Blackbird

Authored by David Nevins

Are you familiar with the song “Blackbird” by The Beatles? Most of us are. I had no idea the meaning behind it. Did you? I will never listen to it the same way again.

“Paul McCartney was visiting America. It is said that he was sitting, resting, when he heard a woman screaming. He looked up to see a black woman being surrounded by the police. The police had her handcuffed, and were beating her. He thought the woman had committed a terrible crime. He found out “the crime” she committed was to sit in a section reserved for whites.

Paul was shocked. There was no segregation in England. But, here in America, the land of freedom, this is how blacks were being treated. McCartney and the Beatles went back home to England, but he would remember what he saw, how he felt, the unfairness of it all.

He also remembered watching television and following the news in America, the race riots and what was happening in Little Rock, Arkansas, what was going on in the Civil Rights movement. He saw the picture of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford attempt to attend classes at Little Rock Central High School as an angry mob followed her, yelling, “Drag her over this tree! Let’s take care of that n**ger!'” and “Lynch her! Lynch her!” “No n**ger b*tch is going to get in our school!”

McCartney couldn’t believe this was happening in America. He thought of these women being mistreated, simply because of the color of her skin. He sat down and started writing.

Last year at a concert, he would meet two of the women who inspired him to write one of his most memorable songs, Thelma Mothershed Wair and Elizabeth Eckford, members of the Little Rock Nine (pictured here).

McCartney would tell the audience he was inspired by the courage of these women: “Way back in the Sixties, there was a lot of trouble going on over civil rights, particularly in Little Rock. We would notice this on the news back in England, so it’s a really important place for us, because to me, this is where civil rights started. We would see what was going on and sympathize with the people going through those troubles, and it made me want to write a song that, if it ever got back to the people going through those troubles, it might just help them a little bit, and that’s this next one.”

He explained that when he started writing the song, he had in mind a black woman, but in England, “girls” were referred to as “birds.” And, so the song started:

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting
for this moment to arise.”

McCartney added that he and the Beatles cared passionately about the Civil Rights movement, “so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.’ ”

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting
for this moment to be free.”

Kristeen Irigoyen-Hernandez
Human Rights Advocate, Researcher/Chronological Archivist and member in good standing with the Constitution First Amendment Press Association (CFAPA.org)

Kristeen Irigoyen-Hernandez aka Lady2Soothe Follow @OurVoicesEcho

BLACK AMERICAN’s ~ STORIES NOT WIDELY KNOWN

MINNIE BROWN

Minnie Brown (Aug. 5,1883- last mention1934 or 35) Actress and singer Ms. Brown later also became a member of the Williams & Walker Vaudevillian troupe. In 1920 she served as vice president for the National Association of Negro Musicians.

JOSEPH LAROCHE

Joseph Laroche was born on May 26, 1886, in Haiti. He was an educated engineer who studied in Paris. He was married to a white French woman named Juliette, and they with their two children were on the Titanic when it crashed into an iceberg in 1912. Joseph, was the only black man on the Titanic when it sank April 15, 1912 drowned like many others, but his family survived the shipwreck and arrived safely to New York City with others who had been rescued. Joseph was highly educated; He spoke English, French and Haitian Creole fluently, and he was a trained engineer. However, he had trouble getting a well-paying job in France due to racial prejudice. Employers also made the excuse that he was too young and inexperienced. Joseph’s wife gave birth to their first two daughters, Simonne and Louise, he realized that he really needed to find a better paying job to support his family. So, in 1911, he and his wife, who had become pregnant again with their third child, decided to move to Haiti. At the time, Haiti was a developing nation with many jobs and business opportunities for engineers. Their plan was to board the Titanic the following year, which would set sail in Southampton, England but also pick up passengers in Cherbourg, France before starting the long voyage to New York City, USA. From there, they could get to Haiti by traveling south to the Caribbean sea. Sadly, on the night of April 14, 1912, the Titanic crashed into an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean and slowly sank. Joseph’s wife and children were able to board one of the sixteen lifeboats. Joseph, however, like many other men who were separated from their families, did not survive and drowned. He was never seen again. When his wife and children arrived in New York, she changed her mind about moving to Haiti and decided to return back to France. Later, that same year, she gave birth to her and her late husband’s third child, a son, whom she affectionately named Joseph, Jr.
Woman pursues tie to Titanic’s black family
http://tinyurl.com/y5bghet5
Miss Louise Laroche ~ A Haitian French Family Which Traveled in Second Class Aboard Titanic
http://tinyurl.com/y4duesdr
Haitian Descendant Of Joseph Laroche “Only Black & Haitian Man On Titanic” Speaks Out
http://tinyurl.com/yxda94m7
Black passengers add another facet to Titanic story
http://tinyurl.com/yxnzy6nq

MAGGIE LENA WALKER

Maggie Lena Walker July 15, 1864, Richmond, VA – December 15, 1934, Richmond, VA was an African-American teacher and businesswoman. Walker was the first Black female bank president to charter a bank in the United States. As a leader, she achieved success with the vision to make tangible improvements in the way of life for African Americans and women.

THOMAS FULLER

Thomas Fuller, an African sold into slavery in 1724 at the age of 14, was sometimes known as the “Virginia Calculator” for his extraordinary ability to solve complex math problems in his head.

Rumors circulated that he was a servant. However, he could not read or write, which was not uncommon among slaves at the time. Some believed that he may have gained his skills with math in his homeland in Africa.

His case was often cited by abolitionists of the time as proof that Blacks were in no way mentally inferior to whites. Born in Africa somewhere between present-day Liberia and Benin, Fuller was enslaved and shipped to America in 1724 at the age of 14, eventually becoming the legal property of Presley and Elizabeth Cox of Alexandria, Virginia.

Both Fuller and the Coxes were illiterate. The Coxes owned 16 slaves, and appeared to value Fuller the most; he expressed gratitude for not being sold. 

Stories of his abilities abounded through the Eastern seaboard. His skill was even used as proof that enslaved Blacks were equal to whites in intelligence, which fueled some pro-abolitionist discussion.

When Fuller was about 70 years old, William Hartshorne and Samuel Coates of Pennsylvania were in Alexandria and, having heard of Fuller’s powers, sent for him. They asked him two questions which satisfied their curiosity.

First, when they asked him how many seconds there were in a year and a half, he answered in about two minutes, 47,304,000.

Second, when they asked how many seconds a man has lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old, he answered in a minute and a half 2,210,500,800.

One of the men was working out the problems on paper, and informed Fuller that he was wrong, because the answer was much smaller. Fuller hastily replied, “‘Top, massa, you forget de leap year.” When the leap year was added in, the sums matched.

Despite Fuller’s perfect answers, it appeared to Hartshorne and Coates that his mental abilities must have once been greater. They wrote: “He was gray-headed, and exhibited several other marks of the weakness of old age. He had worked hard upon a farm during the whole of life but had never been intemperate in the use of spirituous liquors. He spoke with great respect of his mistress, and mentioned in a particular manner his obligations to her for refusing to sell him, which she had been tempted to by offers of large sums of money from several persons. One of the gentlemen, Mr. Coates, having remarked in his presence that it was a pity he had not an education equal to his genius, he said, “No, Massa, it is best I had no learning, for many learned men be great fools.”

OLIVER LEWIS

The first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby was Black. The first Kentucky Derby was won by Oliver Lewis, a 19-year-old Black jockey aboard the colt Aristides on May 17, 1875. The pair won by a reported two lengths, setting a new American record time for a mile-and-a-half race. Lewis’ achievement in the opening year of what has become America’s longest-running sporting event went almost unrecognized for over a century. He rode Aristides to second place in the Belmont Stakes, which later became one of the Triple Crown races, and won a total of three races at the Louisville Jockey Club that season. His legacy has long been neglected by sportswriters and is an example of one the many ways Black achievements and impact have been erased from history. Today we celebrate Lewis’ legacy and we also recognize that we must do and be better when acknowledging the valuable contributions of Black equestrians in horse sports.

ROBERT SMALLS

Robert Smalls (1839 – 1915) born into slavery on a South Carolina Plantation. Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain, even donning the captain’s wide-brimmed straw hat to help to hide his face, responded with the properly coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself, and other defense positions and Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside of Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered his ship to the blockading Union fleet. In fewer than four hours, Robert Smalls had done something unimaginable: In the midst of the Civil War, this black male slave had commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship and delivered its 17 black passengers (nine men, five women and three children) from slavery to freedom. Following the war, Smalls continued to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation black politician, serving in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886) before watching his state roll back Reconstruction in a revised 1895 constitution that stripped blacks of their voting rights. He died in Beaufort on February 22, 1915, in the same house behind which he had been born a slave and is buried behind a bust at the Tabernacle Baptist Church.

𝗘𝗟𝗟𝗔 𝗦𝗛𝗘𝗣𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗗

Ella Sheppard (1851-1915), soprano, pianist and reformer, was the matriarch of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a social reformer, confidante of Frederick Douglas, and one of the most distinquished African American women of her generation.

Sheppard was born a slave in 1851 on Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage plantation. A biracial relation of Jackson’s family, her father Simon Sheppard had purchased his freedom by hiring himself out as a Nashville, Tennessee liveryman and hack driver. When Sheppard was a little girl, her slave mother Sarah threatened to drown Ella and herself if their owners refused to permit her Simon to purchase Ella’s freedom. But an elderly slave prevented her, predicting that “the Lord would have need of that child.” Her owners refused to release Sarah, but allowed Ella to go with her father, who soon remarried and, fearful he and his daughter might be re-enslaved, fled penniless to Cincinnati, Ohio.

A German woman taught Ella Sheppard to play piano. Ella also managed to persuade an eminent white vocal teacher to give her twelve lessons, provided she keep them a secret and arrive and depart at night by the back door. After her father’s death from cholera, Ella supported herself, her stepmother, and her half-sister Rosa by teaching at a school for former slaves. Managing to save about six dollars in five months, she proceeded to Nashville in 1868 to enroll at the Fisk Free Colored School.

Her skill as a pianist immediately drew the attention of Fisk treasurer and musician George White, who appointed her his choir’s accompanist and assistant choral director as he prepared his troupe for a tour of the North. Though frail and sickly, Sheppard valiantly remained with the troupe for seven years. She accompanied the choir on piano, oversaw many of their rehearsals, conducted the Jubilees from her position among the singers on stage, and continued to collect and transcribe spirituals until the troupe’s repertoire numbered over a hundred. When, in 1878, an exhausted and exasperated White finally resigned as director, Sheppard stood in for him for the troupe’s last months. She joined White’s subsequent troupe of Jubilees but retired from Jubilee work when he disbanded his group in 1882.

Sheppard built a house for her mother and half-sister in Nashville, and married one of the most prominent black ministers in the United States, Rev. George Washington Moore. They lived at first in Washington, DC, agitating against the saloons in their neighborhood until it had been transformed into one of the most desirable areas of the city. Returning to Fisk, she trained and inspired generations of Jubilees, and by the time of her death in Nashville in 1915, Ella Sheppard had become in intellect, in spirit, and in musical attainment one of the truly gifted women of the world.

PHILLIS WHEATLEY 

AUGUSTUS JACKSON

Augustus Jackson (April 16, 1808 – January 11, 1852) Philadelphia, PA referred to as the ” Father of Ice Cream”. Jackson began working at the White House when he was just nine years old as a chef from 1817 until 1837. Cooking for Presidents James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson preparing comfort food for the presidents’ families to formal meals at state dinners for visiting dignitaries. Augustus Jackson revolutionized ice cream manufacturing methods, namely the practice of adding salt to the ice making it melt slower, and developing techniques to control the custard while it was freezing. Unfortunately, there is no evidence Jackson ever patented any of his recipes or techniques. After retiring from the White House, Jackson moved back to Philadelphia, and continued inventing new and improved ways to make ice cream, ultimately starting his own catering and confectionery business while developing new ice cream flavors which he packaged in tin cans and distributed to other ice cream parlors in the Philadelphia area. As a savvy businessman, Jackson sold his inventions to ice cream shops as well as ice cream carts and because of this, he became one of the wealthiest black people in Philadelphia.
https://tinyurl.com/hmr8b3k

ANNIE MINERVA TURNBO MALONE

DOB: August 9, 1877, Metropolis, IL DOD: May 10, 1957, Provident Hospital of Cook County, Chicago, IL One of America’s first and most prominent African-American businesswomen, Malone founded and developed Poro College, a commercial and educational business focused on cosmetics for black women. Born to former slaves, Malone would later develop a chemical that could straighten Black women’s hair without causing damage to the hair or scalp. Poro College as an institution of learning was established as a way to teach people about black cosmetology. Through the school and the business, Malone created jobs for 75,000 women around the world. She’s recorded as the first black female millionaire in the United States, with a reported $14 million in assets in 1920 (a whopping $167 million by today’s standards).

 

CATHAY WILLIAMS

Cathay was born and enslaved in 1850 in Jackson County, Missouri. In September 1861 Union troops impressed Cathay and she joined the Army to work as a cook and washerwoman for Union Army officers. On November 15th, 1866 Williams disguised herself as a man and enlisted as William Cathey, serving in Company A of the 38th Infantry, a newly-formed all-black U.S. Army Regiment, one of its earliest recruits. Cathay initially served at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis and was later posted at Fort Cummings and Fort Bayard in New Mexico Territory. Like other black soldiers stationed, she endured inadequate supplies and inferior weapons. Cathay concealed her femininity for two years despite numerous Army hospital visits before her true gender was discovered by the Fort Bayard post surgeon. She was discharged at Fort Bayard on October 14, 1868 on a surgeon’s certificate of disability. Cathay was hospitalized circa 1890 for over a year in Trinidad. In June 1891 she filed an invalid pension application based on medical disability incurred during military service as William Cathey. The Army rejected her pension claim on February 8, 1892, citing no grounds for a pensionable disability, but did not question her gender identity as William Cathay. The date of Cathay Williams’ death is unknown.

BENJAMIN MONTGOMERY

Benjamin Montgomery was born into slavery in 1819 in Loudon County, Virginia. He was sold to Joseph E. Davis, a Mississippi planter. Davis was the older brother of Jefferson Davis who would later serve as the President of the Confederate States of America. After a period time, Davis could see great talent within Montgomery and assigned to him the responsibility of running his general store on the Davis Bend plantation. Montgomery, who by this time had learned to read and write (he was taught by the Davis children), excelled at running the store and served both white customers and slaves who could trade poultry and other items in return for dry goods. Impressed with his knowledge and abilities to run the store, Davis placed Montgomery in charge of overseeing the entirety of his purchasing and shipping operations on the plantation. In addition to being able to read and write, Montgomery also learned a number of other difficult tasks, including land surveying, techniques for flood control and the drafting of architectural plans. He was also a skilled mechanic and a born inventor. At the time commerce often flowed through the rivers connecting counties and states. With differences in the depths of water in different spots throughout the river, navigation could become difficult. If a steamboat were to run adrift, the merchandise would be delayed for days, if not weeks. In an effort to expedite the shipment of merchandise, Montgomery invented a propeller that could cut into the water at different angles, thus allowing the boat to navigate more easily through shallow water. Montgomery attempted to patent his invention after regaining his freedom but was rejected. Davis attempted to patent the device but the patent was denied on June 10, 1858, on the basis that Ben, as a slave, was not a citizen of the United States, and thus could not apply for a patent in his name. Later, both Joseph and Jefferson Davis attempted to patent the device in their names but were denied because they were not the “true inventor.” Ironically, when Jefferson Davis later assumed the Presidency of the Confederacy, he signed into law the legislation that would allow slaves to receive patent protection for their inventions. On June 28, 1864, Montgomery, no longer a slave, filed a patent application for his device, but the patent office again rejected his application. Upon the end of the Civil War, Joseph Davis sold his plantation as well as other properties to Montgomery, along with his son Isaiah. The sale was made based on a long-term loan in the amount of $300,000.00. Benjamin and Isaiah decided to pursue a dream of using the property to establish a community of freed slaves, but natural disasters decimated their crops, leaving them unable to pay off the loan. The Davis Bend property reverted back to the Davis family and Benjamin died the following year. Undeterred, Isaiah took up his father’s dream and later purchased 840 acres of land and along with a number of other former slaves, and founded the town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi in 1887. Isaiah was named the town first mayor soon thereafter.

MARY FIELDS

Mary Fields Hickman County, Tennessee, c. 1832 ~ 1914 at Columbus Hospital in Great Falls Montana “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…” Born a slave in Hickman County, Tennessee, c. 1832, Fields was freed when slavery was outlawed in the United States, in 1865. In 1895, in Montana, although approximately 60 years old, Fields was hired as a mail carrier because she was the fastest applicant to hitch a team of six horses. This made her the second woman and first African American woman to work for the U.S. Postal Service. She drove the route with horses and a mule named Moses. She never missed a day, and her reliability earned her the nickname “Stagecoach.” If the snow was too deep for her horses, Fields delivered the mail on snowshoes, carrying the sacks on her shoulders. She was a respected public figure in Cascade, Montana…and the town closed its schools to celebrate her birthday each year. When Montana passed a law forbidding women to enter saloons, the mayor of Cascade granted her an exemption. In 1903, at age 71, Fields retired from star route mail carrier service. She continued to babysit many Cascade children and owned and operated a laundry service from her home. Fields died in 1914 at Columbus Hospital in Great Falls, but she was buried outside Cascade.

ELIZABETH KECKLEY

Elizabeth Keckley, née Hobbs (Feb. 1818 Dinwiddie County Court House, Dinwiddie, Virginia, – May 1907 Washington DC) born into slavery yet she became a successful seamstress, civil activist, and author in Washington, DC. Although she encountered one hardship after another, with sheer determination, a network of supporters and valuable dressmaking skills, Elizabeth Keckley eventually moved to Washington in 1860 after buying her freedom and that of her son from her St. Louis owners for $1,200. She created an independent business in the capital based on clients who were the wives of the government elite. Among them were Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis; and Mary Anna Custis Lee, wife of Robert E. Lee, but she was best known as the personal modiste and confidante of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Elizabeth Keckley met Mary Todd Lincoln on March 4, 1861, the day of Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration. Keckley assisted Mrs. Lincoln each day as her personal dresser. She also helped Mrs. Lincoln prepare for official receptions and other social events. For the next six years, Keckley became an intimate witness to the private life of the First Family. Known for her love of fashion, the First Lady kept Keckley busy maintaining and creating new pieces for her extensive wardrobe. During the Lincoln administration (and many years afterward), Keckley was the sole designer and creator of Mary Todd Lincoln’s event wardrobe. In January 1862, Mrs. Lincoln went for photos to Brady’s Washington Photography Studio, where she had images taken while wearing two of Keckley’s gowns. After the American Civil War, Keckley wrote and published an autobiography, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868). It was both a slave narrative and a portrait of the First Family, especially Mary Todd Lincoln, and is considered controversial for breaking privacy about them. It was also her claim as a businesswoman to be part of the new mixed-race, middle-class that was visible among the leadership of the black community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Keckley

WILHELMINA THELMA WHITE COLSTON

Wilhelmina Thelma White Colston 1869 Metropolis, Illinois – DOD: 1957 was a student and later a teacher at Bethune-Cookman College (BCC) founded by Mary McLeod Bethune the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 1904. The school became a four-year college in 1941 when the Florida Department of Education approved a 4-year baccalaureate program in Liberal Arts and Teacher Education… In 1935, Wilhelmina White married James Allen Colston, who would later serve as the second president of Bethune-Cookman College from 1942 to 1944. After marrying, Wilhelmina retired from teaching. She also attended Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, and then Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she earned a master’s degree. Together, the couple had one daughter, Jean Allie Colston Foster, and three grandchildren.

EUGENE JACQUES BULLARD

Eugene Jacques Bullard (Oct. 9, 1895 Columbus, GA – Oct. 12, 1961 New York NY) “He was a “nobody,” just another black man trying to get by in a white man’s world. He probably would have remained a nobody in the U.S. had it not been for a visit by an old friend. In 1960, the President of France and international war hero, Charles DeGaulle, visited the United States. The French President made one request to the White House: He wanted to see an old friend, a French knight whose bravery and heroics helped defend the free world. Not knowing this man, the White House had to search for this mysterious hero – what they found was a simple, elevator operator in New York. His name was Eugene Bullard. It was then that the U.S. began to learn about Eugene Jacques Bullard, the first African-American fighter pilot in history. After witnessing his father nearly lynched (and for a supposed offense, which he had never committed), he remembered his father told him that in France, a man is accepted as a man regardless of the color of his skin. So, the young Bullard stowed away on a ship and eventually made his way to France. When World War I broke out, he joined the French Foreign Legion, then the Aéronautique Militaire and the Lafayette Flying Corps, where he distinguished himself, becoming the first African-American fighter pilot in history. When the U.S. finally joined the war, Bullard tried to rejoin his countrymen, but despite all his military honors, he was ignored because he was black. Bullard would be seriously wounded several times, but he never gave up his fight for freedom and justice. At the beginning of World War II, he even worked as a spy, fighting against Nazi sympathizers. In 1954, France invited him to be one of three people to relight the everlasting flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In 1959, he was made a Chevalier (knight) of the Légion d’honneur, which is France’s most coveted award. When he finally returned to the U.S., no one knew him, and he lived in poverty and relative obscurity. The only reminders of his hero status in his humble apartment were a few photos and a framed case containing his 15 French war medals for valor. When the French president finally got to meet the courageous French knight, he publicly and internationally embraced Eugene Bullard as a true hero. When he died a year later, he was laid to rest with full honors by the Federation of French War Officers. It would take his own country 33 years, but on August 23, 1994, Eugene Bullard was posthumously commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. Bullard “was a man who hesitated to speak of himself but one who stood on the principles of honesty and integrity. He treated everyone as he wished to be treated . . . He lived by the belief that all men were created equal and should be treated accordingly,” according to William I. Chivalette, Curator at the Air Force Enlisted Heritage Research Institute. He is remembered for painting a red bleeding heart pierced by a knife on the fuselage of his plane. Below the heart was the inscription “Tout le Sang qui coule est rouge!” which translates to “All Blood Runs Red.”

IDA B. WELLS

Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) published 1895 “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States 1892–1893–1894,” documenting that lynchings of African American men in the south were not the result of the rape of white women. She also wrote articles in the Memphis Free Speech and Chicago Conservator, criticizing the school system, demanding women’s suffrage to include African-American women, and anti-lynching. Although she never achieved her goal of federal anti-lynching legislation, she was a founding member of the NAACP and other activist organizations. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Miss., in 1862, less than a year before Emancipation. She grew up during Reconstruction, the period when black people, including her father, were able to vote, ushering black representatives into state legislatures across the South. As a former slave who stood less than five feet tall, she took on structural racism more than half a century before her strategies were repurposed, often without crediting her, during the 1960s civil rights movement took on racism in the Deep South with powerful reporting on lynchings. Wells is considered by historians to have been the most famous black woman in the United States during her lifetime, even as she was dogged by prejudice, a disease infecting Americans from coast to coast.

A mob dragged Thomas Moss out of a Memphis jail in his pajamas and shot him to death over a feud that began with a game of marbles. But his lynching changed history because of its effect on one of the nation’s most influential journalists. Wells was already a 30-year-old newspaper editor living in Memphis when she began her anti-lynching campaign, the work for which she is most famous. After Moss was killed, she set out on a reporting mission, crisscrossing the South over several months as she conducted eyewitness interviews and dug up records on dozens of similar cases. Her goal was to question a stereotype that was often used to justify lynchings — that black men were rapists. Instead, she found that in two-thirds of mob murders, rape was never an accusation. And she often found evidence of what had actually been a consensual interracial relationship. Ida published her findings in a series of fiery editorials in the newspaper she co-owned and edited, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. The public, it turned out, was starved for her stories and devoured them voraciously. The Journalist, a mainstream trade publication that covered the media, named her “The Princess of the Press.”

BUCK COLBERT FRANKLIN

Buck Colbert Franklin (May 6, 1879 Tulsa, Oklahoma –1960 September 24, 1960, in Oklahoma) Buck Franklin was an attorney in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who is most notably known for defending the survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. He was also father to the venerable civil rights advocate and historian John Hope Franklin. Franklin was born the seventh of ten on May 6, 1879, near the town of Homer in Pickens County, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory (currently Oklahoma). He was named Buck in honor of his grandfather who had been a slave and purchased the freedom of his family and himself.  Practicing law as a young man in the predominantly white town of Ardmore, Oklahoma, he faced racial prejudice and saw major flaws in the white judicial system. In one instance, he was literally silenced in a Louisiana courtroom because of his race. In Tulsa, during 1921, racial tensions were extremely high. The town had one of the most affluent black communities in the nation—the Greenwood District, also known as ‘Black Wall Street’ which created a sharp divide between blacks and whites. In May of 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was in an elevator with a white woman named Sarah Page. It was alleged that he attempted to assault her, and he was promptly arrested. There was an altercation between a group of black and white people at the courthouse which, in the next twenty-four hours, would escalate to a massive one-day race riot that left approximately three hundred dead, much of the black population imprisoned, and the Greenwood District in ruins. Franklin and his family had managed to survive the riot. The Tulsa City Council, however, in the aftermath of the carnage, passed an ordinance that prevented the black people of Tulsa from rebuilding their community. The city planned instead to rezone the area from a residential to a commercial district. Franklin led the legal battle against this ordinance and sued the city of Tulsa before the Oklahoma Supreme Court, where he won. As a consequence, black Tulsa residents could and did begin the reconstruction of their nearly destroyed community. Of his four children, John Hope Franklin would become a prominent historian and black intellectual of this time period. He contributed to the Brown v. Board of Education case and participated in the 1965 march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. John Hope Franklin and his son would finalize B.C. Franklin’s autobiography, My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin.

JANE BOLIN

July 22 marks the day in 1939 that Jane Bolin was appointed judge of the Domestic Relations Court in New York. Bolin was the first Black woman to become a judge in the United States. During her 40-year tenure, Bolin achieved two major changes: the assignment of probation officers to cases without regard for race or religion, and a requirement that publicly funded private child-care agencies accept children without regard to ethnic background.

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON 

James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871, Jacksonville FL – June 26, 1938, Wiscasset ME) was an American author, educator, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, and became involved in civil rights activism, especially the campaign to pass the federal Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, as Southern states did not prosecute perpetrators. In the summer of 1891, following his freshman year at Atlanta University, Johnson went to a rural district in Georgia to teach the descendants of former slaves. While working as a teacher, Johnson also read the law to prepare for the bar. While attending Atlanta University, Johnson became known as an influential campus speaker. In 1892 he won the Quiz Club Contest in English Composition and Oratory. He founded and edited the Daily American newspaper in 1895. At a time when southern legislatures were passing laws and constitutions that disenfranchised  Blacks and Jim Crow laws to impose racial segregation, the newspaper covered both political and racial topics. In 1897, he was the first African American admitted to the Florida Bar Exam since the Reconstruction era ended. 1901 Johnson had moved to New York City with his brother J. Rosamond Johnson to work in musical theater. They collaborated on such hits as “Tell Me, Dusky Maiden” and “Nobody’s Looking but the Owl and the Moon,” for which Johnson wrote the lyrics and his brother the music. Johnson also composed the lyrics of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” originally written for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday at Stanton School. This song became widely popular and has become known as the “Negro National Anthem,” a title that the NAACP  adopted and promoted. Johnson was a speaker at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching. Johnson is best remembered for his leadership of the NAACP where he chartered the Memphis chapter in 1917. In 1920, he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. Johnson died in 1938 while vacationing in Wiscasset, Maine when the car his wife was driving was hit by a train.

WILLIAM BUTLER JOHNSON

William B. Johnson was a model servant. He and his wife, Anna, worked happily for the Paulsen family – first in Baltimore, Maryland; later in Somers, West Chester County, New York – for many years. William was the chauffer; Anna maintained the Paulsen home. When Mr. Paulsen died, they lost their jobs. This unfortunate occurrence, history would show, was ultimately to their great benefit. By then William and Anna had established themselves as respected members of the Somers community. With the help of some friends in high places, they were able to purchase a home, along with the former blacksmith shop behind it. Johnson converted the shop to a garage and soon gained a reputation as “a most reliable, honest, and skillful mechanic.” Along with his business, Johnson also developed a keen interest in motorcycles and racing. William B. Johnson became the first African American dealer principal of a Harley-Davidson shop. For nearly 60 years, Johnson’s Harley-Davidson would function in Somers, New York in a blacksmith building he converted into a motorcycle dealership. Johnson is also known for achieving another first. By claiming to be American Indian, Johnson was given license to compete in national AMA motorcycle races during a time when the events were segregated. In 1932, Johnson was challenged by an AMA official at an event barring “colored” riders. Producing his AMA membership card, there was nothing the AMA official could do but let Johnson compete, then watch as he won the race. In 1985, at the age of 95, William B. Johnson died quietly at his shop.

BENJAMIN BRADLEY

Benjamin Bradley was born into enslavement around 1830 in Maryland. He was put to work in a printing office and at the age of 16 began working with scrap he found, modeling it into a small ship. Eventually, with an intuitiveness seeming far beyond him, he improved on his creation until he had built a working steam engine, made from a piece of a gun barrel, pewter, pieces of round steel and some nearby junk. Bradley’s ingenuity earned him a job at the Annapolis Naval Academy, where he was a classroom assistant in the science department. While there, he developed a steam engine large enough to drive the first steam-powered warship at 16 knots for warships in the 1840s. He later sold the invention and bought his and his family’s freedom. Bradley had not forgotten his work with steam engines. He saved the money he earned, and sold his original model engine to a student at the Academy. Because he was a slave, Bradley was not allowed to get a patent for the engine he develop.

EMMA J. RAY

Emma J. Ray was born into slavery on May 19, 1859, and raised in poverty in Missouri. For nearly thirty years, Emma ministered to the poor and homeless in Seattle slums along with her husband, Lloyd P. Ray “L.P.” They came to Seattle following the 1889 Platte City, Missouri Orphan Asylum fire in order for LP to find work as a stonemason. Shortly after, they were converted in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Emma helped to found the Frances Harper Colored Unit of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union with fifteen women from the AME Church, and she served as its president. With her WCTU Unit, Emma visited the jail, holding religious services on Sunday afternoons. On Wednesday afternoons, she and “Mother” Ryther, who ran an orphanage in Seattle, visited prostitutes and held services in the brothels. Between 1900 and 1902, Emma and L.P. ran a mission in Kansas City, Missouri, for children living in poverty, providing clothes, meals, a warm place to gather in the winter, trips to the park in the summer, and weekly Sunday School. The Rays eventually joined The Free Methodist Church and were licensed as Conference Evangelists. Under the auspices of the Free Methodists, they preached revival meetings in churches throughout the state of Washington. Emma’s autobiography, Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed, was published by the Free Methodist Publishing House in 1926. Emma passed away in 1930 and is buried at Crown Hill Cemetery, Seattle, King County, Washington.

ARMSTEAD HURLEY

Armstead Hurley (1854-1932) arrived in Newport from Culpepper County Virginia in 1886 at the age of 32. He established a successful painting and glazing business along with being a founding partner in the Rhode Island Loan and Investment Company, which was the first Black-owned bank in Rhode Island. Armstead was also the treasurer of the Shiloh Baptist Church.

BRIDGET “BIDDY” MASON

Bridget “Biddy” Mason began life as a slave in Deep South Mississippi on August 15, 1818. In 1848 30-year-old Mason walked 1,700 miles from Mississippi behind a 300-wagon caravan eventually arriving in the Holladay-Cottonwood area of the Salt Lake Valley, Utah with her Mormon owner Robert Marion Smith, a Mississippi Mormon convert who followed the call of church leaders to settle in the West. Mason and her children joined other slaves on Smith’s religious pilgrimage to establish the new Utah Mormon community which was still part of Mexico. In 1851 Smith, his family and slaves set out in a 150-wagon caravan for San Bernardino, California to establish yet another Mormon community. Ignoring Brigham Young’s warning that slavery was illegal in California, Smith brought Mason and other enslaved people to the new community. In December 1855 Robert Smith, fearing to lose his slaves, decided to move with them to Texas, a slave state. The Owens family had a vested interest in the Mason family as one of their sons was romantically involved with Mason’s 17-year-old daughter. When Robert Owens told the Los Angeles County Sheriff slaves were being illegally held, a posse was gathered including Owens, his sons, some cowboys and vaqueros from the Owens ranch. The posse apprehended Smith’s wagon train on the Cajon Pass, en-route to Texas and prevented him from leaving the state. After spending five years enslaved in a “free” state Biddy Mason challenged Robert Smith for her freedom. On January 19, 1856, she petitioned the court for freedom for herself and her extended family of 13 women and children. Los Angeles District Judge Benjamin Hayes took three days before handing down his ruling in favor of Mason, citing California’s 1850 constitution which prohibited slavery. After moving with her family to Los Angeles Biddy became one of the foremost Freed Slaves of African descent. She was one of the founders of the First African Methodist Episcopal (FAME) Los Angeles Church, a nurse/midwife, philanthropist and founder of the first African American school in Los Angeles. Biddy was extremely frugal, so frugal in fact, she was able to start buying and selling real estate, eventually amassing a sizable fortune and reputation for philanthropy before her death on January 15, 1891.

ADDIE WAITES HUNTON 

Addie Waites Hunton (June 11, 1866, Norfolk, Virginia – June 22, 1943, Brooklyn NY) was an African American suffragist, race and gender activist, writer, political organizer, and educator. In 1889, Hunton became the first black woman to graduate from Spencerian College of Commerce. She worked for the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), served as the national organizer for the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) from 1906 to 1910, and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Hunton was a regular participant in the work of the Equal Suffrage League. Hunton is known for her commitment to peace, race relations, and the empowerment of the African American community, especially women. She created a three-part peace strategy. First, she encouraged African American women to create an international organization for themselves. Second, Hunton believed that African American women should get involved in the Pan-African movement, which was predominantly male-dominated at this point. Finally, she aimed to involved African American women in the mainly white U.S. movement for peace. In 1917, the U.S. entered World War I. Hunton quickly became involved through the YMCA, and in June 1918, she set sail for France. Although there were approximately two hundred thousand African American troops serving in World War One, Addie Waites Hunton was one of only three American women of color, the others being Kathryn Johnson and Helen Curtis to serve with the American troops in Europe during the war and were assigned to work with the 200,000 segregated black troops stationed in France. Hunton soon became exposed to the racism against African American soldiers. She saw efforts by the American Command to regulate the lives of black soldiers, recreating a system reminiscent of Jim Crow. In France, Hunton began working for the Services of Supplies sector at Saint Nazaire. She introduced many new programs to increase the quality of the soldiers’ lives, including a literacy course and a discussion series on art, music, and religion, and other topics. Of Hunton’s many wartime efforts, a particularly gruesome assignment was given to her in May 1919. She was sent to a military cemetery and was ordered to oversee and comfort black soldiers who were assigned to recover the dead from the battlefield of the Meuse-Argonne and rebury them.

CHARLES BARKER

LUCY PARSONS 

Lucy Parsons (1853 Texas – March 7, 1942 Chicago) Activist, Activist, Journalist. Some reports indicate that she may have been born a slave, but she only stated that she was of Mexican and Native American descent. Lucy Parsons was politically radical for her times and one of the first minority activists. She sent much of her time as a champion for others, including minorities, women, and laborers. She married Albert Parsons a former soldier and a political activist in 1871. The couple moved to Chicago a few years later where they became involved in the city labor struggle. In the early 1880s, Lucy Parsons became even more radical. She joined the International Working People??s Association, an anarchist organization. The group believed that the government should be dismantled and capitalism should end and thought these goals should be accomplished by any means necessary, including violence. Known for her powerful speeches, Parsons led a strike in May 1886 in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The event turned into a riot, and the whole incident became what is known as the Haymarket affair. Her husband was arrested for a bombing related to the strike, and, despite her best efforts to free him, he was executed in 1887. In 1892, Lucy created a short-lived newspaper known as Freedom, which decried the lynching of African Americans and exploitive sharecropping system. She went on to become a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Lucy Parsons died in a fire at her Chicago home. She is remembered as an anarchist, a reformer, and a labor activist who inspired others with her words to fight for social justice.

DR. GLADYS WEST

Dr. Gladys West (née Brown) the Black Genius who invented the GPS system. Born 1930 in Sutherland, Virginia, Dinwiddie County, a rural county south of Richmond. West came from a farming family in a community of sharecroppers. Her mother worked at a tobacco factory, and her father was a farmer who also worked for the railroad. West realized early on she didn’t want to work in the tobacco fields or factories like the rest of her family, and decided that education would be her way out.  the top two students of each graduating class received full-ride scholarships to Virginia State University (formerly College), a historically black public university. West worked hard and graduated in 1948 with the title of valedictorian. She was initially unsure what college major to pursue at VSU, as she had excelled in all her subjects in high school. She was encouraged to major in science or math because of their difficulty, and West ultimately chose to study mathematics, a subject mostly studied at her college by men. She also became a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She graduated in 1952 with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. After graduating, she taught math and science for two years in Waverly, Virginia. West then returned to VSU to complete her Master of Mathematics degree, graduating in 1955. Afterward, she briefly took another teaching position in Martinsville, Virginia. In 1956, West was hired to work at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia, where she was the second black woman ever hired and one of only four black employees. West was a programmer in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division for large-scale computers and a project manager for data-processing systems used in the analysis of satellite data. Concurrently, West earned a second master’s degree in public administration from the University of Oklahoma. In the early 1960s, she participated in an award-winning astronomical study that proved the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune. Subsequently, West began to analyze data from satellites, putting together altimeter models of the Earth’s shape. She became the project manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project, the first satellite that could remotely sense oceans. West consistently put in extra hours, cutting her team’s processing time in half. She was recommended for a commendation in 1979. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, West programmed an IBM computer to deliver increasingly precise calculations to model the shape of the Earth generating an extremely accurate model required her to employ complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational, tidal, and other forces that distort Earth’s shape. West’s data ultimately became the basis for the Global Positioning System (GPS). West was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018.

CLAUDETTE COLVIN

Claudette Colvin (September 5, 1939) is an American nurse and was a pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city. She relied on the city’s buses to get to and from school, because her parents didn’t own a car. The majority of customers on the bus system were African American, but they were discriminated against by its custom of segregated seating. She said that she aspired to be President one day. Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council, and had been learning about the Civil Rights Movement in school. As she was returning home from school. She sat in the colored section about two seats away from an emergency exit, in a Capitol Heights bus. Colvin was pregnant at the time. When a white woman who got on the bus was left standing in the front, the bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, commanded Colvin and three other Black women in her row to move to the back. The other three moved, but another pregnant Black woman, Ruth Hamilton, got on and sat next to Colvin. The driver looked at them in his mirror. “He asked us both to get up. Mrs. Hamilton said she was not going to get up, she’d paid her fare and she didn’t feel like standing. So Claudette told him I was not going to get up either. The drive said ‘If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman.'” The police arrived and convinced a Black man sitting behind the two women to move so Mrs. Hamilton could move back, but Colvin still refused to move. This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was famously arrested for the same offense. When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day about the local custom prohibiting Blacks from using the dressing rooms in order to try on clothes in department stores. In a later interview, she said: “We couldn’t try on clothes. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot […] and take it to the store”.  Referring to the segregation on the bus and the white woman: “She couldn’t sit in the same row as us because that would mean we were as good as her”. Colvin “It’s my constitutional right!”. She decided she wasn’t going to move.” She was forcibly removed from the bus, handcuffed, arrested, and forcibly removed from the bus by two policemen, Thomas J. Ward and Paul Headley. She shouted her constitutional rights were being violated and initially charged with disturbing the peace, violating the segregation laws, and assault. She was bailed out by her minister, who told her she’d brought the revolution to Montgomery. Through the trial Colvin was represented by Fred Gray, a lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which was organizing civil rights actions. When Colvin’s case was brought to the Montgomery Circuit Court on May 6, 1955, the charges of disturbing the peace and violating the segregation laws were dropped. Colvin was among the five plaintiffs originally included in the federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city. She testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case in the United States District Court. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state, and it upheld the District Court ruling on December 17, 1956. Colvin was the last witness to testify. Three days later, the Supreme Court issued an order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was called off. For many years, Montgomery’s Black leaders did not publicize Colvin’s pioneering effort. She was an unmarried teenager at the time, and was reportedly pregnant by a married man. Colvin’s act was a few months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP, played the lead role, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Colvin has said, “Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn’t the case at all.”

MACNOLIA COX 

MacNolia Cox ~ 1923 13-year-old MacNolia a spelling prodigy from Akron, Ohio had with an IQ through the roof. Her journey to Washington wasn’t easy, nor was her time competing in the Bee. Forced to travel to the May 24, 1936 National Spelling Bee in the “colored” car of the train, unable to stay at the hotel with the other contestants, and had to use the back door of the arena to get into the Bee then forced to sit at a card table once inside. Despite the hardships she faced, Cox went on to become the first African-American finalist in the Top Five and was on her way to victory, having extensively studied the 100,000-word list given to every speller in the Bee. However, the all-white southerner judges pulled an ineligible word not on that list “nemesis”. Cox misspelled the unapproved word and was eliminated from the Bee. MacNolia, her dreams of becoming a doctor, was limited by the Jim Crow era, instead she became a domestic for a doctor and at the age of 53 died from cancer Sept 12, 1976.

AIDA OVERTON WALKER

Aida Overton Walker (February 14, 1880 – October 11, 1914), also billed as Ada Overton Walker and as “The Queen of the Cakewalk”, was an African-American vaudeville performer, actress, singer, dancer, choreographer, and wife of vaudevillian George Walker. Working alongside her husband, Walker’s career and performances were praised by critics and her successes well known. She was both financially successful and respected by the industry. In a 1905 article in Colored American, Walker was clear in her belief that the performing arts could have an effect on race relations, stating that, “I venture to think and dare to state that our profession does more toward the alleviation of color prejudice than any other profession among colored people.”

GEORGE EDWIN TAYLOR

George Edwin Taylor, (August 4, 1857, Little Rock, AR – December 23, 1925, Jacksonville, FL) son of a slave ran for president as the candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party. was one of a dozen children whose father was a slave and his mother was born a free person in the South. “When his mother died, young Taylor was left a waif and slept in dry goods boxes. He finally drifted north and attended the Baptist Academy at Beaver Dam, in Wisconsin. Feeble health and an exhausted pocketbook caused him to leave school within a year of graduating. To support himself, Taylor took a job as a newspaper reporter in La Crosse. He eventually became editor of the La Crosse Evening Star. Taylor was a key player in both the Wisconsin’s People’s Party and the Union Labor Party. His Wisconsin Labor Advocate was the voice of Wisconsin’s labor party in 1886-1887. From 1891 to 1910, Taylor lived in Oskaloosa and Ottumwa, Iowa, where he published a national magazine called the Negro Solicitor. During this period he rose to prominence in national black politics, acting as president of the National Colored Men’s Protective Association and the National Negro Democratic League and served high office in various other Black organizations. Given the fact Taylor received fewer than 2,000 votes when he ran for president in 1904, it is hard to call him “the right man at the right time.” Another way to look at this is to ask why he, in particular, became the first African American to run for president; why did he do what Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Blanche K. Bruce, and other leading black politicians before him could or would not. Part of the irony of the situation is Taylor’s marginal status may have made him more likely to be first. Right before the Civil War, African American men could only vote in New York and five New England states, and their percentage of the population in those states was far too small for any party to consider nominating them. In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave Black men around the country the right to vote (Black women did not gain this right nationally until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920), and so Black politicians in southern states or in the northern cities with rapidly growing black populations might have considered a run for the White House. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats, though, would have seriously considered nominating an African-American for president; the Republicans would not have risked alienating white voters for the sake of gaining black votes that they felt sure to get anyway, and the Democrats had a well-earned reputation for racial hostility. Because of the great expense of running for president, the only African-Americans who could even consider funding a serious third-party campaign were members of the upper-class who were also the most likely to remain loyal to the GOP. Taylor, who had first been a Republican and then a Democrat, was the first to run for president because he was the first Black politician who (1) no longer cared about what either major party thought of him and (2) was able to find allies among progressive whites who took the incredibly bold step of nominating him.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/y2t57uuq

ROSE MORGAN

Rose Morgan 1912 Edwards, Mississippi – Dec. 16, 2008 Chicago Illinois. One of nine children of Winnie (Robinson) Morgan, a homemaker, and Chapple Morgan, who rented land on a cotton plantation in Mississippi before moving the family to Chicago, where he worked in the hotel business. Rose had always been inspired by her father’s business sense, she said. As a 10 year old Rose cut flowers out of crepe paper and went door-to-door selling them with her friends. “We sold them for five cents a bunch.” She started styling hair for friends and neighbors at 12. “I’ve always had a great imagination and I could do things with my hands.” By 16 she was making enough money to drop out of high school despite warnings from her father. “I decided that I wasn’t going to let any grass grow under my feet.” Clients would arrive at her house at 5:30 or 6 a.m. to get their hair done before work. Once her customer base grew, she attended cosmetology school to get her license. She arrived in New York with $500, enough to rent a booth in a salon for $10 a week. The salon was in Sugar Hill, the fabled Upper Manhattan enclave of rich and famous blacks of the day, and word spread quickly about Morgan’s technique. She was known for using less hair product to achieve a softer, bouncier feel for hair that could turn out stiff in the wrong hands. In 1964 Morgan helped start Freedom National Bank, a rare black-owned commercial bank in New York. Rose’s salon, the Rose Meta House of Beauty, grossed more than $3 million in sales in its first few years and became a fixture in Harlem. It went beyond hair care, offering skin care, massages and other services, rarely available to black women at the time, and women traveled to the salon from all over the country.
Source https://tinyurl.com/y6h9v6pb

JAMES HEMINGS

James Hemings was born into slavery to Betty Hemings, who was the mixed-race daughter of Susannah, an enslaved African mother, and John Hemings, an English sea captain father. James was the second of her six children by her master John Wayles, who took Betty as a concubine after he was widowed for the third time. They had a relationship for 12 years, until his death, and he had a “shadow family” of six children with her. They were three-quarters European by ancestry. Betty had four older children by another man. Wayles died in 1773, leaving Betty and her 10 children to his daughter Martha Jefferson, half-sister to his children by Betty. Martha was then married to Thomas Jefferson, who also inherited them by marriage. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson took James Hemings with him when he went to Paris as Minister of France, as he wanted the young man, then 19, trained as a chef. While they were in France, Jefferson paid Hemings a wage of four dollars per month. Hemings studied cooking and apprenticed to pastry chefs and other specialists. He paid personally to learn the language from a French tutor. He earned the role of chef de cuisine in Jefferson’s kitchen on the Champs-Élysées. He served his creations to the European aristocrats, writers and scientists whom Jefferson invited to dinner. It’s important to acknowledge Thomas Jefferson’s role in popularizing French cuisine in the American south and low country, it is equally important to give credit to JAMES HEMINGS the slave and black chef Thomas Jefferson owned and sent to France who learn the culinary skill to replicate the meals Thomas Jefferson and American slave owners were privilege to eat. Just because Thomas Jefferson brought a pasta machine doesn’t mean he made the pasta and just because he has a hand written recipe certainly doesn’t mean he actually made the food which we know historical he did not! It is extremely important to acknowledge the spectrum of history and multitude of contributions made by people of color as well as White patrons to creation of what has become American cuisine.

ALEXANDER SERGEEVICH PUSHKIN

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (May 26, 1799 Moscow, Russia – January 29, 1837 St. Petersburg, Russia) is rightly considered to be the founding father of the modern Russian language. Descended from a distinguished Afro-Russian family of nobility; Ossip Abramovich Gannibal’s father, Pushkin’s great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781), an African page kidnapped to Constantinople as a gift to the Ottoman Sultan and later transferred to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great. Alexander Pushkin rejected the high-blown style of classic Russian poetry, breaking down the barrier between colloquial speech and the elevated odes of the past. Russians still use Pushkin’s language today. Married to Nathalie Goncharova in 1831, she bore him three children, but the couple were not happy together. His wife had many other admirers and he challenged one of them to a duel that took place on January 26, 1837. Pushkin was wounded and died.  https://tinyurl.com/2yutj6uk

RENÉ LACOSTE

René Lacoste (July 2, 1904, Paris, France – Oct. 12, 1996, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France) Black French tennis player known by fans as “The Crocodile” for his tenacity on the tennis court. Lacoste was one of The Four Musketeers with Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon, and Henri Cochet, French tennis stars who dominated the game in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He won seven Grand Slam singles titles at the French, American, and British championships and was an eminent baseline player and tactician of the pre-war period. As a member of the French team, Lacoste won the Davis Cup in 1927 and 1928. Lacoste was the World No. 1 player for both 1926 and 1927. René introduced the Lacoste tennis shirt with the crocodile logo embroidered on the chest in 1933 and founded La Société Chemise Lacoste with André Gillier. The company produced the tennis shirt, also known as a “polo shirt,” which Lacoste often wore when he was playing. In 1961, Lacoste created an innovation in racket technology by unveiling and patenting the first tubular steel tennis racket. At that time, wood rackets were the norm; the new version’s strings were attached to the frame by a series of wires, which wrapped around the racket head. The steel-tube racket was stiffer and imparted a greater force to the ball during a stroke. It was marketed in Europe under the Lacoste brand, but in the United States, it was marketed by Wilson Sporting Goods. Pierre Darmon debuted the racket at Wimbledon in 1963, but it achieved critical acclaim and huge popularity as the Wilson T-2000, used by American tennis greats Billie Jean King and Jimmy Connors. When Lacoste died, the French Advertising agency Publicis, which had been managing his company’s account for decades, published a print ad with the Lacoste logo and the English words “See you later…”

WILBER and CLEOMAE DUNGY

Wilber graduated from Jackson High School in 1943 and served in the segregated Army during World War II. After the war, Dungy enrolled at Jackson Junior College, where his interest in biology awakened. He graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan and in 1952 came back to JCC as the first Black professor. Dungy earned a doctorate in 1967 and even though Dr. Wilbur Dungy had a Ph.D. in physiology, asked people not to call him “doctor” which would be too showy. Dungy was a JCC biology professor from 1953 to 1969 and remembered by his reputation for breaking racial barriers. After his death at age 78, it was discovered he was part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the first unit of American pilots. With his wife, Cleomae, a high school theater teacher at Jackson High, they raised four children, a doctor, a dentist, a nurse and Super Bowl Tony Dungy Hall of Famer football coach. Wilber and Cleomae Dungy the pushed the envelope to inspire inclusivity and education in Jackson.

BABY ESTHER JONES THE ORIGINAL BETTY BOOP

Esther Jones, (unknown cause of death 1934) known by her stage name “Baby Esther”, was an African American singer and entertainer of the late 1920s, known for her “baby” singing style. She performed regularly at the Cotton Club in Harlem where a white American singer/actress named Helen Kane saw her act in 1928 and copied Jones’ “baby” singing style for a recording of “I Wanna Be Loved By You.” Theatrical manager Lou Boulton testified during the Fleischer v. Kane trial that Helen Kane saw Baby Esther’s cabaret act in 1928 with him and appropriated Jones’ style of singing, changing the interpolated words “boo-boo-boo” and “doo-doo-doo” to “boop-boop-a-doop” in a recording of “I Wanna Be Loved By You”. Kane never publicly admitted this. Jones’ style, as imitated by Kane, went on to become the inspiration for the voice of the cartoon character Betty Boop. When Kane attempted to sue Fleischer Studios for using her persona, the studios defended themselves by arguing that Kane herself had taken it from “Baby Esther” Jones. An early test sound film of Baby Esther’s performance was used as evidence. In court, it was presumed that Jones was still in Paris. After a two-year legal struggle, Max Fleischer located a sound film made in 1928 of her performing, which was introduced as evidence. Judge Edward J. McGoldrick ruled, “The plaintiff has failed to sustain either cause of action by proof of sufficient probative force.” In his opinion, the “baby” technique of singing did not originate with Kane. Unfortunately very little is known of Esther Jones including her birth and the events surrounding her death.

SAM CHATMON

Sam Chatmon (January 10, 1897 – February 2, 1983) was a Delta blues guitarist and singer and member of the Mississippi Sheiks. Chatmon was born in Bolton, Mississippi. His family was well known in Mississippi for their musical talents and he was a member of the family’s string band when he was young. In an interview he stated he started playing the guitar at the age of 3, laying it flat on the floor and crawling under it. He regularly performed for white audiences in the 1900s. The Chatmon band played rags, ballads, and popular dance tunes. Two of Sam’s brothers, the fiddler Lonnie Chatmon and the guitarist Bo Carter, performed with the guitarist Walter Vinson as the Mississippi Sheiks. Chatmon played the banjo, mandolin, and harmonica in addition to the guitar. He performed at parties and on street corners throughout Mississippi for small pay and tips. In the 1930s he recorded with the Sheiks and also with his brother Lonnie as the Chatman Brothers. Chatmon moved to Hollandale, Mississippi, in the early 1940s and worked on plantations there. He was rediscovered in 1960 and started a new chapter of his career as a folk-blues artist. In the same year, he recorded for Arhoolie Records and toured extensively during the 1960s and 1970s. While in California in 1970 he made several recordings with Sue Draheim, Kenny Hall, Ed Littlefield, Lou Curtiss, Kathy Hall, Will Scarlett and others at Sweet’s Mill Music Camp, forming a group he called “The California Sheiks”. He played many of the largest and best-known folk festivals, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., in 1972, the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto in 1974, and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1976. Sam did more than recapitulate the past. He bravely sang of racial inequality in songs such as “I Have to Paint My Face,” with its ironic images of a “stomp-down, baby-chicken-killin’ nigger” and a black man’s desire to paint his face a lighter shade. A headstone memorial to Chatmon with the inscription “Sitting on top of the World” was paid for by Bonnie Raitt through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund and placed in Sanders Memorial Cemetery, Hollandale, Mississippi, on March 14, 1998, in a ceremony held at the Hollandale Municipal Building, celebrated by the Mayor and members of the city council of Hollandale, with over 100 attendees.

DUANE JULIUS THOMAS 

Duane Julius Thomas (June 21, 1947 Dallas, TX ) Raised in Dallas, Thomas spent several years in Los Angeles when his parents wanted to get him away from what they considered bad influences. He said he thrived in Southern California but returned to Dallas, playing at Lincoln High School and West Texas State before being drafted in the first round, much to his dismay, by the Cowboys.  in 1973 Thomas quietly left the NFL after refusing to stand for the National Anthem.

STEVE HENSON

THOMAS L. JENNINGS 

Thomas L. Jennings (1791 New York City, NY – February 12, 1856 New York City, NY) was born free to a free African-American family. Jennings operated and owned a tailoring business and was the first African American to receive a patent, on March 3, 1821. His patent was for a dry-cleaning process called “dry scouring” a technique credited to modern day dry cleaning. Jennings’ skills were so admired people near and far came to him to alter or custom-tailor items of clothing for them. Eventually, Jennings reputation grew such that he was able to open his own store on Church street which grew into one of the largest clothing stores in New York City. Under the United States patent laws of 1793 (and later, as revised in 1836) a person must sign an oath or declaration stating they were a citizen of the United States. While there were, apparently, provisions through which a slave could enjoy patent protection, the ability of a slave to seek out, receive and defend a patent was unlikely. Later, in 1958, the patent office changed the laws, stating that since slaves were not citizens, they could not hold a patent. Jennings became active in working for his race and civil rights for the African-American community. In 1831, he was selected as assistant secretary to the First Annual Convention of the People of Color in Philadelphia,  Pennsylvania. He helped arrange legal defense for his daughter, Elizabeth Jennings, in 1854 when she challenged a private streetcar company’s segregation of seating and was arrested. She was defended by the young Chester Arthur, and won her case the next year. Because of her father’s prominence and wealth, his daughter was able to obtain the best legal representation and hired the law firm of Culver, Parker, and Arthur to sue the bus company and was represented in court by a young attorney named Chester Arthur, who would go on to become the 21st President of the United States. Ms. Jennings would ultimately win her case in front of the Brooklyn Circuit Court in 1855. With two other prominent African-American leaders, Jennings organized the Legal Rights Association in 1855 in New York, which raised challenges to discrimination and organized legal defense for court cases. He founded and was a trustee of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a leader in the African-American community.

PHILIP BELL DOWNING

PHILIP BELL DOWNING Providence, Rhode Island  March 22, 1857 Boston Massachusetts June 8, 1934 was an African-American inventor,  designed a metal box with four legs and a hinged door that closed to protect the mail patented on October 27, 1891. He called his device a street letter box and it is the predecessor of today’s mailbox. One year prior to inventing the mailbox, Downing patented an electrical switch allowing railroad workers to turn on or off the power supply to trains at the necessary times. Downing’s designs for the railroad switch were used as inspiration for inventors who created residential electrical switches.

HENRY OSSIAN FLIPPER

Henry Ossian Flipper was born a slave in Thomasville, Georgia in 1856. Just over twenty years later, he would become the first African American to graduate from West Point. His path of education to West Point began in a wood shop of a slave. Henry was eight then. His schooling continued at Missionary Schools and then at Atlanta University. However, his dream was to attend West Point. No African American had ever graduated from West Point. But this didn’t deter Henry. He wrote James C. Freeman, a state Congressman, asking to be appointed to West Point. After the two exchanged letters, the Congressman appointed Henry. Henry joined four other African Americans at West Point. And of the group, he became the first to graduate, a member of the Class of 1877. Then he became the first African American to command regular troops in the U.S. Army.

HENRY BOYD

Henry Boyd (1809 Kentucky –  April 17, 1858  Muder Creek, Halifax, Virginia) was born into enslavement in Kentucky, was an inventor, carpenter, and a master mechanic. He invented the corded bed with the wooden rail screwed into both the headboard and the footboard. Boyd was apprenticed out to a cabinet maker. He had a tremendous talent for carpentry. His woodworking skills and his strong work ethic combined to provide a path out of slavery and poverty. Boyd was permitted to accept additional work assignments to earn his freedom. He worked for a salt works company, chopping wood and keeping an eye on the boiling pots reducing the salt. Boyd eventually made enough to gain his freedom. At 24-years-old, in 1826, Boyd arrived in Cincinnati. Although Ohio was a free state, Cincinnati, bordered the slave state of Kentucky and was not a welcoming city for blacks. Boyd found this out firsthand. Arriving nearly broke, the skilled carpenter set about finding a means to support himself. Although Cincinnati was a bustling place full of opportunities for employment, no one would hire him for a skilled position. One shop that considered hiring him backed down when its white workers threatened to quit. To make ends meet, Boyd found work on Cincinnati’s riverfront. Many African Americans and Irish found employment there, working for stores as stevedores, unloading cargo from the many steamboats at the city’s public landing. His hard work and commitment enabled him to escape this backbreaking work. Boyd became a janitor at a store. One day, when a white carpenter showed up too drunk to work, Boyd built a counter for the storekeeper. This impressed his boss so much that he contracted him for other construction projects. Through word of mouth, Boyd’s talent began to break down the racism he originally encountered and enabled him to pick up more contracting jobs, working alongside white carpenters. Henry Boyd accumulated enough money to purchase his own workshop for woodworking. His workshop soon grew to encompass four buildings located at the corner of Eighth and Broadway in Cincinnati. Here, Boyd would build and assemble bedframes of his own design, the Boyd Bedstead. This was an improvement over existing bedframes of the day. The Boyd Bedstead utilized a right and left wood screw process, with swelled rails, making for a sturdier fit to endure more stress. This revolutionary new design was developed by Boyd. He was unable to obtain a patent for it, due to the color of his skin. Not only was his bedstead breaking new ground, so were Boyd’s work practices. Employing 20-50 people at any given time, he operated an integrated workplace. Boyd was unable to patent his invention but eventually earned enough money to buy freedom for himself and his brother and sister in 1826. Undeterred by the laws barring him from obtaining a patent, and now a freedman, Boyd started H. Boyd Company in 1836, selling his invention the Boyd Bedstead. He made sure to stamp his name on every finished product to assure buyers it was his work. The Notable Kentucky African American Database records that in 1843 Boyd was among the most successful furniture makers in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his company was based.

ROBERT HENRY LAWRENCE JR. 

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. (October 2, 1935 Chicago, Illinois – December 8, 1967 Edwards Air Force Base, California,) attended Haines Elementary School and, at the age of 16, he graduated in the top 10 percent from Englewood High School in Chicago, in 1952. At the age of 20, he graduated from Bradley University with a Bachelor of Science 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. At the age of 21, he was designated as a U.S. Air Force pilot after completing flight training at Malden Air Force Base, Missouri. At 22, he married Barbara Cress, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Henry Cress of Chicago. By the time he was 25, he had completed an Air Force assignment as an instructor pilot in the T-33 training aircraft for the German Air Force. In 1965, Lawrence earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Ohio State University. His doctoral thesis was “The Mechanism Of The Tritium Beta Ray Induced Exchange Reaction Of Deuterium With Methane and Ethane In The Gas Phase.” He was a senior USAF pilot, accumulating well over 2,500 flight hours, 2,000 of which were in jets. Lawrence flew many tests in the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter to investigate the gliding flight of various unpowered spacecraft returning to Earth from orbit, such as the North American X-15 rocket-plane. NASA cited Lawrence for accomplishments and flight maneuver data that “contributed greatly to the development of the Space Shuttle.” In June 1967, Lawrence successfully completed the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School (Class 66B) at Edwards AFB, California. The same month, he was selected by the USAF as an astronaut in the Air Force’s Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) program, thus becoming the country’s first black astronaut. Robert Henry Lawrence was also a member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity. Lawrence was killed in the crash of an F-104 Starfighter at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on December 8, 1967, at 32 years of age. He was flying backseat on the mission as the instructor pilot for a flight test trainee learning the steep-descent glide technique. The pilot flying made such an approach but flared too late. The airplane struck the ground hard, its main gear failed, it caught fire, and rolled. The front-seat pilot ejected upward and survived, with major injuries. The back seat, which delays a moment to avoid hitting the front seat, ejected sideways, killing Lawrence instantly. Had Lawrence lived, he likely would have been among the MOL astronauts who became NASA Astronaut Group 7 after MOL’s cancellation, all of whom flew on the Space Shuttle. During his brief career, Lawrence earned the Air Force Commendation Medal, the Outstanding Unit Citation. On December 8, 1997, his name was inscribed on the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

DONALD CORTEZ CORNELIUS 

Donald Cortez Cornelius (September 27, 1936 Chicago IL – February 1, 2012) and raised in the Bronzeville neighborhood. After graduating from DuSable High School in 1954, he joined the United States Marine Corps and served 18 months in Korea. He worked at various jobs following his stint in the military, including selling tires, g automobiles, and insurance, and as an officer with the Chicago Police Department. He quit his day job to take a three-month broadcasting course in 1966, despite being married with two sons and having only $400 in his bank account. In 1966, he landed a job as an announcer, news reporter and disc jockey on Chicago radio station WVON. Cornelius joined Chicago television station WCIU-TV in 1967 and hosted a news program called A Black’s View of the News. In 1970, he launched Soul Train on WCIU-TV as a daily local show. The program entered national syndication and moved to Los Angeles the following year. Eddie Kendricks, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Bobby Hutton and Honey Cone were featured on the national debut episode. Originally a journalist and inspired by the civil rights movement, Cornelius recognized that in the late 1960s there was no television venue in the United States for soul music. He introduced many African-American musicians to a larger audience as a result of their appearances on Soul Train, a program that was both influential among African Americans and popular with a wider audience. As writer, producer, and host of Soul Train, Cornelius was instrumental in offering wider exposure to black musicians such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson, as well as creating opportunities for talented dancers, setting a precedent for popular television dance programs. Cornelius said, “We had a show that kids gravitated to,” and Spike Lee described the program as an “urban music time capsule”. With the creation of Soul Train, Cornelius was at the helm of a program that showed African Americans in a new light, creating a Black is Beautiful Campaign. Prior to Soul Train, African Americans were only occasionally performing on TV, as guests on white-centered programs. Soul Train showcased African American culture, and brought African American musicians and dancers to television. This show’s appeal to white audiences steadily grew and eventually earned a huge following. It was one of the most groundbreaking television shows ever. Cornelius (second from right) with The Staple Singers during production of a 1974 episode of Soul Train. Besides his smooth and deep voice and his afro (which slowly shrunk over the years as hairstyle tastes changed), Cornelius was best known for the catchphrase that he used to close the show: “and you can bet your last money, it’s all gonna be a stone gas, honey! I’m Don Cornelius, and as always in parting, we wish you love, peace and soul!” After Cornelius’s departure, it was shortened to “and as always, we wish you love, peace and soul!” and it was used through the most recent new episodes in 2006. Another introductory phrase which he often used was: “We got another sound comin’ out of Philly that’s a sure ‘nough dilly”.

YVETTE MARIE “CHAKA KHAN” STEVENSON

Yvette Marie “Chaka Khan” Stevenson (March 23, 1953, Great Lakes, Illinois) In 1969, at 6 years of age Yvette became active in the black power movement joined the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Her duties were selling the Black Panther Newspaper as well as helping start the free breakfast Program for children. Around this time, she took on a new name: Chaka Adunne Aduffe Yemoja Hodarhi Karifi. She also said goodbye to her formal education, dropping out of high school. In the early 1990’s Chaka Khan Foundation, which provides education programs to at-risk children and helps low-income families with autistic children. In 2016 with the single “I Love Myself,” with portions of sales going to the domestic abuse organization Face Forward as well as STOMP Out Bullying.

MATLETHA FULLER BENNETTE

Matletha Fuller Bennette South Bay Lake Okeechobee FL graduated from college before 12th grade. She’s been valedictorian since elementary school and had 3 degrees by the age of 22. Matletha passed her law bar exam while caring for 2 small children under the age of 4. The odds were against her when her father died when she was 14. “If my teacher didn’t give me homework, my mom gave me work to do. She was determined to give me an education.“ Fuller is the first in her family to graduate from college. She also managed to finish her last year while caring for her 14-month-old son, who was born during her junior and senior years. Having a child didn’t slow her down or diminish the quality of her scholarship. Fuller graduated with a 3.85 GPA and will be recognized as one of four Outstanding Four-Year Scholars in her class along with Xavier Williams, Lindsey B. Zionts, and Anthony J. Cerreta.

DAHLIA UMUNNA

Dahlia Umunna is the first Nigerian to be appointed Professor in Harvard School of Law. Ms. Umunna has been a lecturer at HLS since 2007, and is Deputy Director and Clinical Instructor at HLS’s Criminal Justice Institute (CJI), in which she supervises third-year law students in their representation of adult and juvenile clients in criminal and juvenile proceedings and arguments before Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court and Appeals court. Prior to coming to Harvard Law School, Umunna was a trial attorney with the D.C. Public Defender Service and an adjunct professor of law and Practitioner in Residence at the Washington College of Law, American University. She currently serves as a faculty member for Gideon’s Promise, and is a frequent presenter at Public Defender trainings across the country. She was a board member of the District of Columbia Law Students in Court Clinic and was a guest lecturer for several years at the George Washington University Law School. She is the author of the article “Rethinking the Neighborhood Watch: How Lessons from the Nigerian Village Can Creatively Empower the Community to Assist Poor, Single Mothers in America,” published in the American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law.

GENELLE GUZMAN-MCMILLAN

Genelle Guzman-McMillan went to work on September 11, 2001, on the 64th floor of the World Trade Center. While in her office when she heard a terrible noise outside. “I felt the walls cave in. It was dark and everything was rumbling.” Guzman-McMillan said she and 15 other Port Authority employees were making their way down the stairs from the 64th floor of the north tower when, at the 13th floor, she paused to take off her high heels, resting her arm on her friend Rosa Gonzalez of Jersey City. Just then, at 10:28 a.m. As she raced down the stairs, she felt the building collapse around her, the landing shook, the stairs began to crumble beneath them and the walls burst open. Guzman-McMillan lost her hold on Gonzalez, fell to her knees and covered her head with her arms while the floors above her collapsed. With her head wedged between concrete pillars and steel, her legs painfully pinned under a steel beam, she found herself trapped in darkness and complete silence, unable to move, she prayed and asked God to help her. Hour after hour, she fervently prayed for God to spare her, to give her a chance to live a more meaningful life. Then, close to losing strength after almost a day underground, a man who identified himself as Paul thrust his hand into the hole where she was buried. He grabbed her left hand, her only free limb reassuring her help was on the way. Four hours later, she was extricated from the pile and raced to the hospital. Only one other of her group, not her friend Rosa had survived. Later she met face-to-face with her rescuers to thank them. She asked about Paul. There was no one there that day by that name, she was told. Genelle was the last person found alive in the rubble of the World Trade Center. When the towers came down she was buried for 27 hours, longer than any other person and was the final living person rescued from the rubble at Ground Zero. HOWEVER, Genelle was not found by a human equipped with special gear. Instead, her savior was a dog. “It’s so awesome that the dogs could have this kind of sense, to find people buried under the rubble,” Guzman-McMillan told Animal Planet for the new documentary “Hero Dogs of 9/11.” “I felt total renewed life in me. … That was the most joyful moment.” Genelle’s story should have been included in the World Trade Center Movie released in 2006 but was not.

ROLAND G. FRYER

Roland G. Fryer became the youngest tenured African-American Harvard University professor at the age of 30 in 2007. The Lewisville, Texas native was born June 4, 1977 in Daytona Beach, Fla. Fryer was raised primarily in Lewisville and was a star athlete at Lewisville High School. Fryer gained an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas at Arlington, but never played for the school, instead focusing on academics. Fryer graduated magna cum laude in 1998 after two and a half years of study while working a full-time job. In four years, Fryer earned his Ph.D. in 2002 from Penn State in Economics and completed his post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago. He joined Harvard’s Economics department at the end of a three-year fellowship and in 2011, Fryer was named a MacArthur Fellow.

CHARLES HALEY

Retired NFL player Charles Haley (January 6, 1964 Gladys, Virginia) held the title for 21 years, over the course of 12 seasons was the first NFL player to win five Super Bowls. The NFL Pro Football Hall of Famer is a former linebacker and defensive end for the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys. Haley has been described as “the defensive end’s speed, agility and violence that terrified quarterbacks of the ’80s and ’90s” who “crushed quarterbacks and taunted opponents without mercy.” Haley attended William Campbell High School in Naruna, Virginia where he was a three-year starter for the football team, while playing linebacker and tight end. As a senior, he received defensive player of the year honors, All-Region III and All-Group AA accolades, while helping the team win the Seminole District championship. He also played basketball and was an All-district selection. In his 12 NFL seasons, Haley recorded 100.5 quarterback sacks, two interceptions (nine return yards), and eight fumble recoveries, which he returned for nine yards and a touchdown. He was also selected to play in five Pro Bowls (1988, 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995) and was named NFL All-Pro in 1990 and 1994. In his first four seasons in Dallas, he was on three Super Bowl-winning teams: in 1992 (XXVII), 1993 (XXVIII), and 1995 (XXX). After football, Haley was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and began to undergo therapy and to take medication. Haley was an assistant defensive coach for the Detroit Lions from 2001 to 2002. He is a special advisor mentoring rookies for both the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers. He also has dedicated his life to help fund several local initiatives with organizations such as Jubilee Centre and The Salvation Army.

FRANK ROBINSON

Frank Robinson (August 31, 1935, Beaumont, TX – February 7, 2019 Los Angeles CA) Hall of Famer, First Black MLB Manager was an American outfielder and manager in Major League Baseball who played for five teams from 1956 to 1976, and became the only player to be named the Most Valuable Player of both the National League and American League. Robinson hit 586 home runs — he was fourth on the career list behind only Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays when he retired and now ranks 10th. An MVP with Cincinnati and Baltimore, he won the Triple Crown while leading the Orioles to their first World Series championship in 1966. An All-Star outfielder in 12 seasons and a first-ballot selection to Cooperstown, Robinson also was a Rookie of the Year and picked up a Gold Glove. In 1975, Robinson fulfilled his quest to become the first African-American manager in the big leagues when he was hired by the Cleveland Indians. His impact was immediate and memorable. Robinson died in Los Angeles on February 7, 2019, at the age of 83, as a result of bone cancer.

MOVIE ~ “SOMETHING GOOD – NEGRO KISS”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CneQztP7-YQ
Sometimes a kiss is more than just a kiss. That’s certainly the case with the lip-lock in “Something Good – Negro Kiss,” an 1898 short silent film that was recently added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Register for its historic significance. The clip, showing a couple playfully kissing and clasping hands is free of the demeaning racist tropes seen in other depictions of African-Americans at the time. University of Chicago’s Allyson Nadia Field, an expert on African-American cinema who helped identify the film and its historical significance. “It wasn’t racist caricature, not blackface performance, not comedic ridicule. The actors appeared joyful and genuine in their affection”. “It looks like they’re having fun! And they’re not the butt of any joke or the punchline. This makes the film a rare early cinema artifact.” The man, ragtime composer and performer Saint Suttle, jovially swings his partner, actress Gertie Brown, around before going in for another kiss, then a few more. ~ Life article by Brittany Wong

Examining the historical link between the past and present Japanese Experience

Kristeen Irigoyen- Hernandez aka Lady2Soothe Follow @OurVoicesEcho

On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor External, Hawaii Territory, killing more than 2,300 Americans. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed and the U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized. A total of twelve ships sank or were beached in the attack and nine additional vessels were damaged. More than 160 aircraft were destroyed and more than 150 others damaged.

July 26, 1940, 4 months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor President Roosevelt, with the intention of continuing to grant licenses froze all Japanese assets and ended trade by prohibiting the exportation of oil products preventing Japan whose dependency on the US for most of their crude oil and refined petroleum were ordered to depart from US harbors without loading or unloading cargo. In a confidential 26 page memo dated December 4, 1941 headlined “Methods of Operation and Points of Attack.” and “Japanese intelligence and propaganda in the United States” FDR chose to dismiss the red flags warning war was imminent. “In anticipation of possible open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii”.

Yellow Peril Racism began to envelop the country; where at first the Japanese had been welcomed as cheap labor they now became criminals and terrorists and by Feb. 1942 Americans of Japanese ethnicity suspected of having even one drop of Japanese blood were ordered to Relocation Camps. The little Japanese girl who taught my father to write his name in kindergarten was sent to Manzanar and never seen or heard from again.

Allowed to only take bed linen, a few changes of clothing, a personal set of eating utensils and some toiletry articles, the internees were political prisoners left with little dignity as they were herded into the confines of barbed wire fenced enclosures as armed border agents in elevated towers stood guard. Family dynamics rapidly began to erode as multiple generations were forced into sharing living quarters with strangers in unfinished cold/hot and dusty tarpaper shanties with only straw-filled mattresses, a small stove to heat the room, and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Lacking the basic amenities of running water, cooking and bathrooms facilities internees were subjected to communal un-partitioned showers, open toilets, and in Manzanar the constant threat of black widows spiders creeping out from dark crevices and agitated rattlesnakes coiled in corners ready to strike.

The social location of Japanese families gradually evolved into a new structural system of independence and disconnect from established traditions; Husbands felt shamed by their inability to protect and care for their families; with their patriarchy usurped many fell into the abyss of self-medicating with alcohol to relieve stress and feelings of inadequacy. Community dining hall bells announced meal time which served mystery meat and GI rations and rather than the accustomed family meals it became common for teens and children to eat with friends; Social construct flipped whereas before the Issei were in control, however, due to a better command of English the Nisei had the ability to secure better jobs and higher wages becoming the dominant force of family politics.

Women no longer sweated their lives away performing domestic duties giving them more time to socialize, learn hobbies and complete their educations. Students were able to excel without having to compete with White students for coveted scholarly positions and were eligible to participate in a number of programs unavailable to them in secular institutions. Young ladies of marrying age found love and weren’t bound by arranged marriages.

Rafu Shimpo appears to represent a whole generation of people from the elderly to the youngest, from full Japanese to mixed racial heritage; whereas prior to internment traditional Issei parents determined Nisei were only allowed to marry within their own ethnic culture.

Pre-internment workers and business owners were primarily physical laborers yet are now highly educated with degrees from prestigious universities and hold prominent positions in major companies, own multi-million dollar corporations, and reside in exclusive residential neighborhoods once reserved for “Whites Only.”

Traditional culture is still practiced within many of the communities to uphold long-established and time-honored celebrations and observances.

Examining the historical link between the past and present, the Japanese experience provides an inside look into the essence of how systems within communities continue to function successfully by integrating cultural traditions into the parameters of a governed dominant society.

Prior to becoming *The New Enemy* and carted off to internment camps the majority of Japanese American families experienced a moderate level of racism typical for minority groups of that era. Pro-discrimination laws were passed in the early 1900s denied them the right to become citizens, own land, or marry outside their race. The 1907-1908 *Gentleman’s Agreement* consisting of informal letters between American and Japanese leaders virtually halted all Japanese contract labor to America and forbid the Japanese from buying homes in certain areas and barring them from jobs in various industries. By 1913 The California Alien Land Law prohibited Japanese as “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning agricultural land or possessing long-term farming leases. But for the most part the Japanese lived a peaceful life akin to other American families; owning or working in small businesses, children attending segregated public schools, men who voluntary joined the military and wives carrying out domestic duties.

In 1915, the courthouse in Riverside CA. recorded the deed of the house at 3356 Lemon Street in the names of Mine, Sumi, and Yoshizo Harada, the three minor American-born children of Jukichi and Ken Harada, Japanese immigrants living in Riverside. The deed was in the name of the children because the Alien Land Law of 1913 prevented the parents, aliens ineligible from citizenship, from owning property. Jukichi Harada was charged with violating the law. The People of the State of California v. Jukichi Harada became a test case and the state Supreme Court ruled the children could own the house. The Harada House was declared a National Landmark in 1990.

By 1924 immigration was completely blocked. In the early 1930s the visiting Captain of a cargo freighter docked in Santa Barbara was given a tour of the city while admiring the hillside scenery he lost his balance falling backward into a bed of cactus. People burst out laughing; not understanding American sense of humor, the Captain felt he was being ridiculed and lost face, he vowed to get revenge on Americans and on Santa Barbara. On Feb. 23, 1942, approximately 6 weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor the freighter Captain, who subsequently joined the Japanese navy as a submarine commander surfaced his submarine near an oil field pier just north of Santa Barbara and shelled the pier. Furthering the fear of *Japs*.

The Dec. 7th bombing of Pearl Harbor was quickly followed on Dec. 8, 1941, when FDR froze US citizen Isai assets and ordered the FBI to follow community leaders by imposing curfews and raiding homes for anything advocating a connection to Japan.

This photo; entitled ‘Lunch Hour’, was taken by Dorothea Lange at the Raphael Weill School in San Francisco – she captured the children together moments before the Japanese American population of the school was evacuated from the neighborhood.  

Dorothea Lange’s censored photographs of the Japanese-American Internment

Yellow Peril Racism

They had about one week to dispose of what they owned, except what could be packed and carried for their departure by bus and were allowed only to take bed linen, a few changes of clothing, a personal set of eating utensils and some toiletry articles, the internees  were political prisoners left with little dignity as they were herded into the confines of barbed wire fenced enclosures as armed border agents in elevated towers stood guard.

A Child’s Exit Card

It was Sunday, July 4, 1943. Four-year-old Paul Tomita was experiencing Independence Day, not with sparklers and parades, but by getting his right index finger inked. On that day, he was fingerprinted and photographed for a mint-green exit card that certified he was not a risk to national security. In the photo, Paul looks anxious and forlorn. “My parents are nervous and stressed out,” Paul, 79, says now, as he views the card. “And I know something is wrong.”
Continue Reading https://50objects.org/object/a-childs-identity-card/

May 9, 1942 Centerville CA Farm Families waiting to board the train

When the army rounded up and forcibly removed Japanese Americans from their homes in the spring of 1942, people were forbidden from bringing anything more than what they could carry – including any beloved dogs. However, we have heard a handful of stories of people who were able to sneak their dogs into Manzanar, and one story about family who was allowed to bring their dog with them.

Yoshisaburo Kitada was 63 years old when he and his family were forced to board a train to Manzanar. He was gravely ill with Parkinson ’s disease, and his dog provided comfort and assistance. In these two photos by WRA photographer Clem Albers, you can see the pup (maybe named “Miki”) being carried by a family member while they unloaded from a train at Lone Pine Depot, nine miles south of Manzanar. Sadly, Yoshisaburo passed away August 11, 1942, just four months after these photos were taken. He was survived by his wife, three children, and his loyal pup. Yoshisaburo’s granddaughter tells us that the dog lived through the incarceration, and after the war returned to Southern California with the Kitada family. Years later when it became ill, the dog waited until Yoshisaburo’s son returned home from work before it passed away.
Courtesy of Manzanar National Historic Site
https://tinyurl.com/y9ydteqf  

College student Shig Ochi was one of just over a thousand people who “volunteered” to come to Manzanar at the end of March 1942. A week and a half later, the first group of Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes under Executive Order 9066 would arrive on April Fools Day. “Volunteers” like Shig came early for a number of different reasons. Some intended to prepare the camp for family and friends. Others simply wished to face the inevitable without days or weeks of waiting. Yet many were surprised by what they found. In a 2007 oral history interview with Manzanar National Historic Site, Shig recalled:

“When Manzanar was being set up, there was a call for volunteers. I really did not have much enthusiasm for studying when the outlook was so gloomy, and at the urging of friends, they said I should volunteer for Manzanar because I would be helping my family out by doing so. So I volunteered. It was quite an experience to see the MPs when we got on this little train to go to Manzanar from downtown Los Angeles – Union Station I think… When we got to the camp…it was towards dusk. I guess they bused us from the train station and took us into the camp, and all of a sudden you find the next morning that you’re essentially incarcerated. I volunteered to go. You say, ‘Wait a minute.’ You’re volunteering and suddenly you’re behind bars.”

Clem Albers, a photographer hired by the War Relocation Authority, captured these two photographs on April 2, 1942. Though taken ten days after Shig Ochi arrived, they serve to illustrate the dusty, confined conditions Japanese Americans faced when they first set foot in Manzanar. Some would remain incarcerated here for the next three and a half years.
Courtesy of Manzanar National Historic Site
https://tinyurl.com/y9ydteqf  

First evacuees arrival at Granada Internment Camp

The most notorious camp was Manzanar, built at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles. At its peak, over 10,000 people were interned in the 500-acre camp, enclosed by barbed wire, guard towers and armed military police.

Conditions at the camp were unforgiving. Daytime temperatures could reach 110 degrees, while nights could be freezing. Dust and wind were constant, and the crude barracks provided poor shelter. Within these barracks, each family was allotted a 20-by-25-foot cloth partition.

Most of the internees resolved to make the best of their situation, by attempting to create some semblance of normalcy for their indefinite detention. Some built all the facilities and trappings necessary to maintain a community of 10,000.

Japanese waiting for registration at the Santa Anita Reception Center (Photo by Russell Lee)

Some letters arriving from Japanese-American Internment Camps during WWll were very specific asking for a certain kind of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops.

Family dynamics rapidly began to erode as multiple generations were forced into sharing living quarters with strangers in unfinished cold/hot and dusty tarpaper shanties with only straw-filled mattresses, a small stove to heat the room, and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

Amache Japanese Internment Camp

Looking back on Ansel Adams photographs of Japanese Interment Camp

Orphaned infants incarcerated at the Manzanar Children’s Village, some with as little as 1/8th Japanese ancestry were ripped from orphanages.

Lacking the basic amenities of running water, cooking and bathrooms facilities internees were subjected to communal un-partitioned showers, open toilets, and in Manzanar the constant threat of black widows spiders creeping out from dark crevices and agitated rattlesnakes coiled in corners ready to strike.

The social location of Japanese families gradually evolved into a new structural system of independence and disconnect from established traditions; Husbands felt shamed by their inability to protect and care for their families; with their patriarchy usurped many fell into the abyss of self-medicating with alcohol to relieve stress and feelings of inadequacy.

Community dining hall bells announced meal time which served mystery meat and GI rations, and rather than the accustomed family meals it became common for teens and children to eat with friends.

Manzanar teen getting ready to have breakfast

A life Beyond Limits

Potato Field shows people working against the vast backdrop of the High Sierra’s

Social construct flipped whereas before the Issei were in control, however due to a better command of English the Nisei had the ability to secure better jobs and higher wages thus becoming the dominant force of family politics.

The first grave at Manzanar Center Cemetery

Mr. Watanabe’s signature carved into a low bordering wall

High schooler’s attend a science lecture

Women no longer sweated their lives away performing domestic duties giving them more time to socialize, learn hobbies and complete their educations. Students were able to excel without having to compete with White students for coveted scholarly positions and were eligible to participate in a number of programs unavailable to them in secular institutions. Young ladies of marrying age found love and weren’t bound by arranged marriages.

Dorthea Lange

Japanese American internees making camouflage netting at Manzanar. Photo Dorthea Lange July 1, 1944

Mrs. Dennis Shimizu

Kiyo Yoshida, Lillian Wakatsuki and Yoshiko Yamasaki attend a high school biology class.

The Manzanar Fishing Club.

Minidota MN Family

May 11, 1942 A 23 yr old soldier and his mother in a strawberry field near Florin CA – The soldier had volunteered for the Army on July 10, 1941, and was stationed at Camp Leonard Wood, Missouri. He was furloughed to help his mother and family prepare for their evacuation. He is the youngest of six children, two of them volunteers in United States Army. The mother, age 53, came from Japan 37 years before. Her husband had passed away 21 years prior leaving her to raise six children. She worked in a strawberry basket factory until 1945(?) when her children leased three acres of strawberries “so she wouldn’t have to work for somebody else. 

A Japanese Pleasure Garden built by Internees

Dec. 31, 1942 photo by Frances Stewart

Nakamura with her two daughters “Joyce Yuki” and “Louise Tami” walking under a Japanese Style Pavillion. Manzanar Relocation Camp, Owens Valley California

Manzanar, Calif.–Grandfather and grandson of Japanese ancestry at this War Relocation

Joe Blamey Editor Manzanar Free Press Ben Kuroki, the son of Japanese immigrants who was raised on a Hershey NB farm, is seen in this updated Army Corps file photo. The only known Japanese-American known to have flown over Japan during WWll

Japanese Americans incarcerated in Manzanar from 1942 to 1945 celebrated Halloween behind barbed wire. Articles from the Manzanar Free Press provide insight into what kinds of Halloween parties people held mostly in block mess halls, as a rather intimidating warning to children, that Japanese American policemen in Manzanar wore uniforms of green pants and red shirts. A photo of a children’s Halloween party in the Block 20 mess hall, taken by Toyo Miyatake in 1943 or 1944, shows a “carved pumpkin” created from paper in the absence of real pumpkins, and on the plate of each child a large pear, possibly harvested from Manzanar’s many pear orchards which had been planted decades before WWII.

The Rafu Shimpo Newspaper appears to represent a whole generation of people from the elderly to the youngest, from full Japanese to mixed racial heritage; whereas prior to internment traditional Issei parents determined Nisei were only allowed to marry within their own ethnic culture.

Mary “Mollie” Oyama Mittwer as *Deirde*  (1907–1994) was a Nisei journalist whose writing reflected many of the issues her generation faced during World War II. A leading writer of her generation, *Deirde* dispensed wisdom and controversy through various advice columns and articles, giving Nisei women and men a chance to voice opinions and receive feedback regarding the do’s and don’t’s of delicate topics such as dating and marriage, racism and integration and fielding questions mainly centering on the private lives of people concerned with arranged marriage vs  voluntarily marrying for love,  interracial and interethnic dating, fashion advice, incorporating Japanese traditions into modern day society while continuing to maintain the cultural standards their parents and grandparents expected.

The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in camps in the interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had lived on the Pacific coast. Sixty-two percent of the internees were United States citizens.

Ansel Adams took this picture of fellow photographer Toyo Miyatake, who was interned at Manzanar. Ansel Adams/Courtesy Photographic Traveling Exhibitions

The majority of photographs on this page were taken by Mr. Miyatake.

Before World War II, Miyatake had a photo studio in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. When he learned he would be interned at Manzanar, he asked a carpenter to build him a wooden box with a hole carved out at one end to accommodate a lens. He turned this box into a makeshift camera that he snuck around the camp, as his grandson Alan Miyatake explains in the video below, which is featured in the exhibit.

Fearful of being discovered, Miyatake at first only took pictures at dusk or dawn, usually without people in them. Camp director Merritt eventually caught Miyatake, but instead of punishing him, allowed him to take pictures openly. Miyatake later became the camp’s official photographer, however, he could only set up the camera, and set up the shot, but a White person had to snap the shutter.

His photos convey an intimacy with camp life absent in the pictures that Adams and Lange took. He captured laughter at a picnic and men delivering vegetables to the mess hall.

His photos also had moments of silent protest. In one picture three boys peer through the camp’s barbed wire fence to the outside world. And in another, Miyatake’s son, Archie, holds a pair of clippers against the fence, “to show,” that at some point, the barbed wire has to come down.”

Toyo Miyatake as Grand Marshal

Toyo Miyatake 1977

1977 Two Views of Manzanar – Co-Curator Patrick Nagatani ~ Photography by Graham Howe

Fred Korematsu decided to test the government relocation action in the courts. He found little sympathy there. In KOREMATSU VS. THE UNITED STATES, the Supreme Court justified the executive order as a wartime necessity. When the order was repealed, many found they could not return to their hometowns. Hostility against Japanese Americans remained high across the West Coast into the postwar years as many villages displayed signs demanding that the evacuees never return. As a result, the interns scattered across the country.

In 1988, Congress attempted to apologize for the action by awarding each surviving intern $20,000. While the American concentration camps never reached the levels of Nazi death camps as far as atrocities are concerned, they remain a dark mark on the nation’s record of respecting civil liberties and cultural differences.

First, second, third, fourth and fifth generation of immigrants
Issei (一世 born in Japan immigrated to North America.
Nisei (二世 (second generation) children born in North America whose parents were immigrants from Japan.
Sansei (三世 (third generation) grandchildren of the Issei
Yonsei (四世 fourth generation
Gosei (五省 fifth generation
Obāsan お婆さん aunt or older woman generally referring to the grandmother of a Sansei
Ojiisan おじいさん general term for older men but generally referring to the grandfather of a Sansei
Nikkei (日系) was coined by a multinational group of sociologists and encompasses all of the world’s Japanese immigrants across generations. The collective memory of the Issei and older Nisei was an image of Meiji Japan from 1870 through 1911, which contrasted sharply with the Japan that newer immigrants had more recently left. These differing attitudes, social values and associations with Japan were often incompatible with each other. In this context, the significant differences in post-war experiences and opportunities did nothing to mitigate the gaps which separated generational perspectives.

1943 Manzanar Relocation Center taken by Ansel Adams –  L to R – Mrs. Kay Kageyama, Toyo Miyatake (photographer), Miss Tetsuko Murakam, Mori Nakashima, Joyce Yuki Nakamura (eldest daughter), Corporal Jimmy Shohara, Aiko Hamaguchi (Nurse), Yoshio Muramoto, (electrician).

In 1942 Fred Korematsu refused to follow orders to be incarcerated along with 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West coast of the United States. In 1944, his case reached the Supreme Court. Justice Roberts, in dissent of the opinion of the court, wrote:

“The indisputable facts exhibit a clear violation of constitutional rights… It is a case of convicting a citizen as punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition toward the United States.”

In 1983, when U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel vacated Korematsu’s conviction, she said the case is a “caution that in times of distress the shield of military necessity and national security must not be used to protect governmental actions from close scrutiny and accountability.”

Fred Korematsu himself feared, “As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpn3k8mxjqY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxekM4zGAhY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=per594QmeE4

Many people who stored their belongings in commercial places came back to find that everything had been looted and they had no recourse but to start all over from nothing.

DETENTION CAMPS

Permanent detention camps that held internees from March, 1942 until their closing in 1945 and 1946.

Click on Photos for Enlarged Slideshow

AMACHE

Granada, Colorado Opened August 24, 1942. Closed October 15, 1945. Peak population 7318. Origin of prisoners: Nothern California coast, West Sacramento Valley, Northern San Joaquin Valley, Los Angeles. 31 Japanese Americans from Amache volunteered and lost their lives in World War II. 120 died here between August 27, 1942 and October 14, 1945. In April, 1944, 36 draft resisters were sent to Tucson, AZ Federal Prison.

Drone used to create 3D reconstruction of Japanese internment camp in southern Colorado
https://tinyurl.com/yxbn9ux8

GILA RIVER

Arizona Opened July 20, 1942. Closed November 10, 1945. Peak Population 13,348. Origin of prisoners: Sacramento Delta, Fresno County, Los Angeles area. Divided into Canal Camp and Butte Camp. Over 1100 citizens from both camps served in the U.S. Armed Services. The names of 23 war dead are engraved on a plaque here. The State of Arizona accredited the schools in both camps. 97 students graduated from Canal High School in 1944. Nearly 1000 prisoners worked in the 8000 acres of farmland around Canal Camp, growing vegetables and raising livestock.2

HEART MOUNTAIN

Wyoming Opened August 12, 1942. Closed November 10, 1945. Peak population 10,767. Origin of prisoners: Santa Clara County, Los Angeles, Central Washington. In November, 1942, Japanese American hospital workers walked out because of pay discrimination between Japanese American and Caucasian American workers. In July, 1944, 63 prisoners who had resisted the draft were convicted and sentenced to 3 years in prison. The camp was made up of 468 buildings, divided into 20 blocks. Each block had 2 laundry-toilet buildings. Each building had 6 rooms each. Rooms ranged in size from 16′ x 20′ to 20′ x 24′. There were 200 administrative employees, 124 soldiers, and 3 officers. Military police were stationed in 9 guard towers, equipped with high beam searchlights, and surrounded by barbed wire fencing around the camp.

JEROME

Arkansas Opened October 6, 1942. Closed June 30, 1944. Peak population 8497. Origin of prisoners: Central San Joaquin Valley, San Pedro Bay area. After the Japanese Americans in Jerome were moved to Rohwer and other camps or relocated to the east in June, 1944, Jerome was used to hold German POWs.

MANZANAR 

California Opened March 21, 1942. Closed November 21, 1945. Peak population 10,046. Origin of prisoners: Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley, San Joaquin County, Bainbridge Island, Washington. It was the first of the ten camps to open — initially as a processing center.

MINIDOKA 

Idaho Opened August 10, 1942. Closed October 28, 1945. Peak population 9397. Origin of prisoners: Seattle and Pierce County, Washington, Portland and Northwestern Oregon. 73 Minidoka prisoners died in military service.

POSTON

(aka Colorado River), Arizona Opened May 8, 1942. Closed November 28, 1945. Peak population 17,814. Origin of prisoners: Southern California, Kern County, Fresno, Monterey Bay Area, Sacramento County, Southern Arizona. 24 Japanese Americans held at Poston later lost their lives in World War II. Poston was divided into three separate camps — I, II, and III.

ROHWER

Arkansas Opened September 18, 1942. Closed November 30, 1945. Peak population 8475. Origin of prisoners: Los Angeles and Stockton.

TOPAZ

(aka Central Utah), Utah Opened September 11, 1942. Closed October 31, 1945. Peak population 8130. Origin of prisoners: San Francisco Bay Area.

TULE LAKE

California Opened May 27, 1942. Closed March 20, 1946. Peak population 18,789. Origin of prisoners: Sacramento area, Southwestern Oregon, and Western Washington; later, segregated internees were brought in from all West Coast states and Hawaii. One of the most turbulent camps — prisoners held frequent protest demonstrations and strikes.

TEMPORARY DETENTION CENTERS
Temporary detention centers were used from late March, 1942 until mid-October, 1942, when internees were moved to the ten more permanent internment prisons. These temporary sites were mainly located on large fairgrounds or race tracks in visible and public locations. It would be impossible for local populace to say that they were unaware of the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans.

FRESNO, California First inmate arrival May 6, 1942. Last inmate departure October 30, 1942. Peak population 5120.

MANZANAR, California First inmate arrival March 21, 1942. Peak population (before June 1, 1942) 9666. Before it was leased from the City of Los Angeles, Manzanar was once ranch and farm land until it reverted to desert conditions. Manzanar was transfered from the WCCA to WRA on June 1, 1942, and converted into a “relocation camp.”

MARYSVILLE, California First inmate arrival May 8, 1942. Last inmate departure June 29, 1942. Peak population 2451.

MAYER, Arizona First inmate arrival May 7, 1942. Last inmate departure June 2, 1942. Peak population 245. Mayer was a camp abaondoned by the Civilian Conservation Corp.

MERCED, California First inmate arrival May 6, 1942. Last inmate departure September 15, 1942. Peak population 4508.

PINEDALE, California First inmate arrival May 7, 1942. Last inmate departure July 23, 1942. Peak population 4792. Pinedale was the previous site of a mill.

POMONA, California First inmate arrival May 7, 1942. Last inmate departure August 24, 1942. Peak population 5434.

PORTLAND, Oregon First inmate arrival May 2, 1942. Last inmate departure September 10, 1942. Peak population 3676. Portland used the Pacific International Live Stock Exposition Facilities to hold detainees.

PUYALLUP, Washington First inmate arrival April 28, 1942. Last inmate departure September 12, 1942. Peak population 7390.5

SACRAMENTO, California First inmate arrival May 6, 1942. Last inmate departure June 26, 1942. Peak population 4739. Sacramento used a former migrant camp.

SALINAS, California First inmate arrival April 27, 1942. Last inmate departure July 4, 1942. Peak population 3594.

SANTA ANITA, California First inmate arrival March 27, 1942. Last inmate departure October 27, 1942. Peak population 18,719.

STOCKTON, California First inmate arrival May 10, 1942. Last inmate departure October 17, 1942. Peak population 4271.

TANFORAN, San Bruno, California First inmate arrival April 28, 1942. Last inmate departure October 13, 1942. Peak population 7816. Tanforan is now a large shopping mall by the same name.

TULARE, California First inmate arrival April 20, 1942. Last inmate departure September 4, 1942. Peak population 4978.

TURLOCK, Byron, California First inmate arrival April 30, 1942. Last inmate departure August 12, 1942. Peak population 3662.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INTERNMENT CAMPS
27 U.S. Department of Justice Camps (most at Crystal City, Texas, but also Seagoville, Texas; Kooskia, Idaho; Santa Fe, NM; and Ft. Missoula, Montana) were used to incarcerate 2,260 “dangerous persons” of Japanese ancestry taken from 12 Latin American countries by the US State and Justice Departments. Approximately 1,800 were Japanese Peruvians. The U.S. government wanted them as bargaining chips for potential hostage exchanges with Japan, and actually did use. After the war, 1400 were prevented from returning to their former country, Peru. Over 900 Japanese Peruvians were deported to Japan. 300 fought it in the courts and were allowed to settle in Seabrook, NJ. Efforts to bring justice to the Japanese Peruvians are still active; for information contact Grace Shimizu, 510-528-7288.

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA
CRYSTAL CITY, TEXAS
MISSOULA, MONTANA
SEAGOVILLE, TEXAS
KOOSKIA, IDAHO

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND CITATIONS:
5 Attacks on U.S. Soil During World War
http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/5-attacks-on-u-s-soil-during-world-war-ii
Second Generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) before WWII
http://picturethis.museumca.org/timeline/depression-era-1930s/second-generation-japanese-americans-nisei-wwii/info
When the Japanese Attacked Santa Barbara (1940s)
http://picturethis.museumca.org/timeline/depression-era-1930s/second-generation-japanese-americans-nisei-wwii/info
Remembering The Manzanar Riot
https://densho.org/remembering-manzanar-riot/
List of Detention Camps, Temporary Detention Centers, and Department of Justice Internment Camps
http://www.momomedia.com/CLPEF/camps.html

ADDITIONAL READING

Life after Manzanar
https://heydaybooks.com/book/life-after-manzanar/#

It Can Happen Here: The 75th Anniversary Of The Japanese Internment (Part I)
by Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, The University of Chicago
Tracing the history of one of the most unconscionable tragedies in American history.

FAMILY STRUGGLES TO SAVE PIECE OF JAPANESE AMERICAN HISTORY
Four Japanese-American sisters are weeks away from losing a home that’s been in their family for nearly a century. The Yuge family has lived in the gardener’s cottage on the former Scripps estate in Altadena since the 1920s, when the late patriarch Takeo Yuge became a caretaker for the property. Although the Yuge family was sent away to a Japanese Internment Camp during WWII, all of their belongings were kept safe in the main house. CONTINUE READING
https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2015/05/10/family-struggles-to-save-piece-of-japanese-american-history/

Wintersburg Village — as the property was originally known — once contained churches, residential homes, farmland, and goldfish ponds used to grow fish that were sold to drugstore pet departments. It was also one of few sites owned by Japanese Americans before the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which prohibited people of Japanese descent from owning property. Today, six buildings still stand intact.
CONTINUE READING https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/activists-seek-preserve-historic-japanese-american-site-involved-possible-sale-n858676

When the Emperor Was Divine
After the war, the family is permitted to return home. But they return to a neighborhood neither familiar nor hospitable. Their home has been vandalized, their neighbors are at best aloof or at worst hostile, and their sense of place in America is forever changed. Though the novel, “When the Emperor Was Divine” tells a powerful story of the fear and racism leading to exile and alienation, Otsuka weaves a compelling narrative full of life, depth, and character. When the Emperor Was Divine not only invites readers to consider the troubling moral and civic questions that emerge from this period in American history but also offers a tale that is both incredibly poignant and fully human. CONTINUE READING https://www.arts.gov/national-initiatives/nea-big-read/when-the-emperor-was-divine

Kristeen Irigoyen-Hernandez
Researcher/Chronological Archivist/Writer and member in good standing with the Constitution First Amendment Press Association
(CFAPA.org)

Critically Thinking Conspiracy Theories

OR:
WHEN A PERSON LEARNS CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS, THEY REALIZE CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE INVOKED BY PEOPLE IN POWER, AND ARE NOT JUST THEORIES, BUT IN FACT, TRUTH

CONSPIRACY: With the advances in technology, the government is using its vast resources to track citizens.
THE TRUTH: In 2016, government agencies sent 49,868 requests for user data to Facebook, 27,850 to Google, and 9,076 to Apple, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF), a major nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world and advises the public on matters of internet privacy.

CONSPIRACY: The CIA was testing LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs on Americans in a top-secret experiment on behavior modification.
THE TRUTH: The program was known as MK-ULTRA, and it was real.

CONSPIRACY: Tuskegee Syphilis Study
THE TRUTH: Conducted between 1932 and 1972, it observed the natural progression of syphilis in black men in rural Alabama. Unfortunately, this was not known to those involved in the study – they thought they were receiving free health care from the government.

CONSPIRACY: For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence that smoking is deadly.
THE TRUTH: At the beginning of the 1950s, research was showing an indisputable statistical link between smoking and lung cancer, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Philip Morris even admitted that smoking could cause cancer.

CONSPIRACY: Operation Paperclip: the American Government brought Nazi Scientists to the US
THE TRUTH: After World War II, the United States created a secret Joint Intelligence Objective Agency in which they brought more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians – many of whom had direct ties to the Nazi Party – to work for the government. Known as Operation Paperclip, its primary focus was for the U.S. to gain an advantage in the Cold War.

CONSPIRACY: Bohemian Grove’s gloried-in rituals; where all those rich Republicans go and stand naked against redwood trees
THE TRUTH: Every July, some of the “richest and most powerful men in the world” head to Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre campground in California to engage in a series of hush-hush ceremonies including costumes, theatre, and music. It may or may not include former U.S. presidents, oil tycoons, and other business, and where planning for the Manhattan Project took place, leading to the creation of the atom bomb.

CONSPIRACY: The Dalai Lama is a CIA agent.
THE TRUTH: According to declassified intelligence documents, he earned $180,000 in connection with the CIA’s funding of the Tibetan Resistance to the tune of $1.7 million per year.

CONSPIRACY: The FBI was spying on John Lennon.
THE TRUTH: Like many counter-culture heroes, Lennon was considered a threat: “Anti-war songs, like “Give Peace a Chance” didn’t exactly endear former Beatle John Lennon to the Nixon administration,” NPR reported. “In 1971, the FBI put Lennon under surveillance, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to deport him a year later.” In 1957, John Lennon and Paul McCartney met at a party in Woolton. Just yards away from their meeting place was the grave of Eleanor Rigby.

CONSPIRACY: The Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964, was faked to provoke American support for the Vietnam War.
THE TRUTH: Declassified intelligence documents have revealed the Maddox had provided support for South Vietnamese attacks on a nearby island and the North Vietnamese were responding in kind, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

CONSPIRACY: Human Tissue Collected for Atomic Bomb Tests
THE TRUTH: In the 1950s, the U.S. government secretly collected human tissue – primarily from cadavers, without permission from next of kin. The purpose was to monitor the effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests. More than 1,500 samples (many of them babies) were gathered around the world.

CONSPIRACY: Bayer Medicine Causes AIDS
THE TRUTH: In the mid-1980s, pharmaceutical company Bayer discovered that their blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS.

THERE ARE MANY MORE CONSPIRACY THEORIES DEBUNKED BY CRITICAL THINKERS.

Kristeen Irigoyen-Hernandez
Human Rights Advocate, Researcher/Chronological Archivist and member in good standing with the Constitution First Amendment Press Association (CFAPA.org)

Kristeen Irigoyen-Hernandez aka Lady2Soothe Follow @OurVoicesEcho

Cooper

I met Cooper when I flew into Detroit from Los Angles. Julie, my daughter-in-law picked me up at Wayne County Airport, and as we walked to her van, up popped the head of a beautiful dog. Now I didn’t think Cooper was beautiful at that moment because all I could see were the big teeth of a very large dog snarling at me and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was going to be eaten alive before we got to the house. As I stood debating whether I should chance getting in or turn around and head home, Julie walked around her side of the vehicle and yelled “Cooper shut up” as she beckoned me in. Hesitantly I opened the door and cautiously slid inside. No sooner, had I squeezed myself as close to my escape route as possible, this big fluffy dog jumped in my lap, planted a wet slobbery kiss on my face then snuggled up close for the ride home.

It didn’t matter how infrequently I visited; this big ball of luxurious brown and white fur would greet me like we were long-lost friends; and for weeks after I returned home, I’d find little wisps of Cooper’s long silky hair clinging to my clothes.

From the moment they laid eyes on each other, Julie was Cooper’s human, the center of his life, and Cooper was Julie’s best friend, her most trusted and dedicated confidant; the two were inseparable and loved each other unconditionally. Through many years Cooper faithfully comforted and fiercely protected Julie, and on November 10, 2021, Julie was there to comfort and protect Cooper as he moved on to his next adventure.

You see, when the time comes, pets also have last wishes, it’s when they need their people the most and Julie was as devoted to Cooper as he had always been to her; staying with him until his last breath, soothing, reassuring, and comforting him, the strength of her love giving Cooper the power to let go peacefully knowing he was taking her heart with him.

In the years to come long strands of silken dog hair will unexpectedly float down from heaven as a gentle reminder of the wonderful spirit that still lives on in the hearts of those who loved him. Rest in Peace Cooper, you were a constant and truly loyal friend.

Kristeen Irigoyen-Hernandez
Human Rights Advocate, Researcher/Chronological Archivist and member in good standing with the Constitution First Amendment Press Association (CFAPA.org)

Kristeen Irigoyen-Hernandez aka Lady2Soothe Follow @OurVoicesEcho