A Salute to Black History

Understanding Wisdom And FOREVER Appreciating The Past
Dr. Alice Tyler Milton

Black History Month is a whole month dedicated to remembering important people and events in history with African or African-Caribbean origin. 

Annually marking black history was initiated in America in 1926 by Carter Godwin Woodson.

Initially the celebrations were for a week; however the first Black History Month started in 1976. 

It is celebrated annually in February in the United States of America and Canada and in October in the UK and Northern Ireland. 

Why have a whole Black History Month and not just one day?

Black people have only ever been remembered as slaves and not for the massive contributions many people of African and African-Caribbean made to science, medicine, politics and much more and therefore it was decided that a whole month should be dedicated to celebrate these achievements.
Many people feel that it is just as relevant today as it was in 1926.        (More)         

Race riots were caused by a vast number of social, political and economic factors. Joseph Boskin, author of Urban Racial Violence, observed that there were certain general patterns in the major late nineteenth and early twentieth-century race riots:

1. In each of the race riots, with few exceptions, it was whites who started rioting in response to perceived threats from blacks. Some examples are the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Memphis Riots of 1866, the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, and the Omaha Race Riot of 1919.        (More)       

A Killing Season: 'Red Summer' of 1919

A dreadful wave of lynching and anti-Negro violence permeated the very fiber of America during the year 1919. Lynching was so pervasive that James Weldon Johnson labeled it the "Red Summer," of 1919. During the "Red Summer," 76 blacks were reported lynched and 26 race riots took place. One of the worst riots took place in the nation's capital, almost within sight of the White House Six blacks were killed and 100 wounded.

This inhumane treatment was so blatant that civic and religious organizations began to speak out against lawless groups. One of the main opponents of lynching was the Federated Black Catholics under the guidance of Thomas Wyatt Turner. Turner was a supporter of civil rights and a devout Catholic born in Charles County, Maryland, Turner was a graduate of Howard University. Before he accepted the teaching position at Howard, he was the secretary of Baltimore's NAACP.

In September 1919, after the fervor of the "Red Summer" had abated, the U.S. Bishops had a meeting on the campus of Catholic University in Washington, D.C. A committee of 15 eventually became the Federated Colored Catholics. They submitted a statement to the bishops requesting an increase in black priest vocations and to halt racism in the Catholic church. They also requested that the church be more vocal against the lynching of Negroes.        (More)         

Battle of Fort Pillow

The Battle of Fort Pillow, also known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, was fought on April 12, 1864, at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Henning, Tennessee, during the American Civil War. The battle ended with a massacre of surrendered Federal black troops by soldiers under the command of Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Military historian David J. Eicher concluded, "Fort Pillow marked one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history."^[1]

The New York Times reported on April 24:

The blacks and their officers were shot down, bayoneted and put to the sword in cold blood... . Out of four hundred negro soldiers only about twenty survive! At least three hundred of them were destroyed after the surrender! This is the statement of the rebel General Chalmers himself to our informant.^[17]        (More)       

During the violent aftermath of the Civil War known as Reconstruction, a horrible massacre occurred on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, when white supremacists in Colfax, Louisiana, killed anywhere from 100 to 200 freedmen and black state militiamen who had barricaded themselves in the local courthouse. The exact number of fatalities will never be known, as many bodies were secretly buried or dumped into the Red River. This ugly incident was a microcosm of the political battles raging throughout the South.

Republicans were trying to ensure black suffrage and incorporating blacks into the political system, while Democrats and white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were doing all they could to intimidate blacks from voting and restore whites to the level of power they held before the war.        (More)       

Congress’ answer to the shortage of troops was the Conscription Act, passed in March 1863. This law established the first draft in U.S. history. Under its provisions, men between the ages of 20 and 45 were enrolled in the draft lottery. A controversial clause in the act provided an escape for those who could afford it. For $300 or the provision of a substitute, a man could remain safe from the carnage of the battlefields. Not surprisingly, the rich benefited most from the exemption clause.

New York City was hot in July of 1863, both in temperature and the city’s long-simmering class conflicts. German and Irish immigrants were resistant to the draft as they pursued fresh lives in their new homeland. In addition, competition for jobs between the white immigrants and free Blacks raised tensions to a breaking point.

On July 11, 1863, the first names of the new draft were drawn without incident. Two days later, the response was quite different. German and Irish immigrants banded together and began to march in a protest that turned violent. Draft buildings were burned, the rolls of names destroyed, and institutions and persons associated with enforcement of the conscription law were targeted. Anger against the draft law transformed into bloody and violent confrontations between the city’s clashing classes. Blacks in particular received the brunt of the violence. The Irish were viewed as the perpetrators of most of the death and destruction.        (More)         

The violent, racial confrontations in which mobs of whites and blacks battled each other in U.S. towns and cities during the Jim Crow era were triggered by some of the same forces driving legalized segregation, disfranchisement, and the lynching of thousands of African Americans. These explosions of urban violence against blacks differed in several ways from the individual lynchings and systematic terror practiced by organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, in the 1870s. For one thing, the urban explosions were directed less at individuals and more at entire black communities. They also reflected more the anxieties felt by lower-class whites, who feared competition with blacks for housing, employment, and social status as African-American newcomers began moving into urban settings following the Civil War. Also, although whites--who felt enraged by some real or imaginary actions by blacks--always started these riots, black victims increasingly defended themselves as best they could. Clearly, the race riots also were backlashes by white Americans who reacted with contempt and rage to black Americans' cries for equality, justice, and decency.         (More)         

The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880-1950

Immediately following the end of Reconstruction, the Federal Government of the United States restored white supremacist control to the South and adopted a “laissez-faire” policy in regard to the Negro. The Negro was betrayed by his country. This policy resulted in Negro disfranchisement, social, educational and employment discrimination, and peonage. Deprived of their civil and human rights, Blacks were reduced to a status of quasislavery or “second-class” citizenship. A tense atmosphere of racial hatred, ignorance and fear bred lawless mass violence, murder and lynching.        (More)       

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States.  Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19^th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.         (More)       

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