Black History 3/11/2010

NAME: Sissieretta Jones

DATE OF BIRTH: January 5, 1869

PLACE OF BIRTH: Portsmouth, Virginia

FAMILY BACKGROUND: Born Matilda Sissieretta Joyner, she was the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, and Henrietta Beale Joyner, from whom she inherited her soprano voice. She was nicknamed by family and friends as Sissy or Tilly.

EDUCATION: In 1876, when she was seven years old, Sissieretta’s family moved to Providence for better educational and economic opportunities. There, she attended Meeting Street and Thayer Schools. In 1883, at 14 years of age, she married David Richard Jones, a newsdealer and hotel bellman, and began her formal music training at the Providence Academy of Music, studying with Ada Baroness Lacombe. At age 18, she attended the New England Conservatory in Boston, studying with Flora Batson, the leading singer of the Bergen Star Company.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Sissieretta began singing for the public at a very early age; at school functions, festivals and at her father’s Pond Street Church. It wasn’t long before she was drawing public acclaim. In 1887, she sang to 5,000 people at Boston’s Music Hall in a benefit for the Parnell Defence Fund. This performance attracted the attention of concert managers Abbey, Schoffel and Grau.

They scheduled Sissieretta at the Wallack Theater in New York where she made her successful debut on June 15, 1888. The manager of famed Italian operatic star Adelina Patti attended this show and recommended that she tour the West Indies with the Tennessee Jubilee Singers of Fisk University. This six-month tour began her professional concert career and, during it, she was presented with the first of many medals she was often photographed wearing.

James Van der Zee (photographer) -

His work:

Sarah Forbes Bonetta was a West African Egbado tribal princess who was orphaned in inter-tribal warfare at the age of eight. Intended to be a human sacrifice, she was rescued by Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy, who convinced King Ghezo of Dahomey to give her to Queen Victoria, "She would be a present from the King of the blacks to the Queen of the Whites," Forbes wrote later. He named her Sara Forbes Bonetta.

Victoria was impressed by the girl's exceptional intelligence, and had Sara raised as her goddaughter in the British middle class. In 1851 she gained a long lasting cough that was caused by the climate transferring from Africa to Great Britain. She was sent to school in Africa and later then returned to England when she became 20. Sara was sanctioned by Victoria to marry James Davies at Nicholas Church in Brighton in August, 1862. Davies was a West African businessman, and the couple moved there after their wedding. Sarah was baptised at a church called Badagry.

She died at the age of 37 in 1880 of tuberculosis. James Davies was concerned about Sara because she had a bad cough that would not go away.

Harlem Hellfighters 27 December 1917 The 369th Infantry Regiment (or "Harlem Hellfighters") was the first all-black U.S. combat unit to be shipped overseas during WWI. Unfortunately, this distinction was the result of a violent racial incident in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The unit’s unquenchable desire to win justic...e and avenge a physical attack on their drum major, Noble Sissle, ultimately forced the War Department to send them to Europe.

Because there was no official combat role at this time for America’s black soldiers, General John J. Pershing responded to France’s request for troops by assigning the 369th (and the 93rd Division’s other regiments) to the French army. The Germans dubbed the unit the "Hellfighters," because in 191 days of duty at the front they never had any men captured nor ground taken. Almost one-third of the unit died in combat. The French government awarded the entire regiment the Croix de Guerre.

William Peyton Hubbard, (1842 - 1935), was first person of African descent, on Toronto’s City Council. He was first elected in 1894 and served on it for 15 years. Hubbard was born in Toronto to former American slaves, who had escaped via the Underground Railroad. A baker by trade, he was well-kno...wn for his strong political opinions, his sharp wit, his convincing oratory and for his strong sense of public duty. His eloquence was such that his fellow politicians dubbed him "Old Cicero."

William Wells Brown (ca. 1814-1884) was born a slave in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of Elizabeth, a slave woman, and a white relative of his owner. He grew up near St. Louis, Mo. While still a boy William was hired out to the captain of a St. Louis steamboat in the booming Mississippi River trade.

After a year he was ...put to work in the printing office of Elijah P. Lovejoy, a well-known abolitionist. While working again on a steamboat, Brown escaped slavery to freedom in January 1834. He adopted the name of a Quaker, Wells Brown, who aided him when he was a runaway. He spent next two years working on a Lake Erie steamboat and running fugitive slaves into Canada.

In the summer 1834, he met and married Elizabeth Spooner, a free black woman; they had three daughters, one of whom died shortly after birth. In 1836 Brown moved to Buffalo (see Brown's autobiography of Buffalo years), where he began his career in the abolitionist movement by regularly attending meetings of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, by boarding antislavery lecturers at his home, speaking at local abolitionist gatherings, and by traveling to Cuba and Haiti to investigate emigration possibilities.

Buffalo Soldier Memorial, Leavenworth, Kansas.
Despite a record of courage, valor, patriotism and bravery, African Americans have never been fully recognized or acknowledged for their honorable and selfless military service. Buffalo Soldier Memorials, like this marker and the memorial in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, are only recent efforts to do so.

Mahalia Jackson

DATE OF BIRTH: October 26, 1911

PLACE OF BIRTH: New Orleans, Louisiana
DATE OF DEATH: January 27, 1972
PLACE OF DEATH: Chicago, Illinois

FAMILY BACKGROUND: Mahalia was the third child to John A. Jackson, a barber and preacher, and Charity Clark, who died at the age of 25 when Mahalia was four year...s old.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Mahalia Jackson is viewed by many as the pinnacle of gospel music. Her singing began at the age of four in her church, the Plymouth Rock Baptist Church in New Orleans. Her early style blended the freedom and power of gospel with the stricter style of the Baptist Church. As a teenager, through her cousin's aid, she was influenced by such famous singers as Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Enrico Caruso and Ma Rainey, and her own style began to emerge into a more soulful expression.

In 1927, at the age of 16, she moved to Chicago and found work as a domestic. But soon after, she found plenty of work as a soloist at churches and funerals after joining the Greater Salem Baptist Church choir. Her unique contralto voice caught the attention of many small churches from coast to coast. Larger, more formal churches frowned upon her energetic renditions of songs.
Throughout the 1950s, Mahalia's voice was heard on radio, television and concert halls around the world. Her shows were packed in Europe, and her audience very enthusiastic at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, at a special all-gospel program she requested. She sang for President Dwight Eisenhower and at John F. Kennedy's inaugural ball in 1960.

From the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott until her death, Mahalia was very prominent in the Civil Rights Movement. Very close with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she often performed at his rallies--even singing an old slave spiritual before his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. She also sang at his funeral five years later.

Dorothy Irene Height (born: March 24, 1912) is an African American administrator, educator, social activist, and a 2004 recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal.
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Biography
Height was born in Richmond, Virginia. At an early age, she moved with her family to Rankin, Pennsylvania. While in high school, Height was awarded... a scholarship to Barnard College for her oratory skills; however, upon arrival, she was denied entrance. At the time, Barnard admitted only two African Americans per academic year and Height had arrived after the other two had been admitted. After this disappointment, she subsequently pursued studies at New York University, where she earned her Master's Degree in psychology.

Years later, at its 1980 commencement ceremonies, the Barnard College awarded Height its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. According to an article written in the New York Amsterdam News by author Jamal E. Watson, Barnard College also officially apologized to Height for their refusal to admit her into the college.
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Career
Height started working as a caseworker with the New York City Welfare Department and, at the age of twenty-five, she began a career as a civil rights activist when she joined the National Council of Negro Women. She fought for equal rights for both African Americans and women, and in 1944 she joined the national staff of the YWCA. She also served as National President of Delta Sigma Theta, Sorority Incorporated from 1946-1957 She remains active with Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. While there she developed leadership training programs and interracial and ecumenical education programs

In 1957, Height was named president of the National Council of Negro Women, a position she held until 1997. During the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

A. Philip Randolph 1889 - 1979

He was called the most dangerous black in America.
He led 250,000 people in the historic 1963 March on Washington.
He spoke for all the dispossessed: Blacks, poor Whites, Puerto Ricans, Indians and Mexican Americans.
He attained for Black workers their rightful at in the house of Labor.
He won the fight to ban discrimination in the armed forces.
He organized the 1957-prayer pilgrimage for the civil rights bill.
He is A. Philip Randolph, president of the institute bearing his name and President Emeritus of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union he built.


The words and deeds of A. Philip Randolph show us the unyielding strength of his life-long struggle for full human rights for the Blacks and all the disinherited of the nation. In his cry for freedom and justice, Mr. Randolph is echoing the fury of all the enslaved. They are fighting for their freedom, with the kind of desperate strength that only deep wounds can call forth. With none of his words, however, does Mr. Randolph turn aside the help of others. But these comrades-in-arms must share the vision that has led Mr. Randolph through his long years of search for equal human rights. From the day of his arrival in Harlem in 1911, Mr. Randolph had been in the thick of the struggle for freedom for Black Americans.

Nice!
Great thread

The Remarkable Life of A Superman Revisited

Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George, was born on Christmas day, 1745, on the French-Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe. His mother was a young Senegalese slave of remarkable beauty. Joseph's father, George de Bologne Saint-George, was a wealthy sugar plantation owner and a ...former "Gentleman in the King's Chamber" in the court of Louis XVI, King of France.

Musically Saint-George may very well have been the "King of Pop" of his age; militarily he helped prevent what could have been the early collapse of the French Revolution. The vicissitudes of his journey are dramatic: from a young outsider in Paris to the dizzying heights of superstardom in pre-Revolutionary France, to an utterly tragic end. In his lifetime Saint George was an elite musketeer of the King's Horse Guard; a master-swordsman and Europe's fencing champion; a composer, violin impresario, and opera director that influenced Mozart; Queen Marie-Antoinette's music teacher and confidant; a playboy whose inner circle included the author of Valmont; and a military hero who championed the French Revolution. That Saint-George was all of these in an age when slavery was endemic and white superiority was dogma, is beyond extraordinary and the height of irony.

Benjamin E. Mays
Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays was a giant in the Christian ministry and American education. He is remembered for his outstanding leadership and service as a teacher, preacher, mentor, scholar, author and activist in the civil rights movement.

Born August 1, 1894 near Epworth, South Carolina, he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Bates College in Maine. He served as pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church from 1921-1923 in Atlanta, Georgia. Recruited by Morehouse President John Hope, Mays would join the faculty as a mathematics teacher and debate coach. He obtained a master's degree in 1925 and in 1935 a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. In 1934, he was appointed dean of the School of Religion at Howard University and served until 1940.

He became president of Morehouse College in 1940 and launched a 27-year tenure that shepherded the institution into international prominence. He upgraded the faculty, secured a Phi Beta Kappa chapter and sustained enrollment during wartime America. His most noted forum was Tuesday morning Chapel in historic Sale Hall, where he challenged and inspired the students to excellence in scholarship and in life itself. One of Morehouse's most distinguished graduates, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. '48, remembers Dr. Mays as his "spiritual mentor" and "intellectual father."