March 1: Green Feather Movement

On this date in History .... 1954:

The Green Feather movement started in the campus of Indiana University when five “Merry Men” students covered the campus in green chicken feathers, tacking one to every bulletin board on campus, as a protest to McCarthyism and in response to an Indiana Textbook commissioner, Mrs. Thomas White, calling Robin Hood a communist.

In the Cold War era, the Indiana State Textbook Commission had recently raised arms against the Robin Hood legend appearing in schools for its communist undertones in the "rob-the-rich-give-to-the-poor" theme. The students saw the Robin Hood fuss as the epitome of McCarthyism pushed too far. They found their symbol and were ready to run with it. They would call it the "Green Feather Movement" with the five involved standing as "Robin Hood's Merry Men."  

Only two days pass before the entire state is involved in the controversy. Word spreads through the Midwest, and news organizations from Louisville to Indianapolis start taking sides. One Bloomington newspaper goes so far to say that the students are acting on behalf of the adults on campus who lack "courage of their conviction."

The Green Feather movement consequently spread to the Universities of Michigan, Illinois, and to Purdue and other universities across the country. Even Harvard University announced in May 1954 that a chapter would be formed on their campus. The movement was discontinued after McCarthy’s censure in December 1954.

(Sources for this article include www.thecrimson.com and www.idsnews.com)

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February 23: W.E.B. DuBois

On this date in History .... 1868:

W.E.B. DuBois is born in Massachusetts. The initials he is known by stand for William Edward Burghardt.

 

A brilliant scholar, DuBois became the first African-American to obtain a PhD from Harvard and became an influential person in civil rights movements. His first major book was the first sociological study of a black community (Philadelphia).

 

His philosophy was completely opposite of Booker T. Washington, founder and president of the Tuskegee University. “DuBois accused Washington of selling out blacks by advocating silence in civil rights issues in return for vocational training opportunities for blacks.”  

 

He helped found the NAACP in 1909. He broke ties with the group a couple of times before joining the Communist Party in 1961 and becoming a citizen of Ghana in 1963, the year of his death.

February 7: The First "Negro History Week"

On this date in history .... 1926:

The first “Negro History Week”, the precursor to “National Black History Month”, is observed. 

It was the brainchild of Carter G. Woodson, the son of former slaves who is considered the Father of Black History. The second week of February was selected since it included the birthdates of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

After becoming the 2^nd Black American to graduate from Harvard with a Ph.D. (W.E.B. DuBois was the first), he began working to include history of Black Americans in mainstream history. He was bothered that history books largely ignored the black population. One Harvard professor told him, “The Negro has no history” and Woodson set out to prove otherwise. He noted that African-American contributions "were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them."

As a child, he went to school during the four months a year allowed to black children and learned to read from the Bible and newspapers. He worked in coal mines before he was able to attend high school.  He completed a 4-year high school curriculum in just two years. In 1920, as dean of School of Liberal Arts at Howard University, he created the first African-American survey course and founded the Associated Negro Publishers to promote publishing for African-Americans

He once wrote:
“If you can control a man’s thinking, you don’t have to worry about his actions. If you can determine what a man thinks you do not have to worry about what he will do. If you can make a man believe that he is inferior, you don’t have to compel him to seek an inferior status, he will do so without being told and if you can make a man believe that he is justly an outcast, you don’t have to order him to the back door, he will go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the man will demand that you build one.”

He didn’t live long enough to see his “Negro History Week” turn into “Black History Month” but his devotion to putting the contributions of African Americans into the history books have been far-reaching.

Quoting from Wikipedia:  
“Woodson was ostracized by some of his contemporaries because of his insistence on defining a category of history related to ethnic culture and race. At the time, these educators felt that it was wrong to teach or understand African-American history as separate from more general American history. According to these educators, "Negroes" were simply Americans, darker skinned, but with no history apart from that of any other. Thus Woodson's efforts to get Black culture and history into the curricula of institutions, even historically Black colleges, were often unsuccessful.

Today African-American studies have become specialized fields of study in history, music, culture, literature and other areas; in addition, there is more emphasis on African-American contributions to general American culture. The United States celebrates Black History Month.”

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