This is the archive for August 2010
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.
Posted by courier at 10:35 AM. Filed under: Daily Bulletin
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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.
Posted by courier at 12:34 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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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.
Posted by courier at 12:18 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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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.
Posted by courier at 06:16 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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Posted by courier at 06:37 AM. Filed under: Opinion
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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.
Posted by courier at 04:46 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Lester Willis Young (August 27, 1909 – March 15, 1959), nicknamed "Prez", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and clarinetist. He also played trumpet, violin, and drums.
Coming to prominence while a member of Count Basie's orchestra, Young is remembered as one of the finest, most influential players on his instrument, playing with a cool tone and sophisticated harmonies. He became a jazz legend, inventing or popularizing much of the hipster ethos which came to be associated with the music.
Watch a clip of Lester Young playing "Fine and Mellow" with Billie Holliday, free from YouTube.
Posted by courier at 04:28 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Hale Aspacio Woodruff (August 26, 1900 - September, 1980) was an African American artist known for his mural, paintings, and prints. One example of his work, the Amistad murals can be found at Talladega College in Talladega County, Alabama. The murals depict the ship itself and a sequence of scenes depicting various stages of the revolt upon the ship. Local tradition at the school has decreed that no one shall ever step upon the mural of the ship despite its central location in the library’s lobby.
Read an interview with Hale Woodruff, free from the Archives of American Art.
Posted by courier at 05:24 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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Egbert Austin Williams (November 12, 1875 – March 4, 1922) was the pre-eminent Black entertainer of his era and one of the most popular comedians for all audiences of his time. He was by far the best-selling black recording artist before 1920.
Williams was a key figure in the development of African-American music. In an age when racial inequality and stereotyping were an accepted part of life, he became the first black American to take a lead role on the Broadway stage, and did much to push back racial barriers during his career. Fellow vaudevillian W.C. Fields, who appeared in productions with Williams, described him as "the funniest man I ever saw – and the saddest man I ever knew."
Read "Something you don't expect": the recordings of Bert Williams," by Steven C. Tracy, free from findarticles.com.
Posted by courier at 05:40 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833) was a British politician, a philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780 and became the independent Member of Parliament for Yorkshire (1784–1812).
In 1785 he underwent a conversion experience and became an evangelical Christian, resulting in major changes to his lifestyle and a lifelong concern for reform.
Read more about William Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery in Great Britain and the United States, free from wilberforcecentral.org.
Posted by courier at 06:09 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
George Joseph Herriman (August 22, 1880 – April 25, 1944) was an American cartoonist, best known for his comic strip
Krazy Kat.
George Herriman was born in a light-skinned, Creole African-American family in New Orleans, Louisiana. Both of his parents were listed as "mulatto" in the 1880 census. In his adolescence, Herriman's father moved the family to Los Angeles, California, as did many educated New Orleans Creoles of Color at the time in order to avoid the increasing restrictions of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana. In later life, many of Herriman's newspaper colleagues were under the impression that Herriman's ancestry was Greek, and Herriman did nothing to dissuade them of this notion. According to close friends of Herriman, he wore a hat at all times in order to hide his "kinky" hair. He was listed on his death certificate as "Caucasian".
Learn more about George Herriman and Krazy Kat at www.krazy.com.
Posted by courier at 07:43 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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Posted by courier at 07:48 AM. Filed under: Opinion
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Image: wikimedia commons
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday it has invited the leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to Washington next month to resume long-stalled direct peace talks, recognizing "there will be difficulties ahead" in the latest effort to achieve a final settlement of the conflict.
In announcing the invitation, which Israel and the Palestinian Authority both accepted, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged it will be a daunting challenge to reach agreement on the borders of a Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem and other decades-old disagreements between the two sides — particularly in the proposed 12-month timetable.
Posted by courier at 07:41 AM. Filed under: News
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From wikipedia:
Arthur Stewart "Art" Farmer (August 21, 1928, Council Bluffs, Iowa – October 4, 1999) was an American jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player. He also played flumpet, a trumpet/flugelhorn combination designed for him by David Monette. His identical twin brother, Addison Farmer was a bassist.
The son of a steelworker, Art Farmer worked as a musician from the mid-1940s onwards. Based in Los Angeles, he played in the bands of Benny Carter and Jay McShann among others.
Read an interview with Art Farmer, free from Jazzprofessional.com.
Posted by courier at 06:58 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
George Bonga (August 20, 1802–1880) was an African American fur trader who was the first African American born in what is now Minnesota. He was the son of Pierre Bonga, and an Ojibwe mother. Born after 1802, George was schooled in Montreal, and later became a fur trader. He was famous in Minnesota for being, as his brother Stephen claimed "One of the first two black children born in the state." He was also recognized for tracking down a suspected murderer in 1837, an Ojibwe named Che-Ga Wa Skung, then bringing the perpetrator back to justice at Fort Snelling. The ensuing criminal trial was reputedly the first in Minnesota.
Read more about George Bonga in an excerpt from Black Indians: a hidden heritage, by William Loren Katz, free from Google Books.
Posted by courier at 05:50 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Mary Ellen Pleasant (died January 4, 1904) was a 19th Century female entrepreneur of partial African descent who used her fortune to further abolition. She worked on the Underground Railroad across many states and then helped bring it to California during the Gold Rush Era. She was a friend and financial supporter of John Brown and well known in abolitionist circles. After the Civil War she took her battles to the courts in the 1860s, and won several civil rights victories, one of which was cited and upheld in the 1980’s and resulted in her being called, “The Mother of Human Rights in California”.
Learn more about Mary Ellen Pleasant, free from mepleasant.com.
Posted by courier at 07:45 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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Congressman Robert Ney, Simmie Knox and
Congressman Chaka Fattah pose with the
portrait of America's first African American
Congressman, Joseph H. Rainey. (born 1935) is an African American painter who was chosen to paint the official White House portrait of former United States President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
A graduate of Tyler School of Art at Temple University (BFA, Magna Cum Laude, MFA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Simmie Knox as an artist has specialized in oil portraiture since 1981. Prior to that, he taught at various colleges, universities, and public schools in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. During the 1970's, Simmie exhibited as an abstract artist and worked for the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. In 1971, he participated in the Thirty-Second Biennial of Contemporary American Painting at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. with his abstract art.
Learn more about Simmie Knox and his art, free from
simmieknox.com.
Posted by courier at 09:04 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Marcus Garvey, National Hero of Jamaica (August 17, 1887 – June 10, 1940), was a publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, Black nationalist, orator, black separatist, and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). Garvey was born in St. Ann's Bay, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica to Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Sr., a mason, and Sarah Jane Richards, a domestic worker and farmer. Of his eleven siblings, only Garvey and his sister, Indiana, reached maturity. Garvey's father was known to have a large library, and it was from his father that he gained his love for reading.
Garvey is best remembered as an important proponent of the Back-to-Africa movement, which encouraged those of African descent to return to their ancestral homelands. This movement would eventually inspire other movements, ranging from the Nation of Islam, to the Rastafari movement, which proclaims Garvey to be a prophet. Garvey said he wanted those of African ancestry to "redeem" Africa and for the European colonial powers to leave it.
Read The Negro's Greatest Enemy, an autobiographical article written by Marcus Garvey in 1923, free from blackentrepreneurs.co.za.
Posted by courier at 07:57 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Wallace Henry Thurman (August 16, 1902– December 22, 1934) was an American novelist during the Harlem Renaissance. He is best known for his novel
The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, which describes discrimination based on skin color among black people.
Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. His grandmother's home doubled as a saloon where alcohol was served without a license. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned and lived apart from his wife and son. The two did not meet until the younger Thurman was 30 years old.
Read The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader, free from Questia.
Posted by courier at 12:22 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Bridget ("Biddy") Mason (born August 15, 1818 in Hancock County, Georgia - died January 15, 1891 in Los Angeles, California) was an African American nurse, and a California real estate entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Born a slave in Georgia, Mason was among a small group of slaves taken by her master Robert Smith, a convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), first to the Utah Territory, and then on to California. In 1856, when Smith was planning to move to the slave state of Texas, Mason petitioned a Los Angeles court for her freedom. A California judge granted her freedom as a resident of a free state, as well as the freedom of the other slaves held captive by Smith (her three daughters, and ten other African-American women and children).
Learn more about Biddy Mason, free from the Lakewood Public Library.
Posted by courier at 12:04 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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Posted by courier at 04:57 AM. Filed under: Opinion
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Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, better known as Bricktop (August 14, 1894 – February 1, 1984) was an African-American dancer, singer, vaudevillian, and self-described saloon-keeper who owned the nightclub Chez Bricktop in Paris from 1924 to 1961, as well as clubs in Mexico City and Rome. She has been called "...one of the most legendary and enduring figures of twentieth-century American cultural history."
Read an obituary to Ada Smith, which appeared in the Huntington Herald-Dispatch
on February 2, 1984, free from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History.
Posted by courier at 12:31 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Ethel L. Payne (August 14, 1911 - May 28, 1991) was an award-winning African American journalist. Known as the "First Lady of the Black Press", she was a columnist, lecturer, and free-lance writer. She combined advocacy with journalism as she reported on the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. She became the first female African American commentator employed by a national network when CBS hired her in 1972.
Read a series of interviews with Ethel Payne, free from the Washington Press Club Foundation.
Posted by courier at 12:16 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Madame Ophelia DeVore was the first mixed-race model in the United States. In 1946, she helped establish the Grace Del Marco Agency, one of the first modeling agencies in America.
Emma Ophelia DeVore was born on August 12, 1922 in Edgefield, South Carolina. She was one of ten children born to John Walter DeVore, who was of German American and African American descent, and Mary Emma Strother, who was a Black Indian.
Learn more about Ophelia DeVore, free from the University of Central Oklahoma's College of Liberal Arts.
Posted by courier at 11:56 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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Alexander Palmer Haley (August 11, 1921 – February 10, 1992) was an American writer. He is best known for
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he ghostwrote, and his book
Roots: The Saga of an American Family.
Life
Born in Ithaca, New York, Haley grew up in the South in an African American family also mixed with Irish and Cherokee ancestry. Haley's father Simon was a professor of agriculture who had also served in World War I. Haley always spoke proudly of his father and the incredible obstacles of racism he had overcome. On May 24, 1939 Haley began his 20-year service with the Coast Guard.
Read Alex Haley's interview with Malcolm X, originally published in Playboy magazine in 1963, free from the Universität Kaiserslautern.
Celebrate Black History Month with The Courier.
Posted by courier at 12:26 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikpedia:
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (ca. August 10, 1858 – February 27, 1964) was an author, educator, and one of the most prominent African American scholars in United States history. Upon receiving her Ph.D in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1924, Cooper became the fourth African American woman to earn a doctorate degree. She was also a prominent member of Washington, D.C.'s African American community.
Anna Julia Cooper was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1858 to Hannah Stanley Haywood, an enslaved woman in the home of prominent Wake County landowner George Washington Haywood. Haywood is widely believed by historians to be the biological father of Stanley's seven daughters. Cooper had two older brothers named Andrew J. Haywood and Rufus Haywood. In 1868 when she was around nine years old, Cooper received a scholarship to attend school at the newly opened Saint Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute, founded by the local Episcopal Diocese for the purpose of training teachers to educate former slaves and their families.
Learn more about Anna Julia Cooper, and read one of her essays, free from quotidiana.org.
Posted by courier at 04:45 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Janie Porter Barrett (9 August 1865 - 27 August 1948) (née Porter) was an American social reformer, educator and welfare worker. She established the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, a pioneering rehabilitation center for African American female delinquents. She was also the founder of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs.
Barrett was born in Athens, Georgia on 9 August 1865. Her mother Julia was a former slave. Her father's name is unknown, but because of Barrett's fair skin it is thought that he was Caucasian.
Read more about Janie Porter Barrett, free from the Library of Virginia.
Posted by courier at 09:30 PM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Matthew Alexander Henson (August 8, 1866 – March 9, 1955) was an African American explorer and associate of Robert Peary during various expeditions, the most famous being a 1909 expedition which claimed to be the first to reach the Geographic North Pole.
Henson was born on a farm in Nanjemoy, Maryland on August 8, 1866. He was still a child when his parents Lemuel and Caroline died, and at the age of twelve he went to sea as a cabin boy on a merchant ship. He sailed around the world for the next several years, educating himself and becoming a skilled navigator.
Read Project Gutenberg's A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, by Matthew A. Henson.
Posted by courier at 05:59 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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Posted by courier at 07:11 AM. Filed under: Opinion
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Courier Staff Report
Thomas Lewis Johnson, born into slavery in Rock-Raymon, Virginia, on August 7, 1836, became a minister, missionary and author after being freed by the Civil War.
Johnson was the son a freeman with one-eighth African ancestry, and an enslaved woman. His grandfather had been brought to America from Guinea, Africa. When Thomas was three, his father attempted to buy his wife and son, but their owner refused and moved them to Alexandria, VA. When Johnson was 12 years old, he was taken from his mother and sent to work in Fredericksburg, VA.
Read Thomas Johnson's book, Twenty-Eight Years as a Slave, free from the University of North Carolina.
Posted by courier at 05:13 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From the Online Archive of California:
Miriam Matthews (1905-2003), the first credentialed African-American librarian in the state of California, was a librarian at Los Angeles Public Library (1927-1960), a historian of African American and California history, and an active member of the American and California Library Associations' Committees on Intellectual Freedom.
Miriam Matthews was born on August 6, 1905 in Pensacola, Florida and moved to Los Angeles with her family two years later. After graduating from Los Angeles High School in 1922, Matthews studied at the University of California, Southern Branch (now UCLA) for two years. She transferred to the University of California, Berkeley where she graduated with a B.A. in 1926 and a certificate in librarianship in 1927, becoming the first known certified African American librarian in California. Matthews began her career at the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) in 1927 and became a branch librarian in 1934. She took two leaves of absence from LAPL, one in 1940 to work at the New York Public Library in a librarian exchange program and another from 1944 to 1945 in order to earn a master's degree in library science from the University of Chicago. In 1949, she was promoted to regional librarian, a position she held until her retirement from LAPL in 1960.
Read an historical pamphlet on the multi-racial history of Los Angeles, written by Miriam Matthews and contained in and excerpted version of African American librarians in the Far West: pioneers and trailblazers, by Binnie Tate Wilkin, free from Google Books.
Posted by courier at 05:53 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Theodore Flowers (born August 5, 1895 - died November 16, 1927) became the first African-American middleweight champion, defeating Harry Greb in 1926. Known as "Tiger", he began boxing professionally in 1918 at the age of 23 while working at a Philadelphia shipbuilding plant. Nicknamed the "Georgia Deacon", he was a devoutly religious man who would recite a passage from Psalm 144 before every bout.
During his career, Flowers would meet many high caliber fighters, including Sam Langford, Kid Norfolk, Jamaica Kid, and Mickey Walker. In 1924, Tiger was rated the number one contender to Greb's title by
Ring Magazine. Flowers earned a shot at Harry Greb after losing a questionable decision to lightheavyweight champion Mike McTigue.
Learn more about Tiger Flowers from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Posted by courier at 05:32 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Robert Hayden (4 August 1913 – 25 February 1980) was an American poet, essayist, educator. He was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976.
Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan to Ruth and Asa Sheffey (who separated before his birth). He was taken in by a foster family next door, Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden, and grew up in a Detroit ghetto nicknamed "Paradise Valley". The Haydens' perpetually contentious marriage, coupled with Ruth Sheffey’s competition for young Hayden's affections, made for a traumatic childhood.Witnessing fights and suffering beatings, Hayden lived in a house fraught with chronic angers whose effects would stay with the poet throughout his adulthood. On top of that, his severe visual problems prevented him from participating in activities such as sports in which nearly everyone was involved. His childhood traumas resulted in debilitating bouts of depression which he later called "my dark nights of the soul."
Read poems by Robert Hayden, free from poemhunter.com.
Posted by courier at 05:10 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
Horace Roscoe Cayton (1859–1940) was an American journalist and politician. The son of a slave and a white plantation owner's daughter who went to Seattle, Washington in the late 1800s and published the Seattle Republican, a newspaper directed towards white and black readers. At one point this newspaper had the second largest circulation in the city.
Horace was born in 1859 on a plantation in Mississippi. After Emancipation, he and his family moved to a farm near Port Gibson, Mississippi. He graduated from Alcorn College in the early 1880s.
Listen to Studs Terkel interview Horace Cayton.
Posted by courier at 05:37 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From wikipedia:
James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – November 30, 1987) was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist.
Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.
Watch "Take This Hammer," which features novelist, essayist and playwright James Baldwin interviewing community leaders in San Francisco’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods.
Posted by courier at 05:59 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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From
The Courier's Archives
Musically Minded by Kimberly Low
Bubble Jim by Sabina Singh
School Days by Jamie Maxfield
Posted by courier at 06:51 AM. Filed under: Comics
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From wikipedia:
Robert Cray (born August 1, 1953, Columbus, Georgia) is an American blues guitarist and singer.
Cray started playing guitar in his early teens. At Denbigh High School in Newport News, Virginia, his love of blues and soul music flourished as he started collecting records. Originally, he wanted to become an architect, but around the same time he began to study architectural design, he formed a local band "Steakface", described as "the best band from Lakewood you never heard of". Cray's guitar and vocals contributed greatly to Steakface's set list of songs by Jimi Hendrix, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Fleetwood Mac, The Grease Band, Blodwyn Pig, Jethro Tull, Spirit and The Faces.
Laern more at RobertCray.com.
Posted by courier at 05:52 AM. Filed under: In Quotes
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