Twelve African American women helped destroy Jim Crow laws in Long Beach, California, the same way Rosa Parks changed the Jim Crow South.
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| Autrilla Scott (left) One of the 12 Women Sunny Nash (right) Editor & Producer BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way |
Twelve of these women's lives are chronicled in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, a project that pays tribute to black women in Long Beach, California. "Long Beach, California, was not perfect, racially," the 12 African American women agreed, but they did what they could to change the Jim Crow laws that prevailed when they became contributing adults.
BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way explores race relations in America and Southern California, strained during the migration of black females coming from the segregated South during World War II primarily for employment. Long Beach was more progressive than towns in Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and other parts of the Jim Crow South where some of the 12 black women were born and raised. However, employment, education and housing required racial change these black women helped to make in Long Beach.
The late Autrilla Scott pictured above and other women in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way are accomplished in a variety of areas--Congressional Gold Medal, nanny to a future president, papers in the Library of Congress, activist who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other national, state and local achievements and honors in education, government, civil rights and others. Read Autrilla Scott & A Place Called Hope.
BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way explores race relations in America and Southern California, strained during the migration of black females coming from the segregated South during World War II primarily for employment. Long Beach was more progressive than towns in Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and other parts of the Jim Crow South where some of the 12 black women were born and raised. However, employment, education and housing required racial change these black women helped to make in Long Beach.
The late Autrilla Scott pictured above and other women in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way are accomplished in a variety of areas--Congressional Gold Medal, nanny to a future president, papers in the Library of Congress, activist who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other national, state and local achievements and honors in education, government, civil rights and others. Read Autrilla Scott & A Place Called Hope.
In preparing BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, I learned that people of color all over the nation, including Southern California, have felt the effect of racial oppression at some time in their lives throughout American history. In the beginning, the inability of the United States to take any meaningful steps in race relations was due to the Jim Crow system in place for more than 100 years. The Jim Crow system stymied any attempt at race relations by committed black and white citizens in a nation that reeled from the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction for nearly a century and continues to be tainted by the emotions of coming generations.
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| John Kennedy Signs Federal Legislation |
In 1961, President John Kennedy signed an order, "The Contractor will take affirmative action, to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin." This order included no quotas. Many members of minority communities, unimpressed with Kennedy's inaction on civil rights issues, had expected much more based on his campaign and his own Irish-Catholic minority background. Kennedy finally acted by sending the National Guard to Alabama to deal with Governor George Wallace. In addition, he authored civil rights legislation that was enacted after his tragic assassination in 1963.
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| Lyndon Johnson Signs Civil Rights Acts 1964 & 1965 |
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed The Civil Rights Act, Title IV, further declaring that "No person in the United States shall, on the grounds of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 may never have taken place if not for the civil rights leadership of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in sparking and leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott ten years earlier, and later events like the Selma March, the Freedom Riders, Woolworth sit-ins, March on Washington and many other significant civil rights events.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 that required federal contractors to take "affirmative action" to hire persons regardless of race, religion and national origin in an attempt to advance equal opportunity. More teeth were added to the law in 1968 when gender and sexual orientation bias prohibited discrimination against those who may not have been previously treated fairly in the areas of housing, employment, education and business.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 may never have taken place if not for the civil rights leadership of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in sparking and leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott ten years earlier, and later events like the Selma March, the Freedom Riders, Woolworth sit-ins, March on Washington and many other significant civil rights events.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 that required federal contractors to take "affirmative action" to hire persons regardless of race, religion and national origin in an attempt to advance equal opportunity. More teeth were added to the law in 1968 when gender and sexual orientation bias prohibited discrimination against those who may not have been previously treated fairly in the areas of housing, employment, education and business.
Court cases spawned a definition of reverse discrimination that has been mistakenly interchanged with reverse racism. An example of reverse discrimination is explored in the article, “Does affirmative action punish whites? Reverse discrimination first reached the nation's highest court in the 1970s, when a student with good grades named Allan Bakke accused the University of California medical school of twice denying him admission because he was white. Strict racial quotas were unconstitutional, the court said— affirmative action was not. But that ruling far from decided what many considered the big-picture issue: Does protecting minorities discriminate against the majority?"
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| U.S. Supreme Court Building |
The U.S. Supreme Court, closely divided in a 1978 decision of University of California v. Bakke case, held that race could be one of the factors considered in choosing a diverse student body in university admissions. The Court also held, however, that the use of quotas in such affirmative action programs was not permissible; thus the University of California, Davis, medical school had, by maintaining a 16% minority quota, discriminated against Allan Bakke, a white applicant, who had twice been rejected, even with a higher grade point average than a number of minority candidates who were admitted. As a result, Bakke was admitted to the medical school and graduated in 1982. This decision did not send the minority community into riot mode, indicating that it was accepted that the law of the land should be executed in a manner that protects the rights of people of all colors, races, genders, religion, national origin and physical conditions, and guarantees their fair treatment, regardless of past acts against any group. This means that we as a nation cannot go backward in our attempt to equalize in race relations what was not equal in the past. Race relations in America must start from where we are today and go forward.
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| Civil Rights Legislation Protects the Rights of All Citizens |
On the other hand, reverse racism implies that minority members may express racist attitudes toward majority members. Some argue that a minority's social or economic status precludes the minority from having influence over the majority's life. Influence can be as minute as contact on the street or a non-white person denying a white person a fair chance because of skin color. Although the notion of a black racist is not universally accepted, growing evidence supports the idea that a person who uses race or other qualities against another person in issuing or defending rights and privileges in the United States can be considered a racist or bigot of another type, regardless of color, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin and physical condition, which is no longer a simple matter of black and white. Black and white is where the discussion began but certainly is not where the discussion will end.
Whether reverse discrimination and affirmative action can or cannot be defended, it can be said with confidence that race relations in the United States have been affected by Jim Crow laws, which set into motion discrimination against former slaves, and eventually would lead America down a path to remedies for this discrimination and to future discrimination that would occur against numerous other groups of Americans. Many people in the United States have heard of Jim Crow laws but do not fully understand the origins of Jim Crow laws and their significance to the American culture that developed around the legislation and the effect of the legislation on race relations in America.
Jim Crow laws started out as a minstrel character but represented sanctions against civil rights.
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| Jim Crow Minstrel Character |
Jim Crow, a minstrel character invented by a white actor in black face, Thomas "Daddy" Rice, represented laws to perpetuate oppression of African Americans after the Civil War. Outlandishly dressed, oafish portrayals of plantation slaves entertained white audiences from the 1850s to the mid-20th century with performances in Long Beach churches and public schools through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Based on a slave song, Jim Crow not only represented oppressive laws but also helped to sustain a degraded image of African Americans and the lifestyle in which they were portrayed.
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Nine Supreme Court Justices
Decide Plessy v. Ferguson
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| Lynching of African American Female During Reconstruction |
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 passed over President Andrew Johnson's veto. Andrew Johnson was President Abraham Lincoln's vice president and the successor to the office when Lincoln was assassinated after the Civil War. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 declared, "all persons born in the United States were now citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition. As citizens they could make and enforce contracts, sue and be sued, give evidence in court, and inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property. Persons who denied these rights to former slaves were guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction faced a fine not exceeding $1,000, or imprisonment not exceeding one year, or both." Activities of the Ku Klux Klan undermined the act and it failed to guarantee civil rights for former slaves, including female African Americans who suffered retaliation for speaking out for their civil rights. Because many victims of lynching were females, black women led the outcry against racially motivated lynching in the United States in the late nineteenth century, a key ingredient in the enforcement of the Jim Crow system of government in most parts of the officially segregated South and to a large degree universally enforced in the unofficially segregated North.
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| Anti-lynching Crusaders NAACP Button, 1900 |
In the 1890s, journalist, Ida B. Wells (1852-1932), wrote in protest of lynching and later the Anti-lynching Crusaders, a group of black women within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), made a lot of noise against this criminal practice, until the Legislature took on the problem in 1918 in a bill intended to punish state, county and local officials who did not stop lynching in their locales and create an atmosphere to end the practice altogether. Although the House of Representatives passed anti-lynching laws three times, none of the efforts passed in the U. S. Senate. The Senate finally apologized on Monday, June 13, 2005, for not passing anti-lynching laws over the course of its history.
A second attempt at civil rights legislation was passed in 1868 in the form of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Section I of the amendment sums up its meaning and intentions. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
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| African American Schoolhouse South Boston, Virginia 1920s & 1930s |
In the northern states where 'separate but equal' did not apply, locals controlled education, property ownership and voting rights as well as where people lived, where they went to school, where they worked, where they were born, how they were punished and where they were buried when they died. These laws and local traditions took away all of the freedoms that former slaves had gained after the South had supposedly lost the Civil War and had wiped out all of the strides African Americans made during Reconstruction from 1865 through about 1877 when the federal government withdrew resources from the South that financed efforts toward equality for the next 90 years.
In the 1930s, a few miles up Highway 1 from Long Beach, Hollywood had little use for black actresses except as maids and nannies in images of female Jim Crows. Ironically, Hattie McDaniel had been a minstrel show performer with her father's traveling troupe to get her start in entertainment, show business and Hollywood movies. Becoming one of the first black women to perform on radio, she got her first big break when she sang a duet with Will Rogers in the Fox production, Judge Priest, in 1934. One of the reasons McDaniel may have gotten that opportunity was her deliberate lack of sex appeal on screen and her presence was nonthreatening to contemporary white beauty standards.
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| Hattie McDaniel (right) & Vivien Leigh Gone with the Wind 1939 |
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| GONE WITH THE WIND (SPECIAL EDITION) BY GABLE,CLARK (DVD) [2 DISCS] (Google Affiliate Ad) |
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| Hattie McDaniel Receives Oscar 1939 |
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| Vanessa Williams Crowned First Black Miss America, 1983 |
Because African Americans come in an assortment of shades, from the whitest white to the blackest black, Hollywood found it pretty easy to keep from using an African American female image that producers thought unsuitable to satisfy Jim Crow laws. In the area of black male actors, Hollywood kept them very black, dancing and goofy.
Succeeding generations of Americans of all races today, however, accept as normal what preceding generations never dreamed possible to accept, human beings with dark skin. In the old days, however, signs still reminded people of their place, although Jim Crow Beauty Pageants and Race Riots were taking place simultaneously.
Succeeding generations of Americans of all races today, however, accept as normal what preceding generations never dreamed possible to accept, human beings with dark skin. In the old days, however, signs still reminded people of their place, although Jim Crow Beauty Pageants and Race Riots were taking place simultaneously.
Rosa Parks took the civil rights battle to a new level when she and Martin Luther King started and then led the Montgomery Bus Boycott against Jim Crow laws.
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| Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott |
The struggle extended into the lives of black women in Hollywood and those relegated to the backs of buses in real life. Unlike publicized cases of Rosa Parks and black actresses in early Hollywood, black women nationwide affected the history of race relations in America.
Featuring these black women of Long Beach in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way and writing my own memories with my grandmother in Bigmama didn't Shop At Woolworth's helps me to make an installment in the story of race relations in America. In their own ways these women made statements of their worth, worth of their people and worth of their cause. I happened to live through some of those dark times. Having survived and even thrived in the messiness of segregation, I am not bitter. Bigmama, my grandmother, born in 1890, always said, "Take your emotions out or they will distract you to the point of losing the battle. I have found that to be true.
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| Littie Nash |
My mother, Littie Nash, wrestled with Jim Crow racism during the 1950s and 1960s, while giving me the life of a little princess with imagination and without the luxury of having a lot of money...Littie did not waste compliments on me or anyone else. She reserved accolades to celebrate real accomplishments, not just because I dragged myself out of bed before noon on Saturday or because I made an 'A' on my report card. "Some things you have to do," she said. "And those things pass, not without notice, but without an all-day hullabaloo."
To support my efforts, my mother sponsored piano, ballet, tennis and swimming lessons, dance performances, recitals, literary and classical music club memberships, summer camps, school trips and science fair exhibits, still managing to squeeze out of our tight budget money for the dentist to install braces on my teeth. It took a great deal of courage to live with dignity and raise me to have aspirations. About my upbringing, Littie got it right, although I took detours of my own along the way. Read more at: Great Mothering in Jim Crow's World
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| Dale Clinton, Community Activist, wrote letter to President Johnson about poverty in America 1968 letter collected by the Library of Congress |
Some women with similar philosophies are profiled in a book I edited, BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, historical profiles--filmed, compiled, edited and written--about twelve African American women who made a noteworthy difference in the history of Long Beach, California, allows people of all races to learn about the triumphs over racism by these women and others of their time, to experience primary accounts of their lives as Americans and their struggles as black women, and to get a better understanding of race relations in the United States.
The women in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, some born as early as 1918, do not have famous names and their contributions to race relations in America, may have gone unnoticed had this book not been published. This type of project about women who defied all odds can give a writer unlimited material from which to draw topics for public speaking engagements and have the double benefit of featuring women like these in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way and helping to expose the community to their stories and contributions to race relations in America.
BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way came from a photograph by Carolyn Smith Watts, community activist and coordinator of the project. “I am blessed to have known most of these women and I have a wonderful relationship with many. These 12 women have contributed over six-hundred years of experience to Long Beach. In the past fifty years, they have mothered hundreds children, some of whom were their own and others were neighborhood children who needed love and support. Yes, of course, there are other women in our city with thousands of stories and each one invaluable."
The women in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, some born as early as 1918, do not have famous names and their contributions to race relations in America, may have gone unnoticed had this book not been published. This type of project about women who defied all odds can give a writer unlimited material from which to draw topics for public speaking engagements and have the double benefit of featuring women like these in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way and helping to expose the community to their stories and contributions to race relations in America.
BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way came from a photograph by Carolyn Smith Watts, community activist and coordinator of the project. “I am blessed to have known most of these women and I have a wonderful relationship with many. These 12 women have contributed over six-hundred years of experience to Long Beach. In the past fifty years, they have mothered hundreds children, some of whom were their own and others were neighborhood children who needed love and support. Yes, of course, there are other women in our city with thousands of stories and each one invaluable."
You can select women from church voted on by secret ballot so that they all have a fair chance to be in the book and hopefully won't become angry because they don't know who voted for whom. You could choose women in your family who could share stories or recipes. Or you could select women from your community that had an influence on your life. 
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| Alta Cooke Posed for Article in the Press-Telegram, Long Beach |
Advance publicity is crucial to pre-selling copies so that you have money for production. Newspapers and other publications were notified for advance publicity of BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way. Carolyn and I called in favors from many of our media connections and relied heavily on our email lists. With a local project word of mouth and church communications help in promotion.
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Promoting the book release with print and Internet press releases is wise. Cities with weekly freebies will run the press releases. Depending on competition, daily newspapers may write an article. Online press releases can be distributed through emails and social media. I would not distribute through mass Internet distribution because of limited inventory meant to serve a local community. In this case, there is little need to use search engine optimization (SEO) or keywords and such. I prepared posters to announce the events associated with the book and release of the DVD.
The video below was made at the Historical Society of Long Beach (HSLB) where the book, BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, was released. The occasion marked the dedication of a repository of artifacts to be placed permanently at HSLB for the use of future scholars of Long Beach history.
The video below was made at the Historical Society of Long Beach (HSLB) where the book, BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, was released. The occasion marked the dedication of a repository of artifacts to be placed permanently at HSLB for the use of future scholars of Long Beach history.
Collaborate with a Carolyn Smith Watts, who is connected in the community, able to coordinate logistics, hosts a large social group and was president of Leadership Long Beach. We divided responsibilities evenly along the lines of our abilities. While Carolyn took care of all the business, which was a massive undertaking,
I developed the interview model, filmed the interviews and edited the manuscript and DVD. Also, we collaborated with the Historical Society of Long Beach to secure credibility and a location to premier the book and DVD with signing and program. Inventory, restricted to the number of units we pre-sold, means the book and DVD are no longer available. My work is published by Havard and Oxford in the African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates, and, for 15 years, I have contributed to Ancestry and other national publications.
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by Sunny Nash
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When I wrote my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, there was no FaceBook, which requires precautions against political correctness. because communications one key stroke away from insulting someone.
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