OZY Classics: Untold Stories of Black History

The seasoned activist and Quaker Bayard Rustin was Dr. Martin Luther King’s mentor in nonviolence and the organizing genius behind the March on Washington in 1963. Many felt that Rustin was on his way to becoming the “American Gandhi.” There was just one problem: Rustin was gay, and as a result, would be forced to the sidelines of the civil rights struggle, and to the margins of American history.

She was an activist, a choir singer and a political worker. But to many in South Africa, Charlotte Maxeke was first and foremost the “mother of African freedom.” Born in 1874 in South Africa, she attended college in Ohio, where she formed her political beliefs. She then toured the U.S. and the U.K. — but her heart was always back home. Maxeke returned to South Africa and campaigned against the racist policies of a white government that predated the formal imposition of apartheid.

Pauli Murray was born Anna Pauline Murray in 1910 to a mixed-race family. Orphaned at a young age, Murray would go on to become a lawyer, minister and civil rights leader. The transgender activist was what we know now as intersectional. In arguing points about civil rights, Murray was far ahead of her time in viewing race as a social construct and gender beyond a binary. This Howard University professor harnessed the power of sit-ins more than a dozen years before Rosa Parks refused to budge from her seat.

As a freed slave and a British loyalist in 18th-century America, it’s no surprise that Sergeant Thomas Peters and his family sought greener pastures. After fighting for the Brits during the American Revolution, Black loyalists like Peters were evacuated to Nova Scotia when the war turned against the Redcoats in 1783. They’d been promised both land and liberty — but found themselves, yet again, on shores unwilling to accept them. So Peters and 3,000 others journeyed to Sierra Leone and founded Freetown, a colony of freed slaves.

During the Civil War, Black soldiers endured racism within the Union Army — and faced hazardous conditions if they were captured. In total, 180,000 Black soldiers fought in the Civil War, and in the last year of the war they were paid the same as white soldiers — even as they died of disease at far higher rates. Black veterans were also attacked and lynched, and their contributions were often erased from historical memory.

He left his native South Carolina at age 16 to travel the world on a merchant ship and served in a Buffalo Soldier unit during World War I. Osceola McKaine made lieutenant and found better treatment in France, which opened his eyes to the possibility of a brighter future for African Americans back home. He returned stateside and became a civil rights activist, even mounting a historic — though unsuccessful — bid for the U.S. Senate in 1944 as part of a Black-led splinter challenge to the Democratic Party.

He is said to have swung the longest, heaviest bat in the league and swatted some 800 home runs — including 84 in a single season — though Negro Leagues statistics are incomplete. Josh Gibson, aka the “Black Babe Ruth,” died at age 35, mere months before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. So although Gibson never got the chance to test his talents in the major leagues, when MLB announced that it was merging Negro Leagues statistics with the American and National leagues, that gave the power-hitting catcher the best single-season batting average in history, a whopping .441 in 1943.

It’s hard enough to achieve hall-of-fame status in one pro sport. How about two? You may have heard of Althea Gibson, but Ora Washington was the original Black female tennis superstar, winning 20 national titles in the all-Black American Tennis Association from the 1920s through the 1940s — even as she was shut out of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association due to the color of her skin. What’s more, Washington was also a basketball phenom: for a whopping 11 seasons, she was the leading scorer and captain of the Philadelphia Tribunes.

Eugene Bullard spent his last days working as an elevator operator in New York’s Rockefeller Center, but by then he’d lived five lifetimes. He was a boxer, World War I fighter pilot, Paris nightclub owner and World War II resistance fighter. He escaped the Gestapo and was beaten by police at a civil rights demonstration. The first Black fighter pilot, he was as daring as any top gun. America may not have given him the recognition he deserved, but Bullard never gave up his American idealism.

The prime reason there are so few Black farmers and property owners in America is that Black families never received the land that was contractually theirs. At the close of the Civil War, the government promised emancipated slaves 40 acres and a mule. But the government never delivered. Unbowed, Black people worked tirelessly to secure their own parcels — only to have to see their wealth eroded through a parade of racialized economic policies, including Jim Crow. Today, systemic racism and inequalities lodged in gentrification have furthered the decline of Black land ownership. But many are fighting back in new ways.

In 1920, Black Floridians began to organize as never before — voter registration drives, marches, secret voter education workshops at churches and lodges. But on Election Day that year, the residents of the little town of Ocoee, Florida, encountered a voter suppression effort like few in history. In a special OZY podcast miniseries, we heard from the descendants of some of those who endured what remains the worst incident of election violence in U.S. history.

Too often, Black history focuses on the Civil War and emancipation, then skips ahead to the civil rights movement, overlooking an entire century of hard-won progress. During Reconstruction, Black leaders stepped forward as elected candidates in Southern statehouses, as leaders of historically Black colleges and universities, and as heads of businesses and other organizations. With their newfound freedom, they established towns and thriving businesses, as well as churches, schools and newspapers. And still, they were subject to relentless attacks by whites who destroyed their establishments by day and terrorized them in Ku Klux Klan robes after dark.

Which untold story did you find most intriguing? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected].