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Transcribe page 31 of 40
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Download PDF for NASM-NASM.1992.0023-M0000045-00320 (project ID 15930)
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August, 1936 251 26th N.A.A.C.P. Year (Continued from page 245) daughters, they are perpetuating their own slavery and dooming with their children to further exploitation and inferior position. Three suits have actually been filed against state universities: in Maryland, Missouri and Tennessee. In Maryland the fight was successful and this year for the first time in the history of the state university since 1890 a negro boy attended the school of law of the University of Maryland. The suit against the University of Missouri is scheduled to be tried July 10, and the case against the University of Tennessee will be tried sometime next fall. I take it nobody misunderstands the motive behind these university cases. Just once have I heard it questioned whether the association is justified in spending so much money on one student. That is not the point. It was necessary to have one student as a test case. But the efforts against the university are designed to have a repercussion down to the lowest kindergarten and rural school. They are just a preliminary to the fight for equalization of teachers' salaries, equalization of school terms, equalization of per capita expenditures, transportation. The association is pledged to fight all segregation in education, and where it cannot fight segregation direct, it intends to make segregation just as expensive as possible. In addition to the university fight, another just a significant struggle in how educational campaign is going on at the very doors of this convention. Just outside the city limits of Baltimore is Baltimore county. The whites have eleven high schools in the county, the Negros none, although Negroes constitute at least nine per cent of the school population. In September, 1935, a Negro father took his daughter to the white high school since there was no Negro high school in the county. She was rejected, he file suit and the association is lending its support. The case was to have been tried a few days ago, June 23, byt it was continued and probably will be tried the next month. Watch this case because it shows that the association is fighting not only on the top levels that also down on the secondary levels. The fight for educational equality has spread as far as Arkansas. Out in Augusta, Arkansas, the white children in March were going to regular school with the aid of FERA money, well the Negro children in the school district were conducting an egg-a-day school. This means that the Negro school has been closed, but a few teachers remained behind as volunteers to try to give the children some more schooling and the children had to bring an egg a day as their tuition. No egg, and they had to go home, while the white schools were being run off Federal money. The N.A.A.C.P. sent its special counsel to Arkansas, and as a result of his efforts and the sacrifice of the Negro principal, John A. Hibbler of Little Rock, the Negro school was reopened and the federal money divided between whites and blacks. The N.A.A.C.P. program includes all Negroes from the kindergarten to the last postgraduate degree. Here I wish to thank the fraternities and sororities. They have magnificently come to the support of the association in its education campaign. Many have contributed money or appointed committees to raise scholarship funds. The Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity paid the second semester tuition of Donald Gaines Murray in the University of Maryland law school, February, 1936. All persons have responded to this program of the association. By way of caution I wish to show you that all problems of educational discrimination are not in the South. The Mayor's Committee on Conditions in Harlem, which was appointed in part due to the efforts of the association to get a true picture of conditions in Harlem over to the public and the officials after the Harlem riot of 1935, issued a report on Harlem schools which was truly devastating. The association held a mass meeting in New York City in March, 1936, and invited more than one hundred organizations to participate. A provisional committee which had been formed prior to the mass meeting announced it was ready to proceed to permanent organization. The association then, in spite of the fact it had gathered so many together, announced from the platform that it wanted all organizations to form part of the permanent committee and joined with the provisional committee so that there would be one united so front of effort in New York City. I say this to show you that's the association does not have any organizational jealousy. It is not interested in who gets the credit, but solely in whether the work is done the best and most effective way possible. There is enough glory for all in the struggle for equal rights for us all to pull together as one and not worry about who takes the lead. On the ballot, the association, with the help of the citizens of North Carolina, has been in large part the cause of the United States government prosecuting and convicting a Democratic registrar in North Carolina who refused to register Negroes in the Congressional election of 1934. It is still investigating the Democratic primaries in Texas, and I can assure you it will never accept the decision of the United States supreme court as the last word that Negroes cannot vote in the Democratic primaries. The decision of United States supreme court has merely closed out one avenue of attack. If we cannot make a frontal attack, we are looking for weak spots in the flank. I could go on and tell you of fights against discrimination in the government service, and post office, of the struggle to get the Pennsylvania civil rights act truly and effectively enforced, the fight against discrimination in transportation, to keep the Olympics free from race prejudice, the struggle for due process of law represented by the victories in the Jess Hollins case and the Brown, Ellington and Shields case, where the supreme court of United States once again in the Hollins case affirmed the right of Negroes to jury service, and in the Brown, Ellington and Shields case took the high ground that trial by torture could not be tolerated under our constitution. In the field of health, the Association has been waging a steady and relentless fight against segregation of Negro doctors and nurses in hospitals and in public health work. We know that identical justice and equal opportunity are essential for the reduction of our morbidity and mortality rates. We know that some organizations, for the sake of their own existence, try to frighten wealthy citizens by pointing out to them that the Negro's health menace to America. Which is a lie. All sickness and death rates decrease in direct proportion to the economic opportunity of the group studied is concerned. The denial of the Negro patient proper hospitalization, with a equal protection to life – as that afforded to all other citizens, is an outrage that transcends lynching in its subtle barbarity. America is the loser for its damnable proscriptions of and the handicaps placed upon Negro professional men and women. They have purposely been miseducated – they have been taught that they are different from other doctors and nurses – all of which is a deliberately planned and intentional falsehood; but the Association is not misled in this way. It stands shoulder shoulder with and squarely behind the ideals of the Manhattan Medical Society – that vigorous and hard hitting foe of segregation in our professional ranks, to the end that Negro patients, doctors and nurses will receive the identical care, treatment and training as that afforded any citizen, regardless of his extraction. In conclusion, let me assure you that this, our association will never weaken, never waver one iota from our objectives, that will increasingly and persistently wage our fight unselfishly and fearlessly until every bulwark of segregation and discrimination based upon race has been overcome.
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