In the 1920s and ’30s, black families could not buy property in Edgartown. And although Oak Bluffs was a gathering place for black professionals back to the 19th century, their children, home from college, were seldom able to work as clerks in local shops.
When the civil rights movement spread across America in the 1960s, the Vineyard was separate in many ways. The black community here was prosperous and thriving, the regional high school was integrated and race relations were cordial.
There is no end to Lois Mailou Jones’ creative resources.
The name itself is poetry. A youthful, energetic 72, Lois Jones is the veteran of a long and fruitful career in the arts. Being black and a woman, her accomplishment is especially significant.
As early as age 14, composer Harry T. Burleigh had advised Lois that if she wished to establish a serious career, she would have to go abroad in order to get full exposer and avoid the disadvantage of being black in the United States.
Life Magazine photographer Gordon Parks gave a talk at the Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs on Wednesday night. For the Vineyard it was a first. The 79-year-old black artist not only in photography but in the fields of prose, poetry, movies and music stood before an audience of 150 people and said that he is creatively stronger than ever.
At every opportunity, the audience applauded. Included in a program of slides were not only photographs that are known around the world but images from his latest efforts, which will be published soon in a book.
This is the unusual story of the unlikely relationship between the families of Vineyard photographer Peter Simon, his rock ’n’ roll star sister, Carly, and baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson.
The tale begins in 1955, when the fleet-footed Mr. Robinson — the first African-American Major League baseball player in history — was leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to their first World Series title.
As a young man, Edward W. Brooke wanted to be a doctor. Today, he is the first Negro to win state-wide office in Massachusetts and is the attorney general-elect, writes Ronald A. Wysocki of the Boston Globe.
It was while he was in Italy as an infantry captain in World War II that he decided to practice law. Disturbed by the indifference in which officers were chosen as defense counsel in courts-martial - many without any inkling or military law - he began a study of the subject.
His education began in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania, in small towns like Shepton and Port Carbon.
He had come to the smoky mining areas of the state as a young lad from Front Royal, Va., his birthplace, a small resort community nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains. His father was a successful auto mechanic after long military service in the army.
Hidden under scrub oak, among beer bottles, rusty lobster pots and piles of clam shells is a cemetery of forgotten souls. Only a few stones still remain, one which marks the death of young man who died at sea and was buried here along the Lagoon Pond marsh.
The opinions were as varied as they were emphatic: There have been great opportunities lost in the area of civil rights. Poverty affects 43 per cent of all black children in the United States, the same proportion as it did the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Still, African-American people are better off than ever before, and a recent poll showed that most are, in fact, content.
