One of the seldom remembered casualties in the Northern migration history was the prosecution of those Whites who both encouraged and provided monetary favors to the African-American families seeking a better life in the North.
To learn how many African-Americans served in the W.W. I American Army, click here.
A profile of Dr. George Washington Carver (1864 – 1943):
One of the greatest agricultural chemists of our day was born a slave 80 years ago. He has given the world approximately 300 new by-products from the peanut…Today Dr. Carver is the South’s most distinguished scientist. He turned the peanut into a $60,000,000 industry.
I simply go to my laboratory, shut myself in and ask my Creator why He made the peanut. My Creator tells me to pull the peanut apart and examine the constituents. When this is done, I tell Him what I want to create, and He tells me I can make anything that contains the same constituents as a peanut. I go to work and keep working until I get what I want.
An article about Albert B. George (1873 – ?) of Chicago, the first African-American to be elected as a municipal court judge:
An epochal scene will presently be enacted in one of the divisions of Chicago’s Municipal Court, pointed out several editors, when there will ascend to its bench Albert Baily George, the Negro just elected Municipal Judge on the Republican ticket by 470,000 votes. In the past a Negro here and there has been appointed judge, notably Robert H. Terrell (1857 – 1925) of Washington, we are told, but this is the first election of one to a regular judicial office.
Judge George’s ancestors were slaves in old Virginia. His success, says the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, ‘has sent a thrill of hope through the black belts – a new incentive to work and decent living.; It is considered ‘a milestone in the journey of the negro race out of the wilderness of slavery, an application of the principles of democracy which may point the way to better things for both races.’
The attached column is an abstract of an article that first appeared in THE NEW YORK EVENING POST in 1917. The original article was penned by NAACP secretary James Weldon Johnson (1871 – 1938)
I believe the Negro possesses a valuable and much-needed gift that he will contribute to the future American democracy. I have tried to point out that the Negro is here not merely to be a beneficiary of American democracy, not merely to receive. He is here to give something to American democracy. Out of his wealth of artistic and emotional endowment he is going to give something that is wanting, something that is needed, something that no other element in all the nation has to give.
Johnson was quick to point out that American popular culture was enjoyed the world-over and these dance steps and catchy tunes were not simply the product of the Anglo-Saxon majority.
Speaking of thawing ice:
In 1942 Roper Poll found only 42 per cent of Americans saying ‘yes‘ to the question ‘Are Negroes as intelligent as Whites and can they learn just as quickly if given education and training?‘ After W.W. II the number rose to 57 per cent.
Click here to read a second article about the great migration.
Inasmuch as racial integration was the social goal for a vast majority of Americans in 1960, this article made it clear that racial harmony in the U.S. Armed Forces was not simply the goal, it was the reality. Written by a journalist who visited as many as ten U.S. Military establishments throughout Europe and North Africa in order to see how President Truman’s Executive Order 9981 had effected American military culture.
This is a light history of the African-American people; weak in some spots, informative in others, it’s greatest value lies in telling the story of Blacks in the Thirties.
Because the colored race comprises almost a 10th of the population of the United States, sociologists sometimes refer to the Negro as ‘the Tenth Man.’ As such, he is little known to the other nine. Yet there are 12,500,000 colored persons in the nation – black, brown and some so white that 10,000 pass over the color line every year to take up life as whites.
The first three paragraphs of this article explain the 19th Century origins of a moniker that represents the most hideous institution born on American shores. The term in question is Jim Crow – a sobriquet that came into use decades before the American Civil War but was refashioned into a synonym that meant institutional racism. The article goes on to recall one African-American Congressman and his fruitless efforts to clean up Jim Crow.
On January 29, 1947, the Georgia House of Representatives approved the Democratic white primary law – which was intended to exclude any African American in that state from voting in state primary elections.
Not since the Civil War has the nation faced such an explosive situation as it will when public schools in the South open their doors next month. In a plea for tolerance, sympathy and understanding in the South as well as the North, Pulitzer Prize award winning journalist Virginius Dabney (1901 – 1995) analyzes and interprets a problem serious to Americans in every section of the country.
Here is a brief glance at various observations made by a correspondent for The London Observer who compared the two dominate tribes found in 1933 Moscow and Berlin. The journalist was far more distracted by the similarities in their street hustle and their speechifying rather than their shared visions in governance and culture – for example, both the Nazis and Soviets were attracted to restrictions involving public and private assembly, speech and gun ownership while sharing an equal enthusiasm for May Day parades and the color red. Additionally, both totalitarian governments held religion as suspect and enjoyed persecuting their respective dupes – for the Nazis that was the Jews and for the Communists it was the bourgeoisie.
Read an article explaining how the Soviets used early radio…
On January 26, 1942 the long awaited boatload of U.S. troops to Great Britain had finally arrived. The first American G.I. to step off the plank and plant his foot on British soil was Pfc. Milburn H. Henke (1918 – 1998) of the 34th Infantry Division
This article tells the tale of the 1st Battalion, 34th Division which had the distinction of being the longest serving U.S. combat unit in the course of the entire war. It was these men of the Mid-West who took it on the chin that day at Kasserine (America’s first W.W. II battle, which was a defeat), avenged their dead at El Guettar, landed at Salerno, Anzio and fought their way up to Bologna. By the time the war ended, there weren’t many of the original men left, but what few there were reminisce in this article. Interesting gripes about the problems of American uniforms can be read.
A year and a-half before Pearl Harbor American law enforcement agencies got serious about the domestic fascist groups. This article pertains to a twenty-five page Federal order instructing the FBI and local authorities to tap phones and monitor the movements of all groups sympathetic to Axis philosophies.
The Army Nurse during World War II was at work in every quarter of the globe, serving on land, on the sea in hospital ships and in the air, evacuating the wounded by plane. Because of the rugged conditions under which she served, she was trained to use foxholes and to understand gas defense, to purify water in the field and to crawl , heavily equipped, under barbed wire.
By the time VJ-Day rolled around, the Army Nurse Corps was 55,000 strong.
(From Amazon: G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II
Howl is written, says Ginsberg, peering as he does through his glasses with a friendly intermingling of smile and solemnity, in some of the rhythm of Hebraic liturgy – chants as they were set down by the Old Testament prophets. That’s what it’s supposed to represent – prophets howling in the Wilderness. That, in fact, is what the whole Beat Generation is, if it’s anything, – howling in the Wilderness against a crazy civilization.
There is only one retail establishment in the world that is able to boast that they had retained the patronage of both Thomas Jefferson and Andy Warhol, and that would be Brooks Brothers.
Diplomats and prize fighters, dukes and bankers, Cabinet members and theatrical luminaries stroll every day through the ten-story building on Madison Avenue. The sight of Secretary of State Dean Acheson trying on a new overcoat, or Clark Gable testing a new pair of shoes, or the Duke of Windsor undecided between a red or green dressing gown causes scarcely a flurry. The reason is simply that the store itself is a national legend, as noted in its own right as any of its patrons.
The attached five page article lays out the first 132 years of Brooks Brothers. It is printable.
– from Amazon:
Brooks Brothers: Generations of Style, It’s About the Clothing
The very funny Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1869 – 1944) diagnosed many of the character traits that make Americans what they are. Although written eighty years ago, many of these observations are still true to this day:
Americans are a queer people: they can’t read.
They have more schools, and better schools, and spend more money on schools and colleges than all of Europe.
But they can’t read.
They print more books in one year than the French print in ten.
But they can’t read.
They cover their country with 100,000 tons of Sunday newspapers every week.
But they don’t read them.
They’re too busy. They use them for fires and to make more paper with.
They buy eagerly thousands of new novels at two dollars each. But they only read page one…
But that’s all right. The Americans don’t give a damn; don’t need to; never did need to.
That is their salvation.
