Military
(b. July 1, 1877, Washington, D.C., U.S.–d. Nov. 26, 1970, North Chicago, Ill.), soldier who became the first black general in the U.S. Army.
After serving as a volunteer in the Spanish-American War (1898), Benjamin Davis, Sr., enlisted as a private in the 9th Cavalry of the U.S. Army. He rose to sergeant major within two years and earned a commission as a second lieutenant in 1901. In the next four decades he served in Liberia and the Philippines and taught military science at the Tuskegee Institute and at Wilberforce University. All of his duty assignments were designed to avoid a situation in which Davis might be put in command of white troops or officers. He rose slowly through the ranks, becoming the first black colonel in the army in 1930. In 1940 he was promoted to brigadier general by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After commanding the 2nd Cavalry Division in 1941, he was assigned to the office of the inspector general of the army. During World War II he headed a special unit charged with safeguarding the status and morale of black soldiers in the army, and he served in the European theatre as a special adviser on race relations. He retired in 1948 after 50 years of service.
Science
Dr. Bernard Harris, Astronaut, Physician, and Businessman. After receiving his diploma from Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Harris began his formal education by earning a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Houston. He obtained his Doctorate of Medicine from Texas Tech University School of Medicine in 1982, and completed a Residency in Internal Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in 1985. In addition, Dr. Harris completed a National Research Council Fellowship in Endocrinology at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1987, and trained as a Flight Surgeon at the Aerospace School of Medicine, Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas in 1988. In 1996, he received a Master of Medical Science from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Morehouse School of Medicine. Dr. Harris earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Houston in 1999. While working on his fellowship at the Ames Research Center in 1986, Dr. Harris conducted research in the field of musculoskeletal physiology and disuse osteoporosis. Later, as Project Manager of the Exercise Countermeasure Project, he conducted clinical investigations of space adaptation and developed countermeasures for extended duration space flight at the Johnson Space Center. In addition, he is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications. Throughout his life, Dr. Harris has received numerous awards and recognition, including election as Fellow of the American College of Physicians. He holds several faculty appointments including, Associate Professor in internal medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch and Assistant Professor at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Harris serves on several federal, state, and corporate boards. He is also a licensed private pilot. Selected by NASA in January 1990, Dr. Harris became an astronaut in July 1991. He was a Mission Specialist on the Space Shuttle Columbia STS-55/Spacelab D-2, (1993), marking the Shuttle’s one year of total flight time. As Payload Commander on the Space Shuttle Discovery STS-63 (1995), the first flight of the joint Russian-American Space Program, Dr. Harris accomplished his childhood dream by completing his first walk in space. A veteran of space for over nine years, he has logged more than 438 hours in space and traveled over 7.2 million miles. In 1996, Dr. Harris became Vice President of SPACEHAB, Inc., where he was involved in business development and marketing of the company’s space-based products and services. He also served as Vice President of Business Development for Space Media, Inc., establishing an international space education program for students. In addition, he is a member of the board of some of the leading technology companies and institutions. Currently, Dr. Harris is President and Founder of the Harris Foundation, which supports math/science education and crime prevention programs for America’s youth. He was the recipient of the 2000 Horatio Alger Award for his accomplishments.
The Arts
Born in 1894, Bessie Smith was the greatest and most influential blues singer of the 20s. With her talent, her excessive personality and her wild ways, she became a huge black cultural symbol. Her enormous success represented triumph over the white domination of the entertainment industry. Her death in 1937 was at the prime of her career. She died after an auto accident that left her too badly injured to recover. The lore surrounding her death at the time was that she was taken to a white hospital and refused treatment, instead letting her bleed to death. Apparently what really happened was that she was taken to a colored hospital where she recieved treatment that included amputation of one arm. She died the next day. Although there were 7,000 people at her funeral, she went without a headstone until one was purchased by Janis Joplin.
Politics
original name BLACK PANTHER PARTY FOR SELF-DEFENSE, American black revolutionary party founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The party’s original purpose was to patrol black ghettoes to protect residents from acts of police brutality. The Panthers eventually developed into a Marxist revolutionary group that called for the arming of all blacks, the exemption of blacks from the draft and from all sanctions of so-called white America, the release of all blacks from jail, and the payment of compensation to blacks for centuries of exploitation by white Americans. At its peak in the late 1960s, Panther membership exceeded 2,000 and the organization operated chapters in several major cities.
Conflicts between Black Panthers and police in the late 1960s and early ’70s led to shoot-outs in California, New York, and Chicago, one of which resulted in Newton’s going to prison for the murder of a patrolman. While some members of the party were guilty of criminal acts, the group was subjected to police harassment that sometimes took the form of violent attacks, prompting congressional investigations of police activities in dealing with the Panthers. By the mid-1970s, having lost many members and having fallen out of favour with many American black leaders, who objected to the party’s methods, the Panthers turned from violence to concentrate on conventional politics and on providing social services in black neighbourhoods. The party was effectively disbanded by the early 1980s.
Politics
b.1856 — d.1915
Born Booker Taliaferro, a slave on a small farm in western Virginia, Washington was nine years old when the Civil War ended. His humble but stern rearing included his working in a salt furnace when he was 10 and serving as a houseboy for a white family where he first learned the virtues of frugality, cleanliness, and personal morality. Washington was educated at Hampton Institute, one of the earliest freedmen’s schools devoted to industrial education (Hampton was the model upon which he later based his institute in Tuskegee). Growing up during Reconstruction and imbued with moral, as opposed to intellectual, training, he came to believe that postwar social uplift had begun at the wrong end: the acquisition of political and civil rights rather than economic self-determination.
The foremost black educator, power broker, and institution builder of his time, Washington, in 1881, founded Tuskegee Institute, a black school in Alabama devoted to industrial and moral education and to the training of public school teachers. From his southern small-town base, he created a national political network of schools, newspapers, and the National Negro Business League (founded in 1901). In response to the age of Jim Crow, Washington offered the doctrine of accommodation, acquiescing in social and political inequality for blacks while training them for economic self-determination in the industrial arts.
Washington’s philosophy and the “Tuskegee machine” won him widespread support among northern white philanthropists as well as acclaim among blacks. In his Atlanta Compromise address, delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, he struck the keynotes of racial accommodationism: “Cast down your buckets where you are,” Washington urged blacks. “In all things that are purely social,” he announced to attentive whites, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” His thoroughly bourgeois, anti-labor, anti-democratic appeal stood for years as an endorsement of segregation. He sustained his power as an educational statesman by some ruthless and duplicitous methods. Rival black newspapers, educators, and thinkers were frequently intimidated by his brand of boss politics. Black newspaper editors and aspiring young intellectuals risked ostracism and unemployment if they embraced political activism rather than Washington’s accommodationist social policy. Such disputes surfaced especially in the famous debate between Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois over the aims of “industrial” as opposed to “classical” education among blacks.
Growing black and white opposition to Washington’s acquiescence in disfranchisement and Jim Crow led to the formation of the Niagara Movement (1905-1909) and the NAACP activist organizations working for civil and political rights as well as against lynching. Ironically, Washington also labored secretly against Jim Crow laws and racial violence, writing letters in code names and protecting blacks from lynch mobs, though these efforts were rarely known in his own time.
Washington was a pragmatist who engaged in deliberate ambiguity in order to sustain white recognition of his leadership. Such visibility won him international fame and the role of black adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. His widely read autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), stands as a classic in the genre of narratives by American self-made men, as well as the prime source for Washington’s social and historical philosophy. His racial philosophy did not long survive his death, but in theory and practice, his views on economic self-reliance have remained one of the deepest strains in Afro-American thought.
