1940: The Second Great Migration, the Tuskegee Airmen, White Allies & Influential Black Americans
Also alcoholism, child abuse and prostitution
The Second Great Migration consisted of more than 5 million Black Americans from the Northeast, Midwest and West.
It lasts until 1970 and is much larger and of a different character than the first Great Migration (1916–1940), where the migrants were mainly rural farmers from the South and only came to the Northeast and Midwest.
In the Second Great Migration, not only did the Northeast and Midwest continue to be the destination of more than 5 million Black Americans, but also the West that offered skilled jobs in the defense industry.
Most of these migrants were already urban laborers who came from the cities of the South.
The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black American military aviators in the United States Armed Forces
July 3, 1940: R&B and soul singer-songwriter best known for her number-one R&B hit “Rescue Me” in 1965, Fontella Bass, born (click on link to listen to music)
July 21, 1940: Activist and politician, Colia Clark, born.
Clark was a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power movement, and Pan-African movement.
She was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and played a key role establishing equal voting rights in Selma, Alabama.
She was also an organizer with the Birmingham campaign, as well as throughout Mississippi.
Her work included activism in the fields of women's rights and workers' rights, as well as activism and advocacy for homeless people and youth.
July 21, 1940: Politician and retired educator serving as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina, Jim Clyburn, born
July 29, 1940: Chemist, Betty Harris, born.
She is known for her work on the chemistry of explosives completed at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
July 29, 1940: Leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Bernard Lafayette, born.
He played a leading role in early organizing of the Selma Voting Rights Movement; was a member of the Nashville Student Movement; and worked closely throughout the 1960s movements with groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the American Friends Service Committee.
Lafayette was honored as a Doctor of Humane Letters from Mount Holyoke College [down the road from Amherst, Massachusetts where I grew up], in May 2012.
August 1, 1940: Law professor and judge, Franklin Cleckley, born.
Cleckley was the first Black American to serve as a justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
August 3, 1940: Biologist and former professor, Robert K. Trench, born.
In 1972, Trench moved to Yale University as an Assistant Professor.
[where my grandfather graduated from in 1947. I will share photos of those years for paying subscribers]
August 31, 1940: For the next year, the Texas legislature allocates almost five times the amount of money ($119,668) for maintenance and equipment at the University of Texas than it did for “Negro tuition scholarships” ($25,000)
September 1, 1940: Attorney, politician, public servant, and writer, John Patterson Green, dies.
In 1891, he was elected as the first Black American state senator in Ohio.
Green introduced the legislation that established Labor Day in Ohio as a state holiday.
September 1, 1940: Nurse, humanitarian, author and white woman ally, Lillian Wald, dies.
She strove for human rights and started American community nursing.
She founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and was an early advocate for nurses in public schools.
She became an activist for the rights of women and minorities, campaigning for suffrage and advocating for racial integration.
She was involved in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
September 10, 1940: Funk, soul, and jazz composer, vibraphone player, and record producer, Roy Ayers, born (click on link to listen to music)
September 15, 1940: Author who wrote about her experiences growing up poor and Black in rural Mississippi, and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through the NAACP, CORE and SNCC, Anne Moody, born
September 16, 1940: Selective Training and Service Act of 1940
September 22, 1940: Retired career civil service administrator who served for almost four decades in the United States National Park Service, Robert G. Stanton, born.
He was the first Black American to be appointed as the Director of the Park Service.
October 2, 1940: Civil liberties lawyer and white male ally, Walter Pollak, dies of a heart attack at 53.
He established important precedents while working with other leading radical lawyers in the 1920s and 1930s.
His best known cases involved the defense before the Supreme Court of Communist Benjamin Gitlow and the Scottsboro Boys.
October 13, 1940: Jazz saxophonist, Pharoah Sanders, born (click on link to listen to music)
October 19, 1940: Singer-songwriter, Johnny Nash, born (click on link to listen to music)
Primarily a reggae and pop singer, he was one of the first non-Jamaican artists to record reggae music in Kingston.
October 24, 1940: Publisher and editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, Robert Lee Vann, dies
October 29, 1940: President of the National Baptist Convention, Lacey Kirk Williams, dies in a plane crash.
In 1919, he was appointed to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations.
November 5, 1940: Professor and former Department Head in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Cedric Robinson, born.
He served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research.
Robinson's areas of interest included classical and modern political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, racial capitalism, and the relationships between and among media and politics.
November 13, 1940: Hansberry v. Lee is a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that dealt with a racially restrictive covenant that barred Black people from purchasing or leasing land in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood.
The defense argued that Carl Augustus Hansberry (father of Lorraine Hansberry) could not contest the covenant because it had already been deemed valid by the courts in the prior lawsuit.
When his youngest child was eight, Hansberry bought a house in the Washington Park subdivision of Chicago that was restricted to whites.
The family was met with intense hostility by local residents.
The Kenwood Improvement Association filed a mandatory injunction for the Hansberry family to vacate their home which was granted by a Circuit Court judge and upheld on appeal by the Illinois Supreme Court.
Hansberry challenged the ruling, which led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
In a unanimous opinion, the court rejected the specific restrictive covenant impacting the Hansberry family without ruling on the constitutionality of restrictive residential covenants in general.
The plaintiff's case was successfully argued by civil rights attorney Earl B. Dickerson.
November 25, 1940: R&B, soul and gospel singer, Percy Sledge, born (click on the link to listen to music)
November 29, 1940: The eldest member of the Little Rock Nine group who attended Little Rock's Central High School following the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education court case, Thelma Mothershed, born.
The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine Black American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, then Governor of Arkansas.
They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
December 1, 1940: Electronic engineer, Jerry Lawson, born.
He was thus dubbed the “father of the videogame cartridge,” according to Black Enterprise magazine in 1982.
December 1, 1940: Stand-up comedian and actor, Richard Pryor, born.
He grew up in a brothel run by his grandmother, Marie Carter, where his alcoholic mother, was a prostitute.
His father, LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor, was a former boxer, hustler and pimp.
After Gertrude abandoned him when he was 10, Pryor was raised primarily by Marie, a tall, violent woman who would beat him for any of his eccentricities.
Pryor was one of four children raised in his grandmother's brothel.
He was sexually abused at age seven, and expelled from school at the age of 14.
Pryor served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960, but spent virtually the entire stint in an army prison.
According to a 1999 profile about Pryor in The New Yorker, Pryor was incarcerated for an incident that occurred while he was stationed in West Germany.
Angered that a white soldier was overly amused at the racially charged scenes of Douglas Sirk's film Imitation of Life, Pryor and several other Black soldiers beat and stabbed him, although not fatally.
December 2, 1940: Politician and the first Black American woman state senator in Tennessee and the longest-serving female state senator in Tennessee history, Thelma Harper, born.
She was also the first Black American woman to serve as the chair of the Senate Government Operations Committee.
December 7, 1940: Broadcast journalist, news anchor, and author, Carole Simpson, born.
She is the first Black American woman to anchor a major United States network newscast.
December 12, 1940: Singer, actress, and television host, Dionne Warwick, born (click on link to listen to music)
December 23, 1940: Former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Liberia, Bismarck Myrick, born.
During his military career, Myrick also served in Ethiopia from 1975 [the year I was born] to 1979 as an Army foreign area officer.
[My family lived in Liberia and Ethiopia in the 1950s. Paying subscribers will have access to National Geographic quality photos my grandfather took during that era]
December 28, 1940: Jazz, soul, and funk musician, Lonnie Liston Smith, born (click on link to listen to music)
December 31, 1940: American-born Russian actress, singer, dancer, cabaret artist, and writer, Emma Harris, dies
Have a great weekend and see you on Monday for 1941!