The 29 men in attendance set forth a platform that demanded freedom of speech and criticism; a free press; manhood suffrage; abolition of all caste distinctions based on race or color; recognition of the principle of human brotherhood; belief in the dignity of labor; and a united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership.

Niagara Movement Founders, 1905. Top row (left to right): H. A. Thompson, Alonzo F. Herndon, John Hope, James R. L. Diggs (?). Second row (left to right): Frederick McGhee, Norris B. Herndon (boy), J. Max Barber, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Bonner. Bottom row (left to right): Henry L. Bailey, Clement G. Morgan, W. H. H. Hart, B. S. Smith. Reproduction. Detail. Courtesy of the W.E.B Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts. 

The organization they formed, the Niagara Movement, met annually until 1910. It was one of the organizations that paved the way for the formation of the NAACP.

Recommended background reading: Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915.

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Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the re-enfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South—and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere.

But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780807854549 | University of North Carolina Press

A jazz opera, based on the story in Civil Rights Unionism, has been produced by Steve Jones and Elise Bryant. It is called Love Songs from the Liberation Wars: The 1940s Tobacco Workers Struggle. Watch the trailer below and contact the Labor Heritage Foundation if you have any leads on funding for this beautiful, educational performance.

The post Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Ella Baker, born Dec. 13, 1903 and died Dec. 13, 1986, was a civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s whose career spanned more than five decades. She was instrumental in the launch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Ella Baker in Atlantic City, 1964. By George Ballis. Source: Creative Commons

In the article Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement, Barbara Ransby states,

Baker represented a different leadership tradition altogether. She combined the generic concept of leadership — “A process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task” — and a confidence in the wisdom of ordinary people to define their problems and imagine solution. Baker helped everyday people channel and congeal their collective power to resist oppression and fight for sustainable, transformative change.

The best book to read about Baker is Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby (UNC Press, 2005). Read the full introduction online.

A portrait of Ella Baker by Robert Shetterly can be ordered from Americans Who Tell the Truth for $20. The quote at the opening of this post is on the portrait.

A marker was recently installed on Church Street in Norfolk for Ella Baker. Our thanks to Norfolk resident Michael Knepler for alerting us and sending the photo.

A beautiful painting of Ella Baker was featured at the Poor People’s Campaign rally in Washington, D.C. on June 23, 2018.

Portrait of Ella Baker by Phoebe Rotter of Black Lives Matter Greater Burlington. Photo of banner at Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C., June 23, 2018.

Find lessons and other resources below for teaching about SNCC.

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Slavery by Another Name

Based on Blackmon’s research and book of the same title, Slavery by Another Name spans eight decades, from 1865 to 1945, revealing the interlocking forces in both the South and the North that enabled this “neoslavery” to begin and persist.  Using archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments filmed on location in Alabama and Georgia, it tells the forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants living today.  The program also features interviews with Douglas Blackmon and with leading scholars of this period. [Description from PBS.]

Directed by Sam Pollard, produced by Catherine Allan and Douglas Blackmon, written by Sheila Curran Bernard, based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Blackmon.

Trailer

Slavery by Another Name: Author Douglas Blackmon on the Re-Enslavement of Black People in America | Democracy Now! | July 11, 2008

Learn more in the Zinn Education Project national report, “Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction,” and find teaching resources on Reconstruction below.

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Full of photos and primary documents, Fannie Never Flinched puts Sellins’ story in the context of the struggles of workers and the labor movement during the “Gilded Age.” As Farrell, a skilled and engaging nonfiction writer, explains in the author’s note, during the research for the book she realized that the murder of Sellins is part of a much larger pattern of violence against working people. [Review by Rethinking Schools.]

Fannie Sellins (1872-1919) lived during the Gilded Age of American Industrialization, when the Carnegies and Morgans wore jewels while their laborers wore rags. Fannie dreamed that America could achieve its ideals of equality and justice for all, and she sacrificed her life to help that dream come true. Fannie became a union activist, helping to create St. Louis, Missouri, Local 67 of the United Garment Workers of America.

In 1913, she moved to begin work for the mine workers union in West Virginia. She traveled the nation and eventually gave her life, calling for fair wages and decent working and living conditions for workers in both the garment and mining industries. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781419718847  | Abram Books

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Mixed media portrait of Nicolás Guillén. © Erin Currier.

Nicolás Guillén, Cuban poet of social protest and a leader of the Afro-Cuban movement in the late 1920s and ’30s, was born on July 10, 1902.

In 1929, Guillén interviewed Langston Hughes in Havana and they became lifelong friends. In 1930, Guillén created an international stir with the publication of Motivios de Son, eight short poems inspired by the son, a popular Afro-Cuban musical form, and the daily living conditions of Cuban blacks. Composed in Afro-Cuban vernacular, the collection separated itself from the Spanish literary canon and established Black culture as a legitimate focus of Cuban literature.

Carmen Gomez Garcia wrote about Guillén’s poetry on race. She explained,

Guillén did not write in generalities when he wrote of racism but focused on specific indignities with which each human spirit could identify. The “Elegía a Jesús Menéndez,” in addition to stanzas that allude to the horrors of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and lynching, also refers to the Martinsville Seven in a fragment of beautiful and poetic prose. The Martinsville (Virginia) Seven were seven young black men who were accused in 1949 of raping a white woman. After a very public trial, they were convicted and sentenced to death. Unlike the Scottsboro case, these young men were indeed executed in the first week of February 1951.

Siete voces negras en Martinsville llaman siete veces a Jesús por su nombre y le piden en siete gritos de rabia, como siete lanzas, le piden en Martinsville, en siete golpes de azufre, come siete piedras volcánicas, le piden siete veces venganza.

Seven black voices in Martinsville call seven times to Jesus by name and they ask him in seven cries of rage, like seven lances, they ask in Martinsville, in seven strikes of sulphur, like seven volcanic rocks, they ask seven times for revenge.

Our thanks to artist Erin Currier for permission to post the mixed media portrait of Nicolas Guillen.

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Backstage, (L-R) Ben Katz and jazzmen Sandy Williams, Sidney Bechet, Mezz Mezzerow, and Bob Wilbur.

Historian William Loren Katz shares memories of his father, labor and cultural activist Ben Katz (October 13, 1902–June 15, 1970). 

My father, Ben Katz, fell in love with African American blues and jazz music. He first had a large 78-rpm record collection, and then a large collection of African American history books and pictures.

I had to be one of the few white kids in the world who went to sleep listening to Bessie Smith, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong, and woke up surrounded by the writings of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and E. Franklin Frazier.

As he volunteered for a host of good fights, he took me as a school kid:

• to the strike headquarters of longshoremen and Popeye cartoon artists in the 1930s;
• to New York’s Schomburg Library and its treasure of African American history;
• to meet legendary jazzman Bunk Johnson (who helped teach Louis Armstrong trumpet) in 1946;
• to meet the masterful Sidney Bechet, James P. Johnson, “father of stride piano,” and a niece of Bessie Smith in our living room in 1947 and 1948; and,
• to hear Louis Armstrong at his 1947 Carnegie Hall concert and Billie Holiday at a Harlem night club.

Katz helped raise funds for the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America (UNAVA) by organizing “Really the Blues” and “Bessie Smith Memorial” concerts at Town Hall. I was there.

Katz and his best friends, Ernest Crichlow and Walter Christmas, joined with Charles White, Alice Childress, and others to help found the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA) that sought to crack the color line in theater, radio, advertising, publishing, dance, classical music, etc.

(L-R) Walter Christmas, Ruth Jett, Charles White, Janet Collins, Frank Silvera, Viola Scott, and Ernest Crichlow.

With Christmas, Katz wrote “Lift Every Voice Poetry Production,” a Black history play performed in the Schomburg Library basement starring William Marshall, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Frank Silvera, and Alice Childress.

– – – – – – – – –

Thanks, Dad — especially for bringing Ernie and Walter into my life, and pointing me in the right direction.

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The school principal, James Weldon Johnson, wrote the words and Johnson’s brother Rosamond set them to music. The children continued to sing the song, popularizing it for generations to come.

Later, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) adopted the song as the Black National Anthem.

In calling for earth and heaven to “ring with the harmonies of Liberty,” the lyrics spoke out subtly against racism and Jim Crow laws — and especially the huge number of lynchings accompanying the rise of the Klan at the turn of the century.

Sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett.

By the 1920s, copies of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” could be found in Black churches across the country, often pasted into the hymnals. The words to the poem/song and another poem by Johnson can be read on the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website.

The children’s book about the song featured on this page has an introduction by Jim Haskins and art by Elizabeth Catlett. Catlett grew up in Washington, D.C. and lived in Mexico. Her own life story is well worth reading, including being confronted by McCarthyism. “Happy 95th Birthday, Elizabeth Catlett!” (2010) in The Root describes her work as a noted sculptor and printmaker.

Learn about the history of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (UNC Press, 2018) by Imani Perry.

Comments

This annual #tdih post solicits stories from people about “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in their lives. Here are a few from our Facebook page.

Lynn Manfredi: I love this song. It was the first of many lessons I received from coworkers who helped me understand the African-American culture when I taught kindergarten at the Central Presbyterian Child Development Center in downtown Atlanta. Children and staff were mixed, racially and economically, which was highly innovative in 1979. We sang this song every day as we worked to become part of Dr. King’s beloved community.

Michele Hall Robertson: I remember singing this each day in my westside Chicago Public School, way back in the late 60s and early 70s. My 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Gravier, who just happened to be white, taught it to us and sang just as loudly as us kids. She told us it was the Black National Anthem “but people of all colors should celebrate this song and each other.” I’ll never forget her. It gave me chills and pride then and now. #PowerToAllPeople #Liberty

The Harp

In 1937, sculptor Augusta Savage was commissioned by the World’s Fair to create what would become “The Harp.” For a work to commemorate and symbolize the musical contributions of African Americans, she chose as her inspiration “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Her sculpture was one of the most popular works of art at the Fair; however, the event organizers refused to pay for its transport and it was tragically destroyed after the Fair closed.

Source: NYPL

Read the young adult book, Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life by Marilyn Nelson.

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“Where is our historian to give us our side? To teach our people our own history?” asks Afro-Puerto Rican Arturo Schomburg on the first page of this beautifully illustrated picture book,
Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library.

Schomburg’s 5th-grade teacher had told him “Africa’s sons and daughters had no history, no heroes worth noting.”

Schomburg dedicated his life to ensuring that future generations would learn of Africa and African Americans’ powerful heritage. He set out to write, research, and collect the stories that chronicled the Black history of the Diaspora. Filling every nook and cranny of his family home in Harlem, his collection was eventually donated to the now famous Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

ISBN: 9780763680466 | Candlewick Press

The book is also available in Spanish, Schomburg: El Hombre Que Creó Una Biblioteca.

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Cherry Mine was opened in 1905 and supplied coal for a regional railroad. The miners were mainly immigrants, many of them Italian, who didn’t speak English. On Nov. 13, 1909, a wagon of hay for the mules caught fire in the mine.

W. H. Clelland and family. One of the Cherry Mine survivors. It is this man who was said to have led the miners in song and prayer, and encouraged them. He had the only lead pencil among them and made notes which have been published. Source: Wisconsin Historical Society Archives

Attempts were made to put out the fire, but it spread to the wooden shaft infrastructure. They attempted to cut the oxygen from the mine to stifle the fire, but this led to a proliferation of black damp (a fatal mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen) to build up in the mine.

While over 200 boys and men escaped the mine, 259 died. Twenty-one miners were able to survive against the black damp and fire in the mine for eight days before they were rescued.

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