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“John Lewis: Good Trouble” Documentary to Screen for Free on Juneteenth in Tulsa as Trump Rally Counter-Programming

“John Lewis: Good Trouble” Documentary to Screen for Free on Juneteenth in Tulsa as Trump Rally Counter-Programming

By goodblacknews on June 17, 2020

According to an exclusive Variety.com report, Magnolia Pictures will premiere “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” a new documentary about the Civil Rights icon and longtime congress member, in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Juneteenth.

The film, which Magnolia and Participant are distributing, will screen at Circle Cinema, a non-profit organization that operates from a theater that traces back to 1928.

The screenings will be free (theaters will be at 25% capacity) and are intended to serve as counter-programing to Donald Trump’s political rally on Saturday. That rally ignited a firestorm of backlash and condemnation because it was originally scheduled to take place on Juneteenth, a holiday stemming from Texas that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S.

Tulsa was the site of a race massacre in 1921 that has been called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.” Trump later moved the date of the rally back by a day.

“Our city is searching for ideas and ways to do peaceful protest of Trump,” Chuck Foxen, film programmer at Circle Cinema, told Variety. “This feels like a powerful way to celebrate the spirit and meaning of Juneteenth.”

Read more: https://variety.com/2020/film/news/john-lewis-documentary-juneteenth-trump-rally-tulsa-1234637951/

U.S. Supreme Court Rules Title VII of Civil Rights Act Protects LGBTQ Workers

U.S. Supreme Court Rules Title VII of Civil Rights Act Protects LGBTQ Workers

By goodblacknews on June 15, 2020

In an historic and majority 6-3 decision this morning, the United States Supreme Court ruled that workplace discrimination against LGBTQ workers is prohibited by federal law.

According to the New York Times, SCOTUS said the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

To quote nytimes.com:

“The vote was 6 to 3, with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The case concerned Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. The question for the justices was whether that last prohibition — discrimination “because of sex”— applies to many millions of gay and transgender workers.

The decision, covering two cases, was the court’s first on L.G.B.T. rights since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the court’s major gay rights decisions.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/gay-transgender-workers-supreme-court.html

NBA Legend Michael Jordan and Jordan Brand Pledge $100 Million to Racial Equality, Education and Social Justice Organizations

NBA Legend Michael Jordan and Jordan Brand Pledge $100 Million to Racial Equality, Education and Social Justice Organizations

By goodblacknews on June 5, 2020

According to ESPN.com, Michael Jordan and Jordan Brand are pledging $100 million over the next 10 years to nationwide organizations “dedicated to ensuring racial equality, social justice and greater access to education.”

To quote from ESPN:

“Black lives matter. This isn’t a controversial statement,” read a joint statement from Jordan and his company, which is a subsidiary of Nike. “Until the ingrained racism that allows our country’s institutions to fail is completely eradicated, we will remain committed to protecting and improving the lives of Black people.”

Specifically, Jordan Brand will increase its work in communities across the United States to provide access to education and opportunities for future generations, while also taking a more active role in supporting organizations that work to effect policy change in local government.

The Jordan Brand pledge came hours after Nike announced its own “Commitment to the Black Community,” an additional $40 million collective pledge to community organizations from the Nike, Jordan and Converse brands over the next four years.

Read more: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29272682/jordan-brand-pledges-100-million-racial-equality-education-initiatives

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/sports/charlotte-hornets/article243321076.html

Three Other Officers Charged With Aiding and Abetting Murder of George Floyd

Three Other Officers Charged With Aiding and Abetting Murder of George Floyd

By goodblacknews on June 3, 2020

According to nytimes.com and The Washington Post, the other three officers present while Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by holding his knee on his neck for close to nine minutes have been charged in the case for aiding and abetting murder.

Chauvin’s charges have also been increased from third to second-degree murder.

To quote nytimes.com:

The three former officers, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, were charged with aiding and abetting murder, court records show.

The fourth officer, Chauvin, 44, who was arrested last week, faces an increased charge of second-degree murder.

All four officers were quickly fired from the Minneapolis Police Department after video of the encounter emerged. Officers arrested Mr. Floyd on the evening of May 25 after a store employee called the police, saying that someone had used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes.

Read more: nytimes.com

Boxing Champion Floyd Mayweather to Pay George Floyd’s Funeral Expenses

By goodblacknews on June 2, 2020
Floyd Mayweather Jr. (photo: wikipedia.org)

As reported by The Grio, boxing champion Floyd Mayweather offered last week to cover all funeral expenses for George Floyd. His generous offer has been accepted.

To quote from blackamericaweb.com:

According to Leonard Ellerbe, the CEO of Mayweather Promotions, the Floyd family has accepted his offer. “He’ll probably get mad at me for saying that, but yes, [Mayweather] is definitely paying for the funeral,” he told ESPN on Monday, June 1. “Floyd has done these kind of things over the last 20 years,” he added.

The gesture came about through an unexpected six degrees of separation. Anzel Jennings, CEO of The Money Team Record Label, apparently grew up with George Floyd in Houston, Texas.

Jason Lee of Hollywood Unlocked spoke to Jennings and reports that Anzel reached out to the family on behalf of the boxer.

He will reportedly pay for three ceremonies, one in Houston, Minnesota and Charlotte, North Carolina. A fourth is tentatively planned and Mayweather has agreed to bear the costs for that funeral as well.

Read more: https://thegrio.com/2020/06/01/floyd-mayweather-george-floyd-funeral/

 https://blackamericaweb.com/2020/06/02/floyd-mayweather-will-pay-for-george-floyds-funeral/

City of Cleveland to Pay $18 Million to Rickey Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman and Kwame Ajamu for Decades of Wrongful Imprisonment

By goodblacknews on May 26, 2020
(photo of wrongfully convicted brothers Wiley Bridgeman and Kwame Ajamu via moguldom.com)

Earlier this month, the city of Cleveland agreed to pay a combined $18 million to Rickey Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman and his brother Kwame Ajamu, three men who spent decades in prison for a 1975 killing they did not commit, according to cleveland.com.

The trio reached this settlement during an 12-hour mediation held by U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, and will end the lawsuits each man filed for the time they spent behind bars.

To quote from the cleveland.com article:

The men, now in their 60s, were convicted of murder in 1975 for the shooting of money order collector Harold Franks at what was then the Fairmont Cut Rate Store on the city’s East Side. The trio maintained their innocence and were cleared in 2014.

Jackson had served 39 years in prison and was believed at the time to have served the longest amount of time behind bars of anyone wrongfully convicted of a crime.

Ajamu, with tears frequently streaming down his face, said they were accepting the settlement because “we now know that you have no other reason and no other recourse but to tell the world that you wronged three little black boys 45 years ago.”

While thanking his lawyers Terry Gilbert and Jacqueline Greene of Friedman & Gilbert, Ajamu expressed gratitude but did not downplay the long fight he, his brother and friend undertook to clear their names.

“Money cannot buy freedom and money certainly does not make innocence,” said Ajamu, who in addition to Gilbert and Greene was also represented by attorney David Mills.

A jury in August 1975 found Jackson, Bridgeman and Ajamu, then known as Ronnie Bridgeman, guilty of murdering Franks. They were also convicted of trying to kill store owner Anna Robinson. Cuyahoga County prosecutors relied on the eyewitness testimony of young Eddie Vernon to prove their case.

A judge sentenced the men to death, though the sentences were reduced to life in 1978 when the state enacted a short-lived moratorium on the death penalty.

Nearly 40 years later, Vernon recanted his testimony and judges overturned the men’s criminal convictions. Vernon, who was 12 years old when Franks was killed, said in 2014 that city detectives pressured him to lie on the witness stand, which included threats to jail his parents, and that police manipulated him.

Bridgeman, 65, and Jackson, 63, were released in 2014 with the help of the Ohio Innocence Project, which obtained Vernon’s recantation. Ajamu, 62, was paroled in 2003. The story of the murder and the work done to secure their freedom was chronicled in a book called “Good Kids, Bad City” written by Kyle Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post who covered the case for the alternative weekly Cleveland Scene.

Candice Story Lee Named Athletic Director at Vanderbilt University, 1st Black Woman to Lead Power 5 Program

By goodblacknews on May 23, 2020
Candice Storey Lee (photo: Twitter)

According to espn.com, Vanderbilt University recently announced that Candice Storey Lee, a former standout student-athlete and three-time Vanderbilt graduate, has been named Vice Chancellor for Athletics and University Affairs and Athletic Director at Vanderbilt after serving in the role on a temporarily since February 2020.

Lee is Vanderbilt’s first female athletic director and the first African American woman to head a Southeastern Conference (SEC) athletics program. The permanent hire places her in the top tier of college athletics as one of only five women currently leading a “Power 5” program.

“Candice is perfectly positioned to lead our athletics program to new heights of success on and off the field of play. She has the drive, creativity and perseverance to help elevate our student-athletes and the entire Vanderbilt Athletics program,” said Incoming Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier.

Lee has served as an integral leader at the university and in Athletics for almost 20 years. Prior to becoming interim athletic director, she served as deputy athletic director, a role she was appointed to in 2016. Lee was also a captain on Vanderbilt’s women’s basketball team, graduating in 2000.

To quote from ESPN:

“It’s really interesting and humbling to hear words like pioneer and trailblazer, and I appreciate that. I know it’s significant, and it just reminds me of the responsibility that lies ahead,” Lee said on Freddie and Fitzsimmons on ESPN Radio on Thursday night. “I want to do a great job for all the people that I’m working with and for, but I also want to make sure that I’m not a deterrent when there are other opportunities presented to other people of color and other women and other people who are deserving of opportunities.

“There are a lot of people out there that just need a chance, and so if part of this can mean that there are more opportunities to come for others? I’m really excited about that.”

Read more: https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/29205275/vandy-makes-candice-lee-sec-first-female-black-ad

Nicholas Johnson Earns Top Academic Spot as Valedictorian of Princeton’s Class of 2020

By goodblacknews on May 11, 2020
Princeton Class of 2020 Valedictorian Nicholas Johnson (Photo by Lisa Festa, Princeton Center for Career Development)

Nicholas Johnson from Montreal, Canada, has been named valedictorian of Princeton’s Class of 2020, according to princeton.edu. becoming the first black person to earn that academic honor since Princeton was founded in 1746.

Princeton will hold a virtual commencement for the Class of 2020 on Sunday, May 31, 2020, in which Johnson will participate. An in-person ceremony will be held in May 2021.

To quote from princeton.edu:

Johnson said he appreciates the encouragement he has received at Princeton in developing his academic interests. The University’s support through opportunities including international internships and cultural immersion trips to Peru, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom were especially significant, Johnson said. But most of all, he treasures his relationships with his classmates.

“My favorite memories of my time at Princeton are memories of time spent with close friends and classmates engaging in stimulating discussions — often late at night — about our beliefs, the cultures and environments in which we were raised, the state of the world, and how we plan on contributing positively to it in our own unique way,” Johnson said.

Johnson plans to spend this summer interning as a hybrid quantitative researcher and software developer at the D. E. Shaw Group before beginning Ph.D. studies in operations research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in fall 2020.

Along with his concentration in operations research and financial engineering, he is pursuing certificates in statistics and machine learning, applied and computational mathematics, and applications of computing.

His research has focused primarily on sequential decision-making under uncertainty, optimization, and the ethical considerations that must be made given the increasing role of algorithmic decision-making systems.

His senior thesis, “Sequential Stochastic Network Structure Optimization with Applications to Addressing Canada’s Obesity Epidemic,” focuses on developing high-performance, efficient algorithms to solve a network-based optimization problem that models a community-based preventative health intervention designed to curb the prevalence of obesity in Canada.

In addition to serving as a writing fellow at Princeton’s Writing Center, Johnson is editor of Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy. He is also a member of the Princeton chapter of Engineers Without Borders and served as its co-president in 2018.

As a rising senior, Johnson worked as a software engineer in machine learning at Google’s California headquarters.

He previously interned at Oxford University’s Integrative Computational Biology and Machine Learning Group, developing and implementing a novel optimization technique. He presented the project at Princeton’s inaugural Day of Optimization in October 2018 and at the 25th Conference of African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences in June 2019, where his project was recognized with the Angela E. Grant Poster Award for Best Modeling.

More: https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/04/27/nicholas-johnson-named-valedictorian-grace-sommers-selected-salutatorian

R.I.P. Rock and R&B Music Legend Little Richard, 87

By goodblacknews on May 9, 2020
Little Richard (photo via commons.wikipedia.org)

Known by many as “The Architect of Rock and Roll,” Richard Wayne Penniman aka Little Richard, was a pioneer of the popular music that came to dominate in the 1950s and beyond.

With a fusion of blues, boogie woogie and gospel stylings, Little Richard helped create the sound that swept the United States and ultimately the world.

Songs like “Rip It Up,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” ‘Ready Teddy,” “Tutti Frutti” combined with his energetic, rousing performances helped Little Richard set the stage and the bar for any and all rock and R&B superstars that came after him. To quote a recent New York Times article, Little Richard offered “An Ecstasy You Couldn’t Refuse.”

In honor of his life’s work GBN Contributor Marlon West put together a Spotify playlist celebrating Little Richard.

In Marlon’s words:

“Vernon Reid Twittered this tribute to the late great, Little Richard:

“No Jimi, No Beatles No Bowie, No Bolan. NO GLAM, No Freddie, No Prince, No Elton, No Preston No Sly, No Stevie, WITHOUT Little Richard! They DON’T HAPPEN Without HIM BLAZING A TRAIL IN THE DARK.”

Little Richard’s talent and audaciousness was the springboard to so many. Here’s a collection of his music, and of a wide range of artists who he influenced greatly.

Little Richard was a standard-bearer for being whoever the eff you want.”

Enjoy!

[spotifyplaybutton play=”spotify:playlist:3IeausMwSRbBTHk7FmmKrt”/]

 

Colson Whitehead, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jericho Brown and More Win Pulitzer Prizes in 2020

Colson Whitehead, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jericho Brown and More Win Pulitzer Prizes in 2020

By goodblacknews on May 5, 2020
Jericho Brown, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead (photos via commons.wikipedia.org and nikolehannahjones.com)

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

The Pulitzer Prize winners for 2020 were announced yesterday. Notable among them were Colson Whitehead for Fiction for “The Nickel Boys,“ Nikole Hannah-Jones for Commentary for “The 1619 Project,” Jericho Brown for Poetry for “The Tradition,“ Michael R. Jackson for Drama for “A Strange Loop“ and Anthony Davis for Music for “The Central Park Five.”

And, posthumously, the one and only Ida B. Wells was awarded a special citation for her reporting on lynchings in the late-19th and early 20th century.

The Pulitzer Prize awards were established in 1917 through money provided in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher. The Pulitzers are given yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and a US $15,000 cash award. The winner in the public service category is awarded a gold medal.

With his win for “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead becomes the fourth fiction writer to win the prize two times (Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner and John Updike are the other three) and the first African American writer to pull off that feat.

Whitehead won his first Pulitzer for his 2016 best-selling novel “The Underground Railroad.”