Forgotten civil rights heroes

I get irritated upon discerning the shallow and short-sighted perceptions of some people. This surely obtains in the matter of recognition for the men and women who worked and sacrificed for the great cause of civil rights in the United States. They would have you believe that it is nothing more than Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery and Martin Luther King making a fiery speech before a big crowd at the Lincoln Memorial. Far be it from me to criticize Parks or King, both of whom have my sincere appreciation. But many people besides them labored to bring about a better life for black Americans. Much of this predates the mid-1950s, generally regarded as the start of the civil rights movement.

Here, then, are just a few of the others who put their shoulder to the wheel of racial justice in the USA. And let me add that what they did benefited all of us. These were changes that simply had to happen.

• James Peck (1914–1993). A conscientious objector during World War II, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality in 1946. The next year, he and 15 other CORE members took part in the Journey of Reconciliation, a series of bus rides through the upper south (Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky) that sought to chip away at Jim Crow. Peck was also involved in the Freedom Rides of 1961 which went into the heart of Dixie—Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The reception they often got was none too warm. A quick Google search will show photos of a badly mauled Peck.

• Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977). Born the youngest of 20 children to an impoverished family in central Mississippi, she could pick 250 pounds of cotton a day. She started a grass-roots campaign to get blacks registered to vote and to spur literacy, which many white Mississippians and enforcers of Jim Crow laws found threatening. Hamer and her co-workers suffered all kinds of intimidation, including violent beatings, but they were determined to achieve their goals. One of her most famous quotes is “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired."

• Angelo Herndon (1913–1997). The “great migration” saw millions of southern blacks go north. Herndon, by contrast, went from rural Ohio to the Kentucky coal mines to Atlanta. During the height of the Depression, he led a bi-racial group that demanded relief. Local officials charged him with insurrection (under a statute dating from the antebellum period); he was found guilty and sent to the pen. After considerable drama and turmoil, the Supreme Court overturned his conviction. Herndon wrote an impassioned autobiography entitled Let Me Live.

• W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963). Unlike Hamer and Herndon, Du Bois was not too poor. He hailed from Massachusetts and was the first black student to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He came of age when racial segregation was hardening, and yet he put the lie to notions that people of African descent lacked brain power. Du Bois, a co-founder of the NAACP, wrote extensively and provided an intellectual framework under which later civil rights leaders would work.

• John Brown (1800–1859). European-American like the above-cited Peck, his commitment to racial equality was beyond doubt. Even Malcolm X, who generally regarded white people as "devils," admired him. Brown had an Old Testament zeal for abolishing slavery, and he led the daring and doomed raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859. The Civil War started less than a year after his hanging, and northern soldiers went to battle singing, “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave….”

• Sengbe Pieh, a.k.a. Joseph Cinque (1814–1879). He was among 52 people who were taken by some Portuguese slavers from Sierra Leone to a new home in Cuba in 1839. But they would have none of it. Cinque and others fashioned some crude weapons with which they killed most of the crew. The ship, Amistad, was sailed up the east coast before being boarded by the U.S. Navy near Long Island. Initially charged with mutiny and murder, Cinque was finally freed after former President John Quincy Adams advocated on his behalf. He returned to Africa and—in one of history’s strange ironies—may have engaged in the slave trade during his later years.

• Denmark Vesey (1767–1822). Born into slavery and not liking it one bit, Vesey purchased his freedom (with $1,500 won in a lottery!) and soon made plans to liberate four million others then under the lash and toiling without pay in the American south. Vesey’s intention to foment a large-scale revolt that would begin in Charleston, South Carolina was leaked by a pair of slaves who feared retaliation—or was it liberation? Vesey was among 35 people hanged.  

• No less worthy of being remembered and honored are Fred Shuttlesworth, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Claudette Colvin, Bayard Rustin, William Lewis Moore, Robert Williams, Viola Liuzzo, William Wilberforce, Henry Highland Garnet, Nat Turner, George Boxley, Gabriel Prosser and dozens, hundreds, indeed thousands more.