Black History, Amazing But Sad

Black History, Amazing But Sad

By Jack Coll

2-15-14

     As we all know, or as we all should know, February is Black History Month.  There are hundreds if not thousands of really cool and really great people and events surrounding Black History.  I’m a little puzzled as to why we need a Black History Month, I mean black history is black history, it should be taught and recognized along with all the other history of our country.  We have Washington, Lincoln and King, we have Cobb, Robinson and Aaron. We also have Chisholm, Davis, Till and Parks and we have Meredith, Marshall, and four little African American girls Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley.

Well I mean come ‘on, we all know Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and we all know Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Chuck Berry.  We don’t need a Black History month for these guys, we all know the history of these guys, hey Ali “The Greatest,” Robinson, “The Greatest,” and so on.  The reason we need Black History Month is for names like Chisholm, Till, Parks and Davis.  We need Black History Month for names and events like Meredith, Marshall, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Little Rock Central High School, a sit-in at F. W. Woolworths in Downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, and we need Black History Month so events like the Selma-To-Montgomery March doesn’t fade into obsolete history books.

I really can’t help but wonder if I walked into a fifth or sixth or seventh grade classroom in any school USA and said, “Raise your hand if you know anything about the Lorraine Hotel, the Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott, The Little Rock Nine, Freedom Riders, The March on Washington.”  I would ask the students what they know about “Bloody Sunday,” or who Thurgood Marshall was?  I would also ask the students about the 1966 Watts Riots, and I would ask if they ever heard of James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwemer.  With a blank stare on the faces of the students I would tell them that in 1964, 1964, those three civil-rights workers had been working to register black voters in Mississippi and were killed for their actions.

I would tell the students that a woman named Rosa Parks, a woman weighing in at all of 100 pounds was arrested for not giving up her seat in the “colored section” of a bus to a white passenger, and that was the incident that sparked the civil rights movement.  It’s an ugly part of our United States history but I would have to tell the students about Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered, Till, a young black man allegedly whistled at a white woman in Mississippi.

Along with all the ugly things that went on in our country, I would stand proud to tell the children of some great people like Thurgood Marshall, the first Supreme Court Justice appointed by President Johnson in 1967.  I would tell them about Shirley Chisholm, who became known for becoming the first black congresswoman representing New York State in 1968, Chisholm served in the House of Representatives for seven terms.  Something we should all know is that Chisholm went on to run for the 1972 Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States becoming the first major-party African American candidate to do so, not to mention she was female.

I wonder if any kids going to school today would know who Ernie Davis was.  Ernie Davis was a special athlete and a very special person.  Davis played football and led Syracuse University to a National Championship as a sophomore. He was the first African American football player to win the Heisman Trophy.

Davis was born in Salem, Pennsylvania and as an infant moved to Uniontown Pennsylvania after his father died.  At the age of 12 he moved to Elmira, New York and at a young age was recognized as an athletic prodigy playing basketball, baseball and football.  While Davis became All American in basketball and football, it was noted that his talents clearly lay with the game of basketball but he loved football.  He led his basketball team to 52 consecutive victories but was heavily recruited by colleges all over the country for his football skills.  It was former National Football League great Jim Brown who convinced Davis to attend College at Syracuse University to play football.

After rushing for 821 yards in 1961 Davis won the Heisman Trophy, and rushed for 140 yards and MVP honors in the 1961 Liberty Bowl.  Davis set all kinds of records at Syracuse University, he finished with a total of 2,386 total rushing yards on 6.6 yards per carry that led him to scoring 35 touchdowns.  It would seem to anyone that Davis was living a charmed life, he was on his way to becoming the National Football League’s very first African American to be drafted number one.

Davis faced a lot of adversity off the field, he was a black athlete playing many of his games in the South, and he fell victim on many occasions of racism.  The most publicized incident occurred when he was selected as the Cotton Bowl MVP in 1960.  Davis was told by organizers that he would be allowed to accept his award at the post game banquet and immediately has to leave the segregated facility.  Davis refused to receive the award and his entire team agreed to boycott the banquet.

Davis was drafted by the Cleveland Browns and his contract was reported to be the most lucrative ever offered to a rookie.  Davis would be running out of the backfield with the great Jim Brown and the franchise envisioned a decade of championships.

Before Davis could take his place on the field he was diagnosed with acute monocytic leukemia, Davis never played a down with the Browns, he died in May 1963.  In 2008 a movie based on his short life was released called “The Express, The Ernie Davis Story.”

I wonder if we walked into a tenth or eleventh grade classroom anywhere in America and asked the class, “What is the Emancipation Proclamation?”  I wonder how many students in the class would raise their hand and say President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring that all persons held as slaves within the Confederate states are, and henceforward shall be free.  I wonder how many, if any, students would know that in 1869 Howard University’s Law School became the country’s first black law school.  Is it possible that any high school students anywhere in this country would know that Speiman College was the first college for black women in the United States founded by Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles?

Do high schools studies include Vivian Malone and James Hood, they should.  In 1963 Governor George Wallace physically blocked Hood and Malone from registering for classes at the University of Alabama.  Did I mention that Hood and Malone were black, we’re talking about a Governor telling teenagers they can’t go to school.  And what about James Meredith, in 1963 Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, President John Kennedy sent in 5,000 federal troops after rioting broke out.

I was just wondering how many students in our high schools would know that Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and became one of the most effective and celebrated leaders of the Underground Railroad, risking her life each and every day?

During the Civil Rights Movement, for every action, there was a nationwide reaction.  It was a Sunday morning like any other in Birmingham, Alabama back on September 15, 1963.  The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had served as the center of life for Birmingham’s African American community.  Four little girls inside the church were in the bathroom, talking, excited about going to school.  Members of the Ku Klux Klan lunched a bomb through the church window, killing Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley.  At the funeral for three of the girls Martin Luther King spoke, more than 8,000 residents both black and white attended the services.  Mourners included more than 800 members of the clergy, but not one city official attended.  This cowardly act and the death of four little girls led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

If I could walk into a high school classroom anywhere USA and was able to ask one question pertaining to Black History, I think it would be; What was the “Selma-To-Montgomery March and what did it accomplish?

The answer to that question is an entire semester’s worth, but the short version would be the Selma-to-Montgomery March was for voting rights, this was 1965 and African American citizens, had to demonstrate by marching, that they wanted, needed, and were entitled to register to vote without suffering a beating, or their children getting a beating, or their house burned down in the middle of the night by a group of cowards wearing white hoods.

On March 7, 1965 a group of 600 civil rights marchers headed for the Edmund Pettus Bridge, men, women, and children, un-armed, but were met at the foot of the bridge with state and local lawmen who attacked the marchers with billy clubs and tear gas driving them back into Selma.  Two days later Martin Luther King led a symbolic march to the bridge.

Civil Rights leaders sought a court protection for a third, full scale march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery.  On Sunday March 21, more than 3,000 marches set out for Montgomery walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields.  By the time they reached the capitol on March 25, they were 25,000 strong.

Several months later following the marches President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On February 1, 1960, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond and Ezell Blair walked into a Woolworths Five & Dime store in Greensboro, North Carolina.  I wonder if any high school students attending class today would recognize their names.  The four students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at the store’s lunch counter and ordered a cup of coffee.  There were a few problems with their actions.  First of all it was 1960, second, this was North Carolina, and third, they were sitting at an all whites counter, no blacks allowed.  The foursome ordered a cup of coffee, only the waitress ignored them as did the Store manager.  The following day the four students returned only this time with 19 supporters.  By the third day 85 supporters showed up including black and white students from neighboring colleges.  By the end of the week more than 400 students showed up and demonstrated in shifts so they wouldn’t miss classes.

Students staged smaller sit-ins in seven other North Carolina cities as well as in Hampton, Virginia, and Nashville, Tennessee.  By summer, 33 southern cities, including Greensboro, had integrated their restaurants and lunch counters.  Within a year 126 cities had followed the integration of their lunch counters.  The actions of four college students changed the course of segregation throughout the country. The civil rights movement was truly moving in the right direction.

I would like to walk into a classroom, a college classroom with the question, “Can anyone tell me about “The Little Rock Nine?”  I wonder what the response would be.

Little Rock Central High School located in Arkansas, was an all-white school back in 1957 when a federal court ordered Little Rock to comply with the Brown V. Board of Education decision which officially ended public-school segregation.  On September 4, 1957 another fine public official Governor Orval Faubus defied the court order and called in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African America students from entering the school.  The nine students became known as “The Little Rock Nine.”

Ten days later Gov. Faubus met with President Eisenhower, Faubus agreed to use the National Guard to protect the African American students.  Faubus lied, when he returned to Little Rock he dismissed the troops leaving the African American students on their own.  Angry white mobs, brick throwing, jeering members of the crowd had beaten members of the press and smashed out windows of the school, by noon police were forced to remove the students from the school in fear of their lives.

When Faubus failed to restore order and quell the angry crowd President Eisenhower dispatched the 101^st Airborne Division paratroopers to Little Rock and put the Arkansas National Guard under federal command, within three hours of the students being dismissed soldiers surrounded the school with loaded rifles and bayonets fixed.

Under federal protection, the “Little Rock Nine” finished out the school year.  However the following  year, 1958, Faubus closed all the high schools in the state forcing African American students to go out of state for an education  The schools reopened in the fall of 1959 despite more violence like the bombing of one students house, four of the nine students returned to Little Rock, under full time police protection.

I didn’t write this column to anger anyone, or remind you how bad African Americans had it a half a century ago.  I asked the question at the beginning of this column, why do we need or have a Black History Month?  Perhaps we need a reminder, a highlight month, to remind us as to how we got here.  Perhaps we need more than a month to learn and understand the journey of our African American brothers and sisters, or maybe it simply serves as a reminder that we all breathe the same air.

Black History Month is a time to recognize our great leaders who led us through the segregated dark days of the civil rights movement.  All these small, abbreviated stories highlight un-likely hero’s that helped shape a nation, four students sitting at an all whites counter, four little girls who’s life ended with the bombing of their church, their church represented perhaps the most safest place they could be.

All we can do now is understand it all and move forward, but like Washington and Lincoln, our schools and studies should also recognize “The Little Rock Nine,” “Selma To Montgomery March,” “Shirley Chisholm” and all the rest of not only the people and places I mentioned, but to all the key civil rights incidents, and to understand all that it requires year round studies, not just 30 days.

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Can you help us: Jack and Brian Coll are currently working on a book called “Conshohocken in Pictures and Short Story’s.”  We are in search of Conshohocken’s African American history. Did you grow up in Conshohocken, did your parents live and work in or around the borough.  Do you have any family photos in front of your house or at the playground, maybe a picnic in the yard?   We would be happy to talk to you about your family history and perhaps use some or all of the information in the book, feel free to contact us.

(Jack Coll has been a photo journalist for more than 30 years and has written on many topics from sports to politics.  Check out some of Jack’s past columns under Conshystuff.com)

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