Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was engaged in campaigns across the country. The organization was founded in 1957 with the help of clergy and activists from around the country, including Ella Baker. Baker was a seasoned organizer and had served as NAACP Director of Branches in the 1940s; Baker played a […]
Heading south on King Dr. in Chicago at 35th Street, you’ll notice a shopping center to the left and a host of small businesses, to the right. Just one block up, on the right, is the Ida B. Wells-Barnett House. Designated a National Historic Landmark on May 30, 1974, from 1919 to 1930, Wells and her husband Ferdinand […]
Photo courtesy of Mike Carter Kansas City is known for its jazz heritage and barbecue but the city is also home to a little known piece of Black history. Kansas City’s KPRS was the first Black owned radio station, west of the Mississippi River. Today it also has the distinction of being the oldest continually […]
Photo: 1780 John Trumbull portrait of George Washington with William Lee, an enslaved valet Each year Black people are asked to pretend that Washington is worthy of honor and each year it’s an outlandish request. George Washington is a phony, a fake patriot and fraud. Should Black people simply act as if the man did not […]
Photo: Getty Images He was a Morehouse graduate, a preacher and civil rights leader. His home was once bombed because of his commitment to justice and his death is still somewhat of a mystery. This bio reads like that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. but in fact, it refers to the Rev. A.D. King. […]
The Free African Society was started in 1787 and it paved the way for a great number of enterprises. As a mutual aid society, members paid dues and out of that, the Society cared for all those who were in need. Naturally, it created a model easily adaptable to the insurance business. In 1810 the […]
Photo: Mother Bethel AME Church & Richard Allen Museum t’s difficult to say how Black businesses would have developed, had there never been a Free African Society. Shortly before the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Free African Society (FAS) was formed in Philadelphia as a mutual aid society, expressly for “free Africans and their descendants,” […]
Photo: Black Panthers demonstrating at federal courthouse, Seattle, 1969. Tom Barlet, Courtesy MOHAI (1986.5.52268.2) In 1948 Ray Charles was an unknown, blind musician who’d been in Seattle for only about a year. That was also when Charles got his first big break, a gig at the Elks Lodge. The Lodge is where Black soldiers went […]
“The bus company is losing money and willing to sell. We should buy it.” That’s what Samuel B. Fuller is said to have told Dr. King, at the height of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Fuller wanted more than civil rights, he wanted independence. S.B. Fuller was an extraordinary entrepreneur and thought leader. At a time […]
A 1921 massacre erased Black Wall Street in Tulsa. 300 Blacks were killed, over 10,000 were left homeless and countless others fled the city in fear. Hundreds of Black owned businesses were burned to the ground. Survivors were left with nothing and $2.7 million in insurance claims were denied. Very little remains of the original Black […]