Harry T. Moore: Civil Rights Activist

“I am, was, and always be a catalyst for change” (Chisholm, 1970). Shirley Chisholm was a Visionary Leader and Ethical Leader by challenging the country to live up to ideals of equality and opportunity, while navigating the rough political landscape, contending with racial and gender discrimination. In this essay, I will review how Shirley Chisholm used her visionary leadership traits by becoming the first African American congresswoman to create diversity and how she used Idealized Influence to garner votes to run for U.S. presidency. Additionally, I will review how Chisholm displayed Ethical Leadership by challenging the seniority system in Congress and how she used her moral values to stand up for what she believed in. Finally, I will review how Shirley Chisholm’s visionary and ethical leadership behavior is personally relevant to me. First, let’s review how Chisholm used her visionary leadership traits.

This book illustrates how demeaning it is for blacks to beg for basic rights that inherently belong to them. This book encouraged him to meet with black scholars whom he named the "talented tenth." In 1905, he began to meet with these scholars to discuss civil rights issues (Lewis, 1). These meeting were known as the Niagara Movement (Lewis, 1). After five years of meeting the NAACP was formed and Dubois was Director of Publicity and Research (Lewis, 1).

Knowing this man is to love this man. He has been a great role model for and during the civil rights movement and so much more. This man’s name is John Lewis Others may say he is someone who just wanted to start trouble and he should leave things the way they were. By analyzing his early life, his education, becoming a civil rights activist, and a U.S. Congressman, I will be able to show you why I think he is a great person all around. It is also clear that John Lewis shaped his time.

“The bottom line is, people have a right to live their lives even if it doesn’t match what you think is correct. When we fight for civil rights, we must fight for equality for all; anything less is hypocrisy and an insult to the definition of justice itself.” Rev. Al Sharpton is a long time civil rights leader, minister, talk show host, and even has been known to give president Obama advice on civil rights issues. Sharpton’s article is set up by touching on unfair transgender laws in North Carolina, statements made by U.S. representatives, and the civil rights movement as a whole. He limits the article the time period beginning in the civil rights movement. Ding this allows the reader to only think about civil rights from a more progressive mindset. Sharpton does this all from his view. Due to his experience as a civil rights leader he speaks about the movement from a stronger perspective than most.

Rockefeller, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Altman Foundation supported the National Urban League. The National Urban League was responsible for coordinating the “Americans of Negro Lineage” exhibit. One of the most important elements of the America’s Making Exposition was that each racial group would be entirely free to determine for itself the extent and manner of its participation in America’s Making.4 In 1921, African Americans did not have full citizenship rights. Segregation in all aspects of American life limited African Americans’ access to health care, education, employment, housing and transportation. Principal organizers of the Negro Lineage exhibit, W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson viewed the exposition as an opportunity to demonstrate unequivocally the contributions African Americans had made to America, which entitled African Americans to all the privileges and benefits of American citizenship. Equally important, the exposition would give African Americans the opportunity to reimagine and reimage the visual representation of African Americans.

Political advocacy organizations have historically played a big part in securing political rights for minority groups in Western Liberal Democracies. Whether we look to the now infamous Boston Tea Party to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, we observe the importance of political organizations in their quest to ensure equitable rights for the people whom they represent. In context of the early twentieth century, the most prominent group to represent African-American’s in the United States was that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP, as it is more commonly called, was founded on February 12, 1909 by a mixed group of individuals including but not limited to Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. DuBois and Archibald Grimké with the goal of creating a civil rights organization that would help assist in organizing for civil rights for blacks. One of its most prominent members, Charles Hamilton Houston, who became a part of the organization around the mid-twentieth century, changed the trajectory of the organization for years to come. Hence this essay

Booker T. Washington's account of his own perseverence in securing his education is poignantly told in Up From Slavery. Yet with Washington's influence, a shift began from educating students in a liberal arts tradition to an industrial training mode. Unfortunately, by the turn of the century, with the help of the benefactor Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the Hampton-Tuskegee Idea had come to represent the ideological antithesis of the educational and social movement begun by ex-slaves (33). In order for freed slaves to fully participate in a democracy, a classical liberal curriculum was adopted in post-Civil War black, elementary, normal and collegiate schools. As James D. Anderson aptly points out,

You got to keep your eyes on the prize to get the goal you’ve been looking for. The NAACP was an African American organization trying to change and fight for what’s right. They wanted segregated laws to be stopped because it is so unconstitional to the fact it was hard for most blacks. For one segrated schools. All blacks

Since ministers from the black church rose as formal charismatic leaders in the movement, there was not a situation in which a woman could be a charismatic leader.

Many blacks holding elective office from over 45 states were invited as delegates to the convention, along with others selected from each state to develop a unified political strategy for blacks from that day forward. They set out to develop a National Black Agenda and the theme was to be “Unity without Uniformity”.

The Negro community has waited over 300 years to achieve equal constitutional rights. Martin Luther King who was their voice and their leader, was invited in 1963 to Birmingham, Alabama, to help assist with a nonviolent direct action campaign. The unjust segregation taking place in the city of Birmingham needed immediate attention. In spite of, King’s efforts to negotiate with the local and national communities as

Harry and Harriette Moore were two African Americans who were part of the civil rights movement. Both of them had worked at the same school when they first met, Harry was only 20 while Harriette was 23. The couple were both educated teachers working at a black elementary school in Brevard County. Before long, the couple was married and with a child of their own. Expeditiously after their daughter, Harry had found the Brevard County NAACP in 1934. Harry had seeked a variety of attempts for the civil right. Harry would always fight for equal income for black teachers, setting up the black vote, “and publicly condemning racist attitudes and actions of local, state and national officials” (Legacy). The first lawsuit for NAACP was rejected; it was

White grew up in Atlanta Georgia and came from a moderately well to do family. He attended Atlanta University. The summer of his senior year White experienced a great amount of racism while interning for Atlanta Standard Life Insurance. Those actions of racism inspired him to call for a chapter of the NAACP at Atlanta University. This did not occur due to lack of organization and participation. Following graduation Walter White worked at Atlanta Standard Life Insurance. He was very successful as an insurance salesman. This did not deter his will for racial civil rights. White, along with other coworkers, were successful in stopping the school board from cutting eighth grade from black schools to finance white school. An Atlanta branch of the NAACP was soon to follow. White’s life from henceforth would greatly evolve from a well-established insurance salesman to a prominent figure in the NAACP and the civil rights movement.

Walter White was one of the outstanding civil rights leaders in America between 1920 and 1955. He joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1918 and almost immediately became its chief investigator of lynching. Because of his blue eyes and blonde hair, he could easily pass for Caucasian. But instead, he chose to go through life as a black man.

It was a time of conflict, excitement, and confusion in the United States. And this was also “Black Power” of the Civil Rights Movement. Moody at that time was a member of NAACP. She was involved in her first sit-in, and her social science professor, John Salter, who was in charge of NAACP asked her to be the spokesman for a team that would sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter (Moody 1968, 286). Although she could go to jail for this, but she still agreed. After that, she joined CORE and continued to fight for the voting rights (Moody 1968, 311). Following passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the struggle for racial justice moved to the next battleground: voting rights in the Deep South. The campaign was already under way in places like Selma, Alabama, where local activists, facing intense white resistance, asked Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference for support (Ayers 2010, 780). Black voter registration in the South was one of the great accomplishments of the civil rights movement. Within months of its passage, more than 2 million black southern were registered to vote. Most supported the Democratic Party of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, which had endorsed the cause of civil rights (Ayers 2010, 782).