Official Black History Month Thread (2015)

[Deadpool1986]

William T. Shorey

William T. Shorey,a whaling captain known as the Black Ahab, after Moby dikk’s protagonist, was born in Barbados in 1859, the eldest of eight children of a Scottish sugar planter named Shorey and a woman of African descent, Rosa Frazier.

Although he was born free 25 years after slavery was abolished in the British West Indies, Shorey’s prospects as a man of color in Barbados were limited. As a teenager, he apprenticed as a plumber on the island before finding work as a cabin boy on a ship headed to Boston. The captain of the vessel quickly took to the eager, quick-witted and adventurous lad and began to teach him navigation.

Arriving in New England in the 1870s, Shorey, like many African Americans before him, was drawn to the whaling industry. To be sure, few had prospered like maritime trading titan Paul Cuffee or achieved the fame of Frederick Douglass, who worked as a caulker on whaling vessels when he first arrived in New Bedford, Mass., in 1838.

Unlike on other vessels, an ambitious young man, even an ambitious young man of color, could still expect to rise through the ranks on a whaler—that is, if he survived the whaling fleet’s typically arduous and highly dangerous journeys into the Arctic. Shorey very nearly did not. He nearly died on one of his first hunts when a sperm whale he was pursuing attacked his boat. Shorey was saved when his crewmates succeeded in firing a bomb into the whale.

Shorey rose quickly through the ranks. By 1880, at age 21, he was serving as third mate on the Emma F. Herriman, a large Boston whaler that took him around the globe over the next three years. The Herriman crossed the north and south Atlantic oceans, stopped on the west coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa and sailed into the Indian Ocean. Another lengthy journey brought the vessel to Australia, where it passed through the Tasman Sea, traversed the wide southern Pacific, rounded Cape Horn and made calls at several South American ports, including Panama, before ending at San Francisco in late 1883.

Shorey, by this time, was the Herriman’s first officer. His promotion was due largely to his skill as a sailor, but he also benefited from whaling’s changing demographics in the 1880s. As whites left the whaling industry in search of better pay and conditions, they were replaced by people of color from the Caribbean, Cape Verde and even the South Pacific. During the “nadir” of American race relations, then, as blacks in the South and East Asians in the West endured segregation and racial violence, a life at sea offered the possibility of advancement.

Moreover, Shorey arrived in San Francisco just as the temperate waters of the Pacific Northwest were replacing colder New England as the center of the American whaling industry. In 1886, still in his mid 20s, he was promoted to full command of the Herriman, becoming the only black captain of a whaling vessel in the Pacific fleet. The position must have been daunting. As one whaling historian has noted, a whaling master had to act as “physician, surgeon, lawyer, diplomat, financial entrepreneur, taskmaster, judge and peacemaker” in charge of a racially and ethnically diverse crew.

Around this time, Shorey married Julia Shelton, the daughter of one of California’s leading black families. For their honeymoon, the couple traveled to Hawaii on the Herriman. Life on a whaler remained precarious, however, and in 1891 one of his vessels sank in an ice pack near the Bering Sea. Fortunately, Shorey was able to rescue all of his crew. Between 1892 and 1902, Shorey commanded the whaler Andrew Hicks on eight lucrative voyages. On a typical journey he returned from the Sea of Japan with as much as 5,000 pounds of whalebone and nearly 600 barrels of whale and sperm oil.

In one of his final tours to the Sea of Okhotsk between Siberia and Japan, with his wife and 3-year-old daughter, Victoria, on board, Shorey steered his vessel through two major typhoons lasting several days. His crew later credited the “coolness and clever seamanship” of their commander for preventing a near-certain shipwreck on an ice drift off the coast of Siberia. Delilah Beasley, a pioneering black journalist in San Francisco and a friend of Shorey, reported Shorey’s recollections:
“On a wild, stormy night we were driven into an ice-drift at Shanter Bay, and when daylight came we found ourselves caught by ice on every side. ... There was nothing in the world we could do but wait for the ice-fields to break up, and for eight days we lay wedged in the drift while the tides carried us back and forth, ever threatening to carry us on rocks or dash us on the shore.” Finally the ice was carried out to the open sea and the drift released the whaler.

Shorey retired in 1908, just as the era of the whaling bark came to an end, replaced by larger, steam-powered vessels; he would be the first and last black captain of a Pacific whaler. Shorey died at his home in Oakland, Calif., in 1919, a victim of that year’s great influenza epidemic.
http://www.theroot.com/articles/his...whaling_captain_escaped_prejudice_at_sea.html

 

[Mr 500 000 000 YearZ]

 

[↓R↑LYB]

O. W. Gurley: Founder of Black Wall Street

Prior to the turn of the century O. W. Gurley, a wealthy African American land-owner from Arkansas, traversed the United States to participate in the Oklahoma Land run of 1889. The young entrepreneur had just resigned from a presidential appointment under president Grover Cleveland in order to strike out on his own."[9]

In 1906, Gurley moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where he purchased 40 acres of land which was "only to be sold to colored" [9]. Black ownership was unheard of at that time.

Among Gurley's first businesses was a rooming house which was located on a dusty trail near the railroad tracks. This road was given the name Greenwood Avenue, named for a city in Mississippi. The area became very popular among African American migrants fleeing the oppression in Mississippi. They would find refuge in Gurley's building, as the racial persecution from the south was non-existent on Greenwood Avenue.

In addition to his rooming house, Gurley built three two-story buildings and five residences and bought an 80-acre (320,000 m2) farm in Rogers County. Gurley also founded what is today Vernon AME Church.[2]

This implementation of "colored" segregation set the Greenwood boundaries of separateness that exist to this day: Pine Street to the North, Archer Street and the Frisco tracks to the South, Cincinnati Street on the West, and Lansing Street on the East. The segregation is pronounced in subtle landmarks. South of Archer, Greenwood Avenue does not exist in white neighborhoods [2].

Another African American entreprenuer, J. B.Stradford, arrived in Tulsa in 1899. He believed that black people had a better chance of economic progress if they if they pooled their resources, worked together and supported each other's businesses. He bought large tracts of real estate in the northeastern part of Tulsa, which he had subdivided and sold exclusively to other African Americans. Gurley and a number of other blacks soon followed suit. Stradford later built the Stradford Hotel on Greenwood, where blacks could enjoy the amenities of the downtown hotels who served only whites. It was said to be the largest black-owned hotel in the United States.[2]

Gurley's prominence and wealth were short lived. In a matter of moments he lost everything. During the race war The Gurley Hotel at 112 N. Greenwood, the street’s first commercial enterprise, valued at $55,000, was lost, and with it Brunswick Billiard Parlor and Dock Eastmand & Hughes Cafe. Gurley also owned a two-story building at 119 N. Greenwood. It housed Carter’s Barbershop, Hardy Rooms, a pool hall, and cigar store. All were reduced to ruins. By his account and court records, he lost nearly $200,000 in the 1921 race war [2].

Because of his leadership role in creating this self sustaining exclusive black "enclave", it had been falsely rumored that Gurley was lynched by a white mob and buried in an unmarked grave. However, according to the memoirs of Greenwood pioneer B. C. Franklin [10], Gurley exiled himself to California. The founder of the most successful African American community of his time vanished from the history books and drifted into obscurity. He is now being honored in a recently released documentary film, called "Before They Die! The Road to Reparations for the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Survivors" [11].

 

[cylde21]

condoleez rice

huey p newton

 

[↓R↑LYB]

Eatonville, FL - The first all black town in America



The founding of Eatonville, Florida, in 1886 is celebrated on this date. Eatonville is located a few miles north of Orlando, Florida.

Eatonville, the first incorporated black town in America possesses a rich traditional culture and is integrally related to the African-American traditional culture that has endured there through generations. It is one of the more than 100 black towns founded between 1865 and 1900. The town’s population in 2000 was 2,432.

It is the hometown of Zora Neal Thurston, well known Harlem Renaissance writer, and David Deacon Jones, former professional football player. It continues to celebrate its connection with Zora Neal Hurston with a yearly festival.

Artist Jules Andre Smith did a series of paintings depicting life in Eatonville during the 1930s-1940s. Twelve of these works are at the Maitland Art Center in Eatonville.

Eatonville's Logo

 

[Danie84]

Props to all my Real Coli Africans, and Carter G. Woodson

...celebrating Black History Month daily, and not just on the shortest calendar month

BLACKEXCELLENCE

 

[J-Nice]

Marcus Garvey

Born in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) became a leader in the black nationalist movement by applying the economic ideas of Pan-Africanists to the immense resources available in urban centers. After arriving in New York in 1916, he founded the Negro World newspaper, an international shipping company called Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation. During the 1920s, his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was the largest secular organization in African-American history. Indicted for mail fraud by the U.S. Justice Department in 1923, he spent two years in prison before being deported to Jamaica, and later died in London.

Born in Jamaica, Garvey aimed to organize blacks everywhere but achieved his greatest impact in the United States, where he tapped into and enhanced the growing black aspirations for justice, wealth, and a sense of community. During World War I and the 1920s, his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was the largest black secular organization in African-American history. Possibly a million men and women from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa belonged to it.

Garvey came to New York in 1916 and concluded that the growing black communities in northern cities could provide the wealth and unity to end both imperialism in Africa and discrimination in the United States. He combined the economic nationalist ideas of Booker T. Washington and Pan-Africanists with the political possibilities and urban style of men and women living outside of plantation and colonial societies. Garvey’s ideas gestated amid the social upheavals, anticolonial movements, and revolutions of World War I, which demonstrated the power of popular mobilization to change entrenched structures of power.

Garvey’s goals were modern and urban. He sought to end imperialist rule and create modern societies in Africa, not, as his critics charged, to transport blacks ‘back to Africa.’ He knitted black communities on three continents with his newspaper the Negro World and in 1919 formed the Black Star Line, an international shipping company to provide transportation and encourage trade among the black businesses of Africa and the Americas. In the same year, he founded the Negro Factories Corporation to establish such businesses. In 1920 he presided over the first of several international conventions of the UNIA. Garvey sought to channel the new black militancy into one organization that could overcome class and national divisions.

Although local UNIA chapters provided many social and economic benefits for their members, Garvey’s main efforts failed: the Black Star Line suspended operations in 1922 and the other enterprises fared no better. Garvey’s ambition and determination to lead inevitably collided with associates and black leaders in other organizations. His verbal talent and flair for the dramatic attracted thousands, but his faltering projects only augmented ideological and personality conflicts. In the end, he could neither unite blacks nor accumulate enough power to significantly alter the societies the unia functioned in.

Finally, the Justice Department, animated by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and sensing his growing weakness, indicted Garvey for mail fraud. He was convicted in 1923, imprisoned in 1925, and deported to Jamaica in 1927. Unable to resurrect the unia, he moved to London, where he died in 1940.

Garvey’s movement was the first black attempt to join modern urban goals and mass organization. Although most subsequent leaders did not try to create black economic institutions as he had, Garvey had demonstrated to them that the urban masses were a potentially powerful force in the struggle for black freedom.

 

[J-Nice]

Cheikh Anta Diop
Cheikh Anta Diop, a modern champion of African identity, was born in Diourbel, Senegal on December 29, 1923. At the age of twenty-three, he journeyed to Paris, France to continue advanced studies in physics. Within a very short time, however, he was drawn deeper and deeper into studies relating to the African origins of humanity and civilization.

Becoming more and more active in the African student movements then demanding the independence of French colonial possessions, he became convinced that only by reexamining and restoring Africa's distorted, maligned and obscured place in HowComYouCom could the physical and psychological shackles of colonialism be lifted from our Motherland and from African people dispersed globally.

His initial doctoral dissertation submitted at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in 1951, based on the premise that Egypt of the pharaohs was an African civilization--was rejected. Regardless, this dissertation was published by Presence Africaine under the title Nations Negres et Culture in 1955 and won him international acclaim.

Two additional attempts to have his doctorate granted were turned back until 1960 when he entered his defense session with an array of sociologists, anthropologists and historians and successfully carried his argument. After nearly a decade of titanic and herculean effort, Diop had finally won his Docteur es Lettres! In that same year, 1960, were published two of his other works--the Cultural Unity of Black Africa and and Precolonial Black Africa.

During his student days, Cheikh Anta Diop was an avid political activist. From 1950 to 1953 he was the Secretary-General of the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA) and helped establish the first Pan-African Student Congress in Paris in 1951. He also participated in the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956 and the second such Congress held in Rome in 1959.

Upon returning to Senegal in 1960, Dr. Diop continued his research and established a radiocarbon laboratory in Dakar. In 1966, the First World Black Festival of Arts and Culture held in Dakar, Senegal honored Dr. Diop and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois as the scholars who exerted the greatest influence on African thought in twentieth century.

In 1974, a milestone occurred in the English-speaking world when the African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality was finally published. It was also in 1974 that Diop and Theophile Obenga collectively and soundly reaffirmed the African origin of pharaonic Egyptian civilization at a UNESCO sponsored symposium in Cairo, Egypt. In 1981, Diop's last major work, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology was published.

Dr. Diop was the Director of Radiocarbon Laboratory at the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa (IFAN) at the University of Dakar. He sat on numerous international scientific committees and achieved recognition as one of the leading historians, Egyptologists, linguists and anthropologists in the world. He traveled widely, lectured incessantly and was cited and quoted voluminously. He was regarded by many as the modern `pharaoh' of African studies. Cheikh Anta Diop died quietly in sleep in Dakar, Senegal on February 7, 1986.

 

[Deezy314619]

#BlackExcellence checking in

 

[Idaeo]

my distant cousin....met her at a family reunion years ago....

Grace Melzia Bumbry (born January 4, 1937), an American opera singer, is considered one of the leading mezzo-sopranos of her generation, as well as a major soprano for many years. She was a member of a pioneering generation of singers who followed Marian Anderson (including Leontyne Price, Martina Arroyo, Shirley Verrett and Reri Grist) in the world of classical music and paved the way for future African-American opera and classical singers. Bumbry's voice was rich and sizable, possessing a wide range, and was capable of producing a very distinctive plangent tone. In her prime, she also possessed good agility and bel canto technique (see for example her renditions of the 'Veil Song' from Verdi's Don Carlo in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as her Ernani from the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1984). She was particularly noted for her fiery temperament and dramatic intensity on stage. More recently, she has also become known as a recitalist and interpreter of lieder, and as a teacher. From the late 1980s on, she concentrated her career in Europe, rather than in the US. A long-time resident of Switzerland, she now makes her home in Salzburg, Austria.

In the 1970s, Bumbry—having recorded many soprano arias—began taking on more soprano roles. Her first unmistakably soprano role was Salome in 1970 at Covent Garden (both Santuzza and Lady Macbeth, which she had previously sung, can be considered 'transition' roles between mezzo and soprano). In 1971, she debuted as Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera (a performance that also marked James Levine's house debut as conductor). She also took on more unusual roles, such as Janáček's Jenůfa (in Italian) at La Scala in 1974 (with Magda Olivero as the Kostelnička), Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue in Paris in 1975, and Sélika in Meyerbeer's L'Africaine at Covent Garden in 1978 (opposite Plácido Domingo as Vasco da Gama). Because of her full, dramatic soprano sound, she also began assuming such roles as Norma, Medea, Abigaille and Gioconda—roles not coincidentally associated with Maria Callas. She first sang Norma in 1977 in Martina Franca, Italy; the following year, she sang both Norma and Adalgisa in the same production at Covent Garden: first as the younger priestess opposite Montserrat Caballé as Norma; later, as Norma, with Josephine Veasey as Adalgisa.
As an interpreter of lieder she often performed with the German pianist Sebastian Peschko.
Other noted soprano roles in her career have included: Cassandre, Chimène (in Le Cid), Elisabeth (in Tannhäuser), Elvira (in Ernani), Leonora (both Il trovatore and La forza del destino), Aida, Turandot and Bess. Other major mezzo-soprano roles in her repertory included: Dalila, Didon (in Les Troyens), Massenet's Hérodiade, Adalgisa, Ulrica, Azucena, Orfeo (her only trouser role), Poppea and Baba the Turk.
In 1991, at the opening of the new Opéra Bastille, she appeared as Cassandre, with Shirley Verrett as Didon. Because of a strike at the opera, Verrett was unable to perform at the re-scheduled last performance (this incident is recounted in Verrett's autobiography), and Bumbry sang both Cassandre and Didon in the same evening.
In the 1990s, she also founded and toured with her Grace Bumbry Black Musical Heritage Ensemble, a group devoted to preserving and performing traditional Negro spirituals. Her last operatic appearance was as Klytämnestra in Richard Strauss's Elektra in Lyon in 1997. She has since devoted herself to teaching and judging international competitions; and to the concert stage, giving a series of recitals in 2001 and 2002 in honor of her teacher, Lotte Lehmann, including in Paris (Théâtre du Châtelet), London (Wigmore Hall) and New York (Alice Tully Hall). A DVD of the Paris recital was later issued by TDK.
In 2010, after an absence of many years from the opera stage, she performed in Scott Joplin's Treemonisha at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris;[3] and in 2013, she returned to the Vienna State Opera as the Countess in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades.[4]
Her advice to young singers is: "To strive for excellence, that's the answer. If you strive for excellence, that means that you are determined. You will find a way to get to your goal, even if it means having to turn down some really great offers. You have to live with that, as you have to live with yourself."[5]

 

[Deadpool1986]

Carol Taylor’s 1st Flight Made History for African Americans

They Did It First: Carol Taylor was a nurse, consumer activist and civil rights crusader but is best-known for breaking the color barrier in the sky.
By: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Julie Wolf
Posted: Feb. 9 2015 3:00 AM

Carol Taylor as the first African-American flight attendant
Public domain​

Who was the first African-American flight attendant for a U.S. airline?
The skies weren’t always so friendly to black people. In the mid-1950s, the handful of black employees working for the major U.S. carriers were in service positions, and all the pilots (male only) and flight attendants (stewardesses or hostesses, in the vernacular of the day, and female only) were white, until Feb. 11, 1958, when Carol Taylor, born in 1931, made her inaugural flight for Mohawk Airlines as its “first Negro airline hostess.”
The airline industry had been under increasing pressure by civil rights groups to hire African Americans. Taylor and another African-American woman, Dorothy Franklin, backed by New York’s State Commission Against Discrimination, had applied to TWA for a stewardess position; both were rejected.

At the same time, likely motivated more by a desire for publicity than to integrate, the Ithaca, N.Y.-based Mohawk Airlines was seeking to hire a black stewardess. Taylor suspected that the fact that she was “near-white enough with aquiline features, so-called” and had “answered the questions about race in the way I knew they wanted them answered” moved hers to the top of the pile of 800 applications. For six months Taylor worked at what she later called “an upstairs-maid job” and was never once asked to join the rest of the crew for meals.

After Mohawk, Taylor threw herself into grassroots and civil rights activism. She founded the group Negro Women on the March and participated in the March on Washington. At the end of 1963 she moved to Barbados, where she founded the island’s first professional nursing schooland fought for consumer rights and women’s rights. In 1977 she returned to New York City, where she was determined to do something about the divisions that plagued the country. In 1982, collaborating with the psychologist Mari P. Saunders, Taylor invented the Racism/Colorism Quotient, or R/CQ, Test, akin to the IQ test but measuring racial bias in commercial, educational and social settings.

Together they founded the Institute for Interracial Harmony, with the hefty goal of administering the test to all professionals who might be tasked as decision-makers for black people and facilitating diversity-training seminars. In her work and life she created a new vocabulary, calling herself a “blacktivist” and rejecting the notion of there being multiple races, substituting “colorism” for “racism” and embracing the “hueman race”: “many colors, one race.”

In 1985 Taylor self-published The Little Black Book: Black Male Survival in America, or Staying Alive and Well in an Institutionally Racist Society, a rule book inspired by her son’s criminal treatment by police when he sought their help after a mugging in which he was the victim. This son, Laurence Legall Taylor, has picked up the mantle from his mother, advocating on the institute’s website for the administration of the R/CQ Test in an article addressing the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo. Nearly 50 years on, Carol Taylor has never diminished the act that launched her participation in the fight for civil rights. The byline on her blog, the Carol Taylor Word: Subvert the Dominant Paradigm, reads, “Carol Taylor, the First Black USA Flight Attendant.”
http://www.theroot.com/articles/his...light_made_history_for_african_americans.html

 

[Deadpool1986]

Little Known Black History Fact: Darlene Clark Hine

Dr. Darlene Clark Hine is a pioneer in the study of African-American history and the role of women within that narrative. But despite her standing as a leading scholar on Black women, that specialty came about almost by accident.

Hine was born February 7, 1957 in Morley, Mo. She attended Roosevelt University for her undergrad studies and later earned her master’s and Ph. D. at Kent State University. From 1972 to 1974, Hine was an assistant professor of history and Black studies at South Carolina State College. In 1974, Hine joined the faculty of predominantly-white Purdue University in Indiana.

In interviews and reports, Hine remembers much of her time at the school as intellectually and socially isolating as a Black woman. Things shifted drastically for Hine in 1980, then an associate professor at Purdue. She was approached by Ms. Shirley Herd, an Indiana schoolteacher and president of the local National Council of Negro Women to write a book about African-American women in the state.

This set Hine on a path of discovery, ultimately inspiring her to ensure that all aspects of the Black experience be told, in particular, ensuring certain that women are not erased from our history. Hine has released a series of books and resource guides, most notably co-authoring A Shining Thread Of Hope a comprehensive history of Black women in America.

Hine has also become a prolific writer of papers and studies, and her works are preserved by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Hine the National Humanities Medal for her scholarly works. Today, Hine is the Board of Trustees Professor of African-American Studies at Northwestern University in Illinois.
http://blackamericaweb.com/2015/02/10/little-known-black-history-fact-darlene-clark-hine/2/

 

[Deadpool1986]

Jerry Lawson (engineer)

quotes
“With some people, it's become an issue. I've had people look at me with total shock. Particularly if they hear my voice, because they think that all black people have a voice that sounds a certain way, and they know it. And I sit there and go, 'Oh yeah? Well, sorry, I don't.'"[On being one of the few black engineers in the video-game industry.]”
—Jerry Lawson
Synopsis
Born in 1940, Jerry Lawson pioneered home video gaming in the 1970s by helping create the Farichild Channel F, the first home video game system with interchangeable games. A New York native, Lawson is one of the few African-American engineers who worked in computing at the dawn of the video game era.

Early Life and Education
Born in New York City on December 1, 1940, Gerald Anderson Lawson is famous for being a video game pioneer, helping develop the first cartridge-based home video game console system. Lawson's father was a longshoreman and his mother worked for New York City. He had one brother, Michael.

Inspired as a child by the work of George Washington Carver, Jerry Lawson dabbled in electronics growing up, repairing televisions to make a little money before enrolling at Queens College, part of the City University of New York. His interest in computing led him in the 1970s to Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club, of which he was the only black member at the time. While with the club, he crossed paths with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. (In an interview, he referred to Steve Jobs as a business-minded "sparkplug" and recalled being unimpressed when he interviewed Wozniak for a job.)

Video Game Pioneer
In the mid-1970s, Lawson helped create the Fairchild Channel F, a home entertainment machine that was produced in 1976 by Fairchild Semiconductor, where he worked as director of engineering and marketing. (Only years earlier, Mike Markkula, co-founder of Apple Computers Inc., had headed marketing for the company.) Though basic by today's standards, Lawson's work allowed people to play a variety of games in their homes, and paved the way for systems such as the Atatri 2600, Nintendo, Xbox and Playstation.

One of the few black engineers in his industry, Lawson later said that colleagues were often surprised to find out that he was African American: "With some people, it's become an issue. I've had people look at me with total shock. Particularly if they hear my voice, because they think that all black people have a voice that sounds a certain way, and they know it. And I sit there and go, 'Oh yeah? Well, sorry, I don't.'"

Death
Lawson died in Mountain View, California, on April 9, 2009, due to complications relating to his diabetes. He was survived by his wife, Catherine, and two children.
http://www.biography.com/people/jerry-lawson-21330375#video-game-pioneer

 

[Deadpool1986]

Sarah Rector

Sarah Rector received international attention at the age of eleven when The Kansas City Star in 1913 publicized the headline, “Millions to a Negro Girl.” From that moment Rector’s life became a cauldron of misinformation, legal and financial maneuvering, and public speculation.
Rector was born to Joseph and Rose Rector on March 3, 1902, in a two-room cabin near Twine, Oklahoma on Muscogee Creek Indian allotment land. Both Joseph and Rose had enslaved Creek ancestry, and both of their fathers fought with the Union Army during the Civil War. When Oklahoma statehood became imminent in 1907, the Dawes Allotment Act divided Creek lands among the Creeks and their former slaves with a termination date of 1906. Rector’s parents, Sarah Rector herself, her brother, Joe, Jr., and sister Rebecca all received land. Lands granted to former slaves were usually the rocky lands of poorer agricultural quality. Rector’s allotment of 160 acres was valued at $556.50.

Primarily to generate enough revenue to pay the $30 annual tax bill, in February 1911 Rector’s father leased her allotment to the Devonian Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1913, however, her fortunes changed when wildcat oil driller B.B. Jones produced a “gusher” that brought in 2500 barrels a day. Rector now received an income of $300.00 per day. Once this wealth was made known, Rector’s guardianship was switched from her parents to a white man named T.J. Porter, an individual personally known to the Rectors. Multiple new wells were also productive, and Rector’s allotment subsequently became part of the famed Cushing-Drumright Field in Oklahoma. In the month of October 1913 Rector received $11,567.

Once her identity became public, Rector received numerous requests for loans, money gifts, and even marriage proposals from four Germans even though she was 12. In 1914 The Chicago Defender published an article claiming that her estate was being mismanaged by grafters and her “ignorant” parents, and that she was uneducated, dressed in rags, and lived in an unsanitary shanty. National African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois became concerned about her welfare. None of the allegations were true. Rector and her siblings went to school in Taft, an all-black town closer than Twine, they lived in a modern five-room cottage, and they owned an automobile. That same year, Rector enrolled in the Children’s House, a boarding school for teenagers at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

When Rector turned eighteen on March 3, 1920, she left Tuskegee and her entire family moved with her to Kansas City, Missouri. By this point Rector, who now owned stocks and bonds, a boarding house and bakery and the Busy Bee Café in Muskogee, Oklahoma, as well as 2,000 acres of prime river bottomland, was a millionaire.

The family moved into what would be known as the Rector Mansion. Legal wrangling over Rector’s estate and some mismanagement continued until she was twenty. That year Rector married Kenneth Campbell, and the couple had three sons, Kenneth, Jr., Leonard, and Clarence. Much was publicized about her “extravagant” spending on luxuries. Her marriage to Campbell ended in 1930, and in 1934 she married William Crawford.

When Rector died at age 65 on July 22, 1967, her wealth was diminished, but she still had some working oil wells and real estate holdings. Sarah Rector was buried in Taft Cemetery, Oklahoma.
http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/rector-sarah-1902-1967

 

[Barnett114]

"The slavemaster took Tom and dressed him well, and fed him well, and even gave him a little education -- a little education; gave him a long coat and a top hat and made all the other slaves look up to him. Then he used Tom to control them. The same strategy that was used in those days is used today, by the same white man. He takes a Negro, a so-called Negro, and make [sic] him prominent, build [sic] him up, publicize [sic] him, make [sic] him a celebrity. And then he becomes a spokesman for Negroes -- and a Negro leader."