BY TAMBAY A. OBENSON | JULY 13, 2012 1:06 PM via http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/
It was much earlier this year when it was announced that there was renewed interest in exploiting the Soul Train franchise – thanks to Don Cornelius’ death. The news then was that Soul Train Holdings was working with WME to find ways to, as I said, exploit and grow the brand, which would include a film, a stage musical AND a TV show. “Certainly we want to proceed in a way that will highlight the contribution of Don to the creation of the brand and its subsequent impact on American culture,” said Kenard Gibbs, CEO of Soul Train Holdings.
However, there were some rights issues that they’d have to deal with, notably the music used in each episode of the series. But they were confident that wouldn’t be a problem. Things seem to be in motion again as it’s been announced today that Earvin “Magic” Johnson and his business partners have bought the rights to the Soul Train franchise for “several million dollars,” and are planning an upcoming musical based on the life of Don Cornelius, according to the NY Post. The musical, which is being aimed towards Broadway, will focus on the once mega-hit variety show.
Good Black News
Under the scholarship program of the nonprofit Mississippi e-Center @JSU, Jackson State University will provide new iPads to all full-time members of the fall 2012 entering class who are entering the university for the first time. About 800 to 900 students are expected to receive the iPads.
The Apple devices will be integrated into the first-year curriculum and will save students money by allowing them to purchase electronic textbooks instead of traditional books. Students will receive training on the devices. Faculty will be instructed on how to use the iPads to enhance the teaching and learning experience.
Students who leave the university will be asked to return the iPad or pay for the device. Once they complete five semesters the iPad will be there’s to keep.
Mark G. Hardy, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Jackson State University, explained, “We will be placing technology directly in the hands of students and giving them a mobile platform so that learning happens when they are inside or outside of the classroom.”
“Guys with Kids” is the newest sitcom on NBC’s line up and stars comedian Anthony Anderson and former The Cosby Show actress Tempestt Bledsoe. The co-stars say that the new show will represent Black families in a positive light. Read more via Anthony Anderson and Tempestt Bledsoe to Star in New Sitcom | Essence.com.
Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Image
As the clock wound down Thursday night, with the outcome clear, LeBron James let everything out. All the grief he took for leaving Cleveland. All the hate he received for going to Miami. All the criticism he endured for failing in the NBA Finals last year.
The only “crimes” were his over-the-top TV special two years ago and his reckless prediction that the Heat would win eight titles. Yet that was enough to make him Public Enemy No. 1, despised and resented like no one else in the NBA. Overnight, he went from being the league’s most popular player to its most polarizing, and it made him an angrier, less joyous player.
But all of that disappeared in the final moments of Miami’s series-clinching victory.
David Boone used to sleep on this bench in Artha Woods Park when he had nowhere else to go. Next fall, the senior at Cleveland’s MC2STEM High School is headed to Harvard.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — David Boone had a system. There wasn’t much the then-15-year-old could do about the hookers or drug deals around him when he slept in Artha Woods Park. And the spectator’s bench at the park’s baseball diamond wasn’t much of a bed.
But the aspiring engineer, now 18 and headed to Harvard University in the fall, had no regular home. Though friends, relatives and school employees often put him up, there were nights when David had no place to go, other than the park off Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
So he says he made the best of those nights on the wooden bench.
His book bag became his pillow, stuffed with textbooks first — for height, he says — and papers on top for padding.
In the morning, David would duck into his friend Eric’s house after Eric’s parents left early for work so he could shower and dress before heading to class at Cleveland’s specialized MC2STEM High School. David expects to graduate from there next month as salutatorian of the new school’s first graduating class.
“I’d do my homework in a rapid station, usually Tower City since they have heat, and I’d stay wherever I could find,” he said.
If you meet David Boone today, his gentle, confident demeanor and easygoing laugh betray no cockiness over racking up a college acceptance record that others brag about for him. He was accepted at 22 of the 23 schools he applied to — including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown and Penn.
He also gives no hint of the often harsh and nomadic life he has led. The medical problems he faced as a boy, a splintered family, being homeless — it all could have left him bitter and angry.
But David says that giving up would have left him stuck in a dead-end life, so it was never an option.
“I didn’t know what the results of not giving up were going to be, but it was better than nothing and having no advantages,” he said. “I wanted to be in a position to have options to do what I want to do.”
David was born to a young mother, who divorced his father when David was a little boy.
But the aspiring engineer, now 18 and headed to Harvard University in the fall, had no regular home. Though friends, relatives and school employees often put him up, there were nights when David had no place to go, other than the park off Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
So he says he made the best of those nights on the wooden bench.
His book bag became his pillow, stuffed with textbooks first — for height, he says — and papers on top for padding.
In the morning, David would duck into his friend Eric’s house after Eric’s parents left early for work so he could shower and dress before heading to class at Cleveland’s specialized MC2STEM High School. David expects to graduate from there next month as salutatorian of the new school’s first graduating class.
“I’d do my homework in a rapid station, usually Tower City since they have heat, and I’d stay wherever I could find,” he said.
If you meet David Boone today, his gentle, confident demeanor and easygoing laugh betray no cockiness over racking up a college acceptance record that others brag about for him. He was accepted at 22 of the 23 schools he applied to — including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown and Penn.
He also gives no hint of the often harsh and nomadic life he has led. The medical problems he faced as a boy, a splintered family, being homeless — it all could have left him bitter and angry.
But David says that giving up would have left him stuck in a dead-end life, so it was never an option.
“I didn’t know what the results of not giving up were going to be, but it was better than nothing and having no advantages,” he said. “I wanted to be in a position to have options to do what I want to do.”
David was born to a young mother, who divorced his father when David was a little boy.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The first female secretary of state, a former astronaut, and a musical pioneer are among this year’s recipients of the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
President Barack Obama will award the medals at the White House later this spring.
Among this year’s recipients are former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the first woman to hold the nation’s top diplomatic post; John Glenn, the third American in space and the first American to orbit the Earth; and legendary musician Bob Dylan.
In a statement, Obama said of the honorees: “They’ve challenged us, they’ve inspired us and they’ve made the world a better place.”
Among the other honorees:
— John Doar, civil rights attorney.
— William Foege, physician who led the campaign to eradicate smallpox.
— Gordon Hirabayashi, openly defied the forced relocation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
— Dolores Huerta, civil rights workers and women’s advocate.
— Jan Karski, officer in the Polish Underground during World War II and one of the first people to provide accounts of the Holocaust to the world.
— Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts.
— Toni Morrison, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
— Shimon Peres, Israeli president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
— John Paul Stevens, former Supreme Court Justice.
— Pat Summitt, former women’s basketball coach at the University of Tennessee.
by R. Asmerom
The cartoon industry is a rare industry for anyone to be in, but especially a black woman in the 1930s. A new book by Nancy Goldstein called “Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist” paints a profile of the first black woman cartoonist, who used her art to work in journalism and engage in politics from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Ormes started as a proofreader for the weekly African-American paper the Pittsburgh Courier. She launched a strip there called Torchy Browin In Dixie To Harlem about a Southern teen who was a success in the Cotton Club.
She later moved to Chicago to work for the popular Black newspaper Chicago Defender. There she started Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger, a cartoon that ran for 11 years. Her political voice was consistently heard during her tenure. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
During the McCarthy era, she repeatedly took playful jabs in her cartoons at the House Un-American Activities Committee. Delivered with much humor and gusto, the barbs were often spoken by an adorable little girl named Patty-Jo, who always had a way of summing up all that her older, more fashionable sister, Ginger, remained silent about while expressing a look of utter shock that her little sister could say such a thing as:
“It would be interestin’ to discover WHICH committee decided it was un-American to be COLORED!”
Ornes didn’t escape the watchful eye of the vigilant FBI during that time, reportedly being closely watched by the agency for ten years because of some attendance at meetings for American communist groups. She admitted to attending meetings but denied being part of the Communist movement.
According to the book, Ornes used her cartoons to lobby for The March of Dimes and to protest segregation and American foreign policy. Besides her sophisticated political voice, Ornes was known for her elegant depictions.
She often used her own quite charming and beautiful form as the model for her main characters such as Ginger and Torchy Brown, who are downright glamorous — in such a manner not before seen in graphic art depictions of African-American women.
Ormes died at the age of 74 in 1985. She was well ahead of her time. As the New York Times noted, the first daily strip to be produced by a Black woman emerged in 1989 by Barbara Brandon-Croft – obviously decades later after Ormes made her mark.
Urban Prep students at graduation.
For the third year running, an all-male charter school with students from Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods is sending its entire senior class to college. Urban Prep Academy reports that all 85 seniors graduating from the all-male preparatory school have been accepted to four-year colleges or universities, the third consecutive year an entire senior class has gotten acceptance letters along with their diplomas.
This year’s class also has some standout stars, like Vernon Cheeks, 17, who was accepted to 14 schools, according to CBS Chicago. “It taught me how to be resilient. It also taught me how to be accountable for my own actions,” he told the station of his experience in the standout high school program.
Urban Prep’s success is unusual in its West Side neighborhood, which sees disproportionately high rates of violent crime so severe that parents requested heightened protection for academy students earlier this year, amid concerns that gang territories were advancing on the school.
“[In] this volatile, violent area, these are like lambs surrounded by wolves, and that shouldn’t be,” the grandmother of a student told ABC Chicago.
The school’s success has grown exponentially since its founding in 2006, when onlyfour percent of the school’s first freshman class was reading at grade level when they entered.
In 2010, the school sent all 107 graduating seniors directly into college or university programs for the first time.
“No other public [school] in the country has done this,” Urban Prep Academy Founder Tim King said at the time. Continuing that success in 2011 and 2012 makes the school’s performance even more remarkable.
The school also boasts an impressive “persistence” record this year–83 percent of 2010 Urban Prep graduates who went on to college have stayed there, compared to a national average of 35 percent among African-American males, according to the Chicago Tribune.
In the summer of 1865, a former slave by the name of Jourdan Anderson sent a letter to his former master. And 147 years later, the document reads as richly as it must have back then. The roughly 800-word letter, which has resurfaced via various blogs, websites, Twitter and Facebook, is a response to a missive from Colonel P.H. Anderson, Jourdan’s former master back in Big Spring, Tennessee. Apparently, Col. Anderson had written Jourdan asking him to come on back to the big house to work. In a tone that could be described either as “impressively measured” or “the deadest of deadpan comedy,” the former slave, in the most genteel manner, basically tells the old slave master to kiss his rear end. He laments his being shot at by Col. Anderson when he fled slavery, the mistreatment of his children and that there “was never pay-day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows.” Below is Jourdan’s letter in full, as it appears on lettersofnote.com. To take a look at what appears to be a scan of the original letter, which appeared in an August 22, 1865 edition of the New York Daily Tribune, click here. As Letters Of Note points out, the newspaper account makes clear that the letter was dictated.
UPDATE:
After reading the letter attributed to Jourdon Anderson, Michael Johnson, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, did a bit of digging into old slave and census records. He says he has discovered evidence that the people involved in this correspondence are real, and that the letter is probably authentic. According to Johnson, the 1860 federal slave schedules list a P H Anderson in Wilson County, Tenn., with 32 slaves; several of them credibly the people mentioned in the letter, of the correct genders and ages, Johnson said, though the names of slaves were not listed in the schedules. “That in itself is not conclusive proof that the letter is real, but the slave owner was real and he had plenty of slaves,” Johnson wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. Johnson said better evidence that the letter is almost certainly real is that, according to the 1870 federal manuscript census, a Jourdan Anderson, his wife and four school-age children are listed as living in the 8th ward of Dayton, Ohio. Johnson said the records state that Anderson is a hostler, 45, and that he and his family are listed as “black.” Furthermore, according to those records, Anderson, his wife and two older children, ages 19 and 12, were born in Tennessee. Two younger children, ages 5 and 1, were born in Ohio, “which would in turn have him and his family showing up in Ohio at about the right time to have escaped during the Civil War,” Johnson said. The professor said that Jourdan Anderson could not read or write, according to 1870 manuscript census. But the letter could have been written by his 19-year-old daughter, Jane, who was listed as literate in 1870. “The letter probably reflected his sentiments,” Johnson said, who added that Anderson lived in a neighborhood surrounded by working-class white neighbors who were literate, according to the census. It is also possible one of them may have written the letter for him, Johnson said. But the person who most likely wrote the dictated letter is another person listed in Anderson’s letter. In the letter Anderson refers to a V. Winters. According to Johnson a person by the name of Valentine Winters, a “barrister” in Dayton’s 3rd ward who claimed property worth $697,000, also appears in the 1870 federal census. “He may well have been the person who actually wrote the letter since he is the person Jourdan Anderson asks his former master to send his wages to,” Johnson said.
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkens would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
Lucille Singleton
Age: 88
Place of Residence: Harlem, N.Y.
Why she is a local hero: Lucille Singleton inspires people to be healthy with her marathon running.
Singleton runs everywhere she goes. It doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realize she’s almost 90. Singleton has run three New York City Marathons and finished in the top 10 for her age group all three times.
“I just love running. It makes me feel so good,” said Singleton.
Around her Harlem neighborhood, everyone recognizes her as he senior citizen who runs. The door attendant at her senior building asks how her running is going. And when she shows up at her gym at the New York Sports Club, she can barely make it to the weights because everyone wants to hug her.
Singleton gets up at 4 a.m. to run three miles and still hits the gym three or four times per week. She’s recently had some age-related kidney problems and now needs regular dialysis. Even that hasn’t stopped her running.
“When I finish dialysis, I like to run home,” said Singleton.
Her efforts are simply inspiring, says neighbor and friend Sylvia White.
“She runs four days a week, goes to aerobics twice a week. When you see this woman you … do a double take because she looks half her age. She defies the common expectations for seniors,” said White.
Singleton is proof that it’s never too late to accomplish your goals in life. At 71, after a career as a home health aide, she became a construction worker. The manager gave her the job of a flag person but Singleton wanted more. She wanted to lift and carry things. And that’s just what she did, helping to build 19 Rite Aid stores.
Singleton also didn’t run her first marathon until she was 75 years old. A friend’s daughter was running, and Singleton, remembering her high school running days, decided to give it a try. She finished fifth in her age group.
Now, Singleton feels her running is an inspiration to others. That’s why she has no plans to stop.
“When I get out and run in the morning, the cars blow their horns and the people wave,” said Singleton. “I have fans out there so I can’t stop.”