Black History Month

By Elizabeth Daniels

The celebration of February as Black History Month has been an American tradition since 1960. This month was selected because it marks the birthdays of two men who greatly influenced the African American population, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. One of the most important eras in Black History was the Civil Rights Movement, which experienced its peak from 1955 to 1965. The Civil Rights Movement, led primarily by blacks, was the movement for racial equality in the United States that, through nonviolent protests, broke the pattern of racial segregation and achieved national equal rights for individual black citizens. It was also during this movement that many of today’s famous black Americans gained their notoriety.

Though many of the heroes of the movement met untimely deaths, their names will be respected and remembered for years to come in recognition of the changes they brought upon our nation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan. 15, 1929. After attending elementary schools in Atlanta, King went on to skip the ninth and twelfth grades and graduate high school at the age of 15. He then entered Morehouse College the same year and graduated in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested 30 times in later years for his participation in civil rights activities. This did not stop him from participating in the fight for racial justice. In 1963, when President Kennedy proposed a new civil rights bill, activist groups came together to organize the March on Washington, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Over 250,000 people from around the nation attended the march on Aug. 28. A great success, the day contained no violence.

On April 4, 1968, King was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. James Earl Ray, a white man later charged for the shooting, stood trial for the assassination on March 9, 1969. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison

Rosa Parks

In 1955, a woman named Rosa Louise McCauley Parks started a protest in favor of the desegregation of public transportation in Montgomery, Ala. Parks worked as a tailor’s assistant at a department store and also as the secretary of the Montgomery Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She got her start in fighting racial injustice when she and her husband joined a campaign to save nine black men who were accused of raping two white teenagers near Scottsboro, Ala., in 1931.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks got onto a Montgomery bus and took her seat in the front of the colored section along with three other passengers. The bus driver asked Parks and the other colored passengers in the front to relinquish their seats to whites. Parks refused when the others complied. The driver then called the police and had Parks arrested and taken off the bus.

Counteracting the unjust actions, the Montgomery Chapter of the NAACP initiated the idea of a one-day bus boycott on Dec. 5. The same day, Parks was convicted by the local court. Later that month, she rallied the start of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, which lasted 381 days and fought for equal rights to blacks riding public transportation.

In rallying for the boycott, Parks asked for the help of a local reverend, Martin Luther King, Jr. The boycott was successful in changing the segregation laws. Rosa Parks would later be named the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Coretta Scott King

King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, continued to fight for equality after her husband’s death. A year after his death, she published her memoir, “My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.” She also opened the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta as a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work.

Her last public appearance was Jan. 14, 2006, at a Salute to Greatness dinner, as part of the Martin Luther King Day celebration in Atlanta. She received a standing ovation.

Coretta Scott King died on Jan. 30, 2006 in Mexico. She was laid to rest in a tomb next to her husband and is named the “First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Emmett Louis Till

The ten-year movement peaked in a fight that resulted in the lynchings and murders of many African Americans, including that of a 14-year-old boy by the name of Emmett Louis Till.

Born and raised in Chicago, Emmett was the only child of Louis and Mamie Till. In August 1955, Till went with his great-uncle to visit family in the segregated South.

Before giving in and finally allowing Till to go, his mom cautioned him not to fool with white people down South. On Aug. 24, 1955, Till went with his cousins and some friends to a grocery store for refreshments. There, he whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Carolyn stormed out of the store in a rage and the boys fled the area, assuming she went to retrieve a pistol.

At about 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 28, Till was dragged from his bed and taken to the Tallahatchie River where he was beaten, shot in the head and tied to a cotton gin fan before being thrown into the river. His corpse was found in the river days later, disfigured and decomposed, and only identifiable by his father’s ring. The image of Emmett’s battered body in an open coffin at his funeral in Chicago was a rousing moment in the civil rights movement, particularly for Northerners.

Testimony from witnesses linked two white men - Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam - to the crime. An all-white jury acquitted the two men, who later gloated and provided grim details about the murder to a local magazine. Though the case was reopened in 2004, the men were never convicted of the murder. Emmett Till later became known as the “Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement.”