Civil Rights
Raised in abolitionist traditions by his minister father, A. Philip Randolph mirrored those beliefs for more than 60 years as a champion of equal rights. He came to national prominence by organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and achieved the first union contract signed by a white employer and an African American labor leader (in 1937). In 1941 he conceived a march on Washington, DC, to protest exclusion of African American workers from defense jobs. Faced with the public relations threat of 100,000 marchers, President Franklin Roosevelt established the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee. Randolph founded the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, which in 1948 pressured President Harry Truman into ending segregation in the armed forces. Although in later years he became less militant, Randolph was a dedicated socialist from his college days in New York. His lifelong belief in unionism and integration flowed from that philosophy, and he went into action in 1917 by co-founding The Messenger, a weekly magazine of African-American protest, and lecturing across the country. For his outspoken leadership, Randolph’s opponents characterized him as “the most dangerous Negro in America” because of his proven power to create change. He was still the acknowledged patriarch into the early 1970s and into his 80s, after his key role in organizing the historic, 250,000 strong March on Washington in 1963.
Civil Rights
On Feb. 1, 1960 four black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond, took seats at the segregated lunch counter of F. W. Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C. They were refused service and sat peacefully until the store closed. They returned the next day, along with about 25 other students, and their requests were again denied. The Greensboro Four inspired similar sit-ins across the state and by the end of February, such protests were taking place across the South. Finally in July, Woolworth’s integrated all of its stores. The four have become icons of the civil rights movement.
Civil Rights
American nonsectarian agency with headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., established by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers in 1957 to coordinate and assist local organizations working for the full equality of blacks in all aspects of American life. The organization worked primarily in the South and some border states, conducting leadership-training programs, citizen-education projects, and voter-registration drives. The SCLC played a major part in the civil-rights march on Washington, D.C., in 1963 and in antidiscrimination and voter-registration drives, notably at Albany, Ga., and Birmingham and Selma, Ala., in the early 1960s–campaigns that spurred passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After King’s assassination in April 1968, his place as president was taken by the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy. While the SCLC kept its philosophy of nonviolent social change, it soon ceased to mount giant demonstrations and confined itself to smaller campaigns, chiefly in the South. The organization was further weakened by several schisms, including the departure early in 1972 of the Chicago leader, the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, and his followers who had staffed Operation Breadbasket, which was directed at economic goals. Jackson set up a new organization, Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), with similar economic aims.
Civil Rights
(b. Nov. 29, 1908, New Haven, Conn., U.S.–d. April 4, 1972, Miami, Fla.), black American public official and pastor who became a prominent liberal legislator and civil-rights leader.
Powell was the son of the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York City. Brought up in a middle-class home, he received his B.A. from Colgate University (Hamilton, N.Y.) in 1930 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1932. He succeeded his father as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1937 and eventually built up its membership to 13,000 people. With the church as his power base, Powell was able to build a formidable public following in Harlem through his crusades for jobs and housing for the poor. He won election to the New York City Council in 1941, becoming the first black man to serve on that body. In 1945 he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from Harlem. There he began a long fight against racial segregation. He served 11 successive terms in the House and became chairman of its Education and Labor Committee in 1960. In that capacity he played a leading role in the passage of a minimum wage act, antipoverty acts, and bills supporting manpower training and federal aid to education, about 50 major pieces of social legislation in all.
Powell’s outspoken opposition to racism and his flamboyant lifestyle made him enemies, however, and in the early 1960s he became involved in a lawsuit with a woman who claimed he had wrongly accused her of collecting police graft. He was cited for contempt of court in 1966 for refusing to pay damages, and in 1967 the House voted to deprive him of his seat. He was nevertheless reelected in his district in 1968 but was then deprived by his colleagues in the House of his committee chairmanship and his seniority. In 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the action of the House in depriving him of his seat had been unconstitutional, but by that time Powell’s health was failing. After his defeat in the Democratic primary election of 1970, he resigned as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1971 and retired to the island of Bimini in The Bahamas
Civil Rights
Benjamin L. Hooks became the first black criminal court judge in Tennessee in 1965. b. Memphis, Tenn. In 1972 President Nixon named Hooks, a lawyer and Baptist minister, to the Federal Communications Commission, making him its first black member. From 1977 to 1993 he was the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Civil Rights
HUEY PERCY NEWTON (b. Feb. 17, 1942, New Orleans, La., U.S.–d. Aug. 22, 1989, Oakland, Calif.), American political activist, cofounder (with Bobby Seale) of the Black Panther Party (originally called Black Panther Party for Self-Defense).
An illiterate high-school graduate, Newton taught himself how to read before attending Merritt College in Oakland and the San Francisco School of Law, where he met Seale. In Oakland in 1966 they formed the Black Panther group in response to incidents of alleged police brutality and racism and as an illustration of the need for black self-reliance. At the height of its popularity during the late 1960s, the party had 2,000 members in chapters in several cities.
In 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of a police officer, but his conviction was overturned 22 months later, and he was released from prison. In 1971 he announced that the party would adopt a nonviolent manifesto and dedicate itself to providing social services to the black community. In 1974 he was accused of another murder and fled to Cuba for three years before returning to face charges; two trials resulted in hung juries.
Newton received a Ph.D. in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz (1980); his dissertation, “War Against the Panthers,” was subtitled “A Study of Repression in America.” Succumbing to factionalism and pressure from government agencies, the party disbanded in 1982. In March 1989 Newton was sentenced to a six-month jail term for misappropriating public funds intended for a Panther-founded Oakland school. In August of that year he was found shot dead on a street in Oakland.
