Group items tagged

Carnegie and Bertram never insisted on desegregated libraries or that communities accept and maintain separate branches for blacks, but they did attempt to make communities clearly set their own policies, so they could act accordingly"(Carnegie 36).  "Carnegie and Betram tried to compute grant amounts according to the number of people permitted to use them"(Carnegie 32).  This created a complication in southern communities where libraries were segregated.  If the number of likely library users included blacks in the community, Carnegie wanted the assurance that blacks would be allowed to use the library.

At the ALA midwinter meeting of 1961 an amendment was made to the library bill of rights.  "The right of an individual to the use of a library should not be denied or abridged because of his race, religion national origins, or political views."  Although the ALA officially supported integration, many felt the ALA was too complicit in library segregation. 

Public libraries were sometimes battleground sites in the civil rights movement.

Wade was the first African-American to attend a white public school in Fayette County when she took a summer school class at Lafayette High School in 1955.

Dr. Jamye Coleman William’s teaching career spans almost fifty years, the last fourteen of which she served as the head of the Department of Communication at Tennessee State University. In 1984, she assumed the editorship of the AME Church Review, the oldest black journal in America, becoming the first woman to be elected as a major officer in the 197-year history of the AME Church.

Williams’ co-edited the 1970 publication, The Negro Speaks: The Rhetoric of Contemporary Black Leaders.

VIDEO CLIPS

The reason given for the repeal is the large number African American women voting in a block in the 1901 Lexington school board elections.

The Kentucky General Assembly passes the Kentucky Civil Rights Act and Governor Edward T. Breahitt signs it into law on January 27, 1966. The Act prohibits discrimination in employment and public accommodations based on race, national origin, color, and religion. Kentucky becomes the first state in the South pass a civil rights law. It becomes the first in the south to establish enforcement powers over civil rights violations on a state level. The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights becomes the state enforcement authority of the Act.    The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights publishes "Negro Employment in Kentucky State Agencies" in February 1966, tracking for the first time African American employment statistics of the state government workforce. On August 26, 1966, the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights opens an office in Louisville, Ky., to “increase field service activities in the western half of the state, where some 70 percent of Kentucky’s Negroes live,” say state officials.

Since its founding in 1905 by Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Clarence Darrow, Norman Thomas and other well known writers and civic leaders, the League for Industrial Democracy has been an outstanding American educational organization dedicated to increasing democracy in our economic, political, and cultural life. To this end League members are devoted to the struggle for full racial equality, the abolition of poverty, the strengthening of trade unions and cooperatives, the expansion of civil liberties, the extension of public ownership and democratic economic planning, and the realignment of our political organizations with a view toward making them more responsive to the will of the people.

[1964-01-12][NEWSPAPERS. HERALD-LEADER.] [Herald-Leader. p. 9 col. 1-7]717629 "Colored Notes and Obituaries"Readers of the "Colored Notes" columns of The Lexington Herald, The Lexington Leader and Sunday Herald-Leader have voted in a readership poll for continued publication of the feature in the Lexington newspapers. … A letter distributed to readers at the time of the ballot stated that CORE and some all-white reform groups had applied considerable pressure in an effort to remove the Colored Notes from the Lexington newspapers.

e all-white reform group

me all-white reform groups

The second wave of feminism <script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371336/0/170/ADTECH;target=_blank;grp=550;key=false;kvqsegs=D:T:2886:1362:1359:1357:1346:1341;kvtopicid=724633;kvchannel=HISTORY;misc=1291082559495"></script> The women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the so-called “second wave” of feminism, represented a seemingly abrupt break with the tranquil suburban life pictured in American popular culture. Yet the roots of the new rebellion were buried in the frustrations of college-educated mothers whose discontent impelled their daughters in a new direction. If first-wave feminists were inspired by the abolition movement, their great-granddaughters were swept into feminism by the civil rights movement, the attendant discussion of principles such as equality and justice, and the revolutionary ferment caused by protests against the Vietnam War. Women’s concerns were on Pres. John F. Kennedy’s agenda even before this public discussion began. In 1961 he created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388674/0/170/ADTECH;target=_blank;grp=550;key=false;kvqsegs=D:T:2886:1362:1359:1357:1346:1341;kvtopicid=724633;kvchannel=HISTORY;misc=1291082559533"></script> appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to lead it. Its report, issued in 1963, firmly supported the nuclear family and preparing women for motherhood. But it also documented a national pattern of employment discrimination, unequal pay, legal inequality, and meagre support services for working women that needed to be corrected through legislative guarantees of equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and expanded child-care services. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 offered the first guarantee, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to bar employers from discriminating on the basis of sex. Some deemed these measures insufficient in a country where classified advertisements still segregated job openings by sex, where state laws restricted women’s access to contraception, and where incidences of rape and domestic violence remained undisclosed. In the late 1960s, then, the notion of a women’s rights movement took root at the same time as the civil rights movement, and women of all ages and circumstances were swept up in debates about gender, discrimination, and the nature of equality.