Essential The Official African American Thread#2

[IllmaticDelta]

Octavius Valentine Catto

Philadelphia Unveils Statue Of Black Union Army Hero
While confederate monuments are being protested across the nation, Philadelphia erects its own monument to Black Civil War hero Octavius Catto

If your Social Studies textbooks were authored in Texas, you may not have heard of Octavius Catto, a 19th century Philadelphian activist who Mayor Jim Kenney wants the nation to know. After years of lobbying that began when Kenney was a city councilman, Philadelphia finally unveiled Catto’s statue, “The Quest for Parity”, Tuesday, 6ABC News reports. This is the first African-American statue at City Hall.




“Octavius Catto was a true American hero. Like many unheralded black American heroes, he should be revered and recognized. Their lives and accomplishments should be part of the curriculum of our schools, not just during the shortest month of the year,” Mayor Kenney told the crowd gathered for the unveiling. Catto spent a relatively short life fighting for equal rights for African Americans. The Civil War veteran was known for his contributions to education, sports, and civil rights.




Catto was a freeman born in South Carolina, but his family moved to Philadelphia when he was a child. He was the valedictorian at Cheyney University (the nation’s first HBCU that was then called the Institute for Colored Youth) in 1858 and began working there as an English and math teacher. During the Civil War, he served in the Pennsylvania National Guard and recruited more Black soldiers for the Union Army. A talented athlete, he “establish[ed] Philadelphia as a major hub of the Negro Leagues” and fought to integrate the sport in the late nineteenth century. America still hasn’t caught up to Catto’s vision of universal equality, which included voting rights for African Americans. It was the latter vision that cost Catto his life. He was shot dead by “Irish-American ward bosses” on the day he saw the fruits of his activism– the first Election Day after the ratification of the 15th Amendment allowed Black men to vote. He was only 32 years old.

Monumental Man: Martyred Activist Catto at Last Memorialized by Statue in Philadelphia

At a time when historically tone-deaf monuments to Confederate leaders, slave owners, genocidal explorers and other beacons of white supremacy occupy public attention, the city of Philadelphia has erected its first monument to a Black leader in a public space. A martyred civil rights activist, educator and baseball player, Octavius Valentine Catto is one of those unsung heroes who was left out of the history books and is a perfect example of the type of figures society should honor and canonize.

The statue of Octavius Catto was unveiled on Tuesday in front of Philadelphia City Hall, nearly 146 years after his death. He was a part of history at a pivotal time for African-Americans, and yet his story resonates with the issues, challenges and struggles facing Black people today.

Catto was born free in 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina, and was raised in Philadelphia, attending the Institute for Colored Youth, later known as Cheyney University, where he would later become a teacher and principal. He worked with Frederick Douglass to recruit hundreds of Black soldiers to fight for the Union Army in the Civil War.

Octavius V. Catto
A leader in civil rights activism and politics, Catto fought via civil disobedience for equal access for Black people on Philadelphia’s trolley car system and played a crucial role in the passage of a Pennsylvania state law prohibiting segregation in the transit systems. He became an influential Republican Party insider and joined the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League to help secure the right to vote for Black people. Through his efforts, Pennsylvania ratified the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In addition, Catto attended the National Convention of Colored Men in Syracuse, New York, which created the National Equal Rights League.

The NERL, which selected Frederick Douglas as its president, worked toward full citizenship rights for African-Americans. Catto also held leadership positions in the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League and the State Convention of Colored People, which took place in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1865. He became a member of the Franklin Institute, a center for science education and research which had been closed to Blacks, and served in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

An athlete who played cricket and baseball, Catto founded the Philadelphia Pythians professional baseball club.

Just one year following the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, Philadelphia had its first election in which Black people had a right to vote, on October 10, 1871. At that time, Black voters, who were Republican, faced violence and intimidation from Irish-Americans who controlled the city’s Democratic machine. On Election Day Catto was harassed by a group of Irish-Catholic men and shot to death by a man named Frank Kelly. Thousands attended the funeral of the slain leader, and because he was killed while on duty as a national Guardsman, the viewing of his body was held at the City Armory. Catto was buried in the Black-owned Lebanon Cemetery. Kelly, who eluded the authorities for over six years, stood trial and was acquitted by an all-white jury in 1877. Philadelphia’s current mayor, Jim Kenney, championed the cause of bringing the Catto statue to City Hall.

Depiction of the murder of Octavius V. Catto. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
His is the first statue built at City Hall since the memorial to merchant and department store pioneer John Wanamaker in 1923. Although the city had to wait until 2017 to have its first Black hero sculpted, other white figures of questionable merit and ill repute have stood. The Catto memorial is only yards away from the statue of the late police commissioner and mayor Frank Rizzo, known for his “law and order and “tough on crime” stance, who left a legacy of police brutality, terrorizing of the Black community and racial violence against the Black Panthers, MOVE and other political activists.

Standing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is the statue of boxer Rocky Balboa, the star of the “Rocky” movie franchise as portrayed by Sylvester Stallone. A fictional character, the Rocky statue is a popular tourist site and came years before a bronze statue to boxing legend Smokin’ Joe Frazier was unveiled in 2015.

“We shall never rest at ease, but will agitate and work, by our means and by our influence, in court and out of court, asking aid of the press, calling upon Christians to vindicate their Christianity, and the members of the law to assert the principles of the profession by granting us justice and right, until these invidious and unjust usages shall have ceased,” Catto once said. Now, Black Philadelphia honors Octavius Catto–a prominent scholar, activist and athlete, and a man who stood up for racial injustice–at a time when the community needs to draw inspiration from those forgotten heroes who helped paved the way, and paid the ultimate price for doing so.

 

[ridedolo]

this is a really great thread.props to ya'll for keeping it going

 

[IllmaticDelta]

On how long Aframs have been using the term "black" racially and ethnicallysince many think we started using that term during the 1960's, black power era

James McCune Smith (April 18, 1813 – November 17, 1865)

was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist, and author. He is the first African American to hold a medical degree and graduated at the top in his class at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He was the first African American to run a pharmacy in the United States.

In addition to practicing as a doctor for nearly 20 years at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, Smith was a public intellectual: he contributed articles to medical journals, participated in learned societies, and wrote numerous essays and articles drawing from his medical and statistical training. He used his training in medicine and statistics to refute common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. Invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society in 1852, which promoted a new science, he was elected as a member in 1854 of the recently founded American Geographic Society. But, he was never admitted to the American Medical Association or local medical associations.

He has been most well known for his leadership as an abolitionist; a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with Frederick Douglass he helped start the National Council of Colored People in 1853, the first permanent national organization for blacks. Douglass said that Smith was "the single most important influence on his life."[1] Smith was one of the Committee of Thirteen, who organized in 1850 in New York City to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law by aiding fugitive slaves through the Underground Railroad. Other leading abolitionist activists were among his friends and colleagues. From the 1840s, he lectured on race and abolitionism and wrote numerous articles to refute racist ideas about black capacities.

The first African American to receive a medical degree, this invaluable collection brings together the writings of James McCune Smith, one of the foremost intellectuals in antebellum America. The Works of James McCune Smith is one of the first anthologies featuring the works of this illustrious scholar. Perhaps best known for his introduction to Fredrick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, his influence is still found in a number of aspects of modern society and social interactions. And he was considered by many to be a prophet of the twenty-first century. One of the earliest advocates of the use of "black" instead of "colored," McCune Smith treated racial identities as social constructions, arguing that American literature, music, and dance would be shaped and defined by blacks.

The absence of James McCune Smith in the historiographic and critical literature is even more striking. He was a brilliant scholar, writer, and critic, as well as a first rate physician. In 1882 the black leader Alexander Crummell called him "the most learned Negro of his day," and Frederick Douglass considered him the most important black influence in his life (much as he considered Gerrit Smith the most important white one). Douglass was probably correct when, in 1859, he publicly stated: "No man in this country more thoroughly understands the whole struggle between freedom and slavery, than does Dr. Smith, and his heart is as broad as his understanding."

As a prose stylist and original thinker, McCune Smith ranks, at his best, alongside such canonical figures as Emerson and Thoreau. His essays are sophisticated and elegant, his interpretations of American culture are way ahead of his time, and his experimental style and use of dialect anticipates some of the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920s. Yet McCune Smith has been completely ignored by literary critics; and aside from one article on him, he has remained absent from the historical record.

Black Americans have used various names—African, colored, negro, Afro-American, Black, and African American—to identify themselves. Sometimes these terms were used interchangeably, but, more often than not, one term predominated during a particular historical period.

Historically, then Afro-Americans have called themselves “colored,” “Negro” and “Black,” but even in the earlier periods race leaders, particularly the proponents of militant racial protest, consistently used “Black” as a term of ethnic identification. For example,

David Walker (1829) “ . . . the world may see that we the Blacks or Colored People are treated more cruelly by the white Christians of America.”

Nat Turner (1831) “ . . . it had been said of me in my childhood by those by whom I had been taught to pray, both white and black, . . . that I would never be of any use to anyone as a slave.”

Frederick Douglass (1852) “There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which if committed by a black man, subject him to the punishment of Death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment of death.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) “Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud—and behold the suicide of a race.”

Marcus M. Garvey (1923) “Let white and black stop deceiving themselves. Let the white race stop deceiving themselves. Let the white race stop thinking that all black men are dogs and not to be considered as human beings.

Langston Hughes (1926) “The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art in most certainly rocky and the mountain is high.”

Malcolm X (1960) “As a collective mass of Black people we have been deprived not only of civil rights, but even our human rights. The right to human dignity . . . the right to be a human being.”

Thus, the term has political connotations, for it expresses militant opposition to racial oppression through its association with black nationalism, “ . . . a body of social thought, attitudes, and actions ranging from the simplest expressions of ethnocentriam and racial solidarity to the comprehensive and sophisticated ideologies of Pan-Negroism or Pan-Africanism,” according to John H. Bracey et al in Black Nationalism in America. It is not by chance that W.E.B. Du Bois, perhaps the greatest theoretician of Black nationalism in the twentieth century, entitled his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903.

A Black By Any Other Name

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and

Use of ‘African-American’ Dates to Nation’s Early Days

The term African-American may seem to be a product of recent decades, exploding into common usage in the 1990s after a push from advocates like Jesse Jackson, and only enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001.

The O.E.D.’s entry, revised in 2012, traces the first known occurrence to 1835, in an abolitionist newspaper. But now, a researcher has discovered a printed reference in an anti-British sermon from 1782 credited to an anonymous “African American,” pushing the origins of the term back to the earliest days of independence.

“We think of it as a neutral alternative to older terms, one that resembles Italian-American or Irish-American,” said Fred Shapiro, an associate director at the Yale Law School Library, who found the reference. “It’s a very striking usage to see back in 1782.”

Mr. Shapiro, a longtime contributor to the O.E.D. and the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, found the reference last month in one of his regular sweeps of various online databases that have transformed lexicographic research by gathering vast swaths of historical texts — once scattered across the collections of far-flung libraries and historical societies — in one easily searchable place.

One day, Mr. Shapiro typed “African American” into a database of historical newspapers. Up popped an advertisement that appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal on May 15, 1782, announcing: “Two Sermons, written by the African American; one on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis, to be SOLD.”

With the help of George Thompson, a retired librarian from New York University, Mr. Shapiro found one of the titles — “A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis” — and located a copy of it, a 16-page pamphlet, at Houghton Library at Harvard University.

The sermon, which crows about the surrender of the British Army at Yorktown the previous year, was acquired by Harvard in 1845 and seems to have been all but uncited in scholarly literature. Its author — listed on the title page as “an African American” — is anonymous, identified only as “not having the benefit of a liberal education.”

“Was it a freeman?” Mr. Shapiro said. “A slave? We don’t know.”

Black people in the Colonial period, whatever their legal status, were most commonly referred to as “Negro” or “African.”

But in the years after the Revolution, various terms emphasizing their claim to being “American” — a label which was applied to people of European descent living in the colonies by the end of the 17th century — came into circulation.

“Afro-American” has been documented as early as 1831, with “black American” (1818) and “Africo-American” (1788) going back even further.

“We want dancing and raree-shows and ramadans to forget miseries and wretchedness as much as the Africo-americans want the Banjar” — banjo — “to digest with their Kuskus the hardships of their lives,” a correspondent wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1788. (“Kuskus” is a variant of “couscous.”)

Katherine C. Martin, the editor of United States dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said the O.E.D.’s researchers were in the process of confirming Mr. Shapiro’s discovery.

“It’s very exciting,” she said. “Once we have it nailed down, I would expect we’ll update our entry.”

The sermon, one of the earliest surviving ones by a black American, may also attract interest from historians.

In it, the speaker boasts about the capture of Cornwallis and decries the British assault on “the freedom of the free born sons of America” while nodding toward the fact of “my own complexion.”

“My beloved countrymen, if I may be permitted thus to call you, who am a descendant of the sable race,” one passage begins.

The speaker also addresses fellow “descendants of Africa” who feel loyalty to Britain, asking: “Tell me in plain and simple language, have ye not been disappointed? Have ye reaped what you labored for?”

The other sermon mentioned in the ad, Mr. Shapiro said, may be “A Sermon on the Present Situation of Affairs of America and Great-Britain,” which had been previously known to scholars. Both refer to “descendants of Africa,” he said, and have dedications invoking South Carolina, whose governor had been held in solitary confinement by the British for nearly a year.

But curiously, the title page of the other sermon attributes it to “a Black.”

“In other words, the bifurcation between the terms African-American and black, the two leading terms today, was present from the very beginning,” Mr. Shapiro said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/arts/use-of-african-american-dates-to-nations-early-days.html?_r=0

on record since 1782

 

[IllmaticDelta]

James McCune Smith (April 18, 1813 – November 17, 1865)

University of Glasgow
Reverend Williams encouraged Smith to attend the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He and abolitionist benefactors of the AFS provided Smith with money for his trip overseas and his education. He sailed in 1832, at the age of 21. Smith kept a journal of his sea voyage that expressed his sense of mission. After arriving in Liverpool and walking along the waterfront, he thought, "I am free!"

Through abolitionist connections, he was welcomed there by members of the London Agency Anti-Slavery Society. Smith enjoyed the relative racial tolerance in Scotland and England, which officially abolished slavery in 1833. While in Scotland, Smith joined the Glasgow Emancipation Society and met people in the Scottish and English abolitionist movement.

He studied and graduated at the top of his class. He obtained a bachelor's degree in 1835, a master's degree in 1836, and a medical degree in 1837. He also completed an internship in Paris. Dr. Smith then traveled home to New York, sailing on a second choice of a ship after being denied passage on the Canonicus because of his race.

Upon his return to New York City in 1837 with his degrees, Smith was greeted as a hero by the black community. He said at a gathering, "I have striven to obtain education, at every sacrifice and every hazard, and to apply such education to the good of our common country."

He was the first university-trained African-American physician in the United States. During his practice of 25 years, he was also the first black to have articles published in American medical journals. In 1840 he wrote the first case report by a black doctor, which his associate John Watson read at a meeting of the New York Medical and Surgical Society. (It acknowledged Smith was qualified, but would not admit him because of racial discrimination.) Soon after, Smith published an article in the New York Journal of Medicine, the first by a black doctor in the United States.

He established his practice in Lower Manhattan in general surgery and medicine, treating both black and white patients. He also started a school in the evenings, teaching children. He established what has been called the first black-owned and operated pharmacy in the United States, located at 93 West Broadway. His friends and activists gathered in the back room of the pharmacy to discuss issues related to their work in abolitionism.


In 1843, he gave a lecture series, Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Races, to demonstrate the failings of phrenology, which was a so-called scientific practice of the time that was applied in a way to draw racist conclusions and attribute negative characteristics to ethnic Africans. He rejected the practice of homeopathy, an alternative to the scientific medicine being taught in universities.

At Glasgow, Smith had been trained in the emerging science of statistics. He published numerous articles applying his statistical training. For example, he used statistics to refute the arguments of slave owners, who wrote that blacks were inferior and that slaves were better off than free blacks or white urban laborers. To do this, he drew up statistical tables of data from the census.

After getting established, in the early 1840s, Smith married Malvina Barnet, a free woman of color who was a graduate of the Rutger Female Institute. They had seven children. Five survived to adulthood: James, Maud, Donald, John and Guy. Their sons married white spouses; Maud never married.

When John Calhoun, then Secretary of State Senator from South Carolina, claimed that freedom was bad for blacks, and that the 1840 United State Census showed that blacks in the North had high rates of insanity and mortality, Smith responded with a masterful paper. In "A Dissertation on the Influence of Climate on Longevity" (1846), published in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, Smith analyzed the census both to refute Calhoun's conclusions and to show the correct way to analyze data. He showed that blacks in the North lived longer than slaves, attended church more, and were achieving scholastically at a rate similar to whites.




Frederick Douglass
Douglass valued his rational approach and said that Smith was "the single most important influence on his life." Smith tempered the more radical people in the abolitionist movement and insisted on arguing from facts and analysis. He wrote a regular column in Douglass' newspaper, published under the pseudonym, 'Communipaw.'

Opposing the emigration of American free blacks to other countries, Smith believed that native-born Americans had the right to live in the United States and a claim by their labor and birth to their land. He gathered supporters to go to Albany and testify to the state legislature against proposed plans to support the American Colonization Society, which had supported sending free blacks to the colony of Liberia in Africa.

Smith and Henry Highland Garnet, lifelong friends, imagined a bright future for black Americans. Garnet, born into slavery, stressed emancipation as a spiritual process — lifting the soul into a full recognition of its power to do good. McCune Smith, born free, argued that in overcoming their oppressors black Americans would "purify the Republic" and become the great artists, writers, orators, and voices of conscience in the United States. Smith and Garnet split over African colonization in 1859-61 but reconciled by the end of the Civil War.



Henry Highland Garnet
In 1852, Smith was invited to be a founding member of the New York Statistics Institute. In 1854 he was elected as a member by the American Geographical Society, founded in New York in 1851 by top scientists as well as wealthy amateurs interested in exploration. The Society recognized him by giving him an award for one of his articles. He also joined the New York Historical Society.

Smith wrote an introduction to Frederick Douglass' second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). It expressed the new independence in African-American accounts of slavery, compared to earlier works, which had to seek approval for authentication from white abolitionists.



My Bondage, My Freedom, with introduction by Smith
In 1859, he published an article using scientific findings and analysis to refute former president Thomas Jefferson's theories of race, as expressed in his well-known Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).






New York Riots, 1863
After the riots, Smith moved his family and business out of Manhattan, as did other prominent blacks. Numerous buildings had been destroyed in their old neighborhoods, and estimates were that 100 blacks were killed in the rioting. No longer feeling safe in the lower Fourth Ward, the Smiths moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

He died two years after the riots on November 17, 1865 of congestive heart failure on Long Island, New York. He was 52 years old. He died five months after the end of the Civil war and nineteen days before ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which abolished slavery throughout the country.



Greta Blau of New Haven, Connecticut, came across her family connection while taking a course in the history of blacks in New York City. It was there that she came across the name James McCune Smith, which rang a bell. The name was inscribed in a family Bible belonging to her grandmother, Antoinette Martignoni. Blau concluded that after Smith's death, his surviving children must have passed as white, and their children and grandchildren never knew they had a black forbear, let alone such an illustrious one.



Antoinette Martignoni and Greta Blau with Family Bible
"I never, ever would have thought that I had a black ancestor," Blau said. She added, "We're all really happy. ... He was a really amazing person in so many ways."

Blau contacted all the Smith descendants she could find and invited them to join her for a ceremony dedicating a tombstone at Smith's grave. In September 2010, 11 descendents of Smith gathered at his grave in Brooklyn.

"Right now I feel so connected in a new way, to actually be here," said Martignoni, the 91-year-old great-granddaughter of James McCune Smith. "I take a deep breath, and I thank God, I really do. I am so glad to have lived this long."



Martignoni and others at Tombstone Dedication in September 2010




Greta Blau and Joanne Edey-Rhodes
Joanne Edey-Rhodes, the professor whose course led Blau to discover her ancestor, said Blau had written about Smith in her paper for the course. "She was writing about this person and didn't realize that that was her very own ancestor," Edey-Rhodes said.

The tombstone dedication was followed by a panel discussion at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem. Smith had been an active member of the church. The Rev. Craig Townsend, an Episcopal priest and scholar, said Smith's faith in God bolstered his belief that human beings are equal.




Townsend passed out copies of an 1850 letter Smith had written to a friend after the death of his 5-year-old daughter.

"After a year of ailment, at times painful and distressing, always obscure, and which she bore with childlike patience, it pleased God to take her home to the Company of Cherubs who continually do Praise Him," Smith wrote.

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Bringing Black History Home

Little did Blau know that the assignment would years later lead her on an engrossing journey into her own family’s roots.

It began one day in 2003, at her grandmother’s house in Connecticut, when she was looking through the family Bible that an Irish relative had. “The name was in there as the father of my great-grandmother’s second husband,” she said. “I knew I had heard that name before. I went home and Googled the name, and he came up. I said, ‘That can’t be the right person, because I’m white.’ ”

The family had thought James McCune Smith was a white doctor from Scotland, perhaps because Smith — who was denied admission to several American colleges — with the help of abolitionists had earned his bachelor’s, master’s and medical degree from the University of Glasgow, graduating at the top of his class.

But now there was no mistaking the fact that Blau’s great-great-great grandfather Smith was the doctor she had written about, who when he returned to New York City from Scotland had opened what was said to be the nation’s first black pharmacy.

To confirm the relationship, Blau, who lives in New Haven, did further research, including at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Smith was buried in 1865. She learned that Smith, who died at 52, had 11 children. Six died in childhood. A daughter and four sons survived to adulthood, and Blau was descended from one of the sons. After Smith’s death, his children and wife passed for white.



After establishing her link to Smith, Blau and her husband visited the Smith family plot at Cypress Hills, near the graves of baseball icon Jackie Robinson and actress Mae West. A book she encountered about famous people buried at the cemetery includes Smith but doesn’t indicate that he was black. She assumes it’s because in the mid-19th Century, “If he was a doctor, he couldn’t be black.” A marker at the gravesite had badly deteriorated so Blau and some family members decided to replace it with a granite tombstone that would be inscribed with a segment of Smith’s introduction to a Frederick Douglass autobiography: “. . . the worst of our institutions, in its worst aspect, cannot keep down energy, truthfulness and earnest struggle for the right.”



“I read it and burst into tears,” Edey-Rhodes said. “Her paper was so outstanding I kept it. I cried because it was uncovered history, which is so important to me. I felt it was very spiritual. I’ve had situations where students will tell me that the learning that came from a class had an effect on their life, but to be in a situation where a course became a conduit for someone to find out about their past, it was overwhelming.”


James McCune Smith was part of the black community, Edey-Rhodes said. “The thing that was so extraordinary is that before the 1870 census he and his family were mulatto, but after 1870 they were no longer listed as mulatto or colored; all were listed as white. This man was so distin-guished he’s somebody that anybody would want to claim.”

 

[Black Lightning]

11-Year-Old Starts Club For Young Black Boys To See Themselves In Books

An 11-year-old from St. Louis wants to celebrate black books and improve the literacy rate among other boys at the same time.

Sidney Keys III started his own reading club for boys called Books N Bros to show his peers that reading can be fun.

Sidney told radio program “St. Louis on the Air” earlier this month that “every time I go to the library at my school, there aren’t many African American literature books there.” After a visit to EyeSeeMe, a bookstore in University City, Missouri, that promotes African American children’s literature, he yearned to see more of himself reflected in books.

Sidney’s mom, Winnie Caldwell, shot a video of him reading in the store in August that gained more than 62,000 views. She told the program that her son had never been to a store that housed so many books that reflected his culture.





“You get to a point when he is 11 years old and it was so shocking for him to relate to someone on the cover in a positive aspect rather than it be some negative urban story we see a lot,” she told the local outlet. “I would like to make sure he sees himself in being whatever he can be.”

Caldwell said her son immediately had the idea to form a book club, using EyeSeeMe as their designated bookstore, after the video gained popularity. They did some research and decided to target boys 8-10, around the age their reading skills begin to lag behind girls.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Paula T. Hammond

is a David H. Koch Professor in Engineering and the Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[1] She is a widely recognized and cited researcher in biomaterials, and drug delivery. Her primary interest is in hemostatic technology, but, according to her official web page at MIT, she also has interests in "macromolecular design and synthesis, targeted drug delivery for cancer, nano-scale assembly of synthetic biomaterials, and electrostatic and directed materials assembly".[2]She is an intramural faculty member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and is also an Associate Editor of ACS Nano.

Hammond was born in 1963 in Detroit, Michigan[4] as Paula Therese Goodwin to parents Jesse Francis and Della Mae Goodwin (nee McGraw). Her father has a Ph.D in Biochemistry and her mother has a master's degree in nursing.[3]

Goodwin graduated a year prior to her expected date at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield, Michigan in 1980. After graduation, Goodwin went on to study and earn a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering. Soon after graduating from MIT, Goodwin moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she obtained her Master of Science in chemical engineering. She later returned to MIT to receive her Ph.D in ChemE.[3]



Honors and Recognitions
In 2013, Hammond was one of three African-American female fellows to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In September 2013, Hammond was recognized by the United States Department of Defense and awarded the Ovarian Cancer Research Program Teal Innovator Award.[5]

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  • 2017: Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering[6]
  • 2016: Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine[7]
  • 2014: Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research[8]
  • 2013: Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 2013: DoD Ovarian Cancer Teal Innovator Award
  • 2013: Charles M.A. Stine Award, AIChE
  • 2013: Board of Directors, American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE)
  • 2013: Margaret Etters Lecturer in Chemistry, University of Minnesota
  • 2012: Fellow, American Chemical Society Polymer Chemistry Division
  • 2011: David H. Koch Chair Professor of Engineering
  • 2010: Top 100 Materials Scientists, top cited as rated by Thomson-Reuters
  • 2010: Dow Foundation Distinguished Lecturer, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 2010: Distinguished Scientist Award, Harvard Foundation, Harvard University
  • 2009: Melvin Calvin Lecturer, U.C. Berkeley Department of Chemistry
  • 2009: Visiting Women’s Scholar Award, University of Delaware
  • 2009: William W. Grimes Award, AIChE
  • 2009: Caltech Kavli Institute Lecturer
  • 2009: Fellow, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE)
  • 2009: Visiting Women’s Scholar Award, University of Delaware
  • 2008: Karl Kammermeyer Distinguished Lecture at Iowa State University
  • 2008: Irwin Sizer Award for Significant Improvements to MIT Education
  • 2008: Featured in “Top 100 Science Stories of 2008”, Discover Magazine, for micropatterned virus batteries
  • 2007: Lucy Pickett Lecturer, Mt. Holyoke College
  • 2006: Bayer Chair Professorship, 2006-2010
  • 2006: Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award for Virus-Based Thin Film Battery
  • 2006: Member, National Research Council Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology, 2006-2009
  • 2006: Permanent Member, NIH Gene and Drug Delivery Study Group, 2006-2010
  • 2004: Georgia Tech Outstanding Young Alumni Award
  • 2004: Bayer Distinguished Lecturer
  • 2004: Henry Hill Lecturer Award, NOBCChE
  • 2003: Radcliffe Institute Fellow (aka Bunting Fellow), Harvard University
  • 2000: Junior Bose Faculty Award
  • 2000: GenCorp Signature University Award
  • 2000: Lloyd Ferguson Young Scientist Award
  • 1997: NSF CAREER Award for Young Investigators
  • 1996: Environmental Protection Agency Early Career Research Award
  • 1996: 3M Innovation Research Award
  • 1996: DuPont Young Faculty Research Award, 1996-1999
  • 1995: Herman P. Meissner Career Development Chair 1995-1998
  • 1994: NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemistry
  • 1992: Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship
  • 1992: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Karl Taylor Compton Prize Recipient
  • 1990: Eastman Kodak Theophilus Sorrel Graduate Award Recipient, NOBCChE

 

[IllmaticDelta]

John W. Rogers Jr.

(born March 31, 1958) is an investor who founded Ariel Capital Management (now Ariel Investments, LLC)[1] in 1983.[2] He is chairman and CEO of the company,[3] which is the United States' largest minority-run mutual fund firm.[4] He has been a regular contributor to Forbes magazine for most of the last decade.[5] Active in the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign, Rogers was a leader of the 2009 Inauguration committee.[6][7]

Rogers was appointed as the Board President of the Chicago Park District for six years in the 1990s.[8][9] He has also was appointed as board member to several companies, as a leader of several organizations affiliated with his collegiate alma mater, and as a leader in youth education in his native Chicago. In 2007, Rogers was honored with the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University for the breadth and depth of his service to many organizations. While a student at Princeton, he was captain of the 1979–80 Ivy League co-champion Princeton Tigers men's basketball team.[4]

Ariel Capital Management/Ariel Investments, LLC
Rogers was one of the hot stock pickers of the 1980s.[24] Rogers uses a value investing strategy, which has been a problem at times when growth stocks have been the better-performing investment class.[9][24][25] However, his firm and its mutual funds have often been among the industry performance leaders and have on average outperformed the market.[24][25][26] He eschews investing in new companies or making investments in companies that have no track record.[22] For example, rather than invest in AIDS-related stocks, he would prefer to invest in hospitals that treat AIDS victims.[27] His typical holding period is four or five years rather than the 14-month period of the average mutual fund.[28] Mellody Hobson serves as the president of the company.[29]

The growth of his company has been steady. He founded the firm in July 1983 with $10,000, which he turned into $23,170 by the end of February 1984.[30][31] He had financial backing from his mother and other friends and relatives.[31] The Ariel fund became public on November 6, 1986.[32] In November 2000, he had 41 employees.[11] In February 2002, the company had 51 employees and more than 120 institutional clients (including United Airlines, ChevronTexaco, and the California State Teachers' Retirement System),[9] which grew to include institutional clients such as Wal-Mart and PepsiCo by April 2005.[22] The company has over 100 employees as of 2008.[30] In 2008, the company changed its name to Ariel Investments, LLC.[33]

Rogers also has served on the boards of directors of other publicly traded Chicago-based corporations, including Exelon,[34] and Bally Total Fitness Corporation, where he was named lead director.[35]

Rogers has been a regular contributor to Forbes for many years and online archives of his commentaries go back as far as 2001.[5] He provides regular personal finance commentaries in a column that has recently been appearing under the title "The Patient Investor".[36][37][38]

Ariel Investments’ $16 Billion Milestone
The black-owned investment firm achieves a major milestone

Ariel Investments, No. 1 on the BE ASSET MANAGERS list and the first black money manager to launch a family of mutual funds, achieves an investment milestone when 17 major corporations select its mutual funds for their 401(k) plans.

Led by Ariel founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer John W. Rogers Jr., the firm broke new ground with that landmark achievement despite a hypercompetitive environment and greater compliance pressure from the newly enacted Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Due to the relentless efforts of Rogers, Mellody Hobson, the firm’s president, and the rest of the team, Ariel snared new accounts while applying a value investment style to produce hefty returns for individual and institutional investors. The results: Assets under management grew in 2003 to $16.1 billion, an explosive 58% increase from the previous year.




2003: Ariel Investments, No. 1 on the BE ASSET MANAGERS list and the first black money manager to launch a family of mutual funds, achieves an investment milestone when 17 major corporations select its mutual funds for their 401(k) plans.

Led by Ariel founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer John W. Rogers Jr., the firm broke new ground with that landmark achievement despite a hypercompetitive environment and greater compliance pressure from the newly enacted Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Due to the relentless efforts of Rogers, Mellody Hobson, the firm’s president, and the rest of the team, Ariel snared new accounts while applying a value investment style to produce hefty returns for individual and institutional investors. The results: Assets under management grew in 2003 to $16.1 billion, an explosive 58% increase from the previous year.




Rogers, listed among BE’s Most Powerful Blacks on Wall Street, has broken barriers in the nation’s asset management industry and helped paved the way for other African Americans to gain entry into a business dominated by non-diverse firms.

A New Approach to Investing


Like the tortoise of Aesop’s fable, he took a slow-and-steady approach to investing in undervalued small and medium-sized companies over the long term and has built wealth for investors, including millions of African Americans. It was an approach that was in contrast to many of his growth-oriented peers as Rogers would recount in an April 1992 BLACK ENTERPRISE cover story.

The journey for Rogers began in 1983 when he launched Ariel Capital Management, now Ariel Investments. In that 1992 BLACK ENTERPRISE article, Rogers, who worked more than two years for the brokerage firm William Blair, used a connection to gain his first account: $100,000 investment from the Howard University endowment fund. He also developed The Patient Investor, a newsletter describing his stock-picking philosophy —complete with a picture of a tortoise and the “slow and steady” tagline gracing its cover. Due to his performance, assets under management grew to $2 million by 1986.

 

[Whogivesafuck]

America's First Black-Owned Radio Station

WERD 860 - Atlanta Ga

WERD was the first radio station owned and programmed by African Americans. The station was established in Atlanta, Georgia on October 3, 1949, broadcasting on 860 AM (now used by WAEC).

WERD Atlanta was the first radio station owned and operated by African-Americans. (WDIA in Memphis was on the air in 1948 doing black—or Negro as it was then called—programming, but the owners were not African American). Jesse B. Blayton Sr., an accountant, bank president, and Atlanta University professor, purchased WERD in 1949 for $50,000. He changed the station format to "black appeal" and hired his son Jesse Jr. as station manager.[1] "Jockey" Jack Gibson was hired and by 1951 he was the most popular DJ in Atlanta.

The station was housed in the Prince Hall Masonic Temple building on Auburn Avenue,[2] then one of the wealthiest black neighborhoods in the United States. Located in that same building was the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and staffed by Ella Baker.[3][4] According to Gibson, King would tap the ceiling of SCLC office [just below WERD] with a broomstick to signal he had an announcement to make. Gibson would then lower a microphone from the studio window to King at the window below.[5]

WDIA, in Memphis, Tennessee, though white owned, had Nat D. Williams as part of the first radio station programmed entirely for African Americans, WERD had "Jockey Jack" Gibson, a friend of Blayton from Chicago.[6] Blayton sold the station in 1968

 

[Black Haven]

Let me just go ahead and drop this off here it seems like many of us are starting to obtain the real knowledge about our selves

 

[IllmaticDelta]

......aframs really are the like ancient egyptians when it comes to infuence


Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism or Classical Pentecostalism is a renewal movement[1] within Protestant[2] Christianity that places special emphasis on a direct personal experience of God through the baptism with the Holy Spirit. The term Pentecostal is derived from Pentecost, the Greek name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks. For Christians, this event commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus Christ, as described in the second chapter of the Book of Acts.



Pentecostalism emerged in the early 20th century among radical adherents of the Holiness movement who were energized by revivalism and expectation for the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Believing that they were living in the end times, they expected God to spiritually renew the Christian Church thereby bringing to pass the restoration of spiritual gifts and the evangelization of the world. In 1900, Charles Parham, an American evangelist and faith healer, began teaching that speaking in tongues was the Bible evidence of Spirit baptism. The three-year-long Azusa Street Revival, founded and led by William J. Seymour in Los Angeles, California, resulted in the spread of Pentecostalism throughout the United States and the rest of the world as visitors carried the Pentecostal experience back to their home churches or felt called to the mission field. While virtually all Pentecostal denominations trace their origins to Azusa Street, the movement has experienced a variety of divisions and controversies. An early dispute centered on challenges to the doctrine of the Trinity. As a result, the Pentecostal movement is divided between trinitarian and non-trinitarian branches, resulting in the emergence of Oneness Pentecostals.

Comprising over 700 denominations and a large number of independent churches, there is no central authority governing Pentecostalism; however, many denominations are affiliated with the Pentecostal World Fellowship. There are over 279 million Pentecostals worldwide, and the movement is growing in many parts of the world, especially the global South. Since the 1960s, Pentecostalism has increasingly gained acceptance from other Christian traditions, and Pentecostal beliefs concerning Spirit baptism and spiritual gifts have been embraced by non-Pentecostal Christians in Protestant and Catholic churches through the Charismatic Movement. Together, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity numbers over 500 million adherents.[3]

William Joseph Seymour (May 2, 1870 – September 28, 1922) was an American minister, and an initiator of the Azusa Street Revival.[1] Seymour was one of the most influential individuals in the revival movement that grew into the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, along with other figures such as Charles Parham, Howard A. Goss, and Frank Bartleman.[2] Seymour's emphasis on racial equality drew many historically disenfranchised people to the movement, and due to his influence the revival grew very quickly.[3]

Legacy
The spirit of revival spread from Azusa all over the United States, and many missions modeled themselves after Azusa, especially the racially integrated services.[42] By 1914, Pentecostalism had spread to almost every major U.S. city.[42] The egalitarian message was very attractive to many people experiencing some sort of racial division all over the world.[43] The mission quickly spread all around the world: from Liberia, to the Middle East, to Sweden and Norway, the Pentecostal message flourished rapidly and many of the missionaries spreading the new message had themselves been at the Azusa revival.[44] Seymour's global influence spread far beyond his direct interactions with the missions.

Protestant Pentecostals trace their roots back to early leaders such as Seymour, and estimates of worldwide Pentecostal membership ranges from 115 million to 400 million.[2] Most modern Charismatic groups can claim some lineage to the Azusa Street Revival and Seymour.[2] Pentecostalism is the second largest Christian denomination in Latin America, behind Roman Catholicism, and many African churches are Pentecostal or Charismatic in practice.[45] While there were many other centers for revivals, such as Topeka, India, and Chicago, it was the socially transgressive and egalitarian message of Azusa that appealed to many converts.[46][47] Many specific doctrines taught at Azusa, such as glossolalia, are still taught today, as opposed to Parham's xenoglossy.[48] While the movement largely fractured along racial lines within a decade, the splits were in some ways less deep than the vast divide that seems often to separate many white religious denominations from their black counterparts.

Azusa Street Revival

The Azusa Street Revival was a historic revival meeting that took place in Los Angeles, California, and is the origin of the Pentecostal movement.[1] It was led by William J. Seymour, an African American preacher. It began with a meeting on April 9, 1906, and continued until roughly 1915. The revival was characterized by spiritual experiences accompanied with testimonies of physical healing miracles,[2] worship services and speaking in tongues. The participants were criticized by the secular media and Christian theologians for behaviors considered to be outrageous and unorthodox, especially at the time. Today, the revival is considered by historians to be the primary catalyst for the spread of Pentecostalism in the 20th century.





Birth of Pentecostal movement


The leaders of the Apostolic Faith Mission. Seymour is front row, second from the right; Jennie is back row, third from left.
By the end of 1906, most leaders from Azusa Street had spun off to form other congregations, such as the 51st Street Apostolic Faith Mission, the Spanish AFM, and the Italian Pentecostal Mission. These missions were largely composed of immigrant or ethnic groups. The Southeast United States was a particularly prolific area of growth for the movement, since Seymour's approach gave a useful explanation for a charismatic spiritual climate that had already been taking root in those areas. Other new missions were based on preachers who had charisma and energy. Nearly all of these new churches were founded among immigrants and the poor.[citation needed]

Many existing Wesleyan-holiness denominations adopted the Pentecostal message, such as the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Church of God in Christ, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church. The formation of new denominations also occurred, motivated by doctrinal differences between Wesleyan Pentecostals and their Finished Work counterparts, such as the Assemblies of God formed in 1914 and the Pentecostal Church of God formed in 1919. An early doctrinal controversy led to a split between Trinitarian and Oneness Pentecostals, the latter founded the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World in 1916.[27]

Today, there are more than 500 million Pentecostal and charismatic believers across the globe,[28] and it is the fastest-growing form of Christianity today.[9] The Azusa Street Revival is commonly regarded as the beginning of the modern-day Pentecostal Movement.[16][29][30]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Estrelda Alexander was raised in an urban, black, working-class, oneness Pentecostal congregation in the 1950s and 1960s, but she knew little of her heritage and thought that all Christians worshiped and believed as she did. Much later she discovered that many Christians not only knew little of her heritage but considered it strange. Even today, most North Americans remain ignorant of black Pentecostalism.

Black Fire remedies lack of historical consciousness by recounting the story of African American Pentecostal origins and development. In this fascinating description she covers

• what Pentecostalism retained from African spirituality
• the legacy of the nineteenth-century black Holiness movement
• William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival
• African American trinitarian and oneness Pentecostal denominations
• the role of women in African American Pentecostalism
• African American neo-Pentecostals and charismatic movements
• black Pentecostals in majority-white denominations
• theological challenges of black Pentecostalism in the twenty-first century

Whether you come from an African American Pentecostal background or you just want to learn more, this book will unfold all the dimensions of this important movement's history and contribution to the life of the church.

REVIEWS
"This particular book is especially welcome. African American Pentecostals have become a major force in American (and world) Christianity, but there is a serious lack of well-documented studies. Estrelda Alexander does an excellent job filling that lamentable gap."

Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame
"Pentecostalism is one of the most vibrant and important developments in modern Christianity. In this welcome and much-needed book, Estrelda Y. Alexander demonstrates convincingly that this global work of the Spirit has to a large extent emerged from and continues to be fanned into flame by the African American community. Outsiders who think a few more controversial variations of 'black fire' sometimes look like 'strange fire' will be glad to learn that the African American church has able internal critics of its own outliers. Every Christian--indeed, everyone interested in the present and future of Christianity--needs to know this story."

Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College
"Black Fire offers an expansive historical overview of African American Holiness-Pentecostals and their often overlooked contributions to the early development, dissemination and current vitality of the modern Pentecostal movement from its inception to the present. Students and scholars of African American religion and culture will appreciate its rich content, as well as its nuanced attention to matters of race, class, gender and generation."

Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, Ph.D., professor of history, Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas
"Dr. Alexander has gathered the major, minor, profound and pedestrian aspects of African American Holiness-Pentecostalism in a volume that seeks to provide a Rosetta stone for scholars, students, denominational historians and the general public. She is clear to state that this work is an endearing labor of love to articulate her experience as an African American Pentecostal worshiper, scholar and minister. This volume is the seedbed of a crop of readable studies in African American Holiness-Pentecostal history, theology and culture. A worthy investment in understanding the why, who, what and how of a century-old community of denominations linked to the book of Acts and 312 Azusa Street. Kudos!"

Dr. Ida E. Jones, historian, Calvary Bible Institute and Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
"This book will provide its readers with a valuable overview of important monuments and figures from the past one hundred years. It presents a straightforward account of how African American Pentecostalism developed and changed over time. Because of the scope of this work, it will be helpful for general audiences who want to learn more about this topic or for use in an undergraduate course."

Monica Reed, H-Net Pentecostalism, May 2014
"Black Fire provides a much-needed narrative that completes, and at times corrects, the general histories of both American Christianity and the Pentecostal and charismatic movements."

William Purinton, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 2
"Alexander is one of the few historians of black Pentecostalism who have attempted to synthesize the story of black Pentecostalism within one volume. This is a very challenging task that she does exceptionally well given the myriad number of black Pentecostal denominations. Her work is a first of its kind and a timely, valuable resource for students and scholars of African American religion in general and African American Pentecostalism in particular."

Jonathan Langston Chism, Religious Studies Review, Vol. 42, No. 4, December 2016

Black Fire - InterVarsity Press


.
.
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Pentecostalism’s Neglected Black History

In her groundbreaking new book, Black Fire, theologian Estrelda Y. Alexander shines a light on the African American roots of Pentecostalism. Here, she speaks to UrbanFaith News & Religion editor Christine A. Scheller about the miracles and scandals of Black Pentecostal faith.

Dr. Estrelda Y. Alexander grew up in the Pentecostal movement, but didn’t know much about the Black roots of that movement until she was a seminary student. In her groundbreaking new book, Black Fire: 100 Years of African American Pentecostalism, the Regent University visiting professor traces those roots back to the Azusa Street Revival and beyond. Alexander was so influenced by what she learned that she’s spearheading the launch of William Seymour College in Washington, D.C., to continue the progressive Pentecostal legacy of one of the movement’s most important founders.

Christine A. Scheller: I was introduced to Rev. William Seymour through your book. What was his significance in Pentecostal history and why was it ignored for so long?

Estrelda Y. Alexander: I grew up Pentecostal but don’t remember hearing about Seymour until I went to seminary. In my church history class, as they began to talk about the history of Pentecostalism, they mentioned this person who led this major revival, and I’m sitting in class going, “I’ve never heard of him.” I would say part of it was the broad definition of Pentecostalism, which is this emphasis on speaking in tongues, and that wasn’t Seymour’s emphasis. So, even though he’s at the forefront of this revival, he’s out of step with a lot of the people who are around him. Then again, he’s Black in a culture that was racist. For him to be the leader would have been problematic, and so he gets overshadowed. I think his demeanor was rather humble, so he gets overshadowed by a lot of more forceful personalities. He doesn’t try to make a name for himself and so no name is made for him. He gets shuffled off to the back of the story for 70 years, then there’s this push to reclaim him with the Civil Rights Movement. As African American scholars start to write, he’s part of the uncovering of the story of early Black history in the country.

Christine A. Scheller: What was his role specifically in the Azusa Street Revival?





Christine A. Scheller: What is the connection between Pentecostalism and African spirituality?

Estrelda Y. Alexander: Because the early leaders of Pentecostalism were African American, they had been grounded in a spirituality. A lot of times, because you don’t understand your past, you don’t even know what it is that influences you. Seymour grew up in Lousiana and Lousiana was a place where there was a lot of African spirituality around him that he imbibed as a young person. So some of the ways that African people are open to God get incorporated into Pentecostal worship, and you can see this in the difference between white and black Pentecostals even today. There’s this real sense of openness to the Spirit, but not naming it as African religion.

Christine A. Scheller: So, it’s a cultural influence?

Estrelda Y. Alexander: Right. They would never say that, but one of the people who specifically talked about embracing African roots as part of Pentecostalism was Charles Harrison Mason, the founder of the Church of God in Christ, which is the largest African American Pentecostal body in the world. He was unashamedly African in his approach to religion and incorporated things such as healing rituals that he not only found support for in the Bible, but also found support for in his African roots. He was not ashamed and he didn’t want Black people to be ashamed of their Africanness, and so he did things like using herbs and healing roots. Even though he saw this as healing that was being offered by the Holy Spirit, he also saw a place for the African herbs and the things that he had known in his childhood in the ritual of healing in the Black church.

There are elements of Africanism that no they are not named as that, but they get incorporated, such as the music. In the Black Pentecostal church, music is a mainstay, and it’s music at a different level. I’ve heard a critique by a middle class Black person who was appalled by the earthiness of the music in Black Pentecostal worship, and almost saw it as soulish, and didn’t think it was appropriate, because not just music, but rhythm and drums are important to African American Pentecostal worship. When Pentecostalism first began, people who were around Pentecostals thought their worship was appalling. For example, when Rev. Charles Parham came to Azusa Street, he called what he saw at the revival “crude Africanisms.” He was appalled at the openness to the Spirit. It wasn’t just speaking in tongues, but it was the shaking, the quaking, which many people would see as related to Spirit possession in African worship. Pentecostals would say, yes, there’s a Spirit possession, but they would redefine it as possession by the Holy Spirit. If you go back to slave religion, you had things like the “ring shout.” The people who were early Pentecostals weren’t that far removed from slavery, so some of that was in their memory and gets translated into some of the worship that happens in the early movement.

Christine A. Scheller: So those things aren’t foreign to them culturally?

Estrelda Y. Alexander: Those aren’t foreign to them, and so you would see a more free expression. I go to a Black Pentecostal church, but have served in both White and Black churches. When I first went back to a Black church, it was very interesting to me to watch the worship, and to see Africanisms even now incorporated into the worship. For instance, my pastor often does this chant. You would never see a chant in a White Pentecostal church, but my pastor will get up on a Sunday morning and begin to chant, and people will chant with him. It’s not using words. I can’t even explain it, because I’m still trying to understand it. I hate to say this, but in some ways it’s foreign to me. They’re unabashedly African and will say, “This is who we are.”

Christine A. Scheller: The Grio published an article about African Americans abandoning Christianity for African faiths. Do you think Pentecostalism offers something that could appeal to these disaffected Blacks?

Estrelda Y. Alexander: One of the things about Pentecostalism is that it’s still considered, even by many middle-class Blacks, a lower-class religion. Pentecostal worship does offer a way to relate back to our Africanness and the truth is all Christian faith is culturally defined. Evangelicalism and Mainline Christian faith go back to a Greek paradigm. And so, yes, if people were willing to seriously engage Pentecostalism, there could be something in that that would speak to some of those same issues.

Christine A. Scheller: Is it possible to overestimate the influence of Pentecostalism on Christianity given that there are 600 million adherents and the style of worship has influenced all kinds of denominations?

Estrelda Y. Alexander: I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate, but that influence has been filtered through a lot of other things. The worship will be very Pentecostal often, but the theology or the ethical system is less influential. What people are borrowing is what’s attractive to them, without understanding all that that means for Pentecostals.

Christine A. Scheller: Because for Pentecostals the empowerment of the Spirit goes back to the ability to lead a holy life?

Estrelda Y. Alexander: Right, and that’s what makes classical Pentecostals still classical. They would specifically stand by the authority of Scripture. Their thing is, “We’re not Pentecostal people; we are Pentecostal Christians. We’re not trying to sell a religious system.” That’s the danger too, even in terms of what Pentecostalism could offer. It could offer something to the church, but it has to be taken seriously as an ethical system as well as a cultural expression.

Pentecostalism's Neglected Black History | HuffPost

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Pentecostal Movement Celebrates Humble Roots

LOS ANGELES -- One hundred years ago, a series of boisterous revival meetings in a converted stable on Azusa Street launched a global movement that overcame differences in class, gender and race to unite around the belief that the Holy Spirit still works miracles.

Today, there are about 600 million Pentecostal and charismatic Christians whose roots are in the Azusa Street revival. They make up the fastest-growing segment of Christianity, thriving especially in the Southern Hemisphere, with their beliefs having an impact on nearly every Christian denomination.


The congregation met in the round, with Seymour facilitating the interactive gathering from the center of the room. The meetings were in the style of the black church, with hand-clapping, foot-stomping and shouting. But, at the height of the Jim Crow era, they included blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians from the Los Angeles melting pot -- up to 1,300 people at a time.

Newspaper reporters covered the rowdy meetings, and the reviews were less than flattering.

Believers were described as "Holy Rollers," "Holy Jumpers," "Tangled Tonguers" and "Holy Ghosters."


Christians from other traditions were also critical, saying the movement was hyper-emotional, misused Scripture and lost focus on Christ by overemphasizing the Holy Spirit.

Undeterred, the Pentecostal Christians were motivated to share their faith with urgency. According to Robeck, they considered salvation a personal experience and expected physical healing and other miracles to occur when the Gospel was preached.

Believing the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, Azusa Street missionaries were sent throughout the world. And Evangelists from other countries traveled to the mission to experience the revival before bringing it to their own congregations.

Robeck said social factors contributed to the movement's spread. Los Angeles was in the middle of a wave of immigration, and people in the midst of such change were desperately seeking answers. Seymour preached a message of empowerment that appealed to them.

While the mainstream media ridiculed Azusa Street, Frank Bartleman, an evangelist, kept a diary of what he saw and experienced. His vivid accounts, more than 500 in all, were published in Christian newspapers across the country. The Azusa Street mission also published a newspaper, the Apostolic Faith, which was distributed to 50,000 people, some of them overseas.

"That spread curiosity around the world and brought pilgrims from around the world," said Vinson Synan, dean of the school of divinity at Regent University in Virginia Beach, who has researched Azusa Street history.

Services continued to be racially mixed, with Bartleman writing that "the color line was washed away in the blood of Jesus."

Synan points out that having a black man, Seymour, in charge "with white men under his authority" was considered miraculous.

"From that day on I would say Pentecostalism has had more crossing of ethnic boundaries than any movement in the world in Christianity."

Pentecostal Movement Celebrates Humble Roots




Six hundred million Pentecostals and Charismatics trace their particular faith back to its humble origins over one hundred years ago.

 

[Whogivesafuck]

Provident Hospital – the first Black owned and operated medical institution in the United States




Prior to 1891 there was not in this country a single hospital or training school for nurses owned and managed by colored people … there are now twelve! … and not a single failure in the effort!
– Daniel Hale Williams, 19001

Emma Reynolds, a young Chicago woman in the late 1880s, had been denied admission by each of the city’s nursing schools on account of her race. Her brother, pastor of St. Stephen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, approached Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a young black surgeon, for help. Dr. Williams himself, despite his degree from Chicago Medical College (now Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine), had been unable to obtain clinical privileges at any Chicago hospital, and was forced to operate in patients’ homes. He also obtained work as surgeon to the City Railway Company and by securing an appointment as a teacher of anatomy at his alma mater.2

With the support of a few prominent white citizens (Philip Armour, George Pullman, and Marshall Field among them) as well as many black individuals and organizations, Williams worked for two years to develop plans for a hospital accessible to black patients and medical practitioners, and incorporating a nursing school. In 1890 the Reverend Jenkins Jones secured a commitment from the Armour Meat Packing Company for the down payment on a three-story brick house at 29th and Dearborn Streets. In 1891 a board of trustees, an executive committee, and a finance committee were named, a community advisory board and a women’s auxiliary board were assembled, and Provident Hospital and Training School Association opened as a twelve-bed facility. Dr. Williams was appointed hospital chief of staff. It was the first black-owned and operated medical institution in the country and the first interracial hospital in Chicago — the staff and patients were both black and white.3, 4

The initial priority had been to secure an adequate hospital building. But the founders also considered community needs and the hospital’s overall mission. When the legal papers were drawn up in 1891, the charter of the “Provident Hospital and Training School Association” stated that “The object for which it is formed is to maintain a hospital and training school for nurses in the City of Chicago, Illinois, for the gratuitous treatment of the medical and surgical diseases of the sick poor.”3 In 1892 seven women, including Emma Reynolds, enrolled in the first nursing class. The first physician in surgical training, Dr. Austin Curtis (later surgeon-in-chief at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, DC) studied under Dr. Williams from 1891 through 1893. Dr. Williams meanwhile brought renown to himself and to Provident when he performed a thoracotomy to oversew a stab wound to the pericardium and left ventricle of a young man’s heart – thought at the time to be the first operation ever performed directly on the human heart.5

Over the next few years, demand for medical care in the community grew, and despite a national economic depression the Provident board initiated expansion plans. An 1896 funding campaign raised sufficient funds to construct a new building at 36th and Dearborn. The effort was joined by abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who gave a public lecture in Chicago and presented a donation to Dr. Williams at the new hospital site. The hospital moved to its new 65-bed location in 1898.

Although the hospital’s formation was dependent on wealthy donors, and such people stepped in at key moments in Provident’s history, the generosity of community residents was also a critical factor; and community support was not restricted to financial contributions. The strong appeal of a hospital responsive to the black community elicited repeated waves of community volunteerism.

Like any institution that endures for a century, Provident experienced many changes in its medical and administrative leadership. In 1894, President Cleveland appointed Dr. Williams Surgeon-in-Chief at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, DC. Williams transformed that institution by organizing the medical staff into seven departments and creating an academic affiliation with Howard University. He returned to Chicago and Provident Hospital in 1898. In the interim, however, Dr. George Cleveland Hall, an opponent of Dr. Williams, had been named medical director and his supporters had assumed control of the Provident board of trustees. The resulting tensions led Williams to secure appointment at other Chicago hospitals – his national reputation now able to overcome the prejudice that stood in the way of these same opportunities only a decade earlier – and he gradually distanced himself from Provident, finally resigning in 1912. His last decade of practice was as associate attending staff surgeon at St. Luke’s Hospital. On his retirement, St. Luke’s offered to name a patient ward in his honor but he declined, fearing it would become a segregated ward.2

Following his return from Washington Dr. Williams also began working to facilitate the establishment of other black-owned hospitals around the country. Most notably, he served as visiting professor at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, and guided the development of its hospital. The model he had started at Provident, and now brought to Meharry, was soon recapitulated at Knoxville, Kansas City, St Louis, Birmingham, Louisville, Atlanta, and Dallas.2, 4

In 1933 Provident established an educational affiliation with the University of Chicago, and as part of the agreement purchased a building on East 51st Street, near the university and previously occupied by the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The newly refurbished, seven-story facility added considerable space for patient care, education, and administrative functions. A four-story outpatient building was constructed and two apartment buildings at 50th and Vincennes were purchased to house student nurses. As evidence of its support, the University of Chicago established a one million dollar fund for teaching and research at Provident Hospital. This became the most productive period of Provident’s history as an academic medical center, for the rise of specialization in medicine began to make postgraduate training obligatory for physicians, and Provident was one of few places in the country where African-American medical school graduates could train. In 1938 Provident became one of only nine institutions in Illinois approved by the American College of Surgeons for graduate training in surgery, and by the early 1940s the hospital also boasted programs in internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, pathology, ophthalmology, and otolaryngology.3

During the Great Depression Provident struggled financially. But unlike other institutions who then recovered in the post-war economic expansion, Provident’s challenges only increased as black migration to Chicago swelled the population in the hospital’s Bronzeville neighborhood. The hospital narrowly averted bankruptcy in the late 1940’s, then remained reasonably stable financially over the next two decades. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, however, with their non-discrimination clauses applicable to any institution receiving federal funding, had ironic consequences for institutions like Provident.4 As it became more common for black physicians to be granted privileges at larger hospitals, and for black patients, particularly those newly insured by Medicare or Medicaid, to receive care at other institutions, the financial condition of Provident worsened. Other trends, such as a shift of nursing education from hospitals to colleges of nursing, also led to a diminution of Provident’s role as an educational institution. The Provident nursing school closed in 1966.

In order to compete and continue to serve its community effectively, Provident needed to expand further and upgrade its facilities. Through the efforts of John H. Sengstacke, publisher of the Chicago Defender and longtime advocate for Provident, an alliance with Cook County Hospital, and federal grants through the Departments of Health, Education and Welfare and Housing and Urban Development, the hospital was able to open a new 300-bed pavilion adjacent to the existing 51st Street site in 1982. But the new facilities did not turn around the hospital’s fortunes, and debt only increased through the 1970s and 1980s. After declaring bankruptcy in July 1987, the hospital closed its doors that September.

The community’s devotion to the hospital remained, and various groups attempted to garner funding and political support toward its reopening. These efforts coincided with a plan by the Cook County’s Bureau of Health Services to improve service provision to residents on the south side of Chicago, and the Cook County Board of Commissioners acquired the hospital in 1991. After considerable investment in upgrading the physical plant, the Bureau reopened the facility as Provident Hospital of Cook County in August 1993.

While no longer considered a black-run hospital, Provident continues to serve the health needs of the community under the auspices of the Cook County Bureau of Health Services. Its legacy as America’s first black owned and operated hospital survives through the Provident Foundation,6 established in 1995 by Ed Gardner, a prominent businessman and the chair the hospital board at the time of its transfer to the County, and James W. Myles, a longtime union leader. The Foundation honors the legacy of Provident Hospital and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams by providing scholarship support and mentorship to aspiring doctors, nurses, and other health professionals from Chicago.

A less tangible, but more deeply embedded legacy lives on in the many people the hospital served for nearly a century. There are those whose forbearers first entered professional ranks through training as a nurse or physician at Provident, or did so themselves. There are the many Chicago natives proud to be “Provident Babies.” One, born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson in 1964, has become First Lady of the United States. Most of all there are those whose families benefitted from the care they received; it was, as noted by the venerable Chicago historian Timuel Black, “often the safest – and sometimes the only – place to go

 

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