Donna Dahl taught kindergarten to third grade students in a variety of locations, from Alabama to El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Hawaii. Friendships in these communities and school settings formed her love of cultures seen through the eyes of young children learning that the world is open for exploration. Having experienced first-hand the needs for housing, safety, and food security, Donna volunteers at food pantries in Birmingham and also assists refugee families through her service on the board of the Alabama Interfaith Refugee Partnership. Working for social justice, so that every person has opportunities to achieve goals and dreams throughout life, she has joined the Bending the Arc team to expand her work for human rights.
A half century after the United States outlawed international slave trading, Mobile ship captain and cotton plantation owner Timothy Meaher made a $1,000 bet that he could smuggle Africans into the country for enslavement and not get caught. Enlisting a schooner named the Clotilda, Meaher sent the ship to modern-day Benin, where the ship’s captain, William Foster, brought back 110 captives to Mobile, Alabama. With that voyage, the Clotilda became the last slave ship in history to bring captives from Africa to the United States. In The Last Slave Ship, author Ben Raines tells the story of the fateful voyage, of Meaher and Foster, and of the Clotilda survivors who, after five years of enslavement and despite all odds, founded Africatown after the Civil War. The book is an examination of racism, exploitation, slavery’s lasting impact, and how the Meaher and Clotilda survivor descendants’ lives still intersect today.
When Marcia Herman-Giddens was five years old, her family moved to Birmingham, a steel town. It was where wealthy industrialists, nicknamed the “Big Mules,” controlled local politics and helped perpetuate systemic racial inequality and Jim Crow segregation in Alabama. She was the only child of Edwin Herman, an easygoing Pennsylvania native and federal government administrator and Lucy Herman, a woman from Florida who frequently used the N-word at home and took pride in knowing that her family once owned slaves. Herman-Giddens, however, began sensing unfairness in the world starting in the first grade after noticing the inequality between girls and boys in her Dick and Jane reader, and, at age 10, she witnessed the dilapidated housing units where many Blacks in the city lived. In her memoir, Unloose My Heart, the author describes growing up as a middle-class white girl on Birmingham’s Southside, participating in the civil rights movement, working for racial justice as a young adult, and, while investigating and coming to terms with her forebears’ slaveholding past, she learns she has many Black cousins.
Many of the civil rights protest marches that took place in Birmingham during the 1960s began on the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had long been a significant religious center for the city’s Black population and a routine meeting place for civil rights organizers such as Dr. King.
Ku Klux Klan members routinely called in bomb threats intended to disrupt civil rights meetings as well as services at the church.
At 10:22 a.m. on the morning of September 15, 1963, some 200 church members were in the building—many of them children, attending Sunday school classes before the start of the 11 am service—when the bomb detonated on the church’s east side, spraying mortar and bricks from the front of the church and caving in its interior walls.
Most parishioners were able to evacuate the building as it filled with smoke, but the bodies of four young girls (Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, all 14 years old, and 11-year-old Denise McNair) were found beneath the rubble in a basement restroom.
Ten-year-old Sarah Collins, who was also in the restroom at the time of the explosion, suffered severe wounds to both eyes and lost her right eye, and more than 20 other people were injured in the blast. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15 was the third bombing in 11 days, following a federal court order had mandated the integration of Alabama’s school system.
In the aftermath of the bombing, thousands of angry Black protesters gathered at the scene of the bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break up the protests, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were arrested, and two young African Americans—Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson— were killed (one by police) before the National Guard was called in to restore order.
Dr. King later spoke before 8,000 people at the funeral for three of the girls (the family of the fourth girl held a smaller private service), fueling the public outrage now mounting across the country.
Though Birmingham’s white supremacists (and even certain other individuals) were immediately suspected in the bombing, repeated calls for the perpetrators to be brought to justice went unanswered for more than a decade. It was later revealed that the FBI had information concerning the identity of the bombers by 1965 and did nothing.
In 1977, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the investigation, and Klan leader Robert E. Chambliss was brought to trial for the bombings.
As reported in The New York Times, Elizabeth E. Cobbs (who later became Petric “Pete” Smith) testified at the 1977 trial of her uncle, Robert E. Chambliss, that she was with him as he watched television reports about the bombing and heard him say: ”It wasn’t meant to hurt anybody. It didn’t go off when it was supposed to.” That testimony supported the account of a retired laundry worker, Kirthus Glenn, who identified Mr. Chambliss as one of four men she saw in a car parked near the church at about 2 a.m., hours before the bombing, on Sept. 15, 1963.
Chambliss, the only person charged in the case at the time, was found guilty of murder in the bombing and died in prison in 1985. In 1994, Smith published a book about his life, suggesting others who might have had a role in the bombing.
The case was again reopened in 1980, 1988 and 1997, when two other former Klan members, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, were finally brought to trial; Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Cherry in 2002. A fourth suspect, Herman Frank Cash, died in 1994 before he could be brought to trial.
Justice came slowly, but the effect of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was immediate and devastating. Outrage over the death of the four young girls in this terrorist attack built increased support for the continuing struggle to end segregation. That support would help lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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Bending the Arc Project – The Fifth Girl
The Freedom Riders were groups of white and African-American civil rights activists who participated in bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. Freedom Riders tried to integrate “whites-only” restrooms and lunch counters at bus stations in Alabama, South Carolina, and other Southern states. The groups were confronted by arresting police officers—as well as horrific violence from white protestors—along their routes and drew international attention to the civil rights movement.
The Freedom Rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and were modeled on the organization’s 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, in which Black and white bus riders tested the 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Morgan v. Virginia that found segregated bus seating was unconstitutional.
The 1961 Freedom Rides sought to test Boynton v. Virginia, a 1960 Supreme Court ruling that segregation of interstate transportation facilities, including bus terminals, was unconstitutional. A big difference between the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation and the 1961 Freedom Rides was the inclusion of women in the later initiative.
In both actions, Black riders traveled to the Jim Crow South—where segregation continued to occur—and attempted to use whites-only restrooms, lunch counters, and waiting rooms.
The original group of 13 Freedom Riders—seven African Americans and six whites—left Washington, D.C., on a Greyhound bus on May 4, 1961. Their plan was to reach New Orleans, Louisiana, on May 17 to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled that segregation of the nation’s public schools was unconstitutional.
The group traveled through Virginia and North Carolina, drawing little public notice. The first violent incident occurred on May 12 in Rock Hill, South Carolina; there, John Lewis, a Black seminary student and member of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), white Freedom Rider and World War II veteran Albert Bigelow, and another Black rider were viciously attacked as they attempted to enter a whites-only waiting area.
The next day, the group reached Atlanta, Georgia, where some of the riders split off onto a Trailways bus.
On May 14, 1961, the Greyhound bus was the first to arrive in Anniston, Alabama. There, an angry mob of about 200 white people surrounded the bus, causing the driver to continue past the bus station. The mob followed the bus in automobiles, and when the tires on the bus blew out, someone threw a bomb into the bus. The Freedom Riders escaped the bus as it burst into flames, only to be brutally beaten by members of the surrounding mob.
The second bus, a Trailways vehicle, traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, where those riders were also beaten by an angry white mob, many of whom brandished metal pipes. Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor stated that, although he knew the Freedom Riders were arriving and violence awaited them, he posted no police protection at the station because it was Mother’s Day.
Photographs of the burning Greyhound bus and the bloodied riders appeared on the front pages of newspapers throughout the country and around the world the next day, drawing international attention to the Freedom Riders’ cause and the state of race relations in the United States.
Following the widespread violence, CORE officials could not find a bus driver who would agree to transport the integrated group, and they decided to abandon the Freedom Rides. Still, Diane Nash, an activist from the SNCC, organized a group of 10 students from Nashville, Tennessee, to continue the rides.
U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy, began negotiating with Governor John Patterson of Alabama and the bus companies to secure a driver and state protection for the new group of Freedom Riders. The rides finally resumed, on a Greyhound bus departing Birmingham under police escort, on May 20.
The violence toward the Freedom Riders was not quelled—rather, the police abandoned the Greyhound bus just before it arrived at the Montgomery, Alabama, terminal, where a white mob attacked the riders with baseball bats and clubs as they disembarked. Attorney General Kennedy sent 600 federal marshals to the city to stop the violence.
The following night, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a service at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, which was attended by more than one thousand supporters of the Freedom Riders. A riot ensued outside the church, and King called Robert Kennedy to ask for protection.
Kennedy summoned the federal marshals, who used tear gas to disperse the white mob. Patterson declared martial law in the city and dispatched the National Guard to restore order.
On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders departed Montgomery for Jackson, Mississippi. There, several hundred supporters greeted the riders. However, those who attempted to use the whites-only facilities were arrested for trespassing and taken to the maximum-security penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi.
During the Mississippi hearings, the judge turned and looked at the wall rather than listen to the Freedom Riders’ defense—as had been the case when sit-in participants were arrested for protesting segregated lunch counters in Tennessee. He sentenced the riders to 30 days in jail.
Attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) appealed the convictions all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed them.
The violence and arrests continued to garner national and international attention and drew hundreds of new Freedom Riders to the cause. The rides continued over the next several months, and in the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals.
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For African Americans across the South in the 1940s and 1950s, the everyday act of riding the bus to work meant sometimes risking harassment but always accepting the code of racial segregation. City laws separated white and Black riders and, in many cases, granted white passengers the power to take seats already claimed by Blacks. In Montgomery, Alabama, Blacks could never sit in the first 10 rows of the bus. If the Black section was filled to capacity, Black passengers had to stand, even if the white section remained empty. Bus drivers carried guns, and they often verbally and physically tormented Black passengers.
On March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to whites. Another, more famous arrest occurred on December 1, after a white passenger attempted to take the seat occupied by Rosa Parks, who was sitting in the Black section and refused to move. The bus driver called the police, who took Parks to jail. While Parks projected a docile image, she had a long record of activism and served as secretary of the local branch of the NAACP. Her refusal to submit to Jim Crow regulations was a deliberate act of protest. News of her arrest sent shock waves through the city’s Black and white neighborhoods.
E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter and local president of the NAACP, bailed Parks out of jail. Together, they hatched a plan to stage a one-day boycott that they hoped would force the city to modify segregated seating on city buses; they never expected the system to be dismantled entirely. The boycott was not the first such dramatic step taken by Blacks in Montgomery, but this effort would end differently.
The weekend following the arrest, hundreds tirelessly publicized the boycott. That Monday, December 5, nearly every African American stayed off of the buses. The streets flooded with thousands of Black residents walking to work. At a mass meeting that evening, locals voted to continue the boycott indefinitely, forming the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to coordinate the protest. A newcomer to town, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., was chosen to head the organization.
After developing slowly, the boycott captured the attention of the country, and increasingly confident protestors expanded their goals. As talks with the city produced no results, the MIA decided in January 1956 to challenge segregation head-on, filing a class-action lawsuit that would compel the federal courts to rule on the constitutionality of bus segregation. The boycott ran through the summer. On December 13, the Supreme Court, in Browder v Gayle, decided in favor of the protestors, declaring segregation on intrastate travel unconstitutional. After 381 days of walking, carpooling, and waiting, Montgomery Blacks had won the right to sit wherever they chose.
Sources
Bending the Arc Project – The Bus Boycott
Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 329-330.
Emmett Till was not the only African American lynched in Mississippi; sadly, he was one of many who were brutally murdered in the Magnolia State. He was one of hundreds lost to lynching in Mississippi alone, and thousands across the Southeast. Many of those murders happened between 1865 and 1955.
But the August 1955 death of this 14-year-old from Chicago forced America to take notice. More to the point, his mother, Mamie Bradley (later Mamie Till Mobley) made sure that the nation couldn’t ignore what had happened to her son.
The young Black teenager took a dare from friends to talk to Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who worked the counter at her husband’s convenience store. Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that no one will ever know for sure what happened when Till went into that store. But whatever the specifics of Till’s encounter with Bryant were, white vengeance came swiftly.
Three nights later, Roy Bryant—Carolyn’s husband—and his half-brother J.W. Milam appeared at the door of the home of Mose Wright, the uncle with whom Till was staying during his visit from Illinois. Armed, they demanded that the 64-year-old Wright surrender the boy, saying that if he didn’t, “You’ll never live to be 65.”
The men led the boy out of the house and drove west on gravel roads with the headlights off. Several days later, a fisherman found Till’s body, grossly disfigured from torture, in the Tallahatchie River.
Ultimately, the men were acquitted of murder and kidnapping by an all-white jury after only an hour of deliberation. Bryant and Milam promptly sold their story—and their confession—for $4,000.
Montgomery attorney Bryan Stevenson adds perspective: “It’s not just that they discover his body and that he’s been killed. He has been brutally, brutally beaten. … It takes a lot of hatred and a lot of rage to do the kind of violence that was done to Emmett Till.”
The funeral was widely publicized and attended by the national press. Stevenson calls the decision of Till’s mother to have a funeral with an open casket for her son a “really unorthodox choice” that was strategically important. “She wanted civil rights leaders and political leaders to see what they did to her child. She invited David Jackson of Jet magazine (a publication that was primarily produced and distributed to the African American community) to take pictures of this child’s battered body, and these images were widely circulated.”
The images were “really, really challenging … his face was grotesque,” Stevenson says. “You could see eyes but you couldn’t really distinguish all of his facial features. That’s how much violence he had been subjected to.”
The images had the desired effect, as mainstream publications such as Look and Life began writing about this issue. “It became an issue that elected officials were being questioned about,” Stevenson says. “These images made it impossible for white families in other parts of the country to stay indifferent, to stay neutral.”
Till’s murder sparked international outrage and, according to many scholars, helped catalyze the modern civil rights movement.
Said Till’s mother: “If it can further the cause of freedom, then I will say that he died a hero.”
Sources
Bryan Stevenson in YouTube video “The Body of Emmett Till”
Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 327-328.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The trials and repeated retrials of the Scottsboro Boys sparked an international uproar and produced two landmark U.S. Supreme Court verdicts, even as the defendants were forced to spend years battling the courts and enduring the harsh conditions of the Alabama prison system.
By the early 1930s, with the nation mired in the Great Depression, many unemployed Americans would try to hitch rides aboard freight trains to move around the country searching for work. On March 25, 1931, after a fight broke out on a Southern Railroad freight train in Jackson County, Alabama, police arrested nine Black youths, ranging in age from 13 to 19, on a minor charge. Passengers who had been on the train during the incident were questioned by the police, and when deputies questioned two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, they accused the boys of raping them while onboard the train.
The nine teenagers—Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, brothers Andrew and Leroy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson, and Eugene Williams—were transferred to the local county seat, Scottsboro, to await trial.
Only four of them had known each other before their arrest. As news spread of the alleged rape (a highly inflammatory charge given racist attitudes and laws in the South), an angry white mob surrounded the jail, leading the local sheriff to call in the Alabama National Guard to prevent a lynching.
Alabama officials eventually agreed to let four of the convicted Scottsboro Boys—Weems, Andy Wright, Norris and Powell—out on parole.
After escaping from prison in 1948, Patterson was picked up in Detroit by the FBI, but the Michigan governor refused Alabama’s efforts to extradite him.
In November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Powell v. Alabama that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied the right to counsel, which violated their right to due process under the 14th Amendment.
The Supreme Court overturned the Alabama verdicts, setting an important legal precedent for enforcing the right of Black Americans to adequate counsel, and remanded the cases to the lower courts.
In January 1935, the Supreme Court again overturned the guilty verdicts, ruling in Norris v. Alabama that the systematic exclusion of Blacks on Jackson Country jury rolls denied a fair trial to the defendants, and suggesting that the lower courts review Patterson’s case as well.
This second landmark decision in the Scottsboro Boys case would help integrate future juries across the nation.
Clarence Norris, who received a pardon from Governor George Wallace of Alabama in 1976, would outlive all of the other Scottsboro Boys, dying in 1989 at the age of 76.
In 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to issue posthumous pardons to Patterson, Weems, and Andy Wright, bringing a long-overdue end to one of the most notorious cases of racial injustice in U.S. history.
The trials of the Scottsboro Boys, the two Supreme Court verdicts they produced, and the international uproar over their treatment helped fuel the rise of the civil rights movement later in the 20th century and left a lasting imprint on the nation’s legal and cultural landscape.
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The Compromise of 1877 was an informal agreement between Southern Democrats and allies of the Republican Rutherford Hayes to settle the result of the 1876 presidential election; it marked the end of the Reconstruction era.
Immediately after the presidential election of 1876, it became clear that the outcome of the race hinged largely on disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—the only three states in the South with Reconstruction-era Republican governments still in power. As a bipartisan congressional commission debated the outcome early in 1877, allies of the Republican Party candidate Rutherford Hayes met in secret with moderate Southern Democrats to negotiate acceptance of Hayes’s election.
The Democrats agreed not to block Hayes’s victory on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops from the South, thus consolidating Democratic control over the region. As a result of the so-called Compromise of 1877 (or Compromise of 1876), Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina became Democratic once again, effectively bringing an end to the Reconstruction era.
Since the early 1870s, support had been waning for the egalitarian policies of Reconstruction, a series of laws put in place after the Civil War to protect the rights of African Americans, especially in the South. Many Southern whites resorted to intimidation and violence to keep Blacks from voting and restore white supremacy in the region.
Beginning in 1873, a series of Supreme Court decisions limited the scope of Reconstruction-era laws and federal support for the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th Amendment and 15 Amendment, which gave African Americans the status of citizenship and the protection of the Constitution, including the all-important right to vote.
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When the Missouri Territory first applied for statehood in 1818, it was clear that many in the territory wanted to allow slavery in the new state. Part of the more than 800,000 square miles bought from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Missouri was known as the Louisiana Territory until 1812, when it was renamed to avoid confusion with the newly admitted state of Louisiana.
Missouri’s bid to become the first state west of the Mississippi River—and to allow slavery within its borders—set off a bitter debate in a Congress that was, like the nation itself, already divided into pro- and anti-slavery factions.
During the debate, Rep. James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to the statehood bill that would have eventually ended slavery in Missouri and set free the existing enslaved workers living there. The amended bill passed narrowly in the House of Representatives, where Northerners held a slight edge. But in the Senate, where free and slave states had exactly the same number of senators, the pro-slavery faction managed to strike out Tallmadge’s amendment, and the House refused to pass the bill without it.
After this stalemate, Missouri renewed its application for statehood in late 1819. This time, Speaker of the House Henry Clay proposed that Congress admit Missouri to the Union as a state that allowed slavery, but at the same time admit Maine (which at the time was part of Massachusetts) as a free state.
In February 1820, the Senate added a second part to the joint statehood bill: With the exception of Missouri, slavery would be banned in all of the former Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36º 30’ latitude, which ran along Missouri’s southern border.
In March 3, 1820, the House passed the Senate version of the bill, and President James Monroe signed it into law four days later. The following month, the former President Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that the “Missouri question…like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”
Though the Missouri Compromise managed to keep the peace at the time, it failed to resolve the pressing question of slavery and its place in the nation’s future. Pro-slavery citizens who opposed the Missouri Compromise did so because it set a precedent for Congress to make laws concerning slavery, while abolitionists disliked the law because it meant slavery was expanding into new territory.
The Missouri Compromise would remain in force for just over 30 years before it was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that the compromise was unconstitutional, setting the stage for the Civil War.
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Like the self-liberated enslaved people who fought against French colonial rule in what is now Haiti, enslaved people in the U.S launched revolts that, while unsuccessful, were important forces in the long fight for freedom. Among those efforts:
Denmark Vesey was an early 19th century free Black man and community leader in Charleston, South Carolina, who was accused and convicted of planning a major slave revolt in the summer of 1822. Although the alleged plot was discovered before it could be realized, its potential scale stoked the fears of the antebellum planter class and led to increased restrictions on both enslaved people and free Blacks.
Vesey allegedly used his substantial influence among the Black community to plan the revolt. According to the accusations, Vesey and his followers planned to kill slaveholders in Charleston, liberate the enslaved people, and sail to the newly independent Black republic of Haiti for refuge. By some contemporary accounts, the revolt would have involved thousands of enslaved people in the city as well as others who lived on nearby plantations.
Gabriel Prosser was an African blacksmith enslaved by the Prosser family, which is how he attained his surname. He planned a large slave rebellion in the Richmond, Virginia, area in the summer of 1800. Information regarding the revolt, which came to be known as “Gabriel’s Rebellion,” was leaked prior to its execution, and he and 25 followers were hanged.
Prosser’s planned uprising was notable not because of its results, since the rebellion was quelled before it could begin; it was significant because of the potential for mass chaos and widespread violence that it revealed. There were other slave rebellions, but, as Susan DeFord notes in her February 6, 2000 article “Gabriel’s Rebellion” in the Washington Post, this one “most directly confronted” the Founding Fathers “with the chasm between the ideal of liberty and their messy accommodations to slavery.”
The Southampton Insurrection, also known as Nat Turner‘s Rebellion, was a rebellion of enslaved Virginians that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Led by Nat Turner, the rebels killed between 55 and 65 people, at least 51 of whom were white. The rebellion was effectively suppressed within a few days at Belmont Plantation on the morning of August 23, but Turner survived in hiding for more than two months afterward.
There was widespread fear among the white population in the aftermath of the rebellion. Militia and mobs killed approximately 120 enslaved people and free Blacks in retaliation. The Commonwealth of Virginia later executed 56 enslaved people accused of participating in the rebellion, including Turner himself; many Black people who had not participated were also persecuted in the frenzy.
Because Turner had been educated and was a preacher, state legislatures subsequently passed new laws prohibiting the education of enslaved people and free Black people, restricting rights of assembly and other civil liberties for free Black people and requiring white ministers to be present at all worship services.
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On November 4, 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona to become the 44th President of the United States and the first African American elected to the White House. The 47-year-old Democrat garnered 365 electoral votes and nearly 53 percent of the popular vote, while his 72-year-old Republican challenger captured 173 electoral votes and more than 45 percent of the popular vote.
Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii to a white woman from Kansas and a Black man from Kenya. He graduated from Harvard Law School and was a law professor at the University of Chicago before launching his political career in 1996, when he was elected to the Illinois State Senate. He was re-elected to that post in 1998 and 2000. In March 2004, he shot to national prominence by winning the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Illinois, and that July he gained further exposure when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, which included his eloquent call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. That November, Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in a landslide.
On February 10, 2007, in Springfield, Illinois, Obama officially announced his candidacy for president. A victory in the Iowa caucuses in January 2008 made him a viable challenger to the early frontrunner, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, whom he outlasted in a grueling primary campaign to claim the Democratic nomination in early June 2008.
During the general-election campaign, as in the primaries, Obama’s team worked to build a following at the grassroots level and used what his supporters viewed as the candidate’s natural charisma, unique life story, and inspiring message of hope and change to draw large crowds to his public appearances, both in the United States and on a campaign trip abroad. His team also worked to bring new voters—many of them young or Black, both demographics they believed favored Obama—into the election. In addition, the campaign was notable for its unprecedented use of the Internet for organizing constituents and fundraising. According to The Washington Post: “Three million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online, adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less.”
In terms of campaign issues, Obama pledged to get the United States out of the war in Iraq and expand health care, among other promises. A crushing national financial crisis in the months leading up to the election shifted the country’s focus to the economy, and Obama and Republican candidate McCain each attempted to show he had the best plan for economic improvement.
In the November 4 election, Obama captured some traditional Republican strongholds (Virginia, Indiana) and key battleground states (Florida, Ohio) that had been won by Republicans in recent elections.
Late that night, the president-elect appeared before a huge crowd of supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park and delivered a speech in he which acknowledged the historic nature of his victory (which came 143 years after the end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery): “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer…It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”
Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. On November 6, 2012, he defeated Republican challenger Mitt Romney to win a second term in the White House. He left office in January, 2017.
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History.com – Barak Obama Elected as America’s First Black President
In the months before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. He organized a Poor People’s Campaign to focus on the issue, including a march on Washington, and in March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated Black sanitation workers. On March 28, a workers’ protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of a Black teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration.
On April 3, back in Memphis, Dr. King gave his last sermon, saying, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop … And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and killed by a sniper at the Lorraine Motel. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all across the United States, and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C.
A single memorial would not be enough for the man who had been the face of a movement. The first memorial service following his assassination took place the following day at the R.S. Lewis Funeral Home in Memphis, Tennessee. This was followed by two funeral services on April 9, 1968, in Atlanta, Georgia, the first held for family and close friends at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King and his father had both served as senior pastors. That service was followed by a three-mile procession to Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, for a public service. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute as his casket passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules.
President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader on April 7, to be observed on the third Monday of January of each year.
Sources
History.com – Dr King is Assassinated
Even though the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed Black men the right to vote (and the 19th Amendment later extended that right to all women), multiple obstacles to voting remained for decades. Black people attempting to vote often were told by election officials that they had gotten the date, time, or polling place wrong or that they had filled out an application incorrectly. They were also forced to take “literacy tests,” which they often failed due to centuries of oppression and poverty. “Poll taxes” were another barrier to people who lived in poverty.
The voting rights bill was passed in the U.S. Senate by a 77-19 vote on May 26, 1965. After debating the bill for more than a month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 333-85 on July 9. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders present at the ceremony.
The act banned the use of literacy tests, provided for federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50 percent of the non-white population had registered to vote, and authorized the U.S. attorney general to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections.
In 1964, the 24th Amendment made poll taxes illegal in federal elections; poll taxes in state elections were banned in 1966 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Although the Voting Rights Act passed, state and local enforcement of the law was weak, and it often was ignored outright, mainly in the South and in areas where the proportion of Black people in the population was high and their vote threatened the political status quo. Still, the Voting Rights Act gave Black voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and vastly improved voter turnout. In Mississippi alone, voter turnout among Black people increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969. In 1964, just prior to passage of the VRA, only Mississippi had a smaller percentage of eligible African Americans registered to vote than Alabama—6.7 percent compared to 23.0 percent—though some sources say Alabama had less than that number.
Sources
In early 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC decided to make Selma, located in Dallas County, Alabama, the focus of a Black voter registration campaign. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and his profile would help draw international attention to the events that followed.
After the February 26 death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young Black veteran in Marion, Alabama who was shot on February 18 while demonstrating for voting rights, King and the SCLC planned a massive protest march from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery, 54 miles away. A group of 600 people, including activists John Lewis and Hosea Williams, set out from Selma on Sunday, March 7, 1965—a day that would come to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
The marchers didn’t get far before Alabama state troopers, wielding whips, nightsticks, and tear gas, rushed the group at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing religious and civil rights leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest. Hundreds of ministers, priests, rabbis, and social activists soon headed to Selma to join the voting rights march.
On March 9, King led more than 2,000 marchers, Black and white, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge but found Highway 80 blocked again by state troopers. King paused the marchers and led them in prayer, then led the crowd back to Selma. Many of those present were not aware that a compromise was reached the night before with representatives of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who suggested that it be postponed.
Further violence was carried out that evening when members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked Unitarian minister James Reeb, who later died from his injuries.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson went on national television to pledge his support to the Selma protesters and to call for the passage of a new voting rights bill that he was introducing in Congress.
The federally sanctioned march left Selma on March 21. Protected by hundreds of federalized Alabama National Guardsmen and FBI agents, the demonstrators covered between 7 to 17 miles per day, camping at night in supporters’ yards. Limited by Judge Frank Johnson’s order to 300 marchers over a stretch of two-lane highway, the number of demonstrators swelled on the last day to 25,000. They gathered in front of the state capitol to hear King and other speakers, including Ralph Bunche (winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize), address the crowd.
“No tide of racism can stop us,” King proclaimed from the building’s steps, as viewers from around the world watched the historic moment on television.
That evening, Viola Liuzzo, who had come from Detroit to Alabama to support the voting rights movement, was shot to death by KKK members when they saw her driving a Black marcher, Leroy Moton, back to Selma from Montgomery. Immediately following her murder, Liuzzo became the target of a smear campaign, mounted by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as a means of diverting attention from the fact that a key FBI informant was in the car with Liuzzo’s killers. Despite this attempt to discredit her, Liuzzo became a martyr whose brutal murder drew national attention to the cause of voting rights.
The three Selma marches were a pivotal turning point in the civil rights movement. Because of the powerful impact of the marches, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was presented to Congress on March 17, 1965. President Johnson signed the bill into law on August 6, 1965.
Sources
History.com – Selma Montgomery March
King Institute – Selma Montgomery March
Zinned Project – Viola Liuzzo Murdered by the KKK
Zinned Project – Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement
Following the Civil War, a trio of constitutional amendments abolished slavery (the 13th Amendment), made formerly enslaved people citizens (the 14th Amendment), and gave all men the right to vote regardless of race (the 15th Amendment).
Nonetheless, many states—particularly in the South—used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures to keep their Black citizens essentially disenfranchised. These states also enforced strict segregation through “Jim Crow” laws and were hotbeds of violence by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
For decades after Reconstruction, the U.S. Congress did not pass a single civil rights act. Finally, in 1957, it established a civil rights section of the Justice Department, along with a Commission on Civil Rights to investigate discriminatory conditions.
Also in 1957, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and began lecturing nationwide, urging active nonviolence to achieve civil rights for Black Americans. In 1960 he returned to Atlanta to become copastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was arrested and jailed for protesting segregation at a lunch counter; the case drew national attention, and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy interceded to obtain his release.
Congress in 1960 provided for court-appointed referees to help Black people register to vote.
When John F. Kennedy entered the White House in 1961, he initially delayed supporting new anti-discrimination measures. But with protests springing up throughout the South—including one in Birmingham, Alabama, where police brutally suppressed nonviolent demonstrators with dogs, clubs, and high-pressure fire hoses—Kennedy decided to act.
In 1963 King helped organize the March on Washington, an assembly of more than 200,000 people at which he made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In June 1963 Kennedy proposed by far the most comprehensive civil rights legislation to date, saying the United States “will not be fully free until all of its citizens are free.” The March on Washington influenced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and King was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace.
Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963 in Dallas, after which new President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately took up the cause. “Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined,” Johnson said in his first State of the Union address.
During debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Southerners argued, among other things, that the bill unconstitutionally usurped individual liberties and states’ rights. In the end, the House approved the bill with bipartisan support by a vote of 290-130.
The bill then moved to the U.S. Senate, where southern and border state Democrats, arguing that the bill unconstitutionally usurped individual liberties and states’ rights, staged a 75-day filibuster—among the longest in U.S. history. On one occasion, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Ku Klux Klan member, spoke for more than 14 consecutive hours. But with the help of behind-the-scenes “horse-trading,” the bill’s supporters eventually obtained the two-thirds votes necessary to end debate. One of those votes came from California Senator Clair Engle, who, though too sick to speak, signaled “aye” by pointing to his own eye.
Having broken the filibuster, the Senate voted 73-27 in favor of the bill, and Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. “It is an important gain, but I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Johnson, a Democrat, purportedly told an aide later that day in a prediction that would largely come true.
King said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was nothing less than a “second emancipation.”
Sources
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Birmingham in the spring of 1963, along with Southern Christian Leadership Conference co-founder Rev. Ralph Abernathy, hoping to shore up resistance against segregation in the state. The pair partnered with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a local civil rights organization led by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a prominent minister and activist in Birmingham.
But the Alabama movement was fresh off a failed attempt to end segregation in Albany, Georgia. Overall, fewer people were attending meetings, sit-ins, and marches. After King was arrested and confined to a jail cell, where he wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he knew, along with other activists, that a new strategy was essential if they wanted the campaign to succeed.
James Bevel, a member of the SCLC, came up with an idea to include school-age children in protests to help desegregate Birmingham. The strategy involved recruiting popular teenagers from Black high schools, such as the quarterbacks and cheerleaders, who could influence their classmates to attend meetings with them at Black churches in Birmingham to learn about the non-violent movement. There was also an economic reason to have children participate, since adults risked being fired from their jobs for missing work and protesting.
Janice Kelsey, who was one of the students recruited by Bevel, remembers that he asked the students questions designed to make them aware of the differences in white and Black schools—that hand-me-down books and football helmets were not what white students used; nor was there just one typewriter in white schools, but rooms full of typewriters. “Things like that became personal to me, and I decided I wanted to do something about it,” Kelsey says.
King and other activists and members of the Black community were adamantly opposed to involving children in marches because of the threats of violence from white mobs, as well as from policemen led by Birmingham’s public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, notorious for his racist policies. Bevel, undeterred, told the children to gather at 16th Street Baptist Church on May 2, 1963. More than 1,000 students skipped school to participate in the protest. The youth, ranging from ages 7-18, held picket signs and marched in groups of 10 to 50, singing freedom songs.
The demonstrators had several destinations: Some went to City Hall, and others went to lunch counters or the downtown shopping district. They marched daily for almost a week.
As the children bravely took to the streets, the Birmingham police were waiting to arrest them, putting them in paddy wagons and school buses. Kelsey says she was arrested on her first day of marching and remained in jail for four days.
The sight of young people peacefully protesting reinvigorated the Birmingham movement, and throngs of people started attending meetings again and joining the demonstrations. King changed his mind about the effectiveness of the Children’s Crusade.
Although the police were mostly restrained on the first day, that restraint was short lived. In the following days, law enforcement brought out water hoses and police dogs.
Television crews and newspapers filmed the young demonstrators getting arrested, attacked by the dogs, and hosed down by the police, causing national outrage. More than 2,000 children were reportedly arrested during the days-long protest.
President John F. Kennedy demanded a resolution and sent Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to Birmingham to facilitate negotiations. Influential white businessmen and city officials, already unsettled because of seeing the business district swarming with demonstrators, responded to President Kennedy’s demand by calling a meeting with King. An agreement was made to desegregate lunch counters, businesses, and restrooms and to improve hiring opportunities for Black people in Birmingham.
Sources
History.com – Children’s Crusade Birmingham Civil Rights
Janice Kelsey, I Woke Up With My Mind On Freedom. (Pittsburgh, PA: Urban Press, 2017).
On April 28, 1958, someone placed 54 sticks of dynamite outside a window at Temple Beth-El, one of the city of Birmingham’s oldest synagogues, which was founded in 1907 and opened its sanctuary on Highland Avenue in 1926. The sticks didn’t detonate, but the threat was clear.
Richard Friedman, retired executive director of the Birmingham Jewish Federation, says that even without an explosion, something did happen. “It’s not that nothing happened,” he says. “Something did happen. Someone who wanted to cause destruction and death to a Jewish institution and Jewish people planted a bomb. That happened, and the fact that it was discovered before it exploded doesn’t diminish the first thing that happened, and that someone, some person or persons, did it.”
Margaret Norman, director of Programming and Engagement at Temple Beth-El, says there are varied theories regarding the undetonated explosives. She says some people accept the idea of divine intervention, believing that “it was fate; it was a miracle,” she says. “You know, it’s a house of worship, so that that thinking makes sense.”
One theory is that the bomb was actually never meant to go off. “It was a very large bomb, really just outrageously large in terms of the numbers of sticks of dynamite,” Norman notes. “It would not have just destroyed Temple Beth-El; it would have destroyed really the entire city block.” This theory holds that the perpetrators wanted to frighten Jews, “that it was basically meant as a scare tactic, a way to say to the Jewish community, ‘Stay out of this.’
“There was an association in the minds of many white supremacists at that time between Jews and the civil rights movement, regardless of how active the community actually was,” Norman says. “That theory says it was more of a warning than anything.” The theory is bolstered by the bomb being placed on a Tuesday and not a day and time when the synagogue would have been full of people.
After the attempted bombing, some Jews took a step back from being active in the civil rights movement, and some were careful to be supportive from behind the scenes; others played active, prominent roles in the movement, despite the threats of violence.
Sources
Bending the Arc Project – The Bus Boycott
Solomon Crenshaw Jr. interviewed Richard Friedman on Jan. 1, 2023
The Birmingham Times – Shining Light on a Little Known Birmingham Civil Rights Incident
UAB.edu – Community Shines Light on a Little Known Incident in Civil Rights Era Birmingham
After a period of decline, white Protestant nativist groups revived the Klan in the early 20th century, burning crosses and staging rallies, parades and marches denouncing immigrants, Catholics, Jews, African Americans and organized labor.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s saw a surge of local Ku Klux Klan activity across the South, including the bombings, beatings, and shootings of Black and white activists. These actions, carried out in secret but apparently the work of local Klansmen, outraged the nation.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a speech publicly condemning the Klan and announcing the arrest of four Klansmen in connection with the murder of Detroit’s Viola Liuzzo, a white female civil rights worker in Alabama. She was driving along the route of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march when a group of Klansmen—including an undercover FBI agent—shot her. In part because of the shocking national impact of Liuzzo’s brutal murder and other related forms of racist brutality, pressure grew on the federal government to act, and Congress adopted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Signed into law on August 6, the legislation outlawed literacy tests and bolstered federal enforcement of Black suffrage.
Cases of Klan-related violence became more isolated in the following decades, though fragmented groups became aligned with neo-Nazi or other right-wing extremist organizations from the 1970s onward.
As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League estimated Klan membership to be around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center put the number at 6,000.
Some 42 different Klan groups were active in 22 states as of June 2017, a slight increase from early 2016, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League, a nonpartisan civil rights advocacy group. The Klan, known for promoting white supremacist and white nationalist ideas, captured public attention in 2017 during a weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, marked by race-fueled clashes.
In addition to the more than 40 identified Klan groups, the ADL tracked Klan activity to 11 other states during that same time, including some states perceived to be liberal, such as California. The ADL tracked the movement from January 2016 to June 2017.
Nationwide, there are still an estimated 3,000 Klan members and unaffiliated people who “identify with Klan ideology,” according to the ADL. Membership, though, remains spread across dozens of groups. The largest Klans reportedly don’t have more than 50 to 100 active members, and most have fewer than 25.
Sources
US News.com – KKK is Still Based in 22 states in the US in 2017
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, as long as the facilities for Black people and whites were “equal.”
The ruling constitutionally sanctioned “Jim Crow” laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities with whites and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.
But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware.
In the case that would become famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools.
In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The case would ultimately wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was combined with four other cases related to school segregation. In 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall the first Black Supreme Court justice.
Though the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board didn’t achieve school desegregation on its own, the 1954 ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States. It helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.
Source
What’s in a name? Perhaps not as much as what was in a nickname.
Birmingham, then Alabama’s largest city, was largely known as Bombingham during the civil rights movement. It was a well-earned moniker, as there were 50 dynamite explosions at churches and residences in the city from 1949 to 1965. Most of those bombings have never been solved.
The bombings initially targeted African Americans attempting to move into neighborhoods that had been composed of entirely white residents. Later, the bombings were used against anyone working toward racial desegregation in the city. One neighborhood within Birmingham experienced so many bombings that it developed its own nickname—Dynamite Hill.
By the 1940s, Black families were trying to purchase homes in segregated white areas of Birmingham. The local Ku Klux Klan began a terror campaign against Black families attempting to move to the west side of Center Street in the city’s Smithfield Community, sometimes firing shots or bombs at houses, or lighting a home’s door on fire. Center Street became known as Dynamite Hill because of those attacks. Some families refused to leave, instead tolerating the attacks in an effort to support desegregation efforts.
The home of the Reverend Milton Curry Jr. at 1100 Center Street North was the target of bombs three times, including twice in 1949, then a third time in 1950. Five homes of Black people were bombed in December 1957 alone. The KKK was credited with – or took credit for – many of the blasts. Black churches were frequently targeted, as were the homes of Black activists seeking civil rights. The home of civil rights attorney Arthur Shores was bombed on August 20, 1963. Sixteen days later, his home was bombed again. Eleven days after the second explosion at the Shores house came the blast heard around the world at a house of worship—the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
By 1965, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had serious suspects—namely, Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr., all KKK members—but witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. Also, at that time, information from FBI surveillances was not admissible in court. As a result, no federal charges were filed in the 1960s.
In the end, justice was served. Chambliss received life in prison in 1977 following a case led by Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley. And eventually the fear, prejudice, and reticence that kept witnesses from coming forward began to subside. The case was re-opened in the mid-1990s, and Blanton and Cherry were indicted in May 2000. Both were convicted at trial and sentenced to life in prison. The fourth man, Herman Frank Cash, had died in 1994.
Sources
Federal Bureau of Investigation – Baptist Street Church Bombing
Beginning with the American Revolution, African Americans served in the United States military, but almost always separately from white soldiers—and usually in menial roles.
When President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, calling for the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces, he repudiated 170 years of officially sanctioned discrimination. A major achievement of the post-war civil rights Movement and of Truman’s presidency, the signing marked the first time a U.S. commander in chief used an executive order to implement a civil rights policy. It became a crucial step in inspiring other parts of American society to accept desegregation.
When the beatings and murders of recently returned Black World War II veterans in the South captured national attention, Truman, who assumed the presidency after Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, was moved to act.
“My stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten,” Truman said. “Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as president I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.”
In response to the lynchings, and under pressure from Black civil rights groups, Truman formed the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in late 1946. It produced a report, To Secure These Rights, which condemned all forms of segregation and asked for an immediate end to discrimination and segregation in all branches of the armed services.
Source
The 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation, originally called The Clansman, was a technological breakthrough; it pioneered closeups and fadeouts and was the first American-made film with a musical score for an orchestra. It was the first film screened inside the White House, where it was viewed by President Woodrow Wilson and members of his cabinet.
Because of its racially inflammatory content, the film has been called “the most controversial film ever made in the United States and “the most reprehensively racist film in Hollywood history.” The film, which centers on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, portrays Black characters (many played by white actors in Blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive toward white women, and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, coming to the rescue of white women and protecting American values and white supremacy.
In romanticizing and popularizing the Klan, the film helped inspire a resurgence of the terrorist organization, which had been shut down by the federal government in the early 1870s.
This “second coming” of the Klan expanded across the country during the 1920s under the guise of enforcing Prohibition. The Klan’s main targets at that time were Black Americans and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, especially Catholics. Prohibition advocates had already linked them with drinking and criminality, and for Catholics, the era was a time of raids, violence, and terror.
The KKK sold itself as a law enforcement organization that could do what the government couldn’t—put a stop to the Catholic immigrants supposedly violating the law.
“The reason that the Klan was able to basically bring millions of Protestant white evangelical Americans to its ranks in the 1920s is definitely related to the passage of Prohibition and the 18th Amendment,” says Lisa McGirr, a history professor at Harvard University and author of The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. “Prohibition provided the Klan essentially a kind of new mandate for its anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, white Protestant nationalist mission,” she says. “The Klan often gained a foothold in local communities in the 1920s by arguing that it would clean up communities, it would get rid of bootleggers and moonshiners.”
During the 1920s, the Klan—along with its auxiliary “Women of the Ku Klux Klan” and three KKK youth groups—spread across the North and South by arguing that Catholics and immigrants were breaking Prohibition, and only a vigilante police group like the Klan could put a stop to it.
Between 1920 and 1925, the Klan’s membership grew to 2 to 5 million, and there was a lot of overlap between these new members and those who’d supported Prohibition. Prohibition lasted less than 15 years, but it left behind a large legacy; when it ended in 1933, the U.S. government had a more powerful FBI and a lot more prisons. As for the Klan, the upheaval and chaos that it created during the 1920s eroded its support in the ‘30s. Yet the organization’s history didn’t end there, as another resurgence would come during the 1950s and 1960s, with the civil rights movement.
Sources
Anthony Slide, “American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon,” (University Press of Kentucky, 2004).
Ed Rampell, “The Washington Post,” March 3, 2015
Lisa McGirr, “The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State,” (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016).
Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for Black people. Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Supreme Court ruled that a law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between white people and Black people was not unconstitutional. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race became commonplace.
After the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democrats consolidated control of state legislatures throughout the region, effectively marking the end of Reconstruction.
Southern Black people saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution receding quickly, with a return to disenfranchisement and other disadvantages as white supremacy reasserted itself across the South.
Sources
History.com – Plessy v Ferguson
C. Vann Woodward, “Plessy v. Ferguson: The Birth of Jim Crow,” American Heritage (Volume 15, Issue 3: April 1964).
Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy into the United States and to expand the rights of 4 million newly freed people.
Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new Southern state legislatures passed restrictive “Black Codes” to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party.
During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to Southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces—including the Ku Klux Klan—would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.
During this period many landowners turned to sharecropping, a type of farming in which families rent small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year. Sharecropping in the post-war U.S. enabled landowners to reestablish a labor force, while giving poor whites and freed Black people a means of subsistence. About two-thirds of sharecroppers were white, and one-third were Black. The system severely restricted the economic mobility of the laborers, leading to conflicts during the Reconstruction era.
Reconstruction ended in 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South, leading to the rise of Jim Crow laws, which legalized segregation and discrimination against African Americans.
Source
What motivated seven Southern states—and four others that followed after the war began—to declare that they were seceding from the United States and unifying to form the Confederacy? Twenty-first century historians agree on the centrality of the conflict over slavery—it was not just “a cause” of the war; it was “the cause.”
The principal political battle leading to Southern secession was over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into newly acquired Western territories that would someday become states. Initially Congress had admitted new states into the Union in pairs, with one being a slave state and the other free. This had kept a sectional balance in the Senate but not in the House of Representatives, as free states outstripped slave states in population. At mid-19th century, the free-versus-slave status of the new territories was a critical issue, both for the North, where anti-slavery sentiment had grown, and for the South, where the fear of slavery’s abolition had grown. The development of white Southern nationalism in the preceding decades was an added influence leading to secession and the formation of the Confederacy.
Despite not being on the ballot in 10 states, Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election. His victory triggered declarations of secession by seven slave states of the Deep South; the economies of all of these states were based on a cotton industry powered by enslaved labor. They formed the Confederate States of America (CSA) after Lincoln was elected in November 1860, before he took office in March 1861.
Nationalists in the North and “Unionists” in the South refused to accept the declarations of secession. No foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy. Scholars agree that the primary reason the North rejected secession was to preserve the Union, a cause based on American nationalism.
The U.S. government, under President James Buchanan, refused to relinquish its forts that were in territory claimed by the Confederacy. The war itself began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
As a panel of historians emphasized in 2011, “while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war.”
Other important factors were partisan politics, abolitionism, expansionism, economics, and modernization in the Antebellum period, all of which were tied to the core issue of slavery.
Sources
The 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention was called by Southern Democrats of the state with the express goal “within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State.” Its provisions essentially disenfranchised most African Americans and thousands of poor white Europeans, who were excluded from voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The constitution also gave the Alabama Legislature the power to administer most counties directly, with only a few counties having even limited home rule, further entrenching disfranchisement by limiting local autonomy.
Author Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that Alabama, in establishing its constitution, followed the “Mississippi Plan,” named for the Mississippi state constitution (ratified in 1890), which was a blueprint for thwarting Black rights and eliminating the Black vote. Although the 15th Amendment had given Black men the right to vote in 1870, whites immediately undermined Black civil rights through violence, intimidation and fraud, especially in the former Confederate States. Mississippi state senators successfully blocked the “force bill” that would have provided federal supervision of elections. Mississippians also took other means to thwart the rights of Blacks.
While the 15th Amendment mandated suffrage to all qualified male voters regardless of color, the power to determine what constituted a qualified voter still remained with the states. When Mississippi’s constitutional convention met in August 1890, it sought one result: to eliminate the Black vote. On Dec. 22, 1890, The Jackson Clarion-Ledger stated plainly that the convention was held “to restrict suffrage—negro suffrage, if you please.” Among the restrictions established were a new two-dollar poll tax and the requirement to register at least four months in advance of an election. Anyone with a criminal conviction was disqualified from voting, and those seeking to register had to demonstrate that they could read a section of the state constitution and understand it.
The Mississippi Plan established a blueprint for other Southern states. South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), North Carolina (1900), Alabama and Virginia (1901), Georgia (1908), and Oklahoma (1910) all used similar tactics to formally disenfranchise Black voters.
At 388,882 words, the 1901 Alabama Constitution was 12 times longer than the average state constitution, 51 times longer than the U.S. Constitution, and the longest and most amended constitution operative anywhere in the world. The English version of the Constitution of India, the longest national constitution in the world, is about 145,000 words long, less than 40% of the length of Alabama’s.
Sources
Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for Black people. Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Supreme Court ruled that a law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between white people and Black people was not unconstitutional. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race became commonplace.
After the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democrats consolidated control of state legislatures throughout the region, effectively marking the end of Reconstruction.
Southern Black people saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment, and 15th Amendment to the Constitution receding quickly, with a return to disenfranchisement and other disadvantages as white supremacy reasserted itself across the South.
As historian C. Vann Woodward points out in a 1964 article about Plessy v. Ferguson, white and Black Southerners mixed relatively freely until the 1880s, when state legislatures passed the first laws requiring railroads to provide separate cars for “Negro” or “colored” passengers.
Sources
History.com – Plessy vs Ferguson
C. Vann Woodward in 1964 article, The birth of Jim Crow : Plessy v. Ferguson
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first Democrat to win the White House since Woodrow Wilson. In his first 100 days, Roosevelt launched an ambitious slate of federal relief programs known as the New Deal, beginning an era of Democratic dominance that would last, with few exceptions, for nearly 60 years.
Roosevelt’s reforms raised hackles across the South, which generally didn’t favor the expansion of labor unions or federal power, and many Southern Democrats gradually joined Republicans in opposing further government expansion.
Then in 1948, when President Harry Truman (himself a Southern Democrat) introduced a pro-civil rights platform, a group of Southerners walked out of the party’s national convention. These so-called Dixiecrats ran their own candidate for president on a segregationist States’ Rights ticket that year; their candidate, South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, got more than 1 million votes.
Most Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic fold, but the incident marked the beginning of a seismic shift in the party’s demographics. At the same time, many Black voters who had remained loyal to the Republican Party since the Civil War began voting Democratic during the Depression; that trend continued in the following years, and Black voters voted Democratic in even greater numbers with the dawn of the civil rights movement.
Source
History.com – How the Party of Lincoln Won Over the Once Democratic South
The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, was aimed at Black enfranchisement. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote,” the amendment reads, “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
One day after it was ratified, Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, became the first Black person to vote under the authority of the 15th Amendment.
In theory, the measure provided Black men with most basic privilege of citizenship in a republic: the right to participate in the election of political leaders. It was by no means an act of pure idealism; rather, it was a form of partisan calculation, since it was assumed that Black voters would constitute an essential base for keeping the Republican Party in power in the South.
Yet its civic vision could have scarcely been more radical. In the 1860s, most Blacks lived in a world of absolute political disability. To most whites, the notion that a largely illiterate servant class, presumably vulnerable to bribery and coercion, would be given a say in determining the composition of their state and national political leadership seemed absurd, indeed dangerous. But by 1870, Black men who had been enslaved people only a few years earlier were placing tickets in ballot boxes.
With the adoption of the 15th Amendment, a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies in the Southern states to elect Republicans to power. Soon all of the former states of the Confederacy had been readmitted to the Union, and most were controlled by the Republican Party, thanks to the support of Black voters.
Despite the amendment’s passage, by the late 1870s dozens of discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South. In the ensuing decades, a range of discriminatory practices including poll taxes and literacy tests—along with Jim Crow laws, intimidation, threats and outright violence—were used to prevent Black men from exercising their right to vote. With the end of Reconstruction, the Southern Republican Party vanished, and Southern state governments effectively nullified both the 14th Amendment (which guaranteed citizenship and all its privileges to Black Americans) and the 15th amendment, stripping Black citizens in the South of the right to vote.
Sources
Mark S. Weiner, Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the end of Caste, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 188-192.
The 14th Amendment’s reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The final section of the amendment grants Congress the power to enforce these rights “through appropriate legislation.” The amendment enacted a fundamental change—a revolution in our understanding of civic capacity—for Blacks and other minorities, because it speaks of “persons” without regard to race. It was also revolutionary in the distribution of power between state and national governments.
The Dred Scott decision was dead. The amendment further shielded Blacks from attempts by state governments to undercut their civic membership by declaring that states could not deny Blacks the “privileges or immunities: of national citizenship,” nor lawfully withhold the “due process of law and “equal protection of the laws” to which they were entitled.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, has been the subject of more litigation than any other part of the Constitution, Mark S. Weiner writes in “Black Trials: Citizenship from The Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste.”
Source
Mark S. Weiner, Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the end of Caste, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 189-190.
While America’s founding fathers enshrined the importance of liberty and equality in the nation’s founding documents—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—they conspicuously failed to mention slavery, which was legal in all 13 colonies in 1776 and remained legal in the U.S. until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865.
The 13th Amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Many of the founders themselves had owned enslaved workers, and though they acknowledged that slavery was morally wrong, they effectively pushed the question of how to eradicate it to future generations of Americans.
Thomas Jefferson signed a law banning the importation of enslaved people from Africa from 1807 on. Still, the institution became ever more entrenched in American society and economy—particularly in the South.
By 1861, when the Civil War broke out, more than 4 million people (nearly all of them of African descent) were enslaved in 15 southern and border states.
Despite the long history of slavery in the British colonies in North America—and the continued existence of slavery in America until 1865—the 13th Amendment was the first explicit mention of the institution of slavery in the U.S. Constitution.
Source
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration as America’s 16th president, he maintained that the war was about restoring the Union and not about slavery. He avoided issuing an anti-slavery proclamation immediately, despite the urgings of abolitionists and radical Republicans, as well as his personal belief that slavery was morally repugnant. Instead, Lincoln chose to move cautiously until he could gain wide support from the public for such a measure.
By the summer of 1862, enslaved people themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln’s troops marched through the South. Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the “peculiar institution”—that many enslaved people were truly content in bondage—and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity.
In July 1862, Lincoln informed his cabinet that he would issue an emancipation proclamation but that it would exempt the so-called border states, which had slaveholders but remained loyal to the Union. His cabinet persuaded him not to make the announcement until after a Union victory. Lincoln’s opportunity came following the Union win at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. On September 22, the president announced that enslaved people in areas still in rebellion within 100 days would be free. This preliminary proclamation set a date for the freedom of more than 3 million enslaved people in the United States and recast the Civil War as a fight against slavery.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, which declared “that all persons held as enslaved people” within the rebel states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” The proclamation also called for the recruitment and establishment of Black military units among the Union forces. An estimated 180,000 African Americans went on to serve in the army, while another 18,000 served in the navy.
But not all enslaved people were immediately aware of their declared freedom. Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House two months earlier in Virginia, but slavery remained relatively unaffected in Texas—until June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Texas learned they had been freed. On that date, U.S. General Gordon Granger stood on Texas soil and read General Orders No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all enslaved people are free.”
Juneteenth, short for June 19th, marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. The troops’ arrival came a full two-and-a-half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth honors the end of slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African-American holiday. On June 17, 2021, it officially became a federal holiday.
Sources
Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his book Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African-American History 1513-2008, draws a line from African-American involvement in the American Revolutionary War to the Civil War, starting with Crispus Attucks, a sailor thought to be of Black, Indian, and white ancestry, who was the first colonist to be killed in the series of volatile events that led to the American Revolution.
Harriet Tubman, while best known for her legendary exploits leading enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad, played a less known but similarly remarkable role during the Civil War. In 1862, she traveled to Union-occupied South Carolina and tended to wounded soldiers and freed people; she also cooked and sold food to local residents. She roamed the region, acting as a spy, gathering information on Confederate supplies and troop dispositions, which she shared with the Union command. She became well acquainted with Colonel James Montgomery of the Second South Carolina volunteers, an African-American infantry regiment, and provided him with invaluable military intelligence. One of her missions up the Combahee River resulted in the seizure of Confederate supplies and the liberation of 756 enslaved people. At war’s end she traveled to Virginia, where she nursed Black patients at the James River Contraband hospital. She then became the matron of the Black hospital at Fortress Monroe, which had housed “contraband” (self-emancipated enslaved people loyal to Union troops) since the beginning of the war.
Among other African Americans to serve during the Civil War was Martin R. Delany, who is best known for his book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. He served in the Union army and reached the rank of major, the highest rank achieved by an African American during the Civil War.
But the role of African Americans in this war was not clear-cut. The Lincoln administration and state governors across the North repeated countless times that “this is a white man’s war.” White soldiers recoiled at the prospect of uniformed Black men. Yankee soldiers wrote home asking that Blacks be sent as diggers or laborers but never as soldiers; real men used weapons of war, they said, while Blacks used shovels.
Still, many Blacks volunteered for service in any way they could. A few, such as H. Ford Douglas, Joseph T. Wilson, and the mixed-blood Connecticut soldier Meunomennie L. Maimi, served in white units. Others, such as journalist William H. Johnson, became officers’ attendants or teamsters—anything to get into the fight and help enslaved people escape.
Until January 1863, the U.S. government refused to recruit Blacks for the army. Although it publicly rejected countless Black requests to volunteer for service, the Lincoln administration responded inconsistently to individual efforts by a few Union officers determined to enlist Black soldiers.
In August 1862, General James H. Lane, who was also a U.S. senator, organized the First Kansas Colored Infantry. A fiery abolitionist, Lane had been battling proslavery forces since the days of John Brown. He made no secret of his raids across the Kansas border into Missouri to liberate enslaved people and continued the practice after the start of the war, saving hundreds, if not thousands of them. Refusing to allow any source of Union manpower to go untapped, he placed the liberated “property” in his regiment, which at the time operated under state, rather than federal authority.
Sources
Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 29-30, 90-91, 102-103, 122-123.
Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. (Hard Press, 2006; originally published in 1852.)
The schooner Clotilda was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States. It arrived at Mobile Bay in either the autumn of 1859 or July 9, 1860, with 110 enslaved African men, women, and children. The ship was a two-masted schooner, 86 feet long with a beam of 23 feet.
U.S. involvement in the transatlantic slave trade had been banned by Congress through the Act Prohibiting Importation of Enslaved people enacted on March 2, 1807 (effective January 1, 1808), but the practice continued illegally, especially through slave traders based in New York in the 1850s and early 1860. In the case of the Clotilda, the voyage’s sponsors, based in the South, sought to traffic Africans from Whydah, Dahomey. After the voyage, the ship was burned and scuttled in Mobile Bay in an attempt to destroy the evidence.
After the Civil War, Cudjo (Kazoola) Lewis and 31 other formerly enslaved people carried by the Clotilda founded Africatown on the north side of Mobile, Alabama. They were joined by other continental Africans and formed a community that continued to practice many of their West African traditions and Yoruba language for decades.
A spokesman for the community, Cudjo Lewis lived until 1935 and was one of the last survivors from the Clotilda. Redoshi, another captive on the Clotilda, was sold to a planter in Dallas County, Alabama, where she became known also as Sally Smith. She married, had a daughter, and lived to 1937 in Bogue Chitto, Louisiana. She was long thought to have been the last survivor of the Clotilda. Research published in 2020 indicated that another survivor, Matilda McCrear, lived in Alabama until 1940.
Some 100 descendants of the enslaved people carried by the Clotilda still live in Africatown, and others are scattered around the country. After World War II, the neighborhood was absorbed by the city of Mobile. A memorial bust of Lewis was placed in front of the historic Union Missionary Baptist Church. The Africatown historic district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. In May 2019, the Alabama Historical Commission announced that remnants of a ship found along the Mobile River, near 12 Mile Island and just north of the Mobile Bay delta, were confirmed as the Clotilda. The wreck site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.
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Born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Ohio, John Brown came from a staunchly Calvinist and antislavery family. In 1837, he attended an abolition meeting in Cleveland, during which he was so moved that he publicly announced his dedication to destroying the institution of slavery. As early as 1848 he was formulating a plan to incite an insurrection.
In the 1850s, Brown traveled to Kansas with five of his sons to fight against the proslavery forces in the contest over that territory. On May 21, 1856, proslavery men raided the abolitionist town of Lawrence, and Brown personally sought revenge. On May 25, Brown and his sons attacked three cabins along Pottawatomie Creek. They killed five men with broad swords and triggered a summer of guerrilla warfare in the troubled territory. One of Brown’s sons was killed in the fighting.
In 1857, Brown returned to the East and began raising money to carry out his vision of a mass uprising of enslaved people. He secured the backing of six prominent abolitionists, known as the “Secret Six,” and assembled an invasion force. His “army” grew to include 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons. The group rented a Maryland farm near Harper’s Ferry and prepared for the uprising.
On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and his band overran the Harper’s Ferry arsenal. Some of his men rounded up a handful of hostages, including a few enslaved people. Word of the raid spread, and by morning Brown and his men were surrounded. On October 19, a company of U.S. marines, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart, overran Brown and his followers. Ten of his Brown’s men were killed, including two of his sons.
The wounded Brown was tried by the state of Virginia for treason and murder, and he was found guilty on November 2. The 59-year-old abolitionist went to the gallows on December 2, 1859. Before his execution, he handed his guard a slip of paper that read, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
It was a prophetic statement. Although the raid failed, it inflamed sectional tensions and raised the stakes for the 1860 presidential election. The violent response to Brown’s raid helped make any further accommodation between North and South nearly impossible and thus became an important impetus of the Civil War.
Source
From August to October of 1858, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, took on the incumbent Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas in a series of seven debates. Thousands of spectators and newspaper reporters from around the country watched as the two men argued over the primary issue facing the nation at the time: slavery and the battle over its extension into new territories.
As the architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas was one of the most prominent politicians in the country and seen as a future presidential contender. The controversial 1854 law repealed the Missouri Compromise and established the doctrine of popular sovereignty, by which each new territory joining the Union would decide for itself whether to become a free or slave state.
Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act had drawn Lincoln, a lawyer and former one-term Whig congressman, back into the political arena. He had launched a Senate run in early 1855 but stepped aside to make way for another candidate.
By 1858, Lincoln was the most prominent leader in the new Republican Party in Illinois and the clear choice to run against Douglas. He kicked off his campaign in earnest with a speech in Springfield that June, in which he famously declared that “A house divided against itself cannot stand … this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”
Lincoln and Douglas met in seven debates in different congressional districts around the state. In all, they traveled more than 4,000 miles during the Senate campaign. While Lincoln traveled by railroad, carriage or boat, Douglas rode in a private train fitted with a cannon that fired a shot every time he arrived in a new location.
Each debate followed the same structure: an hour-long opening statement by one candidate, an hour and a half-long response by the other candidate, and a half-hour rebuttal by the first candidate. Despite their length and often tedious format, the debates became a huge spectacle, attracting crowds of up to 20,000 people. Thanks to the many reporters and stenographers who attended, and new technologies such as the telegraph and the railroad, the candidates’ arguments drew national attention and fundamentally altered the national debate over slavery and the rights of Black Americans.
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On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down one of its most controversial and far-reaching opinions. Dred Scott v. Sanford, the case that resulted in what is commonly known as “the Dred Scott decision,” infamously ruled that African-Americans had no rights under the Constitution. Often referred to as one of the worst and most important decisions ever issued by the Supreme Court, Dred Scott sparked intense debate over the future of slavery in the United States and helped catapult the country toward civil war.
Dred Scott was born into slavery and sold to an army surgeon who moved frequently and took Scott with him to each new army posting. Scott lived for several years in Illinois and Minnesota, where slavery was illegal, before moving to Missouri, a slave state. He brought his case to a Missouri state court in 1846, claiming that he, his wife, and his two daughters were legally entitled to freedom; because he and his family had lived on free soil in Illinois and Minnesota for several years, they had become free, he argued, and remained so despite returning to Missouri.
After 11 years of victories and reversals in the court system, Scott’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote for the majority in a 7-2 decision, which went well beyond the issue of Scott’s right to freedom. Encouraged by President-elect James Buchanan, the Court, with a stroke of a pen, attempted to quash the debate once and for all between North and South over the issue of slavery.
Taney presented several major conclusions. First, he held that Black people and their descendants were not protected by the Constitution and thus could not be citizens. Second, as noncitizens, Blacks had no privileges granted by the Constitution and were not entitled to sue in court. Taney could have stopped there, dismissing Scott’s case on his lack of standing alone. However, he went on to rule that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories, thereby invalidating the 1829 Missouri Compromise. Finally, he stated that enslaved people were private property and thus should be treated as any other property and could not be seized without due process.
A slave-holder himself, Taney claimed to be following the Constitution’s “true intent and meaning when it was adopted.” Because the framers considered Blacks “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” he reasoned, they had “no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” As the framers had not expressly granted Blacks any rights to citizenship, the Court could not recognize any.
The decision relegated all Blacks to a permanent legal status of inferiority, dashing the hopes of antislavery reformers.
Sources
Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 113.
In his book Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African-American History 1513-2008, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes that the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 was one of the most important events in the development of the abolitionist movement.
The new organization built on the earlier experiences of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society; the American Convention of Abolition Societies, which first met more than 40 years earlier; and other groups in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
Led by Boston’s William Lloyd Garrison and New York’s Arthur and Lewis Tappan, northern abolitionists met in Philadelphia in December 1833 to unite the movement’s disparate elements around the idea of immediate emancipation. White liberal Christians and orthodox Presbyterians met in the Quaker city with Black abolitionists James McCrummell, Rober Purvis, James Forten, and James G. Barbadoes. Together they signaled the society’s “Declaration of Sentiments” in a dramatic ceremony that mimicked the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The Underground Railroad was a network of people, Black and white, who offered shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy in a less-secretive fashion.
The earliest mention of the Underground Railroad came in 1831, when enslaved man Tice Davids escaped from Kentucky into Ohio and his owner blamed an “underground railroad” for helping Davids to freedom. In 1839, a Washington newspaper reported that an escaped enslaved man named Jim had revealed, under torture, his plan to go north following an “underground railroad to Boston.”
In the very picture of contrast, the movement to abolish slavery developed even as those who believed in the institution were passing federal laws allowing the capture and return of runaway enslaved people within the United States.
The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed the capture and return of runaway enslaved people within the territory of the United States. Enacted by Congress in 1793, the first Fugitive Slave Act authorized local governments to seize and return escapees to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who aided in their flight.
Widespread resistance to the 1793 law led Southern politicians to press Congress to revise the act, to add more provisions regarding runaways and to levy even harsher punishments for interfering in their capture. Congress then passed the revised Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. This new law was part of Henry Clay’s famed Compromise of 1850—a group of bills that helped quiet early calls for Southern secession; the new law forcibly compelled citizens to assist in the capture of runaways, denied enslaved people the right to a jury trial, and increased the penalty for interfering with the rendition process to $1,000 and six months in jail.
The Fugitive Slave Acts were among the most controversial laws of the early 19th century.
Sources
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project, 1st ed. (New York: The New York Times Company, 2021), 108.
History.com – Underground Railroad
History.com – Fugitive Slave Acts
Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 67-68.
As cotton demand and profitability rose in the late 18th century, Southern plantation owners sought more land across the South and Southwest to grow cotton. The insatiable demand for land led to such measures as the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which confiscated swaths of former Native American territory, making more land available for cotton farming and therefore further expanding slavery across the South.
The Trail of Tears was an ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of approximately 60,000 people of the “Five Civilized Tribes” between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. As part of the Indian removal, members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to newly designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830.
The Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.
Ryan P. Smith notes on SmithsonianMag.com the little-known fact that there were Cherokee slaveholders, foremost among them Cherokee chief John Ross. Furthermore, numerous Black enslaved people, Cherokee-owned, made the brutal march themselves or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma aboard cramped boats by their wealthy Indian masters.
“And what you may not know is that the federal policy of Indian removal, which ranged far beyond the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee, was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson,” Smith writes, “but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents.”
In the case of the Trail of Tears and the enslavement of Blacks by prominent members of all five so-called “Civilized Tribes,” Smith goes a step farther, likening the ugly truth of history to a “mangy, snarling dog standing between you and a crowd-pleasing narrative.”
“Obviously,” Smith says, “the story should be, needs to be, that the enslaved Black people and soon-to-be-exiled red people would join forces and defeat their oppressor.” But such was not the case—far from it. “The Five Civilized Tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized Black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.”
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On a Friday night in June 1979, as told in the documentary Iron Grit and subsequently in the podcast Unjustifiable, an argument erupted when a Black man took offense at being asked to pay for gasoline before he pumped it, which was a new practice in those days. Ultimately the man, Alger “Buster” Pickett, left, but he returned with a gun and fired into the store. Pickett fled on foot, then realized that he had left his car and yelled back for someone to bring his vehicle to him. Bonita Carter, a 20-year-old Black woman, heeded Pickett’s call and got into the car to drive it to him. Police arrived, and in the ensuing confusion, a white police officer shot Carter in the back and killed her.
The incident led to multiple racially charged protests and counter-protests. Birmingham Mayor David Vann backed the police officer, which put him and Richard Arrington, a Black man on the Birmingham City Council, on opposite sides of the issue. The Bonita Carter incident moved Arrington to run for mayor.
Vann had formerly served on the council with Arrington and had been an Arrington ally. Years later, Arrington acknowledged that, had it not been for the Bonita Carter incident, he likely would not have sought re-election to the council, and he certainly would not have mounted a mayoral campaign against Vann, a progressive who had been favored in the city’s Black community.
The unlikely campaign resulted in Arrington becoming the first Black person elected mayor in the city that had been nationally, if not internationally, known for racial division. He served as mayor for 20 years.
Sources
AL.com – Decades Before Black Lives Matter Bonita Carter Changed Alabama Forever
The Haitian Revolution was a successful insurrection by self-liberated enslaved people against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, which is now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolt began on August 22, 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony’s independence. The revolt involved Black, biracial, French, Spanish, British, and Polish participants. Former slave Toussaint Louverture proved to be Haiti’s most prominent general. The revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state that was both free from slavery—though not from forced labor—and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World.
The revolution’s effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony were followed by a successful defense of the freedoms the former enslaved people won and, with the collaboration of already free people of color, their independence from white Europeans. The revolution represented the largest slave uprising since the unsuccessful revolt of Spartacus against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier. It challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged Black inferiority and about enslaved people’ ability to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels’ organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners throughout the hemisphere.
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Toward the end of the 18th century, the Southern economy was faltering. Existing slave labor was being used to grow the traditional crops of the South, such as tobacco, indigo, cotton, and rice, none of which were particularly profitable at the time. Some plantation owners began to question whether they really needed enslaved people. The upkeep of owning enslaved people was not justified by the profits owners were receiving from their plantations.
Then came the cotton gin, designed by American inventor Eli Whitney. Whitney designed the machine to help save labor for harvesting cotton. Instead, his invention was used to help perpetuate and expand the institution of slavery.
As cotton demand rose, use of the cotton gin raised the profitability of the cotton crop, leading Southern plantation owners to seek more land and thus more enslaved people to continue growing the crop. Coupled with the large demand from northern and British textile mills, cotton quickly became the featured crop of the South.
As plantation owners became wealthier, they sought even more land across the South and Southwest to grow cotton. The insatiable demand for land led to such measures as the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which confiscated swaths of former Native American territory, making more land available for cotton farming and therefore further expanding slavery across the South.
In 1808 the United States issued a ban on the transatlantic slave trade, which had been legal since the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788. This measure was an attempt to reduce the number of enslaved people in the United States, but because of the continuation of the domestic slave trade, populations of enslaved people dramatically increased from around 900,000 in 1800 to around 4 million in 1860.
Slave owners encouraged this growth through natural means, and the domestic slave trade flourished. Owning and selling enslaved people within the U.S. became profitable in itself.
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In late August of 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort (today’s Fort Monroe) in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies.
The landing of the first Africans in Virginia is one of the most significant events in American history. Although English colonists in Virginia did not invent slavery, and the transition from a handful of bound African laborers to a legalized system of full-blown chattel slavery took many decades, 1619 marks the beginning of race-based bondage that defined the African-American experience.
Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that The White Lion dropped anchor about a year before the Mayflower. It was also one of the most important ships in American history, although there was no ship manifest inscribed with names of its passengers and no descendants’ society. These peoples’ arrival was deemed so insignificant, their humanity so inconsequential, that we do not even know how many of those packed into the White Lion’s hull came ashore, just that “some 20 and odd Negroes” disembarked and joined the British colonists in Virginia.
This timeline focuses on the English Colonies. There is documentation of enslaved Africans being present in Spanish Florida earlier.
Sources
“Arrival,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, in Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
In his book The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade in America by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. These men—who trafficked and sold more than half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery’s expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital flows connecting southern fields to northeastern banks. Rothman shows that the domestic slave trade was integral to the rise of interstate commerce, the flow of credit, and the establishment of new transportation routes; he also underscores its systematic cruelty, in which men gloried in rape and casually sold children from parents yet stood as respected members of the community. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.
(Basic Books)
In his new book, To Do Justice: The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes, author Randall Jimerson tells the story of a little known figure who played an important role in the advancement of the civil rights movement in Alabama. Robert E. Hughes, a white Methodist minister and Alabama native, became executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations in 1954. In that role, Hughes developed a friendship with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and faced harassment from white supremacists such as members of the Ku Klan Klan, as well as those members of the Methodist Church who vehemently opposed racial integration. After being forced out of the ministry in Alabama, Hughes moved with his family to colonial Southern Rhodesia – which today is part of Zimbabwe – to work as a missionary. There, he also helped organize Black liberation groups. To Do Justice examines the intersection between race and religion through the life and legacy of Hughes, a man whose faith led him to a lifetime of fighting for justice and racial equality. (University of Alabama Press)
In The Road to Margaret, Birmingham native Lyn Stafford confronts two mysteries: Who murdered her great grandfather, a civil engineer, in an Alabama mine? And, how did Gertrude Bradford, the beloved, Black cook and housekeeper from her childhood, lose one of her hands as a girl? Stafford searches for answers by tracing her father’s English immigrant roots, as well as Gertrude’s Black and Native American background. In telling their stories, and her own, Stafford gives readers a window into Alabama’s history, from the Trail of Tears and the bloody Civil War to the racial violence of the civil rights movement, the rise of labor unions, and the brutal and murderous schemes to suppress workers’ rights in the mining town of Margaret, Alabama and beyond. (Eastern Lake Books)
On December 4, 1947, white men shot Elmore Bolling to death in Lowndes County, Alabama, because he was a successful farmer and businessman, and Black. At the time of the murder, the 39-year-old married father of seven owned a farm and several other enterprises. But in the segregated Jim Crow South, Blacks who achieved business success could become the targets of whites determined to maintain racial supremacy. His “lynching” is the subject of the 2015 book The Penalty for Success, written by his daughter Josephine Bolling McCall. Through interviews with relatives and Lowndes County residents and historical research, McCall traces her family tree, recounts her father’s brutal murder, and describes the efforts made by her family to obtain justice and keep his memory alive. (Self published)
Demopolis native A. G. Gaston was born in 1892, the son of a cook and grandson of former slaves. He rose up from poverty and, with only a 10th grade education, became a multi-millionaire. Gaston launched his first business venture when he sold meals to his fellow coal miners. From there, he built an empire in Birmingham, which included the Booker T. Washington Insurance Co., Citizens Federal Savings Bank, Smith and Gaston Funeral Home, A.G. Gaston Construction Co., and a media company that owned WENN and WAGG. In 1954, he opened the A.G. Gaston Motel, which gave Black travelers, including civil rights leaders, a place to stay when white-owned hotels refused to accommodate Black patrons. At the time of his death in 1996, Gaston’s fortune had reached more than $130 million, making him one of the richest Black men in the United States. In Black Titan, Gaston’s niece, journalist Carol Jenkins, and her daughter, Elizabeth Gardner Hines, tell the story of this extraordinary Alabama entrepreneur and philanthropist. (One World)
The Beth El Civil Rights Experience is a multimedia project exploring the intersection of Birmingham’s Jewish and Civil Rights histories. This dynamic community history venture is comprised of original research, programming and educational initiatives and the development of an audio tour and visitor’s site featuring a short film, exhibit and interactive, facilitated experience.
You can learn more about the Beth El Civil Rights Experience by visiting their website or get in touch by emailing Margaret Norman.
The Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama (HICA) is a community development and advocacy organization that champions economic equality, civic engagement, and social justice for Latino and immigrant families in Alabama. HICA was created in 1999 to address concerns relating to healthcare access, education, economic development, legal issues, and community outreach for immigrant Latinos.
The UUCB Justice Committee provides leadership for the social justice concerns of the church, metro area, state, nation, and the global community.
As a former Birmingham police officer and long-time resident of Birmingham, T.K. Thorne has a unique perspective on Alabama’s largest city, which is still known by many for its central role in the Civil Rights campaign against segregation in the 1960s. In Behind the Magic Curtain – a reference to Birmingham’s nickname of “The Magic City,” which was earned during a period of remarkable growth in the early 20th century – Thorne peels back the veil of history to show the nuances of how the city shook off the stranglehold of segregationists led in part by Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor not just because of mostly-black civil rights marchers, but also by the progressive action of many white allies working behind the scenes in ways never fully explored. She also sheds light on how law enforcement monitored the Movement, and how journalists covered – or didn’t cover – the significant news story that would make Birmingham notorious.
Shelley Stewart’s long and arduous climb to success began at age five. That is the year he witnessed his mother’s murder at the hands of his alcoholic father. Family members shuffled young Shelley from house to house, but when he could no longer stand living with an abusive relative, he ran away at age six. Stewart endured homelessness, racial discrimination and depression, but he overcame those early hardships years later when he found his calling in radio. While working in Birmingham, the popular DJ became known as “Shelley the Playboy.” He also earned the unofficial title as “the voice of the civil rights movement” in the 1960s. During those years he made a practice of playing certain songs and repeating phrases on the air as secret codes that told teen activists where to meet up for protest demonstrations and rallies. In his memoir, The Road South, Stewart recounts his remarkable life, from child abuse survivor to celebrity radio host, entrepreneur and community leader.
(Grand Central Publishing)
In Selma 1965: The March That Changed the South, Charles Fager details one of the most consequential events in the American civil rights movement: the 54-mile, nonviolent protest march, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, from Selma to Alabama’s state capitol in Montgomery. Their aim: To push for equal voting rights for Black Americans. Those joining King included other civil rights leaders, clergy, celebrities, and ordinary citizens of various races. The triumphant march eventually led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law on August 6 of that year. Fager, a former staff member of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, gives readers a comprehensive overview of what happened on that historic, five-day trek for freedom and justice. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)
The book A Walk to Freedom: the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, 1956-1964 tells the story of the civil rights movement in Birmingham led by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). Founded by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the ACMHR came into existence after Alabama banned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from operating in the state. Through speeches, news stories, more than 200 photographs and personal remembrances from those who participated in the demonstrations to end segregation, A Walk to Freedom gives readers insight into the history of the movement as it unfolded in the Magic City in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1963, as tensions in Birmingham between white segregationists and Black civil rights supporters boiled, a bomb exploded at the Sixteen Street Baptist Church on September 15. The blast killed four innocent Black girls and injured other congregants. Soon after the tragedy, Charles Morgan Jr., a young, white attorney stood before members of the all-white Young Men’s Business Club and said that every white person who failed to condemn racism was as guilty as the bombers. He said, “Who did it? Who threw that bomb? The answer should be, ‘We all did it.’” His speech drew the ire of whites, and Morgan and his family eventually left Birmingham for Atlanta where he became a well-respected civil rights attorney. Morgan recalls that turbulent period in his memoir, A Time to Speak, published in 1964. (Harper & Row)
In The Newspaper Boy, attorney and writer Chervis Isom reminisces about his days growing up in Birmingham’s Norwood community, where he delivered newspapers as a boy. Isom grew up believing in the notion that whites like him were superior to Blacks— that is, until he met the new customers on his route, Helen and Vern Miller. The Millers were a young couple from the North and had viewpoints contrary to Isom’s opinions. The three of them began to engage in friendly debates over events in the news, and, over time, Isom started to question the belief system of his upbringing. The Newspaper Boy is a fascinating look at how Isom’s views on race evolved while he lived through some of the most consequential events in modern American history, from the civil rights demonstrations and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (Chervis Isom)
In March 1965, civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo attended the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights. Hours later, while she was giving a ride to another activist, a carload of Ku Klux Klansmen pulled alongside Liuzzo’s vehicle and someone in the car shot and killed her. Liuzzo’s murder made national headlines and law enforcement quickly identified and captured the perpetrators. That is because one of the men in car was Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant. But in The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo, author and historian Gary May gives details from formally undisclosed FBI records and Department of Justice documents to uncover a far more complicated partnership between Rowe, the FBI and the Klan. In addition, May sheds light on the how the FBI was complicit in other attacks on civil rights activists in an effort to keep Rowe’s undercover work a secret. (Yale University Press)
Few books have delved into the role Unitarian and Universalist (UU) members played in the move to end racial discrimination like Southern Witness: Unitarians and Universalists in the Civil Rights Era. Written by author and UU minister Gordon Gibson, the book tells the story of the many UU ministers and laypeople who took extraordinary risks in the fight against Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and 60s. Those individuals include the Rev. Donald Thompson in Jackson, Miss., who was shot and forced out of town by segregationists. In another case, the Ku Klux Klan harassed and firebombed the New Orleans church building and parsonage of the Rev. Albert D’Orlando. Gibson also describes the courage of members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham who helped facilitate the Selma voting rights marches in 1965. Southern Witness is a moving and powerful account of the UU members who dared to speak out against racial intolerance and injustice. (Skinner House Books)
Randall Jimerson and his four siblings moved with their parents from the North to Birmingham in 1961. Their father, the Rev. Norman C. “Jim” Jimerson, was on a mission from the Council on Human Relations to open up lines of communications between blacks and whites in Alabama. He carried out his duties as executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations by traversing the state to develop relationships with black and white ministers and key members of the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Andrew Young, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. Randall Jimerson writes about his father’s career in Shattered Glass in Birmingham. The book details the risks his father took, the many death threats he received, and the day when white clergymen rejected his plea to speak out publically against racism. (LSU Press)
During his lifetime, the Rev. W. Edward Harris was an activist and Unitarian minister who founded the Alabama Civil Liberties Union. He also led voter registration campaigns in Birmingham after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Harris, who was white, examines the contributions other white liberals made to the civil rights movement in his book, Miracle in Birmingham: A Civil Rights Memoir 1954-1965. In it, the author looks back at the tensions in the racially segregated city in the 1950s through 1965 and the bravery of liberal whites who fought alongside Black activists for equal voting rights and the abolishment of racial segregation. (Stonework Press)
Born Black in the segregated South in 1934, Birmingham native Shelley Stewart endured many setbacks in his life. He was five years old when he watched his alcoholic father attack and kill his mother with an axe. Afterward, Stewart and his younger brothers were left to fend for themselves until relatives took them into their homes. But the relatives turned out to be cruel themselves, subjecting the children to both physical abuse and psychological trauma. Stewart, however, survived and overcame the racism around him to eventually launch a successful career in radio. He became a popular radio talk show host and DJ, and, eventually, a station owner. He also founded a public relations firm and earned many awards and accolades. In Mattie C.’s Boy, biographer Don Keith tells the story of Stewart’s inspiring journey and amazing rise from a life of poverty and tragedy to one of triumph and hope. (New South Books)
Paul Hemphill left his hometown of Birmingham as a young man to become a newspaper reporter. He returned almost three decades later in 1992 to live and to reflect on what happened in the city in 1963, one of the most pivotal years in the history of the civil rights movement. In Leaving Birmingham, Hemphill, a former columnist for the Atlanta Journal, delivers a poignant memoir that highlights major historical events in the city such as the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four Black girls, the demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr., and law enforcement’s attacks on nonviolent demonstrators protesting segregation. Hemphill also writes about coming to terms with his past and his own father’s racism while capturing the stories of other longtime Birmingham residents, both black and white. (University of Alabama Press)
The bombing of a Black church in Birmingham that left four young girls dead in 1963 is arguably one of the most pivotal and tragic events in civil rights history. For decades, the perpetrators of that heinous crime remained free. Then in 1995, the FBI reopened the investigation. In Last Chance for Justice, author and retired Birmingham Police Precinct Captain T.K. Thorne gives readers an eye-opening look into the case. The book includes interviews with police detective Ben Herren and FBI Special Agent Bill Fleming. In addition, Thorne pulled together FBI summary reports and internal memos, transcripts from clandestine recordings, and trial transcripts to tell the story of how investigators brought Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry and his cohorts to justice. (Lawrence Hill Books)
In 1965, Detroit resident Viola Liuzzo, a white, married mother of five, traveled to Alabama to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. She never returned home alive. After arriving in Alabama, Liuzzo volunteered to drive demonstrators back and forth between Selma and Montgomery, the state’s capital. On the night of March 25, Liuzzo had dropped off demonstrators in Selma and was driving Leroy Moton, a black civil rights worker, back to Montgomery when a car carrying four Klansmen pulled up alongside her vehicle. Someone in the car fatally shot Liuzzo, making her the first white woman killed in the civil rights movement. In From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo, author Mary Stanton tells the story of Liuzzo’s life, her murder, and why the FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, spread false stories about Liuzzo to divert attention away from an FBI informant who was one of the Klansmen in the car that fateful night. (University of Georgia Press)
The Morgan Project was founded in June 2020 to provide active and meaningful programs that work to eradicate systemic racism, develop a place for citizens to discuss the effects of racism on society, and champion equal justice for all. The group was established in the wake of civil unrest and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and many others, by several members of YMBC, a long-standing civic group in Birmingham who realized that it was time, yet again, to take a stand against racism. The project is named for the late Birmingham attorney Charles Morgan, Jr., who delivered a powerful speech after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, declaring that all of Birmingham’s citizens—not just those who threw the bomb, but also those who had been silent against racism—were guilty of the hateful crime.
The goal of Margins is to uplift and strengthen Black women and their ability to parent. The organization aims to intervene in poverty-stricken familial units and restore hope by providing practical support; this includes but is not limited to bill assistance, avenues for self-care, childcare, activities for children and parents and monetary help.
The Alabama Interfaith Refugee Partnership (ALIRP) is an interfaith group of religious leaders and laypersons, as well as representatives of other community groups, who have come together for the purpose of helping refugees and asylum-seekers, in light of the current migration crisis that has displaced millions of people. ALIRP’s goal is to support refugees and asylum seekers here in Alabama through advocacy, education, and direct support.
The Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama (HICA) is a community development and advocacy organization that champions economic equality, civic engagement, and social justice for Latino and immigrant families in Alabama. HICA was created in 1999 to address concerns relating to healthcare access, education, economic development, legal issues, and community outreach for immigrant Latinos.
The Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (ACIJ) is a grassroots, statewide network of individuals and organizations that works to advance and defend the rights of immigrants in Alabama. ACIJ consists of six non-profit organizations, and hundreds of individual members. The coalition is leading Alabama to a more equitable and just multi-ethnic, multi-lingual future—building a better Alabama for everyone, from the ground up.
The Grassroots Coalition of Birmingham is a collective of local grassroots-minded non-profits, professionals, activists, and community leaders seeking to create and promote a Black Economic Agenda as a form of restorative justice and as one of the first steps in promoting social cohesion in the Birmingham Metro Area. A key goal of the organization is to create a best practices model for elected officials, candidates for upcoming elections, coalition members, and concerned citizens.
Faith in Action Alabama seeks to help create a society free of economic oppression, racism and discrimination, in which every person lives in a safe and healthy environment, is respected and included, and has agency over the decisions that shape their lives. The organization is building a people-powered movement based on the belief that organizing is the best way to address the spiritual and material crises facing our society.
Our Firm Foundation seeks positive change in the community by implementing a multi-generational approach to mentoring, allowing children and their parents and guardians to thrive. The foundation provides courses on social emotional learning (SEL), science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), along with career mentoring to families in Birmingham City Schools.
The People’s Justice Council was founded with a vision to create a just, equitable, sustainable world by connecting people with policy. The organization engages and equips communities with tools to build power from the grassroots up and to fight for justice at the policy level.
The Offender Alumni Association’s mission is to create a network of former offenders who inspire each other to reduce recidivism, develop healthy relationships within their communities, and provide opportunities for social, economic, and civic empowerment.
The Institute for Human Rights serves as a platform for research and education on human rights with a particular focus on the struggle of vulnerable and marginalized populations, including minorities, refugees, women, children, persons with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ community, and people dealing with the consequences of poverty. The IHR’s content-related emphasis is on the social movements associated with human rights—the bottom-up approach and grassroots efforts that lead to empower communities to claim their human rights.
The Jefferson County Committee for Economic Opportunity (JCCEO) seeks to reduce poverty and help low-income citizens of Jefferson County, Alabama to meet critical needs and become self-sufficient.
The Voters Legal Watch Group is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization founded on the principle of securing voter equality and fairness in the legal system. Their mission is to hold our elected officials and political candidates accountable and to fight for fair treatment and justice for all people.
The Black Economic Alliance is a coalition of business leaders and aligned advocates committed to economic progress and prosperity in the Black community, with a specific focus on work, wages, and wealth.
As a boy growing up in Alabama, Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist and Birmingham News journalist John Archibald admired his Methodist minister father. The Rev. Robert L. Archibald, Jr., was the son and grandson of Methodist preachers. He was a good man, a good father and a good and well-liked minister, admired by many. He preached Biblical principles and offered words of inspiration to his flock. But during the civil rights era in the 1960s, as blacks protested racial segregation, fought for the right to vote, and endured violent attacks from white supremacists, the Rev. Archibald was silent. Others had warned Rev. Archibald against preaching about Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement. Doing so would have angered his congregation and led to ostracism, threats or even worse. And with a family to support, much was at stake. In Shaking the Gates of Hell, John Archibald comes to grips with his father’s silence and the complicity many Christian churches had in the systemic racism that civil rights activists fought to end. (Knopf)
Whenever the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., visited Selma, Alabama, he often dropped by the home of Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson. Sullivan Jackson and his wife, Richie Jean, provided succor to the civil rights movement and opened their home to King, where he could strategize with other civil rights leaders such as Andrew Young, John Lewis, and Ralph David Abernathy. In The House by the Side of the Road: The Selma Civil Rights Movement, Richie Jean recalls the meetings that occurred in the months leading up to Bloody Sunday, the fateful March 7, 1965, Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights in which state troopers attacked the marchers. In addition to being a secret meeting place, the Jackson home occasionally served as a respite for MLK, whenever the weary civil rights leader needed rest, sleep, or to get away from it all. (University of Alabama Press)
On a Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, a blast rips through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killing four young black girls. The real-life bombing serves as the backdrop for Birmingham native Sena Jeter Naslund’s novel Four Spirits. The central character is white college student Stella Silver, who after the deaths of the four church girls and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, leaves her world of relative privilege behind to teach a high school equivalency course at Miles College, an HBCU in Fairfield, Alabama, just outside of Birmingham. There she meets colleague Christine Taylor whose impatience with segregation compels her to participate in civil rights work despite being a single mother. Christine’s friend, Gloria Callahan, a young, black musician, manages to overcome her fears to teach at a Freedom School. Four Spirits blends fictional characters of both races with real-life events and civil rights icons for a compelling look at a movement that transformed a nation. (Harper Collins)
Foot Soldiers for Democracy is a collection of the oral histories of 29 ordinary men and women – from teachers and college students to domestic workers, war veterans and a leader with the Black Panthers – who risked their lives to fight for racial equality. While their stories and perspectives are diverse, every narrative illustrates the passion of individuals determined to end segregation, the risks they took, and the fear they overcame in the face of threats of violence from white supremacists, the police, politicians and others bent on maintaining the white power structure. The oral histories are taken from the archives of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Through these stories, historians Horace Huntley and John W. McKerley bring to life the people who helped transform American society. (University of Illinois Press)
In Carry Me Home, investigative journalist and Alabama native Diane McWhorter examines Birmingham’s racial history, the activists who pushed for desegregation and the events leading up to the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four young Black girls. But McWhorter also gives readers an inside look the role the city’s privileged class played during the civil rights era. Specifically, she paints for readers a picture of her life growing up in Mountain Brook, a wealthy Birmingham suburb on what she calls “the wrong side of the revolution.” Her father came from a well-to-do family and joined forces with those opposed to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and his nonviolent demonstrations to end racial segregation. In telling her father’s story, McWhorter gives readers insight into the alliances between the city’s Big Mule elites and the lower-class Klansmen who carried out their wishes, with violent and sometimes deadly results. Carry Me Home won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. (Simon & Schuster)
On March 7, 1965 state troopers in Selma, Ala., brutalized nonviolent protesters bound for Montgomery to advocate for voting rights. Following the horrific attack, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on March 9 issued a call to clergy around the country to come to Alabama and join demonstrators on a second attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery. In his book, Call to Selma: Eighteen Days of Witness, author Richard Leonard recalls what happened when he, a 37-year-old Unitarian minister from New York City, answered the call. Leonard takes readers on a journey as he and other ministers joined King and the civil rights demonstrators on what would become a historic 54-mile march to Alabama’s capital city. (Skinner House Books)
Outside of the city of Birmingham, remarkably few people know the story of Fred Shuttlesworth, the fiery minister who was at the forefront of efforts to desegregate public accommodations from schools to bus terminals and more. Before Martin Luther King came to Birmingham — at Shuttlesworth’s invitation – to lead a campaign for freedom now well known as key to the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth was a thorn in the side of Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, and a frequent target of white supremacist violence, from beatings to bombings. And beyond Shuttlesworth, there were more, many more Birmingham revolutionaries striving to dismantle a system of racial oppression which made Birmingham what King called “the most segregated” city in the country. The book features incisive research by scholars and veterans of the movement brought together to help make the case for the critical importance of the work by the ACMHR – the organization Shuttlesworth formed when Alabama outlawed the NAACP.
Alabama was a battleground state in the struggle for human rights, and in 1963 Birmingham was the beachhead where Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth and an army of freedom fighters made their nonviolent stand against legalized racial segregation. The foot soldiers in that struggle were often women and Birmingham school children who not only risked expulsion but the same punitive action Bull Connor brought on the adults, snarling police dogs, the brutality of powerful water cannons which blasted them down Birmingham’s streets, jailing in inhumane conditions, and systematic injustice at the hands of local officials and white supremacists who acted largely with impunity. While the tragic culmination of that dramatic summer was the terror bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church and the murder of four little girls, many of the foot soldiers stories leading up to that day had not been told. Birmingham Foot Soldiers features the accounts of people who were there – unsung civil rights heroes who in their youth had marched in the Children’s Crusade, slept on hard iron cots in jail and been packed like animals in makeshift cages at Birmingham’s fairgrounds.
Dramatic footage, photographs and news accounts have burned the brutal story of Bloody Sunday into the consciousness of anyone engaged in the human rights struggle. Dramatized in movies that focus on the day Alabama State Troopers and their club-wielding associates mercilessly attacked peaceful Civil Rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, there are still stories to be told by those who were there. Lynda Blackmon (Lowery) and her sister were teenagers among the thousands menaced, tear gassed, beaten but determined to fight for the right to vote in Alabama. Lynda’s perspective – as the youngest person to complete the march from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King, John Lewis and others – gives a rare and raw look at what it was like during the march that took freedom activists from tragedy to triumph. This memoir has earned commendation in literary circles, winning A Sibert Informational Book Medal Honor Book, Kirkus Best Books of 2015, Booklist Editors’ Choice 2015, BCCB Blue Ribbon 2015.
Sarah Collins was the only child who was wounded but survived the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham Alabama in September 1963. The tragic loss of her sister Addie and three other friends led to lifelong injury and trauma that impacted her life even as it shocked the world into the reality of white supremacist hatred in America. In her new book, she takes stock of her life, her survival and puts the Civil Rights Era bombing into context with today’s ongoing racial struggles. Rudolph continues to use her unique vantage point on one of America’s defining moments to seek justice and to make clear in stark terms that there has always been a cost to be paid by those who would fight for freedom.
In 1963, Alabama’s largest newspaper was The Birmingham News, and its reporters and photographers had a ringside seat to the powerfully impactful events unfolding before, during and since the Birmingham Campaign for civil rights. During that year, when the eyes of the nation and beyond were on Birmingham, a huge archive of documentation was collected, and remained in the morgue of the News for decades. In 2012, a year away from the 50th anniversary of the ‘63 struggles, writer Barnett Wright – then a reporter for the News – chronicled the day-to-day stories that captured what had been happening in the city surrounding the protests, demonstrations, arrests, and bombings that would eventually draw national media, federal intervention, international condemnation against the ongoing oppression of black citizens, and eventually, change in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wright’s book offers an unprecedented look into the deep archives of the News, and another important insight into Birmingham’s reality in a year that helped shape the era.
The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.
The goal of the Office of Social Justice and Racial Equity is to create a just and equitable Birmingham. Through advocacy, engagement, and implementation, the office seeks to employ social justice as a core principle in City of Birmingham policies, operations and decision-making.
The Jefferson County Memorial Project is a grassroots coalition composed of more than 35 community partners and a multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-sector, and multi-generational group of committed volunteers. The four goals of the project are to (1) research Jefferson County’s 30 documented racial terror victims and their descendants; (2) educate the public on the importance of this history; (3) place historical markers at lynching sites and retrieve the Jefferson County monument from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice; and (4) advocate for reform where racial injustice still exists in Alabama today.
The Birmingham Urban League, founded in 1967 as part of the National Urban League, is a community-based organization dedicated to empowering communities and changing lives in the areas of education, jobs, housing, and health. The mission of the organization is to enable underserved residents to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights.
Greater Birmingham Ministries (GBM) was founded in 1969 in response to urgent human and justice needs in the greater Birmingham area. BGM is a multi-faith, multi-racial organization that provides emergency services for people in need and engages the poor and the non-poor in systemic change efforts to build a strong, supportive, engaged community and pursue a more just society for all people.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a national movement on the front lines of fighting racial injustice. The Birmingham metro chapter of BLM shares resources that promote racial equality in Birmingham—from educational events to socials to political organizing and more.
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) stands as a national authority on the history of the Civil Rights Movement. BCRI reaches more than 150,000 individuals each year through their programs and services, and the Institute itself brings people from all over the country.
Alabama Arise is a statewide nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of congregations, organizations and individuals united in the belief that people in poverty are suffering because of state policy decisions. Through Alabama Arise, groups and individuals join together to promote policies to improve the lives of Alabamians with low incomes. Arise provides a structure in which Alabamians can engage in public debates to promote the common good.
Dr. Wilson had a 37-year career as a nursing faculty member, retiring in 2015 as Professor Emerita from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Wilson has a long-standing interest in social justice, global health and international nursing. She served as Fulbright Scholar and Specialist in Chile, Zambia, and Malawi, and following her retirement she established a Refugee Interest Group through the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham (UUCB). This group subsequently achieved 501C3 status as a non-profit charitable organization called the Alabama Interfaith Refugee Partnership. Dr. Wilson served on the Planning and Evaluation Committee for the Bending the Arc film project and assisted with preparing grant proposals for this project.
At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Kurata served as chair of the English department, university Director of Core Curriculum Enhancement, and Interim Associate Provost for Undergraduate Programs. Honors include selection as an Outstanding First Year Student Advocate by the National Center for the First Year Experience and Students in Transition, two Difficult Dialogue grants from the Ford Foundation, a Core Commitments grant from the AAC&U, and multiple grants supporting her scholarship in Victorian studies. Her commitment to strengthening town-gown partnerships and promoting diversity are additionally reflected in her 15 years of service on the Alabama Humanities Foundation Board of Directors and 10 years on UAB’s One Great Community council.
Reverend Conrady is the Settled Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham since 2018. The focus of her ministry is on healing religious trauma, making connections with one another and the community at large, and advocating for justice in our institutions and communities. She strives to highlight marginalized voices and to be a better ally. Rev. Conrady is a frequent panelist for social justice conversations, including racial justice, reproductive justice, immigrant justice, and intersectionalities. Before moving to Birmingham, she worked as a hospital chaplain for 6 years, focused on trauma, end-of-life care, and children’s health. When not working, Rev. Conrady is with her family: Josh Flores, educator and stay-at-home dad, children Stark and Ezio, and their black cat, SamIAm.
Holly Hilton is currently the Grants Manager at YWCA Central Alabama. She has had a long career in nonprofit fundraising, including serving as Development Director of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, Major Gifts Manager at The Nature Conservancy of Alabama, and Administrator of the Women’s Fund of Greater Birmingham. A member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham for the past 22 years, she has been a Board member and Secretary of the Board and has served on numerous committees; she is the proud parent of one teenager who is thoroughly enjoying the UUCB youth program. She has helped facilitate production of the Bending the Arc films through fundraising and publicity.
For almost three decades Dr. Weaver was a history instructor at Jefferson State Community College. She says that teaching the Western Civilization sequence, together with her Ph.D. studies, broadened her understanding of the peoples, events, and movements that have shaped the modern world. She continues to draw on that knowledge in an endeavor to make sense of the complex and ever-expanding world in which we find ourselves. For many years she was also the archivist for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham. With input from many local UUs, she compiled a well-received history of the church, published in 2018. Because of the church’s active involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, the events of that on-going struggle necessarily figured prominently in her record of the church’s history. It is in this capacity that she serves on the advisory committee of the Bending the Arc film project.
Virginia Volker is a Birmingham Unitarian who grew up in Sylacauga, Alabama (the home of the Ku Klux Klan) in the 1940s and 1950s and became a lifelong activist in the fight for human rights. Virginia was one of the early white activists in the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham in the 1960s, participating in lunch counter sit-ins and integrated meetings (which were illegal in Alabama at the time). She is the daughter-in-law of Dr. Joseph Volker, who is considered the “father” of the University of Alabama in Birmingham and who facilitated desegregation of UAB’s hospitals and clinics; Dr. Volker was also the founder of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham, which was the first church in the city to open its doors to people of all races, hosting integrated meetings (again, at a time when such meetings were against the law) and promoting racial equality, despite multiple threats to the church and its members.
Antoine and Tanja Bell are both members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham. The couple has been members of the church since 2017, but Tanja has been affiliated for more than 10 years, during which she was heavily involved with the church’s Justice Committee. After serving on the UUCB Board of Trustees, Antoine was elected in 2020 to serve as Board President. He is the first African American president in the history of UUCB. Together, the Bells have served in the church as worship chairs and lay ministers. They also have led workshops on Diversity and Equity and Inclusion. Professionally, Antoine is a veteran communications professional, with a background in broadcast, print, and marketing; he worked in athletics administration for 30 years. He headed up the Athletic Communications Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, as well as serving as Athletic Director. On occasion, he continues to work at athletics events as a consultant. Currently, Antoine works in the College of Continuing Studies at the University of Alabama as the manager of Business Development and College Relations. Meanwhile, Tanja is a land acquisition and compliance professional, managing the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program at the Birmingham Airport Authority. Tanja has also worked as a community organizer for the Alabama Citizens for Constitution Reform. Antoine and Tanja are the owners of a consulting business and are developing a podcast entitled “The Couples Conversation” that will focus on relationship dynamics.
Antoine and Tanja Bell are both members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham. The couple has been members of the church since 2017, but Tanja has been affiliated for more than 10 years, during which she was heavily involved with the church’s Justice Committee. After serving on the UUCB Board of Trustees, Antoine was elected in 2020 to serve as Board President. He is the first African American president in the history of UUCB. Together, the Bells have served in the church as worship chairs and lay ministers. They also have led workshops on Diversity and Equity and Inclusion. Professionally, Antoine is a veteran communications professional, with a background in broadcast, print, and marketing; he worked in athletics administration for 30 years. He headed up the Athletic Communications Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, as well as serving as Athletic Director. On occasion, he continues to work at athletics events as a consultant. Currently, Antoine works in the College of Continuing Studies at the University of Alabama as the manager of Business Development and College Relations. Meanwhile, Tanja is a land acquisition and compliance professional, managing the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program at the Birmingham Airport Authority. Tanja has also worked as a community organizer for the Alabama Citizens for Constitution Reform. Antoine and Tanja are the owners of a consulting business and are developing a podcast entitled “The Couples Conversation” that will focus on relationship dynamics.
Dr. Diane Tucker is a Professor of Psychology and the Founding Director of the Science and Technology Honors Program in the Honors College at University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Tucker grew up in Iowa and moved to Birmingham in 1985 to join the faculty at UAB; she joined the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham in 1995, drawn to the church’s legacy of living its values through the Civil Rights struggle and its continuing commitment to a liberal religious community. Diane is honored to be among the team that has facilitated production of Bending the Arc.
Bending the Arc | The Vote is a film about the hard-fought battle to expand voting rights to all people in Alabama in the 1960s. The film premiered on October 20, 2020 on YouTube.
J Mason Davis grew up in Alabama during segregation and became the first African American partner in a major Birmingham law firm.
Ingrid Kraus is the daughter of Frederick and Anny Kraus, who were leading Jewish activists during the Movement in Birmingham.
Gordon Gibson is a retired Unitarian minister who was heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
Eloise Gaffney was one of the original members of the African American Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights Choir.
Eileen Walbert was a civil rights activist and leading force for integrating the Birmingham schools in the 1950s and 1960s.
Shelley Stewart was one of the first African American radio personalities in Alabama, whose popularity infuriated Bull Connor and other racists.
David Walbert, the son of Birmingham human rights activist Eileen Walbert, participated in interracial activities during the 1950s and 1960s.
Cleopatra Kennedy was one of the original members of the African American Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights Choir.
Charles Jeffries, now deceased, was a Unitarian who was a member of numerous human-rights-focused organizations in Birmingham.
Charles Cleveland became one of several white attorneys who represented African-American clients arrested during protests.
