Politics
1900-1989
C. L. Dellums made significant social contributions as a pioneer in the union movement and as a key officer in the California chapter of the NAACP. As a young man, Dellums took a job as a Pullman porter and
soon afterward began speaking out for his rights and those of his fellow portersmuch to the dismay of the Pullman Company.
He was fired for his union activity in 1927. Undaunted, Dellums organized a union for porters on the West Coast. After meeting A. Philip Randolph, Dellums joined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and was elected its national vice president.
In 1940, Dellums and other civil rights leaders organized what would have been the first march on Washingtonbut the march never occurred. The impetus for the march ended when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the defense industry to hire minority workers.
Politics
Robert Seale was born on Oct. 22, 1936, in Dallas, Texas. He was an African-American political activist and co-founder, along with Huey Newton, of the Black Panther Party. He would eventually become the national chairman of the organization. Seale was one of a generation of young African-American radicals who broke away from the traditionally nonviolent Civil Rights Movement to preach a doctrine of militant black empowerment. Following the dismissal of murder charges against him in 1971, Seale somewhat moderated his more militant views and devoted his time to effecting change from within the system.
Seale grew up in Dallas and in California. Following service in the U.S. Air Force, he entered Merritt College, in Oakland, Calif. During his time at Merrit, his political views took root in 1962, when he first heard Malcolm X speak. Seale helped found the Black Panthers in 1966. Noted for their aggressive views, they also ran medical clinics and served free breakfasts to school children, among other programs.
In 1969 Seale was indicted in Chicago for conspiracy to incite riots during the Democratic national convention the previous year. The court refused to allow him to have his choice of lawyer. When Seale repeatedly rose to insist that he was being denied his constitutional right to counsel, the judge ordered him bound and gagged. He was convicted of 16 counts of contempt and sentenced to four years in prison. In 1970-71 he and a co-defendant were tried for the 1969 murder of a Black Panther suspected of being a police informer. The six-month-long trial ended with a hung jury.
Following his release from prison, Seale renounced violence as a means to an end and announced his intention to work within the political process. He ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, finishing second. As the Black Panther Party faded from public view, Seale took on a quieter role, working to improve social services in black neighborhoods and to improve the environment. Seale’s writings include such diverse works as Seize the Time (1970), a history of the Black Panther movement and Barbeque’n with Bobby (1988), a cookbook.
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.
