From Civil Rights Activists to Human Rights Advocates

By W. D. Palmer

How the fight for civil rights transformed activists into human rights advocates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665538763

W. D. Palmer

Walter. D. Palmer is the founder and director of the W.D. Palmer Foundation (est. 1955), a repository of information-gathering on racism in health, education, employment, housing, courts, prisons, higher education, military, government, politics, law, banking, insurance, and more. He is also the founder of the Black People’s University of Philadelphia (1955) Freedom School, which was the grassroots organizing and training center for grassroots community and political leadership both in Philadelphia and nationally. These organizations were run as nonprofit unincorporated associations from 1955 until 1980, when the W.D. Palmer Foundation received its 501(c)(3) federal tax exemption status. W.D. Palmer has also been a professor, teaching American Racism at the University of Pennsylvania since the 1960s and today he is a member of the President’s Commission on 1619, the 400-year anniversary of African slavery in America. Professor Palmer has been a social activist leading the fight against racial injustice for over 70 years in Philadelphia and around the nation. In 2018, Philadelphia honored him for the organizing work he did to reform the Philadelphia school system in 1967.

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© 2021 Wd Palmer. All rights reserved.

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transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

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ISBN: 978-1-6655-3875-6 (sc)

978-1-6655-3876-3 (e)

Published by AuthorHouse 09/27/2021

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Contents

Introduction

Walter D. Palmer Leadership School

Acknowledgments

Public Appeal

Adam Clayton Powell

Al Sharpton

Andrew Young

Angela Davis

Arthur Schomburg

Barack Obama

Betty Shabazz

Cesar Chavez

Coretta Scott King

Dennis Banks

Eldridge Cleaver

Eunice Kennedy

Fannie Lou Hamer

Floyd McKissick

Godfrey Sithole

Gloria Steinem

H. Rap Brown

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale

Ivan Van Sertima

J. Patrick Rooney

Jack Johnson

James Bevel

James Farmer

James Forman

James Orange

James Usry

Jeanne Allen

Jeremiah Wright

Jesse Jackson

Jimmy Carter

Joe Louis

John Conyers

John F. Kennedy

John Henrik Clarke

John Johnson

John Lewis

Julian Bond

Kathleen Cleaver

Lerone Bennett Jr.

Malcolm X

Marc Morial

Marion Barry

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Maynard Jackson

Michelle Obama

Milton Friedman

Muhammad Ali

Nelson Mandela

Paul Robeson

Percy Sutton

Queen Mother Moore

Ralph Nader

Randall Robinson

Robert Woodson

Ron Daniels

Ron Karenga

Roy Innis

Russell Means

Sargent Shriver

Shirley Chisholm

Stokely Carmichael

Ted Kennedy

References

About the Artist

A Brief Biography of Professor Walter Palmer

W.D. Palmer Foundation Hashtags

Introduction

This book consists of biographies documenting the lives and legacies of over 60 national and international community activists. The biographies were written by a cohort of interns from the University of Pennsylvania. There is a note for each of the figures whom Walter D. Palmer, founder of the Palmer Foundation and director of this book, knew personally. Along with each biography and note, there is a portrait courtesy of the artist Cavin Jones.

Walter D. Palmer Leadership School

W. D. Palmer is the founder and director of the W. D. Palmer Foundation (est. 1955), a repository of information-gathering on racism in health, education, employment, housing, courts, prisons, higher education, military, government, politics, law, banking, insurance, and more.

He is also the founder of the Black People’s University of Philadelphia Freedom School (1955), which was the organizing and training center for grassroots community and political leadership in Philadelphia and nationally. These organizations were run as nonprofit unincorporated associations from 1955 until 1980 when the Palmer Foundation received its 501(c)(3) federal tax exemption status.

W. D. Palmer has also been a professor, teaching American Racism at the University of Pennsylvania since the 1960s and today he is a member of the President’s Commission on 1619, the 400-year anniversary of African slavery in America.

Professor Palmer has been a social activist leading the fight against racial injustice for over 70 years in Philadelphia and around the nation. In 2018, Philadelphia honored him for the organizing work he did to reform the Philadelphia school system in 1967.

In 2020, Philadelphia honored him for 65 years of fighting for social justice throughout the country. In 1980, he led the fight for parental school choice which helped the governor of Pennsylvania get a law passed in 1997, and in 2000 he created the Walter D. Palmer Leadership Charter School.

In 2005, he borrowed $11,000,000 to build a 55,000 square-foot two-story building on two acres of land in North Philadelphia, which was donated to the school by the City of Philadelphia, and because of the school’s rapid growth, in 2010 he acquired the Saint Bartholomew Catholic High School for its middle and high school.

In ten years, the school grew from 300 elementary and middle school students to 200 preschoolers and over 1,000 kindergarteners through 12th graders. In 2005, W. D. Palmer commissioned a muralist to paint over 400 pre-selected portraits on the school walls, corridors, and stairwells, with a goal to paint 30 fifteen-foot tall murals in the gymnatorium.

Although the Walter D. Palmer Leadership School recruited at-risk children from 17 of the poorest zip codes in Philadelphia and 300% below poverty, the school boasted of a 95% daily attendance, 100% high school graduation, and 100% post-graduate placement in four-year and two-year colleges, trade and technology schools, or military, until the school’s closing in 2015.

Acknowledgments

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I would like to acknowledge from the beginning of the Palmer Foundation in 1955 the many contributors who helped to gather information, organize, and write the leadership, self-development, and social awareness curricula.

From the Palmer Foundation’s inception, these contributors have been composed of community members, elementary, middle- and high-school students, as well as college student volunteers and interns, along with professional contributors.

We chose this method and process because it was consistent with our history, vision, philosophy, mission, and goals of always developing leadership in practice.

These groups, who have helped to produce our materials, are the same cohorts who have helped to teach and train others as well as helped to develop a national database through which these curriculum and training materials can be distributed.

The story of the Palmer Foundation is the story of building community and leadership at the same time, and the Palmer Foundation wants to give an enthusiastic endorsement in recognition of the thousands of people who have been with us on this long and arduous journey.

We want to thank the many community leaders and people that have invited us into their communities to help them reclaim and restore the many values, properties, and people who may have been threatened with the loss of finance, property, and life, because they are the true heroes and heroines that made the Palmer Foundation the success that it has become.

Public Appeal

The Palmer Foundation is a federal 501(c)(3) organization that has spent over 65 years educating and fighting for social justice in the most underserved at-risk communities around the country. Our goals have always been to use education for human liberation and encourage at-risk families and children to help gather, write, produce, publish, and teach others in a similar situation.

Our mission is to disseminate our leadership, self-development, social justice, and grassroots-organizing books, manuals, and learning materials across America and around the world.

Our goals are to sell these publications or to offer them in exchange for a suggested tax-exempt donation that would allow us to continue producing our leadership training, as well as grassroots community and political organizing efforts.

Ultimately, we would like to create a satellite school as a model or prototype of the Walter D. Palmer Leadership School that could be replicated around the world, and we appeal for your enthusiastic and sustained support going forward.

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Adam Clayton Powell

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was born on November 29, 1908 in New Haven, Connecticut, to Mattie Buster Shaffer and Adam Clayton Powell Sr. His father was a successful Baptist minister, and Powell Jr. grew up in a wealthy household in New York City. Both of his parents were mixed, with African and European ancestry, and Powell Jr. had hazel eyes, light skin, and blond hair, which allowed him to pass as white. Throughout his college years, he used his appearance to avoid racial discrimination at school. He graduated from Colgate University with an undergraduate degree and Columbia University with an MA in religious education.

Once he became ordained, he began assisting his father in church. He greatly increased the number of clothes and meals the church gave out to those in need while learning about the lives of poor and working-class people in Harlem. Shortly after, he became a prominent civil rights figure. He wrote a book called Who Speaks for the Negro, a recounting of people’s experiences relating to the inequalities they faced and their role in the Civil Rights movement. He organized multiple rent strikes, mass meetings, and strong public campaigns aimed at forcing companies, utilities, and the local Harlem hospital to hire Black workers at a higher skill than the lowest positions to which they had previously been restricted. He also greatly encouraged local residents to shop only where Blacks were hired to work in such positions in order to compel companies to meet his demands.

In 1938, he succeeded his father as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Powell Jr. also founded a newspaper for a progressive African American audience called People’s Voice. This newspaper aimed to educate readers on local gatherings and large-scale civil rights issues in the United States as well as the general economic and political struggles faced by people of Africa. He was later elected to the House of Representatives in 1945, becoming the first African American from New York to achieve this position. He became a national spokesperson for civil rights and social issues. He believed that the United States should aid and support the emerging nations in Africa and Asia as they gained independence. After serving for 16 years in the House of Representatives, he became the chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, the most powerful position that had ever been given to an African American in Congress at the time. He passed away on April 4, 1972 from acute prostatitis, leaving behind three sons, one of whom he had adopted.

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Al Sharpton

Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr., also known as Al Sharpton, was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 3, 1954. He lived in a neighborhood that had one of the highest crime and poverty rates in New York City. He preached his first sermon at the age of four and had the opportunity to tour with The Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson, at a young age. In 1963, his father left his mother. Since his mother had a job as a maid and did not make much money, they qualified for welfare and had to move to the public housing projects located in the Brownsville neighborhood of New York City.

During his youth, Sharpton got involved with a group called Operation Breadbasket, whose goal