In 1959, police were called to a segregated library when a 9 year-old African American boy trying to check out books refused to leave
Unpublished Black History
A High School Sensation
The shorts and kneepads scream 1965.
But who is that lanky seven-foot-tall, 17-year-old high school athlete
standing with teammates from Power Memorial Academy at the Catholic High
School Athletic Association Championship game?
College recruiters were pursuing the
center with intensity, harassing him in the street and searching for his
unlisted phone number. The athlete, Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr., was a
giant, an epic talent. But he eschewed the spotlight. He referred each
scout to his coach.
“I want two things from college,” Alcindor said. “I want to be treated like Lew Alcindor. I want an education.”
Eventually he settled on U.C.L.A., then a
career in the N.B.A., starting with the Milwaukee Bucks. He led the
Bucks to a championship in 1971, and the day after that victory, he
changed his name to one we are a bit more familiar with: Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar.
Unpublished Black History
A Pilgrimage for Equal Rights
Thousands came, from 30 states, to the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on May 17, 1957. They wanted more, and faster, action on civil rights issues and to look back and forward on the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.
In a speech to the crowd that day, the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described that landmark Supreme Court
decision as “a joyous daybreak to end the long night of enforced
segregation.”
But even then, it was clear that
segregation in schools would outlast its historic defeat in the courts,
in part because efforts to put the ruling in effect were weak or
nonexistent.
“The Supreme Court’s decision is not
self-enforcing,” said an article in The New York Times Magazine a few
weeks after the pilgrimage, “and instead of spelling the end of an era
of civil-rights litigation, it has marked the beginning of a new and
even more bitter phase.”
The photograph above seemed to capture
perfectly the mood of the time: No one in the picture looks satisfied or
triumphant. But our article that day relied only on words. No
photographs were included.
Unpublished Black History
The Promise and Limits of School Integration
“Princeton’s two elementary schools were integrated 16 years ago,” reported
The Times on June 21, 1964. “Thus began a three-act racial drama —
first, a period of Negro hopes; next, Negro frustration and
disillusionment; and then, a limited degree of fulfillment.”
An article in The Times Magazine — with a
picture showing high school students in Princeton, N.J., between
classes — assessed the school system’s progress in integration, which
was trumpeted as a model for struggling integration efforts in schools
across the country. It also offered a caveat that still resonates,
noting that in the search for a thriving and equal community, “good
schooling is not enough.”
Unpublished Black History
The House Bars Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
In January 1967, Representative Adam
Clayton Powell Jr., Democrat of Harlem, was prevented from taking his
seat in Congress. The House had voted to keep him out while he was being
investigated by the Judiciary Committee for a number of scandals, but
among some of his constituents, there was a sense that he was being
unfairly singled out.
“He was just too powerful for a Negro,”
one supporter said. “Keep the faith, baby,” said another — and he did.
He took his fight to the Supreme Court, and in 1969 he prevailed in
Powell v. McCormack, in which the justices ruled that Representative
Powell, being duly elected by the people, could not be voted out of his
seat by members of the House.
Unpublished Black History
Run-DMC’s ‘Cry for Justice’
Chester Higgins Jr. spent 40 years
as a staff photographer for The Times before retiring in 2014. Writing
from Ethiopia, he described covering Run-DMC at Madison Square Garden in
1986 for a benefit concert against crack cocaine. We never published
photographs from the show or wrote about the performance.
Arriving to photograph this new group
Run-DMC, I had mixed feelings. The music was slamming. The wordplay
structure was mesmerizing, delivered as a diatribe that delineated the
injustices experienced by this generation of young black people living
in a society that held them in contempt. It resonated as a cry for
justice giving voice to frustrations. The music’s relentless tempo,
driving earnestness and poetic structure had become a new creation with
its own energy that spoke to these young people, but I found some of the
lyrics horrifying, especially the use of the word “nigger.”
Growing up in the South, I felt the sting of this derogatory word; to embrace it in a song smacked of self-hate.
But at the same time, it was clear these
entertainers connected with the youth of their generation. The audience
loved them, and I realized how powerful and totally off the radar the
new music called rap had become.
Unpublished Black History
For Lena Horne, a Home at Last
She was one of the most famous performers in the country, a recording star, a Hollywood actress and a nightclub sensation.
But in the late 1950s, Lena Horne still
struggled to find property owners in Manhattan who were willing to sell
co-ops or condominiums to African-Americans, even very wealthy ones.
So how exactly did she snare the
penthouse apartment, featured in this photograph, at 300 West End Avenue
on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? With the help of a good friend, Harry
Belafonte.
Back in 1958, Mr. Belafonte, who was the
first recording artist to sell more than a million LPs, was turned away
from one Manhattan apartment after another. And he was furious. So he
sent his publicist, who was white, to rent a four-bedroom apartment in
the building at 300 West End Avenue. His publicist passed on the
paperwork, and Mr. Belafonte signed the one-year lease in his own name.
Within hours of moving in, Mr. Belafonte
said, the building’s manager “became aware that he had a Negro as a
tenant.” The building’s owner asked him to leave. Mr. Belafonte refused.
Instead, he bought the building, using
dummy real estate companies to cloak his identity. Some tenants who had
been renting there bought their apartments and some of Mr. Belafonte’s
friends moved in, too. “Lena Horne got the penthouse,” said Mr.
Belafonte, who described the real estate deal in his memoir, “My Song: A
Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance.”
By Dec. 17, 1964, when this photograph
was taken by our photographer, Sam Falk, Ms. Horne and her husband,
Lennie Hayton, a white composer and conductor, were comfortably settled
in. She was hanging Christmas decorations that day as she prepared for
the debut of her television show, “Lena.”
In the article that ran 10 days later,
accompanied by a different photograph, a close-up, she mentioned her
difficulties in finding an apartment, but not the back story to where
she had landed.
“Lennie and I lived in hotels for years
while we were on the road,” said Ms. Horne, who was 47 then. “And then
we went through the hysteria of trying to find an apartment – all those
stupid problems – and when we finally found a place that would admit
both me and Lennie, we put our roots down.”
Unpublished Black History
Malcolm X’s Close Call in Queens
Malcolm X was sleeping when firebombs crashed through his living room windows shortly before 3 in the morning. Jolted awake by the explosions, he rushed his wife and four young daughters out into the cold before fire engulfed their modest brick house in East Elmhurst, Queens.
We published an article about the attack
on Feb. 15, 1965, and paired it with a photograph taken by a news agency
that captured Malcolm X stepping out of his car, in front of his house.
What our readers did not know was that one of our own photographers,
Don Hogan Charles, had walked through the house, shooting powerful
pictures of the damage.
This stark image of the shattered
windows, singed walls and sooty debris, shown here for the first time,
offers a glimpse of the private life of a man who spent much of his time
in the public eye. Malcolm X gave speeches in Manhattan, Detroit and
other cities around the country and overseas. But he came home to
Queens.
The two-bedroom house at 23-11 97th
Street, which was owned by the Nation of Islam, had a small living room,
a dining room, a bathroom, a kitchen and a former utility room, where
Malcolm X’s 5-month-old daughter slept in a crib. Few of the family’s
possessions survived the blaze. Malcolm X, who told our reporter that he
had been receiving daily threats, escaped that firebombing unscathed.
He was assassinated one week later.
Unpublished Black History
Allyn Baum/The New York Times
An Introduction: Photographing Martin Luther King Jr.
Hundreds of stunning images from black history, drawn from old negatives, have long been buried in the musty envelopes and crowded bins of the New York Times archives.
None of them was published by The Times until now.
Were the photos — or the people in them —
not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for
publication? Were they pushed aside by words here at an institution long
known as the Gray Lady?
As you scroll through the images, each
will take you back: To the charred wreckage of Malcolm X’s house in
Queens, just hours after it was bombed. To the Lincoln Memorial, where
thousands of African-American protesters gathered, six years before the
March on Washington. To Lena Horne’s elegant penthouse on the Upper West
Side of Manhattan. To a city sidewalk where schoolgirls jumped rope,
while the writer Zora Neale Hurston cheered them on, behind the scenes.
Photographers for The Times captured all
of these scenes, but then the pictures and negatives were filed in our
archives, where they sat for decades.
This month, we present a robust selection for the very first time.
Every day during Black History Month, we
will publish at least one of these photographs online, illuminating
stories that were never told in our pages and others that have been
mostly forgotten.
Among them are images of confrontations
between the police and demonstrators, including a rally that erupted in
violence after the assassination of Medgar Evers, the civil rights
leader.
There are pioneers in Hollywood and
hip-hop and in the ballpark, as well as ordinary people savoring daily
life. And there are prominent figures, such as James Baldwin and the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in photographs with stories of their
own.
Consider the close-up of Dr. King above.
It is the only photo in this project that has been previously published;
it has appeared many times over the past 50 years, as the backside of
the print clearly shows, and it looks as if it might have been taken
during a formal sitting.
But it was shot during the summer of 1963
on a day when black protesters hurled eggs at Dr. King as he arrived at
a church in Harlem. Earlier that day, he criticized black nationalists,
saying that those who called for a separate black state were “wrong.”
Some believed that those remarks inspired the attack that night.
Our photographer snapped Dr. King’s
picture as he participated in a round table that was broadcast on NBC.
The photo below, unpublished until now, captured that discussion. (Click
on the image for a larger view, and to scroll through the other
photos.)
Sometime later, an editor cropped one of
those images from the NBC appearance to create the head shot of Dr. King
that is now so familiar and so disconnected from the tumultuous events
of that day.
Many of these photographs, and their
stories, are equally intriguing. But the collection is far from
comprehensive. There are gaps, for many reasons.
We had a small staff of photographers —
the first was hired sometime after 1910 — and nearly all of them were
based in New York City. As a result, most staff photographs depicted
events in New York and places nearby, though The Times also bought
pictures from freelancers and studios in other parts of the country and
overseas. (The Times’s picture agency, Wide World News Photo Service,
which had staff members in London, Berlin and elsewhere, was sold to The
Associated Press in 1941.)
More than now, we also put a premium back
then on words, not pictures, which meant that many photographs that
were taken were never published.
But other holes in coverage probably
reflect the biases of some earlier editors at our news organization,
long known as the newspaper of record. They and they alone determined
who was newsworthy and who was not, at a time when black people were
marginalized in society and in the media.
In our archive of roughly five million
prints, after weeks of searching, we could not find a single staff
photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois; of Romare Bearden, one of the country’s
pre-eminent artists; or of Richard Wright, the influential author of
“Native Son” and “Black Boy.” (The Times did publish a handful of
photographs of these men taken by freelancers, friends or private
studios.)
Unpublished Black History
A Jackie Robinson Mystery
It was 1949, the year Jackie Robinson
would bat .342 for the Brooklyn Dodgers and receive the National
League’s Most Valuable Player Award, just 31 months after becoming the
first black player in the major leagues.
But on Feb. 14, before the season
started, before the crowds poured into Ebbets Field, Mr. Robinson spoke
to the Sociology Society at City College in New York.
This photograph, unpublished until now,
documents the moment, with the students leaning forward to hear him
speak. But what was he discussing? The photo caption offers only a hint,
saying that Mr. Robinson was speaking about “his work with Harlem boys’
groups.”
We know that Mr. Robinson coached children at the YMCA in Harlem a year earlier, to help, as he put it,
“keep them off the streets.” And it is easy to imagine how his
successes and struggles would have resonated with African-American boys
and teenagers at a time when racial discrimination was rife. “I had to
fight hard against loneliness, abuse and the knowledge that any mistake I
made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there,”
Mr. Robinson wrote in his memoir, “I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography
of Jackie Robinson,” describing those early years with the Dodgers.
But The New York Times didn’t publish an
article about the ballplayer’s visit to City College that day. So this
morning we turned to you for help.
Several readers (from Brooklyn, San
Francisco and elsewhere) pointed us to City College’s undergraduate
newspaper, “The Campus,“ which published an article about Mr. Robinson’s speech to students on Feb. 18, 1949.
The article said that Mr. Robinson had
spent five months, during his off-season, working with underprivileged
children at the YMCA in Harlem. “I’ve learned more from the kids than
they’ve learned from me,” said Mr. Robinson, who described his work to
members of the Sociology Society, adding that it had given him “great
satisfaction.”
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