Over 120,000 Japanese-Americans, in addition to several thousand Italian and German Americans, were interned (imprisoned) during WWII by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his Executive Order 9066. Congress, in the 1980s, concluded that this detention was unlawful. The propaganda below further solidified in the minds of some Americans that the Japanese military who bombed us at Pearl Harbor and the Japanese-American citizens living in our county were one and the same. President Ford rescinded the Executive Order (9066) in 1976. President Reagan apologized to those Japanese-Americans who were interned, and our government paid them reparations.
The 3rd website briefly indicates the service of app. 6,000 Japanese Americans as interpreters and translators in segregated units for our country during WW2.
The fourth website shows that 44,000 Native Americans served during WW2.
The fifth website illustrates that over 500,000 Latinos (including 350,000 Mexican Americans and 53,000 Puerto Ricans) served our country during WW2.
The sixth and seventh articles are about the lynching of a Black veteran, while the very last webpage is a brief primer on the history of Black lynching in our country. Blacks were lynched the most. Montgomery, Alabama now has a memorial dedicated to the lynching of approximately 4000 Blacks over several decades; however, the number may be much higher.
The eighth article is about how Mexican-Americans were lynched the most after African-Americans.
The ninth, tenth, and eleventh articles are about how Italian-Americans, German-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and Native Americans were also victims of lynching.
The twelfth article is about how a “Black man (could) drive a truck in Europe during WWII but was not permitted to drive a street car in Washington, D.C.”
Please tell us at least 2 things you learned from each of the websites and full articles (the full article appears directly below the link to the article) below:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/injustice-japanese-americans-internment-camps-resonates-strongly-180961422/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Executive-Order-9066
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/asian-pacific-american-world-war-ii#:~:text=Service,the%20war%20and%20save%20lives.
https://www.lhschools.org/Downloads/Native%20Americans%20in%20WWII.pdf
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/los-veteranos-fact-sheet.pdf
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/08/1078977454/race-racism-lynching-postcards-ahmaud-arbery-george-floyd
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/09/13/maceo-snipes-lynching-vote-all-in-stacey-abrams/
A Black WWII veteran voted in Georgia in 1946. He was lynched for it.
Maceo Snipes was shot on his front porch, a new documentary on voter suppression remembers.
Maceo Snipes in his World War II uniform. (Hank Klibanoff/Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory)
By Gillian Brockell
September 13, 2020 at 6:00 a.m.
To Maceo Snipes, the future must have looked brighter than it ever had. He had served honorably in World War II. Now home in Taylor County, Ga., he was working hard to bring the family farm back from the brink. He hadn’t made it far in school, but he knew the power of education and rewarded his nieces when they got good grades.
Plus, a federal court had just decided White officials in his county couldn’t stop Black people from voting in the Democratic primary.
“When you have fought fascists, and you have fought for democracy, you want some of that democracy for yourself,” says historian Carol Anderson in the new documentary “All In: The Fight for Democracy.”
While the documentary focuses on Stacey Abrams’s 2018 Georgia gubernatorial run, filmmakers Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés weave in the history of voter suppression in the United States, including the chilling story of what happened to Snipes.
Police brutality, voting rights, racial justice: Echoes from 1963′s March on Washington
Snipes had been warned, Anderson says, “something to the effect of ‘First Negro that votes, that’ll be the last thing he ever does.’ ” But he cast his ballot on July 17, 1946 — the only Black person to do so in Taylor County.
For a day or two, nothing happened. Then one night, as he and his mother were sitting down to dinner, a White man he knew knocked on the door and asked him to come outside.
“And then he sees three additional White men, and he hears ‘chk-chk.’ It was a firing squad. And they laid Maceo out,” says Anderson, who is the author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.” “The message was really clear: You vote, you die.”
After being shot in the abdomen, his mother helped him walk miles to get a ride to the hospital, family members later told the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University. There he waited for six hours before he was seen in a room not much bigger than a closet.
Doctors were able to remove the bullets, but without a blood transfusion he would die, they told him, and it just so happened the hospital was out of “Black blood.” In the Jim Crow South, even blood was segregated.
‘You’ve got bad blood’: The horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
Snipes died on July 20. He was 37.
Cassandra Jones-Deshazier never met her step-grandfather, but she has a plaque and a photo of him hanging in her living room in Macon, Ga. Snipes had been married to her grandmother Nezzie and took in Jones-Deshazier’s mother as his stepdaughter.
Snipes was still married to Nezzie, according to military records, when he was drafted into the Army in 1943, though the couple split up some time before his death; Jones-Deshazier isn’t sure when. He spent more than two years in the Pacific and was honorably discharged. He had been home for less than a year when he had decided to vote.
“My grandmother told me that during the time after he died, they had heard around that if anyone showed up at his funeral, that they would be killed also,” Jones-Deshazier told The Washington Post in a phone interview. Only Maceo’s ex-wife, stepdaughter and “three or four others” attended “because everybody else was scared.”
His nieces told Emory University he was buried in the town cemetery under cover of darkness in an unmarked grave. No one knows exactly where. Within days, the family moved to Ohio.
“People scattered out of Taylor County quick, just moved away,” Jones-Deshazier said.
Before he died, Snipes told police exactly who had lured him out onto the porch that night — a fellow World War II veteran named Edward Williamson. A coroner’s jury was convened, and Snipes’s mother bravely testified, but a headline in The Washington Post a week later says it all: “Jury Calls Slaying of Negro Veteran ‘Self-Defense.’ ” No charges were ever filed against the men who killed Snipes.
Cases like this one are what motivated the Black community to push for civil rights and the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, Anderson says in the documentary.
In fact, Abrams could be counted among those motivated by the Snipes lynching. “It’s one of those stories about oppression and about Jim Crow that those of us who focus on these issues, especially in this region, you learn about early,” she told The Washington Post in a Zoom interview.
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down key portions of the Voting Rights Act that had prevented states like Georgia from making changes to its voting laws without federal approval. Since then, the state has instituted a strict voter-ID law, closed polling places and purged voters from the rolls.
“My goal was to tell the history of voter suppression so we could understand it in the current context,” Abrams said.
There’s an important coda to the story of Maceo Snipes. His murder, and the lynchings of others in Georgia the next week, got the attention of a 17-year-old student at Morehouse College in Atlanta. The young man was moved enough to write a letter to the editor published in the Atlanta Constitution on Aug. 6, 1946.
“We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote. “Equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar public services; the right to vote; equality before the law; some of the same courtesy and manners that we ourselves bring to all human relations.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names
Kirvin, Tex., where three black men accused of killing a white woman were set on fire in 1922 before a crowd of hundreds.Credit…Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
By Campbell Robertson
⦁ Feb. 10, 2015
DALLAS — A block from the tourist-swarmed headquarters of the former Texas School Book Depository sits the old county courthouse, now a museum. In 1910, a group of men rushed into the courthouse, threw a rope around the neck of a black man accused of sexually assaulting a 3-year-old white girl, and threw the other end of the rope out a window. A mob outside yanked the man, Allen Brooks, to the ground and strung him up at a ceremonial arch a few blocks down Main Street.
South of the city, past the Trinity River bottoms, a black man named W. R. Taylor was hanged by a mob in 1889. Farther south still is the community of Streetman, where 25-year-old George Gay was hanged from a tree and shot hundreds of times in 1922.
And just beyond that is Kirvin, where three black men, two of them almost certainly innocent, were accused of killing a white woman and, under the gaze of hundreds of soda-drinking spectators, were castrated, stabbed, beaten, tied to a plow and set afire in the spring of 1922.
The killing of Mr. Brooks is noted in the museum. The sites of the other killings, like those of nearly every lynching in the United States, are not marked. Bryan Stevenson believes this should change
On Tuesday, the organization he founded and runs, the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., released a report on the history of lynchings in the United States, the result of five years of research and 160 visits to sites around the South. The authors of the report compiled an inventory of 3,959 victims of “racial terror lynchings” in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.
Map of 73 Years of Lynchings
The locations of lynchings from 1877 to 1950.
Next comes the process of selecting lynching sites where the organization plans to erect markers and memorials, which will involve significant fund-raising, negotiations with distrustful landowners and, almost undoubtedly, intense controversy.
The process is intended, Mr. Stevenson said, to force people to reckon with the narrative through-line of the country’s vicious racial history, rather than thinking of that history in a short-range, piecemeal way.
“Lynching and the terror era shaped the geography, politics, economics and social characteristics of being black in America during the 20th century,” Mr. Stevenson said, arguing that many participants in the great migration from the South should be thought of as refugees fleeing terrorism rather than people simply seeking work.
The lynching report is part of a longer project Mr. Stevenson began several years ago. One phase involved the erection of historical markers about the extensive slave markets in Montgomery. The city and state governments were not welcoming of the markers, despite the abundance of Civil War and civil rights movement memorials in Montgomery, but Mr. Stevenson is planning to do the same thing elsewhere.
Around the country, there are only a few markers noting the sites of lynchings. In several of those places, like Newnan, Ga., attempts to erect markers were met with local resistance. But in most places, no one has tried to put up a marker.
Image
Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, in front of the building, then a courthouse, where the lynching began.Credit…Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
Efforts to count the number of lynchings in the country go back at least to 1882, when The Chicago Tribune began publishing each January a list of all executions and lynchings in the previous year. The Tuskegee Institute began releasing a list in 1912, and in 1919, the N.A.A.C.P. published what its researchers said was a comprehensive list of lynchings in the previous three decades. In 1995, the sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck researched the existing lists, eliminated errors and duplicates, and compiled what many consider the most accurate inventory to that time.
The report released Tuesday says that the new inventory has 700 names that are not on any of these previous lists, many of which Mr. Stevenson said were discovered during the compilation of the report.
Professor Beck, who teaches at the University of Georgia, has not reviewed the new list. But he pointed out that, with racial violence so extensive and carried out in so many different ways, compilers of lists may differ on what constitutes a lynching; the new list, as opposed to some previous ones, includes one-time massacres of large numbers of African-Americans, such as occurred in Arkansas in 1919 and in Louisiana in 1887.
“If you’re trying to make a point that the amount of racial violence is underestimated, well then, there’s no doubt about it,” Professor Beck said. “What people don’t realize here is just how many there were, and how close. Places they drive by every day.”
Among Professor Beck’s findings were that the number of lynchings did not rise or fall in proportion to the number of state-sanctioned executions, underscoring what Mr. Stevenson said was a crucial point: that these brutal deaths were not about administering popular justice, but terrorizing a community.
Image
Downtown Dallas in 1910, when Allen Brooks, a black man, was hanged from a telephone pole.Credit…via Dallas Public Library/Dallas History Archives Division
“Many of these lynchings were not executing people for crimes but executing people for violating the racial hierarchy,” he said, meaning offenses such as bumping up against a white woman or wearing an Army uniform.
But, he continued, even when a major crime was alleged, the refusal to grant a black man a trial — despite the justice system’s near certain outcome — and the public extravagance of a lynching were clearly intended as a message to other African-Americans.
The bloody history of Paris, Tex., about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, is well known if rarely brought up, said Thelma Dangerfield, the treasurer of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. Thousands of people came in 1893 to see Henry Smith, a black teenager accused of murder, carried around town on a float, then tortured and burned to death on a scaffold.
Until recently, some longtime residents still remembered when the two Arthur brothers were tied to a flagpole and set on fire at the city fairgrounds in 1920.
“There were two or three blacks who were actually around during that time, but you couldn’t get them to talk about it,” Ms. Dangerfield said.
She helped set up an exhibit in the county historical museum, the only commemoration of the lynchings she knows of in a town with prominent public memorials to the Confederacy. The prospect of a permanent marker had not occurred to her.
“It would be a fight,” she said. “Someone is going to have some resistance to it. But you know, I think it wouldn’t hurt to try it.”
Correction: Feb. 10, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the Texas town where three black men were killed in the spring of 1922. It was Kirvin, not Kirkin.
Lynch Mobs Killed Latinos Across the West. The Fight to Remember These Atrocities is Just Starting.
Arlinda Valencia, a descendant of lynching victims, at a remembrance ceremony at the State Capitol in Austin, Tex., last year.Credit…Jessica Lutz
By Simon Romero
⦁ March 2, 2019
Leer en español
EL PASO — Arlinda Valencia was at a funeral when an uncle told her a bewildering family secret: An Anglo lynch mob had killed her great-grandfather.
“A mixture of grief and shock overwhelmed me since this was the first I heard of this,” said Ms. Valencia, 66, the leader of a teachers’ union in El Paso. “The more I looked into it, the more stunned I was at how many Mexicans were lynched in this country.”
Ms. Valencia and other descendants of lynching victims are now casting attention on one of the grimmest campaigns of racist terror in the American West: the lynching of thousands of men, women and children of Mexican descent from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century.
Some victims were burned alive, like Antonio Rodríguez, 20, a migrant worker who was hauled from a jail in Rocksprings, Tex., tied to a tree and set ablaze in 1910. Other mobs hanged, whipped or shot Mexicans, many of whom were United States citizens, sometimes drawing crowds in the thousands.
Lynchings have long been associated with violence against African-Americans in the American South, and these atrocities are remembered at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama. Lynchings of Hispanics have faded into history with less attention. Often, they have been portrayed as attempts to exercise justice on behalf of white settlers protecting their livestock or claims to land.
But a new movement is underway to uncover that neglected past. It has unleashed discussions about the scramble for land or mining claims that frequently influenced these lynchings, as well as the traces of such episodes in resurgent anti-Latino sentiment and the question many parts of the United States are confronting: Who gets to tell history?
“The conquest of the West is still simply a tale of incredible progress for many Americans,” said Monica Muñoz Martínez, a professor of American studies at Brown University who has written extensively about anti-Mexican violence in Texas.
“But despite the unwillingness to recognize these lynchings as a tragedy, or even recognize them at all, momentum is building to finally reckon with these events,” said Professor Muñoz Martínez, who was raised in Texas and is a co-founder of Refusing to Forget, a group committed to increasing awareness about state-sanctioned violence against Latinos in Texas.
Texas, which enshrined white supremacy in its 1836 constitution when Anglo slaveholders seceded from Mexico, had by far the most episodes of mob violence against people of Mexican descent, according to William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, historians who have documented such cases.
Reasons given for these lynchings varied wildly, including accusations of cattle theft, murder, cheating at cards, refusing to play the fiddle, shouting “Viva Diaz!” — even witchcraft.
Image
Texas Rangers on the King Ranch in South Texas in 1915 with lassoes pulled around the bodies of Jesús García, Mauricio García and Amado Muñoz.Credit…Robert Runyon Photograph Collection/ Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, via The University of Texas at Austin
In 1880, a mob in Collin County in North Texas accused Refugio Ramírez, his wife, and their teenage daughter, María Ines, of bewitching their neighbors. The three of them were burned to death, according to Laura F. Edwards, a historian at Duke University.
In another episode in 1882, a man of Mexican descent identified as Augustin Agirer filed a complaint against an Anglo man who shot at his dog. In retaliation, Anglos tracked Mr. Agirer down and fatally shot him in front of his wife, The Austin Weekly Statesman reported at the time.
In 1922, a group of 10 men snatched Elias Villareal Zarate from a jail in Weslaco in South Texas, where he was being held for fighting with a white co-worker. La Prensa, a San Antonio newspaper, described how the mob hanged him, raising the ire of Mexican diplomats who were trying to curb such killings.
One of the most contentious lynching episodes anywhere in the West involved the ancestors of Ms. Valencia, the El Paso teachers’ union official. The family and several neighbors had settled in the outpost of Porvenir in a remote stretch of West Texas on the Rio Grande, eking out a quiet existence as farmers.
But on Jan. 28, 1918, a group of Anglo cattlemen, Texas Rangers and United States Army cavalry soldiers descended on the village as families slept. They seized 15 men and boys, the youngest of whom was 16, marched them to a bluff overlooking the river and fatally shot them at close range.
After burning Porvenir to the ground, the Rangers and ranchmen claimed, without offering proof, that the villagers had been thieves. They contended that the victims had been informants for Mexicans who had raided the nearby Brite Ranch a month earlier. They also claimed that they had come under fire.
But investigations by the Army and the State Department found that the Mexicans were unarmed when they were killed. Ms. Valencia’s great-grandfather, Longino Flores, was among the dead. Her grandfather, Rosendo Mesa, was a boy at the time. He survived because he was away buying provisions.
“My grandfather kept everything about the massacre to himself, which kind of amazed me,” said Ms. Valencia, reflecting on why it took so long for her to find out about the killings. “Remember, this is Texas. There’s reverence for the nearly godly Texas Rangers. To this day, the truth is hard.”
Ms. Valencia found out how hard it is to even agree on the facts surrounding the killings when historians and descendants of the victims at Porvenir, a village largely erased from local memory after it was razed in 1918 and survivors fled, applied to the Texas Historical Commission for a historical marker.
“Don’t tell me that if the police kill an Anglo in Chihuahua City, there isn’t going to be some differences about what really happened,” said Jim White III, 70, a descendant of the Brite family, whose ranch not far from Porvenir was the one that had been raided a month before the lynchings.
“It was a turbulent time on the border when you had a lot of people getting killed on both sides,” said Mr. White, who still lives on the family’s ranch and refrains from calling the killings a massacre. “It’s 2019, right? Playing the race card doesn’t work any more.”
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A historical marker to commemorate the massacre at Porvenir.Credit…Jessica Lutz
Others who have opposed the marker include the chairwoman of the historical commission, who cited concerns that it was being used by “militant Hispanics” looking for reparations. The Presidio County attorney worried that the dedication ceremony for a marker could serve as the backdrop for a “major political rally” for Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat who last fall was a candidate for the United States Senate, according to The Texas Observer, which wrote an extensive report on the dispute.
After several delays, the descendants finally got their marker in late 2018 on a highway near the razed village. It came after the historical commission’s state chairman, John Nau — a beer-distribution magnate who donates heavily to Republican officeholders — told staff members to inquire about having markers that described raids that occurred on Anglo ranches around the time of the Porvenir massacre.
“Chairman Nau’s comments were provided as advice about how the county could address local concerns that the whole story was not being told about this period in Texas history,” said Chris Florance, a spokesman for the commission.
While tension persists over how to commemorate the lynchings in Porvenir, there are hundreds of examples of other documented extrajudicial killings of Latinos in states aside from Texas, some in places far from the border.
For instance, in 1919, two Mexican citizens were being held in a jail in Pueblo, Colo., as suspects in the murder of a police officer. A mob broke into the jail, drove the two men to the edge of town and hanged them during a heavy rainstorm in front of about 100 people. The El Paso Herald reported that Mexico’s consul in Denver investigated the episode and concluded that the mob had lynched the wrong men.
In Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza, where gift shops and restaurants now cater to tourists, three men identified as Escolastico Perea, Miguel Barrera and California Joe were hanged by a mob of about 200 local residents in 1881 in connection with the murder of a geological surveyor, Col. Charles Potter.
“Though lynching in general is to be condemned, yet to every case there is an exception,” The Santa Fe New Mexican reported at the time. “In the instance of the dastardly murder of Charles Potter, it is very doubtful whether justice can be too swiftly meted out.
California endured its own eruption of lynchings of Mexicans during the Gold Rush from 1848 to 1855 as competition for mining claims intensified. Anglo miners used mob violence in an effort to expel Mexicans or exact revenge. In one episode in 1851, a mob hanged Josefa Segovia in Downieville, Calif., after she stabbed an Anglo man who tried to assault her.
Efforts by Anglo settlers to take control of land owned by Mexicans, along with fears that Mexicans could help African-American slaves foment revolts, contributed to the sense of hostility around some lynchings. In the 1850s, several counties in Texas expelled Mexicans, and in 1854, the city of Austin ordered every Mexican to leave unless vouched for by Anglos.
States on the border are grappling yet again with efforts among prominent conservatives to label Latino immigrants a security threat. Some in the borderlands see parallels with earlier outbreaks of anti-Hispanic militancy in the United States, citing examples like the armed vigilantes patrolling the Arizona desert, the expansion of the Border Patrol, and calls for the mass deportation of undocumented Hispanic immigrants.
“With everything that’s happening on the border, it infuriates me that these lynchings were just swept under the rug,” said Brandi Tobar, 19, a college student in San Tan Valley, Ariz., and a descendant of one of the men killed at Porvenir. Ms. Tobar is a co-writer of a song, “Village Called Porvenir,” to remember the massacre.
She added, “If we don’t want something like this repeated, it’s about time for the entire country to know the truth.”
A version of this article appears in print on March 3, 2019, Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Latinos Were Lynched in West. Descendants Want It Known..
He drove a truck in World War II, but he wasn’t allowed to drive a streetcar in D.C.
Jane and Howard Stokes — 89 and 99, respectively — have been married since 1957. They live in Jessup, Md. Even after Glen Echo Park was integrated, neither paid it a visit. (Family photo)
By
John Kelly
Columnist
Feb. 20, 2021 at 5:19 p.m. CT
Jane Stokes never went to the amusement park at Glen Echo, even after it finally opened its doors to African Americans such as herself in 1961.
“It was just the notion of us not being able to do that,” she told Answer Man.
“It just left something, an emptiness. And I just never went out there.”
Her husband, Howard Stokes, went to Glen Echo thousands of times. But he never went inside the park, either. Stokes was a streetcar operator for the Capital Transit Co., a firm that had its own racist history: The company refused to hire Black bus drivers or streetcar operators until 1955.
Howard Stokes became an operator a year later and was assigned to the No. 20 trolley line, running between Union Station and Cabin John, Md. That meant he took White patrons to a park he was barred from entering.
He couldn’t even go inside to use the bathroom, as the White drivers could.
“You had to hold it till you got back to Union Station,” Stokes told Answer Man.
If you are a Black Washingtonian, your memories of Glen Echo and its streetcar are probably vastly different from the memories of White Washingtonians.
While passenger seating on the District’s streetcars was never segregated, employment was. The CTC fought strenuously against integrating its driver corps. When World War II created an acute shortage of male workers, the company opted to hire White female drivers over Black men.
In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice ordered the CTC to disregard race in hiring. The company dragged its feet, claiming that as many as 90 percent of its White drivers would quit if Black drivers were hired.
In an editorial on Jan. 18, 1945, The Washington Post wrote: “To bar men from serving in these jobs because of their race or color is at once to hamper the war program and to subvert the principles for which the war is being waged.”
As a Capital Transit Co. streetcar operator, Howard Stokes worked the No. 20 route to Glen Echo; though, as an African American, he was not allowed into the segregated amusement park there. When the streetcar was retired, Stokes moved to buses, with D.C. Transit, then WMATA. He retired after 37 years. (Family photo)
Among those waging the war was Howard Stokes. He was serving in the 665th
Quartermaster Truck Company, U.S. 9th Army. After basic training in Mississippi, Stokes sailed with his company to Scotland, then was transferred to England.
In England, children would follow Stokes and other African American soldiers around at night. They had been told by White American troops that Black people grew tails after dark.
“Then we took the boat to France,” Stokes said. “Then we went to Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Germany.”
Stokes was a cook, preparing meals aboard a moving truck as it headed east, but he performed other tasks, too, including hauling supplies and transporting bodies of dead soldiers back from the battlefield. Among his decorations was a citation for driving a vehicle 51 hours under enemy fire “without sleep or relief.”
In 1945, a civilian again, Stokes took a job at the Capital Transit car barn at 14th and Decatur streets NW, cleaning and “shifting” streetcars: moving them around the barn. The pay was 68 cents an hour. He could earn 70 cents an hour as a porter at Union Station, but he longed to drive a streetcar.
In constant need of bus and streetcar operators — in 1952, the company was short for 64 to 186 openings a month — Capital Transit placed ads around the country. Hiring Black drivers
was out of the question, an executive said: “It is the considered judgment of the company, on the basis of past experience and the attitude of its present operators, that if Negroes were hired as operators the company would end up with more overtime rather than less overtime.”
Finally, in March 1955, under pressure from civil rights groups, the District’s Public Utilities Commission and the White House, the CTC hired its first five Black bus drivers and streetcar operators.
“The steps the company has taken to provide equal economic opportunity for qualified persons is a testament to the ideal of human dignity and liberty cherished by us all,” said Vice President Richard Nixon.
In 1956, Howard Stokes — the decorated war veteran — was finally able to drive a streetcar. He loved it. He grew to know the regulars on his route. He came to love the smell of the honeysuckle that bloomed along the long run to Glen Echo, a scent that reminded him of his boyhood in Farmville, Va.
Whenever his mother visited, she would accompany him to work, sitting proudly behind him.
Not everything was easy. Some colleagues were unfriendly. But Stokes made a career of it. When streetcars were phased out in 1962, he moved to buses. Eventually, Capital Transit became D.C. Transit and then WMATA. Stokes retired after 37 years.
“He never complained about anything,” Jane Stokes said. “Sure, he had some bad experiences. But he never came home with it. He just made the best of it. He was doing what he liked to do. He knew he had waited a long time for this chance to do this in his life.”
Jane Stokes is 89. Howard Stokes is 99. They live in a brick house in Jessup, Md., that Howard built with his brother-in-law. Their daughter, Allyson Stokes, grew up there and lives in Ellicott City, Md.
Stokes said he was happy when the streetcar returned to H Street NE in 2016, though he’s never ridden it. He’d prefer to drive.
“I love the streetcar,” said Howard Stokes.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-orleans-apologizes-1891-lynching-italian-americans-180971959/
https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/chinese-massacre-1871