Deeronn Booker, 33, won the United States Bowling Congress Masters championship at Suncoast Bowling Center in Las Vegas on Sunday, defeating Patrick Dombrowski of Parma, Ohio, 217-177, to win the coveted Masters title and the tournament’s $100,000 first-place prize.
This was Albuquerque, New Mexico native Booker’s first major title on the Professional Bowlers Association Tour, and only the third time an African-American bowler has won a major event.
To quote from Donovan Grubaugh’s article on bowl.com:
Booker’s path to the winner’s circle certainly wasn’t an easy one as he was forced to take down the likes of two-time defending Masters champion Anthony Simonsen of Las Vegas, 2023 U.S. Open champion EJ Tackett of Ossian, Indiana, and two-time PBA titlist Sam Cooley of Australia during double-elimination bracket match play on Thursday and Friday…
Booker had enormous support from the crowd during the title match as several family members and friends were on hand to take in Booker’s TV finals debut…
“I can’t believe it,” Booker said after his win, during which he was surrounded by enthusiastic supporters. “This is perfect; I could not have painted a better picture of what’s going on right now.”
To learn more details about Booker and his championship match, click here.
For more information on the USBC Masters, visit BOWL.com/Masters.
Today at Good Black News, we pay tribute to the musical legacy of Mary Wilson, who died Monday night at the age of 76 at her home in Las Vegas.
Wilson was the heart and soul of The Supremes, perhaps the world’s most successful girl group ever, and the archetype for Destiny’s Child, TLC, En Vogue and all the other subsequent soulful girl groups who’ve hit the charts in the decades since the Detroit trio ruled over the charts in the 1960s.
More than 50 years after their last #1, The Supremes still rank second only to The Beatles in garnering the most chart-toppers of any group – With a dozen #1 pop hits in the United States.
If Florence Ballard was the Supremes soulful & brassy blues mama and Diana Ross its demure pop ingenue, the late Mary Wilson was the group’s sultry glamour gal. The three of them together evoke the memories of a time when a group of persistent girls from the local neighborhood high school could encounter the right producer and launch themselves into a whirlwind of global superstardom.
In the process, The Supremes would help change the world’s perception of Blackness. Diana, Florence and Mary were the epitome of Berry Gordy‘s grand Motown crossover experiment – they weren’t just stars of the soul chart, but rather they were ‘the sound of young America’.
They toured Japan and Europe, played Las Vegas and the Copacabana nightclub – venues previously reserved for mostly older white artists.
Mary Wilson (photo via Facebook)
Their classy choreography and gorgeous gowns belied their youthful age. And, back in an era when few Black celebrities were seen with frequency on TV, neighborhoods of Black families from coast to coast were abuzz with pride every time the trio appeared on the popular Ed Sullivan Showin front of the whole nation.
By now, most everyone knows the story of The Supremes. Ballard left the group amid scandal in the mid-1960s (to be replaced by Cindy Birdsong). Ross left in 1970 to pursue a solo career that would make her arguably the biggest Black female star of her era.
But Mary Wilson stayed with the group until the very end, through a litany of other member changes, serving as the steadfast backup to two subsequent lead singers. Following the group’s demise, she performed solo concerts all over the world, wrote two best-selling books about her years with The Supremes and even participated in ‘Dancing With the Stars’.
But all the while, she was determined to preserve the legacy of The Supremes, including battling in court to stop unaffiliated groups from touring under the group’s name. To the end she was almost always identified as ‘Mary Wilson of The Supremes.’
Over the course of 15 years of Supremes recordings, Wilson didn’t get to sing lead often. But we’ve gathered those all those official lead/co-lead vocals here, along with a couple solo tracks and some rare ‘from-the-vaults’ tunes released in more recent years.
Look for nice renditions of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You“ (which frequently served as her solo on tour dates), “Our Day Will Come” and her version of the Martha & the Vandellas hit “Come and Get These Memories” from the Diana years.
By the ’70s, Mary’s veteran status was rewarded with a few more lead vocals, including a shared spotlight on singles like “Floy Joy,” “Automatically Sunshine,” and ‘Touch” as well as a heartfelt vocal on Jimmy Webb‘s standard “I Keep It Hid” and a whispery, plaintive adaptation of the Spinners/Phyllis Hyman number “I Don’t Want To Lose You.”
Following an initial half dozen Wilson-lead or co-lead tracks, we’ve taken the opportunity on our playlist to dive wholeheartedly into the chronological history of the entire span of The Supremes – the Diana Ross, Jean Terrell and Scherrie Payne years all in one – because ALL those years were the Mary Wilson years.
Along with all Mary’s lead vocals, we’ve included all the Motown Supremes singles on which Mary actually sang back-up (including the group’s singles with The Temptations and The Four Tops).
Interestingly, in the late ’60s, there were multiple Supremes hits recorded by Ross with Motown’s house back-up singers taking on the role of The Supremes – including “Love Child,””Forever Came Today,” “I’m Livin’ in Shame” and the group’s final #1 “Someday We’ll Be Together”.
Yes, ironically, on their iconic song about togetherness, the Supremes were not actually together (Mary and Cindy did still appear on the album covers, and of course, sang back-up on the songs during live concerts).
We’ve not included those Wilson-less singles here – although we have included later “Love Child” and “Someday We’ll Be Together” live renditions recorded from the group’s final January 1970 concert, where Mary and Cindy Birdsong did sing the background vocals on the songs they never had recorded in studio.
After the chronological rundown of Supremes singles, we’ve concluded our playlist with the rest of Wilson’s lead vocals on album tracks from the ’70s Supremes albums.
By then, The Supremes rule over the pop charts was a memory – and the group was no longer being paired with Motown’s hottest producers.
But Mary’s passionate vocals help to elevate otherwise ordinary ballads into something worth listening to. We hope you’ll check out our playlist and ‘come and get these memories’ of Mary Wilson, another legend gone too soon. Someday, we’ll be together.
It certainly was unwelcome news to wake up to this morning – the news that singing legend Mary Wilson had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at her home in Las Vegas at 76, news that has been confirmed by her manager.
As an original member of the Supremes, Wilson, along with Florence Ballard and Diana Ross, made history as pop and R&B chart toppers with classic songs like “Where Did Our Love Go?”“Stop! In the Name of Love,”“You Keep Me Hangin’ On” and “Someday We’ll Be Together.”
Although the Supremes line-up changed multiple times over the years, Mary Wilson remained its one steadfast member and continued to perform with the group over the decades, even as she offered music as a solo singer.
Above is an incredible clip of Wilson taking lead vocals on the Supremes cover of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”at the Hollywood Palace in 1969.
In 1986, Wilson wrote the New York Times bestseller Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme and in 2019 offered Supreme Glamour, a retrospective on the group and their iconic costumes and ensembles, its forward written by Whoopi Goldberg.
Recently Wilson was a celebrity contestant on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and was planning to release a new album later this year.
To learn more about Mary Wilson’s life, career and music, click below:
Jonathan Smith (photo via thegrio.com) via thegrio.com
A man who was shot in the neck during the deadly Las Vegas shooting on Sunday helped to save at least 30 people. Jonathan Smith, 30, had attended the concert with nine other members of his family when the shots rang out and his older brother, Louis Rust, told them all to run. Smith was focused on getting his nieces out, according to the Washington Post, but he turned back into the crowd after becoming separated.
He noticed that several people had been paralyzed by fear and started to push them to move, saying, “Active shooter, let’s go!” “I got a few people out of there,” he told the Post. However, while he was trying to get to a group of children, he was struck by a bullet in the neck. The bullet shattered his collarbone, fracture one of his ribs, and bruised one of his lungs.
Smith credits a police officer with saving his life after the police officer saw Smith bleeding and staunched the flow of blood before he was lifted to the hospital. For now, doctors have left the bullet in place.“I might have to live with this bullet for the rest of my life,” Smith said.
While Smith has been heralded as a hero for his actions, he doesn’t see himself that way, either.“I would want someone to do the same for me,” he said. Source: Man shot during Las Vegas massacre helped save 30 people | theGrio
Jordan Peele (photo via thegrio.com) article via thegrio.com
During this year’s CinemaCon Big Screen Achievement Awards, Jordan Peele will be presented with the CinemaCon Director of the Year Award for his 2017 blockbuster “Get Out.”
CinemaCon Managing Director, Mitch Neuhauser, announced the award on Monday saying, “With the phenomenon known as ‘Get Out,” Jordan Peele has instantaneously become a force to reckon with as a gifted and enormously talented director and filmmaker. He has audiences and critics around the globe enamored and spellbound, dare I say hypnotized, with his wildly inventive directorial debut, and we are ecstatic to be honoring him as this year’s ‘Director of the Year.’”
Peele will receive the award on March 30 at the ceremony at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, hosted by the Coca-Cola Company. The official convention of The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) will be held on March 27-30, 2017, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Peele’s thriller has received widespread acclaim and excellent reviews since its debut, including a 99 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. To read original article, go to: Jordan Peele to receive CinemaCon Director of the Year Award | theGrio
8 year-old Lauren Laray (photo via You-Tube) article by Zon D’Amour via hellobeautiful.com
Where can we make an appointment to get our hair done by 8-year-old Lauren Laray? The 3rd grader has a remarkable talent for doing hair and she’s putting her skills towards an excellent cause.
After learning that her best friend’s little sister had cancer and was losing her hair to chemotherapy, Lauren decided to make her a wig. She now wants to help even more little girls feel beautiful while they fight to overcome one of the most difficult times in their lives.
Initially, Lauren was going to make 10 wigs but by the summer, she hopes to finish 30 wigs that will be donated to the Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation.
“Some of them will be blonde; some of them will be redheaded for redheaded little girls. I’ll have a whole bunch because other girls have other styles for their hair”, said Lauren.
Lauren has launched a GoFundMe page where she’s already exceeded the $900 needed to make the 30 wigs which costs $30 per head for supplies. The Las Vegas native uses a crochet needle, weave cap, two packs of hair and a bow.
“I won’t need a thank you, I’ll just see a smile on their face and I’ll be happy,” said Lauren. To see her demonstrate how to make a wig, watch below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK__Cy_l9ws&w=420&h=315]
ENVIROAg Science, Inc. founders and leaders, The Lynn Family
One of the nation’s largest black-owned companies, ENVIRO AgScience, Inc., is celebrating 30 years of business. The family-owned business has grown from a mom-and-pop landscaping business into a $29 million-dollar construction management and commercial landscaping firm.
In addition to its Columbia, South Carolina, headquarters, ENVIRO has offices in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles and is looking to expand its offerings globally. The company is ranked No. 92 on the 2015 BE 100s Industrial/Services List.
ENVIRO is best known for building schools and community centers in the Columbia area, but has also been involved in military structures, jails, mess halls, warehouses, and historic, municipal and airport renovations throughout Georgia and North and South Carolina. Currently, ENVIRO is part of the team helping to build a new minor league baseball stadium, Spirit Communications Park, completing bond referendum projects with the Richland County Recreation Commission and annual grounds maintenance for Richland Two School District. ENVIRO began as a commercial lawn care business that has grown into a full-service construction and landscape company servicing government, military, schools and universities, along with private sector firms. It was founded by Louis B. Lynn in 1985 after a successful career at one of the nation’s largest agrichemical companies. With a legacy of business excellence and ownership, including his grandfather, who owned a grocery store and his father, who ran a butcher shop, Lynn also chose the path of entrepreneurship. Lynn has parlayed a ‘golden handshake’ from Monsanto Corporation into a multi-generational, black-owned business.
Earlier this year, ENVIRO executed its succession plan and Lynn assumed the role of chairman, leaving his children to manage daily operations and strategy of the family’s construction management and commercial landscape firm. Now it is the next generation, Lynn’s children, who are spearheading plans to make ENVIRO a multinational company. His daughters Adrienne Lynn Sienkowski, 41 and an engineer, is chief operating officer, and Krystal Conner, 38 and a pharmacist, is CEO. His son, Bryan Lynn, 30, is a facilities manager.
Frederick Hutson founded the company Pigeonly to help tailor technological products and services for underserved communities, such as the incarcerated and their families. | Pigeon.ly
Frederick Hutson was just 24 and living in St. Petersburg, Florida, when he was convicted on a drug trafficking charge. The Air Force veteran spent four years behind bars, serving out his sentence in eight different correctional facilities.
Hutson found prison life was isolating, no surprise at a time when one 15-minute interstate phone call could cost an inmate as much as $17. Isolation is an ongoing hurdle for prisoners and their families, as research has repeatedly shown that keeping inmates connected with loved ones and support structures on the outside helps reduce recidivism rates.
“[Incarcerated] people who maintain supportive relationships with family members have better outcomes — such as stable housing and employment — when they return to the community,” reads one study by the nonprofit Vera Institute. “Many corrections practitioners and policy makers intuitively understand the positive role families can play in the reentry process, but they often do not know how to help people in prison draw on these social supports.”
Such research, coupled with his own experience, gave Hutson a new idea. Today, that idea has transformed into Pigeonly, a $3 million tech company specifically tailoring products for underserved communities, particularly the incarcerated and their families.
Hutson launched Pigeonly in 2013 after receiving coaching and input from the NewME Accelerator in San Francisco, which helps support underrepresented entrepreneurs. Pigeonly’s products to date include Fotopigeon, a prison-friendly photo-mailing platform, and Telepigeon, a service that drastically reduces the often cost-prohibitive price of phone calls to and from correctional facilities.
“Most people don’t have life sentences, so the real question we have to ask ourselves is, what type of person do we want to release?” Hudson, now 31, told The Huffington Post. “Someone who’s isolated from everyone they know and lost touch with everyone who could support them who, when they’re back on the street, are way more likely to go back to the previous activity they were doing before prison? No.” Inside Pigeonly’s office in Las Vegas. The company recently expanded into a larger space to accommodate its growth. (Pigeon.ly)
The Las Vegas-based company says it has already had a great deal of success with its flagship products in a relatively short period of time.
Fotopigeon prints photos uploaded by a user and mails them to a prison on the user’s behalf, carefully abiding by the strident and sometimes confusing regulations that govern mail sent to prisons. The service already has a base of 80,000 customers who have uploaded over a million photos, at 50 cents apiece with free shipping, since the service began.
Hutson told HuffPost the company is currently shipping a quarter of a million photos a month.
“It’s something that has very high value when you’re isolated from everything you know,” Hutson said. “Think about how important images are in daily life on the outside. It’s crazy to think it’d be any different for the 2.3 million people in prison or the 20 million people who want to communicate with them.”
Superstar singer Diana Ross has inked April dates for the first nine performances of her new mini-residency contract at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Soon to follow in this new entertainment lineup set for the former “Phantom — The Las Vegas Spectacular” theater will be Janet Jackson, Lionel Richie and Ricky Martin.
Diana, named “Most Successful Female Vocalist of All Time,” takes the stage for her new show “The Essential Diana Ross: Some Memories Never Fade” as of April 1. Tickets are on sale for three weekends of shows April 1, 3-4, 7-8, 10-11, 15 and 17-18. To purchase, click here.
She will include songs from her remarkable, nearly five-decade career that made music-history milestones and a significant contribution to pop culture music of the 20th century. She’s promising Motown classics “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” to pop favorites “I’m Coming Out” and hits including “Endless Love.”
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – In an effort to combat police brutality in the Black community, the National Bar Association (NBA) recently announced plans to file open records requests in 25 cities to study allegations of police misconduct. National Bar Association President Pamela J. Meanes Pamela Meanes, president of the Black lawyers and judges group, said the NBA had already been making plans for a nationwide campaign to fight police brutality when Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a White police officer following a controversial midday confrontation in a Ferguson, Mo.
Meanes called police brutality the new civil rights issue of this era, an issue that disproportionately impacts the Black community.
“If we don’t see this issue and if we don’t at the National Bar Association do the legal things that are necessary to bring this issue to the forefront, then we are not carrying out our mission, which is to protect the civil and political entities of all,” said Meanes.
The NBA, which describes itself as “the nation’s oldest and largest national network of predominantly African-American attorneys and judges,” selected the 25 cities based on their African-American populations and reported incidents of police brutality.
The lawyers group will file open records requests in Birmingham, Ala.; Little Rock, Ark.; Phoenix; Los Angeles; San Jose, Calif., Washington, D.C.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Miami; Atlanta; Chicago; Louisville, Ky.; Baltimore, Md.; Detroit; Mich.; Kansas City, Mo.; St. Louis, Mo.; Charlotte, N.C.; Las Vegas, Nev.; New York City; Cleveland, Ohio; Memphis, Tenn., Philadelphia; Dallas; Houston; San Antonio, Texas, and Milwaukee, Wis.
In a press release about the open records requests, the group said it will not only seek information about “the number of individuals who have been killed, racially profiled, wrongfully arrested and/or injured while pursued or in police custody, but also comprehensive data from crime scenes, including “video and photographic evidence related to any alleged and/or proven misconduct by current or former employees,” as well as background information on officers involved in the incidents.
Not only will the NBA present their findings to the public, but the group also plans to compile its research and forward the data over to the attorney general’s office.
Meanes said the group’s ultimate goal is to have a conversation with Attorney General Eric Holder and to ask, and in some cases, demand he seize police departments or take over or run concurrent investigations.
Meanes said federal law prohibits the Justice Department from going into a police department unless a pattern or history of abuse has been identified.
“The problem is that the information needed for that action is not readily available in a comprehensive way on a consistent basis with the goal of eradicating that abuse,” said Meanes, adding that the open records request is the best way to get that information.
Meanes said that the NBA was concerned that the trust had already brrn broken between the police force and the residents of Ferguson and that the rebellion and the protests would continue.
“We don’t think St. Louis County should investigate this. We don’t think the prosecutor should investigate this. There should be an independent third-party investigating this and that is the federal government,” said Meanes.
Phillip Agnew, executive director of the Dream Defenders, a civil rights group established by young people of color in the aftermath of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager in Sanford, Fla., said law enforcement officials taunted, antagonized and disrespected peaceful protesters who took to the streets of Ferguson and at times incited the violence they attempted to stamp out in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown.
“An occupying force came into the community, they killed someone from the community, and instead of being transparent and doing everything they could do to make sure the community felt whole again, they brought in more police to suppress folks who were exercising their constitutional rights,” said Agnew.“If your protocol results in greater violence, greater anger, and greater disenchantment of the people, you have to chart a different course.”
On the heels of the NBA announcement, Attorney General Holder launched two initiatives designed to calm anxiety and frustration expressed by Ferguson’s Black residents towards the local police department over allegations of misconduct, harassment and discrimination.
The Justice Department also introduced a “Collaborative Reform Initiative” to tackle similar concerns with the St. Louis County Police Department and to improve the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve.
Although the Supremes line-up changed multiple times over the years, Mary Wilson remained its one steadfast member and continued to perform with the group over the decades, even as she offered music as a solo singer.
In 1986, Wilson wrote the New York Times bestseller 
