Black History

1. Blacks now vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But if it hadn't been for blacks, there never would have been a Republican party. Why?

In the 1850s, bitterness between northern and southern states was consuming national politics. The key issue was not whether slavery should be abolished; only a small minority of whites thought that was feasible. It was whether slavery should be allowed to spread into the new Western states. Northerners favoring the notion of "Free Soil" - that is, a ban on slavery in the West to preserve the pecking rights of free white workingmen - banded together to form the new Republican party. Under the party's first president, Abraham Lincoln, slavery came to an end. That gained the political loyalties of generations of black voters.

2. Who called jazz "the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world"?

It was Langston Hughes, poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. Because of what his biographer calls "the deliberate saturation of his work in ... black mass culture," Hughes is recognized as one of the most original and important of black American writers.

3. Who were the Exodusters of 1879, and how were they linked to the desegregation of American schools in the 1960s and '70s?

The "Exodusters" were the tens of thousands of freed blacks who migrated to Kansas to escape the resurgence of white supremacists in the south after the Civil War. The plight of their descendants in the segregated schools of Topeka was addressed in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that banned school segregation in the United States.

4. What renowned black writer opposed the Supreme Court decision in Brown V. Board of Education?

The dissenter on Brown was Zora Neale Hurston, one of the great voices of the Harlem Renaissance. She believed the Supreme Court decision implied that southern black students were inferior to whites. Hurston defended the work of black teachers and said: "I can see no tragedy in being too dark to be invited to a white school social affair."

5. A Detroit assembly-line worker and former prizefighter parlayed $800 in savings into the best-known black-owned corporation in America. Who was he?

The entrepreneur was Detroit's Berry Gordy Jr., who founded the Motown Record Corp. in the late 1950s. Gordy's driving ambition was to make Motown artists as popular as any white musicians. The first sign of his success was a No-1 hit on the pop charts - the Marvelettes' Please Mr. Postman in 1961. What followed was a revolution in American pop music led by such Motown superstars as the Supremes, the Temptations and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Their triumphs cemented the "crossover" appeal of black artists.

6. What does crooner Pat Boone owe to rockers Little Richard and Fats Domino?

Just about everything. Boone became the second most popular singer of 1958-62 (behind only Elvis Presley) largely by "covering" songs written and originally performed by black artists, including Fats' "Ain't That a Shame?" and Richard's "Tutti-Frutti." Until black "crossover" artists became popular among whites in the 1960s, many white artists and producers pulled the same stunt, seldom giving the black originators rightful compensation.

7. What's the link between the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 and the shy philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)?

Thoreau spent a night in jail rather than pay a tax he believed would help pay for the war against Mexico - a war he opposed because it would spread slavery. Thoreau's great essay "Civil Disobedience," advocating defiance of unjust laws, influenced the thought of Martin Luther King Jr., who made civil disobedience a key tactic in the modern civil rights movement.

8. What black woman won her way into the all-white bastion of the Daughters of the American Revolution?

Membership in the DAR, a token of prestige in bluestocking society, goes only to those who can prove direct descent from a soldier who fought in the Revolutionary War. The first black member to prove that claim was Metro Detroiter Karen Batchelor Farmer, a lawyer and genealogist. In the basement of a courthouse in eastern Pennsylvania, Farmer found incontrovertible evidence that her fifth great-grandfather, a white soldier named Edward Lee, was killed in 1781 by Indians fighting on behalf of the British army. Farmer's claim was accepted and she joined the DAR in 1977.

9. Who obliterated the publishing industry stereotype that "blacks don't buy books?"

Terry McMillan, author of Waiting to Exhale and a number of other novels, undertook a one-woman marketing blitz to make her first book, Mama, a big success in 1987. Waiting to Exhale rode the New York Times bestseller list for months, and though McMillan has been called a "crossover" success, she says most of her readers are black. "I think I've signed more than 10,000 books (at book-signings)," McMillan once told a reporter, "and the people who come are 90 percent black. In some cities 98 percent."

10. Who was better known as "Deadwood Dick?"

The black cowboy "Deadwood Dick" was really Nat Love (1854-1921), the son of slaves who went west in search of opportunity. He found it as a master rider and roper on the Chisholm Trail, where he gained fame as one of the great cowboys of his day. Love won his nickname in Deadwood City, S.D., where he roped, tied, bridled, saddled and mounted a wild stallion in just nine minutes, a feat that took his closest rival 13 minutes. Love was one of a substantial number of black cowboys, but their memory was lost in 20th-century images of the Wild West. He went from cow punching to life as a Pullman porter, saying it was "still exciting to ride across the great mountains and wide plains, even if one had to do it for tips."

11. Who renounced the "slave name" Cassius Marcellus Clay in 1964?

Cassius Clay, Olympic heavyweight champion of 1960, declared himself Muhammad Ali upon defeating Sonny Liston for the world championship. Ali announced to a watching world that he had joined the Nation of Islam, the black-separatist organization then led by the Rev. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Some whites refused to acknowledge the name change; others grew increasingly angry with Ali when he refused to be drafted in 1967, saying he was a lay Islamic minister and that he had "no quarrel with the Vietcong."

12. Who drew fire from feminists for saying the proper position of women in the civil rights movement was "prone?"

It was Stokely Carmichael, fiery leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The irony was that the liberationist views of the white-dominated women's movement had been inspired in part by the success of the struggle for black civil rights.

13. Who was the Shelley family, and how did it change America's neighborhoods?

For many years white neighborhoods fought the in-migration of blacks and other ethnic groups by writing "restrictive covenants" into housing deeds. These clauses pledged property owners not to sell to members of the forbidden group. They were part of a system of legal practices that enforced segregation in most cities. In the 1940s, a St. Louis black family named Shelley challenged the system. Their lawsuit went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1948 that the equal-protection clause of the Constitution made it illegal for states to enforce restrictive covenants.

14. "So you're the little woman that wrote the book that made this great war," Abraham Lincoln told a white writer who chronicled black America. To whom was he speaking?

The writer was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her book was Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the story of a black family shattered by slavery. Lincoln exaggerated the book's significance, but not by much. It alerted thousands of northern whites to the degradation of slavery, fueling the movements for both abolition and southern secession. (The original "Uncle Tom," by the way, was not a lackey of whites, but a character of dignity and defiance. The lackey image sprang from the spin-off minstrel shows - called "Tom Shows" - with which whites made money off the book.)

15. Modern blues music carries a clue about how plantation owners controlled their slaves. What is it?

Many blues songs follow a call-and-response pattern, either by voice alone or with an instrument. That's because African-American music developed under the influence of a song leader and the members of a chorus, who had to repeat the leader's words because they could not read. Keeping slaves illiterate was one way white owners kept them powerless.

16. Some 1.5 million black Americans served in World War I and World War II. How many of them were awarded America's highest military honor, the Congressional Medal of Honor?

One. He was Cpl. Freddie Stowers, 21, from Sandy Springs, S.C. On Sept. 28, 1918, just six weeks before the end of World War I, Stowers was killed as he led a squad from the all-black 371st Infantry Regiment into no-man's land in France and defeated German troops. His commanding officer recommended him for the Medal of Honor, but the nomination languished for 70 years - "misplaced," the Army said. In 1988, after two congressmen resurrected the case, President George Bush awarded the medal posthumously to Stowers' two surviving sisters.

17. Revenge has been sweet for a Michigan-born businessman who, as a boy, was barred from an ice-cream parlor in Albion. Who is he?

He's Robert Holland, Jr., who became chief executive officer of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc., last year. Holland, a financial whiz specializing in corporate turnarounds, was chosen after a heavily hyped search for a new chief exec. He took over the ice cream giant with not-so-nostalgic memories of Sullivan's, a now-defunct Albion emporium that refused to serve the city's black residents when Holland was a kid.

18. Two black leaders, 40 years apart, were investigated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Who were they?

One was Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Hoover pursued with a fierce hatred. Believing King to be a Communist agent - he wasn't. Hoover made secret tape recordings of King's extramarital liaisons and even had one of his agents send King a note suggesting he commit suicide. But King's stature was undamaged. Forty years earlier, Hoover had been more successful in his pursuit of Marcus Garvey, the vastly popular head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Hoover's G-men turned up enough evidence of mail fraud to have Garvey imprisoned in 1925. In his absence the UNIA faded away, and Garvey was deported to Jamaica.

19. Name the doctor who did pioneering work in preserving blood plasma?

Charles Richard Drew. He was accomplished not only as a researcher who created a system of blood banks, but also as a medical schoolteacher. The story of his death - that he was refused blood at a white hospital, an irony in light of his work on plasma - has become a modern-day myth of black history. Researchers and family members say doctors tried their best to save Drew after he was injured in a car accident in 1950 caused by his falling asleep at the wheel.

20. The arrest of a man who was seven-eighths Caucasian led to a law that kept blacks and whites segregated for more than 50 years. Who was he?

He was Homer Plessy, a Louisiana rail passenger arrested in 1892 when, like Rosa Parks, he took a seat in a railroad car reserved for whites. His lawsuit, Plessy v. Ferguson, rose to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1896 that states could bar blacks from public facilities so long as they were given "separate but equal" facilities. The "separate but equal" doctrine gave states a legal OK to segregate blacks from whites, though black schools and other facilities were far from "equal" to those for whites. Plessy remained the law of the land until it was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

21. Millions of American cars avoid smash-ups every day because a black inventor named Garrett Morgan had a simple, but brilliant, insight. What was it?

In the early 1900s, "stop" and "go" traffic signals were changed manually by a traffic cop. When the cop was gone, motorists ignored the signs and did their own thing. Morgan, a Cleveland businessman and inventor, introduced a signal that allowed cops, when absent, to leave the "stop" and "go" signs at half-mast. That told drivers to proceed with caution. It was the precursor of the modern-day yellow light.

22. Peaches, plums and peanuts are among the few things that can defeat the woman known as the world's greatest athlete. Why?

Jackie Joyner-Kersey suffers from debilitating attacks of asthma, usually brought on by allergic reactions to peaches, plums, apples, peanuts, pollen, dust and cut grass. Yet Joyner-Kersey has overcome her chronic breathing problems to win Olympic and world championships in the grueling heptathlon competition.

23. Beatle John Lennon once said: "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it --- ---." What were the missing words?

The missing words were Chuck Berry, the rock and roll great who sang such songs of youthful rebellion as Roll Over, Beethoven, Johnny B. Goode and Maybelline. Berry, along with Little Richard and other black artists, was a key influence on the "British Invasion" rock groups led by the Beatles.

24. What's the link between feminism and slavery?

The first independent feminist movement, spearheaded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in 1848, grew out of the campaign to abolish slavery. Applying the human rights rhetoric of the abolitionists to the situation of women, Stanton, Mott and their colleagues saw glaring inequities. Thus was born the campaign for women's suffrage and other measures aimed at political and social equality for women.

25. Who was the first person to reach the North Pole?

It may not have been Robert Peary, the man generally credited with the feat. Instead, it may have been Matthew Henson, the only American and the only black to accompany Peary to the Arctic in 1909. Breaking ground for Peary, Henson reached the spot calculated to be the pole 45 minutes before the white explorer. When Henson returned to Peary and said, "I think I'm the first man to sit on top of the world," Peary checked his original calculations and decided, that no, the pole was a few miles farther after all. Some scholars aren't so sure. They think Peary may have been right the first time, making Henson the true discoverer of the Pole. But while Peary came home to superstardom, Henson got jobs parking cars and running messages. Refused burial at Arlington National Cemetery when he died in 1955, Henson's body was reentered at Arlington in 1988 with a hero's funeral.

26. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't emancipate all slaves. Why not?

In 1862, President Lincoln was facing increasing pressure to declare an end to slavery. Abolitionists in Congress were demanding it, and it was thought that emancipation would undermine the South's economy. But Lincoln, though personally opposed to slavery, believed he had a legal right to free slaves only in areas that were actually in rebellion against the Union. That created a paradox. When the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on Jan. 1, 1863, it exempted slaves in the four border states and in three confederate states completely or partly occupied by Union armies. Full emancipation didn't occur until the 13th Amendment took effect in December 1865.

27. What was the Amistad and how did it help the cause of black freedom?

The Amistad was a ship that bore 53 illegally purchased African slaves from Cuba in 1839. Late one night, the Africans hijacked the ship, killed two crewmembers, and ordered other crew members to steer toward Africa. But the crew secretly changed course for New York, where the Africans were caught. A judge dismissed their case on grounds they'd been enslaved illegally. When the case went to the Supreme Court on appeal, the Africans' lawyer - former President John Quincy Adams - successfully argued that since the international slave trade was illegal, anyone escaping it should be considered legally free in America.

28. What did Marian Anderson do at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 that made her world-famous as a champion of black liberty?

She sang, drawing widespread public attention to the injustice of racial discrimination. In 1939, the opera great was invited to sing in Washington's Constitution Hall. But the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to sing. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, outraged, resigned her membership in the DAR and helped to move the concert to the Lincoln Memorial. An audience of 75,000 heard Marian Anderson sing there - one of the first great demonstrations on behalf of black equality.

29. When does "bad" mean "good?"

"Bad" as a term of approval for whatever is strong, brave or defiant is one of countless expressions that blacks have given to the American lexicon. Arising in 19th-century legendry to describe black bandits, it was applied to black heroes - such as the mythic steel-driver John Henry - who defied the power of white society.

30. What did a white handyman from a small town in Massachusetts do to keep slavery going for six decades?

In the 1790s there were signs that slavery might soon be doomed, thanks to the spurt of abolitionist feeling that accompanied the American Revolution. Then along came the handyman-turned-inventor, Eli Whitney. His cotton gin, which vastly speeded up the process of removing seeds from cotton, set a spark to the southern cotton economy, and slavery once again flourished.

31. How did a Mexican insect change the face of Detroit, Chicago, New York and many other northern cities?

The insect was the boll weevil, a cotton-eating scourge that spread through the south in the early 1900s, staggering the cotton economy. Along with "Jim Crow" laws and white harassment, the weevil infestation was one of the key forces behind the "great migration" of southern blacks to northern cities. Until then, blacks had not been numerous in the north. With the great migration, black ghettos proliferated, bringing black culture to urban environments.

32. This Harvard University graduate said, "The problem of the 20th century is the color line." Who was he?

W.E.B. DuBois said the "color line" would define the 20th century. The first black student to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Color People with white benefactors. Later, he went beyond the NAACP with his Pan-African views, which urged blacks to unite as Africans. DuBois, who called for equal access to political power and education, railed against Booker T. Washington's politics of accommodation.

33. Who was Orville Hubbard and how did his view of black Detroiters help his career?

Hubbard, nicknamed "Orvie," became one of America's longest-serving mayors (1942-1978) partly by taking a strong anti-integrationist stand among his Dearborn constituents. Hubbard's long reign symbolizes the emergence of white suburbanites as a dominant force in national politics.

34. Who was the white man called "Jim Crow?"

He was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white entertainer who won broad fame in the 1830s with a blackface routine and a patronizing song called Jim Crow. Among whites, that name became a synonym for the racist image of foolish, ineffectual blacks. By the early 1900s, "Jim Crow" was the common term for the vast southern system of segregation.

35. What doctor turned astronaut took one small step for equality?

In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first black woman to rocket into space aboard the shuttle Endeavor. She left NASA a year later to focus on teaching, health care and science projects.

36. The 1912 sinking of the Titanic became a popular topic in songs of the black church. Why?

The Titanic, touted as "unsinkable," sank on its maiden voyage with some 1,500 passengers, rich and poor alike, aboard. Blacks, who had been banned from the vessel, sang of its demise as a symbol of God's wrath against racism and the ultimate equality of society's highest and lowest in the face of death.

37. Who won the first Academy Award ever given to a black?

The commercial figure of Aunt Jemimah typifies the image of "mammy," the comforting black woman who devotes herself to her white plantation owners. It was a convenient myth that helped white Southerners argue that blacks preferred slavery to freedom. In fact, enslaved women in plantation households seldom fit the "mammy" motif. Yet in 1939, the actress Hattie McDaniel won the first Oscar ever awarded to a black by playing the role of Mammy in Gone With the Wind. McDaniel, who had little choice as a black actress in the 1930s but to accept such roles, was once asked how she felt about them. With icy irony, she replied that she preferred earning a movie star's salary by playing domestic servants to actually being one.

38. What was the nickname for black cavalry soldiers?

Buffalo soldiers. Explanations of the nickname vary, but some historians think Indians accorded it out of respect for their bravery. The Buffalo Soldiers not only defended the Western frontier, but also fought in battles in the Spanish-American War.

39. An admittedly aimless New York youth found his niche when he stumbled upon ROTC in college. Who was he?

Colin Luther Powell was the first and only black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He became a national hero by leading troops during the Gulf War. He retired in 1993. After a whirlwind book-signing tour, he dashed the hopes of millions of Americans by announcing he would not seek the presidency in 1996.

40. What did two sprinters do at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City that thrust civil rights into the international spotlight?

Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medal winners in the 200-meter track event in the 1968 Olympics, raised their fists in the "black power salute," wearing black gloves. The Black Power movement of the 1960s wasn't the first to stress black pride and identity, but this time, it caught on nationally. People began rejecting the word "Negro," which they associated with slavery, in favor of "black."

41. A little-known acquittal in a World War II court-martial made possible the desegregation of professional sports in America. What happened?

At Fort Hood, Texas, in 1944, an Army second lieutenant refused to follow a driver's order to move to the back of the bus. His name was Jackie Robinson. His action led to a tiff with military police, then to court-martial proceedings. Robinson was acquitted. If the court had found him guilty, there's little chance that Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, would have hired Robinson to break Major League Baseball's infamous "color line" in 1947.

42. Who was "the real McCoy?"

"The real McCoy" was Elijah McCoy, a mechanical engineer born to slave parents who invented a device that enabled machines to be self-lubricating. When cheap imitations showed up that didn't do the job as well as his, buyers insisted on "the real McCoy."

43. Who said, when he first saw the black metropolis of Harlem, that "just knowing there were that many of us made me feel better?"

That was Richard Pryor, who rose to stardom on the strength of a comic outrage that laid bare the wounds of racism. Pryor began his career in nightclubs with a less daring routine, but reached the big-time only after giving free rein to an unvarnished, angry-black-man style. Despite his success, Pryor's fortunes declined in a series of self-destructive acts including drug abuse.

44. Who was the first "cat" to be "cool" and "groovy?"

Jazz great Thelonious Monk (1917-1982), popularized hipster slang in the 1940s. Monk, a 200-pound pianist who wore wild hats and bamboo sunglasses, won the Apollo Theater's weekly amateur contests so often as a teen-ager in the 1930s that he was finally banned from performing. After helping to found the bebop movement, he developed a distinctive improvisational style. His style of slang flowed across the racial divide to influence millions of white youths.

45. Poet James Weldon Johnson wrote the lyrics of Lift Every Voice and Sing, the song known as the Negro National Anthem. But who wrote the music?

His brother, J. Rosamond Johnson. James Weldon Johnson, who rejected the back-to-Africa movement, called on people to learn faith from their history and stay true to God and "our native land."

46. A West Indian slave's innocent games provoked the infamous Salem witch trials. Who was she?

Her name was Tituba. In 1692, she lived with the family of a Puritan minister. Tituba entertained the minister's two young daughters and a friend of theirs by teaching them fortune-telling games and sorcery rituals that she had learned in her native West Indies. When the girls began to act strange, they were suspected of being bewitched by Tituba. She and two other local women were jailed for witchcraft, setting off a hysterical search that led to the execution of 19 "witches."

47. What man once described himself as a "shock absorber between the races?"

Charles Spaulding was president of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co., once the largest black-owned business in the United States. His rags-to-riches success made him a symbol of the black middle class. The firm was worth $38 million when he died in 1952.

48. How did the discovery of a few flakes of gold in a California pond lead to the abolition of the slave trade in the nation's capital?

Those flakes triggered the California Gold Rush, which brought such a rush of Easterners that California Territory asked for statehood in 1849. Other Western territories were also clamoring to join the union. But would they be slave states or free? The question divided the nation until politicians led by Henry Clay, the "Great Compromiser," crafted the Compromise of 1850. That made California a free state; allowed slavery in Texas, New Mexico and Utah; gave slave owners a tougher law against runaway slaves; and tossed abolitionists a bone: a ban on the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

49. How did the collapse of Reconstruction - the massive campaign to help freed slaves after the Civil War - help Richard Nixon become president a century later?

Reconstruction was destroyed by a powerful movement of white "redeemers" who re-established white control of southern politics after a period of black-dominated Republican government. These whites, Democrats, built unbeatable political machines based on the principles of white supremacy and segregation. More than 100 years later, their descendants grew disenchanted with the integrationist Democrats of the 1960s and were ready to vote en masse for Republicans like Nixon, who appealed to them with an anti-busing message.

50. In the Revolutionary War era, whose life was often cited to prove the absurdity of white claims that blacks were intellectually inferior?

The man often cited as proof of blacks' intellectual equality was Benjamin Banneker, a black scientist whose self-taught knowledge of calculus and trigonometry enabled him to write an authoritative astronomical almanac.