Charles Diggs Quotes

King established a Pan-African frame for what was to follow. He harkened back to a night in West Africa in 1957 when he stood with Ralph Bunche and the black congressmen Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Diggs and witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s installation as the first president of the new nation of Ghana. Being there had called up the most primal associations, linking him, present-day Africans, and his own slave forebears in an intimate embrace. He had strolled the streets of Accra and wept with joy as he heard both young and old Ghanaians calling out “free-doom!

It was the first time in the history of Mississippi that a Negro had stood in court and pointed his finger at a white man as a killer of a Negro,” said Michigan congressman Charles Diggs, who attended the trial.

Jimmy may well have read the front-page banner in late August exhorting readers to “Go and Register.” The accompanying article extolled the dual power of the franchise: “When we register and go to the polls in large numbers … we not only perform thereby a duty which is obligatory upon good citizens, but our votes make public officials more obligated to give us the recognition and consideration to which we are entitled.” 109 This paper and others sought to whip up excitement about the recent passage of a civil rights bill championed by Democratic state senator Charles C. Diggs. Declaring with some hyperbole that the bill would be the “New Emancipation,” the black Democratic organization Michigan Federated Democratic Clubs sought to use the bill to both galvanize the community and shore up support for Diggs with the “First Annual Emancipation Picnic and Dance” in his honor on August 1, 1937. Attendees received “a small pocket-size souvenir-copy of Senator Diggs Civil Rights Bill” along with “a statement of what to do if the Bill is violated.” 110 More than a decade later, Jimmy would be among a group of activists associated with the Detroit NAACP and the United Auto Workers (UAW) who mounted an effort to enforce this law by “breaking down” restaurants that discriminated against African Americans. By that time, black Detroiters had made important inroads into the UAW, and a strong coalition emerged between labor and civil rights organizations.

When white workers heard about the Sojourner Truth project, they demanded the units for themselves and enlisted the support of white residents in the neighborhood where the development was being built. Rudolph Tenerowicz, Detroit’s congressman, carried the ball in Washington, successfully prevailing upon the members of the Conference Committee, consisting mostly of Southerners, to add a clause to the FWA’s $300,000 appropriations bill specifying that “no money would be released unless the ‘nigger lover’ [Clark Foreman] was fired and the project converted to white occupancy.” The FWA capitulated quickly and dishonorably. That same day, the Detroit housing committee was ordered to redirect its recruitment of prospective tenants from black to white. Minutes later, Clark Foreman “resigned.” Civil-rights leaders reacted with rage. Their first impulse was to contact Eleanor. “Surely you would not stand by and see the Sojourner Truth defense homes that were built for Negroes be taken away from us,” Mrs. Charles Diggs wrote from Detroit. Calmly and directly, Eleanor approached the president, emphasizing that both blacks and whites, including Edward Jeffries, Detroit’s mayor, and leaders of the UAW, were firmly committed to the position that the blacks should have the project.