Black History Month
Americans have recognized Black history annually since 1926, first as "Negro History Week" and later as "Black History Month". What you might not know is that black history had barely begun to be studied or even documented when the tradition originated. Although Blacks have been in America at least as far back as colonial times, it was not until the 20th century that they gained a respectable presence in the history books. We owe the celebration of Black History Month, and more importantly, the study of black history, to Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Born to parents who were former slaves, Woodson spent his childhood working in the Kentucky coal mines. At the age of twenty, he enrolled in high school and graduated within two years. Woodson then went on to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. The scholar was disturbed to find in his studies that history books largely ignored the Black American population and that when Blacks did figure into the picture, it was generally in ways that reflected the inferior social position they were assigned at the time. Woodson, always one to act on his ambitions, decided to take on the challenge of writing Black Americans into the nation's history. He established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, and a year later founded the widely respected Journal of Negro History. In 1926, he launched Negro History Week as an initiative to bring national attention to the contributions of Blacks throughout American history. Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week because it marks the birthdays of two men who greatly influenced the black American population, Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.
February 23, 1868
W.E.B. Dubois, important civil rights leader and co-founder of the NAACP, was born.
February 3, 1870:
The 15th amendment was passed, granting Blacks the right to vote.
February 25, 1870:
The National Association for the Advancement of colored people (NAACP) was founded by a group of concerned black and white citizens in New York City.
And many more.
NAACP
Mary White Ovington
was a social worker who in 1904 had written a study on racial discrimination,
Half a Man: The Status of the Negro. In September 1908, Ovington, now
working for the
New York Post,
read an article by
William English Walling,
entitled Race War in the North, that described the atrocities being
carried out against African-Americans. Walling ended the article by calling for
"a powerful body of citizens to come to their aid."
Ovington responded to the article by writing to Walling and at a meeting in
New York
they decided to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). The first meeting of the NAACP was held on February 12th,
1909.The NAACP
started its own
magazine,
Crisis,
in November of 1910. The magazine was edited by
William Du Bois
and contributors to the first issue included
Oswald Garrison Villard
and
Charles Edward Russell.
The magazine soon built up a large readership among Blacks and white
sympathizers. By 1919
Crisis
was selling 100,000 copies a month.
In 1915 the NAACP
campaigned against the film
Birth of a Nation
(1915). The film's portrayal of the
Ku Klux Klan
and African Americans, resulted in the director,
D.W. Griffith,
being accused of racism. Despite attempts by the NAACP to have the film banned,
it was highly successful at the box office.
Mary White Ovington
was the first executive secretary of the NAACP. She was replaced by the writer
and diplomat,
James Weldon Johnson
in May, 1917. His assistant was
Walter Francis White,
and together they managed to rapidly increase the size of the organization. In
1918 the NAACP had 165 branches and 43,994 members.
The NAACP also fought for
women's suffrage.
Several women, including
Mary White Ovington,
Jane Addams,
Inez Milholland,
Josephine Ruffin,
Mary McLeod Bethune,
Mary Talbert,
Mary Church Terrell
and
Ida Wells-Barnett,
were active in both the struggle for women's rights as well as equal civil
rights.
The NAACP was also involved in legal battles against segregation and racial
discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting and transportation. The
NAACP appealed to the
Supreme Court
to rule that several laws passed by southern states were unconstitutional and
won three important judgments between 1915-23 concerning voting rights and
housing.
The NAACP also fought a long campaign against
lynching.
In 1919 it published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States: 1889-1918.
The NAACP also paid for large ads in major newspapers presenting the facts
about lynching. To show that the members of the organization would not be
intimidated, it held its 1920 annual conference in Atlanta, considered at the
time to be one of the most active
Ku Klux Klan
areas in America.
In 1929
Walter Francis White
became executive secretary of the NAACP. White was an outstanding propagandist
and articles that he wrote about African American
civil rights
appeared in a variety of journals including
Collier's,
Saturday Evening Post,
The Nation,
Harper's Magazine
and the
New Republic.
White also wrote a regular column in the
New York Herald Tribune
and the Chicago Defender.
In July, 1935,
Walter Francis White
recruited
Charles Houston
to establish a legal department for the
(NAACP). The following year Houston appointed
Thurgood Marshall
as his assistant. Over the next few years Houston and Marshall used the courts
to challenge racist laws concerning transport, housing, and education.
In 1940
Thurgood Marshall
became chief of the NAACP's legal department. Over the next few years Marshall
won 29 of the 32 cases that he argued before the
Supreme Court.
This included cases concerning the exclusion of black voters from primary
elections (1944), restrictive covenants in housing (1948), and unequal
facilities
for students in state universities (1950).
Some members of the
NAACP
claimed that
Walter Francis White
had too much power in the organization. In 1950 the NAACP board decided that
Roy Wilkins
should replace White as the person in charge of all internal matters. White
remained the NAACP's official spokesman until his death on 21st March, 1955.
During the 1950s the main tactic of the NAACP was to use the courts to end
racial discrimination in the United States. One of the objectives was the end of
the system of having separate schools for black and white children in the South.
The states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and
Kentucky
all prohibited black and white children from going to the same school.
The NAACP appealed to the
Supreme Court
in 1952 to rule that school segregation was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court
ruled that separate schools were acceptable as long as they were "separate and
equal". It was not too difficult for the NAACP to provide information to show
that black and white schools in the South were not equal. One study carried out
in 1937 revealed that spending on white pupils in the South was $37.87 compared
to $13.08 spent on black children.
After looking at information provided by the NAACP, the
Supreme Court
announced in 1954 that separate schools were not equal and ruled that they were
therefore unconstitutional. Some states accepted the ruling and began to
desegregate.
Several states in the Deep South refused to accept the judgment of the
Supreme Court.
In September 1957, the governor of Arkansas,
Orval Faubus,
used the National Guard to stop Black children from attending the local
high
school in
Little Rock.
Film of the events at Little Rock was shown throughout the world. This was
extremely damaging to the image of the United States.
To learn about some of the NAACP's courageous moments just CLICK HERE.