Politics
Texas attorney Barbara Charline Jordan announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for state representative on February 3, 1962, borrowing the $500 filing fee. Despite a vigorous campaign, she lost, then ran and lost again in 1964. She was finally successful in her 1966 bid for the Texas senate, serving there until 1972. Jordan’s elec-
tion to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972 made her the first African American woman ever elected to that body from the South.
A year and a half later, Jordan became one of the best-known political figures in the country when she served as a member of the judiciary committee debating President Richard Nixon’s impeachment. Her 1976 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention confirmed her reputation as one of the most commanding and articulate public speakers of her era.
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.
Politics
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1817, in Tuckahoe, Maryland. Because his slave mother, Harriet Bailey, used to call him her “little valentine,” he adopted February 14th as his birthday, not knowing the exact date of his birth. He knew very little about his mother since she was employed as a field hand on a plantation some twelve miles away, and she died when he was eight or nine years old. Douglass knew even less about his father, but it was rumored that he was the son of his White slave master, Aaron Anthony.
Young Frederick was grossly mistreated. To keep from starving, on many occasions, he competed with his master’s dogs for table scraps and bones. In 1825, he was sent to serve as a houseboy in the home of Hugh and Sophia Auld in Baltimore. Mrs Auld grew fond of him and sought to teach him to read and write. By the time her irate husband discovered the deed and put a stop to it, Douglass had acquired enough of the rudiments to carry on by himself.
His life in Baltimore was interrupted in 1832, when he was passed along to another master and sent back to Tuckahoe’s brutal, plantation environment. Four years later, Frederick, along with several other slaves, attempted to escape. However, their effort proved unsuccessful when one of the slaves revealed their plan. Viewed as a “bad slave,” Frederick was then sent to a slave breaker who worked and whipped him mercilessly. He endured the mistreatment until one day he could stand it no longer and fought back. Soon thereafter, Fred was again sent to Baltimore, where he met Anna Murray. His love for and encouragement from Anna, a free Black woman, heightened his quest to be a free man. On September 3, 1838, Douglas, dressed in a sailor’s uniform and carrying identification papers provided by a free Black seaman, managed to reach New York City. There he met David Ruggles, an Abolitionist, who sheltered Douglass and assisted him with his wedding plans. Frederick changed his surname from Bailey to Douglass, married Anna Murray, and the couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Douglass began reading the Liberator and frequenting Anti-Slavery meetings, and on one occasion was unexpectedly called upon to speak. In the presence of some of the most prominent Abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and William Collins, Douglass told his story, and he was immediately urged to become an Anti-Slavery lecturer.
His towering, erect posture depicted dignity and strength, and when he spoke, his voice was a rich, powerful baritone. These attributes, when taken together, gave Douglass quite a commanding presence. Yet he provided more than a mere presence. His enunciation and command of the English language armed him with a profound argument, which he reinforced by employing a quick wit and vivid imagery to describe the horror of slavery. So eloquent were his speeches that after a while the public began to wonder if this well-versed man was ever a slave. At the risk of capture, Douglass chose to remove this doubt by publishing an account of his slave experiences, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845. His freedom jeopardized by the detailed documentation presented in his book, Douglass fled to England and remained overseas for two years.
With the financial aid of his European friends, Douglass returned to America, legally secured his freedom, and launched his newspaper, the North Star. Douglass wrote scathing editorials on a variety of topics; slavery was just one of his targets. About the need to remain adamantly concerned about the plight of slaves, he wrote: “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” In an effort to attack job discrimination against Blacks, he wrote, “we need mechanics as well as ministers; we must build as well as live in houses; we must construct bridges as well as pass over them.” He responded to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, by writing that the “true remedy” to the legislation was a “good revolver, a steady hand and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap” a fugitive slave. During this period, Douglass also found time to publish his autobiography, My bondage and My Freedom, in 1855.
Douglass was a man of action, as well. His previous belief in “moral suasion” was becoming dissatisfactory to him, and he began implementing more active ways to show his convictions. He focused attention on Jim Crow laws in the North, by entering public places in which he knew these laws were enforced, sometimes risking physical ejection. He also gave his money to aid fugitive slaves, and used his printing shop in Rochester, New York as an Underground Railroad station. In addition, he became impressed with the radical Abolitionist, John Brown, whose advocacy of revolutionary means to end slavery, intrigued Douglass. However, he decided against joining Brown in his plan to overthrow the government. Still, his involvement with Brown was visible enough that a warrant for Douglass’ arrest was issued after the Harper’s Ferry raid, and Douglass had to again flee; this time, he went to Canada for several months.
