Pennsylvania City Torn By Racial Strife During The 1960s Elects Black Mayor
Hat tip to reader Nanakwame for this one. A little girl who trembled in her house as a National Guard tank rumbled past during York's chaotic 1969 race riots has grown up to become the first black mayor of the central Pennsylvania city. Kim Bracey, 45, an energetic Democratic veteran of the struggling manufacturing city's improvement efforts, will take office in January, to the delight of many African-Americans who thought they would never see a black mayor. Ms. Bracey will inherit a city of 40,000 in which average family income is half of Pennsylvania's, while the poverty rate for children is three times as high, at 48 percent.
The 1960s saw a buildup of black resentment against a city administration that they said systematically ignored their community's needs and a police force that used dogs and other tough tactics to antagonize blacks. In July 1969, York exploded. Violence between white and black youths unleashed more than a week of mayhem. Buildings were set afire, police barricaded black neighborhoods and enforced curfews and the National Guard rolled in on tanks to try to restore order. Prosecutors eventually charged 12 people, including Charlie Robertson, the mayor at the time (and who was the only one who was later acquitted), in an extraordinary investigation of various murders that grabbed national headlines.
York's black population has always been a minority (26 percent), and it is only recently that new Hispanic residents have diluted the voting power of whites.
OBITUARY: Avery Clayton, Preserved Mom's Black History Work
Hat tip to Kenneth Morris Jr., the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington, for this one. Avery Clayton, who carried on the work of his mother, Mayme Clayton, by establishing a library and museum in Culver City, Calif., for her extensive collection of African-American artifacts, died Thursday. He was 62. Mr. Clayton, a retired art teacher, died of unknown causes while hosting a Thanksgiving gathering at his Culver City home, said Evelyn Davis, a family spokeswoman. The collection assembled by his mother — a college librarian who haunted garage sales and then often packed her finds into the garage behind her humble home — is a treasure trove of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, feature films and other ephemera. Several scholars have called the collection one of the most important of its kind in the country. One jewel is a signed copy of the first book published by an African-American, former-slave Phillis Wheatley, in 1773.
The Clayton collection is strong in Civil War-era books and documents, and in writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Earlier this year, Mr. Clayton opened a box and found the first book of black spirituals in the United States, dating from 1867. Mr. Clayton particularly valued the 19th-century documents written by slaves and former slaves. "Most African-American history is hidden," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2007. "What's exciting about this is that we're going to bring it back and show that black culture is rich and varied."
Booker Rising is also told that Mr. Clayton was a huge fan of Booker T. Washington.
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