The James Logan Courier

From wikipedia:
Prudence Crandall (September 3, 1803 - January 28, 1890), a schoolteacher raised as a Quaker, stirred controversy with her education of African-American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. Her private school, opened in the fall of 1831, was boycotted when she admitted a 17-year-old African-American female student in the autumn of 1833; resulting in what is widely regarded as the first integrated classroom in the United States.

Prudence Crandall was born on September 3, 1803 to Pardon and Esther Carpenter Crandall, a Quaker couple in the Hope Valley area in the town of Hopkinton, Rhode Island. At the age of 17, her father decided to move the family to the small town of Canterbury, Connecticut. She attended the Friends' Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island and later taught in a school for girls in Canterbury. In 1831, she returned to run the newly established Canterbury Female Boarding School, which she purchased with her sister, Almira.


Read more about Prudence Crandall at ConnectKids, the official State of Connecticut website for children.

By Farah Habad, Courier Music Editor

Wale Folarin, a prominent rapper under Jay-Z's label Roc Nation, released yet another mixtape with a Jerry Seinfeld theme. Entitled “More About Nothing” he brings about a new, distinct style to his work.

Twenty one original songs, many of which have sampled beats, defy the new wave of music played on hip hop radio stations. With no autotune and no cliché rhymes, he reinstills realness into his music.

MISCELLANEOUS
Parking: Student parking is in the swim center lot, in the spaces marked by white lines only. Parking permits are available at the Main Office window, during posted hours. There is limited staff parking in the new lot next to the Performing Arts Center. Please park in your designated spots. Example: Clerical is reserved for clerical employees only. There are a number of generic staff spots.

All students: If you were issued a locker and you don’t want it or won’t use it, please turn it in to Mrs. Whitaker in the Main Office.

P.E. Clothes are available at the windows in the Main Office before school, after school and lunchtime.

By Kevin C. Johnson
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MCT)
There was a time early in the career of folky-pop group She & Him when all anyone wanted to talk about was the involvement of front woman Zooey Deschanel.

Initially, she was yet another movie star who dared to step out and be in a band.
"When we were doing press a few years ago," says guitarist-producer M. Ward, "about half the questions were about how bad Bruce Willis' records were and stuff like that."

From wikipedia:
Horace Silver (born September 2, 1928), born Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silva in Norwalk, Connecticut, is an American jazz pianist and composer.

Silver is known for his distinctive humorous and funky playing style and for his pioneering compositional contributions to hard bop. He was influenced by a wide range of musical styles, notably gospel music, African music, and Latin American music and sometimes ventured into the soul jazz genre.

Visit HoraceSilver.com

By Nancy A. Youssef and Sahar Issa
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military Wednesday marked the end of its combat mission in Iraq amid a series of conflicting messages that underscored the mixed feelings many here, both American and Iraqi, have toward a seven-and-a-half-year effort that cost tens of thousands of lives but left the political outcome undecided.

"The problem with this war for, I think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid, that is Saddam (Hussein) having weapons of mass destruction," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters as he hopped from one stripped-down U.S. military base to another greeting American troops.

"So when you start from that standpoint, then figuring out in retrospect how you deal with the war - even if the outcome is a good one from the standpoint of the United States - it will always be clouded by how it began."

By Amina Khan
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — Multiple sclerosis, a disease in which a person's own immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, is a lifelong problem — but its effects can be highly seasonal, researchers say.

Between March and August, patients suffering from multiple sclerosis were two to three times more likely to develop brain lesions than during the rest of the year, according to the paper published in the Aug. 31 issue of the journal Neurology.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Scholastic
(400 pages, $17.99)
By Susan Carpenter
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

Almost two years after Suzanne Collins first burst onto bestseller lists with her dystopian young-adult thriller in which 24 children are dressed up in costumes and forced to compete to the death before a television audience, "Mockingjay," the final act of the "Hunger Games" trilogy, has arrived, bringing a wrenching conclusion to the tale of a country in chaos and the 17-year-old protagonist who caused it.

Fans aren't likely to be disappointed.

From wikipedia: Ron O'Neal (September 1, 1937 in Utica, New York – January 14, 2004 in Los Angeles, California) was an American actor, director and screenwriter. O'Neal is most remembered for his starring role as Youngblood Priest in the blaxploitation film Super Fly, although he also had recurring roles on the television show Living Single as Synclaire's father and as Whitley Gilbert's father on A Different World.



Watch an interview with Ron O'Neal, free from WGBH.

MICELLANEOUS

WELCOME BACK STUDENTS AND STAFF!
Parking: Student parking is in the swim center lot only. Parking permits are available at the Main Office window, during posted hours. There is limited staff parking in the new lot next to the Performing Arts Center. Please park in your designated spots. Example: Clerical are reserved for clerical employees only. There are a number of generic staff spots.

All students: If you were issued a locker and you don’t want it or won’t use it, please turn it in to Mrs. Whitaker in the Main Office.

P.E. Clothes are available at the windows in the Main Office before school, after school and lunchtime.

From wikipedia:
Josephine Ruffin (August 31, 1842 – March 13, 1924), born Josephine St. Pierre, was an African American U.S. civil rights leader.

Ruffin was born in Boston. Her mother was an English born white woman and her father was a Martinique born man of African descent. John St. Pierre was a successful clothes dealer and founder of a Boston Zion church. He was able to afford a good education for his daughter. He objected to the segregated schools in Boston and so she was sent to Salem to be educated.

At the age of sixteen, she graduated from a Boston finishing school, completed two years in New York and married George Lewis Ruffin. He was the first African-American to graduate from Harvard Law School, and the first African American to serve on the Boston City Council, the Massachusetts state legislature, and as Boston's first black municipal judge.

Read more about Josephine Ruffin, free from goldenmoon.org.

Roy Wilkins (August 30, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a prominent civil rights activist in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Wilkins was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and between 1931 and 1934 was assistant NAACP secretary under Walter Francis White. When W. E. B. Du Bois left the organization in 1934, Wilkins replaced him as editor of Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP.

In 1955, Roy Wilkins was chosen to be the executive secretary of the NAACP; in 1964 he became the executive director. At the age of 76, he retired. Wilkins was a staunch liberal and proponent of American values during the Cold War, and denounced suspected and actual Communists within the civil rights movement. He has been criticized by some on the left of the civil rights movement for his cautious approach, suspicion of grassroots organization, and conciliatory attitude towards white anticommunism, which was significantly detrimental to the post-war civil rights movement.

Read parts of Roy Wilkins FBI file, free from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Freedom of Information Act.

From wikipedia:
Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American surgical technician and animal surgeon who developed in the canine model the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to white surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons.

Read a review of Vivien Thomas' autobiography, free from the National Institute of Health.

From wikipedia:
Rita Frances Dove (born 28 August 1952) is an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1993, the first African American to be appointed, and received a second special appointment in 1999. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Dove was born in Akron, Ohio to Ray Dove, the first African American chemist to work in the U.S. tire industry (as research chemist at Goodyear), and Elvira Hord, who achieved honors in high school and would share her passion for reading with her daughter. In 1970 Dove graduated from Buchtel High School as a Presidential Scholar, making her one of the 100 top American high school graduates that year. Later, Dove graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Miami University in 1973 and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977. In 1974 she held a Fulbright Scholarship from Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany.

Visit Rita Dove's homepage.