Althea Gibson, the first Black tennis player to win a Grand Slam title, was honored in her hometown of Harlem, NY with a street renaming in her honor on what would have been her 95th birthday.
The intersection of West 143rd Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, where Gibson grew up, is now called Althea Gibson Way.
The ceremony took place last week in front of Gibson’s old apartment building on 143rd Street and was attended by Gibson’s family members, who were given a replica of the new street sign.
Born in 1927, Gibson was the daughter of sharecroppers in South Carolina who moved to Harlem in 1929. There, she was introduced to the Harlem River Tennis Courts in 1941, where she developed her skills.
Gibson won the French Open in 1956, and subsequently took home back-to-back Grand Slam singles titles at Wimbledon and the US Open in 1957 and 1958.
[Photo: Anthony Bruce, the great-great-grandson of Charles and Willa Bruce, at Bruce’s Beach on Thursday. Photograph: Jay L Clendenin/Los Angeles Times/Rex/Shutterstock]
This week, in California, a case for reparations was finally won.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors voted their unanimous approval of the return of two oceanfront parcels unjustly taken by the government known as Bruce’s Beach to the descendants of former owners Charles and Willa Bruce.
Near the beginning of the 20th century, Charles and Willa Bruce made their way to California and purchased two lots in Manhattan Beach right by the sand and ran a popular lodge, cafe and dance hall for Black beachgoers.
A few more Black families, drawn to this new neighborhood that became known as Bruce’s Beach, bought and built their own cottages nearby. But they all soon were threatened by white neighbors and harassed by the local Ku Klux Klan.
When those attempts at intimidation failed, in 1924 city officials condemned the neighborhood and seized more than two dozen properties via eminent domain, claiming there was an urgent need for a public park. For decades, the properties sat empty.
The two oceanfront parcels that had been owned by the Bruces were transferred to the state in 1948, then to the county in 1995. The other lots were eventually turned into the park by city officials in Manhattan Beach.
In a heartfelt moment during the board meeting Tuesday, Supervisor Janice Hahn reflected on all the legal, legislative and very complicated real estate details that had to be worked out to right a wrong that had sparked a movement and captivated the country.
“We are finally here today,” said Hahn, who launched the complex process more than a year ago. “We can’t change the past, and we will never be able to make up for the injustice that was done to Willa and Charles Bruce a century ago. But this is a start, and it is the right thing to do.”
The property will now enter escrow before officially transferring to the Bruce family. After it’s transferred, the county has agreed to rent the property from the Bruces for $413,000 a year and will maintain its lifeguard facility there.
The lease agreement also includes a right for the county to purchase the land at a later date for $20 million, plus any associated transaction costs.
This unprecedented case of restorative justice to a Black family or property owners who were harassed by the KKK and run out of Manhattan Beach via racially-weaponized invocation of eminent domain almost a century ago — paves the way for more efforts by the government to rectify similar historic injustices.
[Wedding portrait of Charles Aaron and Willa A. Bruce. California African American Museum]To quote latimes.com once more:
For Anthony Bruce, the great-great-grandson of Charles and Willa Bruce, the last two years have been a jumble of emotions.
What Manhattan Beach did almost a century ago tore his family apart. Charles and Willa ended up as chefs serving other business owners for the remainder of their lives. His grandfather Bernard, born a few years after his family had been run out of town, was obsessed with what happened and lived his life “extremely angry at the world.” Bruce’s father, tormented by this history, had to leave California.
Bruce, a security supervisor in Florida, was thrust into the spotlight after Bruce’s Beach became a national story. It has been painful for him to talk publicly about his family’s history, but he has been heartened to see the growing movement of people calling for justice.
“Many families across the United States have been forced away from their homes and lands,” he said. “I hope that these monumental events encourage such families to keep trusting and believing that they will one day have what they deserve. We hope that our country no longer accepts prejudice as an acceptable behavior, and we need to stand united against it, because it has no place in our society today.”
According to variety.com, filmmaker Tyler Perry announced he’s donating $500,000 to New York’s famed Apollo Theater during the venue’s annual spring benefit gala yesterday.
Perry made the offer during his acceptance speech for the organization’s Impact Award, which was presented to him by Whoopi Goldberg.
“My studio [in Georgia] was once a former Confederate-owned army base where there were 3.9 million negroes and slaves at the time, and there were Confederate soldiers plotting and planning how to keep them enslaved,” Perry said.
“While now that land is owned by one negro and I know the importance of what it means to honor that and honor the history of what it has been, and what it has been and to redirect it and rechange it. So it’s very important to me that we all give and support, and with that said, I’d like to give a half-million dollars to make sure this place continues to grow and thrive.”
Perry concluded his speech by sharing that 98 percent of the people he paid last year with his $154 million payroll were Black. He then implored those listening not to give up on their career goals, using his own uplift of Black people in the industry as an example of the good that can come from Black people’s success.
“That is the power of us, that is the power of understanding our stories, our messages, whether who gets it or who don’t. Long as you walk you path, you understand who you’re talking to, you know your audience. If you’ve got a dream in this room, please hear me when I say this, do not give up on your dreams,” Perry said.
“If I would have given up, I don’t know who would have given that payroll, or if they would be in Hollywood, if people wouldn’t let them in the door. When you come to Tyler Perry Studios, you see the most diverse group of people who have ever worked in the industry, and for that I am grateful.”
Including Perry’s gift, the Apollo raised a record-breaking $3.7 million last night as comedian Kenan Thompson hosted the fundraising event.
Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is about Dr. Saint Elmo Brady, the first African American person in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry, based on the Monday, March 14 entry in the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022:
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 14th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
Dr. Saint Elmo Brady was fired up in 1916 when he became the first African American person in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry.
Dr. Brady was published three times in Science magazine, taught at Tuskegee Institute, then taught at Howard University – where he built and chaired the Chemistry department.
He took that same position as Chemistry chair at HBCU Fisk University and was there for 25 years. In 2019, Dr. Brady was honored with a National Historic Chemical Landmark at his alma mater, the University of Illinois.
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.
The Shubert Organization, Inc., today announced that the 110-year-old Cort Theatre on 48th Street will become the James Earl Jones Theatre, in recognition of Mr. Jones’s lifetime of immense contributions to Broadway and the entire artistic community.
Jones, who is 91, began his Broadway career in 1957, and in 1958 Mr. Jones played his first role at the Cort Theatre in Sunrise at Campobello. Over the following six-and-a-half decades Jones rose to star in countless stage and screen productions (including twenty-one Broadway shows).
Jones’s Tony awards include Best Actor in a Play for The Great White Hope (1969) where he portrayed turn-of-the-century boxing champion Jack Johnson, and the original production of Fences (1987) by playwright August Wilson, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
Jones has additionally won seven Drama Desk Awards and has been awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honor.
“The Shubert Organization is so incredibly honored to put James—an icon in the theatre community, the Black community, and the American community—forever in Broadway’s lights,” said Robert E. Wankel, Shubert CEO and board chair. “That James deserves to have his name immortalized on Broadway is without question.”
James Earl Jones (via Schubert.nyc)
“For me standing in this very building sixty-four years ago at the start of my Broadway career, it would have been inconceivable that my name would be on the building today,” said Mr. Jones of Shubert’s decision to rename the Cort Theatre in his honor. “Let my journey from then to now be an inspiration for all aspiring actors.”
Most recently Jones portrayed Weller Martin across from Cicely Tyson’s Fonsia Dorsey in the 2015 Broadway revival of The Gin Game at Shubert’s John Golden Theatre.
The Cort Theatre opened in 1912, having been designed in the style of an Eighteenth-Century French palace by renowned theatre architect Thomas Lamb to house productions of theatre impresario John Cort. The building was sold to the Shubert brothers in 1927.
Here is GBN’s Daily Drop for Thursday, February 3rd, 2022, about the creation of The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, MD, the first all African-American wax museum in the U.S.
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 Thursday, February 3rd, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing. It’s in the category for Black Museums and Landmarks we call “Get the Knowledge”:
Sociologist Dr. Elmer Martin and his wife, Dr. Joanna Martin, wanted to teach Black history in a way that would grab kids’ attention—so they did it with wax. The Martins had wax heads made in the likenesses of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Nat Turner, then used department store mannequins for the bodies.
They originally presented the figures at schools and community centers in Baltimore, Maryland but after garnering donations and grants, the figures were upgraded, expanded in number, and permanently installed at the Great Blacks in Wax Museum in 1983.
Just over two decades later, in 2004, the Great Blacks in Wax Museum was recognized by the United States Congress and designated The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum. If you want to learn more about the Martins and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, check out the links provided in today’s show notes.
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, and available at workman.com, Amazon,Bookshop and other online retailers. Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot. For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
Washington National Cathedral recently announced it will replace its stained-glass windows that formerly featured Confederate iconography (removedin 2017) with racial-justice themed windows created by world-renowned artist Kerry James Marshall.
The Cathedral’s commission represents Marshall’s first time working with stained-glass as a medium, and the windows are expected to be his first permanent public exhibition anywhere in the country.
In addition, celebrated poet, author, and scholar Dr. Elizabeth Alexanderhas agreed to create a new poem that will be inscribed in stone tablets alongside Marshall’s window installation, overlaying the previous stone tablets which venerated the lives of Confederate soldiers.
Completion of both Marshall’s new windows and the stone tablets featuring Dr. Alexander’s new poem is expected in 2023, at which time they will be permanently installed at the Cathedral.
Dr. Elizabeth Alexander (photo via elizabethalexander.net)
The Cathedral removed windows featuring Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson – which were located along the southern face of its nave, or its main worship space – in September 2017, following the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In the summer of 2020, amid the historic movement for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, the Cathedral began collaborating with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to plan the public exhibition of the Robert E. Lee window.
“For nearly 70 years, these windows and their Confederate imagery told an incomplete story; they celebrated two generals, but they did nothing to address the reality and painful legacy of America’s original sin of slavery and racism. They represented a false narrative of what America once was and left out the painful truth of our history,” saidThe Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral.
“We’re excited to share a new and more complete story, to tell the truth about our past and to lift up who we aspire to be as a nation.”
Marshall—the artist and professor whose paintings depicting Black life in America have been sold, viewed, and showcased across the world for decades—will design the stained-glass windows that will replace the Lee/Jackson windows.
A Year of Good Black News, written by yours truly, is filled with facts, history, bios, quotes, jokes and trivia in easy-to-read entries delivered on the daily.
The calendar’s official drop date is Tuesday, October 12, and if you pre-order at Workman.com using the code: GOODBLACKNEWS from now until December 31, you will receive 20% off.
A Year of Good Black Newsoffers fun Black facts about inventors, entrepreneurs, musicians, comedians, historians, educators, athletes and entertainers, as well as info shared in fun fact categories 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 Page-A-Day 2022 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.
Well, no more! If this site is for you, this calendar is, too!
It’s also a great gift for family members, friends, teachers, kids and loved ones. Did I mention if you use the code: GOODBLACKNEWS at Workman.com, you get 20% off?
Or, if you prefer, you can also order from the retailers below:
This morning in Richmond, VA, capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, its top general was finally cut down. His statue, that is.
Erected in 1890, a full 35 years after he surrendered at Appomattox, the statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from its downtown perch to chants of “Na Na /Hey Hey /Goodbye”, the last of six confederate statues to come down on Richmond’s Monument Avenue.
At 8:54 a.m., a man in an orange jacket waved his arms, and the 21-foot statue rose into the air and glided, slowly, to a flatbed truck below. The sun had just come out and illuminated the towering gray pedestal as a small crowd on the east side of the monument let out a cheer.
“As a native of Richmond, I want to say that the head of the snake has been removed,” said Gary Flowers, a radio show host and civil rights activist, who is Black and was watching the activity. He said he planned to celebrate on Wednesday night and would tell pictures of his dead relatives that “the humiliation and agony and pain you suffered has been partly lifted.”
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam had planned to remove the Lee statue in June 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the following protests, but faced legal challenges from a group of Richmond residents.
In an opinion issued last week, the Virginia Supreme Court dismissed the Lee statue case, saying that all the plaintiffs’ claims were without merit, and dissolved injunctions the lower court imposed, paving the way for today’s statute removal.
Yesterday, 114 years after coming to then-segregated West Point to teach horsemanship to White cadets, the U.S. Military Academy honored the contributions of the Buffalo Soldiers by raising its first statue of a Black man.
Created by sculptor Eddie Dixon, the statue is of Staff Sgt. Sanders H. Matthews Sr., who is believed to be the last known Buffalo Soldier to serve at West Point.
The words etched into the granite say: “In Memory of the Buffalo Soldiers who served with the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments as part of the United States Military Academy Cavalry Detachment at West Point.”
“Everybody has a right to have their story told,” said Dr. Aundrea Matthews, West Point’s cultural arts director and Matthew’s granddaughter. “Because it’s a powerful story. Just what [the Buffalo Soldiers] endured, their determination and their commitment to prove to the world that African American men can contribute and are viable citizens of this country.”
Dixon pored over old photographs of Sanders Matthews to get the facial image right.
A model was built on an inner structure of carved foam, over which Dixon spread a layer of light-brown clay. Molds were made from the model, and the statue was cast with molten bronze at Schaefer Art Bronze Casting, in Arlington, Tex.
It was transported by truck and arrived Monday morning, escorted by eight motorcycles from the National Association of Buffalo Soldiers and Troopers Motorcycle Club.
The sculpture, which features an image of Matthews carrying a swallow-tailed cavalry flag that reads “USMA Detachment,” is the culmination of a project that was started by him before he died at age 95 in 2016.
Matthews hoped for the day when a monument honoring the Buffalo Soldiers of West Point would come to fruition, not knowing he would be the image for the tribute, his granddaughter said.
