Speaking with veterans of the civil rights movement by Suzanne Hanney
These Civil Rights Movement veterans were participants in last April’s conference, “The Global Sixties: Social Movements for Civil Rights, Decolonization, Human Rights,” hosted by Dr. Fannie Rushing of Benedictine University and SNCCChicago. SNCC, or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was founded in April 1960 as a complement to Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) following student sit-ins at a Greensboro, NC Woolworth that refused to serve African Americans. This year's conference will be February 28 & 29, location TBD. More information is available at snccchicago.org.
Timuel Black The Bronzeville historian & friend to many
Timuel Black was born in Birmingham, AL on Dec. 7, 1918 and came to Chicago when he was less than a year old. The Bronzeville of his youth in the 1920s and 30s, “was a place of much poverty and some wealth, a center for music and sports and a terrain where demonstrations could break out at any time,” according to his archive at the Carter G. Woodson Regional library, 9525 S. Halsted St. During World War II, Black served with an Army supply unit that landed on the beach in Normandy at D-Day June 6, 1944. The war’s life-changing experience for him, however, was seeing the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in central Germany in April 1945. Nearly 250,000 people had been imprisoned at Buchenwald and at least 56,000 had died of disease, malnutrition, beatings, medical experiments and executions. Inmates of the camp included political prisoners, Afro-Germans, gypsies, homosexuals – and Jews. “What I saw and smelled took my mind back to my ancestry of slavery from Africa and having many Jewish friends, what fascism and Nazism was like,” Black said. “They were treated not like human beings but like animals or worse and I got the sense that the black experience in America is simply dramatized by color but is universal in terms of negative human behavior. I left the Army with a dedication that I would spend the rest of my life bringing people together to make this world a better place to live.” Coming home to a segregated Chicago, Black earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Roosevelt University and a master’s degree in sociology and anthropology from the University of Chicago. He taught at DuSable High School (his alma mater), and at Hyde Park and Farragut High Schools; he was also assistant director of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) Chicago Teacher Corps and
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served as a dean and vice president for academic affairs at Wright College and Olive Harvey College, respectively. In the late 1950s, Black participated in the Chicago League of Negro Voters, which challenged City Hall’s control over the African-American vote. As a teachers’ union activist, he was elected president of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC). A. Phillip Randolph, the national president of the NALC, tapped him to be Chicago coordinator for the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Energized by that experience, NALC members were joined by NAACP, CORE, SNCC and the new Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) to stage a boycott of segregated Chicago Public Schools on Oct. 22, 1963. Roughly 250,000 students participated. Harold Washington and Black had been classmates at DuSable High School and so he worked to elect Washington mayor in 1983. Black met his wife, Zenobia, during the campaign and she later said they dated, married and spent their honeymoon doing voter registration for him. Since “retirement” in 1989, he has taught at Roosevelt University, DePaul University and Columbia College and worked on the Black Metropolis Oral History Project. An autobiography of
