Politics
b. 1926
Born in Cedros, Trinidad, Mervyn Dymally emigrated to the United States in 1946 to study at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in education from California State University in 1954 and began teaching school in Los Angeles.
Subsequently, he began a political career and became the first black elected to the California senate, the only black to serve as lieutenant governor of the state (1975), and the first foreign-born black to serve in Congress (1980). Dymally defeated four other candidates to win the primary in California’s Thirty-First Congressional District.
From 1987 to 1989, he was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Today, Dymally heads an international consulting firm in Los Angeles.
Politics
(b. July 2, 1925, Decatur, Miss., U.S.–d. June 12, 1963, Philadelphia, Miss.), American black civil-rights activist, whose murder received national attention and made him a martyr to the cause of the Civil Rights Movement.
Evers served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Afterward he and his elder brother, Charles Evers, both graduated from Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University, Lorman, Miss.) in 1950. They settled in Philadelphia, Miss., and engaged in various business pursuits–Medgar was an insurance salesman, and Charles operated a restaurant, a gas station, and other enterprises–and at the same time began organizing local affiliates of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They worked quietly at first, slowly building a base of support; in 1954 Medgar moved to Jackson to become the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. He traveled throughout the state recruiting members and organizing voter-registration drives and economic boycotts.
During the early 1960s the increased tempo of civil-rights activities in the South created high and constant tensions, and in Mississippi conditions were often at the breaking point. On June 12, 1963, a few hours after President John F. Kennedy had made an extraordinary broadcast to the nation on the subject of civil rights, Medgar Evers was shot and killed in an ambush in front of his home. The murder made Evers, until then a hardworking and effective but relatively obscure figure outside Mississippi, a nationally known figure. He was buried with full military honours in Arlington National Cemetery and awarded the 1963 Spingarn Medal of the NAACP.
Charles Evers immediately requested and was granted appointment by the NAACP to his brother’s position in Mississippi, and afterward he became a major political figure in the state.
Byron de La Beckwith, a white segregationist, was charged with the murder. He was set free in 1964 after two trials resulted in hung juries but was convicted in a third trial held in 1994.
Politics
The interracial organization was created to work for the abolition of segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation; to oppose racism; and to ensure blacks their constitutional rights. The NAACP was created in 1909 with the merging of the Niagara Movement, a group of young blacks led by W.E.B. Du Bois, and a group of concerned whites.
Since its founding, the NAACP has been most successful in the areas of legal redress. Other areas of activity have included political action to secure enactment of civil-rights laws, programs of education and public information to win popular support, and direct action to achieve specific goals. In 1939 the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund was established independently of the NAACP to act as the legal arm of the Civil Rights Movement, and it was the NAACP’s legal council that carried to the Supreme Court the case (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka) that resulted in the high court’s 1954 school-desegregation decision. The organization moved its headquarters from New York City to Baltimore in 1986.
Politics
1822 ? 1901
A U.S. clergyman, educator, and politician, Revels was the first black senator, serving from 1870?71.
Politics
1893 ? 1955
b. Atlanta, Ga., grad. Atlanta Univ., 1916. From 1931 until his death he was secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and tirelessly fought against racial discrimination and violence in the United States. He served on several government commissions. White’s defense of African-American rights is vividly recorded in his autobiography, A Man Called White (1948). His works include Fire in the Flint (1924), Flight (1926), Rope and Faggot (1929), Rising Wind (1945), and How Far the Promised Land (published posthumously in 1955).
Politics
1935 ? 1998
b. Wabbaseka, Ark. Growing up in Los Angeles, he spent much of 1954?66 in prison for various crimes including rape. In 1966 he joined the staff of Ramparts magazine, and soon became a member of the Black Panthers. In 1968 his book Soul on Ice made him famous. The next year, fleeing arrest following a Panther shootout with Oakland (Calif.) police, he began a period of exile in Cuba, Algeria, and other points, during which he broke with the Panthers. After his return to the United States in 1975, he espoused a wide, even bizarre, range of political, religious, and commercial causes.
