than 700 slaves.

African American civil-rights leader Julian Bond, was a student at Morehouse College, participating in sit-ins at segregated Atlanta restaurants. In 1960 he founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--SNCC--serving as its communications director until 1965, when he was elected to the Georgia assembly. Bond was denied his seat because of his statements opposing the war in Vietnam, but was reelected in 1966 and began serving after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his right to hold office. 

A state representative until 1974, he then served as a state senator from 1975 until 1987. Bond led a group of Black delegates to the 1968 Democratic Convention where he challenged the party's unit rule and won representation at the expense of the regular Georgia delegation. In 1986 he lost a Georgia congressional race to John Lewis. In 1998 he became chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

African American civil-rights leader Ralph David Abernathy was a Baptist minister who helped Martin Luther King, Jr., organize the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. 

He was treasurer, vice president, and, after King's assassination in 1968, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). 

An advocate of nonviolence as a means to social change, he led the Poor People's Campaign on Washington, D.C., after King's death. 

African American contralto, Marian Anderson was the first African American to be named a permanent member of the Metropolitan Opera Company, as well as the first to perform at the White House.

Anderson first sang in Philadelphia church choirs, then studied with Giuseppe Boghetti. She began her concert career in 1924 and achieved her first great successes in Europe. Her rich, wide-ranging voice was superbly suited to opera, lieder, and the spirituals that she included in her concerts and recordings.

In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest and sponsored Anderson's concert at the Lincoln Memorial.

In 1955 Anderson made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera. She was appointed an alternate delegate to the United Nations in 1958 and in 1963 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

African American author Ralph Ellison was a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute. Originally a trumpet player and aspiring composer, he moved to New York City in 1936, where he met Langston Hughes, who became his mentor, and became friends with Richard Wright, who radicalized his thinking.

Ellison's earliest published writings were reviews and stories in the politically radical New Masses magazine.

His literary reputation rests almost completely on one novel, Invisible Man. A classic of American literature, it draws upon the author's experiences to detail the harrowing progress of a nameless young Black man struggling to live in a hostile society. 

African American playwright and poet August Wilson was a largely self-educated man. Wilson first attracted wide critical attention with his Broadway debut, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in 1984--a play set in 1927 that dramatized the clash between the blues diva and a member of her band, and the larger conflicts brought about by racist American society.

Wilson's plays center on the struggles and identity of African Americans and the deleterious effect of white American institutions on Black American life. Wilson's works draw heavily on his own experiences growing up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, a black ghetto where nearly all of his plays are set.

His characters are ordinary people whose histories, frustrations, and aspirations Wilson astutely portrays. His cycle of ten dramas written over a period of more than 20 years include various overlapping characters and themes. In addition to Ma Rainey, it includes Jitney in 1982; Fences, a Pulitzer prize winner from 1987; Joe Turner's Come and Gone in 1988; The Piano Lesson the 1990 Pulitzer prize winner; Two Trains Running from 1992; Seven Guitars from 1995; King Hedley II in 2001; Gem of the Ocean in 2003; and Radio Golf in 2005.

Acclaimed as landmarks in the history of Black American culture, these works focus on the major issues confronting African Americans during each of the decades of the 20th century. In 2003, Wilson starred in a production of his autobiographical one-man play How I Learned What I Learned. 

African American James Lafayette Armistead was a patriot of the American Revolution. A slave in Virginia, Armistead sought and received permission from his master, William Armistead, to enlist under General Marquis de Lafayette, a French officer who joined Washington's army during the Revolutionary War.

Lafayette was seeking men to spy on British general Cornwallis and his army at Yorktown. Impressed with Armistead's intelligence, Lafayette had Armistead pose as a laborer looking for work.

He was hired at Cornwallis's camp and was able to relay information about Cornwallis's plans to Lafayette. Armistead also earned the trust of Cornwallis, who asked him to spy on the Americans. As a double agent, Armistead was able to move freely between both camps. He provided Lafayette with critical information that enabled the general to intercept Cornwallis's much-needed naval support and ultimately defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown in Oct. 1781, the decisive battle that ended the Revolution.

After the war, Armistead returned to the Armistead plantation as a slave. He met with Lafayette in 1784, when the general visited the United States. Lafayette wrote a glowing recommendation for his former spy, which Armistead used when he petitioned the Virginia House of Delegates for freedom.

He was finally freed on New Year's Day 1787, and assumed Lafayette as his surname. He spent the rest of his life as a farmer in Virginia. 

African American Stokely Carmichael lived in New York City after 1952 and graduated from Howard University in 1964.

Carmichael participated in the Congress of Racial Equality's “freedom rides” in 1961, and by 1964 was a field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--SNCC--in Alabama. As SNCC chair in 1966, he ejected more moderate leaders and set off a storm of controversy by calling for “Black power,” a concept he elaborated in a 1967 book. His increasingly separatist politics isolated him from most of the civil-rights movement, and he emigrated to Conakry, Guinea, in 1969.

There he spent the rest of his life, calling himself a pan-African revolutionary but largely relegated to the political fringe. 

African American Alvin Ailey, Jr studied dance in Los Angeles with Lester Horton, whose strong, dramatic style and views about multiracial casting influenced his choreography and artistic direction.

Ailey moved to New York in 1954, where he studied dance with Martha Graham and Charles Weidman and acting with Stella Adler. In 1958 he formed his own company, the American Dance Theater, which, multiracial since 1963, has been internationally acclaimed and has brought recognition to many African-American and Asian dancers via works that combine elements of jazz, modern, and African rhythms. 

African American Joycelyn Jones Elders briefly served as the surgeon general of the United States under President Clinton. 

She was confirmed in September 1993 and angered conservatives from the get-go, as she was vocal in her support of sex education, the distribution of condoms in schools, abortion rights, and the medical use of marijuana.

But it was her December 1994 statement that “masturbation is part of human sexuality and a part of something that perhaps should be taught” that prompted President Clinton to seek and receive her resignation. 

African American Crispus Attucks was an American revolutionary patriot of mixed African and American Indian ancestry; Attucks was the slave of William Brown of Framingham, Massachusetts.

He escaped around 1750 to work on whaling ships. On March 5, 1770, Boston patriot Samuel Adams convinced sailors and dockworkers to protest the presence of British troops, and Attucks was the leader of the 50 men in the protest, shouting “Don't be afraid,” as they advanced on the British.

The soldiers fired on the protestors, killing Attucks and four others in what became known as the Boston Massacre. The bodies of the dead lay in state at Faneuil Hall for three days before receiving a public funeral attended by 10,000 people. Although the soldiers were acquitted of the shootings on the grounds that the sailors were inciting a riot, Attucks and the others became heroes. 

African American civil rights activist Ella Baker was a driving force in the creation of the country's premier civil rights organizations.

After graduating as valedictorian from North Carolina's Shaw University in 1927, Baker moved to New York City, where she lived in utter poverty, the result of the Great Depression. She and a group of others founded the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose members pooled funds to buy products and services at reduced cost.

In 1935, Ella Baker joined the NAACP as a field secretary and later served as its national director. She scaled back her national responsibilities with the group eleven years later but still worked at the local level to improve and integrate New York City's schools. Baker and several Southern Black ministers and activists established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--SCLC--in 1957; the SCLC was a major force in organizing the civil rights movement.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as the group's first president and Baker was the director, though she mainly worked behind the scenes, while King was its spokesman. In 1960 Baker left the SCLC when she helped students organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--SNCC--at her alma mater, Shaw University. The SNCC's purpose was to give young Black people a more organized voice in the civil rights movement. 

African American writer and performer, Maya Angelou toured Europe and Africa in the 1950s in the musical Porgy and Bess. She sang in New York City nightclubs, joined the Harlem Writers Guild, and took part in several off-Broadway productions, including Genet's The Blacks and her own Cabaret for Freedom.

During the 1960s she was active in the African-American political movement; she subsequently spent several years in Ghana as editor of the African Review.

Her six autobiographical volumes, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, have generally been well-received. She has also published several volumes of poetry, including And I Still Rise. Angelou read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration of President Clinton in 1993.

A Day in the Life of Joe the Republican

Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards.

He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, so now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

Joe takes his morning shower, reaching for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check, because some liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

It’s noon time. Joe needs to make a bank deposit, so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.

Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to Dad’s; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards.

Joe arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by the Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans.

The house didn’t have electricity until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification. Those rural Republicans would still be sitting in the dark.

Joe is happy to see his Dad, who is now retired. His Dad lives on Social Security and his union pension, because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to.

After his visit with Dad, he gets back in his car for the ride home. He turns on a radio talk show. The host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day) Joe agrees:

“We don’t need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”

Don’t be like Joe; he’s a f*cking moron.

Daily Kos

Repost: Black History Month: Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was one of the most important, impassioned leaders of the civil rights movement, from its earliest incarnations in the 1950s until well into the 1980s. Yet his is a name that is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Bayard Rustin's involvement was a behind-the-scenes involvement, though no less important than any of the other names usually associated with the fight for civil rights. In addition, the fact that Bayard Rustin was also a gay man, and had been a member of the American Communist party probably insured his name would seldom be mentioned.

He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912, to Florence Rustin, one of eight children of Julia and Janifer Rustin. Florence's child had been born out of wedlock; the father was Archie Hopkins. Julia and Janifer decided to raise young Bayard as their son--he did not know that his 'sister' Florence was his mother until he was in his early teens.

Julia Rustin was a member of the Society of Friends--the Quakers--and even though she attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the denomination of her husband, she raised her children on the tenets of the Quaker faith: the equality of all human beings before God, the necessity for nonviolence, the importance of dealing with everyone with love and respect.

After attending Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College, Bayard moved to New York City in 1937, where he would live the rest of his life. He enrolled in City College of New York, though he never received a degree. It was at City College that Rustin began to organize for the Young Communist League of City College; the communists' progressive stance on the issue of racial injustice appealed to him. with the Party's about-face in the issue of segregation in the American military, he became disillusioned with communism and broke with the Young Communist League.

He soon found himself following the words of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and, at that time, heavily involved in the civil rights of African Americans. Bayard Rustin soon found himself heading the youth wing of a march on Washington that Randolph envisioned, but the march was cancelled when FDR issued Executive Order No. 8802, forbidding racial discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries.

Rustin was angered by Randolph's decision to cancel the projected march, and he transferred his efforts at organization to the peace movement, first in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and then in the American Friends Service Committee, the Socialist Party, and the War Resisters League.

As a member of a government-recognized peace church--Rustin belonged to the Fifteenth Street Friends Meeting-- he was entitled to do alternative service rather than serve in the military. But Rustin was unable to accept what he considered the 'easy way out,' given that many young men who did not belong to any recognized peace church were given harsh sentences for refusing to serve in the armed forces.

In 1944, Rustin was found guilty of violating the Selective Service Act and was sentenced to three years in a federal prison. He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, where he set about to resist the pervasive segregation that was the norm in US prisons at that time. Faced with vicious racism from some of the white guards and prisoners, Rustin faced frequent cruelty with courage and completely nonviolent resistance.

After his release from prison, Rustin once more joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which staged a journey through four Southern and border states in 1947 to test the application of the Supreme Court's recent ruling that discrimination in seating in interstate transportation was illegal.

Rustin's resistance to North Carolina's Jim Crow law against integration in transportation earned him twenty-eight days' hard labor on a chain gang, where he met with the usual racist taunts and tortures from his fellow white prisoners, as well as the guards.

From 1947 to 1952, Rustin traveled to India and then to Africa under the aegis of FOR to explore and understand more fully the concept of nonviolent demonstration, working within the Indian and Ghanaian independence movements.

In 1953, back in the US and lecturing for the American Association of University Women in Pasadena, Rustin was arrested for public indecency. It was the first time that Rustin's homosexuality had come into public attention, and at that time homosexual behavior in all states was a criminal offense.

Although the gay rights movement in the United States was still many years away, Rustin's conviction and his relatively open attitude about his homosexuality set the stage for him to become an elder gay icon, as well as an African American icon, in the years to come. Civil Right and gay rights became of a piece with his belief in the inherent dignity of Afro-Americans and other oppressed people.

A consequence of his arrest was that Rustin was released from his position at the FOR.

During this time, what he considered the lowest point of his life, Bayard Rustin began a twelve-year stint as executive secretary of the War Resisters League. He contributed greatly to a compilation of pacifist strategy--entitled Speak Truth To Power--published in The Progressive in 1959.

In 1956 Rustin was asked to provide Dr. Martin Luther King with some practical advice on how to apply Gandhian principles of nonviolence to the boycott of public transportation then taking shape in Montgomery, Alabama. On leave from the War Resisters League, Rustin spent time in Montgomery and Birmingham advising King, who had not yet completely embraced principles of nonviolence in his struggle.

By 1957, Rustin was playing a significant role in the birth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and in the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington that took place in May of 1957 to urge President Eisenhower to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that US schools be desegregated.

The high point of Bayard Rustin's political career, obviously, was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which took place on August 28, 1963; where Martin Luther King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech. By all accounts Bayard Rustin was the March's chief architect.

With small inroads in desegregation, baby steps actually, finally being made, Rustin came to believe that the time for militant action was over. Now that the legal foundation for segregation had been irrevocably shattered, came the larger, more difficult task of forging an alliance of dispossessed groups in American society into a progressive force.

Rustin saw this coalition encompassing African Americans and other minorities, trade unions, liberals, and religious groups. Rustin's plan of action did not go further was due to, in the opinion of several political analysts, the war in Vietnam. The enormous monetary, psychological, and spiritual cost of war had eroded any chance of further progressive movement.

Rustin's opposition to 'identity politics' also came under criticism by exponents of the Black Power movement. His criticism of affirmative action programs and black studies departments in American universities was not a popular viewpoint among his fellow African Americans. Rustin found himself isolated from the movement for a time.

Another viewpoint which did not endear Bayard Rustin to leftists or radical Black Power adherents was his consistent support of Israel. In the wake of the Holocaust, Rustin believed very strongly that the Jews needed their own state.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a delegate for Freedom house, monitoring elections and human rights abuses in places like Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Poland, and Zimbabwe. In all his efforts Rustin evinced a lifelong, unwavering conviction on behalf of the value of democratic principles.

It was Rustin's human rights expedition to Haiti in 1987 that drew the final curtain on his remarkable life. After his visit, under the aegis of Freedom House, to study prospects for democratic elections in Haiti, Rustin began to feel ill. His symptoms were initially misdiagnosed as intestinal parasites, but on August 21, 1987, Rustin was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital and diagnosed with a perforated appendix.

He died of cardiac arrest on August 24.

Although Bayard Rustin lived in the shadow of more charismatic civil rights leaders, like Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, he can lay claim to having been an indispensable, although mostly unsung, force behind the movement toward equality for America's black citizens, and more largely for the rights of human beings around the world.

Throughout his life, Bayard Rustin's Quakerism was a unifying force, and a strong plank in his personal philosophy, incorporating beliefs that were of central importance to him: that there is God in every person, that all are entitled to a decent life, and that a life of service to others is the way to happiness and true fulfillment.

The Funny Papers

Gary Huck, Daniel Boris, JD Crowe, John Cole, Adam Zyglis, Marc Murphy, Nick Anderson, Kevin Necessary, Jack Ohman, Michael de Adder,  Gary Taxali, Max Espinoza, Zez Vaz,

Repost: Black History Month: Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer was a highly publicized campaign in the Deep South to register Black people to vote during the summer of 1964. Thousands of civil rights activists, many of them white college students from the North, descended on Mississippi and other Southern states that summer to put an end to the long-time political disenfranchisement of African Americans in the region. Although Black men had won the right to vote in 1870, thanks to the 15th Amendment, for the next 100 years many were unable to exercise that right.

White local and state officials systematically kept Black people from voting through formal methods, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, and through cruder methods of fear and intimidation, which included beatings and lynchings.

The inability to vote was just one of many problems Black people encountered in the racist South, but the civil-rights officials who decided to zero in on voter registration understood its crucial significance; so did the white supremacists. An African American voting bloc would be able to effect social and political change, especially in the South with its large African American population.

Freedom Summer marked the climax of intensive voter-registration activities in the South that had started in 1961. Organizers chose to focus their efforts on Mississippi because of the state's particularly dismal voting-rights record: in 1962 only 6.7% of African Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote, the lowest in the nation.

The Freedom Summer campaign was organized by a coalition called the Mississippi Council of Federated Organizations, which was led by the Congress of Racial Equality--CORE--and included the NAACP, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--SNCC.

By mobilizing volunteer white college students from the North to join them, the coalition scored a major public relations coup as hundreds of reporters came to Mississippi from around the country to cover the voter-registration campaign.

The organization of the Mississippi Freedom Party--MFDP--was a major focus of the summer program. More than 80,000 Mississippians joined the new party, which elected a slate of sixty-eight delegates to the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City. The MFDP delegation challenged the seating of the delegates representing Mississippi's all white Democratic Party.

While the effort failed, it drew national attention, particularly through the dramatic televised appeal of MFDP delegate Fannie Lou Hamer. The MFDP challenge also led to a ban on racially discriminatory delegations at future conventions.

Freedom Summer officials also established 30 "Freedom Schools" in towns throughout Mississippi to address the racial inequalities in that state's educational system. Mississippi's Black schools were invariably poorly funded, and teachers had to use hand-me-down textbooks that offered a racist slant on American history.

Many of the white college students were assigned to teach in these schools, whose curriculum included Black history, the philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement, and leadership development in addition to remedial instruction in reading and arithmetic.

Freedom Schools had hoped to draw at least 1000 students that first summer and ended up with 3000. Schools became a model for future social programs like Head Start, as well as alternative educational institutions.

Freedom Summer activists faced threats and harassment throughout the campaign, not only from white supremacist groups, but from local residents and police. Freedom School buildings and the volunteers' homes were frequent targets; 37 Black churches and 30 Black homes and businesses were firebombed or burned during the summer of 1964; and the cases often went unsolved.

More than 1000 black and white volunteers were arrested, and at least 80 were beaten by white mobs or racist police officers. But the summer's most infamous act of violence was the murder of three young civil rights workers, a black volunteer, James Chaney, and his white coworkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

On June 21, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner set out to investigate a church bombing near Philadelphia, Mississippi, but were arrested that afternoon and held for several hours on alleged traffic violations. Their release from jail was the last time they were seen alive before their badly decomposed bodies were discovered under a nearby dam six weeks later. Goodman and Schwerner had died from single gunshot wounds to the chest, and Chaney, the only African American in the trio, from a savage beating.

The murders made headlines all over the country and provoked an outpouring of national support for the Civil Rights Movement. But many black volunteers realized that because two of the victims were white, these murders were attracting much more attention than previous attacks in which the victims had been black, and this added to the growing resentment they had begun to feel towards the white volunteers.

There was also growing dissension among the ranks over charges of assumed white elitism. Black volunteers complained that whites seemed to think they had a natural claim on leadership roles, and that they treated the rural Black people as though they were ignorant. There was also increasing hostility from both Black and white workers over the interracial romances that developed the summer. Meanwhile, women volunteers of both races were charging both the Black and white men with sexist behavior.

But despite the internal divisions, Freedom Summer left a positive legacy. The well-publicized voter registration drives brought national attention to the subject of black disenfranchisement, and this eventually led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, federal legislation that, among other things, outlawed the tactics Southern states had used to prevent blacks from voting.

Freedom Summer also instilled among African Americans a new consciousness and a new confidence in political action. As Fannie Lou Hamer later said, "Before the 1964 project there were people that wanted change, but they hadn't dared to come out. After 1964 people began moving. To me it's one of the greatest things that ever happened in Mississippi."