The James Logan Courier

From wikpedia:
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne ((June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010), was an iconic American singer and actress. She has recorded and performed extensively, independently and with other jazz notables, including Artie Shaw, Teddy Wilson, Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Barnet. She currently lives in New York City and no longer makes public appearances.

Lena Horne was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. She grew up in an upper middle class black community. Her father, Edwin "Teddy" Horne, who worked in the gambling trade, left the family when she was three. Her mother, Edna Scottron, was the daughter of inventor Samuel R. Scottron; she was an actress with an African American theater troupe and traveled extensively. Horne was mainly raised by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. Her uncle, Frank S. Horne, was an adviser to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She is a reported descendant of the John C. Calhoun family.

Learn more about Lena Horne, and see her perform, at lena-horne.com.

From wikipedia:
James Van Der Zee (June 29, 1886 - May 15, 1983) was an African American photographer best known for his portraits of black New Yorkers. He was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Aside from the artistic merits of his work, Van Der Zee produced the most comprehensive documentation of the period. Among his most famous subjects during this time were Marcus Garvey, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Countee Cullen.

James Van Der Zee was born in Lenox, Massachusetts. His parents were John and Elizabeth Van Der Zee. His parents worked for President Ulysses S. Grant in New York City. James was the second of six children and enjoyed a close-knit family. His best friend was Justin Moore. As a child he learned piano, violin, and art. Van Der Zee received his first camera at the age of 14. This was a life changing gift. He soon traveled to New York with his brother and father. He was a skilled pianist and an aspiring professional violinist, but hated painting. The five-piece Harlem Orchestra was created by Van Der Zee, in which he also performed. He discovered photography as a hobby in his hometown of Lenox. At age fourteen he received his first camera from a magazine promotion. His interest with the toy camera led him to getting a slightly better camera with which he would take hundreds of photographs of the town and his family. He was only the second person in Lenox to own a camera, and he developed the images himself. This early start led him to a vast and prolific career documenting each decade in his unique style of photography.

See examples of James Van Der Zee's work, free from Artcyclopedia.com.

From wikipedia:
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She is the second female laureate in physics after Marie Curie.

Goeppert-Mayer was born Maria Goeppert in Kattowitz, within the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. Her family moved to Göttingen in 1910 when her father Friedrich was appointed Professor of Paediatrics at the town's university. On her father's side, Goeppert-Mayer a seventh generation professor. From a young age, she was surrounded by the students and lecturers from the university, intellectuals including future Nobel winners, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli. In 1924 Goeppert passed the university's abitur entrance examinations and enrolled there in the fall. Among her professors were three Nobel prize winners: Max Born, James Franck, and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. In 1930 Goeppert married Dr Joseph Edward Mayer, the assistant of James Franck. The couple moved to the United States, Mayer's home country.

Read maria Geoppert-Mayer's Nobel Prize lecture, free from Nobelprize.org.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872– February 9, 1906) was a seminal African American poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 Ode to Ethiopia, one poem in the collection Lyrics of Lowly Life.

Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had escaped from slavery in Kentucky; his father was a veteran of the American Civil War, having served in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry Regiment. His parents instilled in him a love of learning and history. He was the only African-American student during the years he attended Dayton's Central High School, and he participated actively as a student. During high school, he was both the editor of the school newspaper and class president, as well as the president of the school literary society. Dunbar had also started the first African-American newspaper in Dayton.

Visit the University of Dayton's Paul Laurence Dunbar website.

From wikipedia:
Big Bill Broonzy (26 June 1898 – 14 August 1958) was a prolific American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s when he played Country blues to mostly black audiences. Through the ‘30s and ‘40s he successfully navigated a transition in style to a more urban blues sound popular with white audiences. In the 1950s a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the leading figures of the emerging American folk music revival and an international star. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of blues music in the 20th century.

Broonzy copyrighted more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including both adaptations of traditional folk songs and original blues songs. As a blues composer, he was unique in that his compositions reflected the many vantage points of his rural-to-urban experiences.

Watch Big Bill Broonzy perform the "Worried Man Blues," free from youtube.com.

James H. Meredith (born June 25, 1933) is an American civil rights movement figure. He was the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, an event that was a flash point in the American civil rights movement. Motivated by the broadcast of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address (which did not mention civil rights per se) Meredith decided to apply his democratic rights and then made the ultimate decision to apply to the University of Mississippi. Meredith's goal was to put pressure on the Kennedy administration.

Read more about James Meredith, free from racematters.org.

From wikipedia:
Dr. Matilda Arabella Evans (May 13, 1872 – 1935) was the first African American woman licensed to practice medicine in South Carolina.

Matilda Arabella Evans was born in 1872 to Anderson and Harriet Evans of Aiken, South Carolina, where she attended the Schofield Industrial School. Encouraged by Martha Schofield, the school's founder, Evans enrolled in Oberlin College in Ohio, attended on scholarship for almost four years, and left before graduating, in 1891, to pursue a medical career.

Read more about Dr. Matilda Evans.

From wikipedia:
Milton John "Milt" Hinton (June 23, 1910 – December 19, 2000), "the dean of jazz bass players," was an American jazz double bassist and photographer. He was nicknamed "The Judge".

Hinton was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he resided until age eleven when he moved to Chicago, Illinois. He attended Wendell Phillips High School and Crane Junior College. While attending these schools, he learned to play the bass horn, tuba, cello and the double bass.

Visit MiltHinton.com.

From wikipedia:
Katherine Mary Dunham (22 June 1909 – 21 May 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, songwriter, author, educator and activist who was trained as an anthropologist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century and has been called the "Matriarch and Queen Mother of Black Dance".

During her heyday in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, she was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America as La Grande Katherine, and the Washington Post called her "Dance's Katherine the Great". For more than 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only permanent, self-subsidized American black dance troupe at that time, and over her long career she choreographed more than 90 individual dances. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of Dance Anthropology, or Ethno choreology.

Visit the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and the Humanities.

From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859–May 25, 1937) was an African American artist who studied with Thomas Eakins and was the first African American painter to reach international acclaim.

Life and career
Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Benjamin Tucker, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Sarah Miller Tanner, a private school teacher. Tanner was the oldest of nine children. In 1864, Tanner and his family moved to Philadelphia, where his artistic interests developed. At the age of thirteen, Tanner decided to become an artist when he saw a painter in Fairmount Park near his home. Initially self taught, Tanner began to draw constantly in his free time and also tried to observe other artists' work in art galleries in Philadelphia. In 1879, Tanner enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and studied under Thomas Eakins, remaining a student there until 1885.


Learn more about Henry Ossawa Tanner and explore links to many of his paintings and other artwork, free from Artcyclopedia.com.

From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 – November 15, 1932) was an African American author and political activist best known for novels and short stories from Fayetteville, North Carolina. His paternal grandfather was a white slaveholder. Issues of miscegenation, "passing", and racial identity would influence his writing throughout his career.

After the Civil War, the family returned to Fayetteville, where they ran a grocery store. Charles entered school at the age of eight, and at sixteen, became a student-teacher to help support his family following his mother's death. He continued to study and teach, eventually becoming assistant principal of the normal school in Fayetteville.

Read The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W. Chesnutt, one of five of his works available free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Henry LeTang (June 19, 1915 – April 26, 2007) was an American theatre, film, and television choreographer and a dance instructor.

Born in the Harlem neighbourhood of Manhattan, LeTang was the second son of Clarence, born in Dominica, and his wife Marie, who emigrated from St. Croix. The couple owned and operated a radio and phonograph repair shop. All their children were musically inclined; in addition to his interest in dance, LeTang played the violin. At the age of seventeen, he opened his first studio, one small room with a piano. Over the ensuing decades he taught and/or worked with a multitude of entertainment personalities, including Lena Horne, Betty Hutton, Billie Holiday, Eleanor Powell, Lola Falana, Peter Gennaro, Leslie Uggams, Joey Heatherton, Chita Rivera, Ben Vereen, Debbie Allen, Hinton Battle, Savion Glover, and the Hines brothers, Maurice and Gregory.

Learn more about Henry LeTang, free from DanceUniverse.com.

From wikipedia:
Inez J. Baskin (June 18, 1916 – June 28, 2007), was an American journalist and civil rights supporter who covered the Civil Rights Movement and the Montgomery Bus Boycott for African American readers and publications.

Baskin worked as a journalist and reporter for the "Negro News" section of the Montgomery Adviser newspaper. Baskin was hired by Jet Magazine and the American Negro Press in 1955 to cover the bus boycott following the arrest of Rosa Parks.

Learn more about Inez Baskin and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, free from montgomeryboycott.com.

From wikipedia:
Robert Clyve Maynard (17 June 1937 - 17 August 1993) was an American journalist, and newspaper publisher and editor, former owner of The Oakland Tribune and co-founder of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, California.

Maynard was born of six children to Samuel C. Maynard and Robertine Isola Greaves, both immigrants from Barbados. At 16 years old, he dropped out of Brooklyn High School to pursue his passion for writing, and later attended Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship. Maynard became friends with influential New York writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and later acknowledged Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a hero.

Visit the Robert C, Maynard Institute for Journalism Education's website.

From wikipedia:
Marita Bonner (June 16, 1899 – 1971) was an African American writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was also known as Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, Joseph Maree Andrew.

Read more about Marita Bonner, free from the University of Minnesota.

From wikipedia:
Adah Isaacs Menken (June 15, 1835 – August 10, 1868) was an American actress, painter and poet.

She was born Adah Bertha Theodore in New Orleans to a French Creole mother and a Free Negro father, Auguste Theodore. She danced as a child in New Orleans, Havana and Texas. Eventually she worked in San Francisco. Menken was known for her poetry and painting, though both were poorly received. In 1859 she appeared on Broadway in the play "The French Spy. Once again, her work was not highly regarded by the critics. The New York Times described her as 'the worst actress on Broadway'. The Observer said "she is delightfully unhampered by the shackles of talent".


Read more about Adah Menken, free from sfmuseum.org.

From wikipedia:
Nat Love (1854 - 1921) was an African American cowboy during the time of the claim to that moniker. In 1907, Love wrote his autobiography, "Life and Adventures of Nat Love."

Love was born a slave in Davidson County, Tennessee, in 1854. Despite slavery era statutes that outlawed black literacy he learned to read and write as a child with the help of his father. He later went west to Dodge City, Kansas, and became a cowboy.

Read The Life and Adventures of Nat Love
Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" by Himself, by Nat Love, free from the University of North Carolina.)

From wikipedia:
Adolphus Anthony Cheatham, better known as Doc Cheatham (13 June, 1905–2 June, 1997) was a jazz trumpeter, singer, and bandleader.

After having played in some of the leading jazz groups from the 1920s on, Cheatham's career enjoyed renewed acclaim in later decades; Cheatham himself agreed with the critical assessment that he was probably the only jazz musician to create his best work after the age of 70.

Learn more about Doc Cheatham, free from All About Jazz.

From www.blackpast.org:
H. Claude Hudson was an important civil rights and business leader in two different cities: Shreveport, Louisiana, and Los Angeles. Hudson was born in Louisiana in 1886. He studied at Wiley College, in Marshall, Texas, and earned a degree from the dentistry school at Howard University in 1913. He returned to Louisiana, married, and established a dental practice in Shreveport. In 1921 he became the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in that city. Hudson’s active leadership in the NAACP aroused concern among Louisiana officials, who urged him to leave the state. He moved with his wife and children to Los Angeles in 1923.

Read H. Claude Hudson's Los Angeles Times obituary.

From wikipedia:
Charlotte Hawkins Brown (June 11, 1883 - January 11, 1961) was an American educator and academic.

Born Lottie Hawkins in Henderson, North Carolina, in the late 1880s her family moved north to settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An exceptional student in a very white world, during her senior year of high school, Alice Freeman Palmer, a former Wellesley College president, provided financial support to enable her to further her education at the State Normal School in Salem.

Read more about Charlotte Hawkins Brown, free from the State Library of North Carolina.

From wikipedia:
Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910 – January 10, 1976), better known as Howlin' Wolf, was an influential American blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player.
With a booming voice and looming physical presence, Burnett is commonly ranked among the leading performers in electric blues; musician and critic Cub Koda declared, "no one could match Howlin' Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits." Many songs popularized by Burnett—such as "Smokestack Lightnin'," "Back Door Man" and "Spoonful"—have become standards of blues and blues rock.

Listen to Howlin' Wolf perform "Moanin' at Midnight," free from wikipedia.

From wikipedia:
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (June 9, 1877 - March 18, 1968) was an African American artist. She is best known as the first African American artist to make art celebrating Afrocentric themes. A multi-talented artist who created poetry and paintings, she is mainly known as a sculptor who explored her African-American roots. Fuller created emotion-packed work with strong social commentary, and became a forerunner of the Black Renaissance, a movement promoting African-American art.

Read more about Meta V.W. Fuller in Black Genius: Inspirational Portraits of America's Black Leaders By Dick Russell and Alvin F. Poussaint, free from Google Books.

From wikipedia:
William ("Willie") D. Davenport (June 8, 1943 – June 17, 2002) was an American athlete, born in Troy, Alabama. William attended Howland High School, a suburb of Warren in Northeast Ohio. He participated in hurdling events in four Olympic Games, winning the title in 1968. In 1980, he also took part in the Olympic Winter Games as a runner for the American bobsled team.

Read more about Willie Davenport, free from the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame.

From wikipedia:
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas to David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims, their first child. Her mother was a former school teacher who left teaching for marriage and motherhood, and her father, the son of a runaway slave who fought in the Civil War, had given up his ambition to become a doctor to work as a janitor because he could not afford to attend medical school. When Brooks was only six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she grew up. She went by the nickname, "Gwendie", which her close friends called her.

Read poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, free from the Academy of American Poets.

From wikipedia:
Marian Wright Edelman (born June 6, 1939) is an American activist for the rights of children. She is president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund.

Edelman was born the youngest of five children to Arthur Jerome Wright and Maggie Leola Brown in Bennettsville, South Carolina. Her father, a Baptist minister who instilled in her that Christianity obligates one to service, died when she was 14, urging in his last words, "Don't let anything get in the way of your education."

Listen to a radio show featuring Marian Wright Edelman, free from Minnesota Public Radio.

From wikipedia:
Marion Motley (June 5, 1920 - June 27, 1999) was a professional football player, a fullback for the Cleveland Browns, and briefly for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Motley attended high school at Canton McKinley High School in Canton, Ohio, and played college football at South Carolina State and Nevada. Motley joined the U.S. Navy, where he first played for Paul Brown with the Great Lakes Naval Training Station team. This team, full of fine players who had enlisted for World War II, notably defeated Notre Dame 39-7 in 1945. Motley planned on going back to college to get a degree, but then Paul Brown offered him a job with his new professional team. He started his pro football career in 1946, when the Cleveland Browns were part of the new AAFC.


Learn more about Marion Motley, free from the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

From wikipedia:
Oliver Edward Nelson (June 4, 1932 in St. Louis, Missouri – October 28, 1975) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger and composer.

Oliver Nelson's family was musical: his brother was also a saxophonist who played with Cootie Williams in the 1940s, and his sister sang and played piano. Nelson began learning to play the piano when he was six, and started on the saxophone at eleven. From 1947 he played in "territory" bands around Saint Louis, before joining the Louis Jordan big band from 1950 to 1951, playing alto saxophone and arranging. After military service in the Marines, he returned to Missouri to study music composition and theory at Washington and Lincoln Universities, graduating in 1958.

Read an interview with Oliver Nelson, free from jazzprofiles.blogspot.com.

From wikipedia:
John Hope (June 2, 1868 – February 20, 1936), born in Augusta, Georgia, was an African-American educator and political activist. He was the son of James Hope, a white Scottish of his mother's family's status of having been free before the Civil War. Hope could have passed for white, but he was proud of his black heritage and identified with the black community.

Hope graduated from Worcester Academy in 1890 and then from Brown University in 1894. He went on to teach at Roger Williams University (Nashville, Tennessee). On December 29, 1897 he married the former Lugenia D. Burns, who would become a well-known social reformer. In 1898, he became professor of Classics at Atlanta Baptist College, (now Morehouse College), a historically black college. In 1906 he was appointed the institution's first black president.