Midiversitycenter

06/01/2026

05/29/2026

Please join Midiversitycenter (MiDEC) in celebrating PRIDE this year. Your tax-deductible donation (as allowed by law) will be put to good use as we continue or work with the LGBTQ+ communities around the State of Michigan. You can donate online, 24/7, safe and securely at: https://michigandiversityeducationcent.givingfuel.com/the-rainbow-fund. Thank You!

05/25/2026

A white couple wanted the good seats, so a ten-year-old's parents were moved to the back of the room. The child at the piano was Eunice Waymon, and she stood up and told that whole hall she would not play another note until her mother and father were returned to the front row.

She was about ten years old, and there were two chairs in the front row of the library in Tryon that belonged to her mother and father.

She would not touch the piano until they were sitting in them.

This was Eunice Waymon's recital.

The whole town had come, because everybody in Tryon, North Carolina already knew the Waymon girl could play. She had been playing the piano since she was three, and she was the church pianist by six, working the pedals before her feet could comfortably reach them.

A white couple arrived after the room had filled. Someone leaned over and asked her mother and father to give up their seats and move to the back so the couple could sit closer to the front.

Her parents stood up without a word and started for the back of the room.

And Eunice, sitting at the piano in front of everyone who had come, said there would be no music. She told that hall, full of people who had paid to hear a Black child play Bach, that if her parents could not sit in the front then she would not play at all.

She was ten.

The chairs were given back. Her mother and father sat down again in the front row, and only then did she begin.

She wrote later that the day after that recital, every small slight cut her raw. Prejudice had been made real to her, she said, like someone switching on a light.

After that, she started stopping in at the drugstore just to watch the mixture of indifference and disdain she stirred up in the white customers there.

Before that night, she had believed white people were all like Miz Mazzy.

Miz Mazzy was Muriel Mazzanovich, an Englishwoman who had settled in Tryon. Every Saturday, Eunice crossed the railroad tracks into the white part of town to take piano lessons from her.

Miz Mazzy gave her Bach, and Bach decided the rest of her life.

"Once I understood Bach's music," she wrote, "I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist."

That was the plan, and it was a specific one. Not a singer. Not a star in a nightclub.

A Black girl from a preacher's family in the Jim Crow South was going to walk onto a classical concert stage, and there had never been one who looked like her, and she meant to be the first.

As a child she had taken her example from Marian Anderson, the great contralto, another Black artist with a gift the country kept trying to lock out of its finest rooms.

The town of Tryon believed it with her.

Her father, John Divine Waymon, had once run his own businesses, but the Depression took them and illness took the rest, and the family had no money to train a prodigy. So Miz Mazzy and others set up a fund with Eunice's name on it, and the people of Tryon, Black and white, put their money in.

In return, the child played free recitals in the town hall.

She practiced five hours a day.

After high school, where she finished at the top of her class, the town's fund and a scholarship carried her to the Juilliard School in New York to study classical piano. Juilliard was only the preparation.

The real target, the place that would make the concert career real, was the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Curtis was the most selective conservatory in the country, and it cost nothing to attend, and a place there meant the dream was no longer a dream.

Her whole family believed she would get in.

They believed it so completely that they packed up and left North Carolina, moving the family to Philadelphia to be near her while she studied there.

The Waymons bet everything they had on one audition.

She played it, and by the accounts that survive it was a strong audition, the kind a young pianist remembers as one of her finest.

Then the letter came, and Curtis said no.

She was eighteen years old.

She had crossed those railroad tracks every Saturday for years, practiced five hours a day since she was small, carried a whole town's fund and a whole town's pride on her hands. Her family had pulled up its roots and moved to a new city on the strength of those same hands.

And a conservatory in Philadelphia decided, in one afternoon, that it was finished.

They told her she was not good enough.

She did not believe that for a single second, and she never would.

She knew what she could do at a piano, because Juilliard had told her, and Bach had told her, and eighteen years of work had told her.

"I knew I was good enough, but they turned me down," she said years afterward. "It took me about six months to realize it was because I was Black."

She said she never really got over that jolt.

She would say later that an insider at Curtis told her the truth, that the reason had been the color of her skin.

For a while, she stopped.

The girl who practiced five hours a day thought hard about leaving music for good.

When she did go back to it, the work she could find was small. She took a job as a photographer's assistant for a time, and then as an accompanist for a singing teacher, the grand concert career shrunk down to other people's lessons and other people's afternoons.

What Curtis closed was not a job and not a contest. It was the concert stage itself, the only thing she had ever trained for, the reason behind every hour at that piano.

Everything her childhood had pointed at was on the other side of a door a school had shut, and there was no other door cut to that shape.

She had once said plainly what music was to her.

"Music is a gift and a burden I've had since I can remember who I was," she said. "I was born into music."

The gift now had nowhere to go.

She stayed in the North and taught piano to other people's children to pay her rent.

One of those students had a summer job playing piano in a bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and it paid ninety dollars a week.

Ninety dollars was double what Eunice was earning.

She figured, she wrote later, that if a student of hers could get hired as a pianist, then so could she.

So in the summer of 1954, she sat down at the piano in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City.

After the first night, the owner told her the job came with a condition. She would have to sing, not just play.

She had never worked as a singer in her life. She started anyway, six nights a week, six hours a night.

Her mother was a Methodist minister who would not have wanted to know her daughter was playing in a bar. So Eunice Waymon did not use her own name in that room.

She borrowed "Nina" from a nickname and "Simone" from a French actress she admired, and she walked in as someone new.

The classically trained pianist Curtis had turned away became Nina Simone in an Atlantic City bar, so a preacher back home would not find out.

And the voice no conservatory had ever asked to hear turned out to be one of the great voices of the century.

She put the Bach in it anyway.

The training Curtis would not certify went straight into her playing, the counterpoint and the structure sitting under songs that sounded like nothing else on the radio.

She sang "I Loves You, Porgy," and the country heard her.

She sang "Mississippi Goddam" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," and the movement heard her, and she stood on civil rights platforms beside Martin Luther King.

She recorded dozens of albums and wrote hundreds of songs.

The child who was going to be the first Black classical concert pianist had become something the world held no category for.

In 1993, a reporter asked her about Curtis.

She said again that she had been rejected because she was Black. Then she said, with what the reporter called some relish, that her name had grown bigger than the whole Curtis Institute.

She was right, and the school seemed to know it.

In 2003, more than fifty years after that letter, the Curtis Institute of Music gave Nina Simone an honorary degree.

She was seventy years old and ill with cancer at her home in the south of France.

Two days after Curtis finally put her name on a diploma, she died.

It comes back to two chairs in a front row.

At ten years old, she had already decided that her mother and father would sit where they could be seen, or there would be no performance at all. Curtis, when she was eighteen, told her to take a seat at the back of the whole profession.

She did then what she had done in that library as a child.

She would not sit where they put her.

By the time Curtis came around with its diploma, Nina Simone had been sitting in the front row for fifty years, and the country had long since moved its chair to hear her.

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackhistoryarchives
Every coffee helps me keep creating

05/21/2026

On Episode #13 of of the Tedi Talks Podcast, Tedi welcomes his special guest, Rachel Dawson, a Strategic Executive, Attorney & Certified Leadership Coach, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Rachel and Tedi talk about Rachel's book: ‘Bold, Black & Brilliant: A Black Woman's Guide to Career Confidence and Power’. Rachel shares with us why she wrote this book and encourages ALL women to read it, as well as men. Tedi shares a lot of data after hitting the Googler again and he and Rachel break it all down. Rachel shares with us the reason so many black women are overlooked in the workplace and ways we address the systematic and systemic racism that is ever present in today's workplace. This is a very informative and educational episode, one that you def do not want to miss. To listen to past episodes, please visit www.tedikeepstalking.com.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1726062/episodes/19203318

On Episode #13 of of the Tedi Talks Podcast, Tedi welcomes his special guest, Rachel Dawson, a Strategic Executive, Attorney & Certified Leadership Coach. Rachel is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Rachel and Tedi talk about Rachel's book...

05/21/2026

An important message from our friends at Peckham. Opportunity matters. Jobs matter. People matter. A current federal bill could put thousands of jobs for people with disabilities at risk through the AbilityOne Program. As an AbilityOne participant, Peckham sees this impact every day.

If you believe meaningful work should remain accessible, please take one minute to send a message to lawmakers and help protect these opportunities.
Take action here:

HR 2804, the Protecting Small Business Competitions Act of 2025, would codify a small business "rule of 2" that would make it difficult to compete for new contracts. It is important you reach out to your member of Congress to make them aware of this critical issue. As it stands there is already "rul...

05/20/2026

Join us on our mission to make sure every voice is heard, LOUD & CLEAR! https://midiversitycenter.org/donate

05/18/2026

The Michigan Diversity Education Center (MiDEC) is currently seeking new board members from Region #1 - Upper Peninsula and Region #3 - Southwest Michigan. If you, or someone you know, is passionate about Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) and social justice, we want to hear from you. Please visit https://midiversitycenter.org/leadership to learn more or to complete the online BOD Application. Thank you!

05/16/2026

A piece of history from Mother's Day 1961.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18e3BB7Tib/

A twelve-year-old white girl named Janie Forsyth walked into a Klan mob on Mother's Day, 1961, with a five-gallon bucket of water. The Freedom Riders were lying in her front yard, choking and bleeding, after the mob firebombed their Greyhound bus right outside her father's grocery store.

She refilled that bucket again and again while her neighbors urged the mob on and her father stood and watched. She saw what every grown man in that crowd refused to see.

It was Mother's Day, 1961, and the men waiting for the bus in Anniston, Alabama, had come straight from church.

They wore coats and ties. Their shoes were polished.

A few of them had even brought their children along, lifting the youngest ones up on their shoulders so the kids could see what was coming. In their hands they carried baseball bats and iron pipes and lengths of chain.

The bus they were waiting for had left Atlanta at eleven that morning. There were fourteen people on board.

Seven of them were Freedom Riders, an in*******al group of volunteers organized by the Congress of Racial Equality. They had set out from Washington, D.C. ten days earlier to test whether the South would honor a Supreme Court decision that had outlawed segregation on interstate buses.

Their team leader was Joe Perkins. The youngest, at nineteen, was Hank Thomas, a sophomore at Howard University who had taken his roommate's place on this trip and had not told his own mother where he was going.

When the bus pulled into the Anniston Greyhound station around one o'clock, the building was locked from the inside. About fifty men surged forward across the parking lot.

A teenage Klansman named Roger Couch stretched himself out flat on the pavement in front of the bumper so the driver could not pull away. From the crowd came shouts of "Dirty Communists" and "Sieg heil" through the broken air.

A local Klan leader named William Chappell moved among the others giving orders. The bats came down on the metal first, then the pipes, and then a knife went into one tire after another until every last one of them was flat.

Inside the bus, the Riders sat still. Two white men in plainclothes who had boarded back in Atlanta hurried to the front and pressed themselves against the door, holding the mob out with their own bodies.

The Riders had no idea who those two men were. They were Ell Cowling and Harry Sims, undercover agents of the Alabama Highway Patrol, sent by Governor John Patterson with a hidden microphone to eavesdrop on the protesters.

Local police arrived after twenty minutes. They walked through the crowd like neighbors and made a show of dispersing them.

Then they escorted the wounded bus to the city limits. There they turned around and went home.

The mob followed in a convoy of cars. Some estimates put the number of vehicles at fifty, with as many as two hundred people inside them.

Six miles out on Alabama Highway 202, the slashed tires finally gave way. The bus rolled to a stop in front of a small frame house and a wooden building with a hand-painted sign that read Forsyth and Son Grocery.

Inside the house, Janie Forsyth was twelve years old and had just come home from her own Mother's Day church service. Her grandfather was watching a baseball game in the living room when the noise outside started.

Her father had told her over breakfast that some "outside agitators" were coming through town that day. He said he and some of his friends were planning what he called a surprise party for them.

She had not understood what that meant. Now she did.

She walked outside and stood in her father's yard while fifty cars pulled up around the bus. The driver had run into the store to telephone for replacement tires, and he never came back to the door.

Cowling had just enough time to grab his revolver from the luggage compartment before the mob closed in. They began rocking the bus from side to side, trying to tip it over.

Two of them, Roger Couch and a man called Goober Lewallyn, lit bundles of rags and threw them through the broken windows. The seats began to smolder.

Then came the firebomb. Someone heaved an incendiary device through a back window and the inside of the bus filled with black smoke in a matter of seconds.

The Riders dropped to the floor. From outside the windows, voices were calling for them to die in the flames.

Men were holding the door shut from the outside. They wanted that bus to be a coffin.

What saved the Riders was the fuel tank. The fire reached it and it began to explode, and the mob scattered just long enough for Cowling to wedge the door open from the inside.

Hank Thomas was the first one out. He crawled away from the doorway, choking, his eyes streaming from the smoke.

A white man rushed up to him with a worried face and asked if he was all right. Then the man's expression changed and he struck Thomas in the head with a baseball bat.

Thomas fell into the grass and lay there, barely conscious. Behind him the other Riders spilled out of the door, gasping for air.

Genevieve Hughes was so overcome by smoke she could not stand on her own. Bert Bigelow and Ed Blankenheim were coughing too hard to speak.

Two more Highway Patrol agents had arrived by then and fired their pistols into the air. The crowd backed up but did not leave.

Janie Forsyth was still standing in her father's yard. What she remembered most, all the years after, was not the breaking glass or the rocking of the bus but the sound the people coming off it were making as they begged for water.

She ran into her house and pulled the biggest container she could find out from under the sink. It was a five-gallon bucket.

She filled it at the kitchen tap and carried it back outside with a stack of cups. She walked through the Klansmen who were jeering at her and brought it to the Riders lying on the ground.

She washed the smoke from their eyes. She refilled that bucket again, and again, and again, while her neighbors urged the mob on and her own father watched.

She told an interviewer many years later why she did it. She had been raised on the parable of the Good Samaritan, she said, and she believed in being her brother's keeper.

Her older sister had a phrase for her. "Show me an underdog," she used to say, "any underdog, and Janie will be their champion."

Hank Thomas would call her the angel of Anniston when the two of them met again decades later at a reunion. The family paid for her kindness, though, threatened so thoroughly afterward that they eventually had to leave town for good.

The Riders were taken to Anniston Memorial Hospital, where there was no doctor on duty and a single nurse had to look up smoke poisoning in a manual before she knew how to help them. The white staff refused to treat the Black Riders in the same room as the white ones.

So the Riders refused to be separated. Either we are treated together, they told the staff, or none of us are treated at all.

By nightfall, another crowd had gathered outside the hospital itself. They told the administrator they would set the whole building on fire if the Riders were not turned over to them.

The hospital ordered the Riders to leave the premises for their own safety. The local police chief told Attorney General Robert Kennedy by telephone that he could not guarantee anyone's safety, and Governor Patterson refused to send protection.

It was the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, down in Birmingham, who finally came for them. He sent a convoy of eight cars driven by Black men, some of them armed, who pulled up to the hospital after midnight and carried the Riders to safety in his own home and his own church.

Meanwhile a second bus, the Trailways, had arrived at that same downtown station one hour after the first one burned. Klansmen boarded it and harmed the Riders so severely that one of them, a sixty-year-old white teacher named Walter Bergman, suffered brain damage and a stroke that left him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

The next morning, the front pages of newspapers around the world carried the photograph. A Greyhound bus on the side of a country highway, black smoke pouring out of every shattered window, the doors hanging open.

The picture did what the riders had set out for it to do. It forced the federal government, finally, to enforce what the Supreme Court had already said.

By November of that year, the Interstate Commerce Commission had issued the regulations that ended segregation in interstate bus terminals across the country. The Freedom Rides did not stop after Anniston either.

Hundreds of new volunteers came south for the rest of the summer, knowing exactly what had happened on that highway. They got on the buses anyway.

Hank Thomas survived. He served in Vietnam, came home, built a business, married, raised a family.

In 2021, sixty years after the burning, he sat in front of a microphone in Anniston for the anniversary commemoration. Someone asked him why he had done it, why he had gotten on that bus knowing what could be waiting for him in Alabama.

His answer was ten words long. "I had seen something wrong, and I did something about it."

The bucket Janie Forsyth carried out of her father's grocery store is long gone now. The bus is a shell behind glass in a museum.

But the photograph is still there. And the road is still there.

And so is the patch of Alabama grass where a twelve-year-old white girl walked through a Klan mob on Mother's Day to bring water to seven Black and white strangers her own father had taught her to hate.

If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating

NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about the Freedom Rides and the violence faced by civil rights workers in 1961, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.