by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Sick and tired of having to constantly read racist commentary in the mainstream press of the United States, free Black Americans Rev. Samuel E. Cornish andJohn B. Russwurm started their own paper – Freedom’s Journal.
First published on March 16, 1827 in New York City — the same year New York State abolished slavery – the four-page weekly was the first Black-owned newspaper of record in the United States. At its zenith, Freedom’s Journal circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada.
In addition to covering general news and current events, Freedom’s Journal included editorials denouncing slavery, lynchings and challenged the racist attacks against Black people that appeared in other newspapers.
The paper also contained articles advocating for voting rights, repatriation of Blacks to Africa, covered international news, celebrated Black achievements, offered biographies of prominent African Americans and published vital record listings of births, deaths and marriages in the African-American New York community.
Although Freedom’s Journal folded in 1829, shortly before Russwurm emigrated to Liberia, its two-year existence helped spawn at least 40 similar papers over the next four decades and kicked off the long standing, time-honored tradition of the Black Press in America.
To learn more about Freedom’s Journal, you can check out the digitized archive of all 103 issues of the paper on wisconsinhistory.org, as well as other sources linked above and below.
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN Founder and Editor-in-Chief
You’ve likely heard of Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion boxer and Jesse Owens, the first Black world champion sprinter. But have you ever heard of Marshall “Major” Taylor, the first Black world champion of cycling?
Taylor not only was the first African-American world champion in cycling, he might have been the first internationally known sports celebrity ever.
Born in 1878 in Indianapolis, Taylor was one of eight children and the son of a formerly enslaved Civil War veteran. In his youth, Taylor was given a bicycle by the wealthy family his father Gilbert worked for, and was soon earning money delivering newspapers and riding barefoot for miles a day.
When he wasn’t working his paper route, Taylor mastered several stunts and tricks on his bicycle. To drum up business, Taylor was hired by a local bicycle shop to dress in a military uniform and perform his feats in front of the store – and it worked.
Marshall “Major” Taylor (photo via wikipedia commons)
Taylor was nicknamed “Major” and was soon hired to work for the shop full-time. By the 1890s, America was experiencing a bicycle boom, so shop’s owners also entered Taylor into local cycling races, which he easily won.
Though Taylor was prevented from joining any local riding clubs, he kept competing and winning. When there were “whites only” races, friends would smuggle him in and though he couldn’t officially compete, his times could be measured.
At 17, Taylor knocked two-fifths of a second off the world record held by professional racer Ray MacDonald. Taylor’s time could not be submitted for official recognition, but everyone watching the race knew what they had witnessed. Major Taylor earned a second nickname: “The Black Cyclone.”
Taylor soon became a professional racer and won 29 of the 49 races he entered. By 1899, he won the cycling world championship officially, and the victory earned Taylor widespread fame.
Even so, Taylor remained barred from cycling races in the South. Even when he wasn’t, racist spectators would at times throw ice or nails at him, and several white cyclists would jostle him, shove him or box him in.
Taylor started using his competitors’ hatred as fuel — in order to ensure that he wouldn’t be physically accosted or pulled from his bike, he would ride several lengths ahead and stay there.
At the end of a one-mile race in Massachusetts however, cyclist W.E. Becker, upset he finished behind Taylor, pulled Taylor to the ground after the race. “Becker choked him into a state of insensibility,” the New York Times reported, “and the police were obliged to interfere. It was fully fifteen minutes before Taylor recovered consciousness.” Becker was fined $50 for the assault.
After that, Taylor started competing in Europe, where a Black athlete could ride
without fear of racially-motivated violence. Promoters shifted events from Sundays to accommodate Taylor, who refused to race on the Sabbath. In 1902, Taylor dominated the European Tour, winning the majority of races he entered and cementing his reputation as the fastest cyclist in the world.
Taylor in Paris 1902
Reportedly earning $30,000 a year, Taylor raced consistently for the rest of the decade, making him one of the wealthiest athletes of his day, Black or white. But as the automobile emerged as a more exciting mode of movement, mass interest in cycling began to ebb.
In 1910, 32 year-old Taylor retired, living off his sizable earnings. But by 1929, with the Wall Street crash and some other bad investments, Taylor’s fortune was all but wiped out. He self-published his autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World in 1929 and spent the last years of his life in Chicago selling it door-to-door. When Taylor died in 1932 at 53, he was buried in a pauper’s grave at the Mount Glenwood Cemetery in Chicago.
When some former racing stars learned of this, they convinced Frank Schwinn, owner of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, to have Taylor’s remains exhumed and transferred to the cemetery’s Memorial Garden of the Good Shepherd and mark it with a bronze tablet that reads: “Worlds champion bicycle racer who came up the hard way —Without hatred in his heart—An honest, courageous and God-fearing, clean-living gentlemanly athlete. A credit to his race who always gave out his best—Gone but not forgotten.”
Born in 1875 in Virginia to formerly enslaved parents who were never taught to read and write, Carter G. Woodson often had to forgo school for farm or mining work to make ends meet, but was encouraged to learn independently and eventually earned advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard.
It was at these lauded institutions of higher education where Dr. Woodson began to realize these new educational opportunities for Negroes were potentially as damaging as they were helpful, if not more so, as much of the curriculum was biased and steeped in white supremacy.
In 1916, Dr. Woodson helped found the Journal of Negro History with Jesse E. Moreland, intent on providing scholarly records and analysis of all aspects of the African-American experience that were lacking in his collegiate studies.
As Dr. Woodson researched and chronicled civilizations in Africa and their historical advancements in mathematics, science, language and literature that were rarely discussed in academic circles, he also criticized the systematic ways Black people post-Civil War were being “educated” into subjugation and self-oppression:
“The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worthwhile, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race.”
In 1926, Dr. Woodson began promoting the second week of February as Negro History Week. He chose this week in February intentionally, as it overlapped the birthdays of abolitionist activist Frederick Douglass (February 14) and President Abraham Lincoln (February 12) aka “The Great Emancipator.”
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN founder and Editor-in-Chief
Well, here we are, once again. Forty seven years after February was officially recognized by the U.S. government as Black History Month, and ninety seven years after Negro History Weekwas founded by Carter G. Woodson, “The Father of Black History.”
We are also, once again, deeply distressed by the murder of a young Black person (Tyre Nichols) at the hands of police officers. The fact that the officers and the police chief are Black this time around doesn’t complicate but instead amplifies the grotesque, stark, ironically colorblind reality of systemic racism — it is a pernicious construct of power and oppression that can be upheld or enforced by anyone of any color or gender or creed.
So, how do we reconcile the two — the celebration of Black people and their achievements while constantly experiencing injustice, inequity and increasingly, erasure?
As Editor-in-Chief of Good Black News, a site which for over a decade has literally been dedicated year-round to the celebration of Black people and their achievements, I have been wrestling with this question for a while, particularly in the last eight months.
After the murder of 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, NY by a white supremacist in May 2022 and the continued downplaying of racially-based domestic terrorism, I felt depleted and bereft. Of hope, of faith, of purpose. It didn’t seem to matter how much Black people achieved or prospered or protested or suffered in America — we couldn’t even buy our groceries in peace.
And once again, the narrative of the “lone, mentally unstable shooter” was trotted out. One person was (rightfully) punished, but the racist political and economic system he embraced in its most violent extreme? It remained (and remains) steadfastly in place. As did the onus remain on the shoulders of Black people to be seen as worthy of basic human rights.
America quickly got back to the business of forgetting and moving on, even after experiencing only two years before what seemed like a watershed moment of racial reckoning after the police murder of George Floyd.
But here were are again today, literally TODAY, with civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump saying during his call to action during Tyre Nichols’ funeral: “Why couldn’t they see the humanity in Tyre?… We have to make sure they see us as human beings worthy of respect and justice!”
We do?
I’ll admit in many ways, I understand where Crump is coming from. “Show the humanity” has essentially been the GBN operating philosophy since 2010 — to create a site and space where we can see and celebrate our humanity, while offering access to anyone else who wants to take a gander.
But now, in 2023, I must push myself to dig deeper and firmly challenge why it should it ever be the responsibility of any human being to convince any other human being of their humanity. To state the obvious, once, and for all:
BLACK PEOPLE ARE HUMAN BEINGS.
If the words above are not inherently understood to be true, why is that? Why does this have to be shown? Proven? Over and over and over again?
My answer, also obvious, is that they don’t. Not ever.
So, while I absolutely respect and still intend to celebrate the legacies of people such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier and the like, going forward I also need for GBN’s Black History Month and GBN in general to engage more actively in the interrogation and disempowering any systems, institutions or public policies that do not recognize or uphold this truth and all the basic rights that should flow from it (e.g. respect, freedom, safety, equality).
Maybe I’m not giving enough credit to GBN in its past and present form — I acknowledge that GBN has been helpful and appreciated by many for the way we offer information via the lens of celebration and positivity.
What I’m aiming to add to our existing ethos is more critical thinking and opinion about cultural topics and cultural content, boosting political, economic and social policies that are truly about protecting, serving and uplifting Black people, and working to upend those that don’t.
The College Board creates and administers the AP program. Join us in demanding that they:
Reject the narrow interpretation of Florida law that contradicts principles of academic freedom and autonomy in determining what to teach in classrooms.
Take swift action to make sure Florida does not modify the curriculum of the proposed AP African-American Studies course designed with the help of respected Black scholars, but rather, maintains the integrity of the proposed curriculum.
Florida’s current agenda of political interference in the AP African American studies curriculum directly conflicts with the values of equity, fairness, and justice. Our students deserve better.
Additionally, I want to highlight Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Projectseries now streaming on Hulu as well as promote the excellent “Intersectionality Matters” podcast by law professor Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw whose name is among the writers expunged from the AP African American studies curriculum.
I also want to give props to Beyoncéfor officially announcing her 2023 Renaissance World Tour! A definite bright spot on this first day of Black History Month, the efforts Beyoncé and her team are making via the Verified Fan system and its tiers of engagement (first priority given to the BeyHive!) to ensure real fans get access to tickets over usurious resale entities is for sure worth a shout out.
Frankly, I am tired of us being caught out there, and I want GBN to do more, offer more, share more and speak out more. In our tweets, reels, stories, posts, playlists, comments — however.
Maybe I’ll get it wrong sometimes, but with deep love for this community as my true north, may my faith, purpose and hope never again be broken.
Happy 14th of February! It’s your friend and selector, Marlon!
We are halfway through Black History Month. It’s Valentine’s Day! If you are like my kid, it could be your birthday too. And of course, it is Music Monday here at GBN.
I am thrilled to offer this collection of mushy stuff. Here is a full workday wit of music devoted to affairs of the heart. Love is the thing all right here, at Good Black News.
This playlist brings together classics by Aretha, Stevie, Marvin, Sade, and others, along with new voices of artists like Tamia, Mario, and Liza.
There are songs here about new and enduring love. Tracks about the peril and pain of romance, everything in between.
Hope you enjoy this Valentine’s Day offering. See you all next month.
Here is GBN’s Daily Drop for Wednesday, February 2nd on Carter G. Woodson, “The Father of Black History” (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 based on the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day Calendar published by Workman Publishing. This is Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022.
Known as “The Father of Black History,” author and historian Carter G. Woodson was born in 1875 to formerly enslaved parents who were never taught to read and write. To make ends meet, Woodson often had to forgo school for farm or mining work, but he was encouraged to learn independently and eventually earned advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard.
In 1915 he helped found the Journal of Negro History, then in 1926, he began promoting the second week of February as Negro History Week. This holiday led to the month of February officially becoming Black History Month in 1976.
Additionally, Woodson wrote and published The Mis-Education of the Negroin 1933, which is now available for free download in the public domain. This collection of articles and speeches became a classic touchstone for educators, as Woodson advocated for excellence in the education of Black students and demanded that school systems across America eliminate curricula designed deliberately to “mis-educate” Black children and promote the fallacy of white supremacy.
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.
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.
We call it the “daily drop” because, well, it drops daily, and also because it’s no more than a few minutes long and just a drop of GBN.
We are doing this for a few reasons:
To increase accessibility to the calendar to those need an aural source, who may have difficulty reading or acquiring a physical copy of the calendar but still want to experience the content.
So we can update and expand on some of the entries as well as offer links to relevant sources for those who want to learn more.
To archive the work GBN did to research, write and produce the calendar so it may exist in a digital format long after its physical one has served its purpose.
Starting today, we will embed each podcast into a post here on the main page, with the transcript and show notes, which will then be archived and accessible in the masthead category menu by clicking on “GBN Daily Drop Podcast.” (We will also be adding the January episodes we’ve already recorded.)
Alternatively, you can 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.
So, without any more fuss, here is GBN’s Daily Drop for Tuesday, February 1st (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 based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing. This is Tuesday, February 1st, 2022. Today we’re celebrating the start of Black History Month with a West African proverb:
“Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”
Tomorrow we’ll get into how Black History Month was created and who created it. But to get a little personal, I selected this quote and placed it on February 1st in GBN’s physical Page-A-Day calendar for 2022 not only because it’s apropos and reflective of the mission of the month ahead, but also because it’s a reminder to me for why I created Good Black News. Not enough of the people, events, stories, accomplishments, acts of heroism, or acts of creation that are part and parcel of African American and thus American culture have been known, let alone celebrated widely in the U.S. or abroad. That has been by design and as current events reveal, continues to be so. So offering this information and sources to learn more about what’s printed every calendar page, on the Good Black News website, on Good Black News social, and in these expanded audio versions, it’s my way of, so to speak, helping the world hear the lion’s roars.
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. Links to these sources provided in today’s show notes. 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.
Hey, it’s Lori, GBN’s Editor-in-Chief, with this week’s Music Monday share. Although it’s one day early, I offer a list to set the vibe for what February signifies to many in these United States: Black History Month!
Today’s playlist, “Black and Proud: Songs About Being Black” features songs that examine, express, critique and celebrate differing iterations of what it means to be Black in America.
The gamut of human emotions are present in this collection, as African Americans have been creating genres like Jazz, Blues, Soul and Hip Hop and transforming others from the 1600s on.
Artists such as Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, Esperanza Spalding, india.arie, Prince, Janet Jackson, Mickey Guyton, Nas, Jay Z, Common and Kendrick Lamar all have their takes on Blackness and the perceptions of it by themselves, lovers, strangers, authorities and oppressors.
I’ve also included several versions of “Young, Gifted and Black” by Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway and Big Daddy Kane who each in their own way interpret the phrase popularized by playwright Lorraine Hansberry to great effect.
I hope you enjoy this compilation and that it gets you into the mood, groove and spirit of Black History Month.
International supermodel, activist and philanthropist Naomi Campbell welcomes musician, record producer, songwriter, singer, fashion designer and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams for an iconic conversation on “No Filter with Naomi,” a limited-time series under her “Being Naomi” YouTube channel, live today at 3pm EST / 12pm PST.
With more than 500,000 views, the web series has invited fans to #stayhome during this pandemic to save lives and has focused on intimate conversations on multiple topics between Naomi and a diverse collection of her friends, including a variety of designers, musicians, activists, actors and media personalities. Recently, during Black History Month 2021, Campbell used her platform to highlight the “New Black Talent You Need to Know in the Fashion Industry”:
The series debuted on April 6, 2020 and has since featured guests Tracee Ellis Ross, Demi Moore,Mariah Carey,Chelsea Handler,Cameron Diaz, Lenny Kravitz, Whoopi Goldberg,James Charles,Charlamagne Tha God,Mary J. Blige,Gabrielle Union,Kate Hudson,Cynthia Erivo, Cindy Crawford, Marc Jacobs, Nicole Richie, Ashley Graham, Pierpaolo Piccoli, LeeDaniels, Christy Turlington, Adut Akech, Sharon Stone, Paris Hilton, Serena Williams and Venus Williams, Karlie Kloss, Anna Wintour, and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
The “No Filter with Naomi” series returned after hiatus on June 23rd and featured a select group of episodes focused on impactful conversations dedicated to #BlackLivesMatter, social justice issues, racial and human inequalities. These critical conversations included featured guests: Opal Tometi, Rev. Al Sharpton, Alphonso Reed, Cleo Wade, Bethann Hardison, Tyler Mitchell, Indya Moore, Chase Strangio and Tori Cooper.
WHERE: Streaming live on Naomi Campbell’s YouTube Channel. View all “No Filter with Naomi” episodes here.
This is Fannie Lou Hamer. A Mississippi plantation worker turned activist in the 1960s, who, from her own personal desire to claim her constitutional right to vote, was fired from her job, threatened by white supremacists and beaten while in police custody.
Hamer never stopped – she worked with other activists in her church and volunteers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and traveled county to county to register other Black people to vote.
Hamer formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and demanded to represent her state at the 1964 Democratic Convention.
Hamer fought for voting rights, education rights, economic rights (she formed the Freedom Farm Collective to fight for redistribution of wealth from usurious sharecropping) and even ran for Senate.
She was not rich or traditionally educated or well-connected — Fannie was a person who saw injustice, got active and got involved. Among other microcosms of actionable wisdom, she is famous for the quotes, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” and “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free” – the latter of which I proudly wear on my Fannie Lou Hamer T-shirt.
Hamer passed in 1977 after years of dealing with serious health issues, but her legacy as an outspoken and effective activist, organizer and champion for equal rights will never be forgotten.
In fact, it was announced a few days ago that rapper and activist Common is producing a biographical movie on Hamer based on her 1967 autobiography To Praise Our Bridges and the book God’s Long Summerby Charles Marsh, which chronicles of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
