Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
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In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
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
Wezlynn Tildon | |
|---|---|
 Wezlynn Tildon, from a 1934 newspaper | |
| Born | September 19, 1918 Fort Worth, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | August 15, 1993 (aged 74) Texas |
| Other names | Wezlynn Tilden, Wezlyn Tilden, Weslene Tildon |
| Occupations | Actress, columnist |
Wezlynn Margaret Develle Tildon (September 19, 1918 – August 15, 1993), sometimes billed as Wezlyn Tilden, was an American newspaper columnist and radio actress.
Tildon was born in Fort Worth, Texas, the daughter of J. Wesley Tildon Jr. and Bertine Washington Tildon. Her father was a physician.[1] Her uncle was Toussaint T. Tildon, director of the Veterans Hospital at Tuskegee.[2]
Tildon was raised mostly in Chicago,[3] but was a debutante in Harlem in 1939,[4][5] and was billed as "Harlem's Glamour Girl" in newspapers.[6][7] She graduated from Wadleigh High School for Girls in 1936, in the same class as composer Arlein Ford Straw.[8] She graduated from New York University in 1942; at NYU, she was president of the Dramatic Art Club, and the only Black drama student in her year.[9] She was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha.[10] She also attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).[2]
Tildon was junior society columnist for The New York Age newspaper,[11][12] and worked for the Treasury Department as a young woman.[13] In Chicago, she was a stage actress,[14] and a member of the W. E. B. Du Bois Theater Guild[15] and Skyloft Players.[16] She was in the cast of Here Comes Tomorrow (1947–1948),[17] the first all-Black radio soap opera to be broadcast in America.[18] She starred in several episodes of the radio drama anthology series Destination Freedom from 1948 to 1950,[19][20] playing historical figures such as Harriet Tubman, contralto Marian Anderson, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and dancer Katherine Dunham.[21] She was also in the regular cast of the first program broadcast over the National Negro Network, The Story of Ruby Valentine (1954), a daily soap opera.[13]
Tildon wrote several songs, radio scripts, and stage plays, including The Cup (1948).[22] She also taught acting classes at the New Era Professional College in Chicago.[23] In 1954, she was "fan mail secretary" at the Today show.[24]
Tildon died in 1993, at the age of 74, in Texas.
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Wezlynn Margaret Develle Tildon (September 19, 1918 – August 15, 1993), sometimes billed as Wezlyn Tilden, was an American newspaper columnist and radio actress.
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) was an American investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wells dedicated her career to combating prejudice and violence, and advocating for African-American equality—especially for women. Throughout the 1890s, Wells documented lynching of African-Americans in the United States in articles and through pamphlets such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases and The Red Record, which debunked the fallacy frequently voiced by whites at the time – that all Black lynching victims were guilty of crimes. Wells exposed the brutality of lynching, and analyzed its sociology, arguing that whites used lynching to terrorize African Americans in the South because they represented economic and political competition—and thus a threat of loss of power—for whites. She aimed to demonstrate the truth about this violence and advocate for measures to stop it. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She was freed as an infant under the Emancipation Proclamation, when Union Army troops captured Holly Springs. At the age of 16, she lost both her parents and her infant brother in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. She got a job teaching and kept the rest of the family together with the help of her grandmother, later moving with some of her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee. Soon, Wells co-owned and wrote for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, where her reporting covered incidents of racial segregation and inequality. Eventually, her investigative journalism was carried nationally in Black-owned newspapers. Subjected to continued threats and criminal violence, including when a white mob destroyed her newspaper office and presses, Wells left Memphis for Chicago, Illinois. She married Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895 and had a family while continuing her work writing, speaking, and organizing for civil rights and the women's movement for the rest of her life. Wells was outspoken regarding her beliefs as a Black female activist and faced regular public disapproval, sometimes including from other leaders within the civil rights movement and the women's suffrage movement. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. A skilled and persuasive speaker, Wells traveled nationally and internationally on lecture tours. Wells died on March 25, 1931, in Chicago, and in 2020 was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize special citation "for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."
The Wadleigh High School for Girls was established by the New York City Board of Education in 1897 and moved into its new building in Harlem in September 1902. It was the first public high school for girls in New York City. At the time, public secondary education for girls was considered highly novel and perhaps a bit scandalous. Newspapers considered it newsworthy enough to devote many stories to describing classroom scenes of girls receiving "higher" education. The building is shared by several schools including the Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the Frederick Douglass Academy II, and Success Academy Harlem West.
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 →Joe Louis.