The James Logan Courier

From wikipedia:
Dinah Washington (August 29, 1924 – December 14, 1963) was a blues, R&B and jazz singer. Because of her strong voice and emotional singing, she is known as the Queen of the Blues. Despite dying at the early age of 39, Washington became one of the most influential vocalists of the twentieth century, credited among others as a major influence on Aretha Franklin. She is a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

Washington was born Ruth Lee Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her family moved to Chicago while she was still a child. As a child in Chicago she played piano and directed her church choir. She later studied in Walter Dyett's renowned music program at DuSable High School. At 16 as Ruth Jones, she toured the United States' black gospel circuit with Roberta Martin accompanying her at the piano. There was a period when she both performed in clubs as Dinah Washington while singing and playing piano in Sallie Martin's gospel choir as Ruth Jones.

Read more about Dinah Washington's life and career, free from vervemusicgroup.com.

From wikipedia:
George Hoyt Whipple (August 28, 1878 – February 1, 1976) was an American physician, biomedical researcher, and medical school educator and administrator. Whipple shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George Richards Minot and William Parry Murphy "for their discoveries concerning liver therapy in cases of anemia."

Whipple was born to Ashley Cooper Whipple and Frances Anna Hoyt in Ashland, New Hampshire. He was the son and grandson of physicians. Whipple attended Phillips Academy and then Yale University from which he graduated with a B.A. degree in 1900. He attended medical school at the Johns Hopkins University. from which he received the M.D. degree in 1905.

Read George Hoyt Whipple's Nobel Lecture of December 12, 1934, free from nobelprize.org.

From ncnewspapersineducation.org:
By Roy Parker Jr.

Robert Lee Vann (1879-1940) rose from the cotton field to become founder-editor-publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, which by the early 1930s counted 250,000 readers across the country, the largest circulation of any black-owned newspaper in history, and one of the few newspapers of any kind to have a national circulation.

Vann managed to acquire a first-rate education at Virginia Union University and Western University in Pennsylvania,and was licensed as a lawyer in that state in 1909.


Learn more about Robert Lee Vann, free from ExplorePAhistory.com

From wikipedia:
Wynona Merceris Carr (August 23, 1924 - May 12, 1976) was an African-American gospel, rhythm & blues and rock & roll singer/songwriter, who recorded as "Sister" Wynona Carr when doing gospel material.

Wynona Carr was born in Cleveland, OH, where she started out as a gospel singer, forming her own five-piece group The Carr Singers around 1945 and touring the Cleveland/Detroit area. Being tipped by The Pilgrim Travelers, who shared a bill with Carr in the late 1940's, Art Rupe signed her to his Specialty label, giving Carr her new stage name "Sister" Wynona Carr (modelled after pioneering gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe) and cutting some twenty sides with her from 1949 to 1954, including a couple of duets with Specialty's biggest gospel star at the time, Brother Joe May.

Listen to Wynona Carr sing "Life is a Ball Game," free from youtube.com.

From wikipedia:
Isaac Lee Hayes, Jr. (August 20, 1942 – August 10, 2008) was an American soul and funk singer-songwriter, musician, record producer, arranger, composer, and actor. Hayes was one of the main creative forces behind southern soul music label Stax Records, where he served as both an in-house songwriter and producer with partner David Porter during the mid-1960s. In the late 1960s, Hayes became a recording artist, and recorded successful soul albums such as Hot Buttered Soul (1969) and Black Moses (1971) as the Stax label's premier artist.

Alongside his work in popular music, Hayes was a film score composer for motion pictures. His best known work, for the 1971 blaxploitation film Shaft, earned Hayes an Academy Award for Best Original Song (the first Academy Award received by an African-American in a non-acting category) and two Grammy Awards. He received a third Grammy for the album Black Moses.

Learn more about Isaac Hayes at IsaacHayes.com.

From wikipedia:
John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an influential American post-war blues singer, guitarist, and songwriter born in Coahoma County near Clarksdale, Mississippi. From a musical family, he was a cousin of Earl Hooker. John was also influenced by his stepfather, a local blues guitarist, who learned in Shreveport, Louisiana to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time. John developed a half-spoken style that was his trademark. Though similar to the early Delta blues, his music was rhythmically free. John Lee Hooker could be said to embody his own unique genre of the blues, often incorporating the boogie-woogie piano style and a driving rhythm into his masterful and idiosyncratic blues guitar and singing. His best known songs include "Boogie Chillen" (1948) and "Boom Boom" (1962).

Learn more about John Lee Hooker at johnleehooker.com.

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.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Payne began her journalism career rather unexpectedly while working as a hostess at an Army Special Services club in Japan, a position she had taken in 1948. She allowed a visiting reporter from the Chicago Defender to read her journal, which detailed her own experiences as well as those of African-American soldiers. Impressed, the reporter took the journal back to Chicago and soon Payne's observations were being used by the Defender, an African American newspaper with a national readership, as the basis for front-page stories.

Read a series of interviews with Ethel Payne, free from the Washington Press Club Foundation.

From wikipedia:
Carl Thomas Rowan (August 11, 1925 - September 23, 2000), was an African American public servant, journalist and author. Rowan was a nationally-syndicated op-ed columnist for the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. He was one of the most prominent black journalists of the 20th century.

Carl Rowan was born in Tennessee and was raised in McMinnville, in that state. He studied at Tennessee State University (1942-43) and Washburn University (1943-44). He was one of the first African-Americans to serve as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy. He graduated from Oberlin College (1947) and earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota (1948). He began his career in journalism as copywriter for The Minneapolis Tribune (1948-50),

Listen to Carl Rowan: The Life Story of an Influential Newsman, free from the Voice of America.

From wikipedia:
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (ca. August 10, 1858---February 27, 1964) was an author, educator and one of the most important African American scholars in United States history. Upon receiving a Ph. D in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1924, Cooper became the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree. She was also a prominent member of Washington, DC's African American community.

Read Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South, free from the University of North Carolina library.

From wikipedia:
Sara Teasdale (August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933), was an American lyrical poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri.

Throughout her life, Teasdale suffered poor health and it was at age 9 that she was well enough to begin school. In 1898 she went to Mary Institute and to Hosmer Hall in 1899 where she finished in 1903.

Read Helen of Troy and Other Poems by Sara Teasdale, one of four of her books available free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle) (August 7, 1911–June 16, 1979) was an American film director.

Coming from a radio background, Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington musical Beggar's Holiday, in 1946.

One year later, he directed his first film, They Live By Night. It was released two years later due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes' takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society’s young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray’s films). It was influential on the sporadically popular sub-genre often called “love on the run” movies, concerning as it does two young fugitive lovers on the run from the law. (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman’s 1974 remake of They Live By Night, Thieves Like Us.)

Watch an interview with Nicholas Ray, free from youtube.com.

From Blackpast.org:
Miriam Matthews was the first African American librarian in the Los Angeles Public Library system. Hired in 1927, she served in the library until her retirement in 1960 where she was instrumental in preserving the history and cultural heritage of black Angelenos.

Miriam Matthews was born on August 6, 1905 in Pensacola Florida to Reuben and Fannie Matthews. Two years later the Matthews family moved to Los Angeles. Miriam Matthews earning her B.A. degree and librarianship certificate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1926 and 1927, respectively, and her Master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago in 1945.

Read about the Hyde Park Miriam Matthews Public Library in southern California, free from ArchNewsNow.com.

From wikipedia:
Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and poet, born in Savannah, Georgia, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, and an autobiography.

When Conrad Aiken was 11 years of age, his physician father killed his mother, then himself. According to his own writings, Aiken found the bodies of his parents. was raised by his great-great-aunt in Massachusetts. Aiken was educated at private schools and at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, then at Harvard University where he edited the Advocate with T. S. Eliot. Aiken graduated in 1912.

Read The House of Dust; a symphony by Conrad Aiken, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Philippa Duke Schuyler (August 2, 1931-May 9, 1967) was a noted American child prodigy and pianist who became famous in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of her talent, mixed race parentage, and the eccentric methods employed by her mother to bring her up. Schuyler was the daughter of George S. Schuyler, a prominent black essayist and journalist of pronounced conservative views, and Josephine Cogdell, a white Texan and one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty from a former slave-owning family. Her parents believed that intermarriage could "invigorate" both races and produce extraordinary offspring. They also advocated that mixed race marriage could help to solve many of the United States's social problems.

Read more about Philippa Schuyler's troubled life, free from jrank.com.

From wikipedia:
Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays (ca. August 1, 1895 (?) – March 28, 1984) was an African-American minister, educator, scholar, social activist and the president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He was also a significant mentor to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and was among the most articulate and outspoken critics of segregation before the rise of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.

Benjamin Elijah Mays was born in 1895 in Ninety Six, South Carolina, the youngest of eight children; his parents were tenant farmers and former slaves. After spending a year at Virginia Union University, he moved north to attend Bates College in Maine, where he obtained his B.A. in 1920, then entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student, earning an M.A. in 1925 and a Ph.D. in the School of Religion in 1935. His education at Chicago was interrupted several times: he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1922 and accepted a pastorate at the Shiloh Baptist Church of Atlanta, then later taught at Morehouse and at South Carolina State College.

Visit the website of Morehouse College.