February 7, 2022

28 Days of Black Americans

28 Days of Black Americans is our way of highlighting significant individuals known for their illumination of the Black experience, shaping the American story.

DAY 1

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (1856-1931)

-A pioneering cardiologist; one of the first physicians to successfully complete pericardial (open-heart) surgery on a patient. 

-in 1891, Williams opened Provident Hospital, the first medical facility to have an interracial staff. 

-He also worked with the Equal Rights League, a Black civil rights organization active during the Reconstruction era.

https://www.biography.com/scientist/daniel-hale-williams

DAY 2

Arthur Mitchell (1934-2018)

-First African-American principal dancer in a major dance company, New York City Ballet (1956-1968)

-George Balanchine choreographed “Argon” for him and Diana Adams in 1957, challenging “the essence and purity of Caucasian dance.”

– In 1969 he and Karel Shook founded Dance Theatre of Harlem, an integrated school, whose associated company made its debut in 1971 in New York City. 

DAY 3

Harriet Jacobs  (1813 or 1815- 1897)

– writer, whose autobiographyIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is now considered an “American classic”.

-after hiding in a tiny attic crawl space for seven years, she finally managed to escape to the free North, where she was reunited with her children Joseph and Louisa Matilda and her brother John S. Jacobs

-Circa 1849, she operated an antislavery reading room in the Talman Block, the same building in Rochester where Frederick Douglass had his newspaper office. Even here her freedom was in danger until her employer was able to pay off her legal owner.

– During and immediately after the Civil War, she went to the Union-occupied parts of the South together with her daughter, organizing help and founding two schools for fugitive and freed slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Jacobs

DAY 4

Ralph Abernathy (1926 – 1990)

– an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister

– co-founded and was an executive board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He became president of the SCLC following the assassination of King in 1968, where he led the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C.

-He collaborated with King and E. D. Nixon to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the Montgomery bus boycott.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Abernathy

DAY 5

Richard Allen (1760–1831)

– Minister, educator and writer Allen was born into slavery presumably in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 14, 1760.

– allowed Allen to purchase his freedom for $2,000 in 1783. The paper detailing Allen’s freedom would in fact become the first manumission document to be held as a public file, having been donated to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

– In 1799, Allen became the first African American to be ordained in the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Then, in 1816, with support from representatives from other Black Methodist churches, Allen founded the first national Black church in the United States, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Today, the AME Church boasts more than 2.5 million members.

https://www.biography.com/religious-figure/richard-allen

Day 6

bell hooks (1952 – 2021)

– born Gloria Jean Watkins, she was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name “bell hooks” is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

The focus of hooks’s writing (over 30 books) was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination.

-“I believe wholeheartedly that the only way out of domination is love and the only way into really being able to connect with others, and to know how to be, is to be participating in every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html

DAY 7

Medgar Evers (1925 – 1963)

-Evers became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. Following the 1954 ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers challenged the segregation of the state-supported public University of Mississippi, applying to law school there.

-Evers was murdered in 1963 at his home in Jackson, Mississippi (now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument) by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council in Jackson.  In 1994, Beckwith was convicted of Evers’ murder.

-As a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran who had served in World War II, Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medgar_Evers

DAY 8

Ella Baker (1903 – 1986)

-She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century.

-Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves.

-Biographer Barbara Ransby calls Baker “one of the most important American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement”. She is known for her critiques of both racism in American culture and sexism in the civil rights movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker

Day 9

Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967)

– He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he ,oved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.

– Hughes tried to depict the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. He criticized the divisions and prejudices within the black community based on skin color.

– Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture., including their love of music, laughter, and language itself alongside their suffering.

Day 10

Julius Lester (1939-2018)

– Award-winning author, educator, activist, and musician Julius Lester, known for a body of work focused on African-American culture, history, and folklore, as well as for his fierce advocacy for books for black children by black creators.

-He began writing in earnest in 1965, inspired by his work with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. In all, he has more than 40 published titles to his credit.  He partnered frequently with illustrator, Jerry Pinkney.

– You can learn more about him through a 2014 documentary, “The Folk Singer,” airing as part of the American Experience series on PBS.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/75872-obituary-julius-lester.html

Day 11

Jerry Pinkney (1939 – 2021)

-An American illustrator and writer of children’s literature, illustrating over 100 books since 1964.

-He received many awards, including five Coretta Scott King Awards for illustration and the Caldecott Medal in 2010 for his book The Lion & the Mouse.

– Pinkney has partnered with the United States Postal Service, National Park Service, and National Geographic for his illustration work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pinkney

Day 12

Barbara C. Harris (1930-2020)

– Harris was long active in civil rights issues, participating in freedom rides and marches in the 1960s, including the Selma to Montgomery marches led by Martin Luther King Jr.

– Harris was elected bishop suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, on September 24, 1988, at a special convention of diocesan delegates. Her election was controversial, in part because she was divorced and had not attended seminary. She was also the first woman to be elected to the position of bishop not only in the Episcopal Church, but in all of the Anglican Communion.

–  Speaking of her work as bishop, Harris said, “I certainly don’t want to be one of the boys. I want to offer my peculiar gifts as a black woman … a sensitivity and an awareness that comes out of more than a passing acquaintance with oppression.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Harris_(bishop)

Day 13

Mae Jemison (born 1956)

– Jemison graduated from Stanford University with degrees in chemical engineering as well as African and African-American studies. She then earned her medical degree from Cornell University. Jemison was a doctor for the Peace Corps in Liberia and Sierra Leone from 1983 until 1985 and worked as a general practitioner. In pursuit of becoming an astronaut, she applied to NASA.

– Jemison became the first black woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour.

– Jemison left NASA in 1993 and founded a technology research company. She later formed a non-profit educational foundation and through the foundation is the principal of the 100 Year Starship project funded by DARPA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Jemison

Day 14

Bayard Rustin (1912-1987)

– A leader in social movements for civil rights, nonviolence, and gay rights.

-worked with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement, in 1941, to press for an end to racial discrimination in employment. Rustin later organized Freedom Rides, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later served as an organizer for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

-he helped organize a group, called “In Friendship,” amongst Baker, George Lawrence, Stanley Levison of the American Jewish Congress, and some other labor leaders. “In Friendship” provided material and legal assistance to those being evicted from their tenant farms and households in Clarendon County, Yazoo, and other places.

-Rustin was a gay man and, due to criticism over his sexuality, he usually acted as an influential adviser behind the scenes to civil-rights leaders. In the 1980s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay causes, speaking at events as an activist and supporter of human rights.

-On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin

Day 15

CT Vivian (1924-2020)

-Mr. Vivian was a Baptist minister and a member of Dr. King’s inner circle of advisers, alongside the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and other civil rights luminaries.

-Like his followers, Mr. Vivian was arrested often, jailed and beaten. In 1961, at the end of a violence-plagued interracial Freedom Ride to Jackson, he was dispatched to the Hinds County Prison Farm, where he was beaten by guards.  He survived violence in Selma, AL and near death in St. Augustine, FL.

-After leaving Dr. King’s staff, Mr. Vivian founded educational and civil rights organizations, lectured widely, promoted jobs for Black Chicagoans and wrote “Black Power and the American Myth” (1970), an early assessment of the civil rights movement.

-He and John Lewis died on the same day.

Day 16

Desmond Tutu (1931-2021)

– For much of his life, Archbishop Tutu was a spellbinding preacher, his voice by turns sonorous and high-pitched. He often descended from the pulpit to embrace his parishioners. Occasionally he would break into a pixielike dance in the aisles, punctuating his message with the wit and the chuckling that became his hallmark, inviting his audience into a jubilant bond of fellowship. While assuring his parishioners of God’s love, he exhorted them to follow the path of nonviolence in their struggle.

– As leader of the South African Council of Churches and later as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Archbishop Tutu led the church to the forefront of Black South Africans’ decades-long struggle for freedom. His voice was a powerful force for nonviolence in the anti-apartheid movement, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

– Archbishop Tutu preached that the policy of apartheid was as dehumanizing to the oppressors as it was to the oppressed. At home, he stood against looming violence and sought to bridge the chasm between Black and white; abroad, he urged economic sanctions against the South African government to force a change of policy.

Day 17

W.E.B Du Bois (1818-1895)

– American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century.

– In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Dubois charged that Washington’s strategy, rather than freeing the Black man from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many Black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the Black community into two wings—the “conservative” supporters of Washington and his “radical” critics.

– Dubois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association’s director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class Blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the Black protest from 1910 until 1934.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-E-B-Du-Bois

Day 18

Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

– On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake‘s order to vacate a row of four seats in the “colored” section in favor of a white passenger, once the “white” section was filled. She helped inspire the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year.

-The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

– From 1965 to 1988, she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American US Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US.

– After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that there was more work to be done in the struggle for justice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks

Day 19

Robert Sengstacke Abbott (1870-1940)

– With industrialization underway in the United States, Abbot studied the printing trade at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically black college in Virginia from 1892 to 1896.

-in 1905 Abbott founded The Chicago Defender newspaper with an initial investment of ¢25 (equivalent to $7 in 2020). He started printing in a room at his boardinghouse; his landlady encouraged him, and he later bought her an 8-room house.

– The Defender told stories of earlier migrants to the North, giving hope to disenfranchised and oppressed people in the South of other ways to live. Abbott, through his writings in the Chicago Defender, expressed those stories and encouraged people to leave the South for the North.

– The Chicago Defender not only encouraged people to migrate north for a better life, but to fight for their rights once they got there. The slogan of the paper and the first goal was “American race prejudice must be destroyed.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sengstacke_Abbott

Day 20

Jane Bolin (1908-2007)

– In 1931, Bolin became the first African-American woman to graduate from Yale Law School.

– She became the first African-American woman to be the assistant corporate counsel for New York City.

– In 1939, Bolin became the first African-American woman in the US to be sworn in as a judge.

– For the next four decades, Bolin worked in the Family Court and became an advocate for children and families.

https://www.insider.com/african-americans-never-heard-of-should-know?amp

Day 21

Bessie Coleman (1892-1926)

– Since no American flight schools would welcome women, Bessie Coleman taught herself French and studied at the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation in France in 1922.

– In just seven months, Coleman became the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license. That same year, she performed a public fight, becoming the first Black woman to do so.

– Coleman continued flying, becoming an expert in stunt flying and aerial tricks.

– She was popularly known as Queen Bess and Brave Bessie, and hoped to start a school for African-American fliers. Coleman died in a plane crash in 1926. Her pioneering role was an inspiration to early pilots and to the African-American and Native American communities.

https://www.insider.com/african-americans-never-heard-of-should-know?amp

Day 22

Victor H. Green (1892-1960)

– Green was a postal employee who, after moving to Harlem, New York, in the 1930s, started compiling information on New York City establishments that safely served Black travelers.

– In the introduction of the first 1936 edition, Green wrote, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal rights and privileges in the United States.”

– The 2018 film “Green Book” follows a biracial friendship and the journeys it brings them on. “The Green Book,” later named “The Negro Motorist Green-Book,”is used in the movie as a prop; however, the film doesn’t give much attention or credit to its creator, Victor H. Green.

https://www.insider.com/african-americans-never-heard-of-should-know?amp

Day 23

Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950)

– In 1919, Houston entered Harvard Law School. He was the first black student elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review and graduated cum laude. He earned a bachelor’s of law in 1922 and a JD from Harvard in 1923.

– When several black lawyers were refused admission to the American Bar Association in 1925, they founded the National Bar Association. Houston was a founding member of the affiliated Washington Bar Association. He developed Howard University, beginning its years as a major national center for training black lawyers.

– Houston left Howard in 1935 to serve as the first special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving in this role until 1940. In this capacity he created litigation strategies to attack racial housing covenants and segregated schools, arguing several important civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

– For all his work helping to dismantle segregation and the “separate but equal” provision, Houston was nicknamed “The Man Who Killed Jim Crowe.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_Houston

Day 24

Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)

– Johnson was a math prodigy who was 14 years old when she graduated from high school, 18 years old when she earned a double degree in math and French from West Virginia State College. And she helped to integrate the graduate school at West Virginia University — where she was one of three black students

– She was a physicist and mathematician who helped launch the first use of digital electronic computers at NASA, the independent federal government agency that handles aerospace research, aeronautics and the civilian space program. Her wisdom with numbers and accuracy was so highly regarded that her sign-off was paramount for NASA to modernize itself with digital computers.

– Johnson was plucked out of a pool of women hired by NASA to work with an all-male flight research team. She helped calculate the orbit for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon. And she co-authored 26 scientific papers, which NASA still links to via its archives.

http://theundefeated.com/features/the-undefeated-44-most-influential-black-americans-in-history/#katherine-johnson

Day 25

Dorothy Height (1912-2010)

– Height has been called the matriarch of the civil rights movement and often worked behind the scenes.

– After receiving two degrees from New York University in the 1930s, Height worked for the New York City Welfare Department and then became the assistant executive director of the Harlem Y.M.C.A.

– She was involved in anti-lynching protests, brought public attention to the exploitation of African-American women working in “slave markets,” and escorted First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the National Council of Negro Women, a council she served on for more than 40 years.

– In the 1950s, she lobbied President Dwight D. Eisenhower to take an aggressive stance on school desegregation issues. Height also worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and she stood on the platform with him when he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963.

https://parade.com/1328166/shameikarhymes/african-american-historical-figures/

Day 26

Gordon Parks (1912-2006)

– Parks performed as a jazz pianist, composed musical scores, wrote 15 books and co-founded Essence magazine.

– He adapted his novel “The Learning Tree” into a 1969 film, becoming the first African American to direct a movie for a major studio, and later directed “Shaft,” a hit film that spawned the Blaxploitation genre.

– He reached his artistic peak as a photographer, and his intimate photos of African American life are his most enduring legacy.

– His images of life on Chicago’s South Side in the early 1940s won him a job documenting rural poverty for the federal government. A 1948 photo essay about a Harlem gang leader landed him a gig as Life magazine’s first Black staff photographer. In the decades that followed, Parks traveled the country capturing iconic images of the segregated South, the civil rights movement and such figures as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.

– Parks famously called the camera his “weapon of choice,” a tool to fight poverty, racism and other societal ills. As he once put it to an interviewer, “I pointed my camera at people mostly who needed someone to say something for them.”

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/02/us/little-known-black-history-figures

Day 27

Max Robinson (1939-1988)

– Robinson got his start in 1959 when he was hired to read the news at a station in Portsmouth, Virginia. His face was hidden behind a graphic that read, “NEWS.” One day he told the cameraman to remove the slide.

– Robinson’s profile began to rise after he moved to Washington, where he worked as a TV reporter and later co-anchored the evening news at the city’s most popular station – the first Black anchor in a major US city.

– ABC News moved him to Chicago and named him one of three co-anchors on “World News Tonight,” which also featured Frank Reynolds in Washington and Peter Jennings in London.

– Later in his career, Robinson became increasingly outspoken about racism and the portrayal of African Americans in the media. He also sought to mentor young Black broadcasters and was one of the 44 founders of the National Association of Black Journalists.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/02/us/little-known-black-history-figures/

Day 28

Maria P. Williams (1866-1932)

– Williams served as editor-in-chief (1891–1894) of the Kansas City weekly New Era. This spurred her to seek greater independence by founding, writing and editing her own newspaper, the Women’s Voice (1896–1900), “sponsored by the ‘colored women’s auxiliary’ of the Republican party; the paper was described as having “many pleasant things to say on a choice of timely topics.'”

– In 1916, Williams went on to publish her memoir, My Work and Public Sentiment.

– She co-managed a movie theater with her husband, which gave the couple experience in the distribution and release of films for African-American audiences. The couple went on to co-found Western Film Producing Co. and Booking Exchange.

– Williams went on to write the script for Flames of Wrath, produce a film from the script and play the role of prosecuting attorney in the five-reel film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_P._Williams

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