Athlete Tommie Smith speaks to the crowd. Photo dated: July 2, 1968.
Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection.
Smith (b. June 6, 1944) is a former track & field athlete and wide receiver in the American Football League. He is best known, along with John Carlos, for his Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics. It remains a symbolic moment in the history of the Civil Rights Movement.
Marilyn White, the silver medal winner in track and field at the 1964 Olympic Games, shows her medal to friends at Bishop Conaty-Our Lady of Loretto High School, her alma mater.
Ms. White specialized in the 100 meter race. She won her medal for the 4 x 100 relay at the Tokyo Summer Games Willye White, Wyomia Tyus and Edith McGuire.
Los Angeles Public Library, Shades of LA Collection
If I’d been born in Mississippi, I might have come to New York. But, being born in New York, there’s no place you can go. You have to go out. Out of the country. And I went out of the country and I never intended to come back here. Ever. Ever.
—James Baldwin
Baldwin lived in Paris for eight years. Away from America, he was free to explore, through his experiences and his writing, what it meant to be American.
Photo: portrait of James Baldwin as he delivered an address during a West coast tour to benefit of CORE, May, 13, 1963. Photo by Jeff Goldwater, Los Angeles Public Library, Hollywood Citizen News/Valley Times Collection
Dexter Gordon during his Go! recording session, Englewood Cliffs NJ, August 27 1962 (photo by Francis Wolff)
Gordon Parks on the location during the filming of The Learning Tree, Fort Scott, Kansas, 1968
Norman E. Tanis, photographer
Leonard H. Axe Library, The Gordon Parks Collection
The Selective Buying Campaign began in July 1968, as an organization called the Black Solidarity Committee for Community Improvement demanded changes in welfare, housing, and employment practices in the city of Durham, North Carolina. The boycott ended on February 16, 1969, by all accounts, successfully.
Malcolm X speaks at a rally in Durham, April 18, 1963. The event was originally scheduled for the N.C. Central University campus but was banned there and moved to a lodge on N. Roxboro Street.
Photo courtesy of the Durham Herald Sun.
Two years later, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Upper Manhattan. He was 39 years old.
“I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of goodwill. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From Birmingham Jail, 1963
Photo Credit: Bettman-Corbis
Dr. King preaching at White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina.
February 16, 1960
The Herald-Sun via Endangered Durham
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking in Page Auditorium at Duke University, 13 November 1964
Duke University Archives
Most of what I post here is history. These are the images and accounts of how people worked, raised families, built communities, worshiped, maintained relationships, expressed themselves and coped with changes and challenges in the past. The subjects of these posts are usually people of color.
Martin Luther King jr with his mother & wife Coretta Scott. OR Coretta Scott King with her husband...
Pyrographic image of a woman carrying a drum. Reads “Sierra Leone.”...
United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from...
Chinese workers picking olives on the Quito Ranch, California, 1905.
