By now, you’ve all heard. All the major news outlets have called the 2020 election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the next President and Vice President of the United States of America.
Good Black News is sharing this momentous piece of news as well, and of course the biggest part of it from our perspective is that the first Black person and the first Black woman ever has been chosen by the majority of voters of America to be their Vice President.
It is a historic and momentous occasion and will today and always be honored as such. Tomorrow, even harder work begins, but today, we sit in this moment, celebrate and rejoice!
According to the Washington Post, Virginia Military Institute’s Board of Visitors voted Thursday to remove the prominent statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson from the state-supported military school grounds in efforts to address continuous incidents and allegations of racism there.
After reading descriptions by Black cadets of what they endure at VMI, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) ordered an independent investigation into the school’s culture. VMI’s superintendent, retired General J.H. Binford Peay III, resigned Monday in the wake of the controversy.
According to the Associated Press, Juneteenth has officially become a state holiday in Virginia after lawmakers unanimously approved legislation during the Virginia General Assembly special session.
Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation and the abolition of slavery reached Texas via a Union Army general Gordon Granger, setting off celebrations among the newly freed.
Governor Ralph Northam proposed making Juneteenth a state holiday in June during a press conference that included musician and Virginia native Pharrell Williams, and issued an executive order that gave executive branch employees and state colleges the day off. Northam signed the statewide legislation on Oct. 13.
[Dr. William Augustus Hinton. Photo via images.harvard.edu]
Harvard Medical School has approved renaming the Oliver Wendell Holmes Academic Society in honor of the late Dr. William Augustus Hinton, a former HMS clinical professor of bacteriology and immunology and 1912 HMS graduate.
The recommendation from a Faculty Council Subcommittee on Artwork and Cultural Representations task force is part of an ongoing effort to ensure that HMS buildings, symbols, academic societies and public spaces fully reflect the institution’s mission and values.
Holmes was one of the first American intellectuals to promote the racist doctrine of eugenics. In 1850, he revoked the acceptances of the Medical School’s first three Black students, writing that the “intermixing of the white and black races in their lecture rooms is distasteful to a large portion of the class and injurious to the interests of the school.”
Hinton — a 1905 graduate of the College and later HMS — specialized in the fields of bacteriology and immunology. He created a new diagnostic blood test for syphilis, one the U.S. Public Health Service later adopted.
Earlier this year, two medical students launched a petition to rename the former Holmes Society due to Holmes’s support of eugenics and racism towards Black and Indigenous people. The petition garnered over 1000 signatures from HMS and HSDM faculty, administrators, students, and alumni.
On Monday, Netflix will debut A Love Song For Latasha, a short film by first-time filmmaker Sophia Nahli Allison that explores what life could have been like for 15 year-old Latasha Harlins had she not been fatally shot by a Korean convenience store owner in Los Angeles in 1991.
Harlins was shot in the back of the head by Soon Ja Du, then a 51-year-old Korean woman who suspected Latasha was trying to steal a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Security footage later confirmed that Latasha had money in her hand and intended to pay for the beverage and Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter.
Though the jury recommended a 16-year prison stint, Du was sentenced to time served, five years probation, community service, funeral expenses and $500 restitution. Harlins’ killing and the trial outcome were factors that served as a catalyst for the unrest that erupted in Los Angeles in 1992 after the police who brutalized Rodney King were acquitted.
A Love Song For Latasha explores the teenager’s life and dreams through accounts from her family and friends. Watch the trailer below:
“As an LA native, I’m really interested in what it means to interrogate and conjure and excavate stories of the community and stories of Black women and Black girls,” Allison told theGrio exclusively.
“Being a young girl during the riots, Latasha wasn’t a name I often heard. It was always Rodney King. It’s still a story people don’t talk about and her name is often forgotten. She played such an important and devastating role in that shift that happened in South Central and I wanted to see her story live in its fullness.”
Tupac Shakur immortalized Latasha’s story in several of his hits, including “Keep Ya Head Up,” which he dedicated to the slain teen. He referenced her in other tracks like “Something 2 Die 4,” “Thugz Mansion,” and “I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto” and Ice Cube included a song about her on his album, Death Certificate, entitled ”Black Korea.”
“Latasha could have been a family member, or one of my friends. Latasha could have been me,” said Allison. “I wanted to make sure this archive, this story, and this memory existed for Latasha and that there was this evidence of her outside of just the trauma. Her story needed to exist beyond what we have seen.”
Director and Academy Award-winning writer John Ridley (12 Years A Slave) also devoted a section of his 2017 documentary Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 to Harlins, her tragic killing and the relative lack of justice her killer faced. Let It Fall can also be found on Netflix.
In today’s “Power Shot,” TEDx speaker,Power Lab performance coach and GBN’s “This Way Forward” contributor Dena Crowder explains so clearly and succinctly in three simple steps exactly how and why mobilizing to vote is so crucial this November, Good Black News is adding a fourth step:
WATCH and SHARE Dena’s video everywhere so anyone who is on the fence about voting can hop on over into the right side of history and utilize their power to affect significant change.
To quote just some of Dena’s insightful guidance:
There is no perfect, uncorrupted, ideal candidate, do not get caught up in that… Whoever wins this election is going to set the tone for the direction that we take on every single issue facing Black Americans.
We’re talking prison, we’re talking police, we’re talking human rights, we’re talking civil rights, we are talking healthcare and housing. So prioritize what really matters and vote the bigger picture.
On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to March for Jobs and Freedom.
This month, more than 50 years later, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will commemorate the March on Washington with a digital resource webpage exploring the historical significance of the march with collection objects, stories, videos and content related to the historic march.
This page will include voices of union leader and activist A. Phillip Randolph, Rep. John Lewis, and many unsung activists and a performance by singer Marian Anderson. The resource webpage is available at nmaahc.si.edu/marchonwashington.
To mark the anniversary day (Aug. 28), the museum will also make available the film commissioned for its grand opening by Ava Duvernay, August 28: A Day in the Life of a People. The film will be available to view on the museum’s homepage and YouTube channel starting at 10:00 a.m. for 24 hours.
A 1000-square-foot art installation depicting civil rights, anti-lynching and women’s rights advocate Ida B. Wells will go on display in Washington D.C.’s Union Station on Aug. 24, According to wamu.org.
Artist Helen Marshall created the portrait of Wells out of almost 5,000 black-and-white photographs from the suffrage movement early in the 20th century.
“We need to see her portrait, and African American women need to be a lot more visible,” Marshall says. “She was fighting for the same causes that women are now.”
The project — which will be up through August 28 — was created by the British Marshall after she created a massive portrait of a British suffragist and installed it in a train station in Birmingham in the U.K.
Her American piece was commissioned by the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission, created by Congress to commemorate the 19th Amendment’s 100th anniversary.
Making history as the first Black woman and nominated by the Democratic Party for Vice President, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris from California accepted the nomination tonight at the Democratic National Convention from Delaware, where she is working with Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris, her an East Indian immigrant mother, and Donald Harris, a, Jamaican immigrant father, Harris gave a heartfelt, powerful speech acknowledging the support and love of her family as well as so many of the women who blazed the trail ahead of her, such as Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, Constance Baker Motley and Shirley Chisholm.
Harris also pointed to structural racism for the inequities in America — “education and technology, health care and housing, job security and transportation” — as heightened by the coronavirus, and how she and Biden are committed to doing the work to fulfill the promise of “equal justice under the law.”
To read Harris’ acceptance speech in full, see below:
Rochester, New York‘s airport will be renamed to honor 19th-century abolitionist and freedom fighter Frederick Douglass, one of its most famous and influential residents.
According to usatoday.com, the Monroe County Legislature voted Tuesday night to change the airport’s name to the “Frederick Douglass – Greater Rochester International Airport,” adding the Douglass’ name to the existing airport’s title.
