Every Month Is Black History Month

Sanuel Battle

2011-02-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

On June 28, Samuel Battle, a 6-foot-2, 285-pound 28-year-old who lived in Clinton (now known as Hell’s Kitchen), began his duties as Greater New York’s first black police officer (two who served the former city of Brooklyn had been absorbed into the metropolitan force earlier).
Appointed by Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, Battle recalled:
My friends, and some that were not friends, said it was ridiculous: that I could never be appointed because of my color. But I said that what one could do another could, and was not willing to admit any inferiority. I stuck to it and got the appointment on my merits.
Samuel Jesse Battle (b. January 16, 1883 in New Bern, North Carolina) (died August 7, 1966) was the first black police officer in the city of Brooklyn, later New York City. After attending segregated schools in North Carolina, Battle moved north, first to Connecticut, then to New York City, where he took a job as a train porter and began studying for the New York City Police Department civil service exam. He was sworn in on March 6, 1911.
His brother-in-law was Patrolman Moses P. Cobb, who started working for the Brooklyn Police force in the early 1890s before the unification of NYC and acted as Battle's mentor. "Big Sam" as he was known - 6'3", / 280 pounds, earned the respect of his fellow Officers after saving ones life in the early 1920s. They subsequently voted to allow him into the Sargent's academy. As the NYPD's first black Lieutenant, during the intense Harlem Riots of 1935 - after 3 days of violence he circulated fliers of himself with the young boy smiling who had allegedly been murdered in the basement of the Kress Department store.
He joined the force in 1911, assigned first to San Juan Hill, the neighborhood where Lincoln Center is today, which preceded Harlem as one of the key African American neighborhoods in Manhattan. He was soon moved to Harlem, as the African American population there grew. He would later become the first African American police sergeant (1926), lieutenant (1935), and the first African American parole commissioner (1941).
In 1941, Battle began work as a parole commissioner, working with delinquent youths in Harlem. He initiated rehabilitation programs, such as summer camps and sports activities for the youth of Harlem. During a 1943 race riot, triggered by the shooting of an African-American suspect by a white police officer, Battle, at the request of New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, was called in to quell the Harlem area where the riot erupted. Battle retired as parole commissioner in 1951 but remained active in community activities for the Harlem area.
* On August 4, 2009, the intersection of West 135th St and Lenox Avenue in Harlem was officially renamed in his honor.

History Of Black Police Officers In New York

2011-02-09T07:30:00.000-08:00

black-shield
The Black Shields from amazon books

The San Juan Hill Section Of Manhattan 2

2011-02-09T07:27:00.001-08:00

san juan hill

Negro League History: From Baseball Fever

2011-02-05T13:00:00.001-08:00

baseball-fever-negro-leagues
from baseball fever

More On The Cuban Giants

2011-02-05T12:44:00.000-08:00

cuban-giants
from wikipedia

The Cuban Giants were the first African-American professional baseball club.
The team was originally formed in 1885 at the Argyle Hotel, a summer resort in Babylon, New York. The team was so skilled in the game, and achieved victory over so many of the nearby amateur "white" teams that they attracted the attention of a promoter, Walter Cook. To appeal to a broader audience, Cook styled them the "Cuban Giants," a common ploy to avoid referring to the players as "black" or "Negro." There were no Cubans on the Cuban Giants. The team remained one of the premier Negro league teams for nearly 20 years.
The team went on to become the "world colored champions" of 1887 and 1888, and spawned imitators.
Though there were no actual Cuban men on the Cuban Giants, the team had played in Cuba in the fall or winter of 1885–1886.
In the September 1938 issue of Esquire Magazine, Sol White recounts the early days of the team: "…when that first team began playing away from home, they passed as foreigners—Cubans, as they finally decided—hoping to conceal the fact that they were just American Negro hotel waiters and talked a gibberish to each other on the field which, they hoped, sounded like Spanish" (Coover, 3).
It was a popular practice in the Sporting press at the time to refer to African-American players as Cuban, Spanish, or Arabian instead of admitting to the truth.
In 1896 ownership issues would lead to a new offshoot team being created, calling themselves Cuban X-Giants. The older owner's team was then referred to as Genuine Cuban Giant or Original Cuban Giants.
There are two different tales on how the Cuban Giants got their start. According to Sol White, a player who would join the Cuban Giants several years after they got started, Frank P. Thompson, a headwaiter at the Argyle Hotel in Babylon, Long Island, would regularly play baseball with the other waiters that soon became an attraction for the hotel’s guests. Before long, he signed 3 star players from the semi-pro black team, the Philadelphia Orions, and the team went on the road to contend any team who would play them.
However, according to an interview with Thompson himself published on October 15, 1887 in the "New York Age," an African-American newspaper, the majority of the ballplayers did not come from the hotel's staff, but from several other black teams. In Philadelphia, Frank P. Thompson organized the Keystone Athletics in May 1885, and in July they were transferred to Babylon, L.I. By August the Athletics had partnered with the Manhattans from Washington, D.C. and the Philadelphia Orions, and it was the coming together of these three teams that created the Cuban Giants. Walter Cook from Trenton, New Jersey was their white owner and Stanislaus Kostka Govern was their black manager.
Govern, who was a native of St. Croix, Virgin Islands, understood how a team could financially prosper in the Caribbean at this time. His own team, the Manhattans, had been playing in Cuba since 1882. Thompson had a connection to Henry Flagler through Osborn D. Seavey, and once the team was through with their Cuban winter tour, they came to St. Augustine, Florida to entertain the guests at the newly forming resort hub.
The Cuban Giants would come back to Florida many times during their existence. During the St. Augustine years, Thompson put together an organization called the Progressive Association of the United States. Thompson was the president of the Association, and Govern acted as secretary. Thompson used his position to conduct annual sermons for the Cuban Giants and any citizens who wanted, to come together against prejudice in the South. These sermons were widely well received and inspired others to join him in the cause.
In 1886, Walter E. Simpson bought the team and gave them a home at the Chambersburg Grounds in Trenton, New Jersey. Two months later, he would sell the team to Walter I. Cook.
Cook came from a wealthy family and was generous to the team with his money, especially when it came to illness or injuries, and he is known as the Giant’s most well-liked owner. They even played a benefit game for him in which they donated their pay to him. J.M. Bright purchased the Cuban Giants from Cook in June 1887. Bright was able to get them into the Middle States League in 1889, as joining a league was something the team had been trying to do for some time. However, Bright was not nearly as well-liked as Cook, and had to deal often with renegade players. This would be the teams last year in Trenton. In 1890 the entire team fled and played as the Colored Monarchs of York, Pennsylvania. In 1891, the heart of the team fled to their rival, Ambrose Davis’ Gorhams of New York City, then called the Big Gorhams.
This dismantling and reassembling of the team became routine year after year until 1896, when E.B. Lamar Jr. from Brooklyn bought the team from Bright, renaming them the Cuban X-Giants. Bright responded by putting together an inferior team calling them the “Genuine Cuban Giants” or the “Original Cuban Giants.” The Cuban X-Giants had a successful ten year run as one of the best black teams in the East.
In 1885, the year of the inception of the Cuban Giants, Henry Flagler built the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida. Many members of the Cuban Giants worked at the hotel and played exhibition games as entertainment for the patrons of the hotel (Malloy). This is a point of contention, because some people say that the Cuban Giants actually worked at the hotel and began their baseball careers as something fun to do after they got off work, and others say that they didn't actually play at the hotel until their team was actually established. What is known though is that "playing for the wealthy clientele that frequented Flagler's empire kept the team afloat until they headed... to... Trenton, New Jersey" (Heaphy 16).
During their first summer season, 1886, the Cuban Giants played a game at a field in Trenton, NJ. At the time, Trenton did not have a hometown baseball team. The Cuban Giants gladly took the space, and Trenton became their “home base” (Malloy). Soon after moving to Trenton, a man named Walter Cook took over the job of booking games for the team. Cook also established salaries for the players (Heaphy 16). Walter Cook used the position that the player filled to determine how much they earned. The average pay for pitchers and catchers was about $18.00 per week, plus expenses. Outfielders made about $15.00 per week, and infielders made about $12.00 per week. These salaries were much more money than African Americans could have expected to make in a regular job at the time (Heaphy 16). Today, these salaries seem very low. In 2006, the minimum baseball player’s salary was $380,000, while the average salary was $2,699,292 (mlbplayers.mlb.com).
“The Giants…played a number of winters in Havana, Cuba” (Heaphy 17). The Giants had discovered that the key to being financially stable was to play baseball all year round. Cuba was a perfect place for them to play their winter seasons, because they could avoid the cold temperatures that were common in New Jersey in the winter, and they drew huge crowds when they played in Havana. They were so popular in fact that they played “…in front of as many as 15,000 fans” (Heaphy 17). This is very impressive for the late 19th century, considering that the average attendance per game for the Philadelphia Baseball Grounds, a popular baseball venue at the time, in 1890 was 2,231 per game (baseball-statistics.com).
Some of the prominent players were:
* Ben Boyd
* Frank Grant, infield
* Abe Harrison, shortstop
* Andrew Jackson
* Oscar Jackson
* William Jackson
* John Nelson, pitcher
* William Selden, pitcher
* Arthur Thomas
* Sol White, infield
* Clarence Williams (baseball player), catcher
* George Williams (Negro Leagues infielder), infielder and captain

Black Baseball’s Rich Legacy

2011-02-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

black-baseball-times
an excerpt from a 2008 nytimes article by Kevin Coyne

ON a fine September night in 1946, in a ballpark out on the marshy edge of Newark’s East Ward, the Newark Eagles — one of the two professional baseball teams, one black and one white, that shared Ruppert Stadium — trotted onto the field in jerseys so new and bright they looked almost incandescent under the lights.
The players were black, the uniforms white. The team’s co-owner, Effa Manley, had just spent $700 on a new set, about as much as she paid her best players each month. It was the Eagles’ first time in the Negro World Series, and she wanted them to look the part of champions.
The stands were packed with both dignitaries and ordinary fans, black and white alike, and the field was dense with players on their way to the National Baseball Hall of Fame: Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Leon Day and Manager Biz Mackey for the Eagles; Satchel Paige, Hilton Smith and Willard Brown for the Kansas City Monarchs. Conspicuously missing was the Monarchs’ shortstop from the previous season, Jackie Robinson, who was playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm club in Montreal, and was on the verge of rendering moot this whole segregated enterprise.
Sitting in the stands was an old ballplayer, creeping up on 90, who lived at the Y.M.C.A. in nearby Orange, N.J., Ben Holmes. He had brought along a treasure from the earliest days of black baseball: a silver ball awarded in 1888 to the team he played third base for, the Cuban Giants, the first full-time professional black baseball team, when they won an earlier version of the black championship. The heavyweight champion Joe Louis threw out the silver ball to start the game, the opener of the World Series.
“The ’46 series, that’s really the crème de la crème,” said Lawrence D. Hogan, a history professor at Union County College, in Cranford, N.J., and the author of a definitive book on black baseball, “Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball” (National Geographic, 2006). He has trolled through old records and memorabilia for decades, but Holmes’s silver ball has remained elusive, as if it — like the Negro leagues themselves — disappeared from the earth soon after that series.
“There’s never been any sighting of that ball,” Dr. Hogan said. “It’s the holy grail of black baseball.”
Baseball is thriving today on the outskirts of New York, with a crop of minor-league teams and bustling new stadiums that grew quickly over the last decade or so. But these new teams were planted in fertile ground, inheritors of a rich regional tradition of black baseball — of an era when an archipelago of green diamonds stretched from Bacharach Park in Atlantic City to the Argyle Hotel in Babylon on Long Island to Bulkeley Stadium in Hartford. That was a time when much of America still believed that blacks and whites shouldn’t be neighbors or schoolmates, co-workers or teammates.

Frank Grant: Breaking The Barrier Before Robinson

2011-02-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

an excerpt from a 2006 nytimes article by Bill Pennington

In 1886, the Buffalo Bisons, a top minor league baseball team, signed a versatile infielder from Massachusetts named Frank Grant. The next day, a local newspaper announced Grant’s arrival by describing him as “a Spaniard.”
Grant was in fact one of five African-Americans playing in the otherwise all-white minor leagues that year, on teams from Kansas to Connecticut. Their presence was accepted if not widely acknowledged in the 1880’s, passed off with a wink and a nod, a dodge that labeled players like Grant as Spaniards, Portuguese or Arabs.
The ruse did not hide what historians now concede, that some 60 years before Jackie Robinson famously broke organized baseball’s color barrier, integrated teams of white and black athletes played hundreds of professional games. African-Americans even played in the major leagues.
To most Americans, the history of black baseball means the Negro leagues, an enterprising, culturally rich response to the Jim Crow-era segregation in professional baseball. But blacks played professional baseball for decades after the Civil War, long before the Negro National League began in 1920.
On Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will induct by special election 17 stars and team owners who predate modern professional baseball’s integration in the mid-1940’s.
Two of the special inductees, Grant and a onetime teammate, Sol White, trace their baseball lives to the most obscure period of black baseball — the 1880’s, the last decade before the game imposed its color barrier.
The recently documented life stories of Grant and White, 19th-century pioneers who dared not be recognized as such, have helped complete the chronicle of the African-American baseball experience. Theirs are the forgotten tales of men rushing to play at the highest professional tier, aware that their immediate offspring would probably be prohibited such an opportunity.
“They are the players who just vanished from baseball’s narrative, like a secret no one talks about,” said the baseball historian Jim Overmyer, who specializes in black baseball. “But it is important to know that they are the beginning of baseball desegregation. Somebody had to do the early heavy lifting, and even if few people know it, these guys were there first.”
Overmyer and another historian of black baseball, Greg Bond, were among 12 members of a committee that voted for the Hall of Fame’s special election.
“It complicates our understanding of race relations in sports to realize that the color barrier was not a natural outcome of mixing races after the Civil War,” Bond said. “The fact is there were a lot of blacks on mostly white teams. The color barrier became a choice people made at the expense of people like Grant and White, who then disappeared.”
The first black professional baseball player is believed to be John Fowler, who used the nickname Bud and played for minor league teams in Lynn and Worcester, Mass., in 1878. Through recommendations from fans, historians and Hall of Fame members, Fowler was among 94 candidates for the special election, but he was not among the final 17.
Through meticulous work, representatives for the Society for American Baseball Research discovered that Fowler was born John Jackson 20 years earlier in central New York, and that he learned to play baseball, in of all places, the village of Cooperstown during the 1860’s.
Fowler played for 18 years in 13 professional leagues, from New England to New Mexico. He was a speedy base stealer who played every position, including pitcher..

The History Of The Negro Leagues: The Cuban Giants and The Argyle Hotel

2011-02-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

argyle-hotel
from clydes guide

Legends Of The Negro Leagues: Striking Out Jim Crow

2011-02-04T08:12:00.000-08:00

from the legends of the negro leagues

Edward Strickland

2011-02-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

originally from knickerbocker village in December of 2007
I don't know how long Edward Strickland lived in Knickerbocker before he was evicted (I'm assuming he was), but he seems to have a been an artist of note as referenced here in an article about famed artist Raphael Soyer. I found an exampe of his work, a still life on-line. I'm still looking for more information on him. He's mentioned in this book, Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art
By Milly Heyd. I wonder whether Soyer or his twin brother Moses ever lived in Knickerbocker? It mentions that Raphael displayed his work at the Educational Alliance.
from Strickland's obituary

Bay State Banner
09-24-1998
Edward Strickland, 68, educator, artist, writer
Edward Strickland, professor of the psychology of visual arts, a friend to artists, and himself an artist and writer, died in the early morning of Sept. 16 at Deaconess Hospital. He succumbed to respiratory failure due to lung cancer. He was 68.
Throughout his life, in his painting, as an arts administrator and critic, and as a individual, Dr. Strickland sided with those who were struggling to achieve equity in society. He was generous with his time on behalf of such efforts, even though it took him away from his studio where he took an intense pleasure in immersing himself in the …
A woman stands among a smother of foliage, and the leaves around her stir, responsive to her voice. "It's as though she's singing a linden tree into existence," says Edward Strickland, the painter of the scene.
Strickland, through December, is presenting a 40-year retrospective of paintings and drawings in the handsome AAMARP Galleries on the fourth floor of the Ruggles Building of Northeastern University, at 11 Leon St. The retrospective represents the broad scope of his interests built on the dual foundations of psychology and the visual arts. An associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and former chair of the black studies department, …

John Coltrane and Edward Strickland on Coltrane

2011-02-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

Edward Strickland is famous in Knickerbocker Village history
an excerpt from an article Strickland wrote about Coltrane in the Atlantic

What Coltrane Wanted
The legendary saxophonist forsook lyricism for the quest for ecstasy
by Edward Strickland
JOHN COLTRANE died twenty years ago, on July 17, 1967, at the age of forty. In the years since, his influence has only grown, and the stellar avant-garde saxophonist has become a jazz legend of a stature shared only by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. As an instrumentalist Coltrane was technically and imaginatively equal to both; as a composer he was superior, although he has not received the recognition he deserves for this aspect of his work. In composition he excelled in an astonishing number of forms--blues, ballads, spirituals, rhapsodies, elegies, suites, and free-form and cross-cultural works.
The closest contemporary analogy to Coltrane's relentless search for possibilities was the Beatles' redefinition of rock from one album to the next. Yet the distance they traveled from conventional hard rock through sitars and Baroque obligatos to Sergeant Pepper psychedelia and the musical shards of Abbey Road seems short by comparison with Coltrane's journey from hard-bop saxist to daring harmonic and modal improviser to dying prophet speaking in tongues.

More Stars Of The Negro Leagues And Great Art

2011-02-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

will-johnson-black-baseball
from artist will johnson's site

Stars Of The Negro League

2011-02-01T17:16:00.000-08:00

judy-johnson-cards2
Shown above is the set of Judy Johnson tribute cards. One card with 5000 numbered copies is produced each season to honor a former Negro League player. The first card of the set was the Judy Johnson card issued in 1996. The cards are given away with admission to the Judy Johnson Tribute to Negro League Baseball held each August at the Wilmington Blue Rocks ballpark in Wilmington, Delaware.
Several of the honored players played for teams in the ManDak League in the 1950's and many other former Negro League players that played in the ManDak League played on the same teams with these players.
Leon Day, former ManDak League player with the Winnipeg Buffaloes, is inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Ted Radcliffe is a six-time Negro League all star player that played for the Elmwood Giants. Bill Cash was a catcher for the Bismarck Barons in 1955. Satchel Paige was the greatest Negro League pitcher. He is enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He was a Minot Mallard for their first three games in 1950.
The cards are illustrated by Michael D. Mellet and produced by the Judy Johnson Foundation. The cards are 6 inches by 8 inches. The back side of the cards gives biographical information.

Charles Seay: NYC Marbles Champion 1935

2011-02-01T12:49:00.000-08:00

Note the "hard thinking" of James McCahill of the Parks Dept. I don't know where 75 Clove Road is in Brooklyn, but James must have lived in Crown Heights. In 1930 his family lived at 454 New York Avenue. I wonder what ever happened to Charles Seay?

Herbert Hill: NAACP Labor Lawyer

2011-02-01T07:42:00.000-08:00

herbert-hill

Herbert Hill (January 24, 1924 – August 15, 2004) was the labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for decades and was a frequent contributor to New Politics (magazine) as well as the author of several books. He was later Evjue-Bascom Professor of Afro-American Studies and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and eventually emeritus professor. He played a significant role in the civil rights movement in pressuring labor unions to desegregate and to seriously implement measures that would integrate African Americans in the labor market. He was also famous for his belief that American trade unions had downplayed the history of racism that tarred their reputations, before and after the Jim Crow era.
Hill earned a B.A. from New York University in 1945 and attended the New School for Social Research from 1946 until 1948 where he studied under the distinguished political theorist, Hannah Arendt. During the 1940s, Hill was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Hill (although white) was appointed Labor Director of the NAACP in 1951 where he worked until 1977 when he departed for a professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was highly critical of the practice of nepotism in many unions whereby relatives of members were hired. Hill criticized labour relations practices in numerous industries including the film industry as well as the progress of the Kennedy Administration on issues of racial equality in the workplace. Among the many unions he criticized for their record on racial equality were the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the United Auto Workers, the United Federation of Teachers and the United Steelworkers of America as well as the AFL-CIO federation itself. Hill particularly objected to the AFL-CIO position that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act should not interfere with existing seniority systems. He was also a strong supporter of affirmative action. According to a New Politics article by Stephen Steinberg, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once described Hill as "the best barbershop lawyer in the United States".
He also organized pickets to raise awareness of racial discrimination in the construction industry. His conduct was so controversial that some unions threatened to withhold funding of the NAACP unless Hill was fired, but the NAACP leadership under Roy Wilkins supported Hill. Hill published over one hundred articles in journals, anthologies and newspapers and was also known for debates with labor historian Herbert Gutman as well as debates in New Politics (magazine) with union leader Al Shanker and Nelson Lichtenstein, an academic and biographer of Walter Reuther. Hill was especially sharp against Lichtenstein's support for the allegedly racist Reuther and the UAW's activities to betray the civil rights movement. He also served as a consultant for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the United Nations.
One of the most important campaigns led by Hill was his campaign against the discriminatory practices of the ILGWU. Despite the fact that the ILGWU had cooperated with the NAACP with respect to desegregation of union locals in the South, as late as the early 1960s, there were still no African-American nor Puerto Rican officers or executive board members in the ILGWU in its New York City base. The ILGWU was of particular importance because of its major role in the Liberal Party of New York. Hill played a key role in taking on a complaint against Local 10 of the ILGWU of an African American cutter, Ernest Holmes, who had been repeatedly prevented from joining the cutters' union, thereby receiving lower wages and denied the health and welfare benefits associated with union membership. Hill alleged that the ILGWU restricted African American and Puerto Rican workers to low paying jobs. In 1962, the New York State Commission for Human Rights found that Local 10 had violated the state antidiscrimination law. The ILGWU launched a public relations campaign alleging partisanship on the part of the Republican appointed Commission in response and did little to solve the problem. Writing in New Politics (magazine), a leading ILGWU official, Gus Tyler, attempted to show that there were African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the union. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. held Congressional hearings in the House Committee on Education and Labor on the ILGWU practices in 1962. Hill testified at the hearings, criticizing David Dubinsky for his governance of the ILGWU. Even though Hill was Jewish, allegations of anti-semitism were made with respect to the NAACP critique of the ILGWU. Changes to the ILGWU only came about slowly, especially after the retirement of Dubinsky in 1966.

The Tainted History Of The ILGWU

2011-01-31T14:05:00.001-08:00

Crisis Herbert Hill

The San Juan Hill Section Of Manhattan

2011-01-13T10:34:00.000-08:00

an excerpt from the nytimes

IT’S 7:30 on a weekday evening, and the Josie Robertson Plaza at the heart of Lincoln Center is crowded. Slender teenagers from Juilliard’s ballet program, hair still up in tight “bunhead” knots, dart like gazelles toward the New York State Theater, where City Ballet is about to perform. They cut through the older operagoers flowing toward the Metropolitan Opera House. Film fans stroll diagonally across the plaza, heading to the Walter Reade Theater.
The mood is cooler at Jazz at Lincoln Center nearby in the Time Warner Center. In Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, musicians play against the backdrop of the club’s wall of windows, offering patrons at the bar and small tables a spectacular view of Columbus Circle at night.
This kind of activity has characterized the neighborhood since the 1960s. But long before President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground for the Lincoln Center performing arts complex in 1959, the area from Columbus Circle through the neighborhoods called Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill was already something of an arts center. Jazz and opera and rock ’n’ roll, Shakespeare and Ibsen and musical theater, the visual arts and the invention of the Charleston all happened there.
Lincoln Square, the area from Columbus Circle and West 59th Street up to West 72nd Street, between Central Park and the Hudson River, is now thick, and becoming thicker, with giant middle-class residential complexes and soaring commercial towers. Lincoln Center is undergoing a rebuilding, including extensive renovations to Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard. The goal is completion in 2009.
In the early 20th century, however, Lincoln Square’s streetscapes hugged the ground with rows of tenements and brownstones, punctuated by warehouses and industrial lofts. Its residents were mostly working class and poor, with a notable contingent of artists and bohemians. On its eastern fringe stood a variety of theaters and music halls.
Squeezed into the middle, roughly from 59th to 65th Streets between Amsterdam Avenue and the 11th Avenue railroad tracks, was San Juan Hill, one of the largest black neighborhoods in Manhattan before the rise of Harlem.
On an icy, blustery December morning, I toured San Juan Hill with the historian Marcy Sacks, author of “Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). We stood outside two of the neighborhood’s last old houses, 242-244 West 61st Street, with new construction looming beside them.
In the early 1900s the reformer Mary White Ovington observed that San Juan Hill’s “tall, monotonous tenements” were “the worst type which the city affords.” Up to 5,000 people lived jammed into a single block; beds were often used in shifts, shared by boarders.
Ms. Sacks explained that the neighborhood might have been named to honor the United States Army’s black 10th Cavalry, which fought at the battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War in 1898.
But, she said, “the more accepted story is that it really reflected the violence and the tension that were going on constantly in this neighborhood between black residents of San Juan Hill and the Italians to the north and the Irish to the south in Hell’s Kitchen.”
A century ago that fighting was constant, from small territorial skirmishes along the black-white dividing lines to full-scale street warfare. “Race Rioters At It Again,” read a headline in The New York Times in 1905; “Bullets and Bricks Fly in Race Riot,” read another, in 1907.
At the same time, “there was a great and thriving night scene going on in San Juan Hill,” Ms. Sacks said. “In the basements of a lot of tenements were clubs that ranged from really cheap dives to higher-level, higher-scale clubs.” They included poolrooms, saloons, dance halls and bordellos. “On any given Friday or Saturday night there could be some major partying happening,” she said.
In 1913 the pianist James P. Johnson was playing at a West 62nd Street club called the Jungles Casino. Black sailors and dock workers from the nearby waterfront, many of them from the Carolinas and other Southern coastal states, frequented the club and did what Johnson later recalled as “wild and comical” dances. One particular style inspired him to write an accompanying song.
In 1923 Johnson’s musical revue “Runnin’ Wild” had its premiere at the Colonial Theater on Broadway between West 62nd and 63rd Streets, site of the Harmony Atrium since 1979. It featured the song and dance from the Jungles Casino that became synonymous with the Roaring Twenties: the “Charleston.”
The New Colonial also brought Fred and Adele Astaire to its stage and, in 1910, Charlie Chaplin, performing in a British farce, “The Wow-Wows.”
Phil Schaap, the jazz historian and curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center, said jazz took a big leap in popularity in January 1917, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (also spelled “Jass” at the time) came from Chicago to play at Reisenweber’s Cafe, one of the large, popular lobster palaces of the era, which stood at the southwest corner of West 58th Street and Eighth Avenue.
“Within two weeks the lines went all the way down to 50th Street,” Mr. Schaap said. The band recorded songs for the Victor Talking Machine Company (precursor to RCA Victor) on Feb. 26. A week later the record was released, he said. “And before the month of March 1917 was over, it sold a million copies.”
Later, beginning in the mid-1940s, the neighborhood was a crucible of bebop. On the north side of West 66th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, a block now dominated by the offices of the ABC network, stood the Lincoln Square Center, where Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach and others played. On the same block was the St. Nicholas Arena. It was mostly for boxing matches but, Mr. Schaap noted, “Charlie Parker played dances there, and he made the legendary record ‘Bird at St. Nick’s’ there on Saturday, Feb. 18, 1950.”
A few years later the disc jockey Alan Freed, who had brought his radio show from Cleveland to WINS, played host to his first New York City “Rock ’n’ Roll Jubilee Ball” at the St. Nick on Jan. 14 and 15, 1955. Fats Domino, the Moonglows, the Harptones and others performed for 6,000 teenagers each night.
San Juan Hill was home to a few jazz giants. The Phipps Houses, still standing at 233-247 West 63rd and 234-248 West 64th Street between Amsterdam and West End Avenues, were completed in 1912. The buildings, model tenements, were financed by the philanthropist Henry Phipps, friend and partner to Andrew Carnegie, to help alleviate the neighborhood’s slum conditions.
Thelonious Monk, born in North Carolina in 1917, was a child when his family moved into the Phipps Houses. He stayed there most of his life and was often seen roaming local streets, a quiet and distant man lost in thought. ...

Harlem Burial Ground: Old Map Views

2010-03-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

below, the area in 1879

below in 1836

from the manhattan kids blog

Human remains from an African burial ground circa 1700 may still be present near East 126th St. & 1st Avenue (NW corner) in East Harlem
Ever since Nellie Hester Bailey of the Harlem Tenants Council, Inc. mentioned in passing at a Summer 2008 rally that an African burial ground dating from the Dutch and British colonial era may exist in East Harlem, we have been frantically looking for more details to no avail. Recall that an African Burial Ground dating from the 1600s and 1700s was re-discovered in 1991 in downtown Manhattan near City Hall which finally became a national monument memorial in 2007.
The New York Times has published the most exhaustive survey of the potential site of a Harlem African burial ground we have seen on January 19, 2009 (which coincidentally is the Martin Luther King Day federal holiday): Article from the New York Times: Are traces of the original Harlem settlement — including an African burial ground — awaiting discovery during the replacement of the Willis Avenue Bridge and the planned rehabilitation of the 126th Street Bus Depot? The painting below shows the Harlem waterfront as it appeared in 1765. The steeple of the Reformed Low Dutch Church can be seen at the far right. Just below are what appear to be headstones.
There will be no way to know for certain until the soil is dug up, but the prospect of such a discovery is being greeted both anxiously and eagerly by a couple of stewards of Harlem history. The bucolic farming village of Nieuw Haarlem was established in March 1658, meaning that it is still in its 350th anniversary year. “What an awesome way to celebrate!” said Christopher Paul Moore, a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the research coordinator for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. “Seems like a cultural bonus could be reaped from this, and not just about preserving the cemetery, but preserving or recapturing a hugely significant era in New York’s history, the founding and settlement of Harlem.”

Harlem Burial Ground

2010-03-16T21:55:00.000-07:00

an excerpt from ny1

A group of Harlem activists say they are concerned that an African burial ground is being desecrated by city agencies as they move ahead with construction projects near the site. NY1's Cheryl Wills filed the following report.
Hidden underneath the bus depot on East 126th Street is the final resting place for New Yorkers like Jane Anthony, Henry B. Edwards and Eliza Johnson. They were enslaved Africans who were buried there in the mid 17th century just off Harlem River Drive. It's an area that is quickly becoming known as the city's 'other' African burial ground in Harlem. And now there's an emerging movement to preserve and protect the cemetery that had been abandoned.
"The presence of the early Africans and their contributions to what became this city, this state, this country is woefully neglected," said Eric V. Tait, Jr. of the Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force.
The burial ground came to light in 2008 when the Department of Transportation started expanding the Willis Avenue Bridge. The property, which sits at the foot of the burial ground, is where construction workers allegedly found human body parts while digging.
The cemetery is owned by Elmendorf Reformed Church, which is the oldest sanctuary in Harlem.
"They emphasized one thing. That was 'We're going to be very respectful of the bones.' And they repeated, 'We're going to be very respectful of the bones.' Well that unnerved us because if they said that they must have found something," said Reverend Patricia Singletary of Elmendorf Reformed Church.

Larry Doby Tribute

2010-03-14T22:52:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1980's one of my favorite students from PS 397K was Natasha McLean. Her mom, Myrtle Doby was related to Larry.
The song is the Robby Doby Boogie by Brownie McGhee.

Major Taylor's Home In Worcester, Mass: 2 Hobson Avenue, part 2

2010-03-07T22:32:00.000-08:00

from the major taylor association

Some of the racial hostility had receded, but when Taylor bought a house on Hobson Avenue in Worcester's well-to-do Columbus Park, the neighbors were upset. White residents offered to buy back the house for $2,000 more than Taylor had paid. He refused. In the end, the neighborhood grew to accept its distinguished black resident, whose racing career made him one of the wealthiest blacks in the country

Major Taylor's Home In Worcester, Mass: 2 Hobson Avenue

2010-03-07T22:23:00.000-08:00

Maritcha Lyons' Addresses In Brooklyn

2010-03-07T22:20:00.000-08:00

Maritcha Homes
Maritcha was an assistant principal at PS 83.

Maritcha Lyons In The 1900, 1910 and 1920 Census

2010-03-07T22:19:00.000-08:00

Maritcha Census

History Talk: Tonya Bolden's Maritcha: A 19th Century American Girl, Part 4

2010-03-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

On February 9, 2010. Sponsored by Telling America's Story

Telling America's Story (TAS) is an intensive, federally-funded professional development project for American History Teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools in the Bronx Community School Districts 8, 11, & 12. Philip Panaritis and Brian Carlin, Project Directors. TAS is a partnership with the New York City Department of Education and the history and education departments of major universities and cultural institutions.
The program combines content-rich traditional American History and teaching skills development for Teacher-Historians. Workshops take place in museums, historic houses, and universities. Instruction and content is provided by nationally-known historians and educators. Teachers develop original US history curriculum units and activities. Trips, book signings, and walking tours of historical sites are also important aspects of the TAS program. Ms. Bolden had visited many of the classes of the teachers gathered here. Behind her are samples of projects made by some of those classes.

About Ms. Bolden

Growing up, Tonya Bolden thought one day she would be a teacher. Today, as an award-winning author of more than 20 books for young people and adults, she is just that. Her classroom has no walls. Instead, you just need to pick up one her acclaimed books on topics such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver or Reconstruction to step into the world she creates. History, she has said, is her passion. She passes that rich knowledge of the past on to people around the world. Along with being a talented researcher, Bolden is known as a gifted storyteller who turns facts into something more transcendent stories that move, challenge and inspire.

about Maritcha:

from the book flap:
To do the best for myself with the view of making the best of myself. wrote Maritcha Remond Lyons about her childhood.
Maritcha was born in New York City in 1848. For most of her youth, she and her family lived in lower Manhattan. Much of Maritcha's life there mirrored that of many children of the time: helping with the housework, attending school, and practicing the piano. Yet there were thrilling occasions as well, such as visiting the Crystal Palace, site of Americas first worlds fair. However, Maritcha's life took a dramatic turn in 1863, when, at the age of fifteen, she and her family had to flee from their home in the midst of the violent Draft Riots. They eventually resettled in Providence, Rhode Island, where Maritcha triumphantly overcame prejudice to become the first black person to graduate from Providence High School.
Based on an unpublished memoir by Ms. Lyons ~ Memories of Yesterdays: All of Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was, dated 1928 ~ the evocative text and photographs of young Maritcha, her family, and their friends, as well as archival maps, photographs, and illustrations, make this book an invaluable cultural and historical resource. Maritcha brings to life the story of a very ordinary yet remarkable girl of nineteenth-century America.
»» James Madison Book Award Winner
»» Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
»» YALSA Best Book for Young Adults
»» ALSC Notable Childrens Book

History Talk: Tonya Bolden's Maritcha: A 19th Century American Girl, Part 3

2010-03-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

On February 9, 2010. Sponsored by Telling America's Story

Telling America's Story (TAS) is an intensive, federally-funded professional development project for American History Teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools in the Bronx Community School Districts 8, 11, & 12. Philip Panaritis and Brian Carlin, Project Directors. TAS is a partnership with the New York City Department of Education and the history and education departments of major universities and cultural institutions.
The program combines content-rich traditional American History and teaching skills development for Teacher-Historians. Workshops take place in museums, historic houses, and universities. Instruction and content is provided by nationally-known historians and educators. Teachers develop original US history curriculum units and activities. Trips, book signings, and walking tours of historical sites are also important aspects of the TAS program. Ms. Bolden had visited many of the classes of the teachers gathered here. Behind her are samples of projects made by some of those classes.

About Ms. Bolden

Growing up, Tonya Bolden thought one day she would be a teacher. Today, as an award-winning author of more than 20 books for young people and adults, she is just that. Her classroom has no walls. Instead, you just need to pick up one her acclaimed books on topics such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver or Reconstruction to step into the world she creates. History, she has said, is her passion. She passes that rich knowledge of the past on to people around the world. Along with being a talented researcher, Bolden is known as a gifted storyteller who turns facts into something more transcendent stories that move, challenge and inspire.

about Maritcha:

from the book flap:
To do the best for myself with the view of making the best of myself. wrote Maritcha Remond Lyons about her childhood.
Maritcha was born in New York City in 1848. For most of her youth, she and her family lived in lower Manhattan. Much of Maritcha's life there mirrored that of many children of the time: helping with the housework, attending school, and practicing the piano. Yet there were thrilling occasions as well, such as visiting the Crystal Palace, site of Americas first worlds fair. However, Maritcha's life took a dramatic turn in 1863, when, at the age of fifteen, she and her family had to flee from their home in the midst of the violent Draft Riots. They eventually resettled in Providence, Rhode Island, where Maritcha triumphantly overcame prejudice to become the first black person to graduate from Providence High School.
Based on an unpublished memoir by Ms. Lyons ~ Memories of Yesterdays: All of Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was, dated 1928 ~ the evocative text and photographs of young Maritcha, her family, and their friends, as well as archival maps, photographs, and illustrations, make this book an invaluable cultural and historical resource. Maritcha brings to life the story of a very ordinary yet remarkable girl of nineteenth-century America.
»» James Madison Book Award Winner
»» Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
»» YALSA Best Book for Young Adults
»» ALSC Notable Childrens Book

History Talk: Tonya Bolden's Maritcha: A 19th Century American Girl, Part 2

2010-03-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

n February 9, 2010. Sponsored by Telling America's Story

Telling America's Story (TAS) is an intensive, federally-funded professional development project for American History Teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools in the Bronx Community School Districts 8, 11, & 12. Philip Panaritis and Brian Carlin, Project Directors. TAS is a partnership with the New York City Department of Education and the history and education departments of major universities and cultural institutions.
The program combines content-rich traditional American History and teaching skills development for Teacher-Historians. Workshops take place in museums, historic houses, and universities. Instruction and content is provided by nationally-known historians and educators. Teachers develop original US history curriculum units and activities. Trips, book signings, and walking tours of historical sites are also important aspects of the TAS program. Ms. Bolden had visited many of the classes of the teachers gathered here. Behind her are samples of projects made by some of those classes.

About Ms. Bolden

Growing up, Tonya Bolden thought one day she would be a teacher. Today, as an award-winning author of more than 20 books for young people and adults, she is just that. Her classroom has no walls. Instead, you just need to pick up one her acclaimed books on topics such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver or Reconstruction to step into the world she creates. History, she has said, is her passion. She passes that rich knowledge of the past on to people around the world. Along with being a talented researcher, Bolden is known as a gifted storyteller who turns facts into something more transcendent stories that move, challenge and inspire.

about Maritcha:

from the book flap:
To do the best for myself with the view of making the best of myself. wrote Maritcha Remond Lyons about her childhood.
Maritcha was born in New York City in 1848. For most of her youth, she and her family lived in lower Manhattan. Much of Maritcha's life there mirrored that of many children of the time: helping with the housework, attending school, and practicing the piano. Yet there were thrilling occasions as well, such as visiting the Crystal Palace, site of Americas first worlds fair. However, Maritcha's life took a dramatic turn in 1863, when, at the age of fifteen, she and her family had to flee from their home in the midst of the violent Draft Riots. They eventually resettled in Providence, Rhode Island, where Maritcha triumphantly overcame prejudice to become the first black person to graduate from Providence High School.
Based on an unpublished memoir by Ms. Lyons ~ Memories of Yesterdays: All of Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was, dated 1928 ~ the evocative text and photographs of young Maritcha, her family, and their friends, as well as archival maps, photographs, and illustrations, make this book an invaluable cultural and historical resource. Maritcha brings to life the story of a very ordinary yet remarkable girl of nineteenth-century America.
»» James Madison Book Award Winner
»» Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
»» YALSA Best Book for Young Adults
»» ALSC Notable Childrens Book

History Talk: Tonya Bolden's Maritcha: A 19th Century American Girl, Part 1

2010-03-06T08:07:00.001-08:00

On February 9, 2010. Sponsored by Telling America's Story

Telling America's Story (TAS) is an intensive, federally-funded professional development project for American History Teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools in the Bronx Community School Districts 8, 11, & 12. Philip Panaritis and Brian Carlin, Project Directors. TAS is a partnership with the New York City Department of Education and the history and education departments of major universities and cultural institutions.
The program combines content-rich traditional American History and teaching skills development for Teacher-Historians. Workshops take place in museums, historic houses, and universities. Instruction and content is provided by nationally-known historians and educators. Teachers develop original US history curriculum units and activities. Trips, book signings, and walking tours of historical sites are also important aspects of the TAS program. Ms. Bolden had visited many of the classes of the teachers gathered here. Behind her are samples of projects made by some of those classes.

About Ms. Bolden

Growing up, Tonya Bolden thought one day she would be a teacher. Today, as an award-winning author of more than 20 books for young people and adults, she is just that. Her classroom has no walls. Instead, you just need to pick up one her acclaimed books on topics such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver or Reconstruction to step into the world she creates. History, she has said, is her passion. She passes that rich knowledge of the past on to people around the world. Along with being a talented researcher, Bolden is known as a gifted storyteller who turns facts into something more transcendent stories that move, challenge and inspire.

about Maritcha:

from the book flap:
To do the best for myself with the view of making the best of myself. wrote Maritcha Remond Lyons about her childhood.
Maritcha was born in New York City in 1848. For most of her youth, she and her family lived in lower Manhattan. Much of Maritcha's life there mirrored that of many children of the time: helping with the housework, attending school, and practicing the piano. Yet there were thrilling occasions as well, such as visiting the Crystal Palace, site of Americas first worlds fair. However, Maritcha's life took a dramatic turn in 1863, when, at the age of fifteen, she and her family had to flee from their home in the midst of the violent Draft Riots. They eventually resettled in Providence, Rhode Island, where Maritcha triumphantly overcame prejudice to become the first black person to graduate from Providence High School.
Based on an unpublished memoir by Ms. Lyons ~ Memories of Yesterdays: All of Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was, dated 1928 ~ the evocative text and photographs of young Maritcha, her family, and their friends, as well as archival maps, photographs, and illustrations, make this book an invaluable cultural and historical resource. Maritcha brings to life the story of a very ordinary yet remarkable girl of nineteenth-century America.
»» James Madison Book Award Winner
»» Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
»» YALSA Best Book for Young Adults
»» ALSC Notable Childrens Book

The JT Project Reaches Out In Harlem

2010-03-04T06:20:00.000-08:00

Connecting Jazz to Harlem's Youth from Olivia Manders on Vimeo.

Harlem and jazz share a rich history. For it to remain history – and nothing more – for younger Harlem audiences is a problem that one jazz band is seeking to remedy.

Todd is the son of my friend and former Knickerbocker Village neighbor, Murray Schefflin and his lovely wife Arlene.

365 Days Of Black History: January

2010-01-05T21:02:00.002-08:00

Black History Calendar 1
datebook calendar and images from the library of congress

Denmark Vesey

2010-01-05T21:02:00.001-08:00

image above, except for insert, is from Denmark Vesey.org site information below is
from the African American Registry

December 31 celebrates the life of Denmark Vesey in 1767. He was a self-educated black abolitionist who planned the most extensive slave revolt in U.S. history, in Charleston, S.C. in 1822.
Born in St. Thomas, the Danish West Indies, he was sold in 1781 to a Bermuda slave captain named Joseph Vesey. Young Denmark, who assumed his master's surname, accompanied him on numerous voyages and in 1783 settled with his owner in Charleston.
In 1799, Vesey was allowed to purchase his freedom with $600 he had won in a street lottery. He was already familiar with the great Haitian slave revolt of the 1790s, and while working as a carpenter he read anti-slavery literature. Dissatisfied with his second-class status as a freedman and determined to help relieve the far more oppressive conditions of others he knew, Vesey planned and organized an uprising of city and plantation blacks.
The plan reportedly called for the rebels to attack guardhouses and arsenals, seize their arms, kill all Whites, burn and destroy the city, and free the slaves. As many as 9,000 Blacks may have been involved, though some scholars dispute this figure. Warned by a house servant, White authorities on the eve of the scheduled outbreak made massive military preparations, which forestalled the rebellion. During the ensuing two months, some 130 Blacks were arrested.
In the trials that followed, 67 were convicted of trying to raise an insurrection; of these, 35, including Vesey, were hanged, July 2, 1822, in Charleston and 32 were condemned to exile. In addition, four White men were fined and imprisoned for encouraging the plot.

a h/t to Sean Ahern for making aware of the African American Registry site

Claudette Colvin: The "Real" Rosa Parks 2

2009-11-28T10:09:00.002-08:00

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Author Phillip Hoose
On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her classmates and dismissed by community leaders.
Undaunted, a year later she dared to challenge segregation again as a key plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the landmark case that struck down the bus segregation laws of Montgomery and swept away the legal underpinnings of the Jim Crow South.
Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure, skillfully weaving her dramatic story into the fabric of the historic Montgomery bus boycott and court case that would change the course of American history.

Claudette Colvin: The "Real" Rosa Parks

2009-11-28T10:09:00.001-08:00

claudette-colvin
The images above feature Claudette Colvin. The images of her taken on a bus was part of a municipal bus decoration project done in her honor by school children of Portland, Maine.
an excerpt from the nytimes

From Footnote to Fame in Civil Rights History, By BROOKS BARNES
On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.
But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.
Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.
Last week Phillip Hoose won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The honor sent the little-selling title shooting up 500 spots on Amazon.com’s sales list and immediately thrust Ms. Colvin, 70, back into the cultural conversation.
“Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn’t the case at all,” Ms. Colvin said in an animated interview at a diner near her apartment in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. “Maybe by telling my story — something I was afraid to do for a long time — kids will have a better understanding about what the civil rights movement was about.”
Ms. Colvin made her stand on March 2, 1955, and Mrs. Parks made hers on Dec. 1 that same year. Somehow, as Mrs. Parks became one of Time Magazine’s 100 most important people of the 20th century, and streets and schools were named after her, Ms. Colvin managed to let go of any bitterness. After Ms. Colvin was arrested, Mrs. Parks, a seasoned N.A.A.C.P. official, sometimes let her spend the night at her apartment. Ms. Colvin remembers her as a reserved but kindly woman who fixed her snacks of peanut butter on Ritz crackers.
“My mother told me to be quiet about what I did,” Ms. Colvin recalled. “She told me: ‘Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa — her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.’ ”
Ms. Colvin said she came to terms with her “raw feelings” a long time ago. “I know in my heart that she was the right person,” she said of Mrs. Parks.
Unlike Mrs. Parks, whose protest was carefully planned, Ms. Colvin was just a 15-year-old who couldn’t stomach the Jim Crow segregation laws one second longer.
Ms. Colvin was riding the bus home from school when the driver demanded that she give up her seat for a middle-age white woman, even though three other seats in the row were empty, one beside Ms. Colvin and two across the aisle.
“If she sat down in the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her,” Ms. Colvin said.
Two police officers, one of them kicking her, dragged her backward off the bus and handcuffed her, according to the book. On the way to the police station, they took turns trying to guess her bra size.
At the time, the arrest was big news. Black leaders, among them Dr. King, jumped at the opportunity to use her case to fight segregation laws in court. “Negro Girl Found Guilty of Segregation Violation” was the headline in The Alabama Journal. The article said that Ms. Colvin, “a bespectacled, studious looking high school student,” accepted the ruling “with the same cool aloofness she had maintained” during the hearing.
As chronicled by Mr. Hoose, more than 100 letters of support arrived for Ms. Colvin — sent in care of Mrs. Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery branch of the N.A.A.C.P.
But Ms. Colvin was ultimately passed over.
“They worried they couldn’t win with her,” Mr. Hoose said in an interview from his home in Portland, Me. “Words like ‘mouthy,’ ‘emotional’ and ‘feisty’ were used to describe her.”

Isn't it embarrassing the schoolchildren of Portland, Maine honor Bronx native Claudette and nothing has been done in Bloomberg and Klein's Broad Prize Award Winning public school system of New York. Social Studies and history is paid short shrift in the so-called greatest city. It is only done well by inspired and brave leaders and teachers in far few schools that risk side-stepping the all day, every day test prep mantra.
for more on Phil Hoose's award winning book

Major Taylor May 21, 2008: Dedication Of The Monument In Worcester, Mass

2009-10-24T16:12:00.001-07:00

from the Major Taylor Association press release

CHAMPIONS TO DEDICATE MAJOR TAYLOR STATUE
Greg LeMond, Edwin Moses will be featured speakers at May 21 unveiling
WORCESTER, Mass. -- Three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond and three-time Olympic medalist Edwin Moses will be featured speakers at the public unveiling of the Major Taylor memorial from noon to 1 p.m. Wednesday, May 21, at the Worcester Public Library. LeMond, who won a world championship in cycling 90 years after Major Taylor did, and Moses, who dominated the 400-meter hurdles in track and field for a decade, were each named "Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year" at the height of their athletic careers in the 1980s. The statue of the "Worcester Whirlwind" created by sculptor Antonio Tobias Mendez is Worcester's first monument to an African-American. The dedication ceremony will be followed by a reception with refreshments in the library's Banx Room. Preceding the noontime ceremony, the Seven Hills Wheelmen and the Charles River Wheelmen's Wednesday Wheelers will lead a 30-mile bicycle ride starting and ending at the library. At 7 p.m. at the library, the Clark University History Department and Higgins School of Humanities will present a panel discussion on "Race, Sports, and Major Taylor's Legacy." Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson will be moderator for these scholars, historians and authors exploring diversity in sports and society, then and now: Andrew Ritchie, author of the biography "Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer" (1988), Janette T. Greenwood, associate professor of history at Clark University, author of a case study of Worcester County's black community in the late 1800s and of "Bittersweet Legacy," on the emergence and interaction of the black and white middle class, David V. Herlihy, author of "Bicycle: The History" (2004), with research on Major Taylor's popularity abroad, C. Keith Harrison, associate professor of sports business management at the University of Central Florida, and associate director of the Institute for Diversity & Ethics in Sport

Major Taylor 2

2009-10-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

WNBC-TV (Channel 4) New York featured 1899 world cycling champion Major Taylor in a segment broadcast on Nov. 24, 2007. Very well done in my opinion.

Major Taylor

2009-10-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

There's a Major Taylor Blvd in Worcester and I was curious as to why it was there. I had known about him from studying and teaching black history and had made part of the slide show five years ago. Yes, I know the background song is whacky. I stuck it in because it was a favorite of my mother. Excerpt from the Major Taylor Association

"Marshall Walter "Major" Taylor (26 November 187821 June 1932) was an American cyclist who won the world one-mile track cycling championship in 1899 after setting numerous world records and overcoming racial discrimination. Taylor was the second African-American athlete to achieve the level of world championship—after boxer George Dixon.
Taylor was the son of Gilbert Taylor and Saphronia Kelter, who had migrated from Louisville, Kentucky with their large family to a farm in rural Indiana. Taylor's father was employed in the household of a wealthy Indianapolis family as a coachman, where Taylor was also raised and educated. At an early age, Taylor received a bicycle the family and he began working as an entertainer at the age of 13. Taylor was hired to perform cycling stunts outside a bicycle shop while wearing a soldier's uniform, hence the nickname Major.
As an African-American, Taylor was banned from bicycle racing in Indiana once he started winning and made a reputation as "The Black Cyclone." In 1896, he moved from Indianapolis to Middletown, Connecticut, then a center of the United States bicycle industry with half a dozen factories and 30 bicycle shops, to work as a bicycle mechanic in the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company factory, owned by Birdie Munger who was to become his lifelong friend and mentor, and racer for Munger's team. His first east coast race was in a League of American Wheelmen one mile race in New Haven, where he started in last place but won.
In late 1896, Taylor entered his first professional race in Madison Square Garden, where he lapped the entire field during the half-mile race. Although he is listed in the Middletown town directory in 1896, it is not known how long he still resided there after he became a professional racer. He eventually settled in Worcester, Massachusetts (where the newspapers called him "The Worcester Whirlwind"), marrying there and having a daughter, although his career required him to spend a large amount of time traveling, in America, Australia, and Europe."

It looks like his former home on Hobson Ave is right near Clark University
great kids' biography by Lesa Cline-Ransome and James E. Ransome

There's also another good bio by Todd Balf

Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour 2009, Slide Show

2009-05-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

Don't Lie and Don't Lie About History. I had some stills from the walking tour and I thought this song might fit. A main thread of the tour is that "It's time to tell the truth about slavery in New York."

Hey, baby my nose is getting big
I noticed it be growing when I been telling them fibs
Now you say your trust's getting weaker
Probably coz my lies just started getting deeper
And the reason for my confession is that I learn my lesson
And I really think you ought to know the truth
Because I lied and I cheated and I lied a little more
But after I did it I don't know what I did it for
I admit that I have been a little immature
F...... with your heart like I was the predator
In my book of lies I was the editor
And the author
I forged my signature
And now I apologize for what I did to you
Cos what you did to me I did to you
No,no, no, no baby, no, no, no, no don't lie
No, no, no, no, yeah, you know, know, know, know, you gotta try
What you gonna do when it all comes out
When I really see you & what you're all about
No, no, no baby, no, no, no, no don't lie
Yeah, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you gotta try
She said I'm leaving
Cos she can't take the pain
It's hard to continue this love it ain't the same
Can't forget the things that I've done inside her brain
Too many lies committed too many games
She feeling like a fool getting on the last train
Trying to maintain but the feeling won't change
I'm sorry for the things that I've done and what I became
Caught up in living my life in the fast lane
Blinded by lights, cameras, you know the fame
I don't know the reason why I did these things
And I lie and I lie and I lie and I lie
And now our emotions are drained
Cos I lie and I lie and a little lie lie
And now your emotions are drained
No, no, no, no baby, no, no, no, no don't lie (no, don't you lie)
No, no, no, no, yeah, you know, know, know, know, you gotta try (got to try, got to try)
What you gonna do when it all comes out (what you gonna do baby)

Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour 2009, Part 3

2009-05-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

from the event description: Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour. At each site along the tour route, students from Law, Government, and Community Service High School will be performing and presenting historical information. Classes are encouraged to make posters and banners about slavery in New York to carry and display along the tour route.
• Distributed by African American History and United States History students from Law, Government and Community Service Magnet High School, Cambria Heights, Queens.
• Based on the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum guide
• Other than at the colonial era African American Burial Ground, which was uncovered during excavations for a federal office building in 1991, these sites, and slavery in New York in general, have been erased from historical memory. There is not even an historical marker at the South Street Seaport in the financial district of Manhattan where enslaved Africans were traded in the 17th century and were illegal slaving expeditions were planned and financed up until the time of the American Civil War.
• For more information, contact Dr. Alan Singer, Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Hofstra University, at
516-463-5853 or catajs@hofstra.edu or Michael Pezone at zenmap@aol.com.
full page google map at mapchannels

Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour 2009, Part 2

2009-05-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour 2009, Part 1

2009-05-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour Map

2009-05-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

View The Full Screen Map

Gerra Gistand: Winner Of 13th Annual Gardere MLK Jr. Oratory Competition

2009-02-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

from youtube

Fourth grader Gerra Gistand, a student at MacGregor Elementary School in Houston ISD, presents the winning speech from the 13th Annual Gardere MLK Jr. Oratory Competition held Jan. 16, 2009, at Ant...
Fourth grader Gerra Gistand, a student at MacGregor Elementary School in Houston ISD, presents the winning speech from the 13th Annual Gardere MLK Jr. Oratory Competition held Jan. 16, 2009, at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. Held days before the historic inauguration of President Obama, the competition challenged students to focus on the question If Dr. King were alive today, what do you think he would say about current events? Presented in Dallas and Houston by the Texas-based law firm Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP, the competition commemorates the life of Dr. King and is designed to highlight the cultural diversity of the community while recognizing and encouraging the writing and presentation skills of elementary school students.

Wangari Maathai And Black History Month

2009-02-06T19:09:00.000-08:00

from Jess Washington at the Associated Press who did an article on
Time to end Black History Month?
Should Black History Month itself fade into history? No way. An excerpt from the story about a teacher that I'm proud to know:

At Daniel Warren Elementary in Mamaroneck, N.Y., kindergarten teacher Jane Schumer has dedicated many hours this year to the story of Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for leading a movement that planted millions of trees in Africa.
Schumer connected Maathai's story to Obama, who planted a tree in her program and whose father was from Kenya. She connected Maathai to Martin Luther King Jr., who like Maathai was jailed for fighting injustice.
Schumer doesn't have any special black history plans for February.
"It can't be contrived," says Schumer. "It's a way of thinking, a way of life ... to me, the whole year has built up to this month ... the emphasis we have is what people would want to accomplish with Black History Month."
Steve O'Rourke, who has a kindergartner at Warren Elementary, says his son wants to ask Maathai, "You and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. both went to jail for doing the right thing. What did it feel like to be in jail?"
"Whenever we denote something as belonging in a certain month, it becomes tempting to say it belongs in that month alone ... ," says O'Rourke. "Ideally I would like us to have a common rather than compartmentalized history."

Zat You Santa Claus

2008-12-17T05:18:00.000-08:00

from the Granada Hills (pardon the expression) Charter School :)
My pro-union background prejudice aside for charter's-it looks like a great place.

Gifts I'm preparin'
For some Christmas sharin'
But I pause because
Hangin' my stockin'
I can hear a knockin'
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Sure is dark out
Not the slighest spark out
Pardon my clackin' jaws
Uh, who there
Who is it
Uh, stoppin' for a visit
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Are you bringin' a present for me
Something pleasantly pleasant for me
That's what I've been waitin' for
Would you mind slippin' it under the door
Four winds are howlin'
Or maybe that be growlin'
My legs feel like straws
Oh my, my, me, my
Kindly would you reply
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Yeah
Oh hangin' my stockin'
I can hear a knockin'
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Yeah, say now
Hey there, who is it
Stoppin' for a visit
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Whoa there Santa you gave me a scare
Now stop teasin' 'cause I know you're there
We don't believe in no goblins today
But I can't explain why I'm shakin' this way
Well I see old Santa in the keyhole
I'll give to the cause
One peek and I'll try there
Uh-oh there's an eye there
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Please, please
I pity my knees
Say that's you Santa Claus
That's him alright

Christmas Night In Harlem

2008-12-17T00:23:00.000-08:00

The Armstrong audio combined with images of Harlem from Google images hosted from Life Magazine Three different events are highlighted:

from 1938 scenes from photographer Hansel Mieth, from 1953 a Harlem Globetrotter game photographed by J. R. Eyerman, and from 1945 Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s marriage to Hazel Scott, photographed by Sam Shere

lyrics (changed from the original racist ones)

Every gal strutting with her beau
Through the streets covered white with snow
Happy smiles everywhere you go
Christmas night in Harlem
People all feeling mighty good
In that good old neighborhood
Here and now be it understood
Christmas night in Harlem
Oh, Everyone is gonna sit up
Until after three
Everyone be all lit up
Like a Christmas tree
Come on now every Jane and Joe
Greet your sweet underneath the mistletoe
With a kiss and a hi-de-ho
Christmas night in Harlem
Instrumental Break
Everyone is gonna sit up
Until after three
Everyone be all lit up
Like a Christmas tree
Come on now every Jane and Joe
Greet your sweet neath the mistletoe
With a kiss and a hi-de-ho
Christmas night in Harlem

Cool Yule

2008-12-16T07:59:00.000-08:00

From Coney Island to The Sunset Strip
Somebody's gonna make a happy trip
Tonight, while the moon is bright
He's gonna have a bag of crazy toys
To give the groanies of the boys and girls
So dig, Santa comes on big
He'll come a callin' when the snows the most
When all you cats are sleepin' warm as toast
And you gonna flip when Old Saint Nick
Takes a lick on the peppermint stick
He'll come a flyin' from a higher place
And fill the stocking by the fire place
So you'll, have a yule that's cool
-Instrumental Jazz Break-
Yeah, from Coney Island to The Sunset Strip
Somebody's gonna make a happy trip
Tonight, while the moon is bright
He's gonna have a bag of crazy toys
To give the groanies of the boys and girls
So dig, Santa comes on big
He'll come a callin' when the snows the most
When all you cats are sleepin' warm as toast
And you gonna flip when the Old Saint Nick
Takes a lick on the peppernint stick
He'll come a flyin' from a higher place
And fill the stocking by the fire place
So you'll, have a yule that's cool
Have a yule that's cool
Yeah, cool yule

Hold The Fort

2008-12-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

To continue with the "struggles" theme initiated with the Hofstra conference I found an old slide show I had done that highlighted some of labor's heroes. We could sure use some of them now. Many of the images come from the better world heroes site
The inspiring Hold The Fort lyrics, here sung by Joe Uehelin from Classic Labor Songs

We meet today in freedom's cause
And raise our voices high.
We'll join our hands in union strong
to battle or to die.
CHORUS:
Hold the fort for we are coming.
Union men be strong.
Side by side we battle onward.
Victory will come.
(Repeat after each verse)
See our numbers still increasing.
Hear the bugles blow.
By our union, we shall triumph
Over every foe.
Fierce and long the battle rages,
But we shall not fear.
Help will come whenever needed.
Cheer, my comrades, cheer.

The Role Of Women In WWII

2008-12-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

Above was the PowerPoint that Charles Jordan created to accompany his history rap. I converted it to a movie and did my best to match the audio from his performance on a prior post. The lyrics:

Now here’s a little story
I got to tell
About the fight against the Axis
You know so well
It started way back
In history
Against Germany, Japan,
And don’t forget Italy
Now everyone was needed
Cause the whole world was at war.
Triumph over evil
Is what we’re fighting for.
But in nineteen hundred
And forty one
Women couldn’t fight
Couldn’t fire a gun
Still they did there part
For victory,
Working full time
In the factory.
Now we know about Rosie
And the job she did
But the role of women
History has hid
We don’t read about in textbooks
We don’t talk about in class
How the women of this country
Helped us kick some ______
But when the war was over
And victory enjoyed
The women of the factory
Were quickly unemployed.
With no more things to rivet
And no more guns to make
We told the women of the factory
Go home and learn to bake”
But the women weren’t having it
They flat out just said no
They liked it in the factory
Liked making their own dough.
The women of the factory
Together they stood tall
Equal rights and equal pay
It soon became their call.
No longer only housewives
Tending to the crib
The women of the factory
Gave rise to Women’s lib.

Hold On Union Boys

2008-12-14T12:26:00.000-08:00

a youtube movie I found in keeping with the struggle thread of he previous two posts
info on movie:
During ww2,tha Almanac Singers and the Union Boys recorded political protest songs.Pictured are Josh White,Pete Seeger,Tom Glazer,Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Burl Ives, Alan Lomax. This from CD221 at http://mcproductions.shawbiz.ca

December 6, 2008: WWII And Women's Rights

2008-12-14T12:21:00.000-08:00

Charles Jordan, a Hofstra student in Dr. Singer's program, did a great rap about the struggle for women's' rights in the World War II era. Here are the lyrics:

Now here’s a little story
I got to tell
About the fight against the Axis
You know so well
It started way back
In history
Against Germany, Japan,
And don’t forget Italy
Now everyone was needed
Cause the whole world was at war.
Triumph over evil
Is what we’re fighting for.
But in nineteen hundred
And forty one
Women couldn’t fight
Couldn’t fire a gun
Still they did there part
For victory,
Working full time
In the factory.
Now we know about Rosie
And the job she did
But the role of women
History has hid
We don’t read about in textbooks
We don’t talk about in class
How the women of this country
Helped us kick some ______
But when the war was over
And victory enjoyed
The women of the factory
Were quickly unemployed.
With no more things to rivet
And no more guns to make
We told the women of the factory
Go home and learn to bake”
But the women weren’t having it
They flat out just said no
They liked it in the factory
Liked making their own dough.
The women of the factory
Together they stood tall
Equal rights and equal pay
It soon became their call.
No longer only housewives
Tending to the crib
The women of the factory
Gave rise to Women’s lib.

December 6, 2008: Hofstra's NTN Social Studies And English Teacher's Conference

2008-12-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

I took some pictures of some of the student made exhibits. The general theme was freedom struggles. Many of the classes focused on the newsboy strike featured in the excellent film "Newsies." Newsies can really be utilized as a starting off point for tech integration projects. Here are links to Newsie clips and Newsie project ideas I posted on another blog
Seize The Day
Carrying The Banner
The King Of New York
I used the song "The World Will Know" as a soundtrack for the slide show images.
The lyrics:

JACK:
Pulitzer and Hearst
They think we're nothin'
Are we nothin'?
NEWSIES:
No!
JACK:
Pulitzer and Hearst
They think they got us
Do they got us?
NEWSIES:
No!
JACK:
Even though we ain't got hats or badges
We're a union just by saying so
And the world will know!
What's it gonna take to stop the wagons?
Are we ready?
NEWSIES:
Yeah!
JACK:
What's it gonna take to stop the scabbers?
Can we do it?
NEWSIES:
Yeah!
JACK:
We'll do what we gotta do
Until we break the will of mighty Bill and Joe
NEWSIES:
And the World will know
And the Journal too
Mister Hearst and Pulitzer
Have we got news for you
Now the world will hear
What we got to say
We been hawkin' headlines
But we're makin' 'em today
And our ranks will grow
CRUTCHY:
And we'll kick their rear
NEWSIES:
And the world will know
That we been here
JACK:
When the circulation bell starts ringin'
Will we hear it?
NEWSIES:
No!
JACK:
What if the Delanceys come out swingin'
Will we hear it?
NEWSIES:
No!
When you got a hundred voices singin'
Who can hear a lousy whistle blow?
And the world will know
That this ain't no game
That we got a ton of rotten fruit and perfect aim
So they gave their word
But it ain't worth beans
Now they're gonna see
What "stop the presses" really means
And the day has come
And the time is now
And the fear is gone
BOOTS:
And our name is mud
NEWSIES:
And the strike is on
BOOTS:
And I can't stand blood
NEWSIES:
And the world will –
JACK:
Pulitzer may own the World but he don't own us!
NEWSIES:
Pulitzer may own the World but he don't own us!
JACK:
Pulitzer may crack the whip but he won't whip us!
NEWSIES:
Pulitzer may crack the whip but he won't whip us!
And the world will know
And the world will learn
And the world will wonder how we made the tables turn
And the world will see
That we had to choose
That the things we do today will be tomorrow's news
And the old will fall
And the young stand tall
And the time is now
And the winds will blow
And our ranks will grow and grow and grow and so
The world will feel the fire
And finally know!

Information on the conference from Dr. Alan Singer:

NTN Dec 6 Hofstra Social Studies and English Teachers Conference Sponsored by the New Teachers Network and the School of Education and Allied Human Services
Saturday, December 6, 2008, 8:30 AM- 2 PM Hagedorn Hall, Hofstra University School of Education, Health and Human Services Middle School Museum of American Freedom Struggles, Friday December 5, 2008 The theme for this year’s middle school student created museum is freedom struggles in United States history. What a more fitting
time than after this year’s presidential election. Student exhibits and presentations can include all aspects of United States history from the American revolution, through abolitionists, Black resistance to slavery, 19th and 20th century women’s rights advocates, the labor movement in the 19th and 20th century, different immigrant rights advocates, the 20th century African American civil rights movement, Ethnic and Religious minorities, workers and gays, and union, and anti-war movements, or other freedom struggles that have expanded democracy and liberty in the United States.
The Museum will be in Hagedorn Hall on Friday December 5, 2008 from 10 AM until 2 PM.

The Real McCoy: Michelle Obama

2008-12-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

This is a pdf version of the previous post since the text may be hard to read in the movie format

Michelle Obama - Upload a Document to Scribd

The Real McCoy: Michelle Obama

2008-12-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

from 10/07/08 pseudo-intellectualism
The essence of a real American woman, with a real history, is not Sarah Palin. It's Michelle Obama. From the washington post an excerpt:

A Family Tree Rooted In American Soil, By Shailagh Murray, 10/1/08, GEORGETOWN, S.C. The old plantation where Michelle Obama's great-great-grandfather lived is tucked behind the tire stores and veterinary clinics of U.S. Highway 521. But its history and grounds have been meticulously preserved, down to the dikes that once controlled the flow of water into its expansive rice fields.
Not much is known about Jim Robinson, however, including how or when he came to Friendfield, as the property is still called. But records show he was born around 1850 and lived, at least until the Civil War, as a slave. His family believes that he remained a Friendfield worker all his life and that he was buried at the place, in an unmarked grave.
Until she reconnected with relatives here in January on a campaign trip, Obama did not know much about her ancestry, or even that Friendfield existed. As she was growing up in Chicago, her parents did not talk about the family's history, and the young Michelle Robinson didn't ask many questions.
But if her husband is elected president in November, he will not be the only one in the family making history. While Barack Obama's provenance -- his black Kenyan father, white Kansas-born mother and Hawaiian childhood -- has been celebrated as a uniquely American example of multicultural identity, Michelle Obama's family history -- from slavery to Reconstruction to the Great Migration north -- connects her to the essence of the African American experience.

John McCain's Black Family

2008-12-14T11:47:00.000-08:00

from crooksandliars and from 10/21/08 on pseudo-intellectualism

Normally, the story of John McCain's black family -- the ones who are planning to vote for Barack Obama -- might elicit some modest interest in terms of what it says about the complexity of race relations in America. But what's been even more interesting has been how John McCain has responded to the story ever since it surfaced. Initially, back when he first was doing the "Maverick" schtick in the 2000 primaries, he actually denied that the aristocratic Southerners from whom he was descended were slaveholders. But it really became impossible for McCain to deny their existence after a 2000 report in Salon in the course of which reporters showed him photographs and birth records in person and he had to concede to their existence. One account, In the South Florida Times, describes how McCain has handled the connection publicly and privately: White and black members of the McCain family have met on the plantation several times over the last 15 years, but one invited guest has been conspicuously absent: Sen. John Sidney McCain.
“Why he hasn’t come is anybody’s guess,” said Charles McCain Jr., 60, a distant cousin of John McCain who is black. “I think the best I can come up with, is that he doesn’t have time, or he has just distanced himself, or it doesn’t mean that much to him.” Other relatives are not as generous. Lillie McCain, 56, another distant cousin of John McCain who is black, said the Republican presidential nominee is trying to hide his past, and refuses to accept the family’s history. “After hearing him in 2000 claim his family never owned slaves, I sent him an email,” she recalled. “I told him no matter how much he denies it, it will not make it untrue, and he should accept this and embrace it.” She said the senator never responded to her email. In her CNN interview with Kyra Phillips, Lillie McCain discusses this further
PHILLIPS: Do you think it could make a difference with regard to diversity issues, issues of race, if John McCain did participate?
L. MCCAIN: I think it probably could. It would give him an opportunity to know us.
I e-mailed him back in 2000 to remind him of his ties to Tiak, Mississippi. I heard him say on I believe it was "Meet the Press," that his ancestors owned no slaves. Well, I certainly have carried the name McCain from the beginning of my whole life, and I've known of the ties to John McCain and tried to get him to communicate with me about that, but he has been unwilling, at least, to date.
PHILLIPS: Well he found out in 2000, to be fair to the senator there, and he did come forward and gave this quote -- "How the Tiak descendants have served their community and, by extension, to their country, is a testament to the power of family, love, compassion, and the human spirit." And then he added in the statement, "an example for all citizens."
That sure is a warm, fuzzy little sentimental quote from the senator, and the fact that it really says nothing in reality says everything we need to know about John McCain. Since the advent of the Southern Strategy under Nixon, the Republican Party has embraced its role as the Party of White Privilege. John McCain has made a modest career out of making rumbling noises toward some of the uglier aspects of this legacy within the GOP, and he's hoping that those rumbles will be enough to persuade moderate voters to back him. However, the cold realities of the history of race relations in America -- dating back to those dark eons when black women held in slavery were routinely raped and impregnated by their white owners -- still hover like a dark cloud over whites' vision of Golden Age America, the very vision that John McCain and Sarah Palin like to sell to their flocks like so much Coca-Cola. So it's perhaps not a surprise that, given the chance to banish that cloud by doing the human thing, the right thing, and embracing the black side of the McCain family, the Straight Talking Senator From Arizona chose essentially to run from them and hide. Because acknowledging them not only was too painful, but might prove too harmful to his chances of success in a political party predicated on white privilege. Moreover, this also fits what we know about his reflexive predisposition on civil-rights matters. This is, after all, the guy who voted against a Martin Luther King holiday back in 1984. Yes, as the wingnuts already note, Obama's maternal ancestors likely owned slaves, too. But then, it seems doubtful that Obama would hesitate to embrace the ancestors of those slaveowners, either. Running away from black family ties is not exactly a problem for Barack Obama. But it is for John McCain.

Beware Brother Beware

2008-12-14T11:44:00.000-08:00

At the time of the primaries and the lead up to the elections a similar warning could have been made to Barack about the intentions of the Clintons
The original from Louis Jordan

Hey, fellas, yes you fellas, listen to me
I got somethin' to tell you
And I want you to listen to every word
And govern yourselves accordingly
Now, you see these girls with these fine diamonds
Fine furs and fine clothes
Well, they're lookin' for a husband
And you're listening to a man who knows
They ain't foolin', and if you fool around with them
You're gonna get yourself a schoolin'
Now listen, if she saves you dough
And won't go to the show, beware
If she's easy to kiss and won't resist
Beware, I said beware
If you go for a walk
And she listens while you talk
She's tryin' to hook you
Ain't nobody lookin' she asks you to taste her cookin'
Don't do it, don't do it
And if you go for a show
And she wants to sit back in the back row
Bring her down front, bring her home down front
If you wanna go for a snack
And she wanna sit in a booth in the back
Beware, brother
And listen, if she's used to caviar and fine silk
And when you go out with her
She want a hot dog and a malted milk
She's trying to get you brother
If you're used to goin' to Carnegie hall
But when you take her out night clubbing
All she wants one meatball
You better take it easy, [Incomprehensible] take it easy
If she grabs your hand and says
"Darling, you’re such a nice man"
Beware, I’m telling you
Should I tell 'em a little more?
Tell 'em a little more? Alright
You better listen to me ’cause
I’m telling you what’s being put down
And you better be [pickin'] up on it
If her sister calls your brother
You better get further
I’m telling you, you gotta watch it
You better get on [down]
And if she’s acting kind of wild, and says
"Darling, give me a trial"
Don’t you do it, don’t be weak, don’t give it to her
And if she smiles in your face
And just melts into place
Let her melt, forget it, let her melt
Should I tell 'em a little more?
Tell 'em everything? Alright
Now listen, if she calls you on the phone, and says
"Darling, are you all alone? "
Tell her, "No, I've got two or three women with me"
Don’t pay no attention to women
Stand up for your right, be a man, be a man
Are you listening? Are you listening?
Put on that [lotto] step and listen to me
If you turn out the lights and she don’t fight
That’s the end, it’s too late now
She’s got you hooked, you might as well stick with her
Should I tell 'em a little more?
Give 'em a little more? Alright
If you get home about two
And don’t know what to do
You pull back the curtains
And the whole family’s looking at you
Get your business straight
Set the date, don’t be late, yeah
Brother, beware, beware, beware
Brother, you better beware

Chris Rock's Impressions Of Bill Clinton And Sarah Palin

2008-12-14T11:41:00.000-08:00

from his appearance on David Letterman back in September 08....And Michael Vick is wondering, "Why am I in jail?"

My Name Is Barack Obama

2008-12-14T11:37:00.000-08:00

from pseudo-intellectualism on 10/8/08 after McCain referred to Barack as "That One"
I adapted the classic Joe Louis knockout of Max Schmeling photo

Obama In Paris

2008-12-14T11:30:00.000-08:00

my original adaptation of the yip harburg lyrics, with the singers' unlimited providing the audio. This was before the prank Sarkozy call to Sarah Palin
oiginally from pseudo-intellectualism on 7/27/08

Obama in Paris, groupies in blossom
All of France buckle their knees
Obama in Paris, this is a feeling
No one can ever reprise
They never knew the charm of Barack 
They never met him face to face 
So easily were their hearts hijacked 
John should just concede the race
Till Obama in Paris,
Sarkozy be careful too
What has he done to.. Carla's heart ?

from the nytimes, Maureen Dowd

It could have been a French movie.
Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion. They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and — tant pis — go their separate ways.
Sarko, back to Carla Bruni. Obama, forward to Gordon Brown. A Man and a Man. All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.
Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture from Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor, it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush.
Sarko is right and Barack is left. One had a Jewish grandfather, the other a Muslim one. The French president is a frenetic bumper car; the Illinois senator is, as he said of the king of Jordan’s Mercedes 600, “a smooth ride.”
But the son of a Hungarian, who picked a lock to break into the French ruling class, embraced a fellow outsider and child of an immigrant who had also busted into the political aristocracy with a foreign-sounding name.
After 200,000 people thronged to see Obama at the Victory Column in Berlin, christening him “Redeemer” and “Savior,” it turned out Sarko was also Obamarized, as the Germans were calling the mesmerizing effect.
“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.
“I think we could work well together,” he said of Sarko, smiling broadly.
He did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”
He admitted showing “extraordinarily poor judgment” in leaving Paris after only a few hours. Watching Paris recede from behind the frosted glass of his limo was “a pretty good metaphor” for how constricted his life has become, he said, compared with his student days tramping around Europe with “a feeling of complete freedom.”
“But the flip side is that I deeply enjoy the work,” he said, “so it’s a trade-off.”
How do you go back to the Iowa farm after you’ve seen Paree?
“One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about,” he said. “It’s so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues.”
I asked how his “Citizen of the World” tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.
“There will probably be some backlash,” he said. “I’m a big believer that if something’s good then there’s a bad to it, and vice versa. We had a good week. That always inspires the press to knock me down a peg.”
He thinks most people recognize that “there is a concrete advantage to not only foreign leaders, but foreign populations liking the American president, because it makes it easier for Sarkozy to send troops into Afghanistan if his voting base likes the United States.”
How does he like the McCain camp mocking him as “The One”?
“Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things’ll turn on you pretty quick anyway,” he said. “I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, ‘Oh, he’s sort of too cool.’ But it’s not real.”
Obama kept his cool through a week where he was treated as a cross between the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp.
A private prayer he left in the holy Western Wall in Jerusalem was snatched out by a student at a Jewish seminary and published in a local newspaper. In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, “I’m getting hot, and not from the workout,” and concluding, “What a man.”
Obama marveled: “I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie takes the picture.”
I ask him if he found it a bit creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like “fabric softener with spring scent.”
He looked nonplused: “Did she describe what my T-shirt smelled like?”
Being a Citizen of the World has its downsides.

American Prayer

2008-12-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

from dave stewart
originally from pseudo-intellectualism back on 8/8/08 after the Democratic Convention

This is my American Prayer
This is the time to finish what you started
And this is no time to dream
This is the room
We can turn off the dark tonight
Maybe then we might see
American Prayer
American Prayer
And this is the ground
That keeps our feet from getting wet
And this is the sky over our head
And what you see depends on where you stand
And how you jump will tell you where you're gonna land
American Prayer
American Prayer
My oh my
Couldn't get much higher
Lets not kick out the darkness
Make the lights brighter
And these are the hands
What are we gonna build with them?
This is the church you can't see
Give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses
You know they're yearning to breathe free
This is my American Prayer
American Prayer
American Prayer
When you get to the top of the mountain
Will you tell me what you see
If you get to the top of the mountain
Remember me

celebrities, in order of appearance:

Dave Stewart
Forest Whitaker
Amy Keys
Macy Gray
Jason Alexander
Colbie Caillat
Whoopi Goldberg
Joss Stone
Buju Banton
Ann Marie Calhoun
Barry Manilow
Linda Perry
Cyndi Lauper
Sergio Mendes
Herbie Hancock
Mike Bradford
Margaret Cho
Speech
Joan Baez
Daedelus
Pamela Anderson
Peter & Gordon
Sierra Swan
Nadirah X
Perez Hilton
Barack Obama

Negro Americans In The American Revolution

2008-12-12T11:26:00.000-08:00

Negro Americans Revolution

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

Crispus Attucks: Classics Illustrated

2008-12-12T11:25:00.000-08:00

Crispus Attucks

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

Signed Sealed Delivered, I'm Yours

2008-12-12T11:22:00.000-08:00

The original inspiration for Obama's theme song. Stevie Wonder on THE DICK CAVETT SHOW. August 11, 1970.

Like a fool I went and stayed too long
Now I'm wondering if your loves still strong
Oo baby, here I am, signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours
Then that time I went and said goodbye
Now I'm back and not ashamed to cry
Oo baby, here I am, signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours
Here I am baby
Oh, you've got the future in your hand
(signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours)
Here I am baby,
Oh, you've got the future in your hand
(signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours)
Ive done a lot of foolish things
That I really didn't mean
Hey, hey, yea, yea, didn't I, oh baby
Seen a lot of things in this old world
When I touched them they did nothing, girl
Oo baby, here I am, signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours, oh I'm yours
Oo-wee babe you set my soul on fire
That's why I know you are my only desire
Oo baby, here I am, signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours
Here I am baby
Oh, you've got the future in your hand
(signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours)
Here I am baby,
Oh, you've got the future in your hand
(signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours)
Ive done a lot of foolish things
That I really didn't mean
I could be a broken man but here I am
With your future, got your future babe (here I am baby)
Here I am baby (signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours)
Here I am baby, (here I am baby)
Here I am baby (signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours)
Here I am baby, (here I am baby)
Here I am baby (signed, sealed delivered, I'm yours)

A 1953 Video Featuring Jackie Ormes

2008-12-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

from the jackie ormes book site

Jackie Ormes

2008-12-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

Voted one of the top ten books of 2008 in the Village Voice The audio comes from an npr broadcast of 7/31/08

It's 1937, and young Torchy Brown is about to board a train that will whisk her away from her small, Southern town to the Big Apple. Suddenly, a sign with two arrows catches her eye. One arrow points to the colored section of the train. The other arrow points to the white section. She jumps back, contemplating what she should do. Torchy, who's black, clever and mischievous, decides to pretend she can't read — and boards the whites-only car.
Scenes like that were splashed regularly across the comics pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper read from coast to coast. The cartoonist behind the playful, often politically charged comics: Jackie Ormes.
Ormes, who died in 1985, was the first black woman to have a career as a cartoonist. She produced comic strips for the Courier from the 1930s to the 1950s, tackling subjects such as politics, foreign policy, racism and even environmental justice. Torchy Brown was one of Ormes' most beloved characters. She was smart. She was classy. And she frequently rebelled against the prescribed social order.
Torchy also differed greatly from the usual depictions of blacks prior to the civil rights movement.
Nationally syndicated black cartoonist Barbara Brandon-Croft says that Ormes' characters and stories were real — at a time when blacks were typically portrayed in a derogatory fashion.
"Black women were always fat," she says. "Had bandannas on their heads, you know. Had large lips. Were always porters. We were servants. Think of Gone With The Wind, you know. We didn't speak clear English."
The characters of Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger — another Ormes comic — ran counter to that stereotype. Ginger was an attractive, college-educated woman, drawn in a pinup-girl style. Her younger sister, Patty-Jo, was sharp and opinionated.
Nancy Goldstein, author of the new book,Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist, emphasizes that Ormes did a service to the black community by creating role models with her characters.
Readers saw that if Ginger could graduate from college and if Torchy could challenge the era's racist status quo, they were capable of doing the same.
Ormes "was giving voice to what was in the hearts and minds of so many people: [the desire] to move forward and make progress," says Goldstein.
While Ormes was an inspiration for people in her time, today she is largely forgotten, save by older readers and black cartoonists.
But people like Goldstein and Brandon-Croft are trying to preserve her memory. They see that Ormes' cartoons present a realistic slice of history from a rarely heard perspective, one that should not be lost.

Tusgekee Airmen Inaugural Invitation

2008-12-11T11:39:00.000-08:00

from the nytimes 12/9/08

When the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black force of elite pilots, emerged from combat in World War II, they faced as much discrimination as they had before the war. It was not until six decades later that their valor was recognized and they received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can give.
Now, the roughly 330 pilots and members of the ground crew who are left from about 16,000 who served are receiving another honor that has surpassed their dreams: They are being invited to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama as the country’s first black president.
“I didn’t believe I’d live long enough to see something like this,” said Lt. Col. Charles A. Lane Jr., 83, of Omaha, a retired Tuskegee fighter pilot who flew missions over Italy.
“I would love to be there, I would love to be able to see it with my own eyes,” he said, chuckling on the phone as he heard about the invitation. But, he said, he had a “physical limitation” and was not sure he would be able to attend.
Thousands of people who participated in the fight for civil rights over several decades helped pave the way for Mr. Obama’s triumph. But the Tuskegee Airmen have a special place in history. Their bravery during the war — on behalf of a country that actively discriminated against them — helped persuade President Harry S. Truman to desegregate the military in 1948.
“The election of Barack Obama was like a culmination of a struggle that we were going through, wanting to be pilots,” said William M. Wheeler, 85, a retired Tuskegee combat fighter pilot who lives in Hempstead, N.Y. He tried to become a commercial pilot after the war but was offered a job cleaning planes instead.
Mr. Obama has acknowledged his debt to the airmen, issuing a statement in 2007, when they received the Congressional Gold Medal. It said in part: “My career in public service was made possible by the path heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen trail-blazed.”
The invitation to his swearing-in was extended Tuesday by Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.
Howard Gantman, staff director for the committee, said of the decision to invite them: “They served honorably on behalf of our country, helped fight the battle to overcome racial barriers and because of the historic nature of this election, we thought they deserved to be there.”
Tickets to the Jan. 20 inauguration are the most sought-after commodity, with more than 1.5 million people expected in Washington. Of the 240,000 tickets, the airmen would have seats among the 30,000 on the terrace below the podium, along with former members of Congress and others.
For logistical reasons, the actual invitation ended up with Robert D. Rose, a retired Air Force captain in Bellevue, Neb., who was not a Tuskegee airman but is the first vice president of the Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an association of the original airmen and their supporters.
The onus is on the association to extend the invitation to the airmen, who must respond by Dec. 19. Each can bring one guest. The tickets are not transferable, so if an airman cannot make it, he cannot give his ticket away.
“We’ll have a lot of happy fellows and ladies,” said Mr. Rose, who predicted that many would try to attend.
He said that before the invitation was made Tuesday, he had already been trying to get word to higher ups that the airmen would like to be invited. “I thought if the name ‘Tuskegee’ surfaced at a high enough level, someone would recognize it and it would make sense to invite them,” he said.
There is no firm handle on how many are still alive. More than 300 came forward in March 2007 to collect their bronze replicas of the Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony at the Capitol. The actual Gold Medal itself was given to the Smithsonian Institution.
In all, 994 pilots and about 15,000 ground personnel collectively known as the Tuskegee Airmen were trained at the segregated Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama from 1942 to 1946.
About 119 pilots and 211 ground personnel are still alive, according to Tuskegee Airmen Inc. They are in their 80s and 90s, many are frail, and it is unclear how many will be able to make the trip to Washington. And those who make it will face various challenges: they will most likely have to walk some distance, the weather could be harsh, the crowds will be huge and accommodations are scarce.
Still, these are some of the airmen who flew more than 150,000 sorties over Europe and North Africa during World War II, escorting Allied bombers and destroying hundreds of enemy aircraft. Some were taken prisoner. And most faced fierce discrimination during and after the war.
“Even the Nazis asked why they would fight for a country that treated them unfairly,” President Bush said in awarding the medals.
Mr. Rose, of the airmen’s association, said he saw a direct connection between the Tuskegee experience and Mr. Obama’s election.
“The Tuskegee Airmen preceded Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, and if they hadn’t helped generate a climate of tolerance by integration of the military, we might not have progressed through the civil rights era,” he said. ”We would have seen a different civil rights movement, if we would have seen one at all.

”

More Distorted History From The Santa Fe Trail, Plus A Rebuttal

2008-10-16T13:24:00.000-07:00

I'll counter the above with this
A recent podcast done at the Gilder Lehrman Institute by historian David Reynolds

At eight o'clock on Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a party of twenty-one men into the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to free slaves. The plan soon went awry. Brown was found guilty of treason, conspiracy, and murder, and was sentenced to die on the gallows. Click on the link below to read the address he gave at his sentencing:
David Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, reassesses the legacy of John Brown, who was hanged for his role in the October 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry. Brown, a devout Calvinist possessing unshakable integrity and faith in the righteousness of his violent actions against slavery, was the only abolitionist in the years before the Civil War to live among blacks, advocate a rewritten constitution that would make slaves citizens, and ultimately to take up arms and give his life for the abolitionist cause.

A biography from the Kansas Historical Association

John Brown: May 9, 1800 - December 2, 1859, Of all the characters that played significant roles on the Kansas stage during the drama that was Bleeding Kansas, none left a legacy that compares to the controversial abolitionist, John Brown. Born in Connecticut in 1800, "Old" John Brown was only fifty-five years old when he followed his sons to Kansas just as the struggle for control of the territory was taking shape. The family settled in rural Franklin County, just southwest of Osawatomie, the home of the Rev. Samuel and Florella Adair, Brown's half-sister.
John Brown absorbed a deep hatred for the institution of slavery early in life, eventually dedicated his life to its eradication, and quickly made his presence known during the Kansas struggle. He was involved in or responsible for the "Wakarusa war" at Lawrence, the Pottawatomie Massacre, the battles of Black Jack and Osawatomie, and the liberation of dozens of slaves from nearby Missouri.
After leaving Kansas for the last time early in 1859, the crusade continued; Brown, with several of his sons and other followers, planned and conducted the ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was tried and convicted on conspiracy, treason, and murder charges stemming from this incident and was executed on December 2, 1859.
This almost mythic figure in the history of Kansas and the nation still elicits emotional reactions from students, scholars, and the general population, and history has not always been kind to this complex personality. To some of his contemporaries, Brown was a maniacal, bloodthirsty old fanatic. To many others, black and white, he was a martyred saint. He was "a moral Genius," according to a prominent late-nineteenth-century Kansan, whose life and death "brought about the abolition of slave labor years before" it would have otherwise occurred. "No man whose name appears in the annals of Kansas can begin to stand beside John Brown."

Octobr 16th: The Anniversary Of John Brown's Raid

2008-10-16T13:01:00.000-07:00

The final scene from Santa Fe Trail
A 1940 view of John Brown. From wikipedia:

Santa Fe Trail is a 1940 western film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Despite glaring historical inaccuracies, the film was one of the top-grossing films of the year, being the seventh Flynn-de Havilland collaboration. The film also has nothing to do with its namesake, the famed Santa Fe Trail except that the trail started in Missouri. Instead, it follows the life of Jeb Stuart, a cavalry commander (and future Confederate Army general). The film purports to follow the life of J.E.B. Stuart (Errol Flynn) before the outbreak of the American Civil War. Among its sub-plots are a romance with the fictional Kit Carson Holliday (Olivia de Havilland), friendship with George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan), and battles against abolitionist John Brown (Raymond Massey). One glaring inaccuracy has Stuart leading a cavalry charge against John Brown "fort" in Harper Ferry. In fact Stuart was at Harper's Ferry-but John Brown was captured in an infantry assault by US Marines under command of US Army Colonel Robert Edward Lee. Another inaccuracy is the film has Stuart, Custer, and Philip Sheridan all having been part of the West Point graduating class of 1854. In fact, Sheridan was the class of 1853, Stuart 1854, and Custer not until 1861-a year early because of the onset of the Civil War.
The movie is drastically critical of John Brown, portraying him as a bloodthirsty villain and blaming him for causing the Civil War, thereby exonerating the Confederacy for seceding. African-Americans are portrayed as practically content to be slaves and too fearful to fight with Brown in his abolitionist crusade, whereas in reality about one fourth of Brown's group were African-American. After being freed, some African-Americans in the film chant "We's free! We's free!", but later freed slaves say "We don't want it" with regards to freedom.
Massey's John Brown eagerly endorses breaking apart the union of the United States, as though abolitionism was the threat to the union rather than slavery. The movie was made on the eve of World War 2, and its tone and political subtext express a desire to reconcile the nation's dispute over slavery which brought about the American Civil War and appeal to moviegoers in both the southern and northern United States. The American Civil War and abolition of slavery are presented as an unnecessary tragedy caused by an anarchic madman. The heroic protagonists such as Flynn's Jeb Stuart and Reagan's Custer seem unable to conceive how the issue of slavery could place them at odds in the near future, even though by 1859 hostility between the pro/anti-slavery states had reached a boiling point.

Designating W.E.B. DuBois' "Wedding" House A Queens A Landmark

2008-06-21T23:47:00.001-07:00

W E B Du Bois homesite will be developed into memorial - Upload a Document to Scribd

Panoramic Scene: Marcus Garvey Park

2008-06-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

A panoramic scene linking a panorama taken from high up in the park to one at street level (to the West). Look for the "hot spots" that link the two panoramas.

Panoramic Movie Of Marcus Garvey Park

2008-06-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

A panoramic movie taken at street level at Marcus Garvey Park (formerly Mount Morris Park-119th Street-124th Street, 5th Avenue)

Marcus Garvey Park is one of the oldest public squares in Manhattan. Central to the life of Harlem for more than 150 years, it has served as a meeting place for neighbors, a front yard and play area for schoolchildren, and a holy place for members of local churches. Known as Mount Morris Park for more than a hundred years, it was originally part of the estate of Metje Cornelius Kortright. The name Morris became attached to the site by the 1830s; possible sources include Robert H. Morris, elected mayor in 1841, and a family affiliated with a racetrack that once operated nearby.

NYC Slavery Tour Guide

2008-05-28T11:19:00.003-07:00

Handout 2008 - Upload a doc

Lower Manhattan Slave History Walking Tour: 5/23/08

2008-05-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

from Alan Singer's Website at Hofstra University

“Time to Tell the Truth About Local History, New York was a Land of Slavery”:
How Student Activism Promotes Leadership and Literacy
By Michael Pezone and Alan Singer
“Read the books and it's plain to see,
New York's the land of slavery,
If you thought the North was a freedom land,
You thought wrong -- because here you could own a man.
From Francis Lewis to Fernando Wood,
Slave labor is what was happening,
They bought and sold human beings and made their millions,
Soon the whole trade was worth more than 60 billion!
Read the books, if you don't trust me,
New York's the land of slavery.
AT&T and Citibank, just to name a few
From the slaveholding ranks,
Slaves used to be brought in all the time,
So we wanna know, JUST WHERE ARE THE SIGNS?
They tried to cover up these Northern slaves,
And if you thought it was just the South, then you got played,
Read the books, and you'll surely see,
That New York's the land of slavery.”
- India Nelson, junior, Law, Government and Community Service Magnet High School
On May 23, 2008, over six hundred upper elementary, middle-level, and high school students walked the streets of Manhattan learning about the forgotten history of slavery in New York City. It is the largest group to participate in the three-year history of the New York and Slavery Walking Tour.
There are no markers at the locations where enslaved Africans rebelled in 1712, where they plotted to win their freedom in 1741, where they were publicly executed – hung or burned at the stake -- or at the seaport where slave traders and bankers met to plan trans-Atlantic voyages. People, places, and events have been erased from the past. One of the purposes of the tour is to demand that historical markers be installed.
The New York and Slavery Walking Tour is organized by juniors and seniors from Law, Government, and Community Service Magnet High School. The population of the school is overwhelmingly African American, Caribbean, and Hispanic. Many of the students come from troubled communities and have academic difficulties. They are the survivors of less than adequate schools that produce more dropouts than graduates. They are leaders who have chosen to take ownership over their educations.
Each year, a new group of students chooses to take part in the project, a project they learn about from students who participated the previous year. They choose to become involved because they want to learn their history and the truth about American history. They also take part because they want to teach about it to the public and to other students from around the city.
Preparation takes a full school year, although the intensity picks up during the last three weeks before the tour date. The tour is in May because that is when the 1741 freedom plotters were executed in what is now New York City’s Foley Square (Singer, 2008). The square is now surrounded by courthouses, but as one tour guide explained to a group of elementary school students, “In colonial New York, there was no justice for Blacks who wanted to be free.”
In September, one of Michael Pezone’s upper-level history classes is invited to organize the tour. Because they know about it already from friends, not much persuasion is needed. But there is a lot of work to do. The class uses the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum guide
www.nyscss.org.

The 2008 version of the tour followed the path outlined in red. The film clip above is made of about 10 clips that were made with a Flip Video and joined together using VisualHub. There were several classes (600 students in total) from boro-wide schools that followed the 2 hour tour. The kids listened intently and took notes. Most impressive were the presentations of the enthused, knowledgeable and articulate students from Law, Government and Community Service Magnet High School in Cambria Heights, Queens,(the former Andrew Jackson High School)

Mapping The African American Past

2008-03-06T07:11:00.001-08:00

great new black history site.
the above movie is from the Columbia Teacher's College site
from the nytimes of 3/6/07

New Medium, Old Stories: A High-Tech Look at the City’s Black History
By GLENN COLLINS
The teeming restaurant was called Downing’s Oyster House, and its 19th-century patrons were bankers, politicians and lawyers. But even as the swells did their deals upstairs, the proprietor, Thomas Downing, a free black man, presided over a far different scene in his basement, a hiding place for escaping slaves.
The establishment, at 5 Broad Street near Wall Street, was a stop on the Underground Railroad — to Canada, and freedom.
Stories about Downing’s — and many other locales and people significant to black history in New York City — have rarely been classroom staples for schoolchildren. But these sagas, presented in text, historical images and interactive maps, are the focus of a new Web site officially unveiled on Wednesday with an acronym, MAAP, that stands for “Mapping the African American Past.”
The Web site, presented by Columbia University at http://www.maap.columbia.edu, uses video, audio and maps and images to showcase 52 historic sites and people in the city, ranging from the familiar (the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan) to the rarely acknowledged, including the Oyster House and the Colored Orphan Asylum.
“It gives students an opportunity for detailed study in a way that would never be possible in traditional textbooks,” said Frank A. Moretti, a professor of communications at Teachers College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
He described the new site as the most extensive Web-based examination of the city’s African-American history. The Web site — a portal to film and music clips, photographs and artwork — is searchable by location and year, back to 1632. Narratives can be podcast through iTunes.
Dr. Moretti said the yearlong project was conceived by Reginald L. Powe, a longtime developer of educational content for publishers and curriculum providers. Mr. Powe’s Manhattan-based company, Creative Curriculum Initiatives, has produced boxed sets of 52 cards (3 ½ inches by 5 inches) depicting historical locations under the rubric “The African Experience in New York.”
“As an African-American interested in history, I found it hard to understand why so much of the city’s African-American past was unknown to students,” Mr. Powe said. “People know little about slave revolts and people burned at the stake — and about inspirational stories of those who advanced against impossible odds.”
A thousand sets of the cards will be made available free to city schools, and they will be offered for sale to the public for $24, which is “the price reputed to have been paid for Manhattan,” Mr. Powe said.
Educators in Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning added more information, images and video interviews to the cards in creating the Web site, said Dr. Moretti, who is the center’s executive director. The history project was initially financed with $250,000 from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and then Columbia contributed $250,000 in development and staff expenses to produce the Web site and teaching materials, he said.
“Creating lessons on New York history has been a bit of a challenge for many teachers, since there hasn’t been a large market for publishers to create these materials,” said Dr. Margaret S. Crocco, professor and coordinator of social studies education at Teachers College.
As part of the Web site, she directed a team of eight educators at the college to create 24 lesson plans at eighth- and fourth-grade levels that can be downloaded free. The site’s images and information can be dragged, manipulated and otherwise organized by students for projects and teachers creating their own lesson plans.
The Web site is evidence of “the significant awakening of interest in New York’s black history,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, the Jacques Barzun professor of history at Columbia University and the editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of New York City.

“This site should just keep expanding.”

Emmett Till: Part 2

2008-03-03T10:21:00.000-08:00

biography from wikipedia continued

Emmett Till was buried September 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The same day, Bryant and Milam were indicted by a grand jury.
When Mamie Till came to Mississippi to testify at the trial, she stayed in the home of Dr. T.R.M. Howard in the all-black town of Mound Bayou. Others staying in Howard's home were black reporters, such as Cloyte Murdock of Ebony Magazine, key witnesses, and Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan, the first chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Howard was a major civil rights leader and fraternal organization official in Mississippi, the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), and one of the wealthiest blacks in the state.
The day before the trial, Frank Young, a black farm worker, came to Howard's home. He said that he had information indicating that Milam and Bryant had help in their crime. Young's allegations sparked an investigation that led to unprecedented cooperation between local law enforcement, the NAACP, the RCNL, black journalists, and local reporters. The trial began on September 19. Moses Wright, Emmett's great-uncle, was one of the main witnesses called up to speak. Pointing to one of the suspected killers, he said "Dar he," to refer to the man who had killed his nephew.
Another key witness for the prosecution was Willie Reed, an 18-year-old high school student who lived on a plantation near Drew, Mississippi in Sunflower County. The prosecution had located him thanks to the investigation sparked by Young's information. Reed testified that he had seen a pickup truck outside of an equipment shed on a plantation near Drew managed by Leslie Milam, a brother of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant. He said that four whites, including J.W. Milam, were in the cab and three blacks were in the back, one of them Till. When the truck pulled into the shed, he heard human cries that sounded like a beating was underway. He did not identify the other blacks on the truck.
On September 23 the all-white jury, made up of 12 males, acquitted both defendants. Deliberations took just 67 minutes; one juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long."The hasty acquittal outraged people throughout the United States and Europe and energized the nascent Civil Rights Movement.
Even by the time of the trial, Howard and black journalists such as James Hicks of the Baltimore Afro-American named several blacks who had allegedly been on the truck near Drew, including three employees of J.W. Milam: Henry Lee Loggins, Levi 'Too-Tight' Collins, and Joe Willie Hubbard. They were never called to testify. In the months after the trial, both Hicks and Howard called for a federal investigation into charges that Sheriff H.C. Strider had locked Collins and Loggins in jail to keep them from testifying.
Following the trial, Look Magazine paid J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant $4,000 to tell their story. Safe from any further charges for their crime due to double jeopardy protection, Bryant admitted to journalist William Bradford Huie that he and his brother had killed Till. Milam claimed that initially their intention was to scare Till into line by pistol-whipping him and threatening to throw him off a cliff. Milam explained that contrary to expectations, regardless of what they did to Till, he never showed any fear, never seemed to believe they would really kill him, and maintained a completely unrepentant, insolent, and defiant attitude towards them concerning his actions. Thus the brothers said they felt they were left with no choice but to fully make an example of Till, and they killed him. The story focused exclusively on the role of Milam and Bryant in the crime and did not mention any possible part played by others in the crime. The article was published in Look in January 1956. While some found it repugnant that Look had paid these men $4,000, the editorial position was that the good of getting the public to know the truth outweighed the bad of these men being paid a lot of money.
In February 1956 Howard's version of the events of the kidnapping and murder, which stressed the possible involvement of Hubbard and Loggins, appeared in the booklet Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till by Olive Arnold Adams. At the same time a still unidentified white reporter using the pseudonym Amos Dixon wrote a series of articles in the California Eagle. The series put forward essentially the same thesis as Time Bomb but offered a more detailed description of the possible role of Loggins, Hubbard, Collins, and Leslie Milam. Time Bomb and Dixon's articles had no lasting impact in the shaping of public opinion. Huie's article in the far more widely circulated Look became the most commonly accepted version of events.
In 1957 Huie returned to the story for Look in an article that indicated that local residents were shunning Milam and Bryant and that their stores were closed due to a lack of business.
Milam died of cancer in 1980 and Bryant died of cancer in 1994. The men never expressed any remorse for Till's death and seemed to feel that they had done no wrong. In fact, a few months before he died, Bryant complained bitterly in an interview that he had never made as much money off Till's death as he deserved and that it had ruined his life[11]. Emmett's mother Mamie (as Mamie Till Mobley) outlived both men, dying at the age of 81 on January 6, 2003. That same year her autobiography Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (One World Books, co-written with Christopher Benson) was published.
In 1991, a seven-mile stretch of 71st street in Chicago was renamed "Emmett Till Road," after the slain child. In 2006 a Mississippi historical marker marking the place of Till's death was defaced, and in August 2007 it went missing.Less than a week later a replica was put up in its place.[13]
In 2001, David T. Beito, associate professor at the University of Alabama and Linda Royster Beito, chair of the department of social sciences at Stillman College, were the first investigators in many decades to track down and interview on tape two key principals in the case: Henry Lee Loggins and Willie Reed. They were doing research for their biography of T.R.M. Howard. In his interview with the Beitos, Loggins denied that he had any knowledge of the crime or that he was one of the black men on the truck outside of the equipment shed near Drew. Reed repeated the testimony that he had given at the trial, that he had seen three black men and four white men (including J.W. Milam) on the truck. When asked to identify the black men, however, he did not name Loggins as one of them. The Beitos also confirmed that Levi 'Too-Tight' Collins, another black man allegedly on this car, had died in 1993.
In 1996, Keith Beauchamp started background research for a feature film he planned to make about Till's murder, and asserted that as many as 14 individuals may have been involved. While conducting interviews he also encountered eyewitnesses who had never spoken out publicly before. As a result he decided to produce a documentary instead, and spent the next nine years creating The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. The film led to calls by the NAACP and others for the case to be reopened. The documentary included lengthy interviews with Loggins and Reed, both of whom the Beitos had first tracked down and interviewed in 2001. Loggins repeated his denial of any knowledge of the crime. Beauchamp has consistently refused to name the fourteen individuals who he asserts took part in the crime, including the five who he claims are still alive.
On May 10, 2004, the United States Department of Justice announced that it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone other than Milam and Bryant was involved. Although the statute of limitations prevented charges being pursued under federal law, they could be pursued before the state court, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and officials in Mississippi worked jointly on the investigation. As no autopsy had been performed on Till's body, it was exhumed on May 31, 2005 from the suburban Chicago cemetery where it was buried, and the Cook County coroner then conducted the autopsy. The body was reburied by relatives on June 4. It has been positively identified as that of Emmett Till.
In February 2007, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that both the FBI and a Leflore County Grand Jury, which was empaneled by Joyce Chiles, a black prosecutor, had found no credible basis for Keith Beauchamp's claim that 14 individuals took part in Till's abduction and murder or that any are still alive. The Grand Jury also decided not to pursue charges against Carolyn Bryant Donham, Roy Bryant's ex-wife. Neither the FBI nor the Grand Jury found any credible evidence that Henry Lee Loggins, now living in an Ohio nursing home, and identified by Beauchamp as a suspect who could be charged, had any role in the crime. Other than Loggins, Beauchamp still refuses to name the 14 people who he says were involved although the FBI and District Attorney have completed their investigations of his charges and he is free to go on the record. A story by Jerry Mitchell in the Clarion-Ledger on February 18 describes Beauchamp's allegation that 14 or more were involved as a legend.
The same article also labels as legend a rumor that Till had endured castration at the hands of his victimizers. The castration theory was first put forward uncritically in Beauchamp's "Untold Story" although Mamie Till-Mobley (Emmett's mother) had said in an earlier documentary directed by Stanley Nelson, "The Murder of Emmett Till," (2003) that her son's genitals were intact when she examined the corpse. The recent autopsy, as reported by Mitchell, confirmed Mobley-Till's original account and showed no evidence of castration.
In March 2007, Till's family was briefed by the FBI on the contents of its investigation. The FBI report released on March 29, 2007 found that Till had died of a gunshot wound to the head and that he had broken wrist bones and skull and leg fractures.

The Death Of Emmett Till

2008-03-03T09:53:00.000-08:00

a slide show of images backing Dylan's great song
the lyrics

"Twas down in Mississippi no so long ago,
When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door.
This boy's dreadful tragedy I can still remember well,
The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till.
Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up.
They said they had a reason, but I can't remember what.
They tortured him and did some evil things too evil to repeat.
There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street.
Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain.
The reason that they killed him there, and I'm sure it ain't no lie,
Was just for the fun of killin' him and to watch him slowly die.
And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial,
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till.
But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime,
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind.
I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin' down the courthouse stairs.
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free,
While Emmett's body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea.
If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust,
Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust.
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow,
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!
This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.

Emmett Till: Part 1

2008-03-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

Feom wikipedia, part 1 of biography

Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a fourteen year old African-American from Chicago, Illinois brutally murdered [1] in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the state's Delta region. The murder of Emmett Till was noted as one of the leading events that motivated the nascent American Civil Rights Movement.qwdf The main suspects were acquitted, but later admitted to committing the crime.
Till's mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to let everyone see how he had been brutally killed.[2] He had been brutally beaten and had his eye gouged out before he was shot through the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. His body was in the river for three days before it was discovered and retrieved by two fishermen.
Till was laid to rest in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The murder case was officially reopened in May 2004, and as a part of the investigation the body was exhumed so an autopsy could be performed.The body was reburied by the family in the same location later that week.
Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Till and Louis Till. Emmett's mother was born to John and Alma Carthan in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi ("the Delta" being the traditional name for the area of northwestern Mississippi at the confluence of the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers). When she was two years old, her family moved to Illinois. Emmett's mother largely raised him on her own; she and Louis Till had separated in 1942.
Emmett's father, Louis Till, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. While serving in Italy, he was convicted of raping two women and killing a third. He was executed by the Army by hanging near Pisa in July 1945. Before Emmett Till's killing, the Till family knew none of this, having been told only that Louis had been killed due to "willful misconduct". The facts of Louis Till's execution were made widely known after Emmett Till's death, by segregationist senator James Eastland, in an apparent attempt to turn public support away from Mrs. Till just weeks before the trials of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the implication being that criminal behavior ran in the Till family.
In 1955, Till and his cousin were sent to stay for the summer with Till's uncle, Moses Wright, who lived in Money, Mississippi (another small town in the Delta, eight miles north of Greenwood).
Before his departure for the Delta, Till's mother cautioned him to "mind his manners" with white people.
Till's mother understood that race relations in Mississippi were very different from those in Chicago. Mississippi had seen many lynchings during the South's lynching era (ca. 1876-1930), and racially motivated murders were still not unfamiliar, especially in the Delta region where Till was going for a visit. Racial tensions were also on the rise after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregation in public education.
Till arrived on August 21. On August 24, he joined other young teenagers as they went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to get some candy and soda. The teens were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by a husband and wife, Roy Bryant and Carolyn Bryant, and mostly catered to the local sharecropper population. Till's cousin and several black youths, all under 16, were with Till in the store. Till had shown them photos of his life back home, including one of him with his friends and girlfriend, a white girl. The boys didn't believe that he had a white girlfriend and dared him to talk to a white woman in the shop.
As Till was leaving the store, he said "Bye, baby," to Carolyn Bryant, a married white woman. She stood up and rushed to her car. The boys were terrified, thinking she might return with a pistol, and ran away.
Carolyn Bryant told others of the events at the store, and the news spread quickly. When Bryant's husband returned from a road trip a few days later and was told the news, he was greatly angered. By that point, it seemed that everyone in Tallahatchie County had heard about the incident, which had had several days to percolate. Different versions were disseminated. Till's cousin, Wheeler Parker, Jr., who was with him at the store, claims Till did nothing but whistle at the woman. "He loved pranks, he loved fun, he loved jokes... in Mississippi, people didn't think the same jokes were funny." Carolyn Bryant later asserted that Till had grabbed her at the waist and asked her for a date. She said the young man also used "unprintable" words. He had a slight stutter and some have conjectured that Bryant might have misinterpreted what Till said. Bryant decided that he and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, 36, would meet at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday to "teach the boy a lesson."
At about 12:30 a.m. on August 28, Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, came in a car with two people in the back whose identities have still not been confirmed, and kidnapped Emmett Till from his great-uncle's house in the middle of the night. According to witnesses, they drove him to a weathered shed on a plantation in neighboring Sunflower County, where they brutally beat and then shot him. A fan was tied around his neck with barbed wire in order to weigh down his body, which they dropped into the Tallahatchie River near Glendora, Mississippi, another small cotton town north of Money.
Afterwards, with Till missing, Bryant and Milam admitted they had taken the boy from his great-uncle's yard but claimed they turned him loose the same night. Some supposed that relatives of Till were hiding him out of fear for the youth’s safety or that he had been sent back to Chicago where he would be safe. Word got out that Till was missing and soon NAACP civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the state field secretary, and Amzie Moore, head of the Bolivar County chapter, became involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers and going into the cotton fields in search of any information that would help find the young visitor from Chicago.
After Till's body was recovered, the brothers and the police tried to convince people that it wasn't Till; that Till was in Chicago and that the beaten boy was someone else. Till's features were too distorted by the beatings to easily identify him, but he was positively identified thanks to a ring he wore on his finger that had been his father's. His mother had given it to him the day before he left for Money. The brothers were soon under official suspicion for the boy's disappearance and were arrested August 29 after spending the night with relatives in Ruleville, just miles from the scene of the crime.
Moses Wright, a witness to Till's abduction, told the Sheriff that a person who sounded like a woman had identified Till as "the one," after which Bryant and Milam had driven away with him. Bryant and Milam claimed they later found out Till was not "the one" who had allegedly "insulted" Mrs. Bryant, and swore to Sheriff George Smith they had released him. They would later recant and confess after their acquittal.
In an editorial on Friday, September 2, Greenville journalist Hodding Carter, Jr. asserted that "people who are guilty of this savage crime should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," a brave suggestion for any Mississippi newspaper editor to make at the time.
After Till's disfigured body was found, he was put into a pine box and nearly buried, but Mamie Till wanted the body to come back to Chicago. A Tutwiler mortuary assistant worked all night to prepare the body as best he could so that Mamie Till could bring Emmett's body back to Chicago.
The Chicago funeral home had agreed not to open the casket, but Mamie Till fought their decision. The state of Mississippi insisted it would not allow the funeral home to open it, so Mamie threatened to open it herself, insisting she had a right to see her son. After viewing the body, she also insisted on leaving the casket open for the funeral and allowing people to take photographs because she wanted people to see how badly Till's body had been disfigured. News photographs of Till's mutilated corpse circulated around the country, notably appearing in Jet magazine, and drew intense public reaction. Some reports said that up to 50,000 people viewed the body.

Rosa Parks In Poetry

2008-03-02T16:46:00.000-08:00

from npr on 12/5/05 I used images from Weatherford's books to complement the audio

News & Notes , December 5, 2005 · Poet Carole Boston Weatherford reads her poem December 1, 1955: Before Rosa Altered History in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott. Weatherford teaches creative writing at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina. She's the author of several book including Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins.

Paul Cuffee

2008-03-02T16:33:00.000-08:00

I found the audio at Bridgewater State University and combined it with images of Cuffee and/or related to him, including the Paul Cuffee School in Providence, Rhode Island. Note some spell his name Cuffee and others Cuffe.

Paul Cuffee, Negro shipowner and colonizer, was born near New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a free Negro whose father had been a slave, Cuffee became greatly concerned over the status of the Negroes in his native state and throughout America to the extent that he became one of the first to advocate African colonization as a solution to the incipient racial problem. In 1811, he traveled to Sierra Leone, a British colony on the West Coast of Africa, where he founded the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, for the emigration of free Negroes from America. In 1815, he spent $4,000 of his own funds to transport 38 Negroes to Sierra Leone. He had planned more expeditions to Africa, but his health failed and he died in 1817.

A successful shipbuilder and shipowner, he accumulated an estate worth more than $20,000. In 1797, at a price of $3,500, he purchased for himself and his Indian wife, Alice Pequit, a farm on which he built a school for free Negro children. He and his brother, John Cuffee, entered a suit, as taxpayers, against the state of Massachusetts for the right to vote; but they were unsuccessful in winning the case. Several years later, legislation was adopted to correct the unjust practice. The Negro entrepreneur campaigned regularly against discriminatory practices faced by the Negroes in America. His association with whites was unquestioned, and he was received by the Quakers as a member of the Westport Society of Friends.

A Woman Called Moses

2008-03-02T16:32:00.000-08:00

from youtube user jovanvliet

A 7th grader presents the story of Harriet Tubman, using still images and audio.

Black Nurses In World War II

2008-03-01T20:45:00.001-08:00

Panoramic Movie On Linden Boulevard In Addisleigh Park, Queens

2008-03-01T17:45:00.001-08:00

A panoramic movie incorporating some of the beautiful homes near the intersection of 176th Street and Linden Blvd (including the former James Brown-Cootie Williams House) taken on 7/13/07

Black Women In History Timeline 2

2008-03-01T17:39:00.000-08:00

from youtube user badasiwannabe, included are

Whitney Houston, Oprah Whinfrey, Diana Ross, Phillis Wheatley, Ida Wells-Barnett, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth J Harris, Harriet Tubman, Susie King Taylor, Ida Wells-Barnett, Madame CJ Walker, Mary McLeod Bethune, Hattie McDaniel, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Marian Anderson, Ruth Ella Moore, Josephene Baker, Rosa Parks, Toni Morrison, Annie Easley, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson, June Bacon-Bercey, Barbara Jordan, Angela Davis, Maxine Waters, Shirley Caesar, Marian Wright Edelman, Wilma Rudolph, Aretha Franklin, Alice Walker, Patty La'Belle, Gladys Knight, Shirley Ann Jackson, Pointer Sisters, Carol Mosely-Braun, Donna Summer, Whoopi Goldberg, Pam Grier, Rita Dove, Chaka Khan, Condoleezza Rice, Mae C Jemison, Tramine Hawkins, Angela Bassette, Delorez Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Cheryl Miller, Cece Winans, Halle Berry, Janet Jackson, Soledad O'Brian, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blidge, MC Lyte, Lil Kim, Marion Jones, Lauryn Hill, Laila Ali, Foxy Brown, Venus & Serena Williams. (

Black Women In History Timeline 1

2008-03-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

from youtube user badasiwannabe, included are

Whitney Houston, Oprah Whinfrey, Diana Ross, Phillis Wheatley, Ida Wells-Barnett, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth J Harris, Harriet Tubman, Susie King Taylor, Ida Wells-Barnett, Madame CJ Walker, Mary McLeod Bethune, Hattie McDaniel, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Marian Anderson, Ruth Ella Moore, Josephene Baker, Rosa Parks, Toni Morrison, Annie Easley, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson, June Bacon-Bercey, Barbara Jordan, Angela Davis, Maxine Waters, Shirley Caesar, Marian Wright Edelman, Wilma Rudolph, Aretha Franklin, Alice Walker, Patty La'Belle, Gladys Knight, Shirley Ann Jackson, Pointer Sisters, Carol Mosely-Braun, Donna Summer, Whoopi Goldberg, Pam Grier, Rita Dove, Chaka Khan, Condoleezza Rice, Mae C Jemison, Tramine Hawkins, Angela Bassette, Delorez Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Cheryl Miller, Cece Winans, Halle Berry, Janet Jackson, Soledad O'Brian, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blidge, MC Lyte, Lil Kim, Marion Jones, Lauryn Hill, Laila Ali, Foxy Brown, Venus & Serena Williams. (

Google Maps: Count Basie

2008-03-01T17:18:00.000-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

Google Maps: Milt Hinton

2008-03-01T17:17:00.000-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

Google Maps: James Brown And Cootie Williams

2008-03-01T14:17:00.000-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

Google Maps: Brook Benton

2008-03-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

Google Maps: W.E.B. Dubois

2008-03-01T14:06:00.001-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

Google Maps: Fats Waller

2008-03-01T10:38:00.000-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

James Farmer

2008-03-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

from 1/5/08 from pseudo-intellectualism
from wikipedia:

James Leonard Farmer Jr. (January 19, 1920 – July 9, 1999), a Black civil rights activist who was one of the "big four" leaders of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in Marshall, Texas in 1920, Farmer was an excellent student who skipped several grades in elementary school. After he completed high school at the age of fourteen he attended Wiley College. He considered careers in both medicine and the ministry during his undergraduate days. However, after he received his bachelor of science degree in chemistry in 1938 he also realized he could not stand the sight of blood, so he enrolled in Howard University's School of Religion, receiving the Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1941. When World War II began the pacifist Farmer refused to serve, especially in a segregated army. He opposed war in general, and more specifically objected to serving in the segregated armed forces. Farmer was deferred from the draft because he held a divinity degree. After his time at Howard University he began traveling the Midwest speaking about racial equality and pacifism. Farmer decided to fight the Southern Methodist Church's policy of segregation rather than become an ordained minister.
In 1942, Farmer along with a group of students co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality, an organization that sought to bring an end to racial segregation in America through active nonviolence. The organization was also known as CORE. Farmer was the first leader of the Congress of Racial Equality but after several years he became inactive.
During the 1950s, Farmer served as national secretary of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy. SLID later became Students for a Democratic Society.
In 1960 Farmer became reelected as the director, which was around the same time the civil rights movement was gaining power. The organization was first called the Committee of Racial Equality and then became the Congress of Racial Equality. Farmer then served as the national chairman for the Congress of Racial Equality from 1942-1944 and then was reelected for the position in 1950. From 1961-1966 he was elected the national director. Farmer was so involved in his work that he even remained interested in the organization during the times he was not leader.
In 1961 Farmer, who was working for the NAACP at the time, was called back to lead the Freedom Rides for the Congress of Racial Equality and who had taken a hiatus from leading the group, returned as its national director. He also helped organize the Freedom Rides. The Freedom Rides led to the desegregation of bus terminals and interstate buses. He immediately planned a repeat of CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a trip of eight white and eight black men challenging segregation in transportation in the upper South. This time, however, the group would journey to the Deep South, and Farmer coined a new name for the trip: the Freedom Ride. On May 4, participants journeyed to the deep South, this time including women as well as men, and tested segregated bus terminals as well as seating on the vehicles. The riders were met with severe violence and garnered national attention, sparking a summer of similar rides by other Civil Rights leaders and thousands of ordinary citizens. Although the Freedom Rides were attacked by whites, the Freedom Rides became recognized and the Congress of Racial Equality received nationwide attention. Also, Farmer became a well-known civil rights leader. The Freedom Rides led to the capturing of the imagination of the nation through photographs, newspaper accounts, and motion pictures. After the Freedom Rides, concerned whites and blacks decided it was time for racial segregation and racial discrimination to come to an end.
By the mid 1960s Farmer was growing disenchanted with emerging militancy and black nationalist sentiments in CORE and resigned in 1966. He took a teaching position at Lincoln University and continued to lecture. In 1968 Farmer ran for U.S. Congress as a Republican, but lost to Shirley Chisholm. However his defeat was not total; the recently elected President, Richard Nixon, offered him the position of Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
James Farmer co-founded Fund for an Open Society (www.opensoc.org) in 1975, which has as its vision a nation in which people live in communities which are stably integrated; where political and civic power is shared by people of different races and ethnicities. He led this organization until 1999.
Farmer retired from politics in 1971, but remained active lecturing and serving on various boards and committees. He published his autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, in 1985. Farmer lived to see CORE move closer to its centrist roots in the 1980s and 1990s. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. Farmer taught a class on the civil rights movement at Mary Washington College (now The University of Mary Washington) in Fredericksburg, Virginia until his death in 1999.

Panoramic Movie Of A Jazz Mural On Linden Boulevard In Queens

2008-02-29T20:18:00.000-08:00

A panoramic movie of a mural on the northern side of Linden Boulevard as it passes under the Long Island Railroad. It depicts many of the jazz and entertainment giants who resided in Addisleigh Park and St. Albans, Queens

Google Maps: Ella Fitzgerald

2008-02-29T20:09:00.001-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

Google Maps: Roy Campenella

2008-02-29T20:03:00.000-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

Google Maps: Joe Louis

2008-02-29T20:02:00.001-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail

Fats Waller: Ain't Misbehavin'

2008-02-29T19:51:00.000-08:00

Lyrics by Andy Razaf
Music by Thomas "Fats" Waller and Harry Brooks

No one to talk with,
All by myself,
No one to walk with,
But I'm happy on the shelf
Ain't misbehavin',
I'm savin' my love for you
I know for certain,
The one I love,
I through with flirtin',
It's just you I'm thinkin' of.
Ain't misbehavin',
I'm savin' my love for you
Like Jack Horner in the corner
Don't go no where,
What do I care,
Your kisses are worth waitin' for
Be-lieve me
I don't stay out late,
Don't care to go,
I'm home about eight,
Just me and my radio
Ain't misbehavin',
I'm savin' my love for

Fats Waller: The Joint Is Jumping

2008-02-29T10:19:00.000-08:00

biography from redhotjazz
Fats Waller (1904-1943) was the son of a preacher and learned to play the organ in church with his mother. In 1918 he won a talent contest playing James P. Johnson's Carolina Shout which he learned from watching a pianola play the song. He would later take piano lessons from Johnson. Fats began his recording career in 1922 and made a living playing rent parties, as an organist at movie theatres and as an accompanist for various vaudeville acts. In 1927 he co-wrote a couple of tunes with his old piano teacher James P. Johnson for his show "Keep Shufflin'". Two years later Waller wrote the score for the Broadway hit "Hot Chocolates" with lyrics supplied by his friend Andy Razaf. Fats' most famous song, "Ain't Misbehavin'" was introduced in this show which featured Louis Armstrong. Fats Waller's big break occurred at a party given by George Gershwin in 1934, where he delighted the crowd with his piano playing and singing. An executive of Victor Records, who was at the party was so impressed that he arranged for Fats to record with the company. This arrangement would continue until Waller's death in 1943. Most of the records he made were released under the name of Fats Waller and his Rhythm. The group consisted of around half a dozen musicians who worked with him regularly, including Zutty Singleton. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s Fats was a star of radio and nightclubs, and toured Europe. He unexpectedtly died on board a train near Kansas City, Missouri of pneumonia in 1943.
lyrics-which don't quite follow the version above

They have a new expression along old Harlem way,
That tells you when a party is ten times more than gay:
To say that things are jumpin' leaves not a single doubt,
That everthing is in full swing when you hear someone shout.
Here 'tis:
The joint is jumpin',
It's really jumpin',
Come in, cats, and check your hats,
I mean this joint is jumpin'!
The piano's thumpin',
The dancers are bumpin',
This here spot is more than hot,
In fact, the joint is jumpin'!
Check your weapons at the door,
Be sure to pay your quarter,
Burn your leather on the floor,
Grab anybody's daughter.
The roof is rockin',
The neighbors knockin',
We're all bums when the wagon comes,
I mean, this joint is jumpin'!
Let it be! Yas!
Burn this joint, boy!
Yas! Oh, my! Yas!
Don't you hit that chick, that's my broad!
Where'd you get that stuff at?
Why, I'll knock you to your knees!
What? Put this cat out of here!
What? Get rid of that pistol! Get rid of that pistol! Yeah! Get rid of it, yas!
Yeah! That's what I'm talkin' about! Ha, ha! Yas!
Now it's really ready!
No, baby, not now, I can't come over there right now.
Yeah, let's do it!
The joint is jumpin',
It's really jumpin'!
Every Mose is on his toes,
I mean this joint is jumpin'!
Uh-oh! No time for talkin',
This place is walkin', yes,
Get your jug and cut the rug,
I think the joint is jumpin'.
Listen! Get your pig feet, bread and gin,
There's plenty in the kitchen!
Who is that that just came in?
Just look at the way he's switchin'!
Aw, mercy, Don't mind the hour,
I'm in power. I've got bail if we go to jail.
I mean this joint is jumpin'!
Don't give your right name, no, no, no, no!

Assignment Templates For Jazz Time Tale

2008-02-29T09:39:00.000-08:00

For the template on the left the assignment involves "finding the evidence." I give still images references from the movie. On the right it's a straight comprehension assignment with movie time stamp clues.

Here is where you will find a previous post with part 1 of the movie

Here is where you will find a previous post with part 2 of the movie

Illinois Jacquet: A Last Performance

2008-02-29T09:34:00.000-08:00

Illinois Jacquet

2008-02-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

This is Illinois in the 1940's
from a great resource on swing music history
Although Illinois Jacquet may be best remembered as the tenor saxophonist who defined the screeching style of playing the instrument, his warm and sensitive tone may also be heard on countless jazz ballads and medium groove-tempo numbers since the mid 1940s.
Illinois Jacquet was born Jean-Baptiste Jacquet October 31st, 1922 in Broussard, Louisiana. His mother was a Sioux Indian and his father, Gilbert Jacquet, was a French-Creole railroad worker and part-time musician.
The nickname Illinois came from the Indian word "Illiniwek," which means superior men. He dropped the name Jean-Baptiste when the family moved from Louisiana to Houston because there were so few French-speaking people there.
Jacquet, one of six children, began performing at age 3, tap dancing to the sounds of his father's band. He later played the drums in the Gilbert Jacquet band but discovered his true talent when a music teacher introduced him to the saxophone.
Illinois Jacquet cut his first sides as tenor man with Lionel Hampton's newly formed big band in December of 1941. Six months later and not even lead tenor man in the Hampton big band, his energetic vibraphone playing boss asked him to supply some high-spirited blowing on a tune called Flying Home. By the time Jacquet�s work on the May 26th, 1942 recording was through, he had recorded a unique solo that would follow him a lifetime and make his career.
Years later, during an interview with Nancy Wilson on NPR�s Jazz Profiles, Jacquet explained that when he found out he would be soloing on the record he became worried about how to handle the job. When he voiced his fear to the section leader, his advice was to "play your style." It was sound advice but posed a problem in itself because at that time Illinois had yet to develop a style of his own. Later giving credit for thesolo to divine inspiration he said, "Something was with me at that moment. It all came together for some reason."
Unfortunately the recording ban of 1942 was only months away. On August 1st, 1942 only vocalists were allowed to be recorded on record per a rule laid down by James Petrillo, the head of the American Federation Of Musicians union.
With the recording ban still in place in 1943, Jacquet accepted an offer from Cab Calloway to join his band. Calloway was known to take good care of his musicians financially and although he had big shoes to fill, Illinois jumped at the chance. He was to replace one of his early idols, the phenomenal tenor man Chu Berry, who had recently lost his life in an automobile accident on the way to a Calloway outing in Northern Ohio.
Almost immediately Jacquet found himself in the middle of doing a film soundtrack with Calloway and Lena Horne for the film Stormy Weather. Although he can be seen on screen in the movie he did not solo for the film. Unfortunately due to the recording ban, Jacquet can only be heard soloing with Calloway on live broadcast transcription recordings during his short stay with the band. One of the cleanest sounding surviving examples is on a barn-burning tune called 105 In The Shade.
After leaving the Calloway aggregation Jacquet returned back to his home in Houston where his brother, trumpet man Russell Jacquet, had just broken up his own band. Anxious to move forward in their careers the two traveled to Los Angeles and Illinois began participating in small club "jam sessions" organized by jazz impresario Norman Granz.
When Granz moved jazz to the concert hall with a benefit concert given on behalf of several Mexican kids arrested under questionable circumstances during the Zoot Suit Riots, Jacquet was in the lineup. The tenor master�s screech and honk style was in full swing for the July 2nd, 1944 date considered the first ever Jazz At The Philharmonic concert. Jacquet was a crowd exciter on songs like Blues (my naughty sweetie gives to me) captured in Los Angeles that day. The concert was recorded onto 16" transcription discs and subsequently the performances, which ran well longer than the 3 minutes that would fit on one side of a 78RPM record, were broken up into 3 and 4 sides for public consumption. With Jacquet on the date were Nat Cole, Les Paul, J.J. Johnson, Jack McVea, Shorty Sherock, Johnny Miller, Red Callender, and Lee Young.
The following month Jacquet participated with fellow tenor man Lester Young in a classic short film feature that was nominated for an Academy Award called Jammin' The Blues. Young and Jacquet were both noted for their pork pie hats as much as for their innovative styles on tenor sax.
It was also while in Los Angeles that Jacquet first guested with the Count Basie orchestra, in September of 1944, for an AFRS Jubilee show broadcast. Transcriptions of these performances, now available on a HEP records CD release, find Jacquet blowing in fine fashion on songs like Rock-A-Bye-Basie alongside, Basie tenor man, Buddy Tate.
In November Illinois was part of a studio band that helped back Lena Horne on four sides cut for RCA Victor. It was one of the few instances of Jacquet providing backing for a vocalist in the studio. Ella Fitzgerald, Cora Lee Day and Johnny Hartman were the only other vocalists to release studio recordings with his backing although Billie Holiday was the featured vocalist on many JATP concerts subsequently released on Clef and later Verve.
Jacquet joined the Count Basie big band in earnest in 1945 just after the end of WWII. He remained with Basie until the fall of 1946. He can be heard on many of the Count�s Columbia releases like Mutton Leg, The King, Stay Cool and others. After a lot of soul searching and a good deal of trepidation he left the Count in August of 1946 to join Granz�s JATP which was by this time touring the country.
Illinois Jacquet is credited with recording more than 300 original compositions. Although he was working for Basie, then Norman Granz's Jazz At The Philhamonic, and moonlighting on other sessions, many of his tunes were conceived during the period of his career between 1945 and 1951.
Jacquet's wildly swinging improvisational forays were clearly pleasing live crowds at Jazz At The Philharmonic shows, many of which were being recorded and released on Granz's newly formed Clef record label. But there was also emerging a sensitive and swinging, softer tone on a number of studio recordings for other labels. On a Capitol all-star type session led by guitarist Al Casey on January 19th, 1945, Jacquet handled his parts in a much more subtle style. This soft and swinging, yet deep and robust, phraseology is also evident on sides cut the same day under drummer Sid Catlett�s name.
These more mellow performances set the stage for later 1940s recordings with self-led groups that cut numerous sides for a variety of labels including Apollo, Aladdin, Coral, Decca, and RCA. Robbin�s Nest and Black Velvet were both co-written and recorded by Jacquet in the late 1940s. Both songs became big hits, the former achieving jazz standard status.
Jacquet's success as a leader prompted him to ask Norman Granz for more money in 1948. However the amount Jacquet was asking was more than Granz could afford to pay. Jacquet and Granz parted ways (for the moment) with Illinois concentrating on his own band, which he led with various personnel changes until 1950.
In 1951 Jacquet signed a recording contract with Norman Granz and his Clef record label. This led to once again touring with Granz's Jazz At The Philharmonic. Under the Clef and later Verve banners Jacquet cut some superb studio sides with numerous small groups over the next seven-year period. Some of the greatest jazz stars of all time were recorded with Jacquet like old acquaintances Sweets Edison and Count Basie, Hank Jones and Art Blakey, Roy Eldridge and Ray Brown, Wild Bill Davis, Kenny Burrell, Ben Webster and others.
From 1958 through the 1960s Illinois recorded for a number of labels including Epic, Cadet, Argo, and Prestige.
In the 1970s he can be heard on several European labels including Black Lion, Black And Blue and others.
In 1983 Jacquet was invited to speak at Harvard University. The success of his lecture earned him a return for two semesters as an artist-in-residence. He was the first jazz player ever to serve a long-term residency at the Ivy League school. This inspired him to form another big band, which eventually toured Europe, drawing record crowds.
Jacquet played C-Jam Blues with former President Bill Clinton, an amateur saxophonist, on the White House lawn during Clinton's inaugural ball in January 1993. He also performed for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
In 1998 Jacquet recorded with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra playing an incredible passage at 76 years of age on Ben Webster�s former signature song with the Ellington band called Cottontail. In so doing he gave away another one of his early influences, the tenor man known by Ellington�s people as Frog.
His last engagement was July 16, 2004 when he led his band at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Illinois Jacquet's flashy playing, which worked countless crowds into a frenzy throughout his career, will likely be what the tenor great is remembered by most. However true jazz and swing fans will also take into account his numerous sides done at slower tempi that communicate the sensitive side of the last of the big toned swing tenor saxophonists.
Illinois Jacquet died Thursday July 22, 2004 of a heart attack. Despite his fame and wealth he lived in a modest home in New York City�s borough of Queens. He was 81.

Google Maps: Illinois Jacquet

2008-02-29T08:49:00.000-08:00

from My Queen's Jazz Trail