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Former Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick Named 2015 Harvard Commencement Speaker

By goodblacknews on April 2, 2015

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Former Massachusetts Governor and Harvard Alumnus Deval L. Patrick (Photo: Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer)

Deval L. Patrick, who recently concluded two terms as the 71st governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, will be the principal speaker at the Afternoon Exercises of Harvard’s 364th Commencement on May 28.
“Deval Patrick is an extraordinarily distinguished alumnus, a deeply dedicated public servant, and an inspiring embodiment of the American dream,” said Harvard University President Drew Faust. “We greatly look forward to welcoming him home to Harvard on Commencement Day.”
Raised on Chicago’s South Side, Patrick came to Massachusetts at age 14, having won a scholarship to Milton Academy through the Boston-based organization A Better Chance. He earned admission to Harvard College, as the first in his family to attend college, and spent a year in Africa after graduation on a Rockefeller Fellowship before studying for his law degree at Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.
Early in his career, he served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles, as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund working on voting rights and death-penalty cases, and then as a partner at the Boston law firm Hill & Barlow.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton named him assistant attorney general for civil rights, the nation’s top civil rights post. In that role, he led the Justice Department’s efforts in such areas as prosecuting hate crimes and enforcing laws on employment discrimination, fair lending, and rights for the disabled.

Vanderbilt University Renames Black Studies Research Center After Former Slave and Early Reparations Activist Callie House

By goodblacknews on April 2, 2015

Early Reparations Activist Callie House
19th Century Reparations Activist Callie House

The African American and Diaspora Studies Program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, recently renamed its research arm the Callie House Research Center for the Study of Black Cultures and Politics. The center was founded in 2012 and sponsors lectures, conferences, working groups, professional development and academic seminars.
Callie House was born a slave in Rutherford County, Tennessee, in 1861. After she was freed, she worked as a seamstress and washerwoman in Nashville. She became interested in social justice and politics and led the first mass slave reparations movement in the United States. In 1898, she helped found the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association.
Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, gave the keynote address at the renaming ceremony. Professor Berry is the author of My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).
article via jbhe.com

Pomona College English Professor Claudia Rankine Wins National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

By goodblacknews on April 1, 2015

Professor and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Claudia Rankine
Professor and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Claudia Rankine (PHOTO: kcrw.com)

Claudia Rankine, the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for her book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014).
Rankine’s poetry recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Citizen is her fifth published poetry collection.1416441763-citizen
Earlier this year, Professor Rankine made literary history when she was the first author to have a work nominated as a finalist in two categories in the 39-year history of the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
Professor Rankine is a native of Jamaica. She is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and holds a master of fine arts degree in poetry from Columbia University.
article via jbhe.com

National Society of Black Engineers National Advisor Dr. Gary S. May Honored by President Obama

By goodblacknews on April 1, 2015
NSBE National Advisor and Presidential Award Recipient Gary S. May, Ph.D (PHOTO: nsbe.org)

 
Gary S. May, Ph.D., national advisor, lifetime member and former national chair of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), has been honored by President Barack Obama with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). Dr. May, dean of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech, received news of the award on Friday, March 27, during his attendance at NSBE’s 41st Annual Convention, in Anaheim, Calif. He will receive the award during a White House ceremony later this year.
The Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring is given to individuals and organizations to recognize “the crucial role that mentoring plays in the academic and personal development of students studying science and engineering — particularly those who belong to groups that are underrepresented in these fields,” a White House news release stated. “By offering their expertise and encouragement, mentors help prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers while ensuring that tomorrow’s innovators represent a diverse pool of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics talent throughout the United States.”
“These educators are helping to cultivate America’s future scientists, engineers and mathematicians,” President Obama said. “They open new worlds to their students, and give them the encouragement they need to learn, discover and innovate. That’s transforming those students’ futures, and our nation’s future, too.”

Jay Z Launches Tidal, the First Artist-Owned Streaming-Music Service

By goodblacknews on March 30, 2015
Jay Z Kanye Rihanna Madonna Tidal
(JAMIE MCCARTHY/GETTY IMAGES)

Music impresario Jay Z has launched Tidal — positioned as an ad-free, high-quality streaming-music subscription service priced starting at $10 per month — with the participation of numerous big-name artists including Alicia Keys, Beyoncé, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Usher, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Kanye West and Madonna.
In January, Jay Z acquired Sweden-based Aspiro for $56 million. The artists announced onstage at the New York event Monday were introduced as co-owners of the company, representing the first artist-owned digital-music service — as opposed to companies like Spotify and Pandora.
“Our goal is simple: We want to create a better service and a better experience for both fans and artitsts,” Alicia Keys said at the event. “We believe that it is in everyone’s interests — fans, artists and the industry as a whole — to preserve the value of music, and to ensure a healthy and robust industry for years to come.”
Tidal’s mobile launch partner is Sprint. Other artists participating in the service include Arcade Fire, Calvin Harris, Daft Punk, Jack White (formerly of the White Stripes) and Deadmau5. Tidal was launched with the hashtag “#TIDALforALL” — although, obviously, it’s only for those able or willing to pay at least $120 annually for audio and video content.
The Tidal service will compete with other subscription-music services including Spotify and Apple’s forthcoming music-streaming service, based on its acquisition of Beats Music, which is expected to launch this summer.
Tidal will not offer a free version of the service; the standard-audio version (Tidal Premium) will be $9.99 per month and the high-def audio version (Tidal HiFi) will be $19.99 per month. Both tiers are free to try out for 30 days, according to the company.
Tidal says it provides a library of more than 25 million tracks, 75,000 music videos and curated editorial articles. The service is available across iOS and Android devices, as well as in Web browsers and desktop players, available in the U.S. and 30 other countries at launch. Tidal provides streaming quality at more than four times the bit rate of competitive services, according to the startup.
article by Todd Spangler via Variety.com

HISTORY: Mary Bowser Worked as Servant in Confederate White House to Spy on Jefferson Davis for Union Army

By goodblacknews on March 22, 2015
Union Army Spy and Hero Mary Bowser
Union Army Spy and Hero Mary Bowser

For Women’s History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories exemplify the extraordinary, and often unsung, accomplishments of African-American women from our past.
In modern wars, including the Civil War, women have taken on key assignments at the heart of the action as soldiers or nurses or performed supportive roles. Women contributed important work to the intelligence services of the Union as well as the Confederacy: Perhaps the most remarkable service rendered was that of Harriet Tubman, now recognized as having played a central role in gathering intelligence and planning the liberation of more than 700 slaves in the Union Army’s dramatic 1863 raid on the Confederate redoubt at the Combahee River in South Carolina.
Other black women are known to have served the Union cause as spies, but because of the very subterfuge involved, biographical detail about them is hard to pin down.
One exception is Mary Bowser. Born a slave on a plantation near Richmond, Va., she was owned by the family of John Van Lew, a wealthy businessman originally from the North. Along with other slaves of the Van Lews, Mary was emancipated sometime in the 1840s.
Yet she remained a household servant until a Van Lew daughter, Elizabeth, arranged for her to attend a Quaker school for blacks in Philadelphia. In April 1861, she married Wilson Bowser, a free black man. Records list them as “servants” of Elizabeth Van Lew and the couple settled outside Richmond.
Even if Mary Bowser believed herself to be free (although by law she may have still been a slave), some people today might wonder why she bothered to return to a slave state after living in the Quaker circles of Philadelphia.
It turns out, in fact, she did not return directly from the North to the Van Lew household in Virginia but rather spent five years in the African nation of Liberia. There she grew homesick and, perhaps through continued correspondence with Van Lew, arranged to return to Virginia in early 1860, well before Abraham Lincoln’s election as president or the attack on Fort Sumter that ignited the Civil War.
The full extent of the relationship between Mary Bowser and Elizabeth Van Lew is not entirely clear, but at some point early in the war, the two women agreed to collaborate with the Union spy network in the Confederate capital of Richmond. Well known as a staunch Unionist and abolitionist before the war, Van Lew came to adopt a distracted, muttering persona as “Crazy Bet” to deflect Confederate concern. This way she could visit the city’s prison for Union soldiers with care packages of food and medicine and also pass along messages and establish a network of contacts.
To infiltrate the Confederate White House, the home of President Jefferson Davis and First Lady Varina Davis, however, required a different type of talent: the ability to act as a dimwitted yet loyal and hardworking domestic servant even while observing the Confederacy’s first family up close.
Mary Bowser, it seems, took to the role like a natural. After working at several Davis functions, she was hired full time and cleaned and served meals in the Confederate White House from about 1862 until almost the war’s end. She was known as “Little Mary,” according to Thomas McNiven, the Scottish-American baker whose business deliveries throughout Richmond, including to the Confederate White House, served as a cover for his activities as a member of the city’s Union spy ring.
McNiven’s recollection, provided late in life to his daughter, Jeanette, was that Mary Bowser “had a photographic mind” so that “everything she saw on the Rebel president’s desk, she could repeat word for word.”

Kerry Washington Accepts Vanguard Award at the #glaadawards (VIDEO)

By goodblacknews on March 22, 2015

Scandal star Kerry Washington accepted the Vanguard Award at Saturday’s 26th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in Los Angeles at the iconic Beverly Hilton. Ellen DeGeneres, who was previously honored with GLAAD’s Stephen F. Kolzak Award, presented the honor. The Vanguard Award is presented to media professionals who have made a significant difference in promoting equality. Previous Vanguard Award honorees include Jennifer Lopez, Kristin Chenoweth, Charlize Theron, Elizabeth Taylor, Antonio Banderas, Drew Barrymore, Janet Jackson, and Sharon Stone.

Check out the video of Washington below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruv8As-_CMg&w=560&h=315]

In an acceptance speech that had the audience on their feet, Washington said, “I don’t decide to play the characters I play as a political choice. Yet the characters I play often do become political statements. Because having your story told as a woman, as a person of color, as a lesbian, as a trans person, or as any member of any disenfranchised community, is sadly often still a radical idea. There is so much power in storytelling, and there is enormous power in inclusive storytelling, in inclusive representations. That is why the work of GLAAD is so important. We need more LGBT representation in the media. We need more LGBT characters and more LGBT storytelling. We need more diverse LGBT representation. And by that, I mean lots of different kinds of LGBT people living all different kinds of lives. And this is big—we need more employment of LGBT people in front of and behind the camera.”
Washington continued, “We can’t say that we believe in each other’s fundamental humanity, and then turn a blind eye to the reality of each other’s existence, and the truth of each others’ hearts. We must be allies and we must be allies in this business, because to be represented is to be humanized, and as long as anyone anywhere is being made to feel less human, our very definition of humanity is at stake, and we are all vulnerable. We must see each other, all of us. And we must see ourselves, all of us. And we have to continue to be bold and break new ground until that is just how it is, until we are no longer ‘firsts’ and ‘exceptions’ and ‘rare’ and ‘unique.’ In the real world, being an ‘other’ is the norm. In the real world, the only norm is uniqueness, and our media must reflect that. Thank you GLAAD, for fighting the good fight.”
Washington is best known for her role as Olivia Pope on the LGBT-inclusive hit show Scandal, executive produced by Shonda Rhimes. In addition to the ABC drama, Washington has appeared in other LGBT-inclusive projects like Peeples, She Hate Me, The Dead Girl, and Life Is Hot In Cracktown. The actress is a longtime supporter of equality for LGBT people. She has participated in GLAAD’s annual Spirit Day, a campaign to end anti-LGBT bullying, and has advocated for marriage equality both at-home and abroad.
Ellen DeGeneres presented the Vanguard Award to Kerry Washington. Channing Tatum presented the Stephen F. Kolzak Award to director Roland Emmerich. Comedian Tig Notaro hosted the event. Guests included: Zoe Saldana (Guardians of the Galaxy); Patricia Arquette (CSI: Cyber); TV producer Shonda Rhimes; Viola Davis, Jack Falahee, Matt McGorry, Aja Naomi King, Peter Nowalk (How to Get Away with Murder); Portia de Rossi(Scandal); Graham Moore (The Imitation Game); Pauley Perrette (NCIS); Jill Soloway, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass, Alexandra Billings, Rhys Ernst, Kiersey Clemons, Michaela Watkins, Alison Sudol, Clementine Creevy, Brett Parasol (Transparent); Michael Harney, Samira Wiley, Nick Sandow, Alysia Reiner (Orange is the New Black); Andrew Rannells(Girls); Murray Bartlett, Daniel Franzese (Looking); Ron Perlman (Stonewall); Jordan Gavaris (Orphan Black); Against Me! lead singer Laura Jane Grace; Michael Mosley, Kevin Daniels, Kevin Bigley (Sirens); Peter Paige, Bradley Bredeweg, Gavin MacIntosh, Hayden Byerly (The Fosters); Yara Martinez (Jane the Virgin); Serayah McNeill (Empire); Alex Newell (Glee); Gregg Sulkin, Rita Volk, Michael J. Willett, Carter Covington (Faking It); Barrett Foa (NCIS: Los Angeles); Jessica St. Clair, Lennon Parham (Playing House); Wilson Cruz (Red Band Society); stylist Brad Goreski; Gary Janetti (Vicious); Guy Wilson, Freddie Smith, Christopher Sean (Days of Our Lives); musician Our Lady J; model Nats Getty; Hannah Hart (My Drunk Kitchen); DJs Sam Sparro, Kim Anh, Derek Monteiro;  GLAAD Board member Meghan McCain; GLAAD National Spokesperson Omar Sharif, Jr. and GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis.
Visit glaad.org/mediaawards/press for a complete list of award recipients announced on Saturday night.
article by Mariah Yamamoto via glaad.org

Ohio Man Ricky Jackson Receives $1 Million After Spending 39 Years in Jail for a Murder He Didn’t Commit

By goodblacknews on March 20, 2015

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Ricky Jackson (YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT)

Ricky Jackson, 57, spent 39 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and on Thursday an Ohio judge ordered the state to pay Jackson $1 million for his wrongful imprisonment, Reuters reports. Jackson was freed from prison last November.

Jackson was informed by a journalist about the $1 million check coming his way. “Wow, I didn’t know that,” Jackson told the Cleveland Plain Dealer after he found out. “Wow, wow, wow, that’s fantastic, man. I don’t even know what to say. This is going to mean so much.”
Jackson was convicted of murder in connection with the death of Cleveland salesman Harold Franks in 1975, alongside two other men, Kwame Ajamu and Wiley Bridgeman, who are brothers. Jackson was the longest-held U.S. prisoner to be eventually cleared of a crime. Ajamu and Bridgeman also were exonerated. Ajamu’s sentence was commuted and he was released from prison in 2003, and Bridgeman was freed shortly after Jackson in November.
A 12-year-old boy named Eddie Vernon testified during the original trial that he saw the attack. Vernon later recanted his testimony, telling authorities that he did not, in fact, witness the crime.
According to Reuters, there was no other evidence linking Jackson to Franks’ death. Other witnesses said that Jackson, who was a teenager at the time, was on a school bus at the time of the killing.
article by Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele via theroot.com

Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity to Announce Plan to Combat Racial Intolerance

By goodblacknews on March 18, 2015
CHICAGO (AP) — A fraternity under scrutiny because of a racist chant caught on video plans to announce an extensive review of its chapters around the country.
Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity said it will unveil Wednesday what it calls a “national plan to combat racial intolerance.” The Evanston, Illinois-based organization is holding a news conference in Chicago to announce its plans to eliminate insensitivity among its members.
The fraternity is responding to a video that surfaced last week. It showed University of Oklahoma fraternity members engaging in a racist chant that referenced lynching and indicated that black students never would be admitted to that university’s chapter.
SAE has disbanded the local chapter for the video. The university has expelled two students and banned SAE. Two students identified in the video have apologized publicly.
article via blackamericaweb.com

Dr. Olivia Hooker, 1st Black Woman in U.S. Coast Guard, Honored with Training Facility & Dining Hall Dedications

By goodblacknews on March 16, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-03-16 at 12.59.24 PM
In 1945, Olivia Hooker, a 30-year-old black woman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, joined the U.S. Coast Guard. The now-Dr. Olivia Hooker holds a PhD in psychology, worked until she was 87, and just turned 100 in February. But 70 years ago when she enlisted she became the Coast Guard’s first African-American woman on active duty.
Screen Shot 2015-03-16 at 1.00.06 PMThursday, Coast Guard brass honored her by naming a dining hall on Staten Island in her honor. But the commandant of the Coast Guard announced that a training center at Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C., would also bear the name of this 100-year-old pioneer.
“Oh, this is beyond my wildest dreams. I’d never even imagine,” Dr. Hooker said. “It’s still astonishing to me. I’m so grateful that the sun was shining today and we were able to get here.”
To see Fox5NY video of this story, click here.
Hooker grew up in a home that Klan members ransacked during the Tulsa race riot of 1921.
Basic training in Manhattan Beach and the duties of a yeoman first class at the Boston separation office where she worked — and from which she later wrote her own separation letter — looked and felt a lot different than Tulsa in 1921 or White Plains, N.Y., in 2005.
“I learned a lot more about people who grew up in different kinds of situations,” she said. “There are many, many more opportunities but there are still more challenges.”
Hooker’s goddaughter Diane Harris and a roomful of Coast Guard leadership traveled to Staten Island for Thursday’s ceremony.
“She doesn’t act like a 100-year-old to me,” Harris said.
“When I try to reach my toes and I can’t quite reach them, then I’m reminded,” Dr. Hooker said.
Five years ago, at age 95, Dr. Hooker joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary, the service’s civilian reserve.
article by Mac King via myfoxny.com