African-American History – Page 3 – Old Magazine Articles

Social Differences Among the Lighter Skinned and Darker Skinned Blacks
(Literary Digest, 1922)

The varying degrees of color found among American Blacks has been, and still is, a sensitive topic and it was addressed in 1922 with some wit by an African-American journalist whose work is attached. Its a good read and speaks of a social structure that, we like to think, is gone with the wind; words appear in this article that seem queer in our era – there is much talk of

yellow gals
golden-skinned slave girls
tawny-skinned maids
midnight
stove-pipe

-all originating from African-American verse and popular song.

During the Second World War, hair dye was not simply used by women;
click here to read about the men who needed it, too.

Click here to read about black women who pass for white.

Click here to read a history of African-Americans between the years 1619 through 1939.

Anti-Lynching Legislation Shelved
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

Whether it was due to the urgency of the war or whether it was simply business as usual on Capitol hill, who knows – but ever since he came to Washington in 1929 Representative Joseph Gavagan (D., NYC: 1892 – 1968) tried numerous times to get his anti-lynching legislation through Congress. In April of 1937 he succeeded in getting one of his anti-lynching bills passed (277 to 118) – but the Southern Democrats saw to it that he wouldn’t get an encore performance in ’42; this was his last attempt, he retired from the House that same year.

Post-War America and the KKK
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1946)

Written in the aftermath of W.W. II, this is an article which cautioned that the KKK was attempting to pick-up where it had left off prior to the war and made known it’s intentions to open a franchise in Southern California.

The KKK Influence on U.S. Politics
(The Literary Digest, 1922)

Attached is a 1922 report from THE LITERARY DIGEST regarding how remarkably close two KKK candidates for governor came to winning their respective state primaries. The two political contests in question, Oregon and Texas, caught national attention and became popular subjects for concern across the United States:

The closeness of the vote ought to be a warning…If the Ku Klux Klan insists on entering politics, good citizens must show it the way out.

The Klan in Miami
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

The night before [the Miami] citizens went to the polls to decide among 15 candidates for three commissionerships, the old specter of the Ku Klux Klan was raised to scare away the colored votes.

The scheme didn’t work.

The Birth of the KKK
(Coronet Magazine, 1946)

A brief account outlining the post-Civil War origins of the KKK:

The original Ku Klux Klan began in 1865 as a social club of young men in Pulaski, Tennessee. Its ghostly uniform and rituals frightened superstitious Negroes; and when Klansmen discovered this fact accidentally, they lost little time in recruiting membership to 55,000.

During the Thirties and early Forties there was a link between the Bund and the KKK: click here to read about him.

The Red Caps
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

The history of the African American baggage handlers called Red Caps is a sad story in American social history. The Red Caps had been around since the 1890s and they were assigned the task of carrying luggage to and from trains and taxis; this article points out that in the Thirties, one of every three of them had a college degree:

Red Caps did not go to college to learn how to be Red Caps. Their problem is a racial one. To the white, a job toting luggage is a poor way to eke out an existence. To the black, red capping is one of the ‘big’ fields open. The white man who works as a porter can do nothing else, as a rule; the Negro almost invariably can do something else but can’t get it to do.

Dorie Miller was an African-American hero during the Second World War, click here if you would like to read about him.

A History of Anti-Lynching Legislation
(Congressional Digest, 1922)

Here is a very brief study of U.S. congressional anti-lynching legislation spanning the years from 1901 through 1922.

Click here for the Ku Klux Klan Archive.

‘Black Mammy”
(Confederate Veteran Magazine, 1918)

Those sensitive beta-males in the editorial offices of Confederate Veteran were teary-eyed and waxing winsome that day in 1918 when they saw fit to recall one particular long-standing Southern institution that was gone with the wind:

The most unique character connected with the days of slavery was the old black mammy, who held a position of and confidence in nearly every white family of importance in the South… She was an important member of the household, and for her faithfulness and devotion she has been immortalized in the literature of the South.

A White Woman Looks at the Negro and the Scourge of Racism
(Pageant Magazine, 1947)

Writer Margaret Halsey (1910 – 1997) was a patriotic lass who did her bit for Uncle Sam by managing a soldier’s canteen in New York City during the Second World War – you should know that throughout the course of that war there were thousands of canteens throughout America where Allied soldiers, sailors airmen and Marines could enjoy a free meal and have a dance or two with the local girls. Similar to most other canteens in the country, her doors were open to all servicemen regardless of color and as a result, the same policy had to be followed by the local girls who came to dance: they, too, could not discriminate.

Her observations in this integrated environment led to believe that a national policy of racial assimilation will not be as difficult as many people at the time tended to believe.

The Twilight of Segregated Baseball…(People Today Magazine, 1951)

An anonymous scribe at PEOPLE TODAY wrote this well-illustrated piece to mark the occasion that heralded the end of the Negro Baseball League – and the integration of major league baseball in America.

Click here to read a 1954 article about Willie Mays.

Willie Mays
(Quick Magazine, 1954)

Illustrated with nine pictures, this article briefly tells the story of baseball legend Willie Mays (b. 1931) and the Summer of 1954 when sportswriters credited him alone for having raised the athletic standards of his team, The New York Giants (the team won the World Series that year):

A 23-year-old Alabaman with a laugh as explosive as his bat, Willie has electrified N.Y. Giants fans as no man has done since Mel Ott (1909 – 1958)… Statistics don’t begin to give a real picture of Willie’s value. He adds drama to baseball in a way that defies fiction.

Comedian Bert Williams: R.I.P.
(Literary Digest, 1922)

The African-American comedian Bert Williams (1874 – 1922) was a funny fellow who ascended to great heights in his life; he performed in the great theaters of Europe and was adored by many of the foreign potentates of his time. Yet despite all his international glory, he never received acceptance in his own country. Like many African-Americans at the time, Williams simply came to accept the myopic views of race as it was understood by the majority of his countrymen, and learned to do without the appreciation he so craved. Bert Williams died in 1922. One of his more memorable lines:

Being a Negro is not a bad thing, it’s just terribly inconvenient.

Just Another Classified Ad from Dixie…
(The Nation, 1927)

The attached file is a digital facsimile of a classified ad that was once posted in a Georgia newspaper long after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed into law. The editors at THE NATION saw fit to title the notice as an interesting little advertisement when they reproduced it six months later on their pages. Yet, for the Southerners who set the type-face, applied the ink, delivered the paper and subscribed, the ad was typical of so many other classifieds that had appeared during the past one hundred and fifty years, and it was not, as the Yankees put it:

…the request of someone who never heard of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

Bogus Science and the Intelligence of African-Americans
(Current Opinion, 1921)

As many of the readers in the OldMagazineArticles.com audience have figured out, the purpose of this site is to allow the past to represent itself — warts and all, and few articles make manifest this policy better than this 1921 article which reported on the efforts of an appropriately forgotten scientist from the University of Virginia, Dr. George Oscar Ferguson. Ferguson was the author of a project that somehow measured the intelligence of African Americans and White Americans and concluded that his:

psychological study of the Negro indicates that he will never be the mental equal of the white race.

Race Riots in Chicago and Washington
(Leslie’s Weekly, 1919)

A single page report giving an account of two racial uprisings that took place in 1919. The journalist was not at all alarmed that such events should have taken place in a Southern locale like Washington, D.C. -but was stunned to hear of race riot in the Northern city of Chicago. The article is accompanied by two photographs illustrating the events.

The Forgotten Midshipman
(Literary Digest, 1897)

This column emerged from the mists of time, telling us a story that had long been forgotten. Reading this column, we are able to piece together that there once lived an African-American fellow named R.C. Bundy, who let it be know that he wished to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. It gets fuzzy from here as to whether he had sponsors backing him or if he never even took the entrance exam – the shouts from the press were so loud and cruel on this topic from the start. We found no other information of the young man. The first African-American to graduate Annapolis did so decades later, in 1949.

A Clinic On The Move
(Pic Magazine, 1941)

Call it what you will – socialized medicine, the public largess or the community chest, it makes no difference, but let it be known that in the late Thirties the elders who presided over Shelby County, Tennessee, recognized that some measure of TLC was required in their dominion, and so they bought a big bus and stuffed it full of 12 nurses and a physician. The leading African-American doctors in the area were also instrumental in the creation of this behemoth – which was created to contain syphilis in Shelby County.