July 1949: Influential Black Americans Phyllis Hyman, Larry Leon Palmer, Calvin O. Butts, Thulani Davis & Virginia M. Alexander
The Atlanta Negro Voters League is established as a bipartisan governmental organization & the Groveland Four
July 6, 1949 (Cancer): Singer, songwriter, and actress, Phyllis Hyman, born [click on link to listen to music]
Hyman's music career spanned the late 1970s through the early 1990s, and she was best known for her expansive contralto range.
Some of her most notable songs are “You Know How to Love Me” (1979), “Living All Alone” (1986) and “Don't Wanna Change the World” (1991).
Hyman is also known for her covers of popular songs, which include renditions of “Betcha by Golly Wow,” “Here's That Rainy Day,” and “What You Won't Do For Love.”
Hyman also performed on Broadway in the 1981 musical revue Sophisticated Ladies, which ran from 1981 until 1983.
The revue, based on the music of Duke Ellington, earned her a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical.
After an extended struggle with her mental health, Hyman died by suicide in 1995 [when I was a student at UMass Amherst] at her New York City apartment.
July 7, 1949: Atlanta Negro Voters League is established as a bipartisan governmental organization.
The organization was formed by Republican A. T. Walden and Democrat John Wesley Dobbs.
The organization was created after the lynching of Robert Mallard.
The organization’s goal was to increase the strength of the Black vote; they did this by performing sit-ins on historically Black colleges and universities.
July 13, 1949 (Cancer): Former diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean from 2012 to 2015, Larry Leon Palmer, born.
He was the United States Ambassador to Honduras from 2002 to 2005.
He also served as the President of the Inter-American Foundation from 2005 to June 2010.
July 16, 1949: Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin (then 16) are accused of raping 17-year-old Norma Padgett and assaulting her husband on July 16, 1949, in Groveland, Lake County, Florida.
On July 26, 1949, Thomas fled and was killed by a sheriff's posse of 1,000 white men, who shot him over 400 times while he allegedly fled after being found asleep under a tree in southern Madison County.
Greenlee, Shepherd, and Irvin were arrested.
They were beaten to coerce confessions, but Irvin refused to confess.
The three survivors were convicted at trial by an all-white jury.
Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison because he was only 16 at the time of the alleged crime; the other two were sentenced to death.
In 1949, Harry T. Moore, the executive director of the Florida NAACP, organized a campaign against the wrongful conviction of the three Black Americans.
Two years later, the case of two defendants reached the Supreme Court of the United States on appeal, with special counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Thurgood Marshall as their defense counsel.
In 1951, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a retrial after hearing the appeals of Shepherd and Irvin.
It ruled they had not received a fair trial because no evidence had been presented, because of excessive adverse publicity, as well as because Black people had been excluded from the jury.
The court overturned the convictions and remanded the case to the lower court for a new trial.
In November 1951, Sheriff Willis V. McCall of Lake County, Florida shot Irvin and Shepherd while they were in his custody and handcuffed together.
McCall claimed they had tried to escape while he was transporting them from Raiford State Prison back to the county seat of Tavares for the new trial.
Shepherd died on the spot; Irvin survived and later told FBI investigators that McCall had shot them in cold blood and that his deputy, Yates, had also shot him in an attempt to kill him.
Harry Moore called for the Governor of Florida to suspend McCall.
On Christmas Night 1951, a bomb went off below Moore's house, fatally wounding both him and his wife; he died that night, and his wife followed nine days later.
The bombers were never caught.
At the second trial, Irvin was represented by Marshall and again convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.
In 1955, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison by recently elected Governor LeRoy Collins.
He was paroled in 1968, but died the next year in Lake County, purportedly of natural causes.
Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and lived with his family until he died in 2012.
In 2016 [the year the felon and rapist-in-chief was elected the first time], the City of Groveland and Lake County each apologized to survivors of the four men for the injustice against them.
On April 18, 2017 [during the felon and rapist-in-chief’s first term], a resolution of the Florida House of Representatives requested that all four men be exonerated.
The Florida Senate quickly passed a similar resolution; lawmakers called on Governor Rick Scott to officially pardon the men.
On January 11, 2019 [during the felon and rapist-in-chief’s first term], the Florida Board of Executive Clemency voted to pardon the Groveland Four.
On November 22, 2021, Judge Heidi Davis granted the state's motion to posthumously exonerate the men.
July 19, 1949 (Cancer): Academic administrator and a senior pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, historically the largest Black church in New York City, Calvin O. Butts, born.
He led the Abyssinian Development Corporation, which focuses on Harlem, and was president of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury.
July 19, 1949 (Cancer): Playwright, journalist, librettist, novelist, poet, and screenwriter, Thulani Davis, is born.
She is a graduate of Barnard College and attended graduate school at both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
In 1992, Davis received a Grammy Award for her album notes on Aretha Franklin's Queen Of Soul: The Atlantic Recordings, becoming the first female recipient of this award.
She has collaborated with her cousin, composer Anthony Davis, writing the librettos to two operas.
Davis wrote for the Village Voice for more than a decade, including the obituary for fellow poet and Barnard alumna June Jordan.
She was a mentor to a young Greg Tate, before he emerged as an influential journalist and cultural critic.
Thulani Davis is a contemporary of and collaborator with Ntozake Shange.
July 24, 1949: Physician, public health researcher, and the founder of the Aspiranto Health Home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Virginia M. Alexander, dies.