I’m freaking out about this right now! How on earth have I never heard of these women!? I read the first article and thought “Oh, very cool.” Then I saw the video…moments ago…currently freaking out. Anybody wanna make a movie about this with me? It would be like A League of Their Own kinda. But with people of color actually doing something other than standing around wishing they could be doing something at which they, too, are really good. That’s one of my favorite movies of all time, by the way. I digress. I wonder if it’s the racism or the sexism that’s kept this a “secret.” Both I’m sure, but when I watch that video I’m mostly struck by the fact that these are women in positions I don’t think I’ve ever seen held by a woman. Not then, not now. And they came out of Mississippi!? O. M. G.
Written by News One
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the first all-female interracial band in America, faced down both Jim Crow and sexism in the 1930s and 1940s. Then, they faded into obscurity.
This week the Smithsonian Institution celebrates the Sweethearts’ legacy as part of the launch of the museum’s Jazz Appreciation Month.
The Sweethearts’ exhibit will be on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC from March 25 to May 31. Members of the Sweethearts, which included Black, white, Latino and Asian women, will participate in several events on March 29 and 30 at the museum. Radio One founder Cathy Hughes, whose mother Helen Jones Woods was an original band member, will also be a participant [NewsOne is a division of Radio One]:
…Ms. Hughes will facilitate an brief (10 minute) onstage discussion with six of the original Sweethearts who will participate in programming at the Smithsonian: They are Helen Jones Woods (trombonist), Ms. Hughes’ mother; Willie Mae Wong Scott (saxophonist), the child of a Chinese father and mixed race Native American mother, she grew up on Mississippi in 1920s; Sadye Pankey Moore (trumpeter), African American; Johnnie Mae Rice Graham (pianist), African American; Lillie Keeler Sims (trombone), African American woman who played with the Sweethearts their first year but later served as an educator and administrator in the NYC school system 40 years; and Roz Cron, one of the first white woman to join the band. On March 30th, the Sweethearts and Cathy Hughes will participate in a 60 minute discussion on the Sweetheart’s legacy that will be webcast via UStream.
Washington (CNN) — When Rosalind Cron left home in the 1940s to join a teenage girl jazz band called the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, she had no idea what it would be like, as a white girl, traveling with the predominantly black band.
At the time, Cron said she thought “Jim Crow” was a man they were supposed to meet in the South. “I didn’t realize it was a law, and a very strict law — laws, plural,” she said.
State and local ordinances that mandated separate public facilities for blacks and whites made it illegal for Cron to share facilities with her band members.
Cron felt the discrimination because she lived on their tour bus with the other girls, hiding her race. For three years, she said, they were like her sisters.
She spent several hours in jail in El Paso, Texas, in 1944 when authorities didn’t believe the story she had made up that her father was white and her mother was black.
“They went though my wallet and there was a picture of my mother and dad right in front of the house,” she said. She was sprung a few hours later when the band’s manager brought two black girls to the jail who claimed to be Cron’s cousins.
By that time, according to Cron, the authorities that were holding her were glad to get rid of her.
“They just told us never to return. And as far as I know, we didn’t,” she said.
The risks were worth it to play her saxophone with what became known as the nation’s first integrated, female jazz band.
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm were founded at Piney Woods School in Mississippi in 1937, in part as a way for the students to help pay for their education.
They recruited members of different races to help with the “international” part of their image.
Willie Mae Wong had a Chinese father, a mixed-race mother, and no visible musical skills when she was recruited to the group as a 15-year-old. She was out on the street playing stickball when they picked her up.
“The director of the music was named White,” Wong said. “They called me ‘White’s Rabbit’ because he had to spend more time with me to teach me the beat.”
The name “Rabbit” has stuck to this day.
In 1941, the group separated from the school and went professional. They traveled on a bus to gigs across the United States, including venues like the Apollo Theater in New York and the Howard Theater in Washington.
During World War II, the Sweethearts traveled to France and Germany as part of a USO tour in 1945.
Pictures and mementos from the International Sweethearts of Rhythm are on display at the Smithsonian’s American History museum for their 10th annual Jazz Appreciation Month celebration in April.
Six members of the band were in Washington this week to reminisce.
“It was a privilege to come from Mississippi and go and see the other parts of the world,” said Helen Jones, who played the trombone from the band’s founding until it disbanded.
“All I ever wanted to do was play a trumpet,” Sadye Pankey told a group gathered at the museum. And as for music education today, she feels bad for today’s students.
“Some of our schools in our country now have abolished the music, and it’s not fair,” she said.
Cron told the group that if music is your passion, you need to stick with it.
“Don’t let anyone come between you and your horns, or music,” she added.
Then:
Now:
Get with the program.
I would love to take this tour. So many fascinating (albeit horrifying) pieces of our nation’s history are highlighted. Underground railroad, black slave owners, paved over cemeteries, middle passage “reception,” color hierarchy. I’m elated by the notion of forsaking shame and guilt in favor of honest discussion to ensure that this never happens again. I’d like to think that “it” happening again is an impossibility, and that now our ultimate goal is to get rid of the vestiges of slavery. Clearly we’re making progress.
The biggest hint that Charleston is a very different breed of Southern Belle — and that I’m on no ordinary city tour — comes as our air-conditioned mini-bus reaches the mainly African-American east side, a warren of economically deprived streets framing what was once an important stop on the Underground Railroad.
I look up to see a most unusual Star Spangled Banner flying bold African colors of red, black and green from a worn-looking flagpole. It’s an expression of indomitable Gullah pride, explains tour guide Alphonso Brown.
Like many living in the east side, Brown himself is Gullah: a descendant of slaves who endured the brutal “middle passage” from West Africa and the Caribbean during the 18th century, landing at Charleston’s bustling port before being sent to toil on plantations across the South.
Brown’s popular Gullah Tour, which marks its 25th anniversary this year, brims with atypical landmarks like this flag, as it excavates vestiges of an uglier time hidden amid the exquisite cobblestone streets and pastel-painted Georgian home fronts.
A multi-million-dollar waterfront estate, for example, looks impressive — until it is revealed to have been built by a rich slave ship proprietor who added slave quarters and a threatening-looking spiked gate to pen in human chattel. Later, we stop and stretch our legs in a parking lot owned by a Catholic church. It turns out to conceal the paved-over graves of freed slaves, for it was once their cemetery.
And the bus rolls on.
It’s potentially uncomfortable subject matter for his mixed-race audience, but Brown manages to keep the atmosphere light, sprinkling his commentary with anecdotes and jokes, and slipping in and out of the sing-songy Creole of his forefathers. “I-eh hab disshuh dreem,” he recites in Gullah. “We hol’ dees trut’ fuh be sef-ebbuhdent, dat all man duh mek equal.”
Plumped with West-African and Elizabethan English influences, Gullah was initially spoken in secret and spread wherever slaves were taken, along the coast and barrier islands as far as Georgia, and down to around Jacksonville, Fla.
SULLIVAN’S ISLAND
Sullivan’s Island, opposite Charleston, became the macabre version of Ellis: a processing station where newly arrived slaves were kept in preventive isolation before their auction at The Old Slave Mart downtown, which today is a museum.
When the Civil War ended, emancipated blacks stayed on the barrier islands, renting rooms from former masters or squatting on abandoned plantations. In their isolation — bridges were few — they incubated the distinctive Gullah body of traditions for cooking, planting, fishing, praying and burying that are subtly evident throughout Charleston and the Lowcountry today.
Front porches in the city, we learn, often face southeast for shade, as per the African custom. Charlestonians were early, enthusiastic practitioners of root medicine and witchcraft. In literature, the tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox derive from West African oral storytelling. And characteristic dishes, from spicy stone ground grits and shrimp to slippery-smooth okra gumbo, are Gullah to the core.
The inside of Brown’s mini-bus is ringed with pictures of inspiring Gullah throughout history and modern times. Among them is Clarence Thomas, second black appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Philip Simmons, lauded by the Smithsonian Institution as a National Folk Treasure for his ornamental iron gates, which dress many of the city’s architectural landmarks.
CIVIC ACTIVISM
Politically, we learn, the Gullah have been determined organizers of abolitionist and Civil Rights movements. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often retreated to St. Helena Island’s Penn Center — where one of America’s first schools for freed slaves was established — and may have begun drafting his 1963 I have a dream speech there.
More recently, in the run-up to the last presidential election, the Gullahs’ organized support for Barack Obama helped him clinch the crucial South Carolina primary.
Brown, who grew up in nearby Rantowles — not far from the site of the failed Stono River Rebellion of 1739, in which runaway slaves killed 20 whites before they were themselves slain — is justifiably proud of his ancestors’ achievements and defiant will.
He doesn’t deliver history in monochrome. Brown’s choice of material portrays a complex view of race relations in Charleston, which even during slavery was never officially segregated. We’re told, for example, that one of the richest freed black families was the DeReefs, whose patriarch, Richard Edward DeReef, owned multiple businesses — and at least 16 slaves.
Color was such a delineator of social status that freed “octoroons,” who had one-eighth black blood, judged themselves superior to “quadroons” with one-quarter slave ancestry. They, in turn, held themselves above mulattos, the children of white fathers who were often referred to, in delicate conversation, as “friends.” The divisions were physically embodied in the city’s many integrated churches, where slaves worshipped from the balconies while freed blacks sat behind whites in the lower pews.
A SENSE OF PRIDE
Two hours speed by on this tour. Brown makes it clear that Gullah traditions thriving in secrecy and isolation for centuries have more recently become a source of civic pride. Efforts to preserve and celebrate the culture are being stepped up, he says. And events, such as the Gullah Festival in Beaufort each May, or the Penn Center Heritage Days Celebration every second weekend in November, draw ever-growing crowds.
“Slavery was always a taboo subject: blacks were ashamed and whites felt guilty,” says Chuma Nwokike, owner of Gallery Chuma, which hosts works depicting traditional activities like crabbing and sweetgrass basket-sewing. The gallery doubles as rendezvous point for Brown’s tour.
“Now, the younger generation wants to acknowledge what went on, so we’re better able to come together and say, ‘how can we make sure it never happens again?’ ”
Taking into consideration the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960, I think this is a remarkable story…
By Tom Stafford
SPRINGFIELD — There were no lunging police dogs with bared fangs, no fire hoses knocking people to the ground, no instigators putting cigarettes out in the hair of protesters at lunch counter sit-ins.
The first apparent outward sign that Springfield’s F.W. Woolworth store would have its first ‘‘Negro’’ employee — to use the word customary at the time — was a note Jean Fisher, 15, received in class during the fall of 1961, her junior year at South High School.
“I was never in trouble,” said Jean Fisher Curry of Springfield. So when she got the note from the counselor’s office, “I thought, what did I do?”
It wasn’t what she did that was notable but rather what she was about to do.
Like other Distributive Education students, she was told she’d have to meet the standards: keep a B average and take special classes in the department.
“I think (Distributive Education) was the forerunner of the vocational school,” Curry explained.
But if she met the standards, she could work at Woolworth’s — the downtown one at High and Limestone streets.
The importance of that was not lost on Curry: “They didn’t have black people working in the store.”
A happy clerk
“I thought I’d be cleaning,” Curry said.
That might have been OK. Her mother had done that for years in what was called “private family work” — working as a domestic at the Tanglewood Drive home of Seymour and Anne Klein.
Jean Curry hugs her mother, Alberta Fisher, whose encouraging words helped her break new ground as the first black sales clerk at Springfield’s Woolworth store. Photo by Marshall Gorby.
Being a domestic “never bothered her,” Curry said, “because that was honest work.”
And when the Kleins asked Alberta Fisher to run the lunch counter at Victory Lanes, it showed “they trusted her,” Curry said. “And she was happy with that.”
The job at Woolworth’s wasn’t a cleaning job, however — likely because the Distributive Education program didn’t train people for that task.
“They told me it was a sales clerk,” said Curry,” and I said, ‘Yeah.’ ”
As it turned out, her post would be at the cosmetics counter in front of the store, where she’d be seen by all who walked in the main entrance.
The sightings began soon after she turned 16 on Sept. 15, 1961, and got her work permit.
Shades of discrimination
Curry discovered a shade of racial reasoning involved in her placement in the store.
“They hired a black girl from North and me from South,” she explained. “Because I was light (-skinned), I worked at the front of the store. Because she was darker she worked in the back of the store with the pets.”
Asked whether that was the real reason for the assignments, Curry was emphatic: “There’s no doubt. I knew it, she knew it, and she resented it.”
Curry said that colored her attitude toward her own work: “What was I going to be mad about? I didn’t feel discrimination like somebody darker.”
The attitude ran in her family.
When the census came, the light-skinned Curries listed their race as mulatto., and in the militant black pride era, they joked about being “high yellow.”
Still, they had to follow rules of the racial road.
Springfield then was a town in which blacks weren’t allowed in the Liberty Theater and in which blacks were suspicious of drinking out of segregated fountains, wondering what white people put in them.
Blacks also tended to “stay within our culture,” Curry said, taking the elevator in the Arcade to the music store that catered to their tastes and frequenting the Center Street YMCA.
Woolworth’s also had its rules: Blacks could order only carry-out from the food counter.
And when Curry started, “we were told when we gave people change to lay it on the counter,” she said, thus avoiding problems with white customers who were uncomfortable having physical contact with blacks.
“But like I told (the girl from North),” Curry added, “we may get some money.”
At first, the pay was 65 cents an hour. The following year, it would go up to 85 cents — this in an era when $1 an hour was considered decent pay, Curry said.
In her youthful enthusiasm, “I didn’t think it was a job. I thought it was a career.”
In the same spirit, Curry, who knew that the actress Betty Hutton’s sister, Barbara, was part owner of the chain, half expected one or the other Hutton sister to show up some day, coming through the front door right into her area.
When she told people she worked at Woolworth’s “I always said ‘F.W.’ like I knew him.”
“I couldn’t even tell you what F.W. stood for.”
Her mother and God
The non-Hutton whites who came into her area in the front of the store fell into a couple of categories, Curry said.
“The older ones, the little white-haired ladies, they liked me,” she said.
“They were used to black people working in their homes and knowing their place. And I knew my place.”
“The other ones, I had to grow on them,” she said.
And she did, using the enthusiasm and bedrock values her mother taught her.
Part of it was common courtesy. “I was always very friendly. You just do that,” Curry said.
Also, “we were very religious,” she said. “We went to church. I think God had a place in that.
Constantly on her mind at that time was the desire “to make my mom and dad proud of me,” Curry said.
Finally, there was the work ethic her mother sought to instill in her children.
Throughout their childhoods, Mrs. Fisher recited a saying to her children to encourage them to do the best they could in everything they did.
“She said it so much to me that I knew it by heart,” Curry said.
All that you do, do with your might. Things done by half are never done right. All that you do, do with a zeal. Those that reach the top, have to climb the hill.
Touching moments
If some of the white people of the time were uncomfortable touching blacks, the black friends and family who came to the store were the opposite.
They’d reach out, touch her and say “It’s so good to see you” when they came in, Curry recalled.
Her mother was especially proud.
“Out of all the girls, they chose her to be there,” said Mrs. Fisher, now 91, who also lives in Springfield.
“I was excited about it, really I was,” she continued. “All my whole family — my sisters, everyone — I was just telling everybody. And I still tell it now.”
Curry said the Woolworth’s experience helped her to feel a part of the larger community.
Already with a sense that Woolworth’s was a cut above the competitors of Kresge and McCrory’s, Curry soon got to know the downtown merchants as they stopped into Woolworth’s — people like William Greene, owner of an exclusive dress shop.
“I could go into stores and they’d let me lay things away. A lot of time black people couldn’t go into those stores,” she said.
Knowing as a customer, the mistress of one of the downtown businessmen also marked her as an insider.
“I felt like I was part of Springfield because I was doing those things,” Curry said.
“It wasn’t that I wanted to be white. I was being accepted for who I was, making the best of it. And I said some day I’ll tell these stories to my grandchildren, and they’ll love it.”
A discarded term!? I guess Bill Kemp has never visited this blog. I’m grateful for this little piece of our history.
By Bill Kemp Archivist/librarian McLean County Museum of History | Posted: Saturday, December 12, 2009
For much of the 20th century, Bloomington-Normal residents thought it necessary to maintain segregated group homes for underprivileged children. One would be hard-pressed to find a better illustration of the embarrassing state of race relations over the decades than the fact that impoverished, neglected and unwanted children were separated by race until the 1960s.
From World War I until JFK and Camelot, African-American children lived at the McLean County Home for Colored Children, later renamed for Booker T. Washington, on Bloomington’s far west side.
This institution dates to 1918 when Alexander Barker and his wife Cedonia, with assistance from Margaret Wyche, took it upon themselves to care for six orphaned black children. Not long after, the Missionary Union, a group of four local churches stepped in to lend much-needed assistance. Though chartered by the state of Illinois in December 1920, the home was a rather primitive operation, with 25 children and 2 adults living in a six-room house with no plumbing or running water.
Improvements in the home, both in its physical plant and operation, soon followed. Located on the 1200 block of West Moulton Street, now MacArthur Avenue, the home’s mission was to “foster self respect, independence and good character.”
Overseen by a 15-member board of progressive-minded women, the home expanded to an adjacent residence. Also acquired in the early years were five nearby lots that were converted to truck gardens so the home could grow much of its own food. The boys generally worked the garden plots and the girls handled the laundry and canning, along with other duties.
The 1920 U.S. Census identified 15 of the 18 children at the home as mulatto, a since-discarded term for someone of mixed-race heritage. Back then, children with one black parent and one white were often outcasts, and into the 1940s, if not later, the home served as a safe haven for mixed-race children abandoned by their parents and local communities.
Money was always tight and the needs of the new arrivals great. “A special effort has been made to give each child his full quota of milk and butter fat, as many of the children were underweight,” read one report from 1921.
“There is absolutely no place of good repute open to such children in Illinois, except this one,” noted The Pantagraph two years later. “The question arises, shall a child be permitted to subsist on the contents of garbage cans … simply because of their race? Paraphrasing the Biblical interrogatory, ‘Who is thy brother’s keeper?’”
I guess we have come a long way, tho we’ve got so far to go…
On Feb. 1, 1951, Henrietta Lacks–mother of five, native of rural southern Virginia, resident of the Turner Station neighborhood in Dundalk–went to Johns Hopkins Hospital with a worrisome symptom: spotting on her underwear. She was quickly diagnosed with cervical cancer. Eight months later, despite surgery and radiation treatment, the Sparrows Point shipyard worker’s wife died at age 31 as she lay in the hospital’s segregated ward for blacks.
Not all of Henrietta Lacks died that October morning, though. She unwittingly left behind a piece of herself that still lives today.
While she was in Hopkins’ care, researchers took a fragment of Lacks’ tumor and sliced it into little cubes, which they bathed in nutrients and placed in an incubator. The cells, dubbed “HeLa” for Henrietta Lacks, multiplied as no other cells outside the human body had before, doubling their numbers daily. Their dogged growth spawned a breakthrough in cell research; never before could investigators reliably experiment on such cell cultures because they would weaken and die before meaningful results could be obtained. On the day of Henrietta’s death, the head of Hopkins’ tissue-culture research lab, Dr. George Gey, went before TV cameras, held up a tube of HeLa cells, and announced that a new age of medical research had begun–one that, someday, could produce a cure for cancer.
When he discovered HeLa could survive even shipping via U.S. mail, Gey sent his prize culture to colleagues around the country. They allowed HeLa to grow a little, and then sent some to their colleagues. Demand quickly rose, so the cells were put into mass production and traveled around the globe–even into space, on an unmanned satellite to determine whether human tissues could survive zero gravity.
In the half-century since Henrietta Lacks’ death, her tumor cells–whose combined mass is probably much larger than Lacks was when she was alive–have continually been used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits. Dr. Jonas Salk used HeLa to help develop his polio vaccine in the early ’50s. The cells are so hardy that they took over other tissue cultures, researchers discovered in the 1970s, leading to reforms in how such cultures are handled. In the biomedical world, HeLa cells are as famous as lab rats and petri dishes.
Yet Henrietta Lacks herself remains shrouded in obscurity. Gey, of course, knew HeLa’s origins, but he believed confidentiality was paramount–so for years, Henrietta’s family didn’t know her cells still lived, much less how important they had become. After Gey died in 1970, the secret came out. But it was not until 1975, when a scientifically savvy fellow dinner-party guest asked family members if they were related to the mother of the HeLa cell, that Lacks’ descendants came to understand her critical role in medical research.
The concept was mind-blowing–in a sense, it seemed to Lacks’ family, she was being kept alive in the service of science. “It just kills me,” says Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah Lacks-Pullum, now 52 and still living in Baltimore, “to know my mother’s cells are all over the world.”
In the 27 years since the Lacks family serendipitously learned of Henrietta’s unwitting contribution, little has been done to honor her. “Henrietta Lacks Day” is celebrated in Turner Station each year on Feb. 1. In 1996, prompted by Atlanta’s Morehouse College, that city’s mayor proclaimed Oct. 11 Henrietta Lacks Day. The following year, Congress passed a resolution in her memory sponsored by Rep. Robert Ehrlich (R-Md.), whose 2nd District includes Turner Station, and the British Broadcasting Corp. produced a documentary on her remarkable story. Beyond that, however, virtually nothing has been done to celebrate Lacks’ contribution–not even by Hopkins, which gained immeasurable prestige from Gey’s work with her cells.
read much more here
It is a shame that this isn’t common knowledge. It is a shame that her family had no that this was going on. It is a shame that she most likely received insufficient care in the black ward of the hospital. It is a beautiful thing that she lived and made such a contribution to medical advancement.
(Press-Register/Kate Mercer)Patrick Moran prays with Sondra Simmons as they participate in a Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009, worship service between two congregations, Cave Ministries and Fresh Fire on the Mount Ministry, at Plateau Community Center.
PLATEAU, Ala. — Their hands waving in the air, singing and testifying, members of Cave Ministries of Saraland, a predominantly white church of motorcycle riders, joined members of Fresh Fire on the Mount, a mostly black church from Eight Mile, for a 3-hour extravaganza of music and prayer Sunday.
The service, at the Plateau Community Center in north Mobile, was symbolic of the need for racial healing in the nation, said organizer Rod Odom, a religious program host.
Odom, 49, who had introduced Cave Ministries preacher Bryan Jones to Fresh Fire’s pastor, Aaron McKinnis, said he had wanted to bring whites and blacks together for church since his boyhood during the civil rights movement. “Sunday mornings are still the most segregated time in America,” Odom said.
“The Lord can use ‘a wretch like me,'” Odom said of his mission to address that separation, borrowing a line from the spiritual, “Amazing Grace.”
Apart from their racial differences, the two churches had clearly different styles.
Members of Cave, largely adults, were dressed in the garb of their beloved motorcyle riding — bandannas, blue jeans, jackets reading “Soldiers of the Cross” or T-shirts imprinted “My Life, His Way.”
Fresh Fire congregants, a number of whom came in family groups, were decked out in Sunday best — long skirts, coats and ties.
The music, alternating between churches, varied, too. “It’s black and white,” said Jackie Jones, worship leader of the Cave.
Jones stood behind a microphone alongside another singer and belted out a foot-stomping Christian rock song, “I Am Free.”
Gussy Hoeft with Cave Ministries shows 2-year-old McKenzie Williams a motorcycle during a racial reconciliation event Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009, in Plateau, Ala.
mulatto diaries 
