One Hundred Years
The Maundy Monday Newsletter - This Week in History July 1 - 7.
My great-great-grandfather Samuel Dake was born in 1842 in Anderson, Tennessee. His father, John, was born in 1813 but went by Jackson, presumably after Tenessee’s beloved son, Andrew Jackson.
Samuel fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War and captured by the Union at the second Battle of Franklin in November 1864. After the war, Samuel returned to Anderson, where he married Sarah Bell in 1845. They had a son, my great-grandfather, James Jackson Dake, in 1874.
At some point in his life, James and his wife, Myrtle Huckinson moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where my grandfather Charles Jackson Dake was born on July 1, 1907. Charles had two boys, Charles Jackson Dake, Jr., who went by Jack, and my father, Michael Lawrence Dake, who was born in 1943. Dad married in 1964, and my oldest brother was born a year later. It would be another eleven years until perfection happened, and in case you miss the point here, eleven years later, I was born.
One hundred years after Samuel Dake fought for slavery and captured, President Lydon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.
The Civil Rights Act ended discrimination based on race, effectively stopping the practice of denying black people the right to public accommodations like riding a bus, eating in a restaurant, or entering a sports arena. It also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which had the power to file lawsuits against those who wanted to keep practicing their racism.
The law led to two more groundbreaking rules: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. By the end of the 1960s, segregation, literacy tests for voting, and discrimination for securing a place to live were brought down in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Second Emancipation.
One Hundred Years. That’s six generations. From my Confederate ancestor to my Dad beginning his family, it’s been a long journey toward racial equality. There have been numerous achievements, but we must never forget that we are not that far removed when hate was an institution.
Okay, let's highlight what else happened this week. As a reminder, these events celebrate their anniversary, ending in 5 or 0. Here's what I got:
1. France presented The Statue of Liberty to the United States on July 4, 1884. French Sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi designed a concept of a woman dressed in a robe to celebrate the United States' centennial anniversary and the abolition of slavery. Work began on the Statue of Liberty in 1875 and finished in 1884. She stands 151 feet tall and weighs 225 tons. After the presentation, we shipped her in pieces across the Atlantic to be reassembled in New York.
2. Marlon Brando died on July 1, 2004. The American actor and activist won numerous awards and rejected many more. The Godfather once refused to accept a Kennedy Center Honor, something I knew as the person who had to research potential awardees before they were made public. It was the only inside DC knowledge I was ever let in on.
3. Elvis Presley’s first song aired on the radio on July 7, 1954. Record producer Sam Phillips worked with the former trucker driver, turned musician, based on the recommendations of others who claimed the man could sing. Phillips was unimpressed until Elivs played a faster version of a blues song called That’s All Right. Phillips hit the record button, and a few days later, it played on a Memphis radio station, followed by a release as a nationwide single two weeks later.
I’ve been working on a historical fiction story about my great-great-grandfather. The story is a cross of the novels Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley. I’ll probably complete it in about 100 years, give or take.
I hope everyone has a happy Fourth of July. As a reminder, we are two years away from our country’s semiquincentennial celebration. This also means a ton of work is underway here in DC to prepare everything, and the countdown officially begins this week.
I will be taking this Friday off, so there will be no new presidential election rankings. I hope that’s okay.
Thanks for your support of Okay History. You’re the best. See you next week.
Okay,
Chris
Dear Cris: Why is not a statue of President Johnson in every street in this country, the Man was “Un Santo” 😇 I need to read more about him.