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.
Sports
1856-1896
Called by racing experts the “greatest jockey in the history of the sport,” Isaac Murphy dedicated his life to elevating the sport of horse racing to an art form. Murphy won his first race on Glentina at age fifteen, and in 1884 he won his first Kentucky Derby on Buchanan, owned by William Bird, an African American.
A second Derby victory on Riley in 1890 and a historic third win on Kingman in 1891 made Murphy the first jockey to ride winning mounts in the Derby three times and the first to win the prestigious race for two consecutive years.
A winning jockey in other major racing venues as well, Murphy rode the winners from 1884 to 1886 and in 1888 at the American Derby. At Saratoga he won forty-nine of fifty-one races in 1892. His career win-loss record was an incredible 628 out of 1,412 starts.
Sports
Jackie Robinson is a legendary figure and his name is now synonymous with the desegregation and redefinition of professional sports. Yet, our collective knowledge of the historical process that created this American icon, has been reduced to an occasional “color commentary.”
Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey are forever linked in American history. Rickey understood the psyche of white America. While Rickey’s motives are still unclear, history has proven that his “great experiment” to integrate baseball, ultimately had less to do with baseball and more to do with challenging deep seated attitudes about race.
The process had to be systematic, and Jackie Robinson not only had to have all the required physical and emotional assets, he had to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices.
Sam Lacy, The AFRO-American’s sports editor from 1944 through the present, confirms that while Jackie Robinson was not the most talented black player in the Negro Leagues, he was the best choice for integrating the Major Leagues. Like Rickey, Mr. Lacy believed that Jackie’s early experiences playing and working with whites at UCLA and in the Army gave him an understanding many other black players did not have, as most had only lived and played in segregated arenas.
Those early experiences showed Jackie that in America race was the issue that defined the opportunities available to blacks. From his earliest experiences with his family in Pasadena, California, he quickly learned that he had to actively respond to racist ignorance.
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But, from his first game with the Montreal Royals in April 1946, until the 1949 season, Jackie was forced to passively respond to racist taunts and threats. In fact, the required silence was his most difficult sacrifice, as it went against how he had chosen to live his life.
When he was free to speak out, it became clear that he had his own athletic and political agenda to pursue. Throughout the whole experience, especially in his final years in baseball he used his athletic stature and popularity, to turn society’s focus towards humanity and equality for blacks and whites.
Today with the dominance of black players in professional sports, it seems unfathomable that just under 50 years ago not only were black athletes absent in all mainstream sporting arenas, it was simply not an option and even illegal in some states.
Robinson is heroic, in part, because of the excellence of his athletic achievement; and equally important, for his political commitment to racial equality. He reaffirms for blacks in America that ours is a history of struggle, survival and accomplishment.
Slavery
A 15-year-old powderboy who, upon his ship’s capture, declined an offer from the captain’s son to escape to England to live as an aristocrat, saying “I am… a prisoner for the liberties of my country. I never, never shall prove a traitor to her interests!” Sentenced to a notorious slave ship, Forten again denied escape for himself, allowing a younger fellow prisoner to take his place hiding in the clothing chest of a departing officer.
Inventions
Jan Ernst Matzeliger (1852-1889) was born in Paramaribo, Surinam (Dutch Guiana), South America. His father was a Dutch engineer who married a native Black Surinamese woman. At the age of ten, young Jan worked in the machine shops supervised by his father, where his talents and mechanical aptitude was nurtured. In 1871, at the age of 19, he sailed the world and settled in Philadelphia 2 years later.
Hearing about the rapid growth of the shoe industry in Massachusetts, Matzeliger went to Lynn in 1877 in search of a better job. Since he seas a Black foreigner who spoke very little English. he had trouble finding employment. A determined young man, he quickly learned the English language.
He eventually landed a job as an apprentice in a shoe factory operating various shoe making machinery during time when most white people would look down on him because of his Black ancestry, he did manage to make a few friends in town. He was a devout Christian, teaching Sunday School at The North Congregational Church, one of the few churches in the area that would accept Blacks.
In the early days of shoe making, shoes were made mainly by hand. For proper fit, the customer’s feet had to be duplicated in size and form by creating a stone or wooden mold called a “last” from which the shoes were sized and shaped. Since the greatest difficulty in shoe making was the actual assembly of the soles to the upper shoe, it required great skill to tack and sew the two components together. It was thought that such intricate work could only be done by skilled human hands. As a result, shoe lasters held great power over the shoe industry. They would hold work stop-pages without regard for their fellow workers’ desires, resulting in long periods of unemployment for them.
Matzelinger set out to try to solve the problem of this strangle-hold by developing an automatic method for lasting shoes. It took many years and much sacrifice before he came up with a prototype that was successful. Matzeliger’s machine was able to turn out from 150 to 700 pairs of shoes a day versus an expert hand lasters fifty.
By 1889 the demand of the shoe lasting machine was overwhelming. A company was formed, The Consolidated Lasting Machine Company, where Matzelinger was given huge blocks of stock for his invention. His machine had revolutionized the entire shoe industry in the U.S . and around the world.
Unfortunately, Jan Matzelinger didn’t live to see the fruits of his labor. Because he had sacrificed his health working exhausting hours on his invention and not eating over long periods of time, he caught a cold which quickly developed into tuberculosis. He died at age 37 on August 24, 1887.
Jan Ernst Matzeliger’s invention was perhaps “the most important invention for New England.” His invention was “the greatest forward step in the shoe industry,” according to the church bulletin of The First Church of Christ (the same church that took him as a member) as part of a commemoration held in 1967 in his honor. Yet, because of the color of his skin, he was not mentioned in the history books until recently.
Sports
World record-holder Jesse Owens had one qualifying jump left at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. He had fouled on four of his first five tries. And he was angry because Nazi ruler Adolf Hitler, with his misguided notions of Aryan supremacy, had just delivered an insult by departing from the stadium as Owens began his jumps. Suddenly, quietly, his chief rival, German long jumper Luz Long, said to Owens, “…remeasure your steps… take off six inches behind the foul board.” Thus was an unlikely friendship born between an African-American and a German. And thus was Jesse Owens inspired to capture an unprecedented four Olympic gold medals with record performances in the long jump, the 100- and 200-meter dashes, and the 400-meter relay. Positive experiences such as the Olympic Games revelation by Luz, seemed to balance the racial-prejudice negatives in Jesse Owens’ life as an African American, leading too his moderate ideology and his admiration of the principles and practices of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Owens parlayed his international track-star reputation into jobs helping his people–such as national director of physical education for African-Americans with the Office of Civilian Defense (1940-42), which he called”the most gratifying work I’ve ever done.”” But for all his desire to help others, Jesse Owens was largely a self-made man. A frail,, sickly child, he developed into a strong runner, winning national high school titles inn three events. Dozens of colleges pursued Owens, but he chose to go to Ohio State,, where he had to work his way through school. Owens stunned the nation in 1935 when he set three world records and equaled another in one day, running a 20.3-second 220-yard dash, 22.6 in the 220-yard low hurdles, a record-tying 9.4-second 100 yard dash, and long-jumping 26′-8-1/4… a mark that was not surpassed for 25 years.. And amid all his deserved adulation, Jesse Owens maintained his perspective. “Life,”” he said, “is the real Olympics.”
