On this day, an estimated 8,000 to 15,000 African Americans took to the streets in New York City in the Negro Silent Protest Parade. The march, escorted by mounted police, began at 57th Street, proceeded down Fifth Avenue, and ended at Madison Square. It was organised in direct response to a series of racially-motivated attacks in 1916 and 1917, including the East St. Louis massacre and lynchings in Waco and Memphis. The goal of the parade was to protest lynching in particular, and violence against African Americans in general. A specific objective was to urge President Woodrow Wilson to support the enactment of federal anti-lynching legislation. Although the march was “one of the most stunning protest marches in the annals of the black freedom struggle,” as described by historian Patricia Sullivan, it failed to bring about a federal anti-lynching law until the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and, even more recently, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022.
Read Bob Lynn’s short story “Carry it Forward”
about the signing of the Civil Rights Act HERE
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