Chicago Defender - April 24, 1954
1 2019-03-12T23:56:23+00:00 Stanford University Press af84c3e11fe030c51c61bbd190fa82a3a1a12824 1 1 Chicago Defender - April 24, 1954 plain published 2019-03-12T23:56:23+00:00 AnonymousThis page is referenced by:
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April - Archived Posts
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Click on date to view post:April 1, 1950: Political April Fools’ Day wishes in Pittsburgh Courier.April 2, 1966: Pittsburgh Courier sports editor Bill Nunn Jr. on Texas Western championship basketball team.April 3, 1954: Cleveland Call and Post reports on death of nightclub owner and numbers racket king Bennie Mason.April 4, 1968: The front pages of black newspapers after assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.April 5, 1933: Hamilton Lodge Ball and drag performances in New York Amsterdam News.April 6, 1972: North Carolina Mutual insurance advertisement in Los Angeles Sentinel.April 7, 1959: Ads for Lydia Pinkham’s tablets and topics to relieve menstrual and menopausal pain in the Philadelphia Tribune.April 8, 1939: Norfolk Journal and Guide on controversy over Louis Armstrong’s swing version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”April 9, 197: Hank Aaron’s record breaking 715th home run covered in the Atlanta Daily World.April 10, 1909: New York Women’s Business Club featured in Baltimore Afro-American.April 11, 1936: Chicago Defender on a Howard University student bet gone wrong.April 12, 1947: Jackie Robinson’s Major League Baseball debut covered in the black press.April 13, 1948: Philadelphia Tribune reports on killing of World War II veteran George Serrell, who refused to sit in a Jim Crow train car.April 14, 1979: Disco advertisements in the Cleveland Call and Post.April 15, 1939: Account from a fugitive from a North Carolina prison in the Baltimore Afro-American. Guest post by Daniel Arico, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 15, 1939: Marian Anderson’s landmark performance at Lincoln Memorial reported in Chicago Defender.April 16, 1904: Anti-profanity campaign reported in The Appeal. Guest post by Caroline Arkesteyn, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 16, 1959: Francois Andre’s male fashion show at Hollywood’s Moulin Rouge in the Los Angeles Sentinel.April 17, 1915: Ohio Governor Frank Willis blocks exhibition of racist photoplay, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Alex Bishop, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 17, 1943: African-American women protest racial discrimination at Bechtel-McCone-Parsons airplane modification plant in Birmingham, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Lillian G. Page, MA student in history at the University of Memphis.April 18, 1942: Eleanor Roosevelt calls for equality in speech at the Hampton Institute, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Connor Callahan, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 19, 1958: New York Amsterdam News on dangerous apartment conditions. Guest post by Mark Speltz.April 19, 1960: Chicago Defender on racial discrimination and student organizing at Indiana University. Guest post by Samuel Carter, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 20, 1929: Chicago Defender on teen runner killed after winning race. Guest post by Trent Cork, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 21, 1953: Washington Afro-American on discrimination in the U.S. Army. Guest post by Katelyn Culver, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 22, 1950: Housing discrimination in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Austin Demers, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 23, 1960: White woman in Alabama beaten for dating black men, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Thomas Esposito, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 24, 1954: Chicago Defender on discrimination in Baltimore hotels. Guest post by Mark Fowler, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 25, 1987: Indianapolis Recorder on black student demands at Purdue University. Guest post by Derek Gilman, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 26, 1930: Indianapolis Recorder on movie theater discrimination. Guest post by Ethan Hill, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 27, 1974: Chicago Defender salutes Duke Ellington on his birthday. Guest post by Luke Johnson, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 28, 1962: Police brutality reported in Indianapolis Recorder. Guest post by Samanvay Kasarala, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 28, 1988: Cleveland Call and Post endorses Jesse Jackson for President.April 29, 1904: Iowa State Bystander reports on practical joke gone wrong. Guest post by Robert Kinser, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 30, 1960: Student protests in Greensboro, North Carolina reported in the Chicago Defender. Guest post by Samuel Kramer, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.
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April 24, 1954
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Guest post by Mark Fowler, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.
On April 24, 1954, an editorial was released in the Chicago Defender commenting on a story from Baltimore where hotel owners in the city had refused to follow the orders of the governor of Maryland to allow black visitors to room at their hotels. Governor Theodore R. McKeldin made this order because a year before in 1953 the St. Louis Browns had moved to Baltimore and became the Baltimore Orioles, and thus the need to accommodate the players, some of whom were black, was needed. As pointed out in the editorial, Baltimore was the only city with a major league baseball team in which all of the hotels in the city prohibited African Americans. At this time in the history of Major League Baseball, all of the teams were located in the Northeast and Midwest; the most southern team in the league was the St. Louis Cardinals, so at this time most teams were located in cities that were more integrated than other parts of the country.
In the editorial Charles D. Harris, an attorney representing the hotel owners, says that they believe that the hotels will lose money if they were to begin to allow African Americans to reside there. The author of the article writes, ”We do not think Mr. Harris knows what he’s talking about in this regard.” The author believes the whole idea of white people refusing to stay at a hotel because black people are staying there or have stayed there is preposterous and that the Chicago Defender believes that white people in Baltimore are more intelligent than that.
This article is interesting as it talks to the non-black residents of Baltimore and asks them if they are all right with the hotel owners pushing their views on the whole city. “Actually Baltimoreans should resent the presumptuousness of Mr. Harris who has taken it upon himself to represent them as being so prejudiced and un-American that they would refuse to patronize a hotel simply because it admits a Negro guest or two.” The Chicago Defender believed that many Baltimoreans did not agree with the hotel owners but had not had the chance to voice their opinion, and the paper is disappointed that the hotels are representing the city as backwards and racist. It is also interesting that the paper does not come off as angry but more as disappointed in the city and the hotel owners. It is sad to read this paper today, as one can tell that the authors of this editorial have seen stories like this many times and they are only disappointed. It shows how much inequality was present at the time of this publication.
After reading this article and many like it from black newspapers, one gets a new perspective on the lives of African Americans leading up to the civil rights era. Many assume that for African Americans the North was much better than the South, and this is mostly true, but this article shows that the North still had its problems and African Americans were not treated as equals in the North either. In the same year as this publication, the Supreme Court ruled on the case Brown v. Board of Education, and although it did not solve the problem of inequality in America, a problem that this country is still working on, it was black newspapers like the Chicago Defender that brought issues of segregated hotels and schools to the public’s attention and made change possible.