Not all Oscar winners are equal, as the story of Hattie McDaniel shows. The daughter of former slaves, she worked as an actress in Hollywood, playing maids on screen, and also, because her salary was so low, playing them for real. She won the part of Mammy in Gone with the Wind. It was a role criticized for feeding a black stereotype, but it won her an Oscar for best supporting actress. What it didn’t win her was equality. She could not attend the film’s premiere in Atlanta because of the venue’s “no blacks” rule. When it came to the Oscars, she had to sit in the segregated part.
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Today is Feb. 28, 2010. It is the last day of the month in the shortest month of the year. This is the month Black History is celebrated throughout the United States. Each year the question is asked, why February?
The short answer: Historian Carter G. Woodson, one of the founders of the Association of Negro Life and History (ANLH), selected the week that contains the birth dates of two people who played a prominent role in shaping black history: Abraham Lincoln, Feb. 12, and Frederick Douglass, Feb. 14. Lincoln (1809-1865), a white man and the 16th president of the United States, signed the Emancipation Proclamation to free black slaves in some states. Douglass (1817-1895), a black man, was an orator, journalist and anti-slavery leader of the 19th century.
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If you are ever in Washington, DC, Maryland, or Virginia between the hours of 6p-10p and you happen to turn your radio on to 93.9wkys, you will hear my voice. I go by the name of “YOUR ROYAL HYPENESS ANGIE ANGE,” but you can just call me Ange.
I am a true radio girl! All my life I have listened to the radio and the jocks, wanting to be like them. At 25 it still amazes me that I have already worked at all the stations I grew up listening to and have worked with all the jocks I grew up adoring; Donnie Simpson, Russ Parr, Olivia Foxx, Tigger, Steph Lova, P-Stew, just to name a few! For me, radio history dates back to a time, when jocks were the star and the music they loved, we loved. Now that I have become a jock myself, I find that my higher ups want the focus to be solely on the music. Music is the star! That’s what one of my bosses always tells me, and although I agree with him to a certain extent, I personally feel that my listeners are the star and I am merely a reflection of them. So if I can make my listeners the star on my show, then I in turn will also be a star and so will the music I play! But I digress… Read the rest of this entry »
JASPER – Fifty years ago, a teacher in a one-room Jasper County schoolhouse faced a class full of rural African-American children and issued a challenge.
“Everyone of you is going to college,” Viola Tukes told them.
Some of those students did go to college, while others, like Jesse Woods, took the first good-paying job they could find. But in the small school, situated in the Rock Hill community between Kirbyville and Jasper, students were given an education and opportunities that barely existed for previous generations.
“I’ve seen some good times in Rock Hill,” said Woods, 62, whose father never learned to read or drive a car. Woods attended the Rock Hill school in the 1950s.
The schoolhouse was built in the 1920-21 school year through the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which supplied funding and architectural planning for 5,300 African-American schools from 1912 to 1932.
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Musical traditions and recollections of eight retired African-American railroad track laborers whose occupational folk songs were once heard on railroads that crisscross the South. They recount experiences in the segregated South, describe organized labor and occupational safety standards, and demonstrate railroad calls that survive today as expressions of religious faith, social protest and sexually explicit poetry. A film by Barry Dornfeld and folklorist Maggie Holtzberg.
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The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was unique in the annals of World War II history. It was the only all-African American, all-female unit to serve overseas. A Women’s Army Corps (WAC) unit, the 6888th kept mail flowing to nearly seven million soldiers in the European Theater of Operations.
The women of the 6888th Battalion survived two anxious brushes with the German military during World War II. First, German U-boats forced the unit’s convoy to reroute during its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Then, upon arriving in England a V1 rocket, known as a Buzz Bomb, came roaring into the area.
“Everyone was running,” recalled Mrs. Mary Ragland, a veteran of the unit, about the Buzz Bomb attack in February 1945, where the snow-saturated ground made running difficult. Alyce Dixon remembered, “I was little and I could get down.” No one was hurt in the attack, but the rocket got their attention: “I was always ready to run,” said Ragland. The U-boats had a similar effect: “Darn tootin’ I was scared!” admitted Ragland. The worst part was being in the middle of a vast ocean: “You can’t see land anywhere.”
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Fifth Avenue downtown bustles with activity on a blustery recent afternoon. People of all races mingle: This could be any mid-sized city in the United States, circa 2010.
Fifty years ago, things were different. The stores along Fifth – specifically, their lunch counters – and the city itself were the site of a battle that also played out in dozens of other cities in the South.
The fight pitted black college students and a few of their white peers against the city’s white power structure and its downtown merchants over the right to sit down and eat lunch. At the time, blacks could spend money in those stores but couldn’t eat at the stores’ lunch counters.
The lunch counter of 1960 was the equivalent of fast-food restaurants today. Hamburger chains were just beginning to appear on the American landscape. Ray Kroc had opened his first McDonald’s about five years earlier; Burger King had gone national just the year before. People wanting a sandwich or a hamburger popped over to the lunch counter of department stores, drugstores and five-and-dime stores to have a bite.
Except black people. Read the rest of this entry »
“Ayiti Cheri” (or Haiti My Dear) is bleeding from devastation of a massive 7.0 earthquake that rocked the island on January 12, 2010.
While the words- “the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere”- continue to echo throughout the media, we never get to see the side of Haiti that is full of a rich culture and a history of leading other nations to freedom.
Many are simply unaware of Haiti’s historical context and contribution to the Americas, and despite the fact that much of our black history is often buried and never told, we are so much more connected to Haiti than we know. The history and journey of Haiti can never be summed up in just a few paragraphs, but a brief recollection of Haiti’s connection to America will go far to summarize Haiti’s plight.
How Haiti Came to Be
Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and is the first independent nation in Latin America, the first independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion.
First occupied by the indigenous Taino Indians before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, the French colonized the land importing enslaved Africans to Haiti in 1517 and using enslaved Africans to make it the richest French colony in the New World.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave and leader in the slave revolt, along with Jean-Jacques Dessalines rose up against the French, defeated their troops in a slave revolt, and declared the independence of Haiti on January 1, 1804.
Haiti agreed to make reparations to French slaveholders in 1825 in the amount of 150 million francs, reduced in 1838 to 60 million francs, in exchange for French recognition of its independence and to achieve freedom from French aggression. This bankrupted the Haitian treasury and mortgaged Haiti’s future to the French banks, permanently affecting Haiti’s ability to be prosperous.
Haiti’s Connection to the Americas
• Haiti’s slave revolt against the French led to the Louisiana Purchase. When Napoleon Bonaparte and his French army was faced with an uprising in Haiti and failed to re-conquer and reestablish slavery there, he was forced to abandon his plans to rebuild France’s New World empire. As a result, the U.S. paid $15 million ($213 million in present day figures) to acquire the 14 state Louisiana territory. Bonaparte later said “This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.”
• In 1779, about 750 volunteer Haitian slaves fought alongside colonial troops against the British in the Siege of Savannah in the American Revolutionary War in Savannah, GA.
• Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a Haitian born to slaves in Haiti, was the first known non-indigenous settler in Chicago in the 1770’s and is credited with being the founder of Chicago.
• Haiti’s fight for independence left Haiti diplomatically isolated by 1806 for fear of a slave revolt by American slaves and ultimately forced the hand of Thomas Jefferson to end the U.S. slave trade in 1808.
• In 1815 Simon Bolivar, the South American political leader who was instrumental in Latin America’s struggle for independence from Spain, received military and financial assistance from Haiti on the condition that Bolivar free any enslaved people he encountered in his fight for South American independence. As a result, Bolivar was able to liberate Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama and Peru.
L’union Fait La Force- Strength Through Unity
Further Reading
Detailed history can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti
Haitian leaders in the fight for independence thelouvertureproject.org
Haitian revolution en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
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About Fabiola Fleuranvil
As a first generation Haitian-American born in America to Haitian parents, I had all these negative images of what Haiti was based on the stories told by the media. It was not until my first and only trip to Haiti in July 2007 to bury my maternal grandmother that I learned that Haiti was so much more than what the images showed. This trip was the absolute best experience in my life albeit a humbling one, and I really got to see Haiti for what it truly was- so much culture, natural beauty, a village mentality where everyone is family and takes care of one another, and a fighting spirit of people who never give up and never complain. My family in Haiti has been impacted and my parents have lost cousins and family that I will never meet, but at least they have family in America to help them rebuild.
All of my African-American brothers and sisters are all just one or 2 ships shy from being Haitian. Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean was usually the first stop during the Transatlantic Slave Trade before we landed in America. Some of us ended up staying in Haiti and the rest of us were shipped to America, and that is the only thing that separates us. We just ended up on a different ship, but came from the same place.
