by Asha Ambasna

A significant event in Black History was the Springfield Riot of August 1908. Located in the midwestern American state of Illinois, Springfield was a unique hub of thriving Black-owned businesses at the turn of the 20^th century.

The economic success of Springfield’s Black businesses made the area a target for racism, which led to a campaign by some local white Americans to attempt to turn Springfield into a ‘sundown town.’ Sundown towns were civic regions in which white residents purposely limited the access of Black Americans through various methods of hostility, and in Springfield, this emerged in the form of vicious riots.

The 1908 Springfield riots took place in response to false rape accusations against a Black labourer, George Richardson, from a white resident. The riots lasted for 2 days, and it was estimated that 16 people died, with both Black and white residents killed at the hands of the white mob. Oral accounts from the time reveal the remarkable efforts of Black residents, who tried to protect their community and businesses from destruction.

Whilst memory of the Springfield riots had a lasting impact on many residents, it also led to the creation of a remarkable civil rights organization: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After learning of the riots, prominent civil rights activists, including W.E.B Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, worked to bring about the NAACP, which played a significant role in advancing many civil rights causes and continues to lead the fight against racial inequality today.

The Springfield riot remains little known, yet it sparked one of the most important activist groups in modern Black history. These events must be kept alive in public memory as examples of outstanding community mobilisation and resilience.

by Yasmin Gledhill

Zora Neale Hurston was a Black American folklorist and author. She became an key figure during the Harlem Renaissance and her works focused on the gendered and racial struggles of interwar America.

Her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), offered an important critique by contemplating racial identity and gender roles in early 20^th century Florida. In turn, her essays and short stories were published in notable anthologies, such as Fire!! and The New Negro.

Despite her thoughtful and provocative writing, Hurston was overlooked at the time as a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance until Alice Walker’s essay ‘Looking for Zora’ (1979) led to a resurgence in interest. Hurston’s career exemplified many of the challenges of being a Black woman in America. In particular, Hurston’s defiant, yet light-hearted autobiographical essay ‘How it Feels to Be Colored Me’ (1928) captured the essence of Hurston’s life and beliefs. She wrote:

“But I am not tragically colored […] I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong. Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

Hurston was an influential African-American author whose literary contributions have been obscured for too long. Hurston’s short stories, satires, essays and novels were seminal and deserve to be remembered for years to come.

by Lorenzo Costaguta

Peter H. Clark devoted his life to the support of African Americans. Born a free Black in Cincinnati in 1829, Clark was relentless in his political and social activism for the welfare of his community. Clark was an abolitionist and an Underground Railroad conductor; he was also the secretary of the National Convention of Colored Men in 1853 in Syracuse and a drafter of the constitution of the National Equal Rights League. Clark campaigned for African American rights via the Republican Party from its foundation in 1856 until the 1880s. He served as a militant assistant editor of the Frederick Douglass’s Paper and found his own short-lived Black paper, Herald of Freedom, in 1855.

Clark saw teaching as an ideal way to train African Americans toward a better future. As soon as Black schools were opened in Ohio in 1849, Clark started his teaching career. He was fired in 1853 for promoting the writings of Tom Paine to his students, but he returned to class in 1866, this time as principal of the Gaines High School, a Black school named after his uncle, John I. Gaines. He retained this position until 1886.

In his search for the best way to serve his community, in 1877 Clark joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), the first Marxist organisation to have a national reach ever founded in the U.S. In the SLP, Clark offered a combined critique of capitalism and racism in a way that had never been achieved before. He attacked simultaneously Southern racism and Northern capitalism, describing socialism as a cure to both evils. Electoral defeats convinced him that he was more useful to the cause in the Republican Party, but his brief militancy in the SLP has earned him the title of “America’s First Black Socialist”.

by Jacqueline Maingard

Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876-1932), ‘Sol’, a mission-educated African intellectual, was the first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), which was formed in 1912 and subsequently changed its name to the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923. Plaatje led the SANNC’s first major campaign against the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, an early, ‘key’ example of racialised, segregationist policies, which had relegated only a very small portion of land to Africans, in the region of 7.3 percent, and prevented them from purchasing land outside of officially ‘scheduled native areas’. In Native Life in South Africa (1916) Plaatje famously lamented that ‘[a]waking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth’.

Plaatje travelled to Britain on two occasions, in 1914 and 1919, with delegations from the SANNC, to seek support from the imperial government for the repeal of the act. Neither visit was successful. On both occasions, however, Plaatje remained for a further period, making and cementing important friendships, for example, Georgina Solomon of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigine’s Protection Society. On his second visit Plaatje extended his tour to Canada and the United States, where he not only made connections with African-American leaders, for example Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, and spoke at political events, but also travelled to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama where he encountered the use of cinema for the ‘uplift’ of African-Americans. He returned to South Africa in 1923 and, in the mode of itinerant showmen in the early part of the twentieth century, he toured with a mobile cinema, screening a diverse range of topicals, newsreels, travelogues and educational films that he had acquired through his travels, in what he described as a ‘labour of love’. He used a projector donated in the US and a generator from the De Beers mining company.  He developed these film exhibitions to attract African audiences, discussing the effects of racial segregationist policies and lecturing on the need for Africans to embrace modernity.

Plaatje is an important figure in black history not only in relation to international and South African politics, but also as a thinker, linguist, writer and public speaker, who opposed racial injustice and fought for equality.