NYC MARCH FOR CIVIL RIGHTS | NAACP's James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson, c. 1917.

July 28, 2020—On this day in 1917, 10,000 Blacks organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) marched on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Credit for this is given to novelist-poet-songwriter James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), who was also a lawyer, a U.S. consul overseas and a leader of the NAACP.

Behind the scenes at the NAACP was Inez Milholland Boissevain's father, John E. Milholland, who was the NAACP's first Treasurer. Inez, of course, died in 1916 and her father would still be grieving.

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a hotel headwaiter and his mother was a teacher at the segregated Stanton School, which  Johnson attended until he went to his school. He grew up in a middle-class home, and his mother encouraged him to pursue his interests in reading and music.

Johnson attended high school and college at Atlanta University. He received his bachelor’s degree 1894. After college, Johnson became the principal of Stanton School, and expanded the school to include a high school. He also began studying law.  In 1898, he was admitted to the Florida Bar, the first Black person to be admitted.

Johnson continued to serve as principal and began practicing law. In addition, he wrote  poetry and songs. In 1901, Johnson decided to pursue a career in writing. He and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, left for New York City to write songs for musicals. They composed about two hundred songs for Broadway.
I
n New York, Johnson also became involved in politics. In 1904, he served as treasurer for the Colored Republican Club. In 1906, the Roosevelt Administration appointed Johnson as the United States consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In 1909, he served as consul in Corinto, Nicaragua until 1913. In addition to his service as consul, during this time, Johnson anonymously published his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912).

In 1916, Johnson accepted the position of field secretary for the NAACP.  He worked at opening new branches and expanding membership. In 1920, the NAACP appointed him executive secretary. In this position, he was able to bring attention to racism, lynching and segregation. After ten years of serving as executive secretary, Johnson accepted a creative writing teaching position at Fisk University.

Johnson developed his own philosophy on lessening racism in America. While W.E.B. Du Bois advocated intellectual development and Booker T. Washington advocated industrial training to combat racism, Johnson believed it was important for Blacks to produce great literature and art. By doing so, Johnson held that Blacks could demonstrate their intellectual equality and advance their placement in America. 

One of his more popular works was God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). In 1927, he also reissued his first novel under his own name. Johnson died in 1938, after a train hit the car his wife was driving.

Sources: NAACP History.

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July 2 - Amelia Earhart Lost (+ The Flying Flapper)

Amelia Earhart in the year she died. This photo is displayed
 in the small Air Museum in the Melbourne, Fla. airport.

This day in 1937, Amelia Earhart's plane disappeared.

Earhart  first learned to fly in 1921, at the age of 23. Although she had a passion for flying, it was largely a hobby until 1928, when she gained fame as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean while a passenger aboard the plane Friendship.

After this, flying became Earhart’s career, promoted by her publicist and, later, husband G. P. Putnam.

First Woman to Fly Solo Across Two Oceans

When she was 34, in 1932, she became the first  woman to fly the Atlantic solo.

She took off from Newfoundland and landed in County Derry in Ireland. A puzzled farmer went out to see who it was and asked: "Have you come far?" She answered: "From America."

Then she was the first person to fly the Pacific solo, from Honolulu to Oakland. Her flight on a single-engine Lockheed Vega was routine - on her way in to Oakland she was listening on her radio to the broadcast of an opera from the Met in New York. She was called the female Lindy or "Queen of the Air".

National Woman's Party Member

Amelia Mary Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, daughter of Samuel "Edwin" Stanton Earhart (1867-1930) and Amelia "Amy" Otis Earhart (1869-1962). She was married twice but did not take either husband's name. She was a member of the National Woman's Party.

Her plane disappeared in 1937 while she and a navigator were trying to circumnavigate the globe at the equator in an airplane with new equipment.

They were both assumed to be lost at sea. At the time of her disappearance, the 39-year-old Earhart was the most famous female pilot of her day.

Postscript on the Flying Flapper

Elinor Smith, the Flying Flapper.

Someone who read my post above on Amelia Earhart's disappearance alerted me to another famous early female aviator,  Elinor Smith Sullivan. She was known as the Flying Flapper of Freeport.

In 1927 she was the youngest U.S. Government certified pilot on record.

In 1928 she flew in one fell swoop under all four bridges on New York City's East River. Newsreel film documents her feat. No one apparently has ever duplicated it since.

The official reprimand from the Federal Government for her action was accompanied by a request for her autograph. (Mayor Jimmy Walker had sent a letter asking for lenience.)

She was a friend of Jimmy Doolittle, leader of the 1942 raid on Tokyo. Elinor Smith did the commentary on the famous Bendix Air Races.

She reportedly said that Earhart was a lousy pilot but a master of publicity. Watch a YouTube clip on the Flying Flapper and you will see why I am impressed with the FF.

Boat Trip around Indian River Lagoon

Departing from Riverside Cafe - Pelicans taking a rest from fishing see
us off from the dock whence the Indian River Lagoon boat trip leaves.

Tip for Busy Readers: Scroll down to the highlight of this post - pictures of dolphins swimming alongside our boat (near the end).

The Indian River Lagoon boat tour, "River Explorer", leaves from the Riverside Cafe on the edge of Riverside Park, six days per week.

We bought our tickets next the Riverside Cafe, a restaurant and a place to have a drink while listening to live music.

Alice faces front as our well-informed pilot and guide tells us
what to watch for in dolphin territory. Hint: Pelicans and
dolphins look for the same thing - small fish.

Riverside Park on the east end of the Barber Bridge (Route 60) is home to two Vero Beach pillars - the Riverside Theater and Vero Beach Museum of Art. (Others are the Indian River Medical Center, St. Edward's School and the McKee Botanical Garden.)

Alice and I set off on a boat tour of the Indian River Lagoon - the largest lagoon in the United States and the second-largest estuary, after Chesapeake Bay.

Estuaries are special fun because as places where salt water and seawater mix they attack unique plants (like mangroves) and animals (especially fish-hunting birds) that thrive on brackish water.

A second staff member watches from
 the back. Snacks and drinks $1 each.
 (self-service). Rest room on board.

This two-hour tour goes from Riverside Park north to Johns Island, three times a day.

Dead pine trees - killed on purpose.
(See text.)

We plan to take another tour from Captain Hiram's marina in Sebastian that will take us to  Pelican Island, the nation's first national Wildlife Preservation Center, created by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 (a commemorative stamp was issued in 2003) and celebrated recently by Theodore Roosevelt IV in a speech in Orlando.

Beautiful birds along the route. This a Great Blue Heron. Some you rarely
see except in estuaries like Indian River Lagoon.

The guide, who has been doing this tour for a year, pointed out the the dead trees on one of the islands and explained that the trees have been killed by cutting a switch around the bark, depriving the leaves of water. It was done on purpose, so these invasive pine trees will die and be replaced by native trees.

Birds of a feather flock together. So, as a matter of fact, do birds of different feathers.

The Indian River Lagoon is composed of the Mosquito Lagoon and the Banana River, and the Indian River, all on the Atlantic Coast of Florida.

The Lagoon was originally named Rio de Ais after the Ais Indian tribe, who lived along the east coast of Florida.

From 1913 to 2013, human activity has increased the watershed for the lagoon from 572,000 to 1.4 million acres, increasing runoff of fresh water and nutrients from farms.

Both have been detrimental to lagoon health. The wetlands are needed to cleanse the lagoon. About 40,000 acres of land were lost to mosquito control and as of 2013 have been incompletely restored.

Alice looks for dolphins. We are told
that pelicans will lead us to dolphins.

Mangroves are important to marine life. Between the 1940s and 2013, 85 per cent of them had been removed for housing development. From 1989 to 2013, the population along the lagoon increased 50 percent to 1.6 million people.

A pelican feeding. Can a dolphin
or two be far behind?

Seagrass is a critical component to the overall health of the lagoon. By 1990, it had surpassed levels reached in 1943. In 1990, the Florida Legislature passed the Indian River Lagoon Act, requiring most sewer plants to stop discharging into the lagoon by 1996.

Some sports fish rebounded in population in the 1990s when gill nets were banned and pollution in the lagoon was reduced. In 1995 the seagrass covered more than 100,000 acres. But in 2011, a wide bloom of phytoplankton resulted in the loss of 32,000 acres of lagoon seagrass. In 2012, a brown-tide bloom fouled the northern lagoon.

Hurray. Two dolphins playing in sight of us.

Indian River County has approval for funds to investigate unusual blooms to see if they can be prevented.

Catches of blue crabs dropped unevenly from 4.3 million pounds in 1987 to 389,795 pounds in 2012. High catches alternated with low-catch years. The crabs require 2 percent salt content in the water to survive. A drought increases the salt content and heavy rainfall decreases it. Both conditions have recurred over the past decades and probably hurt the crab population.

In 2013, algae blooms and loss of sea grass destroyed all gains.

Pilot speeds up boat and dolphins come chasing behind. What a sight!

That year, four problems with lagoon water quality were identified:

• Excess nitrogen and phos-phorus from fertilizer runoff, 
• Septic tank failures, maybe 10 percent of the tens of thousands of septic tanks in the county.
• Accumulated muck from construction, farming, erosion and dead plants.
• Invasive aquatic species such as the Asian green mussel, South American charru mussel, and the Australian spotted jellyfish, all of which eat clams and fish larvae.

The Indian River Lagoon extends 156 miles from Ponce de León Inlet in Volusia County, Fla., to Jupiter Inlet in Palm Beach County, Fla. The Lagoon is connected to Lake Okeechobee by the Okeechobee Waterway and the St. Lucia River, meeting in Sewall's Point. Stops along the way include Mosquito Lagoon, Banana River, Eau Gallie River, Crane Creek (Melbourne), Turkey Creek Sanctuary, Palm Bay.

Best picture - Dolphin looks like he has wings as he chases the boat.

The Indian River Lagoon is North America’s most diverse estuary with more than 4,300 species of plants (2,100) and animals (2,200), including 35 listed as threatened or endangered.

The Lagoon varies in width from half a mile to 5 miles and averages 4 feet deep. It serves as a spawning and nursery ground for many different species of oceanic and lagoon fish and shellfish - and hosts an extraordinary range of birds. Nearly one-third of the nation’s manatee population lives here or migrates through the Lagoon seasonally. In addition, its ocean beaches provide one of the densest sea turtle nesting areas found in the Western Hemisphere.

Some 200-800 Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) live in the Indian River Lagoon and that is a major attraction of the boat tour, especially since manatees are scarce.

Coming home. Great trip!

Red drum, spotted seatrout, common snook, and the tarpon are the main gamefish sought by anglers in the Titusville area of the lagoon system.

The Indian River Lagoon is worth $2 billion a year to the area economy, according to a 2008 study by Hazen and Sawyer. Visiting boaters,  fishermen and tourists spent about 3.2 million person-days in recreation on the lagoon. The report, “Indian River Lagoon Economic Assessment and Analysis Update”, was prepared for the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program of the St. Johns River Water Management District.

Dragonboat Racing

Susan Rittenhouse, Wellesley
'66, with a racing shirt.

 The Wellesley Class of 1966 had a mini reunion in East Hampton hosted by Joan Hass and my wife Alice Tepper Marlin.

One of the participants in the event was Susan Rittenhouse, who was getting ready with other "senior warriors" to participate in a Dragonboat Race in Europe later this month.

That's her at left with one of the shirts she wears as a dragonboat racer.

Dragonboat with full complement of 20 paddlers, drummer and steerer.

Some of the 22 teammates required for a Dragonboat.

The boat has a drummer at front and a steerer - someone who wields an oar at the back to steer with, much like a gondolier.

The paddlers are in ten rows of two per row. The lead paddler in front of the drummer maintains the pace and the drummer follows the rhythm that the lead paddler establishes.

Susan recently participated the Nine Annual  Dragonboat Festival on Lake Champlain, at Burlington's Waterfront Park. There were 64 slots. Each team has 21 paddlers and a drummer who "race" over a 200-meter course. 

For her group it was not a race but rather an exhibition of local community and corporate teams, many of which are new to the sport and trained during a practice weekend in July. 

The Festival was a fund-raiser for Survivorship NOW, a cancer wellness program that is free service initiated by Dragonheart VT. It includes courses in subjects like yoga, art, finance, fitness and nutrition available to all cancer survivors in Vermont.

Dragonheart VT will have at least four teams (including two Senior teams 60+) representing the USA at the World Club Dragonboat Championships in Italy. The teams are setting off  on August 30. 

This is a sport that older paddlers can compete in because technique and teamwork have a lot to do with winning. Susan told me that her team of mature paddlers has defeated boats with much younger competitors.

There is a camp at Melbourne, Fla., and races are held in places like Princeton, NJ and Montreal. The festivals and races raise money for charity such as breast cancer research. Winning boats travel to Europe and Asia to compete.

Participants in one of the many dragon boat races.

Closer to home in NYC, the Hong Kong Dragonboat Festival in Queens last week drew nearly 200 teams in dragon-headed boats. They race across Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

The all-female team known as the Dragon Queens competes in a variety of heats during the two-day festival.

The first day includes a competition for the Municipal Cup — a co-ed race for NY City agencies. The winning boat in this race is usually the NY State Chinese Auxiliary Police Association. The Dragon Queens were hoping before the race to come in second.