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| Philadelphia, 1844: Mrs. Juliann Jane Tillman, preacher of the A.M.E. Church. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in the 1790s and had over 20,000 members in the nothern states on the eve of the Civil War. It launched a major missionary effort to southern blacks after the war and was a leading source of resistence to Jim Crow. Many of the first black politicos and teachers from the North were ministers of the AME church. Illustration by Alfred M. Hoffy. |
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| Illustration (1891) by I. Garland Penn. Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She raised her four orphaned brothers and then became a schoolteacher in Memphis, Tennessee, where she purchased and edited a newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech. Wells was an outspoken and courageous opponent of lynching. |
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| Booker T. Washington between 1890-1900. Photograph by Schumacher. |
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| Washington, D.C., 1930s: Group portrait of Asa Philip Randolph (center front in dark coat) with railroad employees, and a group of African-American men and women on steps in the background; in front of the Twelfth Street branch of the Y.M.C.A. One of the principal players in the death of Jim Crow, Randolph's slogan of "Service not Servitude" underscored his socialism and his willingness to strike and confront in mass demonstrations the workings of Jim Crow. |
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| Georgia, 1935: Zora Neale Hurston, three-quarter-length portrait, standing, facing front. Photo probably taken during the Lomax-Hurston-Barnicle recording expedition to Georgia, Florida, and the Bahamas. |
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| Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, author and lecturer (1825-1911): She is generally credited with introducing black protest poetry, most notably "The Martyr of Alabama," written in the 1890s. She spans the period from her first works in the 1850s through the Jim Crow era. Although she was an avid advocate of Women's rights, she sided with Frederick Douglass in the famous fight with white and black women over the issue of including women in the 14th and 15th Amendments. She believed that racial equality should be won first, before gender equality. |
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