RACHEL B. NOEL (1918-2008)

CONTRIBUTED BY: ALEXANDRA LAIRD

Rachel B. Noel

Image Courtesy of Metropolitan State University of Denver

Rachel Bassette Noel was the first African American woman to be elected to public office in the state of Colorado. Born on January 15, 1918 in Hampton, Virginia, Noel earned her bachelor’s degree from Hampton University and her master’s in sociology from Fisk University. In 1942 she married Dr. Edmond F. Noel and a few years later the two moved to Denver, Colorado.

Noel was elected to the Denver Public School’s (DPS) Board of Education in 1961 and was appointed to the school board’s special committee on equal education opportunity in 1962. The committee was created in response to community protest following a DPS-proposed segregated junior high. In April 1968, while serving as a member of the board, Noel wrote and introduced Resolution 1490, which became known as the “Noel Resolution.” She authored it with fellow school board member A. Edgard Benton on the evening of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

The resolution directed Superintendent Robert Gilberts to develop and submit a comprehensive integration plan for Denver Public Schools by December 1968. The resolution generated significant controversy, but despite public opposition and threats to Noel and her family, the resolution passed the school board with amendment. The Supreme Court affirmed Noel’s position in the landmark 1973 decision Keys v Denver School District No. 1. It was the first Supreme Court desegregation case that dealt with a school system outside of the American South.

In 1969 Noel became a faculty member at Metropolitan State University of Denver teaching sociology and African American Studies. She was chair of the Department of African American Studies from 1971 to 1980 and won Outstanding Female Faculty Member for the 1974-75 school year. In 1981 MSU Denver endowed The Rachel B. Noel Distinguished Visiting Professorship to foster diversity and academic excellence. Noel Professors have included Lerone Bennett, Diane Reeves, Ossie Davis, Billy Taylor, and Johnetta Cole. Denver’s Rachel Noel Middle School was also dedicated in her honor.

In 1976 Noel was appointed to the University of Colorado Board of Regents by former Governor Richard Lamm and became the first African American woman elected statewide to that body when she won a six-year term in 1978.

Noel worked with a number of civic, church, educational, and social organizations, and received numerous awards and honors for her civil rights contributions. She was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996 and won the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award in 1990, the Denver Mayor’s Millennium Award in 2001, and the Anti-Defamation League’s Civil Rights Award in 2004. She was also a member of the U. S. Civil Rights Commission, the Colorado Advisory Committee, Mayor Wellington Web’s Black Advisory Committee, and was the chair of Mayor Peña’s Black Advisory Committee. MSU Denver awarded her an honorary degree in 1981, and she also received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Denver in 1993 and the University of Colorado in 2004.

Rachel B. Noel died in 2008 in Oakland, California at the age of 90 and is survived by her daughter Angie and son Buddy Noel.

MARSHA P. JOHNSON (1945-1992)

CONTRIBUTED BY: KC WASHINGTON

Marsha P. Johnson (Left) and Sylvia Rivera (Right) in 1973 Gay Pride Parade, NYC

Image Courtesy of the National History Archives of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

Marsha P. Johnson was an African American drag performer and social activist. The fifth of seven children, she was born Malcolm Michaels, Jr. to Malcolm Michaels, Sr. and Alberta (Claiborne) Michaels on August 24, 1945 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. During a tempestuous Christian childhood, around the age of five, Johnson began cross-dressing. Her desire for traditional feminine clothing quickly drew a reprimand from her father, a General Motors assembly line worker and housekeeper mother, as well as from the larger society.

After graduating from Thomas A. Edison High School in 1963, Johnson moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. She had $15 and a bag of clothes. Homeless, she turned to prostitution to survive and soon found a like-minded community in the bawdy nightlife of Christopher Street.

Johnson switched names repeatedly as she established her persona, alternating between her given name Malcolm and Black Marsha before settling on Marsha P. Johnson. She chose Johnson because she enjoyed hanging out at the popular eatery, Howard Johnson’s. The “P” purportedly stands for “Pay It No Mind,” a flippant saying she used to dismiss antagonists.

On June 28, 1969, Marsha P. Johnson became one of the faces of the Queer Revolution. She went from her own party uptown to the Stonewall Inn on the corner of Christopher Street and 7th Avenue, arriving after the Stonewall Riot (Uprising) had begun.

The riot stemmed from members of New York’s LGBTQ community being targeted by the New York Police Department (NYPD). LGBTQ people were routinely rousted, hassled, and arrested on questionable charges. That summer Saturday, their anger reached a breaking point after the police returned to Stonewall Inn for the second time in two days. According to Johnson, the police had forced her and others out onto the street to line up and be frisked the night before and then returned the next night and set the Stonewall Inn on fire.

Twenty-three-year old Johnson and her friend Sylvia Rivera were caught up in the Stonewall Uprising which went on for several days and is credited as the catalyst for the Gay Movement of the late 1960s. The Uprising spawned the first gay pride marches across the country in 1970. In the same year, Johnson and Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which clothed, fed, housed, and advocated for transgender youth from a tenement on the lower eastside.

In 1972, as the face of the resistance, Johnson performed around the world with the popular drag theater company, Hot Peaches. Andy Warhol featured her in a 1975 screen print portfolio of drag queens and transgender merrymakers at the nightclub, Gilded Grape.

As the nascent Gay Rights movement swirled around her, Johnson fought social mores, the police, and her own demons. She suffered from mental illness, weathering breakdowns, arrests, and stints at psychiatric hospitals even as she strove to promote gay civil rights. An early ACT UP member and AIDS activist, Johnson also became a victim of the disease. She announced in a June 26, 1992 interview that she had been H.I.V. positive since 1990. Two years later on July 6, 1994, Johnson was found drowned in the Hudson River off the West Village Piers. The police initially declared her death a suicide and then agreed to reopen the case in 2012. She was 46 at the time of her death.

TUCSON RACE RIOT (1967)

CONTRIBUTED BY: MARITZA FERNANDEZ

Few people are aware of the race riot that occurred in Tucson, Arizona in 1967.  The riot was caused by the arrest of an unidentified black 14-year-old a few days before. On July 23rd to 25th in the North side of the city within a four-mile area between 4th Avenue and Seneca Street, 200 young black people gathered to protest against the Tucson police force.

Rocks were thrown at police cars and buildings with the worst damage to a Crown Liquors store by approximately 60 rioters. Nothing was stolen, but 25 Tucson patrol officers, members of the Arizona National Guard, and firefighters were called to the scene.  There was, according to the  Los Angeles Times, “minor violence” on the 25th of July and at least one fire bomb was thrown at a paint store, but no other major violence or injuries were reported.

Two injured people were reported injured on July 24: Kurt Jackson, a white man who had driven through the area, and an unidentified woman were both struck by unidentified objects, likely rocks, and suffered minor injuries. Two arrests were made: James Brooks and Eugene Jones, two 19-year-old black men were charged with malicious mischief and unlawful assembly. Brooks pled guilty and was sentenced to 150 days in jail. Eugene Jones pled innocent, and was tried and acquitted in September, 1967. Two other juveniles, 13 and 16, were detained by police for throwing rocks at police cars and storefronts.

When the rioting ended in Tucson, slowly petering out on the morning of July 25, it began in Phoenix, Arizona, 116 miles north, on the 26th. However, in Tucson, the day the riot ended (July 25) was devoted to discussing why it had happened and working towards a solution. A meeting between black community leaders and city officials took place involving Tucson City Councilmen James N. Corbett Jr. and Kirk Storch (acting mayor while mayor Lew Davis was out of town), chairman of City Commission on Human Relations Reverend Paul David Sholin, president of the local NAACP branch, Robert Hora, and a chairman of the local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), George Bowden.

In a second meeting on July 28th with black youth from the predominantly black South Side of Tucson, grievances were heard including suspicion of the police, wrongful detainment, unemployment, and lacking public resources like youth recreation centers. Tucson officials conceded to leaving the recreational Mirasol center open until 11 pm at night so that black youth would have a safe, equipped place to play and hang out with friends, without taking to the streets and being seen as threats by police. Tucson officials also created the Job Project, an anti-poverty program which hired 60 chronically unemployed people, focusing on heads of households, at least temporarily, with the possibility of permanent employment. Eventually 400 jobs were developed to combat the city’s persistent high black unemployment.