Bawon Samedi

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This is why the Blues is unlike any other music in the diaspora. It has more of a connection to "Griot" or "Sahelian" West Africa than the more drum dominated or the region which is dominated by asymmetrical timeline patterns.

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A comparison between the Upper West African influenced Blues and the lower West/Central African drum based Cuban music


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Yet confirms my theory of AA culture being unique among that diaspora in that its influence is mainly from Sahelian/Muslim Africans. Good sources.
 

IllmaticDelta

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Yet confirms my theory of AA culture being unique among that diaspora in that its influence is mainly from Sahelian/Muslim Africans. Good sources.


yes sir


“The blues are the roots, everything else is the fruits” -- Willie Dixon



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Delta Blues by Ted Gioia



The blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insights, Ted Gioia, the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and others. Tracing the history of the Delta blues from the field hollers and plantation music of the nineteenth century to the exploits of modern-day musicians in the Delta tradition, Delta Blues tells the full story of this timeless and unforgettable music. No cultural force boasts such humble origins or such world-conquering reverberations. In this evocative rags-to-riches tale, Gioia shows how the sounds of the Delta altered the course of popular music in America and in the world beyond.
 

kayslay

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1FEB2017
Black History Month: Google Doodle Salutes Pioneering Sculptor Edmonia Lewis
posted in Arts / Style, Commemorations, Community, Fine Arts, History, U.S. by goodblacknews


Google Doodle of sculptor Edmonia Lewis (image via Google)

article by Michael Cavna via chicagotribune.com

To kick off its celebration of Black History Month, Google turns to a 19th century artist who burned so bright that her twin gifts of blazing talent and steely determination could not be denied even in the face of her era’s discrimination. Time and again, sculptor Edmonia Lewis — nicknamed “Wildfire” — faced obstacles and setbacks, yet she persevered as if her greatness were already cast.

Lewis was orphaned at age 9, when she was adopted by maternal aunts and joined their Mississauga tribe. She endured bitter racial bias at Oberlin College, which she began attending at age 15; she was falsely accused of poisoning classmates and was beaten, and was ultimately denied the chance to graduate.

She then was refused apprenticeships in Civil War-era Boston, until she encountered the well-connected sculptor Edward Brackett, whose clients included well-known abolitionists. And she would then run a small art studio in Rome (a space formerly used by neoclassicist Antonio Canova), eschewing assistants because she was often without the means of fellow expat artists in Italy.

Yet she would shine as the first woman of American Indian and African-American descent to discover international renown in the arts.


Wednesday’s Google Doodle, by artist Sophie Diao, salutes Lewis and her great work “The Death of Cleopatra,” which rests today in Washington at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (Her work “Forever Free” resides nearby, with the Howard University Gallery of Art.) And the ribboned “Google” wording shines bright, befitting Lewis’s nickname.

Photos of Edmonia:
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Photos of her work:
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IllmaticDelta

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FEBRUARY 16, 2009 ISSUE
That Motown Sound: Berry Gordy, Jr. and the African-American experience




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David E. NantaisFebruary 16, 2009
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Throughout 2009 Motown Records is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a series of special events and performances that kicked off on Jan. 12. Motown’s extraordinary accomplishments include an unprecedented 63 number-one hit songs from 1961 to 1971 by artists that make up a Mount Rushmore of pop music: Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, The Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas and The Four Tops, among many others.

The music Motown created, which symbolizes coming-of-age and celebration, is timeless and still important to many. Motown placed African-Americans firmly in the pop music pantheon and created a new sound that appealed to people of all races.

Hitsville, U.S.A.
In 1959 Berry Gordy Jr. started Motown Records in Detroit with an $800 loan from his family. Four years after Brown v. Board of Education cleared the way for racial integration and four years before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Gordy, an African-American, initiated a pop music revolution in the United States. He modeled Motown Records on the automobile assembly line he had worked on earlier in his life. He aimed to turn out hit songs, create top-of-the-line artists and present a polished image that could be marketed to a general audience. Gordy recruited several songwriters to churn out records. The most famous team was Holland-Dozier-Holland, who penned dozens of popular songs for Motown, including “Please Mr. Postman,” “Where Did Our Love Go?” and “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You).” Gordy’s model succeeded and Motown became the country’s first “hit factory.”

Motown was more than a music studio, however. It was also a school for the singer-performers, many of whom were local teenagers from less than privileged backgrounds. Diana Ross, for example, lived in Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass projects before getting her big break with Motown. Gordy employed instructors to help his performers choreograph their acts and to teach them proper poise and etiquette. The record company drew heavy criticism, however, for what some believed was a disgraceful practice of making black singers palatable to a white audience. During the 1967 Detroit riots, Motown Records received a number of threatening phone calls.

Ready for a Brand-New Beat?
The success of Motown came largely from what is referred to as the “Motown sound,” which flowed from three sources. First, the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band, made a major contribution to this unique sound. These musicians performed on most of the Motown hits from 1959 to the early 1970s, but, unjustly, were seldom credited on the album covers. The Funk Brothers were responsible for the consistency and groove of the Motown sound.

Second, the Motown sound used a primitive but effective method of generating a “reverb” that helped make some songs sound as if they were recorded live on stage. The music and vocals were broadcast from Motown’s famous Studio A to the attic of the building (known as the echo chamber) through a hole cut in the ceiling. The sound bounced around in the vacant space, was picked up by a microphone and recorded. Years before synthesizers and computerized recording, this was an ingenious method of creating a unique sound.

Third, the performers also made liberal use of the tambourine. Black church gospel choirs often played a tambourine to keep a dynamic rhythm steady and excite a congregation. Motown borrowed this idea for a number of its hit records. The tambourine was simple to play, easy to record in the studio and, as it turned out, more pleasing to the ear when the music was played on small transistor radios, which were popular during Motown’s peak years.

Make Me Wanna Holler
Motown Records served an important role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Their “Spoken Word” series held the exclusive right to record the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. In June 1963, two months before the March on Washington, Motown recorded King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as he delivered it in Detroit.

The company was also an active participant in the improvement of the city of Detroit, and it hired local African-Americans for prominent jobs. As the leader of the largest black-owned business in the country, Berry Gordy himself was a role model for young African-Americans, which was no small thing at the time.

In addition to its fun, bouncy hits, Motown also produced socially conscious pop music. Marvin Gaye’s classic 1971 album “What’s Going On,” one of the last Motown albums recorded in Detroit before the company moved to Los Angeles, is a perfect example of music that shines a light on justice issues like inner-city poverty, racism, war, environmentalism and drug abuse.

While Berry Gordy initially opposed Gaye’s desire to record this album because of the serious nature of the lyrics, Gordy eventually conceded. It became one of the biggest selling Motown albums of all time. The title song also paved the way for later artists to highlight social concerns. Contemporary rock, soul and R&B artists of all races still cite “What’s Going On” as a major influence.

While the music of Motown did not change race relations either quickly or singlehandedly, of course, it was the first popular music in the United States marketed to people of many races. Ironically, many today note the joy and innocence associated with the music, but the back story is that during a disgraceful time in U.S. history, when blacks were being beaten on the streets of urban America, Motown stars were performing to the delight of white audiences, slowly chipping away at racist attitudes. In this anniversary year, fans are celebrating the music of Motown—and more than that. For its fans, Motown also became a symbol of hope.
That Motown Sound: Berry Gordy, Jr. and the African-American experience




 

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Juanita Jackson Mitchell (1913-1992) was the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Maryland School of Law, and to practice law in the state. She achieved this in 1950, almost twenty years after she had also obtained a degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

She travelled extensively through the United States, holding talks and courses in race relations. She was also responsible for organizing several programmes for the Youth and College Division of the NAACP. In 1942, she directed the “Register and Vote” campaign in Maryland, which resulted in 11000 more voter registrations.
 

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Sisters-in-law Sadie T.M. Alexander and Virginia Margaret Alexander behind Houston Hall, University of Pennsylvania, ca. 1920

From Sadie’s Wikipedia: Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, was the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics in the United States, and the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

From Virginia’s Wikipedia page: Virginia M. Alexander (1900-1949) was an American physician and founder of the Aspiranto Health Home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
 

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Septima Poinsette Clark was a teacher and civil rights activist whose citizenship schools helped enfranchise and empower African Americans.


Synopsis

Born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina, Septima Poinsette Clark branched out into social action with the NAACP while working as a teacher. As part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she set up citizenship schools that helped many African Americans register to vote. Clark was 89 when she died on December 15, 1987, on South Carolina's Johns Island.

Early Life

Septima Poinsette Clark was born on in Charleston, South Carolina, May 3, 1898, the second of eight children. Her father—who had been born a slave—and mother both encouraged her to get an education. Clark attended public school, then worked to earn the money needed to attend the Avery Normal Institute, a private school for African Americans.

Teaching and Early Activism

Clark qualified as a teacher, but Charleston did not hire African Americans to teach in its public schools. Instead, she became an instructor on South Carolina's Johns Island in 1916.

In 1919, Clark returned to Charleston to teach at the Avery Institute. She also joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in trying to get the city to hire African-American teachers. By gathering signatures in favor of the change, Clark helped ensure that the effort was successful.

Clark married Nerie Clark in 1920. Her husband died of kidney failure five years later. She then moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where she continued teaching and also joined the local chapter of the NAACP. Clark worked with the organization—and with Thurgood Marshall—on a 1945 case that sought equal pay for black and white teachers. She described it as her "first effort in a social action challenging the status quo." Her salary increased threefold when the case was won.

Going back to Charleston in 1947, Clark took up another teaching post, while maintaining her NAACP membership. However, in 1956, South Carolina made it illegal for public employees to belong to civil rights groups. Clark refused to renounce the NAACP and, as a result, lost her job.

Civil Rights Leader

Clark was next hired by Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an institution that supported integration and the Civil Rights Movement. She had previously participated in and led workshops there during breaks from school (Rosa Parks had attended one of her workshops in 1955).

Clark soon was directing Highlander's Citizenship School program. These schools helped regular people learn how to instruct others in their communities in basic literacy and math skills. One particular benefit of this teaching was that more people were then able to register to vote (at the time, many states used literacy tests to disenfranchise African Americans).

In 1961, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took over this education project. Clark then joined the SCLC as its director of education and teaching. Under her leadership, more than 800 citizenship schools were created.

Jimmy Carter honored her with a Living Legacy Award. She received the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina's highest civilian honor, in 1982. In 1987, Clark's second autobiography, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and Civil Rights, won an American Book Award (her first autobiography, Echo in My Soul, had been published in 1962).

Clark was 89 when she died on Johns Island on December 15, 1987. Over her long career of teaching and civil rights activism, she helped many African Americans begin to take control of their lives and discover their full rights as citizens.
 

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NASA’s Hidden Figures: Women You Need to Know

The movie "Hidden Figures," which opens nationwide this Friday, celebrates the African-American women who worked as NASA's "human computers." Learn more about these unsung heroes who made it possible to send Americans into space.

Hidden Figures will introduce moviegoers to three of these women: Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan. While their stories are compelling (and clearly make for great dramatization in movie form), the work of their colleagues who still remain in history’s shadows was also of great importance. Here are a few of the other black women of NASA you need to know who served during the “Hidden Figures” era. Their stories are told in Hidden Human Computers: The Black Women of NASA, a book written by Sue Bradford Edwards and Dr. Duchess Harris (whose own grandmother was one of the “computers”), and published by ABDO in December 2016.

1. Miriam Daniel Mann

It was 1943 when Miriam Daniel Mann learned about job opportunities at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, NASA’s predecessor. Mann, who had earned a chemistry degree with a minor in mathematics from Alabama’s Talladega College, was perfect for the human computer position, which was among the most demanding jobs for women of her era. Mann, who was born in 1907, was hired by NACA, which at the time was operating 24 hours a day. Employees worked shifts from 7am– 3pm, 3pm–11pm, or 11pm–7am. The arrangement made for a “very different household” in an era “when it was the norm for women to stay at home,” said Mann’s daughter, Miriam Mann Harris, in a 2011 oral history interview.

Harris’s earliest recollections revolve around her mother’s career. “My early memories are of my mother talking about doing math problems all day. Back then, all of the math was done with a #2 pencil and the aid of a slide rule. I remember the talk of plotting graphs, logs, doing equations and all sorts of foreign-sounding terms.” Harris, who worked at NASA until poor health forced her to retire in 1966, was among the African-American human computers who worked on John Glenn’s mission.

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Miriam Daniel Mann, pictured seated on the couch, in a family photograph. Her work as one of the first "human computers" made significant contributions to NASA’s advances between the 1940s and 1960s.


It wasn’t just math and computing Mann performed, however. Her daughter recalls her mother’s quiet acts of resistance against the segregation that existed inside NASA, including removing the “Colored” sign from a table in the back of the cafeteria and accepting her white female boss’s invitation to visit her apartment. Such an invitation, crossing lines of both professional rank and race, was quite unusual for the times,” Harris observed. Though Mann would die two years before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, she was aware that her work—both the computing and civil rights actions—made significant contributions to NASA’s advances between the 1940s and 1960s.


2. Kathryn Peddrew

Peddrew, like Mann, had graduated from college with a chemistry degree and was hired by NACA in 1943. She would spend her entire career there, retiring in 1986. She had been raised by parents who taught her that she could be anything she wanted to be and her belief in herself never wavered, even as she endured both gender and racial discrimination in her job search before arriving at NASA. Peddrew had wanted to join the research team of one of her college professors, who studied quinine-incited deafness in New Guinea, but was denied the opportunity because the team had no contingency plan for housing women separately from men.

After this disappointment, Peddrew decided to shoot for the moon, applying for a position in NACA’s chemistry division after reading a job listing in a NACA bulletin. She was hired, but when administrators learned she was black, they rescinded the offer for the chemistry job, transferring her to the computing division instead, which had a segregated section for the black female human computers.


Over the course of her NASA career, Peddrew would work in both aeronautics and aerospace, studying balance in the Instrument Research Division.

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3. Christine Darden

Racial discrimination in hiring practices at NASA hadn’t improved much by the time Christine Darden applied for a position in the late 1960s. Darden, who held a Master’s in engineering and was qualified for an engineer position within the agency, was nonetheless assigned to a human computer role, which represented a sub-professional category. NASA could take advantage of the knowledge conferred upon her through her degree, but wouldn’t assign her a position or corresponding pay grade that was commensurate with it.


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Christine Darden in the control room of NASA Langley's Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in 1975.


Darden, however, wasn’t one to be cowed into conformity. Fully cognizant that she was capable of holding a professional position within the agency, she confronted her supervisor and was transferred to an engineering job in 1973. In this role, she worked on the science of sonic booms, making specific advances on sonic boom minimization and writing more than 50 scholarly articles on the subject.

In 1983, Darden earned a doctorate degree and by 1989 she was appointed to the first of a number of management and leadership roles at NASA, including technical leader of the Sonic Boom Group of the Vehicle Integration Branch of the High Speed Research Program and, a decade later, director in the Program Management Office of the Aerospace Performing Center.



4. Annie Easley

Annie Easley, who joined NASA in 1955 and would work at the agency for 34 years, shared the same self-awareness and confidence as Darden, as well as the same tenacity for ensuring her rights were respected. In the 1960s, Easley wrote the computer code used for the Centaur rocket stage. Dubbed by NASA as “America’s workhorse in space,” Centaur has been used in more than 220 launches. Easley’s code was the basis for future codes that have been used in military, weather, and communications satellites.

Despite this accomplishment, Easley encountered staggering discrimination, particularly when it came to accessing educational benefits promised to NASA employees. NASA had instituted a policy that allowed employees a grant of sorts to cover coursework that was relevant to their jobs. Easley wanted to take some math classes at a nearby community college, and asked her male supervisor if NASA would pay for the classes.“Oh, no, Annie, they don't pay for any undergraduate courses," he said. She informed the supervisor that she was aware of NASA’s policy about paying for classes, but he dug his heels in, saying, “They only do it for professionals." She paid for her own classes and earned her Bachelors in Mathematics, but not after being denied paid leave (another NASA policy) to pursue the degree.

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IllmaticDelta

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The Man Who Killed "Jim Crow"

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Charles Hamilton Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895 – April 22, 1950) was a prominent African-American lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School, and NAACP Litigation Director who played a significant role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws, which earned him the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow".[2] He is also well known for having trained future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.[3]

Charles Hamilton Houston, a renowned civil rights attorney, was widely recognized as the architect of the civil rights strategy that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education. He was also a mentor to Thurgood Marshall who successfully litigated the pivotal Brown case.

Houston was born on September 3, 1895 in Washington, DC to parents William Houston, an attorney, and Mary Houston, a hairdresser and seamstress. He attended M Street High School (later Dunbar High School) in Washington, DC. Following graduation, he enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts where he was the only black student in his class. Houston was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the national honor society there. Upon graduating in 1915, he was selected to deliver that year’s valedictory address.

After graduating from Amherst, Houston returned to Washington. He joined the U.S. Army in 1917 and was trained in the all-black officers training camp in Fort Des Moines, Iowa in 1917. Houston was later deployed to France. While there, Houston and his fellow black soldiers experienced racial discrimination which deepened his resolve to study law.

Following his military discharge in 1919, Houston entered Harvard Law School. He excelled in his studies and became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. As a law student, Houston was mentored by future Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter. In 1922 as Houston graduated with high honors, Frankfurter nominated him for the prestigious Frederick Sheldon Fellowship, which allowed him to study law at the University of Madrid.

Upon his return from Spain in 1924 Houston practiced law with his father, William, at Houston & Houston, and began teaching in Howard University Law’s evening program. Eventually he became Dean of the Howard University Law School.

Houston’s legal accomplishments eventually captured the attention of Walter White, the chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1935 Houston was hired as Special Counsel to the Association. Eventually he brought into the NAACP one of his Howard University law students, Thurgood Marshall. The pair traveled through the South in the early 1930s and noted the inequalities of black school facilities. In response they developed the legal strategy which challenged school segregation, first calling for the equalization of facilities for black students and then eventually calling for full integration.

Houston and Marshall first applied their strategy in 1935 when they took the Pearson v. Murray case, one of the first challenges to racial exclusion in public universities. Donald Gaines Murray, an Amherst graduate, was denied admission to the University of Maryland School of Law on the basis of his race. Houston and Marshall successfully argued that the state had violated Murray’s rights by failing to provide an adequate law school for his studies while denying him admission to the sole state law school on the grounds of race.

Houston continued to work with Marshall for the next fifteen years, laying the groundwork for the eventual Brown decision. Charles Hamilton Houston died on April 22, 1950 in Washington, DC at the age of 54, four years before the Supreme Court handed down the fateful decision that he had spent a lifetime planning and pursuing.










 
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