On the morning of August 23, 1968, a group of Black soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas stage one of the largest acts of civil disobedience ever recorded among members of the United States military. Adopting the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement, the soldiers stage a sit-in to protest their impending deployment to Chicago to defend the Democratic National Convention from protesters.

By 1968, sit-ins were a well-established, peaceful way to protest segregation and demand racial equality. But even as the war in Vietnam escalated and more Americans were sent to fight there, dissent by active-duty military personnel remained rare. Tensions all over the country were peaking in August of 1968 in the wake of the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Bobby Kennedy, who was seeking the Democratic nomination. As protesters headed to Chicago to demand aggressive action on civil rights and an anti-war plank in the Democratic Party’s platform, law enforcement geared up for what would turn out to be a brutal crackdown.

The convention had not yet begun when the troops at Fort Hood received word that they would be deployed to Chicago. The night before they were slated to ship out, 60 Black soldiers sat down at an intersection on the grounds of the fort and began their sit-in. “The people we are supposed to control, the rioters, are probably our own race,” one of them reportedly said. “We shouldn’t have to go out there and do wrong to our own people.” Others stated that they had served honorably and done everything the Army asked, but drew the line at a treating their fellow citizens as “hostiles.”

Source: for the complete article, go to history.com

Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, is shot dead by a white father and son while out for a jog in a suburb of Brunswick, Georgia on February 23, 2020.  On May 7, following the release of a video of the killing that spurred national attention from the media, civil rights …read more

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W.E.B. Du Bois
Born: February 23, 1868
Died: August 27, 1963
Age: 95 years old
Birthplace: Great Barrington, MA, United States
Occupation: Educator, Civil Rights Activist, Journalist

Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s biography >>

On February 23, 1868, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois is born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A brilliant scholar, Du Bois was an influential proponent of civil rights.

Du Bois’ childhood was happy, but during adolescence he became aware of a “vast veil” separating him from his white classmates. He devoted most of his life to studying the position of Black Americas from a sociological point of view. He took his doctorate at Harvard but was unable to get a job at a major university, despite his impressive academic achievements and the publication of his doctoral thesis, about the slave trade to the United States in the mid-1800s. He taught at Wilberforce College in Ohio, then spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his first major book, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). The book was the first sociological case study of a Black community.

Source: history.com