Learn about African American history with these old magazine articles. Find information on Black Civil Rights violations in the 1920s.
The excitement that was 1920’s Harlem can clearly be felt in this article by the journalist and Congregational minister, Rollin Lynde Hartt:
Greatest Negro city in the world, it boasts magnificent Negro churches, luxurious Negro apartment houses, vast Negro wealth, and a Negro population of 130,000…
The Backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance (The Independent, 1921) Read More »
Fat, shrewd-smiling, garrulous Old Doc Evans (Hiram Evans, 1881 – 1966) is still Emperor and Imperial Wizard, but he’s now apparently only fronting for a Big Boss who has some sensational new plans which have already begun to click. Once again the Klan is holding hands with politicians all over the country, but the hand-holding is being done under the table. The big drive begins in May
The Imperial Wizard (Ken Magazine, 1938) Read More »
In this 1959 article Alabama wordsmith Wyatt Blasingame did his level-headed best to explain the sluggish reasoning that made up the opinions of his friends and neighbors as to why racial integration of the nation’s schools was a poor idea. He observed that even the proudest Southerner could freely recognize that African-Americans were ill-served by the existing school system and that they were due for some sort of an upgrade – they simply wished it wouldn’t happen quite so quickly. The journalist spent a good deal of column space explaining that there existed among the Whites of Dixie a deep and abiding paranoia over interracial marriage.
Their line of thinking seems terribly alien to us, but, be assured, Southern white reasoning has come a long way since 1923…
The Old Southern View of Integration (Pageant Magazine, 1959) Read More »
Whether Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey (1871 – 1948) was overwhelmed by a sense of humanity or whether he simply wished to reduce the northern flow of African-Americans from his state in the Great Migration – we’ll never know, but the fact stands that in late April, 1921, the Governor stood before the State Committe on Race Relations and spoke of 135 instances in which Black citizens were unjustly treated by White Georgians (The Georgia Government document pertaining to his address can be read here).
Restraining The Terror In Georgia (The Literary Digest, 1921) Read More »
A small notice from 1947 that reported on the archdiocese of St. Louis standing up in favor of racially integrating their school system – while simultaneously threatening excommunication to all members of the flock who contested the decision.
The Archbishop Did His Bit (Pathfinder Magazine, 1947) Read More »
This book review of Scott Nearing’s Black America
was published on the eve of the Great Depression and it provides a very accurate account of that community.
There are in the United States today, if statistics do not lie, some twelve million Negroes. The population of the Argentine is not so large, nor that of Holland, nor that of Sweden. Eight million of these dark Americans live in the South. In Georgia alone there are more than a million colored people…How do they live – these blacks in a country controlled by whites.
Author Scott Nearing (1883 – 1983) was an American naturalist, educator and civil rights advocate.
Click here to read an article by Ralph Ellison concerning Black writers of the 1930s.
The State of African-Americans in 1929 (The Book League, 1929) Read More »
President Truman was re-elected in 1948 by a slender margin of 52,000 votes in the circulation area of The Chicago Defender, which almost alone of all the newspapers of all kinds in that area, supported Truman. After the election it published a boastful full-page advertisement –
What is the Negro press? Primarily it is a protest press demanding the correction of injustice to colored people. ‘We are organs of protest,’ explains Thomas W. Young, publisher of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, ‘born more than a hundred years ago in righteous indignation over the institution of slavery.’
The Power of the African-American Press (Pageant Magazine, 1952) Read More »
Starting in the 1940s, small articles like the one here began appearing in magazines and newspapers across the nation – snippets indicating that the American people (ie. whites) were slowly catching on to the system of racial injustice they had inherited – and wondering aloud as to the tyranny of it all:
To 13 co-eds at Uppsala College, East Orange, N.J., democracy is something more than a worn text-book theory. It is a living, though thorny, reality. Shortly before school’s end, they formed one of the nation’s first interracial, interfaith college social sororities.
Another article about segregation’s end can be read here.
The Ice was Thawing… (Pathfinder Magazine, 1949) Read More »
Although the attached article is indeed about the famous civil rights march on Washington that took place in August of 1963, the journalist made his primary concern the political gains and losses that remained after all was said and done.
King’s March in Washington (United States News, 1963) Read More »
This article recalls the story behind the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown vs. the Board of Education.
‘The Girl Who Started the Civil-Rights Breakthrough” (Pageant Magazine, 1964) Read More »
