The NorthStar’s Week in Black History

September 13 through September 19

September 13

1885 ----- Alain Locke, African-American educator, philosopher and patron of the arts, was born on this date in Philadelphia. A Harvard graduate, Locke was the first black person to be distinguished as a Rhodes Scholar. He was also the acknowledged force behind the Harlem Renaissance.

Educated at Harvard, Oxford and the University of Berlin, Locke returned to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1918. Though he had previously taught English at the university level before earning his doctorate, Locke was invited to join the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D. C., as a philosophy professor. He chaired Howard's philosophy department until his retirement in 1953.

Apart from teaching, Locke promoted African and African-American artists and collected their work. He studied and taught others African and African-American history and was passionate about blacks embracing and celebrating their history and heritage.

A frequent contributor to the National Urban League’s journal, Locke also established the Associates in Negro Folk Education, an organization that published scholarly works on African-American subjects.

Following his retirement from Howard, Locke devoted his time to a writing project he had long hoped to achieve. He outlined a volume devoted to the subject of African-American cultural identity, but he died in 1954 before he could begin writing the planned book. He was 68.

Alain Locke is listed as the 36th of the most influential African Americans on his list The Black 100, created by educator Columbus Salley, whose book has the same title. Black history scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Locke on his list, 100 Greatest African Americans.


September 14

1874 ----- The Battle of Liberty Place occurred in New Orleans on this date. Members of the Democratic-Conservative White League, a white supremacist group, attacked the Republican Metropolitan Police, a racially integrated force, in the city’s streets in order to gain control of New Orleans and end Reconstruction in Louisiana.

The White League was a vigilante group, dedicated to the “white man’s government” and to the “suppression of the insolent and barbarous African.” The White League was opposed by the Metropolitan Police and black militia groups---perhaps 3,600 men in all---under the command of ex-Confederate General James Longstreet. Longstreet was in fact leading black troops against many of his former soldiers in the Confederacy.

The White League barricaded the streets of New Orleans, overpowered the Republican Metropolitans and forced Louisiana Governor William Pitt Kellogg from office.

Three days after the outbreak of violence in New Orleans, President Ulysses S. Grant intervened and deployed federal troops to the city. Order was restored swiftly and Governor Kellogg was reinstated. The White League, however, was never confronted. In the absence of their actions being restrained, the White League was more or less free to act in ways they wished; they attracted more men to their fold, and the group grew in strength and influence.

While the White League did not achieve the desired regime change in Louisiana, their actions ignited a power shift in Louisiana politics. The Metropolitan Police lost credibility and power and black state militia groups were eventually decimated.

As politicians negotiated the Compromise of 1877, the White League took over New Orleans, thereby ending Reconstruction in Louisiana and assuring the election of Francis T. Nicholls to the governorship in 1878. The White League became the official state militia.

A monument to the Battle of Liberty Place was erected in New Orleans in 1891. A new plaque was added to it in 1932. The monument was always controversial and became increasingly so during the civil rights movement when activists criticized its glorification of white segregationists. The monument was eventually moved to a less central and less visible location in the city. Though it yet stands, the monument is vandalized frequently.


September 15

1935 ----- William “Bill” Pinkney, the first African American and the fourth person in the world to circumnavigate the globe, sailing solo, was born in Chicago on this date.

A hospital corpsman in the Navy from 1956 to 1960, Pinkney relocated to Puerto Rico following his discharge from service. He held a variety of jobs, including professional limbo dancer, sailboat crewman, make-up artist and, eventually, an employee of Johnson and Johnson and the City of Chicago. He was also a motivational speaker.

At 50, Pinkney, feeling he had never created a legacy of which his children and grandchildren could be proud, decided to sail solo around the world. Industrialist Armand Hammer and a prestigious Boston law firm backed Pinkney’s voyage.

On August 5, 1990, Pinkney, then 55, sailed from Boston Harbor in a 47-foot boat he had named The Commitment. The boat was outfitted so that it could be operated by one sailor. During the voyage, Pinkney made four stops---Bermuda, Brazil, South Africa and Tasmania. The voyage took 22 months and covered at total of 27,000 miles.

In 1999, Pinkney completed another solo voyage, replicating backwards the route of the “Middle Passage,” the route of 18th and 19th century slave ships. He sailed from Puerto Rico to Brazil to Ghana and finally to Senegal. This second voyage covered 12,000 miles and took six months to complete.

In 2000, Bill Pinkney accepted the position of first captain on the Freedom Schooner Amistad, a vessel named for the La Amistad, the Spanish schooner captured in 1839 that carried Mende African tribesmen to Cuba to work on plantations there. The Mende tribesmen revolted, overthrew their captors, gained control of the ship and attempted to force the crew to return them to Africa. La Amistad was captured by a U. S. naval brig and escorted to New London Harbor, Conn., instead. The slaves aboard were defended by John Quincy Adams in a court trial that ensued. The Mende tribesmen were freed by decision of the United States Supreme Court and returned to Sierre Leone.

Pinkney retired in 2003 and lives in Chicago.


September 16

1940 ----- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 on this date. The act created the country’s first peacetime draft and formally established the Selective Service System as an independent federal agency. The act held significance for African Americans because it included an anti-discrimination clause.

The anti-discrimination clause did not, however, reduce discrimination in any meaningful way for African Americans in the service. Ranking military officers refused to expand existing black military units, and white draft boards routinely discriminated against blacks.

Incidence of black resistance to the draft occurred in Chicago and in other major American cities. As many as 400 black men refused to serve in the military, viewing war as a white man’s conflict, one with which they could not identify authentically. Many black men also expressed the view that they could not join in a war to support a country that did not support their civil rights, that denied them fair assignments in the military itself and that generally did not recognize or value African Americans’ contributions to military efforts at any level.


September 17

1932 ---- Joseph W. Hatchett, the first African-American Supreme Court Associate Justice to sit on the bench in a southern state, was born on this day in Clearwater, Fla.

A Howard University Law School graduate and an attorney for the N AACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Hatchett was appointed to the Florida Supreme Court in 1975 by Florida Gov. Ruben Askew. Voters re-elected him to the court in 1976, making him the first African American to win a statewide office. He resigned four years later after being appointed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The 5th circuit split into the 5th and 11th circuits and Hatchett joined the 11th circuit where he served as chief judge from 1996 to 1999.


September 18

1895 ---- Booker T. Washington, president and founder of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, later Tuskegee University, announced the Atlanta Compromise on this day during a speech at the Atlanta Exposition.

During a year when lynching by whites would claim the lives of 113 black men and black women, Washington's speech accepted segregation in return for economic advancement, according to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Washington's statement angered black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Dubois. They feared Washington's statement would doom blacks to indefinite subservience to whites. Their concerns lead to the Niagara Movement and to the founding in 1909 of the NAACP.

Not everyone disagreed with Washington. A.G. Gaston, Birmingham, Ala., businessman, who became a millionaire, considered Washington his hero, according to the 2003 book, Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and The Making of a Black Millionaire. Gaston spent $160,000 of his own money to bail Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., out of a Birmingham jail.


September 19

1881 ---- Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, later renamed Tuskegee Institute and Tuskegee University, was founded on this day in Tuskegee, Ala., by Booker T. Washington and others.

Washington founded the university in a one-room schoolhouse to stress practical education. Washington, however, did not ignore the liberal arts. The private university has been designated a National Historic Landmark and boasts a student body of 3,000 and an endowment of more than $76 million.

The NorthStar's Week in Black History is compiled and written by Frederick H. Lowe and Susan M. Miller.