As GBN Editor-in-Chief, firstly I apologize for the delay in the announcement of the latest winners in the GBN calendar giveaway, which was supposed to occur on December 9th. It was wholly due to me being overwhelmed with other professional and personal commitments and nothing else.
Secondly, I hope everyone is having as relaxing and peaceful a holiday season as possible. Thirdly, because of the delay, we have randomly selected one extra winner, so here are the four winners from the second round of giveaways of one free copy each of our “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day® Calendar for 2023!
Congratulations to Kelly Kennedy, Cheryl Kiras, Sonja Combs and Dawna Smith! We will be contacting you each shortly via email to arrange delivery of your free calendars from Page-A-Day.
Thank you so much to all who entered the giveaway, and if you want to buy the calendar for yourself or for family, friends, teachers or loved ones, you can use the code: CALS22 at pageaday.comuntil January 3 to receive 15% OFF site-wide, plus Free Shipping on orders over $35.
If you want to support a Black-owned bookstore with your purchase, order through this link on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/shop/esowonbooks, search “Good Black News Calendar” to add it to your cart, and a portion of the sale will go to directly to Eso Won Books in Los Angeles, CA.
Additionally, A Year of Good Black News is a Top 7 release in Multicultural Calendars on Amazon and is filled with facts, history, bios, quotes, jokes and trivia in easy-to-read entries delivered on the daily.
Or, if you prefer, you can also order from the retailers below:
Good Black News, in collaboration with Workman Publishing, is getting into the holiday spirit once again — by giving away three copies of our “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day® Calendar for 2023 on Thanksgiving Day!
A Year of Good Black News is filled with facts, history, bios, quotes, jokes and trivia in easy-to-read pages delivered on the daily, and GBN will be selecting at random three entrants to each receive one free copy of the calendar.
To enter for a chance to win, send your first and last name and an email address with the subject heading “A Year of Good Black News Giveaway” to goodblacknewsgiveaways@yahoo.com from now until 11:59PM PST on November 23.
One entry per email, and we will announce the names of the three winners in a post on Thanksgiving, then contact them for mailing addresses to receive their individual calendar prize.
In case you can’t wait to see if you’re the lucky winner and/or want to buy copies for gifts to family, friends, teachers, or loved ones, you can order at Workman.com orpageaday.comusing code: CYBER22 from now until November 30, you will receive 25% off.
If you want to support a Black-owned bookstore with your purchase, order through this link on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/shop/esowonbooks, search “Good Black News Calendar” to add it to your cart, and a portion of the sale will go to directly to Eso Won Books in Los Angeles, CA.
The calendar is also available through the following online retailers:
The 2023 calendar’s official drop date is Tuesday, November 1, and if you pre-order now at Workman.com using the code: CALENDAR22 from now until December 31, you will receive 20% off.
A Year of Good Black Newsoffers fun Black facts about inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, musicians, comedians, historians, educators, athletes and entertainers.
We’re introducing new monthly categories for 2023 like “In The Paint: Black Artists,” and “Hit The Books: Black Authors,” along with established ones like “Lemme Break It Down: Black Lexicon,”“We Got Game: Black Trivia,”“Get The Knowledge: Black Museums and Landmarks” and “You Know We Did That, Right?: Black Inventors.”
Here’s a sneak peek inside:
Although I’m biased because I wrote it, the A Year of Good Black News calendar is an awesome way to get inspired every day by the good things Black people do (and have done) for centuries, but haven’t always been widely known or shared.
It’s also a great gift for family members, friends, teachers, children and loved ones. Did I mention if you use the code: CALENDAR22 at Workman.com, you get 20% off?
Or, if you prefer, you can also order from the retailers below:
Harvard University-based historian and Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. will be the editor-in-chief of Oxford’s new dictionary entitled the Oxford Dictionary of African American English.
This dictionary, slated to debut in 2025, will provide a comprehensive collection of words and phrases created and used by Black Americans, past and present.
Gates Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, announced the project officially in an interview with the New York Times.
“Just the way Louis Armstrong took the trumpet and turned it inside out from the way people played European classical music,” Gates Jr. said. “Black people took English and “reinvented it, to make it reflect their sensibilities and to make it mirror their cultural selves.”
“The bottom line of the African American people, these are people who love language.” I am proud to announce I will be the editor in chief for the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. Read more here: https://t.co/fUakIdNo45
— Henry Louis Gates Jr (@HenryLouisGates) July 21, 2022
“Words with African origins such as ‘ ‘goober,’ ‘gumbo’ and ‘okra’ survived the Middle Passage along with our African ancestors,” Gates Jr. said. “And words that we take for granted today, such as ‘cool’ and ‘crib,’ ‘hokum’ and ‘diss,’ ‘hip’ and ‘hep,’ ‘bad,’ meaning ‘good,’ and ‘dig,’ meaning ‘to understand ’— these are just a tiny fraction of the words that have come into American English from African American speakers … over the last few hundred years.”
Resources could also include books like “Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: a Hepster’s Dictionary,” a collection of words used by musicians, including “beat” to mean tired; “Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive,” published in 1944; and “Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner,” published in 1994.
Researchers can look to recorded interviews with formerly enslaved people, Salazar said, and to music, such as the lyrics in old jazz songs. Salazar said the project’s editors also plan to crowdsource information, with call outs on the Oxford website and on social media, asking Black Americans what words they’d like to see in the dictionary and for help with historical documentation.
“Maybe there’s a diary in your grandmother’s attic that has evidence of this word,” Salazar said.
In addition to word and phrase definitions, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English will also provide also where they came from and how they emerged.
“You wouldn’t normally think of a dictionary as a way of telling the story of the evolution of the African American people, but it is,” Gates said. “If you sat down and read the dictionary, you’d get a history of the African American people from A to Z.”
Today, GBN celebrates Dr. Carla D. Hayden who in 2016 became the first woman and first African American person to serve the nation as Librarian of Congress.
To read about Dr. Hayden, read on. To hear about her, press PLAY:
[You can subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or listen every day here on the main page. Full transcript below]:
Hey, this is Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Thursday, April 21st, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
It’s in the category of Black Firsts we call “It’s About Time.”
When President Barack Obama hired Dr. Carla D. Hayden in 2016, he was doing things by the book – literally! University of Chicago graduate Hayden became the first woman and first African American person to hold the position of Librarian of Congress.
Sworn in on September 14th of that year, Hayden also became the first professional librarian to hold the post in over 60 years.
Hayden was president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. In 1995, she was the first African American person to receive Library Journal’s Librarian of the Year Award in recognition of her outreach services at the Pratt Library, which included an after-school center for Baltimore teens offering homework assistance and college and career counseling.
Hayden received a B.A. from Roosevelt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago.
And just last week, Columbia University announced that Dr. Hayden will receive its honorary doctorate of letters during commencement this May.To learn more about Dr. Hayden, follow her on Twitter @LibnofCongress, watch her testifying in a recent U.S. Senate hearing regarding the efforts to modernize the Library of Congress onC-SPAN, read The Black Librarian in America: Reflections, Resistance, and Reawakeningby Shauntee Burns-Simpson, or read the children’s book Carla Hayden: Librarian of Congressby Kate Moening from the Women Leading the Way series.
Links to these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
“Librarianship was really an adventure for me-to find out that there’s a profession that was dedicated to making books and reading and knowledge available to people. And that just seemed ideal. The confirmation process was really an eye-opener for me in so many ways because I got to meet legislators that were committed to not only the nation’s history, but making information available. And that made me very pleased that I was confirmed. My vision for this library is very simple: that people will realize that they have a national treasure and that it is part of their heritage and everyone can find something in the Library of Congress, produced by the Library of Congress, that relates to their lives or where they want to go.”
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, written, produced and hosted by yours truly, Lori Lakin Hutcherson. Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
If you like these Daily Drops, follow us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.
For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
On Easter Sunday, GBN celebrates Thomas A. Dorsey, who once worked as Ma Rainey‘s pianist and musical director, and wrote and sang blues songs as the “Georgia Tom” half of the Georgia Tom and Tampa Red duo before revolutionizing gospel music by integrating the feeling of the blues into sacred songs.
To read about Dorsey, read on. To hear about him, press PLAY:
[You can subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or listen every day here on the main page. Full transcript below]:
Hey, this is Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Sunday, April 17, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
Gospel music existed before Georgia native Thomas Dorsey turned his ear and pen to it, but it was never the same after.
Working most famously as the piano player and musical director for blues legend Gertrude “Ma” Rainey in the 1920s under the moniker “Georgia Tom.” Despite this success, Dorsey fell into a prolonged period of depression for almost two years and barely performed.
In 1928, Dorsey attended a spirited church service where he claimed a minister pulled a live serpent from his throat. From that point on, Dorsey vowed to dedicate himself to composing gospel music. Dorsey wrote “If You See My Savior” in honor of a friend who passed, which combined a blues feeling into a more traditional hymnal structure:
[Excerpt of “If You See My Savior”]
Dorsey tried to sell his new sacred songs directly to publishers and churches but initially had no luck and returned to writing the blues. With duet partner Tampa Red, as “Georgia Tom” Dorsey had a big hit in 1928, selling over seven million copies of “It’s Tight Like That”:
[Excerpt of “It’s Tight Like That”]
This type of “dirty blues” or “Hokum” songs proved to be popular and the duo recorded and performed for years until Dorsey finally turned to gospel music for good.
He formed a gospel blues choir in Chicago, which helped the new style catch on, and soon became the musical director for Pilgrim Baptist Church and running his own music publishing company.
Dorsey worked with a young Mahalia Jackson in the late 1920s and originally composed for Jackson what became a beloved song not only in gospel blues circles, but country & western as well.
[Excerpt of “Peace in the Valley” by Red Foley & the Sunshine Boys]
“Peace in the Valley” has been recorded by over the decades by artists such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Little Richard, Red Foley & the Sunshine Boys, Johnny Cash,Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton.
And while he was still in his gospel group in the 1960s, Sam Cooke and his Soul Stirrers took their turn in the valley as well:
[Excerpt of “Peace in the Valley” by Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers]
In Dorsey’s lifetime, which was long – he lived to 93 – Dorsey composed over 3,000 songs, including the one Martin Luther King, Jr. said was his favorite, the one Mahalia Jackson ended up singing at his funeral, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”:
[Excerpt of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”]
Dorsey’s songs changed the sound of sacred music and influenced generations to come, which is why he is often called “The Father of Gospel Music.”
Dorsey has been inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame, the Blues Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2002, the Library of Congress honored Dorsey by adding his album Precious Lord: New Recordings of the Great Songs of Thomas A. Dorsey, to the United States National Recording Registry.
You can also watch 2005’s The Story of Gospel Musicdocumentary, which is currently available on DVD.
And every year, Dorsey’s hometown of Villa Rica, Georgia holds an annual Thomas A. Dorsey Birthplace Heritage Festivalof gospel music. This year’s will be held on June 25thand 26th.
Links to these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes and the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
And before we go, let’s hear a clip of Thomas Dorsey himself speaking on the meaning of gospel:
“Down through the ages gospel – what? What did they say was? You mean to tell me you don’t know that good news? On down to the ages, gospel was good news. Now if you don’t know that I’ll rush you out of here myself.”
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, written, produced and hosted by yours truly, Lori Lakin Hutcherson. Intro and outro beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
“Roll Jordan Roll” by the Fisk Jubilee Singers is in the Public Domain.
Excerpts of songs composed by Thomas A. Dorsey are included under Fair Use.
If you like these Daily Drops, follow us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon,Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.
For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
According to Variety.com, Hulu has ordered from Lee Daniels’ company eight episodes of a biographical limited series about legendary entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. based on the book In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr. by Wil Haygood. Elijah Kelley is set to play the lead role.
Daniels is writing the series with Thomas Westfall, as well as executive producing and directing at least the first two episodes.
Kelley, who has starred in musical projects such as BET‘s record-breaking New Edition miniseries in 2017, NBC’s The Wiz Live in 2015 and the 2007 remake of Hairspray, will collaborate on some of the show’s music in addition to starring and producing.
Davis rose from childhood stardom on the vaudeville stage to become one of the most famous African American entertainers of the 1950s and 1960s, famed for his impeccable tap dancing skills and his warm and inviting vocal style. Davis even overcame losing an eye in an accident and re-learned how to move onstage and perform.
At the same time, he faced several career challenges — over his relationships with white film stars, his 1960 marriage to Swedish actress May Britt, his conversion to Judaism, his closeness to the Kennedys and later Richard Nixon, his problems with alcohol and drugs, and difficulties with identity within the Black community as the times and attitudes changed.
Henry “Box” Brown gave literal meaning to the term “precious cargo” 173 years ago today, when he ingeniously shipped himself from enslavement in Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia by hiding inside a crate. Listen:
You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Tuesday, March 29th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
173 years ago on March 29, 1849, Henry “Box” Brown escaped to freedom in a most ingenious way — he had himself mailed in a wooden crate from Virginia to abolitionists in Philadelphia. To get out of work on the day of his escape, Brown burned his hand to the bone with sulfuric acid.
All together, the extremely rough journey took 27 hours, but Brown succeeded and was celebrated for his inventiveness.
His status as a fugitive from slavery led Brown to move to England in 1850, but in 1875 he returned to the United States, where he toured and performed as a speaker, mesmerist and magician, pulling off feats of prestidigitation until his dying day.
Links to these and other sources are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.
Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com,Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.
For more Good Black News, you can check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social. Onward and upward.
Today, on World Purple Day (which began in 2008 to increase awareness around epilepsy), we share a quote from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning authorAlice Walkerin our GBN Daily Drop podcast.
You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Saturday, March 26th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar”, published by Workman Publishing.
Today, on World Purple Day, which was started in 2008 to increase worldwide awareness around epilepsy, we offer a quote from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Alice Walker:
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
That quote of course, is from Walker’s acclaimed 1982 novel The Color Purple, a phrase and a title she will forever be remembered for. It was recently announced that The Color Purple, having already been a successful movie directed by Steven Spielberg in 1985, oh, it was also a Tony Award-winning 2005 Broadway sensation that has had numerous revivals… well, now The Color Purple will become a 2023 movie musical based on the Broadway version.
And it will star Fantasia, Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, Ciara, Halle Bailey, Coleman Domingo, Corey Hawkins and H.E.R., among others.To learn more about all the Color Purples, and author Alice Walker, check out the links to sources provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.
Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.
For more Good Black News, you can check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
On #WorldPoetryDay, we celebrate poet and author Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African American writers to celebrate Black speech and vernacular in his works.
You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Monday, March 21st, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
Though several O.G. rappers jump-started their careers by selling CDs out of the trunks of their cars, the real O.G. was 19th century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar – he sold his poems to people riding in the elevator he operated!
One of the first African American writers to garner international fame, Dunbar celebrated Black speech and vernacular in many of his works.
In 1903 he wrote the lyrics for In Dahomey, the first all-African American musical produced on Broadway, but his best-known legacy — other than the poem “We Wear The Mask” — most likely springs from 20th century poet Maya Angelou, who “sampled” Dunbar’s poem Sympathyfor her autobiography’s title: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Links to these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.
Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.
For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
Thank you so much to all who entered the giveaway, and if you want to buy the calendar for yourself or for family, friends, teachers or loved ones, you can use the code: CALS22 at pageaday.com until January 3 to receive 15% OFF site-wide, plus Free Shipping on orders over $35.
All together, the extremely rough journey took 27 hours, but Brown succeeded and was celebrated for his inventiveness.
To learn more about all the Color Purples, and author Alice Walker, check out the links to sources provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on 
To learn more about Dayton, Ohio native Dunbar, read the 2017 paperback of