Black History Appreciation!!!

[Deadpool1986]

Fact #56

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Before he became an NBA legend, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

Fact #57
Chaka Kahn, dubbed the "Queen of Funk Soul," is also well known for singing the theme song to the public television's popular educational program Reading Rainbow.

Fact #58

Alicia Keys was accepted into Columbia University on a full scholarship, but decided to pursue a full-time music career instead.

Fact #59

In her early life, Coretta Scott King was as well known for her singing and violin playing as she was for her civil rights activism. The young soprano won a fellowship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, the city where she met future husband Martin Luther King Jr.

Fact #60

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Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed by a woman in 1958 while attending a book signing at Blumstein's department store in Harlem, New York. The following year, King and his wife visited India to meet Mahatma Gandhi, whose philosophies of nonviolence greatly influenced King's work.

 

[Deadpool1986]

The Little Known Black History Fact: Martin and Coretta

Martin L. King and Coretta Scott met by phone in 1952 at the urging of a friend, Ms. Mary Powell. Coretta Scott from Heiberger, Alabama was studying music at the New England Conservatory. She had been raised in a household that stressed education; her mother even bought a school bus to make sure Coretta and the other black kids got to school everyday. Martin was a grad student and recent pledge of Alphi Phi Alpha Fraternity at Boston University.

The couple bonded over talks of racial injustice, which impressed the future civil rights leader. While she admits to not feeling ready to be married when they met, and Martin was, the couple was betrothed by Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. in the Scott’s backyard, June 18, 1953. By no means was it a small wedding. According to the New York Times, there were 350 guests at the wedding of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King.

Alabama was still very segregated in 1953 and denied the newlyweds a room in the local hotels of Marion. With the help of friends, Mr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. spent their wedding night in the back room of a funeral parlor. Five years later they took a second honeymoon in Mexico. In I May Not Get There With You, by Michael Dyson, Coretta said ”When we get in an argument, usually he just stops talking.”

The Kings would have four children: Yolanda Denise born in 1955, Martin Luther III in 1957, Dexter Scott in 1961, and Bernice Albertine in 1963.

Coretta Scott King was a woman who had known the ways of a strong female backbone in the home. Her mother, Bernice McMurry Scott, was not only the school bus driver, but she served in the community with the Eastern Star Organization, and helped her husband with his business. Coretta served the local chapter of the NAACP in college along with her college’s Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. When her husband was in the height of the civil rights movement, Coretta insisted on helping more out in the field although her husband wanted her in the home with the children.

After his passing in 1968, widow King took over as a leader of the movement to continue her husband’s legacy and stand up for her own beliefs. She helped with the Poor People’s Campaign that same year and brought the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. It was also the work of Mrs. King to see that her husband received one of the highest honors in America: a national holiday.

 

[Deadpool1986]

First Lieutenant Vernon J. Baker

First Lt. Vernon J. Baker was an Army infantryman who, more than 50 years after the end of World War II, became the only surviving African American to receive the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions during the war. In 1993, the Army commissioned a study led by researchers from Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., to determine whether there had been a racial disparity in how the Medal of Honor was awarded during World War II. Of the more than 400 Medals of Honor awarded, not one of the 1.2 million African Americans who served in the war was a recipient. After researchers found the discrepancy, the Army recommended seven African American soldiers for the country’s most prestigious military honor, including First Lt. Vernon J. Baker.

First Lt. Vernon J. Baker was awarded the medal of honor for his actions on April 5th and 6th 1945 near Viareggio, Italy, when he and his platoon killed 26 enemy soldiers and destroyed six machine gun nests, two observer posts and four dugouts. First Lieutenant Vernon Baker, killed nine Germans in a pre-dawn battle at an enemy stronghold. With two-thirds of his company wounded or dead and no reinforcements in sight, Baker's commander ordered a withdrawal. Breaking into tears, Baker protested, "Captain, we can't withdraw. We must stay here and fight it out." Vernon Baker also earned a distinguished service cross, only one of nine African Americans so honored in World War II.



His medal of honor citation read:
For extraordinary heroism in action on 5 and 6 April 1945, near Viareggio, Italy. Then Second Lieutenant Baker demonstrated outstanding courage and leadership in destroying enemy installations, personnel and equipment during his company's attack against a strongly entrenched enemy in mountainous terrain. When his company was stopped by the concentration of fire from several machine gun emplacements, he crawled to one position and destroyed it, killing three Germans. Continuing forward, he attacked and enemy observation post and killed two occupants. With the aid of one of his men, Lieutenant Baker attacked two more machine gun nests, killing or wounding the four enemy soldiers occupying these positions. He then covered the evacuation of the wounded personnel of his company by occupying an exposed position and drawing the enemy's fire. On the following night Lieutenant Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy mine fields and heavy fire toward the division objective. Second Lieutenant Baker's fighting spirit and daring leadership were an inspiration to his men and exemplify the highest traditions of the Armed Forces.

Vernon Baker was born on December 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the youngest of three children. After his parents died in a car accident when he was four, he and his two sisters were raised by their grandparents. His grandfather Joseph S. Baker, a railroad worker in Cheyenne, taught him to hunt in order to feed the family and became "the most influential figure in Vernon's life."

Vernon Baker graduated from high school in his grandfather's hometown of Clarinda, Iowa. He then worked as a railroad porter, a job he despised, until his grandfather's death from cancer in 1939. A series of menial jobs followed until his enlistment in the U.S. Army in mid-1941. At his first attempt to enlist, in April 1941,Vernon Baker was turned away, the recruiter stating "We don't have any quotas for you people." He tried again weeks later with a different recruiter and was accepted; he requested to become a quartermaster but was instead assigned to the infantry.

Baker entered the Army on June 26, 1941, six months prior to the U.S. entry into World War II. He went through training at Camp Wolters, Texas, and after completing Officer Candidate School was commissioned as a second lieutenant on January 11, 1943.

In June 1944, Baker was sent to Italy with the all-black 92nd Infantry Division. He was wounded in the arm in October of that year, hospitalized near Pisa, and in December rejoined his unit in reserve along the Gothic Line. In early spring, 1945, his unit was pulled from the reserves and placed in active combat. On the morning of April 5, he participated in an attack on the German stronghold of Castle Aghinolfi. During the assault, Baker led his heavy weapons platoon through German army defenses to within sight of the castle, personally destroying three machine gun nests, two observation posts, two bunkers, and a network of German telephone lines along the way. It was for these actions that he was later awarded the Medal of Honor.

After the end of the war, Baker remained in Europe with the Allied occupation forces until 1947. He later joined the Army Airborne forces and left the military in 1968 as a first lieutenant.

Eventually Baker retired to northern Idaho. Then one day he received a call telling him he was to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor. At first he was astonished. Then he was angry. When asked how he felt about getting the honor fifty years late, Baker responded that he was angry because it was something that he felt should have been done a long time ago. "If I was worthy of receiving the Medal of Honor in 1945, I should have received it then. I like to be right and I know in my heart that we were right. And we were a heck of a lot better than the people that ran us down thought we were. But receiving the honor now means that every black solider that fought in the Second World War has been vindicated, every one".

 

[Deadpool1986]

February 15 - Today in 1848, Sarah Roberts barred from white school in Boston. Her father, Benjamin Roberts, filed the first school integration suit on her behalf. Leon Spinks defeated Muhammad Ali for heavyweight boxing championship. Ali regained the title on September 15 and became the person to win the title three times in 1978.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Fact #61
Lewis Howard Latimer drafted patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone while working at a patent law firm.

Fact #62
In 1967, chemist and scholar Robert H. Lawrence Jr. became the first black man to be trained as an astronaut. Sadly, Lawrence died in a jet crash during flight training and never made it into space.

Fact #63
Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis helped to end segregation in the U.S. armed forces while serving in the Army during World War II.

Fact #65
Nat "Deadwood dikk" Love, a renowned and skilled cowboy, wrote his autobiographical work The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as Deadwood dikk, published in 1907.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Zora Neale Hurston
Author of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, probably in 1891. She usually gave 1901 as her birth year, but also gave 1898 and 1903. Census records suggest 1891 is the more accurate date.
Zora Neale Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, while she was very young. She grew up in Eatonville, in the first incorporated all-black town in the United States. Her mother was Lucy Ann Potts Hurston, who had taught school before marrying, and after marriage, had eight children with her husband, the Reverend John Hurston, a Baptist minister, who also served three times as mayor of Eatonville. Lucy Hurston died with Zora was about thirteen (again, her varied birth dates make this somewhat uncertain). Her father remarried, and the siblings were separated, moving in with different relatives.

Hurston went to Baltimore, Maryland, to attend Morgan Academy (now a university). After graduation she attended Howard University while working as a manicurist, and she also began to write, publishing a story in the magazine of the school's literary society. In 1925 she went to New York City, drawn by the circle of creative black artists (now known as the Harlem Renaissance), and she began writing fiction.

Annie Nathan Meyer, founder of Barnard College, found a scholarship for Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston began her study of anthropology at Barnard under Franz Boaz, studying also with Ruth Benedict and Gladys Reichard. With the help of Boaz and Elsie Clews Parsons, Hurston was able to win a six-month grant she used to collect African American folklore.

While studying at Barnard College, Hurston also worked as a secretary (an amanuensis) for Fannie Hurst, a novelist. (Hurst, a Jewish woman, later -- in 1933 -- wrote Imitation of Life, about a black woman passing as white. Claudette Colbert starred in the 1934 film version of the story. "Passing" was a theme of many of the Harlem Renaissance women writers.)

After college, when Hurston began working as an ethnologist, she combined fiction and her knowledge of culture. Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason financially supported Hurston's ethnology work on the condition that Hurston not publish anything. It was only after Hurston cut herself off from Mrs. Mason's financial patronage that she began publishing her poetry and fiction.

Zora Neale Hurston's best-known work was published in 1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel which was controversial because it didn't fit easily into stereotypes of black stories. She was criticized within the black community for taking funds from whites to support her writing; she wrote about themes "too black" to appeal to many whites.

Hurston's popularity waned. Her last book was published in 1948. She worked for a time on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, she wrote for Warner Brothers motion pictures, and for some time worked on staff at the Library of Congress.

Eventually, Hurston went back to Florida. She never married and had no childen. In 1960 she died there in poverty, her work nearly forgotten and thus lost to most readers.

In the 1970s, during the "second wave" of feminism, Alice Walker helped revive interest in Zora Neale Hurston's writings, bringing them back to public attention. Today Hurston's novels and poetry are studied in literature classes and in women's studies and black studies courses. They have become again popular with the general reading public.

 

[Deadpool1986]

February 16 - Joe Frazier knocked out Jimmy Ellis in the second round of their New York fight and became the world heavyweight boxing champion in 1970.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Fact #66
African-American fashion designer Ann Lowe designed the wedding dress of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the bride of future President John F. Kennedy.

Fact #67
Jazz pianist and composer Alice McLeod married pioneering saxophonist John Coltrane in 1965. She played with his band and appeared on his later recordings.

Fact #68

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Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said that he was punished for misbehavior in school by being forced to recite the Constitution, ultimately memorizing it.

Fact #69
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was a classmate of jazz vocalist Cab Calloway, Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes and future Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah during their studies at Lincoln University.

 

[Deadpool1986]

February 17 - James Nathaniel Brown, 63, Pro Football Hall of Fame Fullback, Born February 17, 1936 in St. Simons Island, GA, Michael Jeffrey Jordon, Basketball player, former minor league baseball player, Born New York, New York, February 17, 1963.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Fact #70

Buffalo Soldiers— a name given by Native-American plainsmen—were the all-black regiments created in the U.S. Army beginning in 1866. These soldiers received second-class treatment and were often given the worst military assignments, but had a lowest desertion rate than their white counterparts. More than 20 Buffalo Soldiers received the Medal of Honor for their service. The oldest living Buffalo Soldier, Sergeant Mark Matthews, died at the age of 111 in 2005, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Fact #71
The Loew's Grand Theatre on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia, was selected to air the premiere of the film Gone with the Wind in 1939. All of the film's black actors, including future Academy Award winner Hattie McDaniel, were barred from attending.

Fact #72
George Monroe and William Robinson are thought to be two of the first African Americans to work as Pony Express riders.

Fact #73
Pony Express rider George Monroe was also a highly skilled stagecoach driver for U.S. presidents Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield and Rutherford B. Hayes. Monroe, who was known as "Knight of the Sierras," frequently navigated passengers through the curving Wanona Trail in the Yosemite Valley. As a result, Monroe Meadows in Yosemite National Park is named after him.

Fact #74
Garrett Morgan, inventor of the three-way traffic signal, also became the first African American to own a car in Cleveland, Ohio.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Leroy Homer, Co pilot on Flight 93, along with Captain Jason M. Dahl, subdued 911 terrorist and prevented the plane in which they flying from reaching and crashing into U S Capitol in Washington D.C.

On September 11, 2001, Homer was flying with Captain Jason M. Dahl on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco. The plane was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists as part of the September 11 attacks. While struggling for control of the plane, Dahl and Homer managed to transmit to the ground twice, screaming "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Get out of here!". After learning of the earlier crashes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, some of the crew and passengers tried to foil the hijacking and reclaim the aircraft. During this struggle, it crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Mae Jemison

Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September hey 12, 1992. After her medical education and a brief general practice, Jemison served in the Peace Corps from 1985 to 1987, when she was selected by NASA to join the astronaut corps. She resigned from NASA in 1993 to form a company researching the application of technology to daily life. She has appeared on television several times, including as an actress in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She is a dancer, and holds nine honorary doctorates in science, engineering, letters, and the humanities.

After the flight of Sally Ride in 1983, Jemison felt the astronaut program had opened up, so she applied.[2] Jemison's inspiration for joining NASA was African-American actress Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek.[6] Jemison was turned down on her first application to NASA, but in 1987 Jemison was accepted on her second application.[15] "I got a call saying 'Are you still interested?' and I said 'Yeah'," says Jemison.[17]



Jemison at the Kennedy Space Center in January 1992.
Her work with NASA before her shuttle launch included launch support activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and verification of Shuttle computer software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL).[18][19][20] "I did things like help to support the launch of vehicles at Kennedy Space Center," said Jemison.[17] "I was in the first class of astronauts selected after the Challenger accident back in 1986, ... actually worked the launch of the first flight after the Challenger accident.[17]

Jemison flew her only space mission from September 12 to 20, 1992 as a Mission Specialist on STS-47. "The first thing I saw from space was Chicago, my hometown," said Jemison. "I was working on the middeck where there aren't many windows, and as we passed over Chicago, the commander called me up to the flight deck. It was such a significant moment because since I was a little girl I had always assumed I would go into space," Jemison added.[12]

Because of her love of dance and as a salute to creativity,[2] Jemison took a poster from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company along with her on the flight.[21] "Many people do not see a connection between science and dance," says Jemison.[10] "but I consider them both to be expressions of the boundless creativity that people have to share with one another."[10] Jemison also took several small art objects from West African countries to symbolize that space belongs to all nations.[2] Also on this flight, according to Bessie Coleman biographer Doris L. Rich, Jemison also took into orbit a photo of Coleman—Coleman was the very first Afro-American woman to ever fly an airplane. (Coleman died after falling from her Curtiss Biplane in 1926.)

STS-47 was a cooperative mission between the United States and Japan that included 44 Japanese and United States life science and materials processing experiments. Jemison logged 190 hours, 30 minutes, 23 seconds in space.[15]

 

[Deadpool1986]

Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman was the first black woman to earn a pilot's license. Because flying schools in the United States denied her entry, she taught herself French and moved to France, earning her license from France's well-known Caudron Brother's School of Aviation in just seven months. Coleman specialized in stunt flying and parachuting, earning a living barnstorming and performing aerial tricks. She remains a pioneer of women in the field of aviation.
Early Life
Born on January 26, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, Bessie Coleman was one of 13 children to Susan and George Coleman, who both worked as sharcroppers.

At 12 years old, Coleman began attending the Missionary Baptist Church in Texas and, after graduating, embarked on a journey to Oklahoma to attend the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University (Langston University), where she completed only one term due to financial constraints.

In 1915, at 23 years old, Coleman moved to Chicago, where she lived with her brothers and worked as a manicurist. Not long after her move to Chicago, she began listening to and reading stories of World War I pilots, which sparked her interest in aviation.

Breaking Barriers
In 1922, a time of both gender and racial discrimination, Coleman broke barriers and became the world's first black woman to earn a pilot's license. Because flying schools in the United States denied her entry, she took it upon herself to learn French and move to France to achieve her goal. After only seven months, Coleman earned her license from France's well known Caudron Brother's School of Aviation.

Though she wanted to start a flying school for African Americans when she returned to the U.S., Coleman specialized in stunt flying and parachuting, and earned a living barnstorming and performing aerial tricks. In 1922, hers was the first public flight by an African- American woman in America.

Death
On April 30, 1926 Coleman was in Jacksonville. She had recently purchased a Curtiss JN-4 (Jenny) in Dallas. Her mechanic and publicity agent, William Wills, flew the plane from Dallas in preparation for an airshow but had to make three forced landings along the way due to the plane being so poorly maintained and worn.[12] Because of this, Coleman's friends and family did not consider the aircraft safe and implored her not to fly it. Wills was flying the plane with Coleman in the other seat. Coleman did not put on her seatbelt because she was planning a parachute jump for the next day and wanted to look over the cockpit sill to examine the terrain. About ten minutes into the flight, the plane unexpectedly dived, then spun around. Coleman was thrown from the plane at 2,000 ft (610 m) and died instantly when she hit the ground. William Wills was unable to gain control of the plane and it plummeted to the ground. Wills died upon impact and the plane burst into flames. Although the wreckage of the plane was badly burned, it was later discovered that a wrench used to service the engine had slid into the gearbox and jammed it.[7][13] She was 34 years old.

Honors
A public library in Chicago is named in Coleman's honor, as is a road at O'Hare International Airport and at Frankfurt International Airport.[14]

Bessie Coleman Boulevard in Waxahachie, Texas, (where she lived as a child) is named in her honor.

In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 32 cent stamp honoring Coleman.[15]

A bronze plaque with Coleman's likeness was installed on the front doors of Paxon School for Advanced Studies in 2012. The school is located on the site of the Jacksonville airfield where Coleman's fatal flight took off.

 

[Deadpool1986]

February 18 - Today in 1913, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority was incorporated at Howard University.

 

[Deadpool1986]

Fact #75
Jockey Isaac Burns Murphy was the first to win three Kentucky Derbies and the only racer to win the Kentucky Derby, the Kentucky Oaks and the Clark Handicap within the same year. He was inducted into the National Museum of Racing's Hall of Fame in 1956.

Fact #76

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For a time during his youth, future U.S. President Barack Obama used the moniker "Barry."

Fact #77
Barack Obama has won two Grammy Awards. He was first honored in 2005 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams from My Father (best spoken word album), and received his second Grammy (in the same category) in 2007 for his political work ,The Audacity of Hope.

Fact #78
In 1881, Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles founded what would become the first college for black women in the United States. The school was named Spelman College after Laura Spelman Rockefeller and her parents, who were abolitionists. Laura was also the wife of John D. Rockefeller, who made a significant donation to the school.

Fact #79
Legendary baseball player Satchel Paige would travel as many as 30,000 miles a year to pitch as a free agent, to locales that included Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In 1971, Paige also became the first African-American pitcher to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Fact #80
Bill Pickett, a renowned rodeo performer, was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1971, the first African American to receive the honor. He was also recognized by the U.S. Postal service as one of the 20 "Legends of the West" in a series of stamps.