By the mid-'70s, many universities were seeking to increase the presence of minority and female faculty and students on their campuses. Birmingham had become a leading focus of the civil rights movement by the spring of 1963, when Martin Luther King was arrested there while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation.While in jail, King wrote a letter to local white ministers justifying his decision not to call off the demonstrations in the face of continued bloodshed at the hands of local law enforcement officials, led by Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor. While much of the South rejoiced, seeing the verdict as a clear victory, antislavery northerners were furious. President Johnson signed it into law the following day. Davis, claiming that his grades and test scores were higher than those of minority students who were admitted and accusing UC Davis of “reverse discrimination.” In June 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and that Bakke should be admitted; on the other hand, it held that institutions of higher education could rightfully use race as a criterion in admissions decisions in order to ensure diversity.In the wake of the Bakke verdict, affirmative action continued to be a controversial and divisive issue, with a growing opposition movement claiming that the so–called “racial playing field” was now equal and that African Americans no longer needed special consideration to overcome their disadvantages. Though the verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory—it was the first time anyone in Mississippi had been convicted for a crime against a civil rights worker—the judge in the case gave out relatively light sentences, and none of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register Black voters in the South. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca that same year and underwent a second conversion, this time to Sunni Islam. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing civil rights and religious leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest. In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful 1956 reelection campaign. Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947; he led the National League in stolen bases that season, earning Rookie of the Year honors. Police cars were set on fire and officers released tear gas to disperse crowds. Many demanded that the unpopular L.A. police chief, Daryl Gates, be fired and that the four officers be brought to justice for their use of excessive force. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its verdict in As the 19th century came to an end and segregation took ever stronger hold in the South, many African Americans saw self-improvement, especially through education, as the single greatest opportunity to escape the indignities they suffered. W.E.B.
no comments yet. To satisfy the labor needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labor source: enslaved Africans. Congress Slave family picking cotton in the fields near Savannah, circa 1860s.Around the same time, the mechanization of spinning and weaving had revolutionized the textile industry in England, and the demand for American cotton soon became insatiable. Its organizer, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had called for “a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired Black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement.” Farrakhan, who had asserted control over the Nation of Islam (commonly known as the Black Muslims) in the late 1970s and reasserted its original principles of Black separatism, may have been an incendiary figure, but the idea behind the Million Man March was one most Black—and many white—people could get behind.The march was intended to bring about a kind of spiritual renewal among Black men, and to instill them with a sense of solidarity and of personal responsibility to improve their own condition. “There can’t be liberation for half a race,” declared Margaret Sloan, one of the women behind the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973. Though the Union victory had given some 4 million slaves their freedom, the question of Amid the harsh repression of slavery, Americans of African descent, and particularly black women, managed–sometimes at their own peril–to preserve the culture of their ancestry and articulate both their struggles and hopes in their own words and images. After 1619, when a Many northern states had abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, but the institution was absolutely vital to the South, where Black people constituted a large minority of the population and the economy relied on the production of crops like tobacco and cotton. In the same time period, the number of Black people serving in Congress increased from six to about 40.Children and members of the Black Panthers give the Black Power salute outside of their "liberation school" in San Francisco, California in 1969.After the heady rush of the civil rights movement’s first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality—social, economic and political—still eluded them. In 1926, a controversial bestseller about Harlem life by the white novelist Carl von Vechten exemplified the attitude of many white urban sophisticates, who looked to Black culture as a window into a more “primitive” and “vital” way of life. Be the first to … “Today is a spark of hope and a watershed moment for Black women and women of color,” said Aimee Allison, Founder of She the People, an organization dedicated to mobilizing women of color. It went to George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in the general election.The outspoken Chisholm, who attracted little support among African–American men during her presidential campaign, later told the press: “I’ve always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black.