Black women - NOT MEN - led the fight to switch from Republicans to Democrats in 1930

" A decade later, as memories of the war faded, the U.S.government offered to send the mothers and widows overseas, all expenses paid, to visit the graves...With one caveat. The trips would be segregated, with white women given higher classes of transportation and lodging, an arrangement sadly not that unusual in the america of that era. Most black women went, many of them grudgingly overlooking the racial unfairness. But 23 refused..."

Dear friends,

Having been born into an activist family, I learned at a very early age, from direct experience, that, in our centuries-old liberation struggle, it was often African American women who led the fight against our oppression as a group - NOT men! A case in point regards an incident that occurred back in 1930, when "Martin Luther King was still an infant", the Republican president Herbert Hoover insulted the mothers and widows of African American soldiers who died in World War 1, by asking them to take a second-class, segregated trip to the grave sites of their departed relatives overseas, in Europe.

In a 2002 article, "Poignant Protest, by Richard A. Serrano, an LA Times staff writer, it was pointed out that, "Their sons and husbands had been killed in World War I and were buried in Europe, black soldiers, alongside white, in new cemeteries honoring those who died before the Great War ended in 1918. A decade later, as memories of the war faded, the U.S.government offered to send the mothers and widows overseas, all expenses paid, to visit the graves...With one caveat. The trips would be segregated, with white women given higher classes of transportation and lodging, an arrangement sadly not that unusual in the America of that era. Most black women went, many of them grudgingly overlooking the racial unfairness. But 23 refused. They wouldn't tolerate such conditions to visit the resting place of the sons and husbands who had made the same sacrifice as whites. Those 17 mothers and six widows, most of whom rarely traveled far from their hometowns, passed up the trip of a lifetime." Actually, I disagree with the author on his last point, when he insisted that the protesting women had " passed up the trip of a lifetime". To me, it was the other women who missed out on a chance to not only stand up for themselves, but for their dead husbands, fathers, and sons, because the discriminating insult was directed towards the latter as well.

In any case, the protest by these African American women here-to-mentioned has everything to do with, not only the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, then later, the Black Consciousness Movement, but, also, shows why African Americans, almost unanimously,  do not support the Republican Party ticket today. It's a genuine cultural repulsion that has been passed on, rightfully so, for the past few generations.

"Liberation!" - Dr. Barbara Love

G. Djata Bumpus
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/sep/15/magazine/tm-moms37