With each July comes the beginning of the second half of the year. Though summer is just really getting rolling for young people still in school, July for many means the new school year is just a month or so away.
But July also brings something else—something that far too many U.S. schools leave out: Black history.
July, like every month, offers important moments of Black power, Black brilliance, Black resistance and Black love that span across generations.
Listed below are just a few of those July moments worth our remembrance, research and/or celebration.
July 1, 1917: The East St. Louis, Illinois “Race riot” happened on this day. Mislabeled a “race riot,” the occurrence was actually an act of white domestic terrorism aimed at Black residents and business owners. The unwarranted and unprovoked attack is estimated to have resulted in the torture and murder of at least 200 (though probably more) Black people. Martial law was declared. A congressional investigating committee said, “It is not possible to give accurately the number of dead. At least 39 Negroes and eight white people were killed outright, and hundreds of Negroes were wounded and maimed. ‘The bodies of the dead Negroes,’ testified an eye witness, ‘were thrown into a morgue like so many dead hogs.’ There were 312 buildings and 44 railroad freight cars and their contents destroyed by fire.”
July 4, 1881: On this day, the first classes were conducted on the campus of Tuskegee Institute (today known as Tuskegee University). Founded by the legendary and controversial race leader Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee was the living, breathing embodiment of self-reliance and self-determination. Tuskegee’s students and professors literally made the bricks used for the school’s buildings. Professors from Tuskegee went all across the south during one of the nation’s most devastating droughts, teaching farmers how to grow alternative crops in order to maintain their income and continue to feed their families in those hard times. And that’s just one of many ways Tuskegee, over the years, has served more than merely the Black students who matriculated there; the school served Black people… including my oldest child (daughter), who graduated from TU—YOU KNOW!
July 4, 1910: The first Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson (born in Galveston, TX), successfully defended his heavyweight championship by knocking out Jim “The Great White Hope” Jeffries, who had come out of retirement “to win back the title for the White race.” Jeffries got his butt whupped so bad by Johnson that the police ordered the crew recording the fight to stop, jumped in the ring and ended the fight. White domestic terrorist attacks broke out across the country, with white mobs attacking and killing Blacks indiscriminately; angry because the “Great White Hope” caught that “Great Black Butt-whuppin’.”
July 5, 1852: Frederick Douglass gave a speech that is now known as the “What to the Slave Is The 4th Of July” speech. Douglass was asked to give that speech before the good people of Rochester, New York, his hometown. Though attendees expected Douglass to extol America’s great achievements, he instead focused on America’s ongoing sin—the enslavement of Douglass’s people.
July 6, 1971: By now, you know Blackfolk invented “50-leven-million” things (things we use every day) most people had no idea were birthed from the brilliance of Black minds. One of those things was, at least in part, the cell phone. Though Sampson himself says he did not invent the cell phone, there would be no cell phone without the technology he pioneered that is now used in cell phones.
July 20-23, 1967: Actively subverting the notion that “Black people can’t work together,” more than one thousand people from 286 organizations and institutions from across the country participated in the first Black Power Conference in Newark, New Jersey. The conference took place on the heels of the Newark riots (July 12-17). The conference focused on political, economic and cultural empowerment, as well as self-determination and community control, according to the Zinn Education Project. The conference featured workshops, presentations and the development of resolutions, including a Black Power Manifesto that called for the end of “Neo-colonialist control” and the circulation of a “Philosophy of Blackness”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VE0-ynbg4A July 23, 1962: Baseball great Jackie Robinson was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. Robinson is most known for breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball. But Robinson was also an all-star, four-sport athlete in college at UCLA (basketball, football, baseball and track). Amazingly, even though Robinson became an MLB Hall of Famer, many sports historians contend that his best sport was football. Moreover, here’s another nugget of July Black history. Robinson had been court-martialed in July 1944 for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus, but was acquitted. He received his honorable discharge that November. And in his 1972 biography, long before Colin Kaepernick, Robinson declared, due to his disillusionment with the lack of racial progress in the US: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.”
