MARSHA P. JOHNSON (1945-1992)

CONTRIBUTED BY: KC WASHINGTON

Marsha P. Johnson (Left) and Sylvia Rivera (Right) in 1973 Gay Pride Parade, NYC

Image Courtesy of the National History Archives of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

Marsha P. Johnson was an African American drag performer and social activist. The fifth of seven children, she was born Malcolm Michaels, Jr. to Malcolm Michaels, Sr. and Alberta (Claiborne) Michaels on August 24, 1945 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. During a tempestuous Christian childhood, around the age of five, Johnson began cross-dressing. Her desire for traditional feminine clothing quickly drew a reprimand from her father, a General Motors assembly line worker and housekeeper mother, as well as from the larger society.

After graduating from Thomas A. Edison High School in 1963, Johnson moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. She had $15 and a bag of clothes. Homeless, she turned to prostitution to survive and soon found a like-minded community in the bawdy nightlife of Christopher Street.

Johnson switched names repeatedly as she established her persona, alternating between her given name Malcolm and Black Marsha before settling on Marsha P. Johnson. She chose Johnson because she enjoyed hanging out at the popular eatery, Howard Johnson’s. The “P” purportedly stands for “Pay It No Mind,” a flippant saying she used to dismiss antagonists.

On June 28, 1969, Marsha P. Johnson became one of the faces of the Queer Revolution. She went from her own party uptown to the Stonewall Inn on the corner of Christopher Street and 7th Avenue, arriving after the Stonewall Riot (Uprising) had begun.

The riot stemmed from members of New York’s LGBTQ community being targeted by the New York Police Department (NYPD). LGBTQ people were routinely rousted, hassled, and arrested on questionable charges. That summer Saturday, their anger reached a breaking point after the police returned to Stonewall Inn for the second time in two days. According to Johnson, the police had forced her and others out onto the street to line up and be frisked the night before and then returned the next night and set the Stonewall Inn on fire.

Twenty-three-year old Johnson and her friend Sylvia Rivera were caught up in the Stonewall Uprising which went on for several days and is credited as the catalyst for the Gay Movement of the late 1960s. The Uprising spawned the first gay pride marches across the country in 1970. In the same year, Johnson and Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which clothed, fed, housed, and advocated for transgender youth from a tenement on the lower eastside.

In 1972, as the face of the resistance, Johnson performed around the world with the popular drag theater company, Hot Peaches. Andy Warhol featured her in a 1975 screen print portfolio of drag queens and transgender merrymakers at the nightclub, Gilded Grape.

As the nascent Gay Rights movement swirled around her, Johnson fought social mores, the police, and her own demons. She suffered from mental illness, weathering breakdowns, arrests, and stints at psychiatric hospitals even as she strove to promote gay civil rights. An early ACT UP member and AIDS activist, Johnson also became a victim of the disease. She announced in a June 26, 1992 interview that she had been H.I.V. positive since 1990. Two years later on July 6, 1994, Johnson was found drowned in the Hudson River off the West Village Piers. The police initially declared her death a suicide and then agreed to reopen the case in 2012. She was 46 at the time of her death.

TUCSON RACE RIOT (1967)

CONTRIBUTED BY: MARITZA FERNANDEZ

Few people are aware of the race riot that occurred in Tucson, Arizona in 1967.  The riot was caused by the arrest of an unidentified black 14-year-old a few days before. On July 23rd to 25th in the North side of the city within a four-mile area between 4th Avenue and Seneca Street, 200 young black people gathered to protest against the Tucson police force.

Rocks were thrown at police cars and buildings with the worst damage to a Crown Liquors store by approximately 60 rioters. Nothing was stolen, but 25 Tucson patrol officers, members of the Arizona National Guard, and firefighters were called to the scene.  There was, according to the  Los Angeles Times, “minor violence” on the 25th of July and at least one fire bomb was thrown at a paint store, but no other major violence or injuries were reported.

Two injured people were reported injured on July 24: Kurt Jackson, a white man who had driven through the area, and an unidentified woman were both struck by unidentified objects, likely rocks, and suffered minor injuries. Two arrests were made: James Brooks and Eugene Jones, two 19-year-old black men were charged with malicious mischief and unlawful assembly. Brooks pled guilty and was sentenced to 150 days in jail. Eugene Jones pled innocent, and was tried and acquitted in September, 1967. Two other juveniles, 13 and 16, were detained by police for throwing rocks at police cars and storefronts.

When the rioting ended in Tucson, slowly petering out on the morning of July 25, it began in Phoenix, Arizona, 116 miles north, on the 26th. However, in Tucson, the day the riot ended (July 25) was devoted to discussing why it had happened and working towards a solution. A meeting between black community leaders and city officials took place involving Tucson City Councilmen James N. Corbett Jr. and Kirk Storch (acting mayor while mayor Lew Davis was out of town), chairman of City Commission on Human Relations Reverend Paul David Sholin, president of the local NAACP branch, Robert Hora, and a chairman of the local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), George Bowden.

In a second meeting on July 28th with black youth from the predominantly black South Side of Tucson, grievances were heard including suspicion of the police, wrongful detainment, unemployment, and lacking public resources like youth recreation centers. Tucson officials conceded to leaving the recreational Mirasol center open until 11 pm at night so that black youth would have a safe, equipped place to play and hang out with friends, without taking to the streets and being seen as threats by police. Tucson officials also created the Job Project, an anti-poverty program which hired 60 chronically unemployed people, focusing on heads of households, at least temporarily, with the possibility of permanent employment. Eventually 400 jobs were developed to combat the city’s persistent high black unemployment.

MT. GILEAD BAPTIST CHURCH, FORT WORTH, TEXAS (1875- )

 CONTRIBUTED BY: GLORIA LAWSHA SMITH

Following emancipation in 1865, former slaves across the South detached themselves from white-controlled congregations and established independent churches. In Fort Worth, Texas, historic Mt. Gilead Baptist Church was one of those new congregations. Over time it would serve the spiritual and cultural needs of African Americans in the city.

Mt. Gilead Baptist Church is the oldest continuously operating African-American Baptist Church in Fort Worth. It was organized in September 1875 by twelve former slaves who later built a modest structure in a black settlement called “Baptist Hill” near present-day 15th and Crump Streets. Considered the “mother church of Fort Worth black Baptists,” it soon became a symbol of African American self-determination. Once classified a megachurch in the 1920s because of its huge congregation and local influence, today the church sits as a reminder of what was once a vibrant black business district in downtown Fort Worth.

Scholarly pastors promoted progress and taught self-reliance from the pulpit, and these messages resonated with the congregation. Notably, Rev. S.H. Smith (1881-1887) built a second structure at 13th Avenue and Jones Streets in 1882-1883; Rev. A.L. Boone (1916-1923) installed stained glass windows and the dome visible today in existing structure at 5th and Grove Streets; and Rev. Cedric Britt (1979-2009) at age 26 was the youngest to be called pastor and the longest-tenured with 30 years of service at his time of death in 2009.

Rev. Lacy Kirk Williams, prominent leader in national black Baptist circles at the time, led the church congregation from 1907 to 1916. A graduate of Bishop College, he envisioned Mt. Gilead serving the entire black community throughout Fort Worth every day of the week while providing a respite from segregation. In 1911 Williams garnered support from the congregation composed of professional and working-class members to launch the construction of the 4,800-square-foot modified-gothic building that is home to the church today. Widely celebrated for his achievements at Mt. Gilead, Williams was hired away in 1916 to pastor historic Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, Illinois, once called “the largest Protestant church in the world.”

By 1913, Mt. Gilead entered the new sanctuary, designed by black architect Wallace Rayfield and adorned with a pipe organ, elaborate opera chairs in the balcony, and “the first indoor baptismal” in Texas. It had a library with law books, a day nursery for working mothers, and a kindergarten. The basement was furnished with a cafeteria serving signature dishes, a gym, and the only indoor pool in the city where black children could swim. The auditorium was the venue for social events, including a performance by contralto Marian Anderson in 1939.

Although Mt. Gilead has seen declining membership over the last few decades, setbacks in the efforts to restore the building, and a scheme in 2016 to sell the church property to help expand the downtown Fort Worth business district, which the congregation defeated in a lawsuit, the church still stands at its 1913 location, a local landmark that remains a formidable icon in Ft. Worth.

THE 13TH STREET COLORED BRANCH LIBRARY, MERIDIAN, MISSISSIPPI (1913-1974)

CONTRIBUTED BY: MATTHEW GRIFFIS

The 13th Street (St.) Colored Branch was a segregated public library established by the city of Meridian, Mississippi, in 1912 and opened in March 1913. It was one of the first free public libraries for African Americans in the state of Mississippi and one of twelve segregated libraries Andrew Carnegie funded during his library philanthropy program of the early twentieth century.

Although Meridian asked Carnegie for library funds as early as 1904, it was not until 1911 that the library program’s manager, James Bertram, offered the city $30,000 for a main, whites-only library and $8,000 for a “colored” branch. At the time, African Americans accounted for almost one full third of the city’s population. The two-story, main library was built on the corner of 7th St. and 25th Avenue (Ave.) in the city’s downtown, while the segregated library was built on the corner of 13th St. and 28th Ave. in Meridian’s northwest, then known as the “colored” part of town. The Haven Institute, a small black college located on 13th St., was instrumental in establishing the library; the African Methodist Episcopal Churches, which operated both the Haven Institute as well as one of Meridian’s oldest black churches, St. Paul’s Methodist, donated a site for the library.

Although the “Colored Library” received an annual tax appropriation from the city, it was governed by the Colored Library Advisory Board, a separate board whose inaugural chairman was Dr. J. Beverly Shaw of the Haven Institute. The institution’s first librarian was Mary Rayford Collins; later librarians included Helen Strayhorn, Katherine Mathis, and Gradie Clayton, among others.

For over sixty years, the 13th St. library served Meridian’s African Americans as both an educational support center and a community meeting space. When Meridian desegregated its public libraries in 1964, the separate advisory board dissolved and the 13th St. library became a branch of the Meridian-Lauderdale Public Library. It nevertheless continued to serve the predominantly African American northwest part of town.

The city closed the 13th St. Library in September 1974, claiming that it was no longer usable as a public building. The former library was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and in 2006, the Lauderdale County Human Relations Commission announced plans to convert it into a center for arts education. It was demolished in 2008, however, after it was deemed unsuitable for preservation. Only a piece of the original front walkway remains.

FREEDMEN’S HOSPITAL/HOWARD UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL (1862– )

CONTRIBUTED BY: MICHAEL STOLP-SMITH

The Freedmen’s Hospital was founded in 1862 in Washington, D.C.  It was the first hospital of its kind to aid in the medical treatment of former slaves.  Later it became the major hospital for the African American community in Washington, D.C.  The hospital was founded on the grounds of Camp Barker at 13th and R Streets in Northwest Washington.  It remained in that location until a new building was completed in 1909 at Bryant and 6th Street.   Through much of its history the hospital was managed by the U.S. government.

In 1868, six years after its founding, Freedmen’s Hospital became a teaching hospital for the Howard University Medical School.  One of the first members of the school’s faculty was Lieutenant Colonel Alexander T. Augusta, M.D.   Augusta had been placed in charge of the hospital in 1863 and thus was the first black hospital administrator in U.S. history.  He was also on the faculty for the Howard University medical school along with six other faculty members, including Anderson Ruffin Abbott, another African American.  Augusta remained on the faculty from 1868 to 1877.

Despite federal control, Freedmen’s Hospital was often touched by scandal between 1872 and 1910.  Every single hospital administrator, whether white or black, was involved in some sort of scandal from misconduct to malpractice. Numerous cases were brought against hospital officials who utilized hospital services for personal gain.  Other administrators were neglectful and some were charged with embezzlement.  While the Hospital’s leadership was tarnished, the doctors and nurses continued to provide vital treatment to often impoverished District of Columbia residents.  The Freedmen’s Asylum, which was connected administratively to the Hospital, provided care for aged and disabled black patients.

Early in the 20th Century the U.S. Congress authorized the construction of a new hospital, which was completed in 1909.  The new 278-bed state-of-the-art facility now attracted able administrators.  Perhaps the most famous was Charles R. Drew, M.D., a surgeon and hospital administrator.  Drew, already nationally famous for his blood plasma research, ran Freedmen’s Hospital, was a medical professor at Howard University Medical School and chair of the school’s Department of Surgery from 1941 to 1950. Under his leadership the surgery department grew in size and reputation.

In 1967 Freedmen’s Hospital  was taken over by Howard University and operated until 1975. A new university hospital opened in 1975 at 2041 Georgia Avenue.  The former building now houses the Howard University College of Nursing and College of Allied Health Sciences.  Howard University continues to manage the facility, which is now called Howard University Hospital.  The Bryant Street building now houses Howard University’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications.