#Abe Lincoln Charles Darwin NAACP

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The Births of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, February 12, 1809

READ MORE https://landmarkevents.org/the-births-of-abraham-lincoln-and-charles-darwin-1809/

February 12, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

"On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Exactly 100 years later, journalists, reformers, and scholars meeting in New York City deliberately chose the anniversary of his birth as the starting point for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Supporters of the project included muckraking journalists Ray Stannard Baker and Ida B. Wells, and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been a founding member of the Niagara Movement, a Black civil rights organization formed in 1905. In 1910, Du Bois would choose to leave his professorship at Atlanta University to become the NAACP’s director of publicity and research. For the next 14 years, he would edit the organization’s flagship journal The Crisis.

While The Crisis was a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a cultural showcase, its key function reflected the journalistic sensibilities of those like Baker, Wells, and especially Du Bois: it constantly called attention to atrocities, discrimination, and the ways in which the United States was not living up to its stated principles. At a time when violence and suppression were mounting against Black Americans, Du Bois and his colleagues relentlessly spread knowledge of what was happening.

That use of information to rally people to the cause of equality became a hallmark of the NAACP. It challenged racial inequality by calling popular attention to racial atrocities and demanding that officials treat people equally before the law."

"In 1944 the secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery, Alabama, chapter, Rosa Parks, investigated the gang rape of 25-year-old Recy Taylor by six white men after two grand juries refused to indict the men despite their confessions. Parks pulled women’s organizations, labor unions, and Black rights groups together into a new “Committee for Equal Justice” to champion Mrs. Taylor’s rights."

READ MORE https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-12-2023

314 Comments Annamarie 16 hr ago

"William English Walling is my great-grandfather. The family story about the founding of NAACP is that Walling and his wife Anna Strunsky Walling were speaking at Cooper Union in NYC about the Russian revolution. (They were committed Socialists and had spent time in Russia.) They were both to speak with my great-grandmother following to talk about the women's situation in Russia. But as I heard it when it was her turn to speak her heart was heavy with the news of the Springfield lynching and that's what she spoke about. As she was speaking she worried about how her husband would respond. After that speech Ida B Wells approached my great-grandparents and the plan for the first meeting was held. I thought it was at their Greenwich house.

Thought it would be fun to add this story. And I note, how my great grandmother's role gets overlooked. :)"

+ "

Real democracy. Lincoln's understanding of the black race was far from perfect, but he understood the evil that was slavery was consuming America's soul.

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of those may be turned against our liberties, without making us weaker or stronger for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises." -A.Lincoln

& "Two tenacious NAACP legal bulldogs, Thurgood Marshall and his extraordinary mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, targeted Plessy v Ferguson, 19th century Supreme Court ruling that ‘separate but equal’ was OK for African American students. Their focus was to eliminate racial discrimination in education.

Theirs was a decades long struggle. When Houston, the first NAACP legal counsel died, Marshall succeeded him. He pursued a deliberate policy of gradually chipping away at Plessy v. Ferguson bit by bit. He won 29 of his 32 cases on racial discrimination before the Supreme Court.

His monumental triumph was the 9-0 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education that totally overturned PvF. While implementation of this decision has been a long and tortuous path, it remains one of the truly precedent-changing rulings in Supreme Court history.

Marshall was the first Black to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He was a liberal on the Court. Following his death, after a contentious Senate hearing Clarence Thomas was named to fill the ‘Marshall seat.’ "