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Archive through March 07, 2004

The TVClubHouse: General Discussions ARCHIVES: 2004 Nov. - 2005 Jan.: Black History (ARCHIVES): Archive through March 07, 2004 users admin

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Essence
Member

01-12-2002

Monday, March 01, 2004 - 9:34 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
March 1:

1780 Pennsylvania becomes the first state to abolish slavery.

1841 Blanche Kelso Bruce, first Black to serve a full term in the United States Senate was born a slave in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

1864 Rebecca Lee graduates from the New England Female Medical College. She along with Rebecca Cole and Susan Mc Kinney is one of the first African American female physicians.

1867 Howard University, Washington DC, charted

1871 J. Milton Turner named minister to Liberia and became the first Black diplomat accredited to an African county. James W. Mason was named minister in March, 1870, but never traveled to his post.

1875 Civil Rights Bill enacted by Congress. Bill gave Blacks the right to equal treatment in inns, public conveyances, theaters and other places of public amusement. It will be overturned by the Supreme Court in 1883.

Zules
Member

08-21-2000

Monday, March 01, 2004 - 9:37 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
I've enjoyed this thread so much and gleaned much knowledge from it. Thanks for keeping it open, I'll continue to visit.

Ladytex
Member

09-27-2001

Monday, March 01, 2004 - 11:13 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Ed Dwight, Jr.
dwight
Ed Dwight, the first African American trained as an astronaut and the sculptor of major monuments, was born on the outskirts of Kansas City, Kansas, in 1933. His father, Ed Dwight, Sr., played second base for the Kansas City Monarchs in baseball's Negro League. Child rearing fell primarily on Dwight's Catholic mother, Georgia Baker Dwight, who convinced her son that he could accomplish almost anything. Dwight grew up an avid reader and talented artist who was mechanically gifted and enjoyed working with his hands.

Dwight joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953, pursuing his dream of flying jet aircraft. He became a test pilot, and in 1961 earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from Arizona State University. At the suggestion of the National Urban League's Whitney M. Young, Jr., the John F. Kennedy administration chose Dwight as the first black astronaut trainee in 1962. Catapulted to instant fame, he was featured on the covers of Ebony, Jet and Sepia, and in news magazines around the world.

Facing severe discrimination from other astronauts, Dwight persevered until Kennedy's death, when government officials created a threatening atmosphere. He resigned in 1966, never having gone into space. Dwight's talents then led him to work as an engineer, in real estate and for IBM. In the mid-1970s, he turned to art and studied at the University of Denver, learning to operate the university's metal casting foundry. He received an M.F.A. in 1977 and gained a reputation as a sculptor. Ed Dwight Studios in Denver is now one of the largest privately owned production and marketing facilities in the western United States. His engineering background helps him face the problems of creating mammoth sculpture and his well-stocked library of African American history and culture informs his work. Dwight is recognized as the innovator of the negative space technique.

Dwight has sculpted great works of celebratory African American art, including international monuments, the Underground Railroad in Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario; a Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial in Denver's City Park; a bust of George Washington Williams in the Ohio State Capitol in Columbus, Ohio; the Black Patriots Memorial on the mall in Washington, D.C.; the South Carolina Black History Memorial in Columbia, South Carolina; and the Alex Haley-Kunta Kinte Memorial in Annapolis, Maryland. The Quincy Jones Sculpture Park in Chicago brings his total major works to thirty-five, some of which are on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institute.

History Makers Bio

Ladytex
Member

09-27-2001

Monday, March 01, 2004 - 11:18 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Washington's black history marks slavery, freedom and beyond

DERRILL HOLLY
Canadian Press


WASHINGTON (AP) - About 60 per cent of Washington, D.C.'s 572,000 residents are black and their history in the area predates the 1791 creation of the federal district by Congress. That makes the U.S. capital rich in black heritage, from the colonial era to the antebellum and Civil War eras, to contemporary urban life.

"There was always a sizeable free black population in the District of Columbia," said James Horton, the Benjamin Banneker professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University.

Yet for decades after the capital was established, slave markets flourished in the area that is today the National Mall, particularly along what is now Independence Avenue.

Slaves and free blacks helped build the White House and U.S. Capitol as both labourers and craftsmen. Slaves and free blacks helped build the White House and U.S. Capitol as both labourers and craftsmen.

Although President George Washington personally took part in placing the south cornerstone for the future capital at a spot known as Jones Point, 13 kilometres north of his Mount Vernon estate, it was the surveyor Banneker who performed the calculations needed to position 39 other stones along a route measuring 16 kilometres on each side. Banneker was a well-known black inventor, mathematician and astronomer who had been born free.

"Washington was dedicated to having high quality craftsman and workmanship," said Stephanie Brown, a Mount Vernon spokeswoman. Many of the 316 slaves living at his estate at the time of his death were trained as coopers, millers, blacksmiths, carpenters and shoemakers and distillers.

Washington housed many slaves in the "House for Families," a communal quarters. Although the original building burned early in the 20th century, it has been reconstructed.

Neighbourhoods created by and for blacks in the capital, including shops, churches and homes, survive today. Some were sometimes intricately involved in surreptitious escape plots. The Georgetown section of Washington had several "safe houses" used by conductors on the Underground Railroad.

"It's really only on the black history tours that slavery is discussed in any detail," said LaNelle Daughtry, spokeswoman for the Guild of Professional Tour Guides of Washington, D.C.

According to Daughtry, a village established for runaway and freed slaves was located on the grounds of what is now Arlington National Cemetery. It once had a population of 30,000. Section 27 of the cemetery contains their graves, and those of the U.S. Coloured Troops, the Union Army's official designation for its black units during the Civil War.

Anderson Cottage, the summer retreat where President Lincoln spent about 25 per cent of his presidency, was declared one of America's Treasures at Risk in 2000. The 14-room home on the grounds of the Soldier's Home in Northwest Washington is where Lincoln wrote the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865.

The home where abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass lived during the last 18 years of his life is also a national historical site. The Victorian mansion sits on an three-hectare site overlooking the city from one of the highest points in the district east of the Anacostia River. Records indicate that Douglass did much of his civil rights work during Reconstruction in the home's small library.

"In that room, you will find the cane that Mary Todd Lincoln gave to Douglass after the death of President Lincoln," said Bill Clark, a spokesman for the National Park Service.

The Park Service also administers the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, where the National Council of Negro Women was founded. Bethune, who founded Florida's Bethune-Cookman College, was a confidante of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

The district is also home to the African American Civil War Memorial. The five-metre bronze statue features the images of black troops and sailors as well as so-called contraband slaves liberated by union forces during the war. Stainless steel plaques are inscribed with the names of 209,145 soldiers and 19,000 sailors who served with Union forces.

"Virtually every black family in the United States has a name on this wall," said Frank Smith, executive director of the African American Civil War Museum. The home of Carter G. Woodson, the educator considered the "father" of black history month, is undergoing preservation nearby.

Cultural Tourism D.C. has worked with the city government, the National Park Service and others to promote a local African American Heritage Trail.

"There are more than 60 museums off the National Mall that people seldom find," said Kathryn S. Smith, consulting historian on the project.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education decision. The 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring "separate but equal, inherently unequal," cleared the way for integration. During the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War, the Lincoln Memorial and surrounding National Mall were the rallying points for Americans fighting for social justice.

The Lincoln Memorial was the site of opera singer Marian Anderson's Easter concert, after she was barred from performing at DAR Constitution Hall.

"The steps of the Lincoln Memorial were just etched last year with the words from Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech," said Victoria Isley, spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C., Convention and Tourism Council.

At the Smithsonian's Anacostia Museum, the photo-essay "Crowns" includes 30 portrait-quality black-and-white photographs of black women. Although the subjects were homemakers, domestics, and others who did menial jobs, they used their day of worship to add fashion and flair to their lives.

"Sunday was a day that they could really get dressed up," said Michael Cunningham, the photographer who produced the work. Five of the hats, passed down from one generation to the next, are also included in the exhibit.

The Recorder of Deeds office features murals that depict eminent blacks including Douglass, Banneker, Revolutionary War patriot Crispus Attucks, North Pole explorer Matthew Henson, and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, a decorated Union Army unit that included Sgt. William H. Carney, the first black American to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor. The murals were painted during the Great Depression by artists employed in the New Deal's Works Progress Administration. Since 1881, when Frederick Douglass was appointed Recorder of Deeds, that position has been held almost exclusively by blacks.

At Lincoln Park, the Freedmen's Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln was financed with donations from freed slaves, primarily those who'd served in the Union Army. It depicts Lincoln cutting the chains of slave symbolizing his issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. The slave depicted in the work is believed to be Alexander Archer, the last man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Also at Lincoln Park is the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial, the first statue of a black woman erected in a public park in the nation's capital. Dedicated in 1974, it depicts Bethune surrounded by children, symbolizing her role as an educator.



Ladytex
Member

09-27-2001

Tuesday, March 02, 2004 - 9:08 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Black history lessons culminate with contest

By Eric Peterson Daily Herald Staff Writer
Posted Tuesday, March 02, 2004


Illinois Department of Public Health Director Eric Whitaker was humbled Monday to be named alongside such black pioneers as Booker T. Washington, Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman.

But Whitaker was proud as well, knowing that children need recent role models they can ask questions of, as well as historical legends to look up to.

Whitaker was a guest - and a correct answer - at Albert Einstein School's first annual Black History Quiz Bowl in Hanover Park.

As fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders competed on their knowledge of important African-American contributions to society, they imparted this knowledge to the even younger students watching.

The quiz bowl was Principal Sonya Whitaker's plan to spread knowledge and improve academic skills among her students by appealing to their love of competition.

"One of the goals I wanted to stress to the students I was meeting with was that you are somebody, regardless of the color of your skin, regardless of the language you speak, and you are loved," she said.

Einstein School lies in an especially diverse area of Schaumburg Township Elementary District 54. In fact, 21 different languages are spoken among the homes of its more than 500 students.

Sonya Whitaker - the sister-in-law of the health department director - said teachers told her the quiz bowl put students of varying achievement skills on the same level, boosting the confidence of some who'd previously struggled.

The competition rewarded students' familiarity with the facts of African-American history their principal had taught them during Black History Month in February.

The finals Monday afternoon - won by a pair of fifth-graders - obviously came down to speed on the buzzer, since all the finalists seemed equally knowledgeable of the subject. But because each question was read in its entirety, these savvy students were confident enough to buzz in as soon as they heard the first words.

Between rounds, students in the audience heard the Black National Anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing," listened to a recital of a Maya Angelou poem and cheered spontaneously to rare footage of Jesse Owens in the long-jump competition at the 1936 Olympics.

Afterward, students interviewed both of the event's special guests - Dr. Eric Whitaker and Pastor Keith Russell Lee of Destiny Church in Hoffman Estates - in their broadcast studio for live viewing in all classrooms.

What students most wanted to know was what each man was most proud of in his life, and how his education had helped him achieve it.

Dr. Whitaker advised students not to limit themselves at too early an age, but then to find a mentor to guide them in their chosen profession.

"It's a matter of having big dreams, finding someone who's doing what you want to do and then being prepared," he said. "You have to take all your (school) work now seriously, because you don't know what part of that you're going to use."

Lee told students how his education had helped him not only in writing books and sermons, but also in establishing a church in Hoffman Estates that had grown from a mere six people who met in his kitchen eight years ago to one with locations in India and South Africa as well.

The Hoffman Estates location alone is the organization with the highest concentration of African-American membership in the Northwest suburbs.

Lee also advised students to let their interests in their schoolwork guide them toward their career path.

"The things that you really enjoy doing are the things that you should look at," he said.




Ladytex
Member

09-27-2001

Tuesday, March 02, 2004 - 9:23 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Lorraine Hansberry
hansberry
(b. May 19, 1930, Chicago, Ill., U.S.--d. Jan. 12, 1965, New York, N.Y.), American playwright whose Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. This play also won the Best Play Award from the New York Drama Critic's Circle. Only 29 years old at the time, Hansberry was the youngest American, and the first black playwright, to win this prestigious award.

Hansberry's father, a prosperous real-estate broker, fought a lengthy legal battle in the late 1930s against restrictive covenants that kept Chicago's black inhabitants in ghettos. As part of this struggle the Hansberry family moved into a white neighbourhood, where Lorraine met daily hostility in her walks to and from school. Although her father took the case to the Supreme Court and won, he became disillusioned with the prospects for black equality in the United States and moved to Mexico.

Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin for two years and then studied painting in Chicago and Mexico, before she decided she had no talent for it. Moving to New York in 1950, she held a number of jobs, meanwhile perfecting her skill as a writer.

Raisin in the Sun, a penetrating psychological study of the personalities and emotional conflicts within a working-class black family in Chicago, was directed by actor Lloyd Richards, the first black to direct a play on Broadway since 1907. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the film version of 1961 received a special award at the Cannes Festival. Her next play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, a drama of political questioning and affirmation set in Greenwich Village, where she had long made her home, had only a modest run on Broadway in 1964. Her promising career was cut short by her early death from cancer.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black, adapted by Robert Nemiroff from her writings, was produced Off-Broadway in 1969 and published in book form in 1970.

EB Biography

Audio Exerpts from Lorraine Hansberry's play To Be Young, Gifted, and Black

Essence
Member

01-12-2002

Tuesday, March 02, 2004 - 9:43 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
March 1:

1807 Congress banned the slave trade, prohibiting "the importation of slaves into the United States or the territories thereof" after January 1, 1808.

1867 Blacks voted in municipal election in Alexandria, Va., for perhaps the first time in the South. The election commissioners refused to count the fourteen hundred votes and military officials suspended local elections pending clarification of the status of the freedmen.

1962 On this day in 1962, "Wilt the Stilt" Chamberlain scored 100 points in a single basketball game-a professional record that still
stands today. He sunk 36 field goals and 28 foul shots.

1972 Dr. Jerome H. Holland was elected to the board of directors of the New York Sock Exchange on this day.

1980 Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns wins the vacant USBA Welterweight title. This is one of five weight classes that he has won a boxing title making him the first Black to win boxing titles in five different weight classes.

Essence
Member

01-12-2002

Tuesday, March 02, 2004 - 9:56 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Alice Walker

awalkerAlice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. Her mother, Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker, and her father, Willie Lee Walker, were poor sharecroppers. As the eighth and youngest child in the family, she grew up in the midst of violent racism, which combined with her family's poverty left a permanent impression on her writing.

In the summer of 1952 Alice Walker was blinded in her right eye by a BB gun pellet while playing "cowboys and Indians" with her brothers. She was left with permanent damage in her eye and remained facially disfigured. At age 14, her brother Bill had the "cataract" removed for her by a doctor in Boston, but her vision never returned in that eye.

After graduating high school in 1961 as the school's valedictorian and prom queen, Alice entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia on a scholarship. While at Spelman she participated in civil rights demonstrations and was subsequently invited to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s home in 1962 at the end of her freshman year. The invitation was in recognition of her invitation to attend the Youth World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. She attended the conference and then traveled throughout Europe for the summer. In August of 1963 Alice went to Washington D.C. to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While there she was able to hear Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" address.

After two years at Spelman, Alice received a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she became one of very few young blacks to attend the prestigious school. Sarah Lawrence gave Walker the chance to receive mentoring from the poet Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane Cooper. Together they helped to stimulate her interest and talent in writing, and inspired her to write poems that eventually appeared in Once (1968).

Unfortunately, by senior year Alice Walker was suffering from extreme depression, likely due to the fact that she got pregnant. She considered committing suicide and at times kept a razor blade under her pillow. She also wrote several volumes of poetry in an effort to explain her feelings. She was able to have a safe abortion with a classmate's help, not the easiest procedure at the time. While recovering, Walker wrote a short story aptly titled "To Hell With Dying." Her mentor Muriel Ruykeyser sent the story to publishers as well as to the poet Langston Hughes. The story was published and Walker received a hand-written note of encouragement from Hughes.

Always an activist, she participated in the civil rights movement following her graduation in 1965. She first went door-to-door in Georgia and encouraged voter registration, but quickly moved to New York City and worked in the city's welfare department. While there she won a writing fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.

In the summer of 1966 she returned to Mississippi where she met a Jewish civil rights law student named Mel Leventhal. They soon married and moved back to Mississippi. The couple had to deal with threats of violence due to the inter-racial nature of their marriage and the fact that Leventhal practiced on behalf of the NAACP. Alice again got pregnant (which saved Leventhal from the Vietnam draft) but sadly lost the child.

Even while pursuing civil rights, Alice found time to write. She wrote an essay titled "The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?," which won her a first place in the American Scholar magazine annual essay contest. Encouraged by this, she applied for and won a writing fellowship to the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. She subsequently accepted a teaching position at Jackson State University and while there she published her first volume of poetry, "Once." Her first novel, "The Third Life of Grange Copeland," was published the same week her daughter Rebecca Grant was born. The novel received both literary praise and criticism, with many African-American critics claiming that Walker dealt too harshly with the black male characters in her book. Walker disputed such claims, but her writing would continue to dramatize the oppression of woman thereafter.

Alice Walker's career took off as she quickly moved from a position at Tougaloo College to a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute. In 1972 she accepted a teaching position at Wellesley College, where she created one of the first women's studies courses in the nation, a women's literature course. In 1976 she published her second novel, Meridian, a story that chronicled a young woman's struggle during the civil rights movement. On a personal level, she divorced Leventhal in the mid-70s.

Meridian received such acclaim that Walker accepted a Guggeheim Fellowship to concentrate full-time on her writing. She moved to San Francisco, and while in California she fell in love with Robert Allen, the editor of Black Scholar. They moved to a home in Mendocino where she began to write full time. Walker published her second book of short stories, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down.

In 1982 she finished The Color Purple, an epistolary novel about the life of a poor black woman named Celie. This book, easily her most popular novel, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and the American Book Award. Critics again accused her of portraying black men too harshly. The Color Purple was soon made into a motion picture, produced by Quincy Jones and directed by Steven Spielberg. When the movie The Color Purple premiered in her hometown of Eatonton, Walker received a parade in her honor. Her sister Ruth even created "The Color Purple Foundation" to promote charitable work for education.

In 1984 Walker published her third volume of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. In 1988 her second book of essays, Living By the Word was published, and in 1989 she published her epic novel The Temple of My Familiar. Alice continued publishing, including: Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems and Possessing the Secret of Joy.

A later novel, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, dealt with her budding realization that she might be bi-sexual. Alice Walker soon became more politically active in her writings; her non-fiction book Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism contained many essays inspired by her political activism. This included activities in the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement, and the movement to protect indigenous people.

After a six year interlude, in September of 1998 Walker published By the Light of My Father's Smile which examined the connections between sexuality and spirituality. The story is a multi-narrated account of several generations and explores the relationships of fathers and daughters.

A remarkable feature of Alice Walker's writing is the way it draws on elements of her life and incorporates them flawlessly into her novels. Her disfigurement can be seen in The Color Purple via the character of Celie, who suffers from a lack of beauty yet still manages to grow stronger in spite of that. On Alice's mother's side, her great-grandmother Talluhah was mostly Cherokee Indian. This connection emerges in The Color Purple as well, in the form of Corrine, who is of Cherokee decent.

About Alice Walker

Essence
Member

01-12-2002

Wednesday, March 03, 2004 - 7:41 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
March 3:

1865 Congress chartered Freedmen's Savings and Trust Bank with business confined to Blacks.

1869 The 38th and 41st Infantry regiments were joined and became the 24th Infantry Regiment, the third of four proposed African American regiments in the U.S. Army.

1886 Robert F. Flemming, Jr. patents a guitar.

1968 A memorandum sent to field offices of the FBI set goals for what was termed as a new "counterintelligence program" against African American Nationalist groups. The objective was to block attempts by targeted groups to coalesce, grow and exist.

1991 Rodney King is beaten by a group of white policemen in Los Angeles, Calif

Essence
Member

01-12-2002

Wednesday, March 03, 2004 - 7:53 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Richard "Dick" Gregory

gregory

African American comedian and civil rights activist whose social satire changed the way white Americans perceived African American comedians since he first performed in public.

Dick Gregory entered the national comedy scene in 1961 when Chicago’s Playboy Club (as a direct request from publisher Hugh Hefner) booked him as a replacement for white comedian, “Professor” Irwin Corey. Until then Gregory had worked mostly at small clubs with predominantly black audiences (he met his wife, Lillian Smith, at one such club). Such clubs paid comedians an average of five dollars per night; thus Gregory also held a day job as a postal employee. His tenure as a replacement for Corey was so successful — at one performance he won over an audience that included southern white convention goers — that the Playboy Club offered him a contract extension from several weeks to three years. By 1962 Gregory had become a nationally known headline performer, selling out nightclubs, making numerous national television appearances, and recording popular comedy albums.

It’s important to note that no biography of Gregory would be complete without mentioning that he and his beloved wife, Lil, had ten kids who have become highly respected members of the national community in a variety of fields. They are: Michele, Lynne, Pamela, Paula, Stephanie (aka Xenobia), Gregory, Christian, Miss, Ayanna and Yohance. The Gregory’s had one child who died at birth but they have shared 42 years of historic moments, selfless dedication and tremendous personal love.

Gregory began performing comedy in the mid-1950s while serving in the army.
(See Blacks in the Military). Drafted in 1954 while attending Southern Illinois University at Carbondale on a track scholarship, Gregory briefly returned to the university after his discharge in 1956, but left without a degree because he felt that the university “didn't want me to study, they wanted me to run.” In the hopes of performing comedy professionally, he moved to Chicago, where he became part of a new generation of black comedians that included Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, and Godfrey Cambridge. These comedians broke with the minstrel tradition, which presented stereotypical black characters. Gregory, whose style was detached, ironic, and satirical, came to be called the “Black Mort Sahl” after the popular white social satirist. Friends of Gregory have always referred to Mort Sahl as the “White Dick Gregory.” Gregory drew on current events, especially the racial issues, for much of his material: ”Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt? “

From an early age, Gregory demonstrated a strong sense of social justice. While a student at Sumner High School in St. Louis he led a March protesting Segregated schools. Later, inspired by the work of leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Gregory took part in the Civil Rights Movement and used his celebrity status to draw attention to such issues as segregation and disfranchisement. When local Mississippi governments stopped distributing Federal food surpluses to poor blacks in areas where SNCC was encouraging voter registration, Gregory chartered a plane to bring in several tons of food. He participated in SNCC's voter registration drives and in sit-ins to protest segregation, most notably at a restaurant franchise in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Only later did Gregory disclose that he held stock in the chain.

Gregory’s autobiography, Nigger, was published in 1963 prior to The assassination of President Kennedy, and became the number one best-selling book in America. Over the decades it has sold in excess of seven million copies. His choice for the title was explained in the forward, where Dick Gregory wrote a note to his mother. “Whenever you hear the word ‘Nigger’,” he said, “you’ll know their advertising my book.”

Through the 1960s, Gregory spent more time on social issues and less time on performing. He participated in marches and parades to support a range of causes, including opposition to the Vietnam War, world hunger, and drug abuse. In addition, Gregory fasted in protest more than 60 times, once in Iran, where he fasted and prayed in an effort to urge the Ayatollah Khomeini to release American embassy staff who had been taken hostage. The Iranian refusal to release the hostages did not decrease the depth of Gregory's commitment; he weighed only 97 lbs when he left Iran.

Gregory demonstrated his commitment to confronting the entrenched political powers by opposing Richard J. Daley in Chicago's 1966 mayoral election. He ran for president in 1968 as a write-in candidate for the Freedom and Peace Party, a splinter group of the Peace and Freedom Party and received 1.5 million votes. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey lost the election to Republican Richard Nixon by 510,000 votes, and many believe Humphrey would have won had Gregory not run. After the assassinations of King, President John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, Gregory became increasingly convinced of the existence of political conspiracies. Gregory wrote books such as Code Name Zorro: The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr. (1971) with Mark Lane, world famous author, attorney and documentary filmmaker, whose findings published in the best-selling 1966 book Rush To Judgment Gregory credited with reversing the nation’s opinion on who assassinated the president and the facts which contradicted the official government version contained in the Warren Report. Lane’s book contained answers and facts, which Gregory has espoused in Numerous lectures from then until now. Lane and Gregory have been best friends, co-authors and have lectured together for over 40 years and both livein Washington D.C. Gregory and Lane’s book on the assassination of Dr. King was recently released under another title, Murder In Memphis, as a trade paperback.

Gregory's activism continued into the 1990s. In response to published allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had supplied cocaine to predominantly African American areas in Los Angeles, thus spurring the crack epidemic, Gregory protested at CIA headquarters and was arrested. In 1992 he began a program called “Campaign for Human Dignity” to fight crime in St. Louis neighborhoods.

In 1973, the year he released his comedy album Caught in the Act, Gregory moved with his family to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he developed an interest in vegetarianism and became a nutritional consultant. In 1984 he founded Health Enterprises, Inc., a company that distributed weight loss products. In 1987 Gregory introduced the Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet, a powdered diet mix, which was immensely profitable. Economic losses caused in part by conflicts with his business partners led to his eviction from his home in 1992. Gregory remained active, however, and in 1996 returned to the stage in his critically acclaimed one-man show, Dick Gregory Live! The reviews of Gregory’s show compared him to the greatest stand-ups in the history ofBroadway.

In 1998 Gregory spoke at the celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Clinton were in attendance. Not long after that, the President told Gregory’s long-time friend and PR. Consultant, Steve Jaffe, “I love Dick Gregory, he is one of the funniest people on the planet.” They spoke of how Gregory had made a comment on Dr. King’s birthday that broke everyone into laughter, when he noted that the President made Speaker Newt Gingrich ride “in the back of the plane,” on an Air Force One trip overseas. In 2001, Gregory announced to the world that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of Cancer. He refused traditional medical treatment – chemotherapy –and with the assistance of some of the finest minds in alternative medicine, put together a regimen of a variety of diet, vitamins, exercise, and modern devices not even known to the public, which ultimately resulted in his reversing the trend of the Cancer to the point where today he is nearly 85% free of it, and getting better every day.

Gregory’s going public with his diagnosis has helped millions of his fans around the world to understand what Cancer specialists have been trying to explain for decades, which is that “Cancer is curable.” Gregory was honored recently at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., by a sold out house and a tribute hosted by Bill Cosby, with special tributes by Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr., Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes, Cicely Tyson, Mark Lane, Marion Barry and many more.

Gregory’s friend, Ted Terry, initiated his first website, in the year 1998, http://www.dickgregory.com, which has now been redesigned and updated to include many of Gregory’s books and record albums, CDs, and other information for those who want interact with the incomparable Dick Gregory. His most recent book, Callus On My Soul, (Longstreet Press, Atlanta, Ga.) which became a best-seller within weeks of publication, is an autobiography that updates his earlier autobiography (Nigger), because as Dick says, “I’ve lived long enough to need two autobiographies which is fine with me. I’m looking forward to writing the third and fourth volumes as well.”

In 2001, Gregory escaped death once again when a massive tree fell on his car in a storm in Washington D.C. crushing it completely, causing him to have to be extricated from the car by emergency crews. One witness said, “I knew the driver and his passengers had died when I saw the tree fall.” Gregory said, "I knew that God had more work for me to do when I saw the tree falling. " He saved his own life by driving into the oncoming lanes of traffic. The word of the accident circulated the globe immediately in the media, underscoring the power, influence, and support that Gregory has earned from people of all nations.

Doctor’s at George Washington Hospital refused to release Gregory for a few days causing his first-ever “State of the Union Address” to African Americans to be delayed by a month. Gregory gave the first “State of The Union” address live on the Internet from Los Angeles on April 21st. Now the Internet address is the latest offering on a 3 CD set. Dick Gregory 21st Century “State Of The Union”

biography

Ladytex
Member

09-27-2001

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Zora Neale Hurston
zora

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), folklorist and novelist, was best known for her collection of African American folklore Mules and Men (1935) and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which she charted a young African American woman's journey for personal fulfillment.

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, to Reverend John and Lucy Hurston. Zora's mother died when she was nine years old, and her father soon remarried. Her relationship with her stepmother rapidly deteriorated, and her father sent her to school in Jacksonville. In her early teens she became a wardrobe girl in a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company touring the South. Eighteen months later she enrolled in Morgan Academy in Baltimore in 1917. She graduated a year later and went to Howard University, where she completed a year and a half of course work between 1919 and 1924. She secured a scholarship which allowed her to transfer to Barnard College, where she earned her B.A. in 1928. From 1928 to 1932 she studied anthropology and folklore at Columbia University under Franz Boas, the renown anthropologist. In 1936 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for traveling and collecting folklore in Haiti and the British West Indies.

Hurston worked at a variety of jobs, from manicurist, to Fannie Hurst's secretary, to writer for Paramount and Warner Brothers Studios, to librarian at the Library of Congress, to drama coach at North Carolina College for Negroes. Hurston began her writing career while at Howard when she wrote her first short story for Stylus, a college literary magazine. She continued to write stories, and in 1925 won first prize in the Opportunity literary contest for "Spunk." In 1939 Morgan College awarded her an honorary doctorate. In 1943 she received the Annisfield Award for the autobiographical Dust Tracks on the Road; also in 1943 Howard University bestowed its alumni award upon her.

Although Hurston worked all of her life at many jobs and was a prolific writer, money was always a serious problem. In the late 1940s she returned to Florida and worked as a maid in Riva Alto. After several efforts to rekindle her writing career, she died in poverty in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Hurston's most famous work is her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which she created the portrait of an African American female, Janie, growing into adulthood searching for her identity and fulfillment. Through a series of marriages Janie comes to know and define herself in terms of her relationship with whites. For several years after the novel's publication critics saw this work as a sentimental love story. However, if the novel is read with the understanding that love was the traditional way in which a woman was supposed to find fulfillment, then love can be seen as the vehicle for emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development. The novel also portrays the awakening of a woman's sexuality. With the advent of the women's movement of the 1970s and the subsequent growth of female awareness, many critics cited this novel as the central text in the canon of literature by African American women writers, specifically, and by women writers in general.

Hurston was also a famous folklorist who applied her academic training to collecting African American folklore around her hometown in Florida. This work produced two collections of folklore, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1939). All of her work is characterized by her use of African American folk idioms, which are intrinsic to her character portrayals.

Hurston wrote three other novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), an autobiographical novel about her father's rise from an illiterate laborer to become a respected Baptist minister; Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), which recreated Mosaic biblical myth in an African context; and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), which is about a woman's search for selfhood within the confines of marriage to a man who sees all women as inferior.

Hurston also wrote several plays: Fast and Furious (1931), The First One (1927), Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts (1931), and Polk County (1944), as well as many articles and short stories.

Biography

About writing she wrote:
Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
Another bio can be found here.

The movie rights to her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, were bought by Oprah Winfrey. You can read chapter one of this novel here.

Tishala
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08-01-2000

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I love Zora.

Ladytex
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09-27-2001

Thursday, March 04, 2004 - 10:37 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Alain Locke
locke

Alain LeRoy Locke was born on Sept. 13, 1886, in Philadelphia PA. He was an American educator, writer, and philosopher, who is best remembered as a leader and chief interpreter of the Harlem Renaissance.

He graduated from Harvard University (1907) with a degree in philosophy. Locke was the first black Rhodes scholar, studying at Oxford (1907-10) and the University of Berlin (1910-11). He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard (1918). For almost 40 years, until retirement in 1953 as head of the department of philosophy, Locke taught at Howard University, Washington, D.C. Locke became one of the leading members of the Howard faculty as well as a major inspiration to the student body and the growing national African American self-awareness movement of the 1920s. In 1924, he took a sabbatical leave to work with the French Oriental Archaeological Society in Egypt and the Sudan. His experiences there, including his presence at the reopening of Tutankhamen's tomb, reinforced his belief in the strong historic and cultural roots of African civilization. Lecturing widely upon his return to the United States, Locke stressed the contribution of Africans to Egypt's multiracial society, the world's first advanced civilization, a contribution not widely acknowledged by white scholars. As he neared retirement, Locke reviewed his long career at Howard, proud of his success in using philosophy to stimulate critical thinking among his students, helping to create an African American intellectual elite, and his hard work in transforming a small segregated college into the nation's leading African American educational center. His final achievement was to secure a Phi Beta Kappa chapter at the school in 1953, a major milestone in the history of African American education.

Locke stimulated and guided artistic activities and promoted the recognition and respect of blacks by the total American community. Having studied African culture and traced its influences upon Western civilization, he urged black painters, sculptors, and musicians to look to African sources for identity and to discover materials and techniques for their work. He encouraged black authors to seek subjects in black life and to set high artistic standards for themselves. He familiarized American readers with the Harlem Renaissance by editing a special Harlem issue for Survey Graphic (March 1925), which he expanded into The New Negro (1925), an anthology of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays.

Locke edited the Bronze Booklet studies of cultural achievements by blacks. For almost two decades he annually reviewed literature by and about blacks in Opportunity and Phylon, and from 1940 until his death he regularly wrote about blacks for the Britannica Book of the Year. His many works include Four Negro Poets (1927), Frederick Douglass, a Biography of Anti-Slavery (1935), Negro Art--Past and Present (1936), and The Negro and His Music (1936). He left unfinished materials for a definitive study of the contributions of blacks to American culture. His materials formed the basis for M.J. Butcher's The Negro in American Culture (1956).

A humanist who was intensely concerned with aesthetics, Locke termed his philosophy "cultural pluralism" and emphasized the necessity of determining values to guide human conduct and interrelationships. Chief among these values was respect for the uniqueness of each personality, which can develop fully and remain unique only within a democratic ethos. Alain Locke passed away on June 9, 1954, in New York City.

Biography

Africa Within Biographical Essay


Ladytex
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09-27-2001

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.

Essence
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01-12-2002

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March 4:

1837 Weekly Advocate changed its name to the Colored American, the second major Black newspaper.

1869 Forty-second Congress convened with five Black congressmen: Joseph H. Rainey, Robert Carlos Delarge and Robert Brown Elliott,South Carolina; Benjamin S. Turner, Alabama; Josiah T. Walls, Florida. Walls was elected in an at-large election and was the first Black congressman to represent an entire state.

1890 The Black town of Langston, Oklahoma founded. Langston was established by African-Americans Edwin and Sarah McCabe. In their beginning with a population of 600, they envisioned an all-Black city in Oklahoma Territory. Some of the facilities included the Colored Agriculture and Normal School in 1897 that became Langston University, the only Historically Black College in the state.

1921 Black Swan Records was created, the first Black owned record label in America.

1954 President Eisenhower named J. Earnest Wilkins of Chicago assistant secretary of labor.

1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. announced plans for Poor People's Campaign in Washington. He said he would lead a massive civil disobedience campaign in the capital to pressure the government to provide jobs and income for all Americans. He told a press conference that an army of poor white, poor Blacks and Hispanics would converge on Washington on April 20 and would demonstrate until their demands were met.

Essence
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01-12-2002

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Garrett A Morgan

gam

Garrett Augustus Morgan, was an African-American businessman and inventor whose curiosity and innovation led to the development of many useful and helpful products. A practical man of humble beginnings, Morgan devoted his life to creating things that made the lives of other people safer and more convenient.

Among his inventions was an early traffic signal, that greatly improved safety on America's streets and roadways. Indeed, Morgan's technology was the basis for modern traffic signal systems and was an early example of what we know today as Intelligent Transportation Systems.

The Inventor's Early Life. The son of former slaves, Garrett A. Morgan was born in Paris, Kentucky on March 4, 1877. His early childhood was spent attending school and working on the family farm with his brothers and sisters. While still a teenager, he left Kentucky and moved north to Cincinnati, Ohio in search of opportunity.

Although Morgan's formal education never took him beyond elementary school, he hired a tutor while living in Cincinnati and continued his studies in English grammar.

In 1895, Morgan moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he went to work as a sewing machine repair man for a clothing manufacturer. News of his proficiency for fixing things and experimenting traveled fast and led to numerous job offers from various manufacturing firms in the Cleveland area.

In 1907, Morgan opened his own sewing equipment and repair shop. It was the first of several businesses he would establish. In 1909, he expanded the enterprise to include a tailoring shop that employed 32 employees. The new company turned out coats, suits and dresses, all sewn with equipment that Morgan himself had made.

In 1920 Morgan moved into the newspaper business when he established the Cleveland Call. As the years went on, he became a prosperous and widely respected business man, and he was able to purchase a home and an automobile. Indeed it was Morgan's experience while driving along the streets of Cleveland that led to the invention of the nation's first patented traffic signal.

The Garrett Morgan Traffic Signal. The first American- made automobiles were introduced to U.S. consumers shortly before the turn of the century. The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903 and with it American consumers began to discover the adventures of the open road.

In the early years of the 20th century, it was not uncommon for bicycles, animal-powered wagons and new gasoline-powered motor vehicles to share the same streets and roadways with pedestrians. Accidents were frequent. After witnessing a collision between an automobile and a horse-drawn carriage, Morgan was convinced that something should be done to improve traffic safety.

While other inventors are reported to have experimented with and even marketed traffic signals, Garrett A. Morgan was the first to apply for and acquire a U.S. patent for such a device. The patent was granted on November 20, 1923. Morgan later had the technology patented in Great Britain and Canada as well.

The Morgan traffic signal was a T-shaped pole unit that featured three positions: Stop, Go and an all-directional stop position. This “third position” halted traffic in all directions to allow pedestrians to cross streets more safely.

Morgan's traffic management device was used throughout North America until it was replaced by the red, yellow and green-light traffic signals currently used around the world. The inventor sold the rights to his traffic signal to the General Electric Corporation for $40,000. Shortly before his death, in 1963, Morgan was awarded a citation for his traffic signal by the United States Government.

Other Morgan Inventions. Garrett Morgan was constantly experimenting to develop new concepts. Though the traffic signal came at the height of his career and became one of his most renowned inventions, it was just one of several innovations he developed, manufactured and sold over the years.

Morgan invented a zig-zag stitching attachment for manually operated sewing machine. He also founded a company that made personal grooming products, such as hair dying ointments and the curved-tooth pressing comb.

Another Significant Contribution to Public Safety. On July 25, 1916, Morgan made national news for using a gas mask he had invented to rescue several men trapped during an explosion in an underground tunnel beneath Lake Erie. After the rescue, Morgan's company received requests from fire departments around the country who wished to purchase the new masks. The Morgan gas mask was later refined for use by U.S. Army during World War I. In 1921, Morgan was awarded a patent for a Safety Hood and Smoke Protector. Two years later, a refined model of his early gas mask won a gold medal at the International Exposition of Sanitation and Safety, and another gold medal from the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

As word of Morgan’s life-saving inventions spread across North America and England, demand for these products grew. He was frequently invited to conventions and public exhibitions to demonstrate how his inventions worked.

Garrett A. Morgan died on August 27, 1963, at the age of 86. His life was long and full, and his creative energies have given us a marvelous and lasting legacy.

Garrett A Morgan

Ladytex
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09-27-2001

Friday, March 05, 2004 - 8:53 am   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Critical Noir: Ms. Phyllis Hyman
hyman
The pressures that led Hyman to take her life in 1995 still exist for women in the music industry, but continue to be most ignored.

By Mark Anthony Neal

she's more important than her music — if they must be separated —
and they should be separated when she has to pass out before
anyone recognizes she needs
a rest and i say i need
aretha's music
— Nikki Giovanni.

When Nikki Giovanni wrote Poem for Aretha it was as much a cautionary tale as a celebration of Aretha Franklin's groundbreaking talents. She wrote it during what was arguably the height of Franklin's popularity — a moment that established her as the most popular black female entertainer ever. And it was that immense popularity that most concerned Giovanni, as she wondered aloud whether or not Franklin would ultimately visit the same fate as so many other black women entertainers before her. Names like Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Esther Phillips (who was no doubt dying a slow death when Giovanni's poem was first published) are more than footnotes to black musical genius; they are constant reminders of the travails and dangers that black women face in an industry that seemingly cares little for them and has always seemed to place more value in their sexuality than their talent. One can only wonder if Phyllis Hyman had ever read Giovanni's poem before she took her own life in June of 1995. Though Hyman never achieved the popular success Franklin did, she still stands as a diva among divas.

Born in Philadelphia and raised in Pittsburgh, as a teen Hyman didn't think herself much a singer. As she told Jacquelyn Powell in a 1981 profile, "I didn't know I could sing… Not like Nancy Wilson, or Dionne Warwick." But pianist Dick Morgan thought different, and after hearing Hyman sing at local clubs in Pittsburgh in the early '70s, asked her to tour with his band. It was while Hyman was doing regular gigs in New York City at Rust Brown's and Mikell's in 1975 that bandleader and producer Norman Connors first heard her. A year later he tapped her to sing the lead in his version of the Stylistics' classic "Betcha by, Golly Wow." Nearly 30 years after its release, it remains one of Hyman's most memorable performances.

Hyman initially signed as a solo artist with Buddah Records, which had difficulty finding the right material to make her the crossover star they wanted her to be. Though Hyman would have minor success singing mainstream R&B and disco, as witnessed on tracks like "You Know How to Love Me" (1979) and "Can't We Fall in Love Again," recorded with former Miles Davis sideman Michael Henderson in 1981 (the duo was first paired together on Connor's "You Are My Starship" in 1976), she was more at home within the jazz and pop-jazz idioms. Though she didn't sell many records during her two-album stint at Buddah, Phyllis Hyman (1977) and Somewhere in My Lifetime (1978) remain a testament to her link to some of the great torch singers, such as Nancy Wilson and Abbey Lincoln. Hyman was eventually given the chance to fully shine within the jazz tradition when she accepted a role in the Broadway production Sophisticated Ladies, a revue of Duke Ellington's music in which she sang Ellington classics such as "Prelude to A Kiss," "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" and a stirring, heart-wrenching rendition of "In a Sentimental Mood."

Hyman received a Tony Award nomination in 1981 for her work in Sophisticated Ladies but Arista, her label at the time, failed to capitalize on her new found mainstream popularity, instead trying to re-capture the dance-floor magic of "You Know How to Love Me," her first "hit" for the label. The awful "Riding the Tiger" from her 1983 recording Goddess of Love is an example of these efforts, though the song did help introduce Hyman's music to gay audiences, who reportedly embraced the song as a favorite at drag performances in the mid-'80s. Hyman would finally find a label receptive to her unique talents in Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International Records (PIR).

Living All Alone (1987) powerfully captured the full range of Hyman's vocal gifts, but it also gave her audiences a small glimpse of the feelings of loneliness and depression that had begun to engulf her. As her friend and manager Glenda Gracia told writer Esther Iverem, Hyman was "uncovering the riddles of stuff in her life…sometimes when you start that process, the demons that you confront may have more for you than you might have thought you would find." Part of the process for Hyman was dealing with very real feelings of loss after the death of her friend, songwriter Linda Creed, the long-time writing partner of Thom Bell (the duo penned "Betcha By Golly Wow" among other classics). Creed's "Old Friend," which appears on Living All Alone, was one of the last songs she wrote before her death.

Four years later Hyman returned with Prime of My Life (1981), which proved to be the most mature recording of her career as well as the last released during her lifetime. Tracks like "Meet Me on The Moon" and "When I Give My Love (This Time)" exhibit what producer Barry Eastmond refers to as "Phyllisisms." The record also contained her only chart-topping R&B hit, "Don't Wanna Change the World," which ironically was a throwback to her dance-diva days, complete with her first rap performance. Though the title of the album suggested that the then 42-year-old Hyman was at peace with her life and career, "Living in Confusion," a track she co-wrote with Kenneth Gamble and Terry Burrus, suggested a deeper darker reality. In the song's chorus Hyman sang, "seems like I'm always going through changes/Living in confusion…" Things took an even darker turn when Hyman's mother and grandmother died within a month of each other in 1993.

Hyman was working on what would be her last recording, ironically titled I Refuse to Be Lonely when she chose to take her own life on June 30, 1995, leaving behind a note that stated simply "I'm tired. I'm tired." When I Refuse to Be Lonely was released in November of 1995, it became one of Hyman's fastest selling recordings. According to Esther Iverem, so much of the recording was supposed to be about how Hyman "claws back from the brink, back from the place where she fought depression, loneliness, alcoholism, obesity and a consuming anger at lesser voices enjoying more commercial success."

Hyman's depression is telling in that the male-centered recording industry has rarely dealt with how gender impacts how artists are perceived, or with the way various artists choose to deal with the pressures of celebrity and the constant need to please fans, producers and A&R folk. Women artists are also forced to conform to some perceived notion of beauty. More than six feet tall, Hyman also battled her weight, often ballooning close to 300 pounds. Though folks remember Dinah Washington dying of a drug overdose, few remember that she overdosed on diet pills — an addiction directly related to her feelings that her body wasn't the right size. More often than not, women in the industry who struggle with these issues are described as "difficult," as was the case with Hyman, or even Mary J. Blige during earlier moments in her career. While these women may indeed have been "difficult," folks in the industry rarely ask why, or more specifically, how their experiences in a decidedly patriarchal and often sexist industry may have informed their personalities.

And it's not just women in the entertainment industry. As Iverem wrote in a 1996 Essence feature on Hyman's death, her passing "offers a particularly poignant example of the private struggles that many talented, intelligent black women face." Many women face this reality with a resolve that suggests that such darkness is in fact inevitable. In her book, "If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holliday", scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin reflects on an interview Mary J. Blige did with Dream Hampton in 1997, where the "Queen of Hip Hop Soul" responds to the invocation of Billie Holiday with the quip "Dead. Like Phyllis Hyman. Dead." According to Griffin, for a young woman like Blige, the lives of Hyman and Holiday are only a reminder of "Death. Pain. Sadness."

In the end we are only left with the music of Phyllis Hyman. Though the released Ultimate Phyllis Hyman is a good introduction to her music, fans might want to instead take a look at The Legacy of Phyllis Hyman, which was released in 1996. For those desiring to hear Hyman at her most exquisite, it might be worth the effort to track down a copy of Pharaoh Sanders's obscure Love Will Find a Way (1978), on which Hyman sings the gems "As You Are" and "Love is Here." As Roberta Flack told mourners at a memorial service for Hyman, "God is a spirit, music is spiritual so every time you hear Phyllis sing she lives."


First published: March 3, 2004

link


Ladytex
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09-27-2001

Friday, March 05, 2004 - 3:01 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Black Facts that happened on March the 5th:

1770 First to die for the freedom of the Colonies
On this day, in 1770, Crispus Attucks, a mulatto sailor, ropemaker, and runaway, was shot and killed in what would become the Boston Massacre.

1845 Texas As a Slave State
President John Tyler signed the joint resolution of Congress to admit Texas as a slave state.

1897
American Negro Academy founded.

1920 Leontine T.C. Kelly born
Leontine T.C. Kelly, the first African-American woman to become a bishop within the Methodist denomination.

1939 Born on this day: Charles Fuller
Playwright Charles Fuller was born in Philadelphia March 5, 1939. Fuller co-founded the Afro-American Arts Theatre in Philadelphia, his hometown, in 1967. The Perfect Party (1969) was the first of Fuller's plays to receive critical acclaim. Zooman and the Sign won an Obie Award in 1980. A Soldier's Play, about a murder on a Louisiana military base, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was adapted into a film, A Soldier's Story, in 1984.

1981 U.S. Government grants Atlanta $1 million
U.S. government granted Atlanta some $1 million to finance mental health and social programs in the wake of a mysterious series of abductions and slayings involving at least twenty two Black youths.

1985 Mary McLeod Bethune commemorative stamp
The Mary McLeod Bethune commemorative stamp is issued by the U.S. Postal Service as the eighth stamp in its Black Heritage USA series.

1997
Desi Giles, a black man, receives death threats after portraying Jesus in the annual Passion play in Union City, N.J.

Courtesy of http://www.blackfacts.com/

Mocha
Member

08-12-2001

Friday, March 05, 2004 - 3:34 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
I loved Phyllis Hyman. Saw her in concert years ago, beautiful voice. I'm still sad she's gone.

Tishala
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08-01-2000

Friday, March 05, 2004 - 4:07 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
I agree 110% Mocha.

Ladytex
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09-27-2001

Friday, March 05, 2004 - 7:37 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Yes, that was a very sad day. She had such an awesome voice.

Ladytex
Member

09-27-2001

Saturday, March 06, 2004 - 12:08 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Jesse Owens

owens

Born James Cleveland Owens on Sept. 12, 1913, in Oakville, Ala., he was often ill as a child, suffering from both chronic bronchial congestion and several bouts of pneumonia. Inadequate housing, food and clothing didn't help his health.

By the age of seven he was expected to pick 100 pounds of cotton a day. At nine his family moved to Cleveland. When a teacher asked his name, he answered, "J.C.," which is what he was called. The teacher misunderstood his Southern drawl and the name was Jesse from then on.

As a teenager he set or tied national high school records in the 100- and 220-yard dashes and the long jump (called the broad jump then). At Ohio State, he was not a good student but he was easily the swiftest on the track.

Two weeks before the 1935 Big Ten Championships, Owens was involved in some playful hi-jinks with his roommates. But the prank backfired and he slipped on water during his getaway, severely injuring his tailbone.

On May 25 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Owens couldn't even bend over to touch his knees. But as the sophomore settled in for his first race, he said the pain "miraculously disappeared."

He received treatment right up to race time. Confident that the treatment helped, Jesse persuaded the coach to allow him to run the 100-yard dash. Remarkably, each race timer had clocked him at an official 9.4 seconds, once again tying the world record. This convinced Owens' coach to allow him to participate in his other events. A mere fifteen minutes later, Jesse took his first attempt it the broad jump. Prior to jumping, Jesse put a handkerchief at 26 feet 2½ inches, the distance of the world record. After such a bold gesture, he soared to a distance of 26 feet 8¼ inches, shattering the old world record by nearly 6 inches.

Disregarding the pain, Jesse proceeded to set a new world record in the 220-yard dash in 20.3 seconds, besting the old record by three-tenths of a second. Within the next fifteen minutes, Jesse was ready to compete in another event, this one being the 220-yard low hurdles. In his final event, Owens' official time was 22.6 seconds. This time would set yet another world record, beating the old record by four-tenths of a second. Jesse Owens had completed a task that had never been accomplished in the history of track and field. He had set three new world records and equaled a fourth.

In his junior year at Ohio State, Owens competed in 42 events and won them all, including four in the Big Ten Championships, four in the NCAA Championships, two in the AAU Championships and three at the Olympic Trials.

In Germany, the Nazis portrayed African-Americans as inferior and ridiculed the United States for relying on "black auxiliaries." One German official even complained that the Americans were letting "non-humans, like Owens and other Negro athletes," compete.

But the German people felt otherwise. Crowds of 110,000 cheered him in Berlin's glittering Olympic Stadium and his autograph or picture was sought as he walked the streets.

On Aug. 3, the 5-foot-10, 165-pound Owens won his first final, taking the 100 meters in 10.3, edging out Ralph Metcalfe, also an African-American.

The next day, Owens was almost out of the long jump shortly after qualifying began. He fouled on his first two jumps, though he was stunned when officials counted a practice run down the runway and into the pit as an attempt.

With one jump remaining, Luz Long, a tall, blue-eyed, blond German long jumper who was his stiffest competition, introduced himself. He suggested that Owens make a mark several inches before the takeoff board and jump from there to play it safe. Owens took the advice, and qualified.

In the finals that afternoon, Long's fifth jump matched Owens' 25-10. But Owens leaped 26-3¾ on his next attempt and won the gold medal with a final jump of 26-5½. The first to congratulate the Olympic record holder was Long, who looked like the model Nazi but wasn't.

"It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler," Owens said. "You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace. The sad part of the story is I never saw Long again. He was killed in World War II." Owens, though, would continue to correspond with Long's family.

In the 200-meter dash on August 5, Owens won in an Olympic record of 20.7 seconds, beating out Mack Robinson, the older brother of Jackie Robinson.

That was supposed to be the end of Owens' Olympic participation. But from out of the blue, Owens and Metcalfe replaced Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only Jews on the U.S. track team, on the 4x100-meter relay.

The rumor was that the Nazi hierarchy had asked U.S. officials not to humiliate Germany further by using two Jews to add to the gold medals the African-Americans already had won. Glickman blamed U.S. Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage for acquiescing to the Nazis.

On August 9, the 4x100 relay team, with Owens running leadoff, won by 15 yards and its world-record time of 39.8 seconds would last 20 years. Jesse was the first American in the history of Olympic Track and Field to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.

Upon Owens' return to New York and a ticker-tape parade, he had to ride the freight elevator to a reception in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria. He was treated as a kind of curiosity. Despite his success, the financial instability of the Owens family continued. Shamefully, at that time in America he was not offered any endorsement deals because he was black. In an effort to provide for his family, Jesse left school before his senior year to run professionally. For a while he was a runner-for-hire, racing against anything from people, to horses, to motorcycles. The Negro Baseball league often hired him to race against thoroughbred horses in an exhibition before every game. Jesse even raced against the some of the Major Leagues fastest ballplayers, always giving them a 10-yard head start before beating them.

Not until the fifties did he achieve financial security, becoming a public speaker for corporations and opening a public-relations firm.

In a 1950 Associated Press poll, he was voted the greatest track and field star for the first half of century, outpolling Jim Thorpe by almost three to one.

In 1976, President Ford presented Owens with the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the U.S. can bestow upon a civilian.

Owens, a-pack-a-day smoker for 35 years, died of lung cancer at age 66 on March 31, 1980 in Tucson, Ariz.

Four years later, a street in Berlin was renamed in his honor.

A decade after his death, President Bush posthumously awarded Owens the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bush called his victories in Berlin "an unrivaled athletic triumph, but more than that, a triumph for all humanity."

The Official Jesse Owens Website

ESPN Sportscentury Athlete Biography


Ladytex
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09-27-2001

Saturday, March 06, 2004 - 12:15 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Black Facts that happened on March the 6th:

1775 Prince Hall and fourteen other Blacks were initiated into British Military Lodge No. 441 of the Masons at Fort Independence, Massachusetts. Hall was a leather-dresser and caterer.

1857 On March 6, 1857, the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court denied Blacks U.S. citizenship and denied the power of Congress to restrict slavery in any federal territory.

1901 Virginia State University is founded.

1957 Ghana gained it's independence from Great Britain.

1981 Dr. Bernard Harleston, former dean of arts and sciences at Tufts University, appointed president of New York's City College.



Ladytex
Member

09-27-2001

Saturday, March 06, 2004 - 12:48 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
The Dred Scott Decision

United States Supreme Court case Scott v. Sanford (1857), commonly known as the Dred Scott Case, is probably the most famous case of the nineteenth century (with the exception possibly of Marbury v. Madison). It is one of only four cases in U. S. history that has ever been overturned by a Constitutional amendment (overturned by the 13th and 14th Amendments). It is also, along with Marbury, one of only two cases prior to the Civil War that declared a federal law unconstitutional. This case may have also been one of the most, if not the most, controversial case in American history, due simply to the fact that it dealt an explosive opinion on an issue already prepared to erupt - slavery. Thus, many scholars assert that the Dred Scott case may have almost single-handedly ignited the ever growing slavery issue into violence, culminating ultimately into the American Civil War. It effectively brought many abolitionists and anti-slavery proponents, particularly in the North, over the edge.

Dred Scott was a slave born in Virginia who early in life moved with his owner to St. Louis, Missouri. At this time, due to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Missouri was added as a slave state, but no state may allow slavery if that state falls above the 36 degree 30 minute latitudinal line. Later, in 1854 under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, states were allowed to vote on whether they will allow slavery or not, known commonly as popular sovereignty. In St. Louis, Scott was sold to an army surgeon named Dr. John Emerson in 1833. A year later, Emerson, on a tour of duty, took Scott, his slave, to Illinois, a free state. In 1836, Emerson's military career then took the both of them to the free Wisconsin territory known today as Minnesota. Both of these states, it is important to recognize, where both free states and both above the 36 degree 30 minute line. While Emerson and Scott were in Wisconsin, Scott married Harriet Robinson, another slave, and ownership of her was subsequently transferred to Emerson. Dr. Emerson himself took a bride while on a tour of duty in Louisiana, named Eliza Irene Sanford, whose family happened to live in St. Louis. While the slaves (Dred and Harriet) stayed in St. Louis with Eliza and the rest of the family, Dr. Emerson was posted in Florida in 1842, where the Seminole war was being fought. He returned a year later but died within a few months of arrival at home. The slaves continued to work for Mrs. Emerson after Dr. Emerson's death. In April of 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott filed a suit for freedom against Irene Emerson in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, obviously under the jurisdiction of Missouri law. The established legal principle of Missouri at this time regarding slavery was once free, always free. In other words, to the Missouri courts, what Scott was doing was perfectly acceptable due to the precedent of the Missouri case Rachael v. Walker (1837), which basically stated that if a slave was taken by his or her master to a free state that slave was then entitled to freedom by virtue of residence in the free state or territory. On account of this alone, Scott and his wife would have been freed when the case came to trial in 1847, however there was a problem of hearsay evidence in the case and the judge declared it a mistrial. It was not until three years later in 1850 that the court was able to correct the problem and unfalteringly sided with the Scott's and ordered them freed, citing that once he had been in free territory, he was indirectly freed and remained freed. By this time Mrs. Emerson had married, moved to New England with her new husband, and left these affairs and ownership of the Scotts to her brother, John F. A. Sanford. After Scott was declared free by the courts, Sanford sought an appeal from the Missouri Supreme Court. In 1852 in, Scott v. Emerson, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision by the lower court seeing this case now not as the freeing of one slave but as a threat towards the institution of slavery. Basically, the court replaced the notion of once free, always free with an opposite, pro-slavery rhetoric as the new law of Missouri. Scott's lawyers then decided to appeal this case to the U.S. Supreme Court as Scott v. Sandford (there was a clerical error in which Sanford's name was misspelled in the court records).

The case went to the Supreme Court in 1856, and was actually, under orders of the Court itself, argued twice - first in February and then in December of the same year - in the exact same manner. Scott's argument was that he in fact had been freed when brought to the free state of Illinois and should no longer be a slave, in effect what the Missouri Circuit Court ruled before being overturned by that state's supreme court. Sanford argued that Scott, because he was a Negro and a slave, could not be a citizen at all and therefore had no right to sue him in either a state or federal court. It is imperative that we realize that when this case came to the Court the question of slavery, particularly in the western territories, had become the central political issue of the decade. People were killing each other over popular sovereignty in Kansas after the Kansas-Nebraska Act which would allow those states to become slave states if the majority chose to. Kansas became known as Bleeding Kansas because there was literally a mini-civil war within the state over the issue. Also, in the North, the newly-formed Republican party was vehemently opposed to the spread of slavery and was gaining enormous support. Initially, it appeared as though precedent and judicial restraint were going to prevail in this case. In Strader v. Graham (1851), the Court had ruled that each state had a right to decide for itself the status of persons under its jurisdiction. The Court was prepared, under these two principles, to dismiss the case and uphold the ruling of the Missouri Supreme Court, of which Justice Samuel Nelson was prepared to write an opinion that would avoid any controversial questions regarding slavery. However, Justice James M. Wayne from Georgia suggested that it was time for the Court to deal with this issue which had previously been avoided by the Court at every step. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was to write a new opinion, which he delivered on March 6, 1857. In this case, Taney and six other justices declared Scott to still be a slave for several reasons. First of all, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was effectively declared unconstitutional because congress, according to Taney, did not have the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in certain territories. Therefore, Scott had actually never been free because the act forbidding slavery in the territories he was taken to was unconstitutional. Also, freeing slaves in the territories constituted a taking of property without due process, which violated the Fifth Amendment. This was the Court's first use of the notion of substantive due process. Thirdly, blacks, although seen as citizens of certain states, could not be citizens of the United States, and therefore did not have the right to sue in federal courts. Here the U.S. Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction, and the case could therefore be dismissed. Taney was also under the belief that when the Constitution was written, blacks were universally seen as inferior beings. Taney writes in his opinion that blacks …are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the words citizens in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. Finally, and almost contradicting in his previous statements, he asserted that if a slave was taken to a free state or territory and then voluntarily returns to the slave state, then he or she will remain a slave. Here, however, one would think that the term voluntarily would not be accurate in describing the reasons why Scott returned to Missouri, being that he was a slave. Taney again uses Strader v. Graham when he discusses how Scott's status was affected by his residence in Illinois. He stated that if Scott had sued in Illinois, under Strader, that state could have freed him. However, since Scott sued in Missouri, his residency in Illinois could not force the Missouri Supreme Court to set him free. To many, this case was Taney's attempt to settle the issue of slavery once and for all in favor of the South. He had hoped to, in this decision, destroy the new Republican party, which so threatened slavery. His attempt to do this, however, backfired.

The reaction in the North was one of complete and utter outrage. This infuriated abolitionists all over the country and many saw it as a miscarriage of justice. In particular, New York Tribune editor and famous abolitionist Horace Greeley, who wrote that Taney's decision was a collection of false statements and shallow sophistries … a detestable hypocrisy and a mean and skulking cowardice. Further, Taney's attempt to destroy the newly formed Republican party only further strengthened their efforts in the North when their platforms in the 1858 and 1860 elections centered around this case. One notable Republican, Abraham Lincoln, convinced many voters that Taney's opinion was part of a proslavery conspiracy to nationalize slavery. He tried to convince many that this case was the first step towards the Supreme Court forcing slavery upon the North. He stated in another speech: We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state. One of Taney's opinions that particularly enraged the northern abolitionists was his statements regarding the absence of rights for the entire black race, not only slaves. This argument was completely unnecessary in this case an only displayed to many Taney's blatant distaste not only for blacks but for the North and their anti-slavery attitudes. In other words, regarding the text of the case, there was no reason for Taney to include the entire black race in such a specific case regarding the freeing of just one slave. There is no doubt that this case was a major influence in the cause of the American Civil War. The North was so outraged with this opinion that it chose to ignore the Court altogether and regard as an almost alien institution. The South, in response to the Northern discontent, attempted to defend the case, which ultimately only lead to further hatred and increased partisanship that undoubtedly contributed greatly to the Southern fuel for the war for secession.

In hindsight, many scholars consider this decision to be perhaps the worst decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court. Not only was it decisively partisan, but it played an enormous role in the provoking of the Civil War, the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil. This case was overturned by the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery altogether, and the 14th Amendment, which pronounced all persons born in the United States to be citizens of the U.S. regardless of color or previous condition of servitude. Also, this case was the first to employ the substantive due process clause which would be referred to again later in many other cases.

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Dred Scott Exhibit at Washington University in St. Louis

Seamonkey
Member

09-07-2000

Sunday, March 07, 2004 - 3:16 pm   Edit Post Move Post Delete Post View Post    
Anyone who had HBO!!

There is a wonderful program about

BEAH RICHARDS, actress, poet, speaker, writer.

(She played Sidney Poitier's mother in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"..

The Title is BEAH: A Black Woman Speaks.

Extraordinary woman, she was.