Learn about African American history with these old magazine articles. Find information on Black Civil Rights violations in the 1920s.
In 1943 the NAACP asked the administrators at Trenton’s New Lincoln Junior High School to explain why it should be entirely reserved for only Black students when such a practice was in violation of the State Civil rights Act.
The bureaucrats responded that ever since the school was built in the Twenties, that’s the way it had always been. Integration soon started.
In the Digital Age, Beulah Elizabeth Richardson (1920 – 2000: stage name Beah Richards) is largely remembered as an award-winning actress, but it has widely been forgotten that she was also a poet and playwright. The attached poem is an honest expression of her reaction to the tyranny experienced by too many African Americans.
Attached herein are a few pages from 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright (1908 – 1960). The book, published in 1942, is a poetic account of the challenging lives lead by African Americans both before the great migration and after their arrival in the North. The editors of Coronet showed their sympathies for this minority by publishing these pages, but they also showed their total racial insensitivities by running crude pigeon English captions beneath each of the accompanying photographs.
Click here to read about the first Black Marines.
The 1923 lynching of James Thomas Scott was precipitated by a case of mistaken identity. Falsely accused of rape, the World War I veteran was dragged from jail by a mob and hanged from a bridge before 1,000 onlookers. The Time journalist wrote:
“What they did, some people call murder; others, lynching.”
During the closing months of the tempestuous Sixties, American baseball legend Jackie Robinson (1919 – 1972) wrote about his fears in regards to the racist hatreds that existed within the hearts of a handful of the most vociferous Black radicals.
A report on the August, 1925 KKK march in Washington, D.C.:
The parade itself marshaled ‘from 50,000 to 60,000 white-robed men and women’ as the correspondent of the The New York Times estimates, and H.L. Mencken tells us in the New York Sun:
The Klan put it all over its enemies. The parade was grander and gaudier, by far than anything the wizards had prophesied. It was longer, it was thicker, it was higher in tone. I stood in front of the treasury for two hours watching the legions pass. They marched in lines of eighteen or twenty, solidly shoulder to shoulder. I retired for refreshment and was gone an hour. When I got back Pennsylvania Avenue was still a mass of white from the Treasury down to the foot of Capitol Hill – a full mile of Klansmen…
Click here to learn about the origins of the term Jim Crow.
A report from The New York Times stated that, relative to the population, 1912 saw a drop in the number of lynchings. Included in this brief is a record of lynchings that occurred between the years 1885 – 1912.-from Amazon:
In the attached article Count Hermann Alexander Keyserling (1880 – 1946), German philosopher and social critic, wrote about those uncommon cultural elements within the African-American culture that renders American blacks as an unprecedented, unique cultural force in the world:
There has never been anything like the American Negro in Africa, nor is there anything like him in the West Indies or in South America.
In most of our larger cities and many small towns there are thousands of Negroes who have successfully ‘gone over the line’ and are now living as white. Among them, it is said, are several well-known athletes and members of Congress – But you don’t hear much about the Negro women who pass. The roving male nature makes it easier for a man to pass completely, though it involves giving up his family as well as his friends. A woman finds passing harder to take.
Click here to read about the social differences between darker skinned and lighter skinned black people.
The attached is an historic article that explains the lesson that so many white Americans had to learn in order that America become one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. There can be no doubt that many ragged, dog-eared copies of this middle class magazine must have been passed from seat to seat in the backs of many buses; perhaps one of the readers was a nineteen year-old divinity student named Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Before the Atom Bomb came along, Joseph Stalin hatched a scheme to invade the U.S. and create two Americas, one black, one white – click here to read more…
Here is the NY Times review of Lyrics of Lowly Life (1897) by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906), who was a distinguished African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If Helen had the face that launched a thousand ships, then Dunbar had the poetry to launch at least twenty thousand schools – for it seems that is about how many there are named for him.
When FDR saw fit to nominate a Klansman to the Supreme Court, Hugo Black, it prompted the editors at Literary Digest to recall the history of those terrorists and how they came into existence, their customs and practices, etc.
As 1964 came to a close this venom-packed column was read by many in the white American middle-class and it must have seemed very clear to many among them that matters between the races would not be righted for decades to come. Written by the Harlem-born writer James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) on the occasion of the 1964 Harlem Race Riot, Baldwin did not simply denigrate the NYC Police Department but the culture, government and sacred documents of the entire nation.
This article chronicles the poor health that had been a constant companion within the African-American communities and how it differed from their white counterparts.
To the men who count the living and the dead – the statisticians, discrimination against the Negroes carves a picture in their death charts as clear as an inscription on a new tombstone, as pathetic as a dead child’s forgotten doll… There is no question in any public health expert’s mind that to get a real improvement in the death rate picture among Negroes, they must be able to improve their diet, housing, education, and living standards, including medical care. And that can only come about, it seems, by removal of all the discriminatory barriers on the economic and social level.
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…
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
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…
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).
