LYCOS RETRIEVER 
African American: Civil War
built 285 days ago
Before World War II about 20,000 African Americans lived in the entire Bay Area, about 4,000 of them in San Francisco. The tremendous increase in the black population during the next 30 years was set in motion by the war, which brought at least a half million war workers to the Bay Area's shipyards and other industries.
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African-American leaders sought representation as observers at the peace conference and began discussing it before the war ended. Those most interested included the intellectual activist W. E. B. Du Bois, entrepreneur C. J. Walker, National Equal Rights League founder William Monroe Trotter, and activist Wells-Barnett. The Universal Negro Improvement Association, an international organization founded by Marcus Garvey, named delegates to the congress, including the labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Other interested organizations included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Race Congress. The thinking was that if representatives of black organizations were denied admission to the proceedings or audiences with principals, they could use the Pan-African Congress and their proximity to the peace talks to bring their issues to public attention.
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While many African-American communities in the South dissolved after the Civil War, the residents of Flat Rock, Ga., clung to the land of their ancestors. Today, the town is working to preserve its history as a rare, surviving example of the black experience.
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CHICAGO, Oct. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) today recognizes Charles Warner Pierce as the nation's first-known African-American degree-holding chemical engineer. Having earned his degree from IIT in 1901, Pierce is, in fact, the first graduate of the university's chemical engineering program.
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The Civil Rights Movement produced several pieces of legislation, which reaffirmed the rights of African Americans. The most effective were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination in public places, and discrimination by employers of labor unions on the basis of color, race, religion, national origin, and sex. The Voting Rights Act re-enfranchised blacks by outlawing obstructionist educational requirements for voting and by empowering the attorney general to have the Civil Rights Commission assign federal registrars to uphold the voting rights of African Americans.
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* Jada Pinkett-Smith: Actress Jada Pinkett-Smith, wife of actor Will Smith, descends from a line of African-Americans free before the Civil War. Her great-great-grandfather Daniel Pinkett was just a young boy when he was recorded in the 1860 census. At that time, free blacks were the only African-Americans noted in the census. After the Civil War, in 1870, the 13-year-old could not read or write and had not attended school during the previous year. Ten years later in 1880, not only could 23-year-old Daniel read and write, he was a school teacher. * Maya Angelou: According to the 1930 census, the poet's 18-year-old mother, Vivian Johnson, was a widow with two young children -- two-year-old Maya (who is listed by her birth name, Marguerite Johnson) and three-year-old son Bailey.
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