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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.