WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. — A Michigan woman who was believed to be the nation’s oldest veteran at 110 has died, about a month after meeting President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
Emma Didlake died Sunday in West Bloomfield, northwest of Detroit, according to the Oakland County medical examiner’s office.
Didlake was a 38-year-old wife and mother of five when she signed up in 1943 for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She served about seven months stateside during the war, as a private and driver.
She spent time with the president in July during a trip to Washington that was arranged by Talons Out Honor Flight, a southwest Michigan chapter of a national nonprofit that provides free, one-day trips for veterans to visit monuments and memorials in the nation’s capital.
“Emma Didlake served her country with distinction and honor, a true trailblazer for generations of Americans who have sacrificed so much for their country,” Obama said Monday afternoon in a statement. “I was humbled and grateful to welcome Emma to the White House last month, and Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to Emma’s family, friends, and everyone she inspired over her long and quintessentially American life.”
Didlake was born in Alabama and moved with her family to Detroit in 1944. She was known to her family as “Big Mama” and recently moved to an assisted living family in suburban Detroit.
She was deemed the oldest U.S. veteran based on information gleaned by Honor Flight representatives through national outreach campaigns.
Granddaughter Marilyn Horne told The Associated Press last month that when Talons Out officials presented her grandmother with a short-sleeved shirt bearing the group’s logo to wear on the trip to Washington, Didlake took a look and said: “‘I don’t have Michelle Obama arms — I’m going to need a jacket.'”
During her visit to the White House, Didlake wore a patriotic-themed neck scarf and sat in her wheelchair in the same spot in the Oval Office where foreign leaders sit when they meet with Obama.
article by Associated Press via nbcnews.com
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Julian Bond, a former chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a charismatic figure of the 1960s civil rights movement, a lightning rod of the anti-Vietnam War campaign and a lifelong champion of equal rights for minorities, died on Saturday night, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was 75.
Mr. Bond died in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after a brief illness, the center said in a statement Sunday morning.
He was one of the original leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
He moved from the militancy of the student group to the top leadership of the establishmentarian N.A.A.C.P. Along the way, he was a writer, poet, television commentator, lecturer, college teacher, and persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy.
He also served for 20 years in the Georgia Legislature, mostly in conspicuous isolation from white colleagues who saw him as an interloper and a rabble-rouser.
Mr. Bond’s wit, cool personality and youthful face became familiar to millions of television viewers during the 1960s and 1970s. He attracted adjectives — dashing, handsome, urbane — the way some people attract money.
On the strength of his personality and quick intellect, he moved to the center of the civil rights action in Atlanta, the unofficial capital of the movement, at the height of the struggle for racial equality in the early 1960s.
Moving beyond demonstrations, he became a founder, with Morris Dees, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization in Montgomery, Ala. Mr. Bond was its president from 1971 to 1979 and remained on its board for the rest of his life.
When he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965 — along with seven other black members — furious white members of the House refused to let him take his seat, accusing him of disloyalty. He was already well known because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s stand against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.
That touched off a national drama that ended in 1966, when the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision ordered the legislature to seat him, saying it had denied him freedom of speech.
He went on to serve 20 years in the two houses of the legislature. As a lawmaker, he sponsored bills to establish a sickle cell anemia testing program and to provide low-interest home loans to low-income Georgians. He also helped create a majority-black congressional district in Atlanta.
He left the State Senate in 1986 after six terms to run for that seat in the United States House. He lost a bitter contest to his old friend John Lewis, a fellow founder of S.N.C.C. and its longtime chairman. The two men, for all their earlier closeness in the rights movement, represented opposite poles of African-American life in the South: Mr. Lewis was the son of an sharecropper; Mr. Bond was the son of a college president.
In a statement Sunday, President Obama called Mr. Bond “a hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend.”
“It is awe-inspiring and gives you goosebumps on your arms,” Jason Miller, a poetry professor at North Carolina State University, told USA TODAY Network about hearing the recording for the first time.
King gave the speech on Nov. 27, 1962, before a crowd of about 1,800 people in Rocky Mount, N.C. While the Rocky Mount speech is not as well known, it includes many similarities to the famous August 1963 version King gave from the Lincoln Memorial.
The Rocky Mount speech was covered by local newspapers, but an audio recording was not known to exist until Miller found it while researching his book Origins of a Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric. The book explores the connection between Langston Hughes’s poetry and King’s speeches.
The box where the tape was found was rusted and the plastic reel was broken, but the recording itself was in great shape and has been digitized, Miller said. The tape is 55 minutes long and includes three of King’s most famous phrases — “Let freedom ring,” “How long, not long,” and “I have a dream.”
Miller said that kind of intentional rhetorical practice is a sign of a “master orator.” In the process of researching, Miller was able to confirm that Hughes’ work, and specifically the poem “I dream a world,” influenced King’s speeches. “They knew each other, exchanged letters and Dr. King incredibly revered Langston Hughes,” he said.
Understanding what inspired King’s words and how they changed over time is important, according to Miller. “It sheds light on what is easily the most recognizable speech in American history,” he said.
And the message of King’s Rocky Mount speech holds up today, he said. “The central part of Dr. King’s speech was talking about access to the ballot and voting rights,” he said. “And as you know that’s as important today as it was in 1962.”
Miller is working on an online annotated version of the Rocky Mount speech that will be published for the public in November.
article by Lori Grisham via usatoday.com
Maryline Morris Whitaker is the founder of the Sister Soldier Project, a grassroots organization that provides hair care products to African American women soldiers to help them comply with the militaries requirements for hair. “If hair is longer than your ears, it has to be pulled back and tucked under, and as a Black woman I just don’t understand how that happens without the right product,” Whitaker says.
In 2008, Whitaker raised enough money and donations to send 1,000 packages of hair care products to African American women serving in combat areas overseas. She received a large number of thank you letters from the women soldiers. “These women never complained,” said Whitaker, commenting on the letters she received. “They just talked about their lives in the service. They were happy to be there. They talked about the families they left behind, and they’d send pictures of their children.”
Whitaker realized that she had a treasure trove of letters documenting the experiences of African American women serving overseas in the armed forces. She volunteered to donate the archive to the Smithsonian museum but the museum was not interested.
But Whitaker found a home for her archive at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. The Schlesinger Library holdings date from the founding of the United States to the present and include more than 3,200 manuscript collections, 100,000 volumes of books and periodicals, and films, photos, and audiovisual material. The library holds many collections from African American women including Mildred Jefferson, the first Black woman graduate of Harvard Medical School, author June Jordan, civil rights activist Pauli Murray, and author Dorothy West.
article via jbhe.com
In a recent interview with Black Enterprise, feminist journalist and activist Gloria Steinem had some refreshing things to say about Black women’s progressive history in the fight for gender equality.
“I thought that [Black women] invented the feminist movement…I learned feminism disproportionately from Black women. ”
Steinem explained that in earlier years, surveys showed that African American women were twice as vocal and biased towards feminist issues and beliefs as their White counterparts. She also spoke on her personal practice of giving the floor to other young women (whether or not they self-identify as feminists) to address concerns for people of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. If she is challenged by younger Black women who say that feminism doesn’t speak to them, Steinem says:
“I don’t say anything. I listen because the point is that we help each other to get dignity and autonomy and freedom. We’re here to help each other.”
Steinem has a history of working with Black feminists. In 1972, Steinem founded Ms. Magazine with Dorothy Pitman-Hughes, the author and child welfare advocate. Steinem was also affiliated with the deceased lawyer Flo Kennedy and worked alongside Alice Walker, making Walker one of the earliest Black editors at Ms.
The famous feminist spoke on the issues of police brutality as well, noting the importance of equally employing women in the police force to calm racially tense situations.
“[W]e haven’t been raise with our masculinity to prove. All the studies show that if a woman cop arrives on the scene, she de-escalates the situation by her presence and a man cop escalates. So while we’re talking as we should about cops looking like the community, how come we don’t say they should be half women?”
Check out more Steinem’s insightful commentary here at Black Enterprise.
article by Monique John via hellobeautiful.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says all Americans owe a debt to the sharecroppers and maids and ordinary Americans who were brave enough to try time and again to register to vote in the face of violence and oppression.
He says without them, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wouldn’t have been signed into law 50 years ago Thursday.
At a White House event marking the anniversary, Obama said those rights are being whittled away today by voter ID laws and other attempts to discourage voting. He called on Congress to update the law in response to court decisions.
Read President Obama’s full op-ed on the Voting Rights Act on Medium.com here
But Obama says attacks on their voting rights aren’t the main reason Americans don’t vote — many just don’t bother.
He declared Sept. 22 National Voter Registration Day and urged everyone to get registered.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press via thegrio.com
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjgsNc6qlHE&w=560&h=315]
For those who grew up in the 1980s, Public Enemy was one of a handful of nationally-known hip-hop acts that created socially-conscious rap almost exclusively. From “Don’t Believe The Hype” to “Fight The Power” (from Spike Lee‘s still-all-too-relevant movie about racism and police brutality Do The Right Thing) to “By The Time I Get To Arizona”, Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Terminator X and the crew were on the forefront of calling out media manipulation, systemic racism and bigotry, and the widespread mistreatment of black people in America.
Now, over 30 years after they’ve formed and three years since their last album, Public Enemy has released Man Plans God Laughs, offering much-needed and necessary protest music once again. The video for the single “No Sympathy From The Devil” was just released today, and it packs a chilling punch. It ties historical acts of racism with the racism of today – and so much of it looks the same (at the 1:56 mark, Sandra Bland‘s mug shot appears and has the effect of a gut punch).
The entire album, which was released a few weeks ago on July 15, can be heard on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1pmsTgxfLMkCw7C5LuSHFD
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (follow @lakinhutcherson)
Thelma Golden, former curator at the Whitney Museum and current director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, has been picked by President Barack Obama to join the board of the Obama Foundation. Her role will be to plan the presidential library at the Barack Obama Presidential Center in the South Side of Chicago, a museum and library for Obama’s life, presidency, and legacy.
Other new members of the board include John Doerr, a venture capitalist who was on Obama’s USA Economic Recovery Advisory Board and Julianna Smoot, the former White House Social Secretary and Deputy Assistant to the President. Both Smoot and Doerr have played vital roles in fundraising for Obama, reports the Observer.
During Golden’s 15-year tenure at The Studio Museum (she has been the director for the past 10 years) the museum has seen immense visitor growth and international acclaim. She will also oversee a $122 million expansion. Golden is lauded for organizing pioneering exhibitions of African-American artists, raising profiles of important artists such as Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Chris Ofili, and turning the museum into a cultural focal point in Harlem.
“I am very much looking forward to joining the Board of Directors, and working to make the Obama Presidential Center a hub for creative expression through the arts,” Golden said in a statement on the foundation’s website. “The South Side of Chicago has historically been the nexus of several important cultural movements for African-Americans, and I believe the new Center will help usher in a new era of community engagement for this extraordinary neighborhood.”
According to the website, the Foundation “will inspire the next generation of young leaders all over the world. It will convene the brightest minds with the newest ideas from across the political spectrum, and draw strength from the rich diversity and vitality of Chicago, the city it calls home.”
article by Christie Chu via news.artnet.com
Jamaica is set to hold its first gay pride celebration next week. Security concerns prevent a parade, but organizers have planned a full week of events. This is monumental because Jamaica is a country that is known for extreme homophobia. According to the Human Rights Watch, Jam Rock’s LGBT population lives in constant fear, and anyone who listens to (and understands) dancehall may be familiar with anti-gay sentiment in a lot of the music where many artists make references to “burning the chi chi man,” etc. Marriage between men is is also illegal in the country, which is a holdover from British Colonial law.
However, the festivities will commence from August 1-8 in the nation’s capital city, Kingston. This is also concurrent with Jamaica’s Emancipation and Independence celebration. Festivities will include a flash mob, an opening ceremony, an art exhibition, an open mic night, a flag raising ceremony, and a coming out symposium that will feature allies to the community, reports the Advocate.
“We will pause the negative vibrations from anti-gay lobby groups and focus on the strides we have made as a community. More importantly, we will recommit to initiatives that see us moving forward as one community,” said Latoya Nugent, the associate director of the Jamaica Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG).
J-Flag’s Facebook page will have a full list of events.
This is a huge deal for the Caribbean. At the moment, Curacao is one of the few (if not the only) island that has a full on Gay Pride Week.
article by Starr Rhett Rocque via hellobeautiful.com
The University of Pittsburgh announced that it has acquired the professional archives of jazz pianist Erroll Garner.
Garner was born in Pittsburgh in 1921. He began playing piano at age 3 and by the age of seven was performing on the radio. In 1944, Garner moved to New York City where he became a leading performer and composer. He wrote the score for several films and Broadway plays. His ballad “Misty” became a major hit of Johnny Mathis was the featured in the 1971 Clint Eastwood film Play Misty for Me.
To see video of his signature song, click below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_tAU3GM9XI&w=420&h=315]
The archives were assembled by Garner’s long-time agent and manager, the late Martha Glaser and were donated to the university by Glaser’s estate. Included in the collection are correspondence, performance and recording contracts, sheet music, awards, audio and video recordings, photographs, and memorabilia.
Erroll Garner died in 1977 at the age of 55.
original article via jbhe.com; additions by Lori Lakin Hutcherson