Don’t ever let them trick you into thinking this was a long time ago
Holy fuck this has connected two very long-forgotten thoughts!!! When we were in school, I remember seeing pictures like this, but the black and white versions.
So hearing in year 10 that it was as recent as the sixties really fucked with my head! It’d never occurred to me that this was a form of propaganda specificaIIy to mess with future generations!
It’s nuts that we (for the most part of course) onIy reaIIy associate propaganda with the worId wars!
I need to find out what eIse I’ve misunderstood about our history because of government-sanctioned Iies!!!!!
A page from Hosea Williams’ newspaper, The Crusader: an announcement to join The March for the Ballot on March 1, 1964, to be led by a group of high school students called the Youth Crusaders. See more on protests in Georgia in the 1960s.
On the morning of August 28, 1963, about 250,000 travelers came to Washington, DC for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the biggest civil rights rally of its time. These days, the March on Washington is remembered as a major milestone of the 20th century. But in 1963, Americans were divided about whether the March was a good idea at all.
ST-C278-2-63 (PX 96-33). Participants at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
A Gallup poll found that only 23% of Americans who’d heard of the March had a positive view of it - and the negativity didn’t come only from segregationists. President John F. Kennedy’s administration had recently drafted a new civil rights bill for Congress, and some civil rights activists worried that a big protest would push away representatives who were still on the fence about supporting it.
But while a record turnout was expected for the March, civil rights protests weren’t new to the American public in the Kennedy era – especially after a few very public showdowns between the White House and Southern governors. These and other events prompted people across the political spectrum to write to the White House with their views on American protest and civil rights activism. These public opinion letters are now part of the archives at the JFK Library, where we’re working on preserving and describing them.
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The first wave of letters about civil rights protests hit the White House in May 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Birmingham Campaign” highlighted the violence that peaceful civil rights activists faced while trying to integrate the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Writers described the atrocities they read about in newspapers or, in some cases, experienced themselves.
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But as news about the proposed March on Washington spread in June and July, a reporter finally asked for JFK’s views about this specific protest at a July 17 press conference. The President defended the right to peacefully assemble, but stopped short of a full endorsement:
I think that the way that the Washington march is now developed…I think that is in the great tradition. I look forward to being here. …I would suggest that we exercise great care in protesting so that it doesn’t become riots, and, number two, that those people who have responsible positions in government and in business and in labor do something about the problem which leads to the demonstration.
After these remarks, the White House saw an increase in letters about the March. Many interpreted JFK’s press conference statement as an outright endorsement, and the reactions varied widely.
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Many of the anti-March letters expressed worry that the Civil Rights Movement was controlled by Communists, or predicted riots or violence.
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Other writers took the opportunity to write in about civil rights in general, covering a wide range of opinions and beliefs.
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Though our archives don’t include White House responses for all of these letters, a form response sent to multiple writers shows consistency with the President’s July statement: that the administration supported peaceful protest, but did not “suggest, approve, or endorse” the March itself.
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In the end, the March on Washington was a landmark achievement in the history of American protest, safely hosting more than double the number of marchers its organizers had planned for. National Urban League Director Whitney Young summed up the day in an interview after the March: “I just can’t see how anybody could have witnessed this today and denied something long overdue.” But only two weeks later, March leaders found themselves reunited via telegram – this time, to push the White House to action after a Ku Klux Klan bombing killed four little girls in the Birmingham Baptist Church basement. While the March was over, its organizers continued to assert that until the reasons behind it were resolved, the work wasn’t done.
Day 20 of Black History Month and I’m honoring Bayard Rustin. He was an American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. Rustin worked with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement, in 1941, to press for an end to racial discrimination in employment.
Day 19 of Black History Month and I’m honoring Yolanda King. She was an African American activist and first-born child of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. She was also known for her artistic and entertainment endeavors and public speaking. Her childhood experience was greatly influenced by her father’s highly public and influential activism.
Day 15 of Black History Month and I’m honoring Gordon Parks. He was an American photographer, musician, writer and film director, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African-Americans, and in glamour photography.
Remembering 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered on this day, August 28, 1955, by white supremacists in Mississippi. Rest in peace, Emmett.
“I wonder if our white fellow men realize the true sense of meaning of brotherhood? For two hundred years we had toiled for them; the war of 1861 came and was ended, and we thought our race was forever freed from bondage, and that the two races could live in unity with each other, but when we read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, “Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or had it made our conditions more hopeless?…
There are still good friends to the negro. Why, there are still thousands….Man thinks two hundred years is a long time, and it is, too; but it is only as a week to God, and in his own time…the South will be like the North, and when it comes it will be prized higher than we prize the North to-day. God is just; when he created man he made him in his image, and never intended one should misuse the other. All men are born free and equal in his sight.”
Elizabeth Keckley was born enslaved and lived in Dinwiddie County and Petersburg as a young girl. She purchased her freedom working as a seamstress after moving to Missouri. With her freedom, she became the most sought after dress maker in Washington D.C. Her talents as a seamstress, both before and during the Civil War, led to her being chosen as the personal dressmaker of Mary Todd Lincoln. Over the years, both women became good friends and Mrs. Lincoln looked on Elizabeth as one of her closest confidantes during the White House years.
“Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.
I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it. I cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, now how I am still pained by the retrospect. My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. The other slaves in my master’s house noticed the change. Many of them pitied me; but none dared to ask the cause. They had no need to inquire. They knew too well the guilty practices under that roof; and they were aware that to speak of them was an offence that never went unpunished.”
–Harriet Jacobs, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
“My mother was sold at Richmond, Virginia, and a gentleman bought her who lived in Georgia, and we did not know that she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought was to me to know which way she had gone, and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me, and I saw a clear place in the sky, and it seemed to me the way she had gone, and I watched it three and a half years, not knowing what that meant, and it was there the whole time that mother was gone from her little ones.”
“The every-day life of a slave on one of our southern plantations, however frequently it may have been described, is generally little known at the North. The principal food of those upon my master’s plantation consisted of corn meal, and salt herrings; to which was added in summer a little buttermilk, and the few vegetables which each might raise for himself and his family, on the little piece of ground which was assigned to him for the purpose, called a truck patch. The meals were two, daily. The first, or breakfast was taken at 12 o’clock, after laboring from daylight; and the other when the work of the remainder of the day was over. The only dress was of tow cloth, which for the young, and often even for those who had passed the period of childhood, consisted of a single garment, something like a shirt, but longer, reaching to the ankles; and for the older, a pair of pantaloons, or a gown, according to the sex, while some kind of round jacket, or overcoat, might be added in winter, a wool hat once in two or three years, for the males, and a pair of coarse shoes once a year. Our lodging was in log huts, of a single small room, with no other floor than the trodden earth, in which ten or a dozen person-men, women, and children-might sleep, but which could not protect them from dampness and cold, nor permit the existence of the common decencies of life. There were neither beds, nor furniture of any description-a blanket being the only addition to the dress of the day for protection from chillness of the air or the earth. In these hovels were we penned at night, and fed by day; here were the children born, and the sick-neglected. Such were the provisions for the daily toll of the slave.”
–Josiah Henson, “The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave. Narrated by himself. 1849
“Slavery has existed in this country too long and has stamped its character too deeply and indelibly, to be blotted out in a day or a year, or even in a generation. The slave will yet remain in some sense a slave, long after the chains are taken from his limbs, and the master will yet retain much of the pride, the arrogance, imperiousness and conscious superiority, and love of power, acquired by his former relation of master. Time, necessity, education, will be required to bring all classes into harmonious and natural relations…
Law and the sword can and will, in the end abolish slavery. But law and the sword cannot abolish the malignant slaveholding sentiment which has kept the slave system alive in this country during two centuries. Pride of race, prejudice against color, will raise this hateful clamor for oppression of the negro as heretofore. The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large.”
-Frederick Douglass, December 28, 1862, Rochester, New York, Speech at the Spring Street AME Zion Church
