8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
The Amherst track team in 1890, with Jackson in the front row, second from left.
By Evan J. Albright |
In 1892, when northern colleges were almost exclusively white, Amherst stood out for graduating three African-American seniors. Besides William Henry Lewis, the others were George Washington Forbes and William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson. One became an early leader in civil rights; the other a teacher.
George Washington Forbes, Class of 1892, was born in Shannon, Miss., in 1864. He moved to Boston after his Amherst graduation and helped launch a newspaper, the Boston Courant. In Boston, he joined William Henry Lewis and others in attempting to lead a revolt against the dominant force in African-American politics, Booker T. Washington. The Boston group believed that Washington was too willing to exchange civil rights, such as voting rights, for the economic opportunity to own property and businesses.
By 1903, however, Washington and Lewis, at the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt, reached a rapprochement. Forbes, along with William Monroe Trotter, had started a newspaper for African-Americans, The Boston Guardian, that frequently ran articles and editorials criticizing Lewis and Washington. The internecine conflict between the pro- and anti-Washington forces came to a head in July 1903, when Trotter and his supporters disrupted a speech by Washington in a Boston church. W. E. B. Du Bois would credit “The Boston Riot,” as it came to be known, with launching the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and by 1916 the NAACP’s more militant approach to civil rights replaced the accommodationist approach of Washington.
The Boston Riot was also a watershed for Forbes. Five years earlier he hyperbolically demanded that someone should “burn down Tuskegee,” Booker T. Washington’s school in Alabama; after the Boston Riot, Forbes found he no longer had the stomach for combative politics. He transferred his shares of The Boston Guardian to his classmate Lewis, eschewing politics for a quieter life as assistant librarian at the West Boston branch of the Boston Public Library.
William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson, Class of 1892, owed his college education to U.S. Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, who paid Jackson’s tuition and expenses. Jackson never forgot that kindness. He devoted his life to helping others obtain the same opportunities.
After leaving Amherst, Jackson moved to Washington, D.C., where he took up teaching at the M Street High School, later renamed Dunbar High School. He married May Howard, who would become one of the most famous African-American sculptors during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. She made busts of several notable leaders of the time, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar—and Lewis.
At Dunbar, Jackson taught mathematics and coached sports for 38 years. He served as the school’s principal from 1906 to 1909. He shepherded many of his students to Amherst, which graduated more Dunbar students than any other college outside of the nation’s capital.
It was Jackson who convinced Charles Hamilton Houston, Class of 1915, to attend Amherst. Houston became a prominent lawyer and the architect of
the legal challenge that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that in 1954 ended segregation in U.S. schools.
Jackson retired from Dunbar in 1931; his wife died a few months later. In 1942, Amherst honored him for his work as an educator. He died the following year.
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
Forbes was born to slave parents in Mississippi, worked as a laborer at
Harvard University, and graduated from
Amherst College in Massachusetts before gaining a national reputation as a journalist. Locally, he was well known as the reference librarian at the
West End branch of the
Boston Public Library, where he worked for 32 years. He was the Boston system's first black librarian.
Early life and education[edit]
Forbes was born to slave parents in Shannon, Mississippi, in 1864. In his youth he worked as a laborer and a farm hand. At the age of 14 he left Mississippi for Ohio, where he studied for a time at
Wilberforce University. In the mid-1880s he moved to Boston, where he worked for three or four years as a laborer at Harvard University, and saved up to continue his education. While living in Boston he befriended
W.E.B. Du Bois, who was studying at Harvard at the time, and who went on to become one of the most influential African-American leaders of the period.
[1]
In 1888, Forbes enrolled in Amherst College in
western Massachusetts, where he made two lifelong friends:
William H. Lewis, a pioneering black athlete who became an assistant U.S. attorney general, and William T. Jackson, who became an influential educator. Du Bois attended their graduation ceremony in 1892.
[2][3]
After college, Forbes returned to Boston, where he aligned himself with a group of black activists known informally as "the radicals." The group, which included his classmate Lewis as well as
William Monroe Trotter,
Archibald Grimké,
Butler R. Wilson,
Clement G. Morgan, and other black intellectuals, was critical of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach to race relations.
[4] That fall he started one of Boston's earliest African-American newspapers, the
Boston Courant (not to be confused with the periodical by the same name founded in 1995), a weekly paper which he owned and edited until it folded for financial reasons five years later.
[1][note 1]
In 1896 he became the Boston Public Library system's first black librarian when he was hired as an assistant librarian at the West End branch, the largest branch in Boston.
[5] At the time, the West End was a predominantly black neighborhood. As waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began to fill up the West End
tenements, and black Bostonians began moving to the South End, the West End became increasingly Jewish. Forbes stayed put, becoming a neighborhood institution at the West End branch, where he worked for 32 years without taking a single sick day.
[3][6]
In 1901, Forbes co-founded the
Boston Guardian with William Monroe Trotter. According to
Clement G. Morgan, Forbes provided the editorial know-how and literary ability, while Trotter provided the funding.
[7] In the first issue, published on November 9, 1901, Forbes and Trotter declared their intent to fight for equal rights: "We have come to protest forever against being proscribed or shut off in any caste from equal rights with other citizens, and shall remain forever on the firing line at any and all times in defence of such rights."
[8]
For the first two years, Forbes wrote most of the editorials. His sharp criticism of Washington soon garnered national attention. As Du Bois wrote later in The Crisis:
The
Boston Guardian was radical, intransigent and absolutely clear. It opposed Mr. Washington's doctrine of surrender and compromise and it opposed this doctrine with editorials that flamed and scorched and George Washington Forbes wrote them....Whatever has been accomplished from that day to this in beating back the forces of surrender and submission and in making the American Negro stand on both feet and demand full citizenship rights in America, has been due in no small degree to Forbes' work on the
Boston Guardian.
[3]
In July 1903, Trotter and several of his friends disrupted a speech by Washington in a Boston church, and in the ensuing melee Trotter was arrested. The incident, which later became known as the "Boston riot," seems to have been a turning point for Forbes. Soon afterwards he left the
Guardian, transferring his shares to William H. Lewis.
[2] He played a small role in the founding of the
Niagara Movement, the precursor to the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but from about 1910 he retired from politics and focused on his work at the library.
[1] He continued to write, contributing articles on black history and race relations to the
Springfield Republican and the
Boston Transcript, and reviewing books for
The Crisis (the official magazine of the NAACP). He also edited the
A. M. E. Church Review, the quarterly journal of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church.
[3][9]
Death and legacy[edit]
Forbes died of pneumonia on March 10, 1927, at his home at 18 Wellington Street in the South End. He was 63.
[10][11]
After his death, the
Boston Globe called him "one of the leading colored men of this city" and lauded his commitment to higher education, noting that he had encouraged many young black men to go to college.
[12] What the
Globe did not mention was that as a librarian in Boston's heavily Jewish West End, Forbes had influenced the lives of countless young Jews. A warm tribute to Forbes, originally printed in
Yiddish, appeared in
The Jewish Daily Forward and was reprinted in English in the
Crisis and
Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The article hailed Forbes as a "friend of the race," praising not only his intellect but his unfailing kindness:
Many times a college or high school student wrestled with a certain subject. To whom should he go? Of course to Mr. Forbes, and Mr. Forbes gave him advice, assisted and encouraged him, so that the student who came into the Library with a troubled heart and in despair, went out realizing and seeing a way to overcome the difficulty...Though his death is being mourned by the Negro population which was justly proud of him, still more is he being mourned by the Jewish children of the West End of Boston.
[13]
The West End branch of the Boston Public Library closed on the afternoon of his funeral so that his library colleagues could serve as pallbearers. He left an unpublished manuscript, titled
History of the Black Men in the Life of the Republic.
[13]
No comments:
Post a Comment