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Posts tagged as “Thurgood Marshall”

GBN’s Daily Drop (bonus): Celebrating U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (LISTEN)

GBN’s Daily Drop (bonus): Celebrating U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on April 9, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is a bonus episode about U.S Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose historic appointment this week can’t be celebrated enough.

To read about her, read on. To hear about her, press PLAY:

[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. Full transcript below]:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a bonus daily drop of Good Black News for Saturday, April 9th, 2022, based on the format of the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

Just two short days ago, history that was a long time in coming was finally made when Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was officially confirmed by a Senate vote of 53 to 47 to become the 116th Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and first African American woman ever to serve on the highest judicial body of the nation.

In a bit of poetry, the vote was called for and presided over by Vice President Kamala Harris, who herself is quite familiar with making U.S. history as a Black woman.

Nominated by President Joe Biden in February, Justice Jackson faced over a month of scrutiny in the Senate confirmation hearings as well as in the media, but navigated it all with intelligence, grace and candor.

Florida Law School to Open Benjamin L. Crump Center for Social Justice in 2022

Florida Law School to Open Benjamin L. Crump Center for Social Justice in 2022

By goodblacknews on December 3, 2021

The St. Thomas University College of Law in Miami Gardens, FL plans to open The Benjamin L. Crump Center for Social Justice in 2022.

The center will support a program for law students interested in civil rights and social justice, offering need-based financial aid, a speakers series and pro bono service placements for new lawyers, school officials said.

In the past decade, attorney Crump has risen to prominence by representing the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and most recently, Ahmaud Arbery.

“Our country went through a national reckoning in the spring and summer of 2020,” said David. A. Armstrong, the president of St. Thomas University. “Ben Crump was at the center of that as the living civil rights attorney icon here in our country.”

Over the years, Crump has won financial settlements in close to 200 police brutality cases and has pushed cities to ban so-called no-knock warrants, in which police serve warrants at homes without warning.

“Lawyers can be the social engineers,” Crump said in a statement Thursday. “This Center will serve as a pipeline for historically marginalized students to get their law degrees and give back to society, following the legacy of my personal hero, Thurgood Marshall.”

To quote nbcnews.com:

Crump’s friendship with Tamara F. Lawson, the law school’s dean, who wrote the book Mainstreaming Civil Rights in the Law School Curriculum, meant the Florida campus was a natural site for the center.

The law school’s racial diversity also was a draw, school officials said. Black students were 7.57 percent of all incoming law students in the U.S. in 2019, according to the American Bar Association. At St. Thomas, 8.3 percent of students last year were Black and 64.9 percent were Latino, according to a report by PublicLegal, a research project founded by the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

While the law school encourages all students to take on social justice work, special efforts will focus on marginalized students who can bring more diversity to the legal profession, Armstrong said. Crump said he hopes the center will pave the way for students looking for new opportunities in the field of law.

“My mother was a hotel maid who cleaned the rooms for the likes of many people who may be seated in this auditorium,” Crump said Thursday at the new center that bears his name. “And I just remember her and my grandmother, these two Black women who believed with everything in their heart that the American dream was for their children, too.

“We need a whole army of warriors to go out into the community to give a voice to those who have no voice, to say things in the world that are not being said, to take on challenges that others are afraid of,” he said.

To read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/benjamin-crump-social-justice-center-open-florida-law-school-n1285254

Designer Debra L. Mars Offers HBCU Santas and Black Nutcrackers for the Holidays

Designer Debra L. Mars Offers HBCU Santas and Black Nutcrackers for the Holidays

By goodblacknews on November 26, 2021

Designer and long-time Black Santa collector Debra L. Mars has added her own contribution to the canon by partnering with several HBCUs to offer Black Santas this holiday season.

The Inglewood, CA resident and entrepreneur has created Black Santas repping Howard University, Morehouse College, Grambling and FAMU, in addition to offering Black nutcrackers, Santa-themed bracelets and other holiday swag through her etsy.com store, Restore The Hope.

Mars, who has worked in marketing and supplier diversity for Frito-Lay, began collecting Black Santas over 35 years ago.

“I traveled the country and would pick them up whenever I saw them, especially in the Southern states,” Mars said. “My fascination came about when I reflected on how my mother only had one childhood toy; it was a white doll that looked nothing like her—that was triggering for me.”

Debra L. Mars (photo courtesy Debra L. Mars)

Designing and selling Black Santas is about more than the bottom line for Mars.”[It’s] more about storytelling than the product itself. They are designed as triggers to hopefully remind people what a precious gift they are to this world,” Mars said.

“The Santa to me is symbolic of spiritual gifts and talents rather than what’s in the box under the tree. It saddens me that so many people feel worthless and undervalued. That is why our branding tagline for the Black Santa Cause Collective is ‘unwrap your gifts’.”

Mars also has a goal to align and partner with other creators to tell the Santa “Cause” story.

“I am most proud of a woman I found who is exclusively making Black Santa leather bracelets for our line,” Mars stated. “Each one is hand crafted and features a lighter skinned and darker skinned Black Santa in the design to communicate the variety of melanin in the African American race. This alliance with her has created a stream of supplemental income for her and more importantly, a clear validation of her gifts and talents.”

Even though she’s had to work through several obstacles and supply chain challenges, Mars feels she is finally dwelling in her passion.

“This dream was planted in me over 25 years ago to create this line. This has been a master class on perseverance. Having the opportunity to represent our sacred jewels: The HBCUs is an honor that I do not take lightly,” Mars said.

“When I did the research on the game changers that attended these iconic institutions from Thurgood Marshall to Kamala Harris to Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson, I am so proud and a little remorseful that I did not attend a HBCU.”

In Tribute to Chadwick Boseman, ’42’ to be Re-Released in Theaters

In Tribute to Chadwick Boseman, ’42’ to be Re-Released in Theaters

By goodblacknews on September 1, 2020

According to Variety.com, AMC Theatres will pay tribute to beloved actor and Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, who died last week of colon cancer at 43, by screening 42, Boseman’s leading man debut as Major League Baseball barrier breaker and icon Jackie Robinson. (To read GBN’s review of 42, click here.)

Warner Bros. and Legendary, the studios behind the 2013 film, have teamed up with the theater chain to make “42” viewable in more than 300 locations. That’s nearly every AMC venue that’s open as coronavirus closures start to lift. Tickets for 42 will only be $5 and will go on sale by the end of Tuesday.

R.I.P. William T. Coleman Jr., 96, Who Broke Racial Barriers in Supreme Court and White House Cabinet

By goodblacknews on April 1, 2017

William T. Coleman Jr., then the secretary of transportation, testified in 1976 before a Senate subcommittee. (Credit: Harvey Georges/Associated Press)

article by Dennis Hevesi via nytimes.com
William T. Coleman Jr., who championed the cause of civil rights in milestone cases before the Supreme Court and who rose above racial barriers himself as an influential lawyer and as a cabinet secretary, died Friday at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for the international law firm O’Melveny & Myers, where Mr. Coleman was a senior partner in its Washington office. He lived at a care facility with his wife of more than 70 years, Lovida Coleman. A lifelong Republican, Mr. Coleman was as comfortable in the boardrooms of powerful corporations — PepsiCo, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank — as he was in the halls of government.
He was the second African-American to serve in a White House cabinet, heading the Department of Transportation. Mr. Coleman found success on the heels of a brilliant academic career, but he did so in the face of bigotry — what he called “the more subtle brand of Yankee racism” — from which his middle-class upbringing in Philadelphia did not shield him. In one episode, his high school disbanded its all-white swimming team rather than let him join it.
Those experiences would inform his efforts in three major civil rights cases before the United States Supreme Court. In one, Mr. Coleman, recruited by Thurgood Marshall, was an author of the legal briefs that successfully pressed the court to outlaw segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Ten years later, he argued a case that led to a Supreme Court decision establishing the constitutionality of racially mixed sexual relations and cohabitation. (McLaughlin v. Florida, in which the Supreme Court overturned a Florida law that prohibited an interracial couple from living together under the state’s anti-miscegenation statutes.) And in 1982, he argued that segregated private schools should be barred from receiving federal tax exemptions. The court agreed.
Mr. Coleman was appointed transportation secretary by President Gerald R. Ford in March 1975, a little more than six months after Ford, who had been vice president, succeeded President Richard M. Nixon after Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate affair. Mr. Coleman, a corporate lawyer with expertise in transportation issues, was on the Pan Am board of directors at the time.
To read full article, go to: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/us/politics/william-coleman-jr-dies.html?_r=0

Chadwick Boseman’s Thurgood Marshall Movie Bought by Open Road Films

By goodblacknews on June 9, 2016
Chadwick Boseman
Chadwick Boseman (ROB LATOUR/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK)

article by Dave McNary via Variety.com
Open Road Films has acquired all U.S. rights to “Marshall,” starring Chadwick Boseman as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Josh Gad as lawyer Sam Friedman.
Joining the previously announced cast are Kate Hudson, Dan Stevens, James Cromwell, Sterling K. Brown and Keesha Sharp (“The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”).
Reginald Hudlin (producer of “Django Unchained”) is directing and Paula Wagner (“Mission: Impossible,” “The Last Samurai”) is producing through her Chestnut Ridge Productions banner along with Jonathan Sanger (“The Elephant Man”) and Hudlin.

Financiers are Star Light Media Inc., Hero Film Ltd. and Sky Legend along with Hunter Ryan and David Ryan.  Executive producers are Peter Luo and Belton Lee.
Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions has all international distribution rights for “Marshall,” which began principal photography in Buffalo, New York, on May 23. The production is utilizing New York State’s Film Production Program.
“Marshall” is based on the young Marshall defending a black chauffeur in 1941 against his wealthy socialite employer in a sexual assault and attempted murder trial that quickly became tabloid fodder. Marshall was partnered with Friedman, a young Jewish lawyer who had never tried a case.
The screenplay is a collaboration between renowned trial lawyer Michael Koskoff and his son, screenwriter Jacob Koskoff (“Macbeth”).
The film is being produced with the full support of the Marshall and Friedman estates, including their children, John W. Marshall and Lauren Friedman.

Yale University to Name Residential College After Civil and Women’s Rights Activist Anna Pauline Murray

By goodblacknews on May 2, 2016

Anna Pauline Murray
Anna Pauline Murray

article via naacp.org
Yale University is naming a new residential college after African-American Yale alumna and civil rights activist Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray.  Pauli Murray is best known as a staunch civil rights and women’s rights advocate, lawyer and ordained Episcopal priest.  Ms. Murray’s lifelong commitment to ensuring a fair and just society for everyone serves as an inspiration and role model to NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks as well as many civil rights lawyers.
In 1938, Ms. Murray was denied admission to the University of North Carolina’s law school because she was African American – all schools and public facilities in the state were segregated.  Influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and his practice of nonviolent civil disobedience, she joined with Bayard Rustin, George Houser and James Farmer to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).  While a student at Howard Law School, she participated in sit-ins to challenge the discriminatory seating policies of area restaurants.  These sit-ins preceded the more widespread and well-known sit-ins of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
After graduating from law school, Ms. Murray sought to continue her study of the law at Harvard University but was rejected because of her gender.  Her experiences with racism and gender inequality fueled her activism in the civil rights and women’s rights movements.  She authored a book, “States Laws on Race and Color” in 1951. Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel at the  NAACP, described her book as the Bible for civil rights lawyers.  Upon completion of her doctorate in 1965, she became the first African American woman to be awarded a J.D.S from Yale University.

'The Black Count' Wins 2013 Pulitzer Prize For Biography; 'Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America' for General Nonfiction

By goodblacknews on April 20, 2013

 Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, aka Alexandre Dumas, aka “Black Devil” by some of the armies he fought against (let’s just say he was good at his job), aka The Black Count, is at the center of the recently published book from acclaimed author Tom Reiss. Its full title is The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.  Dumas’ son, likely the most popular Dumas, also named Alexandre Dumas, was author of literary classics like The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.  In fact, Dumas, the father of the author, was the inspiration for The Count Of Monte Cristo.
Other 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners of note include Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King, in the General Nonfiction category.

"Because of Them, We Can…" Campaign Features Children as Famous Black Figures (PHOTOS)

By goodblacknews on February 26, 2013
(Courtesy of Eunique Jones Photography)

Photographer Eunique Jones’ photo series, ‘Because of them, we can…” , has made a splash on the Internet as a unique and creative take on the importance of Black History Month.  Her 28-photo project features more than 40 young children posing as some of the most iconic and influential black figures from the past and the present.

From Harriet Tubman to Spike Lee, the children are seen dressed and styled like the individual they are portraying and also incorporate an  inspirational quote from each particular famous person.  Jones, who has been a professional photographer for three years, says she was inspired to create the project for Black History Month because of her two children, Chase, 4, and Amari, seven months-old. She realized they had so many opportunities available to them today which would not have been possible without “the African-American individuals who paved the way for [my kids’] future.”

How Super Bowl-Winning City Baltimore is Celebrating Black History Month

By goodblacknews on February 4, 2013

baltimoreAll eyes are on Baltimore this week as the Ravens took the Super Bowl title and Beyoncé cranked out perhaps the most electrifying halftime performance in history. It’s a great time to recognize that “Charm City” – a nickname created by then Mayor William Donald Schaefer and a bunch of ad agencies to boost the city’s national profile – is once again on the map as a vacation destination.
In honor of Black History Month, here’s a list of Baltimore’s events and exhibitions that pay tribute to the African-American men and women who helped shape the nation. Baltimore is a city shaped by the contributions of African-American visionaries including the likes of world famous jazz singer Billie Holiday; great orator Frederick Douglass, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; and female abolitionist and “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman.

“Girl with Flag,” Bryan Collier  

“The Mountaintop” and Beyond

“The Mountaintop”
CENTERSTAGE
Through Feb. 24
The Lorraine Hotel. April 1968. In room 306, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. unwinds and prepares. A visit from a hotel maid offers welcome diversion and a challenging new perspective – but also raises profound and surprising questions. 
Already a worldwide sensation and recently hailed in a star-studded Broadway production, Katori Hall’s new play receives its Baltimore premiere.