Nathaniel Adams Coles, known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer and jazz pianist. He recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts. His trio was the model for small jazz ensembles that followed. Cole also acted in films and on television and performed on Broadway. He was the first African-American man to host an American television series. He was the father of singer-songwriter Natalie Cole (1950–2015).
The Deacons for Defense and Justice is an armed African-American self-defense group founded in November 1964, during the civil rights era in the United States, in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana. On February 21, 1965—the day of Malcolm X's assassination—the first affiliated chapter was founded in Bogalusa, Louisiana, followed by a total of 20 other chapters in this state, Mississippi and Alabama. It is intended to protect civil rights activists and their families. They are threatened both by white vigilantes and discriminatory treatment by police under Jim Crow laws. The Bogalusa chapter gained national attention during the summer of 1965 in its violent struggles with the Ku Klux Klan.
James Leonard Farmer Jr. was an American civil rights activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement "who pushed for nonviolent protest to dismantle segregation, and served alongside Martin Luther King Jr." He was the initiator and organizer of the first Freedom Ride in 1961, which eventually led to the desegregation of interstate transportation in the United States.
The Watts riots, sometimes referred to as the Watts Rebellion or Watts Uprising, took place in the Watts neighborhood and its surrounding areas of Los Angeles from August 11 to 16, 1965.
Walter Francis White was an African-American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century, 1929–1955, after joining the organization as an investigator in 1918. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University, a historically black college.
Clint Cornelius Wilson Sr. was an African-American editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the most prominent Black owned newspaper in California.
Elmo Lincoln was an American film actor.
Mendez, et al v. Westminister [sic] School District of Orange County, et al, 64 F.Supp. 544, aff'd, 161 F.2d 774, was a 1947 federal court case that challenged Mexican remedial schools in Orange County, California. In its ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an en banc decision, held that the forced segregation of Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional and unlawful, not because Mexicans were "white," as attorneys for the plaintiffs argued, but because as US District Court Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled, "The equal protection of the laws pertaining to the public school system in California is not provided by furnishing in separate schools the same technical facilities, textbooks and courses of instruction to children of Mexican ancestry that are available to the other public school children regardless of their ancestry. A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage." Judge McCormick went as far to state that "The evidence clearly shows that Spanish-speaking children are retarded in learning English by lack of exposure to its use because of segregation, and that commingling of the entire student body instills and develops a common cultural attitude among the school children which is imperative for the perpetuation of American institutions and ideals."
Willis Virgil McCall was sheriff of Lake County, Florida. He was elected for seven consecutive terms from 1944 to 1972. He gained national attention in the Groveland Case in 1949. In 1951 he shot two defendants in the case while transporting them to a new trial, killing one on the spot. Claiming self-defense, he was not indicted for this action. He also enforced miscegenation laws and was a segregationist.
The Chicago race riot of 1919 was a violent racial conflict started by white Americans against black Americans that began on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois on July 27, and ended on August 3, 1919. During the riot, thirty-eight people died. Over the week, injuries attributed to the episodic confrontations stood at 537, with two-thirds of the injured being black and one-third white, while the approximately 1,000 to 2,000 who lost their homes were mostly black. It is considered the worst of the nearly 25 riots and civil disturbances in the United States during the "Red Summer" of 1919, so named because of the racial and labor related violence and fatalities across the nation. The prolonged conflict made it one of the worst riots in the history of Illinois.
R.C. Hickman was an American photographer, photojournalist and circulation manager, known for his photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. Hickman's work includes documenting the Mansfield school desegregation incident, as well as the visitation of people such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald in Dallas, Texas. For many decades he worked as a photographer for the Dallas Star Post as well as freelancing for Jet, Ebony and an array of other African-American magazine publications.
The Covina massacre occurred on December 24, 2008, in Covina, a city in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California, United States. Nine people were killed, either by gunshot wounds or in an arson fire inside a house at 1129 East Knollcrest Drive, where a Christmas Eve party was being held. The perpetrator, 45-year-old Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, who had entered the house wearing a Santa suit, died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head at his brother's residence in the early hours of the morning after the attack. Authorities cited marital problems as a possible motive for the violence; reports indicated that Pardo's divorce had been finalized on December 18, one week before the massacre. Three people, including Pardo's ex-wife and his former in-laws, were initially declared missing pending identification of their bodies.
Brefni O'Rorke was an Irish film actor. He began studying acting with his mother, the actress Jane O'Rorke née Morgan who was born in 1858, and there was a brother, Frederic, twelve years old than him. He made his professional début in 1912 at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin in a production of Shaw's John Bull's Other Island. While still living in Dublin, he met and married in 1916 Alice Cole, a chorus-girl turned actress, who had divorced her first husband and immigrated from South Africa with her young son. Thus O'Rorke became the stepfather of Cyril Cusack.
Louis Allen was an African-American businessman in Liberty, Mississippi who was shot and killed on his land during the civil rights era. He had previously tried to register to vote and had allegedly talked to federal officials after witnessing the 1961 murder of Herbert Lee, an NAACP member, by E. H. Hurst, a white state legislator. Civil rights activists had come to Liberty that summer to organize for voter registration, as no African-American had been allowed to vote since the state's disenfranchising constitution was passed in 1890.
The Negro Silent Protest Parade, commonly known as the Silent Parade, was a silent march of about 10,000 African Americans along Fifth Avenue starting at 57th Street in New York City on July 28, 1917. The event was organized by the NAACP, church, and community leaders to protest violence directed towards African Americans, such as recent lynchings in Waco and Memphis. The parade was precipitated by the East St. Louis riots in May and July 1917 where at least 40 black people were killed by white mobs, in part touched off by a labor dispute where blacks were used for strike breaking.
The Ocoee massacre was a white mob attack on African-American residents in northern Ocoee, Florida, which occurred on November 2, 1920, the day of the U.S. presidential election. The town is in Orange County near Orlando. Most estimates total 30–35 black people killed. Most African American-owned buildings and residences in northern Ocoee were burned to the ground. Other African Americans living in southern Ocoee were later killed or driven out on threat of more violence. Ocoee essentially became an all-white town. The massacre has been described as the "single bloodiest day in modern American political history".
John Cecil Jones was an honorably-discharged World War II corporal and veteran who was tortured and lynched near Minden, in Webster Parish, Louisiana by a mob in 1946. His 17-year-old cousin Albert Harris, Jr. was tortured and left for dead alongside Jones. This was the only known post-World War II lynching to occur in Louisiana, and it involved multiple well-known local individuals, politicians, and a cover-up by multiple law enforcement entities.
George T. Raymond was an American civil rights leader from Pennsylvania who served as president of the Chester, Pennsylvania branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1942 to 1977. He was integral in the desegregation of businesses, public housing and schools in Chester and co-led the Chester school protests in 1964 which made Chester a key battleground in the civil rights movement.
Frank Morris (1914–1964) was an American businessman who died as a result of arson to his shoe shop in Ferriday, Louisiana, a city with a history of racial violence. There have been allegations of witness intimidation, evidence tampering, and involvement by local law enforcement. No charges have been laid despite three FBI investigations.
The Chester school protests were a series of demonstrations that occurred from November 1963 through April 1964 in Chester, Pennsylvania. The demonstrations focused on ending the de facto segregation that resulted in the racial categorization of Chester public schools, even after the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka (1954). The racial unrest and civil rights protests were led by Stanley Branche of the Committee for Freedom Now (CFFN) and George Raymond of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP).
