*On this date in 1929, Autherine Lucy was born. She is a Black activist and educator. Autherine Juanita Lucy was born in Shiloh, Alabama. Her father, Milton Cornelius Lucy, and mother, Minnie Maud Hosea, were sharecroppers; she was the youngest child in a family of five sons and four daughters. The family-owned and farmed 110 acres, and Lucy’s […]
learn more*Dorothy Cotton was born on this date in 1930. She was a Black activist. She was born Dorothy Foreman in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Her mother died when she was three years old, leaving her and her three sisters to be raised by their father, Claude Foreman, a tobacco factory worker with only a third-grade education. […]
learn more*Robert Benford Sr. was born on this date in 1930. He was a Black activist and community administrator. From Kansas City, MO., Robert Benford grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood in north Minneapolis. He was one of seven children of parents of African, Native American, and Irish ancestry. In 1969, he was appointed Minneapolis […]
learn more*Alfred King was born on this date in 1930. He was a Black Baptist minister and civil rights activist. Alfred Daniel King was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the son of Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. He was the youngest of their three children (the other two being Willie Christine […]
learn more*Xernona Clayton was born on this date in 1930. She is an AfricanAmerican journalist and businesswoman.
learn more*On this date in 1930, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) was founded. Activist Jesse Ames founded ASWPL with headquarters in Atlanta. The organization initially excluded Black women and appealed directly to white southern women to stop the lynching. The ASWPL secured the signatures of 40,000 southern women on its ‘Pledge Against Lynching’ (see below). Despite encountering hostile […]
learn more*Katie McWatt was born on this date in 1931. She was a Black Community Activist, Educator, and administrator. From Minneapolis, Minnesota, Kathleen Ann Curry was the daughter of an auto mechanic from a farm near Hastings, Minnesota. As a child, she was the only Black girl at her school and was often subjected to racial […]
learn more*Lillie Brown was born on this date in 1931. She was an African American civil rights activist.
learn more*George Wiley was born on this date in 1931. He was a Black chemist and civil rights leader. George Alvin Wiley was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of a postal clerk and one of six children. His family eventually moved to Warwick, Rhode Island. Wiley earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Rhode Island in 1953 and […]
learn more*The League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) was founded on March 13, 1931. LCP was a British civil rights organization in London that aimed to achieve racial equality worldwide, primarily focusing on Black rights in Britain. Harold Moody, a Black British physician, was frustrated with the prejudice he experienced in the UK, from employment to obtaining […]
learn more*Jürgen Schadeberg was born on this date in 1931. He was a white German-born South African photographer and artist. Jürgen Schadeberg was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1931, where he grew up during the Nazi regime and World War II. In the aftermath of the war, his mother began a relationship with a British officer in the […]
learn more*Hakim Abdullah Jamal was born on this date in 1931. He was a Black radical and author. He was born Allen Donaldson in Roxbury, Boston. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother abandoned him when he was 6. Donaldson started regularly drinking alcohol when he was ten and became a heroin user at 14. […]
learn more*John Africa was born on this date in 1931. He was a Black radical and activist. Born Vincent Leaphart in the Mantua neighborhood of West Philadelphia. His father, Frederick Leaphart, was a handyman, while his mother, Lennie Mae, was a homemaker. He was one of ten children. Lennie Mae died suddenly in her early 40s, […]
learn more*Marion Jones was born on this date in 1931. She was a Black Trinidadian librarian and novelist. Marion Patrick Jones was born in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Her father, Patrick Jones, was of African/Chinese heritage and was a leading Trinidadian trade unionist and socio-political activist at the turn of the 20th century. She […]
learn more*William Taylor was born on this date in 1931. He was a Jewish American attorney, lobbyist and Civil Rights activist who played a major role in drafting civil rights legislation.
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