This Week in People’s History, Aug 21–27
Open to the Public, but Not Really
85 YEARS AGO, on August 21, 1939, five brave young African-Americans staged one of the first-ever anti-racist sit-ins in the U.S., when they visited the Alexandria, Virginia, public library and asked for library cards. When the librarian refused and told them to leave the whites’-only building, each of them picked up a library book and quietly sat down to read it.
The non-violent library protest had been planned by 26-year-old civil-rights attorney Samuel Tucker, who had given advance notice of the sit-in to the media. When police arrived at the library, they found it surrounded by a crowd of some 300 reporters, photographers, and curious citizens.
The police took the five into custody and escorted them from the building, through a phalanx of media representatives. The result of the sit-in was a legal stand-off. Since there was no Virginia law (only a despicable tradition) against ignoring a whites’-only sign, the five were tried for disorderly conduct, an accusation that was not confirmed by the testimony of a single witness, as made clear by lawyer Tucker’s defense.
Tucker hoped that an acquittal could force the library to abandon its racist policy or that a conviction and appeal provide the opportunity for a higher court to take a stand against Jim Crow. But the judge in the case took the cowardly option of never issuing a verdict, thereby making an appeal impossible and leaving the library free to maintain its whites’-only policy. The defendants remained free on their own recognizance for the rest of their lives.
The public-in-name-only library’s directors soon decided to open what would be Alexandria’s first library for Afro-Americans, which was stocked entirely with donated and caste-off books. The whites’-only library was finally integrated in February 1959. https://medium.com/everylibrary/libraries-segregation-and-civil-rights-fe9ad46acece
LBJ Throws Shade on Freedom Democrats
60 YEARS AGO, on August 22, 1964, a small but determined group of anti-racist Mississippians tried to speak truth to power for 30 minutes on national television and the president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, went out of his way to prevent them from broadcasting their powerful message.
The setting was the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the convention’s credentials committee was holding a public hearing on which one of two groups of elected delegates had the right to represent Mississippi Democrats. The regular and racist Mississippi Democratic Party’s delegation was being challenged by the grassroots Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Freedom Party objected that the regular party’s delegates should not be seated because they had been chosen in a whites’-only election. The regular party could not deny the charge, because it had proudly held a whites’-only primary, even though doing so was against the national Democratic Party’s rules.
The Freedom Democrats’ challenge was political dynamite, so President Johnson used his influence over the media to prevent the Freedom Democrats getting the word out on live television. The credentials committee hearing was being broadcast live, so just when the broadcast of the hearing was scheduled to begin, Johnson announced he would speak in a live, televised, press conference in the White House.
The television networks had no choice but to cut away from the convention, where television cameras recorded, but did not broadcast live, dramatic testimony by Martin Luther King, Jr., and leading Freedom Democrat Fannie Lou Hamer about the violent methods used by Mississippi’s racist electoral apparatus to subvert democracy. By monkey-wrenching the broadcast of the Freedom Democrats testimony, Johnson hoped to prevent giving the racist regular Democrats from the entire Deep South an excuse to throw their weight behind the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater.
Party rules or no party rules, the credentials committee was afraid that if it agreed with the Freedom Democrats, every Democratic Party from the Deep South would support Goldwater. The credentials committee proposed a “compromise,” which was to seat two of the Freedom Party’s 68 delegates, but even the “compromise” was not good enough for the regular Democrats from Mississippi and Alabama, who wound up refusing to support Johnson’s election.
Watch this 4-minute clip from “The American Experience” about the dirty trick Johnson pulled to keep the Freedom Democrats off live television, and take note of the unhappy expressions on the faces of the credentials committee members as they listen to Hamer’s shocking testimony. https://youtu.be/07PwNVCZCcY?si=QdXgGOy2OMG9Xkj4
Texas Voters Say ‘No’ to the Klan
100 YEARS AGO, on August 23, 1924, the Ku Klux Klan was flexing its political muscles in Texas. Having recently taken firm control of the governments of the state’s two biggest cities, Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as Wichita Falls, and won a near-majority in the Texas House of Representatives, the Klan was close to taking over the Texas state house and the state attorney-general’s office.
The Klan’s Texas electoral bid was the biggest issue in this day’s hard-fought Democratic primary election. A victory in the primary election meant almost-certain victory in the general election, because the state’s voters were overwhelmingly Democrats.
The winners in the primary were anti-Klan candidate Miriam Ferguson for governor and anti-Klan candidate Dan Moody for attorney general. Even though some 15 percent of Texas voters were Klan members, Ferguson defeated self-proclaimed Klan member and Dallas County District Judge Felix Robertson with 57 percent of the vote.
Of course, Ferguson’s opposition to the Klan did not signify that she was anti-racist. In 1924 Texas public institutions were almost entirely segregated and African-Americans had no political rights, a status quo that would not begin to break down until the 1950s. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/ku-klux-klan
How to Start a Revolution
250 YEARS AGO, on August 24, 1774, more than eight months before the first shots were fired in the American Revolution, Salem, Massachusetts, was in open revolt against the authority of the British crown and the British army. When the local Committee of Correspondence held a forbidden meeting in direct defiance of the law, Thomas Gage, who was both Royal Governor of Massachusetts and commander of the British Army in North America traveled to Salem from Boston with 80 Redcoats to have the committee members arrested. When they attempted to take the committee members into custody, they discovered themselves face-to-face with more than a thousand members of the local militia and returned to Boston empty-handed. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/the-year-3000-people-came-to-to…
Broadway’s a Tough Place to Take a Break
65 YEARS AGO, on August 25, 1959, Miles Davis found himself on the wrong end of a policeman’s blackjack for having committed the offense of standing on a Broadway sidewalk while Black.
Davis, who, only eight days earlier had released his masterpiece album Kind of Blue, was headlining at Birdland on Broadway in Manhattan. He was standing outside the club, when, as he recounted in his autobiography, “This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. I said, ‘Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,’ and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.
“He said, ‘I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.’
“I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, ‘You’re under arrest!’ He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back…I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head… A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming.”
Davis was charged with assault and disorderly conduct. After he was bailed out he required five stitches to close his head wound. Eventually all the charges were dismissed. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/blog/even-fame-could-not-prote…
Protecting the Health of Coal Miners
55 YEARS AGO, August 26, 1969, Ohio’s thousands of coal miners and their families celebrated an important legislative victory over the greed of their employers. The governor of Ohio signed a law, the passage of which had been at the center of a bitter struggle, adding a new sickness to Ohio’s list of occupational diseases, namely, Black Lung. As a result, an Ohio miner who was diagnosed with Black would now be eligible for free medical care treatment and for disability compensation.
The Ohio law was not only a victory for Ohio miners, but for occupational health advocates all over the country, because it was one of the growing number of state laws protecting the health of coal miners. Before the end of the year, the federal government passed the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which extended new health and safety protection to coal miners in all 50 states. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.pu.12.05…
A Setback for Civil Rights
75 YEARS AGO, on August 27, 1949, the left-wing Civil Rights Congress attempted to hold a benefit outdoor concert in Peekskill, New York, 25 miles north of New York City. The concert, which was to be opened by Pete Seeger and feature a performance by Paul Robeson, never took place, because the organizers and venue were attacked by a racist, anti-semitic, anti-communist mob while police refused to intervene. https://jacobin.com/2017/06/peekskill-riots-woody-guthrie-paul-robeson-…