Black folks they didnāt teach us about in school, days 6, 7, and 8
(Iāve missed a few days now, so to play catchup, I wanted to make a longer post highlighting three key women of the Civil Rights Movement and American political scene whose names didnāt appear in any of my history books growing up.)
One thing that doesĀ make it into every history curriculum at predominantly white schools is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.āsĀ āI Have a Dreamā speech. Itās an important one, certainly; itās probably also the one most likely to be cherry-picked by your white Facebook friends when they post about how anxious black protestors make them.Ā
Still, when it isnāt whitewashed and stripped of context, Dr. Kingās speech is an important one. What you may not have knownāI certainly didnāt until I started this projectāis that the person behind the the speechās title and central theme was a woman named Prathia Hall.
Ms. Hall was an activist of the first degree. She began her social justice work as a high school student, volunteering with Fellowship House in Philadelphia; by the time she graduated from Temple University, she had been arrested and jailed for two weeks for protesting segregation on Marylandās eastern shore.
She was an active member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, becoming one of the first female field organizers in Georgia. Her treatment at the hands of law enforcement certainly didnāt get better, either, as she was shot at by police and jailed repeatedly for her work.
In 1962, she traveled to Terrell County, Georgia, to attend a service for the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, which had been burned to the ground by the KKK. Dr. King was also in attendance. As Ms. Hall led those assembled in prayer, she repeatedly invoked the words that would later be made famous by King:Ā āI have a dream.āĀ
Hallās words and influence didnāt end there. She was the only woman sent by the SNCC to Selma in the wake of Bloody Sunday; she described her experiences thus:
It was a very traumatic time for me. When we got there we saw what had happened. It was a bloody mess; peopleās heads had been beaten; theyād been gassed. Of course we held a rally. At the meeting people were angry; they, too, had been traumatizedā¦These were people who were struggling to be nonviolent, who in their hearts and spirits were not a violent people, but they also had notions of self-defense.
It takes individuals with a keen understanding of history, of the past, to work diligently towards a better future. Clara Luper was one such person, from a young age until her death in 2011.
Ms. Luper was the first black student to enroll in the history department at the University of Oklahoma, from which she earned her masterās degree in 1951. From that time forward, she fought to correct the wrongs of the past and create a better future for African-Americans. In fighting to end segregation in Oklahoma, she was jailed twenty-six times, mostly stemming from her organization of and participation in lunch counter sit-ins with her students, her children, and other members of the CRM.Ā
Ms. Luper marched with Dr. King in D.C. and Selma, receiving a gash on her leg during Bloody Sunday. Understanding the intersection of racial and socioeconomic discrimination, she organized the Oklahoma City Sanitation Strike of 1969. She was a history teacher, a playwright, an NAACP Youth Council coordinator, and so much more.Ā
1968 was a major year in America for a whole host of reasons. Not least of these was the start of a political career whose repercussions are still being felt today, in a world where Barack Obama is president and Hillary Clinton is a contender for that office.
It was in 1968 that Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the United States Congress. She had a masterās degree in education, and left an influential teaching career to run for office. She served seven terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Her first assignment, to the relatively apolitical House Forestry Committee, was not nearly enough for Ms. Chisholm, and she demanded reassignment. She got it.
In 1972, Ms. Chisholm announced her candidacy for the United States presidency. This made her the first major-party African-American presidential candidate in history, as well as making her the first woman to run for president as a Democrat. It will perhaps come as no surprise that the sexist vitriol she faced in that capacity was almost as vocal as the racist kind.
Lest there be any doubt that Ms. Chisholm wasnāt the kind of politician or orator to pull punches, she once said,
Our representative democracy is not working, because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.
Filed under Black History Month.Ā