L. Alex Wilson
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L. Alex Wilson
L. Alex Wilson (1909–1960) was an American journalist and editor who rose to prominence during the civil rights movement. He covered the Emmett Till murder for the African-American oriented, ''Chicago Defender'' chain, while serving as the editor of the Memphis-based ''Tri-State Defender''. In 1957, Wilson was covering the Little Rock Nine school desegregation crises when a white mob beat and injured him. He recovered, and continued as an editor in Chicago, but the wounds he received in Little Rock likely shortened his life. Biography Lucious Alexander Wilson was the editor and general manager of the ''Tri-State Defender'', an African-American newspaper published in Memphis, Tennessee. The ''Tri-State'' was then part of the influential ''Chicago Defender'' chain. In 1955, Wilson led the ''Defender''-chain's coverage of the Emmett Till lynching, a catalyst for the civil rights movement. One of the people he hired at the ''Tri-State Defender'' was Dorothy Butler Gilliam. Wils ...
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Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, Racial discrimination in the United States, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the United States, disenfranchisement throughout the United States. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, although it made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans. After the American Civil War and the subsequent Abolitionism in the United States, abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship ...
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Emmett Till
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement. Till was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white, married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Although what happened at the store is a matter of dispute, Till was accused of flirting with, touching, or whistling at Bryant. Till's interaction with Bryant, perhaps unwittingly, violated the unwritten code of behavior for a bla ...
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African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Slavery in the United States, enslaved Africans who are from the United States. While some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American, the majority of first generation immigrants do not, preferring to identify with their nation of origin. African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the U.S. after White Americans, as well as the third largest ethnic group after Hispanic and Latino Americans. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West Africa, West/Central Africa, Central African with some European descent; some also have Native Americans in th ...
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Chicago Defender
''The Chicago Defender'' is a Chicago-based online African-American newspaper. It was founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott and was once considered the "most important" newspaper of its kind. Abbott's newspaper reported and campaigned against Jim Crow-era violence and urged black people in the American South to settle in the north in what became the Great Migration. Abbott worked out an informal distribution system with Pullman porters who surreptitiously (and sometimes against southern state laws and mores) took his paper by rail far beyond Chicago, especially to African American readers in the southern United States. Under his nephew and chosen successor, John H. Sengstacke, the paper dealt with racial segregation in the United States, especially in the U.S. military, during World War II. Copies of the paper were passed along in communities, and it is estimated that at its most successful, each copy was read by four to five people. In 1919–1922, the ''Defender'' attracted t ...
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Tri-State Defender
The ''Tri-State Defender'' is a weekly African-American newspaper serving Memphis, Tennessee, and the nearby areas of Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. It bills itself as "The Mid-South's Best Alternative Newspaper". The ''Defender'' was founded in 1951 by John H. Sengstacke, owner of the ''Chicago Defender''. In 2013, the paper was locally purchased from Real Times Media by Best Media Inc. History Sengstacke's ''Chicago Defender'' circulated widely across the Southern United States, but Sengstacke in the early 1950s identified Memphis as a particularly attractive market, where several African-American newspapers had failed to take root and a startup would face only one competitor, ''The Memphis World'', which had begun in 1931 (and would continue publishing until 1961). In November 1951, Sengstacke and editor Lewis O. Swingler, the former editor of the ''World'', published the first edition of the ''Tri-State Defender'', adopting the slogan "The South's Independent We ...
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Little Rock Nine
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic ''Brown v. Board of Education'', 347 U.S. 483, on May 17, 1954. Tied to the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the decision declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional, and it called for the desegregation of all schools throughout the nation.. After the decision, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the school board agreed to comply with the high cou ...
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African-American Newspaper
African-American newspapers (also known as the Black press or Black newspapers) are newspaper, news publications in the United States serving African-American communities. Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm started the first African-American periodical called ''Freedom's Journal'' in 1827. During the antebellum South, other African-American newspapers sprang forth, such as ''North Star (anti-slavery newspaper), The North Star'' founded in 1847 by Frederick Douglass. As African Americans moved to urban centers around the country, virtually every large city with a significant African-American population soon had newspapers directed towards African Americans. These newspapers gained audiences outside African-American circles. In the 21st century, papers (like newspapers of all sorts) Decline of newspapers, have shut down, merged, or shrunk in response to the dominance of the Internet in terms of providing free news and information, and providing cheap advertising. History O ...
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Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest part of the state; it is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-most populous city in Tennessee, after Nashville. Memphis is the fifth-most populous city in the Southeast, the nation's 28th-largest overall, as well as the largest city bordering the Mississippi River. The Memphis metropolitan area includes West Tennessee and the greater Mid-South region, which includes portions of neighboring Arkansas, Mississippi and the Missouri Bootheel. One of the more historic and culturally significant cities of the Southern United States, Memphis has a wide variety of landscapes and distinct neighborhoods. The first European explorer to visit the area of present-day Memphis was Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541. The high Chickasaw Bluffs protecting the location from the waters of the Mississipp ...
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Dorothy Butler Gilliam
Dorothy Pearl Butler Gilliam (born November 24, 1936) is an American journalist who was the first African-American female reporter at ''The Washington Post''. Biography Gilliam was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on November 24, 1936. She was the eighth child of Adee Conklin Butler and Jessie Mae Norment Butler. When Gilliam was in her first year at Ursuline College (later merged with Bellarmine University) she worked as a secretary for the weekly ''Louisville Defender'', an African-American newspaper, and at 17 years old was unexpectedly made its society reporter. She was struck by how learning journalism could expose her to "new worlds". She transferred to a historically black college with a journalism program, graduating ''cum laude'' from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, with a bachelor's degree in journalism. In 1957, she became a reporter for the Memphis ''Tri-State Defender'', part of the Chicago Defender chain. There she worked for editor L. Alex Wilso ...
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Little Rock Central High School
Little Rock Central High School (LRCHS) is an accredited comprehensive education, comprehensive public high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, Little Rock, Arkansas, Secondary education in the United States, United States. The school was the Little Rock Nine, site of forced desegregation in 1957 after the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Brown v. Board of Education, segregation by race in public schools was unconstitutional three years earlier. This was during the period of heightened activism in the civil rights movement. Central is located at the intersection of Park Street and Daisy Bates (activist), Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive (formerly 14th Street). Bates was an African-American journalist and state NAACP president who played a key role in bringing about, through the 1957 crisis, the integration of the school. Central can trace its origins to 1869 when the Sherman School operated in a wooden structure at 8th and Sherman streets; it graduated i ...
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The Chicago Defender
''The Chicago Defender'' is a Chicago-based online African-American newspaper. It was founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott and was once considered the "most important" newspaper of its kind. Abbott's newspaper reported and campaigned against Jim Crow-era violence and urged black people in the American South to settle in the north in what became the Great Migration. Abbott worked out an informal distribution system with Pullman porters who surreptitiously (and sometimes against southern state laws and mores) took his paper by rail far beyond Chicago, especially to African American readers in the southern United States. Under his nephew and chosen successor, John H. Sengstacke, the paper dealt with racial segregation in the United States, especially in the U.S. military, during World War II. Copies of the paper were passed along in communities, and it is estimated that at its most successful, each copy was read by four to five people. In 1919–1922, the ''Defender'' attracted t ...
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