African-American History – Page 3 – Old Magazine Articles

Bogus Science and the Intelligence of African-Americans
(Current Opinion, 1921)

As many of the readers in the OldMagazineArticles.com audience have figured out, the purpose of this site is to allow the past to represent itself — warts and all, and few articles make manifest this policy better than this 1921 article which reported on the efforts of an appropriately forgotten scientist from the University of Virginia, Dr. George Oscar Ferguson. Ferguson was the author of a project that somehow measured the intelligence of African Americans and White Americans and concluded that his:

psychological study of the Negro indicates that he will never be the mental equal of the white race.

Race Riots in Chicago and Washington
(Leslie’s Weekly, 1919)

A single page report giving an account of two racial uprisings that took place in 1919. The journalist was not at all alarmed that such events should have taken place in a Southern locale like Washington, D.C. -but was stunned to hear of race riot in the Northern city of Chicago. The article is accompanied by two photographs illustrating the events.

The Forgotten Midshipman
(Literary Digest, 1897)

This column emerged from the mists of time, telling us a story that had long been forgotten. Reading this column, we are able to piece together that there once lived an African-American fellow named R.C. Bundy, who let it be know that he wished to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. It gets fuzzy from here as to whether he had sponsors backing him or if he never even took the entrance exam – the shouts from the press were so loud and cruel on this topic from the start. We found no other information of the young man. The first African-American to graduate Annapolis did so decades later, in 1949.

A Clinic On The Move
(Pic Magazine, 1941)

Call it what you will – socialized medicine, the public largess or the community chest, it makes no difference, but let it be known that in the late Thirties the elders who presided over Shelby County, Tennessee, recognized that some measure of TLC was required in their dominion, and so they bought a big bus and stuffed it full of 12 nurses and a physician. The leading African-American doctors in the area were also instrumental in the creation of this behemoth – which was created to contain syphilis in Shelby County.

Miscegenation
(Time Magazine, 1923)

The Crackers of old hated miscegenation (i.e.race-mixing). Sadly, they seemed to have removed the concept of love from the equation – and happily this article reminds us that not everyone felt the same way in 1923. The attached column concerns U.S. Senator Arthur Capper (1865 – 1951) and all the hot water he got into when he sponsored a bill that would have, among other things, criminalized race-mixing.

African-American Appointed to Presidential Sub-Cabinet
(U.S. News, 1954)

Admirable Prudence Crandall
(Coronet Magazine, 1961)

W.E.B. DuBois on Black Labor
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)

‘Is It Worth While to Educate the Negro?”(Literary Digest, 1900)

This column discusses a public address that got a lot people talking back in 1900. Charles Dudley Warner (1829 – 1900) was an honored man back in his time – even today he is celebrated with a website that has preserved his better quotes – but non of those citations were pulled from the controversial speech that is remembered here. In his address as president of the American Social Science Association, Warner openly called into question the usefulness higher education for African-Americans. The news of his prattle soon spread like a prairie fire and thousands of editorials were set to newsprint. Three eloquent responses appear here, one was by the (white) editor of a prominent African-American paper, The New York Age.

Racial Integration Comes to Sin City
(People Today Magazine, 1955)

When it became clear to all that the Black community was not wasting its money or withering under the weight of Syphilis like their White counterparts – it was decided that it was time to erect an interracial hotel in the Nevada casino capital of Las Vegas, and so they did; it was called Moulin Rouge.

‘Should the Color Line Go?”
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)

Robert Watson Winston (1860 – 1944) was, in every sense, a man of his age. A Democratic politician from the state of North Carolina, he penned this highly prejudiced article about segregation (he liked it). He packed his column with all sorts of fifty cent words like miscegenation, quadroons and octoroon. He was yet one more white Southerner who feared race blending and the sharing of political power with African-Americans. He was delighted that so many of them were headed to the more industrialized states in the North.

America’s Black Muslims
(The Hibbert Journal, 1965)

An article about Elijah Muhammad and the realization of his efforts to establish a Muslim foothold in the United States; he called it the Nation of Islam.

‘Southern Opinions on Negro Suffrage”
(Literary Digest, 1900)

Racism in ”The Old Line State”
(The Diamond Back, 1950)

From the pages of THE DIAMONDBACK, the student newspaper of the University of Maryland, came this surprising article that listed numerous denunciations concerning the various ways that the state of Maryland had failed time and again to educate their African-American youth.

‘Separate but equal’ facilities are a myth in Maryland. No Negro school in the state compares with the University of Maryland, which is for white students only.

A Racial Dust-Up in Harlem
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

One of Reverend Martin Luther King’s most poignant observations involved the sad fact one of America’s most segregated institutions was the church. This article is about the New York Episcopal Archdioceses and their efforts to remedy that in the early Thirties:

All Souls Episcopal Church is in Harlem, New York’s ‘black belt’. This once lily white congregation has been engulfed by the spreading colored population. Opposition to negro parishioners reached a point when an element of the white vestry asked the rector, Reverend Rollin W. Dodd, to resign…

‘Thank You, Mr. President”
(Quick, 1952)

Although African-American leaders anticipated a rough time when a Missouri politician named Harry Truman assumed the mightiest office in the land – in the end, he proved to be their champion.

[The NAACP] still regard President Truman as their real hero for pressing anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, FEPC and anti-segregation programs in the face of heavy Southern Democratic Opposition.

Those councilors who advised FDR on all matters African-American were popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…

Brough Called Out for Racial Parity
(New York Times, 1915)

One year prior to being elected as the 25th governor of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (1876 – 1935), while serving as the chairman of the University Commission on the Southern Race Question, submitted his opinion regarding racial segregation in the Annual Report that he had written for that organization. Dr. Brough, who at the time was a professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Arkansas, condemned the Jim Crow laws that had separated Whites from Blacks, believing that no good could ever spring from it:

In my humble opinion, it is better to admit the negro to all the stimulus and the inspiration of the white’s social heritage, so far as it applies to economic equality of opportunity given through industrial education, in so far as it does not endanger the integrity of the social heritage itself, than to encourage an ignorant and debased citizenship by his neglect and repression.

FDR, African-Americans, and the 1944 Election
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

This article is a segment from a longer piece regarding the 1944 presidential election and the widespread disillusionment held by many Black voters regarding the failings of FDR and his administration:

…the Negro vote, about two million strong, is shifting back into the Republican column.

The report is largely based upon the observations of one HARPER’S MAGAZINE correspondent named Earl Brown.