In 2016, Charles Barkley marked Black History Month with a daily spotlight on local African-American heroes. Many of them didn’t make it into the history books or even the newspapers of their time. But their stories are inspiring and worth knowing. Here’s another look.
06
Crystal Bird Fauset
Politician
Crystal Bird Fauset
Politician
(June 27, 1894 – March 27, 1965)
A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, Fauset was the first African-American woman elected to a state legislature in the country, chosen in 1938 to represent the 18th District of Philadelphia, which was over 66 percent white.
In that role, she introduced legislation that addressed public health, low-income housing and women’s workplace rights.
She later joined Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” to promote African-American civil rights.
As a member of the interracial committee for the American Friends Service Committee, she gave over 200 lectures about African-American culture to mostly white audiences.
“White students, both high school and college, think of the American Negro as being not quite human … and that whatever advantages and privileges he enjoys are due solely to the magnanimity of white people,” Fauset said. “They do not seem to realize that these advantages and privileges are due him as a native-born American citizen and as a normal human being—at least as normal as the attitude of the white world permits him to be.”
- Columbia University Teachers College, B.S. 1931
- Worked on the Interracial committee for the American Friends Service Committee, speaking to over 40,000 mainly white audience members
- Chairperson of the Philadelphia Negro Woman’s Democratic League
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Executive secretary of Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore College
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First African American woman to take a seat in state legislature in the U.S.
FINAL WORD:
“We should not want to think of America as a ‘melting pot,’ but as a great interracial-laboratory where Americans can really begin to build the thing which the rest of the world feels that they stand for today, and that is real democracy,” Fauset said in the 1940 Woman’s Centennial Congress.