The Martinsville Seven were a group of young black men executed in 1951 after being convicted of raping a white woman. Their trials and the electrocutions became a cause célèbre similar to the Scottsboro Case of the 1930s. Continue reading Revisit: MARTINSVILLE SEVEN (1949-1951)
The Mother’s Day Disturbance of May 11, 1969, also called the Mother’s Day Riot, is viewed by many as the turning point in Tacoma, Washington’s civil rights struggle. While Tacoma in the 1960s did not experience the violence that enflamed many northern cities, the Mother’s Day disturbance in the Hilltop community, the black ghetto of Tacoma, bore the seeds of similar frustration—a black population concentrated by residential discrimination in a deteriorating inner city neighborhood, the lack of economic opportunity and political representation, and the gulf between the promise of equal rights and the daily reality of black life. Continue reading Revisit: MOTHER’S DAY DISTURBANCE, 1969
The four California Colored Conventions held between 1855 and 1865 were a response to blacks being treated as second-class citizens and constantly threatened and violently assaulted by white men without legal and political recourse in Gold Rush era California. The first convention in 1855 marked the beginning of organized civil rights activism in the American West. Continue reading Revisit: THE CONVENTIONS OF COLORED CITIZENS OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA (1855-1865)
Ida M. Bowman Becks also known as Ida M. Becks, was an American elocutionist, suffragist, and African-American community organizer. She played prominent roles in establishing a number of community organizations, especially in Kansas City, Kansas, from the 1910s to the late 1940s. Continue reading Profile: Ida M. Becks (1880 – 1953)
Black Art Story 