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By J am s A dams
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continued
ghettos began to form, blacks began
to feel their economic and political
strength amass. Group cohesiveness
. and group capital spells power.
During the early 193O’s,in the urban
areas where blacks now lived, they
■ began to advocate group economics
and group politics, especially where
they spent their hard-to-come-by
dollars. They had clear goals for
their group activities. Blacks began
a “C o n su m e r B u y in g P o w e r”
movement in Chicago. They used
pickets and boycotts to force white
business owners, especially those
that had large black clientele and
customer bases, to employ blacks
in their businesses. In New York,
Adam Clayton Powell, a young
black community activist, minister
and future Congressman, led a four-
year employment effort that added
ten thousand black workers to the
telephone company, the electric
c o m p a n y , th e b u s lin e , and
d e p a rtm e n t sto re s. In b lack
communities throughout America,
organizations began to use the same
tactics to get blacks jobs.
February 9, 2000
Focus
As the 19'h Century drew to an end,
the U.S. Supreme Court’s May 18,
1896, Plessy v. Ferguson decision
to legalize “separate but equal”
segregation validated a racist reign
o f terror, undermined human rights,
and fired the spirit o f the indomitable
Mrs. Mary McLeod, one o f the
Century’s noblest warrior women.
In 1904, she founded Florida’s first
school to educate blacks beyond
the elementary grades, Daytona
Educational and Industrial Institute,
now Bethune-Cookman College. In
1935 she founded the National
Council o f N egro W om en, her
‘organization o f organizations” to
represent the combined clout o f over
one million women.
By the time Death called her name
on May 18,1955, she had served as
adviser to p resid en ts F ranklin
Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and
helped draft the United Nations
charter.
Bethune’s was a life well lived
e d u c a tin g , c h a lle n g in g , and
inspiring others. Never one to leave
a job unfinished, as death neared in
her eightieth year, she prepared a
final legacy for generations to come.
for Domestic Worker
for Du Bois, W.E.B.
B y J a m s A dams
and
C arol T avior
Bom in Massachusetts in 1868,
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
was the foremost black intellectual
o f his time - and mind you, his time
s tre tc h e d all the w ay from
Reconstruction to the Civil Rights
Movement o f the 1960s. A man o f
staggering intellect and drive, he
was the first black to hold a doctorate
from Harvard University. Du Bois
wrote three historical works, two
novels, two autobiographies, and
six te e n p io n e e rin g bo o k s on
sociology, history, politics, and race
relations. He was a founder o f the
N AACP,
p io n e e rin g
Pan-
Africanist, spirited advocate for
world peace, and tireless fighter for
civil rights during the darkest days
o f Jim Crow.
In 1935, The C risis
p u b lish e d “ T he B ronx Slave
Market,’ a landmark exposé on the
plight o f domestic workers during
the Depression. As Ella Baker and
M arvel
C ooke
observ ed :
“Paradoxically, the crash of 1929
brought to the dom estic labor
m arket...the lower middle-class
housewife, who, having dreamed
on the luxury o f a maid, found
opportunity staring her in the face
in the form o f the Negro woman
pressed to the wall by poverty,
starvation, and discrim ination.”
Isolated to work and in society,
most domestics could only resort to
their own wits for help or hope, as
Naomi Ward wrote in “I Am a
D om estic,” published in New
Masses on June 25, 1940.
T ïlc IT le n a m in s k e n n e d y S ch o o l
MARDI
In ¡904, M ary M cLeod founded the Daytona Normal and
Industrial School, which later became Bethune-Cookman
College. Beginning in 1914, she began to participate in
health and child-welfare conferences, where she exchanged
ideas with prom inent social reformers.
A frican A mericans
in the N orthwest
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L iv e M u s ic w ith
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tb e B lack S w a n C lassic J a z z B a n d
Doors at 6:30pm
Show at 7pm • Dinner at 7:30pm
Reservations required • Cost $28
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