Tag Archives: the new york age

Standing on the shoulders of Black Legends

15 Feb

On Saturday, Feb. 17, I will be among several individuals inducted into the 2024 Class of the Black Legends of Silicon Valley. This is quite an honor. Previous recipients in the News and Documentary category in which I am being honored include journalists with stellar credentials. Loretta Green, an award-winning reporter for several local papers and a former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, has been a mentor and role model, not only for her work as a journalist but as someone who is well regarded for her community service. David Early, another seasoned award-winning editor and writer whom I also have looked up to since I arrived in the Bay Area, is a previous Legend. Henrietta Burroughs, executive director of the East Palo Alto Center for Community Media, is 2018 winner of this award and someone I deeply admire for her commitment to the East Palo Alto and Belle Haven communities.

The award recognizes my work as a journalist and communications professional including Essence magazine, where I wrote and edited articles on a variety of subjects, including careers, relationships and travel. At the Boston Globe, my editorials effected policy changes in city and state education reform, child welfare, domestic violence and community development. I also wrote editorials, op-ed articles and features on Haiti and South Africa.

This recognition also honors my community service. In addition to my work at Stanford and in journalism, my significant contributions in Silicon Valley have been in the nonprofit and educational advocacy space. I currently serve as vice president of the board of the Pear Theatre, a performance theater based in Mountain View, Calif. The Pear strives to amplify diverse voices through the performing arts. I served for several years as a board member and board president of Foundation for a College Education, an organization based in East Palo Alto, Calif. that is committed to college access and success. In 2005,  I co-founded the Parent Network for Students of Color, an advocacy group for students attending the Palo Alto Unified School District. That organization has evolved into Parent Advocates for Student Success. I was a founding board member of the Girls’ Middle School, when it was established in 1998, with a core vision  of recruiting and retaining high-achieving girls from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.

We live in an age in which journalists are verbally denigrated as purveyors of “fake news,” and politicians insult our intelligence with “alternative facts.” Journalists across the world are physically assaulted and even killed simply for trying to do their jobs.

Our democracy requires a free press to ensure that our political leaders and public institutions act in our interests and to make sure our tax dollars are used to support, protect and uplift all of us and particularly those most in need. We need well-resourced media organizations to make sure that corporate interests do not harm or exploit us in the name of profit.

At Saturday’s ceremony I will accept the award on behalf of my father, Ebenezer Ray, a journalist for Harlem’s New York Age and the Pittsburgh Courier, whose commitment to truth telling is in my blood.

In the photo above, I’m the one in the middle.

The Black Legends of Silicon Valley awards ceremony takes place Saturday, Feb. 17 at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, Calif. Visit the website for information.

Here is a list of all of the 2024 inductees and a bit more information about the award vision behind the effort:

The Alexander-Green News & Documentary Award recipient is Elaine Carolyn Ray. This honor is awarded to journalists, historians, photojournalists, documentarians, editors and community people who record local black community history & events, as well as significant world events that have enhanced the quality of life in the Black Community and the broader community.  

The Banks-Gage Education Award recipients are Brenda J. Smith-Ray and Dr. Harriett B. Arnold, (Ed.D). This honor is awarded to individuals who had outstanding careers as teachers, administrators, and policymakers, who had a significant impact on the quality of educational services for the community, and who enhanced the lives of people in the Black community.

The Clay-Williams Business & Entrepreneur Award recipient is Reginald Swilley. This honor is awarded to those business owners and entrepreneurs who created successful businesses or services in the community and used their success to enhance people’s lives in the Black community.

The Dean-Greene S.T.E.M Award recipient is Donald G. James. This honor is awarded to individuals who helped produce, enhance, and improve today’s social network and were instrumental in landmark changes in S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) to enhance and improve the general public’s lives and those in the Black community.

The English-Higgins Health & Medicine Award recipient is Dr. Carol A. Somersille, (M.D.) This honor is awarded to those doctors, nurses, and health practitioners who provided healthcare to people in the broader community and enhanced the lives of people in the Black community.

The Joyner-Stroughter Community Service Award recipients are Angela Warren and Robert Hoover. This honor is awarded to businesspeople and volunteers who created and/or volunteered for non-profit agencies that provide essential services to enhance the quality of life for people in the Black community.

The Piper-Whye Art/Theater/Music Award recipient is Ron E. Beck. This honor is awarded to individuals who have distinguished themselves and have had outstanding careers in art, theater, television, or movies in the broader community and have used their influence to enhance people’s lives in the Black community.

Community Organization Award recipients are Santa Clara County Black Lawyers Association and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. San Jose Alumnae Chapter. This honor is awarded to Black organizations that have served and enhanced the lives of people in the Black community and Silicon Valley.

Black Legend Awards Silicon Valley also celebrates the publication of Legacy: The History and Stories of African Ancestry & African Americans in Silicon Valley. More than a history book, it is the must-have missing piece of the puzzle that firmly reinserts African Ancestry and African Americans back into the halls of history. Legacy is available in Hardcover and Paperback and can be purchased on site at the Hammer Theatre before the event begins. It can also be purchased online at Barnes & Noble, Amazon and various bookstores. For bulk purchase for schools and other organizations, please contact Black Legend Awards Silicon Valley at 408.320.2111 or info@blacklegendawards.org. The books are available for individual purchase online or at bookstores.

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It happens here, and now

20 Jun

In this photo taken June 19, 2015, photos of the victims of the shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., are held during a vigil at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington. The black church has long been the cornerstone and sanctuary for African American life. It has also long been a target for racists and white supremacists trying to strike blows against the African American psyche. The latest attack came Wednesday in Charleston, South Carolina, when 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof joined a prayer meeting inside historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and shot nine people dead, including the pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, and other ministers. (AP Photo/Glynn A. Hill)

In this photo taken June 19, 2015, photos of the victims of the shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., are held during a vigil at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington. (AP Photo/Glynn A. Hill)

From his columns, I know my father as someone who believed America thought too much of itself when it came to racial justice.

He often used his writing to remind readers that while the United States was promoting itself around the world as the land of the free, it had a lot to answer for at home. He chastised white American leaders who responded vocally to the scourge of Nazism, but were mum on “the many injustices to which Negroes of America have been subjected during the past many years.”

“Truly, the oppression of Negroes in America is of a more subtle nature than the present ruthless persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime,” he wrote, but “there are individual cases which compare remarkably well with the deeds perpetrated by proponents of the brown shirt and swastika.”

dottings_1_7_1939

The New York Age, January 7, 1939

Much of that column, published in the New York Age on January 7, 1939, was devoted to an incident a few weeks prior involving a wealthy black Chicago businesswoman  — Noblesse Boyd  — who was racially profiled, jailed and charged with vagrancy in Indianapolis for the crime of wearing an expensive coat.

But that weekly offering also referenced lynchings, including one notorious case in which several members of a family — the Lowmans — were brutally murdered by a mob in Aiken, South Carolina, in 1926.

“It Happens Here!” was the title of that column.

And it happens still. It happened in America on June 17, 2015, when nine black women and men were gunned down during bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist who allegedly spewed racial epithets along with his bullets.

The dead are Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Rev. Daniel Simmons, Sr., 74; Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45, and Myra Thompson, 59.

I refuse to utter this terrorist’s name or publish his photograph, as it will just give him another platform for his hatred. But photos show him wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia. His neo-Nazi and Klan inspired diatribes appear to be well documented. His terror indeed compares, as my father said, “remarkably well with the deeds perpetrated by proponents of the brown shirt and swastika.”

“It happens here,” Ebenezer Ray reminded his readers in 1939. As we approach Father’s Day 2015, I am forced to say, “Daddy, you were, and still are right.”

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Happy Birthday, Ebenezer

24 May

My father would be 117 years old today. Eighty years ago his birthday wish was for a typewriter with the same configuration of keys as a Linotype machine.  I wonder what he would think of our writing implements and communications platforms today.  A dear friend recently gave me a bracelet made of typewriter keys. I’m wearing in honor of my Daddy’s birthday today.

 

Bracelet courtesy of Brenda Starr
Royal typewriter, circa 1934
Linotype Keyboard

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More than a dream: The March on Washington was a movement decades in the making

21 Aug

Note: I posted this item two years ago. As I head to D.C. for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I think it is even more relevant.

Today, Aug. 28, marks the 48th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But the seeds for that march were planted two decades before Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech.

A. Philip Randolph

A. Philip Randolph, best known as the founder and head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, conceived a mass march on Washington in the early 1940s to rally the national black community to fight employment discrimination, particularly in the defense industry.

“The movement grew out of the plight of the urban Negro worker on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, black unemployment having reached 25 percent in 1940,” Benjamin Quarles wrote in his essay “Labor Leader at Large” (Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, 1982). The long-existent discriminatory practices in hiring, in on-the-job training and in upgrading were more aggravating than ever to the Negro workers as they noted their country’s eagerness to contrast the American creed of liberty and equality with the suppressions that characterized the Fascist nations, Hitler’s Germany in particular. And although American industry was increasing its production to meet the needs of the national defense program, blacks were being turned away at the defense plant gates.”

In the fall of 1940, Randolph and representatives of the NAACP and the Urban League met with President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House, but the meeting netted little in the way of opening those defense plant doors. So Randolph and other black leaders formed a March on Washington Committee and scheduled a march for July 1, 1941.

In a column published on the front page of the June 14, 1941 issue of The New York Age, Randolph wrote:

“As the day approaches for the all out, total dramatic march on Washington and demonstration at the Monument of Abraham Lincoln for jobs and justice in national defense and the abolition of discrimination in Government departments, interest, sentiment and enthusiasm for this movement continues to mount daily. The task to mobilize Negroes throughout the nation for such and occasion is tremendous and herculean, but this is why it will be effective, powerful and unmistakable evidence of the Negroes’ determination to put a stop to discrimination against him on jobs provided by the money of the taxpayers in our country.

. . . “I appeal to the conscience, spirit and heart of Negro America, including men, women, youth, workers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, social service workers, office workers, railroad toilers, farmers, housewives, Negroes from every village town and hamlet; Negroes who are employed and unemployed; those in school, church, fraternal lodge, fraternity and sorority throughout the length and breadth of America to rally behind the march on Washington. More than any other single demonstration, this march on Washington is certain to make white America know that black America is here and has made up its mind that they shall leave no stone unturned in attempting to make democracy and liberty in our country real and true.”

Just the thought of tens of thousands of black folks demonstrating at the Lincoln Memorial gave Roosevelt pause. According to Quarles, he attempted to use several political weapons in his arsenal to get Randolph to call the march off. He described the plan as “bad and unintelligent” and enlisted the assistance of the First Lady, Eleanor, and New York Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia  —  both of whom were popular among blacks —  to persuade the leaders to stand down. But Randolph wasn’t going away that easily.

Plans for the march continued until just a week before the scheduled march Roosevelt blinked, signing into law Executive Order 8802, which  barred discrimination “based on race, creed, color or national origin”  in the defense industry and in government. The president also formed the Committee on Fair Employment Practices.

Only then was the march cancelled.  But Randolph still did not let down his guard. He declined an invitation to serve on Roosevelt’s fair employment practices committee and instead kept the March on Washington Movement alive to keep a watchful eye on the government’s  progress.

Sixteen years later, in 1957, at the request of  Martin Luther King,  Randolph was one of the sponsors at a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, to bring attention to lingering civil rights issues. According to Quarles, Randolph gave a stirring address to a crowd of more than 20,000 gathered on the Lincoln   Memorial on May 17 of that year. Then in 1963 it was Randolph who proposed and led the March on Washington (which was skillfully organized by Bayard Rustin) at which King delivered his “Dream” speech.

A threatened hurricane forced the postponement of  the dedication of a new Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, which was to take place today in Washington. I trust the monument will withstand whatever Hurricane Irene has in store. My bigger hope is that the spirit of the movement for jobs and justice continues to gain strength.

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Dottings on a presidential reelection: Hate me if you dare

11 Nov

I’m re-posting an entry I originally published in February of 2011, which seems like ages ago. Last Tuesday, We The People overcame voter suppression campaigns, lies, bungled debates and obscene amounts of campaign spending to reelect President Barack Obama and to put down efforts to make him a one-term president. Now that the Florida vote has been counted, I thought I would add this year’s final electoral map.

The New New Deal, 2008, Photo illustration by Arthur Hochstein and Lon Tweeten. ( F.D.R. photo by Associated Press. Obama photo by John Gress, Reuters.)

“Never before have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said of Republicans during his reelection campaign in 1936.
Sound familiar? I wish.
Perhaps President Obama will take a page from FDR as he gears up for the 2012 campaign.
After all, these fightin’ words turned out to be winning words for FDR.
In honor of Presidents’ Day, I offer a column published by my father, Ebenezer Ray, on Nov. 14, 1936, shortly after the shellacking Roosevelt doled out to his opponent, Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas,  in 1936. Prior to the election, my father had written columns endorsing Roosevelt. But his support was not a given.  His employer, The New York Age, was a traditional supporter of the Republican Party.  The paper opposed the Democratic Party nationally because of its tolerance  of southern segregation.

FDR’s 1936 landslide.    Credit: 270toWin

Referring to himself in typical self-deprecating fashion, Ebenezer wrote: “This newcomer and political dunce failed to be convinced (1) that President Roosevelt was not the fit and proper person to guide the destiny of this country for the next four years and (2) that the Republican candidate was the better man.
. . . With his avalanche of votes in favor of the New Deal went the Negro vote, local and national, despite the fact that President Roosevelt represents the Party which disenfranchises the Negro in the South. Wherefore the Negro vote?
According to the man in the street, in the barbershop, in the restaurant and other proletariat among whom this writer moves, prosperity is the paramount issue. Up to 1929, they contend there was discrimination in the South, but we also had prosperity. Since 1929, and especially during the last Republican regime, there was still discrimination in the South but NO prosperity. In President Roosevelt is seen the capability of bringing prosperity from around  that elusive corner, made popular by Mr. Hoover.”
To illustrate his community’s support of the New Deal, Ebenezer described the changing atmosphere in the bank at the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Ave.
“In these premises, until president Roosevelt’s bank holiday, was situated the unlamented Chelsea Bank.  During its declining months one could easily race a bull about the premises without harming a depositor.  Nowadays, occupied by the Dunbar National Bank, during business hours the premises resemble a market rather than a bank. Of great concern to the poor man is the knowledge that whatever part of his earnings he is privileged to save is SAFE.
The great majority has reelected Roosevelt. ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God,'” Ebenezer concluded.
Robert Reich, former secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration, who is now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote a column before the midterm election last fall, titled “Why Obama should learn the lesson of 1936, not 1996,” In it, Reich said: “The relevant political lesson isn’t Bill Clinton in 1996, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.”

Library of Congress

Reich continued:”By the election of 1936 the Great Depression was entering its eighth year. Roosevelt had already been president for four of them. Yet he won the biggest electoral victory since the start of the two-party system in the 1850s.” Reich wrote that while the key to Clinton’s victory was a booming economy, the key to Roosevelt’s was setting himself apart from the greed of the Republicans and their financiers and standing up for and with everyday people.

Back to Ebenezer’s column: At the end he offers a brief review of the theater adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, about a Hitler type character who attempts to dominate the United States:
“The capacity crowd which attended the Adelphi Theatre on West 54th Street Thursday evening last . . . is better testimony to the entertainment value of It Can’t Happen Here than any reviewer can write. For, after all, ‘It is the guest who is the judge of the meat,'” Ebenezer wrote.

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