A00118 - Nnamdi Azikiwe, First President of Nigeria

Nnamdi Azikiwe,  (b. November 16, 1904, Zungeru, Nigeria  — d. May 11, 1996, Enugu), first president of independent Nigeria (1963–66) and prominent nationalist figure.

Azikiwe attended various primary and secondary mission schools in Onitsha, Calabar, and Lagos. He arrived in the United States in 1925, where he attended several schools. Azikiwe earned multiple certificates and degrees, including bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and a second master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1934 he went to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where he founded a nationalist newspaper and was a mentor to Kwame Nkrumah (later the first president of Ghana) before returning to Nigeria in 1937. There he founded and edited newspapers and also became directly involved in politics, first with the Nigerian Youth Movement and later (1944) as a founder of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which became increasingly identified with the Igbo people of southern Nigeria after 1951. In 1948, with the backing of the NCNC, Azikiwe was elected to the Nigerian Legislative , and he later served as premier of the Eastern region (1954–59).

Azikiwe led the NCNC into the important 1959 federal elections, which preceded Nigerian independence. He was able to form a temporary government with the powerful Northern People’s Congress, but its deputy leader, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, took the key post of prime minister. Azikiwe received the largely honorary posts of president of the Senate, governor-general, and, finally, president.

In the conflict over Biafra (1967–70), Azikiwe first backed his fellow Igbo, traveling extensively in 1968 to win recognition of Biafra and help from other African countries. In 1969, however, realizing the hopelessness of the war, he threw his support to the federal government. After Olusegun Obasanjo turned the government over to civilian elections in 1979, Azikiwe ran unsuccessfully for president as the candidate of a newly formed Nigerian People’s Party (NPP). Prior to the 1983 elections, the NPP became part of an unofficial coalition of opposition parties known as the Progressive Parties Alliance (PPA). The coalition, which was tenuous at best, could not agree on one presidential candidate and decided to field two — Azikiwe, representing the NPP, and Obafemi Awolowo, representing the United Party of Nigeria (UPN). Awolowo, the leader of the UPN, was a political rival of Azikiwe, with whom he was often at odds. The coalition had largely deteriorated by the time of the election, and neither Azikiwe nor Awolowo won.

An important figure in the history of politics in Nigeria, Azikiwe had broad interests outside that realm. He served as chancellor of the University of Nigeria at Nsukka from 1961 to 1966, and he was the president of several sports organizations for football, boxing, and table tennis. Among his writings are Renascent Africa (1937) and an autobiography, My Odyssey (1970).

A00117 - Arthur Mitchell, Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem

Arthur Mitchell,  (b. March 27, 1934, New York, New York), American dancer, choreographer, and director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. 

Mitchell attended the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City and began performing in Broadway musicals and with the companies of Donald McKayle and John Butler. In 1956 Mitchell became the only black dancer in the New York City Ballet. He soon became a principal with the company, and George Balanchine created several roles for him, notably those in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) and Agon (1967).

Mitchell was sensitive to the prejudice against African Americans in the world of ballet and determined to form an all-black ballet company. In 1968 he and Karel Shook founded an integrated school, whose associated company made its debut in 1971 in New York City and at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Mitchell choreographed a number of ballets for the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

A00116 - Hemsley Winfield, Founder of the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group

Hemsley Winfield (April 20, 1907 – January 15, 1934) was an African-American dancer who created the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group.

He was born Osborne Hemsley Winfield to a middle-class, African-American family in Yonkers, New York. Winfield struggled in Yonkers as jobs available to African-Americans remained menial. Contrary to the natural inclination of the residents of Yonkers at that time, Winfield pursued a career in the Arts, developing a strong background as an actor, director, stage technician, dancer and eventually a choreographer. With combination of Winfield's middle-class ambition as well as the growing cultural movement of the African-Americans at that time, Winfield was able to achieve acclaim by the Art world. Winfield first won his fame in the leading role of Oscar Wilde's Salome,  which he won acclaim to in 1929. Winfield came upon the role as Salome when the female lead of the company fell ill, causing Winfield to dress in drag as the show was staged at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, New York. Winfield, during this time, continued to attend concerts by the great trailblazers of modern dance, who later served as an influence and sponsor for his choreographic work.

As part of the “Little Theater movement” Winfield started and directed the Sekondi Players of Yonkers in 1925.  Taking words from the Negro’s African heritage Sekondi is the name of a city that is located on the south west coast of Ghana. In November of 1927 Winfield and the Sekondi Players were performing a children’s play, The Princess and the Cat, written by his mother, Jeroline Hemsley Winfield. This inaugural opening of children’s plays was under his direction of The New Negro Art Theater. This is the first reference to the New Negro Art Theater group that Winfield directed during the rest of his acting and dance career. On March 6, 1931, at the Saunders Trade School the dance company gave its first performance. Winfield served as the head organizer and director of the company. The first name of the dance company was The Bronze Ballet Plastique, which lasted only one performance. Edna Guy was trained by Ruth St. Denis of the Denis-Shawn School of Dance, and performed as a guest in at least two of Winfield's concerts which soon grew to draw massive crowds. Edna Guy was never a member of the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group, the leading female dancers of the company were Ollie Burgoyne, Drusela Drew, and Midgie Lane. Winfield's choreographic work during this time fused uniquely German Expressionism with African-American themes and spirituals. 

In 1933, the company appeared in the premier of Louis Gruenberg's opera The Emperor Jones at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Winfield took on the role of the Congo witch doctor in the piece. His first performance as the Witch Doctor was listed as January 7, 1933 and his last performance was March 18, 1933 Winfield also danced the role of the Witch Doctor in the performances in Philadelphia and Baltimore that year. Controversy around the work resulted from the Met's original request to blacken White dancers' faces rather than use Black dancers, but Tibbett threatened to quit, and the Met relented. His final performance of the 1933 season was reviewed as “a thrilling exhibition of savage dancing” and “his sinister and frantic caperings as the Witch Doctor made even the most sluggish, opera-infected blood run cold.”

On January 15, 1934, Hemsley Winfield died of pneumonia shortly before his 27th birthday, leaving with the final words, "We're building a foundation that will make people take black dance seriously". Hemsley Winfield was considered “the pioneer in Negro concert dancing."

A00115 - Lou Rawls, Grammy Winning Singer and Telethon Host

Lou Rawls,  (b. December 1, 1933, Chicago, Illinois — d. January 6, 2006, Los Angeles, California), American singer whose smooth baritone adapted easily to jazz, soul, gospel, and rhythm and blues. 

As a child, Rawls sang in a Baptist church choir, and he later performed with Sam Cooke in the 1950s gospel group Teenage Kings of Harmony. In 1956 he stepped back from his burgeoning career to enlist in the army. After his discharge in 1958, he briefly performed with another gospel group, the Pilgrim Travelers, again with Cooke. However, after recovering from a 1958 car crash that sidelined him for a year, Rawls began to perform secular music. 

Rawls’s debut album, Stormy Monday (1962), was a collection of jazz songs, but he did not have a hit single until the soulful “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing” (1966), off his first rhythm and blues album, Soulin’. Rawls won three Grammy Awards: for the single “Dead End Street” (1967), for the track “A Natural Man” (1971), and for the album Unmistakably Lou (1977). His biggest hit single, however, was the 1976 chart topper “You’ll Never Find (Another Love like Mine).” In addition, Rawls ushered in the pre-rap era with spoken monologues in his songs, notably in “Tobacco Road.” Rawls released more than 50 albums, and in later years he appeared in films and television commercials, lent his voice to children’s television shows, and helped raise more than $200 million for the United Negro College fund as the host of its annual telethon.

A00114 - Quincy Jones, Legendary Grammy Winning Record Producer

Quincy Jones, in full Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., byname “Q”   (b. March 14, 1933, Chicago, Illinois), American musical performer, producer, arranger, and composer whose work encompasses virtually all forms of popular music.

Jones was born in Chicago and reared in Bremerton, Washington, where he studied the trumpet and worked locally with the then-unknown pianist-singer Ray Charles. In the early 1950s, Jones studied briefly at the prestigious Schillinger House (now Berklee College of Music) in Boston before touring with Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger. He soon became a prolific freelance arranger, working with Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce, Oscar Pettiford, Cannonball Adderley, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, and many others. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie's big band in 1956, recorded his first album as a leader in the same year, worked in Paris for the Barclay label as an arranger and producer in the late 1950s, and continued to compose. Some of his more successful compositions from this period include “Stockholm Sweetnin’,” “For Lena and Lennie,” and “Jessica’s Day.”

Back in the United States in 1961, Jones became an artists-and-repertoire (or “A&R” in trade jargon) director for Mercury Records. In 1964, he was named a vice president at Mercury, thereby becoming one of the first African Americans to hold a top executive position at a major American record label. In the 1960s, Jones recorded occasional jazz dates, arranged albums for many singers (including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Billy Eckstine), and composed music for several films, including The Pawnbroker (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and In Cold Blood (1967). Jones next worked for the A&M label from 1969 to 1981 (with a brief hiatus as he recovered from a brain aneurysm in 1974) and moved increasingly away from jazz toward pop music. During this time he became one of the most famous producers in the world, his success enabling him to start his own record label, Qwest, in 1980.

Jones’s best-known work includes producing an all-time best-selling album, Michael Jackson's Thriller(1982), organizing the all-star charity recording “We Are the World” (1985), and producing the film The Color Purple (1985) and the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–96). In 1993, he founded the magazine Vibe, which he sold in 2006. Throughout the years, Jones has worked with a “who’s who” of figures from all fields of popular music. He was nominated for more than 75 Grammy Awards (winning more than 25) and seven Academy Awards and received an Emmy Award for the theme music he wrote for the television miniseries Roots (1977). Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones was published in 2001. In 2013 Jones was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

A00113 - Sam Gilliam, Color Field Painter

Sam Gilliam (b. November 30, 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi) is a Color Field Painter and Lyrical Abstractionist artist. Gilliam is associated with the Washington Color School. and is broadly considered a Color  He works on stretched, draped, and wrapped canvas, and adds sculptural 3D elements. He is recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a painted canvas hanging without stretcher bars c.1965, a major contribution to the Color Field School.  

Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and was the seventh of eight children born to Sam and Estery Gilliam. The Gilliams moved to Louisville, Kentucky, shortly after Sam was born. His father worked on the railroad, and his mother cared for the large family. Gilliam began painting in elementary school and received much encouragement from teachers. In 1951, Gilliam graduated from Central High School in Louisville. Gilliam served in the United States Army from 1956 to 1958. He received his bachelor's and master's degree of Fine Arts from the University of Louisville. In 1955, Gilliam had his first solo exhibition at the University of Louisville. He initially taught art for a year in the Louisville public schools. In 1962, he married Dorothy Butler, a Louisville native and a well-known journalist. That same year, Gilliam moved to Washington, D.C.

A00112 - Tony Brown, Trailblazing Journalist

Tony Brown, in full William Anthony Brown   (b. April 11, 1933, Charleston, West Virginia), American activist, television producer, writer, educator, and filmmaker who hosted Tony Brown’s Journal (1968–2008; original name Black Journal until 1977), the longest-running black news program in television history.

Brown was the son of Royal Brown and Catherine Davis Brown. Segregation and poverty were a part of Brown’s upbringing and influenced his view that freedom can be achieved only through economic means. Brown attended public schools in Charleston, West Virginia, where he joined the track team and excelled in academics, especially English and drama. He performed in school plays and, shortly before graduating in 1951, performed segments of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on WGKV radio in Charleston.

After serving in the army from 1953 to 1955, Brown enrolled in Wayne State University in Detroit where he studied sociology and psychology, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1959. Primarily concerned with the suffering caused by poverty that plagued the African American community, Brown continued his studies at Wayne State, focusing on psychiatric social work. He earned a master’s degree in 1961 and began a career as a social worker but quickly discovered that he did not like the work. Changing careers, Brown became a drama critic for the Detroit Courier in 1962. He soon rose to the position of editor at the newspaper, but in 1968 he decided to move on to a job in public-affairs programming at WTVS, Detroit’s public television station.

Over the next 30 years, Brown hosted and produced programming that concerned the black community. While at WTVS, he produced Colored People’s Time, the station’s first show aimed at a black audience, and Free Play, another community-oriented program. In 1970 Brown became executive producer and host of Black Journal, a New York-based program that aired nationally and had begun in 1968. The program consisted of commentaries, documentaries, and surveys. Brown’s approach to Black Journal garnered much criticism. His view of the United States government and its effect on African American life, as well as his seeming arrogance when focusing on the struggles of black people, caused a stir in both the broadcasting and black communities. As a result, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded the program, announced that it would not fund the 1973–74 season of Black Journal. The national black community protested the decision, however, and the show was aired, although on a limited basis. In 1977 Brown negotiated a contract with the Pepsi-Cola Company to sponsor the show, changing its name to Tony Brown’s Journal and moving it to commercial television. The show was later moved back to public television after Brown experienced trouble getting desirable viewing times on commercial television stations.

Activism was important to Brown. He maintained a strong presence in community-oriented programs as well as launching initiatives of his own. His belief that education was the key to success prompted him to initiate Black College Day to highlight black colleges and the need for African American youth to pursue a college education. He also formed the Council for the Economic Development of Black Americans; the organization’s Buy Freedom campaign encouraged African Americans to patronize black businesses. To address the problem of drug addiction, he wrote and produced a film about the issue, The White Girl (1990).

Brown held academic positions throughout his career. He founded the School of Communications at Howard University in Washington, D. C., in 1971 and served as the school’s dean until 1974. He later served as dean of the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University in Virginia from 2004 to 2009.

In addition to writing a syndicated column for many years, Brown also wrote the books Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown (1995), Empower the People: A 7-Step Plan to Overthrow the Conspiracy That Is Stealing Your Money and Freedom (1998), and What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life (2003).

A00111 - Camille Billops, Sculptor and Filmmaker

Camille Billops (b. August 12, 1933, Los Angeles, California), an African American sculptor, filmmaker, archivist, and printmaker. 

Billops was born in Los Angeles on August 12, 1933. Her parents, Alma Gilmore and Lucius Billops, worked "in service" for a Beverly Hills family, enabling them to provide her with a private secondary education.

Billops graduated in 1960 from Los Angeles State College, where she majored in education for physically handicapped children. She obtained her B.A. degree from California State University and her M.F.A. degree from City College of New York in 1975.

Billops’s primary visual art medium is sculpture and her works are in the permanent collections of the Jersey City Museum and the Museum of Drawers, Bern, Switzerland. Billops has exhibited in one-woman and group exhibitions worldwide including: Gallerie Akhenaton, Cairo, Egypt; Hamburg, Germany; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer Gallery, and El Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia. 

In 1982, Billops began her filmmaking career with Suzanne, Suzanne. She followed this by directing five more films, including Finding Christa in 1991, a highly autobiographical work that garnered the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Finding Christa has also been aired as part of the Public Broadcasting Service's P. O. V. television series. Her other film credits include Older Women and Love in 1987, The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks in 1994, Take Your Bags in 1998, and A String of Pearls in 2002. Billops produced all of her films with her husband and their film company, Mom and Pop Productions.

Billops's film projects have been collaborations with, and stories about, members of her family. For instance, they were co-produced with her husband James Hatch and credit Hatch's son as director of photography.Suzanne, Suzanne studies the relationship between Billop's sister Billie and Billie's daughter Suzanne. Finding Christa deals with Billops's daughter whom she gave up for adoption. Older Women and Love is based on a love affair of Billops's aunt.

In 1961 the seeds of Hatch-Billops Collection were sown when Billops met James Hatch, a professor of theater at UCLA, through Billops's stepsister, Josie Mae Dotson, who was Hatch's student. A 40-year artistic collaboration followed. The Hatch-Billops Collection is an archive of African American memorabilia including thousands of books and other printed materials, more than 1,200 interviews, and scripts of nearly 1,000 plays. Once housed in a 120-foot-long (37 m) loft in lower Manhattan, the Collection is now largely located at the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch archives at Emory University.

Hatch and Billops also hosted a salon in their Manhattan loft, which led to the publication of Artist and Influence, an annual journal featuring interviews with noted American "marginalized artists" across a wide range of genres. 

Billops collaborated with photographer James Van Der Zee and poet, scholar, and playwright Owen Dodson on The Harle Book of the Dead, which was published in 1978 with an introduction by Toni Morrison. 

A00110 - Sofasonke Movement

James Mpanza (1889–1970) was an eccentric teacher and preacher who was once convicted of both murder and fraud, but who later became a squatter leader in Johannesburg, South Africa from the mid-1940s until the late 1960s. In 1944, he led the land invasion that resulted in the founding of modern Soweto.  Mpanza was at one time known as 'the father of Soweto'.

In April 1944, despite being seen as controversial, Mpanza persuaded 8,000 people to follow him from Orlando to create a new township called Sofasonke Township with himself as unofficial mayor. By 1946, there were 20,000 people squatting there and Mpanza charged a fee to join the camp and to claim a site.

 Afterwards, the squatters paid a fee of two shillings and sixpence every week. In return, the squatters had their own police force. 

Mpanza operated informal courts at his Orlando home where family disputes could be settled. Conditions, however, were poor and there was no health service. The death of Mpanza's son, Dumisani, was put down to poor medical care. The squatters had left the slums of Orlando but their plight was still uncertain and Mpanza got the nickname of "Sofasonke" ("we shall all die"). It was this rhetoric that got Mpanza's movement the nickname but it also encouraged the funding necessary to convert this shantytown into the town of SOuth WEstern TOwnships" or 

A00109 - Detroit Race Riot of 1943

Altercations between youths started on June 20, 1943, on a warm Sunday evening on Belle Isle, a recreation area on an island in the Detroit River off Detroit's mainland. In what was considered a communal disorder, youths fought intermittently throughout the afternoon. The brawl eventually grew into a confrontation between groups of European Americans and African Americans on the long Belle Isle Bridge, crowded with pedestrians returning to the city, and it spread into the city.  European American sailors joined fights against African Americans. The riot escalated in the city after a false rumor spread that a mob of European Americans had thrown an African-American mother and her baby into the Detroit River. African Americans looted and destroyed European American owned property but in the end, much more African American owned property was destroyed.

The rumors that gave rise to the riot reflected longstanding racial fears.  Based on history, African American males feared European American male violence against African American women and children.  Conversely, based on a false rumor, European Americans feared that African Americans had raped and murdered a European American woman on the Belle Isle Bridge. In response to the false rumor, angry mobs of European Americans spilled onto Woodward Avenue near the Roxy Theater around 4 a.m., beating blacks as they were getting off street cars on their way to work. Stores were looted and buildings were burned in the riot, most of them in the African American neighborhood of Paradise Valley, one of the oldest and poorest neighborhoods in Detroit.

The clashes soon escalated to the point where mobs of European Americans and African Americans were assaulting one another, beating innocent motorists, pedestrians and streetcar passengers, burning cars, destroying storefronts and looting businesses. Both sides were said to have encouraged others to join in the riots with false claims that one of "their own" was attacked unjustly.  African Americans were outnumbered by a large margin, and suffered more deaths, personal injuries and property damage.

The riots lasted three days and ended after Mayor Jeffries and Governor Harry Kelly asked President Roosevelt to intervene. Roosevelt ordered in federal troops.  A total of 6,000 troops restored peace and occupied the streets of Detroit. Over the course of three days of rioting, 34 people had been killed: 25 were African Americans, and 17 of these were killed by the police (the police forces at the time were predominately European American and dominated by descendants of immigrants). Thirteen murders remain unsolved. Of the approximately 600 persons injured, more than 75 percent were African American; of the roughly 1,800 people arrested over the course of the three-day riots, 85 percent were African American.

After the riot, leaders on both sides had explanations for the violence, effectively blaming the other side. European American city leaders, including the mayor, blamed young "black hoodlums” and persisted in framing the events as being caused by outsiders, people who were unemployed and marginal. The Wayne County prosecutor believed that leaders of the NAACP were to blame as instigators of the riots. Governor Kelly called together a Fact Finding Commission to investigate and report on the causes of the riot. Its mostly European American members blamed African American youths, and regarded the events as an unfortunate incident. The commissioners never interviewed any of the rioters but based their conclusions on police reports, which were limited.

Other officials drew similar conclusions, despite discovering facts that disproved their thesis. Dr. Lowell S. Selling of the Recorder's Court Psychiatric Clinic conducted interviews with 100 offenders, finding them to be "employed, well-paid, longstanding (of at least 10 years) residents of the city", with some education and a history of being law abiding. He attributed their violence to their Southern heritage. This view was repeated in a separate study by Elmer R. Akers and Vernon Fox, sociologist and psychologist, respectively, at the State Prison of Southern Michigan. Although most of the men they studied had jobs and had been in Detroit an average of more than 10 years, Akers and Fox characterized them as unskilled, unsettled, and stressed their Southern heritage as predisposing them to violence.

Detroit's African American leaders identified numerous other causes, including persistent racial discrimination in jobs and housing, the lack of African Americans among police officers and frequent police brutality against blacks, and the daily animosity directed at their people by much of Detroit's European American population.

A late 20th-century analysis of the facts collected on the arrested rioters has drawn markedly different conclusions, noting that European Americans were younger, generally unemployed, and had clearly traveled long distances from their homes to the African American neighborhood to attack people there. Even in the early stage of the riots near Belle Isle Bridge, European American youths traveled in groups to the riot area and carried weapons.

Later in the second stage, European Americans continued to act in groups and were prepared for action, carrying weapons and traveling miles to attack the ghetto along its western side at Woodward Avenue. African Americans arrested were older, often married and working men, who had lived in the city for 10 years or more. They fought closer to home, mainly acting independently to defend their homes, persons or neighborhood, and sometimes looting or destroying mostly European American owned property there in frustration. Where felonies occurred, European Americans were more often arrested for use of weapons and African Americans for looting or failing to observe the curfew imposed. European Americans were more often arrested for misdemeanors. In broad terms, both sides acted to improve their positions; the European Americans fought out of fear, African Americans fought out of hope for better conditions.

Following the violence, Japanese propaganda officials incorporated the event into its materials that encouraged African American soldiers not to fight for the United States. They distributed a flyer titled "Fight Between Two Races". The Axis Powers publicized the riot as a sign of Western decline.

Walter White, head of the NAACP, noted that there was no rioting at the Packard and Hudson plants, where leaders of the UAW and CIO had been incorporating blacks as part of the rank and file, part of the changes that had begun to open opportunities for blacks.

Future Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, then with the NAACP, assailed the city's handling of the riot. He charged that police unfairly targeted African Americans while turning their backs on European American atrocities. He said 85 percent of those arrested were African American while European Americans overturned and burned cars in front of the Roxy Theater with impunity as police watched. Marshall said: "This weak-kneed policy of the police commissioner coupled with the anti-Negro attitude of many members of the force helped to make a riot inevitable."

A00108 - Harlem Riot of 1943

On Sunday, August 1, 1943, a European American policeman attempted to arrest an African American woman for disturbing the peace in the lobby of the Braddock Hotel.  The hotel, which once hosted show business celebrities in the 1920s, had become a location known for prostitution by the 1940s. The Army designated the area as a "raided premise", and a policeman was stationed in the lobby to prevent further crime.

Various accounts detail how Marjorie (Margie) Polite, the African American woman, became confrontational with James Collins, the European American policeman. According to one, Polite checked into the hotel on August 1, but was unsatisfied and asked for another room. When she switched rooms and found the new accommodation did not have the shower and bath she wanted, Polite asked for a refund, which she received. Afterwards, however, she asked for the $1 tip that she gave to an elevator operator to be returned. The operator refused. Polite began to protest loudly, which caught the attention of Collins. According to another account, she became drunk at a party in one of the rooms, and confronted the officer as she attempted to leave.

After Collins told Polite to leave, she became verbally abusive of the officer and Collins arrested her on the grounds of disturbing the peace. Florine Roberts, the mother of Robert Bandy, an African American soldier in the United States Army, observed the incident and asked for Polite's release. The official police report held that the soldier threatened Collins.  In the report, Bandy and Mrs. Roberts proceeded to attack Collins. Bandy hit the officer, and while attempting to flee, Collins shot Bandy in the shoulder with his revolver. In an interview with PM, the soldier stated that he intervened when the officer pushed Polite. According to Bandy, Collins threw his nightstick at Bandy, which he caught. When Bandy hesitated after Collins asked for its return, Collins shot him. Bandy's wound was superficial, but he was taken to Sydenham Hospital for treatment. Crowds quickly gathered around Bandy as he entered the hospital, around the hotel, and around police headquarters, where a crowd of 3,000 amassed by 9:00 pm. The crowds combined and grew tense as rumors that an African American soldier had been shot soon turned to rumors that an African American soldier had been killed.

At 10:30 pm, the crowd became violent after an individual threw a bottle off of a roof into the crowd aggregated about the hospital. The group dispersed into gangs containing between 50–100 members. The gangs first broke windows of European American owned businesses as they traveled through Harlem.  If the mob was informed the business was under African American ownership, it left the establishment alone. If the ownership was European American, however, the store would be looted and vandalized. Rioters broke streetlights and threw white mannequins onto the ground. In grocery stores, the rioters took war-scarce items, such as coffee and sugar; clothing, liquor, and furniture stores were also looted. Estimates put the total monetary damage between $250,000–$5,000,000, which included 1,485 stores burglarized and 4,495 windows broken.

When Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia was informed of the situation at 9:00 pm, he met with police and visited the riot district with African American authority figures such as Max Yergan and Hope Stevens.  La Guardia ordered all unoccupied officers into the region.  In addition to the 6,000 city and military police, 1,500 volunteers were called on to help control the riot, with an additional 8,000 guardsmen "on standby". Traffic was directed around Harlem to contain the riot.  After he returned from the tour, the mayor made the first of a series of radio announcements that urged Harlemites to return home. Soon after, he met with Walter Francis White of the National Association of Colored People to discuss the appropriate action to take.  White suggested that African American leaders again visit the district to spread the message of order. Just after 2:00 A.M, the mayor instructed all taverns to close.

The riot ended on the night of August 2. Cleanup efforts started that day.  The New York City Department of Sanitation worked to clean the area for three days and the New York City Departments of Buildings and Housing boarded windows. The city assigned a police escort for all department workers. The Red Cross gave Harlemites lemonade and crullers, and the mayor organized various hospitals to handle an influx of patients. By August 4, traffic had resumed through the borough, and taverns reopened the next day. La Guardia had food delivered to the residents of Harlem, and on August 6, food supplies returned to normal levels. Overall, six people died and nearly 700 were injured. Six hundred men and women were arrested in connection with the riot.

The cause of the riot lay with a disparity between the values of American democracy and the conditions of African American citizens.  The segregation of African Americans in the armed forces while the United States fought for freedom underscored this disparity.  The resentment of the status given African American members of the armed forces came to be embodied Robert Bandy while James Collins came to represent European American oppression of African Americans.  Additionally, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his Four Freedoms speech, calling for freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear for people "everywhere in the world", African Americans felt that they never had such freedoms themselves in America and, therefore, needed to be willing to fight for them domestically.

After the Harlem Riot of 1935 caused widespread destruction, La Guardia ordered a commission to pinpoint its underlying causes: commission head E. Franklin Frazier wrote that "economic and social forces created a state of emotional tension which sought release upon the slightest provocation". The report listed several "economic and social forces" that worked against African Americans, including discrimination in employment and city services, overcrowding in housing, and police brutality. Specifically, it criticized New York City Police Commissioner Lewis Joseph Valentine and New York City Hospitals Commissioner Sigismund S. Goldwater, both of whom responded with criticisms of the report. Conflicted, La Guardia asked academic Alain LeRoy Locke to analyze both accounts and assess the situation. Confidentially, Locke wrote to La Guardia that Valentine was blameworthy and listed several areas for immediate improvement, such as health and education. Publicly, Locke published an article in the Survey Graphic which blamed the 1935 riot on the state of affairs that La Guardia inherited.

Communally, conditions for African American Harlemites improved by 1943, with better employment in civil services, for instance, but economic problems became exacerbated under wartime conditions, which enforced employment discrimination in new war and non-war industries and business. Though new projects such as the Harlem River Houses expanded housing for African Americans, by 1943, Harlem housing had deteriorated as new construction slowed and buildings were destroyed.  Although the state of African Americans improved relative to society, individuals could not accelerate their own progress.

A00107 - Harlem Race Riot of 1935

At 2:30 in the afternoon on March 19, 1935, an employee at the Kress Five and Ten store at 256 W. 125th Street (just across the street from the Apollo Theater) caught 16-year-old black Puerto Rican Lino Rivera shoplifting a 10-cent penknife. When his captor threatened to take Rivera into the store's basement and "beat the hell out of him," Rivera bit the employee's hand. The manager intervened and the police were called, but Rivera was eventually released. In the meantime, a crowd had begun to gather outside around a woman who had witnessed Rivera's apprehension and was shouting that Rivera was being beaten. When an ambulance showed up to treat the wounds of the employee who had been bitten, it appeared to confirm the woman's story, and when the crowd took notice of a hearse parked outside of the store, the rumor began to circulate that Rivera had been beaten to death. The woman who had raised the alarm was arrested for disorderly conduct, the Kress Five and Ten store was closed early, and the crowd was dispersed.

In the early evening, a group called the Young Liberators started a demonstration outside the store, quickly drawing thousands of people. Handbills were distributed: One was headlined "CHILD BRUTALLY BEATEN". Another denounced "the brutal beating of the 12 year old boy [...] for taking a piece of candy."

At some point, someone threw a rock, shattering the window of the Kress Five and Ten store, and the destruction and looting began to spread east and west on 125th Street, targeting white-owned businesses between Fifth and Eighth Avenues.  Some stores posted signs that read "COLORED STORE" or "COLORED HELP EMPLOYED HERE". In the early hours of the morning, as the rioting spread north and south, Lino Rivera was picked up from his mother's apartment and photographed with a police officer. The photographs were distributed in order to prove that Rivera had not been harmed. New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia also had posters drawn up urging a return to peace.

By the end of the next day, the streets of Harlem were returned to order. District Attorney William C. Dodge blamed Communist incitement.  Mayor LaGuardia ordered a multi-racial Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem headed by African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and included Judge Hubert Thomas Delany, Countee Cullen, and A. Philip Randolph to investigate the causes of the riot. The committee issued a report, "The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935," which described the rioting as "spontaneous" with "no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters." The report identified "injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of the police, and the racial segregation" as conditions which led to the outbreak of rioting. The report congratulated the Communist organizations as deserving "more credit than any other element in Harlem for preventing a physical conflict between whites and blacks." Alain Locke was appointed to implement the report's findings.

The Harlem Riot of 1935 was the first modern race riot in that it symbolized that the optimism and hopefulness that had fueled the Harlem Renaissance was gone.  The Harlem Riot of 1935 was the first manifestation of a 'modern' form of racial rioting satisfying three criteria:

1. violence directed almost entirely against property
2. the absence of clashes between racial groups
3. struggles between the lower-class African American population and the police forces

Whereas previous race riots had been characterized by violent clashes between groups of African American and European American rioters, subsequent riots (including those of the early twenty-first century) would resemble the 1935 riot in Harlem.

A00106 - Lynn Huntley, Prominent Civil Rights Lawyer

Lynn Huntley, aka Mary Lynn Jones, (b. January 24, 1946, Petersburg, Virginia - d. August 30, 2015, Atlanta, Georgia) was a prominent civil rights lawyer.  She was born on January 24, 1946, in Petersburg, Virginia. Her father, the Reverend Lawrence Jones, was active in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, when he was associated with Fisk University in Nashville. He was dean of Howard University’s divinity school in Washington from 1975 to 1991 and died in 2009. Her mother, Mary Ellen, died in 2003.

Ms. Huntley attended Fisk University as an early entrant, received an A.B. in Sociology with honors from Barnard College, and J.D. degree with honors from Columbia University Law School, where she was a member of The Columbia Law Review. She worked as law clerk for a federal judge, Judge Constance Baker Motley; and as staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she focused on cases involving the abolition of the death penalty, prisoner rights and education. She served as general counsel to the New York City Commission on Human Rights and as section chief and deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, where she directed a trial section to vindicate the rights of institutionalized persons, and exercised oversight of sections concerned with legislative affairs, employment, housing, federal regulatory and budgetary matters.

During her tenure at the Ford Foundation from l982-1994, where she advanced from program officer to director of Ford Foundation’s Rights and Social Justice Program, Ms. Huntley was responsible for grant making related to minority and women’s rights, refugee and migration issues, legal services for the poor, minorities and media, and coordination of field office activities related to the foregoing.  In l995, Ms. Huntley joined the staff of the Southern Education Foundation as a program director, where she conceived and directed the Comparative Human Relations Initiative, an examination of race and inequality in Brazil, South Africa and the United States and strategies to reduce inequality. She is the author of several reports resultant from this effort, and served, with others, as editor of two related books, Tirando a Mascara (Removing the Mask, 2000) and Race and Inequality in South Africa, Brazil and the United States (2001). She retired from the Southern Education Foundation in 2010, having doubled the endowment and raised over $44 million from diverse donors.

Ms. Huntley has received many honors, including the Thurgood Marshall Award of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University, honorary doctorates from Cambridge College in Boston, Mass., and Allen University in Columbia, SC, and the Lucy Terry Prince Award of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.  She also received the National Bar Association outstanding achievement award, the Unsung Heroine Award from the Atlanta Coalition of 100 Black Women, and was the Association of Black Foundation Executives’ James A. Joseph Lecturer in 2004.   She served as a member of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, and on the Boards of the American Constitution Society, the Association of Black Foundation Executives (where she was counsel) Grantmakers for Education, CARE USA (where she was vice chair), the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Marguerite E. Casey Foundation,  and the Interdenominational Theological Center. She was recently elected vice chair of the Board of Trustees of the Jesse Ball DuPont Fund in Jacksonville, Florida. 

A00105 - Max Beauvoir, Haiti's High Priest of Voodoo

Max Gesner Beauvoir (b. August 25, 1936 – d. September 12, 2015) was a Haitian biochemist and houngan. Beauvoir held one of the highest titles of Voudou priesthood, "Supreme Servitur" (supreme servant), a title given to Houngans and Mambos (Voudou priests and priestesses) who have a great and very deep knowledge of the religion, and status within the religion. As Supreme Servitur, Beauvoir was seen as a high authority within Voudou.

Beauvoir graduated in 1958 from City College of New York with a degree in chemistry. He continued his studies at the Sorbonne from 1959 to 1962, when he graduated with a degree in biochemistry. In 1965, at the Cornell Medical Center, he supervised a team in synthesizing metabolic steroids. This led him to a job at an engineering company in northern New Jersey, and later as an engineer at Digital Equipment Company in Massachusetts. His interest in steroids led him to experiment with hydrocortisone synthesized from plants.  However, the death of his father led him to move back to Haiti in January 1973 and become a voodoo priest.

In 1974, he founded Le Péristyle de Mariani, a Hounfour (voodoo temple) in his home (which also served as a village clinic) in the village of Mariani. He had a troubled relationship with the ruling Duvalier family. While he urged that they do more to meet the medical needs of the poor, his status as a houngan kept him from being subjected to much of the wanton violence exacted by the Tonton Macoutes against critics.

During this period, he founded the Group for Studies and Research on the African Tradition (French: Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches Traditionnelles, GERT) with a group of scholars, and later founded the Bòde Nasyonal in 1986 to counter the effects of the post-Duvalier dechoukaj violence which had targeted both Vodou practitioners and the Tonton Macoutes paramilitary, both of which had been used by the Duvalier regime to oppress the Haitian people.

In 1996, Beauvoir founded The Temple of Yehwe, a Washington, D. C. based non-profit organization for the promotion of education concerning African American religion. In 1997, he became involved with the creation of the KOSANBA group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

^{In 2005, Beauvoir launched the Federasyon Nasyonal Vodou Ayisyen, which he later renamed in 2008 as Konfederasyon Nasyonal Vodou Ayisyen; he serves as "chef Supreme" or "Ati Nasyonal" of the organization, which is an attempt to organize the defense of Vodou in the country against defamation.}