Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
q2K BHP
Black History Portal
THE BHP WIRE —
HIDDEN TRUTHS
What's New!
Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Culbert Olson | |
|---|---|
 Olson in 1935 | |
| 29th Governor of California | |
| In office January 2, 1939 – January 4, 1943 | |
| Lieutenant | Ellis E. Patterson |
| Preceded by | Frank Merriam |
| Succeeded by | Earl Warren |
| Member of the California Senate from the 38th district | |
| In office January 7, 1935 – January 2, 1939 | |
| Preceded by | J. W. McKinley |
| Succeeded by | Robert W. Kenny |
| Chairman of the California Democratic Party | |
| In office September 29, 1934 – September 26, 1937 | |
| Preceded by | Maurice Harrison |
| Succeeded by | Clifford C. Anglim |
| Member of the Utah State Senate from the 6th district | |
| In office January 8, 1917 – January 10, 1921 | |
| Preceded by | Multi-member district |
| Succeeded by | Multi-member district |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Culbert Levy Olson November 7, 1876 Fillmore, Utah, U.S. |
| Died | April 13, 1962 (aged 85) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Party | Democratic |
| Spouse |
Kate Jeremy
(m. 1905; died 1939) |
| Children | 3 |
| Relatives | Edmund Rice (ancestor) William H. King (first cousin) |
| Education | |
| Profession | Journalist, lawyer |
| Signature |  |
Culbert Levy Olson (November 7, 1876 – April 13, 1962) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 29th governor of California from 1939 to 1943. A member of the Democratic Party, Olson was previously elected to both the Utah State Senate and California State Senate, serving one term in each. During his term as governor, Olson struggled to pass New Deal legislation due to hostility from the California legislature. He also supported the internment and removal of Japanese Americans from California after the United States entered World War II. He was the first atheist governor of an American state.
Olson was born in Fillmore, Utah, the son of Delilah Cornelia (née King) and George Daniel Olson, on November 7, 1876. Olson's mother was a suffragette and became the first female elected official in Utah. His first cousin was U.S. Senator William H. King, and both were descendants of Edmund Rice, an early immigrant to Massachusetts Bay Colony.[1]
Olson's mother and father belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, Culbert was unconvinced of the existence of God, and became an atheist at the age of 10.
Leaving school at the age of 14, Olson worked briefly as a telegraph operator. In 1890, he enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo, where he studied law and journalism.
Upon graduating at the age of 19 in 1895, Olson embarked on a career as a journalist with the Daily Ogden Standard. During the 1896 presidential election, Olson campaigned for Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. After the election, Olson moved briefly to Michigan, studying law at the University of Michigan, and then later to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a newspaper correspondent and secretary for the U.S. Congress. During his time in the capital, Olson attended law school at George Washington University, and he was admitted to the Utah Bar in 1901.[2]
Olson moved back to Utah in 1901, settling in Salt Lake City to join a law practice. Building a reputation of defending trade unionists and political progressives, Olson was elected to the Utah State Senate in 1916. During his four years in the State Senate, Olson wrote and endorsed legislation to end child labor in the state, guarantee old age pensions, and expand government control of public utilities.
Olson declined to run again for the State Senate in the 1920 general election. Instead, Olson relocated to Los Angeles, California, beginning another law practice, where he again gained a reputation of investigating corporate fraud. Politics never remained far. Olson campaigned openly for Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette in 1924, and for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
In 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression, Olson ran as a Democrat for the California State Senate, representing Los Angeles. During the 1934 state general elections, Olson campaigned for former Socialist Party member and Democratic nominee for governor, Upton Sinclair, participating in Sinclair's End Poverty in California campaign.[2] While Sinclair lost the gubernatorial election to Republican Frank Merriam, Olson was elected to the California State Senate that year.
While in the state senate, the second state legislative seat to which he was elected, Olson openly supported Roosevelt's New Deal policies towards the unemployed. Seeing large business interests as a barrier to change, Olson wrote the Olson Oil Bill to cut down oil company monopolies in the state.
With the open support of President Roosevelt, Olson ran for governor of California in the 1938 election against conservative Republican and anti-labor incumbent Governor Frank Merriam. Merriam, known for suppressing the 1934 Longshore Strike and his conservative fiscal policies, was a highly unpopular candidate among progressives and unionists, with even conservative Republicans angered by his 1935 tax reforms. Merriam lost soundly to Olson. He was the first Democrat to win the governorship since James Budd's election in 1894, breaking the 40-year Democrat isolation from the governorship.
Olson was inaugurated as California's twenty-ninth executive on January 2, 1939, the first Democrat to serve as governor of California in 40 years. He refused to say "so help me God" during his oath of office to state Supreme Court chief justice William H. Waste. Olson remarked earlier to justice Waste that "God couldn't help me at all, and that there isn't any such person." Instead, Olson said, "I will affirm."[2]
In his inaugural address, Olson pointed at progressives and the Left for his inspiration, citing that "[t]hey point the way forward - toward the achievement of the aspiration of the people for an economy that will afford general employment, abundant production, equitable distribution, social security and old age retirement, which our country, with its ample resources, great facilities and the genius of its people, is capable of providing."[3]
Olson's tenure in the governorship got off to a rocky start. He collapsed four days after his inauguration, and doctors discovered that he was suffering from an ailing heart. On top of personal health matters, Kate Jeremy Olson, the Governor's wife of nearly thirty-four years, died shortly after he assumed the office.[6]
Among those Olson appointed to his cabinet were businessman George Killion as director of Finance, labor leader George G. Kidwell as director of Industrial Relations, and social worker Martha Chickering as director of Social Welfare.[7] During his tenure, he appointed four associate justices to the state Supreme Court: Jesse W. Carter, Phil S. Gibson, Roger J. Traynor, and B. Rey Schauer. After the death of chief justice Waste in 1940, Olson elevated Gibson to the position.
Contrasting with the conservative policies of Governor Frank Merriam, Olson promoted friendly relations with the state's labor unions. In September 1939, he officially pardoned Tom Mooney, a labor activist and political prisoner accused of plotting the 1916 Preparedness Day Bombing in San Francisco. Olson cited scant evidence against Mooney as the reason for his pardon. The next month, Olson pardoned Mooney's alleged accomplice, Warren Billings.[2]
Although a number of progressive reforms were carried out during Olson's time as governor,[8][9] his relationship with the California State Legislature was often bitter. With a conservative coalition of Republicans[10] and 10 “economy bloc” Democrats[11][12] controlling the Assembly, and business-friendly Republicans in the Senate, Olson had little room to promote his New Deal politics, while the Legislature remained wary of Olson's leftist agenda. In the first year of his governorship, Olson's proposed budget was cut by nearly 100 million dollars, while the Legislature also defeated legislation to raise income, bank and corporate taxes, as well as Olson's bills to regulate lobbyists and reform the state penal system. State-subsidized relief for farmers was cut nearly in half.[6] In addition, Olson's proposal of compulsory universal health insurance for every Californian was defeated by the Assembly, with 48 votes against and only 20 votes in favor of the proposal.[13]
Olson installed a telephone hotline to the legislature to get immediate word of lawmakers' positions on bills in committee or on the floor for a vote.[14]
During his tenure, Olson grew increasingly critical of the Roman Catholic Church and its presence in the state educational system, and raised the ire of Archbishops John J. Cantwell of Los Angeles and John J. Mitty of San Francisco. A secular atheist, Olson was disturbed by the state legislature's passage of two bills in 1941: one to give free transportation to students attending Catholic schools, and the other to release Catholic children from public schools in the middle of the school day in order to attend catechism, leaving the schools and other students idle until the Catholic students returned. Olson signed the first bill into law, later citing the enormous pressure of the Catholic Church on his office and on state lawmakers, but he vetoed the second ("early release") bill.[2]
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the entry of the United States into the Second World War, many in California feared a Japanese invasion. In the wake of the attack, Olson urged calm from Californians.[15] In a plea for racial tolerance, broadcast on December 14, he stated he had assurances from "every racial group" of their loyalty and devotion to the United States, even reading a telegram he had received from a Japanese citizen.[16] Olson attempted to revoke the business licenses of "enemy alien" Japanese in California.[17] (Japanese immigrants were prohibited by law from becoming U.S. citizens and were therefore permanent aliens, although many had resided in California for decades.) On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, allowing U.S. military commanders to create zones from which "any or all persons may be excluded." Based on that, all West Coast Japanese Americans, including American-born Nisei and Sansei, in addition to the non-citizen Issei, were forcibly relocated to isolated internment camps over the next several months.
The pro-internment recommendations of General John L. DeWitt (head of the Western Defense Command) were embarrassing for Governor Olson. On February 2, 1942, the Governor, following a meeting with DeWitt, said that mass evacuation would not be necessary; DeWitt pursued his plans regardless of Olson's disagreement.[18] However, despite his preference for excluding Japanese Americans only from "coastal California", and allowing adult men to work in labor camps as an alternative to incarceration, Olson wholeheartedly supported the eviction.[17] A long-time supporter of nearly every Roosevelt position on economics, politics and foreign policy, on March 6, 1942, he testified before a U.S. House committee on the danger of allowing Japanese Americans to remain free: "Because of the extreme difficulty in distinguishing between loyal Japanese Americans, and there are many who are loyal to this country, and those other Japanese whose loyalty is to the Mikado, I believe in the wholesale evacuation of the Japanese people from coastal California."[19]
By the 1942 election, Republicans were accusing Olson of blatant partisan politics during wartime, citing Olson's often bitter divides with the State Legislature. The Republicans nominated California Attorney General Earl Warren as the party's nominee for the governorship. Warren, a centrist Republican, campaigned as a moderate who would appeal to both liberals and conservatives during a time of war, where California was considered as a possible front line, while accusing Olson of being an uncompromising left-wing Democrat.
Olson lost re-election to Warren in an electoral landslide, receiving just 42% of the vote to Warren's 57%. In later years, Olson blamed "the active hostility of a certain privately owned power corporation and the Roman Catholic Church in California" for his defeat.
Following his departure from the governorship, Olson returned to law. He regained the public spotlight again in the 1950s, when the Legislature voted to exempt Catholic schools from real estate taxes. Olson filed an amicus curiae brief to the state Supreme Court, asking the court to explain how the state's exemption of a religious organization from civil taxes was constitutional.
In 1957, Olson became president of the United Secularists of America, a body of secularists, atheists, and freethinkers.
He was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution.[20][21] As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.[22]
Olson died in Los Angeles on April 13, 1962, aged 85. He is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendale, California.
Olson's son John was appointed a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court by governor Pat Brown in 1962,[23] serving until his death in 1971.[24]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Culbert Levy Olson (November 7, 1876 – April 13, 1962) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 29th governor of California from 1939 to 1943. A member of the Democratic Party, Olson was previously elected to both the Utah State Senate and California State Senate, serving one term in each. During his term as governor, Olson struggled to pass New Deal legislation due to hostility from the California legislature. He also supported the internment and removal of Japanese Americans from California after the United States entered World War II. He was the first atheist governor of an American state.
Governor Olson may refer to: Allen I. Olson (born 1938), 28th Governor of North Dakota Culbert Olson (1876–1962), 29th Governor of California Floyd B. Olson (1891–1936), 22nd Governor of Minnesota Ole H. Olson (1872–1954), 18th Governor of North Dakota
Earl Warren (March 19, 1891 – July 9, 1974) was an American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as the 14th chief justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969 and as the 30th governor of California from 1943 to 1953. The Warren Court presided over a major shift in American constitutional jurisprudence, which has been recognized by many as a "constitutional revolution" in the liberal direction, with Warren writing the majority opinions in landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Reynolds v. Sims (1964), Miranda v. Arizona (1966), and Loving v. Virginia (1967). Warren also led the Warren Commission, a presidential commission that investigated the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Warren is the most recent chief justice to have served in a statewide elected office before nomination to the Supreme Court and is generally considered to be one of the most influential Supreme Court justices and political leaders in the history of the United States. Warren was born in 1891 in Los Angeles and was raised in Bakersfield, California. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, he began a legal career in Oakland. He was hired as a deputy district attorney for Alameda County in 1920 and was appointed district attorney in 1925. He emerged as a leader of the state Republican Party and was elected as the attorney general of California in 1938. In that position he supported and was a firm proponent of the forced removal and internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. In the 1942 California gubernatorial election, Warren defeated incumbent Democratic governor Culbert Olson. As governor, Warren presided over a period of major growth for the state as well as the nation. Serving from 1943 to 1953, Warren is the only governor of California to be elected for three consecutive terms. Warren was Thomas E. Dewey's running mate in the 1948 presidential election, but the ticket lost the election to incumbent president Harry S. Truman and Senator Alben W. Barkley in an election upset. Warren sought the Republican nomination in the 1952 presidential election, but the party nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower. After Eisenhower won election as president, he appointed Warren as chief justice. A series of rulings made by the Warren Court in the 1950s helped lead to the decline of McCarthyism. Warren helped arrange a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. After Brown, the Warren Court continued to issue rulings that helped bring an end to the segregationist Jim Crow laws that were prevalent throughout the Southern United States. In Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), the Court upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal law that prohibits racial segregation in public institutions and public accommodations. In the 1960s, the Warren Court handed down several landmark rulings that significantly transformed criminal procedure, redistricting, and other areas of the law. Many of the Court's decisions incorporated the Bill of Rights, making the protections of the Bill of Rights apply to state and local governments. Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) established a criminal defendant's right to an attorney in felony cases, and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) required police officers to give what became known as the Miranda warning to suspects taken into police custody that advises them of their constitutional protections. Reynolds v. Sims (1964) established that all state legislative districts must be of roughly equal population size, while the Court's holding in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) required equal populations for congressional districts, thus achieving "one man, one vote" in the United States. Schmerber v. California (1966) established that forced extraction of a blood sample is not compelled testimony, illuminating the limits on the protections of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Warden v. Hayden (1967) dramatically expanded the rights of police to seize evidence with a search warrant, reversing the mere evidence rule. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) established a constitutional right to privacy and struck down a state law that restricted access to contraceptives. Loving v. Virginia (1967) struck down state anti-miscegenation laws, which had banned or otherwise regulated interracial marriage. Warren announced his retirement in 1968 and was succeeded by Warren E. Burger in 1969. The Warren Court's rulings have received both support and criticism from liberals and conservatives alike, and few of the Court's decisions have been overturned.
The 1942 California gubernatorial election was held on November 3, 1942. The election pitted incumbent Democratic Governor Culbert Olson against state Attorney General Earl Warren. Warren won in a landslide to become the 30th governor of California, receiving 57% of the vote to Olson's 42%.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
