Rosa Parks rightfully holds a place in history for resisting the racist Jim Crow laws in Alabama when she refused to give up her seat to a white person in 1955. However, Irene Morgan Kirkaldy deserves just as much praise for her actions eleven years prior to Parks’ more famous stand. Irene Morgan, as she […]
Nearly 60 years ago, Dot Counts-Scoggins, then known as Dorothy Counts, endured racism so harsh that her parents had to send her to school out-of-state. As one of the first students to racially integrate Charlotte, North Carolina’s Harry Harding High School, Counts became an unwilling figure of the civil rights movement. The 1954 Brown vs. […]
While Judge Haikala recognized that racism was behind the white suburb wanting to break away from the racially mixed school district, she ruled in their favor anyway.
The case of Hocutt v. Wilson occurred this month in 1933 in North Carolina and is reportedly the first attempt to integrate a higher learning institution. While the matter was unsuccessful, it laid the groundwork for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision some two decades later. Thomas Hocutt, then a 24-year-old student at […]
The case of Sipuel v. The Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma laid the early groundwork for other “separate but equal” cases such as the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Ada Louis Sipuel’s racial discrimination case against the school was decided on this day in 1948, making it possible for […]
The Birmingham Bus Boycotts in Alabama took place on this day in 1956, led by the efforts of late minister and civil rights figure Dr. Fred Shuttlesworth. The boycott lasted until 1958 and while it wasn’t as effective as other such protests across the Deep South, the movement laid plenty of necessary groundwork and bolstered the […]
St. Louis Schools plan to draw down its long-running school desegregation program. Observers say the program achieved integration, but mixed academic results.
On this day in 1956, FAMU students Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson sat on a city bus in Tallahassee, Florida. and began what would become a seven-month boycott of the transit system. Through the efforts of a local church leader and civic groups, protesters were able to get Black drivers hired and integrate the bus […]
Jim Crow is back. The notion of a post-racial society after President Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s first black president has just been blown up: America’s public schools are re-segregating at an alarming rate. Decades of racial progress in public schools is now being erased, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report […]
There was no pomp and circumstance, no procession with classmates, but on Friday a school district in Illinois finally handed Alva Early his high…
What you see above is a map of Detroit. The small colorful dots represent people, plotted to show where they live and their race. Whites are…
For those of you who continue to see the best in humanity, allow me to step in like Maleficent on Princess Aurora’s royal unveiling with…
