African American History aka Black History & History of Afrikans World Wide
- Thread starter Lexx Diamond
- Start date
Remembering the first successful organized Negro League in baseball history. It was established on February 13, 1920 and occurred at a YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri.
The rise of organized baseball after the Civil War led to early attempts to integrate the sport. A small handful of Black players took the diamond alongside their white teammates like Moses Fleetwood Walker, Bud Fowler and Frank Grant but that was short-lived.
The National Association of Amateur Base Ball Players rejected Black membership in 1867, and in 1876, owners of the professional National League adopted a “gentleman’s agreement” to keep blacks out as well. By the turn of the 20th century, with the rise of Jim Crow laws and unwritten rules between white owners, they would effectively shut out Black ballplayers to so-called big league competition entirely.
Black players found their greatest opportunities with traveling teams until 1920, when Andrew “Rube” Foster launched the #NegroNationalLeague. Player and Hall of Famer, Foster and his fellow team owners filled a much needed void when they came together to create the League.
Reformulated several times with new leagues and owners, Negro League baseball enjoyed great success in the early 1920s and again after the Great Depression with ball park attendances many times eclipsing that of the all white leagues. #JackieRobinson’s integration of baseball in 1947 prompted a slow but irreversible influx of Black and Brown talent to the majors. Subsequently the remaining #NegroLeague teams generally folded by the 1960s.
Digital Art By: #ReadRMcCants
THIS DAY IN HISTORY
1779
February 14
Captain Cook killed in Hawaii
In 1768, Cook, a surveyor in the Royal Navy, was commissioned a lieutenant in command of the HMS Endeavour and led an expedition that took scientists to Tahiti to chart the course of the planet Venus. In 1771, he returned to England, having explored the coast of New Zealand and Australia and circumnavigated the globe.
Beginning in 1772, he commanded a major mission to the South Pacific and during the next three years explored the Antarctic region, charted the New Hebrides, and discovered New Caledonia. In 1776, Cook sailed from England again as commander of the HMS Resolution and Discovery, and in January 1778 he made his first visit to the Hawaiian Islands. He may have been the first European to ever visit the island group, which he named the Sandwich Islands in honor of one of his patrons, John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich.
Cook and his crew were welcomed by the Hawaiians, who were fascinated by the Europeans’ ships and their use of iron. Cook provisioned his ships by trading the metal, and his sailors traded iron nails for sex. The ships then made a brief stop at Ni’ihau and headed north to look for the western end of a northwest passage from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Almost one year later, Cook’s two ships returned to the Hawaiian Islands and found a safe harbor in Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay.
It is suspected that the Hawaiians attached religious significance to the first stay of the Europeans on their islands. In Cook’s second visit, there was no question of this phenomenon. Kealakekua Bay was considered the sacred harbor of Lono, the fertility god of the Hawaiians, and at the time of Cook’s arrival the locals were engaged in a festival dedicated to Lono. Cook and his compatriots were welcomed as gods and for the next month exploited the Hawaiians’ good will. After one of the crewmen died, exposing the Europeans as mere mortals, relations became strained. On February 4, 1779, the British ships sailed from Kealakekua Bay, but rough seas damaged the foremast of the Resolution, and after only a week at sea the expedition was forced to return to Hawaii.
The Hawaiians greeted Cook and his men by hurling rocks; they then stole a small cutter vessel from the Discovery. Negotiations with King Kalaniopuu for the return of the cutter collapsed after a lesser Hawaiian chief was shot to death and a mob of Hawaiians descended on Cook’s party.
The captain and his men fired on the Hawaiians, but they were soon overwhelmed, and only a few managed to escape to the safety of the Resolution. Captain Cook himself was killed by the mob. A few days later, the Englishmen retaliated by firing their cannons and muskets at the shore, killing some 30 Hawaiians. The Resolution and Discovery eventually returned to England.
1779
February 14
Captain Cook killed in Hawaii
In 1768, Cook, a surveyor in the Royal Navy, was commissioned a lieutenant in command of the HMS Endeavour and led an expedition that took scientists to Tahiti to chart the course of the planet Venus. In 1771, he returned to England, having explored the coast of New Zealand and Australia and circumnavigated the globe.
Beginning in 1772, he commanded a major mission to the South Pacific and during the next three years explored the Antarctic region, charted the New Hebrides, and discovered New Caledonia. In 1776, Cook sailed from England again as commander of the HMS Resolution and Discovery, and in January 1778 he made his first visit to the Hawaiian Islands. He may have been the first European to ever visit the island group, which he named the Sandwich Islands in honor of one of his patrons, John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich.
Cook and his crew were welcomed by the Hawaiians, who were fascinated by the Europeans’ ships and their use of iron. Cook provisioned his ships by trading the metal, and his sailors traded iron nails for sex. The ships then made a brief stop at Ni’ihau and headed north to look for the western end of a northwest passage from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Almost one year later, Cook’s two ships returned to the Hawaiian Islands and found a safe harbor in Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay.
It is suspected that the Hawaiians attached religious significance to the first stay of the Europeans on their islands. In Cook’s second visit, there was no question of this phenomenon. Kealakekua Bay was considered the sacred harbor of Lono, the fertility god of the Hawaiians, and at the time of Cook’s arrival the locals were engaged in a festival dedicated to Lono. Cook and his compatriots were welcomed as gods and for the next month exploited the Hawaiians’ good will. After one of the crewmen died, exposing the Europeans as mere mortals, relations became strained. On February 4, 1779, the British ships sailed from Kealakekua Bay, but rough seas damaged the foremast of the Resolution, and after only a week at sea the expedition was forced to return to Hawaii.
The Hawaiians greeted Cook and his men by hurling rocks; they then stole a small cutter vessel from the Discovery. Negotiations with King Kalaniopuu for the return of the cutter collapsed after a lesser Hawaiian chief was shot to death and a mob of Hawaiians descended on Cook’s party.
The captain and his men fired on the Hawaiians, but they were soon overwhelmed, and only a few managed to escape to the safety of the Resolution. Captain Cook himself was killed by the mob. A few days later, the Englishmen retaliated by firing their cannons and muskets at the shore, killing some 30 Hawaiians. The Resolution and Discovery eventually returned to England.
You cant efficiently oppress Black people without the help of Black people.
Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux was a pioneering evangelist.
The preacher launched a radio show, “The Radio Church of God,” in 1929 to national acclaim. About two decades later, he became the first minister with a weekly television show. He spread a gospel of individual salvation, saying that converting people to Christianity would help cure the evils and injustices of the world.
He also did something that, until recently, remained virtually unknown to the public: Elder Michaux, an African-American, worked with J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. to publicly discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and give the bureau cover for its intrusive surveillance of the civil rights leader.
That revelation was made in a paper, written by Prof. Lerone A. Martin and published in February in the Religion and American Culture journal.
It was already known that Elder Michaux (mi-SHAW) was a fierce critic of Dr. King. But Professor Martin’s research was the first to find that Elder Michaux’s criticisms were part of a coordinated effort with the F.B.I.
www.nytimes.com
Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux was a pioneering evangelist.
The preacher launched a radio show, “The Radio Church of God,” in 1929 to national acclaim. About two decades later, he became the first minister with a weekly television show. He spread a gospel of individual salvation, saying that converting people to Christianity would help cure the evils and injustices of the world.
He also did something that, until recently, remained virtually unknown to the public: Elder Michaux, an African-American, worked with J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. to publicly discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and give the bureau cover for its intrusive surveillance of the civil rights leader.
That revelation was made in a paper, written by Prof. Lerone A. Martin and published in February in the Religion and American Culture journal.
It was already known that Elder Michaux (mi-SHAW) was a fierce critic of Dr. King. But Professor Martin’s research was the first to find that Elder Michaux’s criticisms were part of a coordinated effort with the F.B.I.
A Black Evangelist Who Opposed Dr. King (Published 2018)
New research shows how Elder Michaux, the first minister with a weekly television show, worked with the F.B.I. to discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Two girls from The Jarawa tribe of India
Photo: Kean Collection/Getty ImagesQUICK FACTS
Granville T. Woods
April 23, 1856
January 30, 1910
Columbus, Ohio
New York, New York
"Black Edison"
- WHO WAS GRANVILLE T. WOODS?
- EARLY LIFE
- EARLY INVENTING CAREER
- INDUCTION TELEGRAPH
- DEATH AND LEGACY
- CITE THIS PAGE
Biography
(1856–1910)
- JAN 19, 2018
Who Was Granville T. Woods?
Granville T. Woods, born to free African Americans, held various engineering and industrial jobs before establishing a company to develop electrical apparatus. Known as "Black Edison," he registered nearly 60 patents in his lifetime, including a telephone transmitter, a trolley wheel and the multiplex telegraph (over which he defeated a lawsuit by Thomas Edison).
Early Life
Born in Columbus, Ohio, on April 23, 1856, Woods received little schooling as a young man and, in his early teens, took up a variety of jobs, including as a railroad engineer in a railroad machine shop, as an engineer on a British ship, in a steel mill, and as a railroad worker. From 1876 to 1878, Woods lived in New York City, taking courses in engineering and electricity — a subject that he realized, early on, held the key to the future.
Back in Ohio in the summer of 1878, Woods was employed for eight months by the Springfield, Jackson and Pomeroy Railroad Company to work at the pumping stations and the shifting of cars in the city of Washington Court House, Ohio. He was then employed by the Dayton and Southeastern Railway Company as an engineer for 13 months.
During this period, while traveling between Washington Court House and Dayton, Woods began to form ideas for what would later be credited as his most important invention: the "inductor telegraph." He worked in the area until the spring of 1880 and then moved to Cincinnati.
Early Inventing Career
Living in Cincinnati, Woods eventually set up his own company to develop, manufacture and sell electrical apparatus, and in 1889, he filed his first patent for an improved steam boiler furnace. His later patents were mainly for electrical devices, including his second invention, an improved telephone transmitter.
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The patent for his device, which combined the telephone and telegraph, was bought by Alexander Graham Bell, and the payment freed Woods to devote himself to his own research. One of his most important inventions was the "troller," a grooved metal wheel that allowed street cars (later known as "trolleys") to collect electric power from overhead wires.
Induction Telegraph
Woods's most important invention was the multiplex telegraph, also known as the "induction telegraph," or block system, in 1887. The device allowed men to communicate by voice over telegraph wires, ultimately helping to speed up important communications and, subsequently, preventing crucial errors such as train accidents. Woods defeated Edison's lawsuit that challenged his patent, and turned down Edison's offer to make him a partner. Thereafter, Woods was often known as "Black Edison."
After receiving the patent for the multiplex telegraph, Woods reorganized his Cincinnati company as the Woods Electric Co. In 1890, he moved his own research operations to New York City, where he was joined by a brother, Lyates Woods, who also had several inventions of his own.
Woods's next most important invention was the power pick-up device in 1901, which is the basis of the so-called "third rail" currently used by electric-powered transit systems. From 1902 to 1905, he received patents for an improved air-brake system.
Death and Legacy
By the time of his death, on January 30, 1910, in New York City, Woods had invented 15 appliances for electric railways. received nearly 60 patents, many of which were assigned to the major manufacturers of electrical equipment that are a part of today's daily life.
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Citation Information
Article Title
Granville T. Woods Biography
Author
Biography.com Editors
Website Name
The Biography.com website
URL
https://www.biography.com/inventor/granville-t-woods
Access Date
February 15, 2022
Publisher
A&E Television Networks
Last Updated
May 4, 2021
Original Published Date
April 2, 2014
Fati Diallo, a Toucouleur woman, 1930-60.
April 9, 1921 – February 11, 2005)
Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started out in the computing unit at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. She took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA’s first black female engineer.
After 34 years at NASA, Jackson had earned the most senior engineering title available. She realized she could not earn further promotions without becoming a supervisor. She accepted a demotion to become a manager of both the Federal Women’s Program, in the NASA Office of Equal Opportunity Programs and of the Affirmative Action Program. In this role, she worked to influence the hiring and promotion of women in NASA’s science, engineering, and mathematics careers.
Jackson’s story features in the 2016 non-fiction book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. She is one of the three protagonists in Hidden Figures, the film adaptation released the same year.
In 2019, Jackson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.[2] In 2021, the Washington, D.C. headquarters of NASA was renamed the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters.
“For Mary Jackson, life was a long process of raising one’s expectations.” - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly
Viola Desmond
Canadian businesswoman and civil libertarian
Alternate titles: Viola Irene Desmond
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By Russell Bingham | See All • Last Updated: Feb 3, 2022 • Edit History
Viola Desmond
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Born: July 6, 1914 Halifax CanadaDied: February 7, 1965 (aged 50) New York City New York
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Viola Desmond, in full Viola Irene Desmond, née Davis, (born July 6, 1914, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada—died February 7, 1965, New York, New York, U.S.), Canadian businesswoman and civil libertarian who built a career as a beautician and was a mentor to young Black women in Nova Scotia through her Desmond School of Beauty Culture. It is, however, the story of her courageous refusal to accept an act of racial discrimination that provided inspiration to a later generation of Black persons in Nova Scotia and in the rest of Canada.
Early life and family
She was brought up in a large family, including 10 siblings, and her parents were highly regarded within the Black community in Halifax. Her father, James Albert Davis, was raised in a middle-class Black family and had worked for a number of years as a stevedore before establishing himself as a barber. Her mother, Gwendolin Irene (née Johnson) Davis, was the daughter of a white minister and his wife who had moved to Halifax from New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. Although racial mixing was not uncommon in early 20th-century Halifax, intermarriage was a rare occurrence. Nonetheless, her parents were accepted into the Black community, where they became active and prominent members of various community organizations.
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Motivated by her parents’ example of hard work and community involvement, Desmond aspired to success as an independent businesswoman. After a short period teaching in two racially segregated schools for Black students, she began a program of study at the Field Beauty Culture School in Montreal, one of the few such institutions in Canada at the time that accepted Black applicants. She continued her training in the U.S., in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and in New York. Desmond opened Vi’s Studio of Beauty Culture in Halifax, catering to the Black community.
Entrepreneur and community leader
In the early part of the 20th century, with the advent of new hairstyles that demanded special products and maintenance and an emphasis on fashion trends and personal grooming, beauty parlours offered opportunities for female entrepreneurs. Black women, in particular, were able to discover opportunities not otherwise available. Beauty parlours became a centre of social contact within the Black community, allowing shop owners to achieve a position of status and authority.
Desmond quickly found success. She opened a beauty school, the Desmond School of Beauty Culture, and expanded her business across the province. (Desmond created a line of beauty products, which were sold at venues owned by graduates of her beauty school.) Aware of her obligation to her community, Desmond created the school in order to provide training that would support the growth of employment for young Black women. Enrollment in Desmond’s school grew rapidly, including students from New Brunswick and Quebec. As many as 15 students graduated from the program each year.
Although racism was not officially entrenched in Canadian society, Black persons in Canada—and certainly in Nova Scotia—were aware that an unwritten code constrained their lives. Sometimes the limits were difficult to foresee. In a way, the “unofficial” character of Canadian racism made it more difficult to navigate.
Roseland Theatre
On the evening of November 8, 1946, Desmond made an unplanned stop in the small community of New Glasgow after her car broke down en route to a business meeting in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Told that the repair would take a number of hours, she arranged for a hotel room and then decided to see a movie to pass the time. At the Roseland Theatre, Desmond requested a ticket for a seat on the main floor. The ticket seller handed Desmond a ticket to the balcony instead, the seating generally reserved for nonwhite customers. Walking into the main floor seating area, she was challenged by the ticket taker, who told her that her ticket was for an upstairs seat, where she would have to move. Thinking that a mistake had been made, Desmond returned to the cashier and asked her to exchange the ticket for a downstairs one. The cashier refused, saying, “I’m sorry, but I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.” Realizing that the cashier was referring to the colour of her skin, Desmond decided to take a seat on the main floor.
Desmond was then confronted by the manager, Henry MacNeil, who argued that the theatre had the right to “refuse admission to any objectionable person.” Desmond pointed out that she had not been refused admission and had in fact been sold a ticket, which she still held in her hand. She added that she had attempted to exchange it for a main floor ticket and was willing to pay the difference in cost but had been refused. When she declined to leave her seat, a police officer was called. Desmond was dragged out of the theatre, injuring her hip and knee in the process, and taken to jail. There she was met by Elmo Langille, chief of police, and MacNeil. The pair left together, returning an hour later with a warrant for Desmond’s arrest. She was then held in a cell overnight. Shocked and frightened, she maintained her composure and, as she related later, sat bolt upright all night long.
Trial of Viola Desmond
In the morning, Desmond was taken to court and charged with attempting to defraud the provincial government based on her alleged refusal to pay a one-cent amusement tax (i.e., the difference in tax between upstairs and downstairs ticket prices). Even though she had indicated when she was confronted at the theatre that she was willing to pay the difference between the two ticket prices and that her offer had been refused, the judge chose to fine her $26. Six of those dollars were awarded to the manager of the Roseland Theatre who was listed in the court proceedings as prosecutor. Throughout the trial, Desmond was not provided with counsel or informed that she was entitled to any. Magistrate Roderick MacKay was the only legal official in the court; no crown attorney was present.
At no point in the proceedings was the issue of race mentioned. Still, it was clear that Desmond’s real offense was that she had violated the implicit rule that Black persons were to sit in the balcony seats, segregated from white persons on the main floor. When asked about the incident by the Toronto Daily Star, MacNeil maintained that there was no official stipulation that Black persons could not sit on the main floor. It was “customary,” he said, for Black persons to sit together in the balcony. Nonetheless, it was common knowledge among the Black community in New Glasgow that seating at the Roseland Theatre was racially segregated.
Desmond’s husband, Jack, had grown up in New Glasgow and was not surprised when she told him about her treatment at the Roseland. Like many other Black Nova Scotians who had grown accustomed to the racist attitudes that prevailed in the province, he was inclined to let the issue rest. “Take it to the Lord with a prayer,” was his suggestion. Others in the community were less accepting: the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NSAACP) raised money to fight her conviction, and Carrie Best, founder of The Clarion, the province’s second Black-owned and operated newspaper, took a special interest in the case. Best had had a similar experience at the Roseland Theatre five years earlier and had unsuccessfully filed a civil suit against the theatre’s management. The Clarion closely covered Desmond’s story—often on the front page.
On the advice of the doctor who had examined the injuries that resulted from her arrest, Desmond contacted a lawyer in order to reverse her charge. Legal scholar and historian Constance Backhouse mentioned that, at the time, the legal nature of racial discrimination was unsettled in Canada. While judgments varied from case to case, two competing principles prevailed: freedom of commerce and an individual’s right to freedom from discrimination based on race, creed, or colour. Neither principle took precedence over the other. In addition, no court in the province had ruled on the illegality of racial discrimination in hotels, theatres, or restaurants.
Given the ambiguity of the situation, Frederick Bissett, Desmond’s white lawyer, chose not to take on the violation of Desmond’s rights—neither her basic civil rights nor her rights to a fair trial with competent legal representation. Instead, Bissett had the court issue a writ identifying Desmond as the plaintiff in a civil suit that named MacNeil and the Roseland Theatre Co. Ltd. as defendants. It sought to establish that MacNeil had acted unlawfully when he forcibly ejected Desmond from the theatre, which would entitle her to compensation on the grounds of assault, malicious prosecution, and false imprisonment.
The suit never made it to trial, and Bissett later applied to the Supreme Court to have the criminal conviction put aside. The case was considered by Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Maynard Brown Archibald, who, on January 20, 1947, ruled against Desmond on the grounds that the decision of the original magistrate should have been appealed to the County Court. As the 10-day deadline for filing an appeal to the original conviction had passed, the conviction stood.
Subsequent to the Supreme Court decision, legal action on the matter ceased. Bissett did not bill his client, which allowed the NSAACP to use the funds raised for legal fees to continue their fight against segregation in Nova Scotia. Change didn’t happen quickly, and it is difficult to say whether Desmond’s experience had a direct effect on the quest for racial equality in the province. Nonetheless, her choice to resist the status quo and the level of community support she received—e.g., from The Clarion and the NSAACP—revealed a mobilization for change among members of Nova Scotia’s Black population who were no longer willing to endure life as second-class citizens. In 1954 segregation was legally ended in Nova Scotia, thanks in large part to the courageous determination of Desmond and others like her who fought to be treated as equal human beings.
It is difficult to know how Desmond felt about her brave stand and its aftermath. Eventually, and perhaps because of her experience with the Nova Scotia legal system, her marriage fell apart. She subsequently decided to abandon her business and move to Montreal.
Legacy
Decades later Desmond’s story began to receive public attention, primarily through the efforts of her sister Wanda Robson. In 2003 Robson, at the age of 73, enrolled in a course on race relations in North America at the University College of Cape Breton (later Cape Breton University) taught by Graham Reynolds. During the course, Reynolds related the experience of Viola Desmond, prompting Robson to speak out. With the help of Reynolds, she began a prolonged effort to tell her sister’s story, including the publication of a book about her sister’s experience, Sister to Courage (2010).
On April 15, 2010, Desmond was granted a free pardon by Nova Scotia Lieut. Gov. Mayann Francis at a ceremony in Halifax. The pardon, accompanied by a public declaration and apology from Premier Darrell Dexter, recognized that Desmond’s conviction had been a miscarriage of justice and that charges should never have been filed. At the formal ceremony, Percy Paris, minister of African Nova Scotian Affairs and Economic and Rural Development, said, “With this pardon, we are acknowledging the wrongdoing of the past,” and “we are reinforcing our stance that discrimination and hate will not be tolerated.”
The Viola Desmond Chair in Social Justice was established at Cape Breton University in 2010, and two years later Canada Post issued a postage stamp bearing her image. Desmond’s honours continued in 2018, when she was selected to appear on Canada’s $10 banknote. The new bills went into circulation in November, making Desmond the first nonroyal woman to appear alone on the country’s currency and the first Black person to be depicted on Canadian currency.
Viola Desmond | Biography, Family, & Facts
Viola Desmond, Canadian businesswoman and civil libertarian who in 1946 defied the segregation policy of a movie theater in Nova Scotia, taking a seat in the whites-only section. Her refusal to accept an act of racial discrimination provided inspirational to a later generation of Black persons...
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Edna Lewis
The grande dame of Southern cooking. Words by Sara Franklin. Photography by John T. Hill.
Edna bakes a cake for Vogue in 1973.
When Edna Lewis died in 2006, she was among the most beloved figures of American food. The author of four cookbooks—the best known being her 1976 memoir-infused The Taste of Country Cooking—she earned the praise of the food literati of her era, including Craig Claiborne, M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard. In 2014, Lewis was honored by the United States Postal Service—commemorated on a postage stamp as much for her advocacy of the farm-to-table methods of traditional Southern cooking as for her rejection of the knee-slapping stereotypes of the American South and its food.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Edna Lewis never became a household name. Though she lived well into the dawn of food television and the celebrity chef era, she never had a television show, nor did she peddle her own line of cookware. Perhaps it was due to her unobtrusive demeanor; among those who knew her, she is remembered for her quiet way. More likely, it’s the region of her birth, her race and her proximity to one of the most shameful periods in America’s past that excluded Lewis from a central role in American culinary history. To grapple with Lewis’s life and legacy is to grapple with the South itself.
Lewis was born in Freetown, Virginia, a farming community settled by emancipated slaves that included her grandparents, Chester and Lucinda. Lewis’s childhood orbited around food production and preparation. Her family and neighbors worked cooperatively toward self-sufficiency, an achievable goal—save a few staples such as coffee and sugar—in a pre-industrial South.
In The Taste of Country Cooking, Lewis chronicled her rural upbringing, taking readers through a year in the farming community with menus and recipes shaped by the particular offerings of each season. She writes of storing hand-churned butter in the cool water that ran beneath the springhouse, picking wild watercress from the streams and walking behind the plow to sow seeds. In the kitchen, where everything was prepared on a wood-burning stove, Lewis was an apprentice to her mother, under whose guidance she learned how to prepare three meals a day, every day. In Lewis’s Freetown, cooking was both an essential craft and a prized art, as quotidian as sweeping the floor and also an important outlet for creative expression. It was, too, a way of teaching and preserving cultural heritage; Lewis’s menus celebrate Emancipation Day and Juneteenth rather than Thanksgiving.
Lewis’s pride in her ties to the African diaspora and her sense of the importance of African-American contributions to both Southern and American culture is the thread that connects her writings and approach to food. As she aged, Lewis grew increasingly intent on correctly replicating the flavors of her youth; she was chasing memories, and working to preserve the culture of food in Freetown and the particular piece of Southern history that it represented. In Lewis’s essay, “What is Southern?,” which was published in Gourmet two years after her death, she wrote, “The world has changed. We are now faced with picking up the pieces and trying to put them into shape, document them so the present-day young generation can see what southern food was like.”
“To grapple with Lewis’s life and legacy is to grapple with the South itself.”
Edna Lewis collects pears in Freetown, Virginia.
Lewis’s father died when she and her siblings were young, leaving her mother to care for a large family through the lean years of the Great Depression. Lewis left Freetown at age 16, later moving to Washington, D.C. and then to New York City. There, she briefly found work in a Brooklyn laundry (famously lasting only three hours at the ironing board before being summarily fired) and later as a seamstress. Her skillful copies of designer frocks and African-inspired dresses drew a following among New York’s fashion set, including Marilyn Monroe and Doe Avedon, and she went on to dress the windows of such elegant shops as Bonwit Teller. Immersed in the bohemian scene of postwar New York, she married Steve Kingston, a retired merchant marine who was active in the communist cause. She also met and befriended an eccentric antiques dealer and entrepreneur named Johnny Nicholson and, in 1949, took the helm of his newly opened East Side venture, Café Nicholson.
At Café Nicholson, Lewis earned praise for her fine preparations of such bistro favorites as roast chicken, mussels in delicate broth, lightly dressed green salads and cheese and chocolate soufflés. The restaurant attracted a tony crowd that included Eleanor Roosevelt, Marlon Brando, Gore Vidal and, notably, Southern writers like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and William Faulkner. Using only muscle memory, Lewis prepared biscuits, pan-fried chicken and other comfort foods that reminded them of home.
Lewis left Nicholson in the 1950s and undertook a number of ventures, including running a pheasant farm with her husband and working as a caterer. Eventually she realized her dream of opening her own restaurant in Harlem, a short-lived establishment the name of which, strangely, none of her living family members can recall.
By then she had earned a name for herself, and in 1972, published her first book, The Edna Lewis Cookbook, which she co-authored with socialite Evangeline Peterson. A few years later, while laid up with a broken leg, Lewis decided to write another book. Around that time, she was introduced to legendary editor Judith Jones (whose list of culinary authors includes a veritable who’s who of modern American food writers including Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, James Beard, Claudia Roden and Madhur Jaffrey). It was a working relationship that resulted in the publication of The Taste of Country Cooking in 1976, followed by In Pursuit of Flavor in 1988 and The Gift of Southern Cooking, a collaboration between Lewis and her protégé and companion, Scott Peacock, in 2003. Meanwhile, she continued to cook professionally, helming the kitchen at such noted restaurants as Fearrington House in North Carolina, Middleton Place in South Carolina and Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn.
Posthumous articles and food-world awards have tended to rehash the same hackneyed story of the black farm girl from the South translating her happy, autonomous childhood to the pages of cookbooks and onto the tables of fine-dining restaurants. In 2013, a one-woman show, Dinner with Edna Lewis, premiered at the Southern Foodways Alliance annual symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. In it, Lewis is portrayed as a slow-talking, gentle retiree with a thick Southern accent, gone soft around the hips and mired in nostalgia, remembering only her days as a girl in Virginia and then as a chef in the heart of bohemian New York.
“Aunt Edna wasn’t like that at all,” says Lewis’s niece, Nina Williams-Mbengue. “She had no Southern accent whatsoever, moved about 90 miles per hour, and talked kind of fast.” Williams-Mbengue remembers Lewis as a giggler, with a great sense of humor, but also shy, unassuming and humble. “She was politically astute,” Williams-Mbengue remembers. On Sundays, the family watched Meet the Press with the television set up on the dining table; no one was permitted to talk while the show was on. “Aunt Edna may have worked all day, but she’d pull a chair up to the TV and listen,” Williams-Mbengue recalls of the Watergate era, which coincided with the years in which Lewis was working on the manuscript for The Taste of Country Cooking.
Lewis was an utter perfectionist when it came to testing the recipes for her books, throwing away attempts that didn’t live up to her memories. Some recipes she only tested when she went back to Virginia to visit her sister Jenny, who lived on a farm not far from where Freetown had been. For others, she obsessively tracked down the freshest, most historically accurate ingredients she could find. She rode the subway from the South Bronx to the newly opened Greenmarket in Union Square, and once requested that her brother FedEx her a squirrel, so that she could refine a squirrel stew recipe. Lewis even had Jenny mail her pot ash to use in various culinary applications, Williams-Mbengue recalls. “Aunt Edna and my mom laughed about that for a long time,” she says. “They thought they might get arrested if someone mistook it for dope.”
Lewis worked well past the retirement age of most chefs. When she cooked at Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn in the ’90s, she would arrive at 7 in the morning and often work until 11 at night. “Other chefs couldn’t keep up with her,” Williams-Mbengue recalls, “and she was 75 years old.”
“When I was growing up, we ate only what was ripe and fresh at the moment,” Edna wrote in In Pursuit of Flavor.
Jackson’s General Store in Freetown, where Edna’s family would buy provisions. The store no longer exists.
“If someone borrowed one cup of sugar, they would return two,” Edna once told documentarian Phil Audibert of life in Freetown.
Edna plays with her niece Nina Williams-Mbengue—daughter of her younger sister Naomi. It was Nina who, at the age of 12, helped Edna to type the manuscript for The Taste of Country Cooking.
www.kinfolk.com
The grande dame of Southern cooking. Words by Sara Franklin. Photography by John T. Hill.
Edna bakes a cake for Vogue in 1973.
When Edna Lewis died in 2006, she was among the most beloved figures of American food. The author of four cookbooks—the best known being her 1976 memoir-infused The Taste of Country Cooking—she earned the praise of the food literati of her era, including Craig Claiborne, M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard. In 2014, Lewis was honored by the United States Postal Service—commemorated on a postage stamp as much for her advocacy of the farm-to-table methods of traditional Southern cooking as for her rejection of the knee-slapping stereotypes of the American South and its food.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Edna Lewis never became a household name. Though she lived well into the dawn of food television and the celebrity chef era, she never had a television show, nor did she peddle her own line of cookware. Perhaps it was due to her unobtrusive demeanor; among those who knew her, she is remembered for her quiet way. More likely, it’s the region of her birth, her race and her proximity to one of the most shameful periods in America’s past that excluded Lewis from a central role in American culinary history. To grapple with Lewis’s life and legacy is to grapple with the South itself.
Lewis was born in Freetown, Virginia, a farming community settled by emancipated slaves that included her grandparents, Chester and Lucinda. Lewis’s childhood orbited around food production and preparation. Her family and neighbors worked cooperatively toward self-sufficiency, an achievable goal—save a few staples such as coffee and sugar—in a pre-industrial South.
In The Taste of Country Cooking, Lewis chronicled her rural upbringing, taking readers through a year in the farming community with menus and recipes shaped by the particular offerings of each season. She writes of storing hand-churned butter in the cool water that ran beneath the springhouse, picking wild watercress from the streams and walking behind the plow to sow seeds. In the kitchen, where everything was prepared on a wood-burning stove, Lewis was an apprentice to her mother, under whose guidance she learned how to prepare three meals a day, every day. In Lewis’s Freetown, cooking was both an essential craft and a prized art, as quotidian as sweeping the floor and also an important outlet for creative expression. It was, too, a way of teaching and preserving cultural heritage; Lewis’s menus celebrate Emancipation Day and Juneteenth rather than Thanksgiving.
Lewis’s pride in her ties to the African diaspora and her sense of the importance of African-American contributions to both Southern and American culture is the thread that connects her writings and approach to food. As she aged, Lewis grew increasingly intent on correctly replicating the flavors of her youth; she was chasing memories, and working to preserve the culture of food in Freetown and the particular piece of Southern history that it represented. In Lewis’s essay, “What is Southern?,” which was published in Gourmet two years after her death, she wrote, “The world has changed. We are now faced with picking up the pieces and trying to put them into shape, document them so the present-day young generation can see what southern food was like.”
“To grapple with Lewis’s life and legacy is to grapple with the South itself.”
Edna Lewis collects pears in Freetown, Virginia.
Lewis’s father died when she and her siblings were young, leaving her mother to care for a large family through the lean years of the Great Depression. Lewis left Freetown at age 16, later moving to Washington, D.C. and then to New York City. There, she briefly found work in a Brooklyn laundry (famously lasting only three hours at the ironing board before being summarily fired) and later as a seamstress. Her skillful copies of designer frocks and African-inspired dresses drew a following among New York’s fashion set, including Marilyn Monroe and Doe Avedon, and she went on to dress the windows of such elegant shops as Bonwit Teller. Immersed in the bohemian scene of postwar New York, she married Steve Kingston, a retired merchant marine who was active in the communist cause. She also met and befriended an eccentric antiques dealer and entrepreneur named Johnny Nicholson and, in 1949, took the helm of his newly opened East Side venture, Café Nicholson.
At Café Nicholson, Lewis earned praise for her fine preparations of such bistro favorites as roast chicken, mussels in delicate broth, lightly dressed green salads and cheese and chocolate soufflés. The restaurant attracted a tony crowd that included Eleanor Roosevelt, Marlon Brando, Gore Vidal and, notably, Southern writers like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and William Faulkner. Using only muscle memory, Lewis prepared biscuits, pan-fried chicken and other comfort foods that reminded them of home.
Lewis left Nicholson in the 1950s and undertook a number of ventures, including running a pheasant farm with her husband and working as a caterer. Eventually she realized her dream of opening her own restaurant in Harlem, a short-lived establishment the name of which, strangely, none of her living family members can recall.
By then she had earned a name for herself, and in 1972, published her first book, The Edna Lewis Cookbook, which she co-authored with socialite Evangeline Peterson. A few years later, while laid up with a broken leg, Lewis decided to write another book. Around that time, she was introduced to legendary editor Judith Jones (whose list of culinary authors includes a veritable who’s who of modern American food writers including Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, James Beard, Claudia Roden and Madhur Jaffrey). It was a working relationship that resulted in the publication of The Taste of Country Cooking in 1976, followed by In Pursuit of Flavor in 1988 and The Gift of Southern Cooking, a collaboration between Lewis and her protégé and companion, Scott Peacock, in 2003. Meanwhile, she continued to cook professionally, helming the kitchen at such noted restaurants as Fearrington House in North Carolina, Middleton Place in South Carolina and Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn.
Posthumous articles and food-world awards have tended to rehash the same hackneyed story of the black farm girl from the South translating her happy, autonomous childhood to the pages of cookbooks and onto the tables of fine-dining restaurants. In 2013, a one-woman show, Dinner with Edna Lewis, premiered at the Southern Foodways Alliance annual symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. In it, Lewis is portrayed as a slow-talking, gentle retiree with a thick Southern accent, gone soft around the hips and mired in nostalgia, remembering only her days as a girl in Virginia and then as a chef in the heart of bohemian New York.
“Aunt Edna wasn’t like that at all,” says Lewis’s niece, Nina Williams-Mbengue. “She had no Southern accent whatsoever, moved about 90 miles per hour, and talked kind of fast.” Williams-Mbengue remembers Lewis as a giggler, with a great sense of humor, but also shy, unassuming and humble. “She was politically astute,” Williams-Mbengue remembers. On Sundays, the family watched Meet the Press with the television set up on the dining table; no one was permitted to talk while the show was on. “Aunt Edna may have worked all day, but she’d pull a chair up to the TV and listen,” Williams-Mbengue recalls of the Watergate era, which coincided with the years in which Lewis was working on the manuscript for The Taste of Country Cooking.
Lewis was an utter perfectionist when it came to testing the recipes for her books, throwing away attempts that didn’t live up to her memories. Some recipes she only tested when she went back to Virginia to visit her sister Jenny, who lived on a farm not far from where Freetown had been. For others, she obsessively tracked down the freshest, most historically accurate ingredients she could find. She rode the subway from the South Bronx to the newly opened Greenmarket in Union Square, and once requested that her brother FedEx her a squirrel, so that she could refine a squirrel stew recipe. Lewis even had Jenny mail her pot ash to use in various culinary applications, Williams-Mbengue recalls. “Aunt Edna and my mom laughed about that for a long time,” she says. “They thought they might get arrested if someone mistook it for dope.”
Lewis worked well past the retirement age of most chefs. When she cooked at Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn in the ’90s, she would arrive at 7 in the morning and often work until 11 at night. “Other chefs couldn’t keep up with her,” Williams-Mbengue recalls, “and she was 75 years old.”
“When I was growing up, we ate only what was ripe and fresh at the moment,” Edna wrote in In Pursuit of Flavor.
Jackson’s General Store in Freetown, where Edna’s family would buy provisions. The store no longer exists.
“If someone borrowed one cup of sugar, they would return two,” Edna once told documentarian Phil Audibert of life in Freetown.
Edna plays with her niece Nina Williams-Mbengue—daughter of her younger sister Naomi. It was Nina who, at the age of 12, helped Edna to type the manuscript for The Taste of Country Cooking.
Edna Lewis - The grande dame of Southern cooking - Kinfolk
When Edna Lewis died in 2006, she was among the most beloved figures of American food. Edna Lewis The grande dame of Southern cooking best known for her..
www.kinfolk.com
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr
b. August 17, 1887 in Jamaica / d. June 1940
Visionary, Businessman, Speaker, Teacher
In 1914 Garvey helped create the United Negro Improvement Association. By 1920, the U.N.I.A. had 1,100 chapters in 40 countries. By 1926, the membership had grown to 11 million members. Garvey built the largest Black organization ever.
Garvey started news publications, "The Watchman" and "The Negro World", that reached hundreds of thousands of subscribers. He launched the UNIA's Black Star Line Steamship Corporation to establish and facilitate transportation and communication between Africans worldwide. He created the Negro Factories Corporation, which owned grocery stores, restaurants, tailor shops, and more.
In New York he owned buildings, a fleet of trucks, and employed over 1,000 Blacks in his businesses.
His vision was to enhance the self-image and pride of Blacks and Black communities, build schools, obtain independence for colonized African Countries, and 100% economic independence for African people across the world.
Garvey was a champion of the back-to-Africa movement, and continues to represent an unapologetic liberation from the psychological bondage of racism.
Kudos to the Great Marcus Garvey Jr.
I hope everyone who goes to the gynecologist will close their eyes for a moment and honor these enslaved black women.
I cannot, cannot fathom the pain these black women endured under this man’s hands. And that painting.... who should be honored? Not him IMO... The irony is also them standing there in smart clothes . Some people in society look at people’s status and give respect on how one is dressed. The one who should be honored and respected is the one who owns no shoes.
Fillmore District, San Francisco, 1952
Photographed by Gerald Ratto
CHARLES V & THE SLAVE TRADE
A charter was granted by Emperor Charles V to Lorenzo de Gorrevod for permission to transport slaves, on August 18, 1518...
Emperor Charles V opened the trans-Atlantic slave trade on a massive scale on August 18, 1518 when he granted a charter to Lorenzo de Gorrevod, giving him permission to transport 4,000 slaves directly from Africa to the SPANISH AMERICAN colonies...
In 1518, Fernando and Isabel’s grandson, Emperor Charles V, abolished the provision requiring slaves to be born under Christian dominion, and issued a charter allowing 4,000 Africans to be purchased directly from Portuguese traders in the Cape Verde Islands and transported to the “New World”
The first slave ships presently known to have sailed with captives directly from Africa to the Americas embarked from the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé, arriving in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Cuba during the mid-1520s...
According to the Emory University Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database, by 1865, approximately 4,900,103 Africans had disembarked in Spanish Mainland Americas and the Caribbean...
This portrait of Charles was painted by Jan Mostaert in 1520...
Jan Mostaert was the court painter for Margerat of Austria, the aunt of Charles V...
Margerat of Austria commissioned him to paint portraits of the principal members of the imperial Court...
This panel Portrait of Charles V, painted by Jan Mostaert and dating approximately from the period 1520-30, is the earliest [extant] and only independent painted portrait of a so called black man in the Renaissance...
The BankGiro Loterij, the Mondriaan Stichting, Vereniging Rembrandt co-facilitated by Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the VSBfonds and the Rijksmuseum Fonds contributed towards the acquisition of the panel, purchased for € 600,000. ($667,000)
The rich clothing worn by Charles—the gloves, the sword and the embroidered bag point to Spanish-Portuguese origins and are evidence of the considerable status he had...
The insignia on his hat, of Our Lady of Halle (south of Brussels, where Burgundy and Hapsburg pilgrims journeyed), the sword and the fleur-de-lis on the embroidered bag are clues that provided more information about his true identity...
“Charles V was a swarthy man”
SOURCE;
(The Battle of Pavia, 24th February, 1525)
The word Swarthy or Swart derives from ‘Schwarz’ or ‘Schwartz’ which means “to be black; black man, and negro
SOURCE;
(Flügel-Schmidt-Tanger, a Dictionary of the English and German Languages for Home and School; 1905)
“Philip II was of an atrabilaire (melancholic) complexion. He derived it from his father Charles V”
SOURCE;
(Alexander Pope, “The works of Alexander Pope, with notes and illustrations, by himself and others”; 1770)
Atrabilaire is derived from the Latin ‘Atra Bilis’, meaning “Black Bile”
The word "melancholy" derives from Greek μέλαινα χολή (melaina kholé) meaning 'black bile'
“The Melancholic temperament , the reverse of the former , consists of dry , firm solids , accompanied with a swarthy complexion”
SOURCE;
(Thomas Jameson, “Essays on the Changes of the Human Body”; 1811)
“His [Carlos, Prince of Asturias] features were somewhat like those of his father Phillip II, his complexion was swarthy and sallow”
SOURCE;
(Eliakim Littell, Robert S. Littell, "Littell's Living Age - Volume 210"; 1896)
SALLOW, a. sāl’ lō [AS. salu, sallow: Bav. sal, discolored: Dut. zaluw, TAWNY]
Sallow means Tawny...
“The Fr. Tane, tanned, is also–swart, SALLOW, dusky, or tawney of hue”
Tawney or Tawny is derived from the French word Tanné which means Tan color or Brown...
“Tan or Tawny will be—the color of the chestnut”
SOURCE;
(Charles Richardson, “A New Dictionary of the English Language, Volume 2; 1855)
African American History
Meet George T. Sampson Black Man Who Invented America’s First Automatic Clothes Dryer
Published
7 months ago
on
July 18, 2021
By
Chuka Nduneseokwu
George T. Sampson was an African-American inventor best known for inventing the automatic clothes dryer in 1892 and receiving a patent for it in 1893. He also invented a propeller for a sled.
Sampson’s personal life, such as his childhood and education, is unknown. Even his birth date and location are disputed. Sampson was living in Dayton, Ohio, and had invented and patented a sled propeller when we first see him in the public light in 1885. It was a pedal-powered device that made snow travel easier.
Sampson was born in the city of Dayton, Ohio. His clothes drier (US patent #476,416) was a frame that hanged clothing above a burner to speed up drying. Prior to Sampson’s innovation, clothes dryers were invented in the form of ventilators, which were essentially barrels with holes in them, in England and France. Over a fire, the barrels would be turned by hand. Sampson’s design was likewise a ventilator, but it didn’t require an open flame and instead relied on frames rather than a barrel.
George T. Sampson is credited with laying the groundwork for today’s dryers. Electric clothes dryers did not exist until around 1915, and in 1938, the Hamilton Manufacturing Company built the first completely automatic drier.
The #312,388, which was Sampson’s other known sled propeller invention, was submitted in 1885 and concerned the attachment of a propelling device to a tricycle. To make it work in the snow, the wheels were replaced with runners. The propeller would be controlled by the sled’s occupants using pedals. The schematics for this and Sampson’s other patents are still on file with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Thanks
African American History
Meet George T. Sampson Black Man Who Invented America’s First Automatic Clothes Dryer
Published
7 months ago
on
July 18, 2021
By
Chuka Nduneseokwu
George T. Sampson was an African-American inventor best known for inventing the automatic clothes dryer in 1892 and receiving a patent for it in 1893. He also invented a propeller for a sled.
Sampson’s personal life, such as his childhood and education, is unknown. Even his birth date and location are disputed. Sampson was living in Dayton, Ohio, and had invented and patented a sled propeller when we first see him in the public light in 1885. It was a pedal-powered device that made snow travel easier.
Sampson was born in the city of Dayton, Ohio. His clothes drier (US patent #476,416) was a frame that hanged clothing above a burner to speed up drying. Prior to Sampson’s innovation, clothes dryers were invented in the form of ventilators, which were essentially barrels with holes in them, in England and France. Over a fire, the barrels would be turned by hand. Sampson’s design was likewise a ventilator, but it didn’t require an open flame and instead relied on frames rather than a barrel.
George T. Sampson is credited with laying the groundwork for today’s dryers. Electric clothes dryers did not exist until around 1915, and in 1938, the Hamilton Manufacturing Company built the first completely automatic drier.
The #312,388, which was Sampson’s other known sled propeller invention, was submitted in 1885 and concerned the attachment of a propelling device to a tricycle. To make it work in the snow, the wheels were replaced with runners. The propeller would be controlled by the sled’s occupants using pedals. The schematics for this and Sampson’s other patents are still on file with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
You can't efficiently oppress Black people without the help of Black people. Take this hoassnegro for example.
You know this punk was so proud of himself when he got up there and kissed whiteys' ass. It aint about him it's about the entire race as a whole.
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WASP's banned interracial marriage for 300 odd years in the United States. Yet folks like him are happy and proud to join & mix with ofays & every other group of people except Black people. Those types of people are far too plentiful these days
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