Tag: black history

Black History Fun Fact Friday – The First Black Public High School

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In 1870, the first Black public High School opened in Washington, D.C. or rather, the first recorded school (Aside from Tuskegee Institute–one of the first schools for African Americans financially sponsored by Blacks and Whites but headed by a Black President, the late Booker T. Washington–I do not believe Dunbar was the first High School just as Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to give up her seat on a bus (LEARN MORE HERE) there is a lot of things that just aren’t recorded.)

The Preparatory High School for Colored Youth (renamed in 1916 to M Street Public School when its location was changed from M Street), was founded in the basement of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church by William Syphak, the first chair of the Board of Trustees of the Colored Public Schools in the District of Columbia. According to Dr. Thomas Sowell in an article (100 Years After Dunbar) in 1899, when it was called “the M Street School,” a test was given in Washington’s four academic public high schools, three white and one Black. The Black High School scored higher than two of the three white High Schools. Of course, this isn’t about color or race but is used as an example to highlight the success of all Black Schooling at that time.

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Blacks during Segregation were more unified considering many of us had to stick together in order to build communities and schools. For this reason, many all-Black communities, as well as all Black schools, did well. There was a communal spirit among blacks during segregation that sadly deteriorated once we were capable of going outside of ourselves.

Before Brown vs. Board of Education, Dunbar acquired only the best teachers, many of them with Ph.Ds. and graduated 80% of its students. Among its students: the architect of school desegregation, Charles Hamilton Houston, Elizabeth Catlett, the artist, Billy Taylor, the jazz musician, the first Black general in the Army, the first Black graduate of the Naval Academy, and the first Black presidential Cabinet member, according to Journalist Alison Stewart, author of First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School as told to NPR host Cornish on All Things Considered.

In addition, many more, including the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. from an American institution, the first Black federal judge, and a doctor who became internationally renowned for his pioneering work in developing the use of blood plasma.

The Downfall of Dunbar

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Source: Courtesy of Chicago Review Press

Unfortunately, like many Black experiences after integration, Dunbar declined. According to Sowell, senior at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University:

“For Washington, the end of racial segregation led to a political compromise, in which all schools became neighborhood schools. Dunbar, which had been accepting outstanding Black students from anywhere in the city, could now accept only students from the rough ghetto neighborhood in which it was located. Virtually overnight, Dunbar became a typical ghetto school. As unmotivated, unruly and disruptive students flooded in, Dunbar teachers began moving out and many retired. More than 80 years of academic excellence simply vanished into thin air.”

I agree with Sowell only to an extent. I do not think that “unruly and disruptive ghetto students” are responsible for the downfall of Dunbar, but rather the decline in Blacks students being taught by Black teachers concerning Black lives and Black history.

I remember a video interview Maya Angelou gave where she testified that her school was “grand” and many others of the era who described their schooling as a positive experience. Though not given the same quality of learning materials, I believe Blacks got a better education before integration. Not merely because of segregation itself, but rather because it forced us to unify in a way that does not exist today.

In short, we were educating our own. Without teachers and faculty who actually understand them, their struggles and experiences, students can find it harder to adjust. In Angelou’s words, “blacks used what the West Africans in Senegal called ‘Sweet Language'” which is still used today. For example:

“Hey, there” is used as opposed to, “Hi, how are you?”

The Hey is drawn out and spoken with a certain tone of familiarity as sweet language is dependent entirely on tone. The way that Angelou spoke herself was in a sort of sweet language where every word, even if she didn’t mean it to, sounded like poetry.

“Hey, how you?”

This is not grammatically correct or what may be referred to as “proper” and it’s not meant to be. It is the lengthening of the word, the dragging it out and using a loving tone of voice, a caring voice: “Hey.” It is something that Blacks have been doing their entire lives without effort and is something that is mostly understood by other Blacks and while deemed sweet language, I call it a language of love.

This is just one example of the kind of History Israelite, so-called Black, children do not learn in today’s schools.

As the Black teachers moved on, so did Black students interest in learning, or so it seems. Over time, at least three more schools would be named after Dunbar: Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore, Maryland, Fort Worth, Texas, and Chicago, IL.

While segregation allowed for inferior educational experiences in some respect (such as torn and used books as opposed to new ones) who is to say that the education itself was inferior? I am more interested in what was being taught behind closed doors. The historical, archaeological, and biblical history of Blacks that I am sure to have never made it in the history books. What really made these students prosper as opposed to the students today?

Dunbar now graduates only 55% of its students according to the 2016 values based on student performance on state exit exams and internationally available exams on college-level coursework, and AP®/IB exams are unranked in the National Rankings. But what do we expect? How do we expect the people who oppress us to also teach us the truth about who we are? If you weren’t being treated right, how do you think that you were taught right?

One thing is for certain, to assume that integration made education for Blacks better is up for debate.

Memories

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Nostalgia’s a nauseating

sickness

like four little girls

still trying to tear down the brick

painted on the sides

of their heads

Pocketbook scriptures still dangling

from underneath

their tongues

like a scorched covenant

under burned fingernails

still trying to get me to

remember

Truth be queasy

like first trimesters

be painful

like birth pains

I heard

a roll of thunder

and laughter more frightening

than decomposed bodies

at the bottom of bi-racial rivers

whispering

like the voice of Emmet

till when?

It asked me.

Before strings of voices erupted from some place

beyond the banks of the James River

from someplace before William Lynch’s arrival

somewhere marchin

stomping on my roots

somewhere printed on the back

of the forbidden fruit, I still

got between my teeth

a string of voices

sprung up

from the oppression

marching down the streets of Birmingham,

Chicago, Georgia, Mississippi, Harlem.

Willie Edwards,

James Chaney,

Michael Donald,

Michael Griffith,

Michael Brown,

Yusef Hawkins,

James Byrd Jr, and Trayvon Martin’s voices

sang hymns of “I told you so’s”

for my memories

like women giving birth

to still born children

Till when?

said Mr. Till.

Will you people continue to give birth

to death

still lying on the bed

of Martin’s dreams?

They sang with an authority

like rolling thunder

and butterflies in my stomach

like truth on top Moses mountain they sang

like earthquakes

cracking my memories into lynched question marks

they sang

like blood-thirsty whales behind slave ships

like ripping flesh

torn open

with Hebrew scriptures

in their veins

they sang

like diseases written into the sky

and prison chains

their voices roared

like a million I told you so’s they sang

like voices do

and they asked me a question

but their words

were few

Till when?

Screamed the segregated

Set-apart

and unequal lungs

of Emmett

Till when?

He sang.

Like the lyrics of Deuteronomy

carried up

Till when will Malcolm,

Booker T.

and Martin King

still dream

before

they wake up?

Black History Fun Fact Friday – The Soto Brothers

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Two kids had already been killed down the street from the apartment complex that would one day be the center of media attention when Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton would be murdered in his bed this same year. Teens from the Henry Horner projects had been protesting for months, a little over a year to be exact, for a traffic signal at the corner of local schools and health clinics where two teens had already been killed. The city refused. In addition, earlier this year, police kicked down the doors of a Panther office, brutally beating and injuring six people and one bystander on Madison Street.

As you can see, the climate of 1969 Chicago was already heated surrounding citizens and the city. Police brutality in Chicago is far from anything new and this year they were on a roll.

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Source: JET Magazine, Oct. 30, 1969

John Soto was an active member of the protest campaigns to get a traffic light installed at the corner, a few blocks from Fred’s Apartment. Sadly, John only lived to seventeen, were killed just one day (Oct 5th) after a police raid on a Panther office. According to the reports, John fought with the police before being “accidentally” shot by them. The already agitated community grew furious and John’s brother, Michael Soto, returned home from the army to attend his brother’s funeral. Five days later, on October 10, 1969, Michael Soto too was shot and killed. The black community did not believe in coincidences.

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Source: The Chicago Tribune, Oct. 11th,1969

It was said that Michael was killed because, after being stopped by police, he pulled out a gun, contrary to the account given by witnesses.

The community became even more outraged and according to the NAACP’s Commission of Inquiry, “The commission discovered that a substantial segment of the community believed that, contrary to all police reports, John and Michael Soto had been murdered by the police because of their participation in the traffic light protests.”

Source: JET Magazine, Oct. 30, 1969

According to Jeffrey Haas, Panther Lawyer of The People’s Law Office and author of “The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther”, (one of the books I’m reading), the coroner’s inquests in the Soto case were delayed; meanwhile, the internal police investigation found John’s death to be “accidental homicide” and Michael’s death “justifiable homicide”.

I decided to dedicate this week’s Black History Fun Fact to these brothers because of two things:

  1. Google’s limited amount of information on them
  2. Their minimum mention in black history

Though their lives were sadly ended, I wanted to highlight what happened to them for those who may not have been familiar. They existed and are among the many so-called Black and Hispanic men and women who died at the hands of law enforcement.

Update: Interestingly enough, I found this article and thought I’d update this post to include the link:

Chicago police use excessive force, DOJ finds

“Chicago police officers’ use of excessive force, she said, stemmed in large part from what the Justice Department found were severely insufficient training and accountability procedures — including failing to train officers to de-escalate situations.”

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/13/us/chicago-police-federal-investigation/index.html

Black History Fun Fact Friday – 5 Harlem Renaissance Women You Probably Don’t Know

If you’re anything like me, you get tired of the same repeated history. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. These are names to which we are exceptionally familiar. They were great but we know them. Let’s talk about something else.

Admittedly, I didn’t have a lot of time on my hands this week so I decided to compile a list of women who took part in The Harlem Renaissance to which we aren’t too familiar for this week’s fun fact. Enjoy.

Dorothy West

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The daughter of a freed slave, the only child of Isaac and Rachel West, Dorothy West’s father built a fruit and vegetable business that provided the family a more affluent life among Boston’s middle class. Nicknamed “The Kid” by Langston Hughes and sharing an apartment with Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West was a young member of the Harlem Renaissance. Not yet 20 in 1926 when her short story ”The Typewriter” won a prize from the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, Dorothy moved to Harlem and joined the poets, novelists, musicians and other artists.

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

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When I first came across Alice I kept trying to figure out what was so familiar about her name. It wasn’t until I researched her that it became apparent. She was once married to Paul Lawrence Dunbar before they separated in 1902. Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mixed-race parents. Documented as African American, Anglo, Native American, and Creole, her works cover the complex subjects of race, ethnicity, and oppression. Her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), was published when she was just 20. A writer of short stories, essays, and poems, Dunbar-Nelson was one of the few black female diarists of the early 20th century.

Clarissa Scott Delany

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Clarissa looks as if she was fly back in the day lol.

Born in 1901 in Tuskegee, Alabama Delany is most known for her powerful poem “The Mask”. Dying at an early age (26) she did not contribute many works but still contributed by publishing poetry and journal articles into the newspaper Opportunity. After her young years in Alabama, she was sent to New England where she graduated from Wellesley College in 1923. During Delany’s years at Wellesley, she attended meetings of the Boston Literary Guild. Speakers were featured each week. Delany started writing and gained the attention and became associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

May Miller

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“To read across May Miller’s life is to read across the history of 20th century America.”

– Myra Sklarew

It begins with May’s father, Kelly Miller. Born a year before Emancipation he was the first African American to attend John Hopkins University and among the first blacks to learn to read in public schools. He studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy. His daughter, May Miller was the most widely published playwright of The Harlem Renaissance. Myra writes how May often told about having to give up her childhood room for visits by W.E.B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk, and the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. She spoke of visits by Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke.

Maria Bonner

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One of four children, Marita Bonner was born in Boston to Joseph Andrew and Mary Anne Bonner. She was raised and educated in Boston, attending Brookline School, where she received musical training and in 1918 she entered Radcliffe College, concentrating in English and comparative literature. In Washington Bonner became closely associated with poet, playwright, and composer Georgia Douglass Johnson, whose “S” Street salon was an important gathering place for many of the writers and artists associated with the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s better known as The Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, May Miller, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Willis Richardson, and others. She also began to publish her writing in journals like The Crisis of the NAACP and Opportunity, the official journal of the Urban League. Her first published pieces, “Hands” and “On Being Young-a Woman-and Colored,” appeared in The Crisis in 1925.

Yecheilyah Ysrayl is the YA, Historical Fiction author of eight books most notably, The Stella Trilogy, Blogger, and Poet. She is currently working on her next book series “The Nora White Story” about a young black woman writer who dreams of taking part in The Harlem Renaissance movement and her parents struggle to accept their traumatic past in the Jim Crow south. “Renaissance: The Nora White Story (Book One)” is due for release July 15-16, 2017. For updates on this project, sneak peeks of other projects, nuggets and tidbits, video tutorials, writing inspiration, and more, be sure to follow this blog and to subscribe to Yecheilyah’s email list HERE.

Black History Fun Fact Friday – The Inspiration Behind “Renaissance”

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Since this is our last Black History Fun Fact of the year (There won’t be one next week. I will be on vacation), I decided to share my inspiration for the first book in my soon-to-be released novel series Renaissance: The Nora White Story.

renaissance-ebookDespite the wealth of information online, in books, and in movies, there’s still a misconception about what it meant to be black in the south and black in the north in the early 1900s. One recycled piece of information that no doubt holds some truth, is the mass movement of blacks who packed up and carried their southern roots north to escape Jim Crow and to acquire better financial opportunities. But not only were blacks escaping Jim Crow, but the north had a reputation of being prosperous and successful. This image largely shaped by the south’s brutal history.

Slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves all over the U.S. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; In Chicago and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant’s Coffee House of New York. The north has been painted as the picture of staunch abolitionism when in truth Northerners bought, sold, and owned slaves.

In the presence of such information, many blacks came to look at northern cities as a saving grace. Not only did it represent freedom from bondage, but discrimination in the north has always been so well organized that it did not have the same up close and the personal effect that the south had. The south was more brutal, more abusive, and more personal whereas the racism in the northern cities was sugar coated (I should use the present tense here).

Blacks then looked up to Harlem and Chicago and many in their hearts scorned their brothers and sisters in Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana who picked cotton instead of sleep on the floor. Blacks opted to tread north to share rooms with rats and roaches in overcrowding apartment buildings while leaving an impression among their southern brethren that they were in the lands of milk and honey. And even when we returned, many of us maintained this air of superiority and this created a silent fuel between blacks in the south and blacks in the north.

Deep down southern blacks knew that northern blacks thought themselves too proud because they were in New York trying to live like white men but being black men without a pot to piss in, and a window to throw it out of. This was my inspiration behind The Nora White Story.

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Shaped by such views, Nora is not as appreciative of the sacrifices that her parents made as she should be. She’s naïve, pampered, and sees the North through the same eyes as many who came before her. Before and during The Harlem Renaissance, many black women tried to mimic the traditional image and role of white women. Many of them saw themselves as  elite and often tried to appear “white”. (Many black women lightened their skin or passed as white as portrayed in Book Two of The Stella Trilogy “Beyond The Colored Line” which you can read free HERE). Since the days of chattel slavery blacks have been faced with a constant reminder of America’s sweetheart.

Her blonde hair and blue eyes graced the workplace, newspapers, women’s magazines, and everywhere in their daily lives’. When the end of slavery happened and blacks were given the opportunity to escape the south, a symbol of their captivity, many adapted the model of the white world and white standards of beauty and not only beauty but the concept of success itself, that is to exude whiteness.

Nora is a descendant of freemen, not just slaves. Her family does not sharecrop but they own land, and Nora does not live in a shabby home in the middle of corn fields. This story, Nora’s story, is not of your stereotypical black southern family. Nora’s lineage is a prestigious one. The only question is, will she realize how good she’s got it before it’s gone?

book-and-e-reader-nora-wRenaissance: The Nora White Story Coming July 15-16, 2017

Meanwhile, The Road to Freedom is $0.99! Don’t miss out. Get your copy at this super low price now HERE.

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“Deeply concerned about the state of Black America, a fight with his brother compels a young Joseph to leave his mother’s house and join his friends for a trip to Atlanta for SNCC’s (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) second conference. Excited to live life on their own, Jo and his friends have left school and the lives they were living for a chance to become part of the movement. With no money and essentially no plan the seven friends, three black and four white, set out for the road when they are stopped by a racist cop who makes them exit the car. The teens are unaware that a mob of Klansmen also await them at the New Orleans bus terminal.”

Black History Fun Fact Friday – The Chicago Black Renaissance

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Many of us have heard of The Harlem Renaissance, the literary, musical, and artistic movement that exploded during the 1920s in Harlem New York. Also known as The New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, the Negro Renaissance, and the Jazz Age, the Great Migration of blacks from the south to northern cities like New York produced a national movement centered around black culture and tradition.

Music, poetry, literature, art, and theatre was brought to the mainstream from a black perspective in a huge way. Magazines such as The Crisis (the NAACP monthly journal) and Opportunity (the monthly publication of the Urban League) employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staff, published their poetry and short stories, and promoted African American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. Names like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston come to mind.

However, though termed Harlem Renaissance, the time was much more complex than Harlem itself (which in many ways can make it hard to define). While standing as the anchor for the movement, Harlem was just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Across the United States and the Caribbean, The Renaissance was taking place. In fact, only some of the writers, musicians, and artists were native to Harlem itself. The Renaissance did not just happen in Harlem but a Black Metropolis was brewing in other big cities as well, such as Chicago.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks

As the Harlem Renaissance was winding down, The Chicago Black Renaissance was getting started, or rather, continuing. Creativity and activism was blooming from the great number of blacks coming up from the south to escape Jim Crow and The Great Depression. While it’s true many blacks did not suffer as much during the depression due that many of us were already struggling (having been depressed since we got here) there were some who came to Chicago from southern states like Mississippi and secured well paying jobs that were no longer available. While at first blacks could work at factories, meat packing places, and steel mills, the great depression shut this down.

Blacks were also dealing with extremely poor living conditions and fighting housing discrimination. As more and more blacks moved to Chicago the city was also still getting a large immigrant population pouring in from Europe so there was always competition for jobs and since segregation was in full effect, many blacks found themselves at a loss. However, there is great beauty that often springs from the depths of struggle and The Black Mecca of Chicago’s South Side was quite literally a diamond in the rough.

The black belt of Chicago’s South Side, as it was called, was the location for such diamonds.  Jazz, Blues, and Literature flourished as an outlet for blacks to voice their discontent not only about the city but also the whole of the black experience in America in general, and when Gwendolyn Brooks passed a pool hall in a Chicago neighborhood and took notice of a group of young men standing around, “We Real Cool” (a poem that speaks from the point of view of these seven young men, see my analysis of the poem here) was born. Chicago exploded in culture from the 1930s through the 1950s and the south side remains the most cultured part of city today.

Music, art, literature, and journalism were all part of The Chicago Renaissance. Though never deemed “Chicago Renaissance” officially, there are many who contributed to the movement whose names we’ve grown to know. The writers: Richard Wright (born in Mississippi but moved to Chicago in 1927), Frank Yerby, Margaret Walker, Willard Motley, John H. Johnson (publisher of Ebony), St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton (who later co-authored Black Metropolis), Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, and Lorraine Hansberry; entertainers Nat King Cole, Ray Nance and Oscar Brown, Jr.; dancers Katherine Dunham and Talley Beatty; photographer Gordon Parks, and the artists Elizabeth Catlett and Hughie Lee Smith.

Yecheilyah Ysrayl is the YA, Historical Fiction author of eight books, most notably The Stella Trilogy. She is currently working on her next book series “The Nora White Story” about a young black woman who dreams of taking part in The Harlem Renaissance movement and her parents struggle to accept their traumatic past in the Jim Crow south. “Renaissance: The Nora White Story -Book One” is due for release summer, 2017. For updates on this project, sneak peek of chapters and the pending book cover release for this project, be sure to follow this blog and to subscribe to Yecheilyah’s email list HERE.

Black History Fun Fact Friday – Free Frank

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This is a man who was free in more ways than one. Welcome back to Black History Fun Fact Friday. Meet, Free Frank.

The first African American to found his own town in the United States, Free Frank was born Frank McWorter on September 7, 1777 as a slave in South Carolina to a West African woman named Juda. Having been abducted and then enslaved it is commonly assumed that his father was the Scots-Irish master George McWhorter. In any event, Frank was leased by McWhorter to neighbors as a laborer. This experience (despite the situation) lead to him gaining entrepreneurial skills and businesses skills being around those he was leased to.

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He later married an African American woman from another plantation named Lucy.  Together they had four children. The extra money Frank was making gave him the opportunity not only to free himself but also his wife ($800) and oldest son. Earlier in life he’d founded a saltpeter plant which he sold later in exchange for the freedom of Frank Jr. who was a fugitive in Canada. Lucy and Frank also had three more freeborn children.

Free Frank did more than free individuals from slavery but he was also an entrepreneur. Frank and his family moved to Pike County, Illinois in 1830 and in 1836 founded what is now Philadelphia Illinois. Frank built the community on 80 acres of land, but it didn’t stop here. Limited by state statutes, McWorter petitioned the Illinois General Assembly using a legislative loophole, and by 1836 he and his sons owned 600 acres in Hadley Township without restriction. Frank leased plots to both white and black residents.

Although the railroad sliced through Pike County in 1869, there were some parts of the community that remained active until the 1920s and is considered one of the most famous antebellum towns.

The town size grew to approximately 160 people, 29 households, and several craftspeople and merchants by 1865. Frank witnessed that growth until his death in 1854 at the age of 77 years, while Lucy lived to 99 years of age, raising their family until her death in 1870.