All tagged social movements
The pace of the civil rights movement accelerated with the return of World War II soldiers like Medger Evers who fought in France and earned the rank of sergeant during the war. He returned to his home state of Mississippi where he went on to become Mississippi’s first NAACP field secretary setting up his office in Jackson over the top of the Big Apple Inn restaurant. Still open today, Juan “Big John” Mora (1890-1976) opened it back in 1939. Evers did not have adequate office space to hold meetings, and he would often hold them down stairs in Big John's where he would discuss civil rights organizing and protest strategies. When customers came in they liked what they
The New Negro Alliance in Washington, D.C. had the largest and most successful direct action movement of the 1920s through the 1940s.
In 1961, Albany Georgia Police Chief Laurie Pritchett restrained his forces from using violence on civil rights protesters. Instead he ordered their wholesale arrest of and incarceration in separate holding places in neighboring hamlets thus keeping his jails from getting overcrowded. Pritchett held Abernathy, MLK, and other leaders of the movement in Albany proper in horrid conditions including withholding food.
Starting in the 1920s, The New Negro Alliance’s ( NNA) movement focused on ending racist hiring and promoting nondiscriminatory practices in the food industry in the nation’s capital. William H. Hastie, who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College before earning a Harvard law degree, serve as one of the organization’s attorneys.
Operation Breadbasket started as an initiative of the SCLC in 1962
