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Posts tagged as “Abraham Lincoln”

GBN Daily Drop Podcast: Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley – Dressmaker, Author and Confidante to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (LISTEN)

GBN Daily Drop Podcast: Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley – Dressmaker, Author and Confidante to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on February 12, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast, on Lincoln’s birthday, is based on the Saturday, February 12 entry in the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022. It’s about the amazing Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, an enslaved woman owned by her own father who managed to buy her freedom and become dressmaker and confidante to first lady Mary Todd Lincoln.

(Btw, GBN’s Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 is 50% off at workman.com with code:50CAL until 2/28/22!)

You can also follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Saturday, February 12th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing. Today, on Lincoln’s birthday, we are honoring 19th century dressmaker and designer Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley.

Against all odds, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley had perseverance, talent and style. Owned by her own father, Keckley was born enslaved in 1818. Despite being treated brutally, she eventually became an accomplished seamstress, and in 1855 Keckley had earned enough money to purchase her and her son’s freedom.

She then built a dressmaking business and became dresser and confidante to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. In 1863 she founded a relief association for newly freed Blacks. Keckley published her autobiography, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, in 1868.

To learn more about Keckley, you can read her autobiography, which is in the public domain and online at the internet archive, check out The Elizabeth Keckley Reader, Volumes 1 & 2, which are two collections of essays and other published works about Keckley, check out the dresses she designed online, including the one for Mary Todd Lincoln that resides at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, and watch her short biography on YouTube produced by the Smithsonian Channel.

Keckley, played by Gloria Reuben, is also a featured character in Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln. Links to these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing, and available at workman.com, Amazon, Bookshop and other online retailers.

Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.

For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

“Lift Every Voice And Sing”: James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson’s Anthem to Freedom (LISTEN)

“Lift Every Voice And Sing”: James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson’s Anthem to Freedom (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on July 4, 2021

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

James Weldon Johnson,  an NAACP field secretary, civil rights activist, Broadway composer and professor who investigated and spoke out about lynchings in the first decades of the 20th century, also wrote the classic novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, first published in 1912.

But perhaps the publication Weldon is best known for was that of a song he wrote with his brother John Rosamond Johnson. In 1900, in honor of Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington as part of a tribute to Abraham Lincoln‘s birthday, they crafted a poem that was read by 500 schoolchildren entitled “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The poem celebrated freedom as it recognized a brutal past never to be repeated. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was so well received that the brothers set it to music and by 1919 the NAACP dubbed it “the Negro national anthem.” It has functioned in that capacity ever since.

The Johnson brothers pictured on the cover of this 1973 version of the sheet music

Sung for decades at countless meetings, events, and ceremonies, a 1990 version of the song performed by Melba Moore (which can be heard here on GBN’s “Black Americana” playlist ) was entered into the Congressional Record and, in 2016, into the National Recording Registry.

Singing this song today makes as much sense as any other American anthem, as it is a song of independence from tyranny, inhumanity and injustice. It is sung in honor of Americans who died building this country by progeny who seek to embrace the liberty, hope and prosperity freedom promises.

Enjoy Aretha Franklin, whose voice literally was designated an American natural resource, singing the song we might all lift our voices to sing. Full lyrics published below.

BHM: “Ain’t I A Woman?” The Life and Legacy of Abolitionist and Activist Sojourner Truth

BHM: “Ain’t I A Woman?” The Life and Legacy of Abolitionist and Activist Sojourner Truth

By goodblacknews on February 1, 2019

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

It’s February 1st, which means it is now officially Black History Month! Although we here at Good Black News celebrate the achievements of Black people every day of the year, it is always lovely when the rest of the U.S. joins in to do the same for at least 28 of them. So, for #BHM2019, GBN will be highlighting the achievements of black women, past and present, who have and are paving the way to a better future.

Sojourner Truth Google Doodle (via google.com)

And what better person to start with than today’s Google Doogle, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, who, with “Ain’t I A Woman?” gave one of the most powerful and unforgettable American speeches of all time on what we now call intersectionality?

In 2014, Sojourner Truth was included in Smithsonian Magazine’s list of the “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time” – yet the majority of Americans don’t know who she was, what she did, or they confuse her with Harriett Tubman.

Born Isabella (“Bell”) Baumfree circa 1797, Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, in 1828 she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.

She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 after she became convinced that God had called her to leave the city and go into the countryside “testifying the hope that was in her.” Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title “Ain’t I a Woman?,” a variation of the original speech re-written by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect. Truth was from New York and grew up speaking Dutch as her first language, and had a Dutch accent. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_Truth)

There are a lot of other events and details in Truth’s life, of course, including collaboration with Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, President Abraham Lincoln and varied suffragists and women’s groups – Truth was known for her persuasive speeches against slavery as well as sexism – she even once defiantly opened her top and showed her breasts during a speech when she was accused of being a man.  

But what is remarkable and often not mentioned is that she is likely the first black woman in the U.S. to attain national fame (she sold photos and autographs of herself at events to make money “I sell the shadow to support the substance”) and the first to have her voice heard in America. It is also rather ironic that many of the records of her speeches were written by white men, and thus often altered to their perception of a black, female, former slave.

Some would quote that she had 13 children who were sold away from her (she had 5 and raised most of them) or say she was raving when she was calm. Truth’s was a 19th-century case of what is all too familiar today – media distortion by the dominant culture trying to make sense of “the other”- and in her instance, white men trying to process the experiences and truths of black women.

However, Truth was self-possessed – she claimed her ownership of herself by renaming herself and writing her own Narrative in 1850. Truth traveled and spoke to hostile, indifferent and embracing crowds, fought for women’s rights and black women’s right to vote, fought for land grants and reparations for former slaves, prison reform and the end of capital punishment.

Truth was in her 80s when she died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan. In 1999, a 12-foot high monument was built in Battle Creek to honor her. The calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church remembers Truth annually, and the Lutheran Church calendar of saints remembers her on the same day as Harriet Tubman. 

In 2009, Truth became the first black woman honored with a bust in the U.S. Capitol.

Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton honoring Sojourner Truth as her likeness is added to U.S. Capitol (photo via sfgate.com)

To learn more about Truth, you can read her autobiography The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, the biography Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter, and for children, Who Was Sojourner Truth?  or My Name is Truth: The Life of Sojourner Truth written by Ann Turner and illustrated by James Ransome.

To watch a mini-biography on Truth on biography.com, go to: http://www.biography.com/video/sojourner-truth-mini-biography-11191875531

BOOKS: New Biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” Focuses on the Man and his Voice

BOOKS: New Biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” Focuses on the Man and his Voice

By goodblacknews on November 11, 2018

by Jennifer Szalai via nytimes.com

Time has a way of sanding off the rough edges of historical memory, turning even the most convulsive, contentious lives into opportunities for national triumphalism and self-congratulation. With “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” the historian David W. Blight wants to enrich our understanding of an American in full who, for more than half his life, wasn’t even legally recognized as such. Now that Douglass is enshrined on his pedestal, shorn of what made him “thoroughly and beautifully human,” Blight notes how the “old fugitive slave” has been “adopted by all elements in the political spectrum,” eager to claim him as their own.

Plenty has been written about Douglass in the 200 years since he was born, not least by Douglass himself, who recounted his life story in three autobiographies — a paper trail of memoirs that Blight deems “both a pleasure and peril” for the biographer. In tracing an arc from bondage to freedom, Douglass cast himself as a “self-made hero,” Blight writes, while leaving “a great deal unsaid.” A number of other books have filled in the gaps — exploring Douglass’s relationships with the women in his life, for instance, as well as his fraught and transformative friendship with Abraham Lincoln — but Blight’s is the first major biography of Douglass in nearly three decades, making ample use of materials in the private collection of a retired doctor named Walter O. Evans to illuminate Douglass’s later years, after the Civil War.

Blight, who has edited and annotated volumes of Douglass’s autobiographies, undertakes this project with the requisite authority and gravity. The result is comprehensive, scholarly, sober; Blight is careful to tell us what cannot be known, including the persistent mystery of Douglass’s father (who was most likely white, and may have been Frederick’s mother’s owner). On the stuff that’s known, Blight is an attentive if sometimes fastidious guide, poring over speeches and texts with the critical equivalent of a magnifying glass. Douglass, Blight says, was a “man of words,” making this book “the biography of a voice.”

That voice took shape and sharpened over time, but it would return again and again to the banks of the Tuckahoe River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in 1818. Twenty years a slave, then almost nine years a fugitive; as Douglass himself described it in his autobiographies (having adopted his new surname from a Sir Walter Scott poem), the first decades of his life were both thrilling and terrifying. Until his abolitionist allies helped to purchase his freedom in 1846, everything he did felt provisional; he lived with the incessant fear of someone who could be plunged back into captivity at any moment.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/books/review-frederick-douglass-prophet-of-freedom-david-blight.html

GBN Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018 With Closer Look at Memorial in D.C.

GBN Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018 With Closer Look at Memorial in D.C.

By goodblacknews on January 15, 2018


by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN Editor-in-Chief

In April of 2017, I had the good fortune to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of a business trip. Once in Washington D.C. and at the National Mall, I was thrilled to learn that the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was only a ten-minute walk away, so after my work was done, I headed over. Photos don’t do it justice, but it is an awesome space, and one I’d encourage every American to visit it if ever in our nation’s capital.  It’s the quotes that strike you first – the aesthetic beauty of the words coming out of the granite, then the meaning, then the context of each one of them. Like the MLK we know publicly, it is equal parts solemn, potent, righteous and wise.
I’ve since read that the grounds of the Memorial, which opened to to the public on August 22, 2011, cover four acres and includes the Stone of Hope, a granite statue of Dr. King carved by sculptor Lei Yixin. The inspiration for the memorial design is a line from King’s “I Have A Dream” speech: “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”  In a word, it is formidable. MLK stands as a beacon of strength, hope and possibility, despite seemingly insurmountable challenges and inequity and injustice. Reflecting upon the man, his journey and his words is of course doable from anywhere in any space, but there is something incredibly special about being to do it where he is honored in the same area as other lauded architects of this country such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
There are fourteen quotes around the memorial – above are photos of the ones that I was able to get clear photos of before it started getting dark on my day. Enjoy and Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

Smithsonian Exhibit Parallels Emancipation, Civil rights

By goodblacknews on December 18, 2012
Smithsonian parallels Emancipation, Civil Rights

Smithsonian parallels Emancipation, Civil Rights

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington for Civil Rights were 100 years apart, but both changed the nation and expanded freedoms.

Beginning Friday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is presenting a walk back in time through two eras. A new exhibit, “Changing America,” parallels the 1863 emancipation of slaves with the 1963 March on Washington.

Jada Pinkett Smith Speaks Against Human Trafficking To Congress

By goodblacknews on July 18, 2012


WASHINGTON (AP) — Actress and activist Jada Pinkett Smith urged Congress on Tuesday to step up the fight against human trafficking in the U.S. and abroad.  The actress testified during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that she plans to launch a campaign to raise awareness and spur action against human trafficking and slavery. She said the “old monster” of slavery “is still with us,” almost 150 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the U.S.
“Fighting slavery doesn’t cost a lot of money. The costs of allowing it to exist in our nation and abroad are much higher,” the actress said. “It robs us of the thing we value most, our freedom.”  She said the issue was brought to her attention by her daughter Willow, 11, who sat nearby with actor Will Smith, Pinkett Smith’s husband and Willow’s father. The Smiths all wore blazers over T-shirts that read, “Free Slaves.” The hearing room was filled mostly with young people, some trying to take photos of the famous family.
With her father’s arm around her, Willow remained attentive to her mother’s testimony and often whispered to her father. At least 30 minutes into the hearing, Will wrapped his gray blazer around Willow.  The actress called for an extension of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which provides funding to combat trafficking and help trafficking victims. The act also created a task force, chaired by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, which coordinates among federal agencies to implement policies against human trafficking.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., pledged to try to gather bipartisan congressional support to further fund the act.
The State Department estimates that at least 14,500 people are trafficked to the U.S. annually.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.