July 1, 2024
The greatest boxer of all time — Muhammad Ali — turns 71 today. Besides being a sports legend, Ali is considered a civil rights and cultural icon. His boxing career spanned three decades and certainly had its share of ups and downs. Still, no fighter’s heights were as compelling as Ali’s. Check out The Grio’s list of the top 10 greatest bouts of his career in the slideshow by clicking below:
Muhammad Ali 71st birthday: The champ’s 10 greatest fights | theGrio.
Michael Tubbs, a 22 year-old Stanford graduate, is the youngest-ever city councilman to be elected in his hometown of Stockton, C.A.
Born into poverty to a teenage mother and father who is in prison, Tubbs grew up determined to make a difference.
Upon graduating from high school, Tubbs attended Stanford, where he earned a bachelor’s in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and a master’s in Policy, Organization and Leadership Studies.
While in college, Tubbs interned for both Google and the White House. With multiple high-paying job offers, Tubbs decided to turn them down and return to his hometown to run for city council.
The struggling city of Stockton, CA. is in need of serious change. In June of 2012, Stockton became the most populous U.S. city to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The city also has a record high number of homicides in 2012 with 71.
Tubbs first made headlines last spring when he received a campaign endorsement form Oprah Winfrey after meeting her on campus at Stanford. Winfrey donated $10,000 to the then-college senior.
article by Carrie Healey via thegrio.com
NEW YORK (AP) — The film “Cloud Atlas,” AMC’s reality show “Small Town Security” and the New Yorker magazine are among the nominees for the 24th Annual GLAAD Media Awards. The awards are meant to recognize and honor media for outstanding images of the gay and lesbian community.
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation announced on Wednesday 120 nominees in English-language categories and 33 nominees in Spanish-language categories.
Other nominees include the NBC shows “Smash” and “The New Normal,” Frank Ocean for his “Channel Orange” album, the magazine People en Espanol and Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Neil Patrick Harris and partner David Burtka.
The winners will be announced March 16 in New York and at ceremonies in April and May in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press via thegrio.com
Washington DC city officials released renderings of the city’s recreational tribute to go-go godfather Chuck Brown — a $1 million steel-and-wood music pavilion on the grounds of Langdon Park in Northeast Washington. The bandshell faces outdoor seating built into an earthen berm and surrounded by magnolia trees and backed by a copse of evergreens. Beside it stands a “timeline tower” listing Brown’s most famous songs in chronological order.
The architects, Marshall Moya Design, said the pavilion “follow[s] the ancient design concepts that the Romans used to build open-air amphitheaters.” In any case, it’s a lot more impressive than the initial plans for Chuck Brown Park.
It will be an all-too-rare locally oriented memorial, Mayor Vincent C. Gray said Thursday. ”A lot of our monuments, which are iconic, are really a tribute to people who have national significance,” he said. “We have so many of those, and we just want to make sure we recognize that we have over 600,000 people in the city, many of whom made an important contribution to the city. … Chuck was one of those.”
Pioneering percussionist, composer, band leader, and drummer Max Roach was born Maxwell Lemuel “Max” Roach in North Carolina to parents Alphonse and Cressie, and worked with dozens of musical greats, including Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Denzel Washington scored his first Oscar nomination in over a decade this morning for his acclaimed performance as an alcoholic pilot in the hit drama Flight. This is Denzel’s sixth career Academy Award nomination, making him the most honored black actor in history. He’s won twice before: supporting actor for 1989′s Glory and best actor for his villainous role in 2001′s Training Day.
This recognition caps perhaps a career-best year for the A-list superstar, following the box office success of February’s action thriller Safe House and now his return to Hollywood’s most prestigious night.
Meanwhile, Quvenzhané Wallis received her first Oscar nomination ever for her acting debut in Beasts of the Southern Wild. At nine, Wallis is also the youngest actress to ever be nominated in the Academy’s leading actress category.Auditioning for the lead role when she was only 5 years old, Quvenzhané was 6 when filming began in 2010 in Pointe-aux-Chenes and Isle de Jean Charles, not too far from her hometown of Houma, Louisiana.
Beasts of the Southern Wild won the ‘Grand Jury Prize’ at the Sundance Independent Film Festival and won the Camera d’Or for best first film at the Cannes Film Festival.
To Randall Halstead and other minority officers in the Boston Police Department, the story of Sergeant Horatio J. Homer serves as a beacon of hope and of the power of perseverance.
Homer, who in 1878 became the department’s first African-American officer, ushered in a new era in the city over a 40-year career. In the decade after his appointment, the force hired as many as a half-dozen additional black officers, in large part on his recommendation.
Last week, the department unveiled a plaque honoring Homer at the Area B-2 police precinct in Roxbury, a neighborhood where he once resided. Halstead, a deputy superintendent, presided over the ceremony, which some of Homer’s descendants attended.
“This man set a precedent,” said Halstead. “To move forward, you have to know where you come from.”
The tribute is the latest honor bestowed upon Homer by the Police Department.
Writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (pictured) was one of the most-outstanding authors that emerged from the Harlem Renaissance. Over the course of four novels, an autobiography, and dozens of published writings, Hurston has been an inspiration for distinguished writers, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, and countless others.
Hurston was the fifth of eight children born to her parents, John and Lucy Ann, in the small town of Notasulga in Alabama. The family uprooted when she was just a toddler, making their new home in Eatonville, Fla. Her father, a preacher, would become mayor of the town, which was one of the first all-black incorporated cities in the United States. After the death of her school teacher mother in 1904, her father remarried and she was sent to boarding school in nearby Jacksonville. Hurston was later expelled after her father stopped paying the tuition.
Philanthropists Joanna and Daniel Rose have donated funds to Yale University to create the Henry Louis Gates Jr. Lectures. Professor Gates is a 1973 alumnus of Yale and currently serves as Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and is director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
The first Henry Louis Gates Jr. Lecture was delivered by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, and a close friend of professor Gates. Speaking at the inaugural event, Dr. Gates stated, “It is difficult for me to think of a greater honor in the life of a Yale alumnus than to have one’s alma mater create a lecture in one’s name.”
article via jbhe.com
Parks, who taught himself photography with a used camera he bought for $7.50, led a life filled with firsts and major milestones, including shooting for Vogue and becoming the first Black photographer at Life magazine, where for two decades he documented the civil rights movement, race relations and urban life in America.