Commemorating 52nd Anniversary of the March on Washington

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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August 28, 2015

By Clarence B. Jones, the Huffington Post

During the past two weeks two great persons in the struggle against injustice, both of whom I knew, passed away. First was Julian Bond at the age of 75, the other was Louis Stokes, a 15-term former congressman from OH. He died at the age of 90.

The death of these two social justice and political warriors were on my mind as I realized that this week marks the 52nd anniversary of the August 28th, 1963 March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom. (Most persons associate their memory of The March with the soaring oratory of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.)…

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. giving his I Have a Dream speech to huge crowd gathered for the Mall in Washington DC during the March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom (aka the Freedom March) on August 28, 1963.

In thinking about Julian Bond and Louis Stokes I reflected on how much has happened in our nation during their lives, including, but not limited to The March On Washington. This, in turn, caused me to remember many other things…

For example, I remember, the morning of the March, speaking with Harry Belafonte. He had asked me to meet the “Celebrity Delegation” to the March who were arriving that morning by private chartered plane from CA. Harry “charged” me with the responsibility of meeting Charlton Heston, “head” of the “Delegation” and leading him and other to their designated seats on the March platform. Space consideration limits my written recital, of all of the names of those prominent motion picture, TV, and performing artist stars that comprised the “Celebrity” delegation…

In honor of Julian Bond, Congressman Louis Stokes, and so many, many, known and unknown heroes and heroines of the Civil Rights Movement, and in tribute to the younger successor generation of The Black Lives Matter Movement, we must find a way to stop, once and for all, this systemic assault by local police on Black and other people of color.

It is not an overstatement to remind the current generation in our country that Dr. King, and so many, many others, “marched” so that that it would not be necessary 52 years later for our children and grandchildren to march to tell our nation TODAY, that “Black Lives Matter.”…

If not now, when? If not us, who?

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