Monday, December 9, 2013

Delbert Tibbs, "Exonerated" Inspiration

Delbert Tibbs, Who Left Death Row and Fought Against It, Dies at 74

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Published: December 7, 2013
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It is not easy:


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Delbert Tibbs, right, in 2005 with Delroy Lindo, the actor who portrayed him in the television adaptation of “The Exonerated.”
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you stand waiting for a train
or a bus that may never come
no friend drives by to catch a ride
cold, tired:
call yourself a poet
but work all day mopping floors and looking out for thieves.
Those lines, describing the experience of an innocent man on death row, are from a poem by Delbert Tibbs, who in 1974 was convicted in Florida of a rape and a murder that he had nothing to do with, it was later found. He spent nearly three years in prison before the State Supreme Court reversed his convictions, vacated his death sentence and freed him.
Mr. Tibbs then campaigned for the abolishment of capital punishment and became one of six people whose stories of wrongful conviction and near execution were told in “The Exonerated,” a play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, who assembled their script from court documents, testimony, depositions and letters.
First presented in 2002 in Los Angeles and New York with celebrity-studded casts, the play went on to help reshape the national debate about the death penalty, reaching audiences in productions across the country and then on television in a filmed adaptation starring Susan Sarandon, Brian Dennehy, Aidan Quinn, Danny Glover and, as Mr. Tibbs, Delroy Lindo.
“People who once argued about the morality of executing the guilty now discuss whether the capital justice system can be trusted to separate those deserving death from the wholly innocent,” Adam Liptak wrote in The New York Times in 2005 in assessing the play’s impact.
Mr. Tibbs, whose poetic bent led Ms. Blank and Mr. Jensen to use his character as a kind of Greek chorus, introducing and closing the play and appearing intermittently throughout as a sagelike figure, died on Nov. 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 74.
His death was confirmed by Andrea Lyon, a law professor at DePaul University who is godmother to Mr. Tibbs’s daughter Mahalia. Professor Lyon said that the cause was uncertain but that Mr. Tibbs had had cancer.
The crimes for which he was arrested occurred in Fort Myers, on Florida’s southwest coast, on Feb. 3, 1974. A teenager, Cynthia Nadeau, was raped, and her boyfriend, Terry Milroy, who was in his 20s, was shot to death. Ms. Nadeau’s story was that while hitchhiking, they were attacked by a black man who had picked them up in a green truck. The couple were both white.
Mr. Tibbs was rootless at the time, though not a drifter so much as a seeker. A former seminary student in Chicago, he had himself been hitchhiking around the country and had made his way to Florida. The case against him had holes. Evidence showed that he was in Daytona Beach on the day of the killing, 250 miles from Fort Myers, and Ms. Nadeau’s initial description of her assailant was at odds with Mr. Tibbs’s appearance. (She identified him from a photograph several days later.)
An all-white jury nevertheless found him guilty on the basis of Ms. Nadeau’s uncorroborated testimony and a cellmate’s claim that Mr. Tibbs had confessed to the killing in jail.
Mr. Tibbs received a life sentence for the rape and the death sentence for the murder.
But in the summer of 1976, citing the weakness of the evidence against him, the Florida Supreme Court reversed the verdict on appeal and ordered a new trial, saying it did not want to “risk the very real possibility that Tibbs had nothing to do with these crimes.”
He was released from prison in January 1977, and after further legal wrangling — Mr. Tibbs’s lawyers argued that a retrial would amount to double jeopardy — the state dropped its charges against him in 1982. (In 2002, state prosecutors nonetheless said they held to their belief in Mr. Tibbs’s guilt. No one else has been charged with the crimes.)
“I’m a Southern boy,” Mr. Tibbs said in an interview with the oral historian Studs Terkel for his book “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith,” published in 2001. “My rationale to them for being in the state was just that I wanted to roam across the country, which is typical of writers and artists and so forth, but it’s not typical of black people. It’s all right for Jack Kerouac, but not for Delbert Tibbs.”
Delbert Lee Tibbs was born in Shelby, Miss., on June 19, 1939. His father, Pete Johnson, was a traveling salesman. He was reared by his mother, Lillie Bryant, and her husband, Frank Tibbs, who were sharecroppers.
He moved to Chicago with family members when he was about 12 and, before he was 20, had married and had a son, Delbert Jr. The marriage ended in divorce. Mr. Tibbs is survived by his son; two daughters, Mahalia Abeo Tibbs and Afrika Rouselle; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Tibbs attended colleges in Chicago, including Chicago Theological Seminary, though he never finished a degree, and worked as an insurance claims adjuster. In the early 1970s, he left school and hit the road for the adventure that landed him on death row.
“I’d dropped out of the seminary and now I don’t know what to do with myself,” he told Mr. Terkel. “There was an agitation within my spirit, so I said, ‘Well, I’ll take off. I’ve never been anyplace except Mississippi, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana.’ I thought, you might not live that long anyway, so I took off and I took off walking.”
In recent years, Mr. Tibbs did volunteer work tutoring at-risk young black men. He also worked with anti-death penalty groups like Witness to Innocence, founded by the activist nun Helen Prejean and Ray Krone, a former death row inmate in Arizona who was exonerated in 2002, and the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which succeeded in its aim when Gov. Pat Quinn signed a bill repealing the state’s death penalty law in 2011 and commuted the sentences of 15 death row inmates. (The organization is now known as the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty.)
“Delbert was not only articulate, which many exonorees seem to be, but he had this air of genteel thoughtfulness about him that greatly distinguished him,” Robert Warden, a founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University Law School in Evanston, Ill., said in an interview.
As time passed, Mr. Tibbs grew more philosophical.
“When I meet people now,” he said more than 25 years after his release, “if they try to make a big deal about me having been on death row, I sometimes gently remind them that we’re all on death row.”

***

Delbert Tibbs was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape in 1974 and sentenced to death, and was later exonerated. He later became a writer and anti-death penalty activist. He died on November 23, 2013.


Early life and trial[edit]

Tibbs was born in Mississippi and grew up in Chicago. He attended the Chicago Theological Seminary from 1970 to 1972. In 1974, he was hitchhiking in Florida when he was wrongfully implicated in a crime for which he would receive the death penalty.[1]
That year, a 27-year-old man and a 17-year-old female were violently attacked near Fort Myers, Florida. The man was murdered and the young woman raped. She reported that they had been picked up while hitchhiking by a black man who shot her boyfriend dead and then beat and raped her, leaving her unconscious by the side of the road. Tibbs was stopped by police some 220 miles north of Fort Meyers and questioned about the crime. The police took his picture, but as he did not fit the victim's description of the perpetrator, did not arrest him. However, the photograph was sent to Fort Meyers and the victim identified him as the attacker. A judge then issued a warrant for Tibbs' arrest. He was picked up in Mississippi two weeks later and sent to Florida.[1]
Though Tibbs had an alibi, he was indicted for the crimes. During the trial, the prosecution supplemented the victim's identification with testimony from a jailhouse informant who claimed Tibbs had confessed to the crime. The all-white jury convicted Tibbs of murder and rape and he was sentenced to death.[1]
After the trial, the informant recanted his testimony, saying he had fabricated his account hoping for leniency in his own rape case. The Florida Supreme Court remanded the case and reversed the decision on the grounds that the verdict was not supported by the evidence. Tibbs was released in January 1977. In 1982, the Lee County State Attorney dismissed all charges, ending the chance of a retrial.[1]

Legacy[edit]

In November 1976 Pete Seeger wrote and recorded the anti-death penalty song "Delbert Tibbs"[2]
A portion of Tibbs' story is featured in the play The Exonerated. On February 14, 2011 Tibbs, along with fellow exonerees and anti-death penalty activists, spoke with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn about repealing the death penalty in their state.[3][4] A month later, on March 14, 2011, the death penalty was repealed in Illinois.[5][6]
Tibbs is the author of "Selected Poems and Other Words/Works", Edited by O'Modele Jeanette Rouselle, Copyright 2007, Printed by The Manifestation-Glow Press New York City October 2007. His poetry also appears in the chapbook anthology "Beccaria", edited by poet Aja Beech released on April 22, 2011.

***
Delbert Tibbs, 1939-2013
Delbert TibbsDelbert Tibbs, a former seminary student from Chicago, had been traveling across the country and found himself in Florida in February 1974. He was stopped by the state police and questioned about the rape of 16-year-old Cynthia Nadeau and the murder of her traveling companion, Terry Milroy, in Fort Myers. Cynthia had described the offender as 5’6” with a dark complexion and a large Afro; Delbert stood 6’3” with a light complexion and had a small Afro. Yet after seeing photographs, her description of the killer changed dramatically. She said the killer was Delbert Tibbs.
An all-white jury returned a guilty verdict against Delbert in less than two days. Florida had a moratorium on the death penalty at the time, so the judge told Delbert “if the moratorium continues, you will serve consecutive life sentences. If it doesn’t, you’ll be sent to death row.” It didn’t, and Delbert was given a death sentence.
Yet his story became the basis for tremendous community support. Celebrities such as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger became involved and raised money for the Delbert Tibbs Defense Committee. Delbert was then able to hire better legal representation and get a retrial. Eventually, the Florida State Supreme Court overturned his conviction by a 4-3 vote, and the District Attorney finally dropped the case in 1982.
Delbert sadly passed away on November 23, 2013. He is survived by a loving family and countless admirers around the world. He lived in Chicago, wrote extraordinary verse, and traveled around the world, where he shared his story and recited his poetry with big-hearted emotion and poignant reminiscences. His story is also featured in the play The Exonerated. He was an Assistant Director of Membership and Training for Witness to Innocence, and will be sorely missed by his colleagues. Read former WTI Jesuit volunteer Andrea Wood's moving tribute to Delbert here.
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Friday, December 6, 2013

Walter White, NAACP President

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.

In 1918, he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.

White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.

Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance", the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general.

White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.

***

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.
In 1918 he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.[1]


Early life and education[edit]

White was the fourth of seven children born in Atlanta to George W. White and Madeline Harrison. They belonged to the influential First Congregational Church, founded after the Civil War by freedmen and the American Missionary Association, based in the North. Of all the denominations in Georgia, the Congregationalists were among the most socially, politically and financially powerful.[2] Membership to First Congregational was the ultimate status symbol in Atlanta.[2] Among the new middle class of blacks, both of the Whites ensured that Walter and each of their children got an education. When White was born, George had graduated from Atlanta University and was a postal worker, an admired position in the federal government.[3] Madeline had graduated from Clark University and became a teacher.
Of mixed race with African and European ancestry on both sides, White's appearance showed his high proportion of European ancestry. He emphasized in his autobiography, A Man Called White (p. 3): "I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. All in his family were light-skinned, and his mother Madeline was also blue-eyed and blonde.[4] It has been suggested that her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, a concubine and slave, and Dilsia's master William Henry Harrison, who much later became president of the United States. Madeline's mother Marie Harrison was one of Dilsia's mixed-race daughters by Harrison, and her father Augustus Ware was a white man.[5] White and his family identified as Negro and lived among the Atlanta Negro community. George and Madeline took a kind but firm approach in rearing their children, encouraging hard work and regular schedules.[6] In his autobiography, Walter relates that his parents ran a strict schedule on Sundays; they locked him in his room for silent prayer, a time so boring that he all but begged to do homework. His father forbade Walter from reading any books less than 25 years old, so he chose to read Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope by the time he was 12.[7] When he was 8, he threw a rock at a white child who called him a derogatory name for drinking from the fountain reserved for Blacks.[7] Events such as this shaped Walter's self-identity. He began to develop skills to pass for white, a device he used later to preserve his safety as a civil rights investigator in the South.[7]

Career[edit]

White was educated at Atlanta University, a historically black college. WEB Du Bois had already moved to the North before White enrolled, but Du Bois and Walter’s parents knew each other well.[8] Du Bois had taught two of Walter’s older brothers at Atlanta University.[8] Du Bois and Walter White later disagreed about how best to gain civil rights for blacks, but they shared a vision for the country. After graduating in 1916 from Atlanta University, White took a position with the Standard Life Insurance Company, one of the new and most successful businesses started by African Americans in Atlanta.
He also worked to organize a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Atlanta; the organization had been set up several years before and White was supportive of their work. He and other leaders were successful in getting the Atlanta School Board to support improving education for black children, who were kept in segregated schools that were traditionally underfunded by the white-dominated legislature.
At the invitation of James Weldon Johnson, a 25-year-old White moved to New York City, and in 1918 started working at the national headquarters of the NAACP. WEB Du Bois and other leaders of the NAACP eventually got over their concerns about his youth. Walter White took to the ranks of secretary assistant of the NAACP, eventually becoming an undercover agent in lynching investigations. With his keen investigative skills and light complexion, Walter White proved to be the NAACP's secret weapon against white mob violence.[9] White passed as white as a NAACP investigator, finding both more safety in hostile environments, and gaining freer communication with whites in cases of violations of civil and human rights, such as lynchings and hate crimes. He became involved in KKK groups in the South in order to expose those involved in lynchings and other murders. On one occasion he escaped on a train after learning of threats that a black man "passing for white" was being hunted down to be lynched.
To become a popular leader, he needed to fend off the appeal of Marcus Garvey and display a skillful verbal dexterity. His successor at the NAACP, Roy Wilkins suggested "White was one of the best talkers I've ever heard."[10]
Throughout his career, Walter White spoke out against segregation and discrimination while also suppressing manifestations of nationalism. Most notably, Walter White and WEB Du Bois' 1934 conflict was over the latter's endorsement of blacks' voluntary separation within United States society.[11]

Marriage and family[edit]

White married Gladys Powell in 1922. They had two children, Jane White, who became an actress on Broadway and television; and Walter Carl Darrow White, who lived in Germany for much of his adult life.
The Whites' long marriage ended in divorce in 1949.[12]
White generated public controversy by his marriage to Poppy Cannon, a white South African magazine editor. Many of his black colleagues and acquaintances were offended. Some said he had always wanted to be white; others said he had always been white.[13]
His ex-wife and children broke off with the couple. White's sister said that he wanted all along simply to pass as a white citizen.[13] His son changed his name from Walter White Jr. to Carl Darrow, signifying his disgust and desire to separate himself from his father.[13]
After the brouhaha, Walter White published an article in Look Magazine entitled "Has science conquered the color line?" It described a new scientific breakthrough that allowed for skin lightening, with the suggestion that such changes would eliminate the color line.[13] By describing "Whiteness as a solution for something to be aspired to, he profoundly insulted the people he had given his life to and all but destroyed his own enormous legacy." [13] He later defended the article by saying that he had intended it satirically. He wanted individual character to matter more than skin color, and wanted people of all skin tones "to realize the full range of possibilities within themselves and not just exercise the easy politics of race."[14]

NAACP[edit]

Investigating riots and lynchings[edit]

White used his appearance to increase his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the American South. He could "pass" and talk to whites, but also identified as black and could talk to members of the African-American community. Such work was dangerous. “Through 1927 White would investigate 41 lynchings, 8 race riots, and two cases of widespread peonage, risking his life repeatedly in the backwaters of Florida, the piney woods of Georgia, and in the cotton fields of Arkansas.”[15]
In his autobiography, A Man Called White, he dedicates an entire chapter to a time when he almost joined the Ku Klux Klan undercover. White became a master of incognito investigating. He started with a letter from a friend that recruited new members of the KKK.[16] After back and forth correspondence between him and Edward Young Clark, leader of the Ku Klux Klan, it became apparent Clark was interested in White joining.[16] White was eventually invited to Atlanta, Georgia to meet with other Klan leaders, but politely declined for fear if his true identity were found out, he would be killed.[16] White used this access to Klan leaders to further his investigation into the "sinister and illegal conspiracy against human and civil rights which the Klan was concocting."[16] After deeper inquiries into White's life, Edward Young Clark stopped sending signed letters; instead White was threatened by anonymous letters stating his life would be in danger if he ever divulged any of the confidential information.[17] By this time however, White had already turned the information into the Department of Justice and New York Police Department.[17] White understood undermining the strong hold of mob violence would be crucial to progressing his cause.
One of the first riots he investigated was that of October 1919 in Elaine, Arkansas, where white vigilantes and Federal troops in Phillips County killed more than 200 black sharecroppers. The case had both labor and racial issues. The white militias had come to the town and hunted down blacks in retaliation for the killing of a white man. He was killed in a shootout at a church where black sharecroppers were meeting on issues related to organizing with an agrarian union.
White was granted credentials from the Chicago Daily News. That enabled him to obtain an interview with Governor Charles Hillman Brough of Arkansas, who would not have met with him as the representative of the NAACP. Brough gave White a letter of recommendation to help him meet people, and his autographed photograph.
White was in Phillips County for only a brief time before his identity was discovered; he took the first train back to Little Rock. The conductor told him that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start", because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger down here passing for white and the boys are going to get him."[18] Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White, "When they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!"[18] "High yellow" was a term used at the time to refer to white-appearing blacks, mostly those of mixed-racial descent.
White published his findings about the riot and trial in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender and The Nation, as well as the NAACP's own magazine The Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to prohibit the mailing of the Chicago Defender and The Crisis to Arkansas, while others attempted to enjoin distribution of the Defender at the local level.
The NAACP put together a legal defense of the men convicted and carried the case to the Supreme Court. Its ruling overturned the Elaine convictions and established important precedent about the conduct of trials. The Supreme Court found that the original trial was held under conditions that adversely affected the defendants' rights. Some of the courtroom audience were armed, as were a mob outside, so there was intimidation of the court and jury. The 79 black defendants had been quickly tried: 12 were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death; 67 were condemned to sentences from 20 years to life. No white man was prosecuted for the many black deaths.[19]

Scottsboro Trial[edit]

Walter White’s first major struggle as leader of the NAACP centered on the Scottsboro Trial and the NAACP battle against communism. The Scottsboro trial was a high profile case that the NAACP and Walter White could use to increase their following. Weeks after White secured his new position, nine black teenagers looking for work were arrested after a fight with a group of white teens as the train both were riding on passed through Scottsboro, Alabama.[20] Two white girls were also found who accused the nine black teenagers of rape. Locked in a cell awaiting trial, the "Scottsboro boys looked to be prime lynching material: dirt poor, illiterate, and of highly questionable moral character even for teenagers." [20] Because the Communist party and the NAACP had long been battling for the black community's support and leadership over the black population, Scottsboro was an important battle ground for these two groups.[21] The Communist party had to devastate black citizens' faith in the NAACP to assume sole control of leadership, and they saw a Scottsboro victory as a way to solidify this superior role over the NAACP.[21] Their case against the NAACP was easier when Walter White and other leaders were second in approaching the case after the International Labor Defense.[22] Ultimately, the case was a synopsis of conflicting ideals between the two organizations. To White, “Communism meant that blacks have two strikes against them: blacks were aliens in white society where skin color was more important than initiative or intelligence, and blacks would also be Reds which meant a double dose of hatred from white Americans”.[23] White believed the NAACP could not in any way be associated with the Communist Party for this reason. Ultimately the Communist leaders failed in solidifying their position. White stated, "The shortsightedness of the Communist leaders in the United States (led to their eventual failure); Had they been more intelligent, honest, and truthful there is no way of estimating how deeply they might have penetrated into Negro life and consciousness.[24] White meant the Communist's philosophy of branding anyone opposed to their platform was their failure. He believed the NAACP had the best defense council in the country, yet the Scottsboro boy's families chose to go with the ILD partly because they were first on the scene.[24] White believed in capitalistic America and used the Communist propaganda as leverage to promote his own cause in securing civil liberties. He advised white America to reconsider their position of unfair treatmtent because they might find the black population choosing radical alternative methods of protest.[25] Ultimately, White and other NAACP leaders decided to continue involvement with the Scottsboro boys since this was only one of many efforts they had.[26] In his autobiography, Walter White gave a critical summary of the injustice in Scottsboro, "In the intervening years it had become increasingly clear that the tragedy of a Scottsboro lies, not in the bitterly cruel injustice which it works upon its immediate victims, but also, and perhaps even more, in the cynical use of human misery by Communists in propagandizing Communism, and in the complacency with which a democratic government views the basic evils from which such a case arises. A majority of Americans still ignore, the plain implications in similar tragedies." [27]

Anti-Lynching Legislation[edit]

Walter White was also a strong proponent and supporter of anti-lynching bills. Because of his first hand experience he was well versed in the motivation of Southern Whites to complete such heinous acts. One of White’s many surveys showed 46 of 50 lynchings during the first six months of 1919 were black victims, 10 of whom were burned at the stake.[28] After the great 1919 Chicago riot, White concluded the causes of such violence were not rape, as had been rumored, but rather the result of "prejudice and economic competition." [29] This was also the conclusion of a city commission that investigated the riots; it noted that ethnic Irish had led the anti-black attacks.
Newspapers reported a decreasing number of southern lynchings in the late 1910s, but postwar violence in Northern and Midwestern cities increased under the competition of returning veterans, immigrants and African Americans for work and housing. Walter White investigated one particularly horrific example of the sadistic events in 1918. He found evidence that in Lowndes and Brooks counties, Georgia, "The killings (of many black citizens) ended with a pregnant black woman being tied to a tree and burned alive after which (the mob) split her open, and her child, still alive, was thrown to the ground and stomped by some of the members”.[30]
White lobbied for federal anti-lynching bills during his time as leader of the NAACP. In 1922, the Dyer anti-lynching bill was passed by the House, the “first piece of legislation passed by the House of Representatives since Reconstruction that specifically protected blacks from lynchings”.[31] Congress never passed the Dyer bill, as the Senate was controlled by Southerners who opposed the bill. White sponsored other civil rights legislation, also defeated by the Southern bloc: the Castigan-Wagner bill of 1935, the Gavagan bill of 1937, and the VanNuys bill of 1940. It did, however, take a monumental effort on Southerners' part both financially and politically to take the Castigan-Wagner bill out of consideration and to defeat the Gavagan bill.[31] White had become a powerful figure, and James F Byrnes of South Carolina stood on the Senate floor and said, “One Negro has ordered this bill to pass. If Walter White should consent to have this bill laid aside its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard."[31] White's word was the only thing that kept the bill before Congress. It would be easy to conclude White and the NAACP failed in their attempts to secure anti-lynching legislation, but they were able to secure the all-important public support for their cause. By 1938, a Gallup poll found that 72% of Americans and 57% of Southerners favored an anti-lynching bill.[32] Because of his strong push for antilynching legislation, White had created a strong alliance of groups that believed in the same basic ideals of civil liberty which in turn formed the basis of the modern Civil Rights Movement.[32]

Attacks on Paul Robeson[edit]

During the McCarthy era, White did not openly criticize McCarthy’s campaign in Congress against communists, which was wide-ranging. During this era, American fears of communism were heightened and the FBI had been trying to classify civil rights activists as communists. White feared a backlash on this issue might cost the NAACP its tax-exempt status and lead to equating civil rights with Soviet Communism.[33] He criticized singer/activist Paul Robeson, who was accused of pro-Soviet leanings. Together with Roy Wilkins, then editor of The Crisis, he arranged for distribution of Paul Robeson: Lost Shepherd, a leaflet discounting Robeson that was written under a pseudonym.[34]

Literary career[edit]

Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance", the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general.
Writer Zora Neale Hurston accused Walter White of stealing her designed costumes from her play The Great Day.[35] White never returned the costumes to Hurston although she repeatedly asked for them by mail.[36]
White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.

Awards and honors[edit]

***

Walter White, in full Walter Francis White (born July 1, 1893—died March 21, 1955), foremost spokesman for African Americans for almost a quarter of a century and executive secretary (1931–55) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He waged a long and ultimately successful campaign against the lynching of blacks by white mobs in the United States.
Despite his blond hair and blue eyes, denoting that only a fraction of his ancestry was African American, White chose to go through life as a black. At age 25 he joined the NAACP national staff as assistant executive secretary under James Weldon Johnson, whom he succeeded as executive secretary. White’s principal objective became the abolition of lynching. Aided by his fair skin, he made on-the-spot investigations of lynchings and race riots and conducted a vigorous, sustained drive for enactment of a federal antilynching law. Although no such law was enacted, the climate of public opinion was markedly changed by his investigations and exposés. In 1918, when he joined the NAACP staff, 67 persons, all but 4 of them blacks, were lynched. In the year of his death, 1955, there were only three recorded lynchings, and none had occurred in the five previous years. Lynchings had become a rarity and were soon to disappear from the American scene.
In an early assault on discrimination in voting rights, White in 1930 almost single-handedly succeeded in influencing the U.S. Senate to reject by a 41–39 vote President Herbert Hoover’s nomination of Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Parker was on record as being opposed to black suffrage.) At the outbreak of World War II, White assisted labour leader A. Philip Randolph in pressing for a U.S. Fair Employment Practices Committee (June 1941) that would act to ban discrimination in government and wartime industry.
White’s writings include two fictionalized accounts of a Southern lynching: The Fire in the Flint (1924) and Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929). His autobiography, A Man Called White, was published in 1948.
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Monday, December 2, 2013

T. J. Jemison, Baton Rouge Bus Boycott Leader

Rev. T. J. Jemison, Civil Rights Leader Who Organized Early Boycott, Dies at 95

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Published: November 22, 2013
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The Rev. T. J. Jemison, a civil rights pioneer who organized a 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge, La., that foreshadowed the one set off byRosa Parks in Montgomery, Ala., and who went on to lead the nation’s largest black Baptist organization into liberal political activism, died on Nov. 15 in Baton Rouge. He was 95.
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Associated Press
The Rev. T.J. Jemison in 1960 with two students from Southern University who had just been released from jail in Baton Rouge, La. The women had been arrested in lunch-counter sit-ins.
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His son, Theodore J. Jemison Jr., confirmed the death.
Mr. Jemison was one of a handful of black clergymen recognized as a leader of the first generation of the civil rights movement. He was a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth.
As president of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A.from 1982 to 1994, Mr. Jemison ushered into being the World Baptist Center in Nashville, the first national headquarters of a predominantly black church in the United States. But in 1991 he lost much of his church-based support by speaking out in defense of the boxer Mike Tyson after he was charged with rape.
Mr. Jemison was known for his political skills in the early days of the civil rights struggle, displaying a mix of charm and toughness that served him well in leading what historians say was apparently the movement’s first large-scale bus boycott.
Appointed pastor of the Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge in 1949, Mr. Jemison led voter registration efforts, beginning in 1950, that resulted in improved municipal services and the construction of a dozen new schools for black citizens.
In 1953 he persuaded the Baton Rouge City Council to abolish a public transportation rule barring blacks from sitting in the first 10 rows of public buses. When bus drivers went on strike to protest the change, Mr. Jemison led an eight-day boycott, starting on June 20.
Blacks accounted for 80 percent of the city’s bus ridership, and they were tired of having to stand up while some or even all of the first 10 rows went empty, Mr. Jemison said. “We were not necessarily interested at that time in ending segregation,” he said in an interview in 1993. “We were after seats.”
The dispute ended in a compromise: Only the first two rows would be reserved for whites.
Dr. King, the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, contacted Mr. Jemison in late 1955 for advice on managing a citywide bus boycott.
“Knowing that Jemison and his associates had set up an effective private car pool, I put in a long-distance telephone call to ask him for suggestions for a similar pool in Montgomery,” Dr. King wrote in a 1958 memoir, “Stride Toward Freedom.” Mr. Jemison’s tutorial was “invaluable” in winning that fight, Dr. King added.
The yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, set off by Ms. Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white person, was the beginning of the end of separate-but-equal accommodations in the South.
In a statement released on Tuesday, President Obama called Mr. Jemison a man of “visionary spirit and charisma” who helped “eradicate legal segregation and improve voting rights laws for disenfranchised Americans.”
The National Baptist Convention, with 26,000 member congregations and seven million congregants, had been a nonpolitical organization when Mr. Jemison was elected president in 1982 (his father, the Rev. David Jemison, had been president from 1940 to 1953). But Mr. Jemison quickly began staking out firm, liberal positions on race-related issues, accusing President Ronald Reagan of giving “respectability to racism,” supporting the presidential candidacies of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 and, in 1991, opposing the Persian Gulf war, which he called “a fight over oil.”
When Desiree Washington, an 18-year-old Miss Black America contestant, accused Mr. Tyson of rape in 1991, Mr. Jemison described him as a victim of racial stereotyping, prompting other church leaders and women’s groups to criticize his support as insensitive to Ms. Washington. They also accused of him of being prejudiced by Mr. Tyson’s offer (never received) of $5 million toward the building of the convention’s $12 million headquarters in Nashville.
Mr. Tyson was convicted and served three years of a six-year prison sentence.
Mr. Jemison was later indicted, though never tried, on federal perjury charges in connection with an alleged attempt to bribe Ms. Washington to drop the charges. After stepping down as president of the Baptist convention in 1994, he told interviewers that he was especially proud of his role in building the group’s new headquarters, his signature achievement, because it fulfilled a dream of his father’s.
Theodore Judson Jemison was born on Aug. 1, 1918, in Selma, Ala., the youngest of the six children of Henrietta and David Jemison. His father was also the pastor of Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist Church. The younger Mr. Jemison attended segregated public schools and graduated from the historically black Alabama State University in Montgomery before earning a divinity degree at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Va.
He remained the pastor of the Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge for 54 years. He retired in 2003.
Besides his son, Mr. Jemison is survived by two daughters, Dianne Jemison Pollard and Betty Jane Wagner, and nine grandchildren. His wife, Celestine Catlett Jemison, died in 2006.
Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religion and African studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Jemison’s contributions to the civil rights cause were never widely known primarily as a result of a decision he made in 1961 as secretary of the Baptist convention.
That year, the group’s president, the Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, and Dr. King were bitterly divided over the organization’s role in the civil rights struggle; Mr. Jackson opposed involving the church in it, and Mr. Jemison sided with him.
His decision secured his place in the church hierarchy — he remained secretary for the next two decades — but forced him to reduce his role in the movement, though he said he disagreed with Mr. Jackson’s views and would eventually change the organization’s policies after succeeding Mr. Jackson in 1982.
“It’s felt that he had a sense of loyalty to the organization because of his father’s association with it,” Professor Butler said.
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Theodore Judson Jemison (August 1, 1918 – November 15, 2013), better known as T. J. Jemison, was the president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. from 1982 to 1994. It is the largest African-American religious organization. He oversaw the construction of the Baptist World Center in Nashville, Tennessee, the headquarters of his convention.

In 1953, while minister of a large church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jemison helped lead the first civil rights boycott of segregated seating in public bus service. The organization of free rides, coordinated by churches, was a model used later in 1955-1956 by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama.  Jemison was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. 

In 2003, the 50th anniversary of the Baton Rouge bus boycott was honored with three days of events in the city. These were organized by a young resident born two decades after the action

T. J. Jemison was born in 1918 in Selma, Alabama where his father, the Reverend David V. Jemison, was the pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church. He came from a family of prominent ministers and strong churchgoing women. He attended local segregated public schools.

Jemison earned a bachelor's degree from Alabama State University, a historically black college in the state capital of Montgomery, where he joined Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He earned a divinity degree at Virginia Union University in the capital city of Richmond, Virginia, to prepare for the ministry. He later did graduate study at New York University in New York City.

In 1949, Jemison was first called as a minister by Mt. Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge. There he worked chiefly on internal church matters, overseeing construction and continued fundraising of a new church building. At the time, his father was serving as President of the National Baptist Convention, the association of African-American Baptist churches established in 1895.

Within a few years, Jemison became involved in an early civil rights action. In 1950, the city had ended black-owned buses, requiring all residents to use its monopoly system, which enforced segregated seating. It was racially segregated by law; in practice, black citizens had to sit at the back half of the bus or stand, even if seats in the front "white" section were empty. Jemison said later he was struck by "watching buses pass by his church and seeing black people standing in the aisles, not allowed by law to sit down in seats reserved for whites. 'I thought that was just out of order, that was just cruel'." 

Making up 80 percent of the passengers on the system, African Americans were fed up with standing on buses while "white" seats remained empty, particularly after the company had raised fares from ten to fifteen cents in January 1953. Rev. Jemison took up the issue with the Baton Rouge City Council.  He testified on February 11, 1953 against the fare increase and asked for an end of the practice of reserving so many seats for whites. The city council met that demand, without abolishing segregation per se. They passed Ordinance 222, which established a first come-first served system: it allowed black passengers to board the bus from the back and take any empty seats available, while white passengers boarded from the front. In actuality though, the white drivers largely ignored the ordinance and continued to pressure blacks to sit in the rear of the buses.

When bus drivers harassed those black passengers who sought to sit in empty seats reserved for whites, Jemison tested the law on June 13, 1953, when he sat in a front seat of a bus. The next day the bus company suspended two bus drivers for not complying with the city ordinance. The drivers' union responded by striking for four days. That strike ended on June 18, 1953 when state Attorney General Fred S. LeBlanc declared the city ordinance unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the state's compulsory segregation laws.

Reverend Jemison set up a free-ride network, coordinated by the churches, to compensate for the lack of public transit. This was its signature action for the boycott, which was also adopted for later use. "While the Baton Rouge boycott lasted only two weeks, it set protest standards, and is growing in recognition as a precedent-setting event in the history of the modern American civil rights movement."

With most of the black bus riders refusing to ride, by the third day the buses were almost entirely empty. The boycott lasted eight days, as Reverend Jemison called it off after successful negotiations between black leaders and the city council. The following day, the city council passed an ordinance under which the first-come, first-served, seating system of back-to-front and front-to-back was reinstated. In addition, they set aside the first two seats on any bus for white passengers and the back bench for black passengers, while allowing anyone to sit on any of the rows in the middle. To comply with state segregation laws, blacks and whites were prohibited from sitting next to each other within this arrangement. Jemision's model of boycotting in Baton Rouge was adopted in 1955 by organizers of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, Jemison's "painstaking description of the Baton Rouge experience proved invaluable."

While a number of boycotters wanted to continue the action to attack segregation directly, the majority approved the compromise.

Jemison was elected as president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.,  the largest black religious organization, in 1982 and served until 1994. His best-known achievement of his tenure as president of the National Baptist Convention was the construction of the Baptist World Center in Nashville, Tennessee. It is a headquarters for the Convention. He publicly opposed the nomination of Clarence Thomas, a conservative African American as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He also objected to American intervention in the Gulf War.

Toward the end of his term as convention president, Jemison faced criticism because of his support for the boxer Mike Tyson, who was convicted in a rape case against a black woman. He was strongly criticized both by church members and observers.

Approaching the end of his tenure (a result of term limits), Jemison selected Dr. W. Franklyn Richardson as his successor, but Richardson was defeated by Dr. Henry Lyons at the 1994 convention.

Jemison filed a lawsuit to try to overturn the result. Eventually, through the appeals process, the election of Dr. Lyons was upheld. Jemison individually, as well as a co-plaintiff and their counsel, was ordered to pay $150,000 in punitive damages. By a later court order, Jemison and his co-plaintiff were required to pay the other side's attorney fees. The court found that Jemison had concocted evidence to justify the suit.

Jemison died in Baton Rouge at the age of ninety-five. His body lay in repose at the Louisiana State Capitol on November 22, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Services were conducted on November 23 by the Reverend Dr. Rene F. Brown, formerly of Topeka, Kansas, and Jemison's successor pastor at Mt. Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge.

Two Jewish Republican officeholders spoke at the funeral.  Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardenne said that despite national prominence, Jemison's most important role ... was as shepherd of this flock and this church." Attorney General Buddy Caldwell at the ceremony quoted Psalms 37:27: "the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord." He likened Jemison's life to the Statue of Liberty: He "gave us a torch to light the way."

United States Representative Cedric Richmond, a Democrat from Louisiana's 2nd congressional district, based in New Orleans, described himself and other African-American legislators as "direct beneficiaries of the hard work, commitment, and courage of Dr. Jemison." Reading a statement of United States President Barack H. Obama, Richmond described Jemison as "part of the generation that challenged the conscience of our nation and moved us toward justice and equality for all."

Interment followed in Green Oaks Memorial Park in Baton Rouge.
From June 19 to  June 21, 2003, the 50th anniversary of the bus boycott and its participants were honored with a community forum and three days of events.  Organizers were Marc Sternberg, a 30-year-old resident, Southern University, Louisiana State University, and major organizations. Sternberg said, "Before Dr. King had a dream, before Rosa kept her seat, and before Montgomery took a stand, Baton Rouge played its part."
In 2007, Mt. Zion First Baptist Church established the annual T. J. Jemison Race Relations Award in his honor. It was first awarded that year to Jesse Bankston, a long-term Democratic politician in Baton Rouge.





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