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Chicago Tribune
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: First Kentucky Derby held
Today is Saturday, May 17, the 137th day of 2025. There are 228 days left in the year. Today in history: On May 17, 1875, the first Kentucky Derby was held; the race was won by Aristides, ridden by jockey Oliver Lewis. Also on this date: In 1792, the Buttonwood Agreement, a document codifying rules for securities trading, was signed by 24 New York stockbrokers, marking the formation of the New York Stock Exchange. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman seized control of the nation's railroads, delaying — but not preventing — a threatened strike by engineers and trainmen. In 1954, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, which held that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In 1973, a special committee convened by the U.S. Senate began its televised hearings into the Watergate scandal. In 1980, rioting that claimed 18 lives erupted in Miami after an all-white jury in Tampa acquitted four former Miami police officers of fatally beating Black insurance executive Arthur McDuffie. In 1987, 37 American sailors were killed when an Iraqi warplane attacked the U.S. Navy frigate Stark in the Persian Gulf. (Iraq apologized for the attack, calling it a mistake, and paid more than $27 million in compensation.) In 2004, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to allow same-sex marriages. In 2015, a shootout erupted between members of motorcycle clubs and police outside a restaurant in Waco, Texas, leaving nine of the bikers dead and 20 people injured. Today's Birthdays: Musician Taj Mahal is 83. Boxing Hall of Famer Sugar Ray Leonard is 69. Sports announcer Jim Nantz is 66. Singer-composer Enya is 64. TV host-comedian Craig Ferguson is 63. Musician Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) is 60. Actor Sasha Alexander is 52. Basketball Hall of Famer Tony Parker is 43. Screenwriter-actor-producer Lena Waithe is 41. Dancer-choreographer Derek Hough is 40. Former NFL quarterback Matt Ryan is 40. Actor Nikki Reed is 37.
Boston Globe
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Today in History: May 17, Supreme Court strikes down school segregation
In 1875, the first Kentucky Derby was held; the race was won by Aristides, ridden by jockey Oliver Lewis. Advertisement In 1946, President Harry S. Truman seized control of the nation's railroads, delaying — but not preventing — a threatened strike by engineers and trainmen. In 1954, a unanimous US Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, which held that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In 1973, a special committee convened by the US Senate began its televised hearings into the Watergate scandal. In 1980, rioting that claimed 18 lives erupted in Miami after an all-white jury in Tampa acquitted four former Miami police officers of fatally beating Black insurance executive Arthur McDuffie. In 1987, 37 American sailors were killed when an Iraqi warplane attacked the US Navy frigate Stark in the Persian Gulf. (Iraq apologized for the attack, calling it a mistake, and paid more than $27 million in compensation.) Advertisement In 2004, Massachusetts became the first US state to allow same-sex marriages. In 2015, a shootout erupted between members of motorcycle clubs and police outside a restaurant in Waco, Texas, leaving nine of the bikers dead and 20 people injured.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
It's better now, but don't tell me Oklahoma has never been a racist state
In a recent Facebook post eulogizing Pope Francis, I happened to mention that I was born in a small town in a racist state. The point of the article was not racism, it was praising a great pope. But the story began with my first interaction with pastoral Catholicism by virtue of a monastery fortuitously located in the small 'Baptist' town of my birth. I was not prepared for the attacks I received on characterizing my (unnamed) home state of the '50s as racist. Most of my readers do know I am from Oklahoma, and this is not a controversial characterization, as far as anyone who knows anything about Oklahoma history is concerned. But, among other things, I was informed that Oklahoma was 'not now' and 'never had been' racist, and I was 'stirring the pot' to say so. Well, I hadn't addressed 'now,' but the past from before statehood to my birth in 1953 is as about as clear as human vision allows. Oklahoma's founding politics was Southern, and it inherited all the downsides of that politics, including racism. Oklahoma's constitutional framers did not include Jim Crow laws — laws mandating segregation especially in transportation and schools — in their founding constitution because President Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive Republican, let it be known he would not allow the constitution to go forward with racism enshrined in it. After it was finally approved and became law, the Oklahoma Legislature passed Jim Crow as Senate Bill 1. Interracial marriages and miscegenation were banned and made felonies. Over time hospitals, schools, cemeteries, restaurants were segregated, and Oklahoma made national news by being the first state in the nation to segregate public phone booths. That's not all. In the early years, lynching took the lives of dozens of Black people. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was perhaps the worst incident of racial violence in American history, destroying 35 blocks of homes of Black residents and causing at least 36 to possibly 300 fatalities — the numbers cannot be verified to this day. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark decision ruling public school segregation unconstitutional, was issued in 1954, a year after my birth. The court ordered states to desegregate with 'all deliberate speed,' but of course it took several years. It would have taken longer but for the courage of a Bible-believing Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher named Raymond Gary, who happened to be governor of Oklahoma. Gary not only removed the segregated restrooms in the Capitol, but took special leadership to integrate our schools and raise funds to support necessary new education expenditures. I went to grade school in segregated schools, but by high school, Gary's efforts had integrated my school. Incidentally, the great lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who had successfully argued the Brown v. Board case, made several trips litigating in Oklahoma. In the 1940s when he came to Norman, a 'sundown' town, to argue the Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher case (seeking to obtain a Black student's admission into OU's law school) before the state court, no restaurant in Norman would serve him lunch. He snacked on peanuts from a machine. ( A couple of progressive churches found out about this and opened their kitchens to him and his team throughout the rest of the trial.) More: I'm a former high school teacher. We need DEI, but discourse must center on civility | Opinion Numerous other incidents show the sadness of these times. The record-setting Black football player Prentice Gautt (who was named the MVP in the 1959 Orange Bowl, also an Academic All-American and later earned a Ph.D.) was allowed on the field to score but was not allowed to lodge in the hotels with his traveling Sooner football colleagues. Rep. Hannah Atkins, the first Black woman elected to the state Legislature, moved into Oklahoma the year of my birth. With a couple of degrees and a medical doctor husband, she was welcomed in her community, and into the Episcopal Church. But when she and Dr. Atkins went to church, the only Oklahoma City restaurant that would serve them Sunday lunch was the Howard Johnson's on the interstate — which was required by federal law to serve Black people. We have made great progress in Oklahoma, largely led by Black people themselves: Clara Luper, Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, Roscoe Dungee, Hannah Atkins, the Rev. Ben Hill, and many others. President Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president and orator, warned in his fabled second inaugural address that the costs of racism might rage 'until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword….' Those days are hopefully behind us; so much glorious progress has been made. Yet as recent as two years ago, we saw news reports that a southeast Oklahoma county sheriff and other officials were caught on tape bemoaning the inability to lynch Black people and kill journalists. I'm hoping that Pope Francis, in a new venue, will pray for us — and I suspect he will. Robert H. Henry has served as a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and was elected attorney general of Oklahoma in 1986 and 1990. Later, he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where he served as chief judge until 2009. He became the 17th president of Oklahoma City University in July 2010, retiring from that post in 2018. This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: I've been criticized for speaking the truth about OK racism | Opinion
New York Times
06-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
L. Clifford Davis, Who Fought to Desegregate Texas Schools, Dies at 100
L. Clifford Davis, a civil rights lawyer who led efforts to desegregate high schools in Texas, sometimes in the face of mob violence, hostility from state politicians and threats on his life, died on Feb. 15 in Fort Worth. He was 100. His daughter Karen Davis confirmed the death, in a nursing facility. Although the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed public school segregation in 1954 in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka — a case on which Mr. Davis had worked alongside Thurgood Marshall in its early stages — many cities and states across the South initially defied the ruling. It was left to lawyers like Mr. Davis to hold those local districts to account. He began with Mansfield, Texas. The town's only high school was whites only, and Black students had to find their own way to a Black high school, traveling 20 miles to Fort Worth. On behalf of five students, Mr. Davis sued the Mansfield school district in 1955, and a year later a federal appeals court ruled in their favor. But when Black students arrived for the first day of school in September 1956, they were met by hundreds of angry white people, some holding nooses. Burning crosses were on display. Mr. Davis appealed to the U.S. attorney general, Herbert Brownell Jr., for help, but he refused. Mr. Davis then wrote to Gov. Allan Shivers of Texas. 'These Negro students are exercising a constitutional right,' Mr. Davis wrote. 'I call upon you as Governor to cause to be dispatched additional law enforcement officers to Mansfield to assure that law and order will be maintained.' Governor Shivers deployed the Texas Rangers — but only to keep the peace. He made it clear that he would do nothing to enforce the integration ruling. At one point, a friend of Mr. Davis's offered him a handgun for protection, warning him about white vigilantes. He took the weapon but never used it. He did, however, receive death threats in the mail, though he shrugged them off. As tensions rose, Mr. Davis decided that the risk to the students was too great, and he pulled back his efforts to bus them to white schools. But he continued to press the cause. In 1959, he brought a class-action suit against the Fort Worth school system, which remained segregated. He won, and this time the system agreed to a plan to integrate its schools. Such work, he later reflected, was the epitome of what lawyers should aspire to do. 'The philosophy that was instilled in us in those days was that lawyers were social engineers,' he said in a 2014 oral history interview for the University of North Texas. 'It was our job to try to use the principles of law to help bring about equality and opportunity for all people, not just Black people.' L. Clifford Davis (the initial L. did not stand for a name) was born on Oct. 12, 1924, in Wilton, in southwestern Arkansas, where his parents, Augustus and Dora (Duckett) Davis, were sharecroppers. Wilton was deeply segregated, and the local Black school system stopped at the eighth grade. Clifford's parents rented a house in Little Rock, the state capital, where he and five of his six siblings lived while attending high school and college. He graduated from Philander Smith College (now Philander Smith University), a historically Black institution, in 1945 with a degree in business administration. Mr. Davis wanted to go to law school, but there were none in Arkansas that would accept Black applicants, so he moved to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard University. Finding the cost of living in Washington too high, however, and feeling that the time was ripe to attempt to desegregate the law school at the University of Arkansas, he applied for admission there in 1947. The school, in Fayetteville, offered him a spot, but with a big caveat: He would have no contact with white students and would have to pay his tuition in advance. Mr. Davis declined and remained at Howard, graduating in 1949. But his efforts did not go to waste. In 1948, Silas Hunt, taking the same offer, became the first Black student at Arkansas's law school. Mr. Davis initially practiced law in Pine Bluff, south of Little Rock. He moved to Texas in 1952, settling in Fort Worth, where he became the city's first Black lawyer to open a practice. He worked with the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights groups, participating in the early phases of the case that became Brown v. Board of Education, led by Thurgood Marshall, the future associate justice of the Supreme Court. In 1983, Mr. Davis was named a criminal district court judge, and the next year won election to the post. He lost re-election in 1988 but remained a visiting judge until retiring in 2004. Along with his daughter Karen, he is survived by another daughter, Avis Davis. His wife, Ethel (Weaver) Davis, died in 2015. Judge Davis was not one to seek the spotlight, but in time it found him. In 2012, the Fort Worth Black Bar Association, which he helped found in 1977, renamed itself the L. Clifford David Legal Association in his honor. And in 2017, the law school at the University of Arkansas awarded him an honorary degree. 'It never crossed my mind that this would happen,' he told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. 'I applied 71 years ago to earn a degree. Now they're going to give me one.'
