Born along the Color Line by Miller Eben

Author:Miller, Eben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

Juanita Jackson and representatives of the Birmingham branch of the NAACP visiting the Scottsboro defendants in November 1936. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records.

Before returning to Baltimore, Jackson stopped in Columbia, South Carolina. The NAACP had only been fitfully active in the Palmetto State during the previous several years, but she organized college chapters at Benedict College and Allen University and met with a group interested in reviving the Columbia NAACP, before boarding a Jim Crow train car for Maryland. She reached Druid Hill Avenue the day before Thanksgiving, exhausted but satisfied. She wrote Walter White, “I can’t help feeling a wee bit proud of the success of this last tour.” After visiting with many hundreds of young people from Charleston to Columbia, she found “the most inspiring thing has been the ready and enthusiastic response of young Negroes. They are ready for action—what they need is leadership, a program, and an organization through which to channel their activities. WE have it!”37

After an autumn on tour, Jackson was back at 69 Fifth Avenue in December 1936, while the newly founded youth councils were fashioning a national movement that supported the NAACP’s national programs even as they pursued the improvement of local conditions. With the February 12th anti-lynching demonstrations looming, Jackson again attended the winter meeting of the National Council of Negro Women, maintaining an important tie between the youth councils and Mary McLeod Bethune’s formidable organization. That Bethune had just received a position within the Roosevelt administration—as a director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration, Bethune was a keystone in the Black Cabinet—only heightened the significance of this relationship.38 If the 1935 Christmas seal campaign had portended tedium in the coming year, this December it offered creative approaches to entwining the national fundraising efforts with local holiday social seasons. The Detroit youth council took up the challenge with gusto. Willing to include proper entertainment in their movement’s repertoire, the group hosted a Christmas seal dance and frolic featuring the crowning of a Seal Queen and music provided by no fewer than three orchestras that had volunteered their services. A musical Christmas tea requiring the purchase of ten seals (they were a penny apiece) for admittance made a dainty, and profitable, addition to the holiday schedule. Such events in Detroit netted the sale of 16,300 seals, and the Boston youth council was not too much further behind. With contributions to fund the NAACP’s upcoming programs in 1937, Jackson welcomed the news from Boston, and beyond. In New Rochelle, New York, the youth council had founded a lecture series and reported hosting a “symposium on politics.” Council members in Gary, Indiana, had continued their boycott campaign, and had now picketed over fifty stores, convincing at least thirty-five to hire black workers. Rallies had been held in Staten Island, New York, Chicago, and on the campus of Lincoln University, in Lincoln, Pennsylvania. Lansing, Michigan, had begun a “fight against barring of Negro teachers in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.