Nonfiction

In just a few short weeks, I’ll head back to the Windy City to join colleagues from around America and the world as a 2017 Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) Fellow. With funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the BMRC offers summer fellowships to scholars, artists and writers working on projects that explore Chicago’s rich African American history and culture.

And as someone who spent her college years in Chicago, and whose recent book Word Warrior is about pioneering Black Chicago writer/activist Richard Durham, I can’t wait to return this intriguing and significant midwestern city.

For details about the fascinating explorations of my BMRC colleagues, as well as my own research on affirmative action and higher education, click here.

And don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about the BMRC fellowship program, or you’d like to simply reminisce about your own Chicago experiences.

A couple of years ago, I posted the tribute below to celebrate May Day – or International Workers Day – and writer Richard Durham.  Since this information is still relevant today, here’s a reboot of that tribute.  Enjoy the day and this significant spring month!

Each year around the world, May Day (also known as International Workers Day) or May 1^st, is celebrated as a day to honor workers and spring. During his lifetime (1917-1984), Richard Durham surely made time to herald the day.  He was committed to and involved in labor unions that championed the rights of working men and women.

During the 1950s, one of Durham’s most significant associations was with the Chicago-based United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). Considered to be one of city’s more progressive unions, the UPWA fought to protect the rights of the thousands of people who toiled in the industries that produced meat and its byproducts.

Undoubtedly, Durham appreciated the union’s logo. A black and a white hand clasped in a handshake went along with the UPWA’s slogan, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”

And there was plenty to fight about regarding working conditions in meatpacking plants. The plants’ slaughter assembly lines, for example, were dangerous, blood-soaked environments. Some meatpacking companies didn’t provide insurance to protect injured employees, and workers on some fast-moving assembly lines were treated like prisoners.

In 1952, Durham landed a contract with the union. The organization needed a writer who could translate studies, conducted by Fisk University scholars, about the UPWA’s antidiscrimination activities into a digestible brochure for the rank and file.

Durham eventually produced a twenty-one-page brochure titled Action against Jim Crow: UPWA’s Fight for Equal Rights. The brochure married photos of union members with Durham’s attention-grabbing writing:

At daybreak on November 30, 1950, a young Negro mother left her three children with their grandmother and hurried out into the cold Chicago dawn to catch a street-car.

She was Mrs. Pauline Wilson and she needed a job.

She was an experienced packinghouse worker and she knew they were hiring at Swift and Company.

Swift—like the Wilson, Armour, and Cudahy companies—operated America’s largest meat processing plants. Durham went on to write:

At 7 a.m. [Mrs. Wilson] was rushing unnoticed down the crowded, cobblestone streets of the world’s biggest packing center, and at 7:30 a.m. she was inside the employment office of the biggest packer.

It was the third anxious morning she had raced to be among the first to apply.

“Oh-h-h-h you’re just a little bit too late,” one of the clerks shook a sad head. “We’re not hiring anymore women. Just men.”

Durham then introduced Ruth Merson, a white job seeker who rushed down the same cobblestone streets to the same company on that same November morning. Yet Merson was directed to a back office and hired with every other white woman who applied that day.

Swift foreman Bill Cummings encouraged Merson to send her friends because he thought she “looked like a good worker.” Durham conceded, “He was right. She was even better than he thought. He had hired a field representative of UPWA on assignment for its Anti-Discrimination Department, a symbol of the Negro and white unity which has made the UPWA-CIO, the most important packinghouse union in the world.”

An arbitrator eventually ruled that Mrs. Wilson and twelve other black women “were entitled to reach into Mr. Swift’s pockets for $2,600 in back pay,” Durham wrote. Additionally, Swift had to hire those women with a year’s worth of seniority.

Richard Durham continued working with the UPWA, helping the union organize its workers to support various civil rights struggles – including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

So whatever work you are passionate about and engaged in, have a productive month!

Forty-nine years ago, on April 4, 1968, an assassin’s bullet silenced the eloquent voice of civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But in the mid-1950s, Dr. King and Richard Durham’s lives intersected in Durham’s Chicago hometown. At the time, Durham served as an organizer and program director with the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) – one of the most progressive labor unions in Chicago.

In mid-February, 1956 Durham attended a UPWA meeting with other union members, a local preacher, and Dr. King – then a 26-year-old Baptist minister described as the “outstanding leader of a ‘passive resistance’ boycott” in its infancy in Montgomery, Alabama.

Dr. King summarized the events leading to the ongoing boycott of Montgomery’s segregated bus system by its African American residents. On December 1, 1955, a respected community member, 42-year-old Rosa Parks, was arrested and jailed after refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person. Her arrest sparked outrage. Black community members and their religious leaders decided to stage a one-day boycott of all city buses on Monday, December 5th.

Dr. King told Richard Durham and his UPWA colleagues that only eight Negroes traveled by bus that day—in a city where roughly 75 percent of Montgomery’s black population, about 47,000 strong, used the bus system. In the city’s Holt Street Baptist Church that Monday evening, Dr. King delivered a fiery speech that electrified the overflowing crowd. Montgomery’s African American citizens resolved to fight on, extending the bus boycott indefinitely.

To support the boycott, some of Montgomery’s Black residents dusted off their shoes and walked everywhere.

Some stayed home.

But for the thousands of other Blacks who needed it, the MIA established an alternate transportation system. Individual car owners and churches volunteered their vehicles; Negro taxi drivers reduced their fares. Dr. King said that the MIA needed about $300 a day just to pay for gas.

Some funds to support the boycott came from donations received at mass meetings. Prominent souls such as Montgomery pharmacist Richard Harris and internationally acclaimed entertainer Harry Belafonte also contributed. Still, Dr. King told Durham and his UPWA colleagues that unless additional aid flowed in “to boost the morale of the people,” the two-month-old boycott might soon have to end.

Richard Durham asked Dr. King if similar boycotts in cities like Mobile, Alabama, or Sioux City, Iowa, would help this boycott effort. Durham’s suggestion was based on research which revealed that the corporate owners of Montgomery’s bus line owned subsidiaries in several other cities throughout the United States.

In solidarity with the boycott and Durham’s Program Department, union members “committed ourselves to [raising] $20,000,” UPWA district president Addie Wyatt recalled. “They divided that [amount] up between the districts so that each one of our [nine] districts had responsibility to raise funds and send it into the international union.” According to Wyatt, her district led the way by raising about $12,000 for the boycott.

For almost one year, Montgomery’s Black residents stayed away from and nearly bankrupted the city’s bus system. Finally, on November 13, 1956, victory reigned. The United States Supreme Court declared Alabama’s law mandating segregated buses unconstitutional.

I hope that you enjoyed this excerpt from Word Warrior and this brief tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Durham’s legacy.

This Women’s History Month, I’d like to celebrate the life and ingenuity of jazz singer/songwriter Betty Carter.

A musical force of nature, Carter was an inventive musician and bandleader. She also mentored generations of younger musicians.

Born Lillie Mae Jones in 1929, Carter grew up in Detroit. Early in her career she was influenced by and performed with saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, eventually touring with the band of vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Because of her ability to improvise and scat sing, Hampton called her Betty “BeBop” – a nickname that stuck.

Carter went onto to perform with Ray Charles before charting her own course by leading her own bands and launching a successful record label.

Betty Carter was one fearless – inspired and talented – musician/business woman!

Before her death in 1998, she would inspire a host of band members including pianists Mulgrew Miller and Cyrus Chestnut, bassists Curtis Lundy and Buster Williams and drummers Lewis Nash and Jack DeJohnette.  And Carter influenced the careers of many other aspiring young jazz musicians.

So click here to hear my piece about Betty Carter’s incredible musical journey. This documentary was an episode in NPR’s Jazz Profiles series, an award winning weekly program hosted by another phenomenal singer, Nancy Wilson.

On Tuesday, February 21st, noted author/poet E. Ethelbert Miller interviewed me on his TV show The Scholars.  Our wide ranging discussion examined the history of the Black press and Black radio, the significance of writer Richard Durham and the impact of legendary figures like boxing champion Muhammad Ali, novelist Toni Morrison and Chicago mayor Harold Washington.

Click below to see this Black History Month show and enjoy!