African-American Railroader Month - Celebrating Leadership
When President Jimmy Carter appointed Patricia R. Harris as Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1979, it was only the second time in history that a black woman served in a president's cabinet. The first? In 1977, when President Carter appointed the same Patricia Harris to serve as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. These appointments were only two in a long and distinguished career that spanned both law and social and public service. After graduating summa cum laude from Howard University in 1945, she managed the political action and national legislative programs for the American Council of Human Rights. In 1961, after graduating with honors from the law school at George Washington University, she became an associate dean of students at Howard University's law school and served as co-chairman of the National Women's Committee on Civil Rights during the Kennedy administration. In 1964, Harris became the first black female ambassador when Lyndon Johnson named her ambassador to Luxembourg.
Her career in fact was a long series of firsts: first black to serve in the United Nations, first black female on major corporate boards, first black female to chair a national political party committee, first black female to participate in a presidential nomination, first female to serve as dean of a law school, and first black - and only woman - to serve in multiple cabinet-level positions. After her death, a United States commemorative stamp was issued in her honor as part of the Black Heritage Series.
The son of a career military man, Davis had large shoes to fill when he himself decided to pursue his own military career. After all, the elder Davis became the first black general in the history of the U.S. Army when he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in 1940. But the younger Davis put together a remarkable career of his own after his 1936 graduation from West Point.
In 1942, he joined the Army Air Corps and became a lieutenant colonel with the 99th Fighter Squadron, also known as the "Tuskegee airmen." By 1944, the 99th was the only four-squadron fighter group performing bomber-escort missions in the 15th Air Force. All the more remarkable was the fact that during more than 200 escort missions that the squad flew over war-torn central and southern Europe, it did not lose a single bomber to enemy aircraft.
Known for a dignified bearing and superb oratory skills, in 1954 Davis was named the first black brigadier general in the history of the US Air Force. In 1965, he rose to the rank of lieutenant general.
From the time he was 8 years old, Bernard Harris, Jr. wanted nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong and Scott Carpenter and become an astronaut. Although he decided to fulfill a few other personal goals along the way - Harris also became a full-fledged pilot, flight surgeon, scientist and mission specialist - in February 1995 he became one of only seven black astronauts. That same month, he made history when he became the first black astronaut to walk in space. In looking back upon his achievements, Harris commented that it is vital for everyone to know and understand the importance of history. "If you don't know where you are and where you came from, you'll never know where you are going," he said.
After moving from St. Louis to the Paris at the age of 18, dancer and entertainer Josephine Baker soon become one of France's most well-regarded performers. After years of success in Paris, she returned to the United States in 1936 to appear in the famous Ziegfeld Follies, but the country's entrenched racism brought a chilly reception to her talents and forced her to return to France, where she renounced her citizenship and became a French citizen. When Hitler tore across the country during World War II, Baker joined the French resistance and served with distinction - after the war, her heroics were recognized when she was awarded the French Legion Medal of Honor.
Baker also possessed a great deal of affection for both animals and orphaned children. After the war, she purchased a castle on a 300-acre estate nestled in the French countryside, where she lived with her husband, an array of exotic animals and 14 adopted children from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. When Baker returned to the US again in 1951, she performed to rave reviews, and earned the admiration of the civil rights community by adamantly refusing to perform in establishments that did not admit black patrons. Baker would return to the US again in 1963 to join Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march on Washington, DC.
At the height of Whitney Young's prolific career as a political activist and civil-rights pioneer, an admirer commented, "[Young] truly knows the high art of how to get power from the powerful and share it with the powerless." Although he never achieved the fame of such contemporaries as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr., he nevertheless cut a wide swath as he overcame numerous economic, social and political barriers to aid black Americans.
Using tactics of "reason, persuasion and negotiation," according to one biographer, Young persuaded established companies and major foundations to assist the civil-right rights movement by supporting self-help programs for jobs, housing, education and family rehabilitation. In fact, Young designed what he called a "Domestic Marshall Plan" for urban areas that President Lyndon Johnson later made a key component of his War on Poverty. This plan - calling for $145 billion over 10 years - was designed to reduce the presence of ghettos while increasing funding for education, vocational training, housing and health care.
Despite these efforts, some in the African-American community harshly criticized Young for his close working relationship with established, predominantly white organizations and his lack of presence at large protests and marches. After his death in 1971, his sister explained, "He may not have been a marcher, but he was a negotiator. I don't care how much marching you do, if you didn't have a job, you can't buy a home or get good health benefits. So African-Americans needed somebody in the boardroom talking to those people and telling them what they could do and insisting that they do it. Whitney was that kind."
Born on a farm in Marion Township, MO, George Washington Carver's research revolutionized Southern agriculture and yielded myriad useful industrial applications. After receiving a master's degree from Iowa Agricultural College in 1896, he joined the faculty of Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts to oversee the school's work in the systematic botany department. In developing farm products for industrial use, Carver's research yielded 325 products from peanuts, 108 applications for sweet potatoes and 75 products that were derived from pecans. He continued his work at Alabama's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute and derived 118 more applications from agricultural products, including a rubber substitute and several new dyes and pigments. Other synthetics he developed over the course of his career ranged from axle grease to shampoo to mayonnaise, and in 1943 President Franklin Roosevelt earmarked $30,000 for a national monument to be erected in Carver's honor. The park that resulted had the distinction of being the first national monument in the United States that honored an African-American.
Much as George Washington Carver's most famous work involved the peanut, Dr. Percy Julian probably will be forever linked to the soybean. In 1939, while at work in his lab, Julian noticed that a water leak in a tank of purified soybean oil yielded a strange substance. After a lengthy study of the byproduct (also known as soy sterol), he found that it could be used to manufacture both male and female hormones. The latter became especially useful in treating certain cancers and easing problem pregnancies. Prior to this point, the soybean had not been subject to a great deal of research outside of the culinary arena, but Julian was intrigued. Further study into the bean yielded a foam from soy protein that was able to extinguish oil and gas fires, much to the delight of the US military during World War II.
When the Mayo Clinic announced in 1948 the discovery of cortisone, a compound that provided relief for rheumatoid arthritis, Julian immediately sought to create a less expensive but equally effective substitute. At the time, naturally produced cortisone was extracted from the adrenal glands of oxen and came with a price tag of several hundred dollars per gram. The synthetic that Julian generated from the oil of soybean cost only a few pennies per ounce.
Julian's aggressive commitment to producing plentiful and less expensive alternatives to medical products accelerated the science community's research on them. In fact, his work is credited with leading to the rapid development of chemical birth control and medicines designed to suppress the immune system, which became indispensable partners in organ transplant procedures.
Shortly after escaping slavery and reaching the state of Pennsylvania, Harriet Tubman quickly found her calling when she finally tasted freedom. Her liberation so altered her worldview that she concluded that her mission would be to help as many slaves as possible escape to the free Northern states. After rescuing her sister and her two children, Tubman would eventually make more than 15 trips to the South to rescue slaves.
The key to her success was her unparalleled abilities as both a project planner and strategist. In forming her plan of attack, she made preparations for every eventuality she could think of, from leaving clothes along the escape routes to packing sedatives to quiet wailing infants. (And on one famous occasion, she even threatened to shoot an escapee who threatened to jeopardize the safety of the other slaves when he had second thoughts about his actions.) Using a wide network of homes and churches - later called the Underground Railroad - Tubman led more than 200 slaves to the free territories.
During the Civil War, Tubman expanded her services to include working as a nurse, cook and scout for the Union Army, and received numerous official commendations from Union officers for her efforts. In the later stages of her life, she continued to work in social welfare as a fundraiser for schools, former slaves, poverty-stricken children and the sick, among others. When she died in 1913, she was buried with full military honors.
Although her early career saw her teaching in the classroom and editing a Memphis, TN newspaper called The Free Speech and Headlight, Ida B. Wells found her life's work when a respected local black storeowner was lynched in 1892. Under the penname "Iola," Wells employed her paper as a vehicle through which to denounce the practice of lynching and instead urged the local black community to abandon Memphis and move West.
She soon cultivated her speaking skills and earned a wide reputation as an eloquent, fiery orator as she continued to denounce racism and oppression. After settling in Chicago in 1895, Wells formed the Women's Era Club, the first civic organization for African-American women (and one that would eventually change its name to the Ida B. Wells Club in her honor). She continued to speak out against lynching, and that same year she published Southern Horrors and the Red Record, the first statistical study of the practice of lynching and one that would eventually win her an international audience.
While in Chicago she continued to write for magazines and journals and would eventually help to found a settlement house to assist migrant African-Americans in locating work and homes. Her later years saw her promoting rights for women through marches and vigorous lobbying efforts.
As a prolific creative artist and social critic, James Weldon Johnson harnessed his many talents to create a truly unique voice of protest. Among his numerous personal accomplishments was his standing as the first African-American to be admitted to the Florida bar since the end of Reconstruction; the co-composer of the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing," which would later become known as the Negro National Anthem; the field secretary for the NAACP; a respected journalist and publisher; an English professor; the US consul to Venezuela; and an accomplished novelist and poet whose work is credited as being one of the keystones of the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century.
From his post as field secretary of the NAACP, Johnson was a key figure in regard to the changes taking place in the arts. As a prominent voice in the literary debates of the day, Johnson undertook the task of editing The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (1926), and writing his survey of African-American cultural contributions to the New York artistic scene in Black Manhattan (1930). His own career as a poet reached its culmination in God's Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, published in 1927. Through each of these literary enterprises Johnson worked to refute biased commentary from white critics while nudging African-American writers toward more ambitious literary goals.
After retiring to a life as professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, Johnson lectured widely on the topics of racial advancement and civil rights and completed Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a book that argued for the merits of racial integration and cooperation, as well as his last major verse collection, Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (1934).
Despite myriad early hardships, John Mercer Langston became one of the most influential African-American figures of the 19th century via an all-consuming drive for racial equality. Orphaned at the age of 5, Langston earned both a bachelors and masters degree from Oberlin College before turning his attention to politics. His work in this arena is credited for shaping the character of the Republican party in terms of its then progressive relationship to African-Americans. As he often stated, "If the Republican Party is not anti-slavery enough, take hold of it and make it so."
After organizing numerous black political clubs across the country, Langston was chosen to lead the western recruitment of black soldiers to fight in the Civil War and also worked as an advocate for equal treatment of these soldiers within the ranks of the Union Army. When the war concluded, he shifted his work toward securing black voting rights and redistributing wealth and power evenly across the social system. During the remainder of his career, his posts included dean of the law department at Howard University, US diplomat to Haiti, and Congressman for the state of Virginia.
Mary Ann Shadd was born a free citizen in 1823, in Wilmington, Delaware. When the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act threatened to return free northern blacks and escaped slaves to bondage, Shadd quickly relocated to Ontario, where she established a school to accommodate the influx of black refugees from the United States.
In 1853, Shadd established the Provincial Freeman, a weekly paper designed to cover the lives of Canadian blacks and promote the cause of black refugees to Canada. The first black woman in North America to edit a weekly paper, Shadd balanced her active anti-slavery efforts and editorials with many articles on women and their contributions and accomplishments. At a time when it was still uncommon for women to speak in public, Shadd lectured frequently in the United States against slavery and for black emigration to Canada in an effort to keep the paper viable. Although an economic depression ended the Provincial Freeman, Shadd continued to be a staunch advocate for social reform.
After her husband's death in 1860, she took her children back to the United States and became a recruiter for the Union army during the Civil War. Returning to her educational roots after the war, she spent several years as a school principal and continued to write letters and articles calling for change. After the war, she focused much of her attention to the issue of gender equality and eventually testified before Congress on the issue of women's suffrage.
During her life, Mary Church Terrell worked as a writer, lecturer and educator, but she is best remembered for her efforts in fighting for the rights of African-American women. Although her family was financially secure, she and her relatives still were forced to endure the Jim Crow laws that were in place in their home state of Tennessee. A steady stream of humiliations and witnessing the preferential treatment given to her white neighbors set her on the path toward becoming a vocal advocate for social reform.
After earning the distinction of becoming one of the nation's first black female college graduates when she received a degree from Oberlin College in 1884, she found her speaking voice in her experience as a teacher at the Preparatory School for Colored Youth in Washington D.C. After marrying Robert Terrell, she resigned her teaching post to spend the rest of her life as a lecturer, women's rights activist and leader of the black women's club movement.
During the late 19th century, numerous local black women's service clubs were formed, but they ran up against the same prejudices that were in place throughout the rest of the day's society. The members found that they could not affiliate themselves with the National Council of Women or the General Federation of Women's clubs. Inspired by the ability of national clubs to tackle national issues, black women came together to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), and Mary Church Terrell was chosen to serve as its first president. Under her stewardship, the NACW aggressively addressed issues such as lynching, Jim Crow, suffrage and the plight of rural women.
On July 10, 1875, two years before the end of Reconstruction, Mary Jane McLeod was born as the fifteenth of seventeen children and most of her brothers and sisters were born in slavery. Once her family was reassembled from various plantations after slavery, her parents acquired five acres of land and built a family home known as the "Homestead."
It was on this spread that she cultivated an ironclad work ethic as well as an insatiable desire to become educated. After excelling at a number of institutions in her youth, Bethune taught and rendered social services for several years before becoming a highly regarded public leader in the 1920s. She spearheaded a voter-registration drive in Daytona Beach for local black citizens, an effort that brought the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to her doorstep. During this period, Bethune was elected president of the State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs - in four years in office, she organized scattered clubs of black women throughout the Southeast to combat school segregation and the lack of health care facilities among black children. In 1924, Bethune became the eighth president of the prestigious National Association of Colored Women's clubs (NACW).
It was during this period that she built Bethune-Cookman College, an endeavor that was reported to have been funded with nothing more than a few dollars of her own cash and her unyielding commitment to education and social change. The school was designed to cater to blacks who were working in the railroad labor camps of Florida, and, after several years of operating with crate boxes for desks and in rooms of old houses located near the Daytona Beach city dump, the school cemented a reputation for providing a high-quality education. Today the campus graduates thousands of students, and in 1935, the NAACP recognized her achievements by presenting her with the prestigious Springarn Medal. Her reputation also earned her the position of trusted advisor to several US presidents: that same year, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed her the national director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs, and after World War II, President Harry Truman employed her to serve as a consultant in the formation of the United Nations.
The son of a Methodist minister, Philip Randolph moved to the Harlem district of New York City in 1911. He attended City College at night and also founded (1912) an employment agency in an attempt to organize black workers. In 1917, following the entry of the United States in World War I, Randolph became a vocal advocate in calling for more positions in the war industry and the armed forces for blacks.
In 1925, as founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph began organizing that group of black workers and, at a time when half the affiliates of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) barred blacks from membership, took his union into the AFL. Despite opposition, he built the first successful black trade union and won a contract with the Pullman Company in 1937. The following year, Randolph removed his union from the AFL in protest against its failure to fight discrimination in its ranks and took the brotherhood into the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He then returned to the question of black employment in the federal government and in industries with federal contracts. After warning President Franklin Roosevelt that he would lead thousands of blacks in a protest march on Washington, DC, Roosevelt issued an executive order outlawing discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Following World War II, Randolph founded the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, resulting in banning of segregation in the armed forced by President Harry Truman.
When the AFL merged with the CIO in 1955, Randolph was made a vice president and member of the executive council of the combined organization. When he saw that civil rights reform had not progressed to his satisfaction by the early 1960s, Randolph served as a director of the March on Washington, which brought more than 200,000 people to the nation's capital on Aug. 28, 1963, to demonstrate support for civil-rights policies for blacks. Two years later, he formed the A. Philip Randolph Institute for community leaders to study the causes of poverty.
Born a slave in upstate New York in approximately 1797, she labored for a succession of five masters until 1827, when slavery was finally abolished in New York State. After prevailing in a court action demanding the return of her youngest son Peter, who had been illegally sold away from her to a slave owner in Alabama, she moved to New York City.
After fifteen years in New York, she felt a call to become a traveling preacher. With little more than the clothes on her back, she began walking through Long Island and Connecticut, speaking to people in the countryside about her life and her relationship with God. She was a powerful speaker and singer. When she rose to speak, wrote one observer, "her commanding figure and dignified manner hushed every trifler to silence." Audiences were "melted into tears by her touching stories." Although Truth never learned to read or write, she dictated her memoirs and had them published in 1850 as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. This book, and her powerful presence as a speaker, made her a sought-after figure on the anti-slavery woman's rights lecture circuit.
After years of traveling the country as a lecturer, Truth relocated to Washington, DC after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and worked with former slaves who were living in the city.
Ralph Johnson Bunche earned several academic distinctions before becoming active in the civil rights movement and he never lost sight of his belief that education often led to peaceful, diplomatic solutions to problems. His legacy, however, stems primarily from his work as a diplomat and with the United Nations. From 1947 to 1949, he worked tirelessly on one of the most incendiary conflicts of the day when he was asked to consider the confrontation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. Finally, after 11 months of ceaseless negotiations, he was able to obtain signatures on armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab States.
Bunche returned home to a hero's welcome. New York gave him a ticker-tape parade up Broadway and Los Angeles followed suit by declaring a Ralph Bunche Day. He was inundated with invitations to lecture throughout the country, was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP, and more than 30 honorary degrees were bestowed upon him over the next three years. But perhaps the most prestigious award came in 1950, when he was given that year's Nobel Peace Prize.
Born in 1898 in Princeton, NJ, Paul Robeson first achieved fame as an athletic standout who also won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers University. Despite violence and racism from teammates, he earned 15 varsity letters in three sports and also graduated as his class' valedictorian. (However, it wasn't until 1995, 19 years after his death, that Paul Robeson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.)
After racism from his peers stunted a promising law career, Robeson decided to use artistic talents in theater and music to promote African and African-American history and culture. While he earned numerous accolades on both stage and screen, he is probably best known for changing the lines of the Showboat song "Old Man River" from the meek "...I'm tired of livin' and 'feared of dyin'..." to a fierce declaration of resistance, "... I must keep fightin' until I'm dying ...".
He continued to utilize his unmatched baritone voice to promote black spirituals, to share the cultures of other countries, and to benefit the labor and social movements of his time. He sang for peace in 25 languages throughout the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa. During the 1940s, Robeson continued to perform and to speak out against racism, in support of labor, and for peace and served as a champion of both working people and organized labor. He spoke and performed at strike rallies, conferences, and labor festivals worldwide. As a passionate believer in international cooperation, Robeson protested the growing Cold War and worked to develop a better relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1945, he headed an organization that challenged President Truman to support an anti-lynching law.
In the late 1940s, when dissent was not tolerated in the U.S., Robeson openly questioned why African-Americans should fight in the army of a government that tolerated racism. Because of his outspokenness, he was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a Communist and had to endure years of legal battles in order to travel internationally again. He continued to be a staunch advocate of social and labor reform until poor health forced him into retirement in 1963.