A Day In Black History
Benjamin Holmes was a slave and a tailor’s apprentice born around 1846. Throughout his life, he would serve many different owners. The South Carolina native was purchased by a hotel owner and moved to Tennessee. Through illegal curiosity, Holmes would teach himself to read and write by reading the signs and words on the doors […]
Piran, a small city in the country of Slovenia, formerly associated with Yugoslavia, has elected its first black mayor, 54-year-old Peter Bossman. http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/the_black_diaspora_news/23065
Before the National Basketball Association was the NBA, there was the Black Five Era, or the period of The Black Fives. Any basketball team back in the late 19th century up to 1947 was referred to as the Fives. But the term Black Fives came from the five starting players that would make up the […]
Blues Hall of Fame inductee Sonny Terry was a blind blues legend of the harmonica who played with other greats of the blues, including Brownie McGhee and Woody Guthrie. Born Saunders Terrell, the Greensboro, North Carolina native was known for his use of whoopin’, hollering and imitating sounds of fox hunts in his music. http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/the_black_diaspora_news/22998
In contemporary art history, 30-something-year-old black artist Kara Walker has pushed the boundaries of expression in her life-sized black silhouettes that bring an artistic vision to civil rights history, racial and gender oppression. http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/the_black_diaspora_news/22956
The African Grove Theater was founded in lower Manhattan in 1821. Other black theaters were attempted, but the African Grove would become the most mainstream black theater in its time. http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/the_black_diaspora_news/22918
Award-winning author Ann Petry was the first African-American woman writer to attain bestseller status in the United States. Though born to a family with privilege, she and her sisters were subjected to many incidents of discrimination while growing up black in privileged society. As a child, she remembers being forced to read the parts of […]
Clara Brown was a slave from Virginia, who spent her entire life looking for her 10-year-old daughter, Eliza Jane.
In 1781, Elizabeth “Mum Bett” Freeman became the first African-American slave to win her freedom through a court of law. The case was held in Massachusetts, which, coincidentally became the first state in the Union to abolish slavery. Many attribute the decision to the Freeman case and two others in the state. http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/the_black_diaspora_news/22826
Down in the delta of Indianola, Mississippi in 1891, a prominent Fisk University graduate by the name of Minnie Cox would be appointed the first African-American postmaster in Mississippi. From a well-to-do family in the south, she was favored among the black elites. However, her re-appointment to a third-term as postmaster would almost cost Cox […]
Harlem native Tee Collins was the first African-American animator to establish his own studio in New York. He was best known for his creation of the character Wanda the Witch on “Sesame Street.” It was the story of a witch with a pet weasel who washed her wirey wig on Wednesday. His new animation would […]
Writer Harriet Jacobs told her story of captivity and escape in her 1861 novel called “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” The North Carolina slave girl was handed down through generations of the Horniblow family until she became the property of Dr. James Norcom. Norcom would not allow Jacobs to marry and forced […]
