BLACK HISTORY MONTH THREAD

[antonlavey]

Donde?

it was on the smithsonian channel

 

[j-radd]

jus gonna give my 2 cents then keep it pushin, black history month isnt about suclusion, hate , or false entitlement, its about recognition of not only where we've been as a people but where we can go. Im not here to undermine any other race/culture/people of a different backround but in HERE its about a pan-african conciousness that keeps us grounded as a proud productive people who's only intention is to educate an move the culture foward, that atleast to me is what black history means to me.

Black Panther Party (aaron dixon)

Marcus Garvey (Pan-Africanist, founder of the U.N.I.A)

Mestre Pastinha (founder/teacher of the African-brazilian martial arts of Capoeira Angola)

Zumbi Dos Palmeres (King/Freedom Fighter of the strongest escaped slave colony Palmeres in brazil)

 

[retro23j]

http://niketalk.com/t/523801/offici...-thread-vol-share-what-you-know#post_17121567

I started this thread on the first. Zero replies

 

[retro23j]

Double -_-

 

[DCAllAfrican]

you disgust me to the point where i actually feel sick.



why cant we let go and stop bringing it up?


why couldnt white americans not own slaves and systematically oppress blacks all the way till today?

you sick of hearing about it? i am too, it makes me sick to listen to American history...


but thats what it is, AMERICAN HISTORY


slavery isnt going anywhere....we wont EVER forget, BOY


certainly won't "let it go" to ease the guilt of white america, BOY


its easy, in 2011, for white america to call for letting bygons be bygons...


i mean, white america got off scot free.....yall dudes are complaining about mexicans taking $4/hr jobs....


but we can't talk about 500+years of slavery and 100+ years of systematic oppression, cause it makes YALL feel some sort of way?

why black people gotta stick together?

where the hell are you from, dude?



  


it sickens me that people that think like this exist on NT

#Boom

 

[6 Rings G.O.A.T.]

Going to backtrack this thread..

 

[301216baller]

BUMMMMPPPPPPP
[h2]  [/h2]

February 7, 2014

According to Black America Web, the new sleek $100 bills that were released by the U.S. Federal Reserve on Oct. 8, 2013, were designed by 43-year-old African American artist, Brian Thompson.

Thompson started as an apprentice at the bureau when he was just 19 years old. His father worked as a cylinder maker at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing in D.C. When there was a need for an artist, the father knew his son would fit the bill.

The artist had been working at the bureau for 24 years before he could finally call the newly released $100 bill his very own design. He had drawn many of the new images by hand at his desk.

Thompson wanted to keep some elements of the old bill especially the expressions relating to Benjamin Franklin and his signature on the Declaration of Independence.

Read the five differences in the newly designed $100 bill.

After Thompson designed the new bill, William Fleishell spent five months engraving his design so it could be printed on plates. This was accomplished through handwork and digital engraving.

Thompson’s design of the new $100 bill is in high demand all over the world.

Do you have one of Thompson's designed $100 bill? Have you see Thompson's design of the $100 bill?

http://www.examiner.com/article/black-history-fact-100-bill-was-designed-by-an-african-america

 

[DCAllAfrican]

 

[hand2handking]

 

[hand2handking]

Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Early 20th Century Harlem Radicalism

http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/hubert-harrison-voice-early-20th-century-harlem-radicalism

In the article below independent historian Jeffrey Perry discusses his 2008 book on early 20th Century Harlem activist Hubert Harrison.

Hubert Harrison (1883-1927) is one of the truly important figures of early twentieth-century America. A brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist, he was described by the historian Joel A. Rogers, in World’s Great Men of Color as “the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time” and “one of America’s greatest minds.” Rodgers adds that “No one worked more seriously and indefatigably to enlighten” others and “none of the Afro-American leaders of his time had a saner and more effective program.”

Born in St. Croix, Danish West Indies, in 1883, Harrison arrived in New York as a seventeen-year-old orphan in 1900. He made his mark in the United States by struggling against class and racial oppression, by helping to create a remarkably rich and vibrant intellectual life among African Americans, and by working for the enlightened development of the lives of “the common people.” He consistently emphasized the need for working class people to develop class consciousness; for “Negroes” to develop race consciousness, self-reliance, and self-respect; and for all those he reached to challenge white supremacy and develop modern, scientific, critical, and independent thought as a means toward liberation.

A self-described “radical internationalist,” Harrison was extremely well-versed in history and events in Africa, Asia, the Mideast, the Americas, and Europe. More than any other political leader of his era, he combined class consciousness and anti-white supremacist race consciousness in a coherent political radicalism. He opposed capitalism and maintained that white supremacy was central to capitalist rule in the United States. He emphasized that “politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea”; that “as long as the Color Line exists, all the perfumed protestations of Democracy on the part of the white race” were “downright lying”; that “the cant of ‘Democracy’” was “intended as dust in the eyes of white voters”; and that true democracy and equality for “Negroes” implied “a revolution . . . startling even to think of.” Working from this theoretical framework, he was active with a wide variety of movements and organizations and played signal roles in the development of what were, up to that time, the largest class radical movement (socialism) and the largest race radical movement (the “New Negro”/Garvey movement) in U.S. history. His ideas on the centrality of the struggle against white supremacy anticipated the profound transformative power of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggles of the 1960s and his thoughts on “democracy in America” offer penetrating insights on the limitations and potential of America in the twenty-first century.

Harrison served as the foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician in the Socialist Party of New York during its 1912 heyday; he founded the first organization (the Liberty League) and the first newspaper (The Voice) of the militant, World War I-era “New Negro” movement; and he served as the editor of the Negro World and principal radical influence on the Garvey movement during its radical high point in 1920. His views on race and class profoundly influenced a generation of “New Negro” militants including the class radical A. Philip Randolph and the race radical Marcus Garvey. Considered more race conscious than Randolph and more class conscious than Garvey, Harrison is the key link in the ideological unity of the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement--the labor and civil rights trend associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the race and nationalist trend associated with Malcolm X. (Randolph and Garvey were, respectively, the direct links to King marching on Washington, with Randolph at his side, and to Malcolm, whose parents were involved with the Garvey movement, speaking militantly and proudly on street corners in Harlem.)

Harrison was not only a political radical, however. Rogers described him as an “Intellectual Giant and Free-Lance Educator,” whose contributions were wide-ranging, innovative, and influential. He was an immensely skilled and popular orator and educator who spoke and/or read six languages; a highly praised journalist, critic, and book reviewer (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer in history); a pioneer Black activist in the freethought and birth control movements; a bibliophile and library builder and popularizer who helped develop the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture, and a promoter and aid to Black writers and artists. In his later years he was the leading Black lecturer for the New York City Board of Education and one of its foremost orators. Though he was a trailblazing literary critic in Harlem during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance, he questioned the “Renaissance” concept on grounds of its willingness to take “standards of value ready-made from white society” and on its claim to being a significant new re-birth. (He maintained that “there had been an uninterrupted,” though ignored, “stream of literary and artistic products” flowing “from Negro writers from 1850” into the 1920s.)

Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 is the first volume of my two-volume biography and I began work on it over twenty-five years ago. My ancestral roots are entirely among working people, I was afforded the opportunity to attend college, and, like millions of others, I was deeply affected by the civil rights struggle-inspired movements for social change in the United States. These factors, and many related experiences, have led me towards a life in which I have tried to mix worker-based organizing with historical research and writing. My major preoccupation has been with the successes and failures of efforts at social change in the United States. In that context, I have focused on the role of white supremacy in undermining efforts at social change and on the importance of struggle against white supremacy to social change.

These influences and interests provided me with a certain openness to the contributions of working class and anti-white-supremacist writers and intellectuals. It was in this context, in the early 1980s, while researching a proposed Columbia University doctoral dissertation that I first encountered the work of Hubert Harrison. When I first read microfilm copies of Harrison’s two published books I was arrested by the clarity of his writing and the perceptiveness of his analysis. I knew that I had encountered a writer of great importance and within a short while I decided to write on Harrison. I made contact with his daughter, Aida Harrison Richardson, and son, William Harrison, in 1983. After several meetings and discussions of their father’s work they very generously (before William’s death in 1984) granted me access to some of their father’s materials and, over the years, I was provided access to additional materials by Aida and then (after she passed in 2001) by her son Charles Richardson. While working full-time in the union movement I proceeded to preserve and inventory the Hubert H. Harrison Papers and, when the family requested, I worked with them to place the Papers at Columbia University.

I was influenced toward serious study of matters of race and class in America through personal experiences and readings and through the work of an independent scholar and close personal friend, the late Theodore William Allen (author of the two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race), whose papers I am similarly preserving and inventorying. Allen’s writings on the role of white supremacy in United States history and on the centrality of the struggle against white supremacy disposed me to be receptive to the life and work of Harrison, another independent, autodidactic, anti-white-supremacist, working class intellectual.

After completion of my doctoral dissertation in 1986, Harrison's daughter Aida surprised me by presenting me with his diary (which I did not know existed). This opened up many new avenues of investigation and convinced me of Harrison’s extraordinary importance and of the fact that I had a two-volume biography on my hands. The first volume focuses on Harrison’s Crucian roots, his early intellectual growth, his Socialist Party years, the founding of the Voice, the Liberty League and the New Negro movement, and the wartime Liberty Congress. The second volume will focus on Harrison’s editing of the New Negro, his relationship with Garvey and his editing of the Negro World, his relationships with Socialists, Communists, and other organizations, his efforts at building a Liberty Party and the International Colored Unity League, his activities during the Harlem Renaissance, and his truly extraordinary last decade of prolific writings and public speaking. I think the two volumes will leave no doubt as to Harrison’s importance as a major figure, his life story will lead to much new interpretation of early twentieth century events and individuals, and many of his writings and ideas will be found to offer important insights for today.

 

[hand2handking]

Alain Locke (1886-1954)

Image Ownership: Public Domain

http://www.blackpast.org/aah/locke-alain-1886-1954

Alain Leroy Locke, a leading black intellectual during the early twentieth century and an important supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 13, 1886 to Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke. His parents were middle class educated professionals. A gifted and talented student, Locke attended Harvard University in 1904 where he studied under renowned scholars including Josiah Royce, George Santana, and William James.

Locke excelled at his studies and became the first African American to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1907, Locke attended Oxford University where he obtained another B.A degree in 1910. The following year he attended the University of Berlin in Germany.

In 1912 Locke returned to the United States where he became an assistant professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C., beginning an academic career that would span four decades. He also joined the newly organized Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity. In 1916 Locke interrupted his teaching career at Howard to return to Harvard University where he earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy. When Locke rejoined the faculty at Howard he quickly rose in rank and in 1921 became the chair of the Philosophy department. He remained in this position until his retirement in 1953.

Locke was known as an engaging, talented, accessible and admired professor by both his students and his colleagues. He was a pioneer in interdisciplinary scholarship as his work transcended standard academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Locke also embraced progressive, avant-garde, and, some would argue, unorthodox teaching methods while at Howard which were sometimes viewed with suspicion by more traditionally oriented colleagues and administrators at his institution.

Alain Locke has been widely regarded as the originator of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. His main contribution to both movements was the promotion and emphasis on values, diversity, and race relations. He challenged African Americans to acknowledge and promote their cultural heritage while at the same time, making the effort to integrate into the larger society and appreciate the mores and customs of other ethnic groups. He also was a firm believer in W.E.B DuBois' Talented Tenth philosophy, yet, unlike DuBois, he remained socially attached to the general African American population and staunchly resisted any form of elitist behavior.

Locke was a resourceful, intelligent, altruistic, and generous man who managed to serve as a mentor and establish close relationships with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, and Zora Neale Hurston. While Locke was never open about his homosexuality, his sexuality contributed to his various sensibilities and would frequently manifest itself in his works.

Alain Locke died on June 9, 1954 in New York City, New York at the age of 68.

 

[hand2handking]

Little Known Black History Fact: Reginald Lewis
D.L. Chandler

https://blackamericaweb.com/2017/12/07/little-known-black-history-fact-reginald-lewis/

Reginald F. Lewis was the nation’s richest African-American in the ’80’s and the first to build a billion-dollar company. This morning in his hometown of Baltimore, the late pioneering Black tycoon’s life will be celebrated at the museum that bears his name on the day of his birth.

Lewis was born December 7, 1942 in Baltimore, Md. Stating, in his words, that his neighborhood was “semi-tough,” Lewis excelled in academics and sports in high school. Entering Virginia State University in 1961 on an athletic scholarship, Lewis majored in economics. After losing his scholarship due to an injury and facing some academic struggles, Lewis eventually found his footing.

In his final year, Harvard Law School began introducing Black students to its legal studies department via a summer program. Lewis was selected for the program, and was invited by Harvard to attend its prestigious law school. To date, Lewis is the only individual to be admitted to the school before applying. The school renamed its international law center after him due to his achievements and his generous $3 million grant offering, the largest such for the school at the time.

With a focus on securities law, Lewis established the first African-American law firm on Wall Street, helping many minority businesses obtain much-needed startup capital.

In 1983, Lewis established the TLC Group, a venture capital firm known for corporate takeovers of struggling companies and then turning them around. Lewis’ biggest coup came in 1987 when he purchased the international division of Beatrice Foods. At $985 million, it was the largest leveraged buyout at the time.

Renaming it TLC Beatrice International, Lewis rapidly turned around the company as its chairman and CEO. In 1992, the company earned over $1.6 billion annually. Lewis worked between offices in New York and Paris.

Lewis was often portrayed as a man who didn’t acknowledge racial matters. In fact, he was quoted as saying that he didn’t involve himself in such discussions. However, the way white businessmen were treated versus those of color quietly motivated him according to some accounts.

Lewis used the overwhelming success he obtained as his way to combat the racist and divisive nature of American business. Lewis also remarked that his skin color wasn’t a factor in Europe. Instead, he was judged there on the merit of his hard work.


In 1993, Lewis died at the age of 50 after a long bout with brain cancer. His wife, attorney Loida Nicolas-Lewis, took over TLC Beatrice’s operations.

In 2005, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture opened in Baltimore.

Late last month, Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings placed Lewis’ financial milestone in 1987 and honoring its 30th anniversary by entering in the United States Congressional Record

 

[hand2handking]

Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885)

Image Ownership: Public Domain

http://www.blackpast.org/aah/delany-major-martin-robison-1812-1885

Martin Robison Delany was an African American abolitionist, the first African American Field Officer in the U.S Army, and one of the earliest African Americans to encourage a return to Africa.

Delany was born in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia) to a slave father and afree mother. Delany’s mother took her children to Pennsylvania in 1822 to avoid their enslavement and persecution brought on by attempting to teach her children to read and write, which was illegal in the state at that time. In 1833 Martin Delany began an apprenticeship with a Pittsburgh physician and soon opened a successful medical practice in cupping and leeching (it was not necessary to be certified to practice medicine prior to 1850). In 1843 he began publishing a newspaper in Pittsburgh calledThe Mystery, Later Delany joined Frederick Douglass to produce and promote The North Star in Rochester, New York.

Martin R. Delany entered Harvard Medical School in 1850 to finish his formal medical education (along with two other black students) but was dismissed from the institution after only three weeks as a result of petitions to the school from white students. Two years later he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, claiming that even abolitionists would never accept blacks as equals and thus the solution to the black condition lay in the emigration of all African Americans back to Africa. In 1859 Delany led an emigration commission to West Africa to explore possible sites for a new black nation along the Niger River, “We are a nation within a nation, we must go from our oppressors,” he wrote.

When the Civil War began in 1861 Delany returned to the United States. Jettisoning for a time his emigrationist views, Delany recruited thousands of men for the Union Army. In February 1865, after meeting with President Abraham Lincoln to persuade the administration to create an all-black Corps led by African American officers, Delaney was commissioned a Major in the 52nd U.S. Colored Troops Regiment. With that appointment he became the first line officer in U.S. Army history.

When Reconstruction began Delany was assigned to the Freedman’s Bureau in South Carolina. There he called for black pride, the enforcement of black civil rights and land for the freedpeople. Delany became active in local Republican politics, losing a close election for Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina but later serving briefly as a judge in Charleston, South Carolina. As the Republicans lost power in the state Delany renewed his calls for emigration, becoming in 1878 an official in the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company. He also wrote in 1879 The Principia of Ethnology, a book that argued for race pride and purity.

In 1880 Delany withdrew from the Liberian Exodus Company and moved first to Boston, Massachusetts and then toWilberforce College in Xenia, Ohio. Martin R. Delany, considered my many as the “father of black nationalism,” died in Xenia, Ohio on January 12, 1885.

 

[hand2handking]

Robert F. Williams

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/arts/television/outspoken-and-feared-but-largely-forgotten.html

"Negroes With Guns," a 1962 manifesto about a group battling the Klan and other white terrorists in Monroe, N.C., is still a compelling title. But the story of its author, Robert F. Williams, has gathered dust. Once one of the most feared men in the country, he was an architect of the modern black power movement and symbolized a century-long debate among blacks about the need to meet violence with violence.

Tonight, amid the Black History Month television programs about better-known figures and moments, comes the documentary "Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power." The one-hour film, being shown on the PBS series "Independent Lens," is by Sandra Dickson and Churchill L. Roberts, co-directors of the Documentary Institute at the University of Florida.

Mr. Williams toppled from a big stage. He was a local N.A.A.C.P. president and World War II veteran who grabbed international headlines as he advocated for oppressed Southern blacks. He agitated for black freedom while self-exiled in Cuba and China from 1961 to 1969 to evade kidnapping charges in Monroe.

"Negroes With Guns," put out by a left-wing New York publishing house, was cited as inspiration by Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, and other black power leaders and is considered one of the seminal documents of that movement. "He forces us to examine our notions of patriotism and the boundaries of acceptable behavior," Ms. Dickson said in an interview about why she and Mr. Roberts chose their subject, whom they discovered while making "Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore," about the first murder of a major civil rights leader.

Through newsreel clips and interviews with family members, neighbors, historians and civil rights stalwarts like Julian Bond, the story of Mr. Williams, who died quietly in 1996 -- without ever meeting the filmmakers -- is rendered as fascinating in its own right.

Edie Falco, host of "Independent Lens," asks rhetorically at the beginning of the film, "What's more American than carrying a gun?" Mr. Williams, in a suit and tie, speaking in his Southern drawl, takes on that subject early in the documentary.

"If the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie at this time, then Negroes must defend themselves, even if it is necessary to resort to violence," Mr. Williams says evenly. The clip is from a 1959 press conference in Monroe. Mr. Williams was anguished, family and friends explain, by the dismissal of charges against a white man accused of the attempted rape of a pregnant black woman. There were witnesses, including her child.

It was a common occurrence in those days. The small town of Monroe, ancestral home of Jesse Helms, the former Republican senator known for his opposition to civil rights leaders and legislation, had Klan rallies in the 50's that drew as many as 15,000 people to the region. Mr. Williams founded his armed group, the Black Guard, after seeing Klan members make a black woman dance at gunpoint "like a puppet," he says in an audiotape, heard over the film's scene of sad-faced blacks working at a Monroe poultry factory.

Still, the press conference comments earned Mr. Williams a six-month suspension as an N.A.A.C.P. branch president. Headlines denounced him as a "racial zealot." In an interview in the film, Beatrice Colson says that as a young black girl in rural Monroe at the time, she and others "had mixed feelings about who this man was," because blacks feared white retaliation.

He was also seen as a hero. "You become violent, we become violent," Richard Crowder, a Black Guard member, says in an interview in the film. "We weren't attacking anybody, just protecting ourselves."

Timothy B. Tyson, a historian, says of Mr. Williams in the documentary, "Threatened with death, he walked down the street carrying a pistol, which would be a normal white, Southern thing to do."

Dr. Tyson is a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the author of the biography "Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power." Mr. Williams was one of the first black leaders to use the cold war to embarrass the United States internationally, contrasting its claims of democratic superiority with the way American blacks were denied their rights and subjected to violence, Dr. Tyson said.

For example, Mr. Williams waged an unusual letter-writing campaign in 1958 that brought international attention -- and ultimately freedom -- to two black boys, ages 8 and 10, who had been terrorized by the Klan and were about to spend their youths in reform school after one supposedly was kissed by a white girl.

Glenda Gilmore, a professor at Yale who specializes in Southern and African-American history, said Mr. Williams had been neglected for decades, in part because his approach underscored the violence of white resistance to black equality. "Robert Williams is drawing on a tradition of people who always thought they should defend their homes," Dr. Gilmore said. "Often, these people were lynched or driven out of the South in the dead of night," after whites learned they were armed.

"Negroes With Guns" also shows how Mr. Williams trod the traditional route of trying to desegregate lunch counters and swimming pools peacefully, despite death threats.

In 1961, Mr. Williams fled for Cuba and then China with his wife, Mabel, and two young sons after he was pursued on kidnapping charges following a riot in downtown Monroe. His face flashed on television screens nationwide and on F.B.I. wanted posters. Mr. Williams always maintained that he was simply sheltering a white couple in his home from a mob. Dr. Tyson said the evidence against Mr. Williams was always flimsy. The last of the charges were dropped in 1976.

"Rob had a machine gun and I had a Luger," Mabel Williams recalled of the night they fled Monroe. They feared lynching, she said. Her husband, she said, was not a Communist, a racist or anti-American, as he has sometimes been labeled. "He loved his country," she said.

During their exile, the couple communicated with black leaders in the United States and shined an international spotlight on the black struggle at home. Perhaps even more important, they broadcast a music and commentary show from Havana, "Radio Free Dixie," which was heard as far away as New York and Los Angeles and throughout the South. The topics included race riots and Vietnam, accompanied by jazz and the songs of Nina Simone and others in the protest tradition.

The C.I.A. expected Mr. Williams to emerge as the next radical black leader, Dr. Tyson says in "Negroes With Guns," but he did not. Dr. Tyson's book describes Mr. Williams as quietly remaining in the Detroit area, where he lived after returning from exile, working with community and black nationalist groups, speaking on campuses and at prisons. "He never played the politics of civil rights celebrity," Dr. Tyson said.

"Negroes With Guns" ends with images of a slower, white-haired Mr. Williams with a bushy white beard, near the end of his life. He died of Hodgkin's disease at 71. His dream, Mabel Williams says in the documentary, was to return to Monroe and live out his days as a gentleman farmer. Although he returned for visits, he never managed to move back.

Still, there are hints that the town is far different from the one Mr. Williams fled in 1961. The camera lingers on a Confederacy monument but then swings to a public swimming pool. It is full of both black and white children, laughing.

 

[hand2handking]

Mark Dean

He was part of the team that developed the ISAbus, and he led a design team for making a one-gigahertzcomputer processor chip.[1] He holds three of nine PC patents for being the co-creator of the IBM personal computer released in 1981.
Mark Dean (computer scientist) - Wikipedia

Jerry Lawson


was an American electronic engineer, and one of the few African-American engineers in the industry at that time. He is known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console as well as inventing the video game cartridge.[3]

Jerry Lawson (engineer) - Wikipedia

Walt Braithwaite


is a Jamaican born American engineer and former executive at Boeing. He joined the company in 1966 as an associate tool engineer in the Fabrication Division. In 1975 he was the senior engineer responsible for developing Boeing's use of computer technology by using CAD/CAM in the design of commercial airplanes. Over the next several decades Braithwaite's teams oversaw the engineering development of the 707,727,737 and later as head of engineering operations for the 747, 767 programs and the 777, the first commercial aircraft to be designed entirely with computer-aided design.

Walt Braithwaite - Wikipedia

Wanda Austin


Wanda Austin (born 1954) is the former President and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, a leading architect for the nation’s national security space programs. The Aerospace Corporation has nearly 3,600 employees and annual revenues of more than $917 million. She assumed this position on January 1, 2008 and retired on October 1, 2016.[1] She continues as a consultant for the corporation.

Wanda Austin - Wikipedia

 

[hand2handking]

Who is Prophet Noble Drew Ali?
July 18th, 2016

http://moorishamericannationalrepublic.com/news/who-is-prophet-noble-drew-ali/

He was born Timothy Drew in the Lunar Logging of the 8th point, in January, when this planet Earth positioned itself in the location of the revolution of year 1886 of the Gregorian calendar.

The Prophet traveled throughout the southern States examining the conditions under which we Moors lived as negroes, blacks, and coloreds. We were oppressed by strictly enforced Jim Crow Laws. Jim Crow was a fictional negro character in a song and dance act of the early 1860’s presented by Thomas D. Rice. Jim Crow is used to denote segregation and racial discrimination and refers mostly to the laws of that era.

The Jim Crow Laws segregated us from the pale European Americans in every way of life. The forced separation of the races rendered us unequal, inferior, and deprived of Birthrights. We were unable to advance as a people because legal prohibitions and racism would NOT allow them. After being kidnapped, tortured, and made to labor here in North America, we were stripped of everything. Our history was distorted and destroyed. We were deprived of our language, names, religious customs, families, and Birthrights. Bound in chains and sold amongst the European American slaveholders, we were forced to work on cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rubber plantations. By the early 1900’s, very little had changed.

The Prophet sought to change all of that. Ready to teach Islam in America, the Prophet went amongst the down trodden Moors and began his missionary work. The Prophet teaches us that we are direct descendants from the first human family who rapidly populated the earth. Our superior intellect, skillfulness, and imagination helps us survive and excel under unfavorable conditions. The Prophet also teaches us that most of the members of the pale-skinned Nations of Europe has dealt unjustly with us and has tried to crush us, true Moslems, and divert us from the path of Allah. This is why we must join the ranks of our fellow Moslem brothers and sisters and abandon the religion of your enemies: CHRISTIANITY, the religion of Rome who worship the gods of Europe!

The Prophet sought the Citizenship of ALL Moors so we would receive our Divine Rights as Citizens according to the Free National Constitutions that was prepared for ALL Free National Beings!

The Prophet was born on Sampson County, North Carolina Republic. On the day of his birth, there was a great earthquake. This was a Presentment of the Prophet’s spirit hitting the earth. Born amongst the Cherokee, young Timothy was put in the care of his Aunt after the death of his Mother. Little is known about his father and the Prophet’s early childhood was very tragic. Before his mother passed, she had the feeling that her Sun would one day inherit a great mission. Therefore she entrusted him in the care of her Sister who was very jealous of her nephew and abused him physically as well as mentally. His Aunt put the young baby in a burning furnace leaving him to die but Allah saved the child from the burning furnace and from that point on! Allah prepared him for the great work that he was to perform for his people!

The Prophet had permanent scars on his hands and face due to the abuse he endured as a child. His younger life was spent with gypsies. Later on, he accepted his mission that Allah gave him and he left the gypsy camp never to return.

During the 1900’s, the Prophet was a victim of racial discrimination, poverty, and suffering. He was very intelligent and was always eager to listen to the wise. He was a boy of great bravery and courage. As he grew older, he was very interested in the East. So with nothing to lose, he left the home of his Aunt and began his journey towards manhood. Since he loved to travel, he first went to Egypt. While there, he learned of his heritage which laid the foundation for his becoming a pioneer of Islam in the West. He went to Egypt as ‘Timothy Drew’ and he returned to America with the name ‘Ali’.

In Egypt, he had the opportunity to visit the great Universities, sit with the Egyptian sages, travel through the inner chambers of the pyramids and also to learn the origin of the slave trade. He was able to SEE and know his true way of life, Islam, and that Allah is the creator of the Original Man and Woman. By being in Egypt, he could SEE for himself that the Moors had laws, science, math, art, dignity, Citizenship, and power over the land.

At that time, there was little formal education of the modern Egyptians. So most of their education came by way of word of mouth. This is how the Prophet was able to learn so much about the life, both past and present, of the Egyptians.

The Prophet was inspired with his origin and returned to America to claim his people — to raise them up as clean, self-respectable, upright Citizens who descended from a glorious race of people. After he returned to the U.S.A., he began his mission leading his congregation to the history of the Moors.

In 1913 at the age of 27, he started teaching. He began his teaching on Essex County, New Jersey, in the city of Newark. He wanted his people to live for, of, and by each other. His teachings were spread by way of street corners, vacant lots, and open discussions in the homes of his people. He taught his people of the lower-self and the higher-self and that they should lead moral and clean lives.

The Prophet’s efforts were interfered by the appearance of Abdul Wali Farrad Muhammad who was a Desert Arab of the East and a member of the P.L.O. Farrad began teaching Arabic and the distorted Islam of the Arabs. The people were fascinated by him and many Moorish Americans began deserting the Canaanite Temple to follow Farrad. As a result, the Prophet dismantled the Canaanite Temple and traveled to Chicago, Illinois to rebuild and made this location his Official headquarters.

In 1925, the Prophet planned a historic trip to the archives of the District in order to reclaim the Moorish Flag and to seek the Divine Right to call his people to their True faith, Islam. To finance this trip, he developed a line of health products including teas, oils, tonics, and body rub compounds. He designed these products for and sold them to his people. While in the District, he asked for the right to rename his people and restore their Nationality. President Calvin Coolidge, feeling that the people would NOT listen to the Prophet, gave him FULL PROTECTION to teach Islam in America. The Prophet claimed our True flag from the archives which, at the time, had been in European possession for 113 years.

The wearing of the Fez was one of the many customs that the Prophet saw in Egypt which he adopted for his mission. By the late 1920’s, the Temple’s membership had grown tremendously. The Prophet was NO longer able to personally supervise the inner workings of the movement so he designated subordinate Temples with Sheiks and Sheikesses. A Moorish American becomes a Sheik or Sheikess because he/she has earned the Title and NOT because he/she is anyone’s friend or because of his/her age alone. These Moors were considered figures of Authority and responsibility.

Some of these Sheiks/Sheikesses that the Prophet shared power and authority with abused their responsibilities and began exploiting the Temple members. A power struggle began with the Prophet in the middle. The Sheiks and Sheikesses were becoming rich from their positions in the Temple. During a violent conflict within the movement, one of the Sheiks was killed and the Prophet was charged with the crime although he was NOT even in the city at the time. He was NEVER sent to trial NOR convicted because a few weeks after he was released from jail on bond, he made his transition to the plane of Soul in 1929. Afterwards, the movement split into small splinter groups.

So now with the Founder gone, who was left to direct the mission? Sheik John Givens-El, the Reincarnated Prophet. Make note that, at the same time, there was another claiming to be the Reincarnated Prophet: Wallace Douglas Ford who claimed to be Farrad of the Canaanite Temple in New Jersey. W.D. Ford is the FAKE Farrad who was a member of the Nazi party and formed the Nation of Islam.

 

[hand2handking]

Pitfalls and Radical Mutations: Frantz Fanon’s Revolutionary Life

http://isj.org.uk/pitfalls-and-radical-mutations-frantz-fanons-revolutionary-life/

 

[hand2handking]

Black Wall Street: Early Black Accomplishments



http://www.sfltimes.com/business/black-wall-street-early-black-accomplishments

Moreover, I have become saddened by the way our achievements fly under an undetected radar as if irrelevant, nonexistent and not properly recorded. Therefore, with great pride and an overwhelming desire I decided to get the ball rolling and pen Fires of Greenwood: The Tulsa Riots of 1921.

An integral part of my motivation for Fires began with a study conducted by Dr. Robert E. Washington. It was the first sociological study that situates black literary discourse, and the major Black American literary intellectuals in the social and political developments of American race relations.
The Ideologies of African-American Literature, written by Washington, carefully outlines the dearth of historical fact from the pens of African-American writers.

Washington noted and I quote, “In the preindustrial structures of domination, the ruling group typically controls not only the subordinate group’s economic and political life, but also its cultural representations — namely the ideas and images inscribing its social identity in the public arena.” These controls are alive and functioning to a greater extent today. It is my opinion that the only logical way to change how African Americans had been defined in the past was through research.

As I dug deeper, my interests led me to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. After two years of research and two trips to the Greenwood Section of the city, better known as Black Wall Street, I was determined to craft a novel built around the men and women who erected a self-sustaining community within the city.

The tragedies that Black Americans suffered in the early morning hours on June 1, 1921, will never surpass the accomplishments of men like J. B. Stradford and O. W. Gurley, business pioneers that went on to become the wealthiest African Americans in Tulsa.

Both were determined to make the capitalist system work for them. Stradford and Gurley, who were born a few years after Emancipation, owned hotels and rental properties. Stradford’s 54-room luxurious facility was considered the finest black-owned hotel in the country and Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois lodged at Gurley’s place two months before the riot.

Mabel Little arrived in Tulsa in 1915 with one dollar and fifty cents to her name. Through hard work, thrift and sheer determination she built “Little Rose Beauty Shop,” bought rental property and assisted her husband in opening the “Little Restaurant.” Mabel was well regarded and respected in Greenwood. So much so, the Mabel Little Heritage House was built post the riots on the very grounds where the businesses were destroyed.

The Greenwood section was a magnet for successful black professionals.

Dr. Andrew Jackson was considered to be the finest black surgeon in the country by The Mayo Clinic; and Andrew Smitherman owned the Tulsa Star, a newspaper that received notoriety because of its fine commentaries written about the plight of black people, not only in Tulsa, but throughout the country.

Historical facts about African Americans must be shared with young black boys and girls who often doubt their ability and opportunity to achieve success in this country. It is imperative that role models much like the men and women of Black Wall Street present themselves now.

 

[DCAllAfrican]

H2h, good stuff man

 

[hand2handking]

J. A. Rogers (1880-1966)

http://www.blackpast.org/aah/rogers-j-1880-1966

Self-trained historian, novelist, and journalist Joel Augustus Rogers spent most of his life debunking pseudo-scientific and racist depictions of people of African ancestry while popularizing the history of persons of black people around the world. Rogers was born September 6, 1883 in Negril, Jamaica. He and his siblings were raised, after their mother passed, by their schoolteacher father, Samuel John Rogers. Rogers emigrated to the United States in 1906 and Joel Rogers became a naturalized citizen in 1917. Rogers lived briefly in Chicago, Illinois before eventually settling in New York City, New York.

Joel Rogers held a variety of jobs including a Pullman porter, and a teacher, but eventually found his niche as a journalist and historian. In this capacity, he began to focus on combating what he saw as white racist propaganda history in both books and popular films and other media of the period that omitted persons of African ancestry as contributors to world history. Towards that end, Rogers in 1917 published his seminal work, From Superman to Man. In this work Rogers had his protagonist, a racist Southern senator, realizing finally that he was only a man, create a Hollywood film studio that would produce films that highlighted Africa's gifts to the world. Subsequent Rogers books also dealt with this theme including 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro(1934), Sex and Race Volume 1 (1941), Sex and Race, Volume 2 (1942); Sex and Race, Volume III (1944); World’s Great Men of Color (1946), and Africa’s Gifts to America (1961).

By the 1930s and 1940s Rogers was writing history columns in a number of leading black newspapers including thePittsburgh Courier, Messenger, Crisis, Mercury, and the New York Amsterdam News. Typical of such articles was his 1940 piece in Crisis titled “The Suppression of Negro History.” Rogers was present at the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930 and five years later covered the Italo-Ethiopian conflict as the war correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier.

Although Rogers had no formal educational degrees or training in established academic programs, he was widely recognized for his professional excellence and intellect throughout his career. He belonged to the Paris (France) Society for Anthropology, American Geographical Society, and the Academy of Political Science; in addition, he was also multilingual, mastering German, Italian, French, and Spanish.

Joel A. Rogers wrote anti-racist history using universal humanity as his theme until his death in New York City on March 26, 1966. His wife Helga Rogers continued to re-publish Rogers’ works for some years after his passing.

 

[hand2handking]

Robert Smalls



http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-ame...istory/which-slave-sailed-himself-to-freedom/

Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain, even donning the captain’s wide-brimmed straw hat to help to hide his face, responded with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself, and other defense positions. Cleared, Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside of Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered his ship to the blockading Union fleet.

In fewer than four hours, Robert Smalls had done something unimaginable: In the midst of the Civil War, this black male slave had commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship and delivered its 17 black passengers (nine men, five women and three children) from slavery to freedom.

Sailing From Slavery to Freedom

Our story begins in the second full year of the war. It is May 12, 1862, and the Union Navy has set up a blockade around much of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Inside it, the Confederates are dug in defending Charleston, S.C., and its coastal waters, dense with island forts, including Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired exactly one year, one month, before. Attached to Brig. Gen. Roswell Ripley’s command is the C.S.S. Planter, a “first-class coastwise steamer” hewn locally for the cotton trade out of “live oak and red cedar,” according to testimony given in a U.S. House Naval Affairs Committee report 20 years later.

After two weeks of supplying various island points, the Planter returns to the Charleston docks by nightfall. It is due to go out again the next morning and so is heavily armed, including approximately 200 rounds of ammunition, a 32-pound pivot gun, a 24-pound howitzer and four other guns, among them one that had been dented in the original attack on Sumter. In between drop-offs, the three white officers on board (Capt. C.J. Relyea, pilot Samuel H. Smith and engineer Zerich Pitcher) make the fateful decision to disembark for the night — either for a party or to visit family — leaving the crew’s eight slave members behind. If caught, Capt. Relyea could face court-martial — that’s how much he trusts them.

At the top of the list is Robert Smalls, a 22-year-old mulatto slave who’s been sailing these waters since he was a teenager: intelligent and resourceful, defiant with compassion, an expert navigator with a family yearning to be free. According to the 1883 Naval Committee report, Smalls serves as the ship’s “virtual pilot,”but because only whites can rank, he is slotted as “wheelman.” Smalls not only acts the part; he looks it, as well. He is often teased about his resemblance to Capt. Relyea: Is it his skin, his frame or both? The true joke, though, is Smalls’ to spring, for what none of the officers know is that he has been planning for this moment for weeks and is willing to use every weapon on board to see it through.

Background

Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, behind his owner’s city house at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort, S.C. His mother, Lydia, served in the house but grew up in the fields, where, at the age of nine, she was taken from her own family on the Sea Islands. It is not clear who Smalls’ father was. Some say it was his owner, John McKee; others, his son Henry; still others, the plantation manager, Patrick Smalls. What is clear is that the McKee family favored Robert Smalls over the other slave children, so much so that his mother worried he would reach manhood without grasping the horrors of the institution into which he was born. To educate him, she arranged for him to be sent into the fields to work and watch slaves at “the whipping post.”

“The result of this lesson led Robert to defiance,” wrote great-granddaughter Helen Boulware Moore and historian W. Marvin Dulaney, and he “frequently found himself in the Beaufort jail.” If anything, Smalls’ mother’s plan had worked too well, so that “fear[ing] for her son’s safety … she asked McKee to allow Smalls to go to Charleston to be rented out to work.” Again her wish was granted. By the time Smalls turned 19, he had tried his hand at a number of city jobs and was allowed to keep one dollar of his wages a week (his owner took the rest). Far more valuable was the education he received on the water; few knew Charleston harbor better than Robert Smalls.

It’s where he earned his job on the Planter. It’s also where he met his wife, Hannah, a slave of the Kingman family working at a Charleston hotel. With their owners’ permission, the two moved into an apartment together and had two children: Elizabeth and Robert Jr. Well aware this was no guarantee of a permanent union, Smalls asked his wife’s owner if he could purchase his family outright; they agreed but at a steep price: $800. Smalls only had $100. “How long would it take [him] to save up another $700?” Moore and Dulaney ask. Unwittingly, Smalls’ “look-enough-alike,” Captain Rylea, gave him his best backup

To white Confederates, the Union ships blocking their harbors were another example of the North’s enslavement of the South; to actual slaves like Robert Smalls, these ships signaled the tantalizing promise of freedom. Under orders from Secretary Gideon Welles in Washington, Navy commanders had been accepting runaways as contraband since the previous September. While Smalls couldn’t afford to buy his family on shore, he knew he could win their freedom by sea — and so he told his wife to be ready for whenever opportunity dawned.

The Escape on the Planter

That opportunity is at hand on the night of May 12. Once the white officers are on shore, Smalls confides his plan to the other slaves on board. According to the Naval Committee report, two choose to stay behind. “The design was hazardous in the extreme,” it states, and Smalls and his men have no intention of being taken alive; either they will escape or use whatever guns and ammunition they have to fight and, if necessary, sink their ship. “Failure and detection would have been certain death,” the Navy report makes plain. “Fearful was the venture, but it was made.”

At 2:00 a.m. on May 13, Smalls dons Capt. Rylea’s straw hat and orders the Planter’s skeleton crew to put up the boiler and hoist the South Carolina and Confederate flags as decoys. Easing out of the dock, in view of Gen. Ripley’s headquarters, they pause at the West Atlantic Wharf to pick up Smalls’ wife and children, along with four other women, three men and another child.

At 3:25 a.m., the Planter accelerates “her perilous adventure,” the Navy report continues (it reads more like a Robert Louis Stevenson novel). From the pilot house, Smalls blows the ship’s whistle while passing Confederate Forts Johnson and, at 4:15 a.m., Fort Sumter, “as cooly as if General Ripley was on board.” Smalls not only knows all the right Navy signals to flash; he even folds his arms like Capt. Rylea, so that in the shadows of dawn, he passes convincingly for white.

“She was supposed to be the guard boat and allowed to pass without interruption,” Confederate Aide-de-Campe F.G. Ravenel explains defensively in a letter to his commander hours later. It is only when thePlanterpasses out of Rebel gun range that the alarm is sounded — the Planter is heading for the Union blockade. Approaching it, Smalls orders his crew to replace the Palmetto and Rebel flags with a white bed sheet his wife brought on board. Not seeing it, Acting Volunteer Lt. J. Frederick Nickels of the U.S.S.Onward orders his sailors to “open her ports.” It is “sunrise,” Nickels writes in a letter the same day, an illuminating fact that may have changed the course of history, at least on board the Planter — for now Nickels could see.

In The Negro’s Civil War, the dean of Civil War studies James McPherson quotes the following eyewitness account: “Just as No. 3 port gun was being elevated, someone cried out, ‘I see something that looks like a white flag’; and true enough there was something flying on the steamer that would have been white by application of soap and water. As she neared us, we looked in vain for the face of a white man. When they discovered that we would not fire on them, there was a rush of contrabands out on her deck, some dancing, some singing, whistling, jumping; and others stood looking towards Fort Sumter, and muttering all sorts of maledictions against it, and ‘de heart of de Souf,’ generally. As the steamer came near, and under the stern of the Onward, one of the Colored men stepped forward, and taking off his hat, shouted, ‘Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!’ ” That man is Robert Smalls, and he and his family and the entire slave crew of the Planter are now free.

After “board[ing] her, haul[ing] down the flag of truce, and hoist[ing] the American ensign” (his words), Lt. Nickels transfers the Planter to his commander, Capt. E.G. Parrott of the U.S.S. Augusta. Parrott then forwards it on to Flag Officer Samuel Francis Du Pont (of the “du Pont” Du Ponts), at Port Royal, Hilton Heads Island, with a letter describing Smalls as “very intelligent contraband.” Du Pont is similarly impressed, and the next day writes a letter to the Navy secretary in Washington, stating, “Robert, the intelligent slave and pilot of the boat, who performed this bold feet so skillfully, informed me of [the capture of the Sumter gun], presuming it would be a matter of interest.” He “is superior to any who have come into our lines — intelligent as many of them have been.” While Du Pont sends the families to Beaufort, he takes care of the Planter’screw personally while having its captured flags mailed to Washington via the Adams Express, the same private carrier that had delivered Box Brown to freedom in 1849.

The Reception

Smalls may not have had the $700 he needed to purchase his family’s freedom before the war; now, because of his bravery and his inability to purchase his wife, the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1862, passed a private bill authorizing the Navy to appraise the Planter and award Smalls and his crew half the proceeds for “rescuing her from the enemies of the Government.” Smalls received $1,500 personally, enough to purchase his former owner’s house in Beaufort off the tax rolls following the war, though according to the later Naval Affairs Committee report, his pay should have been substantially higher.

The Confederates seemed to know this already; after Smalls’ escape, biographer Andrew Billingsley notes, they put a $4,000 bounty on his head. Still, those on the scene had a hard time explaining how slaves pulled off such a feat; in the aftermath, Aide-de-Campe Ravenel even intimated to his commander that the night before, “it would appear that … two white men and a white woman went on board of her, and as they were not seen to return it is supposed that they have also gone with her.” Suppose all they wanted — there was no record of any white passengers aboard the Planter the morning of May 13 — Smalls and his crew had acted alone. As his contemporary steamer pilot Mark Twain famously wrote: “Facts are stubborn things.”

In the North, Smalls was feted as a hero and personally lobbied the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to begin enlisting black soldiers. After President Lincoln acted a few months later, Smalls was said to have recruited 5,000 soldiers by himself. In October 1862, he returned to the Planter as pilot as part of Admiral Du Pont’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. According to the 1883 Naval Affairs Committee report, Smalls was engaged in approximately 17 military actions, including the April 7, 1863, assault on Fort Sumter and the attack at Folly Island Creek, S.C., two months later, where he assumed command of thePlanter when, under “very hot fire,” its white captain became so “demoralized” he hid in the “coal-bunker.” For his valiancy, Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain himself, and from December 1863 on, earned $150 a month, making him one of the highest paid black soldiers of the war. Poetically, when the war ended in April 1865, Smalls was on board the Planter in a ceremony in Charleston Harbor.

Robert Smalls’ Postwar Record

Following the war, Smalls continued to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation black politician, serving in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886) before watching his state roll back Reconstruction in a revised 1895 constitution that stripped blacks of their voting rights. He died in Beaufort on February 22, 1915, in the same house behind which he had been born a slave and is buried behind a bust at the Tabernacle Baptist Church. In the face of the rise of Jim Crow, Smalls stood firm as an unyielding advocate for the political rights of African Americans: “My race needs no special defense for the past history of them and this country. It proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”

 

[hand2handking]

Civil Rights Crusader Fannie Lou Hamer Defied Men — and Presidents — Who Tried to Silence Her

Fannie Lou Hamer, a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, speaks before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City on Aug. 22, 1964. (AP)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-tried-to-silence-her/?utm_term=.1933ac5b3c57

Fannie Lou Hamer walked with a limp and still had a blood clot behind her eye from being severely beaten by police in a Mississippi jail. She was the youngest of 20 children born to sharecroppers in Mississippi, where she had spent much of her life picking cotton until she was fired for trying to register to vote.

And yet President Lyndon B. Johnson was terrified of her, terrified of the appeal she would make in 1964 before the Democratic National Committee’s credentials panel on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

The Freedom Party, an integrated coalition of delegates, had come to Atlantic City on Aug. 22, 1964, to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi, many of them rabid segregationists. Hamer demanded that the credentials committee seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation instead.

Johnson, who needed the support of Southern Democrats to win reelection, was beside himself. He told advisers he couldn’t take the pressure. “Last night I couldn’t sleep,” he said, according to White House tapes. “About 2:30, I waked [sic] up . . . I do not believe I can physically and mentally carry the responsibilities of the world, and the Niggras, and the South.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. (John Rous/AP)

The president, who would eventually sign the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, sent political advisers to persuade Hamer not to make her appeal to the credentials committee. When she refused, Johnson called an impromptu news conference to make it impossible for the national television networks to cover her testimony live.

It didn’t matter. Hamer’s testimony would become one of the most powerful speeches of the civil rights movement.

Hamer, born 100 years ago, on Oct. 6, 1917, in the Mississippi Delta, rivaled Martin Luther King Jr. in her command of audiences.

This week, black lawmakers marked the centennial of Hamer’s birth on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington.

“Tonight, I recognize a civil rights hero whose work is no small part of the reason I and many other African American members of Congress are able to stand before you today,” said Democratic Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, who worked on Hamer’s unsuccessful 1964 congressional campaign and now represents Mississippi’s 2nd District. “Ms. Hamer taught black Mississippians how to read and write in order for them to pass discriminatory voter tests designed to prevent black Americans from utilizing their right to vote.”

When Hamer tried to register to vote in 1962, there were no black elected officials in the district. “I am happy to report to you now the sheriff, the chancery clerk, the circuit clerk and four of the five county supervisors are African Americans,” Thompson said. “So Mrs. Hamer’s work has not been in vain.”

Before cancer claimed her life on March 14, 1977, Hamer was not afraid to speak for herself.

“I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d a been a little scared,” she said about the night in August 1962 when she attended a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting and volunteered to go to the courthouse the next day to try to register to vote.

“But what was the point of being scared? The only thing the whites could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”

The SNCC meeting at the church changed Hamer’s life.

“They talked about how it was our right, that we could register and vote,” Hamer later recalled. “I had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote.”

As a child in Ruleville, Miss., Hamer often went hungry and without shoes. Her mother, Ella, often fed her children greens with flour gravy. She tied rags on her feet in the winter. Hamer was 6 when she started picking cotton. Because of her ability to read and write, she was given the job of working as a “time-keeper” in a sharecropping system designed to keep black workers in debt.

When she was 27, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, and together they worked as sharecroppers on a plantation owned by W.D. Marlow in Ruleville, according to the 1991 biography “This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,” by Kay Mills.

Fannie and Pap Hamer adopted two girls. Her own pregnancies had ended in stillbirths. In 1961, Hamer was sterilized without her consent when she went to a Sunflower County hospital for a minor surgery to remove a tumor. She was given a hysterectomy, which was known as the “Mississippi appendectomy.”

“In the North Sunflower County Hospital,” Hamer said, “I would say about six out of the 10 Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied.”

The forced sterilization would compel her to fight for human rights. On Aug. 31, 1962, Hamer and 17 other people took a bus to Indianola, the county seat of Sunflower County, “to register to become first-class citizens,” she said.

Only Hamer and Ernest Davis were allowed in the clerk’s office to register. They were required to take a literacy test, created to dissuade black people from voting. They had to say who they worked for and where they lived — information the Ku Klux Klan often used to find and intimidate black people attempting to register to vote.

The clerk asked Hamer to interpret a section of the state constitution dealing with “de facto” laws.

“I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day,” Hamer said later. She and Davis failed the literacy test. She told the clerk she would be back.

When Hamer returned to the plantation that day, she was fired from her job, recalls Hamer’s daughter, Vergie Hamer Faulkner, 63.

Hamer became a SNCC community organizer and helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In 1964 she ran for Congress as a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party candidate against Democratic incumbent Jamie L. Whitten.

“My opponent has done nothing to help the Negro in the Second Congressional District,” Hamer said in a campaign speech. “If I’m elected as congresswoman, things will be different. We are sick and tired of being sick and tired. For so many years, the Negroes have suffered in the state of Mississippi. We are tired of people saying we are satisfied, because we are anything but satisfied.”



Grainy black-and-white footage from the 1964 Democratic National Convention shows Hamer making her way through a crowd of men. She is wearing a printed summer dress and carrying a white purse on her left arm.

As a speaker, she followed Rita Schwerner, the wife of Michael Schwerner, one of three civil rights workers killed two months earlier near Philadelphia, Miss., in a case the FBI would call “Mississippi Burning.” Others also spoke, including Martin Luther King Jr.

But all eyes were on this woman with a powerful voice from Mississippi.

Hamer walked into the hall with determination, squeezing between men in suits who refused to make space for her.

When she arrived at the witness chair, Hamer put her purse on the table, folded her hands and without notes proceeded to speak for 13 riveting minutes, telling the credentials committee and the world about the injustices suffered by black people who wanted to vote.

Hamer recounted being stopped by police after trying to register to vote, about being fired as a sharecropper, about 16 bullets shot into the home of friends where she had slept after moving off the plantation.

She described the beating she endured in a Mississippi jail.

Fannie Lou Hamer walks toward the entrance to the convention hall, where she was finally admitted. (UPI/Bettmann)

In June 1963, Hamer attended a voter registration workshop in South Carolina. On her trip home, the Continental Trailways bus stopped at a station in Winona, Miss., where five people — June Johnson, Annell Ponder, Euvester Simpson, Rosemary Freeman and James West — got out.

They sat at the rest stop’s lunch counter, but a white waitress refused them service. A highway patrolman ordered, “Y’all get out.”

Ponder, who worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reminded him that the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated rest stops were illegal.

“Ain’t no damn law,” he replied. “You just get out of here.” In the parking lot, Ponder began writing down license plates of police cars. She was arrested.

Hamer got off the bus to see what was happening. As she climbed back on the bus, an officer shouted to arrest her, too.

She was taken to the county jail. “After I was placed in the cell,” Hamer told the DNC credentials committee, “I began to hear sounds of licks and screams, I could hear the sounds of licks and horrible screams. And I could hear somebody say, ‘Can you say, “Yes, sir,” ******? Can you say, ‘Yes, sir’?”

The police called Ponder “horrible names,” Hamer recalled. “She would say, ‘Yes, I can say, “Yes, sir.” ’ ”

“So, well, say it,” the officers ordered.

Ponder refused. “They beat her, I don’t know how long. And after a while she began to pray, and asked God to have mercy on those people.”
Then three white men came to Hamer’s cell. One of them warned her: “We are going to make you wish you was dead.”

They carried Hamer into another cell, where they forced her to lie face down on a bunk and ordered two black male prisoners to beat her with a blackjack.

“I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted,” Hamer said. “I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side, because I suffered from polio when I was 6 years old. After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the state highway patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack.

“I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush. One white man — my dress had worked up high — he walked over and pulled my dress. I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up.”

The convention was captivated. Then Hamer brought her testimony to a close.

“I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered.”

Hamer fought back tears.

“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer said. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Then she got up, dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, grabbed her purse and made her way out of the convention.

President Johnson would apply political pressure to the credentials committee to drop support for Hamer’s Freedom Party.

Johnson sent advisers to Atlantic City and told Hubert Humphrey, who was trying to win the vice presidential nomination, to fix “the Mississippi problem.”

As a compromise, Democrats offered the Freedom Party two at-large seats, but Johnson emphasized that he did not want one of them to go to Hamer.

“The president has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention,” Humphrey said, explaining that his nomination hung on the Freedom Party accepting the compromise.

“I was amazed,” Hamer remembered later, “and I said, ‘Well, Mr. Humphrey, do you mean to tell me that your position is more important to you than 400,000 black peoples’ lives?’ ”

The Freedom Party voted unanimously to reject the compromise.

When Hamer and other Freedom Party members returned to the Gem Hotel, she discovered Johnson had held a news conference to preempt her testimony. She was livid. But Johnson’s efforts to silence her didn’t work.

That night, in a hot Atlantic City hotel room, Hamer watched her testimony broadcast in prime time on the evening news.

 

[getback]

 

[6 Rings G.O.A.T.]

 

[calibeebee]

We getting a banner again right?