Learn about African American history with these old magazine articles. Find information on Black Civil Rights violations in the 1920s.
The Crackers of old hated miscegenation (i.e.race-mixing). Sadly, they seemed to have removed the concept of love from the equation – and happily this article reminds us that not everyone felt the same way in 1923. The attached column concerns U.S. Senator Arthur Capper (1865 – 1951) and all the hot water he got into when he sponsored a bill that would have, among other things, criminalized race-mixing.
Robert Watson Winston (1860 – 1944) was, in every sense, a man of his age. A Democratic politician from the state of North Carolina, he penned this highly prejudiced article about segregation (he liked it). He packed his column with all sorts of fifty cent words like miscegenation, quadroons and octoroon. He was yet one more white Southerner who feared race blending and the sharing of political power with African-Americans. He was delighted that so many of them were headed to the more industrialized states in the North.
This column discusses a public address that got a lot people talking back in 1900. Charles Dudley Warner (1829 – 1900) was an honored man back in his time – even today he is celebrated with a website that has preserved his better quotes – but non of those citations were pulled from the controversial speech that is remembered here. In his address as president of the American Social Science Association, Warner openly called into question the usefulness higher education for African-Americans. The news of his prattle soon spread like a prairie fire and thousands of editorials were set to newsprint. Three eloquent responses appear here, one was by the (white) editor of a prominent African-American paper, The New York Age.
When it became clear to all that the Black community was not wasting its money or withering under the weight of Syphilis like their White counterparts – it was decided that it was time to erect an interracial hotel in the Nevada casino capital of Las Vegas, and so they did; it was called Moulin Rouge.
An article about Elijah Muhammad and the realization of his dreams.
One of Reverend Martin Luther King’s most poignant observations involved the sad fact one of America’s most segregated institutions was the church. This article is about the New York Episcopal Archdioceses and their efforts to remedy that in the early Thirties:
All Souls Episcopal Church is in Harlem, New York’s ‘black belt’. This once lily white congregation has been engulfed by the spreading colored population. Opposition to negro parishioners reached a point when an element of the white vestry asked the rector, Reverend Rollin W. Dodd, to resign…
Although African-American leaders anticipated a rough time when a Missouri politician named Harry Truman assumed the mightiest office in the land – in the end, he proved to be their champion.
[The NAACP] still regard President Truman as their real hero for pressing anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, FEPC and anti-segregation programs in the face of heavy Southern Democratic Opposition.
Those councilors who advised FDR on all matters African-American were popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…
From the pages of THE DIAMONDBACK, the student newspaper of the University of Maryland, came this surprising article that listed numerous denunciations concerning the various ways that the state of Maryland had failed time and again to educate their African-American youth.
‘Separate but equal’ facilities are a myth in Maryland. No Negro school in the state compares with the University of Maryland, which is for white students only.
Dan Burley (1907 – 1962) was a much admired man of his day; noted editor and columnist who served at a number of respected African-American newspapers and magazines, a Boogie Woogie pianist, sports writer covering the Negro League and he was to Jive what Samuel Johnson was to English – a lexicographer. This PIC MAGAZINE profile centers primarily on his efforts to translate famous English lines into Jive talk and chronicle the slanguage .
More about the African-American press corps can be read HERE.
When President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights submitted their findings to the White House in December of 1947, the anxious and skeptical editors at COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE eagerly waited their conclusions. Knowing that this Southern president was the only Klansman (1924 membership) to have ever attained such high office, they were doubtful that any good would come of it, and in this column they explain why they felt that way.
Four years later an article was written about the gratitude many African-Americans felt toward President Truman and his stand on civil rights – read it here…
This article is a segment from a longer piece regarding the 1944 presidential election and the widespread disillusionment held by many Black voters regarding the failings of FDR and his administration:
…the Negro vote, about two million strong, is shifting back into the Republican column.
The report is largely based upon the observations of one HARPER’S MAGAZINE correspondent named Earl Brown.
Recognizing that the United States has seldom ever been without civil libertarians, of one form or another, who could always be relied upon to file papers in the courts on behalf of one injured tribe or another – I often wondered why, if this was the case, was so much progress made in the American civil rights struggle of the 50s and 60s as opposed to other periods? This article answered that question.
Radio Moscow noted the warnings of a Klansman in South Carolina, that there will be bloodshed if Negro students attend white schools. But ignored the admittance of 1,000 Negroes to colleges in 15 Southern and Border states, schools formerly for whites only.
One year prior to being elected as the 25th governor of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (1876 – 1935), while serving as the chairman of the University Commission on the Southern Race Question, submitted his opinion regarding racial segregation in the Annual Report that he had written for that organization. Dr. Brough, who at the time was a professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Arkansas, condemned the Jim Crow laws that had separated Whites from Blacks, believing that no good could ever spring from it:
In my humble opinion, it is better to admit the negro to all the stimulus and the inspiration of the white’s social heritage, so far as it applies to economic equality of opportunity given through industrial education, in so far as it does not endanger the integrity of the social heritage itself, than to encourage an ignorant and debased citizenship by his neglect and repression.
This is the 1929 book review of What the Negro Thinks
by Robert Moton (1867 – 1940).
[To the Negro] the white man sometimes seems a bit pathetic in his insistence upon keeping the worth of the Negro hidden, in refusing to recognize skill and talent, honor and virtue, strength and goodness simply because it wears a black skin. To him, the white man’s apparent dread of the Negro is incomprehensible…
