by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, Good Black News Editor-in-Chief
Thank you to everyone who so far has purchased, gifted and supported GBN’s A Year of Good Black News, the Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022 we’ve done with Workman Publishing. Your appreciation has made it more than worth it.
Even though 2022 has officially started, if you or someone you know is still looking to get A Year of Good Black News, it is now available for 35% off at workman.comwith Code: CAL35 until January 31st!
I’m also excited to share that we’ve broadened the calendar’s accessibility recently by launching Good Black News: The Daily Drop.
Good Black News: The Daily Drop is a podcast based on the calendar that offers an audio version of each entry that is posted daily, in addition to one new bonus episode every weekend (Saturdays and Sundays of the physical calendar share an entry). Check out the trailer here:
The National Book Foundation announced the 2021 National Book Awards winners list yesterday. Author and poet Jason Mott won the fiction prize for Hell of a Book, while author and historian Tiya Miles garnered the nonfiction prize for All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.Mott’s Hell of a Book tells the story of an author on a promotional tour and his haunted past and present in a surreal, narrative style.
“I would like to dedicate this award to all the other mad kids, to all the outsiders, the weirdos, the bullied,” he said in his acceptance speech. “The ones so strange they had no choice but to be misunderstood by the world and by those around them. The ones who, in spite of this, refuse to outgrow their imagination, refuse to abandon their dreams and refuse to deny, diminish their identity, or their truth, or their loves, unlike so many others.”
Miles’ All That She Carried traces the history of an American family through a cotton sack an enslaved ancestor gave to her daughter in the 19th century as they were about to be separated and sold apart.
In her acceptance speech, Miles thanked her editor Molly Turpin for championing her decision to write a book about “an old bag.” “Your face lit up,” Miles said. “You were so curious. You were so receptive. You were the perfect editor for this project.”
Other winners include Malinda Lo for young people’s literature with Last Night at the Telegraph Club — a story of same-sex, cross-cultural love set in the 1950s.
Martín Espada took the poetry prize with Floaters, and best translation went to Elisa ShuaDusapin‘s Winter in Sokcho, translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.
Winners in competitive categories each receive $10,000.
Established in 1950, the National Book Awards are intended to celebrate the following core beliefs:
Books are essential to a thriving cultural landscape
Books and literature provide a depth of engagement that helps to protect, stimulate, and promote discourse in American society
Books and literature are for everyone, no matter where the reader is situated geographically, economically, racially, or otherwise
Judging panels looked through more than 1,800 submitted books. This year’s judges included acclaimed authors such as Eula Biss, Ilya Kaminsky and Charles Yu, winner in 2020 of the National Book Award for fiction.
A Year of Good Black News is filled with facts, history, bios, quotes, jokes and trivia in easy-to-read entries delivered on the daily, and GBN will be announcing one winner a month until January 2022.
To enter for a chance to win, send your name and email address with the subject heading “A Year of Good Black News Giveaway” to goodblacknewsgiveaways@yahoo.com from now until December 31. One entry per email, and we will choose at random one winner per month and announce their names here.
As the calendar’s official drop date is next Tuesday, October 12, that’s when we will announce the first winner.
In case you can’t wait to see if you’re the lucky winner or want to buy copies for gifts to family, friends or loved ones, you can order at Workman.comusing code: GOODBLACKNEWS from now until December 31, you will receive 20% off.
According to cnn.com, Kennedy Mitchum, 22, emailed Merriam-Webster last month to let the renowned dictionary publisher know that she thought its definition of the word racism was inadequate. She was surprised when an editor responded and that the company agreed to update the entry.
“Merriam-Webster’s first definition of racism is ‘a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.’
Mitchum said many people she’s talked to use that to dismiss her concerns about racism and overlook broader issues of racial inequality because they don’t personally feel that way about people of color.
Mitchum said she sent her email on a Thursday night and got a reply from editor Alex Chambers the next morning.
After a few emails, Chambers agreed that the entry should be updated and said a new definition is being drafted.
“This revision would not have been made without your persistence in contacting us about this problem,” Chambers said in the email, which was provided to CNN. “We sincerely thank you for repeatedly writing in and apologize for the harm and offense we have caused in failing to address this issue sooner.”
Peter Sokolowski, an editor at large at Merriam-Webster, told CNN that their entry also defines racism as “a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles” and “a political or social system founded on racism,” which would cover systematic racism and oppression.
“I think we can express this more clearly to bring the idea of an asymmetrical power structure into the language of this definition, but it’s there,” Sokolowski said.”
(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.
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.
It’s no secret how much the Good Black News team loves and reveres Stevie Wonder, as we have been celebrating him throughout May with various tributes, posts and playlists on the main page and across our social media.
But today, on May 13, Stevie Wonder’s actual birthday, we want to offer you links to all things Stevie, like his official website, Instagram (which is playing Stevie music live all day!) and Twitter, the biography written about him, as well as the Wikipedia and Biography entries that encapsulate the his life and career in words and video.
But really, to know Stevie all you have to do is listen to his music, especially the songs that comprise the majority of his offerings to this world – album tracks never released as singles – aka Stevie Wonder’s Deep Cuts.
Our newest playlist is comprised solely of these songs, and arguably they are as moving and meaningful as his tunes that topped the charts.
In fact, many of these songs (“You and I,” “Too High,” “Bird of Beauty,” “Love’s In Need of Love Today,” “Rocket Love”) are more popular with Stevie stans than many of his global hits.
They are sequenced in chronological order (like our companion playlist of chart releases and hits “The Age of Wonder”) so the listener can hear the evolution of Stevie Wonder’s writing, production and sound. Enjoy – and Happy Birthday, Stevie! We love you!
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.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer at The New York Times Magazine, (whose Twitter handle, btw, is Ida Bae Wells, an homage to the woman who serendipitously was also honored by Pulitzer this year), mixed U.S. history and personal anecdote in her essay for the “The 1619 Project,” which worked to re-center the contributions of African-Americans, including enslaved people, to American history.
Although I’m typically calm-if-a-bit-nerdy when I meet artists I admire, there is one time in my life I fully lost my natural mind for someone. That someone was the woman and musical legend Good Black News is celebrating today, April 25, on what would have been her 103rd birthday – Ella Fitzgerald.
To set the scene, it was the day of my college graduation in June of 1990. I was standing in my black cap and gown next to my roommates, as the graduating class formed something akin to a Soul Train line for alumni, professors and distinguished guests to walk through on the way to taking the stage for the ceremony. I’d spent four long, great years earning a bachelor’s degree at Harvard in American History and Literature with a minor in African-American Studies. I also DJ’d at the college radio station 92.3FM WHRB all four of those years.
In addition to being all about hip-hop, house, R&B and dance music, I fell in love with jazz at WHRB, too. So much so that I got up several mornings a week to jock the 6-8am “Jazz Spectrum” program at WHRB, and even found a way to incorporate jazz into my senior thesis by comparing jazz autobiography to the slave narrative. Not exactly everyone’s idea of a page-turner, I know, but it was nice and egghead-y, earned me high honors from my department, and was a sneaky way to earn credit while spending time deepening my nascent love of jazz and jazz history.
So when I heard Ella Fitzgerald – the singer whose interpretation of “Lullaby of Birdland” took my heart and mind to heights of joy so unexpected that I immediately began to consume her versions of every standard as if they were musical narcotics – was on the list of people receiving honorary degrees from Harvard that year, I was beyond thrilled. Ella, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson were my personal Mt. Rushmore of jazz singers, and having her name indelibly connected to my class was momentous.
But I also knew she’d had some recent health issues (she was 73 at the time) and did not expect her to accept her doctorate in person. In fact, I was saying pretty much that to my roommate Susan as several of the distinguished graduation guests filed past us. And then I turned. And saw her. Elegant. Beautiful. Smiling. Ella.
There was a consistent smattering of applause accompanying every step she took. When I finally caught my breath, all that came roaring out of my mouth was the primal scream – “ELLLLLLLAAAAA!!!! ELLLLLLLAAAAA!!!” I couldn’t stop. I was hopping up and down and cheering and – as I said before – losing my natural mind.
I saw on my roommate’s face and other faces around me that amused “Damn, what exactly is happening to her right now?” look, but that was all in slow motion and I did not care because a national treasure was walking towards me. The architect of vocal improvisation and scatting and so much pure jazz singing greatness was in my sights, and I could not contain myself.
I think Ella heard me before she saw me, because I saw her glance my way, smile, then veer close enough to lay her hand on my forearm. Yes, that’s right, I can now and forever brag that the one and only Ella Fitzgerald touched me.
As I observed her small but mighty hand on my forearm, it reminded me of my grandmother’s. From it I felt a gentle squeeze – and in that squeeze she communicated her amusement, her thanks, and, if I’m being 💯 about it, encouragement to get a gotdamn grip on myself and attempt some level of decorum. I was at my college graduation ceremony, her hand reminded me, not Showtime at the Apollo. And then she kept going down the line and when no more dignitaries were left to file past us, we collapsed the Soul Train line and headed to our seats.
https://youtu.be/or1kqkeGXrI
I have no idea what else was said or done during the rest of that ceremony – I spent most of it plotting with my wing woman Karen Moody on how to get close enough to the stage so I could ask Ella for her autograph. Moody offered to distract the security guard once the ceremony was over – she turned on her gift of gab and I was able to glide by and up to Miss Fitzgerald with a pen and the only paper I had, my graduation program. Ella graciously signed it and smiled at me once again as security quickly became undistracted and pointed me away.
Thirty years later, when I look back on this moment, I can’t help but ask myself exactly why I went so crazy. The obvious answer is, duh – ELLA FITZGERALD – but it was such lightning bolt of energy that came through me, it was more than that. Back then I didn’t know much about her life, her professional or personal struggles, but something in me knew to honor the totality of who she was, what she’d gone through and what she gave to this world.
Ella Fitzgerald deserved (and got) a full body-and-soul shout out from the younger generation through me that day. To let her know that she was seen, heard, loved and would never be forgotten, particularly by those, like me, who present to the world in the same type of package.
And here I am again, thirty years later, shouting out love and appreciation for the one and only Ella, master of tone, phrasing, intonation, improvisation and interpretation, so the next generation may know her and pass on to the next their appreciation for one of the best to ever do it.
Below is a playlist compiled in her honor, as well as several other resources and links to foster even more awareness of the “First Lady of Song.” Love you always, Ella!
GBN delights in the opportunity to commemorate the birth of Billie Holiday, one of America’s most talented singing artists, on what would have been her 105th birthday.
Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915 and raised primarily in Baltimore, MD, Holiday is best known for her signature songs “God Bless The Child,” which she co-wrote with Arthur Herzog, Jr. and “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching protest song she first recorded in 1939.
Slightly older generations may have become acquainted with Holiday through the 1972 film Lady Sings The Blues, which garnered Diana Ross an Academy Award nomination for the title role.
Above you can watch Lady Day in 1957 on CBS’ The Sound of Jazz performing “Fine and Mellow,” the blues standard she wrote and first recorded in 1939, with Jazz All Stars such as Lester “Prez” Young, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Gerry Mulligan, Milt Hinton and Mal Waldron.
Below you can experience a comprehensive compilation of Billie Holiday’s recordings in a Spotify playlist called Loving Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday. Click through to follow and/or download. Enjoy!
California Hall of Fame Inductees Maya Angelou, Rupaul
Author Maya Angelou and performer/television series host RuPaul are among the inductees for the 2019 class of California Hall of Fame, according to sfgate.com.
California’s governor Gavin Newsom and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom announced the inductees on Wednesday.
The class includes civil rights leader James M. Lawson Jr., actor and comedian George Lopez, soccer player and two-time World Cup champion Brandi Chastain, skateboarder and entrepreneur Tony Hawk, chef and restaurateur Wolfgang Puck, astrophysicist France A. Córdova, author Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston,and winemaker Helen M. Turley.
The class will be inducted during a ceremony on December 10. The California Hall of Fame started in 2006 and inductees are selected each year by the governor and first partner.
“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.
But today, on May 13, Stevie Wonder’s actual birthday, we want to offer you links to all things Stevie, like his 
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.
