Daily Archives: 07/28/2022

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On this day … Jul 28, 1868 a repost from 2014


WethePeopleFollowing its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July 1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.” The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”

In the decades after its adoption, the equal protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law. However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which announced federal toleration of the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. However, “colored” facilities were never equal to their white counterparts, and African Americans suffered through decades of debilitating discrimination in the South and elsewhere. In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/14th-amendment-adopted

Resource : history.com

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1917- July 27-28 , Silent Parade organised by James Weldon Johnson of 10,000 African-Americans who march on 5th Ave in NYC to protest against lynching


Jul 27, 2020 The July 28, 1917 Silent Protest Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City, was one of the first major mass demonstrations by African Americans. Conceived by James Weldon Johnson and organized by the NAACP with church and community leaders, the protest parade united an estimated 10,000 African Americans who marched down Fifth Avenue, gathering at 55th–59th Streets and proceeding to Madison Square, silently carrying banners condemning racist violence and racial discrimination. More info: https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/191…

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NAACP Silent Protest Parade, New York City 7/28/1917


The National Association of the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Silent Protest Parade, also known as the Silent March, was held in New York City on Saturday, July 28, 1917, on 5th Avenue. This parade came about because the violence acted upon African Americans, including the race riots, lynching, and outages in Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, and other states.

One incident in particular, the East St. Louis Race Riot, also called the East St. Louis Massacre, was a major catalyst of the silent parade. This horrific event drove close to six thousand blacks from their own burning homes and left several hundred dead.

James Weldon Johnson, the second vice president of the NAACP, brought together other civil rights leaders who gathered at St. Phillips Church in New York to plan protest strategies. None of the group wanted a mass protest, yet all agreed that a silent protest through the streets of the city could spark the idea of racial reform and an end to the violence. Johnson remembered the idea of a silent protest from A NAACP Conference in 1916 when Oswald Garrison Villard suggested it. All the organizations agreed that this parade needed to be comprised of the black citizens, rather than a racially-mixed gathering. They argued that as the principal victims of the violence, African Americans had a special responsibility to participate in this, the first major public protest of racial violence in U.S. history.

The parade went south down 5th Avenue, moved to 57th Street and then to Madison Square. It brought out nearly ten thousand black women, men, and children, who all marched in silence. Johnson urged that the only sound to be heard would be the “the sound of muffled drums.” Children, dressed in white, led the protest, followed by women behind, also dressed in white. Men followed at the rear, dressed in dark suits.

The marchers carried banners and posters stating their reasons for the march. Both participants and onlookers remarked that this protest was unlike any other seen in the city and the nation.  There were no chants, no songs, just silence. As those participating in the parade continued down the streets of New York, black Boy Scouts handed out flyers to those watching that described the NAACP’s struggle against segregation, lynching, and discrimination, as well as other forms of racist oppression.

James Weldon Johnson wrote in his 1938 autobiography, Along This Way, that “the streets of New York have witnessed many strange sites, but I judge, never one stranger than this; among the watchers were those with tears in their eyes.”

Sources:
Jessie Carney Smith, Linda T. Wynn, Freedom Facts and Firsts: 400 Years of the African American Civil Rights Experience (Visible Ink Press, 2009); James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way:  The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008); James Barron, “A History of Making Protest Messages Heard, Silently,” The New York Times (June 2012); “Snippet From History #2: The Negro Silent Protest of 1917,” http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2013/02/28/snippet-from-history-2-the-negro-silent-protest-of-1917/; “The Negro Silent Protest Parade,”

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai2/forward/text4/silentprotest.pdf.