Tag Archives: white people

featured photo is from google

In a letter dated March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams writes to her husband, John Adams, urging him and the other members of the Continental Congress not to forget about the nation’s women when fighting for America’s independence from Great Britain.

The future First Lady wrote in part, “I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Nearly 150 years before the House of Representatives voted to pass the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, Adams letter was a private first step in the fight for equal rights for women. Recognized and admired as a formidable woman in her own right, the union of Abigail and John Adams persists as a model of mutual respect and affection; they have since been referred to as “America’s first power couple.” Their correspondence of over 1,000 letters written between 1762 and 1801 remains in the Massachusetts Historical Society and continues to give historians a unique perspective on domestic and political life during the revolutionary era.

Abigail bore six children, of whom five survived. Abigail and John’s eldest son, John Quincy Adams, served as the sixth president of the United States. Only two women, Abigail Adams and Barbara Bush, have been both wives and mothers of American presidents.

http://www.history.com

Black History, ~ Culture & History

March 2, 1955 – Women’s American History … In memory of Claudette Colvin

03/02/2025 Nativegrl77

Black History Unsung Heroes: Claudette Colvin

Women’s History Month

History & Culture

Black History Unsung Heroes: Claudette Colvin

click on link above to read her amazing story

As a teenager, she made history, but it took decades for her to become recognized for her courage and achievements.

source: biography.com

first posted 2015

A full nine months before Rosa Parks‘s famous act of civil disobedience, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin is arrested on March 2, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus.

Colvin was traveling home from school when the bus’ driver ordered her, along with three fellow Black students, to give up their row of seats to a white passenger. Colvin’s friends obliged, but she refused to move. At school, she had recently learned about abolitionists, and later recalled that “it felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.”

Women’s History Month!

Black History, ~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

African Americans in Full Color – in memory of Black History – a repost

02/23/2025 Nativegrl77 1 Comment

Lonnie Bunch, museum director, historian, lecturer, and author, is proud to present A Page from Our American Story, a regular on-line series for Museum supporters. It will showcase individuals and events in the African American experience, placing these stories in the context of a larger story — our American story.A Page From Our American Story

In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans became fascinated with photo journalism. Pictures were literally “worth a thousand words” as full-color magazines and tabloid newspapers became the rage.

Publications targeted to African American audiences that featured illustrations and photographs began appearing in the early 1900s. One of the earliest to effectively use illustrations and photography was The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP. Seeking to educate and inform its readers with scholarly articles, the covers of the journal and its entertainment section were designed to appeal to the masses of African Americans.

In the 1930s, we see pictorial magazines such as Abbott’s Monthly, published by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender newspaper, and Flash, which billed itself as a “weekly newspicture magazine.” Published in Washington, D.C., Flash contained a mixture of news, gossip and advertisements and articles on racial issues, providing an overview of the highs and the lows of Black life in the 1930’s.

In 1942, African American businessman John H. Johnson founded the Johnson Publishing Company, a corporation that would go on to publish the well-known magazines Ebony, Jet, Tan, and Ebony Jr. The magazines promoted African American achievements and affirmative black imagery in popular culture, which appealed to readers … and to advertisers. Mr. Johnson was a savvy businessman and used the statistics of a rising black middle class to persuade companies and businesses that it was in their economic “self-interest” to advertise in his magazines to reach African American consumers.

With the success of the Johnson Publishing Company’s magazines, other magazines targeted to African Americans quickly came on the scene. For example, in 1947 Horace J. Blackwell published Negro Achievements, a magazine highlighting African American success articles and featuring reader-submitted true confessions stories. After Blackwell died in 1949, a white businessman named George Levitan bought the company and renamed the publication Sepia. This publication featured columns by writer John Howard Griffin, a white man who darkened his skin and wrote about his treatment in the segregated South, that eventually became the best-selling book Black Like Me.

Whether featuring positive images of African Americans, inspiration stories, news features or commentaries on racism, the rise of African American magazines defied long-held racial stereotypes through rich storytelling, in-depth reporting, and stunning photography.

Due to a variety of economic, editorial, and other factors, most of these magazines have ceased being published. Yet today some African American magazines are still a thriving part of popular culture. Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony and its digital sites reach nearly 72% of African Americans and have a following of over 20.4 million people.

All the best,

Lonnie Bunch
Director

P.S. We can only reach our $250 million goal with your help. I hope you will consider making a donation or becoming a Charter Member today.

To read past Our American Stories, visit our archives.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Ferguson: Urgent Action – Forever Black History

02/12/2025 Nativegrl77

a message from Congressman Hank Johnson

The following sponsored email was sent to you by AlterNet on behalf of Congressman Hank Johnson:

Urgent Petition: DontMilitarizeMainStreet.com

Dear AlterNet Reader,

I’m outraged.

The failure of the grand jury to indict Darren Wilson is a travesty of justice. And, the reaction of the police? The tear gas. The armored vehicles. The body armor. It’s the kind of action we expect from despotic governments, not the United States.

We in Congress can’t fix the grand jury’s terrible decision, but what we can do is stop the militarization of our police.

Join with me and sign my petition at DontMilitarizeMainStreet.com.

Police don’t need more armored vehicles to enforce the law. They need the trust of our citizens.

Police don’t need more grenade launchers. They need to build trust with people in our communities.

Police don’t need more assault rifles. They need more accountability.

I’m leading on this issue. I have introduced a bill in Congress to stop the militarization of our police. Both Republicans and Democrats alike are supporting this effort. Now, I need your support.

Sign the petition now. As a nation, we need to have discussions to tackle difficult questions about how officers patrol communities, prevent crime, and arrest suspects. Seeing the way a militarized police confronted protestors after the murder of an unarmed teenager makes it clear to me we have more work to do – the struggle for equal justice under the law must continue. That’s why Congress must pass our bill to stop the militarization of Main Street.

We have some incredible news. Our bill to end Main Street militarization now has 45 co-sponsors and our own petition now has hundreds of signatures. And it’s not just Democrats. Republicans have joined our effort as well. Help put us over 2,500 signatures. Together, will pressure Congress to act!

Our quest for justice continues. I hope you’ll stand with us.

For justice,

Hank Johnson

Hank

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Horace Julian Bond

02/10/2025 Nativegrl77 1 Comment

“We are better people because he walked
among us for a while.”

Julian Bond came of age during that critical time in this nation’s history when winning equal rights for all took a great deal: a clear head, a big heart, a razor-sharp intellect, and a way with words.

Julian Bond had it all. And he could wrap all of it up to create whatever was needed at the time – either a tool or a weapon, a poem or a sermon. He was driven by a commitment to make America better.

While a Morehouse-based member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), helping to organize the Freedom Summer of 1964 and its massive voter registration drive in Mississippi, Julian Bond took to task the American public and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“We have learned through bitter experience in the past three years that the judicial, legislative and executive bodies of Mississippi form a wall of absolute resistance to granting civil rights to Negroes. It is our conviction that only a massive effort by the country backed by the full power of the President can offer some hope for even minimal change in Mississippi.”

Those words came from a letter Julian Bond wrote on April 28, 1964 to one of America’s most inspiring writers, James Baldwin. He was writing to encourage Baldwin to join a “jury” to hear “testimony” about Civil Rights violations from African Americans facing discrimination in employment, housing, and voting rights in Mississippi. Under a plan designed by SNCC and other members of the Council of Federated Organizations, the testimony would be presented to the President so he would be moved to create a government-sanctioned way to protect the Freedom Summer workers.

“The President must be made to understand that this responsibility rests with him, and him alone, and that neither he nor the American people can afford to jeopardize the lives of the people who will be working in Mississippi this summer by failing to take the necessary precautions before the summer begins.”

Bond’s letter to Baldwin has entered the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It will be used alongside similar documents to show how people like Julian Bond helped design and fuel the Civil Rights Movement.

Bond was so committed to helping us tell that story well, that he became a member of the museum’s Civil Rights History Project advisory committee. In that role he helped us land interviews with some of the most important workers in the movement; he also conducted two of the more than 150 interviews for this oral history project. One was with Lawrence Guyot, the director of the 1964 Freedom Summer project in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Julian Bond wrote his letter to James Baldwin in 1964 at the age of 23. Less than three years later he would be awarded his seat in the Georgia House of Representatives by a unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Four years after that, in 1971, he would become the founding president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Nearly 30 years later, in 1998, he would take the helm of the NAACP serving as its national chairman for an astonishing 12 years.

Julian Bond has spent his life as a champion in the campaign for equality. Much of what we as a nation know about compassion and commitment, we have learned from Julian Bond, the people he emulated and the people he inspired. We are sad because he has left us. And we are deeply honored that we had him for as long as we did … to help us help America live up to her promises. We are better people because he walked among us for a while.

Thank you, Horace Julian Bond.

Lonnie G. Bunch
Founding Director
Smithsonian
National Museum of African American History and Culture