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The Central Georgian
In Retrospect/Black
History
Civil rights-era
landmark eyed for restoration
By JERRY
MITCHELL - The Clarion-Ledger
JACKSON, Miss. --A push is under way to preserve a
crumbling symbol of where the civil rights movement began.
Decades of neglect have almost destroyed the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market in
Money, but few have forgotten the events during the summer of 1955 that started
in the Leflore County store with a wolf-whistle and ended with the slaying of an
African-American teenager from Chicago named Emmett Till.
"This was the Alamo, not just for blacks, but for everybody," said Greenwood
insurance agent Billy Walker, who is raising money in hopes of buying the
building, restoring it and turning it into a museum.
Walker said the Tribble family of Greenwood, who owns the property, asked him
not to reveal the purchase price, but he acknowledged it's in the six figures.
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June 7,
1943
THIS DAY IN BLACK
HISTORY
Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr. on June
7, 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee. A leading poet of the Black Arts Movement,
Giovanni's graduated from Fisk University and published her first poetry
collection, Black Feeling.
Point of reference
→ →
1962: Mississippi race riots over first black student.
BBC News
Point of reference
→ →
1962: Mississippi race riots over first black student.
BBC News
John Wesley Carlos (born June 5, 1945 in Harlem, New
York) is an African American former track and field athlete and professional
football player. He was the bronze-medal winner of the 200-meter at the 1968
Summer Olympics.
Carlos became a founding member of the
Olympic Project for Human Rights
(OPHR), initially created to organize a boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympics in
Mexico City. At the 1968
Olympic Trials, Carlos stunned the track world when he won the 200-meter dash in
19.92 seconds, beating world-record holder
Tommie Smith and surpassing his
record by 0.3 seconds. Though the record was never ratified because the spike
formation on Carlos' shoes wasn't accepted at the time, the race reinforced his
status as a world-class sprinter.
Future Exhibitions at
Tubman Museum
Eye on Atlanta: Photographs by Bud Smith
August 8, 2008 - October 18, 2008
Larry Walker: Twentieth Century Master
October 31, 2008 - January 10, 2009
Selections from the Safeco Insurance
Collection
January 23, 2009 - April 14, 2009
Wini McQueen: The History of the Dream
Project
April 17, 2009 - June 27, 2009
Timeline of significant
events in black American history
1619 The first African slaves arrive in Virginia.
1861 The Confederacy is founded when the South secedes from the United
States. Civil War begins.
1863 President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation,
declaring all slaves in Confederate states free.
1865 The civil war ends. Lincoln is assassinated. The 13th amendment to
the U.S. Constitution outlaws slavery.
1868 The 14th amendment grants full citizenship to all African-Americans.
1870 The right to vote is given to black males.
1896 The Supreme Court holds racial segregation is constitutional, paving
the way for segregation in the South.
1954 Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision declares
segregation in schools unconstitutional.
1955 Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a segregated bus in
Montgomery, Ala. Her arrest sparks a successful year-long boycott led by Martin
Luther King to desegregate the city's buses.
1963 King is jailed during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Ala.
Delivers "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington.
1964 President Lyndon Johnson signs Civil Rights Act. King wins Nobel
Peace Prize.
1965 Civil rights leader Malcolm X is murdered. Congress passes the
Voting Rights Act.
1966 Edward Brooke of Massachusetts is elected the first black U.S.
senator since the Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War.
1967 Johnson appoints Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, making him
the first black Supreme Court Justice.
1968 King is assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.
Tuskegee Airmen look back on life in a
segregated military
By Travis Reed Associated Press
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Even though they were
treated like second-class citizens as black pilots in a segregated military
during World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen proved their mettle in the skies.
The airmen never lost a plane under escort to
enemy fighters, developing such a reputation that some German pilots stopped
pursuing American planes they knew would be escorted by the scrappy airmen.
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The Central Georgian, 2008,
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