Tag: Black history month

Mildred “Candi” Thorpe

Mildred “Candi” Thorpe, tap dancer who was a member of the famed duet duo Candi and Pepper, was one of four children (two boys and two girls) born to William Thomas Thorpe, of African American and Native American heritage who migrated to Philadelphia in 1905 in the midst of the Great Migration; and Laura Decker Thorpe, of Pennsylvanian Dutch and African-American heritage. Young Thorpe attended Saint Peter Claver’s Parochial school and Auden Reed Junior High School, dropping out of school when she was in the ninth grade to pursue her dance career. Though she never went to dancing school, she saw performances at the Lincoln Theatre, a black vaudeville theater in Philadelphia, where she learned tap dance steps from such legendary hoofers as Bill Bailey, Derby Wilson, and Charles “Honi” Coles. After learning a step from Coles, he remarked, “I liked the way you did it better.” Around 1935 when she was sixteen, she joined a traveling troupe of eight tap dancers who performed in a carnival and billed as “Tally’s Minstrels”; the troupe performed songs and dances in blackface in a one-hour show held in a tent and part of the larger carnival tent show. In Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the owners deserted the carnival and ran off with the money, leaving Thorpe to return to Philadelphia to work as a solo performer in local nightclubs.

In 1939, while working at the Congo Club, Thorpe met her first dance partner, Jewel “Pepper” Welch; they performed their first engagement at Simm’s Paradise in Philadelphia as the tap dance team “Candi and Pepper.” In short time, their manager, Reiss DuPree, booked them at New York’s Apollo Theater, home to thousands of African-American performers. The Apollo was known for its fierce competitive spirit; an audience had the power to make or break careers. “Candi and Pepper” made their debut at the Apollo in 1941 as the opening act, on the same bill as Fats Waller and his band and comedy singers “Apus and Estrellita.” The master of ceremonies announced them: “Ladies and Gentlemen, we got two girls who are going to dance for you out of Philadelphia. Candi is sweet, Pepper is hot; come on girls show me what you’ve got.” As Thorpe remembered “We tore ‘em up. We tore ‘em up!” They were called back onstage for so many encores they ran out of routines. After their first performance they replaced “Stump and Stumpy” (who regularly closed the show) as the closing act, thereby gaining the highest billing. The Apollo success helped launch the team into an active performing career as they toured the East coast and Mid-West as featured performers with such musical stars as Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Erkstine Hawkins.

Candi and Pepper began their act with a jazz song, such as “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” to which they added some dance movement. Then Thorpe performed her rhythm tap dance solo to “I’ve Got Rhythm,” played in stop-time, allowing her to perform her rhythmic breaks without musical accompaniment. An improvisational dancer in the tradition of Baby Laurence, Teddy Hale, and Eddie Brown, she was comfortable expressing herself rhythmically, adding slides, wings, and trenches while dancing. “I’m an innovator,” she explained. “What I think is no particular sound or music that goes with it. I could just go out there and dance without music. It swings. It’s just a mover and a shaker.” “Pepper” Welch followed Thorpe with her expressive style of flash dancing. Tall, and with a beautiful style of moving, Welch added quick turns to her dancing, her jacket flowing around her body. “I played to the audience,” Welch recalled. “I looked to make each person think I was dancing for them.” They closed their act to “One O’Clock Jump,” performing trench steps and straddle splits jumps, in which they touched their toes, and their version of Russian-styled kazotsky kicks.

Thorpe was often complimented by predominantly male African-American tap dancers as being “that girl who could dance her ass off”: in the 1930s and 40s, that was considered the highest compliment a female dancer could receive, as it meant that this dancer’s skills incorporated swinging rhythmic phrases, some elements of surprise (flash, acrobatics, eccentric), and personal style. When the Candi and Pepper team broke apart in the early 1940s, 1944 to be exact. Thorpe remained in Chicago for a few years and thereafter retired from show business.

Written by Dianne Washington

John Henry Murphy

John Henry Murphy, Sr. was an African-American newspaper publisher, best known as founder of the Baltimore Afro-American (also known as The Afro), published by the Afro-American Newspaper Company of Baltimore, Inc. This newspaper is one of the oldest remaining family-owned newspapers in the U.S.

According to the 1860 United States Federal Census, Murphy was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Benjamin and Susan Murphy (nee Colby). He is popularly believed to have been enslaved until mustering into United States Colored Infantry’s 30th Regiment in Camp Stanton, Maryland in February 1864. He served as a non-commissioned officer.

In 1868 he married Martha Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the well-to-do African-American landowner, Enoch George Howard of Montgomery County, Maryland. Murphy and his wife had 11 children in all, 10 of whom survived to adulthood. After his death, several of his descendants led the paper over the course of several generations, including his grandson, John H. Murphy, III.

Using proceeds from a land sale by his wife, Murphy was able to acquire from Rev. Harry Bragg, Sr. the publication, The Afro-American, in 1892 and merge it with his pre-existing publications, The Sunday School Helper and The Ledger.

Little is known about Murphy before his service in the American Civil War, among the over 8,000 United States Colored Troops who mustered into regiments throughout the State of Maryland.

After the war, Murphy returned home and worked as a whitewasher, a trade he learned from his father. The development of wallpaper at prices available to the middle class made whitewashing obsolete. Murphy was appointed to the federal civil service in the postal service. He later worked in various jobs: as a porter, janitor, manager of a feed store, and manager of the printing department of the Afro-American,published by Rev. Harry Bragg Sr. for his church.

During these years, Murphy became active with Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, founded in Philadelphia in the early 19th century as the first black denomination in the United States. After being appointed as a District Sunday School Superintendent, Murphy used a manual printing press to produce a weekly church publication, the Sunday School Helper, to make copies of materials for students. In 1897 Murphy purchased the printing presses of the Afro-American at auction with $200 borrowed from his wife, who had sold land inherited from her father. He merged the Sunday School Helper with the Afro. In 1900, he acquired another newspaper, The Ledger, and renamed his paper as The Afro-American Ledger.

Murphy helped build the African-American community in Baltimore by sharing its news, pressing for civil rights, and reporting on abuses. At first his family worked unpaid for the paper. Later he had up to 100 employees. “He crusaded for racial justice while exposing racism in education, jobs, housing, and public accommodations. In 1913, he was elected president of the National Negro Press Association.”

Due to the economic and political power of blacks in Baltimore, who comprised a large community, and the activism of people like Murphy, the Maryland state legislature did not follow the example of other southern states and disenfranchise black voters at the turn of the century. African Americans struggled with discrimination in the city but maintained more freedom and political power than blacks in most other southern states.

His son Carl Murphy, by then having a doctorate from the University of Jena in Germany and serving as head of the German department at Howard University, returned to Baltimore in 1918 to work on the paper in his father’s last years. In 1922, after his father’s death, Carl J. Murphy was named as editor and publisher of the paper.

After John Henry Murphy’s death on April 5, 1922, his descendants led the newspaper over the course of the next generations, including son Carl J. Murphy for 45 years, and John’s grandson and namesake, John H. Murphy, III.

Written by Dianne Washington

African American

The term is celebrated on this date.

In August of 2005, an Ethiopian-born activist named Abdulaziz Kamus seemed to melt into the crowd; a sea of black professors, health experts and community leaders considering how to educate blacks about the dangers of prostate cancer. But when he piped up to suggest focusing some attention on African immigrants, the dividing lines were quickly and pointedly drawn.

The focus of the campaign, the activist, Kamus, was told, would be strictly on African-Americans. “He said, ‘but I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African-American?’ ““They said ‘No, no, no, not you.’ “The census is claiming me as an African-American,” said Kamus, who has lived in this country for 20 years.” If I walk down the streets, white people see me as an African-American. Yet African-Americans are saying, ‘You are not one of us.’ So I ask myself, in this country, how do I define myself?”

That thorny question is increasingly being raised as the growing number of foreign-born blacks in America inspires a quiet debate over who can claim the term “African-American,” which has rapidly replaced “black” in much of the nation’s political and cultural discourse. The demographic shifts, which gained strength in the 1960’s after changes in federal immigration law led to increased migration from Africa and Latin America, have been accompanied in some places by fears that newcomers might eclipse native-born blacks. And they have touched off delicate musings about ethnic labels, identity and the often unspoken differences among people who share the same skin color.

In the 1990’s, the number of blacks with recent roots in sub-Saharan Africa nearly tripled while the number of blacks with origins in the Caribbean grew by more than 60 percent, according to demographers at the State University of New York at Albany. By 2000, foreign-born blacks make up 30 percent of the blacks in New York City, 28 percent of the blacks in Boston and about a quarter in Montgomery County, Md. Recently, black immigrants and their children have become more visible in universities, the workplace and in politics, with Colin L. Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants, serving as secretary of state, and Barack Obama, born to a Kenyan father and an American mother, a United States Senator from Illinois and emerging as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

During the campaign, the debate spilled into public view when Alan Keyes, the black Republican challenger for the Senate seat in Illinois, questioned whether Mr. Obama, the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, should claim an African-American identity. “Barack Obama claims an African-American heritage,” Keyes said on the ABC program “This Week”. “Barack Obama and I have the same race that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the same heritage.” “My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country,” Mr. Keyes said. “My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage.”

Some black Americans argue that black immigrants, like Kamus, and the children of immigrants, like Mr. Obama and Mr. Powell, are most certainly African-American. (Mr. Obama and Mr. Powell often use that term when describing themselves.) Yet some immigrants and their children prefer to be called African or Nigerian-American or Jamaican-American, depending on their countries of origin. Other people prefer the term black, which seems to include everyone, regardless of nationality. Keyes’s comments reflect the views of a number of black Americans, including those who challenged Kamus at the meeting on prostate cancer.

Many argued that the term African-American should refer to the descendants of slaves brought to the United States centuries ago, not to newcomers who have not inherited the legacy of bondage, segregation and legal discrimination. Dr. Bobby Austin, an administrator at the University of the District of Columbia understood why some blacks were offended when Mr. Kamus claimed an African-American identity. Dr. Austin said some people feared that black immigrants and their children would snatch up the hard-won opportunities made possible by the civil rights movement.

Several studies suggest that black immigrants and their children are already achieving at higher levels than native-born blacks. A study based on 2000 census data conducted by John R. Logan and Glenn Deane at SUNY Albany found that African immigrants typically had more education and higher middle incomes than native-born blacks. Officials at Harvard pointed out that the majority of their black students perhaps as many two-thirds — were African and Caribbean immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. Sociologists say foreign-born blacks from majority-black countries are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race. Many arrive with higher levels of education and professional experience. And sociologists say they often encounter less discrimination.

“We’ve suffered so much that we’re a bit weary and immigration seems like one more hurdle we will have to climb,” said Dr. Austin, who traces his ancestors back to slavery. “People are asking: ‘Will I have to climb over these immigrants to get to my dream? Will my children have to climb?’ “These are very aggressive people who are coming here,” said Dr. Austin, who is calling for a frank dialog between native-born and foreign-born blacks. “I don’t berate immigrants for that; they have given up a lot to get here. But we’re going to be in competition with them. We have to be honest about it. That is one of the dividing lines.”

Obama said such arguments do not reflect the views of black Americans who have joined forces over the years with Africans and people from the Caribbean to fight colonialism and poverty. He said black descendants of slaves share more similarities than differences with black immigrants and their children. Obama says his grandfather worked as a servant in Kenya and was called a “house boy” by whites even when he was a middle-aged man. Obama also said, “Some of the patterns of struggle and degradation that blacks here in the United States experienced aren’t that different from the colonial experience in the Caribbean or the African continent,” “For me the term African-American really does fit,” said Obama. “I’m African, I trace half of my heritage to Africa directly and I’m American.”

Shifting ethnic labels have long inspired fierce debates and discussions among blacks in this country, reflecting changes in socioeconomic circumstances, political strategies and evolving views of identity since Africans were first brought here as slaves. Michael Thornton, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin who has studied the issue said the term “African” was used sporadically during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 1800’s, “colored” started gaining popularity because it was viewed as more inclusive referring to those of mixed-race as well as full African heritage. In the 1890 census, for instance, blacks were asked to choose among four ethnic labels: black, mulatto, quadroon and octoroon, depending upon the degree of white blood in their ancestry.

In the 20th century, many black Americans shifted from colored to Negro to black and, most recently, to African-American, sometimes within one generation. “I’ve had to check several different boxes in my lifetime,” said Donna Brazile, former Democratic campaign manager in the 2000 presidential race. “In my birth certificate I’m identified as a Negro. Then I was black. Now I readily check African-American. I have a group of friends and we call ourselves the colored girls sometimes, to remind ourselves that we aren’t too far from that, either.” The term African-American has crept steadily into the nation’s vocabulary since 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson held a news conference to urge Americans to use it to refer to blacks. “It puts us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said then, adding in a recent interview that he still favored the term. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”

Polls show the number of blacks using the term has steadily increased. In a survey that year conducted by ABC and The Washington Post, 66 percent said they preferred the term black, 22 preferred African-American, 10 percent liked both terms and 2 percent had no opinion. In 2000, the Census Bureau for the first time allowed respondents to check a box that carried the heading African-American next to the term black. In 2003, a poll by the same news organizations found that 48 percent of blacks preferred the term African-American, 35 percent favored black and 17 percent liked both terms. The term has become such a fixture in the political dictionary that many white politicians, including President Bush and Senator John Kerry, his Democratic rival in 2004, favored it in their political speeches. Yet Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who is white, has referred to herself on occasion as an African-American. She was born to Portuguese parents in Mozambique.

Many whites use the term for all blacks. But among blacks there is much less agreement, particularly in places like Maryland where Africans, Haitians and Dominicans mingle in the town’s coffee shops, nightclubs and beauty salons, or in neighboring Washington, where the City Council voted this year to include the Ethiopian language Amharic as an official language to accommodate the growing Ethiopian community. Even adherents of African-American acknowledge that shifting demographics have made the term’s meaning more unclear. “It’s a comfortable term for me personally and for people like me who are of African descent and have been in this nation for a long time,” said Michael Lomax, the president of the United Negro College Fund, which raises money for 38 historically black colleges. “But it gets more confusing when you recognize that this nation is full of all kinds of people of African descent.” “It’s a much richer and more complex variety than when we started asserting that we were African-American,” said Lomax, who argues that recent black immigrants from the Caribbean and elsewhere should feel free to use the term.

Foreign-born blacks are also divided. Angelique Shofar, the Liberian-born host of a weekly radio program in Washington called “Africa Meets Africa,” prefers to call herself an African, even though she has lived in the United States for 28 of her 39 years. Phillip J. Brutus, the first Haitian-born state legislator in Florida, favors the term black because it includes foreign-born immigrants and black Americans. Brutus lives in Miami, where more than a third of the blacks are foreign born. “African-American has become the politically correct term to use, but I still say black,” Brutus said. “I say I’m black and American. That’s what’s most accurate. I think, by and large, black is more encompassing.”

Additionally, younger Africans and African Americans are not bonding as well as group elders would want many years after immigration. The African American Registry views these issues as preconceived stereotypes from both groups towards each other. Also many African American youths do not respect the daily religious beliefs and practices that Africans bring with them. In Maryland, Mr. Kamus is still searching for the right label. He says he would like to be described simply as a universal man, but he knows that the United States, like many countries, has a long history of categorizing its people. And he would like to find a way of stitching his twin identities, one Ethiopian, one American into a whole.

With that in mind, Mr. Kamus and some of his Ethiopian-born friends plan to sit down with Dr. Austin and his American-born friends over a meal of savory meats and Ethiopian bread. They want to start a dialog about their similarities, their differences and issues of identity at a time of demographic change. “We are in a critical stage of defining ourselves, who we are as Americans,” Mr. Kamus said of African immigrants and their children here. “But one thing is clear. We are here and we are not going home. This is our home now. That is the reality.”

Written by Dianne Washington

Sarah Breedlove

Sarah Breedlove (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919), known as Madam C. J. Walker, was an African American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a political and social activist. Eulogized as the first female self-made millionaire in America, she became one of the wealthiest African American women in the country, “the world’s most successful female entrepreneur of her time,” and one of the most successful African-American business owners ever.

Walker made her fortune by developing and marketing a line of beauty and hair products for black women through Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the successful business she founded. Walker was also known for her philanthropy and activism. She made financial donations to numerous organizations and became a patron of the arts. Villa Lewaro, Walker’s lavish estate in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, served as a social gathering place for the African American community.

Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867, near Delta, Louisiana, to Owen and Minerva (Anderson) Breedlove. Sarah was one of six children, which included an older sister, Louvenia, and four brothers: Alexander, James, Solomon, and Owen Jr. Breedlove’s parents and her older siblings were enslaved on Robert W. Burney’s Madison Parish plantation, but Sarah was the first child in her family born into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Her mother died, possibly from cholera, in 1872; her father remarried, but he died within a few years. Orphaned at the age of seven, Sarah moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the age of ten and worked as a domestic. Prior to her first marriage, she lived with her older sister, Louvenia, and brother-in-law, Jesse Powell.

In 1882, at the age of fourteen, Sarah married Moses McWilliams, possibly to escape mistreatment from her brother-in-law. Sarah and Moses had one daughter, Lelia McWilliams, born on June 6, 1885. When Moses died in 1887, Sarah was twenty; Lelia was two years old. Sarah remarried in 1894, but left her second husband, John Davis, around 1903 and moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1905.

In January 1906, Sarah married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman she had known in Missouri. Through this marriage, she became known as Madam C. J. Walker. The couple divorced in 1912; Charles died in 1926. Lelia McWilliams adopted her stepfather’s surname and became known as A’Lelia Walker.

In 1888 Sarah and her daughter moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, where three of her brothers lived. Sarah found work as a laundress, barely earning more than a dollar a day, but she was determined to make enough money to provide her daughter with a formal education. During the 1880s, Breedlove lived in a community where ragtime music was developed—she sang at the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church and started to yearn for an educated life as she watched the community of women at her church. As was common among black women of her era, Sarah experienced severe dandruff and other scalp ailments, including baldness, due to skin disorders and the application of harsh products such as lye that were included in soaps to cleanse hair and wash clothes. Other contributing factors to her hair loss included poor diet, illnesses, and infrequent bathing and hair washing during a time when most Americans lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity.

Initially, Sarah learned about hair care from her brothers, who were barbers in Saint Louis. Around the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World’s Fair at St. Louis in 1904), she became a commission agent selling products for Annie Turnbo Malone, an African American hair-care entrepreneur and owner of the Poro Company. While working for Malone, who would later become Walker’s largest rival in the hair-care industry, Sarah began to adapt her knowledge of hair and hair products to develop her own product line.

In July 1905, when she was thirty-seven years old, Sarah and her daughter moved to Denver, Colorado, where she continued to sell products for Malone and develop her own hair-care business. Following her marriage to Charles Walker in 1906, she became known as Madam C. J. Walker and marketed herself as an independent hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. (“Madam” was adopted from women pioneers of the French beauty industry.) Her husband, who was also her business partner, provided advice on advertising and promotion; Sarah sold her products door to door, teaching other black women how to groom and style their hair.

In 1906 Walker put her daughter in charge of the mail order operation in Denver while she and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern United States to expand the business. In 1908 Walker and her husband relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they opened a beauty parlor and established Lelia College to train “hair culturists.” After closing the business in Denver in 1907, A’lelia ran the day-to-day operations from Pittsburgh, while Walker established a new base in Indianapolis in 1910. A’lelia also persuaded her mother to establish an office and beauty salon in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in 1913.

In 1910 Walker relocated her business to Indianapolis, where she established the headquarters for the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. She initially purchased a house and factory at 640 North West Street. Walker later built a factory, hair salon, and beauty school to train her sales agents, and added a laboratory to help with research. She also assembled a competent staff that included Freeman Ransom, Robert Lee Brokenburr, Alice Kelly, and Marjorie Stewart Joyner, among others, to assist in managing the growing company. Many of her company’s employees, including those in key management and staff positions, were women.

To increase her company’s sales force, Walker trained other women to become “beauty culturists” using “The Walker System”, her method of grooming that was designed to promote hair growth and to condition the scalp through the use of her products. Walker’s system included a shampoo, a pomade stated to help hair grow, strenuous brushing, and applying iron combs to hair. This method claimed to make lackluster and brittle hair become soft and luxurious Walker’s product line had several competitors. Similar products were produced in Europe and manufactured by other companies in the United States, which included her major rivals, Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro System and later, Sarah Spencer Washington’s Apex System.

Between 1911 and 1919, during the height of her career, Walker and her company employed several thousand women as sales agents for its products. By 1917 the company claimed to have trained nearly 20,000 women. Dressed in a characteristic uniform of white shirts and black skirts and carrying black satchels, they visited houses around the United States and in the Caribbean offering Walker’s hair pomade and other products packaged in tin containers carrying her image. Walker understood the power of advertising and brand awareness. Heavy advertising, primarily in African American newspapers and magazines, in addition to Walker’s frequent travels to promote her products, helped make Walker and her products well known in the United States. Walker became even more widely known by the 1920s as her business market expanded beyond the United States to Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Panama, and Costa Rica.

In addition to training in sales and grooming, Walker showed other black women how to budget, build their own businesses, and encouraged them to become financially independent. In 1917, inspired by the model of the National Association of Colored Women, Walker began organizing her sales agents into state and local clubs. The result was the establishment of the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents (predecessor to the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Culturists Union of America). Its first annual conference convened in Philadelphia during the summer of 1917 with 200 attendees. The conference is believed to have been among the first national gatherings of women entrepreneurs to discuss business and commerce. During the convention Walker gave prizes to women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new sales agents. She also rewarded those who made the largest contributions to charities in their communities.

As Walker’s wealth and notoriety increased, she became more vocal about her views. In 1912 Walker addressed an annual gathering of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) from the convention floor, where she declared: “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground.” The following year she addressed convention-goers from the podium as a keynote speaker.

Walker helped raise funds to establish a branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Indianapolis’s black community, pledging $1,000 to the building fund for the Senate Avenue YMCA. Walker also contributed scholarship funds to the Tuskegee Institute. Other beneficiaries included Indianapolis’s Flanner House and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church; Mary McLeod Bethune’s Daytona Education and Industrial School for Negro Girls (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach, Florida; the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina; and the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Georgia. Walker was also a patron of the arts.

About 1913 Walker’s daughter, A’Lelia, moved to a new townhouse in Harlem, and in 1916 Walker joined her in New York, leaving the day-to-day operation of her company to her management team in Indianapolis. In 1917 Walker commissioned Vertner Tandy, the first licensed black architect in New York City and a founding member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, to design her house in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Walker intended for Villa Lewaro, which cost $250,000 to build, to become a gathering place for community leaders and to inspire other African Americans to purse their dreams. She moved into the house in May 1918 and hosted an opening event to honor Emmett Jay Scott, at that time the Assistant Secretary for Negro Affairs of the U.S. Department of War.

Walker became more involved in political matters after her move to New York. She delivered lectures on political, economic, and social issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. Her friends and associates included Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. During World War I Walker was a leader in the Circle For Negro War Relief and advocated for the establishment of a training camp for black army officers. In 1917 she joined the executive committee of New York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which organized the Silent Protest Parade on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. The public demonstration drew more than 8,000 African Americans to protest a riot in East Saint Louis that killed thirty-nine African Americans.

Profits from her business significantly impacted Walker’s contributions to her political and philanthropic interests. In 1918 the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC) honored Walker for making the largest individual contribution to help preserve Frederick Douglass’s Anacostia house. Prior to her death in 1919, Walker pledged $5,000 (the equivalent of about $65,000 in 2012) to the NAACP’s antilynching fund. At the time it was the largest gift from an individual that the NAACP had ever received. Walker bequeathed nearly $100,000 to orphanages, institutions, and individuals; her will directed two-thirds of future net profits of her estate to charity.

Walker died on May 25, 1919, from kidney failure and complications of hypertension at the age of fifty-one. Walker’s remains are interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.

At the time of her death Walker was considered to be the wealthiest African American woman in America. She was eulogized as the first female self-made millionaire in America, but Walker’s estate was only worth an estimated $600,000 (approximately $8 million in present-day dollars) upon her death. According to Walker’s New York Times obituary, “she said herself two years ago [in 1917] that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time.” Her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, became the president of the Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.

Walker’s personal papers are preserved at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis. Her legacy also continues through two properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places: Villa Lewaro in Irvington, New York, and the Madame Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis. Villa Lewaro was sold following A’Lelia Walker’s death to a fraternal organization called the Companions of the Forest in America in 1932. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has designated the privately-owned property a National Treasure. Indianapolis’s Walker Manufacturing Company headquarters building, renamed the Madame Walker Theatre Center, opened in December 1927; it included the company’s offices and factory as well as a theater, beauty school, hair salon and barbershop, restaurant, drugstore, and a ballroom for the community. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

In 2006, playwright and director Regina Taylor wrote The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, recounting the history of Walker’s struggles and success. The play premiered at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Actress L. Scott Caldwell played the role of Walker.

On March 4, 2016, skincare and haircare company Sundial Brands launched a collaboration with Sephora in honor of Walker’s legacy. The launch, titled “Madam C.J. Walker Beauty Culture”, comprised four collections and focused on the use of natural ingredients to care for different types of hair.

Written by Dianne Washington

Frank Morgan

Frank Morgan (December 23, 1933 – December 14, 2007) was a jazz saxophonist with a career spanning more than 50 years. He mainly played alto saxophone but also played soprano saxophone. He was known as a Charlie Parker successor who primarily played bebop and ballads.

Frank Morgan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1933, but spent most of his childhood living with his grandmother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin while his parents were on tour. Morgan’s father Stanley was a guitarist with Harlan Leonard and the Rockets and The Ink Spots, and his mother, Geraldine, was a 14-year-old student when she gave birth to him. Morgan took up his father’s instrument at an early age, but lost interest the moment he saw Charlie Parker take his first solo with the Jay McShann band at the Paradise Theater in Detroit, Michigan. Stanley introduced them backstage, where Parker offered Morgan advice about starting out on the alto sax, and they met at a music store the following day. Morgan, seven years old at the time, assumed they’d be picking out a saxophone, but Parker suggested he start on the clarinet to develop his embouchure. Morgan practiced on the clarinet for about two years before acquiring a soprano sax, and finally, an alto. Morgan moved to live with his father (by that time divorced) in Los Angeles, California at the age of 14, after his grandmother caught him with marijuana.

As a teenager Morgan had opportunities to jam with the likes of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray on Sunday afternoons at the Crystal Tearoom. When he was just 15 years old, Morgan was offered Johnny Hodges’s spot in Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, but Stanley deemed him too young for touring. Instead he joined the house band at Club Alabam where he backed vocal luminaries such as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. That same year he won a television talent-show contest, the prize of which was a recording session with the Freddy Martin Orchestra, playing “Over the Rainbow” in an arrangement by Ray Conniff, with vocals by Merv Griffin. Morgan attended Jefferson High School during the day, where he played in the school big band that also spawned jazz greats Art Farmer, Ed Thigpen, Chico Hamilton, Sonny Criss, and Dexter Gordon. Morgan stayed in contact with Parker during these years, finding himself in jam sessions at Hollywood celebrities’ homes when Parker visited L.A. In 1952, Morgan earned a spot in Lionel Hampton’s band, but his first arrest in 1953 prevented him from joining the Clifford Brown and Max Roach quintet (that role went instead to Harold Land, and later, Sonny Rollins). He made his recording debut on February 20, 1953 with Teddy Charles and his West Coasters in a session for Prestige Records. This sextet featured short-lived tenor player Wardell Gray and was included on the 1983 posthumous release Wardell Gray Memorial Volume 1. On November 1, 1954, Morgan cut five tracks with the Kenny Clarke Sextet for Savoy Records, four of which were released with Clarke billed as the leader, with “I’ve Lost Your Love” credited to writer Milt Jackson as leader. Morgan recorded an all-star date with Wild Bill Davis and Conte Candoli on January 29, 1955 and participated in a second recording session on March 31, 1955 with Candoli, Wardell Gray, Leroy Vinnegar and others, which were combined and released in 1955 as Morgan’s first album, Frank Morgan, by GNP Crescendo Record Co.. Later releases also included five tracks cut at the Crescendo Club in L.A. on August 11, 1956 with a sextet featuring Bobby Timmons and Jack Sheldon. The album copy hailed Morgan as the new Charlie Parker, who had died the same year. In his own words, Morgan was “scared to death” by this and “self-destructed.”

Following in the footsteps of Parker, Morgan had started taking heroin at 17, subsequently became addicted, and spent much of his adult life in and out of prison. Morgan supported his drug habit through check forgery and fencing stolen property. His first drug arrest came in 1955, the same year his debut album was released, and Morgan landed in San Quentin State Prison in 1962, where he formed a small ensemble with another addict and sax player, Art Pepper. His final incarceration, for which Morgan had turned himself in on a parole violation, ended on December 7, 1986. Though he stayed off heroin for the last two decades of his life, Morgan took methadone daily.

Fresh out of prison in April, 1985, Morgan started recording again, releasing Easy Living on Contemporary Records that June. Morgan performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 21, 1986, and turned down an offer to play Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s film Bird (Forest Whitaker took his place). He made his New York debut in December 1986 at the Village Vanguard, and collaborated with George W.S. Trow on Prison-Made Tuxedos, a semi-autobiographical Off-Broadway play which included live music by the Frank Morgan Quartet (featuring Ronnie Mathews, Walter Booker, and Victor Lewis). His 1990 album Mood Indigo went to number four on the Billboard jazz chart. Morgan suffered a stroke in 1998, but subsequently recovered, recording and performing during the last four years of his life. HighNote Records eventually released three albums worth of material from a three-night stand at the Jazz Standard in New York City in November, 2003. Morgan also participated in the 2004 Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Tompkins Square Park.

After moving to Minneapolis in the fall of 2005, Morgan headlined the 2006 Twin Cities Hot Summer Jazz Festival and played duets with Ronnie Mathews at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis and George Cables at the Artists’ Quarter in St. Paul. Morgan also performed at the 2006 East Coast Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C., and on the West Coast at Yoshi’s and the Catalina. His last gig in Minneapolis featured Grace Kelly, Irv Williams, and Peter Schimke at the Dakota on July 1, 2007. For one of Morgan’s final recordings, he composed and recorded music for the audiobook adaptation of Michael Connelly’s crime novel The Overlook (2007), providing brief unaccompanied sax solos at the beginning and end of the book, and between chapters.

Shortly before his death, Morgan completed his first tour of Europe.

Frank Morgan died in Minneapolis on Friday, December 14, 2007 from complications due to colorectal cancer, two days before his 74th birthday. A memorial service featuring members of Morgan’s family and a performance by Irv Williams was held at the Artists’ Quarter on Sunday, December 23.

Warren “Baby” Dodds

Warren “Baby” Dodds (December 24, 1898 – February 14, 1959) was a jazz drummer born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is regarded as one of the very best jazz drummers of the pre-big band era, and one of the most important early jazz drummers. He varied his drum patterns with accents and flourishes, and he generally kept the beat with the bass drum while playing buzz rolls on the snare. Some of his early influences included Louis Cottrell, Sr., Harry Zeno, Henry Martin, and Tubby Hall. Dodds was among the first drummers to be recorded who improvised while performing.

“Baby” Dodds was the younger brother of clarinetist Johnny Dodds. His mother, who died when he was nine years old, taught him valuable lessons about persistence and putting one’s whole effort into endeavors, and he carried these with him through his career as a jazz drummer. He was born into a very musical family. His father and uncle played violin and his sister played harmonica. In addition, his father was religious and the family regularly sang hymns together. Dodds, in his autobiography The Baby Dodds Story, told the story of making his first drum: “I took a lard can and put holes in the bottom and turned it over and took nails and put holes around the top of it. Then I took some rounds out of my mother’s chairs and made drumsticks out of them”. At age 16, Dodds saved up enough money to buy his own drum set. Although Dodds had several paid teachers during his early years as a drummer, various jazz drummers around New Orleans also influenced him. He started playing in street parades around New Orleans with Bunk Johnson and his band and then got a job playing in Willie Hightower’s band, the American Stars.

The band played in various venues around New Orleans, and Dodds recalls hearing many musicians along the way, including Buddy Bolden, John Robichaux, and Jelly Roll Morton. He played with several different outfits including those of Frankie Duson and Sonny Celestin, and he was part of the New Orleans tradition of playing jazz during funeral marches. Dodds describes this experience in his autobiography: “The jazz played after New Orleans funerals didn’t show any lack of respect for the person being buried. It rather showed their people that we wanted them to be happy”.

Dodds gained reputation as a top young drummer in New Orleans. In 1918, Dodds left Sonny Celestin’s outfit to play in Fate Marable’s riverboat band. A young Louis Armstrong also joined the band, and the two of them were on the boats for three years (from 1918 to 1921). The band played on four different boats, and usually left New Orleans in May and travel to St. Louis, though they also sometimes traveled further north. They played jazz, popular, and classical music while on the boats.

Dodds and Armstrong left Fate Marable’s band in 1921 due to a disagreement about musical style, and Dodds soon joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. At this time, the personnel in Oliver’s band were Joe “King” Oliver on cornet, Baby Dodds’ brother Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Davey Jones on alto saxophone, Honoré Dutrey on trombone, Lil Hardin on piano, Jimmie Palao on violin, and Eddie Garland on bass fiddle.

They moved to California in 1921 to work with Oliver there, and they played together for about fifteen months. In 1922, the band, excepting Garland, Palao, and Jones, followed Oliver to Chicago, which would be his base of operations for several years. They began playing at the Lincoln Gardens, and Louis Armstrong also joined this outfit. Dodds describes playing with this band as “a beautiful experience”. Dodds recorded with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Art Hodes, and his brother Johnny Dodds. Dodds played in Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven groups. In May 1927 Armstrong recorded with the Hot Seven, which consisted of Johnny Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr, Lil Hardin Armstrong, John Thomas, Pete Briggs, and Baby Dodds. From September to December 1927 the Hot Five Armstrong assembled consisted of Johnny Dodds, Kid Ory, Johnny St. Cyr, Lonnie Johnson, and Baby Dodds.

After the Oliver band broke up, the Dodds brothers played at Burt Kelley’s Stables in Chicago, and soon after, Johnny Dodds began leading his own outfit, of which Baby was a part. Johnny Dodds died of a stroke in 1940. Of his brother, Baby Dodds said the following: “There just couldn’t be another Johnny Dodds or anyone to take his place. And his passing on made a big difference in my life. I had been connected with him for many years and from then on I had to be wholly on my own”.

After his brother’s death, Baby Dodds worked mostly as a freelance drummer around Chicago. This was the time of the New Orleans Revival, which was a movement in response to the emerging style of bebop. Many jazz traditionalists wanted jazz to return to its roots during this time. Dodds, having remained a New Orleans style drummer untouched by the influence of swing, found himself playing a role in the New Orleans jazz revival. In 1941, he played with Jimmie Noone and his band for a short time. This band featured Mada Roy on piano, Noone on clarinet, Bill Anderson on bass, and Dodds on drums. Dodds stayed with this outfit for only three months before they went to California, while Dodds decided to stay in Chicago. In the late 1940s he worked at Jimmy Ryan’s in New York City. On some of his trips back to New Orleans, he recorded with Bunk Johnson. Dodds ended up playing with Johnson’s band in New York. Dodds described his impressions of New York as a place where people listened to jazz rather than danced to it: “When I first went to New York it seemed very strange to have people sitting around and listening rather than dancing. In a way it was similar to theatre work. But it was peculiar for me because I always felt as though I was doing something for the people if they danced to the music”. After playing with several outfits in New York, he joined Mezz Mezzrow’s group on a tour of Europe in 1948 that lasted eight weeks. The group ended up playing solely in France, and Dodds had a great experience, saying that Europeans “take our kind of music much more seriously than they do in our own country”. They played at the Nice Festival along with Rex Stewart, Louis Armstrong, and several other American jazz musicians. Dodds returned to Chicago after the European tour and while taking a trip to New York in April 1949, he suffered a stroke. In 1950 he had his second stroke and in 1952 suffered a third. After his three strokes, Dodds tutored and played in public as much as he could, though he was unable to complete entire performances. He died on February 14, 1959 in Chicago.

Written by Dianne Washington

Seminole Indians

On this date in 1831, during the Second Seminole War, a force of Seminole Indians defeated U.S. troops in the Battle of Okeechobee in Florida.

Chief John Horse (a Black man) shared command with Alligator Sam Jones and Wild Cat. Blacks had a reputation as “fearless” fighters in the numerous battles with U.S. troops. Blacks also served with the American troops as scouts, interpreters, and even spies. In 1849, the U.S. attorney general’s office ruled that Black Seminoles were slaves by law. The U.S. government actively promoted slavery among relocated Native American tribes.

Even tribes who had never practiced slavery before were encouraged to do so. It was in the same year that John Horse founded the city of Wewoka in Oklahoma. It served as a refuge for runaway slaves.

Written by Dianne Washington

Willie Reed

Willie Reed did not know Emmett Till, the young black man whose murder in the Mississippi Delta became one of the most infamous lynchings in the history of the Jim Crow South. Mr. Reed saw him only once — on Aug. 28, 1955, during the last hours of Till’s life — in the back of a green and white Chevrolet pickup truck.

Mr. Reed, an African American sharecropper, risked his life at 18 to appear as a surprise witness in the prosecution of the white men accused of the crime. He became the momentary hero of the Till trial, an event that helped spur the civil rights movement but left a moral stain on the American legal system.

Mr. Reed died July 18, 2013 at a hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. He was 76, and he had lived in Chicago under a different name — first in secrecy and later in relative obscurity — since fleeing Mississippi for his safety nearly 60 years ago. For decades, he had worked as a hospital orderly.

Written by Dianne Washington

Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert

Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert (December 24, 1853 – c. 1890) was an African-American author and biographer. She documented slavery in the United States through a collection of interviews with ex-slaves in her book The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. She was a Black teacher and writer.

Octavia Victoria Rogers was born in Oglethorpe, Georgia, where she lived in slavery until the Emancipation. Like millions of freed blacks, she had a deep yearning for learning and eventually she studied to be a teacher at Atlanta University. This steady young woman was as serious about being a stalwart Christian as she was about being a sterling teacher. While still living in Oglethorpe, she joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was led by the legendary Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.

Like many of her contemporaries, Rogers saw teaching as a form of worship and Christian service. Her first teaching job was in Montezuma, Georgia. There, in 1874, she married another teacher at this school, A.E.P. Albert, who later became an ordained minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Soon after their marriage, the Alberts moved to Houma, Louisiana, where she began conducting interviews with men and women who were once enslaved. These interviews were the raw material for what became her gifted collection of narratives, “The House of Bondage,” or “Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves.” Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert did not live to see “The House of Bondage” reach the public.

It was shortly after her death in 1890 that the New Orleans-based Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper, the “Southwestern Christian Advocate” serialized the work from January to December 1890.

Written by Dianne Washington

Jabbo Smith

Jabbo Smith, born as Cladys Smith (December 24, 1908 – January 16, 1991) was an American jazz musician, known for his virtuoso playing on the trumpet.

Jabbo Smith was born in Pembroke, Georgia. He was the son of a barber and a church organist. After his father died, Smith and his mother moved to Savannah when he was four. His mother found it increasingly difficult to care for him and at age six he was placed into the Jenkins Orphanage Home in Charleston, but she found employment in the Home in order to be near to him.

The Jenkins Home placed heavy emphasis on music education and it was in this setting that Smith took up trumpet and trombone at the age of eight and began touring the country with a student band at the age of ten.

Smith left The Jenkins Home at the age of 16 and headed north to make his mark on music. He kept a promise to his mother never to work for less than $100 dollars a week. Smith found employment in a number of top bands, the most important of which were Charlie Johnson’s Paradise Ten. This group included arranger Benny Carter on alto and Duke Ellington. Smith played on the 1927 recording of Black and Tan Fantasy. He turned down an offer to join the Ellington Orchestra that same year because of money.

Smith was stranded in Chicago in 1929 while on the road with “Keep Shufflin'” following the gangland killing of Arnold Rothstein, the financier of the show. Smith then formed his Rhythm Aces, a quintet with whom he recorded nineteen songs in 1929. These works attracted the attention of Roy Eldridge, who adopted some of Smith’s speed into his own playing. Toward the end of the 1930s, Smith gradually withdrew from serious music activity. He led a group for a while at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and gigged in a Newark club called the Alcazar.

It was there that he encouraged a 17-year-old Newark singer who sat in at the Alcazar from time to time to enter a talent show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She won and got her start. The Singer, The Divine One, was Sarah Vaughn.

From there Smith moved to Milwaukee where he married, did some local playing, and enjoyed the security of a steady job with a car rental agency, fading away into quiet oblivion for 20 years. Around 1960, Smith recorded two albums, and in 1979, was a guest artist in the musical One Mo’ Time.

He also made appearances at several jazz festivals, toured Europe, and performed at the West End Cafe, the Bottom Line, and the Village Vanguard, all in New York. One of his last public performances was in Berlin in 1986.

Jabbo Smith died in January of 1991 at age 82.

Written by Dianne Washington