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.}

A00104 - Bill Pickett, Rodeo and Wild West Performer

Bill Pickett,  (b. December 5, 1870?, Williamson County, Texas — d. April 2, 1932, Tulsa, Oklahoma), American rodeo cowboy who introduced bulldogging, a modern rodeo event that involves wrestling a running steer to the ground.

Pickett was descended from American Indians (Cherokees) and African American slaves in the Southwest. He grew up in West Texas, learning to ride and rope as a boy, and became a ranch hand; he performed simple trick rides in town on the weekends. In 1900, he became a showman, sponsored by Lee Moore, a Texas rodeo entrepreneur. In 1907, Pickett signed with the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, becoming one of its star performers and assuming the status of a legendary figure for his masterful handling of both wild and domestic animals. For bulldogging, or steer wrestling, he perfected a technique of jumping from his horse, grabbing the steer around the neck or horns, sinking his teeth into the animal’s lip, and pulling it to the ground. Pickett’s most-grueling performance came in 1908 in a bullring in Mexico City. He there wrestled and rode a Mexican fighting bull for seven minutes before a riotous audience enraged at this original interpretation of the Mexican national pastime of bullfighting.

Pickett performed until about 1916, working as a cowhand and rancher thereafter. He later appeared in the silent films The Bull-Dogger (1921) and The Crimson Skull (1922). He died after being kicked by a horse in April 1932.

A00103 - Andrew Young, United States Ambassador to the United Nations and Mayor of Atlanta

Andrew Young, in full Andrew Jackson Young, Jr.    (b. March 12, 1932, New Orleans, Louisiana), American politician, civil-rights leader, and clergyman.

Young was reared in a middle-class African American family, attended segregated Southern schools, and later entered Howard University (Washington, D.C.) as a premed student. But he turned to the ministry and graduated in 1955 from the Hartford Theological Seminary (Hartford, Conn.) with a divinity degree.

A pastor at several African American churches in the South, Young became active in the civil-rights movement—especially in voter registration drives. His work brought him in contact with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Young joined with King in leading the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Following King’s assassination in 1968, Young worked with Ralph Abernathy until he resigned from the SCLC in 1970.

Defeated that year in his first bid for a seat in Congress, Young ran again in 1972 and won. He was re-elected in 1974 and 1976. In the House he opposed cuts in funds for social programs while trying to block additional funding for the war in Vietnam. He was an early supporter of Jimmy Carter, and, after Carter’s victory in the 1976 presidential elections, Andrew Young was made the United States’ Ambassador to the United Nations. His apparent sympathy with the Third World made him very controversial, and he was finally forced to resign in 1979 after it became known that he had met with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1981 Young was elected mayor of Atlanta, and he was re-elected to that post in 1985, serving through 1989.

A00102 - Melvin Van Peebles, Sweet Sweetback's Creator

Melvin Van Peebles, original name Melvin Peebles   (b. August 21, 1932, Chicago, Illinois), American filmmaker who wrote, directed, and starred in  Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), a groundbreaking film that spearheaded the rush of African American action films known as "blaxploitation" in the 1970s. He also served as the film’s composer and editor.

After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University (B.A., 1953), Van Peebles traveled extensively in Europe, Mexico, and the United States, working a variety of jobs that included painter, postal worker, and street performer along with a stint in the air force. While living in Paris, he wrote several French-language novels, including La Permission (1967), which he turned into his first feature film. The romantic drama was released in France in 1967 and in the United States (as The Story of a Three-Day Pass) the following year. Van Peebles made his Hollywood directorial debut with Watermelon Man (1970), a comedy about racial bigotry. He then turned to his pet project, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Using mostly his own money and relying largely on non-professional actors and technicians, Van Peebles told the story of one African American man’s battle against European American authority. Violent, sexy, and angry, the film scored a huge success with African American audiences (it was one of the top box-office earners that year) while angering many European American critics.

Van Peebles had begun a musical career with the album Brer Soul (1969), which featured a mostly spoken vocal style that prefigured rap. He subsequently moved into Broadway musical theatre, adapting some of his recorded songs for the production Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971) and one of his novels for Don’t Play Us Cheap! (1972; film 1973). Thereafter he continued to write, act, compose, and direct for films, television, and the stage. Subsequent films in which he appeared include O.C. and Stiggs (1985), Boomerang (1992), The Hebrew Hammer (2003), and Peeples (2013). With the comedy Identity Crisis (1989), he ended a 16-year hiatus from screen directing, and he later wrote and directed Le Conte du ventre plein (2000; Bellyful) and Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha (2008); none of these efforts, however, were widely seen. In addition to his entertainment career, Van Peebles became involved in commodities trading in the 1980s and was the first African American to hold a seat on the American Stock Exchange. 

Van Peebles’s son Mario, who played the character Sweetback as a boy in the 1971 film, became a noted film actor and director in his own right. Besides directing his father in such films as the western Posse (1993), Mario co-wrote, directed, and starred in the feature Baadasssss! (2003), about the making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.