Her Fight for Civil Rights Was Recognized During the March on Washington’s Tribute to Women—But She Wasn’t Actually There

Photo: Gloria Richardson, left, a leader in the Cambridge, Md., integrationist’s movement, Dr. Rosa L. Gragg of the National Association of Colored Woman’s Clubs and Mrs. Diane Nash Bevel, right, representing the Southern Christian Leadership Committee, are interviewed as they leave the White House in Washington, D.C., July 9, 1963. (Henry Burroughs—AP)

(Time) On Aug. 28, 1963, when about 250,000 people streamed toward the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington, in the hours before Martin Luther King Jr. would give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, six women were invited to stand and be recognized onstage during an official “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”

One of those women, listed alongside Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates, was Diane Nash Bevel. She was not there. Nash, then 25, was watching the ceremony from a motel room in Birmingham, Ala., eating room service in bed with her then-husband and fellow civil rights organizer James Bevel.

“That morning in Birmingham, when people had started to assemble to get on the buses, Bevel said to me, ‘Diane, you know, with everybody having left and gone to Washington, we could get some rest if we stayed here,’ which sounded great to me,” she recalls to TIME. “We had worked so hard recruiting people to get on the buses that we were exhausted.” (more)


Sculptor Edmonia Lewis Shattered Gender and Race Expectations in 19th-Century America

As the orphaned child of a black father and a Native-American mother, Lewis rewrote the 19th-century definition of sculptor

lewis_cleopatra

(Smithsonian) Kidnapped, beaten and left to die, Edmonia Lewis, a talented artist with both African and Native-American ancestry, refused to abandon her dreams. In the winter of 1862, a white mob had attacked her because of reports that she had poisoned two fellow Oberlin College students, drugging their wine with “Spanish Fly.” Battered and struggling to recover from serious injuries, she went to court and won an acquittal.

Though these details are apparently true, after becoming an internationally known sculptor, Lewis used threads of both truth and imagination to embroider her life story, artfully adding to her reputation as a unique person and a sculptor who refused to be limited by the narrow expectations of her contemporaries.

Among the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum are several of Lewis’ works, and her most significant work, The Death of Cleopatra, greets visitors who climb to the museum’s third floor in the Luce Foundation Center. Many of Lewis’s works disappeared from the art world, but her image of Cleopatra found its way back from obscurity after a decades-long sojourn that carried its own strange story of fame and lost fortunes. (more)

Photo: Some saw the work, The Death of Cleopatra, as a “masterful marble sculpture. Others criticized its disturbing image of the moment when Cleopatra killed herself. (SAAM, gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois)


How history textbooks reflect America’s refusal to reckon with slavery

Textbooks have been slow to incorporate black humanity in their slavery narratives. And they still have a long way to go.

history textbooks

Students read during class in Montgomery, Alabama, April 1939. (Marion Post Wolcott via Library of Congress)

(Vox) Four hundred years ago, a group of about 20 Africans were captured in the African interior, probably near modern-day Angola, and forcibly transported on a slave ship headed to the Americas. After tumultuous months at sea, they landed ashore in the first British colony in North America — Jamestown, Virginia — in late August 1619.

Hazen’s Elementary History of the United States: A Story and a Lesson, a popular early 20th-century textbook for young readers, picked up the story of the first black Virginians from there.

“The settlers bought them,” explained the 1903 text, “… and found them so helpful in raising tobacco that more were brought in, and slavery became part of our history.”

But the history of Jamestown and slavery isn’t that simple. Even though the 1619 landing wasn’t the first arrival of Africans in the Americas, it fits within the history of colonial America, black America, the global slave trade, and ultimately the foundation of our country. So how textbooks summarized this history — one characterized by a scant documentary record and often from the perspective of European settlers and white Americans — matters.

“Textbooks are supposed to teach us a common set of facts about who we are as Americans … and what stories are key to our democracy,” said Alana D. Murray, a Maryland middle-school principal and author of The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum, 1890-1940: Countering the Master Narrative. (more)


Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores National Battle of the Bands

PV Marching Storm among eight elite collegiate bands to compete Labor Day weekend at NRG Stadium

PV Marching Storm

                     PV Marching Storm

(Houston Sports Authority) It’s not halftime. It’s not the fifth quarter.

It’s the show.

Bands are the essence of the Historic Black College and University experience and the HBCU’s ultimate celebration is coming to Houston on Labor Day weekend for the Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores National Battle of the Bands, Sunday, September 1 at NRG Stadium.

The Battle of the Bands begins at 6 p.m. and will be preceded at 3 p.m. by the HBCU STEM college recruitment fair which is free and open to area students interested in higher education opportunities from 20 of the top HBCUs in the country. Education and scholarship partner H-E-B is sponsoring the H-E-B Tailgate Cook Off Experience later that afternoon.

Think Drumline at NRG. Think showmanship, precision, dancing and the best marching band showcase in the country.

Eight of the nation’s top HBCU bands will celebrate the culture of their universities at what will be the largest African-American event in Texas. Each band has its own unique style and music and was created to celebrate, support and recognize the excellence of Black college marching bands.

Bands participating in the event will be: PVAMU’s Marching Storm, Texas Southern University’s Ocean of Soul, North Carolina Central University’s The Sound Machine, Talladega College’s Marching Tornado Band, Southern University’s Human Juke Box, Miles College’s Purple Marching Machine, Tennessee State University’s Aristocrat of Bands, and Floria A&M’s Marching 100.

Click here for tickets and other information.


TIPHC Bookshelf

Desegregating Texas SchoolsPublished scholarship on black history in Texas is growing and we’d like to share with you some suggested readings, both current and past, from some of the preeminent history scholars in Texas and beyond. We invite you to take a look at our bookshelf page – including a featured selection – and check back as the list grows. A different selection will be featured each week. We welcome suggestions and reviews. This week, we offer, “Desegregating Texas Schools — Eisenhower, Shivers, and the Crisis at Mansfield High,” by Robyn Duff Ladino.

In the famous Brown v. the Board of Education decisions of 1954 and 1955, the United States Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. Yet history records that it took more than a decade of legal battles, civil rights protests, and, tragically, violent confrontations before black students gained full access to previously white schools.

Mansfield, Texas, a small community southeast of Fort Worth, was the scene of an early school integration attempt. In this book, Robyn Duff Ladino draws on interviews with surviving participants, media reports, and archival research to provide the first full account of the Mansfield school integration crisis of 1956.

Ladino explores how power politics at the local, state, and federal levels ultimately prevented the integration of Mansfield High School in 1956. Her research sheds new light on the actions of Governor Allan Shivers—who, in the eyes of the segregationists, actually validated their cause by his political actions—and it underscores President Dwight Eisenhower’s public passivity toward civil rights during his first term of office.

Despite the short-term failure, however, the Mansfield school integration crisis helped pave the way for the successful integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Thus, it deserves a permanent place in the history of the civil rights movement, which this book amply provides.


This Week in Texas Black History

Aug. 25

Lunch counter sit-inOn this date in 1960, seventy Houston lunch counters quietly integrated, the result of an agreement between local businesses to avoid the unrest that had occurred in other U.S. cities during the civil rights movement’s lunch counter sit-in demonstrations. Bob Dundas, vice president of Foley’s department store in downtown Houston, got local downtown merchants to agree to desegregate their lunch counters all simultaneously on the condition that there would be no press coverage of the event. Dundas and John T. Jones, publisher of the Houston Chronicle and president of the Houston Endowment, secured an agreement between local newspapers and radio stations to remain silent on the event for ten days drawing criticism from the national press for censoring the move. Students from Texas Southern University had begun the sit-in movement in Houston in the spring of 1960. (See video, Texas Southern University: Silencing Houston’s Jim Crow; documentary,The Strange Demise of Jim Crow.)

Aug. 25

Lone Star Med_DentalThe Lone Star State Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association was formed on this date in 1886 in Galveston. The group came to be because the Texas Medical Association refused admission to 15 African-American medical professionals, including physicians Monroe Alpheus Majors – the first black Texan to graduate from a medical school (Meharry, 1886) and Benjamin Jesse Covington, one of the founders of Houston Negro Hospital (now Riverside General Hospital). After endorsing the group in 1939, the TMA began admitting African-Americans in 1955. Lone Star was the second organization of black medical professionals formed in the U.S., following the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Washington D.C. founded in 1884 as the first African-American medical society.

Aug. 25

tonsorial artistsHenry Miller Morgan, a barber, was born in Tyler on this day in 1895. Texas began requiring licenses for barbers in the 1920s, but because of segregation there were no schools admitting African Americans. In 1933, Morgan opened the first college for black barbers. The school had only five chairs, but in less than two decades, he had opened branches of his barber college around the country, including Houston, Dallas, New York, Jackson, Mississippi, and Little Rock. At one time, the school reportedly was training a majority of the nation’s African-American barbers. Morgan went on to help found the Texas Association of Tonsorial Artists, a professional barber’s organization, as well as the Democratic Progressive Voters League, one of the oldest African American political organizations in the state. On June 21, 2005, the Texas State Senate honored Morgan with a resolution honoring his life and achievements.

Aug. 27

Zelmo BeattyPrairie View A&M basketball great Zelmo Beaty died of cancer at age 73 on this day in 2013. A native of Hillister (100 miles northeast of Houston), Beaty played during segregation at all-black Scott High School in Woodville. At PV, Beaty led the Panthers to the 1962 NAIA national championship and was named tournament MVP. He averaged 25 points and 20 rebounds during his collegiate career. Though undersized at 6-9 for a center, Beaty was the third overall pick in the 1962 NBA draft by the St. Louis Hawks and made the NBA All-Rookie Team in 1963 and was a league All-Star in 1966 and 1968 in an era dominated by centers Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. Beaty jumped to the American Basketball Association and led the Utah Stars to their only championship in 1971. In eight NBA seasons, Beaty averaged 16 points and 11 rebounds a game. In 2014, he was named to the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame. In 2012, he was named to the NAIA’s 75th Anniversary All-Star Team.

Aug. 28

march on washingtonOn this date in 1963, in conjunction with the National March for civil rights in Washington, approximately 900 protesters marched on the Texas state capitol in Austin. The group, which included Hispanics, blacks, and whites, attacked the slow pace of desegregation in the state and Gov. John Connally’s opposition to the pending civil rights bill in Washington.

Aug. 30-31

MansfieldIn 1956, defiant white citizens of Mansfield blocked the enrollment of three black students at Mansfield High School in what became known as the “Mansfield School Desegregation Incident.” The school district had been sued by the NAACP and a federal court ordered the district to desegregate – the first such order in Texas. However, Mansfield would not integrate its schools until 1965.

Aug. 30

Kenny Dorham

In 1924, Kenny Dorham, jazz trumpeter, was born on this day in Fairfield. A pioneer of the bebop era, Dorham attended Anderson High School in Austin and played in the Wiley College dance band. In the ’40s and ’50s, he played with such greats as Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, and Thelonius Monk. Dorham was also a founding member of the Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey.

Aug. 31

Frank Robinson

Frank Robinson, the first black manager in Major League Baseball, was born on this day in Beaumont. Robinson grew up in Oakland and played the bulk of his career with the Cincinnati Reds and Baltimore Orioles. He won the triple crown — leading the league in home runs (49), runs batted in (122), and batting average (.316) — in 1966, and became manager of the Cleveland Indians in 1975. A Baseball Hall of Famer, his 586 career home runs are ninth all-time in MLB.


Blog: Ron Goodwin, Ph.D., author, PVAMU history professor

Ron Goodwin is an assistant professor of history at Prairie View A&M University. Even though he was a military “brat,” he still considers San Antonio home. Like his father and brother, Ron joined the U.S. Air Force and while enlisted received his undergraduate degree from Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas. After his honorable discharge, he completed graduate degrees from Texas Southern University. Goodwin’s book, Blacks in Houston, is a pictorial history of Houston’s black community. His most recent book, Remembering the Days of Sorrow, examines the institution of slavery in Texas from the perspective of the New Deal’s Slave Narratives.

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Hidden In Plain Sight

July 30th, 2019

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk in which he claimed: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” That was 1903. American society is in the last year of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and I wonder if that famous quote still applies. In 1903, Jim Crow dominated every aspect of American life and forced the black community into the shadows. Du Bois used”…(more)


 

Submissions wanted

Historians, scholars, students, lend us your…writings. Help us produce the most comprehensive documentation ever undertaken for the African American experience in Texas. We encourage you to contribute items about people, places, events, issues, politics/legislation, sports, entertainment, religion, etc., as general entries or essays. Our documentation is wide-ranging and diverse, and you may research and write about the subject of your interest or, to start, please consult our list of suggested biographical entries and see submission guidelines. However, all topics must be approved by TIPHC editors before beginning your research/writing.

We welcome your questions or comments. Please contact Michael Hurd, Director of TIPHC, at mdhurd@pvamu.edu.