Christie: African-American Civil Rights Should Have Been Put Up To A Vote | The New Civil Rights Movement →

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie this week said that African-American civil rights should have been voted upon, in lieu of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed racial discrimination and segregation and strengthened voting rights. Christie made these remarks as he insisted he would veto any legislation that came to his desk allowing same-sex marriage.

“The fact of the matter is, I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South,” Christie said Tuesday, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer: READ MORE

And he sat in that church with all of those African-American leaders and celebrities who were there to bury an African-American legend. 

Question Bridge: Black Males is a transmedia art project that seeks to represent and redefine Black male identity in America. Through video mediated question and answer exchange, diverse members of this “demographic” bridge economic, political, geographic, and generational divisions.

(via QUESTION BRIDGE)

Day In Black History . com ~ Rosa Parks - (initiator of the Montgomery Bus Boycott... (Category: People) →

“Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to give up her bus seat for a white man.  Public buses were segregated then, reserving seats in the front and middle of the vehicles only for whites.

The African American community in Montgomery was able to respond so quickly to the arrest of Rosa Parks because it was written of in the newspaper.  The newspapers were then delivered across the country, allowing all people to read her story. READ MORE

Happy Birthday Rosa Parks!

The Smash hit was released today in 1983

Michael Jackson - Beat It (by michaeljacksonVEVO)

In Rediscovered Letter From 1865, Former Slave Tells Old Master To Shove It →

In the summer of 1865, a former slave by the name of Jourdan Anderson sent a letter to his former master. And 147 years later, the document reads as richly as it must have back then.

The roughly 800-word letter, which has resurfaced via various blogs, websites, Twitter and Facebook, is a response to a missive from Colonel P.H. Anderson, Jourdan’s former master back in Big Spring, Tennessee. Apparently, Col. Anderson had written Jourdan asking him to come on back to the big house to work.

In a tone that could be described either as “impressively measured” or “the deadest of deadpan comedy,” the former slave, in the most genteel manner, basically tells the old slave master to kiss his rear end. He laments his being shot at by Col. Anderson when he fled slavery, the mistreatment of his children and that there “was never pay-day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows.” READ THE LETTER

This is an amazingly well written letter!

flyandfamousblackgirls:

Birmingham, Alabama, and the Civil Rights Movement in 1963

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was used as a meeting-place for civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy and Fred Shutterworth. Tensions became high when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) became involved in a campaign to register African American to vote in Birmingham.

On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a white and turquoise Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). The four girls had been attending Sunday school classes at the church. Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.

Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a “few first-class funerals.”

A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. On 8th October, 1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.

The case was unsolved until Bill Baxley was elected attorney general of Alabama. He requested the original Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the case and discovered that the organization had accumulated a great deal of evidence against Chambliss that had not been used in the original trial.

In November, 1977 Chambliss was tried once again for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. Now aged 73, Chambliss was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Chambliss died in an Alabama prison on 29th October, 1985.