Wordless Wednesday: Miscellaneous Photos Related to Memorable People

 

Legend: (top to bottom) Joy, BB King, the Lorraine Motel where MLK was shot, MLK church in Montgomery, Beale Street, Will-Hay Nelson, House where Bonnie & Clyde once stayed, Birthplace of Nat King Cole, Little Richard's grave, statue honoring Rosa Parks.

All photos courtesy Gary Firstenberg.

Courage Made Her Influential: Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells

Last week when I shared A Little Girl’s Dream on my blog here, it prompted me to become more familiar with the stories of African Americans who were early pioneers in the pursuit of freedom and justice. Many of their names were familiar to me but I knew very few of their stories, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman preeminent examples.

While doing research this week for Black History Month (Feb 1-29) I came across a list titled the 100 Greatest Books by African American Women. It was an enlightening read. This blog post today on Dr. Martin Luther King Day is about one of these women, Ida Bell Wells.

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Ida born into slavery in 1862 during the Civil War in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents were slaves till the 13th Amendment freed them after the war. In 1877 a yellow fever epidemic killed both of her parents while she was away visiting her grandmother.

The authorities would have split the family but she said she could raise her younger siblings, and took a test that enabled her to get a teaching job. Her only previous experience was teaching her younger brothers and sister.

One day Ida took a seat on a train but was forcibly removed to the smoking car. She sued the railroad and actually won a $500 settlement. The headline in the papers read, “Darkey Damsel Gets Damages.”

Naturally, the railroad didn’t like that outcome and took the matter to a higher court where the decision was reversed.

Ida wrote about these experiences for her church newspaper The Living Way, and even though she never received the money, she saw the impact her writing had on people who reacted to what she wrote. She was learning the power of the written word. In 1889 she became part owner of a black-owned newspaper called Free Speech and Headlight. For two more years she also continued teaching until she was dismissed for writing about conditions at the black schools.

Ida learned early the power of the written word, but it was her courage that most stands out. She wrote about what she saw in order that others would know what was going on.

Ida had friends who ran a black grocery store called The People’s Grocery, which was in competition with a white grocery store. An incident occurred which escalated. Three black men were taken to jail. Then, in the middle of the night 75 masked men came, took them from the Shelby County Jail and shot them dead.

It was this event that led Ida to begin investigating and writing about lynchings. After writing an editorial about another incident, her newspaper office was burned to the ground.

Ida married in Chicago and raised a family there.

Ida was in New York at the time her office was looted and destroyed. She was urged not to return and began writing from up North. She later moved to Chicago.

In 1892 Ida Wells began publishing her lynching research in pamphlet form It was titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. The following year her lynching research was compiled in a book titled The Red Record. Frederick Douglass wrote the introduction.

She was invited to speak in England and Scotland. She spoke with eloquence and passion about the unfair treatment of blacks. Her pamphlets included disturbing photos of actual lynchings.

Ida claimed that "ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution." She believed that the massive rise in such killing after the Civil War was because previous to the war Blacks had more value as “property” of the slaveholders.

Ida found support from white women involved with the battle for women’s rights, becoming friends with Susan B. Anthony and others in the movement.

In 1928 she began working on her autobiography, but it was never finished. She died in 1930 after an influential career. Her story was published posthumously four decades later in 1970. For more than half a century she used her writing skills to promote freedom, safety, and justice.

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Information for this brief bio came from the Walter Dean Myers' book Ida B. Wells: Let the Truth Be Told and Wikipedia.

Related Links
12 Facts About Marting Luther King, Jr. That You May Not Know
Who Killed Dr. Martin Luther King?

The Significance of Martin Luther King's Speech at Riverside Church

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Wikimedia Commons)

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4, 1967 Dr. King gave a major speech at the Riverside Church in New York. One year later to the day the Baptist minister and civil rights leader was assassinated.

At what point did Martin Luther King know that he was a marked man? He saw what happened to JFK, to Bobby, to Medgar Evers, to Malcolm X. It must have weighed on him heavily that one day he would leave his wife and family for the cause that burdened his heart.

As with all his major speeches, it is delivered with power and authority. The new feature here is that he is critical of our government's involvement in Viet Nam, accusing our leaders--and with good cause--of being a great purveyor of violence.

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I come to this great magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization that brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

Why was Dr. King now addressing the war? People were telling him that civil rights issues were different from the anti-war movement. He disagreed, and he spells out his reasons. First, it became apparent to him that the war was an enemy to the poor.

Riverside 1967. (Photo: Public domain)

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. 

Another reason he had come to make this speech was because he saw how blacks were arming themselves, many believing that violence was the only way to set things right. When he said it was not, they would point to Viet Nam and say how our government believed violence was the way to resolve issues.

This latter led Dr. King to become more vocal about the wrongness of the war.

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.”

His career as a minister required him to preach peace to the nation and take up the cause of the needy.

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

The next section of his speech details the history of Viet Nam after the end of World War II, and our part in the then-present devastation.

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church.

He follows this section now with concern for our own troops and what we are doing to them.

I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.

How do you un-see once you've seen it so plainly?

He goes on to make a statement that is expounded upon more fully in more recent book The Cold War's Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin, that the U.S. misinterpreted all national ambitions for self-rule through a Cold War lens. He stated, "In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution," and then elaborated on this.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries.

Sadly, this next paragraph could have been written yesterday:

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

And finally:

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

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Why I Am Writing About This

Nearly every point in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech is something many of us had thought about at one time or another growing up in the Sixties, or so I thought. We hadn't articulated it so clearly, but were uncomfortable with what we were hearing, seeing in the news, reading in the papers. 

Simultaneously, Dr. King was being slammed as becoming a Communist now, taking the side of our enemies. As you can plainly see, this speech is in harmony with the Gospel, for we are all brothers and sisters in the human family, and have responsibilities to one another. It has been cited as the moment he was perceived as a real threat to out nation's Machiavellian war efforts, a voice that had to be silenced. 

Related Links
Background on the speech Beyond Vietnam 
The full speech, Beyond Vietnam
Coretta Scott King's Statement at the Conclusion of the Conspiracy Trial  regarding the assassination of her husband on e year later.

The "We Shall Overcome" Speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are all kinds of collectors in the world. Some people collect art. Others collect pedal cars. Still others collect baseball cards. In 2016 I learned that a graduate of one of our Duluth high schools, who made a small fortune in California real estate 50 or so years ago, collects manuscripts, which I wrote about here in a piece titled Treasures of the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum. 

Handwritten sheet from Dr King's speech at SMU.

This weekend I visited Karpeles in Duluth (there are a dozen such Karpeles museums in this country) and saw on display the original handwritten "We Shall Overcome" speech by Dr. King. It led me to go find and read it again in honor of the day, the man and the fight. Here are a few excerpts followed by a link to the complete speech, which he delivered in March of 1966 at Southern Methodist University.

'We have come a long, long way but we still have a long, long way to go.' --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here are a few excerpts from this speech, which is essentially a summary of what seem to be self-evident truths. 

And I believe also that it is true that if we are to solve the problem ultimately, the white person must see the Negro as his brother. And he must treat him right because it is natural and because the Negro is his brother and not merely because the law says it. If we are to solve the problem ultimately, every person must rise to the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable.

But after saying this I think we must see the other side and see the wrongness of the notion that legislation can’t help. It may be true that you can’t legislate integration but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality can’t be legislated but behavior can be regulated. It may be that the law cannot make a man love me but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.

* * * *

My contention is that as we bring these things to the surface and deal with them, we must deal with them non-violently. And we need the support of all people of goodwill as we develop a non-violent assault on the evils of segregation and discrimination.

* * * *

And so if one is working for a just society, he should use just methods in bringing about that society.

And so the plea facing us today is to move on that additional distance that we have to go with understanding, with a concern for brotherhood, with the removal of all prejudices, with an understanding that all of God’s children are significant.

Read the full transcript of this speech:
www.smu.edu/News/2014/mlk-at-smu-transcript-17march1966

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Key civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 (Pub.L. 86–449, 74 Stat. 89, enacted May 6, 1960) is a United States federal law that established federal inspection of local voter registration polls and introduced penalties for anyone who obstructed someone's attempt to register to vote. Signed into law by President Eisenhower.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 defines housing discrimination as the "refusal to sell or rent a dwelling to any person because of his race, color, religion, or national origin". Title VIII of this Act is commonly referred to as the Fair Housing Act of 1968.  Signed into law by President Johnson.

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For further reading:
Read Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech which he delivered in August 1963. It opens with "Five score years ago" so as to echo the opening of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address while drawing attention to that significant event of 1863, The Emancipation Proclamation.
Here is the link:
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/i-have-dream-address-delivered-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom

Let's not forget the dream.