View allAll Photos Tagged Segregation
This Neo-Colonial Style building sits on what was originally known as the Cherokee Plantation. The plantation was owned by a wealthy southern industrialist, Robert Jemison.
The first Alabama Insane Hospital was built in 1861. The name was changed in 1900 after its first superintendent to Bryce Hospital.
With the end of the Civil War and the pressures of segregation looming, the number of African American patients increased dramatically at Bryce Hospital.
In the 1920s, Bryce Hospital became segregated and this building, the Jemison Mental Institution, was built to house the increasing numbers of African American mentally insane.
The Magnolia/Mobil gas station, which facilitated the role of the press in covering the events, as it had the only payphone in the area.
The events of 1957, as summarized in the museum across the street from the school: "On the morning of September 4, 1957, the Arkansas National Guard blocked nine African-American students from entering Little Rock Central High School. Two weeks later, a federal judge ruled that Governor Orval Faubus had illegally used the Guard to defy the U.S. Supreme Court's "Brown v. Board of Education" decision that school segregation was unconstitutional. Faubus removed the guardmen, but when the Little Rock Nine entered the school for the first time, segregationists outside grew violent. With the Little Rock police unable to ensure their safety, the students were forced to leave. The next day President Dwight D. Eisenhower backed the Supreme Court's constitutional authority by calling out the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne division. On September 25, soldiers escorted the teenagers into the school."
December 2019.
Williston Senior High School yearbook, 1960
Booker T. Washington served as Williston’s principal from 1951 to 1968.
CFM 2004-012-0001
Museum purchase
A uniformed guard with a gun saw me taking pictures and told me: "We don't want no trouble makers 'round here, Yankee !"
The photo is blurred. I guess the armed guard made me nervous.
NO 038 - New Scan uploaded December 6, 2017
Cyrus likes to eat his food separately. I didn't notice this until he started complaining a little bit when I made stuffed peppers (the rice, cheese and meat are mixed together!) and that time I made a baked goat cheese salad and he ate the goat cheese separate from the rest of the salad.
As a joke, Regan bought him 2 of these cafeteria style trays last year. He finally used one last night, and I had to document it.
Garnet C. Wilkinson, the longtime assistant superintendent in charge of the District of Columbia’s segregated public African American schools, is shown in a portrait circa 1950.
Wilkinson was in charge of the black segregated schools from 1921 until 1954 when the school system was integrated and he became an assistant superintendent in the merged schools.
Wilkinson became the first African American in charge of black schools in the District after the resignation of Roscoe Conkling Bruce in the wake of the 1919 Moens’ child abuse scandal when so-called professor Moens was revealed to be taking nude photographs of African American school children.
While in charge of black schools, Wilkinson developed them into some of the best in the nation.
However working class African American parents challenged the deplorable conditions of their schools in the city and Wilkinson became a target when he instituted a plan where students went to school at the Browne Junior High for half a day, later amending the plan to have students walk half a mile to annexes during their school day to sit in small elementary school desks with no equipment or recreational facilities.
Wilkinson remained on the hot seat until lawsuits arising out of the uproar settled the issue once and for all when the Supreme Court ruled in May 1954 that District of Columbia school segregation was illegal in the Bolling v. Sharpe case.
For more information and related images, see www.flickr.com/gp/washington_area_spark/m2x047
Read the story of of DC desegregation from the pickets to the courts: washingtonspark.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/dcs-fighting-bar...
Photo by Scurlock Studios. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History: Archives Center.
Click the "All Sizes" button above to read an article or to see the image clearly.
These scans come from my rather large magazine collection. Instead of filling my house with old moldy magazines, I scanned them (in most cases, photographed them) and filled a storage area with moldy magazines. Now they reside on an external harddrive. I thought others might appreciate these tidbits of forgotten history.
Please feel free to leave any comments or thoughts or impressions... They are happily appreciated!
L&C unveiled and dedicated a historical marker honoring education champion Scott Bibb, who fought against segregated schools in Alton from 1897-1908, on June 19, 2017 in front of the Scott Bibb Center in Alton. Photo by Laura Inlow, L&C Media Services
Parents picket demanding better schools for African American children outside the Franklin building at 13th & K NW where the school board met in Washington, D.C. in December 1947.
The group led by Gardner Bishop that became the Consolidated Parents Group staged a two-month strike of students demanding an end to double shifts at Browne Junior High on Benning Road that resulted in a part time education for children.
The other demand was an end to using two elementary schools as annexes, forcing children to make half-mile walks between schools only to sit in elementary school desks that were too small.
None of the Browne facilities had recreational facilities or equipment like the nearby white school.
Their efforts ended both double shifts and the annex facility arrangement at Browne. The group’s suits resulted in the 1954 Bolling v. Sharpe Supreme Court decision desegregating District schools.
For more information and related images, see www.flickr.com/gp/washington_area_spark/564wW3
Read the story of of DC desegregation from the pickets to the courts: washingtonspark.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/dcs-fighting-bar...
The photographer is unknown. Via Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History.
There is a TV drama forthcoming on WowWow TV on racial discrimination, segregation versus integration issues. Here is a collection of cast members taken in between production shooting. It was perfect weather as well being an unusually warm day (19ºC) for early February. Every one seemed to enjoy themselves, except there was a lot of excess standing, so our legs became quite tired and sore.
Shoot location was Showa Memorial Park near Nishi Tachikawa Station, Tokyo, Japan. Anyone who is a subscriber to Wow Wow and is interested in viewing the movie, please send me a personal message. Cheers…..
本日のプロダクションは人種差別の主テーマとしてWowWowテレビで近い将来に放映する予定です。この写真集は撮影ロケでその番組のキャストメンバーです。天気も最適で最高でした。19ºCは２月の昇順ごろとしてとても例外的です。皆さんは楽しんでいましたが立つことはかなりありましてメンバーの一部の足み疲れてきて痛くなりました。
撮影ロケは西立川の昭和記念公園です。その番組予定の詳細を知りたい場合はメッセージを送って下さい。
John Vachon
Although there was improvement in racial equality over all, there was still no end to segregation or discrimination, especially in the city. Atlanta for instance, was one of the most know areas in the nation when it came to racial disturbances. This is partly due to the elites desire to keep the economic system at the status quo and electing Eugene Talmadge as Governor. Talmadge was well liked by those who were benefiting from an economic system which took advantage of blacks and other minorities by paying them low wages. This was the way it had always been done. The New Deal in opposition was designed to help the very people the elites wanted to keep down and was seen as a threat to their lifestyle. In response, they elected Talmadge who drove hard against accepting the New Deal Programs which eventually became as powerful as the state government. In response, local officials in charge of relief often found excuses to give blacks less in the way of relief. A few years later, an excuse was found to clear a large African American neighborhood in order to push blacks toward and contain them within a certain area in the city. The excuse used was that the neighborhood was a slum and unattractive, especially as close as it was to the upscale shopping area downtown. After the the slums were removed though, nice apartments were built for the elite whites. These as well as the fear and panic about the unstable economy and the lack of jobs in the city all contributed to further segregation and discrimination in the city of Atlanta, and certainly in other cities.
Ferguson, Karen. Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Chapel Hill and London, 2002.
A poster series [1 of 4] dedicated to the deterioration of a conformed society of the 1950s, events that would precede the turbulent 60s.
1956: Civil Rights // The Montgomery Bus Desegregation
November 15, 1956, almost a year after the boycott had begun, the Supreme Court judged the Montgomery bus-segregation law to be unconstitutional. On December 21, the city prepared to desegregate its buses.
Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893, Atlanta, Georgia – March 21, 1955, New York, New York) was a civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 (now Clark Atlanta University). In 1918 he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson, where he acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, serving from 1931 to 1955.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. Under his leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White was the virtual author of President Truman's presidential order desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.
White was the fourth of seven children born in Atlanta to George W. White and Madeline Harrison. They belonged to the influential First Congregational Church, founded after the Civil War by freedmen and the American Missionary Association, based in the North. Among the new middle class of blacks, both of the Whites ensured that Walter and each of their children got an education. When White was born, George had graduated from Atlanta University and was a postal worker. Madeline had graduated from Clark University and became a teacher.
Of mixed race with African and European ancestry, White's appearance showed his high proportion of European ancestry. He emphasized in his autobiography, A Man Called White (p. 3): "I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white.
All of his family were light-skinned, and his mother Madeline was also blue-eyed and blonde. Her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, a slave, and Dilsia's master William Henry Harrison, who much later became president of the United States.
Madeline's mother Marie Harrison was one of Dilsia's mixed-race daughters by Harrison, and her father Augustus Ware was a white man. Despite his family's ancestry being mostly white and himself being blond-haired, blue-eyed, and very fair, White and his family identified as black and lived among the Atlanta black community. In the earlier stages of his career White took advantage of his features to make investigations in the South, passing for white to gather informations more freely and protected on violations of civil and human rights such as lynchings and hate crimes in socially hostile environments.
Sinclair Lewis' 1947 novel, Kingsblood Royal, about a man who appears to be white but learns late in life that he is black, has characters based in part on White and his professional circles, many of whom were of mixed race and among the educated elites of black society, with relatives or friends who had chosen to live as white based on appearance. Lewis consulted White on the novel and White helped him meet numerous professional acquaintances. While some white critics found the novel contrived, the prominent African-American magazine Ebony named it the best novel of the year.
After graduating in 1916 from Atlanta University, a historically black college, White's first job was with the Standard Life Insurance Company, one of the new and most successful businesses started by African Americans in Atlanta. He also worked to organize an NAACP chapter in Atlanta; the organization had been set up several years before and White was supportive of their work. He and other leaders were successful in getting the Atlanta School Board to support improving education for black children. At the invitation of James Weldon Johnson, White moved to New York and in 1918 started working at the national headquarters of the NAACP.
One of the first riots he investigated was that of October 1919 in Elaine, Arkansas, where white vigilantes and Federal troops in Phillips County killed more than 200 black sharecroppers. The case had both labor and racial issues. The white militias had come to the town and hunted down blacks in retaliation for the killing of a white man. He was killed in a shootout at a church where black sharecroppers were meeting on issues related to organizing with an agrarian union.
White was granted credentials from the Chicago Daily News. That enabled him to obtain an interview with Governor Charles Hillman Brough of Arkansas, who would not have met with him as the representative of the NAACP. Brough gave White a letter of recommendation to help him meet people, and his autographed photograph. White was in Phillips County for only a brief time before his identity was discovered; he took the first train back to Little Rock. The conductor told him that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start", because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger down here passing for white and the boys are going to get him."[6] Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White, "When they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!" "High yellow" was a term used at the time to refer to white-appearing blacks, mostly those of mixed-racial descent.
White published his findings about the riot and trial in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender and The Nation, as well as the NAACP's own magazine The Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to prohibit the mailing of the Chicago Defender and Crisis to Arkansas, while others attempted to enjoin distribution of the Defender at the local level. The NAACP put together a legal defense of the men convicted and carried the case to the Supreme Court. Its ruling overturned the Elaine convictions and established important precedent about the conduct of trials. The Supreme Court found that the original trial was held under conditions that adversely affected the defendants' rights. Some of the courtroom audience were armed, as were a mob outside, so there was intimidation of the court and jury. The 79 black defendants had been quickly tried: 12 were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death; 67 were condemned to sentences from 20 years to life. No white man was prosecuted for the many black deaths.
Boarding houses at night along Douglas Street near Fannin St. in St. Paul's Bottoms, 19 Aug 1963. Coll. 393, Jacket 30501.
"Little Journeys into Storyland" or Stories that will Live and Lift by Louis B. Reynolds and Charles L. Paddock. Copyrighted in 1947 by The Southern Publishing Association, apparently for segregated schools.
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Toby Jackson
Saturday 2 - Sunday 17 November, Thursday - Sunday, 12:00pm - 5:00pm
GENERATORprojects
25/26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate
Dundee, DD1 4JG
GENERATORprojects will present two exhibitions, Genetic Automata and Sensor
Genetic Automata by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy forms the first part of an ambitious new body of works by the artists, exploring race and identity in an age of avatars, video games, and DNA Ancestry testing. Initially commissioned by Arts Catalyst, this exhibition will be shown during NEoN Festival as part of a national tour.
Referencing the history of the theory of evolution, and the relationship between Darwin and his taxidermy teacher John Edmonstone, a freed slave, Genetic Automata raises important questions of invisible histories, eugenics, and segregation, through the lens of historical and contemporary contexts. The video installation combines animation, spoken word and text interspersed with microscopic topographies of varied shades of skin, digital renditions of skin from video games, and film footage of taxidermied bird life from Darwin’s bird skin collection at the Natural History Museum.
Sensor by emerging artist Toby Jackson is an extension of work that he has been developing over the past few years, highlighting the relationships between humans and computers; lived experience, and its digital manipulation. Sensor will use live capture 3D mapping to create an interactive projection which maps and distorts the audience’s movements, dictating the ways in which we interact with the work. The projected images will reference digital avatars via the visual simplifications of those who interact with it, questioning ideas of identity, privacy and anonymity in a world of digital surveillance.This relationship between the artwork and the audience will highlight the precarious power dynamic that exists between humans and computers, encouraging us to disrupt this dynamic, and reclaim control of our own narratives.
Each of these exhibitions discusses the insidious ways in which narratives can be altered and sculpted in order to disseminate ideas which negatively influence collective thinking. encourages us to reconsider our interactions with technology in order to combat this deceptive influence. Genetic Automata urges an awareness of the ways in which historical omissions can contribute to contemporary issues, particularly in relation to racial discrimination and segregation. Ultimately, these exhibitions combine to encourage a heightened awareness of the responsibility that each of us hold to question the information that we are forced to consume.
About the Artists
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy’s work has been shown both within the UK and abroad including Tate Modern, London; The Baltic, Gateshead; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefied; Fact, Liverpool; BFI London Film Festival, London; Transmediale Festival, Berlin, Germany & Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Texas, USA. They have been on residencies at Praksis, Oslo in Norway & Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire. Recent awards include an Elephant Trust award and support from Arts Council England. They have been shortlisted for the Film London Jarman award 2018. Larry Achiampong is represented by Copperfield Gallery, London & David Blandy is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London.
Toby Jackson is a Scotland-based digital artist, who uses innovative technology to create installations which are both interactive and generative. Jackson’s work explores themes of identity, self-expression, surveillance, and censorship, and the ways in which each of these affects – or is effected by – abstract representation of the self in our digital age. Following the critical success of his most recent work Blind Eye, this exhibition marks Jackson’s first solo show since graduating from DJCAD earlier this summer.
Opening/Preview night: Friday 1st November, 6pm – 9pm
Photography Kathryn Rattray
Joan Sexton is knocked down and nearly trampled by a mounted police officer after a melee broke out during an attempt to integrate the Anacostia swimming pool June 29, 1949.
Members of the local Progressive Party youth group led the attempt to integrate the facility.
The confrontation took place when 10 white and 10 black members and supporters of the Young Progressives entered the pool. Later, about 70 African Americans arrived and entered the pool area while about 100 waiting white opponents began a scuffle. Scattered fighting broke out both inside and outside the facility between the groups.
A white woman was chased by about 50 white youths who believed she was a “Wallacite” One in the crowd yelled, “Go back to Russia, you dirty red.”
An African American boy was corned by a white mob and sustained cuts when he attempted to climb over a barbed wire fence. Fighting continued between the two groups outside the pool area while the numbers of participants grew to about 1,000.
Two white students distributing Young Progressive handbills in favor of integration were arrested along with two African Americans who were alleged to be fighting with whites. One white youth was arrested for fighting with one of the white Young Progressives distributing handbills.
Several others among the Progressives were injured, including one African American hit in the head with a stone and a white woman trampled by a police horse.
The pool was temporarily closed as result of the clashes. The Interior Department had been scheduled to transfer the six pools to the District’s recreation department, but held off because DC insisted on segregating pools by race.
DC finally integrated its parks and pools in 1954 in the wake of the Bolling v. Sharpe school decision. The Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public parks nationwide in 1958.
For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHskhNEzdC
The photographer is unknown. The image is an Associated Press photo obtained via an Internet sale.
Dr. William Monroe Wells accounting books show his "Gross from Dances" at the South Street Casino. Two thirds of the way down the page there is a Cab Calloway entry.
A somewhat closer view of the relatively obscure exhibition about the history of segregation. I recalled the segregated beach from my childhood in the 1950’s and 60’s. Since my family’s main interest was fishing and the Little Talbot Island State Park beaches didn’t allow fishing from the shore, we usually went past them to Big Talbot Island, but it was impossible to not see that there were separate signs for the ‘colored’ section and the unlabeled (therefore ‘white’) section. When I asked my parents why there were separate beaches, my father would say something along the line of “hush child, we don’t talk about that.”
Looking up the history of this (see the research article linked below), I was surprised to see that this had been a relatively radical effort by the state of Florida. Throughout the South state parks (and public beaches) were for whites and blacks were actively excluded. As pressures to provide public accommodations for blacks increased in the 1940’s and 1950’s, some states in the south (the article notes South Carolina) considered privatizing all of their state parks so that they would not have to allow for use by blacks. Florida’s state parks were also limited to use by whites, but pressures towards integration of beaches and other public areas resulted in the state deciding to develop separate and (relatively) equal facilities for blacks at a state park near Tallahassee and for this state beach. Little Talbot Island State Park opened in 1951 as two separate beaches, a black beach on the south end of the island and a white beach on the north end.
Both beaches did better economically than had been expected; while I didn’t see an explanation regarding the white beach’s success, apparently part of the reason for the success of the black beach was its accessibility to large black populations from south Georgia.
As it became clear in the mid 1960’s that ‘separate but equal’ did not work, state parks in other parts of the South began to integrate, though that often meant the end of the use of the parks by whites. Similarly, Florida State Parks began integration in 1964, not by an official declaration, but simply by not enforcing segregation. As was often the case, de facto segregation continued for quite some time. I do recall that when I was in high school (I graduated in 1965), the signs indicating separation of the beaches had disappeared, but the beaches were still essentially segregated. After high school I spent much less time in Jacksonville, so I don’t know when they were modified to what they are now, as one park.
Little Talbot segregation history: ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/historicalgeography/article/v...
(Part of a photo-essay series on personal history and race with keyword FlaAla0518)
The building above was a barracks for soldiers training at Fort Des Moines. Fort Des Moines started out as a cavalry post in 1903. On June 17, 1917, one thousand Black college men and 200 noncommissioned officers from the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments were sworn into the Provisional Army Officer Training School. Four months later, 639 men graduated from the course and becoming U.S. Army Officers. Black units led by the officers trained at the Provisional Army Officer Training School were assembled in France as the 92nd Division. The all black 92nd received many citations and awards for meritorious and distinguished conduct in combat against the Imperial German Army on the approaches to Metz in the Lorraine.
In 1942, Fort Des Moines became home to the first Woman's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), later renamed the Women's Army Corps (WAC). Both black and white women were trained at Fort Des Moines for service in World War II. Initially, black women lived and trained separately from other women. The Army eliminated segregation in training, but not in assignments. The WAC program trained 72,000 women and commissioned the first female officers.
After World War II Fort Des Moines was deactivated and became home to several Reserve units. Many of the buildings were neglected over the years. This photograph was taken in 2018 following extensive renovation. To view a 2012 photograph of the barracks before it was renovated go to: flic.kr/p/ch1L2m The old fort is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark.
This school was used back in the day for the residents of Eloy. Apparently Eloy was the first town in Arizona to desegregate, but this larger school house was for the whites and Mexican-Americans and the smaller school house was for the African-Americans. Even the brown people had to be separated, who knew.
The windows said a lot to me. You could still see light through the glass, but the opaqueness speaks to the history of this building.
C'è sempre qualcosa che ci separa, che ci divide dagli altri... a volte per colpa nostra che non alziamo gli occhi per vedere oltre quello che ci circonda... - There is always something that separates us, that divides us from the others... at times for guilt ours that we don't lift the eyes to see over what surrounds us... - Siempre hay algo que nos separa, que nos divide de los otros... a veces por culpa nuestro que no levantamos los ojos para ver más allá de lo que nos circunda...
"Little Journeys into Storyland" or Stories that will Live and Lift by Louis B. Reynolds and Charles L. Paddock. Copyrighted in 1947 by The Southern Publishing Association, apparently for segregated schools.
Nearly 10,000 youth and students marched on Washington, D.C. October 26, 1958 to demand integration of schools and other public facilities.
The protesters were addressed by entertainer Harry Belafonte and baseball star Jackie Robinson after marching down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial.
This protest and the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom helped lay the groundwork for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
For more information and additional images, see flic.kr/s/aHska27CEb
Photographer is unknown. The image is an auction find.
March 17, 1950
Recently constructed replacement sits next to the old wooden structure of the original Fire Station 14. Fire Station 14 was an all black segregated company at the time this photo was taken. They utilized both houses for a short time before the old building was torn down. The lot was paved, a block wall erected to provide parking for the firefighter's personal vehicles.
Ross Robert Barnett (January 22, 1898 – November 6, 1987) was the governor of Mississippi from 1960 to 1964. He was a States' Rights Democrat, as well as one of many Democrats supporting segregation.
Born in Standing Pine in Leake County, Barnett was the youngest of ten children of a Confederate veteran.
He served in the United States Army during World War I, then worked in a variety of jobs while earning an undergraduate degree from Mississippi College in Clinton in 1922. Four years later, he followed that with an LL.B. from the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1929, he married Mary Pearl Crawford, a schoolteacher, with the couple's long-time union producing two daughters and a son. Over the next quarter century, Barnett became one of the state's most successful trial lawyers, earning more than $100,000 per year while specializing in damage suits. He often donated his skills to causes, and served as president of the Mississippi Bar Association for two years beginning in 1943.
Using the income derived from his legal fees, Barnett sought to try his hand at politics, unsuccessfully running twice for Governor of Mississippi, in 1951 and 1955. On his third try in 1959, he won the election and was inaugurated on January 19, 1960. During his term in office he celebrated the centennial of the American Civil War. Barnett traveled to Civil War sites to pay homage to fallen "Sons Of Mississippi".
During his time as governor, Barnett, a staunch segregationist and Democrat, became noted for his tumultuous clashes with the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Barnett arranged for the arrest of Freedom Riders in 1961 and then imprisoned them in a brutal prison called Parchman Farm (now Mississippi State Penitentiary) in Parchman, Mississippi. While the offenses were minor, the Freedom Riders were stripped searched, had beds taken away, and were humiliated and brutalized in the prison. While this approach was popular in the state, it was done in part to blunt the criticism he was receiving for a variety of reasons: failing to follow through with promises of jobs for office-seekers; filling those jobs with acquaintances, and attempting to wrest control of state agencies from the legislature.
Barnett was a member of the white supremacist Citizens' Council movement as well.
In 1962, he actively opposed James Meredith's efforts to desegregate his alma mater, the University of Mississippi. As a result, Barnett was fined $10,000 and sentenced to jail for contempt but never paid the fine or served a day in jail. This was because the charges were terminated (civil) and dismissed (criminal) by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, due to "substantial compliance with orders of the court," and "in view of changed circumstances and conditions."
On the night before the Ole Miss riot of 1962 protesting Meredith's entry to the university, Barnett gave his famous fifteen-word "I Love Mississippi" speech at the University of Mississippi football game in Jackson. Ole Miss Rebels were playing Kentucky Wildcats. 41,000 fans cheered at the stadium waving thousands of Confederate flags. At halftime, a gigantic Confederate flag was unveiled on the field. The crowd shouted "We want Ross"! Barnett went to the field, grabbed the microphone at the 50-yard line and said to an enthusiastic crowd: "I love Mississippi! I love her people! Our customs. I love and respect our heritage."
Until the 1960s, Mississippians had known no alternative to segregation, and many linked the separation to the Bible. Barnett, a Baptist Sunday school teacher, declared "The Good Lord was the original segregationist. He put the black man in Africa. ... He made us white because he wanted us white, and He intended that we should stay that way." Barnett said that Mississippi had the largest percent of African Americans because "they love our way of life here, and that way is segregation."
Shortly after he left office, Barnett's looming presence was evident at the first trial of white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in February 1964. De La Beckwith was on trial for the murder of African American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, but an all-white jury was unable to agree on a verdict in both this and a subsequent re-trial. In the second subsequent re-trial, former Governor Ross Barnett interrupted the proceedings—while Myrlie Evers was testifying—to shake hands with Beckwith. De La Beckwith was eventually convicted at a subsequent trial three decades later, a case chronicled in the movie Ghosts of Mississippi.
"Little Journeys into Storyland" or Stories that will Live and Lift by Louis B. Reynolds and Charles L. Paddock. Copyrighted in 1947 by The Southern Publishing Association, apparently for segregated schools.
Louis Redding, an African American attorney, successfully argued the case that ended racial segregation in public schools.
Exposition : The color line
Du mardi 04 octobre 2016 au dimanche 15 janvier 2017
Quel rôle a joué l’art dans la quête d’égalité et d’affirmation de l’identité noire dans l’Amérique de la Ségrégation ? L'exposition rend hommage aux artistes et penseurs africains-américains qui ont contribué, durant près d’un siècle et demi de luttes, à estomper cette "ligne de couleur" discriminatoire.
—————
« Le problème du 20e siècle est le problème de la ligne de partage des couleurs ».
Si la fin de la Guerre de Sécession en 1865 a bien sonné l’abolition de l'esclavage, la ligne de démarcation raciale va encore marquer durablement la société américaine, comme le pressent le militant W.E.B. Du Bois en 1903 dans The Soul of Black Folks. L’exposition The Color Line revient sur cette période sombre des États-Unis à travers l’histoire culturelle de ses artistes noirs, premières cibles de ces discriminations.
Des thématiques racistes du vaudeville américain et des spectacles de Minstrels du 19e siècle à l’effervescence culturelle et littéraire de la Harlem Renaissance du début du 20e siècle, des pionniers de l’activisme noir (Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington) au réquisitoire de la chanteuse Billie Holiday (Strange Fruit), ce sont près de 150 ans de production artistique – peinture, sculpture, photographie, cinéma, musique, littérature… – qui témoignent de la richesse créative de la contestation noire.