Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture

#OnThisDay in 1919, Chicago race uprisings began in response to the death of a young Black man who was stoned after swimming into a segregated section of Lake Michigan. The police refused to arrest the white man who observers identified as responsible for the incident. ⁣ Indignant crowds gathered on the beach and fights eventually broke out between Black and white groups. By the time the violence ended on August 3rd, 35 Black people and 15 white people had been killed. Thousands of Black families lost their homes due to arson. ⁣ The Chicago uprising was the most severe of more than a dozen targeted racialized attacks against Black people that occurred across America that summer. The summer of 1919 would become known as the “Red Summer.” #APeoplesJourney #ANationsStory 📸 Courtesy of Jun Fujita/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images.

The 2024 #Olympic Summer Games boast a Who’s Who of African American female athletes across the spectrum of sports–including track and field, gymnastics, and basketball. Summer 2024 marks 100 years since the 1924 Games in Paris where women were only 3% of participants. #Paris2024 will be the first Olympic Games where one in every two athletes is a woman. The first African American women—Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes—competed in track and field at the 1936 Games in Hitler’s Germany (Pickett and Stokes made the 1932 Olympic team but were kept from competition). When American society has been reluctant to encourage women’s athletics, African American women have been at the vanguard of sporting opportunities for all. Misconceptions about women’s physical capabilities and an emphasis on their roles as wives and mothers severely limited athletic opportunities for women in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Learn more: https://s.si.edu/3WB4K2t #Olympics #GameChangers 📸 Photograph of the 1960 Olympic gold medal 4x100 meter relay team (l to r) Wilma Rudolph, Lucinda Williams, Barbara Jones, and Martha Hudson from a program for the 1964 U.S. Olympic Team Trials for Women’s Track and Field. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of 1964 Olympic Silver Medalist Marilyn E. White, © United States Olympic Committee.

Today, Emmett Till would have turned 83 years old. In 1955, he was 14 when he was kidnapped and murdered for “inappropriately interacting with a white woman” in Mississippi. Discover how Emmett Till's death inspired a movement: http://s.si.edu/2ojo7wk #APeoplesJourney #ANationsStory 📸 Photograph of Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Till Mobley. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the Mamie Till Mobley family.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1936, Johnnetta Betsch Cole grew up in an upper-middle-class household. However, she quickly realized that “money could never really protect me from racism.” At the age of five, she walked into a whites-only neighborhood where a boy called her the n-word. She never forgot the incident that “tore at me.” “As if the boy, no bigger than I was, was attacking me with daggers,” she recalled. Prestige ran through Cole’s family history. Her great-grandfather, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, became Jacksonville’s first Black millionaire and co-founded the Afro-American Life Insurance Company as well as founding the Black-owned community of American Beach. Her mother worked as an English teacher and registrar and filled their home with Black art and classic literature. The library became Cole’s sanctuary, where she buried herself in books that transported her to another world. Her passion for learning led Cole to enroll at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, at fifteen years old. One year later, she transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she discovered her passion for anthropology. She graduated from Northwestern University and received her doctorate in 1967. Learn more: https://s.si.edu/3xDUtt3 #APeoplesJourney #HiddenHerstory 📸 Photograph by Vandell Cobb. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

#DYK that Alfred L. Cralle patented the ice cream scoop in 1897? 🍨 Cralle noticed the difficulty ice cream servers were having scooping ice cream with one hand and holding the cone in the other while working in the Markell Brothers drugstore in Pittsburgh. The newly patented design kept the ice cream from sticking and is still widely used today. #NationalIceCreamDay 📸 Courtesy of Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

#OnThisDay in 1896 Mary Church Terrell and fellow activists Frances E.W. Harper, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). The organization was established with the intention of addressing social matters such as lynching, education, suffrage, care for children and the elderly, job readiness, fair wages, and more. “Lifting as we climb,” the slogan of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), became a well-known motto for Black women’s activism in the late nineteenth century. Their project of racial uplift focused on combating harmful stereotypes surrounding Black women. “ The reasons why we should confer are so apparent…We need to talk over not only those things which are of vital importance to us as women, but also the things that are of special interest to us as colored women…” Ruffin said in their inaugural conference. When the organization was incorporated in 1904, it was formally renamed the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC). They continue their efforts today. #ANationsStory #APeoplesJourney 📸 Mary Church Terrell, 1953. Photograph by Bertrand Miles. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Today, we remember Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, scholar, curator, singer, composer, organizer, activist, and member of our museum’s Scholarly Advisory Committee. Dr. Reagon was a cultural force who spent her life’s work fighting for freedom and justice. Reagon’s life work supported the concept of mutual respect: respect for self and those who move among us who seem different from us. She has left the world a tremendous legacy, and her presence will truly be missed. Learn more about her life and legacy: https://s.si.edu/3Lu1srN 📸 1. Leah L. Jones/NMAAHC. 2. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, © 1985 Flying Fish Records.

Today, we remember Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, scholar, curator, singer, composer, organizer, activist, and member of our museum’s Scholarly Advisory Committee. Dr. Reagon was a cultural force who spent her life’s work fighting for freedom and justice. Reagon’s life work supported the concept of mutual respect: respect for self and those who move among us who seem different from us. She has left the world a tremendous legacy, and her presence will truly be missed. Learn more about her life and legacy: https://s.si.edu/3Lu1srN 📸 1. Leah L. Jones/NMAAHC. 2. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, © 1985 Flying Fish Records.

Today, in honor of Mary McLeod Bethune and her legacy, our museum opened “Forces for Change: Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Activism.” This dynamic reenvisioning of the “Bethune Room,” a special gallery dedicated to the story of Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women, first opened in 2016 as part of the “Making a Way Out of No Way” permanent exhibition. “Forces for Change” offers new perspectives on Black women as activists and illuminates the history of Black women affecting social change. Learn more: https://s.si.edu/3xUjkZJ Credit: 📸 Mona Makela/NMAAHC

Constance Baker Motley was the first Black woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and the first to serve as a federal judge. She played a pivotal role as a front-line lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, leading litigation that integrated the University of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and other institutions. Born to working-class immigrants from the West Indies, Motley avoided overt racism as a child. However, when she traveled by train to college in Tennessee, she encountered Jim Crow laws. Upon reaching Cincinnati, Ohio, local customs directed her and others to an aging, rusty car marked “colored.” Reflecting on this experience, she wrote, “Although I had known this would happen, I was both frightened and humiliated. All I knew for sure was that I could do nothing about this new reality.” Learn more: https://s.si.edu/3xDUtt3 #APeoplesJourney #HiddenHerstory 📸 World Telegram & Sun Photo by Fred Palumbo. New York, 1965. Courtesy of Library of Congress, 2011645202.