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It always bothered me that the 'Color Purple' never received proper recognition during the Oscar ceremonies in the early 1990s. The director and actors in that flick were outstanding. Who cannot still remember when Oprah Winfrey got medieval on her husband and her father-in-law?
The movie never exists if the book wasn't written first. Alice Walker was born on this date in 1944. She is an African American author, speaker, and poet. [SOURCE]
Born Alice Malsenior Walker in Eatonton, Georgia, she was educated at Spelman and Sarah Lawrence colleges. Walker is responsible for a number of writings.
Most of her material portrays the lives of poor, oppressed African American women in the early 1900s. The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) is about the emotional growth of an African American man. Meridian (1976) follows the life of an African American woman during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Walker won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple (1982).
Do you have a favorite book by Alice Walker? Is there a part of Color Purple that you always remember when you think of that movie (or book)? My favorite thing about Alice Walker in recent years was her timely endorsement of Barack Obama!
Minnie Riperton was born on this date in 1947. Her goal at a very young age was to become a famous singer. Riperton studied opera and spent months learning how to breathe and listening to and holding vowels.
She left school early to make $10 a song, singing backup at local studios. Some reports indicate that Minnie signed her first contract at 14, while others report her to be 16. [SOURCE]
The song that inspires me whenever I hear it is simply entitled, 'Loving You'. She sang it with gusto in 1974 on Soul Train:
In 1976, Riperton announced that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone a modified mastectomy. Her "experience" (as she referred to her illness) would give her yet another reason for her life ... lending her celebrity and compassion for others to become a spokesperson for breast cancer awareness, the need for self-examination, and the benefit of early detection.
In addition to being a mother, wife, activist, fund raiser, lecturer, wife, and mother, she signed with Capitol Records, a contract that gave her the creative freedom and production quality that she desired. During the summer of 1978, creating what would be her last album, simply entitled "Minnie." She passed away in her husband’s arms on July 12, 1979, at 31 years of age.
My father and grandfather were both Nupes. Neither of them are with us today. However, I think that they would be pleased to know that their fraternity ... Kappa Alpha Psi ... is celebrating its 104th birthday today.
Do you have any Nupes in your family? If so, call 'em up and say Happy Birthday!
OURstory must be shared at all times of the year, not just in February. I think it is important that our young people challenge themselves in K-12 with science and math classes. Perhaps it will help if this blog shares examples of African American role models who used their knowledge of science and math to create exciting futures for themselves.
For example, Did you know that a young brother named Michael Anderson was born December 25, 1959, in Plattsburgh, New York. He graduated from Cheney High School in Cheney, Washington in 1977. He received a bachelor of science degree in physics/astronomy from University of Washington in 1981. Later he earned a master of science degree in physics from Creighton University.
He successfully got a job with NASA in December 1994. Anderson flew for over 593 hours in space. One of his spaces flight was in January 1988 on the Shuttle Endeavor.
The seven member crew, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Rick Husband, Kalpana Chawla and William McCool died on February 1, 2003 when Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry.
It was later determined that a piece of foam broke free and struck the shuttles wing during launch, damaging the thermal heat tiles which protect the shuttle from extreme temperatures during reentry into the atmosphere.
Michael Anderson was a hero. He was a role model for all of us. May he rest in peace.
My favorite female athlete of all times is Florence Griffith-Joyner ... or Flo-Jo. Flo-Jo was born in Los Angeles on this date in 1959.
She was a dominant track star in the 1980s. In fact, the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul Korea is forever imprinted in my mind as the Games of Flo-Jo. In the 1988 Seoul Games, she won gold medals in the 100- and 200-meter dashes and in the 400-meter relay. For these accomplishments, she received the Jesse Owens Award, given to the year's top track and field athlete, and the Sullivan Award, given to the year's most outstanding amateur athlete.
Only us villagers from a certain generation can remember her flashy one-legged uniforms as well as her long and extravagantly painted fingernails. Check out this video to gain an appreciation of this powerful female athlete:
Flo-Jo retired from track in 1989 to devote more time to endorsement activities, modeling, writing, and coaching her husband. President Bill Clinton appointed Griffith-Joyner co-chairperson of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports in 1993.
Some, like Marion Jones, tried to emulate her without success. Florence Griffith-Joyner died of an apparent heart seizure in 1998.
Do you remember Flo-Jo? What female athlete do you think can challenge her as the greatest of all times?
Ossie Davis was born on this date in 1917. He was an African American actor, writer, producer, director, and a "giant of civil rights." It is hard to think of Ossie Davis without thinking of his wife, Ruby Dee. The two of them demonstrated the power of a committed love between a married couple.
Raiford Chatman Davis (his birth name) was the oldest of five children born to Laura Cooper and Kince Davis in Cogden, GA. He picked up his nickname others mistook his mother's articulation of his initials, "R.C” as "Ossie." He headed for Howard University, where he studied under drama critic Alain LeRoy Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar. Davis began his career as a writer and an actor with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem in 1939.
Davis and Ruby Dee were married in 1948, and are the parents of three children. In 1961, Davis wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed “Purlie Victorious.”
He wrote and directed many films, including “Cotton Comes to Harlem” (1970) and “Countdown at Kusini” (co-produced with his wife, Ruby Dee, 1976), the first American feature film to be shot entirely in Africa by Black professionals.
Davis wrote a number of books and received many honors and citations, including the Hall of Fame Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement in 1989; the Theater Hall of Fame in 1994; the U.S. National Medal for the Arts in 1995; the New York Urban League Frederick Douglass Award; the NAACP Image Award and more. Dee and Davis were joint Kennedy Center honorees in December. They were cited not only for their "theatrical and film achievement," but because they opened "many a door previously shut tight to African American artists and planted the seed for the flowering of America's multicultural humanity."
Davis and Dee were eloquent voices and fundraisers for civil rights issues from the McCarthy era in the 1950s. They were blacklisted because of their activities, and well into the 1980s and '90s, Davis continued as a spokesman for numerous causes of equality.
Ossie Davis was found dead on February 4, 2005, in his hotel room in Miami Beach, FL, at the age of 87.
I enjoyed watching Ossie Davis whenever I could. I thought that he was great in two Spike Lee movies, 'Get on the Bus' and 'Do The Right Thing'. However, my most powerful memory of Ossie Davis comes from somthing that I heard many years after the fact ... his eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X.
Villagers -- what is your favorite memory of Ossie Davis?
On this date in 1933, Flip Wilson was born. He was an African American entertainer and the most visible Black comedian of the early 1970s.
He was born in Jersey City, N.J., the tenth of 24 children. Clerow Wilson (his given name) was a troublesome and troubled child in his youth. His family was extremely poor, he ran away from several reform schools, and was ultimately raised in foster homes. His comedic talents first surfaced while he was serving in the Air Force overseas. While in the Pacific, Wilson entertained his buddies with preposterous routines. Upon his return to civilian life he had to settle for a day job as a bellhop along with part-time showmanship.
Opportunity found him in 1959 when a Miami businessman sponsored him for one year for $50 per week, enabling him to concentrate on the work he loved. For the next five years, Flip Wilson appeared regularly at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The Tonight Show was his next stop. in 1965, he began a series of nationwide appearances, followed by long-term contracts and a number of hit records. With "The Flip Wilson Show" in the early 1970s, he became the first African American to have a weekly prime-time television show under his own name.
I remember watching Flip Wilson when I was a kid. The two catch phrases that stick with me are: "What you see is what you get!" and "The devil made me do it!" Could Tyler Perry have been successful with Madea without Flip Wilson's portrayal of Geraldine?
Wilson died November 25, 1998 at the age of 64. Rest in peace Mr. Wilson!
Hiram R. (Rhodes) Revels was born on this date in 1822. He was a Black educator, minister, and politician, and the first African American to serve in the United States Senate.
He was born as a free man in Fayetteville, N.C. Unfortunately, all Blacks in the South, free or slaves, were forbidden to learn to read and write. Revels was secretly taught these basics by a free Black woman. When he was 15, his family moved to Lincointon, N.C., where Revels worked as a barber. In 1844, he moved to Indiana (a free state) and began studying at Beech Grove Seminary, a Quaker school.
At this time Revels became involved with the teachings of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a significant religious and educational force in the Black community. In 1845, Revels began studying for the ministry in Drake County, Ohio. Later that year, he was ordained as a minister of the AME Church, and made an elder in 1849.
Revels, an itinerant preacher, was imprisoned in Missouri in 1854, for preaching the gospel to Negroes. In the early 1850s, Revels married Phoeba A. Bass, and together they raised six daughters. He attended Knox College in Galesburg, IL, and in 1857, he became a minister became principal of an African American high school in Baltimore, Maryland.
When the Civil War started, He raised two Black regiments during the Civil War and fought at the battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi. He established a school for freedmen in St. Louis, in 1863, and worked with the U.S. Provost Marshall to handle the affairs of ex-slaves.
In 1865, Revels joined the Methodist Episcopal (ME) Church, which offered more opportunities for his work in the South. After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Act of 1867 required the Southern states to write new constitutions permitting African Americans to vote and hold public office. In the following year. African Americans were officially recognized as citizens of the United States as a result of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Later that year, Revels was appointed for a term on the Natchez city board of aldermen. During the first session of the Mississippi legislature in January 1868, Revels was asked to open the session with a prayer. According to John R. Lynch,
"That prayer-—one of the most impressive and eloquent prayers that had ever been delivered in the [Mississippi] Senate Chamber-made Revels a United States Senator. He made a profound impression upon all who heard him. It impressed those who heard it that Revels was not only a man of great natural ability but that he was also a man of superior attainments."
In 1869, Lynch, a Black political figure from Natchez, encouraged him to enter as a candidate for state senator, representing Adams County. Revels accepted the nomination at the Republican caucus in December 1869.
In January 1870, Mississippi elected Hiram Revels as a U.S. senator. He was seated on February 25, 1870, and held the office until March 3, 1871, becoming the first African American member of Congress. During Revels' short tenure, he introduced several bills, presented a number of petitions, and served on the Committee on the District of Columbia and the Committee on Education. After his term in the senate, Revels became president of Alcorn College from 1871 to 1873.
He then reentered the ministry as the pastor of the Holly Springs, Mississippi, ME church. In 1876, he came back to Alcorn College until 1882, then taught theology at Rust College in Holly Springs. On January 16, 1901, Revels died of a stroke.
To date, six African Americans have served in the United States Senate. Although Revels served in the Senate for just a year, he broke new ground for African Americans in Congress!
Black History is something that should be shared 24/7/365 ... not just in the month of February. We should glorify OURstory whenever we have the chance to do so.
Villagers, it turns out that a remarkable nubian woman was born on this day (September 23) in 1863. Her name was Mary Church Terrell and she lived for 90 years and had a remarkable influence for African Americans ... particularly women.
She was a popular speaker and lecturer and wrote many articles denouncing segregation. Her appointment to the District of Columbia Board of Education in 1895 was a first in America for a woman of color. She resigned in 1901, was reappointed in 1906, and held the post until 1911. In 1909, she was one of two Black women (Ida B. Wells-Barnett was the other) invited to sign the "Call" and be present at the organizational meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, thus becoming a charter member of the national organization. She assisted in the formation of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority at Howard University in 1914, accepted honorary membership, and wrote the Delta Creed, which outlined a code of conduct for young women.
Mary Church Terrell was involved in the international women's movement on three occasions. She represented Black women on the American delegation to the International Congress of Women at Berlin in 1904 and was the only women to deliver her address in English, German, and French. Her theme was equal rights for women and people of African descent wherever they may be found. In 1919, she received international recognition as a speaker on the program at the Quinquennial International Peace Conference in Zurich, and in 1937 she delivered an address before the International Assembly of the World Fellowship of Faith in London. In 1940, she wrote her autobiography, A Colored Woman In A White World.
This is an example of a powerful African American who may not be known well enough in our community. Villagers, did you know of this sister before today?
On this date we mark the birth of Kwame Nkrumah in 1909. Kwame Nkrumah became the first prime minister and later president of Ghana. He was born at Nkroful in what was then the British-ruled Gold Coast, the son of a goldsmith.
In 1930, at Achimota College in Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast Nkrumah earned a teacher's certificate and taught at several Catholic elementary schools. In 1939 he graduated from Lincoln University with B. A. degrees in economics and sociology, earned a theology degree from the Lincoln Theological Seminary in 1942, and received M. A. degrees in education and philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942 and 1943.
He also promoted Pan-Africanism, a movement for cooperation between all people of African descent and for the political union of an independent Africa. In 1945 he went to London, to study economics and law. That year he helped organize the fifth Pan-African Congress, in Manchester; with Black American sociologist and writer W.E.B. Du Bois, future president of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta, and American actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. In 1946 Nkrumah left his academic studies to become secretary general of the West African National Secretariat. That same year, Nkrumah became vice president of the West African Students Union, a pro-independence organization of younger, more politically aggressive African students studying in Britain.
He returned to Ghana in 1947 and became general secretary of the newly founded United Gold Coast Convention but split from it in 1949 to form the Convention People's party (CPP).
However, the strikes had convinced the British authorities to move the colony toward independence. In 1951 Nkrumah, while still in prison, won the central Accra seat by a landslide. The British governor of the Gold Coast released Nkrumah from prison and appointed him leader of government business. The following year he named him Prime Minister. Reelected in 1954 and 1956, Nkrumah guided the Gold Coast to independence in 1957 under the name Ghana, after an ancient West African empire. Nkrumah built a strong central government and attempted to unify the country politically and to muster all its resources for rapid economic development.
As a proponent of Pan-Africanism, he sought the liberation of the entire continent from colonial rule, offered generous assistance to other African nationalists, and initially pursued a policy of nonalignment with the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His goal was never realized, but his efforts helped bring about the Organization of African Unity in 1963, which promotes peace and cooperation between African nations. In 1960 Ghana became a republic and Nkrumah was elected president. Between 1961 and 1966 Nkrumah put together an ambitious and very expensive hydroelectric project on the Volta River that though highly successful, was laced with economic mismanagement along with several other developmental schemes over the period.
As time passed he was accused of forming a dictatorship. In 1964 he formed a one-party state, with himself as president for life, and was accused of actively promoting a cult of his own personality.
Nkrumah did not hesitate to use strong-arm methods in implementing his domestic programs. He remained popular with the masses, yet his tactics made enemies among civil servants, judges, intellectuals, and army officers. While Nkrumah was visiting China in 1966, his government was overthrown in an army coup. He spent his last years in exile, dying in Bucharest, Romania, on April 27, 1972, while receiving treatment for throat cancer. Kwame Nkrumah's remains were returned to Ghana for burial in his hometown.
His legacy and dream of a "United States of Africa" still remains a goal among many.
Born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, on August 17, 1887, Marcus Garvey was the youngest of 11 children. Garvey moved to Kingston at the age of 14, found work in a print shop, and became acquainted with the living conditions of the laboring class. He quickly involved himself in social reform, participating in the first Printers' Union strike in Jamaica in 1907 and in setting up the newspaper The Watchman. Leaving the island to earn money to finance his projects, he visited Central and South America, amassing evidence that black people everywhere were victims of discrimination. He visited the Panama Canal Zone and saw the conditions under which the West Indians lived and worked. He went to Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia and Venezuela. Everywhere, blacks were experiencing great hardships and discrimination.
Garvey returned to Jamaica distressed at the situation in Central America, and appealed to Jamaica's colonial government to help improve the plight of West Indian workers in Central America. His appeal fell on deaf ears. Garvey also began to lay the groundwork of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), to which he was to devote his life. Undaunted by lack of enthusiasm for his plans, Garvey left for England in 1912 in search of additional financial backing. While there, he met a Sudanese-Egyptian journalist, Duse Mohammed Ali. While working for Ali's publication African Times and Oriental Review, Garvey began to study the history of Africa, particularly, the exploitation of Black peoples by colonial powers. He read Booker T. Washington's “Up From Slavery”, which advocated black self-help.
In 1914 Garvey organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its coordinating body, the African Communities League (ACL). In 1920 the organization held its first convention in New York. The convention opened with a parade down Harlem's Lenox Avenue. That evening, before a crowd of 25,000, Garvey outlined his plan to build an African nation-state. In New York City his ideas attracted popular support, and thousands enrolled in the UNIA. He began publishing the newspaper The Negro World and toured the United States preaching Black Nationalism to popular audiences. His efforts were successful, and soon, the association boasted over 1,100 branches in more than 40 countries. Most of these branches were located in the United States, which had become the UNIA's base of operations. There were, however, offices in several Caribbean countries, Cuba having the most. Branches also existed in places such as Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Venezuela, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Namibia and South Africa. He also launched some ambitious business ventures, notably the Black Star Shipping Line.
Garvey promoted two new business organizations — the African Communities League and the Negro Factories Corporation. Financial betrayal by trusted aides and a host of legal entanglements (based on charges that he had used the U.S. mail to defraud prospective investors) eventually led to Garvey's imprisonment in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for a five-year term. In 1927 his half-served sentence was commuted, and he was deported to Jamaica by order of President Calvin Coolidge.
Garvey then turned his energies to Jamaican politics, campaigning on a platform of self-government, minimum wage laws, and land and judicial reform. He was soundly defeated at the polls, however, because most of his followers did not have the necessary voting qualifications. In 1935 Garvey left for England where, in near obscurity, he died on June 10, 1940, in a cottage in West Kensington.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey advocated that Africans control the wealth of Africa. He taught that control, control of resources, control of self, control of nation, requires preparation, Garveyism was about total preparation.
Today is Mandela Day. On this date in 1918 Nelson Mandela was born. I think that Mr. Mandela has been rewarded with long-life to compensate for the remarkable sacrifice that he made for his people.
Born in Umtata, South Africa, in what is now Eastern Cape Province, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was the son of a Xhosa-speaking Thembu chief. He attended the University of Fort Hare in Alice where he became involved in the political struggle against the racial discrimination practiced in South Africa. He was expelled in 1940 for participating in a student demonstration. After moving to Johannesburg, he completed his course work by correspondence through the University of South Africa and received a bachelor’s degree in 1942. Mandela then studied law at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
He became increasingly involved with the African National Congress (ANC), a multiracial nationalist movement which sought to bring about democratic political change in South Africa. Mandela helped establish the ANC’s Youth League in 1944 and became its president in 1951. The National Party (NP) came to power in South Africa in 1948 on a political platform of white supremacy. The official policy of apartheid, or forced segregation of the races, began to be implemented under NP rule. In 1952, the ANC staged a campaign known as the Defiance Campaign, when protesters across the country refused to obey apartheid laws. That same year Mandela became one of the ANC’s four deputy presidents.
In 1952, he and his friend Oliver Tambo were the first Blacks to open a law practice in South Africa. In the face of government harassment and with the prospect of the ANC being officially banned, Mandela and others devised a plan. Called the "M" plan after Mandela, it organized the ANC into small units of people who could then encourage grassroots participation in anti-apartheid struggles.
By the late 1950s, Mandela, with Oliver Tambo and others, moved the ANC in a more militant direction against the increasingly discriminatory policies of the government. He was charged with treason in 1956 because of the ANC’s increased activity, particularly in the Defiance Campaign, but he was acquitted after a five-year trial. In 1957, Mandela divorced his first wife, Evelyn Mase; in 1958, he married Nkosikazi Nomzamo Madikizela, a social worker, who became known as Winnie Mandela. In March 1960, the ANC and its rival, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), called for a nationwide demonstration against South Africa’s pass laws, which controlled the movement and employment of Blacks and forced them to carry identity papers.
When police massacred 69 Blacks demonstrating in Sharpeville, both the ANC and the PAC were banned. After Sharpeville, the ANC abandoned the strategy of nonviolence, which until that time had been an important part of its philosophy. Mandela helped to establish the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), in December 1961. He was named its commander-in-chief and went to Algeria for military training.
Back in South Africa, he was arrested in August 1962 and sentenced to prison for incitement and for leaving the country illegally. In response to both international and domestic pressure, the South African government, under the leadership of President F. W. de Klerk, lifted the ban against the ANC and released Mandela in February 1990 after 28 years in prison.
Soon after his release from prison he became estranged from Winnie Mandela, who had played a key leadership role in the anti apartheid movement during his incarceration. Although Winnie had won international recognition for her defiance of the government, immediately before Mandela’s release she had come into conflict with the ANC over a controversial kidnapping and murder trial that involved her young bodyguards. The Mandelas were divorced in 1996. Mandela, who enjoyed enormous popularity, assumed the leadership of the ANC and led negotiations with the government for an end to apartheid. While white South Africans considered sharing power a big step, Black South Africans wanted nothing less than a complete transfer of power. Mandela played a crucial role in resolving differences. For their efforts, he and de Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. The following year South Africa held its first multiracial elections, and Mandela became president. Mandela sought to calm the fears of white South Africans and of potential international investors by trying to balance plans for reconstruction and development with financial caution. His Reconstruction and Development Plan allotted large amounts of money to the creation of jobs and housing and to the development of basic health care. In December 1996, Mandela signed into law a new South African constitution. The constitution established a federal system with a strong central government based on majority rule, and it contained guarantees of the rights of minorities and of freedom of expression. Mandela became the oldest elected President of South Africa when he took office at the age of 77 in 1994. He retired in 1999, to be succeeded by Thabo Mbeki as party leader of the ANC. After his retirement as President, Mandela went on to become an advocate for a variety of social and human rights organizations. He has expressed his support for the international Make Poverty History movement of which the ONE Campaign is a part. Since his retirement, one of Mandela's primary commitments has been to the fight against AIDS. Mandela's 90th birthday was marked across the country on July 18, 2008, with the main celebrations held at his home town of Qunu. A concert in his honor was also held in Hyde Park, London. In a speech to mark his birthday, Mandela called for the rich people to help poor people across the world. My Mandela Memory: Nelson Mandela went on a worldwide tour after his release from prison in 1990. Stevie Wonder joined him on the tour when it came to the United States. I was living in Detroit when the Mandela tour came to Tigers Stadium. I recall the sense of pride and awe that I felt in realizing that this stoic African sacrificed his youth during 28-years in prison. He stood like a rock in his belief. All of us should aspire to have Mandela's strength of character.What 'Mandela Memory' can you share with us?
Malia Obama, the eldest of President Barack Obama's two daughters, turned 16 today. I wonder how cool it must be to celebrate a birthday in the White House?
Born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908, Thurgood Marshall was the grandson of a slave. His father, William Marshall, instilled in him from youth an appreciation for the United States Constitution and the rule of law.
After graduating from Frederick Douglass High School in 1925, Thurgood followed his brother, William Aubrey Marshall, to Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania. His classmates at Lincoln included a distinguished group of future Black leaders such as the poet and author Langston Hughes, the future President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and musician Cab Calloway.
Just before graduation, he married his first wife, Vivian "Buster" Burey. Their twenty-five year marriage ended with her death from cancer in 1955.
In 1930, he applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was denied admission because he was Black.This was an event that was to haunt him and direct his future professional life.
Thurgood sought admission and was accepted at the Howard University Law School that same year and came under the immediate influence of the dynamic new dean, Charles Houston, who instilled in all of his students the desire to apply the tenets of the Constitution to all Americans.
Paramount in Houston's outlook was the need to overturn the 1898 Supreme Court ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson which established the legal doctrine called, "separate but equal." Marshall's first major court case came in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland to admit a young African American Amherst University graduate named Donald Gaines Murray.
Applauding Marshall's victory, author H.L. Mencken wrote that the decision of denial by the University of Maryland Law School was "brutal and absurd," and they should not object to the "presence among them of a self-respecting and ambitious young Afro-American well prepared for his studies by four years of hard work in a class A college."
Thurgood Marshall followed his Howard University mentor, Charles Houston to New York and later became Chief Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During this period, Mr. Marshall was asked by the United Nations and the United Kingdom to help draft the constitutions of the emerging African nations of Ghana and what is now Tanzania. It was felt that the person who so successfully fought for the rights of America's oppressed minority would be the perfect person to ensure the rights of the White citizens in these two former European colonies.
After amassing an impressive record of Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination, including the landmark Brown v. Board decision in 1954, President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over 150 decisions including support for the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues. Biographers
Michael Davis and Hunter Clark note that, "none of his (Marshall's) 98 majority decisions was ever reversed by the Supreme Court."
In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Judge Marshall to the office of U.S. Solicitor General. Before his subsequent nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1967, Thurgood Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. Indeed, Thurgood Marshall represented and won more cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other American.
Until his retirement from the highest court in the land, Justice Marshall established a record for supporting the voiceless American. Having honed his skills since the case against the University of Maryland, he developed a profound sensitivity to injustice by way of the crucible of racial discrimination in this country. As an Associate Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall leaves a legacy that expands that early sensitivity to include all of America's voiceless.
Justice Marshall died on January 24, 1993.
I invite all villagers to use the COMMENTS section ('Village Voices') to share your thoughts, memories or insights on Thurgood Marshall.
Chris Henry would have been 31 years old today. From all accounts he was turning his life around. Unfortunately, he died in a freak accident during the 2009 NFL season.
The 6-foot-4, 200-pound Chris Henry played for the Bengals for five seasons. Henry played at West Virginia University and joined the Bengals as a third-round draft pick in 2005.
I'm a fan of the Cincinnati Bengals. As such, I had high hopes for Chris Henry. I'm sad that he is no longer with us. However, I suspect that his story is a cautionary tale for all young athletes ... Never take your talent for granted. Never feel that you are above the law. Mostly, I think that he reminds all of us never to do things that will embarrass ourselves or our family.
All that being said ... I'm sorry that he passed away. Our blog is honored to remember the positive aspects of him memory on his birthday. Rest in peace Chris!
Luther Vandross was born on this date 1951. I imagine that most villagers know about the legacy of this brother.
I remember when I first heard Luther's song Never Too Much. I played that song over and over to learn the lyrics. This was before you could go on the Internet and print out the lyrics like we do today. My goal was to repeat the lyrics to my first wife as a personal Valentines Day celebration.
Me and some of my buddies once took a limousine from Palm Springs to San Diego to attend a Vandross concert. I remember being amazed at how much his live concert sounded exactly like his albums. Do you remember the flawless bridge that he made between If Only For One Night and Creepin'?
Towards the end of his life he recorded a song that will always be one of my all-time favorites ... Dance With My Father.
Harold Washington sparked the imagination of African Americans throughout the nation when he was elected mayor of Chicago. It was one thing to have mayors in small towns or someplace down in the South. It was another thing for an unabashedly proud Blackman to be elected mayor of the 2nd largest city in the nation.
I think it is fair to say that we would not have Barack Obama has our president if we didn't have Harold Washington as Chicago's mayor.What are your thoughts or memories of Harold Washington?
It always bothered me that the 'Color Purple' never received proper recognition during the Oscar ceremonies in the early 1990s. The director and actors in that flick were outstanding. Who cannot still remember when Oprah Winfrey got medieval on her husband and her father-in-law?
I think it is fair to say that we would not have Barack Obama has our president if we didn't have Harold Washington as Chicago's mayor. What are your thoughts or memories of Harold Washington?
