People of Color

From The Progressive, "Forty-five years ago, one of the most pivotal racist attacks of the civil rights era occurred. Local members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., on a Sunday morning, Sept. 15, 1963. The explosion killed four young girls, three of them age 14 and one of them only 11 years old."

Most popular accounts of the civil rights movement mark 1963 as the apex of nonviolence. In August of that year, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial facing an audience of 250,000 supporters.

But while King praised nonviolence, racist groups and individuals engaged in violence throughout the region. Birmingham was at the center of the fray. There were so many buildings and homes blown up by vigilantes there that the town was dubbed “Bombingham.”

Convictions for these crimes were rare. It was not until 1977 that prosecutors in Alabama aggressively went after the culprits in the 16th Street Church bombing, resulting in the conviction of KKK member Robert Chambliss that same year.

The New York Times Magazine this Sunday will feature a story on how the resistance of the civil rights generation to Barack Obama’s candidacy reveals a generational divide in African-American politics.

Forty-seven years after he last looked out from behind the bars of a South Carolina jail cell, locked away for leading a march against segregation in Columbia, James Clyburn occupies a coveted suite of offices on the second and third floors of the United States Capitol, alongside the speaker and the House majority leader. Above his couch hangs a black-and-white photograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in Charleston, with the boyish Clyburn and a group of other men standing behind him onstage. When I visited Clyburn recently, he told me that the photo was taken in 1967, nine months before King’s assassination, when rumors of violence were swirling, and somewhere on the side of the room a photographer’s floodlight had just come crashing down unexpectedly. At the moment the photo was taken, everyone pictured has reflexively jerked their heads in the direction of the sound, with the notable exception of King himself, who remains in profile, staring straight ahead at his audience. Clyburn prizes that photo. It tells the story, he says, of a man who knew his fate but who, quite literally, refused to flinch. … [Read more]

Amy Tan speaks as a part of "Roger Rosenblatt and Friends: On Writing" during the 2008 Chautauqua Institution morning lecture series. 

Amy Tan speaks as a part of "Roger Rosenblatt and Friends: On Writing" during the 2008 Chautauqua Institution morning lecture series. 

For my high-school literature class I was constructing an anthology with a wide range of different stories that I believed reflected the black girl’s experience. For the different chapters, I conducted interviews with a variety of black girls in my high school, and a number of issues surfaced concerning the standards of beauty imposed on today’s black girls and how this affects their self-image. I thought this topic would make an interesting film and so when I was accepted into the Reel Works Teen Filmmaking program, I set out to explore these issues. I also decided to would reconduct the “doll test” initially conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark, … [Read more]