Mary McLeod Bethune, HBCUs, and History

 
The daughter of former slaves and among the youngest of 17 children, Mary McLeod Bethune became an educator, and a leader in the movements for civil and women’s rights.  The college she founded, Bethune - Cookman, set educational standards for today’s black colleges and universities.  A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1936 Bethune became the highest ranking African-American woman in government, when the President named her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration.   She remained in that role until 1944. She was also a leader of FDR’s unofficial black cabinet.  In 1940, she became vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP), a position she held for the rest of her life. 

Elijah Cummings Makes History

It's worth noting, during Black History Month, that Representative Elijah Cummings (D - MD 7th), as Chair of the House Oversight Committee, plans to spend significant time on  H.R.1 — a bill to protect voting rights and ethics rules. .

Elijah Cummings

During a hearing Wednesday of the Committee he now chairs, Cummings recalled how his mother, a sharecropper, had witnessed Americans being beaten while seeking the right to vote.  He said that, as she was dying, she said to him Do not let them take our votes away from us.

Stacy Abrams Makes History

It's worth noting, during Black History Month, that  Stacy Abrams of Georgia delivered the Democratic response to Donald Trump's State of the Union address.

Stacy Abrams

Abrams' speech refocused on what I've always believed was the core of the Democratic party - working-class folks of all backgrounds.

Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks was among the first killed in the American Revolution.  Attucks began life as a slave,  and later became a skilled seaman.


As early as the mid-19th century, Attucks also became a hero within the African-American community, memorialized as a Martyr for Liberty.

The Homestead Grays

An athlete himself, my dad appreciated the skills and performance of his fellow athletes.  His first sport was football; at one point he had an offer from Art Rooney to become an early Pittsburgh Steeler.  He also delighted in baseball.  My earliest memory of learning about our national pastime was my asking Dad why there was a photo, on the  front-page of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, of a man with his shoulder covered with an ice pack.  He's having his arm iced down, Dad said, because he just pitched twelve perfect innings.

The Pirates weren't the only baseball professionals my dad viewed from the stands. With the steel town of Homestead across the Monongahela River, and only a few miles from, our home in Braddock, he also had the delight of seeing Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell when they played for the Homestead Grays of the Negro League.

The Homestead Grays

Dad's opinions of Gibson and Bell squared with those of baseball writers and just-plain-fans: He said, in his deep baritone and with obvious admiration, that Gibson was one of the best power hitters, and Bell by far the fastest, ball player, of any color and in any league.

I'll close with a vignette about Bell.  It's been said he was so fast he could flip the light switch and get under the covers before the room got dark ...

Philip Randolph and the Pullman Porters

In 1925, Asa Philip Randolph organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly African-American labor union. 

Randolph was a leader in more than one effort for social change; he helped direct the civil rights movement and the labor movement.

Perhaps Randolph's most important contribution in either of those contexts was his organizing the March on Washington movement in 1941.  That movement in turn pressured President Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries, and, after the war, caused President Harry Truman to desegregate the United States' military.