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Alexandra Elchert's List: Martin Luther King Jr.

  • Jan 14, 10

    www1.cuny.edu/...jim_crow.html

    • n addition to disfranchisement, African Americans were also subject to racist   laws, known as Jim   Crow legislation, which spread throughout the South in the late 1890s.   Jim Crow racially segregated all public facilities, including bathrooms, hospitals,   schools, and streetcars.

  • Jan 15, 10

    www.nytimes.com/...efing-on-blacks-in-office.html

    • The number of blacks elected to office in the United States rose from 6,056 to 6,424 in 1985, or a little more than 6 percent, but that figure is less than a cause for rejoicing at the Joint Center for Political Studies, the research group that compiled it. The center says blacks now constitute 11 percent of the country's population of voting age but still hold less than 1.5 percent of its elective offices.

      In addition, the current rate of increase is only about one-third of what it was from 1970, when the center began keeping statistics, to 1976. ''Further growth in the number of black elective officials is needed,'' said Eddie N. Williams, the center president, ''and will depend on the ability of black candidates to appeal to nonblack electorates.''

  • Jan 18, 10

    www.fsmitha.com/ch28.htm

    • An advance in integration -- the first step in integrating major league baseball   - had come in 1947 when Jackie Robinson began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers.   More integration came when President Truman desegregated the military, Korea   being the first war that Americans fought with integrated units. And in 1954   black men were receiving commissions as officers.
    • In the Fifties, blacks were rising in the world of popular entertainment.   Count Basie and Nat King Cole were popular. In the mid-fifties Harry Belafonte   became a popular singer. Fats Domino was putting songs in the top 40. Little   Richard began singing for young white audiences. So too did Big Mama Thorton,   with her lively song "Hound Dog." In 1957 Chuck Berry was playing music that   appealed to young whites. In the fifties, Diana Ross and the Supremes were on   top in music. Eartha Kitt was popular. And Sidney Poitier was a rising movie   star. Stars like Nat King Cole and their families experienced bigotry in their   white Hollywood, California neighborhood. And regarding the new popularity of   rock and roll, a few older whites were upset with Elvis Presley because he was   helping to make popular what they called "nigger music." Nevertheless, a shift   in attitude by whites toward black people was taking place. Meanwhile, battles   over civil rights for blacks had begun.

  • Jan 24, 10

    www.core-online.org/...voting_rights.htm

    • In Mississippi, for instance, only five percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote in 1960.

       

        

    • The law's effects were wide and powerful. By 1968, nearly 60 percent of eligible African Americans were registered to vote in Mississippi, and other southern states showed similar improvement. Between 1965 and 1990, the number of black state legislators and members of Congress rose from two to 160. 

       

       

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