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Posts tagged as “California”

Laverne Cox’s Madame Tussauds Wax Figure Will Be the 1st Transgender Figure in the Museum’s History

By goodblacknews on June 8, 2015
LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 20: Actress Laverne Cox attends Netflix's "Orange Is The New Black" For Your Consideration screening and Q&A at Directors Guild Of America on May 20, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic)
Actress Laverne Cox (Photo by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic)

Madame Tussauds San Francisco announced Monday that it will debut a wax figure of Laverne Cox, star of Orange Is the New Black and a transgender rights activist, on June 26 during Pride Weekend festivities in the Bay Area. It is the first-ever transgender figure in the museum’s history.

June 2015 is already shaping up to be a banner Pride Month for the transgender community since a Vanity Fair cover introduced Caitlyn Jenner (formerly known as Bruce Jenner) on June 1.
article by Olivia B. Waxman via time.com

Doreetha Daniels, 99, Graduates from College of the Canyons

By goodblacknews on June 7, 2015

99 Year-Old graduate Doreetha Daniels (photo via Facebook)
99 Year-Old graduate Doreetha Daniels (photo via Facebook)

Talk about a “senior moment.”  99-year-old Doreetha Daniels is no stranger to chasing her dreams. Dulce recently graduated from the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, CA. According to ktla.com, the 99 year-old was inspired by her grandchildren.
Her son said she persevered through her education despite suffering a couple of strokes and losing her driver’s license.
College officials said Daniels struggled sometimes — especially with computer literacy — at a campus where most students are 18 to 24 years old.
But she just worked harder, according to the college. Twice a week before class, she studied, did her homework and worked with tutors at the college’s tutoring center.
She was touted as “one of the most dedicated and hardworking students” in the statistics class, the college said in a news release.
Doreetha stated, “99, here I am. I accomplished what I wanted to do, and this is my dream come true.”

When she was asked what advice she would to younger generations, Daniels said: “Don’t give up. Do it. Don’t let anybody discourage you. Say that, ‘I’m going to do it,’ and do it for yourself.”
article by Courtney Whitaker via madamenoire.com

America's Oldest Park Ranger, 93 Year-Old Betty Reid Soskin, Hopes to Inspire Women of Color

By goodblacknews on May 20, 2015
America's Oldest Park Ranger Hopes To Inspire Women of Color Everywhere With Unique Career
America’s Oldest Park Ranger Betty Reid Soskin (photo via bet.com)
If your first thought regarding park rangers resembles something close to a pesky bear and picnic baskets, you clearly haven’t met Betty Reid Soskin, 93, America’s oldest living park ranger.
The nonagenarian, who’s been a member of the National Park Service since she was 85, says she’s not sure that she ever really wanted to be a park ranger, but there’s no way she’s stopping now.
“I still love this uniform. Partly because there’s a silent message to every little girl of color that I pass on the street or in an elevator or on an escalator…that there’s a career choice she may have never thought of,” Soskin said in a recent interview on The Today Show.
Starting her historic career as a file clerk for a segregated union auxiliary in 1942, Soskin then moved to a white neighborhood after World War II, where she received death threats for attempting to build a home there.
Eventually, she found her home among the tons of visitors at Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif., where she’s been since 2003.
A walking time capsule, Soskin has made a great joy out of recalling her life to anyone who is interested as she serves as tour guide for the park exhibit “Untold Stories and Lost Conversations,” about the history of wartime women laborers.
She also shares her personal stories as both a political activist and a Black woman in the workforce.
‘Since I’m working from memory, my work tends to be ‘in the moment’ and depends upon my ability to respond to questions out of a well that seems bottomless at times,” she said.
And she’s not planning on retiring any time soon. She clocks in five days a week and says, “And as long as that’s true, and as long as I’m developing new questions, then I’m going to go on living it.”
article by George Chapman Jr. via bet.com

John Legend Launches "Free America" Campaign To End Mass Incarceration

By goodblacknews on April 13, 2015

John Legend at Atlanta's Chastain Park Amphitheatre in 2014. (Photo by Robb D. Cohen/Invision/AP)
John Legend at Atlanta’s Chastain Park Amphitheatre in 2014. (Photo by Robb D. Cohen/Invision/AP)

Grammy and Academy Award-winning singer John Legend has launched a campaign to end mass incarceration by announcing today the multiyear initiative, FREE AMERICA.  He will visit and perform at a correctional facility on Thursday in Austin, Texas, where he also will be part of a press conference with state legislators to discuss Texas’ criminal justice system.
“We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country,” Legend said in an interview. “It’s destroying families, it’s destroying communities and we’re the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration.”
Legend, 36, will also visit a California state prison and co-host a criminal justice event with Politico in Washington, D.C., later this month. The campaign will include help from other artists — to be announced — and organizations committed to ending mass incarceration.
“I’m just trying to create some more awareness to this issue and trying to make some real change legislatively,” he said. “And we’re not the only ones. There are senators that are looking at this, like Rand Paul and Cory Booker, there are other nonprofits that are looking at this, and I just wanted to add my voice to that.”

Snoop Dogg & Allen Hughes Team for 1980s Family Drama At HBO

By goodblacknews on March 20, 2015

Snoop Dogg Allen Hughes 2 HBO is developing a drama series from rapper-actor Snoop Dogg and director-producer Allen Hughes (Broken City, Gang Related). Written by Rodney Barnes (The Boondocks, Everybody Hates Chris) and directed by Hughes, the untitled drama is set in early 1980s Los Angeles and centers on a family whose seemingly idyllic life is turned upside down by the collision of their community and American politics. Snoop Dogg (real name Cordozar Calvin Broadus Jr.) was born in Long Beach and grew up in the port city just south of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. He executive produces the potential series with his longtime manager, Ted Chung of Stampede Management, Hughes and Barnes. Snoop Dogg and Barnes previously worked together on the animated family comedy The Boondocks, which Barnes executive produced and on which Snoop Dogg voiced a recurring character.

article by Nellie Andreeva via deadline.com

MUSIC: Kendrick Lamar on His New Album and the Weight of Clarity

By goodblacknews on March 17, 2015
Kendrick Lamar is working to purify hip-hop, a genre he hopes to ground in his true experiences growing up poor in Compton, Calif.,  the son of a former gangbanger. (Credit: John Francis Peters for The New York Times)

LOS ANGELES — Following the success of his major label debut, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” in 2012,  Kendrick Lamar did not indulge in earthly luxuries. Instead, he got baptized.

That album was the story of his redemption, not just from street gangs through rapping but from a life of sin by embracing Jesus Christ. His long-awaited follow-up, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (TDE/Aftermath/Interscope), which was made available online Sunday night, ahead of a planned March 23 release, is about carrying the weight of that clarity: What happens when you speak out, spiritually and politically, and people actually start to listen? And what of the world you left behind?

Mr. Lamar, who grew up in Compton, Calif., had previously been saved as a teenager in the parking lot of a Food 4 Less, he said, when the grandmother of a friend approached him after a tragedy, asking if he had accepted God. “One of my homeboys got smoked,” Mr. Lamar recalled. “She had seen that we weren’t right in the head. That was her being an angel for us.”

On his new album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” Mr. Lamar is an evangelist for black power. (Credit: John Francis Peters for The New York Times)

Nearly a decade later, having found that fame and riches did not offer additional salvation, or happiness, he “wanted to take it to the next level — being underwater,” he said. “I felt like it was something I had to do.”

Whereas “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” zoomed in on a day in the old life of Mr. Lamar, a gifted but wayward high schooler in a neighborhood filled with death and temptation, “To Pimp a Butterfly” brings listeners up to his present day, from world tours to the B.E.T. Awards, and the separation he feels from his past. Rather than relief, his escape from Compton has brought only more opportunities for sin and self-doubt, an internal chaos reflected not only in Mr. Lamar’s intricate stories but also in vigorous jazz- and funk-inflected production that builds on the smoother West Coast sounds of his debut.

University of California, San Diego Honors Sojourner Truth with Life-Size Bronze Statue

By goodblacknews on February 19, 2015

Sojourner Truth Statue at UCSD
The University of California, San Diego, recently unveiled a new life-size bronze sculpture of Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery, Sojourner Truth became a leading abolitionist and advocate for women’s rights.
The statue, displayed on the campus of Marshall College, is the work of local artist Manuelita Brown, a graduate of the University of California, San Diego. Brown stated that “Sojourner Truth serves as a drum major for social justice, equity and voting rights. It is my hope that the brilliant students and graduates of UC San Diego will be reminded each day as they walk past her of what they can accomplish with a superior education.”
At the ceremony unveiling the new sculpture, Pradeep K. Khosla, chancellor of the University of California San Diego noted that “centrally located, hundreds of campus and local community members will pass by Sojourner Truth each day. Her presence will serve to start conversations about who she was and what she stood for, a reminder of her influence and the need to continually address racial and gender equality.”
According to the latest U.S. Department of Education figures, Blacks make up only 1 percent of the undergraduate student body at the University of California, San Diego. Under state law, race cannot be considered in admissions decisions at the university.
article via jbhe.com

Snoop Dogg's Son Cordell Broadus Earns Football Scholarship to UCLA

By goodblacknews on February 4, 2015

Cordell Broadus
Cordell Broadus

Years of hard work and a reality show later, Cordell Broadus has officially announced that he’ll be playing football for the UCLA Bruins.
Ranked as the #14 Wide Receiver prospect in the country, the son of superstar rapper Snoop Dogg will join a UCLA program that made him an offer since he was just a ninth grader. He chose the Bruins over LSU, Arizona State and his father’s favorite school, USC.
The Long Beach native moved his son to Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, to give Cordell the best opportunity to grow athletically and academically. And with NFL regulations stating that a student-athlete must be at least three years removed from high school, fans will have the delight of watching the standout recruit make plays for several years to come.
article by @TheKidSkoob via theurbandaily.com

Comedian and Activist Dick Gregory to be Honored with Star on Hollywood Walk of Fame

By goodblacknews on January 29, 2015

dick gregory (walk of fame)The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has announced that comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory will be honored with the 2,542nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Monday, February 2, 2015.
The star in the category of Live Theatre/Performance will be dedicated at 1650 Vine Street near Hollywood & Vine.
“We are proud to honor Dick Gregory with a star on the Walk of Fame during Black History month. He has given so much to the world with his wisdom through his work in entertainment,” stated Leron Gubler, President of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and emcee of the ceremonies.
The star ceremony will be streamed live exclusively on www.walkoffame.com
The day after the ceremony the celebration will continue with the Dick Gregory & Friends All Star Tribute and Toast on Tuesday, February 3, at 8:00 p.m. at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre, 1615 N. Vine Street in Hollywood.
Richard Claxton Gregory aka Dick Gregory is a comedian, civil rights activist, author, recording artist, actor, philosopher and anti-drug crusader. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Gregory, 82, began his career as a comedian while serving in the military in the mid-1950s. He was drafted in 1954 while attending Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. After being discharged in 1956, with a desire to perform comedy professionally, he moved to Chicago.
Gregory attributes the launch of his career to Hugh Hefner, who watched him perform at Herman Roberts Show Bar. Hefner hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club as a replacement for comedian Professor Irwin Corey.
By 1962, Gregory had become a nationally-known headline performer, selling out nightclubs, making numerous national television appearances, and recording popular comedy albums. Gregory, whose style was detached, ironic, and satirical, gained the attention of audiences with his political and controversial stand up acts. By being both outspoken and provocative, he became a household name and opened many doors for Black entertainers.

Sly Stone Wins $5 Million Verdict in Lawsuit Against Former Manager and Attorney

By goodblacknews on January 28, 2015
Sly Stone Wins $5 Million Verdict
Sly Stone (TIM MOSENFELDER/GETTY IMAGES)

Legendary singer/songwriter Sly Stone has been awarded $5 million by a Los Angeles jury in his lawsuit against a former manager and attorney he claimed diverted royalties from his music for their own benefit.  The Los Angeles Superior Court announced its verdict on Tuesday, after two days of deliberations.
Stone’s litigation, filed under his real name Sylvester Stewart, involved millions of dollars in royalties and stretched over almost five years.
He filed suit in 2010, claiming that manager Gerald Goldstein and attorney Glenn Stone in the late 1980s induced him to sign an employment and shareholder agreement with Even Street Prods., but that they instead used the arrangement to divert millions in royalties, leaving him unable to get the money he said was due him.
The jury awarded $2.5 million in damages against Even St. Productions, $2.45 million against Goldstein and $50,000 against attorney Glenn Stone.
“It was a classic case of Hollywood accounting, but I guess it would have to be called record industry accounting,” said Nick Hornberger of Hornberger Law Corp., the lead attorney for the singer.
The jury, he said, “sent a very clear message.”
Gregory Bodell of Kozberg & Bodell, lead attorney for the defendants, said via e-mail that the jury found that Sly Stone was underpaid by $2.5 million under the employment agreement with Even St. Prods., and that the money was paid instead to Goldstein and Stone.
“We are disappointed in the finding and believe it will be changed by further proceedings,” Bodell said.
Stone, whose real name is Sylvester Stewart, testified that he had not received any royalty payments between 1989 and 2000.
But attorneys for Goldstein and Glenn Stone contended that the singer was paid millions, but broke an agreement to make new records. They claim that the singer was not tricked into signing the contract, but was aware of the terms and renewed the agreement 40 times over 15 years between 1994 and 2006.
article by Ted Johnson via Variety.com