Black History Month: The Final Post

Please click on the photo for a large view. This is a testament to what African Americans had to survive so that we could be here and have the opportunities we have today. If you are African American, as you read this remember that the Black people mentioned in this document could be one of your or my ancestors.

Photo Attribution: HickTownPress

Black History Month: Revolutionary Women!

This post is part two of two profiling abolitionist Frances Harper

(Part one was posted yesterday)

In 1859 Watkins's tale "The Two Offers" appeared in the Anglo-African, the first short story to be published by an African-American. Although cast in fictional form, the piece is actually a sermon on the important life choices made by young people, women in particular.

The tale relates the tragedy of a woman who mistakenly thinks romance and married love to be the only goal and center of her life. "Talk as you will of woman's deep capacity for loving," Watkins preached, "of the strength of her affectional nature. I do not deny it; but will the mere possession of any human love, fully satisfy all the demands of her whole being? . . . But woman—the true woman—if you would render her happy, it needs more than the mere development of her affectional nature.

Her conscience should be enlightened, her faith in the true and right established, and scope given to her Heaven-endowed and God-given faculties."

In 1860, Frances Watkins married Fenton Harper, a widower with three children, and moved to Ohio. Their daughter, Mary, was born in 1862. Fenton died in 1864. After the war was over, Frances Harper toured the South, speaking to large audiences, encouraging education for freed slaves, and aiding in reconstruction.

With slavery a thing of the past, Harper turned her energy to women's rights. She spoke up for the empowerment of women and worked with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to secure votes for women.

Unlike Anthony and Stanton, Harper supported the Fourteenth Amendment, which, together with the Fifteenth, granted the vote to black men but not to women. Recognizing the ever-present danger of lynching,

she reasoned that the African-American community needed an immediate political voice. With that would come the possibility of securing further legal and civil rights.

During the next few decades, Harper wrote a great deal and had her works published frequently. Because of her many magazine articles, she was called the mother of African-American journalism. At the same time she also wrote for periodicals with a mainly white circulation.

The poems in Harper's Sketches of Southern Life, 1872, present the story of Reconstruction, as told by a wise and engaging elderly former slave, Aunt Chloe. Harper's serialized novel, "Sowing and Reaping," in the Christian Recorder, 1876-77, expanded on the theme of "The Two Offers." In "Trial and Triumph," 1888-89, the most autobiographical of her novels, Harper presented her program for progress through personal development, altruism, non-discrimination, and racial pride.

In 1873 Harper became Superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union. In 1894 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president, 1895-1911. Along with Ida B. Wells, Harper wrote and lectured against lynching. She was also a member of the Universal Peace Union.

Although busy as a writer and active in public life, Harper continued to engage personally in social concerns at the local level. She worked with a number of churches in the black community of north Philadelphia near her home, feeding the poor, preventing juvenile delinquency, and teaching Sunday School at the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.

Harper died on 22 February 1911, nine years before women gained the right to vote. Her funeral service was held at the Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. She was buried in Eden Cemetery, next to her daughter, who had died two years before.

Although an extremely popular writer during her lifetime, Harper was not acclaimed by literary critics. Following her death W.E.B. Du Bois, whose ideal of high style was Henry James, eulogized her with faint praise: "She was not a great singer, but she had some sense of song; she was not a great writer, but she wrote much worth reading."

Shortly after, Harper's communicative and intentionally popular style was dismissed as sentimental hackwork by African-American male critics and her message held in suspicion because her mixed-race protagonists were not sufficiently black.

Text Attribution: Unitarian Universalist Historical Society

Black History Month: Revolutionary Women!

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825-February 22, 1911), was an African-American writer, lecturer, and political activist, who promoted abolition, civil rights, women's rights, and temperance. She helped found or held high office in several national progressive organizations. She is best remembered today for her poetry and fiction, which preached moral uplift and counseled the oppressed how to free themselves from their demoralized condition.

Frances was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to free parents whose names are unknown. After her mother died in 1828, Frances was raised by her aunt and uncle. Her uncle was the abolitionist William Watkins, father of William J. Watkins, who would become an associate of Frederick Douglass. She received her education at her uncle's Academy for Negro Youth and absorbed many of his views on civil rights. The family attended the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.

At the age of fourteen, Frances found a job as a domestic in a Quaker household, where she was given access to their library and encouraged in her literary aspirations. Her poems appeared in newspapers, and in 1845 a collection of them was printed as Autumn Leaves (also published as Forest Leaves).

Following the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Law, conditions for free blacks in the slave state of Maryland deteriorated and the Watkins family fled Baltimore.

Frances Watkins moved on her own to Ohio, where she taught sewing at Union Seminary. She moved on to Pennsylvania in 1851. There, alongside William Still, Chairman of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, she helped escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad on their way to Canada.

Watkins continued to write, and in 1854 her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects attracted critical notice and became her biggest commercial success. In these poems she attacked not only racism but also the oppression of women. Most of the earnings from this and her other books went to help free the slaves. In 1854 she also began her lecturing career. She was much in demand on the anti-slavery circuit and she traveled extensively in the years before the Civil War.

Part two of the profile of Frances Watkins tomorrow.



Text Attribution: Unitarian Universalist Historical Society

Black History Month: The Arts

Mary Edmonia Lewis (born July 4, 1845 - died 1907) was the first African American and Native American woman to gain fame and recognition as a sculptor.

At a time in America when slaves were just freed, she found inspiration in the lives of abolitionists and Civil War heroes. In a world which didn’t encourage women of color, through incredible determination and sense of purpose, Edmonia Lewis created great art and received world acclaim.

The daughter of a Chippewa Indian woman and an African American man, Edmonia Lewis was born about 1845 near Albany, New York. Her parents died when she was young, and she went to live with her mother’s sisters in Niagara Falls.

The Chippewa people named her Wildfire and taught her to make baskets and embroidered moccasins. Her brother, a California gold miner, arranged for her to enter Oberlin College in Ohio. At the school, Lewis was accused of theft and of trying to poison two classmates. Although she was acquitted of both charges, she was not allowed to graduate.

Moving to Boston, Lewis studied with a local sculptor and began selling her work. She opened her own studio, where she created a number of pieces, including a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of an African American Civil War regiment from Massachusetts, as well as medallion portraits of the abolitionists John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison.

Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis

In 1865 Lewis sailed for Europe, settling in Rome to continue her studies. She ended up staying there most of her life and becoming a member of a lesbian circle of American expatriates and artists (the group included Emma Stebbins (1815-1882) and Margaret Foley (1820-1877). Influenced by the Greco-Roman sculpture she saw there, she began creating works in a neoclassical style.

By the time she returned to the United States in 1874, her patrons included distinguished families in this country and abroad.

Edmonia Lewis eventually vanished from the art world.

Lewis’s surviving works include Forever Free, which was acquired by the Howard University Gallery of Art, and Death of Cleopatra, in Washington’s National Museum of Art.

Nothing is known of Lewis' final years and her death has been calcuated to have occurred sometime around 1907.

In 1996, the PBS television network featured Lewis in a "News Hour" piece hosted by Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Her story was also told by author Rinna Evelyn Wolfe in a 1998 biography titled Edmonia Lewis: Wildfire in Marble and in A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present, by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson (Pantheon, 1993).

Text Attribution: Wikipedia

Black History Month: Revolutionary Women

This is part two of a profile of Assata Shakur. The previous post was yesterday.

After a widely-publicized nine-week trial, on March 25, 1977 in Middlesex County, New Jersey, Shakur was convicted as an accomplice in the murders of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and Zayd Shakur and possession of weapons, as well as of assault and attempted murder of Trooper Harper.

Although the prosecution could not prove that Shakur fired the shots that killed either Trooper Foerester or Zayd Shakur, being an accomplice to murder carries an equivalent life sentence under New Jersey law.

New Jersey Superior Court Judge Theodore Appleby sentenced her to 26 to 33 years in state prison for assault and weapons charges which was to be served consecutively with her mandatory life sentence for being an accomplice to the murders.

All of the jury members were white and five had personal ties to State Troopers (one girlfriend, two nephews, and two friends). One prospective juror was dismissed for reading Target Blue , a book by Robert Daley, a former New York City Deputy Police Commander, which dealt in part with Shakur and had been left in the jury assembly room.

Shakur's attorneys sought a new trial on the grounds that one jury member, John McGovern, had violated the jury's sequestration order. McGovern later sued Kunstler for defamation after Judge Appleby rejected Kunstler's claim that he had violated the order. In September 1977, New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne vetoed a bill to give the Morris County sheriff $7,491 for overtime expenses incurred in guarding Shakur's jury.

The judge did not allow evidence of alleged COINTELPRO involvement to be admitted during her trial. Shakur's defense attorneys had attempted to subpoena FBI Director Clarence Kelley, Senator Frank Church and other Federal and New York law enforcement officials to testify about the Counter Intelligence Program, which they alleged was designed to harass and disrupt black activist organizations.

Shakur's attorney's had also successfully asked a 10-judge panel of the Federal Philadelphia Court of Appeals to order that sessions for her murder trial not be held on Fridays because of Black Muslim Sabbath, although Appeals Court rejected her plea to move the murder trial to a federal court.

Imprisonment

After the Turnpike shootings, Shakur was imprisoned in New Jersey State Reception and Correction center in Yardville, Middlesex County, New Jersey and later moved to Rikers Island Correctional Institution for Women in New York City where she was kept in solitary confinement.

After a bomb threat was made against Judge Appleby, Sheriff Joseph DeMarino lied to the press about the exact date of her transfer to Clinton State Correctional Institute for security reasons. She was also transferred from Clinton Prison for Women to the Yardville Youth Correction and Reception Center in New Jersey, where she was the only female inmate, for "security reasons."

On May 6, 1977, Trenton Federal District Court Judge Clarkson Fisher denied Shakur's request for a transfer from the all-male facility to Clinton Correctional Facility. Shakur's only daughter, Kakuya Shakur, was conceived during her trial and born in September 1974 at the fortified psychiatric ward at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.

On April 8, 1978, Shakur was transferred to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia where she met Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón and Mary Alice, a Catholic nun, who introduced Shakur to the concept of liberation theology. At Alderson, Shakur was housed in the Maximum Security Unit, which also contained several members of the Aryan Sisterhood as well as Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme, followers of Charles Manson.

On March 31, 1978, after the Maximum Security Unit at Alderson was closed, Shakur was transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey.

A 1979 special UN investigation into human rights abuses of political prisoners cited Shakur as "one of the worst cases" of such abuses and including her in a "a class of victims of FBI misconduct through the COINTELPRO strategy and other forms of illegal government conduct who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions."

Escape and political asylum in Cuba

On November 2, 1979 she escaped the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey, when three members of the Black Liberation Army visiting her drew concealed .45-caliber pistols, seized two guards as hostages and commandeered a prison van. No one, including the guards, was injured during the prison break.

Charged with assisting in her escape was her brother, Mutulu Shakur, and Silvia Baraldini; Ronald Boyd Hill was also held on charges related to the escape. In part for his role in the event, Mutulu was named on July 23, 1982 as the 380th addition to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, where he remained for the next four years until his capture in 1986.

State correction officials disclosed in November 1979 that they had not run identity checks on Shakur's visitors and that the three men and one woman who assisted in her escape had presented false identification to enter the prison's visitor room, before which they were not searched.

After her escape, Assata lived as a fugitive for the next several years. The F.B.I. circulated "wanted" posters throughout the New York-New Jersey area; her supporters hung "Assata Shakur is welcome here" posters in response.

In July 1980, FBI director William Webster said that the search for Shakur had been frustrated by residents' refusal to cooperate, and a New York Times editorial opined that the department's commitment to "enforce the law with vigor – but also with sensitivity for civil rights and civil liberties" had been "clouded" by an "apparently crude sweep" through a Harlem building in search of Shakur.

In particular, one pre-dawn April 20, 1980 raid on 92 Morningside Avenue, during which FBI agents armed with shotguns and machine guns broke down doors, and rummaged through the building for several hours while preventing residents from leaving, was perceived by residents as having "racist overtones."

In October 1980, New Jersey and New York City Police denied published reports that they had declined to raid a Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn building where Shakur was suspected to be hiding for fear of provoking a racial incident.

She fled to Cuba in 1984 where she was granted political asylum, saying she had never received a fair trial. In 1985 she was reunited with her daughter, Kakuya, who had previously been raised by Shakur's mother in New York.

She published Assata: An Autobiography, which was written in Cuba, in 1987. Her autobiography has been cited in relation to critical legal studies and critical race theory.

Extradition attempts

In 1997, Carl Williams, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police wrote a letter to the Pope John Paul II asking him to raise the issue of Shakur's extradition during his talks with President Fidel Castro.

During the pope's visit to Cuba in 1998, Shakur agreed to an interview with NBC journalist Ralph Penza. Shakur later published an extensive criticism of the NBC segment, which interpliced footage of Trooper Foerster's grieving widow with an FBI photo connected to a bank robbery of which Shakur had been acquitted.

On March 10, 1998—the 85th anniversary of the death of Harriet Tubman—New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman asked Attorney General Janet Reno to do whatever it takes to return Shakur from Cuba. Later in 1998, U.S. media widely reported claims that the United States State Department had offered to lift the Cuban embargo in exchange for the return of ninety U.S. political exiles, including Shakur.

In 1998, the United States Congress passed a resolution asking Cuba for her "return"; House Concurrent Resolution 254 passed 371-0 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate.

Many members of the Congressional Black Caucus later explained that they were against her extradition, but mistakenly voted for the bill which was placed on the accelerated suspension calendar, generally reserved for non-controversial legislation.

Representative Maxine Waters of California, who voted for the resolution, later explained her opposition, calling COINTELPRO "illegal, clandestine political persecution."

On May 2, 2005, the thirty-second anniversary of the Turnpike shootings, the F.B.I. classified Assata Shakur as a "domestic terrorist", increasing the reward for assistance in her capture to $1 million, the largest reward placed on an individual in the history of New Jersey.

New Jersey State Police superintendent Rick Fuentes said "she is now 120 pounds of money." New York City Councilman Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, has called for the bounty to be rescinded. The New Jersey State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation each still have an agent officially assigned to her case.

Text Attribution: Wikipedia

Black History Month: Revolutionary Women

Assata Shakur (born July 16, 1947, as Joanne Deborah Byron Chesimard) is an African-American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (BLA).

Shakur was born in New York City on July 16, 1947, or, according to the FBI, August 19, 1952, but spent most of her childhood in Wilmington, North Carolina until her family relocated to Queens when she was a teenager.

She attended Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College of New York in the mid 1960s, where she was involved in many political activities. After graduation, Shakur became involved in the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army.

Shakur and others claim that she was targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO as a result of her involvement with these organizations.

New Jersey Turnpike shootout

On May 2, 1973, just after midnight,Shakur, at that time a member of the Black Liberation Army and no longer a member of the Black Panther Party, along with Zayd Malik Shakur (born James F Coston) and Sundiata Acoli (born Clark Squire), was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike in East Brunswick by State Trooper James Harper and backed up by Trooper Werner Foerster, for driving with a broken taillight, only 200 yards away from a police administration building.

Accounts of the confrontation differ, but Zayd Shakur and Trooper Foerester were killed in the ensuing shootout, and Assata Shakur and Trooper Harper were injured. Acoli then drove the car (a white Pontiac LeMans with Vermont license plates) which contained Assata, who was wounded, and Zayd, who was dead or dying; several miles down the road, where Assata Shakur was apprehended.

Acoli then exited the car and fled into the woods and was captured after a manhunt the following day.

After the Turnpike shootings, Shakur was imprisoned in New Jersey State Reception and Correction center in Yardville, Middlesex County, New Jersey and later moved to Rikers Island Correctional Institution for Women in New York City where she was kept in solitary confinement.

Part Two of the Assata Shakur profile tomorrow

Text Attribution: Wikipedia

Black History Month: Revolutionary Women

Kathleen Neal Cleaver was born on May 13, 1945, in Dallas, Texas. Kathleen's father was a sociology professor at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas and her mother had a master’s degree in mathematics.

Soon after Kathleen was born, her father, Ernest Neal, accepted a job as the director of the Rural Life Council of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Six years later, Ernest joined the Foreign Service.

The family moved abroad, and lived in such countries such as; India, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Philippines.

Kathleen returned to the United States to attend a Quaker boarding school near Philadelphia, the George School. She graduated with honors in 1963. She continued her education at Oberlin College in Ohio, and later transferred to Barnard College in New York. In 1966, she left college for a secretary job with the New York office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Black Panther Party

She was in charge of organizing a student conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At the conference, Kathleen met the minister of information for the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver.

After she met Eldridge, Kathleen moved to San Francisco in November, 1967, to join the Black Panther Party. Kathleen Neal and Eldridge Cleaver were married on December 27, 1967.

Cleaver became the communications secretary and the first female member of the Party’s decision-making body. She also served as the spokesperson and press secretary. Notably, she organized the national campaign to free the Party’s minister of defense, Huey Newton, who was jailed. Cleaver also ran for the California state assembly for the Peace and Freedom party, but was unsuccessful.

As a result of being part of the Black Panther Party, the Cleavers suffered from some acts of violence. The Cleavers’ apartment was raided in 1968 before a Panther rally by the San Francisco Tactical Squad on the suspicion of hiding guns and ammunition. Later that year, Eldridge was wounded in a shoot-out between Panther members and the police. Eldridge was charged with parole violation following the incident. He decided he did not want to face another incarceration and fled the country.

Living in Exile

Eldridge spent seven months in Cuba and was finally reunited with Kathleen in Algeria in 1969. Kathleen gave birth to their first son, Maceo, soon after arriving in Algeria. A year later she gave birth to Jojuyounghi, while the family was in North Korea.

In 1971, Huey Newton, a fellow party member, and Eldridge had a disagreement; Huey expelled the International Branch of the Black Panther Party. The Cleavers formed a new organization called the Revolutionary People’s Communication Network. Kathleen returned to promoting and speaking about the new organization. To accomplish this, she and the children moved back to New York.

The Algerian government became disgruntled with Eldridge and the new organization. Eldridge was forced to leave the country secretly and met up with Kathleen in Paris in 1973. Kathleen left for the United States later that year to arrange Eldridge’s return and raise a defense fund. In 1974, the French government granted legal residency to the Cleavers and the family was finally reunited.

After only a year, the Cleavers moved back to the United States, and Eldridge was sent to prison. He was tried for the shoot-out in 1968 and was found guilty of assault. He was sentenced to five year’s probation and 2,000 hours of community service. Kathleen went to work on the Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund and Eldridge was freed on bail in 1976. Eldridge’s legal situation was not finally situated until 1980.

After all of Eldridge’s legal situations, Kathleen went back to school in 1981, after receiving a full scholarship from Yale University. She graduated in 1983, summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

In 1987, Kathleen divorced Eldridge Cleaver. She then furthered her education by getting her law degree from Yale Law School. After graduating, Cleaver worked for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore.

Cleaver has had numerous jobs following the law firm including: law clerk in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta, visiting faculty member at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, the Graduate School of Yale College and Sarah Lawrence College.

In 2005, she was selected an inaugural Fletcher Foundation Fellow. She currently is a Senior Research Associate at the Yale Law School, and a Senior Lecturer in the African American Studies department at Yale University.

Text Attribution: Wikipedia

Black History Month: More firsts!

Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback- First African American Governor in U.S. History

P. B. S. Pinchback - (May 10, 1837 – December 21, 1921) was the first African American to become governor of a U.S. state. He was also the first non-white (biracial) governor of Louisiana. Pinchback, a Republican, served as the governor of Louisiana for thirty-five days, from December 9, 1872, to January 13, 1873.

Pinchback was born in Macon, Georgia (Bibb County), to a white planter (William Pinchback) and his former slave, Eliza Stewart. Known as "Pinckney Benton Stewart," he was educated at the Gilmore High School in Cincinnati. After his father died in 1848, he left Cincinnati because he feared that his paternal relatives might try to force him into slavery. He worked as a hotel porter and barber in Terre Haute, Indiana.

In 1860, while in Indiana, Pinchback married the former Nina Emily. They had two daughters and four sons.

During the Civil War, Pinchback traveled to Louisiana and became captain of the Union Army's Company A, 1st Louisiana Native Guards (later reformed as the 74th U. S. Colored Infantry Regiment).

After the war, he became active in the Republican Party and participated in Reconstruction state conventions.

In 1868, Pinchback organized the Fourth Ward Republican Club in New Orleans. That same year, he was elected as a Louisiana state senator, where he became the state Senate president pro tempore.

In 1871 he became acting lieutenant governor upon the death of Oscar Dunn, the first elected African American lieutenant governor of a U.S. state.

In 1872, the incumbent Republican governor Henry Clay Warmoth, was impeached and convicted, removing him from office. Pinchback, as lieutenant governor, succeeded as governor on December 9.

Black History Month: Pan-African Flag

The Pan-African flag, also referred to as the UNIA flag, Afro-American flag or Black Liberation Flag, is a tri-color flag consisting of three equal horizontal bands colored red, black and green.

It was originally created as the official banner of the African Race by the members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA).

They formally adopted it in article 39 of the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World on August 13, 1920 during their month long convention held in Madison Square Garden, New York City, United States.

The three colors represent:

* Red: the blood that unites all people of African ancestry, and shed for liberation;
* Black: black people whose existence as a nation, though not a nation-state, is affirmed by the existence of the flag; and
* Green: the abundant natural wealth of Africa.

The flag was created in 1920 by the members of the UNIA in response to the enormously popular 1900 coon song "Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon," which has been cited as one of the three coon songs that "firmly established the term coon in the American vocabulary".

A 1921 report appearing in the Africa Times and Orient Review, for which Marcus Garvey previously worked, quoted him regarding the importance of the flag:

"Show me the race or the nation without a flag, and I will show you a race of people without any pride. Aye! In song and mimicry they have said, "Every race has a flag but the coon." How true! Aye! But that was said of us four years ago. They can't say it now...."

The flag later became an African nationalist symbol for the liberation of African people everywhere. As an emblem of black pride, the flag became popular during the Black Liberation movement of the 1960s.

In 1971, the school board of Newark, New Jersey, passed a resolution permitting the flag to be raised in public school classrooms. Four of the board's nine members were not present at the time, and the resolution was introduced by the board's teen member, a mayoral appointee. Fierce controversy ensued, including a court order that the board show cause why they should not be forced to rescind the resolution, and at least two state legislative proposals to ban ethnic or national flags in public classrooms other than the official U.S. flag.

In the United States, the flag is presently widely available through flag shops or ethnic specialty stores. It is commonly seen at parades commemorating Martin Luther King Day, civil rights rallies, and other special events.

Text Attribution: Wikipedia

Black History Month: Café Society

Café Society was a New York City nightclub opened in 1938 in Greenwich Village by Barney Josephson to showcase African American talent and to be an American version of the political cabarets he had seen in Europe before the war.
Josephson also intended the club to defy the pretensions of the rich; he chose the name to mock Clare Booth Luce and what she referred to as "café society", the habitués of more upscale nightclubs.

Josephson not only trademarked the name, which had not been trademarked by the gossip columnist for the New York Journal American M, who wrote as the first "Cholly Knickerbocker". but advertised the club as "The Wrong Place for the Right People." Josephson opened a second branch on 58th Street, between Lexington and Park Avenue, in 1940.

The club also prided itself on treating black and white customers equally, unlike many venues, such as the Cotton Club, that featured black performers but barred black customers. The club featured many of the greatest black musicians of the day, from a wide range of backgrounds, often presented with a strongly political bent.

Billie Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit" there; at Josephson's insistence, she closed her set with this song, leaving the stage without taking any encores, so that the audience would be left to think about the meaning of the song.

Relying on the keen musical judgment of John Hammond, Josephson helped launch the careers of Lena Horne and Hazel Scott and popularized gospel groups such as the Golden Gate Quartet and the Dixie Hummingbirds among white audiences.

The club was also a regular venue for such artists as the boogie woogie pianists Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, blues shouter Big Joe Turner, singer and activist Paul Robeson, country blues singers Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy, and jazz giants Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, James P. Johnson, Sarah Vaughan, and Mary Lou Williams.

The club also served as a place for musical interchange and development: the Dixie Hummingbirds, performing under the name "The Jericho Quintet", sang with Lester Young's combo, while adopting some of the stage moves that their more popular rivals, the Golden Gate Quartet, had perfected.

Many of these acts had first been presented at Hammond's Carnegie Hall concerts, From Spirituals to Swing, in 1938 and 1939.

The club was the scene of numerous political events and fundraisers, often for left-wing causes, both during and after World War Two. In 1947 Josephson's brother Leon Josephson was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which led to hostile comments from columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell. Business dropped sharply as a result and the club closed the following year.

Text Attribution: Wikipedia

Stuff

I'm sure all of you have heard about the campus shooting spree in Illinois this week. But did you know that there was another deadly shooting on a college campus last week as well? Well if you didn't that may be because it involved three African American women college students and all three are dead.

If it had not been for the blog Essential Presence I would not have heard anything about it.

Read Symphony's post here: I can't wait to get my ass off a college campus

Did you hear about the Louisiana College shootings?

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You really should see this, this young woman is amazing. Her name is Nokulunga Buthelezi or Lunga for short. Apparently she is South African and very talented.

Thanks to Undercover Black Man for this.

What do you think?

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Black History Month

Exodusters was a name given to black Americans who fled the Southern United States for Kansas in 1879 and 1880. After the end of Reconstruction, racial oppression and rumors of the reinstitution of slavery led many freedmen to seek a new place to live. Many settled in Kansas because of its fame as the land of the abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859). The state was reputed to be more progressive and tolerant than most others. Separatist leaders such as Benjamin "Pap" Singleton had promoted it among black Americans.

The Kansas Exodus was an unorganized mass migration which began in 1879. Local relief agencies, such as the Kansas Freedman's Relief Association, did try to provide aid, but they could never do enough to meet the needs of the impoverished migrants. The Exodusters continued coming to Kansas through the summer of 1880; then the movement died out.

Have you heard of the Exodusters before?



Wolf ticket is a corruption of woof ticket, an African American slang expression for the practice of verbal intimidation, "sellin' (or passin' out) wolf tickets," that was misinterpreted. Over time, the misnomer has become accepted terminology in some quarters.

Woofing (woofin')," like "signifyin" and "talkin' trash," is part of the African American oral tradition. The term is derived from the onomatopoeic expression of the sound of, for instance, a junkyard dog barking to ward off potential intruders.

"Selling wolf tickets" is the act of engaging in threatening or intimidating verbal aggression, usually without the intent of doing actual physical harm. In West African and African-American cultures, verbal sparring and physical displays traditionally were employed as proxies for physical violence to preserve life and maintain peace and order. Woofin' also can be a means of "calling someone out," of challenging an opponent to a verbal or physical match.

Have you heard the phrase "woof Ticket" before?

Text Attribution: Wikipedia

Black History Month: More Firsts!

United States Air Force Major Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. (October 2, 1935 - December 8, 1967) was the first black astronaut.

At the age of 16, he graduated in the top 10% from Englewood High School. At the age of 20, graduated from Bradley University with a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry. At Bradley, he distinguished himself as Cadet Commander in the Air Force ROTC and received the commission of Second Lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve Program.

Read more about Major Lawrence here.

Text Attribution: Wikipedia

Black History Month: Words

pigmentocracy - a group-based social hierarchy based largely on human skin color, spanning across ethnic, religious, gender, and socio-economic groups.

Explanation: the British Empire imported labourers (from British India) to the British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. These Indian labourers were free, had more rights and had better societal functions and status than the darker-skinned Africans (who were mostly slaves), but less than the lighter-skinned European colonizers.

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Hypodescent - the practice of determining the lineage of a child of mixed race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his or her more socially subordinate parent.

Because recent history shows Caucasians being socially dominant in the Western world, mixed race children are most commonly assigned to their non-Caucasian parent.

However when two non-Caucasian parents have a child, the child is typically not assigned to either race. Although mulattos and Blasians are both half Black, only the former are generally perceived as Black, while Blasians such as Tiger Woods are not forced to self-identify as Black.

What do you think of these words?

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Black History Month: More Firsts

In 2002 René Syler became the first African-American woman to host a network morning news program as co-anchor for The Early Show on CBS. Syler deftly handled news stories and conducted interviews with both celebrities and political heavy-weights, and she won a top journalism honor for her 2003 series on breast-cancer awareness after her own health scare.

Read more about René Syler here.

Black History Month: More firsts!

E. Denise Simmons is the current mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts and is the first African-American (openly) lesbian mayor in the United States. The previous mayor, Kenneth Reeves, was the first openly gay African-American mayor in the United States.

Read more about Mayor Simmons here.

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Shirley Clarke Franklin (born May 10, 1945) is an American politician, a member of the Democratic Party, and, since January 7, 2002, the mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, a nonpartisan office. The 58th mayor of Atlanta, she was the first woman to hold the post and became the first black woman to be elected mayor of any major Southern city. Franklin is the fourth black mayor of Atlanta, the latest in a line of African American mayors that stretches back to 1974.

Read more about Mayor Franklin here.

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Former Ohio Lt. Governor Jennette Bradley

In 2002, Governor of Ohio Bob Taft ran for re-election but his lieutenant governor, Maureen O'Connor, ran for the Ohio Supreme Court. Taft replaced her with Jennette Bradley, a decision that sparked protests from his own party on the grounds Bradley was too liberal, having supported abortion and homosexual rights. The Taft-Bradley ticket easily defeated the Democratic challengers, Tim Hagan and Charleta Tavares and Bradley became Ohio's first African-American lieutenant governor and the first African-American woman to serve as Lt. Governor in the United States. (The 2002 election marked the first time that both candidates for lieutenant governor were black women.)

Read more about Lt. Governor Bradley here.

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Black History Month: Complicated lives and beautiful music

Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), born Eleanora Fagan and later nicknamed Lady Day , was an American jazz singer, composer, a seminal influence on jazz and pop singers, and generally regarded as one of the greatest female jazz vocalists.

Billie Holiday had a difficult childhood, which greatly affected her life and career. Much of her childhood is clouded by conjecture and legend, some of it propagated by her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, published in 1956. This account is known to contain many inaccuracies.


Read more about Lady Day here.

The Blues Are Brewin' - Live with Louis Armstrong

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Phyllis Hyman

Phyllis Hyman - Even though she was born in Philadelphia, Phyllis grew up in the St. Clair Village section in Pittsburgh. After leaving Pittsburgh, her music training started with a scholarship to a music school. On graduation, she performed on a national tour with the group New Direction in 1971.

After the group disbanded, she joined All the People and worked with another local group, The Hondo Beat. At this time, she appeared in the film Lenny (1974). She also did a two-year stint leading a band called Phyllis Hyman and the P/H Factor. Phyllis was discovered in 1975 by music industry veterans Sid Maurer and Fred Frank, and signed to their Roadshow Records / Desert Moon imprint.

Hyman moved to New York City to work on her reputation. She did background vocals on Jon Lucien's Premonition and worked in clubs. It was during one of these performances that she was spotted by Norman Connors, who offered her a spot as a vocalist on his album, You Are My Starship (1976). Her best performance on the album is a remake of The Stylistics' Betcha By Golly Wow.

Read more about Phyllis here.

Meet Me On The Moon - Live

Black History Month: More Firsts...

Cora Brown

1827
First African-American owned-and-operated newspaper: Freedom's Journal

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1868
First elected African-American lieutenant governor: Oscar Dunn (Louisiana)

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1870
First African-American to vote in an election under the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, granting voting rights regardless of race: Thomas Mundy Peterson

January: First African-American elected to U.S. Congress: Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels (Republican, Mississippi)

December: First African-American elected to U.S. House of Representatives: Joseph Rainey (Republican, South Carolina)

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1891
First African-American police officer in present-day New York City: Wiley Overton, hired by the Brooklyn Police Department seven years before the 1898 incorporation of the five boroughs into the city of New York.

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1926
First African-American woman to receive a degree (Ph.D.) from Yale University: Otelia Cromwell, who had previously been the first African-American graduate of Smith College.

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1952
First African-American woman elected to a United States state senate: Cora Brown (Michigan)

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1957
First African-American assistant coach in the NFL: Lowell W. Perry

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Black History Month: Another First

Kamala Devi Harris (born 1964 in Oakland, California) is the current District Attorney of San Francisco. She is the first female District Attorney to be elected in San Francisco, the first African American elected as District Attorney in California, and the first Indian American elected to the position in the United States. She was elected in December 2003 with over 56 percent of the votes in a run-off election against the two-term incumbent, Terence Hallinan.

Read more about Kamala Harris here.

Black History Month: Before there was Rosa Parks there was...

Irene Morgan (April 9, 1917 – August 10, 2007), later known as Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, was an important predecessor to Rosa Parks in the successful fight to overturn segregation laws in the United States.

Like the more famous Parks, but eleven years earlier, in 1944, the 27-year-old Baltimore-born Morgan was arrested and jailed in Virginia for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate Greyhound bus to a white person. In a 1946 landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that Virginia's state law enforcing segregation on interstate buses was illegal.

Read more about Irene Morgan Kirkaldy here.

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Black History Month: Cathy Williams

Cathy (or Cathay) Williams (1844 - 1892) was the first recorded African American female to serve in the United States Army.

On November 15, 1866, Cathy Williams decided to enlist, and joined up with the United States Regular Army in St. Louis, Missouri. Being relatively tall (5'9") and physically tough after many years of forced marches and hard physical labor, Williams apparently had no problem passing a cursory physical exam. She initially signed on for a three-year tour of duty under the name "William Cathay."

Read more about Cathy Williams here.

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