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Books by Ellen Tarry
The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman
(1955) /
Janie Belle /
My Dog Minty
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Hezekiah
Horton
Young Jim: The Early Years of James Weldon
Johnson /
The Other Toussaint
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Saint Katherine Drexel
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Books on A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights
Movement /
A. Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard
A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait /
A. Philip Randolph and the African American Labor Movement
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Randolph & the “Great White Father”
Roosevelt Issues Executive Order
8802
A
Perspective by Ellen Tarry
Harlem is always restless but
there was an added sir of rebellious discontent hanging over the
community in the latter part of 1940. Hiring was going on in the
plants which manufactured materials necessary to the war efforts
of our friends across the sea. Prices were rising with the higher
wages Harlem read about. Negroes felt that they were being left
out of the war effort and they were angry.
Wherever there was a
gathering of Negroes there was bound to be hostile talk, which
they considered righteous indignation. Too often I heard hate,
too, and it frightened me. It was not unusual to see a couple of
Negroes beating a white man who had come to Harlem to enjoy wine,
women, or song and instead had gotten drunk and called somebody a
“nigger.”
What was happening in Harlem
was happening all over the country. The Negro had not been
integrated with the industrial effort to prepare for a war which
we would inevitably enter. Tension rose in areas where money was
slow to trickle in and it was obvious that some steps would have
to be taken.
There was much talk of the
need for a “leader,” and A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters was being mentioned as a man about whom
Negro America might rally. In our Monday night meetings at
Friendship House this general unrest was one of the frequent
topics of discussion.
It was February of 1941 when
a call to organize resounded. A. Philip Randolph, who had publicly
expressed the belief that “nothing short of organized and
dramatic mass protest and pressure could place the cause of the
Negro in the mainstream of public of public opinion,” proposed a
“March on Washington Movement,” with chapters in every major
city. Participation in the war effort through employment was the
objective. If the Negro was not integrated, a march on the
nation’s capital was to take place.
The March on Washington
Movement captured the imagination of the Negro masses. During my
lifetime I have read or heard talk of only one other mass movement
among my people which reached national proportion—the Marcus
Garvey movement with its back-to-Africa plan which was
disintegrating around the time I came to new York. Garvey, who was
deported to his native Jamaica, was said to have possessed many of
the same qualities of leadership which were winning support among
Negroes for A. Philip Randolph.
Unlike Walter White of the
NAACP and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who had become a New York City
Councilman, Randolph looked like a Negro. And in spite of a
Harvard accent, he told the Negroes what they wanted to hear;
namely, that they were Americans and entitled to all the rights
guaranteed by the Constitution. Furthermore, Randolph promised to
lead his people to the doors of congress if steps were not taken
to curb racial discrimination in industry.
The Negro press carried
stories weekly of instances in which factory doors were closed in
the faces if qualified Negroes. Pleas for fair play fell on ears
that refused to hear. “get ready to march” was the word passed
along and July 1, 1941, was the deadline. Motor pools were set up
and cars were canvassed as master plans for the line of march were
projected. With each passing day the Movement gained momentum but
there was still no word from the White House or Congress.
By June of 1941 the whole
country knew the Negroes were planning to march on Washington.
President Roosevelt called A. Philip Randolph and Walter White to
Washington for a conference. Layle Lane, a New York teacher, and a
labor leader, Frank Crosswaith, accompanied Randolph and White.
It is reported that the
President sought desperately to persuade Randolph to call off the
march. He pointed to the need for unity in a time of war and
suggested that the conference method, rather than mass pressure,
was the American way of dealing with minority problems. The Negro
committee would not relent. Randolph realized, however, that the
President was inclined to admit that the demands he was making for
the Negroes of America were just and Randolph proposed an
executive order forbidding discrimination in industry.
Pending any developments
which might have resulted from the conference with the President,
plans for the March moved ahead. It is rumored that there was a
second conference in New York City with Mrs. Roosevelt and Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia urging Randolph to call a halt to the proposed
March on July 1. Randolph is said to have repeated his demand for
an executive order and expressed his determination to march if the
order was not forthcoming.
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On June 25, 1941, Franklin D.
Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which stated:
“ . . . I do hereby reaffirm the policy of
the United States that there shall be no discrimination in
the employment of workers in defense industries or
Government because of race, creed, color, or national
origin and I do hereby declare that it is the duty of
employers and of labor organizations, in furtherance of
said policy and of this order, to provide for the full and
equitable participation of all workers in defense
industries, without discrimination because of race, creed,
color or national origin. . . .” |
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There was no justification
for the March after the order was given, and Randolph canceled the
mass protest. His followers received both the President’s
declaration and Randolph’s “no march” order with mixed
emotions. Negroes were skeptical that industry would comply with
Executive Order 8802 and the machinery of the march had been put
in such high gear that it was difficult to stop it. Many Negroes
were so emotional they could not see the wisdom of their
leader’s strategy and insisted that Randolph should not have
canceled the mass protest.
On June 28th,
1941, two days before the proposed march, a major network donated
air time for A. Philip Randolph to make a radio speech explaining
the reasons for his action and urging the Negroes of America to
contribute their brain and brawn to the war effort. He reaffirmed
the determination of the march on Washington Movement to fight
until “full participation” was a reality.
President Roosevelt created
the first Fair Employment Practices Committee, composed of seven
consultants, two of whom were Negroes, to oversee the enforcement
of his executive order. The order and the FEPC served to rekindle
the Negroes’ faith in their government. (175-178)
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To write of Harlem in 1945
without making mention of the great sorrow which blanketed the
community on April 12 at the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
would be a serious oversight. Regardless of the numerous
controversies which have arisen over the role played by our
wartime president, Roosevelt was the first chief executive since
Lincoln who succeeded in creating a national atmosphere in which
the Negro felt as if he were really free.
I was ironing the last of a
pile of tiny dresses when the announcement was made over the radio
that Roosevelt had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. At first I
thought I had been mistaken, then as additional details filled in
the death picture my first impulse was to call out to someone, to
say: Can it be true?” But I was alone except for the baby. I
took her in my arms and said a prayer for the repose of the soul
of this every human, physically handicapped man who, by being
aware of the changing tides and nodding at the right times, had
helped my people to walk taller, to dream and to hope.
When I went out to shop, the streets were crowded with
little groups of Negroes standing aimlessly together looking as if
they were lost. Some were crying. Others were asking: “What will
happen now? What will become of us?” Franklin Delano Roosevelt
succeeded in making many enemies, but none of them that I have
known was black. He was our “Great White Father,” the first
since “Father Abraham,” and we were bereft. (253-254)
Source: Ellen Tarry.
The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman. New York: David McKay
Company, Inc., 1955.
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Ellen Tarry (September 26, 1906 –
September 23, 2008) was an African-American author of literature
for children and young adults. Tarry was the first African
American picture book author. She was born in Birmingham,
Alabama. Although raised in the Congregational Church, she
converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. She attended Alabama
State Normal School, now Alabama State University, and became a
teacher in Birmingham. At the same time, she began writing a
column for the local African-American newspaper entitled
"Negroes of Note", which focused on racial injustice and
promoted racial pride. In 1929, she moved to New York City in
hope of becoming a writer. There she befriended such Harlem
Renaissance literary figures as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay
and Countee Cullen.
She was also a civil servant, social worker, and
educator. A friend of Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson she
attended the Writer's Laboratory in New York and obtained a job
as writer-researcher in New York's Federal Writers' Project. She
also joined White Russian Catherine de Hueck's Harlem movement
"The House of Friendship." She was the author of such
children books as
Janie Belle,
My Dog Minty,
Hezekiah
Horton,
Young Jim: The Early Years of James Weldon
Johnson and made many aware of
The Other Toussaint. |
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Asa Philip
Randolph was born April 15, 1889 in Crescent
City, Florida, the second son of the Rev. James
William Randolph, a tailor and
minister in the
African Methodist Episcopal Church, and
Elizabeth Robinson Randolph, a skilled
seamstress. In 1891 the family moved to
Jacksonville, Florida, which had a thriving,
well-established African-American community.
From his
father, Randolph learned that color was less
important than a person's character and conduct.
From his mother, he learned the importance of
education and of defending oneself physically
against those who would seek to hurt one or one's
family, if necessary. Randolph remembered vividly
the night his mother sat in the front room of their
house with a loaded shotgun across her lap, while
his father tucked a pistol under his coat and went
off to prevent a mob from
lynching a man at the local county jail.
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He was a
leader in the
U.S.'s Negro
civil-rights movement and the
American labor movement. He organized and led
the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first
predominantly Negro labor union. In the
early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the
March on Washington Movement, which convinced
Franklin D. Roosevelt to desegregate
production-plants for military supplies during
World War II.
In 1963, Randolph was the head of
the
March on Washington, which was organized by
Bayard Rustin, at which Reverend
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his
I Have A Dream speech. Randolph inspired the
Freedom budget, sometimes called the "Randolph
Freedom budget," which aimed to deal with the
economic problems facing the Negro community,
particularly workers and unemployed Negroes. . . .
Randolph died
May 16, 1979. A statue of A. Philip Randolph was
erected in his honor in the concourse of
Union Station in Washington, D.C. In 1986 a
nine-foot bronze statue of Randolph by Tina Allen
was erected in Boston's Back Bay commuter train
station. On February 3, 1989, the United States
Postal Service issued a 25 cent postage stamp in his
honor. In 2002, scholar
Molefi Kete Asante listed A. Philip Randolph on
his list of
100 Greatest African Americans
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Books on A.
Philip Randolph
Jervis
Anderson,
A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait
(1973; University of California Press, 1986).
Sarah E. Wright,
A. Philip Randolph: Integration in the Workplace
(Silver Burdett Press, 1990),
Paula Pfeffer,
A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights
Movement (1990; Louisiana State University
Press, 1996).
Andrew E.
Kersten,
A. Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard
(Rowan and Littlefield, 2006).
Cynthia Taylor,
A. Philip Randolph: The Religious Journey of An
African American Labor Leader (NYU Press,
2006).
Source:
Wikipedia
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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