Martin Luther King, Lunch Counters, Freedom Riders, and Albany, Lewis’ Biography
Civil Rights

Martin Luther King, Lunch Counters, Freedom Riders, and Albany, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 4-6

Martin Luther King was vigorously campaigning for voting rights. In his first national address, he proclaimed, “Give us the ballot. Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.” “Give us the ballot and we will fill the legislature with men of goodwill. Give us the ballot and we will get the people judges who love mercy. Give us the ballot and we will quietly, lawfully, and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement” the US Supreme Court Brown decision. Ensuring that blacks have the right to vote was the key civil rights objective in the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War. […]

Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott
Civil Rights

Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Lewis’ Biography, Chapter 3

The biographer David Levering Lewis writes, “By here dignified bearing during her arrest and arraignment, and because of her impeccable reputation in the black community, Mrs Parks’ defiance compelled the city to charge her explicitly with the violation of the municipal ordinance governing racial accommodation on publicly owned vehicles, and not, as was usually the case, with the elastic offense of disorderly conduct.” […]

Martin Luther King, Youth and Schooling, Lewis’ Biography
Civil Rights

Martin Luther King, Youth and Schooling, Lewis’ Biography Chapters, 1 and 2

The biographer David Levering Lewis observes that “the King family belonged to what is known as the school hard preaching, of which cult of personality, and occasional pinch of exploitation, and sulfurous evangelism are indispensable ingredients.” Martin’s maternal grandfather founded the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr, grew it into one of the largest and most prestigious black Baptist Churches in Atlanta.

His family was known for their involvement with civil rights. After the disastrous 1906 Atlanta race riots, his maternal grandfather was one of the charter members of the local NAACP chapter. He helped defeat a local bond issue that did not fund any new black schools and was instrumental in advocating the building of Booker T Washington High School, the first school in Atlanta for secondary education. […]

Benefits and Detriments of Slavery in the Deep South
Civil Rights

Benefits and Detriments of Slavery in the Deep South

There was one very real benefit of slavery to the enslaved in the Deep South. Before the Civil War, slaves were far less likely to be lynched or killed than were freed slaves after the war. The reason for this was simple: it is illegal to damage someone’s property, and slaves were extremely valuable. Slaves were the most valuable asset class in America before the Civil War. Before the Civil War, a slave was worth as much as an economy car is worth today. […]

Should Blacks Receive Reparations? Happy Juneteenth from Atlantic Magazine, Civil Rights Articles
Civil Rights

Should Blacks Receive Reparations? Happy Juneteenth from Atlantic Magazine, Civil Rights Articles

The most compelling story in the Atlantic Juneteenth collection is “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is one of the Black Lives Matter banned authors, banned for making sensitive white children ashamed of their past history, ashamed that slavery was indeed the cause of the Civil War, ashamed of the brutal history of Jim Crow and KKK violence during Reconstruction and Redemption targeted at blacks. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ works were deleted from the AP Black History Studies course in a futile attempt to make it acceptable to Red State schools. If they wanted to change the emphasis to the AP Lost Cause White History Studies course, they would have better luck. […]

Civil Rights

Booker T Washington, Later Autobiography, My Larger Education

When Booker T Washington first started Tuskegee Institute, he immediately had to raise funds from the white businessmen of Macon County. He explains his pitch, “the best way to influence the Southern white man in our community, I have found, is to convince him that you are of value to that community. For example, if you are a teacher, the best way to get the influence of your white neighbors is to convince them that you are teaching something that will make your students” acquire skills that “adds something of value to the community.” I showed them that “the presence of Tuskegee Institute meant better farms and gardens, good housekeeping, good schools, and law and order.” […]

Summary Three Generations Black Leaders
Civil Rights

Three Generations of Leading Black Leaders: Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and WEB Du Bois

Who do we consider to be the leaders of the first three generations of black leaders? Frederick Douglass, first generation black leader, abolitionist writer and orator, who was born a slave and escaped to freedom; Booker T Washington, educator, second generation black leader, who was born a slave, was freed when the Civil War ended; and WEB Du Bois, third generation black leader, civil rights activist, author and scholar, who was born free in Massachusetts after the Civil War, chose to attend college in the Deep South, and was co-founder of the NAACP. […]

Civil Rights

History of History of WEB Dubois’ Black Reconstruction, Challenging Lost Cause Myth and Dunning School

The established dogma was that the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War was a dark period in American history, where black rule bred corruption and unwanted federal interference in the governments of the Deep South. WEB Du Bois counters by claiming that the Jim Crow Redemptionist Era following Reconstruction was the dark era when blacks lost the right to vote and any semblance of due process and fair play, that many blacks were, in effect, re-enslaved in a more brutal segregationist society, and that the Reconstruction was a time of greater democracy where the civil rights and liberties of all races and classes were respected. […]

Civil Rights

Was the Rough Rider President Theodore Roosevelt a Proponent of Civil Rights?

Theodore Roosevelt was not a man bound by class, which can be seen in the composition of the Rough Rider volunteer regiment unit he organized to fight in the Spanish American War. The newspaper publicity hyping his heroic charge leading his Rough Rider regiment up San Juan Hill made him a household name, eventually propelling him to the Presidency.
Roosevelt, like his distant cousin Franklin, was a member of the patrician class, which meant that, of course, he attended Harvard University. After serving in the New York State Legislature, Roosevelt was devastated when both his beautiful young wife Alice and his mother passed away on the same day, just two days after the birth of his daughter, also named Alice. For solace, he purchased a cattle ranch in North Dakota, developing many friendships among the rough riding cowboys in this western state. His rough rider recruits were an unlikely mix of wealthy blue-blooded aristocrats and rough and ready cowboys from the Badlands.
Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were not the only regiment charging up San Juan Hill, history books often do not mention the role of the colored regiment Buffalo soldiers in the Spanish-American War. During the war Roosevelt was chided for fraternizing with the enlisted men, this criticism makes more sense if he fraternized with both his Rough Riders and the Buffalo soldiers, which have an interesting history of their own. […]

Civil Rights

Was WEB Du Bois a Communist? The Later Years of WEB Du Bois

Was WEB Du Bois a communist? The answer is YES: When he turned 93, he joined and paid his dues to the CPUSA, Communist Party. Most people are born in the first chapters of their autobiography; but no, WEB Du Bois, being ever the contrarian, chooses to extol the virtues of communism in the opening chapters. Personally, I am quite angry with him, why did he do that? It is political poison for a black leader to announce he is a communist, and now I must explain it. We will reflect on his growing embrace of communism over the course of his life. […]