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< Back St Augustine’s College was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina on October 14, 1867 ​ On Mon, 10.14.1867 St Augustine’s College was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina. The founding of St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C., in 1867 is celebrated on this date. It is One of over 100 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in America. It was established by the Episcopalian clergy for the education of freed slaves. Over time, this Black school has become one of the country's most highly respected private, accredited, coeducational institutions. The college's liberal arts department includes programs in business, computer science, teacher education, the natural sciences, mathematics, allied health, interdisciplinary studies, urban, social/international studies, theater and film, adult education, community development, communications, and military science, a required course for all members of the College's distinguished Army ROTC division. Recently the College's annual enrollment has grown to 1,400 students, about half from North Carolina, the remainder from 37 states, the District of Columbia, the U. S. Virgin Islands, Jamaica and 30 foreign countries. St. Augustine’s consists of nearly 100 dedicated men and women, all capable teachers and scholars. Their main campus is over 55 acres with 37 facilities, three of which, its Chapel, St. Agnes Hall and Taylor Hall, are registered historic landmarks. St. Augustine's was the first HBCU in the nation to have its own on-campus commercial radio and television stations: WAUG-AM750 and WAUG-TV68, Cable Channel 20. They provide a strong liberal arts base for all of its students with flexibility. They enable their students to make educational and career choices consistent with widening opportunities and the rapidly changing conditions of society too. While technical skills are highly prized to guarantee students a meaningful role in the marketplace, St. Augustine's also assists students in developing enriched perspectives to deal competently with an increasingly complex, interactive global society. Some of St. Augustine's more than 10,000 living alumni are: North Carolina State Auditor, the Hon. Ralph Campbell, Jr., class of 1968, the first African-American elected to that position in this state; George Williams, class of 65, internationally acclaimed track and field coach; Ruby Butler DeMesme, ’69, former assistant secretary of the Air Force (ret.) for manpower, installations and environment; and Hannah Diggs Atkins, ’43, first African-American woman elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives (1968-1980). Reference: Black American Colleges and Universities: Profiles of Two-Year, Four-Year, & Professional Schools by Levirn Hill, Pub., Gale Group, 1994 ISBN: 0-02-864984-2 Previous Next

< Back Irwin Holmes Irwin Holmes on the NC State University tennis team in 1957. Irwin Holmes Photo description: Irwin Holmes on the NC State University tennis team in 1957. Credit Courtesy Of Meredythe Holmes -A college age Irwin, an African American wearing glasses, smiling, looking at the viewer, holding a tennis racket. He is wearing a grey tee shirt. Below is an interview with Irwin Holmes on The State Of things-NPR Meet Irwin Holmes: From Tennis With Arthur Ashe To Putting Men In Space By Dana Terry & Frank Stasio • OCT 28, 2019 Irwin Holmes had the early makings of an all-around star. He graduated third in his class at Hillside High School in 1956 at the age of 15. In addition to his academic prowess, Holmes was also a champion on the tennis court. He grew up practicing at the Algonquin Tennis Club where he honed his craft by playing against future greats like Arthur Ashe. Holmes became the No. 2 African American high school player in the country during a time when most blacks were not allowed on the tennis court. Holmes would go on to make history in many other ways: He was one of the first African Americans accepted to North Carolina State University and the first to graduate. He is credited with helping integrate ACC sports as co-captain of NC State’s tennis team. Alongside all of these firsts, Holmes and his family were also overlooked and underutilized. As a kid, Holmes watched as his mother, an English major, was unable to secure a job teaching her preferred subject. She took the only one available and put her creativity to work as an arts and crafts teacher. Despite his father’s expertise, education and ambition, no one below the Mason-Dixon Line would hire a black chemistry teacher. Holmes watched his father turn his relationships and reputation into a career running the recreation centers and programs for blacks in Durham. After graduating from NC State, Holmes faced many of the same problems himself. No one would hire a black engineer. So he headed up North where he helped develop technologies including the one that put a man in space and laid the groundwork for the Internet. Holmes would go on to spend nearly 20 years as an engineer with IBM. In 2018, NC State renamed a building after Holmes in honor of his accomplishments at the university and in his career. Host Frank Stasio talks with Irwin Holmes about his life and legacy. INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS On his parents’ lives: [My parents] both finished college. They both were people who liked other people and spent their careers making life better for other people. My dad ended up in Durham as head of parks and rec for black people … And my mom taught in the Durham County Public School system. She was an art teacher. On his parents’ unrealized potential: They were an example of what America did when it ignored the contributions that black people could make. And we still have that problem by deliberately putting us in jobs that white people feel comfortable with us being in that are usually far below what we are capable of doing. On how discrimination was handled by his father’s generation: Black men in America in those days accepted the way it was in America. [They] did not talk about the fact that the discrimination against them prevented them from doing all the things they could do in life. I never heard either him or his friends ever discuss that … My generation, we complained. On the role of the Algonquin Tennis club in Durham: [The Algonquin Tennis club] was put together by members of the upper [class] black community to have a place to congregate for leisure things, but also to develop a tennis program … Some of us kids snuck in when nobody was watching and used that court to learn and taught ourselves how to play. "I was in college before I ever had a tennis coach" - Irwin Holmes On the first time he heard about Arthur Ashe: Arthur’s father was a janitor for some tennis courts in Richmond, Virginia, so Arthur grew up right next to these tennis courts. Somewhere around 6 years old he started playing tennis on these courts. I know that because some Durham people had played in a tournament in Richmond. I heard them talking about this little 6-year-old boy who was out hitting balls on the court almost like a grown man. On the year he finally got to play Arthur Ashe: That was the year Arthur did not lose a match to any black male of any age in America. And that was the year I played Arthur. It was the year when Arthur finally got big enough, and his game was unbelievable for his age. On choosing to attend college at NC State after Howard University ran out of scholarship money: It had already appeared in all of the major newspapers in North Carolina and half the country that this black student was going to be going to North Carolina State. I got all kinds of people who were happy and let me know how happy they were that I was going. And then I get this opportunity to go to Howard on a [full]scholarship … Even with the scholarship at Howard, I would have ended up paying more than if I went to State. On staying off campus with another black freshman Walter Holmes: Since we were doing something nobody had done before at NC State, we didn’t know what to expect from the white community. So the first thing we did was we found us a room next to the highway so we could get out of Raleigh quicker. So we stayed off campus the first year. On how an opposing college tennis team forfeited a match rather than play a black player: So we show up to play, and their white coach with his all-white team shows up to play what he expects to be an all-white NC State team. And lo and behold here’s this black person showing up to play against his players. Poor guy did not know what was happening. On his tennis coach standing up for him: [Coach John Kenfield] gave them a heads up, but he said under no circumstances would they play NC State where I did not play also. On helping develop technology that would make way for the Internet: The government said we have all these computers all over the United States that need to talk to each other directly. And we need a system where they can talk to each other quickly, and we don’t have one. So they asked us to put together this system. On working to help the next generation of aspiring college students: I’m trying to increase the number of scholarships available at NC State and working with HBCUs to better their situations. We have a shortage of opportunities for people in our race to develop into all they can be in life. Please click Source Link to Listen to the Interview. Source Link: https://www.wunc.org/.../meet-irwin-holmes-tennis-arthur... Previous Next

< Back Max Roach Throughout his career, drummer Max Roach constantly sought to extend the boundaries of jazz, both stylistically and in the service of political change. On April 13th, 2022 the National Recording Registry, a division of the The Library of Congress, included Max Roach's "We Insist" among the 25 entries for treasured American sound recordings for 2022. Max Roach was born in the Newland portion of Pasquotank County NC, in 1924. The link below shares Wednesday's news release from the Library of Congress: https://newsroom.loc.gov/.../fee30140-0454-401c-a2a2... "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite" by Max Roach (1960) (Album cover is middle image). Throughout his career, drummer Max Roach constantly sought to extend the boundaries of jazz, both stylistically and in the service of political change. “We Insist!” consists of an innovative suite featuring singer Abby Lincoln performing lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr., accompanied by Roach, legendary tenor sax player Coleman Hawkins (on “Driva’ Man”), Booker Little (trumpet), Julian Priester (trombone), Walter Benton (tenor sax) and James Schenk (bass). Shortly after the album’s release, Roach stated that he would “never again play anything that does not have social significance,” and he urged Black musicians to “employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people.” The album masterfully fulfills this brief. “Driva’ Man” focuses on the history of slavery and the notorious figure of the slave driver, while “Freedom” and “Tryptich: Prayer/Protest/Peace” deal with emancipation, the ambiguous legacy of freedom, and protest. Side two, devoted to pan-African themes, features a larger percussion ensemble including Babatunde Olatunji, Raymond Mantilla and Thomas Du Vall. The resulting works are heavily influenced by African rhythms; they also foreshadow Roach’s future work with the percussion ensemble M’Boom.=boundaries of jazz, drummer Max Roach, tenor sax players Coleman Hawkins and Walter Benton, trumpeter Booker Little, trombonist Julian Priester, bassist James Schenk, percussionists Babatunde Olatunji, Raymond Mantilla and Thomas Du Vall, and singer Abbey Lincoln brought forth an avant-garde jazz suite that tells dramatic stories of a nation struggling for freedom and justice, through protest, prayer, and a panoply of African rhythms. The album concludes with "Tears for Johannesburg," a mournful and moving tribute to the victims of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. The album's subject matter was considered controversial by some critics, but Roach protested the importance of performing socially-relevant music. "We Insist!" would stand as one of his most vital works. ---- ABOUT MAX ROACH: Maxwell Lemuel Roach (Born: January 10, 1925--Died: August 16, 2007), was a percussionist, drummer, and jazz composer. He has worked with many of the greatest jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins. He is widely considered to be one of the most important drummers in the history of jazz. Roach was born in Newland portion of Pasquotank County North Carolina in 1924., to Alphonse and Cressie Roach; his family moved to Brooklyn, New York when he was 4 years old. He grew up in a musical context, his mother being a gospel singer, and he started to play bugle in parade orchestras at a young age. At the age of 10, he was already playing drums in some gospel bands. He performed his first big-time gig in New York City at the age of sixteen, substituting for Sonny Greer in a performance with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In 1942, Roach started to go out in the jazz clubs of the 52nd Street and at 78th Street & Broadway for Georgie Jay's Taproom (playing with schoolmate Cecil Payne). He was one of the first drummers (along with Kenny Clarke) to play in the bebop style, and performed in bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis. Roach played on many of Parker's most important records, including the Savoy 1945 session, a turning point in recorded jazz. Two children, son Daryl and daughter Maxine, were born from his first marriage with Mildred Roach. In 1954 he met singer Barbara Jai (Johnson) and had another son, Raoul Jordu. He continued to play as a freelance while studying composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He graduated in 1952. During the period 1962-1970, Roach was married to the singer Abbey Lincoln, who had performed on several of Roach's albums. Twin daughters, Ayodele and Dara Rasheeda, were later born to Roach and his third wife, Janus Adams Roach. Long involved in jazz education, in 1972 he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In the early 2000s, Roach became less active owing to the onset of hydrocephalus-related complications. Renowned all throughout his performing life, Roach has won an extraordinary array of honors. He was one of the first to be given a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, cited as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, twice awarded the French Grand Prix du Disque, elected to the International Percussive Society's Hall of Fame and the Downbeat Magazine Hall of Fame, awarded Harvard Jazz Master, celebrated by Aaron Davis Hall, given eight honorary doctorate degrees, including degrees awarded by the University of Bologna, Italy and Columbia University. In 1952 Roach co-founded Debut Records with bassist Charles Mingus. This label released a record of a concert, billed and widely considered as “the greatest concert ever,” called Jazz at Massey Hall, featuring Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Mingus and Roach. Also released on this label was the groundbreaking bass-and- drum free improvisation, Percussion Discussion. In 1954, he formed a quintet featuring trumpeter Clifford Brown, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Richie Powell (brother of Bud Powell), and bassist George Morrow, though Land left the following year and Sonny Rollins replaced him. The group was a prime example of the hard bop style also played by Art Blakey and Horace Silver. Tragically, this group was to be short-lived; Brown and Powell were killed in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in June 1956. After Brown and Powell's deaths, Roach continued leading a similarly configured group, with Kenny Dorham (and later the short-lived Booker Little) on trumpet, George Coleman on tenor and pianist Ray Bryant. Roach expanded the standard form of hard-bop using 3/4 waltz rhythms and modality in 1957 with his album Jazz in 3/4 time. During this period, Roach recorded a series of other albums for the EmArcy label featuring the brothers Stanley and Tommy Turrentine. In 1960 he composed the “We Insist! - Freedom Now” suite with lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr., after being invited to contribute to commemorations of the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Using his musical abilities to comment on the African-American experience would be a significant part of his career. Unfortunately, Roach suffered from being blacklisted by the American recording industry for a period in the 1960s. In 1966 with his album Drums Unlimited (which includes several tracks that are entirely drums solos) he proved that drums can be a solo instrument able to play theme, variations, rhythmically cohesive phrases. He described his approach to music as “the creation of organized sound.” Among the many important records Roach has made is the classic Money Jungle 1962, with Mingus and Duke Ellington. This is generally regarded as one of the very finest trio albums ever made. During the 70s, Roach formed a unique musical organization—”M'Boom”—a percussion orchestra. Each member of this unit composed for it and performed on many percussion instruments. Personnel included Fred King, Joe Chambers, Warren Smith, Freddie Waits, Roy Brooks, Omar Clay, Ray Mantilla, Francisco Mora, and Eli Fountain. Not content to expand on the musical territory he had already become known for, Roach spent the decades of the 80s and 90s continually finding new ways to express his musical expression and presentation. In the early 80s, he began presenting entire concerts solo, proving that this multi-percussion instrument, in the hands of such a great master, could fulfill the demands of solo performance and be entirely satisfying to an audience. He created memorable compositions in these solo concerts; a solo record was released by Bay State, a Japanese label, just about impossible to obtain. One of these solo concerts is available on video, which also includes a filming of a recording date for Chattahoochee Red, featuring his working quartet, Odean Pope, Cecil Bridgewater and Calvin Hill. He embarked on a series of duet recordings. Departing from the style of presentation he was best known for, most of the music on these recordings is free improvisation, created with the avant-garde musicians Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, Abdullah Ibrahim and Connie Crothers. He created duets with other performers: a recorded duet with the oration by Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream”; a duet with video artist Kit Fitzgerald, who improvised video imagery while Roach spontaneously created the music; a classic duet with his life-long friend and associate Dizzy Gillespie; a duet concert recording with Mal Waldron. He wrote music for theater, such as plays written by Sam Shepard, presented at La Mama E.T.C. in New York City. He found new contexts for presentation, creating unique musical ensembles. One of these groups was “The Double Quartet.” It featured his regular performing quartet, with personnel as above, except Tyrone Brown replacing Hill; this quartet joined with “The Uptown String Quartet,” led by his daughter Maxine Roach, featuring Diane Monroe, Lesa Terry and Eileen Folson. Another ensemble was the “So What Brass Quintet,” a group comprised of five brass instrumentalists and Roach, no chordal instrumnent, no bass player. Much of the performance consisted of drums and horn duets. The ensemble consisted of two trumpets, trombone, French horn and tuba. Musicians included Cecil Bridgewater, Frank Gordon, Eddie Henderson, Steve Turre, Delfeayo Marsalis, Robert Stewart, Tony Underwood, Marshall Sealy, and Mark Taylor. Roach presented his music with orchestras and gospel choruses. He performed a concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He wrote for and performed with the Walter White gospel choir and the John Motley Singers. Roach performed with dancers: the Alvin Aily Dance Company, the Dianne McIntyre Dance Company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In the early 80s, Roach surprised his fans by performing in a hip hop concert, featuring the artist-rapper Fab Five Freddy and the New York Break Dancers. He expressed the insight that there was a strong kinship between the outpouring of expression of these young black artists and the art he had pursued all his life. During all these years, while he ventured into new territory during a lifetime of innovation, he kept his contact with his musical point of origin. His last recording, “Friendship”, was with trumpet master Clark Terry, the two long-standing friends in duet and quartet. -End- ---- PHOTOGRAPHS CREDIT: Top and Bottom Left-Images from: https://www.gretschdrums.com/artists/max-roach Middle album cover image: LOC Top Right: Max Roach at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival at Columbia University in 2000. Credit : Ozier Muhammed/The New York Times. Bottom Right: Event and photographer unknown. From -https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/max-roach About Max Roach Source: https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/max-roach Previous Next

< Back The Round That Changed A Town The Round That Changed A Town One afternoon in 1955, six Black men played golf on a whites-only course. What happened next pushed Greensboro toward integration and turned a local dentist into a civil rights icon. written by Jeremy Markovich/Our State Magazine--This story was published on July 31, 2018 Photo: The Greensboro Six-the men are standing in a group looking at the camera- (from left: Phillip Cooke, Samuel Murray, Elijah Herring, Joseph Sturdivant, Dr. George Simkins, Leonidas Wolfe) defiant round of golf sparked lasting change. Photograph By Greensboro News & Record Doc Simkins has been gone going on 17 years now. But at Gillespie Golf Course, he’s still very much alive. “Doc Simkins was the man,” Ralph Miller says over the clacking of dominoes. When the weather’s fine, Miller and a few other guys set up their tiles on the shaded, beat-up picnic tables overlooking the ninth hole. They call themselves the Tree Boyz. “Everybody went to him,” Miller says, keeping an eye on the game. “My play?” “You want to talk, you need to move to another damn table,” grouses another player. Miller waves him off. “Tennis, golf, Doc did it all,” he says. Politics, too. They called him Doc because he was a dentist, but he would become better known for something else. Something that started after the police came to this course to arrest him. “Sent him to jail,” Miller says with a slight, knowing smirk. “Heh.” Out in the parking lot, Jimmy Moore rolls up on his golf cart when he hears someone mention Simkins. “I knew Doc,” he says. “Caddied for him.” Caddies are long gone at Gillespie, but Moore’s still around, doing odd jobs for the course in retirement. He recalls how Simkins always had something funny to say: “Might rub you on the head and say, ‘How you doin’ today? You got a bag today?’ You’d say no, and he’d say, ‘I’m gettin’ ready to play, grab mine.’” Moore’s brother-in-law Fred Pritchett is playing Gillespie on this day, too. Growing up, he caddied the course, and he was here when Simkins was arrested on December 7, 1955. He remembers watching from the caddie shack as Simkins and five other black men walked to the sixth green. “The sheriff came up in front of them and said, ‘Don’t hit that ball,’” Pritchett recalls. “Doc told them, ‘Get out of the way.’ They hit that ball.” Dr. George C. Simkins Jr. was not the kind of person who just let people win. Not even his own son. Over the course of his life, Chris Simkins says, he only beat his father twice. At any sport. “Lots, lots of trash talk,” Chris says. Tennis was his father’s best game, but golf was often his focus. Chris remembers his father at the golf course, hitting practice shot after practice shot. Then he’d go to the putting green, then the driving range. At home, he’d chip in the backyard. He swung clubs in the living room, and he studied the pros on TV. As a result, the Simkins house was full of trophies; shiny tributes to Doc’s prowess filled a half-dozen cases and lined the stairway. “We ran out of room,” Chris says. But first and foremost, Simkins was a dentist, following his father into the profession. After graduating from Dudley High School in 1940, he left town for college and dental school, and returned nine years later. For five years, he worked for the Guilford County Health Department, and then opened his own dental office in 1954. Most of his customers were black, or white people who didn’t have much money. Sometimes they couldn’t pay. That was OK. “He would work on anybody,” Chris says. “Other dentists would not accept those patients. He would.” Every Wednesday at noon, without fail, Simkins closed his office, came home for lunch, changed into a polo shirt and slacks, and, by 2 o’clock, he was on the golf course. But not Gillespie. In the 1950s, Gillespie was for whites only. Designed by one of the men responsible for creating Augusta National and built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the course allowed black boys and men to caddie, but never to play. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that, in essence, separate accommodations for blacks were inherently unequal, municipal spaces like golf courses and tennis courts remained segregated across the South for a decade or more. For that matter, so did many public schools. “It took a long time to do what the Supreme Court said in 1954,” says Henry Frye, an acquaintance of Simkins, and a lawyer who would become the first (and so far the only) black chief justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Efforts to integrate Gillespie had started even before Brown. In 1949, a group of black golfers demanded the right, as taxpayers, to play the newly opened Gillespie Golf Course. In response, the city leased the property to a private company for a fee. The company made the course for members and their guests only. Those members were exclusively white. Over the years, more black golfers tested the waters at Gillespie, trying to sign up as members or asking to play, only to be turned away. And then came Doc Simkins. December 7, 1955, was chilly, 42 degrees with a light breeze, but Simkins and five friends were determined to play some golf. They could play Nocho Park Golf Course, the black course only a few blocks away. But Nocho was shabby. Long grass, rough greens. The stench from a nearby sewage plant was strong. So the six men walked into the Gillespie clubhouse ready to pay the fee. The man working the counter snatched the sign-in book before they could touch it. “You can’t play here,” he told them. Calmly, the men put their greens fees on the counter — 75 cents each — and walked outside to tee off. The irate pro caught up with them a few holes later. Simkins told him: “We’re out here for a cause.” “What damn cause?” the man asked. “The cause of democracy.” The pro, then the police, followed the men hole to hole. Instead of putting his club back in his bag between shots, Simkins kept it in his hand, ready to defend himself. He was rattled — pulling shots to the right — but he knew he had to continue. The group played through the ninth hole and then left. Hours later, a black policeman tracked down all six men and arrested them for trespassing. The real crime, it seemed, was golfing while black. To many people, including Pritchett, the young caddie who was watching, that moment of courage felt small at first. Bigger things were happening elsewhere: Rosa Parks had been arrested just a week before, and Emmett Till had been murdered in Mississippi four months before that. In context, a half-dozen arrests over a round of golf seemed to be a lot of fuss over a game. A month later, a city court judge told Simkins and the other men to plead guilty, pay a $15 fine, and forget about it. Instead, the group took their case to Superior Court, where they faced an all-white jury. During the trial, Simkins’s lawyer discovered that two jurors had played Gillespie, and called them as witnesses. The men said that they weren’t members or guests, but had played at the course without a problem. The attorney for Gillespie had argued that the club was members-only, and this new admission seemed to shoot a hole right through his argument. Even so, the six men were found guilty of trespassing and sentenced to 15 days in jail. Simkins’s lawyer kept appealing and eventually filed a federal complaint. A U.S. district court judge sided with the Greensboro Six, a moniker that had started to stick, and ordered that the course be integrated. Then, two weeks before the order was to take effect, the clubhouse at Gillespie mysteriously burned down. Rather than rebuild it, the City of Greensboro condemned the entire course. It also closed the course at Nocho Park. Moreover, the city removed the sod from the front nine at Gillespie and began to store parks and recreation equipment on the land. Greensboro’s best municipal golf course had been turned into a junkyard. “That’s how I got started in civil rights,” Simkins would later say. He joined the NAACP and became president of the local chapter in 1959. Soon after, a local businessman, Ralph Johns, suggested that Simkins take a seat at the local Woolworth’s in an effort to get served at the whites-only lunch counter. Simkins said no. “There’s no way in hell I’m going to get in any more stuff than I am right now,” he recalled to the Greensboro News & Record. “I’m catching hell with the lawyers, I’m catching hell with the whites, and I’m catching hell with the blacks, who think I’m going too fast,” he said. Johns found four freshmen at NC A&T who would do it. The sit-in movement born at that lunch counter on February 1, 1960, quickly spread across the South. Simkins gave the students the support of his NAACP chapter. “If I had gone up there and sat down,” he said later, “it wouldn’t have materialized like it did.” Meanwhile, the golf case had worked its way to the highest level of the legal system. In 1959, four years after the arrests, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear it. Simkins asked Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who’d argued Brown and would later go on to be a Supreme Court justice, to take his case. Marshall declined. The case, Wolfe v. North Carolina, would be a losing effort, Marshall said, since Simkins’s previous lawyers had forgotten to include information about their federal court judgment in their legal briefs. It was a glaring mistake, and Marshall didn’t want to sully his record with a case that he predicted, correctly, would lose in a 5-4 decision. But in a scathing dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wondered why North Carolina would want its citizens arrested and thrown in jail for enjoying its recreational facilities. That opinion was enough to shame Gov. Luther Hodges into commuting the sentences of the Greensboro Six in 1960, so they could avoid jail time. With that, the Gillespie golf case was over. Simkins had lost. And yet, because of that loss, Simkins turned his attention to a different way to win: voting. At the time, Greensboro only had about 5,500 registered black voters. So Simkins went to NC A&T, Bennett College, and Dudley High School, and registered teachers and students. Then he and others went house to house, registering black men and women, one at a time. Steadily, the number of registered black voters in the area more than doubled, to 12,000. Next, Simkins launched a letter writing campaign to tell those new voters whom they should elect. The councilmen who had voted to close down the city’s recreational facilities needed to go, he said. “Do you intend to open up Gillespie Park so that everybody can play there?” read one flyer. “Otherwise, we’re not going to vote for you.” The campaign worked. A new crop of politicians replaced members who had voted to close the golf courses, swimming pools, and other facilities. And, on December 7, 1962, seven years to the day after Simkins and his friends had played nine holes at Gillespie, the course finally reopened. To everyone. Simkins was the first one to tee off. Ralph Miller insists that while the golf story is important, the tennis story is even bigger. Everybody forgets about that, he says, but Simkins integrated the city pools and tennis facilities, too. Through court action, he desegregated Greensboro’s hospitals and schools as well. With his newfound political clout, Simkins also changed the makeup of the city council, guaranteeing that black neighborhoods had local representation. It helped that Simkins was a dentist, says former Chief Justice Frye, and didn’t have to answer to any boss but himself. Simkins’s competitive spirit, which Frye experienced regularly on the golf course, kept him pushing for more. “Once he made up his mind, I don’t care what anybody else said, he was right,” Frye says. “George wasn’t one of these people who believed in waiting for things to change.” Jim Melvin, who grew up across the street from Gillespie and would later become Greensboro’s mayor, says Simkins never ran for office himself because he believed it would have diminished his influence. “A lot of politicians are self-serving — he was not personally self-serving. He was trying to positively change the system,” Melvin says. “He was our Martin Luther King.” Through it all, Simkins continued to see patients, although he’d stop to talk politics from time to time. (“He’d get up to come talk to me and some poor soul would be sitting there for 20 minutes with his mouth open,” Melvin says.) And always, on Wednesday afternoons, the dentist would close up shop to play golf. He continued to play tennis tournaments, too, and was ranked fourth in the state in the men’s 65 division when he died in 2001. Persistence and dedication were hallmarks of his character. “Over and over, when the Greensboro Community sought to tackle its Jim Crow specters, the community’s cry was ‘Let George do it,’” one obituary began. “Over and over, George did it.” Gillespie Golf Course is only nine holes now, but it’s still cheap to play, and challenging. “That’s number seven, the hole that I hate,” Moore says, pointing from his golf cart. “But it’s a good hole.” He has a nickname for the top of the green, where dreams of birdies go to die: Hell. “If that’s where you are,” he says, “that’s what you’re in.” Many of the golfers puttering along the paths here are older black men who once caddied at courses around Greensboro. In some ways, it was a good job, Moore says. “You got to talk to doctors, lawyers, and they gave you some good advice about how to make it in the world,” he says. Now, these men pass along what they know to the kids who come here to learn. Back at the picnic tables, the Tree Boyz are wrapping up. Ralph Miller, it turns out, was talking too much. He lost the game of dominoes. But he can’t stop talking about Doc. Somebody asks: What if he’d never come along? What if he’d never golfed here? Never gotten involved? Miller thinks for a moment. “He would have come in time,” he says with certainty. “It was his time.” Note: In 2016, the City of Greensboro dedicated a statue of George Simkins on the grounds of the Old Courthouse. Source Link: https://www.ourstate.com/the-round-that-changed-a-town/ Previous Next

< Back Chatham's Patriots of Color Did you know that Chatham County can claim at least 30 free people of color who participated in the Revolutionary War? Sourced from: Chatham County Historical Museum Did you know that Chatham County can claim at least 30 free people of color who participated in the Revolutionary War? Learn more from a presentation delivered last year by David Morrow, in which he discussed the untold story of those Black Chatham Patriots. You can view Morrow's presentation on "Chatham's Patriots of Color," on the Chatham Community Library's YouTube channel. In the presentation, Morrow talked about several Chatham free men of color who served in the Revolutionary War and also about how he discovered this information while researching his own family's history. If you are researching free people of color or are interested in the Revolutionary War, you won't want to miss Morrow's presentation. The photo here shows Morrow's great grandparents, Thomas Bowden and Ruth Burnette, both of whom descend from Patriots of Color in Chatham County. Thanks to Chatham Community Library and the Chatham Community Remembrance Coalition for sponsoring this great talk and to David Morrow for this important contribution to Chatham history. Link to David Morrow's talk: "Patriots of Color in Chatham County: Untold Stories: A Community Discussion by David Morrow: https://youtu.be/fh9LnLQgVHc . Source link: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=660886019374254&set=pb.100063585852768.-2207520000.&type=3 Previous Next

< Back Ben E. King On September 28, 1938, soul and R&B singer Benjamin Earl Nelson better known as Ben E. King, was born in Henderson, NC. On September 28, 1938, soul and R&B singer Benjamin Earl Nelson better known as Ben E. King, was born in Henderson, NC. King at the age of nine left North Carolina with his family for Harlem in 1947, and started work in his father’s restaurants as a teenager. His remarkable ability to sing both bass and tenor made him appealing to choirs and led him to form a vocal group called the Four Bs with some friends. King began singing in church choirs, and in high school formed the Four B’s, a doo-wop group that occasionally performed at the Apollo In 1958, King (still using his birth name) joined a doo-wop group called the Five Crowns Later that year, the Drifters' manager George Treadwell fired the members of the original Drifters, and replaced them with the members of the Five Crowns. King had a string of R&B hits with the group on Atlantic Records. He co-wrote and sang lead on the first Atlantic hit by the new version of the Drifters, "There Goes My Baby" (1959). He sang lead on a succession of hits by the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, including "Save the Last Dance for Me", "This Magic Moment", and "I Count the Tears". King recorded only thirteen songs with the Drifters—two backing other lead singers and eleven lead vocal performances—including a non-single called "Temptation" (later redone by Drifters vocalist Johnny Moore). The last of the King-led Drifters singles to be released was "Sometimes I Wonder", which was recorded May 19, 1960, but not issued until June 1962. Due to contract disputes with Treadwell in which King and his manager, Lover Patterson, demanded greater compensation, King rarely performed with the Drifters on tour or on television. On television, fellow Drifters member Charlie Thomas usually lip-synched the songs that King had recorded with the Drifters. After the disputes over salary he embarked on a solo career in 1961 with the song “Spanish Harlem.” Later that year, he released “Stand by Me,” the hit for which he is best known. King’s feelings for his soon-to-be-wife Betty inspired the words and his performance, creating a heartfelt classic that remains fresh to this day. Broadcast Music, Inc., dubbed it the fourth most-played song of the 20th century.. In May 1960, King left the Drifters, assuming the stage name Ben E. King in preparation for a solo career. Remaining with Atlantic Records on its Atco imprint, King scored his first solo hit with the ballad "Spanish Harlem" (1961). His next single, "Stand by Me", written with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, ultimately would be voted as one of the Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America. King cited singers Brook Benton, Roy Hamilton and Sam Cooke as influences for his vocals of the song."Stand by Me", "There Goes My Baby", "Spanish Harlem", and "Save the Last Dance for Me" were all named in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll; and each of those records has earned a Grammy Hall of Fame Award. King's other well-known songs include "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)", "Amor", "Seven Letters", "How Can I Forget", "On the Horizon", "Young Boy Blues", "First Taste of Love", "Here Comes the Night", "Ecstasy", and "That's When It Hurts". In the summer of 1963, King had a Top 30 hit with "I (Who Have Nothing)", which reached the Top 10 on New York's radio station, WMCA. King's records continued to place well on the Billboard Hot 100 chart until 1965. British pop bands began to dominate the pop music scene, but King still continued to make R&B hits, including "What is Soul?" (1966), "Tears, Tears, Tears" (1967), and "Supernatural Thing" (1975). King returned to the Drifters in late 1982 in England, and sang with them until the group's break-up and reorganization in 1986. From 1983 until the band's break-up, the other members of this incarnation of the Drifters were Johnny Moore, Joe Blunt, and Clyde Brown. A 1986 re-issue of "Stand by Me" followed the song's use as the theme song to the movie Stand By Me and re-entered the Billboard Top Ten after a 25-year absence. This reissue also reached Number 1 in the United Kingdom and Ireland for three weeks in February 1987. In 1990, King and Bo Diddley, along with Doug Lazy, recorded a revamped hip hop version of the Monotones' 1958 hit song "Book of Love" for the soundtrack of the movie Book of Love. He also recorded a children's album, I Have Songs In My Pocket, written and produced by children's music artist Bobby Susser in 1998, which won the Early Childhood News Directors' Choice Award and Dr. Toy's/the Institute for Childhood Resources Award. King performed "Stand by Me" on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2007. Ahmet Ertegun said, "King is one of the greatest singers in the history of rock and roll and rhythm and blues." As a Drifter and as a solo artist, King had achieved five number one hits: "There Goes My Baby", "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Stand By Me", "Supernatural Thing", and the 1986 re-issue of "Stand By Me". He also earned 12 Top 10 hits and 26 Top 40 hits from 1959 to 1986. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a Drifter; he was also nominated as a solo artist. King's "I (Who Have Nothing)" was selected for the Sopranos Peppers and Eggs Soundtrack CD (2001). King was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009. On March 27, 2012, the Songwriters Hall of Fame announced that "Stand By Me" would receive its 2012 Towering Song Award and that King would be honored with the 2012 Towering Performance Award for his recording of the song. Later in his life, King was active in his charitable foundation, the Stand By Me Foundation, which helps to provide education to deserving youths. He was a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, from the late 1960s. King performed "Stand By Me" during a televised tribute to late comedian George Carlin, as he was one of Carlin's favorite artists. On November 11, 2010, he performed "Stand By Me" on the Latin Grammys with Prince Royce. King toured the United Kingdom in 2013 and played concerts in the United States as late as 2014, despite reported health problems. It was announced on May 1, 2015 that King had died at the Hackensack University Medical Center on April 30, 2015 at the age of 76. His agent said he had suffered from "coronary problems" at the time of his death. King was survived by his wife of 51 years, Betty, three children and six grandchildren. On May 17, two weeks after his death, American rock band Imagine Dragons performed "Stand By Me" at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards as a tribute to his memory. Ben E. King's Legacy King has been covered by acts from several genres. "So Much Love" was recorded by Dusty Springfield and many others. "I (Who Have Nothing)" was performed by Shirley Bassey in 1963 and also by Tom Jones in 1970, as well as a 1979 recording by Sylvester. "Till I Can't Take It Anymore" was revisited by peer Ray Charles in 1970 and "Spanish Harlem" was sung by Aretha Franklin in 1971. "Stand by Me" was covered by The Righteous Brothers, Otis Redding, John Lennon, Mickey Gilley, Florence + The Machine, Tracy Chapman, and Prince Royce. King also inspired a number of rock bands: Siouxsie and the Banshees recorded "Supernatural Thing" in 1981 and Led Zeppelin did a cover version of "Groovin'", more known under the title of "We're Gonna Groove". On May 19, 2018 King's "Stand By Me" was performed at the Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle by Karen Gibson and the Kingdom Choir. #ncmaahc #Irememberourhistory #TellTheWholeTruth #DontLetThemForgetUs #BenEKing #StandByMe #NCBlackHistory #afrocarolinahistory #ncmusic #ncBlackmusicians #AfroCarolinaMuseumOfHistory Source:http://www.beneking.info/ Previous Next

< Back Student pickets boycott Kress Student pickets boycott Kress, 1960-Orangeburg, SC Cecil J. Williams Photographer Previous Next

< Back Charles T. Norwood Charles T. Norwood was from Raleigh, NC, and was Raleigh's first Black soldier to die in WWI. The day an armistice was signed ending World War I was on Nov. 11, 1918 — 100 years ago today. We remember this war and the American soldiers that fought in this war on this day Veterans Day, every year. So much of the African American's of NC history and stories are not taught in our schools, not exhibited in the states museums, not written about or included in many of the books that White authors create, and is not shared or spoken about. As usual, it is purposely erased, colonized, buried, or only mentioned by other African Americans. Keeping with our main purpose, We here at #ncmaahc would like to remember Private Charles T. Norwood who was from Raleigh, NC, and was Raleigh's first Black soldier to die in WWI. We will continue to celebrate the lives of as many African American soldiers from NC that we can find information on. But, Today, we celebrate the Life of Private Charles T. Norwood. During WWI, 367, 710 African Americans were drafted and roughly 400,00 served in the still segregated military. More than 200,00 served overseas. An estimated 750 servicemen died in combat, and another 5,000 were wounded. Charles T. Norwood Bio BY: Post 157 - Raleigh, North Carolina Apr 15, 2018 The Charles T. Norwood American Legion Post 157 was chartered December 19, 1924, five years after the National American Legion received its Congressional Charter. The Post was named to honor Pvt. Charles T. Norwood who served with Company H, 365 Infantry, 92nd Infantry Division. Pvt. Norwood was wounded on November 11, 1918 just hours before the Armistice to end World War I was set to begin. Pvt. Norwood died from his wounds and Lobar Pneumonia on January 17, 1919 making him the first Black solider to be killed from Raleigh, North Carolina during World War I. Pvt. Charles T. Norwood was buried in the Raleigh National Cemetery on August 21, 1921. He is buried in Section 8 Site 1226 ------ Raleigh’s first Black soldier to die in WWI was wounded on the day the war ended The first African-American soldier from Raleigh to be killed in World War I was wounded on Nov. 11, 1918, which was Armistice Day. That commemoration is now part of Veterans Day. The Army soldier was Charles T. Norwood, who is buried in Raleigh National Cemetery. BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN November 10, 2018 04:56 PM Updated November 10, 2018 05:19 PM RALEIGH The day an armistice was signed ending World War I on Nov. 11, 1918 — 100 years ago — was also the day Raleigh soldier Charles T. Norwood was wounded. He later died, becoming the first African-American soldier from Raleigh who died in World War I. American Legion Post 157 in Raleigh is named for Norwood. Members of the post marched in the North Carolina Veterans Day Parade in downtown Raleigh on Saturday. According to the American Legion, Norwood was an Army private who served with Company H, 365 Infantry, 92nd Infantry Division. At the time he lived with his mother, Emmeline Norwood, on East Lane Street, according to a newspaper clipping. During World War I, African-American soldiers in the U.S. Army were segregated from white soldiers and assigned to units led by white officers, according to a war exhibit now on display at the N.C. Museum of History in downtown Raleigh. Two African-American combat divisions served in France: The 92nd Division, where Norwood was assigned, served in the American Expeditionary Force and fought in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, according to the museum. The other division was the 93rd Division, which served with the French army. Charles T. Norwood, 23, was wounded in France on Nov. 11, 1918, and died from his wounds and pneumonia on Jan. 17, 1919. The American Legion post in Raleigh was named for him when it was chartered in 1924. Norwood was buried in the Raleigh National Cemetery in 1921. “It’s just a great blessing to be here today to honor (Norwood),” said American Legion member Willie Pulley, who marched in the Veterans Day parade. Pulley, the post chaplain, is an Army veteran. Post member James Whitaker, also retired from the Army like Pulley, said that it means a lot to be in the American Legion post named for Norwood. Whitaker said the post, which meets at Martin Street Baptist Church, works to help families in the community at Thanksgiving and Christmas. In a ceremony on the N.C. Capitol grounds after the parade, U.S. Army Col. (ret.) Martin Falls noted that it was “on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent across Europe, and America’s doughboys started coming home.” The parade Saturday morning including high school marching bands, high school JROTC groups, the Triangle chapter of Veterans for Peace, Scouts groups and veterans groups. Source:https://www.newsobserver.com/.../article221422570.html... Source:https://centennial.legion.org/.../charles-t-norwood-bio Previous Next

< Back Nina Simone "She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works. Nina Simone Born: February 21, 1933, Tryon, NC Died:April 21, 2003, Carry-le-Rouet, France ------- "She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works. She earned the moniker ‘High Priestess of Soul’ for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they became absorbed in the moment. She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone." ____ "Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodigious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert. This website captures milestones in a career that has had more than its share of peaks and valleys.After graduating valedictorian of high school class, the community raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default. To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret." Source: To read more about Nina Simone's life, please click the link: http://www.ninasimone.com/bio/ Previous Next

< Back Mary McLeod Bethune In the late 1800s, African American workers, tradesmen, and professionals who were excluded from all-White labor unions organized their own unions. Mrs. Bethune wrote in her 1936 speech “Closed Doors”: “My boy belonged to a labor union, but when there came the chance for the distribution of jobs, it was not until all white applicants had been supplied, and then even though he is a skilled laborer, nothing was offered him in his own field, but he was forced to accept a job as a common laborer.” Image description: Left is a portrait of Mary McLeod Bethune. Right image shows us one of the African American unions formed in the U.S. before the turn of the century. Images source: LOC To read about Mrs. Bethune's life, click this link: https://archive.org/.../marymcleodbethun00smit_djvu.txt Previous Next

< Back 1939, Negro sharecropper, Will Cole, picking cotton. The owner is Mrs. Rigsby, a White woman. About five miles below Chapel Hill, going south on highway toward Bynum in Chatham County, North Carolina. ​ 1939, Negro sharecropper, Will Cole, picking cotton. The owner is Mrs. Rigsby, a White woman. About five miles below Chapel Hill, going south on highway toward Bynum in Chatham County, North Carolina. Photographer: Marion Post Wolcott 1910-1990 Source: FSA/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Previous Next

"Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places." Romare Beardon Arts , Entertainment & Media Music/Musicians/Bands/Instruments/Comedians/Songs & Dancers 1/60 Music, dance, songwriting; all expressions of movement; all stem from the rich traditions of our African ancestors. North Carolina specifically has a tremendous amount of talented musicians, singers, songwriters, dancer etc., that have shaped, and continue to shape what we enjoy today. Newspapers and Magazines This is EBONY Magazine's first edition, which came out November 1, 1945. 1/15 We celebrate every facet of African American culture, and strive to keep the stories and legacies of great periodicals in hearts and minds of readers everywhere. Movies/Actors/Playwrights/Directors/Producers Mike Wiley JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell Actress Pamela Suzette Grier Mike Wiley 1/15 In this gallery, we showcase t he outstanding contributions made to Theater Arts by African American Actors, Playwrights, Directors and Producers from North Carolina. Artists, Sculptors, Photogr aphers and Painters Selma Burke in her studio. Part of the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Mus John Thomas Biggers (April 13, 1924 – January 25, 2001) Selma Burke in her studio. Part of the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Mus 1/34 In this gallery, we celebrate the artistry of North Carolina's African American sculptors, artists and painters. We invite you to discover the incredible creativity and artistic legacy of African American art community in North Carolina. Sports 1/20 In this gallery, we feature in-depth storytelling that brings to life the most significant events, people, and moments in North Carolina's sports history and explore how their sporting prowess has impacted the state and beyond. TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

Enter Here 1/5 1/4 I Remember Our History G.C. and Frances The Hawley Museum @IrememberOurHistory N.C. Black History

< Back Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta ​ The Banjo's Roots, Reconsidered "My father was born with this instrument," Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. "This is part of our history." Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He's holding an akonting: a three-stringed instrument with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd with a goat skin stretched over it. Jatta's father and cousins played the instrument, but he didn't think much about it himself until 1974, when he was visiting the U.S. from Gambia, attending a junior college in South Carolina. He recalls watching a football game on TV with some of the other students. "When the football ended, there was this music program from Tennessee, and they called it country music," Jatta says. "I watched the program and saw the modern banjo being used. And the sound just sounded like my father's akonting." That experience put Jatta on a journey to explore the banjo's connections with the instrument he grew up with. The banjo came to America with the slaves, and musicologists have long looked in West Africa for its predecessors. Much of the speculation has centered on the ngoni and the xalam, two hide-covered stringed instruments from West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. But they're just two of more than 60 similar plucked stringed instruments found in the region. Over the next two decades, while he pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in the U.S., Jatta learned everything he could about the origins of the banjo. Eventually, he reached a conclusion. "Among all the instruments ever mentioned as a prototype of the banjo from the African region," he says, "the akonting to me has more similarities, more objective similarities than any other that has ever been mentioned." For one thing, the akonting looks like a banjo. It has a long neck that, like those of early banjos, extends through the instrument's gourd body. It has a movable wooden bridge that, as in banjos, holds the strings over the skin head. But for Jatta and other banjo scholars, most convincing is how the akonting is played. Players use the index finger to strike down on one of the long strings, and the thumb sounds the akonting's short string as the hand moves back upward. When Jatta looked at early banjo instruction books from the mid-1800s, he found that they described an almost identical playing style. "What struck me was when they mentioned the ball of the thumb and the nail of the index or middle finger, I knew straight away my father was using this same style," Jatta says. "This was never a surprise to me, because I have seen this since I was 5 years old." That early style of playing predates the three-finger style used today by nearly all bluegrass banjo players. Something similar is still used by folk and country musicians who play in a style sometimes called frailing or clawhammer. After doing 10 years of research supported by a Swedish university, in 2000, Jatta presented his findings first in Stockholm, and then a few months later at a banjo collectors' convention in Boston. Greg Adams is a banjoist and graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland; he says Jatta's findings on the akonting have forced many scholars to rethink their assumptions about where to look for information on the banjo's ancestors. "A lot of the emphasis up to that point was focused on griot traditions, which is extremely important as part of the conversation as we look to West Africa," Adams says. "But what the akonting did was open up a new line of discourse." The ngoni and xalam are instruments typically played by griots — praise singers who enjoy special status in many West African tribes. Adams says the akonting is a folk instrument, played not by griots, but by ordinary people in the Jola tribe. In terms of which tradition has the most direct connection to the banjo, Adams says it's a mistake to think of it as an either/or proposition: "Each of these traditions deserves to be explored, experienced, examined on their own terms." Jatta plans to continue his work, documenting the akonting musical tradition and its connections to the banjo and other areas of Jola culture, through a research and education center he's founding back home in Gambia. *Photo credit:Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta plays the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo. Courtesy of Chuck Levy Source:https://www.npr.org/.../139.../the-banjos-roots-reconsidered Previous Next

< Back Jean Moore Fasse (seated) Image: Jean Moore Fasse (seated) and other Special Services members participate in craft activities with two Army soldiers, circa 1955. Image: Jean Moore Fasse (seated) and other Special Services members participate in craft activities with two Army soldiers, circa 1955. Fasse joined the American Red Cross in 1944 and was sent to Washington, D.C., for training. She was assigned to a unit prepared for overseas duty and traveled to California to depart for Calcutta, India. Photo and narrative source: Gateway - Triad Digital History Collections M. Jean Moore Fasse Collection. . Mayme Jean Moore Fasse was born in Lillington, North Carolina, in 1908 and was raised on a farm nearby. She attended Hillside High School in Durham, North Carolina, where she lived with families as a nanny until she graduated in 1931. She then worked in a tobacco factory and a local hospital. Fasse enrolled at Fayetteville State Teachers College (now Fayetteville State University) and earned a teaching degree. Her first teaching job was in a one-room school in Goldsboro, North Carolina. After deciding she didn’t want to teach, she returned to FSTC and attended summer school. She and a friend then decided to move to New York. After only a year she returned to Fayetteville and teaching. Fasse worked at the Robeson County Training School in Maxton, North Carolina, in the late-1930s and early 1940s . Fasse joined the American Red Cross in 1944 and was sent to Washington, D.C., for training. She was assigned to a unit prepared for overseas duty and traveled to California to depart for Calcutta, India. Fasse was stationed along the Lido Road, including a short time in Burma. After the jungle bases were closed, she became the head of the Cosmos Club, a Red Cross club in Calcutta. She returned to the United States in August of 1946, landing in New York City. Fasse immediately signed up for the U.S. Army Special Services in order to run recreation clubs in Europe. She was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, for training, she was assigned as a club director in Mannheim. Almost six years later she was transferred to Füssen for a few months, and then Höchberg, and then Munich. In the early 1950s Fasse was sent to France, where she worked in clubs in Tours and Toul. Fasse married in 1963 and left the Special Services. The Fasses remained in Europe until 1990. Jean Fasse died on 21 June 2008. Link to source: https://gateway.uncg.edu/islandora/object/wvhp%3AWV0390 Previous Next

< Back Leonora Tecumseh Jackson ​ Words on image: Leonora Tecumseh Jackson was also known as "Mother Jackson" (1859-1950), Was An Early Asheville, NC School Teacher. She was born enslaved in Halifax County , NC to Caroline Garrett and Andrew Joshua Jackson. - Photograph source: The 1946 Fayetteville State Teachers College Yearbook. . Lenora T. Jackson 1859-1950 Leonora Tecumseh Jackson died in Asheville in 1950 at the age of 91. Her brief obituary mentioned the schools where she had taught and simply stated that she was “a teacher of 62 years.” Leonora was born in 1859 in Halifax County to Caroline Garrett and Andrew Joshua Jackson. She had two siblings, Casca, a teacher and Andrew Thomas a lawyer and graduate of Howard University. Prior to emancipation, her father, Andrew Joshua Jackson was owned by Mr. George Washington Barnes who apprenticed Andrew to a blacksmith. Leonora would have been 4 years old in 1863. Leonora graduated in 1881 from Shaw University, a Freedmen School in Raleigh, N.C. and was teaching there from 1878 through 1882. She also studied at the University of Chicago and Hampton Institute, a Freedmen school in Virginia, founded in 1868 by Black and White leaders of the American Missionary Association. In 1883 she began teaching at Garfield Graded School in Raleigh. In 1887 the Raleigh Signal newspaper wrote, “We hear with pleasure of the appointment of Miss Leonora T. Jackson, of Halifax, to the principalship of the Normal School.” Her work for the last five years at Garfield Graded School “has made a very enviable reputation there as a teacher. It is said by those in the city of Raleigh, that she is the finest teacher of primary classes in the State.” With the establishment of the Asheville City School system in 1888, Leonora came to Asheville in 1891 and began teaching the first grade at Mountain Street School, which opened in August 1890 taking the place of Beaumont Academy. Edward S. Stephens was principal. With the opening of the Catholic Hill School in 1892 (the precursor to Stephens-Lee), Leonora began teaching first grade there through 1907. In 1901-02 she served as principal of Hill Street School. She is also listed as principal at Hill Street in the 1907 Asheville City Directory. After being listed in the Asheville City Directories for the next several years as teaching in a private school, one document says that she also taught in Missouri which is where she may have been during the 1930s. [Hill Street School was listed as a private school in the 1907 directory, so that may have been where she was at after 1902.] The 1940 census lists Leonora as the Directress of Boys at Cross Creek, Cumberland, N.C. This reference refers to Fayetteville State Teachers College. Her yearly salary was $1,030. In the same year, she gave a speech at the 75th anniversary for Shaw University along with Governor-elect J. Melville Broughton and others. She is also listed as a teacher. In 1941 she was elected vice president of the Shaw University Alumni Association. The Fayetteville State Teachers College Yearbook for 1946 included the photograph used here above and this notice; “Miss Leonora T. Jackson, known to all graduates and students of Fayetteville State Teachers College as “Mother Jackson, “is now Honorably retired after having served the State for more than sixty years.” Leonora returned to her home at 45 Grail Street in Asheville in 1947. When she died in 1950, her services were held at the Nazareth Baptist Church and she was buried in Violet Hill Cemetery. After Leonora Jackson graduated from Shaw University, it seems apparent that she could have taught anywhere she wanted to. Why did she come to Asheville? Leonora is listed in the American Baptist Home Mission Society 50th Annual Report for 1882, where it gives the name of the missionary, the state they’re working in, their profession, and in what institution. She is listed as a missionary teaching at Shaw University. For this reason, it seems probable that Leonora came to the rugged mountains of western North Carolina to teach as a missionary in a new public school system. -End- Click this link to read about her father, Rev. Andrew Joshua Jackson https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=840459148082778&set=a.170087133715877 Previous Next

< Back The 57th Anniversary Of The March On Washington For Jobs And Freedom Today, August 28, 2020 is The 57th Anniversary Of The March On Washington For Jobs And Freedom - August 28, 1963 The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also known as the March on Washington or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. At the march, Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism. The march was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who built an alliance of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations that came together under the banner of "jobs and freedom." Estimates of the number of participants varied from 200,000 to 300,000, but the most widely cited estimate is 250,000 people. Observers estimated that 75–80% of the marchers were black. The march was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, was the most integral and significant white organizer of the march. The march is credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and preceded the Selma Voting Rights Movement which led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. BACKGROUND Although African Americans who were prior slaves had been legally freed from slavery, elevated to the status of citizens and the men given full voting rights at the end of the American Civil War, many continued to face social, economic, and political repression over the years and into the 1960s. In the early 1960s, a system of legal discrimination, known as Jim Crow laws, were pervasive in the American South, ensuring that African-Americans remained oppressed. They also experienced discrimination from businesses and governments, and in some places were prevented from voting through intimidation and violence. Twenty-one states prohibited interracial marriage. The impetus for a march on Washington developed over a long period of time, and earlier efforts to organize such a demonstration included the March on Washington Movement of the 1940s. A. Philip Randolph—the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the AFL-CIO—was a key instigator in 1941. With Bayard Rustin, Randolph called for 100,000 black workers to march on Washington, in protest of discriminatory hiring by U.S. military contractors and demanding an Executive Order.Faced with a mass march scheduled for July 1, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25. The order established the Committee on Fair Employment Practice and banned discriminatory hiring in the defense industry. Randolph called off the March. Randolph and Rustin continued to organize around the idea of a mass march on Washington. They envisioned several large marches during the 1940s, but all were called off (despite criticism from Rustin). Their Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, held at the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, 1957, featured key leaders including Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King Jr., and Roy Wilkins. Mahalia Jackson performed. The 1963 march was an important part of the rapidly expanding Civil Rights Movement, which involved demonstrations and nonviolent direct action across the United States. 1963 also marked the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. Members of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference put aside their differences and came together for the march. Many whites and blacks also came together in the urgency for change in the nation. Violent confrontations broke out in the South: in Cambridge, Maryland; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Goldsboro, North Carolina; Somerville, Tennessee; Saint Augustine, Florida; and across Mississippi. Most of these incidents involved white people retaliating against nonviolent demonstrators. Many people wanted to march on Washington, but disagreed over how the march should be conducted. Some called for a complete shutdown of the city through civil disobedience. Others argued that the movement should remain nationwide in scope, rather than focus its energies on the nation's capital. There was a widespread perception that the Kennedy administration had not lived up to its promises in the 1960 election, and King described Kennedy's race policy as "tokenism". On May 24, 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited African-American novelist James Baldwin, along with a large group of cultural leaders, to a meeting in New York to discuss race relations. However, the meeting became antagonistic, as black delegates felt that Kennedy did not have an adequate understanding of the race problem in the nation. The public failure of the meeting, which came to be known as the Baldwin–Kennedy meeting, underscored the divide between the needs of Black America and the understanding of Washington politicians. However, the meeting also provoked the Kennedy administration to take action on the civil rights for African-Americans. On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy gave his famous civil rights address on national television and radio, announcing that he would begin to push for civil rights legislation—the law which eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That night, Mississippi activist Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway, further escalating national tension around the issue of racial inequality. PLANNING A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin began planning the march in December 1961. They envisioned two days of protest, including sit-ins and lobbying followed by a mass rally at the Lincoln Memorial. They wanted to focus on joblessness and to call for a public works program that would employ blacks. In early 1963 they called publicly for "a massive March on Washington for jobs". They received help from Amalgamated Clothing Workers unionist Stanley Aronowitz, who gathered support from radical organizers who could be trusted not to report their plans to the Kennedy administration. The unionists offered tentative support for a march that would be focused on jobs. On May 15, 1963, without securing the cooperation of the NAACP or the Urban League, Randolph announced an "October Emancipation March on Washington for Jobs". He reached out to union leaders, winning the support of the UAW's Walter Reuther, but not of AFL–CIO president George Meany. Randolph and Rustin intended to focus the March on economic inequality, stating in their original plan that "integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persists." As they negotiated with other leaders, they expanded their stated objectives to "Jobs and Freedom" to acknowledge the agenda of groups that focused more on civil rights. In June 1963, leaders from several different organizations formed the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership, an umbrella group which would coordinate funds and messaging. This coalition of leaders, who became known as the "Big Six", included: Randolph who was chosen as the titular head of the march, James Farmer, president of the Congress of Racial Equality; John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP; and Whitney Young, president of the National Urban League. King in particular had become well known for his role in the Birmingham campaign and for his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Wilkins and Young initially objected to Rustin as a leader for the march, because he was a homosexual, a former Communist, and a draft resistor. They eventually accepted Rustin as deputy organizer, on the condition that Randolph act as lead organizer and manage any political fallout. About two months before the march, the Big Six broadened their organizing coalition by bringing on board four white men who supported their efforts: Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers; Eugene Carson Blake, former president of the National Council of Churches; Mathew Ahmann, executive director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice; and Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress. Together, the Big Six plus four became known as the "Big Ten."[38][39] John Lewis later recalled, "Somehow, some way, we worked well together. The six of us, plus the four. We became like brothers." On June 22, the organizers met with President Kennedy, who warned against creating "an atmosphere of intimidation" by bringing a large crowd to Washington. The civil rights activists insisted on holding the march. Wilkins pushed for the organizers to rule out civil disobedience and described this proposal as the "perfect compromise". King and Young agreed. Leaders from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), who wanted to conduct direct actions against the Department of Justice, endorsed the protest before they were informed that civil disobedience would not be allowed. Finalized plans for the March were announced in a press conference on July 2. President Kennedy spoke favorably of the March on July 17, saying that organizers planned a peaceful assembly and had cooperated with the Washington, D.C., police Mobilization and logistics were administered by Rustin, a civil rights veteran and organizer of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, the first of the Freedom Rides to test the Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel. Rustin was a long-time associate of both Randolph and Dr. King. With Randolph concentrating on building the march's political coalition, Rustin built and led the team of two hundred activists and organizers who publicized the march and recruited the marchers, coordinated the buses and trains, provided the marshals, and set up and administered all of the logistic details of a mass march in the nation's capital. During the days leading up to the march, these 200 volunteers used the ballroom of Washington DC radio station WUST as their operations headquarters. The march was not universally supported among civil rights activists. Some, including Rustin (who assembled 4,000 volunteer marshals from New York), were concerned that it might turn violent, which could undermine pending legislation and damage the international image of the movement. The march was condemned by Malcolm X, spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, who termed it the "farce on Washington". March organizers themselves disagreed over the purpose of the march. The NAACP and Urban League saw it as a gesture of support for a civil rights bill that had been introduced by the Kennedy Administration. Randolph, King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) saw it as a way of raising both civil rights and economic issues to national attention beyond the Kennedy bill. CORE and SNCC saw it as a way of challenging and condemning the Kennedy administration's inaction and lack of support for civil rights for African Americans. Despite their disagreements, the group came together on a set of goals: Passage of meaningful civil rights legislation; Immediate elimination of school segregation; A program of public works, including job training, for the unemployed; A Federal law prohibiting discrimination in public or private hiring; A $2-an-hour minimum wage nationwide (equivalent to $17 in 2019); Withholding Federal funds from programs that tolerate discrimination; Enforcement of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution by reducing congressional representation from States that disenfranchise citizens; A broadened Fair Labor Standards Act to currently excluded employment areas; Authority for the Attorney General to institute injunctive suits when constitutional rights are violated. Although in years past, Randolph had supported "Negro only" marches, partly to reduce the impression that the civil rights movement was dominated by white communists, organizers in 1963 agreed that whites and blacks marching side by side would create a more powerful image. The Kennedy Administration cooperated with the organizers in planning the March, and one member of the Justice Department was assigned as a full-time liaison. Chicago and New York City (as well as some corporations) agreed to designate August 28 as "Freedom Day" and give workers the day off. To avoid being perceived as radical, organizers rejected support from Communist groups. However, some politicians claimed that the March was Communist-inspired, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) produced numerous reports suggesting the same. In the days before August 28, the FBI called celebrity backers to inform them of the organizers' communist connections and advising them to withdraw their support. When William C. Sullivan produced a lengthy report on August 23 suggesting that Communists had failed to appreciably infiltrate the civil rights movement, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rejected its contents. Strom Thurmond launched a prominent public attack on the March as Communist, and singled out Rustin in particular as a Communist and a gay man. Organizers worked out of a building at West 130th St. and Lenox in Harlem. They promoted the march by selling buttons, featuring two hands shaking, the words "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom", a union bug, and the date August 28, 1963. By August 2, they had distributed 42,000 of the buttons. Their goal was a crowd of at least 100,000 people. As the march was being planned, activists across the country received bomb threats at their homes and in their offices. The Los Angeles Times received a message saying its headquarters would be bombed unless it printed a message calling the president a "Nigger Lover". Five airplanes were grounded on the morning of August 28 due to bomb threats. A man in Kansas City telephoned the FBI to say he would put a hole between King's eyes; the FBI did not respond. Roy Wilkins was threatened with assassination if he did not leave the country. Convergence Thousands traveled by road, rail, and air to Washington D.C. on Wednesday, August 28. Marchers from Boston traveled overnight and arrived in Washington at 7am after an eight-hour trip, but others took much longer bus rides from places like Milwaukee, Little Rock, and St. Louis. Organizers persuaded New York's MTA to run extra subway trains after midnight on August 28, and the New York City bus terminal was busy throughout the night with peak crowds. A total of 450 buses left New York City from Harlem. Maryland police reported that "by 8:00 a.m., 100 buses an hour were streaming through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel." The United Automobile Workers financed bus transportation for 5,000 of its rank-and-file members, providing the largest single contingent from any organization. One reporter, Fred Powledge, accompanied African-Americans who boarded six buses in Birmingham, Alabama, for the 750-mile trip to Washington. The New York Times carried his report: The 260 demonstrators, of all ages, carried picnic baskets, water jugs, Bibles and a major weapon - their willingness to march, sing and pray in protest against discrimination. They gathered early this morning [August 27] in Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park, where state troopers once [four months previous in May] used fire hoses and dog to put down their demonstrations. It was peaceful in the Birmingham park as the marchers waited for the buses. The police, now part of a moderate city power structure, directed traffic around the square and did not interfere with the gathering ... An old man commented on the 20-hour ride, which was bound to be less than comfortable: "You forget we Negroes have been riding buses all our lives. We don't have the money to fly in airplanes." John Marshall Kilimanjaro, a demonstrator traveling from Greensboro, North Carolina, said: Contrary to the mythology, the early moments of the March—getting there—was no picnic. People were afraid. We didn't know what we would meet. There was no precedent. Sitting across from me was a black preacher with a white collar. He was an AME preacher. We talked. Every now and then, people on the bus sang 'Oh Freedom' and 'We Shall Overcome,' but for the most part there wasn't a whole bunch of singing. We were secretly praying that nothing violent happened. Other bus rides featured racial tension, as black activists criticized liberal white participants as fair-weather friends. Hazel Mangle Rivers, who had paid $8 for her ticket—"one-tenth of her husband's weekly salary"—was quoted in the August 29 New York Times. Rivers stated that she was impressed by Washington's civility: The people are lots better up here than they are down South. They treat you much nicer. Why, when I was out there at the march a white man stepped on my foot, and he said, "Excuse me," and I said "Certainly!" That's the first time that has ever happened to me. I believe that was the first time a white person has ever really been nice to me. Some participants who arrived early held an all-night vigil outside the Department of Justice, claiming it had unfairly targeted civil rights activists and that it had been too lenient on white supremacists who attacked them Click Source Link To Read More. Source Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/.../March_on_Washington_for_Jobs... Previous Next

< Back Civil Rights Act of 1964 ​ July 2, 1964 , President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today marks the 55th anniversary of the signing of The Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Start date: July 2, 1964 Titles amended: Title 42—Public Health And Welfare Acts amended: Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1960 Enacted by: the 88th United States Congress Statutes at Large: 78 Stat. 241 --- "The passage of this legislation championed the fight for equality in the United States. What started as a Black liberation movement, soon escalated into outlawing discrimination based on all races, religions, sexes, and national origins. ⁣However, the Black liberation movement was often seen as a "threat to internal security" in the United States, and activists were often harassed, intimidated, and divided from within by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the years leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the FBI targeted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with one goal; "to find avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader." They bugged his hotel rooms, followed him and his family, and even attempted to blackmail him into suicide. Simultaneously, FBI agents sent anonymous letters that incited violence between street gangs and Black Panthers which resulted in the killings of four Black Panther members, in addition to numerous beatings and shootings across various United States cities. As the FBI worked to dismantle the movement both internally and externally, divisions across groups arose based on methods and approaches to liberation. The Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Urban League were all working towards the liberation of Black people oppressed by systemic racism that plagued the entire Nation. However, personal rivalries and political disagreements led to disunity within the coalition. The Civil Rights coalition eventually broke down, with each organization going their separate ways. This was not before violence and death plagued the lives of leaders within these coalitions, and therefore their members. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was nothing less than a "second emancipation." Despite challenges from within and from outside forces, the legislation paved the way to end legal segregation in the United States with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. " Laurie A. Cumbo Majority Leader, New York City Council District 35 ---- Read More about The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Here:: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 And Here: https://www.eeoc.gov/stat.../title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964 And Here: https://www.history.com/.../black-history/civil-rights-act Previous Next

< Back The Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone. This amazing 1998 documentary shows how the Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone preserved an old mourning song in the Georgia Sea Islands, in their ancestral language, though they no longer understood the words or the meaning. Shared from fb page: Suppressed Histories Archives -posted · September 17 · This amazing 1998 documentary shows how the Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone preserved an old mourning song in the Georgia Sea Islands, in their ancestral language, though they no longer understood the words or the meaning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0OirdYGdlY... In Harris Neck, in Georgia's coastal islands, in the 1930s, Lorenzo D. Turner recorded a 50-year-old woman singing. Her song preserved the longest known text in an African language in the North American diaspora. It was later recognized as Mende by a grad student from Sierra Leone, on the basis of a single word, kambei, which had funerary significance, and he published a translation of the song. The singer's grandmother had been born into slavery, a descendant of many West Africans trafficked to Georgia because of their expertise in rice cultivation. Slave traders paid a higher price for people with this skill, shipping captives from the rice-growing countries from Senegambia to Sierra Leone and Liberia. More than 45% of those trafficked to Savannah were taken from Sierra Leone, out of Bunce Island which was used as a holding area prior to the Middle Passage. The channels these Mende people dug for rice plantations still remain in Georgia. A group of Gullahs returned to Sierra Leone, and performed this melody for their African hosts. They discovered that one word, tombei, could be traced to a specific place. Anthropologists took recordings of the song around that region, and at first people recognized one or two words, but not the song. The researchers finally gave up, disappointed. Later, Cynthia Schmidt decided to try one more place, just outside the boundaries of the area they had searched in. To her amazement, people began to sing the song, which included the words “Everybody come together, the grave is restless, the grave is not yet at peace.” (starting around 15:25 in the video at link) This was a song that Mende women sang at burials, in a funerary rites called Tenjami, Cross the Water. Bendu Jabati describes how her grandmother taught her how to perform the mourning rites, kneeling and making gestures to the ground with outstretched hands. (And it seems that the grandmother foresaw that her descendant would be the one to preserve this knowledge, and the connection that it would make to distant kin.) The ceremony began with a call to the ancestors to accept the dead person. The women went in procession, their faces painted with white clay, dancing while bent over. They then cooked at the grave side (three days after a woman’s death, and four days after a man’s). They performed ritual crying and lamentation at the grave, and bid farewell with rice mixed with palm oil and meat. The ceremony ended when the pot was upturned over the grave, the final farewell. The ceremony lapsed after World War II, according to the narrator, when soldiers brought back Islam and Christianity; but this one woman Bendu Jabati had been charged to remember by her grandmother, and she kept the knowledge and the song alive. Back in the Georgia Sea Islands, Amelia Dawley taught this song to her daughter. Living in a remote area, without TV or radio, she was able to preserve it. (Hear her sing it around 26:00 in the video) The anthropologists visit and play the recording of her grandmother, telling her of the historical importance of her family legacy, in its connection to African roots. Previous Next

< Back Ella Baker "In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning- getting down and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system." - Ella Baker 1964 ------- Ella Baker, born Dec. 13, 1903 and died Dec. 13, 1986, was a civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s whose career spanned more than five decades. She was instrumental in the launch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Ella Josephine Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker, and first raised there. She was the second of three surviving children, bracketed by her older brother Blake Curtis and younger sister Maggie. Her father worked on a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk, and so was often away. Her mother took in boarders to earn extra money. In 1910, Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard. Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company. Ella was seven when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina. She is the granddaughter of a slave who was beaten for refusing to marry a man her master chose for her, Ella Baker spent her life working behind the scenes to organize the Civil Rights Movement. If she could have changed anything about the movement, it might have been to persuade the men leading it that they, too, should do more work behind the scenes. Baker was a staunch believer in helping ordinary people to work together and lead themselves, and she objected to centralized authority. In her worldview, "strong people don't need strong leaders." In 1927, after graduating from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Baker moved to Harlem and began her long career of organizing, helping to establish consumer cooperatives during the Depression. She joined the NAACP's staff in 1938 and spent half of each year traveling in the South to build support for local branches, which would become the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1946, she reduced her NAACP responsibilities to work on integrating New York City public schools. Baker was one of the visionaries who created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, and she recruited the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. into it. She served two terms as the SCLC's acting executive director but clashed with King, feeling that he controlled too much and empowered others too little. In 1960, when four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, were refused service in a university cafeteria, setting off sympathetic sit-ins across the country, Baker seized the day. Starting with student activists at her alma mater, she founded the nationwide Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which gave young blacks, including women and the poor, a major role in the Civil Rights Movement. Baker returned to New York City in 1964 and worked for human rights until her death. Her words live on in "Ella's Song," sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock: "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." Previous Next

< Back Jean Marie Bright Jean Marie Bright was born on 25 September 1915, the daughter of farmers John and Lollie Bright of Rutherford County, North Carolina. Image: Portrait of Jean Marie Bright against a backdrop of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., probably taken in Fall of 1944. Bright wears the American Red Cross Military Welfare winter uniform with the Military Welfare overseas cap. Jean Marie Bright was born on 25 September 1915, the daughter of farmers John and Lollie Bright of Rutherford County, North Carolina. She graduated from the Allen Home High School in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1933, and then attended North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, from which she graduated in 1939 . In the late 1930s and early 1940s Bright moved between various cities in North Carolina and New York for teaching various jobs. In summer 1942 she moved to Washington, D.C., to work as a clerk-typist in the adjutant general's office at the Pentagon. The following year she returned to Greensboro and served as director of recreation for the Windsor Community Center in Greensboro . Bright joined the American Red Cross in September 1944. After training in Washington, and at Camp Pickett, Virginia, she was sent to Camp Pendleton in California for embarkation to the Pacific in December 1944. Bright worked in recreational clubs in Finchaven, New Guinea, for almost a year, and then in Tokyo, Japan, until May 1946 . Following her discharge, Bright worked at several jobs, including as a clerical worker at Macy's in Washington, at the Harvard Coop in Massachusetts, and as a substitute teacher in Louisburg, North Carolina. She received a masters degree in English from Columbia University in 1953 and returned to Greensboro, where she taught at North Carolina A&T State University until 1978. In 1979, she set up a summer camp for low-income children in Rutherford County, North Carolina. Source: Gateway - Triad Digital History Collections. Source link: https://gateway.uncg.edu/.../%20Jean%20Marie%20Bright... Previous Next

< Back Bryan Dickson, Grandson of Isaac Dickson, 1917. Asheville, Buncombe County (N.C.) Bryan Dickson, Grandson of Isaac Dickson, 1917. Asheville, Buncombe County (N.C.) Bryan Dickson, Grandson of Isaac Dickson, 1917. Asheville, Buncombe County (N.C.) Heritage of Black Highlanders. Images in the Heritage of Black Highlanders Collection include photographs collected by Lucy Herring and other leaders of Asheville’s African American community in 1977. The collection is housed in Special Collections, Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina Asheville. Retrieved from: DigitalNC Previous Next

< Back Kellis Earl Parker Kellis Earl Parker 13 Jan 1942 - 10 Oct 2000 Kinston, Lenoir County, NC native Kellis Earl Parker, an accomplished lawyer, activist, scholar, and musician, was born January 13, 1942 in Kinston, North Carolina. In addition to his distinguished career, Parker was also well known for several firsts: he was one of the first black students to enroll at UNC-Chapel Hill, the first black student to run for a campus-wide office at Carolina, and the first black professor of law at Columbia University. Kellis Parker’s parents, Maceo Sr. and Novella, were business owners in Kinston and operated the only black dry cleaning facility in the city. Kinston had a thriving music scene and the entire Parker family played music: Kellis and his younger brothers Maceo Jr. and Melvin had a band together, having been taught the basics by their mother and father. Kellis’ chosen instrument was the trombone, which he would continue to play throughout his life and career, using jazz music as a tool to illuminate to his students the legal challenges facing black Americans. One of his classes at Columbia was called “Jazz Roots Revisited: The Law the Slaves Made.” Maceo, whose chosen instrument was the saxophone, and Melvin, drummer, would go on to be career musicians and collaborate with James Brown. From his own recollection, Parker’s work as a civil rights activist began as a teenager. As the head of the band at the segregated high school he attended, Parker successfully petitioned the Kinston Chamber of Commerce to change the rule requiring black schools to march at the back of a town parade. Parker matriculated at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1960, one of only four black students to enter as freshmen that year. He was deeply involved with the YMCA, working on numerous committees and holding multiple official positions, as well as with the student chapter of the NAACP. He was a leader in civil rights activism while at UNC with an eye on the community outside of campus; for example, coordinating the boycott of a Durham movie theater (the Rialto) that refused to integrate. In 1962, a fundraising campaign spearheaded by fellow Kinstonians raised money to help Parker travel to Greece as the first black undergraduate delegate to the United Nations International Students Conference. Parker became the first black student at UNC elected to a campus-wide position when he was chosen by the student body to attend the National Student Congress in 1963. He was also a member of the Order of the Grail, the highest undergraduate men’s honorary organization, and the Order of the Old Well. Parker’s accomplishments continued after leaving Carolina in 1964. He went on to attend Howard University Law School, where he graduated at the top of his class, and then taught at the University of California at Davis. In 1972, he became the first black law professor at Columbia University, receiving tenure in 1975. Parker’s civil rights work remained central: he was director of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund and produced numerous publications considering legal remedies for race issues in the United States. Kellis Earl Parker died of acute respiratory distress syndrome on October 10, 2000 in New York City. Previous Next

< Back Young Negro farm laborer. Stem, North Carolina. ​ May 1940. “Young Negro farm laborer. Stem, North Carolina.” 35mm nitrate negative by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration. Previous Next

< Back Durham, NC, Feb. 12, 1938: Ellen Harris Refuses to Move for White Passenger Durham, NC, Feb. 12, 1938: Ellen Harris Refuses to Move for White Passenger Time Periods: Prosperity, Depression, & World War II: 1920 - 1944 Themes: African American, Criminal Justice & Incarceration, Laws & Citizen Rights, Women's History In Durham, North Carolina on February 12, 1938, a bus driver asked Ellen Harris to move to the back of the bus when a white passenger got on board. She refused, but offered to get off the bus if her fare was refunded. Instead of refunding her fare, the bus driver had Ms. Harris arrested for violating segregation laws. Ms. Harris, represented by two Black attorneys, Caswell Jerry Gates and Edward Richard Avant, was tried and convicted in Recorder’s Court and fined $10.00. She appealed her case to the Superior Court, where she received a trial by jury and was again convicted for “unlawfully and willfully” occupying a seat. Gates and Avant immediately appealed her case to the North Carolina Supreme Court, where Judge J. Carson reversed her criminal conviction. He wrote “we do not think the defendant intended to willfully violate the provisions of this act.” Ellen Harris did not stop there. One month after being found innocent of the criminal charges, Ms. Harris and her attorneys filed a $15,000 civil lawsuit against Durham Public Services Company. The record shows that she settled her case with Durham Public Services for an undisclosed amount. Further reading here: State v. Harris, 213 N.C. 758 (1938) June 15, 1938 · Supreme Court of North Carolina 213 N.C. 758 STATE v. ELLEN HARRIS https://cite.case.law/nc/213/758/ Article source: https://www.zinnedproject.org/.../ellen-harris.../... Previous Next

< Back Elizabeth City State University- Principal Peter W. Moore and students ​ Photograph: ECSU Principal Peter W. Moore and students, 1899. Photo courtesy of North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. Previous Next

< Back Young Men’s Institute Jazz Band Young Men’s Institute jazz band, c. 1900 Ashville, NC Today, the Young Men’s Institute (YMI) is arguably one of the nation’s oldest African American institutions. Young Men’s Institute jazz band, c. 1900 Ashville, NC Today, the Young Men’s Institute (YMI) is arguably one of the nation’s oldest African American institutions. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area surrounding the Young Men's Institute (YMI) was the center of the business district for Asheville's African Americans. George Vanderbilt built the YMI in 1893 to serve as the equivalent of the YMCA for black men and boys who helped construct his palatial house during the 1890s. Many of these masons, carpenters, plasterers and laborers also built the YMI. It was Vanderbilt's vision that the building's users would buy the YMI building from profits earned by the stores and offices on the first floor. After much effort on the part of the African American community, the Vanderbilt estate was paid $10,000 for the building in 1906. The multi-use building was the center for social activity in the community where it supported professional offices, a public library and the YMI Orchestra. While the YMI flourished during segregation, integration signaled a new era in the country and the YMI ceased to be the focal point of social life for Asheville's African Americans. Following a period of decline in the 1960s and 1970s, a coalition of nine black churches, with the support of both the black and white communities, bought the YMI in 1980. The building was restored and reestablished as the YMI Cultural Center. Since 1981, the YMI Cultural Center has developed a variety of cultural programs and exhibitions of art and artifacts from Asheville to Africa preserving the heritage of African Americans in Buncombe County. The Young Men's Institute Building is located at the corner of South Market and Eagle sts., south of downtown Asheville's Pack Square. The exhibit rooms are open to the public Monday-Saturday, 10:00am to 5:00pm. Donations are accepted. For further information visit the YMI Cultural Center's website or call 828-257-4540. Here is the link to the YMI's web site: https://www.ymiculturalcenter.org/ Previous Next

< Back The 100th Anniversary of The Negro Leagues The Negro League documents the careers of more than four thousand black baseball players. To date there are less than 50 living players. Negro Baseball League’s 100th Anniversary 1920 – 2020 The Negro League documents the careers of more than four thousand black baseball players. To date there are less than 50 living players. The 100th Anniversary of The Negro Leagues The year 2020 marks the centennial celebration of the founding of the Negro National Leagues in 1920. During the 1920s, the combined forces of discrimination and segregation created a conducive environment for the development of separate enterprises such as professional baseball. The unparalleled Rube Foster started the first Negro League in 1920 with such dominant teams as the Chicago American Giants and the Kansas City Monarchs. Pittsburgh soon produced two of the greatest teams of all time, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, featuring such stars as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and many more. This superb brand of baseball rivaled the best of the major leagues until the historic signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Negro Leagues. During a time of segregation & discrimination, North Carolina would be a part of this important history. Photo collage description: Top photo-In this undated photo, the Asheville Royal Giants pose at the former Oates Park on Southside Avenue. Photo courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, Pack Memorial Library, Asheville. Bottom Left photo-Walter Fenner “Buck” Leonard was an American first baseman in Negro league baseball and in the Mexican League. After growing up in North Carolina, he played for the Homestead Grays between 1934 and 1950, batting fourth behind Josh Gibson for many years. The Grays teams of the 1930s and 1940s were considered some of the best teams in Negro league history. Bottom Right Photo-The book "THEY CALLED US CORNFIELD BOYS" Black Baseball, Hertford County, NC 1940-1955 Ahoskie War Hawks, Ahoskie, North Carolina- chowan Bees, Winton, North Carolina, Como Eagles, Como, North Carolina By Raymond Whitehead & E. Frank Stephenson, Jr.- Cover Photograph: David Collin "Ran" Jordan, of The Como Eagles This year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Negro Leagues. During a time of segregation and discrimination, North Carolina would be part of this important history. The 100th anniversary of Negro League Baseball should have been marked with grand style, with pronouncements, with recognition of a profoundly significant time in American sports history. The names now should have been called, again and again, in Major League Baseball stadiums throughout America and Canada. Josh Gibson. Buck Leonard. Jackie Robinson. Satchel Paige. Cool Papa Bell. Etched in legend they are, some properly enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. A once-in-a-lifetime virus has changed that plan. The centennial of the Negro Leagues, as they were then called. could have raised — and still can raise — awareness in this age of tumult of not just the enduring racial tensions in the United States, but of some of the triumphs over it. For there are profound lessons in the legacy of the Negro Leagues, created from a thirst for competition from the finest African-American athletes of the day, a thirst that forced them to play in sandlots far beneath the worthiness of their talents, while white players — yes, a man named Ruth and another named Gehrig among them — played in grand stadiums and made huge salaries for the day. Those players, names now in bronze on that wall in Cooperstown, were lionized as the greats of their time. But meanwhile, Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard and Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell and a youngster named Willie Mays, were forced to stay in horrible hotels because the best places on the roads wouldn’t feed or house them. The era now is properly regarded with disgrace and still calls forth, in the few people left who remember it, tears of anger and yes, tears of regret in the white athletes who were aware of what was going on but were powerless to do anything about it beyond their individual protests. There are sandlots still left in North Carolina, in Rocky Mount and Reidsville and Greensboro and Winston-Salem, where old-timers will point out the places where the Negro League games were held, who recall the Asheville Royal Giants and the Raleigh Tigers and the teams from Greensboro and High Point. North Carolina was big in the Negro Leagues, because it has a baseball legacy built in the small towns, and though the African American kids and the white kids may not have played together officially, they always remained curious about one another’s skills. There were African American games all over North Carolina probably dating from the early 20th century and running through the 1950s, when African-American players were brought into the major leagues. In the 1930s, cities such as Greensboro (Red Wings), Asheville (Blues), Durham (Red Caps), and Winston-Salem (Mohawk Giants) had active black ball clubs, as did smaller towns including Erwin (Red Sox) and Louisburg (Independents). During World War II, the Raleigh Grays played against Negro units at Fort Bragg. The Raleigh Tigers came a little later and were among the last of the state’s prominent black teams. The Tigers played until the early 1960s, featuring several future minor and major leaguers. In 1951, four years after Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in the major leagues, some white minor-league squads in North Carolina had begun signing black players. Granite Falls of the Western Carolina League, for example, hired Boney Fleming, a pitcher from Morganton; Christopher Rankin, a pitcher out of Hickory; Conover’s Bill Smith, a catcher; Hickory’s Russell Shuford, a catcher; and Eugene Abernathy, an outfielder from Hickory. But before Jackie Robinson, there were players in the Negro Leagues who were clearly “good enough” for the big leagues. And one of them, Walter Fenner Leonard of the Homestead Grays of Pennsylvania, was good enough and then some. His boyhood name of “Buck” was given to him by his family during his upbringing In Rocky Mount, a seemingly unlikely place to launch a remarkable career and life. But today, that name is in bronze in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and deservedly so. For in his day, in the 1920s through the 1940s, Buck Leonard was as good a baseball player, in any league, as any other. He was called the “black Lou Gehrig” after the New York Yankees first baseman (Leonard’s position), though some players of both races would later say that Gehrig probably should have been called the “white Buck Leonard.” Leonard played on famous Grays teams and batted behind Josh Gibson, perhaps the most famous of all the Negro Leagues players. Gibson also is in the Hall of Fame. Leonard was so good that at the age of 45, he was offered a professional contract in the major leagues, but typical for a man of his pride and grace, he decided against it for fear of embarrassing himself. And so he carved quite a life, working in professional baseball running farm teams but also being a strong citizen in his hometown as a truant officer among other occupations. It must also be said it was a good, long life too, with Leonard living to be 90 years old at his death. North Carolina would send other small town fellows to the major leagues, and yes, some of them like Gaylord Perry and Jim “Catfish” Hunter and others would gain fame. But it would hard to find anyone comparable to Buck Leonard, for whom the hill to greatness was steep but as he demonstrated, one that could be climbed. Today, his story serves as a grand one for all players who put on the glove and lace up the spikes to study. Alas, Leonard is not going to get the recognition he and other Negro Leagues players should be getting this year, in the 100th anniversary. The COVID-19 virus has seen to that, shuttering major league ballparks for the summer, a summer that was going to see celebrations around the country. Thankfully, there has already been recognition for Leonard in Chapel Hill, with some of his descendants participating in a special event in February. The Negro Leagues legacy in human terms is found in the stories of the greatest players of the era, who ranked by all accounts as the greatest players there were in that or any other time. In historic terms, the legacy is more complicated. For there is little glory in an era defined by racial separatism and injustice. Little glory, but perhaps lessons. Lessons that will teach generations now and forever. Lessons from here, from one small town in North Carolina and from others. Read More About The Book, "They Called Us The Cornfield Boys" Here: https://www.facebook.com/.../a.169158.../497358524322068/... View Video Interview of Clifford Layton, who was born in Dunn, North Carolina. Clifford Layton spent four years playing in the Negro Leagues and was inducted into the Negro Leagues Legend Hall of Fame in 2003. Video Link Here: https://youtu.be/CS5RCz1bmD0 Source: NC DNCR Source: https://negroleague.org/ Previous Next

< Back William Hooper Councill ​ William Hooper Councill was a teacher, social justice activist, college president, and editor. He was born in March.22.1849, Or in July 12, 1848. Council was formerly enslaved and the first president of Huntsville Normal School, which is today Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University in Normal, Alabama. He was born enslaved in Fayetteville, North Carolina to William and Mary Jane Councill. His father escaped to Canada in 1854 and made several unsuccessful attempts to free his family. The young William Hooper Councill was taken to Huntsville, Alabama, by slave traders in 1857. He and his mother and brothers were sold as slaves from the auction block, at Green Bottom Inn to Judge David Campbell Humphreys. At this auction he saw two of his brothers sold in 1857, and never heard from them again. He worked in the cotton fields near Huntsville until 1863, during the American Civil War, he and his remaining brothers were taken into rural areas to keep them from the Union Army, but before the end of the war they escaped to Union lines. They attended on a part-time basis the Freedmen's Bureau school opened by northerners in Stevenson, Alabama in 1865, where Councill remained until 1867, when he began teaching, the first person to teach a school for black students outside of a city in northern Alabama – a position which caused frequent trouble with the Ku Klux Klan. Councill helped start the Lincoln School, four miles west of Huntsville, in 1868, which had 36 students by 1870. During Reconstruction after the American Civil War, he held minor political positions in Alabama, serving as assistant enrollment clerk in the Alabama legislature in 1872 and 1874. He was a secretary of the Colored National Civil Rights Convention in Washington, DC in 1873. He taught for a time at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia and edited a newspaper, the Negro Watchman in 1874 in Huntsville. Councill used his connections in the Democratic party and state legislature to gain approval for his plan for the State Normal School for Negroes in 1875, becoming its principal and, later, president. He was appointed notary public by Governor Rufus W. Cobb in 1882. In 1883, he was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of Alabama. In 1884 he married Maria H. Wheeden from Huntsville. As a contemporary of Booker T. Washington, he and Washington (who performed research at Tuskeegee Institute) often competed for favors and funds from the Alabama legislature and northern philanthropists. In 1887 Councill attracted wide attention when he complained to the Interstate Commerce Commission of harsh treatment on the Alabama railroad. That action later prompted his superiors to relieve him of his duties as president of AAMU for one year. That experience may have helped alter his position on the proper role for a Black man to play in the South during that era, because afterwards, he advocated accommodation and acceptance of his "unctuous sycophancy," which prompted Washington to characterize him as "simply toadying to White people." He served at AAMU until 1909, although Solomon T. Clanton served as acting president in 1903 when Council was ill. Under his leadership, AAMU was second only to Tuskegee Institute in size among Alabama Negro industrial schools. The first high school for blacks in Huntsville was named for him when it opened in 1867. William Hooper Councill High School closed after the schools were integrated in the 1960s. Source:The African American Desk Reference Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture Copyright 1999 The Stonesong Press Inc. and The New York Public Library, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Pub. ISBN 0-471-23924-0 Previous Next

< Back Thelonious Monk Thelonious Monk, was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed more than a thousand pieces, whereas Monk wrote about 70. Thelonious Monk photo by Lawrence Shustak, 1962 Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and was the son of Thelonious and Barbara Monk. He died of a stroke on February 17, 1982, and was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Nellie Monk, his wife died on in June 2002, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 80 years old He and his wife Nellie had two children, T. S. Monk, and Barbara Monk who died in 1984. Thelonious Monk, was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed more than a thousand pieces, whereas Monk wrote about 70. Monk's compositions and improvisations feature dissonances and angular melodic twists and are consistent with his unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations. His style was not universally appreciated; the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin dismissed him as "the elephant on the keyboard". Monk was renowned for a distinct look which included suits, hats, and sunglasses. He was also noted for an idiosyncratic habit during performances: while other musicians continued playing, Monk would stop, stand up, and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano. Monk is one of five jazz musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time magazine (the others being Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis). Read More Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelonious_Monk And Here: https://www.nytimes.com/.../nellie-monk-80-wife-muse-and... Previous Next

< Back Charlotte Hawkins Brown ​ Early Palmer Faculty. Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown is in center top. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Palmer Institute, Sedalia, NC. The Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute, better known as Palmer Memorial Institute, was a boarding school for upper class African Americans. The school was founded in 1902 by Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown at Sedalia, North Carolina near Greensboro. Palmer Memorial Institute was named after Alice Freeman Palmer, former president of Wellesley College and benefactor of Dr. Brown. Source: N-83-12-10 - From the General Negatives, State Archives of NC Previous Next

< Back Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta is playing the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo. The Banjo's Roots, Reconsidered August 23, 201112:59 PM ET Heard on NPR All Things Considered Greg Allen Photo description: Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta sitting in a chair. He is facing the camera, wearing a V-neck white shirt with no sleeves. He is playing the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo. Courtesy of Chuck Levy "My father was born with this instrument," Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. "This is part of our history." Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He's holding an akonting: a three-stringed instrument with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd with a goat skin stretched over it. Jatta's father and cousins played the instrument, but he didn't think much about it himself until 1974, when he was visiting the U.S. from Gambia, attending a junior college in South Carolina. He recalls watching a football game on TV with some of the other students. "When the football ended, there was this music program from Tennessee, and they called it country music," Jatta says. "I watched the program and saw the modern banjo being used. And the sound just sounded like my father's akonting." That experience put Jatta on a journey to explore the banjo's connections with the instrument he grew up with. The banjo came to America with the slaves, and musicologists have long looked in West Africa for its predecessors. Much of the speculation has centered on the ngoni and the xalam, two hide-covered stringed instruments from West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. But they're just two of more than 60 similar plucked stringed instruments found in the region. Over the next two decades, while he pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in the U.S., Jatta learned everything he could about the origins of the banjo. Eventually, he reached a conclusion. "Among all the instruments ever mentioned as a prototype of the banjo from the African region," he says, "the akonting to me has more similarities, more objective similarities than any other that has ever been mentioned." For one thing, the akonting looks like a banjo. It has a long neck that, like those of early banjos, extends through the instrument's gourd body. It has a movable wooden bridge that, as in banjos, holds the strings over the skin head. But for Jatta and other banjo scholars, most convincing is how the akonting is played. Players use the index finger to strike down on one of the long strings, and the thumb sounds the akonting's short string as the hand moves back upward. When Jatta looked at early banjo instruction books from the mid-1800s, he found that they described an almost identical playing style. "What struck me was when they mentioned the ball of the thumb and the nail of the index or middle finger, I knew straight away my father was using this same style," Jatta says. "This was never a surprise to me, because I have seen this since I was 5 years old." That early style of playing predates the three-finger style used today by nearly all bluegrass banjo players. Something similar is still used by folk and country musicians who play in a style sometimes called frailing or clawhammer. After doing 10 years of research supported by a Swedish university, in 2000, Jatta presented his findings first in Stockholm, and then a few months later at a banjo collectors' convention in Boston. Greg Adams is a banjoist and graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland; he says Jatta's findings on the akonting have forced many scholars to rethink their assumptions about where to look for information on the banjo's ancestors. "A lot of the emphasis up to that point was focused on griot traditions, which is extremely important as part of the conversation as we look to West Africa," Adams says. "But what the akonting did was open up a new line of discourse." The ngoni and xalam are instruments typically played by griots — praise singers who enjoy special status in many West African tribes. Adams says the akonting is a folk instrument, played not by griots, but by ordinary people in the Jola tribe. In terms of which tradition has the most direct connection to the banjo, Adams says it's a mistake to think of it as an either/or proposition: "Each of these traditions deserves to be explored, experienced, examined on their own terms." Jatta plans to continue his work, documenting the akonting musical tradition and its connections to the banjo and other areas of Jola culture, through a research and education center he's founding back home in Gambia. Click source link to listen to this article. Source Link: https://www.npr.org/.../the-banjos-roots-reconsidered... Previous Next

< Back The Birthplace of The Environmental Justice Movement Photo: PCB landfill protest in Afton, North Carolina, September 1982. (Jerome Friar/UNC Libraries) -- Warren County, NC Is The Birthplace of The Environmental Justice Movement Dolly Burwell is considered the Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement Against Environmental Racism. Her daughter, Kim Burwell who was nine years old looked at her mother and said, "mom, this seems like environmental racism" Environmental Justice --Warren County, NC- The Dumping of Toxic PCP In/near Black Communities Was Fought Against By The Grassroots Organizing Of The African Americans Who Lived In And Near The Areas Where Dumping Occurred. Looking to skirt costly new environmental laws, the Ward Transformer Company began dumping toxic waste along the shoulders of North Carolina roads in 1978. From June to August, a team of men used the cover of night to spray transformer oil — laced with hazardous chemicals such as dioxin, dibenzofurans, and polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — onto the ground, polluting lakes, farmland, and groundwater. In final tally, some 31,000 gallons of transformer oil were dumped, contaminating 60,000 tons of earth along 240 miles of highway. Ironically, the toxic dumping travesty in Warren County, North Carolina, owed its existence to a separate environmental disaster. The same year Robert Ward and Robert Burns began dumping their waste along the highway, the town of Love Canal, New York made headlines as its citizens fell ill from the toxic landfill beneath their feet. Reacting to the crisis, in August, 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a disaster area, and the EPA moved to prevent a similar catastrophe from happening again. It was this subsequent regulation — which made toxic waste disposal more expensive — that the surreptitious dumpers were looking to avoid. Robert Burns and his sons released the valves of tanker trucks to spray tens of thousands of gallons of waste along tracts of highway in 14 counties. The oil left dark stripes on the grass, generating the swift attention of law enforcement. The dumpers, as well as company owner Robert Ward, were briefly jailed and fined under the new Toxic Substance Control Act, drafted in the wake of the Love Canal disaster. That same law also stipulated that the soil, contaminated by an abundance of PCBs, had to be put in a landfill. Where does one put a heap of toxic earth, laced with a chemical reputed to cause birth defects, skin and liver problems, and cancer? The state decided on the politically neglected Warren County, North Carolina— the population of which was 65 percent black. It ranked 97th of 100 for GDP by county statewide. As of the 1970 census, 40 percent of the county’s homes lacked indoor plumbing. A public hearing on the Warren County landfill was held in January, 1979. Around 800 people attended to protest the dump site, which residents worried would pollute the water and deter new investment in what was an already vulnerable local economy. Governor Jim Hunt’s administration was unfazed, and one official that the construction of the landfill would continue, “regardless of public sentiment.” Residents and sympathizers opposed the Warren County landfill for nearly four years. They suggested an already active chemical waste site in Emelle, Alabama, but shipping contaminated soil there was estimated to cost $8.8 million. Reverend Joseph Lowry called it “an assault on the life and dignity of the citizens of Warren County.” Organizations and community leaders, including the NAACP and a black Baptist church, mounted a lawsuit against the dump, which they argued chose the town of Afton because its residents were “few, black, and poor.” ‘’These folks believe that they’re fighting for their lives, more so now than ever,’’ said Ken Ferrucio, the president of a 400-member group established to fight the PCB disposal site. ‘’People believe that PCB’s are just the beginning. That’s what frightens them.’’ But the state yielded little. And when a delegation from the community visited Washington to meet with the EPA, where they discovered that the agency was actually working to loosen requirements about a landfill’s proximity to groundwater to enable the dump’s construction. Governor Jim Hunt had also loosened state laws concerning public hearings, which were required to precede major civil projects. In 1982, the EPA Superfund, headed by Anne Gorsuch Burford (mother of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch), allocated $2.5 million to create the Warren County landfill. Workers were to scrape up soil along the roads in three-inch-deep, thirty-inch-wide tracts, turning up enough to fill 10,000 truckloads. In late summer, the project officially began. Even before the first trucks rolled in the atmosphere was tense. In August, a vandal used a knife to cut a slice into the plastic liner of the dump site. Taking it as a promise of violence, the state assigned 200 patrol officers to the area and put the National Guard on alert. But protesters were almost entirely peaceful. They marched and held signs asking for the protection of their community. Many lay on the road to prevent the trucks from dispatching their loads of PCB-laden soil. High-profile names, like Walter E. Fauntroy, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, were among the protesters taken into police custody. Ken Ferrucino, president of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCB, was arrested, and staged a 19-day hunger strike in prison. During the six weeks of protest, police arrested over 500 people. The protest efforts did not stop the landfill’s construction, but they did, in 1982, lead to the election of local black officials, as well as galvanize the cause of environmental injustice. Duke University’s student newspaper called the protest “the largest civil disobedience in the South since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marched through Alabama.” It tied black leaders, especially in the case of the Congressional Black Caucus, to the cause of toxic waste disposal, which almost always affected poor communities, and often impacted African American ones. Following the impetus set by the Warren County protests, in 1987 the United Church for Christ released a report detailing how minority communities bear the brunt of hazardous chemical sites. It found three out of every five African Americans and Hispanics live in a community housing toxic waste, and confirmed the intuitive conclusion that the government was most likely to dispose of dangerous materials in poor and politically marginalized neighborhoods. As the issue of environmental justice gained traction, in 1994 President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring the federal government to account for the harm posed to minority communities by new hazmat disposal sites. With Warren County, environmentalism became not just about whales, or acid rain, or holes in the ozone, but also about people protecting their own homes. Previous Next

< Back The Badgett Sisters Connie B. Steadman of the Badgett Sisters, an a cappella gospel trio of tremendous depth, not too well known outside of North Carolina, where they sang in “folklife festivals, churches, schools, prisons and mental hospitals” according to the notes on their first LP. Singing in Harmony: The Badgett Sisters Noah Angell heads to North Carolina to track down a member of the gospel trio By Noah Angell on December 2, 2016 Red Bull Music Academy Daily December 30th, 2015. It was nearly noon and still no sign of the sun. We were on our way to Yanceyville from Durham, about an hour’s drive. The rain was dense beyond belief, pelting down on the windshield as I watched puddles and tributaries form in the fields we drove past. My mother was driving and was unusually calm given the tumultuous weather. I was on my way to meet Connie B. Steadman of the Badgett Sisters, an a cappella gospel trio of tremendous depth, not too well known outside of North Carolina, where they sang in “folklife festivals, churches, schools, prisons and mental hospitals” according to the notes on their first LP. I’ve been studying ethnographic records and incorporating them into lecture works for years now, immersing myself in ritual music from far-flung and little-known areas of this world, but something persistently calls me back to my childhood home of North Carolina. The Badgett Sisters’ recordings, in particular, have been a great source of strength, and of replenishment. I had heard that one of the Badgetts was still around and resolved that the next time I returned home I would seek her out, mostly just to say thank you. Riding through the rolling hills of Orange County, I studied old country shacks, stray architectural ciphers of rural life that punctuate the passing mounds of earth. Dilapidated scraps of wood and bowed sheet metal housing farming equipment, grain and wood – they always seem to be rotting from exposure to the elements, ready to fall apart and yet there they are, steadfast. “They say flooding is a big part of the cleansing process for North Carolina,” my mother said as she watched the road, the rain on the windshield now coming in waves, moving towards an undifferentiated downpour. I thought of the trail of tears, what it might take to wash something like that away. Yanceyville is a small town, population around 2,000. It’s a predominantly African American agricultural community located in Caswell County, bordering Virginia to its north. (I would later find out the Badgetts themselves farmed tobacco there for generations.) I must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb in the local library, our designated meeting place. Any out-of-towner would, but I walked in with a bouquet of pink roses and started looking around corners. A man seated at a computer stared and made a curious upward nod in my direction, the woman at the front desk asked if she could help me. “I’m meeting someone here actually...” Just then she appeared, only a few feet from the librarian. “I believe you’re looking for me.” I handed her the flowers and we made our way to an adjacent conference room. (Their three voices so often blend so gracefully into one indistinguishable, powerful whole that it can be hard to separate one from another.) I began by expressing my gratitude and appreciation for the Badgett Sisters, how much their music affected me, how their voices reminded me so much of home, of women in my own family and those who taught me as I grew. As soon as I had her on the phone, I was trying to guess which voice she was. Her older sister Celeste has an unmistakably deep voice, but their three voices so often blend so gracefully into one indistinguishable, powerful whole that it can be hard to separate one from another. In the discourse of ethnomusicology, polyphony is often thought to map power relations within a given community. How voices relate to one another – who leads and who follows, who is allowed to sing at all and how we then sing together / to one another, these are all reflective of hierarchy or lack thereof within a given community, or – in this case – family. The Badgett Sisters are not only an excellent example of harmony in a technical sense, they provide a startlingly beautiful example of how people within a family might relate to one another – such intimacy, such sensitive understanding of one’s place in relation to others, even the silences are considered. I asked about the distinction between gospel and secular music in their household growing up. “Well, we weren’t allowed to do secular music. My daddy wouldn’t allow it. He may have known that we danced... and he didn’t say anything, but he didn’t approve.” Then she leaned in as if letting me in on a secret. “Daddy even played the guitar, but he wouldn’t play it outside the house.” During the struggle for civil rights, old church songs served to lift the spirits of those African Americans who wanted nothing more than to live in peace and in undisturbed dignity. So many of these songs – which told of being received in heaven and laying burdens down – were readily understood as urgent messages of the need for liberation. African American oral tradition has, out of necessity, grown to accommodate such camouflaged and codified speech, carefully weighed to reach certain ears and to evade others, as is most famously exemplified in the language of the underground railroad where Harriet Tubman was called “Moses” and the Ohio River was known as “the River Jordan.” I asked Steadman about the song, “Steal Away.” During the Jim Crow period, the phrase referred to sharecroppers who, unfairly burdened with debt by plantation owners, would disappear into the night seeking freedom and in doing so run off on their unjust debt. To what extent, when you were growing up, did you think of these songs as political? She didn’t seem quite comfortable with my characterization of the songs as political, but on “Steal Away” she offered: “Well, you know, when we sing ‘my Lord calls me by the thunder and the lightning,’ this comes from the time of slavery. That was a signal that at night there would be a storm and that would be the time to make our move. Wade in the water was (sung as) a way to signal that they were to escape by crossing the water that night.” Storytelling – and explaining the origins songs like these – has always been a part of the Badgetts’ repertoire, a means of ensuring not only that the old songs are kept alive, but also that the context in which they were sung is not lost. In trying to establish a timeline, I asked, “Were they always a trio?” “We were the Badgett Family – the original Badgett Family consisted of my dad, my oldest sister Ella, next oldest sister Cleo and oldest brother Cortelyou, Jr…. When my brother was 12 he was no longer with the group because of Baptist Church Traditions that didn't allow you to participate in church services if you had not become a member. Celester was placed in the group to fill his space. When Ella became 16 she no longer wanted to be a part of the group and so I replaced her.” Connie’s father, Cortelyou Odell Badgett was the architect and the visionary of their sound. In 1954 he recorded a number of four part a cappella gospel songs using his own voice multi-tracked and overdubbed to form all four parts of the harmony, calling himself a “one man quartet.” He was locally renowned as a master quartet arranger and choirmaster. He worked with two groups – The Badgett Family and the Silvertone Quartet – both comprised solely of family. Unfortunately their father passed away in 1978, just before the Badgetts recorded “Travelling Shoes,” their first official on-record appearance, for Eight-Hand Sets and Holy Steps under the name The Badgett Sisters. When it came time to record their first full-length record in 1986 it was dedicated to their father and titled in homage, The Voice that Refused to Die. It even begins with Mr. Badgett’s four-part overdubs singing “I don’t want nobody stumbling over my life...” before his daughters’ voices come in, echoing him in the present. Thus from the beginning of their recorded life there was always a voice which we the listeners could not detect but which shaped, guided and invisibly harmonized. Five years later, in 1991, Cleo, frequently the lead singer of the Badgett Sisters, passed. In 1995, Connie and Celester released Give Me Wings, which brings both of their voices powerfully to the fore but in doing so highlights the absence of their sister. The economy of harmonizing had to shift towards a dual axis, trading off on lead and support, whereas before they laid a shifting bed of hums and wordless vocals for their sister to sing atop, or all alternated parts, or sang in unison. Nowadays Celester no longer sings. When she does perform, Connie sings alone. It must be strange singing by yourself, as this always been a matter of singing harmonies right? “Yes, it is... But I can still hear them.” Which is to say that even when she sings alone this could never be a soloistic practice – it is inextricable from polyphony, and from harmony. Connie B. Steadman is currently back in the studio recording with Glenn Hinson, who has recorded and produced all of The Badgett Sisters’ studio output, and Noah Angell is presently working on a documentary film about The Badgett Sisters. This article first appeared in Arabic at ma3azef.com. NOTE: To hear The Badgettt Sisters singing, Click the Source Link* Source: https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/.../badgett-sisters... Previous Next

< Back Frederick Jones ​ On this day in 1949 Frederick Jones invented the air conditioner. Patent No. 2475841. Frederick McKinley Jones (May 17, 1893 – February 21, 1961), was an African-American inventor, entrepreneur, winner of the National Medal of Technology, and inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. His innovations in refrigeration brought great improvement to the long-haul transportation of perishable goods. He cofounded Thermo King. Over his lifetime, he patented more than sixty inventions in divergent fields with forty of those patents in refrigeration. He is best known for inventing the first automatic refrigeration system for trucks. Jones was born on May 17, 1893 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Source:http://www.blackpast.org/.../jones-frederick-mckinley... Previous Next

< Back Walter Long (r) with his baby brother Sylvester *Photo: Walter Long (r) with his baby brother Sylvester* ---- Black police officers…the forgotten story… February 25, 2010 A few days ago, in celebration of Black History Month, the Winston-Salem Police Department honored some of the first black police officers in the city. But there is a backstory that has been lost in the fog of time. On August 7, 1880, two black women, residents of the town of Winston, got into a fight. The police were summoned. The local weekly newspaper the Union Republican reported that the policemen arrested one woman: “It is reported that she was boisterous and would not go gently, and the police had to call for assistance. It is reported that she was somewhat roughly handled, and that the crowd of negroes looking on became enraged, and threatened a rescue.” Someone panicked and called out the local militia. Amidst great confusion, three black men were arrested and charged with inciting to riot. A week later, one policeman testified in court that one of the accused had actually assisted him in making the arrest. That charge was dropped. The other two accused had their charges reduced to disorderly conduct and were released under a peace bond. Shortly thereafter, the town commissioners received a petition from several leading white citizens, including Superior Court judge Darius H. Starbuck: “(We) do petition your Honorable Body to appoint Israel L. Clements (colored) as additional Policeman in and for the Town of Winston.” The commissioners’ response astonished almost everyone. Earlier that year, they had, on their own, asked Mr. Clements to join the local police force. And he had turned them down, because his job at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company paid considerably more than the salary of a policeman. No further action was taken to hire a black policeman. A year later, Clements ran for a seat on the town commission. In a non-districted election, he won, and became the first ever black town commissioner. Unfortunately, near the end of his term, he died. The commissioners passed a resolution that said, in part: “(he) was one who was recognized as a Standard for morals and probity…a most faithful and efficient upholder of law and good government in the town.” It would be almost ten years before another black man was elected to the town commission. Flash forward about thirty years, to around 1912. A local black man named Walter Long, who had been fascinated since childhood by police work, applied for a job as a Winston city policeman. He was told that that was impossible. So he went off to West Virginia to take a course in law enforcement. Around 1916 he returned to Winston-Salem and opened his own private detective agency. Over the next 25 years, his practice extended all along the Atlantic seaboard, from Atlanta to New York. Many of the cases that he worked were in conjunction with lily white local police agencies, including the North Carolina state police, the Forsyth County sheriff’s office and the Winston-Salem Police Department. But because he was a “hired gun,” he never received public credit for his work. When he died in 1941, most “black” obituaries appeared in agate type in the local papers in a special boxed section. Walter Long’s obituary ran as a regular story, including a picture of him, a bit of belated recognition. Source:https://northcarolinaroom.wordpress.com/.../black-police.../ Previous Next

< Back Ella Baker "In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning- getting down and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system." - Ella Baker 1964 Ella Baker born on December 13, 1903 was a Civil Rights and Human Rights Activist who began her long career in the 1930s. Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia and when she was seven, her family moved to her mother's hometown of Littleton in rural North Carolina. As a girl, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. Baker attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduating as class valedictorian in 1927 at the age of 24. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating, she moved to New York City. During 1929-1930 she was an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News and at the Negro National News. She was a behind-the-scenes activist for over five decades working alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the 20th century. Including: W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and John Lewis. She also had high positions in some of the greatest civil rights organizations in history including: NAACP (1938–1953), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957–1960), Southern Conference Education Fund (1962–1967), and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. It is widely written that Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other SCLC members, differed in opinion and philosophy. She once claimed that the "movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement”. #EllaBaker was a very private person. People close to her did not know that she was married for twenty years to T. J. "Bob" Roberts. She left no diaries. The 1981 documentary Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, directed by Joanne Grant, revealed her important role in the Civil Rights Movement. She remained an activist until her death in 1986 on her 83rd birthday. In 2009 Ella Baker was honored on a U.S. postage stamp. Source: https://snccdigital.org/people/ella-baker/ Source: https://ellabakercenter.org/who-was-ella-baker/ Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker Read More About Ella Baker Here: https://www.facebook.com/.../a.171506.../403415917049663/... Previous Next

< Back Navy B-1 Band Racial Barrier-Busting U.S. Navy B-1 Band The First African American Band Honored With Chapel Hill NC Historical Marker MAY 25, 2017 By Tammy Grubb The 44 members of the U.S. Navy B-1 Band cracked the color barrier, leaving an impression on the Chapel Hill community during their two-year service on UNC’s campus during World War II. Racial Barrier-Busting U.S. Navy B-1 Band The First African American Band Honored With Chapel Hill NC Historical Marker MAY 25, 2017 By Tammy Grubb The 44 members of the U.S. Navy B-1 Band cracked the color barrier, leaving an impression on the Chapel Hill community during their two-year service on UNC’s campus during World War II. The community will commemorate their contribution with a historical marker at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 27, 2017 at the intersection of West Franklin and South Roberson streets. Two of the band’s original members – Simeon Holloway of Las Vegas and Calvin Morrow of Greensboro – and many of the veterans’ family members are expected to attend. Only four of the original members are still living. The ceremony will be followed by a reception at the Hargraves Center, 216 N. Roberson St. The B-1 Band’s beginning is credited to four black university and business leaders who garnered support from UNC President Frank Porter Graham and North Carolina Gov. J. Melville Broughton in finding a role for black men in the war effort. The first B-1 Band members were highly skilled musicians enrolled at N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University and Dudley High School in Greensboro. Others hailed from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), South Carolina State University, Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, and N.C. Central University and Hillside High School in Durham. “They were the men who knew music. We read it. We could arrange it,” member Huey Lawrence says on the band’s website. “Most people back then thought black music was just jamming. But we played the classics, for the officers, the admirals, for dances for the movie stars. We played stocks, the classics, concert music, and marching songs.” They were formally inducted into the Navy on May 27, 1942, at a recruiting station in Raleigh – four years before the Navy adopted integration and equal rights policies for black service members. Before that, black Navy service members could serve only as cooks and porters. They trained in Norfolk, Virginia, before transferring to the Navy’s PreFlight School at UNC in July 1942. Although they served under the Navy’s general rating, segregationist laws prevented them from living and eating on campus. Four prominent black Chapel Hill residents – Harold M. Holmes, Albert Register, Kenneth Jones and O.D. Clark – offered the use of a new Negro Community Center – now Hargraves – in the Northside neighborhood near downtown. The band members lived there until being transferred in May 1944 to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. BUILDING COMMUNITY Those years in Chapel Hill were a big deal for the black community, the band’s history states. Children would gather each morning to watch the men march to campus in strict formation to play for assembled cadets six days a week at the raising of the colors. The late Rebecca Clark, a longtime Northside resident and civil rights activist, remembered the band in a 2007 town news release. “They’d come by before the kids went to school and before most of us had gone to work,” she said. “All the people, especially the kids, would come out to watch them parade by. Every morning. It was really something to see, all those boys in their white uniforms. It made us all proud.” Her son. John Clark, who would later perform with his brother in the band Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, recalled his fondness for the saxophone music, and how B-1 Band leader James B. Parsons inspired his brother. “Doug and I and all the kids in the neighborhood would run out to Roberson Street when we heard the band coming, and we followed them as far as we could,” John Clark said. The bandsmen also embraced the community, dedicating free time to outreach programs and music lessons for local children in their barracks. They provided equipment for football games and organized Christmas parties at which one member would dress as Santa Claus, the website noted. A few members formed a dance band, the Cloudbusters, and others went on to marry local girls. PUSHING BARRIERS History shows their influence beyond the black community, however, through patriotic gatherings, war bond rallies, concerts featuring stars such as Kay Kyser and Kate Smith, and special events, including ship launchings and visits by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President Henry A. Wallace. The road was not always smooth, as Parsons explained in recounting their arrival in Chapel Hill: “Just outside of town we got off our bus and were met by the officers and three companies of cadets in dress whites, like ours, and we assembled to parade into town. People started coming out on Franklin Street to see what was happening,” he said. “They started jeering at us, calling us all kinds of ugly names, most of them racial slurs. They were throwing mud and rocks at us. I got cut on my cheek. At least one instrument was dented. My men had mud all over them. But in the midst of all that, they held their heads high. I’d never heard them play better.” As Morrow explained in 2007: “It was straight segregation back then. There might have been a couple of places where you could eat. Certainly not on campus, not in downtown Chapel Hill. And you certainly wanted to be real careful if you ever left barracks.” UNC Chancellor Emeritus James Moeser apologized to band members that year for their treatment, and they became honorary members of the Marching Tar Heels during halftime of a Carolina-James Madison football game in Kenan Stadium. The marker will be Chapel Hill’s fourth. The others commemorate UNC’s founding, U.S. astronauts who trained at Morehead Planetarium and the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. A nearby Carrboro marker commemorates local blues and folk musician Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten. Source: http://b1band.org/ Learn More About The B-1 Band Members From Their Own Words =https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL33CAD62526A5AC3B Source: https://www.heraldsun.com/.../orang.../article152613599.html Previous Next

< Back Hughie Maynor Civil Rights: No Accommodations for Indians Life in the small town of Dunn, North Carolina in 1960 was like any other Southern, segregated town during the Jim Crow era. For decades, residents lived separate public lives based on whether they were Caucasian, African American, or Native American. Schools, restaurants, and theaters were divided based on their race. Growing up in a segregated society seems strange nowadays, but Hughie Maynor was impacted by racial discrimination at every turn. In some ways, being Native American was even more of a struggle than being African American. “They wouldn’t let us go to the theater, Hughie explains, For a while, the Dunn Stewart Theater had an upstairs and downstairs. The upstairs was for the blacks and the downstairs was for the white folks. We went to the movies and sat downstairs for a couple of years and then one day, we walked up there and there was a sign hanging up there at the ticket booth: No Accommodations for Indians. They wouldn’t let you go upstairs or downstairs. And that went on for a couple of years.“ “One night somebody threw a brick through the window of the movie theater. Uncle Junior went down to the Stewart Theater and he talked to a guy named Bill Yates who managed the theater. Me and Junior went up to Yates’s office to talk to him as to why it was we couldn’t go to the theater. I don’t remember what his excuse was, but they still would not let us go to the movies." Image description: Hughie Maynor, a Native American from North Carolina, standing in the backyard of a house. He is wearing a cap and a long sleeve shirt. His left arm is across his chest reaching for his shoulder. Previous Next

< Back African American Gold Star Mothers African American Gold Star mothers sail to France aboard the American Banker in 1933, on a mission to visit the graves of their sons killed in World War I. (Dick Lewis/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images) Photo: African American Gold Star mothers sail to France aboard the American Banker in 1933, on a mission to visit the graves of their sons killed in World War I. (Dick Lewis/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images) When the U.S. government organized segregated trips for Gold Star mothers, black women protested After World War I, the problematic program was implemented by Allen McDuffee Oct 31, 2017 In the summer of 1930, Bessie Strawther took a train from her home in Urbana, Ohio to New York City. It was the first leg of a long trip that would finally allow her to visit her son’s grave more than a decade after his death in World War I. Henry Strawther, a black American private in a segregated infantry unit, died fighting the German army in October 1918 — just weeks before the Armistice of November 1918. Strawther, like tens of thousands of other members of the military, remained buried in Europe either because of circumstances or by family choice. But after significant and sustained pressure on Congress from the American War Mothers and the newly formed American Gold Star Mothers, President Calvin Coolidge in March 1929 signed legislation authorizing Gold Star Mothers — or widows if mothers were deceased — to travel to Europe as guests of the U.S. government to see the final resting places. A fund of $5 million was allocated to cover two-week, all-expense-paid pilgrimages. Before the women left home, the Army’s Quartermaster Corps sent each traveler a list of what to pack and gave detailed travel arrangements. The War Department warned the women to wear “somewhat heavier clothing” to protect them against “the cold and dampness.” Because of the lack of laundry facilities, the quartermaster urged them to pack “sufficient underwear, nightgowns, stockings and handkerchiefs.” The travel arrangements included dates and times of travel as well as berth, seat, or room number for the ship, trains, and hotel rooms. Everything was taken care of. Strawther was to be among the first group of nearly 7,000 women making the Gold Star pilgrimages over the course of three years. But shortly after she arrived in New York, she declined to take the next step of the journey — the War Department required black mothers and widows to travel on freight ships instead of the luxury liners the white travelers were boarding, and their accommodations in Paris would also be segregated. In New York, white women were already staying in expensive hotels while black women slept in Harlem’s YWCA. “I am not going to France,” Strawther wrote to a prominent member of the NAACP, adding, “I do not want to be a disgrace to my son and the race.” In some ways, the segregation was not a surprise given the segregated army structure and the fact that the American Gold Star Mothers did not grant membership to black women, but it was no less insulting. By late May, 55 black women had signed a letter drafted by NAACP officials in which they pledged to refuse the trip rather than submit to segregation. “Twelve years after the Armistice, the high principles of 1918 seem to have been forgotten,” it read. “We who gave and who are colored are insulted by the implication that we are not fit persons to travel with other bereaved ones.” The Chicago Defender, the prominent black newspaper, responded by running a front-page article with a swelling headline: “Gold Star Black Mothers: STAY OUT OF FRANCE If Forced to Sail on Jim Crow Ships!” The director of the pilgrimage program, Gen. J. L. DeWitt, tried to soften the tension with the NAACP. “The composition of the groups,” he wrote, was “determined after the most careful consideration of the interests of the pilgrims themselves. No discrimination whatever will be made as between the various groups.” President Herbert Hoover, who was under increasing pressure to address the matter, referred all questions to the War Department, which, in its replies, both eschewed any suggestion of wrongdoing and illuminated how the military viewed the matter. Assistant Secretary of War F. H. Payne responded to one letter of complaint, “After thorough study, the conclusion was reached that the formation of white and colored groups of mothers and widows would best assure the contentment and comfort of the pilgrims themselves,” according to the National Archives. Payne continued, “No discrimination as between the various groups is contemplated. All groups will receive like accommodations at hotels and on steamships, and the representatives of the War Department will, at all times, be as solicitous of the welfare of the colored mothers and widows as they will be of the welfare of those of the white race.” He added: “It would seem natural to assume that these mothers and widows would prefer to seek solace in their grief from companions of their own race.” As such, the women were presented with a seemingly impossible choice: take a stand against segregation by joining the growing protest organized by the NAACP and black newspapers, or live with the government’s stipulations and make what would likely be a one-in-a-lifetime voyage to see the final resting place of their sons and husbands. Ultimately, most would choose the latter. “Ever since I lost my son in 1918 I have been wanting to come,” wrote one mother. “I would have come over on a cattle-boat. I would have swam if possible. I love my race as strongly as any other but when I heard that the United States was going to send us over I could not refuse.” Four years later, after struggling with her decision, Strawther finally sailed with the very last party of black women — by far the largest one, suggesting many also struggled with their decisions before yielding to the government’s terms. Approximately two dozen black women refused the trip and stuck with the decision. Mabel Johnson of Philadelphia wrote to the War Department that despite “an intense desire to visit the grave of my beloved husband” she would “not be a party to this conspiracy against the dead.” When Grace F. Taylor, a seamstress from Cambridge, Massachusetts, received a letter from another Gold Star widow who had made the pilgrimage and implored her to reconsider, Taylor replied that she considered the second-class treatment of black Gold Star mothers and widows a closed and private matter that could not be rectified. “I wish to say right here that I need no urging from anyone pertaining to making the pilgrimage to France, as my mind was completely settled when I cancelled my invitation last summer,” wrote Taylor. “I am a Massachusetts-born woman and my parents before me and I strongly resent any such stand as the United States government has taken. I feel they have grossly insulted our race and that they can never make amends.” Source: https://timeline.com/when-the-u-s-government-organized... Previous Next

< Back Manteo, NC Church Manteo, NC Church An African American congregation poses for a group photo outside of their church in Manteo, Dare County, NC. 1953 Photographer: Charles Brantley Aycock Brown, 1904-1984. Source: digital ncdcr gov Previous Next

< Back North Carolina A&T students working in the Biological laboratory ca 1800. ​ An early image of N.C. A&T students working in the Biological laboratory ca 1800. This was one of the photographs that W. B. DuBois used in his exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Source: African American photographs assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001705867/ On March 9, 1891, North Carolina A&T State University was founded as a land grant institution for African Americans. The school, originally named the Agricultural and Mechanical College, was established as a result of the Second Morrill Act, enacted by Congress in 1890, which mandated separate colleges for Black students. Initially, the college shared space with Shaw University but eventually moved to its permanent home in Greensboro with the assistance of Dewitt Clinton Benbow, a Guilford County businessman and philanthropist, and Charles H. Moore, an African American educator, and businessman. In 1915, the state legislature changed the name to Agricultural and Technical College. In 1967, the college became a university and took its current name, and in 1972, N.C. A&T became a constituent institution of the University of North Carolina system. Today, N.C. A&T has more than 12,000 students and awards degrees in bachelor’s, master's, and doctoral programs with a strong emphasis on engineering, science, and technology. It awards more degrees in engineering to African Americans than any other university in the country and is the second-largest producer of minority agricultural graduates nationwide. Image: Students inside the Biological laboratory; Circa 1899 Previous Next

< Back Jean Moore Fasse (1908-2008) ​ Photograph of Jean Moore Fasse with her class of singers at the Robeson County (N.C.) Training School on May 19, 1939. Jean Moore Fasse (1908-2008), of Lillington, North Carolina, served in the Red Cross during WWII, and later the Special Service, from 1946 to 1963. Source: Gateway - Triad Digital History Collections - M. Jean Moore Fasse Collection. Source link: https://gateway.uncg.edu/islandora/object/wvhp%3A15645 Link to the Jean Moore Fasse Collection: https://gateway.uncg.edu/islandora/object/wvhp%3AWV0390 Previous Next

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" L.D. Edwards Cemeteries & Graveyards Cemeteries & Graveyards 1/5 North Carolina is home to many historic African American cemeteries and graveyards that hold significant cultural and historical value. These cemeteries serve as a reminder of the contributions and struggles of African Americans throughout the state's history. From the historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh to the Mount Hope Cemetery in Asheville, these sacred grounds offer a glimpse into the past and honor the lives of those who have passed on. Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" L.D. Edwards Enslavement, Emancipation & Freedom Enslavement 1/5 North Carolina is home to many historic African American cemeteries and graveyards that hold significant cultural and historical value. These cemeteries serve as a reminder of the contributions and struggles of African Americans throughout the state's history. From the historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh to the Mount Hope Cemetery in Asheville, these sacred grounds offer a glimpse into the past and honor the lives of those who have passed on. Emancipation 1/1 More great content coming soon! Freedom 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

< Back Andrew J. Brown [or Browne] Real-photo postcard of a studio portrait of Andrew J. Brown [or Browne] of Vaughn, N.C., wearing his U.S. Army uniform, sitting in a chair. An African American soldier. Andrew J. Brown [or Browne] of Vaughn, N.C. Real-photo postcard of a studio portrait of Andrew J. Brown [or Browne] of Vaughn, N.C., wearing his U.S. Army uniform, sitting in a chair. An African American soldier. Brown served during World War I in Company B, 349th Labor Battalion. He died of the results of diphtheria at Camp Greene in Charlotte, N.C., on October 18, 1918, less than two months into his service (undated) Photograph by: The Carolina Studio, Charlotte, N.C. Source: WWI 92.B1.F11.1 - From Warren County Compiled Individual Military Service Records, WWI 92, WWI Papers, Military Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, N.C. Previous Next

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” ​ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Health Wellness & Medical Healthcare Systems 1/5 African Americans have made significant contributions to the medical field in North Carolina, overcoming obstacles and discrimination throughout history. From the days of slavery when they were used as medical experiments, to the present day where they are still underrepresented in the field, their perseverance and dedication have paved the way for future generations. Despite the challenges, African American doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals continue to make a positive impact on the health and well-being of their communities. Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Medical 1/1 African Americans have made significant contributions to the medical field in North Carolina, overcoming obstacles and discrimination throughout history. From the days of slavery when they were used as medical experiments, to the present day where they are still underrepresented in the field, their perseverance and dedication have paved the way for future generations. Despite the challenges, African American doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals continue to make a positive impact on the health and well-being of their communities. Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" L.D. Edwards Cemeteries & Graveyards Cemeteries & Graveyards 1/5 North Carolina is home to many historic African American cemeteries and graveyards that hold significant cultural and historical value. These cemeteries serve as a reminder of the contributions and struggles of African Americans throughout the state's history. From the historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh to the Mount Hope Cemetery in Asheville, these sacred grounds offer a glimpse into the past and honor the lives of those who have passed on. Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

< Back Negro Church in Durham, NC Negro Church in Durham, NC The ushers of a Negro church have their photograph taken to be sold in order to raise money for the church. Durham, North Carolina. May 1940. (We think this is St. Mark AME Zion Church that is on S. Roxboro St. in Durham, NC. The Pastor at the time of this photograph was, Rev. S. P. Perry. He pastored St. Mark from 1936-1956. Roxboro St. used to be called Pine Street. ) Photographer: Jack Delano-FSA/WPA. Source: NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division. Previous Next

< Back Ernest Richardson Real-photo postcard of a studio portrait of Ernest Richardson of the community of Essex in Halifax County, N.C. He is wearing his U.S. Army uniform, sitting in an elaborately-carved wood chair with an American flag in the background. Real-photo postcard of a studio portrait of Ernest Richardson of the community of Essex in Halifax County, N.C. He is wearing his U.S. Army uniform, sitting in an elaborately-carved wood chair with an American flag in the background. An African American soldier, Richardson was originally from Warren County, N.C. He served during World War I in Company C, 344th Labor Battalion, U.S. Army (undated). Source: WWI 92.B2.F35.1 From Warren County Compiled Individual Military Service Records, WWI 92, WWI Papers, Military Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, N.C. Previous Next