The U.S. House is considering a bill that would put lynching sites in western Tennessee on track to become part of the National Park Service, part of a trend this year of Congress using the agency to advance discussions of the nation’s troubled and often violent racial history.
American History
WSV’s Aundrea Sayrie writes, “Worthy causes have always required allies. Thankfully the work of past generations has not been in vain because inhumane and cruel social constructs have been eradicated but the fact remains there is still need for progress on many fronts. There is still a need for advocacy and activism. This is because although the month of February is coming to a close, Black history, Black joy, Black exploitation, Black pain, and racism isn’t over.”
Zora Neale Hurston is most famous as a fiction writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her most famous book became the 2005 movie of the same name: Their Eyes Were Watching God. Yet this remarkable, and controversial woman was also a notable cultural anthropologist — and a student of the “father of American anthropology” Franz Boas — whose contributions have only recently begun to be appreciated.
Fred Hampton was an American civil rights leader, deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party Illinois chapter, and founder of the City of Chicago’s first Rainbow Coalition.
Garrett Morgan was an African-American inventor, businessman, and community leader who is credited with inventing an improved sewing machine and traffic signal, a hair-straightening product, and a respiratory device that would later provide the blueprint for World War I gas masks.
Gloria Richardson Dandridge was the first woman in the United States to lead a civil rights movement outside of the Deep South as co-founder of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC).
The bills package would mandate that K-12 public schools, charters schools, and intermediate school districts incorporate curriculum lessons on Asian American and Pacific Islanders; Latin Americans, Hispanic Americans Caribbean Americans; Indigenous Peoples and Native Americans; and Middle Easterners and Chaldeans starting in the 2022-23 school year.
A.M. Darke is first person to create an open-source platform dedicated to black hair.
Black hair has long been undervalued, and poorly represented. Not only in gaming or other types of simulations, but also with toys available, non-toxic hair care products by big name companies, and television. Proper representation can help eliminate prejudice and restore a sense of cultural pride.
Elizabeth Freeman, best known as “Mum Bett,” was the first Black woman to sue and win her freedom in the state of Massachusetts.
Rob Schofield writes, “Here in the United States, it has taken many decades – indeed, centuries – for the tragic scope of what was done to Native Americans to slowly penetrate the consciousness of a population raised on cowboy movies and fanciful Thanksgiving stories.
“And so it is, perhaps not surprisingly, that many modern Americans continue to struggle with one of the most horrific of all episodes of oppression in human history: the forced enslavement of millions of people of African descent by white Americans. While no one denies the fact of slavery, millions still avert their eyes from its gruesome reality and, even more importantly, from its legacy.”
WSV’s Aundrea Sayrie writes about the man behind the March on Washington, Civil Rights icon Bayard Rustin. This event and plenty more surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr.’s achievements fail to recognize his right-hand man. It was Rustin who had strategically organized the march in only eight weeks.