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Two years after his murder, most people still only know George Floyd for the way he died: Under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis, Minn.

Many don’t know how he lived – that he habitually told friends that he loved them, often in all-caps text messages; that he was self-conscious about his 6-foot-6-inch frame and that he suffered from lifelong claustrophobia; that he and his roommate in Minneapolis moved their mattresses into the living room right next to each other.

“They wanted to watch over each other. They had met each other in rehab, and they wanted to help ensure that they didn’t stray,” said Robert Samuels, a national political enterprise reporter for The Washington Post.

“What George Floyd understood was that they were in a society that was unforgiving toward their missteps, and they needed to look out for each other if they were going to make it through.”

Samuels and his colleague Toluse Olorunnipa are the authors of the new biography, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life And The Struggle For Racial Justice. The pair of reporters say the book is a story about how racism affected every part of Floyd’s life, starting more than 150 years ago.

“We traced his ancestry back to a great-great-grandfather who was born and enslaved in North Carolina and, after the Civil War, was able to get his freedom,” Olorunnipa said. “And he quickly amassed a great amount of wealth and land by working the land with his large family. But during the turn of the century, he lost all of his land to fraudulent tax sales and dubious business deals, and he was unable to transfer any of that to his descendants.”

It was important to show why Floyd came into the world poor, Olorunnipa said.

“We saw George Floyd’s family wealth be stripped away because of racism. And it impacted his life,” Olorunnipa said. “It impacted his beginning and made him essentially come into the world born with two strikes as someone who was Black and poor in America.”

Olorunnipa and Samuels spoke with NPR’s All Things Considered about Floyd’s personality, his awareness of his physical presence, his missteps and how he was on his way to coming back from them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q&A Interview Highlights

Florido: One detail that struck me in your reporting and that comes up over and over throughout the book is he was really aware that his sort of mere presence as a big, Black man often scared people. Why did you dive into this aspect of his personality?

Olorunnipa: It’s key to understanding those moments that we all saw on the video of Floyd’s final moments, his fear of being assaulted by the police. From his earliest days, he would go into a room and shake everyone by hand just to put them at ease, just to say, you know, “I know I’m a big guy, I know my size may intimidate you, but, you know, look at me eye to eye. I’m OK, I’m not going to hurt you.” And that was something that was a big part of his personality.

Samuels: It was also one of the cruelest contradictions about himself. By the time he gets to high school, he is this tall string bean of a guy. And immediately, people say, what you need to do is focus on playing football. And George Floyd was taught that maybe academics isn’t the way to escape poverty, football is. But he was left with a body that – if it was not on a football field, it would be seen as something intimidating, threatening and, ultimately, one of the things that would make him seem as a threat to a police officer.

Your book doesn’t shy away from Floyd’s missteps. He was arrested on drug charges. He was addicted to opioids. He pled guilty to an armed robbery for which he spent years in prison. And his friends and family seem to speak to you pretty openly about his criminal record. What did they say about his struggles with the law?

Olorunnipa: They wanted us to understand that Floyd wasn’t someone who wanted to take advantage of other people, but he also was someone who came from a community that was ravaged by drugs and where police officers often targeted for low-hanging-fruit arrest. Floyd was once arrested for just walking through his neighborhood – literally – for trespassing. He was across the street from his house. And he was stopped more than 20 times over the course of his life, including by six officers who were later charged themselves with breaking the law. So there is a sense of police corruption that took place.

Now, Floyd’s own mistakes were definitely evident. And we got access to his diary entries and his writings in which he agonized over his mistakes and over the decisions that he made and the struggles that he had to try to break free from addiction and break free from his criminal past.

Well, the way he tried to reset his life was by moving to Minnesota in 2017 from Texas, where he’d lived for most of his life. And he signed up for a rehabilitation program designed for Black men. He found a roommate. He managed to rent this fancy townhome in the middle of a middle-class white suburb. For a while, things seem to be looking up for him in Minneapolis, didn’t they?

Samuels: Yeah. This was his dream. He found a job. He was clean. He got this new townhome with his roommate, the person who he met in rehab. And a few months after he leaves rehab and he’s living in this townhome, he comes home after a double shift of working, and he encounters his roommate unconscious and cold on the couch, Big E. And it turns out that Big E had overdosed.

And he died. And when that happened, the gregarious, friendly George Floyd that everyone knew, he went into isolation. And when one of his friends happened to run into him at a gas station, he tells his friend about what a dark place he was in. And that set George Floyd on a course to relapse.

As I read your book, I really came to understand what a special man George Floyd was. But I also sort of found myself wondering, was he unique or could you have written this kind of book about many other Black men?

Samuels: I think all of us know someone like George Floyd in our lives that you love being around, that can be a little hapless, that things in life have never fully gone their way, but they carry on a spirit of persistence. But one thing that we wanted folks to understand when they read the book is that the institutional hardships and barriers that were presented to George Floyd could have happened to almost any Black man living in America. And that’s one of the terrifying things about it.

Toluse and I, we were very conscientious about how easy it can be to exploit Black pain as if that were the full story. But one of the wonderful things about writing about George Floyd is George Floyd himself, who never stopped trying, who remained persistent even though he acknowledged those barriers and acknowledged those mistakes. And that is a reason why I think so many people who knew him took up the cause for justice.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099585400/george-floyd-biography-book

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

James Madison Bell, poet, orator and activist was born in Gallipolis, Ohio on April 3, 1826. Bell lived in Ohio most of his life although he briefly resided in Canada and California before eventually returning to Ohio. When Bell was 16 he moved to Cincinnati to live with his brother-in-law George Knight who taught him the plastering trade. Knight and Bell were talented plasterers who in 1851 were awarded the contract to plaster the Hamilton County public buildings.

On November 9, 1847, Bell married Louisiana Sanderlin. The couple eventually had seven children and lived in Cincinnati until 1854 when they moved to Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Chatham was a major destination for the Underground Railroad, and while there Bell became involved in abolitionist activities and later returned to Cincinnati to continue his antislavery work.

Although he supported himself primarily as a plasterer, Bell soon became known for his speeches and poems which he used in the campaign against slavery.  His most famous poem, “The Day and the War,” was read at Platt’s Hall in Cincinnati in January 1864 for the Celebration of the first Anniversary of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Bell dedicated “The Day and the War” to friend and fellow abolitionist John Brown who was executed in 1859 for his role in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

Bell was also active in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and became superintendent of the AME Sunday School from 1870-1873. His wife and oldest son are thought to have died in 1874. Bell continued to travel around as an orator until 1890 when he settled down with his family in Toledo, Ohio. In 1901 Bell published 27 of his poems which he called The Poetical Works of James Madison Bell.  James Madison Bell died one year later in Toledo, Ohio.

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Born in 1912, Ava Speese (Day) traveled with her family in 1915 to homestead in Cherry County, Nebraska.  Taking advantage of the Kincaid Homestead Act of 1904, the Speese family, Charles and Rosetta Meehan Speese and their nine children, were among forty African American families who made land claims throughout the county. Some of the settlers founded a small town they named DeWitty after a local black store owner.

Years later, Ava Speese wrote about her life in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, an account that would provide a rare glimpse into African Americans on the Nebraska frontier.  Ava’s narrative recalled a difficult life for African Americans in north central Nebraska but she also described a resourceful and vital community.  Like most homesteaders of the era, the Speeses lived in a sod home which originally consisted of one room but which grew as the family prospered.  She recalled many a night watching her mother bake bread and sew their clothing by hand.  Learning to be resourceful, Ava and her siblings made toothbrushes out of burnt corn cobs, and natural herbs were used to ward off colds and the flu. Ava Speese attended two one-room, wood frame schools in Cherry County where she learned to value education.

The Speese family raised and sold range cattle, horses and mules after they discovered the Sand Hills weren’t good for large commercial crops such as wheat. They grew their own vegetables and fruit. The social life of the community revolved around attending church and school events and the annual picnic at “Daddy Hannah’s” place on the first Sunday in August where all of the settlers gathered for food, speeches and a rodeo.  Other important social events included square dances, recitations and readings by children and adults. Music was an important part of community life; everyone sang, or tried to, and the homes where there was a piano or organ were often the place of many a party.

Ava’s family officially filed their claim in 1921, six years after arriving in Cherry County.  By that year, however, the family fortunes began to decline.  In 1925, the Speese family left the Sand Hills for Pierre, South Dakota. Ava Speece Day passed away on November 9, 1988 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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Meet the cool 62-year-old Kenyan on first all-Black team to summit Everest

When James “KG” Kagambi was 23, he climbed Mount Kenya in his homeland, the second tallest peak in Africa — and swore he’d never do it again. “I hated it,” he recalls. “By the time I got to 15,000 feet, I had headaches.” But then he encountered a magical substance for the first time. “I just loved snow. I touched it and knew that I like this. I was looking back [at the summit] and saying, ‘You know what? I want to go back there right now.’ After that, I couldn’t stop.”

He soon left his job as a geography, music, and physical education teacher of grades 5 through 8. And for 39years, Kagambi has climbed the peaks of the world. He’s summited Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania “so many zillion times,” Denali twice, and Aconcagua (the highest peak in the Americas), among others. He’s taught mountaineering from Patagonia to the Rockies, and he’s trained climbers and guides the world over. Then, in 2020, he was invited to join the first all-Black climbing team to summit Mount Everest.

This Monday, Kagambi, now 62, will land at the Nairobi airport, returning home a national hero. On May 12, he became the first Kenyan to summit the tallest peak in the world – one of six climbers on the Full Circle Everest Expedition to reach the top of the 5.5-mile-high mountain.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you come to find yourself a member of Full Circle — the first all-Black team of mountaineers to summit Everest?

At first, in 2020, when I was asked to come on this expedition, I actually said no.

Why?

The first thing obviously was my age — 60 at the time. Second was my knees. Last year, in the U.S., I saw a doctor and they said, “Do not even step. You need to do knee replacements.”

So what made you decide to say yes?

Phil Henderson, the expedition leader, knows me very well. And he said, “I know when you are determined, you can do it. Even if you go there and you don’t summit, you’ll still be so resourceful to the group — being the oldest and having spent so much more time in the mountains than anybody else. People will respect what you say.” Phil knew my abilities. I’m a good mountaineer, I make good decisions. He said, “If somebody deserves being here, being with us, it’s KG.” After that, for me, it was as simple as saying, “Oh yeah, I’ve been waiting for this. I deserve it. I’ll just go do it.”

How did you navigate the south route of Mt. Everest?

Most of us had already met on a team-building hike in January at the base of Everest. So we knew one another when we came to Nepal in April. The hike to base camp was obviously the easier part whereby it’s quite scenic. There are motels along the way. You don’t even need a sleeping bag. You get to a small village, you sleep there, you get your food there.

We spent a few days at Everest Base Camp (EBC), which is where I started to feel like I was in the wilderness. We practiced with ladders, which was good because between Camp EBC and Camp 1, and also Camp 1 and Camp 2, there are quite a number of places where you use ladders.

At EBC, around 17,400 feet, you want to spend enough time for your body to get used to the altitude. And after a few days, you start feeling like your body’s going back to normal.

Then we did rounds of acclimatizing, called rotations, taking your body higher where there is less oxygen, and then coming back down again. Then it was time again to sit and wait for the weather. Fortunately for us, there was an opening for good weather. From Camp 3, we went to Camp 4. Then we staggered ourselves to go up to the summit.

You don’t want to go too slow because if you do, you get so cold and exposed. You don’t want to run because then you get out of breath and that affects your heart and your body. So the best thing is to use your own pace.

Some of our teams were very strong. One person summited around 3 a.m. and another by 4. I personally summited at 6.

And then, after you summit, you start heading down slowly back down to Camp 4. When I got to Camp 4, I was like, “You know what — why am I rushing? I will just stay here.” The following day, we hiked slowly to Camp 2. And then, when I go to Camp 2, I realized I could go all the way to EBC. It took a long time. It was tiring but I got there by around 10:00 at night.

Did you take any selfies at the summit?

One of the most disappointing times was the summit, getting there and finding the whole place occupied by people. You could not even get time by yourself on the summit to take a photo.

It was crowded up there?

It was definitely crowded, yeah.

What does it mean to be part of this first all-Black team to summit Everest?

It is important to me. It’s not the first time I’ve been with all-Black team. I did that on Denali. Still, it’s important because it’s part of history. This is the first time this has happened since they started climbing Everest. We wanted to show the world that people of color can do something like this. That is a good accomplishment. And also as part of making history for Kenya. As the first Kenyan, I’m proud of it.

P.R.O.U.D 🤗🤗🙌🏼🙌🏼 First Native Kenyan to summit Mt Everest : James Kagambi 🤗❤ pic.twitter.com/AmyhW9lSdB— Chichi (@Karekagambi) May 13, 2022

But it’s not only Black people. You’re talking about people of color, you’re talking about diversity. We have seen that in the outdoors, there’s less people who come from different disadvantaged areas — age, gender, color, etc. It is important for me to bring all those people together.

How do we achieve that?

Part of it is being able to have the facilities to be able to take you to Everest, including economic. Also, it’s unfortunate that all over the world, there’s a lot of people who don’t do things not because they can’t but just because they are not exposed to it. In your community, nobody does it. People lack a role model. Nobody has come back and said, “Oh, I’ve been on the mountain.” And I think when we do something like this, there are people who will look at us and follow suit. They don’t have to be a mountaineer like me but we can introduce them into the outdoors. And to me that means a lot.

Tell me about your work over the years.

I stopped being a classroom teacher a long time ago when I joined NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School based in Lander, Wyoming). And they gave me contracts all over the world. I’ve worked in Chile, I’ve worked in India, I’ve worked in North America. They trust me so much that whenever they have new rangers, they’ll ask me to go and train them on first aid.

Currently, every summer I go out in the Rockies and teach kids mountaineering. At the end of one month of them being in the outdoors, I can see their growth. You can see that kid who is 14, 15, 16 years old… within a month, you can almost judge and say, “Wow, this kid has developed from here to here.” That’s the reward. For young people especially, three months in a classroom is not much. But one month in the outdoors teaches people so much — self-care, making decisions, learning about the environment.

I also have my own guiding company. Some of my clients are people who may want to go to a certain mountain but then think, “Oh, I’m too old to get there.” Others tell them, “KG will get you there.” I have the patience.

What do you think makes you a good mountaineer?

This is not an easy job. But I like the physical challenge of it. I like the fact that every day comes with its own challenges, and you learn so much by trying to solve all those problems. I like being with new people and meeting new people — the student you had yesterday is not the one you have today. I think that’s what keeps me there.

What’s mountaineering like in Kenya? Is there an active outdoor culture?

I’ve gone to the government to ask for help. And I’ve been told, “Oh, mountaineering is not recognized as a sport so we cannot help.” And that’s one of the points I want to put across to the government of Kenya — that it is time they need to recognize the importance of mountaineering as a sport. And not just mountaineering, but outdoor education — making sure that people going to school are also being exposed to the natural world.

What’s next after Everest? A good book? Chocolate cake?

With Everest, I’ve done the four summits of the world. So maybe I could have a goal of doing the seven summits. That’s just a thought. Fortunately, the three mountains that are left are not that challenging.

As for right now, I’m feeling good. A bit tired. My knees are uncomfortable a little bit, but I’ll get through that.

What’s the reaction in Kenya to your accomplishment?

Right after summiting, everything just went crazy. The president wants to meet me. I cannot even think of how it will be when I arrive. I’m not looking forward to that because I don’t like being overrun by so many people. But I know it’s so important to Kenya. And I expect — I not only expect, I know — that there’ll be a lot of people at the airport waiting for me.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/05/21/1100363030/meet-the-cool-62-year-old-kenyan-on-first-all-black-team-to-summit-everest

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‘Sex Education’ actor Ncuti Gatwa will be the first Black lead in ‘Doctor Who’

May 8, 20222:30 PM ET

Actor Ncuti Gatwa will play the role of The Doctor in the show Doctor Who, the BBC announced Sunday, in a historic casting selection that marks the first time a Black person has been cast to star in the show’s central role full-time.

The 29-year-old Gatwa, best known for his work in the Netflix series Sex Education, is also among the youngest Doctors yet.

“There aren’t quite the words to describe how I’m feeling. A mix of deeply honoured, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared,” Gatwa said in a press release. “Unlike the Doctor, I may only have one heart but I am giving it all to this show.”

Gatwa was born in Rwanda and raised in Scotland. He began his professional acting career eight years ago after graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, one of the world’s top performing arts schools.

In Netflix’s warm-hearted series Sex Education, Gatwa plays the vibrant Eric Effiong, a gay high school student.

As a gay Black teen who is the best friend of the show’s main character, the role of Eric could have been a trap of cliches as the “gay sidekick” or “Black best friend” for a straight white male protagonist.

Instead, Gatwa’s Eric stands out from the ensemble cast with a fully realized personality and inner life. The actor has twice been nominated for Best Male Comedy Performance at the British Film and Television Awards.

He becomes the 14th actor to be cast in the iconic role, following the departure of Jodie Whittaker, who was the first woman to play the role when she was cast in 2017.

In 2020, a Black person played a variation of the Doctor role for the first time when Jo Martin was cast as the Fugitive Doctor.

The new season of Doctor Who is also marked by the return of showrunner Russell T Davies, who helped revive the show in 2005 after a 15-year hiatus. Davies stepped away from the showrunner role in 2009.

“Sometimes talent walks through the door and it’s so bright and bold and brilliant, I just stand back in awe and thank my lucky stars,” Davies said. “Ncuti dazzled us, seized hold of the Doctor and owned those TARDIS keys in seconds.”

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Richard Robert Wright Sr. (May 16, 1855 – July 2, 1947) was an American military officer, educator and college president, politician, civil rights advocate and banking entrepreneur. Among his many accomplishments, he founded a high school, a college, and a bank. He also founded the National Freedom Day Association in 1941.^[1]

Early life and education

Wright was born into slavery on May 16, 1855, in a log cabin six miles from Dalton, Georgia.^[1][3]

After emancipation in 1865, Wright’s mother moved with her son from Dalton to Cuthbert, Georgia. He attended the Storrs School, which developed by the late 1870s as Atlanta University, a historically black college or university (HBCU). (Today it is known as Clark Atlanta University, following a merger). The school had a reputation among freedmen as a place for their children to be educated.^[4]

While visiting the school, retired Union General Oliver Otis Howard asked students what message he should take to the North. The young Wright reportedly told him, “Sir, tell them we are rising.” That exchange inspired a once-famous poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, “Howard at Atlanta“.^[4][5]

The Storrs School, a forerunner of Atlanta University, was one of many academic schools for freedmen’s children founded by the American Missionary Association (AMA) in the South. Wright was valedictorian at Atlanta University’s first commencement ceremony in 1876.^[3]

Career

Republican politics

Wright joined the Republican Party and became active in its politics. Blacks worked to resist white Democratic efforts to disrupt their organizing and suppress their votes.

There were also tensions within the party. In 1890, Emanuel K. Love and Wright were in a dispute with William White, Judson Lyons, Henry A. Rucker, and especially John H. Deveaux, who was in control of Georgia’s Republic Party machinery. At the time, the party was dominated by African Americans. The dispute centered around leadership of the party district nomination conventions. Lyons, Rucker, and Deveaux were all supported by patronage of Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute. They were identified with light-skinned elites of the state, some of whose families had been free people of color, free for generations before the Civil War. Love, Wright (and Charles T. Walker) represented a “black” or “darker-skinned” faction. Skin color and assumptions about economic class were not as important as political allegiance and ideology.^[6]

In 1896, Alfred Eliab Buck was the leader of the Georgia Republican Party. Buck was the president of the Republican State Convention in late April and presided over the election of delegates to the 1896 Republican National Convention. When dispute arose, Buck attempted to preempt by passing a “harmony” slate of delegates outside of standard procedure. However, the slate did not include Wright, who had widespread support among party members.^[7]

When the convention erupted in protest, a representative of Buck’s tried to adjourn the meeting, and the Buck faction left the hall. The Wright faction remained. Wright’s friend, Emanuel K. Love, took the chair. A new slate of delegates was elected, including Love and Buck (but not Wright).^[7] Wright never did win a seat as a delegate, but he attended the national party convention as an alternate.^[8]

Military career

In August 1898, President William McKinley appointed Wright as a major and paymaster of United States Volunteers in the United States Army. He was the first African American to serve as a U.S. Army paymaster. During the Spanish–American War, he was the highest-ranking African-American officer.^[5][9] He was honorably discharged in December of the same year.

Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth

The Second Morrill Land Grant Act of August 30, 1890 provided more land-grant funding to states, but also established federal oversight. It required that southern and border states, which had segregated public schools, develop land grant colleges for black students, in order to receive any funds under this program. Georgia was among the several states that had not done so. On November 26, 1890 the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation creating the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth.^[10]

In 1891, Wright was appointed as the first president of the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth, the first public historically black college (HBCU) in the state. By October 1891, it was having classes in Savannah, Georgia, which became its permanent home. It started with five faculty and eight students, but rapidly attracted more.^[3] It has since developed as Savannah State University, the oldest public HBCU in the state.

During the 1890s, Wright traveled to other colleges, including Tuskegee Institute, Hampton Institute, Girard College of Philadelphia, and the Hirsch School in New York, to document current trends in higher education. Based on his studies, he developed a curriculum at Georgia State College to include elements of the seven classical liberal arts, the “Talented Tenth” philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois; Booker T. Washington’s vocational emphasis and self-reliance concepts, and the educational model of New England colleges. (He had graduated from Atlanta University, and was taught by graduates of Dartmouth College and Yale University).^[3]

Wright was viewed as one of the leading figures of black higher education in America, and he conferred regularly with major educational leaders.^[3] Visitors and lecturers to campus during his tenure as president included Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Walter Barnard Hill, Lucy Craft Laney, Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington and Monroe Nathan Work.^[3] U.S. presidents William McKinley and William Howard Taft also visited the campus and spoke to students in Peter W. Meldrim Hall.^[3]

By the end of Wright’s tenure as president, the college’s enrollment had increased from the original eight students to more than 400. Additionally, he expanded the curriculum to include a normal division (for teacher training), and courses in agriculture and mechanical arts. He also provided four-year high school subjects, to prepare students who came from areas without such facilities, as did many blacks from rural Georgia.^[3]

Wright participated in the March 5, 1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and public intellectual. The group founded the American Negro Academy, led by Alexander Crummell.^[11] From the founding of the organization until 1902, Wright remained active among the scholars, editors, and activists of this first major African-American learned society. Their work refuted racist scholarship, promoted black claims to individual, social, and political equality, and published the history and sociology of African-American life.^[12]

Banker

After moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1921 Wright decided to open a bank. At the age of 67 he enrolled in the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania to prepare for this venture.^[5] He entered the business world in 1921, creating and leading Philadelphia’s Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company at 1849 South Street. At the time, it was the only African-American-owned bank in the North and the first African-American trust company. He also founded the Negro Bankers Association, the first African-American banking association.^[5]

Under his leadership, the bank withstood the Great Depression. When it was sold in 1957, more than a decade after Wright’s death, it had assets of $5.5 million.^[5]

Personal life

Wright married Lydia Elizabeth (née Howard). Together the couple had nine children, including Richard R. Wright Jr. He followed his father into an academic career.

Legacy

Civil rights leader

Richard Wright wrote a landmark letter to President Harry Truman describing the horrible mistreatment of Isaac Woodard, a Black veteran who was severely beaten by white policemen. They also gouged his eyes out. As a result of this letter and advocacy by the NAACP about the case, President Truman asked his Attorney General Tom Clark to investigate. Clark brought a federal case against the police and sheriff who abused Woodard, but the all-white jury acquitted them. (Note: Georgia had passed an amendment in 1908 that essentially disenfranchised black voters; this absence from the voter rolls also resulted in their being excluded from juries.)

Wright and others, including White liberals, were outraged and advocated for a federal civil rights commission. Agreeing with this, Truman formed a Committee on Civil Rights. It made far-reaching and prescient recommendations, including that there should be a permanent Civil Rights division of the Justice Department and that the entire Executive branch of the federal government should be desegregated. Some agencies had established segregation in their facilities in the early 20th century under President Woodrow Wilson, who was influenced by his own background in the South and Southern members of his cabinet. The military was still segregated, although Blacks and other minorities had been arguing since World War I to end this, especially during World War II.

As a result, Truman was the President who ordered desegregation of all branches of the military. The US military has remained desegregated ever since.

Family legacy

In June 1898, his son Richard R. Wright Jr. received the first baccalaureate degree awarded by Georgia State Industrial College. Wright Jr. was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, having studied in the new field of sociology. He became a professor and later president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. He also was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the US. Wright Jr. became a bishop in the AME Church.^[3]

One of Richard Jr’s daughters, Dr. Ruth Wright Hayre, also earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. They were the first African-American father and daughter to do so. Dr. Ruth Wright Hayre became the first full-time African-American teacher in the Philadelphia public-school system. She rose to become an administrator and high-school principal. After being elected to the Philadelphia Board of Education, she served as its first female president.

At the age of 80, she established the “Tell Them We Are Rising” program, promising to pay college tuition for 116 sixth-graders in two poor North Philadelphia schools if they completed high school. Her story was chronicled in her book Tell Them We Are Rising: A Memoir of Faith in Education, published in 1997, the year before she died.^[4]

National Freedom Day

In 1941, Wright invited national and local leaders to meet in Philadelphia to formulate plans to set aside February 1 each year to memorialize the signing of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by President Abraham Lincoln on February 1, 1865, which freed all U.S. slaves. They formed the National Freedom Day Association.^[1]

One year after Wright’s death in 1947, both houses of the U.S. Congress passed a bill to make February 1 National Freedom Day. The holiday proclamation was signed into law on June 30, 1948, by President Harry Truman. It was the forerunner to Black History Day and later Black History Month, officially recognized in 1976, though begun by Carter G. Woodson in 1926.^[5][13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_R._Wright