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Rasool Berry

@rasoolberry

9 Feb

The First Black Senator &
The Unfulfilled Promise of Reconstruction

Hiram Revels was born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to free parents of African, Native and European with ancestry who had been free since before the American Revolution. 1/

In 1845 Revels was ordained as a minister in the AME Church; he served as a preacher & educator in the Midwest. His preaching was met with a great deal of opposition. He later recalled. "I was imprisoned in Missouri in 1854 for preaching the gospel to Negroes." 2/

In 1866, he was called as a permanent pastor at a church in Natchez, Mississippi, where he settled with his wife and five daughters. He became an elder in the Mississippi District of the Methodist Church, continued his ministerial work, and founded schools for black children. 3/

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Rasool Berry

@rasoolberry

8 Feb

Sick & Tired of Being Sick & Tired

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Mississippi in 1917. Her family’s livestock was poisoned by local white farmers because it was profitable. They became sharecroppers & at age 13, she attended school & picked 200-300 lbs of cotton per day. 1/

In 1945 she married & was planning for a family, but her doctor performed a hysterectomy without her consent. This program of forced sterilization of Black women was so common it was called a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Unable to conceive, they would later adopt 2 girls. 2/

At age 45 she attended a SNCC meeting & learned the power of her vote. So Hamer volunteered to register others in the Black community on their rights & how overcome the tools created to disenfranchise them such as registration tests & poll taxes. 3/

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Rasool Berry

@rasoolberry

7 Feb

Cecil B. Moore was born in West Virginia in 1915. A Black WWII vet, Moore’s fight for freedom He said: “I was determined when I got back (from World War II) that what rights I didn't have I was going to take, using every weapon in the arsenal of democracy.” 1/

He moved to Philly became a lawyer & served as the local NAACP president. In 1964 he began to fight the biggest battle of his life. 2/

Moore was based in North Philly, which was mostly poor & working class Black folk, but in the heart of the ‘hood stood an enormous 45 acre, private boarding school with neoclassical marble buildings called Girard College. 3/

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Rasool Berry

@rasoolberry

6 Feb

The First African American Author

On July 11, 1761 a slave ship named The Phillis carrying hundreds of human cargo from present day Gambia including an 8 year old girl. The name her parents gave her as they looked into her new born eyes has been lost to history. 1/

What we do know is that she was enslaved in Boston by John Wheatley, a wealthy merchant who gifted the young girl to his wife, Susanna. They re-named the girl Phillis after the slave ship that snatched her from her family and gave her the last name Wheatley.
2/

The Wheatleys’ 18 year old daughter began to tutor Phillis & seeing her unique aptitude, it became a family affair. By age 12, Phillis was reading Greek & Latin classical literature. Phillis wrote her first poem at 14. 3/

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Rasool Berry

@rasoolberry

5 Feb

Heard of Marcus Garvey? WEB DuBois? Malcolm X?

Then you have Alexander Crummell, the father of Pan-Africanism, to thank. Crummell was born in NYC to a free mother & formerly enslaved father in 1819. His grandfather was from Sierre Leone, when he was enslaved at 13 years old. 1/

His father never let him forget that his story was tied to the African Diaspora. Motivated by their Christian faith & sense of solidarity, the Crummells worked as abolitionists. Their home was the publishing site of Freedom’s Journal, the FIRST African American newspaper. 2/

Seeing his brilliance, he was sent to a school in New Hampshire run by abolitionists. But it was burned down by racists neighbors. He sensed a calling by God to be an Episcopal priest, however, because he was black, he was refused admission to seminary. 3/

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Rasool Berry

@rasoolberry

4 Feb

https://twitter.com/TheKingCenter/status/1357361311944966145

In her autobiography, Rosa Parks debunked the myth that she refused to vacate her seat because she was tired after a long day at work. “I was not tired physically,” she wrote, “I was not old, I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” #BlackHistoryMonth

https://twitter.com/TheKingCenter/status/1357361311944966145

Parks was sitting in the middle section of the bus open to African Americans . After the “whites-only” section filled up & a white man was left standing, the driver demanded that Parks & 3 others in the row leave their seats. While the other three eventually moved, Parks did not.

Her act of civil disobedience was not pre-meditated. She did not set out to be arrested. Parks wrote that she was so preoccupied that day that if she hadn’t failed to notice that a notorious racist was the driver, “I wouldn’t even have gotten on that bus.”

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