Think of trailblazing black TV shows, and The Cosby Show immediately comes to mind. But before the Cliff Huxtable, there was Fat Albert, Bill Cosby’s beloved animated creation that became famous for his catchphrase, “Hey, hey, hey!” Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids began airing in 1972, around the same time that other cartoons and animated shows finally began featuring black characters that weren’t all embodiments of negative stereotypes. “It wasn’t until the early 1970’s that Saturday Morning television cartoons started to feature image affirming Black characters with a modern look and positive story lines that delivered culturally relevant messages,” writes Pamela Thomas, aka SistaToFunky, on the website of her online Museum of UnCut Funk.
The museum, which I discovered thanks to a recent NPR story, is a treasure trove of African-American pop cultural artifacts and ephemera, from Blaxploitation movie posters to black comic books. Perhaps the most extensive is the black animation collection, which includes extensive explanatory texts, YouTube links, and original production cels and drawings. Thomas, who has a degree in black history from City College and is a former art dealer, focuses not just on shows with all-black casts, like Fat Albert and The Jackson 5ive cartoon, but on black characters that popped up in other shows, like Josie and the Pusscats’ Valerie Brown, whom she dubs the “first positive Black female character in a Saturday morning cartoon series”; and the “first Black male superhero character in a Saturday morning cartoon,” Schoolhouse Rock’s Verb (“I can question like: What is it? / Verb, you’re so demanding,” the song goes).
The Museum of UnCut Funk is an internet rabbit hole that you can (and should) easily get lost in for hours. It has no physical home yet, but I can only hope it will one day. In the meantime, Thomas has organized a physical exhibition, Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution, focused on black characters in Saturday morning cartoons. It opens at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in February, and will travel to Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History and Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum afterwards.
article by Jillian Steinhauer via hyperallergic.com
Posts published in “History”
After a big dinner, we enjoy mixing up a classic digestive cocktail known as the Stinger. Inevitably, we all end up in the library with drinks in hand. We keep a framed image of a distinguished looking gentleman among our cocktail books. This encourages guests to ask about his identity and opens up conversation to educate people on the first African American cocktail book author in known American history–Tom Bullock.
Not much is known about Mr. Bullock. He appears to have been born in Kentucky to a freed married couple in 1873. He made bartending fame at the Pendennis Club in Louisville as well as the St. Louis Country Club. He served quite a few powerful people, including George Herbert Walker, the grandfather of our 41st President George Herbert Walker Bush, who was such a fan he wrote the forward in Mr. Bullock’s book.
The earliest Stinger recipe we have in our cocktail book collection goes back to Tom Bullock’s The Ideal Bartender published in 1917. The Stinger is an after-dinner drink typically made with brandy, though various other liquors can be substituted. Mr. Bullock instructs to make a stinger in the following manner:
Stinger–Country Club Style
Use a large Mixing glass; fill with Lump Ice.
1 jigger Old Brandy.
1 pony white Creme de Menthe.
Shake well; strain into Cocktail glass and serve.
[jigger=1.5 ounces]
[pony=1 ounce]
I prefer a two to one ratio of even more brandy to menthe. No matter the proportions, the stinger has been seen sipped in the swankiest New York nightspots and remains a classic the world over.
article by LeNell Camacho Santa Ana
Read More: http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2013/12/tom-bullock-first-african-american-cocktail-book-author.html#ixzz2ojOzNaUv
A major coup has been won by the students at the controversial Nathan B. Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla. After 54 years of ignoring the wishes of protestors who argued that the school should not be named after an American Civil War Confederate lieutenant-general and later served as a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, the educational facility will now finally be receiving a new moniker, reportsWPTV.
The Duval County School Board voted on Monday, 7-0 that the high school, which has a predominantly Black student body, will choose between the names of “Westside” and “Firestone” in January. When the high school opened its doors back in 1959 during the middle of the Civil Rights era, district school officials at the time chose to name it after Nathan B. Forrest (pictured), who had also been a slave trader. Under the Confederate lieutenant general’s orders, his troops massacred Black union soldiers at a Tennessee fort. Forrest then went on to serve as the first Grand Wizard of the KKK in 1867.
Under his leadership, he and his dragoons launched a campaign of midnight attacks, which included whipping and killing Black voters and White Republicans to scare them from voting and running for office.
The high school name change was actually spearheaded this go-round by Ty Richmond, a parent who set up a Change.org petition that garnered 162,150 signatures. Many attempts had been made previously to get board members to change the high school’s name but to no avail.
LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. (AP) — An Olympic gold medal won by Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Games has sold for a record $1.4 million in an online auction. SCP Auctions said Pittsburgh Penguins co-owner Ron Burkle paid $1,466,574, the highest price for a piece of Olympic memorabilia. The online auction ended Sunday.
“We just hope that it’s purchased by an institution where the public could have access to it, a museum or something like that,” Owens’ daughter, Marlene Owens Rankin of Chicago, told The Associated Press before the sale. The auction house said Burkle, who also owns William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize for literature, has plans for an educational tour of the historic pieces. He wasn’t available for comment Sunday. The Los Angeles billionaire investor’s holdings include retail, food and entertainment companies.
Owens won gold in the 100- and 200-meters, 400 relay and long jump at the games attended by Adolf Hitler, who used the Olympics to showcase his ideas of Aryan supremacy. According to the auction house based in Laguna Niguel, Calif., the medal is unidentifiable to a specific event. It said Owens gave the medal to his friend, dancer and movie star Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, as thanks for helping Owens find work in entertainment after he returned from Berlin.
The medal was sold by the estate of Robinson’s late widow, Elaine Plaines-Robinson. SCP Auctions Vice President Dan Imler said the Owens family confirmed the medal is original; the whereabouts of the other three is unknown. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the medal will be donated to the Jesse Owens Foundation. The Robinson family had declined to comment on the auction, but Imler said they also plan to use the proceeds to pay college tuition.
Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from white minority rule and served as his country’s first black president, becoming an international emblem of dignity and forbearance, died Thursday night. He was 95.
“Our nation has lost its greatest son,” said Jacob Zuma, the South African president, about Nelson Mandela. Zuma announced Mr. Mandela’s death. Mr. Mandela had long said he wanted a quiet exit, but the time he spent in a Pretoria hospital this summer was a clamor of quarreling family, hungry news media, spotlight-seeking politicians and a national outpouring of affection and loss. The vigil eclipsed a visit by President Obama, who paid homage to Mr. Mandela but decided not to intrude on the privacy of a dying man he considered his hero.
Mr. Mandela ultimately died at home at 8:50 p.m. local time, and he will be buried according to his wishes in the village of Qunu, where he grew up. The exhumed remains of three of his children were reinterred there in early July under a court order, resolving a family squabble that had played out in the news media.
Mr. Mandela’s quest for freedom took him from the court of tribal royalty to the liberation underground to a prison rock quarry to the presidential suite of Africa’s richest country. And then, when his first term of office was up, unlike so many of the successful revolutionaries he regarded as kindred spirits, he declined a second term and cheerfully handed over power to an elected successor, the country still gnawed by crime, poverty, corruption and disease but a democracy, respected in the world and remarkably at peace.
The question most often asked about Mr. Mandela was how, after whites had systematically humiliated his people, tortured and murdered many of his friends, and cast him into prison for 27 years, he could be so evidently free of spite.
The government he formed when he finally won the chance was an improbable fusion of races and beliefs, including many of his former oppressors. When he became president, he invited one of his white wardens to the inauguration. Mr. Mandela overcame a personal mistrust bordering on loathing to share both power and a Nobel Peace Prize with the white president who preceded him, F. W. de Klerk.
And as president, from 1994 to 1999, he devoted much energy to moderating the bitterness of his black electorate and to reassuring whites with fears of vengeance. The explanation for his absence of rancor, at least in part, is that Mr. Mandela was that rarity among revolutionaries and moral dissidents: a capable statesman, comfortable with compromise and impatient with the doctrinaire.
When the question was put to Mr. Mandela in an interview for this obituary in 2007 — after such barbarous torment, how do you keep hatred in check? — his answer was almost dismissive: Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate.
History and Halle Berry have teamed to develop Hannibal, a miniseries centering on famed general Hannibal Barca in the Second Punic War. Beginning in 264 BC, Hannibal takes viewers through the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, exploring the relationship between Hannibal and his archrival Scipio Africanus. Despite their fiercely opposed allegiances, the two are brought together and grow to respect each other as brothers.
Berry will executive produce the miniseries, with Jeffrey Caine serving as the series’ writer. The project will be a co-production between A+E Studios and Red Arrow Entertainment. “Hannibal was not only the greatest African general to ever live,” said Berry, “he may have been the greatest general, period. His story is an intricate and captivating ride and I’m thrilled to get this project off the ground with our partners at History.”
This miniseries builds on Berry’s small screen plans, as the actress was recently cast in the CBS project Extant. Steven Spielberg is executive producing that hour-long Eye drama.
article by AJ Marechal via Variety.com
This miniseries builds on Berry’s small screen plans, as the actress was recently cast in the CBS project Extant. Steven Spielberg is executive producing that hour-long Eye drama.
article by AJ Marechal via Variety.com
AOP (American Opera Projects), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will co-present an evening of scenes from Nkeiru Okoye‘s folk opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom that tells of how a young girl born in slavery, becomes Harriet Tubman, the legendary Underground Railroad conductor. The musical excerpts will be followed by an artist Q&A moderated by WQXR’s Terrance McKnight. The concert will be presented on Monday, December 9, 2013 at 6:30 PM at the Langston Hughes Auditorium: 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York, NY 10037-1801. General admission will be $10 ($8 for Schomburg Society Members) and available by calling (212) 491-2206 or visiting www.showclix.com/event/HarrietTubman.
Harriet Tubman will include performances by soprano Sumayya Ali (Lincoln Center, Berkshire Opera, Sarasota Opera), soprano Sequina DuBose (Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Memphis, PAB Theater), contralto Nicole Mitchell (Lincoln Center Festival, Sarasota Opera), tenor Clinton Ingram (Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Teatro Real), and baritone Damian Norfleet (Perseverance Theater, AMAS Musical Theater, Prospect Theater Company). The evening will feature a string ensemble with music direction by Mila Henry, stage direction by Beth Greenberg (New York City Opera) and WQXR’s Terrance McKnight moderating a Q&A with the artists.
Using a mixture of opera and vernacular folk music, featuring gospel spirituals, ragtime, early blues, minstrel songs, work songs, call and responses, and field hollers, Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom tells this important chapter of American history in the context of Tubman’s tight-knit family of lively characters and two sisters vowing that nothing but death will separate them, despite the slavery threatening to tear them apart. The work is in development at Brooklyn-based AOP who has featured music from Tubman at venues such as Galapagos Art Space, SUNY Albany, and the Brooklyn Public Library Main Branch.
A semi-staged performance of the entire Harriet Tubman opera will be presented by AOP in February 2014 at Brooklyn’s Irondale Center as part of Lines of Freedom, a theatrical celebration of African-American history. Presentations of Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Art Works.
To learn more about the show, go to: broadwayworld.com
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The Pelagie Green Wren dancers continued to perform all over the city, including at the esteemed Kiel Opera House. Her students have later gone to Broadway. While Green-Wren was the first to join the chorus, the first black performers appeared on the Muny stage in 1930 in the production “Show Boat.”
The Muny Opera House is the oldest outdoor theater in the U.S. The venue opened its stage in 1916 with a production of “Aida”. Following the production of “Show Boat”, the opera house featured shows with all-black casts such as “Porgy and Bess”, “The Wiz” (1982) and “Ain’t Misbehavin”. There were also re-productions of “Hello, Dolly!” starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway and “Guys and Dolls” featuring stage legends Leslie Uggams and Richard Roundtree. Pelagie Green Wren passed away on September 19th. Her funeral was held yesterday in St. Louis, Mo. She was 71 years old.
article by Erica L. Taylor via blackamericaweb.com
The Muny Opera House is the oldest outdoor theater in the U.S. The venue opened its stage in 1916 with a production of “Aida”. Following the production of “Show Boat”, the opera house featured shows with all-black casts such as “Porgy and Bess”, “The Wiz” (1982) and “Ain’t Misbehavin”. There were also re-productions of “Hello, Dolly!” starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway and “Guys and Dolls” featuring stage legends Leslie Uggams and Richard Roundtree. Pelagie Green Wren passed away on September 19th. Her funeral was held yesterday in St. Louis, Mo. She was 71 years old.
article by Erica L. Taylor via blackamericaweb.com
It always seemed pretty straightforward. And horrifying. Early African-American history was the story of thousands of Africans who were captured, shipped like cargo to the New World and sold into slavery, mostly to work and die on Southern plantations. But Henry Louis Gates Jr. and PBS show us that history’s complexity in a beautifully done six-part, six-hour documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, which began on Tuesday night and continues weekly through Nov. 26.
Mr. Gates — the Harvard professor, author and critic — is highly visible, interviewing historians, talking to older black Africans who acknowledge that their ancestors became wealthy through the slave trade, chatting with contemporary black Americans over Hoppin’ John and iced tea, standing at seemingly innocuous city intersections where shameful history unfolded.
Everyone (you hope) knows that slavery existed at least as long ago as Ancient Egypt. Many are also aware that black Africans helped the white slave traders who arrived on their shores. But Episode 1 (“The Black Atlantic: 1500-1800”) delves deeper — in Sierra Leone, the Temne people would sell the Loko people, so they didn’t see it as turning against their own — and points out that Europeans invented the idea that skin color determined who was and was not enslavable. As Mr. Gates observes, “the dehumanization of an entire race” takes a while.
Charlie Parker started playing as a boy, when his mother gave him a saxophone to cheer him up after his father left. He went on to spearhead a musical revolution.
Charlie “Bird” Parker was one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. In his brief life, Parker created a new sound on the alto saxophone and spearheaded a revolution in harmony and improvisation that pushed popular music from the swing era to bebop and modern jazz.
In Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, scholar and author Stanley Crouch tells the story of Parker’s early years and his rise to prominence. But Crouch says he didn’t want to tell the same old story of young black musicians overcoming obstacles.
“These guys, they thought about life,” he says. “Oh yes, they thought about being colored, but they also thought about life. And people came to hear you because you played life. It wasn’t because you played, ‘Oh, I’m just a poor colored man over here, just doing some poor colored things. I’m thinking about my poor colored girl and how the white man is not going to let us blah blah.’ That wasn’t what they were playing.”
‘I Put Quite A Bit Of Study Into The Horn’
Crouch’s book opens with a triumphant moment in Parker’s career. It’s February 1942 and the 21-year-old alto player is on the bandstand at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, performing with the Jay McShann Orchestra for a live radio broadcast. He steps up to solo and Crouch explains what happens next:
When the band started throwing up stock riffs behind him, Parker sidestepped the familiar shapes, issuing his responses from deep in left field.
… Each chorus was getting hotter; it was clear, from the position of his body and the sound of his horn, that Charlie Parker was not going to give in. All the nights he had worked on it, the flubs, the fumblings, the sore lips, mouth, and tongue, the cramped fingers — they all paid off that afternoon. Suddenly, the man with the headphones was signaling McShann, Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Keep on playing!
In 1980, the late pianist and bandleader Jay McShann described how Parker’s sound grabbed him the first time he heard it. “One particular night, I happened to be coming through the streets and I heard the sound coming out. And this was a different sound, so I went inside to see who was blowing,” he said. “So I walked up to Charlie after he finished playing and I asked him, I said, ‘Say man,’ I said, ‘where are you from?’ I said, ‘I thought I met most of the musicians around here.’ Well, he says, ‘I’m from Kansas City.’ But he says, ‘I’ve been gone for the last two or three months. Been down to the Ozarks woodshedding.’ “