Olive Myrl Diggs (died 1980) was the managing editor of Anthony Overton's Chicago Bee from 1929 until it closed in 1947, a public official advocating for Chicago's African American community, and a city planner.
She was born in Mound City, Illinois, received a B.S. in Economics and Accounting from Northwestern University and an M.S. from Roosevelt University.
At the Chicago Bee, Diggs focused on housing for African-Americans in Chicago and advocated for neighborhood rejuvenation. She directed the Neighborhood Youth Corps [1] and was a consultant for the National Youth Administration. [2]
She served as Assistant Direct of the Illinois Commission on Human Relations. She gave speeches. [3] She retired as Administrative Assistant in the Chicago Department of Planning, City and Community Development in 1979. [1]
Ralph Johnson Bunche was an American political scientist, diplomat, and leading actor in the mid-20th-century decolonization process and US civil rights movement, who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Israel. Among black Nobel laureates he is the first African American and first person of African descent to be awarded a Nobel Prize. He was involved in the formation and administration of the United Nations and played a major role in both the decolonization process and numerous peacekeeping operations sponsored by the UN. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy. At the UN, Bunche gained such fame that Ebony magazine proclaimed him perhaps the most influential African American of the first half of the 20th century and "[f]or nearly a decade, he was the most celebrated African American of his time both [in the US] and abroad."
The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. It was caused primarily by the poor economic conditions as well as the prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. The historic change brought by the migration was amplified because the migrants, for the most part, moved to the then-largest cities in the United States at a time when those cities had a central cultural, social, political, and economic influence over the United States. There, African Americans established influential communities of their own. According to Isabel Wilkerson, the migrants and the children of the migration put the lie to the limiting ideology of Jim Crow, and exclusion. Despite, for many, the real sadness in leaving the South, and all the barriers faced by the migrants in their new homes, the migration was an act of individual and collective agency, which changed the course of American history, a "declaration of independence" written by their actions.
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Over the course of a lifetime dedicated to combating prejudice and violence, and the fight for African-American equality, especially that of women, Wells arguably became the most famous Black woman in America.
Douglas, on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, is one of Chicago's 77 community areas. The neighborhood is named for Stephen A. Douglas, Illinois politician and Abraham Lincoln's political foe, whose estate included a tract of land given to the federal government. This tract later was developed for use as the Civil War Union training and prison camp, Camp Douglas, located in what is now the eastern portion of the Douglas neighborhood. Douglas gave that part of his estate at Cottage Grove and 35th to the Old University of Chicago. The Chicago 2016 Olympic bid planned for the Olympic Village to be constructed on a 37-acre (15 ha) truck parking lot, south of McCormick Place, that is mostly in the Douglas community area and partly in the Near South Side.
Regina M. Anderson was an American playwright and librarian. She was of Native American, Jewish, East Indian, Swedish, and other European ancestry ; one of her grandparents was of African descent, born in Madagascar. Despite her own identification of her race as "American", she was perceived to be African-American by others. Influenced by Ida B. Wells and the lack of black history teachings in school, Regina became a key member of the Harlem Renaissance.
The history of African Americans in Chicago dates back to Jean Baptiste Point du Sable’s trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable, the city's founder, was Haitian of African and French descent. Fugitive slaves and freedmen established the city's first black community in the 1840s. By the late 19th century, the first black person had been elected to office.
Charles Spurgeon Johnson was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities. He preferred to work collaboratively with liberal white groups in the South, quietly as a "sideline activist," to get practical results.
Charles Coles Diggs Jr. was an American politician from the U.S. state of Michigan who served in the state senate and U.S. House of Representatives. Diggs was an early member of the civil rights movement. In September 1955, the Michigan Representative garnered national attention when he attended the trial of the two white Mississippians accused of murdering Emmett Till. He was also elected the first chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and was a staunch critic of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
African-American newspapers are news publications in the United States serving African-American communities. Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm started the first African-American periodical called Freedom's Journal in 1827. During the antebellum South, other African-American newspapers sprang forth, such as The North Star founded in 1847 by Frederick Douglass.
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, 38 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, and approximately 1,000 to 2,000, most of whom were black, lost their homes. It is considered the worst of the nearly 25 riots and civil disturbances in the United States during the "Red Summer" of 1919, named because of the racial and labor violence and fatalities across the nation. The prolonged conflict made it one of the worst riots in the history of Illinois.
The Washington Park Subdivision is the name of the historic 3-city block by 4-city block subdivision in the northwest corner of the Woodlawn community area, on the South Side of Chicago in Illinois that stands in the place of the original Washington Park Race Track. The area evolved as a redevelopment of the land previously occupied by the racetrack. It was originally an exclusively white neighborhood that included residential housing, amusement parks, and beer gardens.
John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism led him to document much of the social turmoil of the 1960s, establish some of the first Black Studies programs in American universities, and contribute to the independence movement in Ghana. Drake often wrote about challenges and achievements in race relations as a result of his extensive research.
Black Metropolis–Bronzeville District is a historic African American district in the Bronzeville neighborhood of South Side, Chicago, Illinois.
The Chicago Bee Building is a historic building on Chicago's South Side. It originally housed the Chicago Bee, a newspaper serving the African Americans of Chicago. The building now houses the Chicago Bee Branch of the Chicago Public Library. The building was named a Chicago Landmark on September 9, 1998. It is located in the Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District in the Douglas community area of Chicago, Illinois.
Hygienic Manufacturing Company, also known as Overton Hygienic Company, was a cosmetics company established by Anthony Overton. It was one of the nation's largest producers of African-American cosmetics. Anthony Overton also ran other businesses from the building, including the Victory Life Insurance Company and Douglass National Bank, the first nationally chartered, African-American-owned bank. The Overton Hygienic Building is a Chicago Landmark and part of the Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District in the Douglas community area of Chicago, Illinois. It is located at 3619-3627 South State Street.
Anthony Overton Jr., a banker and manufacturer, was the first African American to lead a major business conglomerate.
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations was a non-partisan, interracial investigative committee, appointed by Illinois governor Frank Lowden. The commission was set up after the Chicago riots of July and August 1919 in "which thirty-eight lives were lost, twenty-three Negros and fifteen whites, and 537 persons were injured".The purpose of the commission was to investigate the causes of the Riot and make recommendations to prevent a tragedy like this from reoccurring. The research was the first extensive research on interracial Black-white relations conducted in Chicago funded by a government agency.
The Chicago Bee or Chicago Sunday Bee was a Chicago-based weekly newspaper founded by Anthony Overton, an African American, in 1925. Its audience was primarily African-American and the paper was committed to covering "wholesome and authentic news", and adopted a middle-class, conservative tone. Politically, it was aligned with the Republican Party.
Samuel W. Nolan was an American police officer for the Chicago Police Department who served as the interim superintendent of the department briefly from April 25, 1979 or September 1, 1979 until January 11, 1980. Nolan was the first African American to serve in any capacity as head of the Chicago Police Department.
Mary Jane Richardson Jones was an American abolitionist, philanthropist, suffragist, and activist.