By Rosaland TylerAssociate EditorNew Journal and GuideSheer necessity pushed African Americans to organize the 1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade in New York City, due to the absence of laws that protected Blacks from lynchings and violence.According to The Equal Justice Initiative, More than 4,000 racial terror lynchings (occurred) in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. This is why an estimated 10,000 African Americans in 1917 silently marched down Fifth Avenue carrying banners in an effort to condemn widespread racist violence and racial discrimination.To resist racial violence, more than six million African Americans also migrated from the South to the North and West in fear for their lives, the Equal Justice Initiative website noted.Many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators (including elected officials and prominent citizens) for bumping into a white person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person, the Equal Justice Initiative website noted. People who participated in lynchings were celebrated and acted with impunity.Black Resistance—an organized pushback against racially-motivated hardships—is the 2023 theme for Black History Month.The prosthetic device that a Virginia Black inventor created for World War II amputees in the 1950's illustrates the theme.Specifically, a prosthetic is an artificial device that replaces a missing body part. Aiming to help World War II amputees feed themselves, Bessie Virginia Blount Griffin, who was born in 1914 in the Hickory community of Princess Anne County (now a part of the city of Chesapeake), invented a patented electrical motor that pushed food through a tube into an amputee's mouth. Griffin's device delivered one bite of food at a time through a tube.The catch was a World War II amputee with a missing arm or leg, had to intentionally bite down, in order to eat independently. This means each bite was released after the patient deliberately bit down on the tube.“You’re not crippled, only crippled in your mind,” Griffin often told amputees, who could not walk to the bathroom, pull a tee-shirt over their head, or raise a fork to their lips.The way Griffin's 1951-patented device compensated for an amputee's lack of limbs and allowed him to use his last remaining bodily functions (his lips and teeth) to secure food, in other words—Blacks began to deliberately respond to harsh Jim Crow laws.For example, four years after Griffin's prosthetic device was patented—Rosa Parks deliberately bit down. This means Parks' intentionally responded to the sense of helplessness that the Jim Crow system bred. Parks deliberately remained in her seat on a Jim Crow bus in Montgomery in 1955. Rosa Parks' resistance launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and fueled the Civil Rights Movement, which led to Barack Obama becoming president.Years later, Park's explained why she bit down. Elaborating on her refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger, Park
