Miami to honor Wayne Embry and late wife with Freedom Summer of ’64 Award
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Miami University will honor NBA executive and basketball icon Wayne Embry (Miami 58) and his late wife, Theresa Embry (Miami 60), with the Freedom Summer of 64 Award. The award is bestowed by Miami each year upon a distinguished leader who has inspired the nation to advance civil rights and social justice. Photo: Jeff Sabo
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Statue of NBA executive and basketball icon to be unveiled
By Margo Kissell, university news and communications
Miami University will honor NBA executive and basketball icon Wayne Embry (Miami ’58) and his late wife, Theresa “Terri” Embry (Miami ’60), with the Freedom Summer of ’64 Award at 11 a.m. Tuesday, May 18, outside the main entrance of Millett Hall, Miami’s basketball arena.
Julius Rosenwald, the son of Jewish immigrants who fled religious persecution in Germany, turned Sears, Roebuck & Co. into America’s largest retailer. Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery, created the Tuskegee Institute and led the college for more than 30 years.
Their groundbreaking partnership in the early decades of the 20th century led to a transformative initiative: the creation of 4,978 schools for African American children in 15 Southern and border states.
The program reshaped America. Economists at the Federal Reserve said the Rosenwald Schools were the most significant factor in the narrowing of the South’s racial education gap between World War I and II. Further, they were a meaningful force in the rise of the civil rights movement. Educating Blacks helped belie the canard that African Americans were intellectually inferior and many of the leaders and foot soldiers of the movement attended Rosenwald schools.
HISTORY
The first Freedom Ride departs from Washington, D.C.
On May 4, 1961, a group of thirteen young people departs Washington, D.C.’s Greyhound Bus terminal, bound for the South. Their journey is peaceful at first, but the riders will meet with shocking violence on their way to New Orleans, eventually being forced to evacuate from Jackson, Mississippi but earning a place in history as the first Freedom Riders.
Two Supreme Court rulings,
Morgan v. Virginia and
Boynton v. Virginia, forbade the racial segregation of bus lines, and a 1955 ruling by the Interstate Commerce Commission outlawed the practice of using “separate but equal” buses. Nonetheless, bus lines in the South continued to abide by Jim Crow laws, ignoring the federal mandate to desegregate, for years. The Congress of Racial Equality, with assistance from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, decided to protest this practice by sending white and Black riders together into the South, drawing inspira
By Princess WeekesApr 26th, 2021, 4:31 pm
Last week, the trailer for upcoming BBC miniseries period drama
The Pursuit of Love was released, and being the literary nerd that I am, once I saw that it was based on a book written by a woman, I ended up going into a deep dive about the author, Nancy Mitford. Nancy Mitford was part of a scandalous and celebrated family where she was one of six sisters (and one brother) whose paths in life all took interesting turns during and following World War II.
If you want a little hint of what’s to come, the sisters were described by The Times journalist Ben Macintyre as: “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur.”
60 Voices: Charles Black and Dr Laura Emiko Soltis on the fight for civil rights atlantamagazine.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from atlantamagazine.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.