by Sarah Becker Copyright ©2021 Sarah Becker Celebrating Women’s History Month “I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the people on the wrong side in our nation—the extreme rightists of our nation, have often used time more effectively than the people of good will,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in 1967 in The Future of Integration . “And it may well be that this generation has to repent, not merely for the vitriolic words and violent action of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say ‘wait on time.’” After more than 110 years, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue has been removed from the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. If Virginia’s Lost Cause advocates are riled others are quietly rejoicing. March is Women’s History Month and the Commonwealth has chosen to honor sixteen year-old, black student activist Barbara Rose Johns (1935-1991) instead. “It was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, time that they had a decent school, time for students themselves to do something about it,” Johns explained. “There wasn’t any fear. I just thought—this is your moment. Seize it!” Barbara Johns 1951 “plan was daring, even risky: Convince the entire all-black student body to walk out of [Farmville, Virginia’s, Robert Russa Moton High School] and not return until the government gave them a bigger, better building—one like the white students had,” The New York Times noted in 2019. “The case Johns would join, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, would not only have the largest group of plaintiffs; it would also be the only one that was led by students.” The Davis case was one of five consolidated cases known as Brown…
History Written by ©2020 Sarah Becker Copyright ©2020 Sarah Becker August 28th – 57th Anniversary of the March On Washington “The liberty attained by that soul which is converted from evil by the influence of Divine love, is the only liberty which truly deserves the name,” Quaker minister, abolitionist and Alexandria apothecary Edward Stabler wrote in 1825. “The difference between this state, which has been the happy possession of many whose bodies were in bonds,—and mere personal freedom, is so great, that the one may be designated as being of heaven, the other of the earth.” Quakers understood discrimination. In 1656 Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans greeted the first arriving Quakers with imprisonment. More than three hundred years later civil rights activist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream: “Five score years ago, a great American [Abraham Lincoln], in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation [January 1, 1863]. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice….” “But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free,” Dr. King continued. “One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation [Jim Crow] and the chains of discrimination…[W]e have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.” “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” Dr. King exclaimed. “No, no we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Justice as defined by The Oxford American Dictionary: “fairness, a fair claim; the…
The Lost Cause and Jim Crow Written by ©2018 Sarah Becker In 1888 Congress established the U.S. Department of Labor; former Union General and U.S. Senator Benjamin Harrison (R-IN) won the Presidency (1889-1893), and the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union or Southern Alliance emerged. Business gave way to industry; William Burroughs invented the first commercially successful adding and listing machine and farmers, including the one million member Colored Farmers’ Organization, advocated for greater control of railroaders, bankers and land speculators. In Alexandria, as in Jackson, Mississippi, the city approved a Confederate monument. The evangelical Alliance welcomed all who were “not obnoxious to the Constitution.” Harrison “held that a protective tariff [a tax on imports] is…wholesome and necessary.” He also dealt with election fraud and immigration. • “In many parts of our country…the colored…people…are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political [and] civil rights,” Harrison continued. “The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us. They were brought here in chains….” He favored “National aid to education” and “a free and unmolested exercise of suffrage.” • “Closely connected with the subject of the tariff is that of the importation of foreign laborers under contracts of service to be performed here,” Harrison concluded. “In the earlier years of our history public agencies to promote immigration were common…Labor was scarce and fully employed….While our doors will continue open to proper immigration we do not need to issue special invitations to inhabitants of other countries.” Especially China. George Washington, America’s first President, was inaugurated in New York City on April 30, 1789. In his Address he spoke of “an indissoluble union…of duty…and the destiny of the republican model of government.” President Benjamin Harrison twice visited Mount Vernon, in 1889 and 1890. “[O]ur country now steps…into its second…
By Sarah Becker On September 24th, the long awaited Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture opens to the public. Its five acre site, located in the District of Columbia on Constitution Avenue between 14th and 15th Streets NW, is “a place where everyone can explore the story of America through the lens of the African American experience.” President George W. Bush gave his approval in 2003; President Barack Obama will cut the Saturday ribbon. “After 13 years of hard work, I am thrilled,” founding Director Lonnie G. Bunch III said. “The Museum is a place for all people. We are prepared to offer exhibitions and programs to unite and capture the attention of millions of people worldwide.” The $500 million museum opens with 11 inaugural exhibitions. The Museum’s more than 34,000 objects illustrate the major periods of African American history. All were acquired after 2003 and highlights include: an 1800s South Carolina slave cabin; Virginia slave and insurrectionist Nat Turner’s 1831 Bible; Maryland underground railway conductor Harriet Tubman’s 1876 hymnal; a 1920 segregation-era Southern Railway car, and pop-singer Michael Jackson’s 1992 fedora. The building’s exterior bronze finish contrasts sharply with the nearby George Washington Memorial’s white marble. It is intentional. Americans increasingly are People of Color and coexistence has not always come easily. George Washington’s adopted grandson, slave owner George Washington Parke Custis of Arlington House explains slavery as the “unhappy error of our forefathers.” The 400,000 square foot Museum stands five stories tall. Four additional stories are located underground. Among the building’s signature spaces: a water and light-filled Contemplative Court; a theater; café and store; an education center and library. The Museum’s educational standards are tied to Standards of Learning, standards which favor historical knowledge; its application, analysis and evaluation. Slave preacher Nat Turner’s…
In 1964 China’s Mao Tse-Tung published his Little Red Book, Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali] won the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s $947,000,000 War on Poverty began. The North Vietnamese attacked two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, three missing civil rights workers were found buried in a Mississippi earth dam, and the bipartisan Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was signed. “The civil rights bill is the law of the land today,” The Alexandria Gazette wrote on July 3, 1964, “and civil rights groups immediately began testing whether the sweeping provisions against discrimination can break generations of racial barriers.” The 10 Virginia members of the House of Representatives voted against the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was President Johnson’s “challenge to all Americans to [voluntarily] transform the commands of our laws into the customs of our land.” In Virginia, despite ratification of the 24th Amendment, elements of the discriminatory 1902 election poll tax remained. With Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896—the US Supreme Court’s separate but equal doctrine—black newspaper editors like Alexandria’s Colored Republican Magnus L. Robinson denounced racial discrimination. Colored Republicans met “to devise means so the ‘Lily Whites’ of the South may not crowd [them] out…to petition [southern] negroes to unite [and] come back to first principles—human rights.” Plessy remained Jim Crow law until Brown v. Board of Education in1954. Until the mid-1930s enterprising Alexandria blacks traveled to the District of Columbia for high school: to attend either Armstrong or Dunbar High Schools. Samuel W. Tucker, born in 1913, bootlegged his Armstrong High School education. Yet a white only high school stood within sight of his Alexandria home. Samuel W. Tucker is a hero of both the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. His father, real estate agent Samuel A. Tucker…