Du Bois was a member of the three-person delegation from the NAACP that attended the 1945 conference in San Francisco at which the United Nations was established. The NAACP delegation wanted the United Nations to endorse racial equality and to bring an end to the colonial era. To push the United Nations in that direction, Du Bois drafted a proposal that pronounced "[t]he colonial system of government ... is undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars." The NAACP proposal received support from China, Russia and India, but it was virtually ignored by the other major powers, and the NAACP proposals were not included in the United Nations charter.
After the United Nations conference, Du Bois published Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, a book that attacked colonial empires and, in the words of one reviewer, "contains enough dynamite to blow up the whole vicious system whereby we have comforted our white souls and lined the pockets of generations of free-booting capitalists."
In late 1945, Du Bois attended the fifth, and final, Pan-African Congress, in Manchester, England. The congress was the most productive of the five congresses, and there Du Bois met Kwame Nkrumah, the future first president of Ghana who would later invite Du Bois to Africa.
Du Bois helped to submit petitions to the United Nations concerning discrimination against African Americans. These culminated in the report and petition called "We Charge Genocide", submitted in 1951 with the Civil Rights Congress. "We Charge Genocide" accuses the US of systematically sanctioning murders and inflicting harm against African Americans and therefore committing genocide.
_________________________________________________________________________________ Lillian Allen (b. April 5, 1951, Spanish Town, Jamaica), a Jamaican Canadian dub poet, reggae musician, writer and Juno award winner.
Born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, she left that country in 1969, first moving to New York City, where she studied English at the City University of New York. She lived for a time in Kitchener, Ontario, before settling in Toronto, where she continued her education at York University, earning a bachelor of arts degree. After meeting Oku Onuora in Cuba in 1978, she began working in dub poetry. She released her first recording, Dub Poet: The Poetry of Lillian Allen, in 1983.
Allen won the Juno Award for Best Reggae/Calypso Album for Revolutionary Tea Party in 1986 and Conditions Critical in 1988. Both albums were produced by Billy Bryans, the percussionist for Canadian dance-pop band Parachute Club.
In 1991, she collaborated on the one-off single "Can't Repress the Cause", a plea for greater inclusion of hip hop music in the Canadian music scene, with Dance Appeal, a supergroup of Toronto-area musicians that included Devon, Maestro Fresh Wes, Dream Warriors, B-Kool, Michie Mee, Eria Fachin, HDV, Dionne, Thando Hyman, Carla Marshall, Messenjah, Jillian Mendez, Lorraine Scott, Lorraine Segato, Self Defense, Leroy Sibbles, Zama and Thyron Lee White.
In 2006 Allen and her work were the subject of an episode of the television series Heart of a Poet, produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge. She is a Faculty of Liberal Studies Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, where she teaches creative writing. She recently held the distinction of being the first Canada Council Writer-in-Residence for Queen's University's Department of English. Allen also co-produced and co-directed Blak Wi Blakk, a documentary about the Jamaican dub poet Mutabaruka.
Oris Buckner, Detective Who Blew Whistle on Police Abuse, Dies at 70
The only Black man on the New Orleans homicide squad, he provided key testimony in one of the city’s most notorious civil rights cases.
Oris Buckner’s testimony led to the conviction of three New Orleans police officers. But his decision to break the department’s long-running code of silence derailed his career.Credit...via Buckner family
Oris Buckner, who as New Orleans’s only Black homicide detective in the early 1980s exposed one of the worst cases of police violence in the city’s history, leading to the conviction of three officers on civil rights charges, died on June 1 in Houston. He was 70.
His sister, Adrienne Jopes, confirmed his death, in a hospital. She said the cause was complications of leukemia and diabetes.
By the late 1970s, police officers in New Orleans were killing more civilians per capita than in any other city in America, even those with comparable crime rates — 7.7 people per 1,000 officers, or 9.5 times higher than it was in New York City, according to a study by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
The homicide division was especially notorious, not only for its violent record but also for its strict code of silence. Every killing by a police officer was labeled a “justifiable homicide,” with no questions asked.
Mr. Buckner joined the division in April 1980. A rising star in the department with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, he sought the assignment even though his father had died in New Orleans police custody decades before.
That November, the body of a young officer named Gregory Neupert was found in a ditch in Algiers, a predominantly Black neighborhood across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. Even though witnesses said that two white men had been seen running from the scene of Officer Neupert’s murder, the police flooded the Black sections of Algiers, kicking down doors and hauling in witnesses, including two young Black men, Robert Davis and Johnny Brownlee.
The police wanted them to identify a pair of Black men, James Billy Jr. and Reginald Miles, as the suspects, but they refused. Mr. Buckner, who was on duty that night, watched as police officers tied Mr. Davis to a chair with cloth bandages and beat him. They then placed a plastic bag over his head and held it tight so that he couldn’t breathe.
Before the interrogation started, another officer had taken Mr. Buckner aside and told him that the other detectives didn’t trust him. Not only was he Black, the officer said, but he had only yelled at witnesses; he never beat them. Now, the implication went, was his chance to prove himself.
And so, during the questioning, Mr. Buckner approached Mr. Davis, still seated, and slapped him hard across the face.
Mr. Buckner immediately felt remorse, even disgust, he later said, and when the other officers resumed beating Mr. Davis, he tried to stop them. They kicked him out of the room.
Leaving Mr. Buckner behind, the rest of the officers took Mr. Davis and Mr. Brownlee separately to a swampy area outside the city. They hung them over a bridge and fired shotgun blasts around their heads until both men agreed to identify Mr. Billy and Mr. Miles.
A few hours later, dozens of police officers descended on the homes of Mr. Billy and Mr. Miles. Mr. Buckner was assigned to stand in the back of Mr. Miles’s house, in case Mr. Miles or his pregnant girlfriend, Sherry Singleton, tried to run.
Mr. Buckner later testified that he heard officers burst into the home and immediately start shooting. He also heard Ms. Singleton running; she was naked and had gone to the bathroom to hide. One officer followed and shot her with a shotgun blast to the stomach and a pistol shot to the head, killing her.
The police also killed Mr. Miles, while the other squad killed Mr. Billy. Another Black man, Raymond Ferdinand, had been killed by police officers earlier that evening. Mr. Buckner never drew his weapon.
A few days later Morris Reed, an assistant district attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana and the head of its civil rights unit, got a call from a friend of his on the police force. Mr. Buckner wanted to testify.
In exchange for immunity, he broke the homicide division’s code of silence, telling prosecutors about everything — the interrogations, the beatings, the killings.
But despite Mr. Buckner’s testimony, a majority-white grand jury in Orleans Parish twice refused to hand up homicide indictments in the case, which was brought by District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., the father of the musician Harry Connick Jr.
It was, Mr. Reed said, simply unthinkable at the time for a white jury to indict white officers for killing Black people.
“In any other scenario they would have easily been indicted for murder,” he said in a phone interview. “But you’re talking about 1980 in the South.”
The city erupted in protest. The police chief, James Parsons, whom Mayor Ernest Morial had brought in to reform the department, resigned. Demonstrators occupied Mayor Morial’s office at City Hall.
In July 1981, a federal grand jury handed down indictments against seven officers for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Mr. Davis and Mr. Brownlee. Concern about a fair trial ran high: It was moved to Dallas, and a judge tried to block “60 Minutes” from airing a segment about the case before the proceedings began. (He failed.)
Mr. Buckner’s lengthy testimony was damning. Defense lawyers tried to paint him as unreliable, given his own participation in the beating, but jurors were sufficiently persuaded to convict three of the seven officers. Each received a five-year sentence, and each was fired from the department.
As a result of Mr. Buckner’s testimony, lawyers also brought a series of civil suits against 55 defendants, resulting in a $2.8 million settlement by the city in 1986, the largest in New Orleans at the time.
Mr. Buckner suffered for his decision to come forward. He was ostracized by his colleagues. He received death threats. He was demoted from homicide detective to traffic cop. Though he was finally promoted to sergeant in 1995, his career was effectively over.
“Despite an awareness of what it would mean for him personally,” it read, “in one of the most pivotal moments of his life, he honored his oath as a law enforcement officer to uphold the Constitution and as a witness to testify honestly, and for his actions, he and his family paid a heavy price.”
Oris Benny Buckner III was born on July 16, 1951, in New Orleans. His parents, Oris Buckner Jr. and Marguerite (Bush) Buckner, had divergent experiences with the law — his father died in police custody when Oris III was young, while his mother was the first Black woman on the New Orleans police force.
He received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Loyola University in New Orleans in 1978, and in 1991 he was ordained as a Baptist minister.
Along with his sister, he is survived by his wife, Stephanie Buckner; his son, Oris Buckner IV; his daughter, Amiya Lewis; his stepson, Ronnie Gilmore; his stepdaughters, Stephanie Powell and Tonette Vasquez; and several grandchildren. Another sister, the actress Carol Sutton, died in 2020. His daughter Angel Buckner died in 2010.
After Mr. Buckner and his wife lost their home in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, they moved to Houston. He retired from the New Orleans Police Department and later taught criminal justice at Lee College, a community college in nearby Baytown, Texas.
Mr. Buckner’s decision to come forward may have derailed his career, but it exposed the widespread corruption and abuse within the New Orleans police force, which helped pave the way for later civil rights cases and reforms, Mary Howell, a longtime civil rights lawyer in New Orleans, said in a phone interview.
“Oris had deep regret that he succumbed to hitting Robert Davis,” she said, “but didn’t regret telling the truth.”
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 _________________________________________________________________________________ Jean-ClaudeDuvalier, byname Baby Doc, French Bébé Doc (born July 3, 1951, Port-au-Prince, Haiti—died October 4, 2014, Port-au-Prince), president of Haiti from 1971 to 1986.
The only son of Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, Jean-Claude succeeded his father as president for life in April 1971, becoming at age 19 the youngest president in the world. Partly because of pressure from the United States to moderate the tyrannical and corrupt practices of his father’s regime, Duvalier instituted budgetary and judicial reforms, replaced a few older cabinet members with younger men, released some political prisoners, and eased press censorship, professing a policy of “gradual democratization of institutions.”
Nevertheless, no sharp changes from previous policies occurred. No political opposition was tolerated, and all important political officials and judges were still appointed by the president. Under Duvalier, Haiti continued a semi-isolationist approach to foreign relations, although the government actively solicited foreign aid to stimulate the economy.
Duvalier graduated from secondary school in Port-au-Prince and briefly attended law school at the University of Haiti. In 1980 he married Michèle Bennett, who later supplanted Duvalier’s hard-line mother, Simone, in Haitian politics. In the face of increasing social unrest, however, Duvalier and his wife left the country in February 1986, and a military council headed the country for several years. From 1986 Duvalier resided in France, despite the urging of Haitian authorities that he be extradited to stand trial for human rights abuses.
Duvalier returned to Haiti in January 2011, one year after the devastating 2010 earthquake. Two days later, Duvalier was taken into custody by authorities for questioning regarding alleged corruption and embezzlement during his rule; he was subsequently released. He remained in Haiti but refused several times to appear for hearings on human rights violations he was alleged to have committed while president. In late February 2013, Duvalier was taken before a pretrial hearing to face questioning on those charges.
Duvalier died in his home of a heart attack on October 4, 2014.
*****
Seif, Ahmed Ahmed Seif , also written as Ahmad Saif (el-Islam Hamad Abd el-Fattah) (January 9, 1951 - August 27, 2014), was an Egyptian journalist and human rights lawyer.
In the 1980s, Seif served a five-year prison sentence for activism. Afterwards, he was still several times imprisoned for political reasons, including during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. In 1999, he was one of the founders of the Hisham Mubarak Center for Law. In 2011, he was also leader of the political movement Kefaya.
Seif was the father of two prominent activists during the Egyptian Revolution, Mona Seif and Alaa Abd El Fattah. Seif married to Laila Soueif, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cairo.
Because of Seif's involvement in the socialist movement, he was arrested in 1983 and tortured by agents of the Egyptian security forces. For five years, he was in prison. After his release, Seif focused on the fight against torture in Egypt. In 1989, shortly after his release, he took on one of the most important human rights issues in the country itself. Because of his struggle against torture and injustice he grew over the years into a central figure in several successful Egyptian human rights cases.
In 1999, he was one of the founders of the Centre Hisham Mubarak for Law in Cairo, a center named for Hisham Mubarak, a lawyer who had focused on human rights and the granting of legal assistance to victims of violations of human rights laws.
Seif was one of the attorneys in the case against fifteen defendants after the bombing in Taba and other places in the Sinai in October 2004. Seif argued strongly against the wave of bombings while. on the other hand, arguing that the defendants in no way tortured of engaged in violations of human rights. Nevertheless, all fifteen defendants were convicted on the basis of confessions obtained during their torture.
Other high-profile cases with other lawyers were the Queen Boat case in 2001, in which 52 men were tried on the basis of their sexual orientation, and the defense of 49 textile workers because they had participated in protests on April 6, 2008 in Mahalla.
In 2006, Seif took on the defense of Karim Amer, the first blogger who was indicted for a crime because of his criticism, on the Internet, of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Islam. Amer was sentenced to four years imprisonment.
Seif died on August 27, 2014 at the age of 63 during open-heart surgery.
***** Oscar Stanton De Priest (March 9, 1871 – May 12, 1951) was an American lawmaker and civil rights advocate who served as a United States Representative from Illinois from 1929 to 1935. He was the first African American to be elected to Congress from outside the southern states and the first in the 20th century. De Priest was born in Florence, Alabama to former slaves. His mother worked part-time as a laundress, and his father, Alexander, was a teamster associated with the "Exodus" movement, which arose after the American Civil War to help blacks escape continued oppression in the South by moving to other states that offered greater freedom. In 1878, the De Priests left for Dayton, Ohio, after the elder De Priest had to save a friend who was a former Congressman from a lynch mob and another black man was killed on their doorstep. In Salina, Kansas, De Priest studied bookkeeping at the Salina Normal School.In 1889, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked as an apprentice plasterer, house painter, and decorator, and eventually became a successful contractor and real estate broker. He went on to build a fortune in the stock market and in real estate by helping black families move into formerly all-white neighborhoods. From 1904 to 1908, he was a member of the board of commissioners of Cook County, Illinois, and he then served on the Chicago City Council from 1915 to 1917 as alderman of the 2nd Ward, Chicago’s first black alderman. De Priest stepped down as alderman in 1917 after being indicted for alleged involvement with Chicago's South Side black mob, but was acquitted after hiring Clarence Darrow to defend him. In 1919, De Priest ran unsuccessfully for alderman as a member of the People's Movement Club, a political organization he founded. However, after a few years, De Priest's organization became the most powerful of Chicago's many black political organizations, and he became the top black politician under Chicago Republican mayor William Hale Thompson. In 1928, when Republican congressman Martin B. Madden died, Mayor Thompson selected De Priest to replace him on the ballot and he became the first African American elected to Congress in the 20th century, representing the 1st Congressional District of Illinois (the Loop and part of the South Side of Chicago) as a Republican. During his three consecutive terms (1929–1935) as the only black representative in Congress, De Priest introduced several anti-discrimination bills. His 1933 amendment barring discrimination in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A second bill, an anti-lynching bill, failed, even though it would not have made lynching a federal crime. A third proposal, a bill to permit a transfer of jurisdiction if a defendant believed he or she could not get a fair trial because of race or religion, was passed by a later Congress. Civil rights activists criticized De Priest for opposing federal aid to the poor, but they applauded him for speaking in the South despite death threats. They also praised De Priest for telling an Alabama senator he was not big enough to prevent him from dining in the Senate restaurant, and for defending the right of Howard University students to eat in the House restaurant. De Priest took the House restaurant issue to a special bipartisan House committee. In a three month-long heated debate, the Republican minority argued that the restaurant's discriminatory practice violated 14th Amendment rights to equal access. The Democratic majority skirted the issue by claiming that the restaurant was not open to the public, and the House restaurant remained segregated. In 1929, De Priest made national news when first lady Lou Hoover, at De Priest's urging, invited his wife, Jessie Williams De Priest, to a tea for congressional wives at the White House. De Priest also appointed Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., to the United States Military Academy at a time when the army had only one African-American line officer (Davis's father, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr.). By the early 1930s, De Priest's popularity waned because he continued to oppose higher taxes on the rich and fought Depression-era federal relief programs. De Priest was defeated in 1934 by Democrat Arthur W. Mitchell, who was also an African American. He was again elected to the Chicago City Council in 1943 as alderman of the 3rd Ward, and served until 1947. He died in Chicago at age 80 and is buried in Graceland Cemetery. Oscar married the former Jessie L. Williams (1873?-March 31, 1961). This union had two sons:
Laurence W. (1900? - July 28, 1916)
Oscar Stanton De Priest, Jr. (May 24, 1906-November 8, 1983)
His house in Chicago, on 45th and King Drive is a National Historic Landmark. Before Oscar DePriest, the Republican Representative from Chicago's First District, was sworn in on April 15, he was accused of election fraud and had difficulty in obtaining office space. The charges of fraud were unsupported and New York Representative Fiorello H. LaGuardia offered the office next to his to DePriest. DePriest was the first African American elected to Congress in the twentieth century, the first African American Congressperson since 1901 and the first African American to be elected to Congress from a Northern state.
Mrs. DePriest's attendance at the official White House Congressional tea became a national cause celebre. The Florida House of Representatives adopted a resolution condemning "certain social policies of the Administration in entertaining Negroes in the White House on a parity with white ladies." Senator Blease of South Carolina introduced a resolution to the effect that President and Mrs. Hoover should "remember that the house in which they are temporarily residing is the "White House," and that Virginia, Texas, Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina contributed to their becoming its custodians." After his election to Congress, DePriest was constantly in demand as a speaker. He did realize that he was not only a representative of voters from Illinois 1st Congressional District, but also a symbol for black people. He urged his many audiences to study political organization to learn their rights under the Federal Constitution, and to see campaign activity as a public duty. A native son of Florence, Alabama, DePriest's early interest in politics can be traced back to his father, Alexander DePriest, who knew and admired James T. Rapier, an African American who represented Alabama in Congress in the days of Reconstruction. The elder DePriest learned to study people and politics while a dray man; Oscar DePriest learned them through his successful career as a real estate entrepreneur. Through his long life he maintained a keen interest in politics and in the progress of blacks. His success in business and politics did not change him, he insisted to his dying day in 1951 that "I am of the common herd". _________________________________________________________________________________ Father Divine As Father Divine's health declined, he continued to petition for civil rights. In 1951, he advocated reparations to be paid to the descendants of slaves. He also argued in favor of integrated neighborhoods. However, he did not participate in the burgeoning American Civil Rights Movementbecause of his poor health and especially his dislike of the use of racial labels, denying he was black. *********************************************************************************** The Johnny Bright Incident occurred (October 20).
*Johnny Bright, a professional football player in the Canadian Football League and a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the National Football Foundation's College Football Hall of Fame, the Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Fame, the Edmonton Eskimos Wall of Honour, the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame, and the Des Moines Register's Iowa Sports Hall of Fame, was born Fort Wayne, Indiana (June 11).
Johnny D. Bright (b. June 11, 1930, Fort Wayne, Indiana – d. December 14, 1983, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) played college football at Drake University. In 1951, Bright was named a First Team College Football All-American, and was awarded the Nils V. "Swede" Nelson Sportsmanship Award. In 1969, Bright was named Drake University's greatest football player of all time. Bright is the only Drake football player to have his jersey number (No. 43) retired by the school. In February 2006, the football field at Drake Stadium, in Des Moines, Iowa, was named in his honor. In November 2006, Bright was voted one of the Canadian Football League's Top 50 players (No. 19) of the league's modern era by Canadian sports network TSN.
In addition to his outstanding professional and college football careers, Bright is perhaps best known for his role as the victim of an intentional, most likely racially motivated, on-field assault by an opposing college football player from Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University) on October 20, 1951, that was captured in a widely disseminated and Pulitzer Prize winning photo sequence, and eventually came to be known as the "Johnny Bright Incident".
Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on June 11, 1930, Bright was the second oldest of five brothers. Bright lived with his mother and step father Daniel Bates, brothers, Homer Bright, the eldest, Alfred, Milton, and Nate Bates, in a working class, predominantly African American neighborhood in Fort Wayne.
Bright was a three-sport (football, basketball, track and field) star at Fort Wayne's Central High School. Bright, who also was an accomplished softball pitcher and boxer, led Central High's football team to a City title in 1945, and helped the basketball team to two state tournament Final Four appearances.
Following his graduation from Central High in 1947, Bright initially accepted a football scholarship at Michigan State University, but, apparently unhappy with the direction of the Spartans football program, transferred to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he accepted a track and field scholarship that allowed him to try out for the football an basketball squads. Bright eventually lettered in football, track, and basketball, during his collegiate career at Drake..
Following a mandatory freshman redshirt year, Bright began his collegiate football career in 1949, rushing for 975 yards and throwing for another 975 to lead the nation in total offense during his sophomore year, as the Drake Bulldogs finished their season at 6–2–1. In Bright's junior year, the halfback/quarterback rushed for 1,232 yards and passed for 1,168 yards, setting an NCAA record for total offense (2,400 yards) in 1950, and again led the Bulldogs to a 6–2–1 record.
Bright's senior year began with great promise. Bright was considered a pre-season Heisman Trophy candidate, candidate, and was leading the nation in both rushing and total offense with 821 and 1,349 yards respectively, when the Drake Bulldogs, winners of their previous five games, faced Missouri Valley Conference foe Oklahoma A&M at Lewis Field (now Boone Pickens Stadium) in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on October 20, 1951.
Bright's participation as a halfback/quarterback in Drake's game against Oklahoma A&M on October 20, 1951, was controversial, as it marked the first time that such a prominent African American athlete, with national notoriety (Bright was a pre-season Heisman Trophy candidate and led the nation in total offense going into the game) and of critical importance to the success of his team (Drake was undefeated and carried a five-game winning streak into the contest, due in large part to his rushing and passing), had played against Oklahoma A&M in a home game at Lewis Field, in Stillwater.
During the first seven minutes of the game, Bright had been knocked unconscious three times by blows from Oklahoma A&M defensive tackle Wilbanks Smith. While the final elbow blow from Smith broke Bright's jaw, Bright was able to complete a 61-yard touchdown pass to halfback Jim Pilkington a few plays later before the injury finally forced Bright to leave the game. Bright finished the game with 75 yards (14 yards rushing and 61 yards passing), the first time he had finished a game with less than 100 yards in his three-year collegiate career at Drake. Oklahoma A&M eventually won the game 27-14.
A photographic sequence by Des Moines Register cameramen Don Ultang and John Robinson clearly showed that Smith's jaw breaking blow to Bright had occurred well after Bright had handed off the ball to fullback Gene Macomber, and that the blow was delivered well behind the play. Years later, Ultang said that he and Robinson were lucky to capture the incident when they did; they'd only planned to stay through the first quarter so they could get the film developed in time for the next day's edition.
It had been an open secret before the game that A&M was planning to target Bright. Even though A&M had integrated two years earlier, the Jim Crow spirit was still very much alive in Stillwater. Both Oklahoma A&M's student newspaper, The Daily O'Collegian, and the local newspaper, The News Press, reported that Bright was a marked man, and several A&M students were openly claiming that Bright "would not be around at the end of the game." Ultang and Robinson had actually set up their camera after rumors of Bright being targeted became too loud to ignore.
When it became apparent that neither Oklahoma A&M nor the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC) would take any disciplinary action against Smith, Drake withdrew from the MVC in protest and stayed out until 1956 (though it did not return for football until 1971). Fellow member Bradley University pulled out of the league as well in solidarity with Drake; while it returned for non-football sports in 1955, Bradley never played another down of football in the MVC (it dropped football in 1970).
The "Johnny Bright Incident", as it became widely known, eventually provoked changes in NCAA football rules regarding illegal blocking, and mandated the use of more protective helmets with face guards.
Recalling the incident without apparent bitterness in a 1980 Des Moines Register interview noted three years before Bright's death:
There's no way it couldn't have been racially motivated. Bright went on to add: What I like about the whole deal now, and what I'm smug enough to say, is that getting a broken jaw has somehow made college athletics better. It made the NCAA take a hard look and clean up some things that were bad.
Bright's jaw injury limited his effectiveness for the remainder of his senior season at Drake, but he finished his college career with 5,983 yards in total offense, averaging better than 236 yards per game in total offense, and scored 384 points in 25 games. As a senior, Bright earned 70 percent of the yards Drake gained and scored 70 percent of the Bulldogs' points, despite missing the better part of the final three games of the season.
Despite irrefutable evidence of the incident, Oklahoma A&M officials denied anything had happened. Indeed, Oklahoma A&M/State refused to make any further official comment on the incident for over half a century. This was the case even when Drake's former dean of men, Robert B. Kamm, became president of OSU in 1966. Years later, he said that the determination to gloss over the affair was so strong that he knew he could not even discuss it. Finally, on September 28, 2005, Oklahoma State President David J. Schmidly wrote a letter to Drake President David Maxwell formally apologizing for the incident, calling it "an ugly mark on Oklahoma State University and college football." The apology came twenty-two years after Bright's death.
In February 2006, the football field at Drake Stadium, in Des Moines, Iowa, was named in Bright's honor.
Following his final football season at Drake (1951), Bright was named a First Team College Football All-American and finished fifth in the balloting for the 1951 Heisman Trophy. Bright was also awarded the Nils V. "Swede" Nelson Sportsmanship Award, and played in both the post-season East-West Shrine Game and the Hula Bowl.
In 1969, Bright was named Drake University's greatest football player of all time. He is also the only Drake football player to have his jersey number (No. 43) retired by the school.
Bright was the first pick of the Philadelphia Eagles in the first round of the 1952 National Football League draft. Bright spurned the NFL, electing to play for the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovinciai Football Union (WIFU), the precursor to the West Division of the Canadian Football League. Bright later commented:
I would have been their (the Eagles') first Negro player. There was a tremendous influx of Southern players into the NFL at that time, and I didn't know what kind of treatment I could expect.
Bright joined the Calgary Stampeders as a fullback/linebacker in 1952, leading the Stampeders and the WIFU in rushing with 815 yards his rookie season. Bright played fullback/linebacker with the Stampeders for the 1952, 1953, and part of the 1954 seasons. In 1954, the Calgary Stampeders traded Bright to the Edmonton Eskimos in mid-season. Bright would enjoy the most success of his professional football career as a member of the Eskimos.
Though Bright played strictly defense as a linebacker in his first year with the Eskimos, he played both offense (as a fullback) and defense for two seasons (1955-1956), and played offense permanently after that (1957-1964). He, along with teammates Rollie Miles, Normie Kwong, and Jackie Parker, helped lead the Eskimos to successive Grey Cup titles in 1954, 1955, and 1956 (where Bright rushed for a then Grey Cup record of 171 yards in a 50–27 win over the Montreal Alouettes). In 1957, he rushed for eight consecutive 100-yard games, finishing the season with 1,679 yards. In 1958, he rushed for 1,722 yards. In 1959, following his third straight season as the Canadian pro rushing leader with 1,340 yards, Bright won the Canadian Football League's Most Outstanding Player Award, the first African American or African Canadian athlete to be so honored.
Bright was approached several times during his Canadian career by NFL teams about playing in the United States, but in the days before the blockbuster salaries of today's NFL players, it was common for CFL players such as Bright to hold regular jobs in addition to football, and he had already started a teaching career in 1957, the year he moved his family to Edmonton.
Bright retired in 1964 as the CFL's all-time leading rusher. Bright rushed for 10,909 yards in 13 seasons, had five consecutive 1,000 yard seasons, and led the CFL in rushing four times. While Bright, as of 2017, was 15th on the All-Pro Rushing list, his career average of 5.5 yards per carry is the highest among 10,000+ yard rushers (National Football League Hall of Famer Jim Brown is second at 5.2 yards per carry). At the time of his retirement, Bright had a then-CFL record thirty-six 100-plus-yard games, carrying the ball 200 or more times for five straight seasons. Bright led the CFL Western Conference in rushing four times, winning the Eddie James Memorial Trophy in the process, and was a CFL Western Conference All-Star five straight seasons from 1957 to 1961. Bright played in 197 consecutive CFL games as a fullback/linebacker. Bright's No. 24 jersey was added to the Edmonton Eskimos' Wall of Honour at the Eskimo's Commonwealth Stadium in 1983. Bright was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame on November 26, 1970. In November 2006, Bright was voted one of the CFL's Top 50 players (No. 19) for the league's modern era by Canadian sports network TSN.
Bright earned a Bachelor of Science degree in education at Drake University in 1952, becoming a teacher, coach, and school administrator, both during and after his professional football career, eventually rising to the seat of principal of D.S. Mackenzie Junior High School and Hillcrest Junior High School in Edmonton, Alberta. He became a Canadian citizen in 1962.
Bright died of a massive heart attack on December 14, 1983, at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, while undergoing elective surgery to correct a knee injury suffered during his football career. He was survived by his wife and four children.
Bright is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, in Edmonton.
In September 2010, Johnny Bright School, a kindergarten through grade 9 school, was named in Bright's honor, and opened in the Rutherford neighborhood of Edmonton. The school was officially opened on September 15 by representatives of the school district and Alberta Education Minister Dave Hancock, and included tributes from Bright's family, several dignitaries, and former colleagues of Bright from both his athletic and educational careers.
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