Last year, I thought that I would start a new series on the blog titled “I Wish I Knew More About…” as a way to catalog information that interests me but don’t have the time to explore. I wrote about Emma J. Atkinson then. At the time, I mentioned that I didn’t know if I would keep up with the idea. I didn’t.

Today, however, I wish that I knew more about a pioneering black journalist and activist named Evelyn Cunningham (incidentally her “Wikipedia page is paltry). I am stunned to learn that no one has yet written a book about this extraordinary woman’s life and her accomplishments. She passed away in 2010 at the age of 94. She was a friend of Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, and many others. A feminist before it was cool, she covered the rise of Dr. King in the black freedom movement as well as Malcolm X and others. She was a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier for 20 years. She was nicknamed the “lynching editor” because she was relentless in covering “hard news.”

Listen to her talk about this in her own words:

While reporting in Birmingham and other places during the black freedom movement, Ms. Cunningham was jailed and harassed. An article in the Amsterdam News from 1990 captures a bit of her indomitable spirit.

I really hope to read a biography about her soon…

I picked up this photograph while antiquing last year. I didn’t recognize the young man’s name or know of his legal case. I was just struck by the photograph. Later, I did some research to educate myself about what happened to him. Predictably, it was another miscarriage of justice. You can read more about his story here and here

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks sorting through my ideas and beliefs about “gun control.” In the process, I have come across several interesting historical artifacts. These have helped to contextualize the ambivalent & complicated relationship that many blacks in the U.S. have had with firearms.

I’ve briefly written on this blog about the fact that black freedom fighter Robert Williams started an NRA gun club in Monroe, North Carolina in the late 1950s. He did this in response to unrelenting attacks by local whites without any recourse from law enforcement and the government.

I recently discovered that Lewis Robinson, a Cleveland-based CORE organizer, decided to form a rifle club after the murder of a local civil rights activist. He immediately came to the attention to the FBI (of course). The agency began to monitor his activities and the spread of these gun clubs which Robinson named Medgar Evers Rifle Clubs (MERC). The National Archives offer several documents related to the FBI’s surveillance and investigations of these clubs.

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The National Archives are terrific. I love visiting their site to find interesting artifacts from the past. They pulled together a few primary source documents about Rosa Parks’ 1954 arrest on a Montgomery bus. Below are copies of her original police report and a diagram of where Mrs. Parks was sitting on the bus when she was arrested.

I was perusing a used book store in Evanston last month and came across a first edition copy of Bayard Rustin’s collected writings. I am re-reading them now. I often wish that his contributions were better known. Those who do know something about him probably know that he was an ally to Dr. King and perhaps also that he was an openly gay man (at a time when that was perhaps even more dangerous). Since we have spent the better part of this week discussing civil rights and the LGBT community, I thought that it would be fitting to revisit Rustin’s contributions since he isn’t a household name among the icons of the black freedom movement in the U.S. For me however, Bayard Rustin is/was a giant. In reading about the black freedom movement, I gravitated to him, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer and later Ella Baker as organizers of understated but unparalleled skill.

Rustin was a Quaker and a pacifist. In 1944, he was drafted & as a conscientious objector (CO) he refused to serve. For this, he was sentenced to prison:

On February 17, 1944, a court found Rustin guilty of resisting the draft and sentenced him to three years (most COs received one year and a day) in the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, a segregated prison in a segregated state. On one visit to white COs, Rustin was beaten by a white prisoner who only stopped when he realized that neither Rustin nor the other COs were fighting back. Rustin’s protests against racial segregation, and his open homosexuality, were a source of growing tension. So in August 1945, he was transferred to the higher-security penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he served out the remainder of his time.

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This August, it will be 18 years since I moved to Chicago from my hometown of New York City. I can hardly believe that I’ve been here this long. I moved here for graduate school and never expected to stay. But Chicago is a city that grows on you. I’ve come to love this place. Not as much as I love New York where I was born and where much of my family still lives. But it’s a close second in my heart now.

When Rahm Emanuel announced that he would run for Mayor of Chicago. I had a viscerally negative reaction. I ranted to anyone and everyone that he was a corporatist who would seek to further privatize the commons. I supported his opponent Miguel Del Valle in the primary. I believe that the city would be in much better shape had Del Valle won but the truth is that I would have voted for almost anyone besides Emanuel.

Now we find ourselves under constant and coordinated assault by Emanuel and his allies in the business community. He closed down six mental health clinics last year with a promise to target more. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) decided to increase its fares and Emanuel responded that riders who were unhappy should consider driving instead. In just a few weeks, the CTA will close all red line stops from Cermak to 95th street for 5 months effectively cutting off much of the Southside from the rest of the city. Emanuel is pushing a new mandatory minimum gun bill (HB2265/SB1003) designed to spike the prison population by nearly 4,000 in the next decade and costing us nearly $1 billion more in state prison funding. And the coup de grace is his recently announced decision to close 54 Chicago Public schools on the West and South sides of the city. He has been called the “Murder Mayor.” The title is earned and well-deserved.

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I’ve written about my love for Mr. Dick Gregory before on this blog. In 1963, while protesting for school desegration, he was arrested, charged with disorderly conduct & jailed. He wrote about his experiences in Chicago’s Cook County House of Correction in JET MAGAZINE in 1963. Below are his words:

“Hey baby!

“How does it feel to see a real, big-time gangster this close up? You wanna know why I stayed in jail for something I believe in very much. I couldn’t march against segregation in Alabama and Mississippi without protesting it here. I was arrested on disorderly conduct charges because I joined hundreds of Negro parents demonstrating against those mobile units being placed all over the South Side in order to keep the city’s schools Jim Crow. The parents call them Willis Wagons because they are Supt. Benjamin Willis’ personal methods of hauling little colored folks all over the city’s Jim Crow ghetto to keep them from the white kids.

“I was actually put in a cell at the House of Correction. They call it Bridewell. Dig these baggy work pants with the four big rolls on the cuff and the army green, long sleeved shirts. I’d be the sharpest cat in my neighborhood if they let me wear these on the street.

“Man, those boots with the laces up above the ankles are real wild. I’ve been thinking about keeping mine if I get out ‘cuz I want to go to Washington, August 28 and I know there’s gonna be a lot of toes stepped on that day.

“You wanna know how I did my time. Well, some of the guards have it rougher than the prisoners. They have to punch the clock. Actually there’s only one guy in the cell with me, but plenty in the dormitory. I was thinking the other night, if we didn’t get a large Washington turnout, I know why…They got us all in jail.

“After we get up, we go to breakfast. After breakfast, I go back to my cell. The rest of them go to work. Then I had lunch. There’s a lot more baloney around this place than just between two slices of bread.

“Most prisoners are assigned to work details. The officials say race has nothing to do with it. You are assigned on the basis of your training and background and ability. It is all equal. Just like outside. You know what that means.

“I’m gonna write a book exposing this place when I get out. I’ll have a title something like The House of Corruption, That Needs Correction. It has been a real eye opener to be a prisoner and what I’ve seen will fill a book.

“I’ve seen dozens of examples of the greatest injustices of all…guys who wouldn’t even be here except they didn’t get adequate legal help during their trials. And sometimes they have to wait in the House of Correction 30 days to six months to get messed up. A lot of prisoners I’ve talked to complain of this. Most of them leave filled with bitterness and less able to face society then when they were jailed. If this can happen to me and I can afford to pay for legal help, what happens to the millions of poor souls. Guess there is some truth to the axiom ‘Justice delayed is Justice denied.’

“Then I learned about the guys who run this place. It’s a hard cold fact that Negroes with top seniority are passed over for advancement in preference for some white guy. I thought I was fighting racial prejudice and corruption on the outside, but that was nothing compared to in here.

“And they call it a model detention camp. A model for where they would like to put all of us.

“You know I was asked to entertain a bunch of the prisoners in here and I didn’t do it. You know why? Because I am not here as an entertainer, but as a Negro fighting for the rights that every Negro should be fighting for. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to visit me and some other ministers and it was great that these people knew what I was trying to do. My staff told me that the Crescendo Night Club in Los Angeles where I was booked is waiting anxiously for me to get out.

“Few people outside our race really understand the depth of our feelings. I’ve tried to relay the message through satire and comedy, but actions tell better than words and that’s why I went down to that mobile school site … to show how strongly I felt that those “Willis Wagons” should go. “When we win, just think of the news … It’ll be the first time in history that the schools are running away from the kids.”

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Every day is Black History day on the Prison Culture blog. But I do want to acknowledge February as Black History Month. Unlike others, I am not ambivalent about the month. I think that it is a good thing that we have it and I acknowledge that it took over 100 years of work by scholars like Carter G. Woodson among others to make it a reality. I am one of the beneficiaries of that hard work, organizing, and scholarship. I am grateful. I’ve settled on Thursdays as my regular day for posting something related to the history of the PIC on the blog. I will of course continue to weave historical moments in other posts but you can always be assured of finding something history-related on Thursdays here.

“That there was no simple crime with one indictable perpetrator makes it all the more universal.” – Ron Hollander

There once lived a man. He was a very good man. If he were alive today, Tom Brokaw would be touting him as one of the “Greatest Generation.” His name was Clyde Kennard and he was killed by the state. His story has been called by historian John Dittmer “the saddest of the whole [Civil Rights] Movement.”

Mr. Kennard is not a household name even among those who know a lot about the Black Freedom Movement. He should be. I only learned about Clyde Kennard’s story in 2000 when I read David Oshinsky’s “Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm, & the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.” I then heard more about the case in 2006 when the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School won his posthumous exoneration with the help of three local high school students: Mona Ghadiri, Agnes Mazur and Callie McCune.

Born in Hattiesburg Mississippi in 1927, Kennard was according to all who knew him quiet and smart. At 12, he moved to Chicago and at 18 he joined the Army where he spent 7 years as a paratrooper. He served in Germany and in Korea. After he was honorably discharged from the Army, he used some of his savings to buy a chicken farm for his parents in Hattiesburg. In 1952, Clyde moved back to Chicago and enrolled in the University of Chicago.

After three years at U of C, his stepfather died. Clyde decided to move back to Mississippi to help his mother with the chicken farm. Because he had already finished three years of his political science degree requirements, he decided that he would enroll at Mississippi Southern College (now called University of Southern Mississippi) to complete his studies.

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