BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2015: African-Americans' long road to equality
Decades-long struggles of blacks in U.S. have come far — and have far to go
BY HERB BOYD
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, February 5, 2015, 4:00 AM
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© BETTMANN/CORBISDemonstrators flanked by National Guardsmen in Memphis in 1968. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to the city to support a strike by black sanitation workers.
With persistent chants and “Black Lives Matter” placards held high, thousands of demonstrators are filling city streets — and making headlines — in an unrelenting call that is older than America itself.
From America’s slavery days to the dawn of the 20th century and beyond, black Americans have continually pressed for equality, insisting on the cherished rights promised all Americans in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Over the past half-century, black Americans — blocked from registering and exercising their right to vote, deprived of economic and educational freedom and denied basic civil rights — have spoken with their feet through marches, demonstrations and protests.
Woman at recent protest in Grand Central Terminal against police abuse.
At the very beginning of this nation's history, there was a protest against British tyranny and oppression led by Crispus Attucks, a black man with Native American blood. Attucks did not just happen to stumble onto the pages of history, as some have purported. He was an organizer for the maritime union and had a vested interest in the outcome of the looming conflict between the colonies and the British empire.
A dedicated “son of liberty,” Attucks was the first to fall and die in the pivotal Boston Massacre that triggered the American Revolutionary War. After this seminal event has come a centuries-long line of people resorting to similar tactics to bring about peaceful change. And over the course of this struggle for freedom and justice, African-Americans have often taken to the streets, demanding an end to racism and discrimination.
While history books are often replete with testimonies about the courage and determination of white abolitionists pushing to end slavery, they often overlook the fact that black Americans were also agents for their own liberation. Freedom fighters such as Frederick Douglass, Robert Smalls, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and David Walker were not passive bystanders in the anti-slavery crusade.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESSThe NAACP-led Silent Parade was 1917 protest against lynching and an attempt to get a national legislation to stop the heinous acts.
They, along with countless other black men and women, in and out of bondage, took to the ramparts for equality. They would be among the forerunners of thousands more who fought with the Union forces during the Civil War, which led to the end of slavery in America in the mid-1800s.
At the dawn of the 20th century, with full freedom still a distant dream, black Americans continued to protest for legal rights and constitutional liberties. Black activists, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett and W.E.B. Du Bois, collaborated with Mary White Ovington, Henry Moskowitz and other white comrades to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and fought for the rights of African-Americans.
In 1915, there were protests in several American cities and an education campaign against the artistically praised, controversial 1915 D.W. Griffith film “Birth of a Nation,” which featured negative portrayals of blacks and glorified the Klu Klux Klan hate group as heroic.
PHIL GREITZERYoung man at the historic 1963 March on Washington.
One of the most striking and early expressions of anger about the treatment of African-Americans occurred in 1917, and was called the Silent Parade or Silent Protest. Thousands marched down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue led by the NAACP in an unsuccessful attempt urge President Woodrow Wilson to put an end to lynchings and aid black Americans through legislation. But the legislation never came.
In the 1920s, large New York parades and rallies under the red, black and green flag of Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey’s internationally popular Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) generated pride and were more than moments of celebration. The squadrons of UNIA women and men in military regalia who marched through Harlem were making statements of self-determination and African redemption. Their banners and placards marked their declaration of racial pride, self-reliance, and black nationalism.
DAILY NEWSNews’ coverage of protest march after death of Michael Griffith in 1985.
A decade later, in the 1930s, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. picked up where earlier community efforts left off — holding marches and boycotts against white-owned stores on 125th St. that did not employ blacks. “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work!” was the rallying cry for Powell and his followers. Eventually, their sustained action brought about change to the uptown commercial strip and across the nation as other groups began to adopt similar strategies.
The threat of a protest march by the venerable black union leader A. Philip Randolph in 1941 proved effective — forcing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to use his executive authority to end the practice of discrimination in the factories and plants. Twenty-two years later, Randolph, with the able assistance of activist Bayard Rustin, would revive the same tactic in the more famous March on Washington for Jobs and Justice.
That historic assembly of people in the nation’s capital in 1963 came as a result of an accumulation of frustration and continual intransigence of white supremacy, especially in the southern states upholding segregationist Jim Crow laws. Within a two-year period, the marches and demonstrations would grow to such a tidal wave of urgency that President Johnson had no recourse but to sign the Civil Rights Law of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Into the 1970s and 1980s, with instances of police brutality and violence against blacks by white reactionaries and hate groups, more protesters’ boots hit the ground — and nowhere were the marches more intense and consistent than in New York City
The death of Michael Griffith was one haunting reminders of the period and cause for demonstration. Chants of “No Justice, No Peace!” accompanied the massive wave of resentment from black Americans venting anger and discontent after a gang of white toughs attacked a group of black men in the Howard Beach, Queens, in 1985. Griffith was chased onto the Belt Parkway, where he was fatally struck by a car.
Today, there are thousands of nonviolent demonstrators — from Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was killed by a police officer to Staten Island, where Eric Garner was the victim of a police officer’s chokehold. The outrage against police abuse and misconduct shared by a critical mass of peaceful protesters today is nothing new; it reflectis a centuries-old tradition of protests against injustice that stretches back to revolts on slave ships coming to America during the Middle Passage.
Like the successful 381-day Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which started in 1955, and the 50-plus mile 1965 Selma to Montgomery march to bring down the South’s “cotton curtain” of racial bias and end disenfranchisement, demonstrations continue today — part of an American tradition of dissent and demonstration.
