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Saluting the poets and spoken word artists that have filled us with pride. (Photography by Shawn Theodore)

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https://www.rosesharonoates.com

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You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

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Still I Rise by Maya Angelou | Poetry Foundation

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I celebrate Lawrence Brownlee, one of our best tenors today with amazing operatic technique and stage presence. I have had the honor to watch his prodigious performance live at the Metropolitan Opera and San Francisco Opera. Enjoy this duet of him and American tenor Michael Spyres. I suggest that everyone should see Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
-Natty Hamilton

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Lawrence Brownlee, Michael Spyres – Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia: "All'idea di quel metallo"

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John T. Biggers (1975)

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Kehinde Wiley, the Artist Behind Barack Obama's Portrait

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Kehinde Wiley, the Artist Behind Barack Obama's Portrait

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"Not only did Obama become the first African-American president to have a portrait hang in the National Portrait Gallery, but Wiley became the first African-American artist to paint an official presidential portrait."

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3 Things to Know About Kehinde Wiley, the Artist Behind Barack Obama's New Portrait

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Kehinde Wiley painted former President Barack Obama's official portrait. He's an African-American artist who is based in New York.

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A Black culture treasure hunt throughout the City of Oakland that encourages foot traffic and patronage to landmarks, art installations, and locally owned businesses.

Organized by Black Joy Parade, a "hyper-positive non-profit based in Oakland, CA that celebrates the Black experience and community's contribution to history and culture" (https://www.blackjoyparade.org)

The treasure hunt can be completed any time during Black History Month. Plus, prizes to a select number of winners!

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Embark on a Black culture treasure hunt throughout the City of Oakland featuring landmarks, art installations, and locally owned businesses

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Dr. Selma Burke Renowned for FDR Portrait on the Dime

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Dr. Selma Burke Renowned for FDR Portrait on the Dime

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"Burke’s most famous work, a portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that now graces the dime, came about from a competition to sculpt the president for the Recorder of Deeds Office in Washington, D.C. After feeling like she couldn’t capture the likeness of Roosevelt from photographs, Burke wrote the White House and, to her surprise, was granted a sitting with the president."

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On December 31, 1900, renowned sculptor Selma Burke was born in Mooresville.

Fascinated by African ritual objects and other sculptural pieces, Burke made sculpture by shaping white clay from her parents' farm as a child. After being educated at what is now Winston-Salem State University and trained as a nurse at St. Agnes Hospital Nursing School in Raleigh, Burke moved to New York City to work as a private nurse.

Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance movement emerging around her, Burke began to focus on art. In 1938, she studied with Aristide Maillol and Henri Matisse in Europe after earning both Rosenwald and Boehler Foundation Fellowships.

After completing an M.F.A. at Columbia University in 1941, Burke began to teach art, first at the Harlem Community Art Center and later at schools she founded in New York and Pittsburgh.

Burke's most famous work, a portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that now graces the dime, came about from a competition to sculpt the president for the Recorder of Deeds Office in Washington, D.C. After feeling like she couldn't capture the likeness of Roosevelt from photographs, Burke wrote the White House and, to her surprise, was granted a sitting with the president.

Eleanor Roosevelt later visited Burke's studio to view the finished plaque. Though officially credited to U.S. Mint Chief Engraver John Sinnock, scholars believe that Sinnock borrowed Burke's original design.

Burke's last monumental work, a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. that graces Marshall Park in Charlotte, was completed in 1980.

She died in New Hope, Pa. in 1995.

For more about North Carolina's history, arts, nature and culture, visit DNCR online. To receive these updates automatically each day, make sure you subscribe by email using the box on the right, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Selma Burke, Renowned for FDR Portrait on the Dime

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On December 31, 1900, renowned sculptor Selma Burke was born in Mooresville. Fascinated by African ritual objects and other sculptural pieces, Burke made sculpture by shaping white clay from her parents' farm as a child. After being educated at what is now Winston-Salem State University and trained as a nurse at St.

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Simone Biles: First double-double dismount on beam in competition

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Simone Biles: First double-double dismount on beam in competition

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"Simone Biles shook the world as she made history by being the first gymnast to perform a double-double dismount on beam during a competition."

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I celebrate the one and only Nat King Cole. Happy Valentine's, everybody!
-Natty Hamilton

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1956, Too Young To Go Steady, Nat King Cole, Hi Def .wmv

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I just saw this very intense and very real video about economic injustice. Must see. - Rebecca

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Presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History

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Live + Powerful!

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Nina Simone - I Wish I Knew (How It Would Feel To Be Free) (Live at Montreux, 1976)

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New Impactful Mural @ The Harriet Tubman Museum in MD

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New Impactful Mural @ The Harriet Tubman Museum in MD

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Artist: Michael Rosato
(Source: https://tinyurl.com/harriettubmanmural)

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zerogrocery.com seamlessly links my love of living ethically with my absolute loathing of having to go to a store... Definitely the best low-waste shopping experience, and you earn TRIPLE the karma points because it's a local, woman-owned, Black-owned business.

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Cheaper groceries. Zero hassle. Zero plastic.

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When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade.
We've braved the belly of the beast,
We've learned that quiet isn't always peace,
and the norms and notions
of what just is
isn't always just-ice.
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't broken,
but simply unfinished.
We the successors of a country and a time
where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one.
And yes we are far from polished.
Far from pristine.
But that doesn't mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge a union with purpose,
to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man.
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us,
but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true,
that even as we grieved, we grew,
that even as we hurt, we hoped,
that even as we tired, we tried,
that we'll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat,
but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
and no one shall make them afraid.
If we're to live up to our own time,
then victory won't lie in the blade.
But in all the bridges we've made,
that is the promise to glade,
the hill we climb.
If only we dare.
It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it's the past we step into
and how we repair it.
We've seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth,
in this faith we trust.
For while we have our eyes on the future,
history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption
we feared at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs
of such a terrifying hour
but within it we found the power
to author a new chapter.
To offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So while once we asked,
how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert,
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was,
but move to what shall be.
A country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold,
fierce and free.
We will not be turned around
or interrupted by intimidation,
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain,
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy,
and change our children's birthright.
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with.
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west.
We will rise from the windswept northeast,
where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states.
We will rise from the sunbaked south.
We will rebuild, reconcile and recover.
And every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful.
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid,
the new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it.
If only we're brave enough to be it.

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Let us celebrate Leontyne Price, one of our greatest sopranos of all time. Please listen to her performance at The Metropolitan Opera on this Padlet.
-Natty Hamilton

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The Opera House: Leontyne Price Recalls Opening the Met's Inaugural Season at Lincoln Center

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Tosca by Giacomo Puccini.

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Leontyne Price at the Met: "Vissi d'arte"

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"María Concepción Balboa Buika (born 11 May 1972), known as Concha Buika or Buika, is a Spanish singer. Her album Niña de Fuego was nominated for the 2008 Latin Grammy Award for Album of the Year and La Noche Más Larga was nominated for Best Latin Jazz Album at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards in 2014."

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For the first week of this fine February, a celebration of our legendary "Lady Day".

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For the first week of this fine February, a celebration of our legendary "Lady Day".

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I say to you, all of you, my dear friends, just direct your feet to the "sunny side of the street"!
-Natty Hamilton

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Gladys West - the 'hidden figure' of GPS

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Gladys West - the 'hidden figure' of GPS

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From the sat nav in your car, to the tags on your social media posts, many of us use global positioning systems, or GPS, every day.

Gladys West is one of the people whose work was instrumental in developing the mathematics behind GPS.

Until now, her story has remained untold.

When Mrs West started her career at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in the US state of Virginia in 1956, just one other black woman and two black men worked alongside her.

"I carried that load round, thinking that I had to be the best that I could be," she says.

"Always doing things just right, to set an example for other people who were coming behind me, especially women.

"I strived hard to be tough and hang in there the best I could."

Mrs West was born in 1930, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia - "a real rural kind of a place" as she describes it.

Many of the families around them were sharecroppers - tenants of a farm who had to hand over a proportion of their crops to the landowners.

Her family had their own small farm and she had to work in the fields with them.

"I guess I found that a little bit contrary to what I had in my mind of where I wanted to go," she says.

Mrs West was ambitious; she didn't want to stay picking tobacco, corn or cotton like the people she saw around her.

Neither did she want to work in a nearby factory, beating tobacco leaves into pieces small enough for cigarettes and pipes.

"I thought at first I needed to go to the city. I thought that would get me out of the country and out of the fields," she says.

"But then as I got more educated, went into the higher grades, I learned that education was the thing to get me out."

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At her school, people who came top of the class were offered a scholarship to the local university.

Her family "didn't have a whole lot of money" and Mrs West knew this was her one big chance.

She worked hard, graduating first in her high school class, securing her that scholarship.

"When it was time to go to college, I didn't quite know what to major in," she says.

"They were trying to tell me, since I was good at all my subjects, that I should major in science or math or something that was more difficult and meant people didn't major in it."

What is 100 Women?

BBC 100 Women names 100 influential and inspirational women around the world every year. We create documentaries, features and interviews about their lives, giving more space for stories that put women at the centre.

Follow BBC 100 Women on Instagram and Facebook and join the conversation.

She took maths, a subject mostly studied at her college by men.

"You felt a little bit different. You didn't quite fit in as you did in home economics.

"You're always competing and trying to survive because you're in a different group of people."

The few female classmates she had went on to careers like teaching. Ms West also taught for a couple of years but her degree meant she had opportunities elsewhere too and she moved on to work at the naval base in Dahlgreen.

Mrs West would collect and process data from satellites, using it to help determine their exact location.

It was this information that would go on to help develop GPS.

"We would come in and sit at our desks and we would logic away, go through all the steps anyone would have to do to solve the mathematical problem," she explains.

Then she would work with programmers on the functions the massive computers needed to do.

"The operators would call us to tell us our programme was running now and we could come down and watch it," she says.

"So we would come down and watch this big computer churn away. Then you'd get some results.

"Nine times out of 10 they weren't completely right so you had to analyse them and find out what was different to what you expected."

At the same time Mrs West was working as a mathematician, the civil rights movement was gaining ground in the US.

The campaign, led by figures such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, challenged racism across the country.

More than a quarter of a million people marched to the Lincoln Memorial, to listen to King's "I have a dream" speech.

But Mrs West's work set her apart from that movement.

"It turned out to be somewhat separate for us because we were working for the government and we couldn't do a whole lot of participating in non-government activities off-base," she says.

"We lived on the base and we didn't communicate too well with the community that was around us.

"We didn't get involved with it [the civil rights movement], partly because it wasn't safe because of the job, to do that."

Not long after starting work at the base, Mrs West fell in love with the man who would become her husband - Ira West, one of her two male black colleagues. They married, started a family and have been together for more than 60 years.

She continued working as a mathematician and her hard work was rewarded when she was nominated by her departmental head for a commendation in 1979.

Mrs West was then recommended as project manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project, the first satellite that could remotely sense oceans.

Retiring in 1998, after a career spanning more than 40 years, she and Ira decided to mark this new era in their life by travelling.

And then Mrs West returned to education - working towards a PhD - but suffered a stroke.

It affected her hearing, vision, balance and mobility, and left her feeling miserable.

"All of a sudden," she says, "these words came into my head: 'You can't stay in the bed, you've got to get up from here and get your PhD.'"

Not only has she achieved her PhD, she's also gone on to deal with other challenges to her health, including a breast cancer diagnosis a few years ago.

It was only when a member of her university sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, read a short biography Mrs West had submitted for an alumni function, that her achievements were brought into the spotlight.

Since then, articles about Mrs West have appeared in local press, students have done class reports on her and she has been officially recognised by the Virginia Senate.

A joint resolution, passed in February, commended her "for her trailblazing career in mathematics and vital contributions to modern technology".

In a message about Black History Month, written in 2017. Capt Godfrey Weekes, then-commanding officer at Dahlgren, said Mrs West played an "integral role" in the development of GPS.

"As Gladys West started her career as a mathematician at Dahlgren in 1956, she likely had no idea that her work would impact the world for decades to come."

"I think I did help," she says, of her becoming a role model for other women.

"We have made a lot of progress since when I came in, because now at least you can talk about things and be open a little more.

"Before you sort of whispered and looked at each other, or something, but now the world is opening up a little bit and making it easier for women.

"But they still gotta fight."

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From the sat nav in your car, to the tags on your social media posts, many of us use global positioning systems, or GPS, every day. Gladys West is one of the people whose work was instrumental in developing the mathematics behind GPS. Until now, her story has remained untold.

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India.Arie - Little Things (Official Music Video)

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(PHOTOS) The Door of No Return: the last stop of the Atlantic Slave Trade

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The House of Slaves on Senegal's Gorée Island is believed to be one of the the final exit points for many slaves from Africa being brought to the Americas.

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Revered as the Mother of Civil Rights in California. She was born a slave in 1814.

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Model & Actor, best known for their role as Angel in Pose. Time magazine named them as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019. Transgender Non Binary pronouns (they/them)

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Nadine Burke Harris, M.D., M.P.H. ~ Trailblazer in STEM

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Nadine Burke Harris, M.D., M.P.H. ~ Trailblazer in STEM

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Pediatrician and leader in addressing toxic stress in youth and California’s first-ever Surgeon General

Dr. Burke Harris decided early on to specialize in medicine and help children. She studied integrative biology at UC Berkeley and received her bachelor’s degree in 1996. After Cal, Dr. Burke Harris continued her education at UC Davis where she earned her medical degree, then at Harvard, where she earned her master’s in public health.

As a pediatrician, Dr. Burke Harris aimed to address toxic stress in children who have experienced early-childhood trauma. The Heinz Foundation recognized her for her work in establishing a system to screen and treat youth dealing with this toxic stress.

In 2013, Dr. Burke Harris founded the Center for Youth Wellness in San Francisco, “in the effort to advance pediatric medicine, raise public awareness, and transform the way society responds to children exposed to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress.” In 2019, she was appointed California’s first-ever Surgeon General, a role in which she will continue to stress the importance of screening children for toxic stress and addressing its root causes.
(Source: UC Berkeley Cal Alumni Association, https://tinyurl.com/or3cfeyh)

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Naomi Osaka (大坂 なおみ, Ōsaka Naomi, Japanese pronunciation: [o̞ːsäkä näo̞mi], born October 16, 1997) is a Japanese and African  professional tennis player. Osaka has been ranked No. 1 by the Women's Tennis Association (WTA), and is the first Asian player to hold the top ranking in singles.

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WASHINGTON - The podium in the White House Press Briefing Room is the public face of the presidency, and when Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20 it will look quite different. A few weeks after his election in November, Biden named the first all-female White House communications staff, which includes multiple women of color. It was a milestone for a nascent administration that has prided itself on diversity.

However, Biden's briefings will not be the first time a Black woman served as the main voice of the presidency; that moment came in 1991, when Judy Smith stepped behind the podium as a deputy press secretary for President George H.W. Bush.

"I didn't think about it at the time. ... What I thought about at the time was that going to work in the White House was ... just such an incredible opportunity. ... It was a dream come true," Smith said in an interview with Yahoo News last month. "I didn't understand the significance of what that was, getting up briefing at that moment, seeing a Black woman behind the podium, speaking on behalf of the president to the American public."

After her time in the White House, Smith became one of the country's foremost crisis communications specialists, and her work inspired the hit television show "Scandal." Despite this renown, Smith's role as the first Black woman to lead a White House briefing has rarely been acknowledged and there are few available photos or videos of her time behind the podium.

White House deputy press secretary Judy Smith briefs the press in the White House Briefing Room in 1991. (Screengrab from video, via George H.W. Bush Presidential Library)

Martha Joynt Kumar, who is director of the nonpartisan White House Transition Project and author of multiple books on the president's press shop has studied its communications operation since 1975. She believes Smith's history-making turn didn't attract more notice because White House briefings were not televised until the Clinton presidency. They went on to become highly rated spectacles, particularly in the administration of President Trump.

"I think it's because the press secretary and the deputies were not well known until they went on camera in January 1995 ... when the briefing was televised," Kumar said. "Bush was not somebody who spent a lot of time on publicity and I don't think his staff did either. His Cabinet secretaries were very visible, but less so, was his White House staff."
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Meet Judy Smith, the 1st Black woman to lead a White House press briefing

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WASHINGTON - The podium in the White House Press Briefing Room is the public face of the presidency, and when Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20 it will look quite different. A few weeks after his election in November, Biden named the first all-female White House communications staff, which includes multiple women of color.

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"His groundbreaking technology became the foundation for Atari, Nintendo, and Sega"

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Atari. Magnavox. Intellivision.

Each evokes memories of the golden age of video games, which brought the first wave of consoles you could connect to your home television.

But there's an oft-forgotten person from that era whose contributions to the industry still resonate today: a black engineer named Jerry Lawson.

Lawson oversaw the creation of the Channel F, the first video game console with interchangeable game cartridges - something the first Atari and Magnavox Odyssey systems did not use.

Those initial consoles had a selection of games hardwired into the console itself. (The Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, also used game "cards," that were printed circuit boards, but did not contain game data as the subsequent cartridges did.)

But Lawson, an engineer and designer at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., led a team at the Silicon Valley semiconductor maker charged with creating a game system using Fairchild's F8 microprocessor and storing games on cartridges.
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"A lot of people in the industry swore that a microprocessor couldn't be used in video games and I knew better," Lawson said during a speech at the 2005 Classic Gaming Expo in San Francisco posted on YouTube.

The Fairchild Video Entertainment System, later named the Channel F (for "Fun"), which began selling in 1976, had games such as hockey, tennis, blackjack and a maze game that foreshadowed Pac-Man.

Before Atari, there was Channel F

The console beat the Atari 2600 to market by one year. But Atari's name recognition and marketing heft basically pushed the Channel F into video game history obscurity. The system would sell about 250,000 units while the Atari 2600, which would get hits such as "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids," would go on to sell about 30 million units.

Regardless, the Channel F established the concept of a console that could play an unlimited number of games, the foundation for today's global video game market, which is projected to surpass $160 billion in 2020, according to research firm Newzoo.

Lawson, who died in 2011 at the age of 70 due to complications of diabetes, "literally created an industry that is bigger than the movie industry," said John William Templeton, executive producer of curriculum and content for ReUNION: Education-Arts-Heritage, which creates programming for schools.

How Lawson got into games

A groundbreaker as one of the few African American engineers in the industry at the time, Lawson grew up in Queens, New York. He was a lifelong inventor who attended college but did not earn a college degree, according to his obituary in The New York Times. As a teen, he made money by repairing televisions.

After he moved to the Bay Area and was working at Fairchild, Lawson belonged to a home inventors club that included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; the pair would go on to found Apple. Lawson also built his own coin-operated arcade game called "Demolition Derby" in his garage, which led the company to ask him to focus on games, according to an interview in 2009 with Vintage Computing and Gaming.

When he left Fairchild, Lawson founded his own video game company, Videosoft, which created games for the Atari 2600 and made some of the first 3D games. But he closed the company during the video game crash of the mid-1980s.

Lawson got some recognition before he died. He was included in the 2009 documentary, "Freedom Riders of the Cutting Edge," produced by Templeton, who had served as editor of the San Jose Business Journal from 1987 to 1989.

Soon after that, Templeton mentioned Lawson to Joseph Saulter, chairman of the International Game Developers Association's diversity advisory board. "I just said to him, 'Well, you know the person who did the first video game console was black.' He just literally stopped in his tracks," Templeton said. "I just interviewed him I can bring him over and have him speak to folks."

As a result, Lawson was invited to a Blacks in Gaming gathering at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in 2011. "The most important part of it was that there were maybe 70 or so black developers there listening to him," Templeton said. "It was just extremely emotional for them because for their entire lives, their professional lives, they had been feeling like outsiders and, then they (could say), 'Hey, wait a minute, somebody who looks like me started the whole thing'."

Gordon Bellamy, who at the time was the IGDA's executive director, recalled how the event helped younger African Americans working in video games embrace "our reality, to learn and value and celebrate the very history of how our careers were built on (Lawson's legacy)," he said.

In the early '90s, Bellamy was one of the few African Americans working in video games and he rose to become a lead designer on Electronic Arts' John Madden Football franchise. "We are a continuation of a history," said Bellamy, who seven years later got an IGDA lifetime achievement award named after Lawson.

Meeting Lawson, he said, "was great and obviously for me resonant. I think for him it was his first time seeing his legacy live on not only in the recognition of his work but in all of us existing in the craft."

"As I reflect on it, I was an engineer myself coming out of school," said Bellamy, who is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and president of Gay Gaming Professionals. "I am just so thankful for his contributions that afforded me my career."

His place in video game history

An exhibit of Lawson's handiwork is on permanent display at The World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. There, you can see the Channel F game system and some of Videosoft's games. The museum has Lawson's papers in its archive, too. Lawson and the Channel F game system are also included in " A History of Video Games in 64 Objects," a book published by the museum in 2018.
It's not you, it's them: Move aside, Google Maps and Apple Maps: Why people still love their paper maps Google, Alexa and Siri may answer even if you haven't called
Among the museum's missions: bringing to light the contributions of minorities and women in the video game industry. Lawson's contributions counter a lack of representation of black game developers in the industry, said Jeremy Saucier, an assistant vice president for interpretation and electronic games at the museum.

"The major figures often tend to be white men," Saucier said. "We really want to get the history right and tell a more inclusive history than the meta-narrative that we have stuck with in the past."

The creation of the Channel F system by Lawsons's team at Fairchild was "an achievement (that) ends up completely changing what was at the time a really burgeoning video game industry," he said. "It laid that groundwork for the business model of the industry, the razor blade model, of (putting) a console in the hand of consumers for a low profit or loss and make much higher profits on all these individual games."
Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.
Violence in today's video games

As he aged, Lawson became upset with how video games glorified violence. "Most of the games that are out now - I'm appalled by them," he told Vintage Computing and Gaming. "They're all scenario games considered with shooting somebody and killing somebody. To me, a game should be something like a skill you should develop - if you play this game, you walk away with something of value. That's what a game is to me."

Lawson's story is told almost daily still. Templeton co-produced (with William Hammons II) another documentary, "A Great Day in Gaming: the Gerald Anderson Lawson Story" in 2011 and it is shown in schools that participate in the ReUNION network.

As he works with children in Brooklyn and Queens, Templeton says he often evokes Lawson's career, "as an example of how they can be creators and not just consumers."

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Before Nintendo and Atari: How a black engineer changed the video game industry forever

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Atari. Magnavox. Intellivision. Each evokes memories of the golden age of video games, which brought the first wave of consoles you could connect to your home television. But there's an oft-forgotten person from that era whose contributions to the industry still resonate today: a black engineer named Jerry Lawson.

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Speech Entitled "Ain't I a Woman?" by Soujourner Truth

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Speech Entitled "Ain't I a Woman?" by Soujourner Truth

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"Tennis megastars Venus and Serena Williams, the pair of sisters who have captured 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them, as well as nine Olympic medals."

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Having first faced off in 1998, the Williams sisters' head-to-head battles have stretched over 23 years. But what rises above their storied rivalry? Friendship, of course.

Few sports rivalries stretch into two decades in length. Even fewer involve two siblings who call one another "best friend."

But both of those things (and much more) ring true for tennis megastars Venus and Serena Williams, the pair of sisters who have captured 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them, as well as nine Olympic medals.

"The best part is (that) we bring out the best in each other," Serena told reporters during the US Open in 2018. "I know when I play her, I have to play some of my best tennis. She does, too. ... I feel like throughout our career, we have pushed each other to be the best that we can be... and be Venus and Serena Williams."

In August of 2020, the Williams sisters went head-to-head for a 31st time at the WTA stop in Lexington, Kentucky, a match that Serena won 3-6, 6-3, 6-4. It was a first even for the Williams sisters: Playing in front of no fans due to the COVID-19 pandemic. "It's never easy," Serena told reporters about facing her sister after the win.

Here are five things you may not have known about their rivalry, which started way back in January of 1998, when they met in the second round of the Australian Open - when both were still teens.

Four decades in the making

It's Serena who leads their head-to-head 19-12 in their 31 clashes, but the first belonged to older sister Venus, 7-6(4), 6-1, back in the day when the sisters still wore beads in their hair during matches. (Remember that?!)

"Today would have been great fun if it were a final, but it wasn't so fun to eliminate my little sister in the second round," Venus said in 1998.

They haven't slowed down since, meeting throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Their busiest period was 2008-09, when they played nine times in two years, including in two Wimbledon finals.

Setting records every step of the way

While many argue their story is one of the most compelling in all of sports, the Compton, California-raised sisters became the first siblings to meet for a Grand Slam singles title in the Open Era when they played in the 2001 US Open championship match.

Between 2002 and 2003, they would clash in four consecutive major finals, including the French Open, Wimbledon, US and Australian Opens, becoming the first two women to meet back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Serena won all four of those matches, marking her first of two "Serena Slam" runs.

Their numbers are mind-boggling:

30 singles Slams between them: 23 for Serena; seven for Venus

Nine Olympic medals, including eight gold and three in doubles: 2000, 2008 and 2012

14 doubles majors together

A combined 330 weeks at world No.1: 11 weeks for Venus; Serena the rest

USD $134.5 million combined prize money (not to mention endorsement deals)

And an immeasurable global reach for their sport: Go anywhere in the world and say "Venus and Serena" - their names are synonymous with tennis.

Hey, you look familiar...

While tennis greats Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert have met on the singles court more than any other duo in the Open Era (80 times!), Venus has never played anyone more than Serena - and the same goes for Serena with Venus.

"I want to play the best players and I think I got my wish in playing Serena," Venus said this week. "So here we go."

While Serena maintains the head-to-head edge, they've produced some classics, going toe-to-toe in nine major finals. Their 2003 Australian Open final was particularly close, Serena winning 7-6(4), 3-6, 6-4. But many fans point to their 2008 US Open quarter-final as their most compelling, a high-quality 7-6(6), 7-6(7) triumph for Serena. She'd go on to hoist the trophy that fortnight.

Rivals, siblings, partners

While their rivalry has carried through on the singles court, they've maintained just as long-lasting of a doubles partnership, as well, most notably on the Olympic stage.

In 2000, the sisters made their Olympic debut with resounding success, Venus winning the singles and then teaming up with Serena for the doubles. It was the first time since 1924 that a woman had won both the singles and doubles ( Helen Wills Moody did it back in the day) in tennis. Serena would match her sis in 2012, going golden in both singles and doubles on the courts of Wimbledon in London.

If all goes according to plan, the two say they'd like to play alongside one another again for Tokyo 2020 next summer.

"(We've) had a lot of success in doubles. That's been a real highlight in my career," Venus said during the 2020 Australian Open. "In a perfect world, I would play (doubles) every time. I love it."

Their most recent of major doubles titles came at Wimbledon 2016, when they captured No.14 in preparation for Rio (where they lost in the first round).

Venus and Serena, Serena and Venus

While plenty can be said about their rivalry, their respective greatness and their success on court, off the court they remain the very best of friends.

"V was my guiding light," Serena said in a Wimbledon video this year about their childhood together, seen as prodigies from a young age.

Serena said in 2018 she's even cheering for Venus when they play one another, though she's trying to focus on winning: "I never root against her, no matter what. I think that's the toughest part (of playing her) for me. When you always want someone to win, to have to beat them. I know the same thing is for her. When she beats me, she always roots for me as well."

After beating Serena to win Wimbledon in 2008, Venus put it simply:

"My first job is big sister and I take that very seriously."

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Venus and Serena's decades-long rivalry: 5 things to know

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Having first faced off in 1998, the Williams sisters' head-to-head battles have stretched over 23 years. But what rises above their storied rivalry? Friendship, of course. Few sports rivalries stretch into two decades in length. Even fewer involve two siblings who call one another "best friend."

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"Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent."

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The chaotic brilliance of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat - Jordana Moore Saggese

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The Black Female Battalion That Stood Up to a White Male Army

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The Black Female Battalion That Stood Up to a White Male Army

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Major Adams addresses members of the Six Triple Eight in February 1945. Credit... By National Archives

Beyond the World War II We know

The unit was set up to determine the value Black women brought to the military. They ultimately ran the fastest mail service in the European Theater during World War II.

Major Adams addresses members of the Six Triple Eight in February 1945. Credit... By National Archives

The latest article from "Beyond the World War II We Know," a series from The Times that documents lesser-known stories from the war, looks at the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the largest unit of Black servicewomen to ever deploy overseas.
In January 1945, a C-54 cargo plane carrying a group of young Army officers departed an Air Transport Command terminal in Washington for war-torn Europe. Among the passengers was a 26-year-old major named Charity Adams, who was quietly making history as the first African-American commanding officer in the Women's Army Corps to be deployed to a theater of war. As the plane ascended over the Atlantic, she still wasn't sure where she was headed or what she would be doing there. Her orders, marked "Secret," were to be unsealed in flight. When she opened the envelope, the documents revealed only that her destination was somewhere in the British Isles; she would be briefed on the particulars of the mission once on the ground.

A couple of weeks later, Adams stood on a windswept parade field in Birmingham, England, addressing a formation of hundreds of Black soldiers in khaki-skirted uniforms. She had been placed in command of a battalion that would soon number 855 women. She could see that many were scared and tired, still reeling from a treacherous 11-day journey from the United States by sea spent dodging torpedoes and German U-boats. Groans rippled through the ranks as Adams explained that they would begin work immediately. As the newly created 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, their mission was neither glamorous nor particularly thrilling. The work would be grueling, the hours long, and what little sleep they were allotted would be prone to interruption by air raids. Progress would be measured by the depletion of undelivered mail they had been summoned to England to sort out. With the war now at its bloody peak, mail was indispensable for morale, but delivering it had become a towering logistical challenge. The backlog, piled haphazardly in cavernous hangars, amounted to more than 17 million letters and packages addressed to Allied military personnel scattered across Europe.

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Captain Adams drilling her company at the first W.A.A.C. training center in Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in 1943. Credit... National Archives

Despite her can-do attitude, Adams believed that she and her troops had been set up for failure. Before the formation of the Six Triple Eight, as the battalion was known, it was unfathomable that a unit composed entirely of Black women would be posted overseas and trusted with such a monumental task. The Six Triple Eight was an experiment - a pass-fail test to determine the value Black women brought to the military. Years of unyielding pressure from civil rights activists, including the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, had convinced the War Department to give them a shot, but those who strongly opposed their inclusion in the ranks expected to be validated by seeing them fail. "The eyes of the public would be upon us, waiting for one slip in our conduct or performance," Adams later recalled in her memoir. She knew that simply getting the job done wouldn't be enough. The Six Triple Eight would need to not only pass the test but also, as Adams wrote, prove to "be the best WAC unit ever sent into a foreign theater."

A pastor's daughter from Columbia, S.C., Adams dropped out of graduate school to join the war effort in the summer of 1942, after the newly formed Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (W.A.A.C.) announced that it was accepting 40 Black women into its first officer-candidate school. Black civic leaders were calling for African-American men and women to volunteer for military service and literally fight for equal rights overseas; as Adams soon learned, however, the arbitrary constraints of Jim Crow applied even in matters of national security. At the ceremony that culminated the W.A.A.C. officer course, the candidates were commissioned as third officers, equivalent to Army second lieutenants, in alphabetical order by last name. Though Adams topped the list, she watched all the white candidates cross the stage before her name was called and she officially became the first Black woman ever commissioned in the corps.

More than 6,500 Black women ultimately served in the auxiliary corps during the war, as both officers and enlisted women. They came from all over the country, many in search of opportunities unavailable to them in the civilian sector. The Six Triple Eight veteran Elizabeth Barker Johnson quit housekeeping to become a soldier. She hadn't realized that military service was even an option for her until a pamphlet for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps landed on her doorstep in Elkin, N.C. "There was a picture of Uncle Sam, and he was pointing a finger,'" recalled Johnson, 100. "It said, 'Uncle Sam wants you.' So I picked it up and looked at it. I read some of the information, and after I'd finished reading, I said, 'Well, maybe you just got me.' "

Johnson completed basic training at Camp Breckinridge in Kentucky and then became a truck driver - a job not typically held by African-American women in the 1940s. But for many Black servicewomen, the Army proved hardly less oppressive than the places they signed up to escape. Some commanders simply refused to allow African-Americans onto their posts, and those who did often assigned them menial tasks, like cleaning or handling supplies. Overseas postings were usually not an option, even though white servicewomen began deploying to Europe and the Pacific promptly after the corps's creation.

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With American forces stretched across multiple continents, front-line commanders were beginning to wake up to the pitfalls of institutionalized racism. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted an Army that reflected the racial breakdown of the United States. "We are giving Negro troops equal status in the military field," he told reporters in London in August 1942, with numbers commensurate with their share of the total population. Eisenhower was less progressive when it came to gender, however. At that same news conference, he announced a plan to send Black members of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps to England "to perform duties such as car driving and secretarial work and also to provide companionship for the thousands of Negro troops" deployed there. The W.A.A.C. director, Oveta Culp Hobby, replied with a firmly worded announcement that Black women would be posted overseas to do the important wartime jobs that they'd been trained for, not to be anybody's companions.

Plans to deploy a large unit of Black servicewomen wouldn't be seriously floated again until late in 1944, more than a year after the W.A.A.C. was redesignated as the Women's Army Corps (WAC) and officially absorbed by the active-duty Army. This time, the situation was about to become even more urgent. The Germans had begun a concentrated counteroffensive on the Western Front, assaulting through the Ardennes forest in an attempt to split Allied lines. Known as the Battle of the Bulge, the fighting raged for five weeks and took a heavy toll on American forces. Some 19,000 G.I.s were killed, and many tens of thousands were wounded, captured or missing in action. Surrounded by death, soldiers in the trenches were desperate to receive word from loved ones back home - while at the same time, the chaos of the battle strained the Army's ability to deliver it.

The War Department seized the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: get the soldiers their mail and grant Black women fuller participation in the war. By that point, Adams had ascended to the rank of major and had served in various administrative and leadership roles. She was training new recruits in Fort Des Moines when her commander asked how she would feel about an assignment in Europe. She was hesitant at first, concerned that she might be out of her depth leading troops overseas. But it seems that whatever doubts she harbored vanished by the time she arrived on the ground. She was allotted six months to complete her mission. The Six Triple Eight would do it in three.

The Six Triple Eight and civilian postal employees sorting mail in France in November 1945, two months after the war ended. Credit... National Archives

Birmingham was battered and scarred in the winter of 1945. More than 1,800 tons of ordnance had been dropped on the city during the Battle of Britain. The Six Triple Eight was delivered by convoy to a bombed-damaged school on the edge of town. There was scant heat and barely any light, as the windows had been painted black to avoid detection by the Luftwaffe. In addition to serving as a barracks for the unit's more than 800 enlisted personnel, the building would also be their workplace. As for the daily mechanics of the operation, there was still a lot that needed to be figured out.

The battalion was split into four postal-directory companies, and duties were divided up. The women worked around the clock, seven days a week, in rotating eight-hour shifts. Each shift sorted and processed approximately 65,000 pieces of mail bound for troops scattered across Europe. Letters and packages were often labeled without key identifying information, like serial numbers, making it exceedingly difficult to locate the intended recipients, especially because many soldiers shared the same name. More than 7,500 Robert Smiths served in the European Theater.

But the initial shock of the workload eventually gave way to collective determination. Before long, the Six Triple Eight was operating the fastest and most reliable mail directory in the European Theater. "No mail, low morale" was their unofficial motto. Looking back years later, women who served under Adams would recount how she earned their full support by going above and beyond to safeguard the unit's integrity. Like the time an American general appeared in Birmingham for a surprise inspection. When he complained of low turnout, Adams explained that a third of the battalion was occupied with their work, while their strict scheduling required another third to be sleeping. Appalled, the general threatened to replace her. "I'm going to send a white first lieutenant down here to show you how to run this unit," he said. But Adams didn't budge. Her reply: "Over my dead body, sir." The general made moves to court-martial Adams for insubordination but ultimately he backed down, and she remained in charge.

Adams also clashed with the Red Cross after it prepared a segregated hotel specially for Six Triple Eight members on leave in London. Apparently worried about Black servicewomen socializing with white soldiers and civilians in the city, the organization suggested to Adams that "colored girls would be happier if they had a hotel all to themselves." At the encouragement of Adams, nobody from the unit ever stayed there. Instead, she coordinated with Black troops stationed in London to ensure her soldiers stayed only in integrated hotels. The outcome was a small but profound victory for Adams. "What we had was a large group of adult Negro women who had been victimized, in one way or another, by racial bias," she wrote in her memoir. "This was one opportunity to stand together for a common cause."

Following Germany's surrender in May 1945, the Six Triple Eight was sent to France. They had been summoned to the city of Rouen to clear another postal logjam while noncombat military operations continued in the aftermath of the war. It was there that the unit tragically lost three of its own to a motor-vehicle accident: Mary Bankston, Mary Barlow and Dolores Browne, a trio known in their company as the "three B's." Adams was determined that they receive a proper burial. A few members of the battalion had worked in a mortuary before joining the military, and they prepared the bodies. The services, paid for with money the unit raised, were held in a hospital chapel. Bankston, Barlow and Browne account for three of just four women buried at the Normandy American Cemetery.

The 6888th Battalion taking part in a parade in May 1945 in honor of Joan of Arc at the marketplace in Rouen, France, where she was burned at the stake. Credit... National Archives

In December 1945, Adams and much of the Six Triple Eight sailed back to the United States. That same month, the Army promoted Adams to lieutenant colonel, making her the first African-American woman to achieve that rank. She left the service the following year to finish graduate school before working at the Veterans Administration and as a college dean. "The problems of racial harmony, Black acceptance and opportunity were still unresolved," she wrote in her memoir, "but these were problems I could still work to help solve as a civilian." After marrying and spending a few years in Switzerland studying Jungian psychology and learning German while her husband attended medical school, Charity Adams Earley spent the rest of her life applying her talents and energies to issues of racial justice as a community leader and activist in Dayton, Ohio.

Despite the enormous sacrifices made by Black soldiers overseas, the military wasn't officially desegregated until 1948. It would take another two decades for the country as a whole to follow suit - and that process is still far from complete. Five more decades passed before the Six Triple Eight, as a unit, received any formal recognition for its contributions during World War II. In 2019, the Army awarded the battalion the Meritorious Unit Commendation. As Lena King, 97, one of the Six Triple Eight's few still-surviving members, put it, "We were never made to feel like anything we'd done was special. We never got a parade. We just went home to our families."

That was how the story ended for most Six Triple Eight veterans.

When Adams died in January 2002, her family requested an honor guard but was turned down by an Army stretched thin by the recent invasion of Afghanistan. Only after an Air Force general learned of Adams's passing and offered to provide an honor guard for her funeral, as an acknowledgment of the importance of her legacy to all of the armed services, did the Army reverse its decision. Thus two honor guards - the Army's, and one from the Air Force, composed mostly of women - helped lay to rest the commander of the Six Triple Eight and the first Black woman to ever lead American troops overseas.

Christina Brown Fisher is an Air Force veteran and writer whose work has appeared in BrainLine, Big Think, HuffPost and The Root. She was an anchor and correspondent for MSNBC and NBC News. Follow her on Twitter: @cbrownfisher.

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The Black Female Battalion That Stood Up to a White Male Army

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Major Adams addresses members of the Six Triple Eight in February 1945. Credit... By National Archives Beyond the World War II We know The unit was set up to determine the value Black women brought to the military. They ultimately ran the fastest mail service in the European Theater during World War II.

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Ronald Erwin McNair was an American NASA astronaut and physicist. He died during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L, in which he was serving as one of three mission specialists in a crew of seven

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Ronald Erwin McNair (October 21, 1950 - January 28, 1986) was an American NASA astronaut and physicist. He died during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L, in which he was serving as one of three mission specialists in a crew of seven.

Prior to the Challenger disaster, he flew as a mission specialist on STS-41-B aboard Challenger from February 3 to 11, 1984, becoming the second African American and the first Baháʼí to fly in space.

McNair was born October 21, 1950, in Lake City, South Carolina, to Pearl M. and Carl C. McNair. He had two brothers, Carl and Eric A. McNair. In the summer of 1959, he refused to leave the segregated Lake City Public Library without being allowed to check out his books. After the police and his mother were called, he was allowed to borrow books from the library; the building that housed the library at the time is now named after him. A children's book, Ron's Big Mission, offers a fictionalized account of this event. His brother Carl wrote Ronald's official biography, In the Spirit of Ronald E. McNair-Astronaut: An American Hero.

McNair graduated as valedictorian of Carver High School in 1967.

In 1971, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering physics, magna cum laude, from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, North Carolina. At North Carolina A&T, he studied under professor Donald Edwards, who had established the physics curriculum at the university.

In 1976, he received a PhD degree in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Michael Feld, becoming nationally recognised for his work in the field of laser physics. Also in 1976, he won the AAU Karate gold medal. He would subsequently win five regional championships and earn a 5th degree black belt in karate.

McNair received four honorary doctorates, as well as a score of fellowships and commendations. He became a staff physicist at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu, California.

In 1978, McNair was selected as one of thirty-five applicants from a pool of ten thousand for the NASA astronaut program. He was one of several astronauts recruited by Nichelle Nichols as part of a NASA effort to increase the number of minority and female astronauts. He flew as a mission specialist on STS-41-B aboard Challenger from February 3 to 11, 1984, becoming the second African American to fly in space.

Following the STS-41-B mission, McNair was selected for STS-51-L as one of three mission specialists in a crew of seven. The mission launched on January 28, 1986. He was killed when Challenger disintegrated nine miles above the Atlantic Ocean, 73 seconds after liftoff. The disintegration also killed six other crew members.

He was initially buried at Rest Lawn Memorial Park in Lake City, South Carolina. His remains were disinterred in 2004 and moved to Ronald E. McNair Memorial Park, located elsewhere in Lake City.

McNair was an accomplished saxophonist.

Before his last fateful space mission, he worked with French composer and performer Jean-Michel Jarre on a piece of music for Jarre's then-upcoming album Rendez-Vous. It was intended that he would record his saxophone solo onboard the Challenger, which would have made McNair's solo the first original piece of music to have been recorded in space (although the song " Jingle Bells" had been played on a harmonica during an earlier Gemini 6 spaceflight). However, the recording was never made, as the flight ended in the disaster and the deaths of its entire crew. The final track on Rendez-Vous, "Last Rendez-Vous," has the subtitle "Ron's Piece," and the liner notes include a dedication from Jarre: "Ron was so excited about the piece that he rehearsed it continuously until the last moment. May the memory of my friend the astronaut and the artist Ron McNair live on through this piece." McNair was supposed to have taken part in Jarre's Rendez-vous Houston concert through a live feed from the orbiting Shuttlecraft.

McNair was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 2004, along with all crew members lost in the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

A variety of public places, people and programs have been renamed in honor of McNair.

The crater McNair on the Moon is named in his honor.

The McNair Building (a.k.a. Building 37) at MIT, his alma mater, houses the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The McNair Science Center at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina

The McNair Center for Aerospace Innovation and Research at the University of South Carolina is named in his honor.

Ronald McNair Boulevard in Lake City, South Carolina, is named in his honor and lies near other streets named for astronauts who perished in the Challenger crash.

The Quailbrook East development in Somerset, New Jersey has streets named after the Challenger and each of the seven astronauts.[1]

The U.S. Department of Education offers the TRIO Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program for students with low income, first generation students, and/or underrepresented students in graduate education for doctorate education.

On January 29, 2011, the Lake City, South Carolina, library was dedicated as the Ronald McNair Life History Center.[3] When Ronald McNair was eight, the police and his mother were called because he wished to check out books from this library, which served only white patrons before he arrived. He said, "I'll wait," to the lady and sat on the counter until the police and his mother arrived, and the officer said, "Why don't you just give him the books?" which the lady behind the counter reluctantly did. He said, "Thank you, ma'am," as he got the books.[2] The episode as recalled by his brother Carl McNair has been depicted in a short animated film.[13][14][15]

Several K-12 schools have also been named after McNair.

McNair Memorial Park in El Lago, Texas, is named in his honor.[16]

Ronald E. McNair Middle School in Lake City, South Carolina, was renamed from Carver High School in his honor (he was a high school graduate of the facility).

Dr. Ronald E. McNair Academic High School in Jersey City, New Jersey[17]

Ronald McNair Elementary School in Greensboro, North Carolina

Ronald McNair Elementary School in Germantown, Maryland

Ronald E. McNair Prince Hall Masonic Lodge No. 146 is named in his honor in Suitland, Maryland[18]

Dr. Ronald E. McNair High School in DeKalb County, Georgia, near Decatur

Ronald E. McNair Middle School, San Antonio, Texas - Southwest ISD

Ronald McNair Middle School in DeKalb County, Georgia, near Decatur

Ronald McNair Middle School in College Park, Georgia

The McNair Open Access Computer Lab at California State University, Bakersfield

Ronald E. McNair Administrative Center in University City, Missouri

Ronald E. McNair Elementary School in Hazelwood, Missouri[19]

Ronald Ervin McNair Elementary School in Denton, Texas (Denton ISD)

Ronald McNair Middle School in Rockledge, Florida

Ronald E. McNair Elementary School in Dallas, Texas (Dallas ISD)

Dr. Ronald McNair Junior High School in Pearland, Texas (Alvin Independent School District), is named in honor Dr. McNair.[20]

Ronald E. McNair Academic Center in Chicago, Illinois

Ronald E. McNair Junior High School in Huntsville, Alabama[21]

Los Robles Ronald McNair Academy[22] in East Palo Alto, California

Ronald E. McNair High School in Stockton, California

PS 5, Dr. Ronald McNair School in Brooklyn, New York City, New York

PS/MS 147 Ronald McNair in Cambria Heights Queens, New York City, New York

McNair Elementary School in Compton, California

Ronald E. McNair Building: Lycée Français de la Nouvelle-Orléans, New Orleans, Louisiana

Ronald E. McNair Building: KIPP Believe College Prep, New Orleans, Louisiana

A building on the Willowridge High School campus in Houston, Texas, is named in honor of McNair.

There is a memorial in the Ronald McNair Park in Brooklyn, New York, in his honor.[23][24][25]

The Dr. Ronald E. McNair Playground in East Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, is named after him.[26]

The Ronald E. McNair Space Theater inside the Davis Planetarium in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, is named in his honor.

The Naval ROTC building on the campus of Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is named in his honor.

The Engineering building at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina, is named in his honor. The university holds a McNair Day celebration annually.[27]

McNair was portrayed by Joe Morton in the 1990 TV movie Challenger.

The song "A Drop Of Water", recorded by Japanese jazz artist Keiko Matsui, with vocals by the late Carl Anderson, was written in tribute to McNair.

The Jean Michel Jarre track "Last Rendez-Vous" was re-titled "Ron's Piece" in his honor. McNair was originally due to record the track in space aboard Challenger, and then perform it via a live link up in Jarre's Rendez-vous Houston concert.

The federally-funded McNair Scholars/Achievement Programs award research money and internships to juniors and seniors who are first-generation and low-income, or members of groups that are underrepresented, in preparation for graduate study. 187 institutions participate (as of 2020).[28][29] Michigan State University, Washington State University, and Syracuse University are three examples of these programs and both offer Summer Research Opportunity Program as additional program components.[30]

McNair was married to Cheryl McNair, and the couple had two children. Cheryl is a Founding Director of the Challenger Center, which focuses on space science education.

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Ronald Erwin McNair (October 21, 1950 - January 28, 1986) was an American NASA astronaut and physicist. He died during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L, in which he was serving as one of three mission specialists in a crew of seven.

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Misty Danielle Copeland is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre, one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT's 75-year history.

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Misty Copeland | Biography, Performances, & Facts

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Misty Copeland: Misty Copeland, American ballet dancer who, in 2015, became the first African American female principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre (ABT). Her inspiring story made her a role model and a pop icon. She appeared in music videos, on Broadway, and in film. Read more about Copeland's life and career.

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Ranger Shelton Johnson Speaks about African American History and National Parks

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Ranger Shelton Johnson Speaks about African American History and National Parks

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Ranger Shelton Johnson Speaks about African American History Month 2021

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Celebrate Black History Month with these 14 icons who did it all without eating meat.

This Black History Month, we honor the groundbreaking contributions and achievements of Black history icons-artists, activists, athletes, academics, and entrepreneurs. Notably, many of these changemakers have transformed society and even altered history, all while living vegan and plant-based lifestyles.

From activists for racial justice like Coretta Scott-King, to academics and authors like Angela Davis and Alice Walker, to rising political leaders like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, it might surprise you how many Black Americans at the vanguard of political, cultural and intellectual change are also vegan.

After all, despite the waning cultural stereotype of the white, vegan hipster, Black Americans are more than three times more likely than white Americans to be vegan, according to a Pew Research Center survey from last year.

14 Plant-Based Black History Icons

Everyone has their own reasons for choosing a plant-based diet, and these Black leaders and icons do, too. Here are some of them:

Coretta Scott-King went vegan in support of nonviolence. | Getty Images

Coretta Scott-King

Best known as the wife of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott-King was a vocal leader in the civil rights movement in her own right.

Throughout her life, Coretta traveled around the world speaking and advocating for racial justice, economic justice, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and environmental justice. After her husband's death, Coretta joined their son, Dexter Scott King, in becoming a vegan in support of animal rights and nonviolence.

Angela Davis links her reasons for being vegan to other social justice causes. | Thomas Samson /AFP via Getty Images

Angela Davis

A leader in the global movement for prison abolition and liberation, Angela Davis is also the author of influential texts like Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete?

Davis served prison time from 1970 until 1972 for false charges for murder, and her imprisonment, activism, and hopeful vision for the future sparked a political and cultural movement for systemic change that persists to this day.

Davis has spoken out about her choice to live a vegan lifestyle, saying, " I think there is a connection between ... the way we treat animals and the way we treat people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy."

Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton has said that a vegetarian diet helps him manage stress. | Paras Griffin | Getty Images

Rev. Al Sharpton

Rev. Sharpton is a civil rights activist, Baptist minister, and former Democratic presidential candidate from 2004. Sharpton gave his first sermon at the age of four, and through decades of leading protests police violence and killings of Black and brown folks, he survived a nearly fatal assassination attempt in 1991.

On his choice to be vegan, Sharpton has cited health reasons, and his busy lifestyle. "Avoiding meat is the way to eat for anyone with a highly charged life. A vegetarian diet has a way of absorbing the stress and gives you greater endurance," he said.

Civil rights activist Dick Gregory has said: "Animals and humans suffer and die alike." | Getty Images

Dick Gregory

A civil rights and animal rights activist, Dick Gregory rose to cultural fame and significant influence through his work as an unapologetic, anti-racist comedian poking fun at bigotry.

Gregory was also nothing if not vocal about his choice to live a vegan lifestyle. His comic career first surged in the 1960s Civil Rights Era, during which Gregory was also a prominent voice against the Vietnam War.

In his 2003 memoir Callus On My Soul, he wrote, "Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel, and brutal taking of life."

The iconic civil rights leader was vegetarian. | Getty Images

Rosa Parks

Best known for her crucial role in the Montgomery bus boycotts as a leader of the 1960s civil rights movement, Rosa Parks lived a life defined by sacrifice, and showed the transformative power of grassroots organizing.

While today she is known as the "mother of the civil rights movement," Parks' identity as a Black woman exposed her to dual racism and misogyny, with men frequently credited for her organizing work. Parks was also a vegetarian, simply because it was "something [she] wanted to do." Parks would live to be 92 years old, witnessing and helping to create massive social and political change over the course of her life.

Senator Cory Booker has introduced legislation in support of social justice and animal welfare. | Ethan Miller | Getty Images

Sen. Cory Booker

Elected in 2013 to be the first Black U.S. senator since Barack Obama in 2004, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker is also a former presidential candidate, Rhodes scholar, and vegan.

Throughout his political career, Booker has introduced groundbreaking legislation, from a federal anti-lynching bill to a bill to address racist disparities in drug sentencing.

Booker said in 2019 that he began exploring a vegan diet after reading Gandhi's memoir The Story of My Experiments with Truth in 1992, and cites health and wellness, animal rights, and environmental consciousness as the reasons for his choice.

The author of "The Color Purple" has written that animals "were not made for humans." | Anthony Barboza | Getty Images

Alice Walker

The first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her book The Color Purple, a powerful story of Black womanhood and trauma, Alice Walker is another Black, vegan literary genius.

Walker's brilliant stories and essays sparked transformative change, bringing intersecting conversations on economic insecurity, white supremacist terror, and Black history into mainstream cultural consciousness.

Well-known for her support for animal rights, Walker has written about her lifestyle choice: "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men."

The "Kiss" artist was a vegan foodie as much as he was a music legend. | Bertrand Guay / AFP via Getty Images

Prince

A true original, Prince blurred the lines of genre and gender with the power of his art.

The iconic genius not only commanded every instrument and produced all his own music, he also changed the music industry forever by rallying for artists' rights. He spent much of his career advocating for more control of his own music licensing and publishing, and artists today continue to benefit from his efforts.

Prince was also known to be a food-lover - and a vegan one, at that. "I've always had a preference for all things vegetarian. But not until recently did I find out how good they were for you (in a physical sense). We don't eat anything with parents. Complete vegans - both of us!" he said in a 1997 interview, of him and then-wife Mayte Garcia.

Four-time Olympic Gold medalist Venus Williams went plant-based after being diagnosed with Sjogren's syndrome. | Eric Feferberg / AFP via Getty Images

Venus Williams

A top-ranking tennis player, trailblazing athlete, and leader in the fight for equal pay for women athletes, Venus Williams is widely credited with changing the game of tennis alongside sister Serena.

A four-time Olympic Gold medalist, Venus was diagnosed with Sjogren, a rare autoimmune disease that comes with fatigue, muscle aches, and joint pain, in 2011. Venus primarily eats a raw vegan diet, also for health reasons.

The 23-time Grand Slam champion followed in her sister's footsteps and went vegan. | Dimitrios Kambouris | Getty Images

Serena Williams

As Venus' younger sister, Serena built on her sister's legacy of breaking down barriers and has won 23 Grand Slam titles, four Olympic Gold medals.

Williams is also a vocal activist for racial justice and investor in Black-owned businesses, and advocate for Black women's maternal health, drawing on her lived experience with severe birth complications. In 2012, Serena told Bon Appetit that she cleaned up her diet, and started eating vegan after Venus was diagnosed with Sjogren.

Lizzo's Tik Tok has become a platform for sharing her vegan meals and words of body acceptance. | Tommaso Boddi / FilmMagic / Getty Images

Lizzo

An outspoken voice for body acceptance, and the artist behind empowering summer hits like "Juice" and "Good As Hell," Lizzo has forever changed the conversation around what healthy looks like.

Her infectious self-love has made people around the world feel seen and accepted - and sparked timeless hits that have won her three Grammy Awards. Lizzo announced she began a vegan lifestyle in 2020 on Tik Tok.

According to the dynamic singer and performer, her vegan diet is all about health and joy. "As a new vegan, I'm enjoying exploring flavors from plants and plant-based proteins! Every journey is personal and deserves to be celebrated," she said in a caption of one of her vegan Tik Tok videos.

The prolific filmmaker has called veganism a "social justice issue." | Amy Sussman | Getty Images

Ava DuVernay

The director and filmmaker behind Selma, 13th,and When They See Us, Ava DuVernay has spent her career challenging the conventions of Hollywood to tell crucial stories of racial justice - and injustice.

DuVernay fought back against the deep racism and misogyny of the industry to become one of the most influential directors and storytellers of her generation. She's also a vegan and has even called veganism a "social justice issue."

"Like many food trends that seem new, black veganism has historical roots," DuVernay tweeted in 2017. She added a quote from a New York Times article, "For a lot of black people, it's also about social justice and food access. The food we've been eating has been killing us."

The former NFL quarterback went vegan for ethical and health reasons. | Carmen Mandato | Getty Images

Colin Kaepernick

Racial justice activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick is best known for helping to spark a movement by taking a knee to protest anti-Black police violence, which would lead to his being forced out of the league.

Kaepernick's sacrifice transformed the conversation around racial justice, exposing how speaking up for Black lives often remains severely punished. Since 2016, Kaepernick confirmed he had been a vegan for nine months, citing both health and ethical reasons.

In a Facebook Live, Kaepernick's girlfriend Nessa Diab said of their decision to go vegan, "We did it together. Because we feel like, it's true that the more animal products you eat ... your body becomes more acidic, which allows more diseases to basically breed within you."

The "Superstition" singer went vegan for the environment. | Mike Coppola | Getty Images

Stevie Wonder

Legendary singer-songwriter and producer Stevie Wonder is an icon of the music world, whose art, political activism, and decades-long support for causes ranging from racial justice to AIDS awareness have changed the world.

Wonder reportedly met Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and held rallies to pressure Congress to make King's birthday a national holiday. Wonder is also been a vegan since 2014, and in a 2016 interview with AOL, cited environmental reasons: "We have to be about making our planet more greener, the urban areas more sustainable for the children. We can't just talk about it, we have to be about it."

About the author

Kylie Cheung | Los Angeles, CA Kylie Cheung is a journalist and author who writes about health justice and wellness. Her work has appeared in Mediaite, ATTN:, DAME, and other publications.

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14 Black History Icons Who Changed the World-And Didn't Eat Meat

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Celebrate Black History Month with these 14 icons who did it all without eating meat. This Black History Month, we honor the groundbreaking contributions and achievements of Black history icons-artists, activists, athletes, academics, and entrepreneurs. Notably, many of these changemakers have transformed society and even altered history, all while living vegan and plant-based lifestyles.

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Aretha Franklin: First female artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

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Aretha Franklin: First female artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

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The life of Aretha Franklin, in her own words

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Muhammad Ali: Most boxing Fighter of the Year Awards

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Muhammad Ali: Most boxing Fighter of the Year Awards

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Muhammad Ali - The Greatest (Greatest Ali Video on YOUTUBE)

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Michael Jordan: Highest point scoring average in an NBA career

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Michael Jordan: Highest point scoring average in an NBA career

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Michael Jordan - ESPN Basketball Documentary

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How an Enslaved African Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox

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How an Enslaved African Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox

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In the early 1700s, Onesimus shared a revolutionary way to prevent smallpox

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The news was terrifying to colonists in Massachusetts: Smallpox had made it to Boston and was spreading rapidly. The first victims, passengers on a ship from the Caribbean, were shut up in a house identified only by a red flag that read "God have mercy on this house." Meanwhile, hundreds of residents of the bustling colonial town had started to flee for their lives, terrified of what might happen if they exposed themselves to the frequently deadly disease.

They had reason to fear. The virus was extremely contagious, spreading like wildfire in large epidemics. Smallpox patients experienced fever, fatigue and a crusty rash that could leave disfiguring scars. In up to 30 percent of cases, it killed.

MPI/Getty Images

But the smallpox epidemic of 1721 was different than any that came before it. As sickness swept through the city, killing hundreds in a time before modern medical treatment or a robust understanding of infectious disease, an enslaved man known only as Onesimus suggested a potential way to keep people from getting sick. Intrigued by Onesimus' idea, a brave doctor and an outspoken minister undertook a bold experiment to try to stop smallpox in its tracks.

Smallpox was one of the era's deadliest afflictions. "Few diseases at this time were as universal or fatal," notes historian Susan Pryor. The colonists saw its effects not just among their own countrymen, but among the Native Americans to whom they introduced the disease. Smallpox destroyed Native communities that, with no immunity, were unable to fight off the virus.

Smallpox also entered the colonies on slave ships, transmitted by enslaved people who, in packed and unsanitary quarters, passed the disease along to one another and, eventually, to colonists at their destinations. One of those destinations was Massachusetts, which was a center of the early slave trade. The first enslaved people had arrived in Massachusetts in 1638, and by 1700, about 1,000 enslaved people lived in the colony, most in Boston.
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In 1706, an enslaved West African man was purchased for the prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather by his congregation. Mather gave him the name Onesimus, after an enslaved man in the Bible whose name meant "useful." Mather, who had been a powerful figure in the Salem Witch Trials, believed that owners of enslaved people had a duty to convert enslaed people to Christianity and educate them. But like other white men of his era, he also looked down on what he called the "Devilish rites" of Africans and worried that enslaved people might openly rebel.

Mather didn't trust Onesimus: He wrote about having to watch him carefully due to what he thought was "thievish" behavior, and recorded in his diary that he was "wicked" and "useless." But in 1716, Onesimus told him something he did believe: That he knew how to prevent smallpox.

Onesimus, who "is a pretty intelligent fellow," Mather wrote, told him he had had smallpox-and then hadn't. Onesimus said that he "had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it...and whoever had the courage to use it was forever free of the fear of contagion."

The operation Onesimus referred to consisted of rubbing pus from an infected person into an open wound on the arm. Once the infected material was introduced into the body, the person who underwent the procedure was inoculated against smallpox. It wasn't a vaccination, which involves exposure to a less dangerous virus to provoke immunity. But it did activate the recipient's immune response and protected against the disease most of the time.

Mather was fascinated. He verified Onesimus' story with that of other enslaved people, and learned that the practice had been used in Turkey and China. He became an evangelist for inoculation-also known as variolation-and spread the word throughout Massachusetts and elsewhere in the hopes it would help prevent smallpox.

Corbis/Getty Images

But Mather hadn't bargained on how unpopular the idea would be. The same prejudices that caused him to distrust his servant made other white colonists reluctant to undergo a medical procedure developed by or for Black people. Mather "was vilified," historian Ted Widmer told WGBH. "A local newspaper, called The New England Courant, ridiculed him. An explosive device was thrown through his windows with an angry note. There was an ugly racial element to the anger." Religion also contributed: Other preachers argued that it was against God's will to expose his creatures to dangerous diseases.

But in 1721, Mather and Zabdiel Boylston, the only physician in Boston who supported the technique, got their chance to test the power of inoculation. That year, a smallpox epidemic spread from a ship to the population of Boston, sickening about half of the city's residents. Boylston sprang into action, inoculating his son and his enslaved workers against the disease. Then, he began inoculating other Bostonians. Of the 242 people he inoculated, only six died-one in 40, as opposed to one in seven deaths among the population of Boston who didn't undergo the procedure.

The smallpox epidemic wiped out 844 people in Boston, over 14 percent of the population. But it had yielded hope for future epidemics. It also helped set the stage for vaccination. In 1796, Edward Jenner developed an effective vaccine that used cowpox to provoke smallpox immunity. It worked. Eventually, smallpox vaccination became mandatory in Massachusetts.

Did Onesimus live to see the success of the technique he introduced to Mather? It isn't clear. Nothing is known of his later life other than that he partially purchased his freedom. To do so, writes historian Steven J. Niven, he gave Mather money to purchase another enslaved person. What is clear is that the knowledge he passed on saved hundreds of lives-and led to the eventual eradication of smallpox.

In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox entirely eradicated due to the spread of immunization worldwide. It remains the only infectious disease to have been entirely wiped out.
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How an Enslaved African Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox

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The news was terrifying to colonists in Massachusetts: Smallpox had made it to Boston and was spreading rapidly. The first victims, passengers on a ship from the Caribbean, were shut up in a house identified only by a red flag that read "God have mercy on this house."

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Black History Month: A Medical Perspective: Chronology of Achievements

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Black History Month: A Medical Perspective: Chronology of Achievements

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Onesimus,an enslaved African, describes to Cotton Mather the African method of inoculation against smallpox. The technique, later used to protect American Revolutionary War soldiers, is perfected in the 1790's by British doctor Edward Jenner's use of a less virulent organism.

Dr. James Durham,born into slavery in 1762, buys his freedom and begins his own medical practice in New Orleans, becoming the first African-American doctor in the United States. As a youngster, he was owned by a number of doctors, who taught him how to read and write, mix medicines, and serve and work with patients. Durham had a flourishing medical practice in New Orleans until 1801 when the city restricted his practice because he did not have a formal medical degree.

Dr. James Durham is invited to Philadelphia to meet Dr. Benjamin Rush, who wanted to investigate Durham's reported success in treating patients with diphtheria. Dr. Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of America's foremost physicians, was so impressed that he personally read Durham's paper on diphtheria before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Durham returned to New Orleans in 1789, where he saved more yellow fever victims than any other physician (During an epidemic that killed thousands, he lost 11 of 64 patients).

Dr. James McCune Smith graduates from the University of Glasgow, becoming the first African American to earn a medical degree.

Dr. David Jones Peck becomes the first African-Amercan medical student to graduate from a medical school in the United States (Rush Medical College, Chicago, IL).

Augusta, GA: The Jackson Street Hospital is established as the first institution of record solely for the care of colored patients. The founders were a group of charitable minded whites led by Dr. Henry Fraser Campbell, University of Georgia School of Medicine. There was no colored staff in this three story structure, which housed fifty beds, operating quarters, and a lecture hall.

Freedmen's Hospital is established in Washington, D.C., and is the only federally-funded health care facility for Blacks in the nation.

Born a slave in Georgia in 1848, Susie Baker (who later became known as Susie King Taylor) is the first African-American U.S. Army nurse during the Civil War. King served in a newly formed regiment of Black soldiers organized at Port Royal Island off the South Carolina coast by Major General David Hunter, commander of the Union's Department of the South. After the war, she helped to organize a branch of the Women's Relief Corps

Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African-American female to earn a medical degree, graduates from New England Female Medical College, Boston.

Robert Tanner Freeman is one of the first six graduates in dental medicine from Harvard University, thus becoming the first African American to receive an education in dentistry and a dental degree from an American medical school. (Freeman was born in 1847 to slave parents in North Carolina.)

Washington, DC: Howard University School of Medicine, established for the purpose of educating African-American doctors, opens to both black and white students, including women.

Dr. James Francis Shober earns his M.D. from Howard University School of Medicine, Washington, D.C. and later becomes the first known African-American physician with a medical degree to practice in North Carolina.

Mary Eliza Mahoney becomes the first African-American professional nurse, graduating from the New England Hospital for Women and Children (Now Dimock Community Health Center), Boston.

Chicago, IL: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams establishes the Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the first Black-owned and first interracial hospital in the United States. Dr. Austin Maurice Curtis, Sr. (a Raleigh, North Carolina native) becomes the hospital's first intern.

Chicago, IL: At Provident Hospital, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performs the first successful operation on a human heart. (The patient, a victim of a chest stab wound, survived and lived a normal life for twenty years after the operation.)

Atlanta, GA: The National Medical Association is founded, since African Americans are barred from other established medical groups.

Philadelphia, PA: Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell founds the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School for Nurses.

Saint Agnes Hospital established in Raleigh, North Carolina on the grounds of St. Augustine's College. Despite obvious handicaps, it was referred to in 1922 as the "only well equipped hospital for Negroes between Washington and New Orleans, serving not only North Carolina, but adjacent Virginia and South Carolina." The hospital closed in April 1961 after nearly 65 years of service. Source: Journal of the National Medical Association, 53(5):439-446; Sept. 1961.

Nashville, TN: Dr. John Henry Jordan,a son of slaves, graduates from Meharry Medical College, defying his father and the ways of the Deep South. He was the first Black doctor in Coweta County, Georgia, and built the first Black hospital in the county.

Washington, DC: The Washington Society of Colored Dentists, the first organization of Black dentists, is founded.

Durham, NC: Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore convinces Washington Duke to donate money for the construction of Lincoln Hospital.

Alois Alzheimer selects five foreign visiting students at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital, University of Munich, as his graduate research assistants, including African American Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller. After leaving Germany in 1906, Fuller continued his research on degenerative disorders of the brain and was a widely published pioneer in Alzheimer's disease research. At the time of his death in 1953, the only acknowledgment of his Fuller's work was an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree awarded in 1943 by his alma mater, Livingstone College, Salisbury, NC.

The NAACP awards Dr. Ernest E. Just the first Springarn Medal for his pioneering research on fertilization and cell division.

Camp Upton, NY: Dr. Louis T. Wright, a pioneer in clinical antibiotic research, develops a better technique (intradermal injection) for vaccinating soldiers against smallpox.

Boston, MA: Dr. William Augustus Hinton develops the Hinton Test for diagnosing syphilis. (He later develops an improved version, the Hinton-Davies Test, in 1931.)

Dr. William Augustus Hinton's book, Syphilis and Its Treatment, is the first medical textbook written by an African American to be published.

Sara Delaney's article entitled "Bibliotherapy in a Hospital" is published in the February issue of Opportunity magazine. (Delaney, chief librarian at the U.S. Veteran's Administration Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, was a pioneer in the use of selected reading to aid in the treatment of patients.)

Vivien Theodore Thomas, laboratory researcher and surgical technician, makes history with Dr. Alfred Blalock as co-developer of the "Blalock" clamp, the first clamp for temporary occlusion of the pulmonary artery which is used in the first successful surgical treatment for "Blue-Baby" Syndrome in 1944. Although Thomas, who had previously been a carpenter and janitor, never completed his original plans for medical school, he was supervisor of Johns Hopkins surgical laboratories for 35 years and later appointed instructor in surgery at Johns Hopkins University Medical School.The 2004 HBO television movie "Something the Lord Made" was based on his role in the historic Blue Baby surgery, as was the 2003 public television documentary, Partners of the Heart.Partial Partial Source: African-American Contributions to Medicine -- part 6 of 7

A group of African-American medics land on Utah Beach/Normandy on D-Day + 4, as part of a nine-person, all Black team of medics, which included two officers. Serving with the 687th and the 530th Medical Detachments, they spent most of the rest of the European campaign attached to the 3rd Army while participating in many of its major actions.

Leonidas Harris Berry becomes the first black physician on staff at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, IL, but he continued to fight for an attending position, which he finally received in 1963. He also chaired a Chicago commission in the 1950s that worked to make hospitals more inclusive for black physicians and increase facilities in underserved parts of the city. Berry helped to organize the "Flying Black Medics" in 1970, a group of practitioners who flew to Cairo from Chicago to bring medical care and health education to those remote communities

African American Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer and treated at Johns Hopkins University, where a doctor took cells from her cervix without her knowledge. These cells were found to be unique in that they could be kept alive and would also grow indefinitely. Since that time, Lacks' cells, now known as HeLa cells (in Lacks' honor), have been cultured and used in experiments ranging from determining the long-term effects of radiation to testing the live polio vaccine. Read more

Dr. Jane C. Wright, pioneer in chemotherapy research and daughter of Dr. Louis T. Wright ( see "1917"), is appointed an Associate Dean and Professor of Surgery at New York Medical College. At the time, this was the highest post ever attained by an African-American woman in medical administration.

Prentiss Harrison is the first African American to be formally educated as a Physician Assistant. Prentiss graduated from Duke's Physician Assistant (PA) Program which was established in 1965 as the first of its kind in the nation.
1969
Alfred Day Hershey, PhD, geneticist, becomes the first African American to share a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He received the award for his research on the replication and genetic structure of viruses. Please note: Although Alfred Day Hershey appears in African American Firsts in Science and Technology (1999), there is controversy regarding his ethnicity, as there is no reference to him being African American in his New York Times Obiturary.

Joyce Nichols is the first female (and African-American female) to be formally educated as a Physician Assistant. Nichols graduated from Duke's Physician Assistant (PA) Program which was established in 1965 as the first of its kind in the nation. As a Charter member of the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) and the North Carolina Academy of Physician Assistants, Nichols helped write the bylaws for both organizations and was instrumental in establishing the AAPA's Minority Affairs Committee.

Patricia Bath is the first African American to complete a residency in ophthalmology, which led to her appointment two years later as the first woman faculty member at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research

Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, is the only Black medical school founded in the United States during the 20th century. It is among one of the nation's leading educators of primary care physicians and has been recognized as the top institution among U.S. medical schools for their social mission which emphasizes underserved urban and rural populations.

Dr. Louis Wade Sullivan, founding dean and president of Morehouse School of Medicine, is also noted as the serving as the Secretary of the Dept. of Health & Human Services under the George H. W. Bush Administration, where he directed the creation of the Office of Minority Programs in the National Institutes of Health's Office of the Director.

Patricia Bath, a pioneer in the treatment and prevention of blindness and an advocate for eyesight as a basic human right, founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research

Alexa Canady becomes the first African-American woman neurosurgeon in the U.S. She served as chief of neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital of Michigan from 1987-2001. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research

Dr. Yvonne Thornton becomes the first black woman board certified in special competency in maternal-fetal medicine. The challenges surrounding Thornton and her sisters' struggle to obtain higher education were detailed in her Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Ditchdigger's Daughters: A Black Family's Astounding Success Story, which was later made into a movie. Source: African-American Contributions to Medicine -- part 3 of 7

Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston's groundbreaking study of sickle-cell disease led to a nationwide screening program to test newborns for immediate treatment.

Baltimore, MD: Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon, leads a seventy-member surgical team at Johns Hopkins Hospital in separating Siamese twins joined at the cranium.

Patricia Bath is the first African-American woman physician to receive a medical patent with her Laserphaco Probe, which improved cataract treatment. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research

Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston becomes the first female and first African American physician to direct the Health Resources and Services Administration's Bureau of Primary Health Care. She was also the second black woman to serve as assistant surgeon general, achieving the rank of rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service. Her 1986 study of sickle-cell disease led to a nationwide screening program to test newborns for immediate treatment.

Dr. Edward S. Cooper is the first African American elected as National President of the American Heart Association.
Dr. Joycelyn Elders is the first African American to be appointed as U.S. Surgeon General.
Dr. Barbara Ross-Lee is the first African-American woman to be appointed Dean of a U.S. medical school (Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine)

Dr. Helene Doris Gayle is the first female and first African-American Director of the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. Lonnie Bristow becomes the first African American President of the American Medical Association (AMA) in its 148 year history. His work as president focused on many of the issues he addressed throughout his career including sickle cell anemia, coronary care, and socio-economic issues impacting health care.

is the first woman physician and first African-American woman physician in the U.S. Congress.

Des Moines, IA:are members of a team of forty specialists involved in the delivery of the McCaughey septuplets at Iowa Methodist Medical Center.

is the first African-American woman to be elected into membership as a fellow in the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma.

The nation's largest group of African-American physicians, the National Medical Association (NMA), charge that many managed care plans effectively discriminate against them, forcing some of their physicians to cease practicing medicine or relocate, and discouraging others from establishing practices in certain areas. Although NMA members conceded that they lacked comprehensive national data to buttress their claims, the doctors claimed to have plenty of anecdotal accounts of instances where they had been left out.

Emmette Chappelle, a renowned NASA biochemist and inventor and holder of 14 U.S. patents, is inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work in bioluminescence. A World War II veteran whose research enabled the more accurate detection of bacteria in water, Chappelle worked in support of NASA's manned spaceflight missions. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research

The National Library of Medicine, in collaboration with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, releases The Charles R. Drew Papers on the Library's Profiles in Science Website.

William G. Coleman, Jr., PhD, is appointed as NIH's National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities first permanent Scientific Director and the first African-American Scientific Director in the history of the NIH Intramural Research Program. Dr. Coleman, a microbiologist, has had a long career as a scientist in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Intramural Research Program.

Carla D. Hayden, longtime chief executive of the Enoch Pratt Free Library system in Baltimore and a former president of the American Library Association, is sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress. Hayden, who was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, is the first woman and the first African American to serve in this role. The collections of the Library of Congress include books, pamphlets, and periodicals in a vast number of languages and classifications including medicine.

Dr. Patrice Harrisbecomes the first black woman President-Elect of the country's largest physician organization, the American Medical Association (AMA). First elected to AMA's board of trustees in 2011, Harris most recently was the group's point person on the opioid epidemic.

Beverly Murphy, a Distinguished Member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals and a Medical Library Association (MLA) Fellow, begins her term as the first African-American President of the Medical Library Association, established in 1898 as a global, nonprofit educational organization of institutions and professionals in the health information field.

Dr. Ernest Grant begins his term as the first male and the first African-American man serving as President of the American Nurses Association. He was also elected as the first African-American male President of the North Carolina Nurses Association in 2010. An internationally recognized burn care expert, Dr. Grant has worked at the University of North Carolina's Jaycee Burn Center since 1982.

Kizzmekia Corbett, PhD, is one of the National Institutes of Health's leading scientists working directly to develop and produce the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. A native of North Carolina, Corbett's work helps to highlight the significance of supporting black students in entering STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.

Yale Professor Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a leader in the field of health equity, is chosen to be a co-chair for the Coronavirus Task Force Advisory Board during the administrative Transition for President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris. The charge of this task force will be to craft a plan to curb the spread of Covid-19 including the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on people of color. Nunez-Smith previously advised on the pandemic strategy for Connecticut, serving on the Reopen Connecticut Advisory Board under Governor Ned Lamont.

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LibGuides: Black History Month: A Medical Perspective: Chronology of Achievements

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Onesimus ,an enslaved African, describes to Cotton Mather the African method of inoculation against smallpox. The technique, later used to protect American Revolutionary War soldiers, is perfected in the 1790's by British doctor Edward Jenner's use of a less virulent organism.

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Mural To Honor Women of the Black Panther Party in West Oakland

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Mural To Honor Women of the Black Panther Party in West Oakland

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Mural to Honor Women of the Black Panther Party

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A West Oakland resident wants to celebrate the legacy of the women of the Black Panther Party with a permanent 2,000-square-foot mural on her house. Jilchristina Vest joins NBC Bay Area to talk more about the project.

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https://www.paullewinart.com/

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The state of California is named after a Black Woman, QUEEN CALIFIA.

The pictures below are various depictions and artwork of the true representation of California’s namesake, including the famous mural of her at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, and the mural that was part of a Disneyland exhibit created about her around 10 years ago.

When the European Colonizers from Spain first arrived on this soil, they named it “CALIFORNIA” based on a legend that was popular in Spain at the time.

The Spanish legend reads as follows:

"There exists an island called California very near the terrestrial paradise; and inhabited by BLACK women...

And there ruled over that island of California a queen of majestic proportions, more beautiful than all others...

She was not petite, nor blond, nor golden-haired. She was large, and BLACK AS THE ACE OF CLUBS...

For, as you shall learn, she was reputed the MOST BEAUTIFUL of women; and it was she, O Californias! who accomplished great deeds, she was valiant and courageous and ardent with a brave heart, and had ambitions to execute nobler actions than had been performed by any other ruler — QUEEN CALIFIA."

(from Las Sergas de Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo)

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Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, reworked some of his original designs from the BPP newspaper and broadsides for the pr campaign for the new HBO film Judas and the Black Messiah, about Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Party. Long live Chairman Fred!

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'Education is my tool': Activist Ilyasah Shabazz on teaching Black history in schools and the legacy of her father Malcolm X

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'Education is my tool': Activist Ilyasah Shabazz on teaching Black history in schools and the legacy of her father Malcolm X

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For Ilyasah Shabazz, so much of her work is tied to her history.

Her father was assassinated when she was just 2 years old, and in February she released her fifth book, The Awakening of Malcolm X, about her dad's early days as Malcolm Little.

"I was so committed to make sure that my father's story was told more accurately, especially for our children," she tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

The young adult book starts with Malcolm Little in jail, serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence for robbery. Tales of his early childhood traumas are shared during flashback scenes, as he contemplates life's biggest questions.

"His father is lynched by a mob of the KKK. His mother is institutionalized and his family is torn apart," says Shabazz. "He's wondering, 'Who am I as a Black person, because society is saying that I'm nothing.' He is able to confront these personal issues."

"These were some qualities that I felt were really important to show [about] who the real Malcolm is," Shabazz adds.

Setting the story behind bars was important for Shabazz because of the alarming incarceration rates in America. According to Pew Research in 2017, Black people represented 12 percent of the U.S. adult population - but 33 percent of the sentenced prison population. In comparison, white people account for 64 percent of adults and 30 percent of prisoners.

"Since 1970, the prison population has increased 700 percent, and so that says that we need to do better for our young people," says Shabazz. "I thought it was important first to show that my father, yes, went to jail at a very young age in his teens - he was released in his 20s. And also wanting to take a close examination at the inmates' humanity."

For Shabazz, the best tool to address some of this country's systematic issues is through education. Many schools around the country teach pieces of American history, but there is an inconsistency with how slavery, white supremacy, and the Civil War are taught, she notes.

In 2020, several states like Texas and Kentucky announced plans to expand Black history instruction, although not all states are looking to adjust their curriculum. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri and South Dakota are aiming to cut funding to schools, using lesson plans from the 1619 Project, which examines the impact of slavery in the United States.

"I think that we need a better education curriculum so that we understand that Black history is also American history. And if the terrorism of slavery and the subsequent massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood, Florida are taught in high school U.S. history classes to be as American as the Boston Tea Party, then we understand that our education is based on historical truth," she says.

Schools may be debating how to teach Black history, but conversations around white supremacy are already happening in homes around the country. Books like How to Be an Anti-Racist and White Fragility became best sellers in 2020, and Instagram is flooded with infographics and memes exposing white supremacy. Like Malcolm X, our country seems be undergoing its own awakening.

"I think that young people are discovering, you know, there's so much information they had no idea of, which means that our education curriculum is failing them," says Shabazz.

Ultimately, Shabazz hopes that sharing her father's story - his obstacles, strategies and leadership- will help to guide the intergenerational and multi-racial movement happening right now.

"I think it's extremely important that our young people are understanding that they have to have the capacity to understand these challenges, not from a Black and white perspective, but the capacity from a right and wrong perspective."
Video produced by Read more from Yahoo Life: Want lifestyle and wellness news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoo Life's newsletter. Jacquie Cosgrove

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'Education is my tool': Activist Ilyasah Shabazz on teaching Black history in schools and the legacy of her father Malcolm X

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For Ilyasah Shabazz, so much of her work is tied to her history. Her father was assassinated when she was just 2 years old, and in February she released her fifth book, The Awakening of Malcolm X, about her dad's early days as Malcolm Little.

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Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf were Kaepernick before Kaepernick 

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Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf were Kaepernick before Kaepernick 

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As we commemorate Black History Month, my mind goes back to the NBA players whose beliefs and principles cost them their careers.

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I recently interviewed former NBA player Matt Barnes for my show The Rematch, where he discussed meeting with Joe Biden before November's presidential election. Barnes and a coalition of prominent Black influencers including billionaire businessman Robert F Smith, CNN's Van Jones, Charlamagne tha God and film director Deon Taylor pushed Biden on subjects such as the 1994 Crime Bill, making sure he and Kamala Harris would be held accountable for their policies around race and social justice moving forward.

Etan Thomas

During the interview - and as we examine race in America during Black History Month - I kept thinking about how times have changed since Craig Hodges was whiteballed by the NBA less than 30 years ago for wanting to do the same thing as Barnes today.

Hodges played in the NBA for 10 seasons and led the league in three-point shooting three times. He won two NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls, and along with Larry Bird, is one of only two players to win three consecutive three-point shooting contests at NBA All-Star weekend.

But when he visited the White House in 1992 for the ceremonial championship team visit, he wore a dashiki and delivered a handwritten letter to the staff of then president George HW Bush. The letter challenged the administration's treatment of poor communities and sought a partnership to hold them accountable. Sounds very similar to what Barnes did with Biden, right? But that was a different time, and as a result, Hodges was subjected to a firestorm of public scrutiny, resentment, ridicule and condemnation that led to his exile from the league. His career was effectively over at 32, even though he was still in his prime and in a league where shooters such as Hodges often thrive into their late 30s.

I interviewed Hodges for my book We Matter: Athletes And Activism and asked him how he dealt with the criticism and his exile from the NBA.
Craig Hodges: 'Jordan didn't speak out because he didn't know what to say'
"Black people are my first love, and then basketball," he said. "And even though basketball gave me opportunities and opened doors for me my entire life, I wasn't going to have one without the other. That wasn't even a question."

Hodges is not the only courageous player I remember during Black History Month. This past summer, we witnessed entire NBA teams - as well as coaches and referees - take a knee during the national anthem to bring attention to racial injustice in the US. And I couldn't help but also remember how Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, like Hodges, was whiteballed from the NBA for his beliefs. Abdul-Rauf was Kaepernick before Kaepernick, protesting during the national anthem in 1996. Like Hodges and Kaepernick, his career wasn't cut short because his skills were diminishing or because of injuries. It was the result of the controversy he sparked for calling the flag of the United States a symbol of oppression and racism and explaining that standing for the anthem would conflict with his Muslim faith.

"You can't be for God and for oppression. It's clear in the Qur'an, Islam is the only way," he said at the time. "I don't criticize those who stand, so don't criticize me for sitting."

He eventually came to a compromise with the NBA after being suspended. It was agreed he could stand and pray with his head bowed during the national anthem. But even that was met with hostility, death threats and public condemnation. The NBA, along with mainstream America, turned on Abdul-Rauf and he was inevitably depicted as an ungrateful Black athlete who didn't appreciate the riches and fame basketball provided for him.

Despite recording career-best figures that season, he was traded away by the Denver Nuggets and by 1998, at the age of 29, he couldn't get so much as a tryout with an NBA team and left to play in Turkey.

As with Hodges, I asked Abdul-Rauf if he would do it all again when I interviewed him for my book.

"When I make a decision, especially when I have thought it out, I stick to that decision," he said. "In looking back at all of the decisions that I've made and looking at my life now, I see the growth, I see the development, and I wouldn't trade that for anything."

Have things changed since? I also spoked with NBA commissioner Adam Silver andasked him if he would ever punish a player for speaking out on something that Silver personally disagrees with. Because that's always the caveat: Anybody can applaud someone when they agree with them.

"What is special about this league and something I worked very hard at is making sure that players feel safe having a voice on important social matters, because I have heard from employees in other industries, other companies, athletes in other situations, where they have told me they have a strong point of view but they're concerned that it will have a direct impact on their employment," Silver said. "We've made it a point to encourage players to be active participants in our system. To have a voice. They have a point of view about what's happening around them"

If only Silver had been the commissioner while Hodges and Abdul-Rauf were playing. I remember reading about both of those in high school. I was amazed at their courage, to have the conviction to take a stand for what they believed in like the great athlete activists of the past such as Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Curt Flood, John Carlos, Tommie Smith and, of course, the great Muhammad Ali.

Now that NBA stars like Draymond Green enjoy the freedom to say whatever they want, whenever they want, it's important to remember athletes such as Hodges and Abdul-Rauf. They made the sacrifice and paid the price so players today can speak their minds and take whatever stance they choose, without fear of being exiled from the NBA as a result.

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Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf were Kaepernick before Kaepernick

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I recently interviewed former NBA player Matt Barnes for my show The Rematch, where he discussed meeting with Joe Biden before November's presidential election.

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Art by Panhandle Slim

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Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She worked for many years as a book editor, published her first novel in 1970 and was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. She died in 2019.

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ebruary 18, 2021 would have been Toni Morrison's 90th birthday. As we approach the anniversary of a global pandemic that has changed our lives in every way, it seems a fine time to dive back into the world of Toni Morrison. The questions she asked in a 2002 lecture seem wholly relevant now, almost 20 years later: "To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?"

In everything Morrison wrote, she offered narratives that revealed the journeys of characters, specific but universal, flawed and imperfect, with a deeply American desire for freedom and adventure. One might say that because her characters were almost exclusively African-American, the quest to be free - in mind, body and spirit - was the consistent adventure. She was also a masterful crafter of windows; when you opened a book of hers, the worlds you entered were so rich with detail, you could feel the molecules around you change as if you'd just taken a long flight and were descending onto the tarmac in a town or city where you'd never been.

I'll say this. Reading Morrison can be daunting. She won the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was, and will remain for lifetimes to come, one of the finest writers to craft narrative in the English language. As Dwight Garner wrote when she died in 2019, "Morrison had a superfluity of gifts and, like few other writers of her era, bent language to her will. Her prose could be lush, or raw and demotic, or carefree and eccentric, often on a single page. She filtered folklore, biblical rhythms, dreams, choral voices and a steep awareness of history into her work. In the best of her 11 novels ... she transmuted the basic matter of existence into profound works of art."

One of the greatest joys of Toni Morrison's work is knowing that you will never get it all on the first read. In her Nobel Prize speech, she famously said, "We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough, neither is skill. But try."

She was talking, ostensibly, about writing and writers. But I think it also applies to readers, her readers in particular, the millions of people around the world who have read and re-read her books. To read Toni Morrison is to know that from her brilliant opening lines to the stunning last pages that leave you shook that you will likely never match her wit and wisdom, but what joy there is in trying!

As someone who had the privilege of interviewing her several times over the last decade of her life, I think I can say with confidence that she wanted all of us - intellectuals and romance readers, book club aficionados and those of us who binge TV more than books - to get in where we fit in. Creatively, Toni Morrison set a large and lavish table of literature. If you're new to her work, or haven't read her in a long while, here are some thoughts about where to start.

My attention span is short.

If, like so many of us, you've found the anxiety-ridden free time of the pandemic not exactly conducive to deep reading, I'd start with her Nobel Lecture in Literature. It is a slim 10 pages, available as a digital download and it is a powerful meditation on why we read, why writers write, and why it matters.

It is, from beginning to end, chock full of the gorgeous, sugar-spun prose that the Nobel Prize judges noted when deciding to award the prize to Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

It was in this speech that she first uttered the words, "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."

Relevant to the moment we're in - and any hard times still to come - she offers up both an invitation and an invocation for the power of vulnerability to transform our relationships and ourselves: "For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul."

And she does what she did better than almost anyone else, bring to life the humanity of enslaved African-Americans, writing them so real that you can almost hear their whisper: "Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow."

Published March 1, 1994, 40 pp.

I want to read one powerful, not too long, book.

Published in 1970, Morrison's debut novel, " The Bluest Eye," tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl who has so deeply absorbed that whiteness conveys privilege and beauty and - this is important - protection, that she prays for God to turn her eyes blue.

It's worth mentioning that white characters are rare in Morrison's novels and among the many things this does is erase the prospect of easy villains. In "The Bluest Eye," for example, the focus is always on Pecola - her jeopardy, her world view, her survival.

As Morrison would later tell The Times, "I was eager to read about a story where racism really hurts and can destroy you."

But the book itself is by no means polemic. This is Morrison showing us how much she has mastered craft. There is not a single word in this novel that wasn't considered, chosen and polished with the kind of love a real Pecola Breedlove would long for. An example: "Nuns go by as quiet as lust and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel."

Published 1970, 224 pp.

I want to read a masterpiece.

"" is considered Morrison's most important novel and rightly so. Many know it from the movie adaptation that was produced by and stars Oprah. The novel was inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, a runaway enslaved woman, who decided when realizing that her captors were upon her, killed her daughter rather than allow her to return to the brutality of plantation life. It had been Garner's aim to kill all four of her children before killing herself. It was a case that made papers across the nation, including The Times.

As Rebecca Carroll wrote in her Overlooked obituary of Garner, "Garner's story has been preserved in history as both sensational and singular. It writ large a question that had been unanswered in the homes and hearts of whites in pre-Civil War America: Was slavery a fate worse than death? Garner, with knife in hand, gave an answer that was impossible to ignore."

Morrison would go on to write the libretto for an acclaimed opera about Garner. In 2010, she told NPR, ""The interest is not the fact of slavery, but of what happens internally, emotionally, psychologically, when you are in fact enslaved and what you do you do to try to transcend that circumstance. And that really is what Margaret Garner reveals."

"Beloved" is Morrison at the height of her gifts, asking and answering dozens of questions across the narrative: What is required in motherhood when the world is at its most menacing? What might this story tell us about life after death, love after despair, the healing power of forgiveness and the shelf life of vengeance and rage?

As Morrison once told the critic Hilton Als, "I didn't want to grow up to be a writer, I wanted to grow up to be an adult." And so in "Beloved," as we will in other novels like "Jazz" and "A Mercy," we get to see what a grown-up love looks like. When Paul D., who was enslaved at the same plantation as Sethe, the protagonist, describes their relationship, he never needs to use the word "love" to say what she means to him: ""There are too many things to feel about this woman. His head hurts. Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. "She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

Incidentally, " The Pieces I Am " is also the name of the powerful documentary on Morrison.

Published Aug 12, 1987, 288 pp.

I love Marvel, mythology and origin stories.

" Song of Solomon, " the story of one Macon "Milkman" Dead, is infused with Morrison's love of language and mythology. It begins with his birth the day after an insurance agent attempts to fly from the roof of the local hospital: "I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.''

The palette of language Morrison uses in "Song of Solomon" is particular and vast. As she once said, "In my own family, there was street language, there was sermonic language.You know people actually quoted the Bible to you." Morrison weaves that mixture of languages, high and low, slang and holy into a quest where the hero of the story searches for gold, purpose, meaning and truth.

In an interview about the book she said, " "I was very enchanted with the myths and sagas, and, you know, mythological stories that had been told to us as we were kids. Because I thought, the one thing you can say about a myth is that there's some truth in there, no matter how bizarre they may seem.

"And the one that I had always heard that seemed like just a child's wish was the one about Black people - Black slaves - who came to the United States, and under certain circumstances, they would fly back to Africa."

She went on to explain that of course, the mythography that there were enslaved people who could fly had to do with escape. What struck her in reading narratives of former enslaved people that were collected in the 1930s was that this was a myth that came up again and again. Some people said they'd heard of people who could fly. Some claimed to have seen it with their own two eyes. But no one, Morrison noted, ever told an interviewer that the question was crazy or unheard of. The mythology of flight and freedom was deeply familiar to all of the former slaves. Throughout "Song of Solomon," there is a beautifully woven thread of the possibility that this ancestral folk tale of black people and flight is true. (You can read more about this phenomenon in Virginia Hamilton's powerful collection of African-American folktales and myths, "The People Could Fly.")

Published 1977, 337 pp.

I want to read a story about female friendships.

"" is about two women, cherished friends, who take decidedly different paths. Hilton Als wrote, "Part of the extraordinary power of 'Sula' is that it's a world where men are not the focus. It's the sound of women's voices that takes precedence, makes the story."

At one point in the novel, Sula returns home, and the grandmother who raised her says, "Well, don't let your mouth start nothing that your ass can't stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you."

Sula's response? ""I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself."

How does a woman make herself? How can two women be friends when they make radically different choices about what their lives might look like? What can you forgive in a friendship and where is the line when the friend who is outlandish, bold and maybe just a little bit unhinged, becomes more of a liability than an inspiration? A full 25 years before books and shows like "Sex and the City" portrayed female friendship as being the emotional center of smart and daring women who wanted to live by their own rules, "Sula" posited that two straight women could actually be the love of each others' lives.

Published November 1973, 192 pp.

I love books, but make it fashion.

" Tar Baby " is the story of Jadine, a beautiful fashion model based in Paris, and the man she falls in love with - a working class guy from northern Florida called Son. (His father is known as the Old Man.) Can star-crossed lovers from different classes make it? As Jadine and Son traverse each other's worlds, the question comes up again and again: What is home for these entirely different Black Americans? Is there one place where they can both feel whole?

Jadine and Son's banter is so light and playful, one can only imagine the delight Morrison took in constructing it.

"Imagine something. Something that fits in the dark. Say the dark is the sky at night. Imagine something in it."

"A star?"

"Yes."

"I can't. I can't see it."

"Okay. Don't try to see it. Try to be it. Would you like to know what it's like to be one? Be a star?"

"A movie star?"

"No, a star star. In the sky. Keep your eyes closed, think about what it feels like to be one." He moved over to her and kissed her shoulder. "Imagine yourself in that dark, all alone in the sky at night. Nobody is around you. You are by yourself, just shining there. You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself, it's not a twinkle, it's more like a throb. Star throbs. Over and over and over. Like this. Stars just throb and throb and throb and sometimes, when they can't throb anymore, when they can't hold it anymore, they fall out of the sky."

Published Mar 12, 1981, 320 pp.

I want historical fiction that swings.

"" is the story of a love triangle gone violently wrong. But it's also about Harlem in the 1920s. It is Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker. It is shiny and powerful, hopeful and talented, it swings with possibility.

One of my favorite passages of all time in any book is from "Jazz," and it goes like this: "I'm crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep."

James McBride, the award-winning author who is also a musician, wrote in this paper that "it is through jazz, actually, that one can best understand the imaginative power and technical mastery that Morrison has achieved over the course of her literary journey. No American writer I can think of, past or present, incorporates jazz into his or her writing with greater effect. Her work doesn't bristle with jazz. It is jazz. Her novel of the same name is an homage to the genre. Jazz eats everything in its path - rock, classical, Latin. Like the great jazz musicians who evolved out of bebop and moved to free jazz, and whose later work demands listening, Morrison's later novels are almost as enjoyable listened to as read. That is why, I suspect, she spends exhausting hours in the studio recording her books, instead of letting actors do the job. She's the bandleader. She wrote the music. She knows where the song is going."

Morrison recorded most of her own audiobooks, and to hear her say these words and so many others compounds the value of the gift of her narrative. Pat Conroy said that the four most important words in the English language are "tell me a story." Hearing Morrison read her novels is like having the most elegant, erudite, elder in your tribe saying, "Come. Sit next to me, let me tell you a story."

In every book, and on every page, one gets the sense that Morrison, who did not publish her first novel until she was 39 and did not quit her day job until more than a decade later, took the art of fiction as a solemn calling. Everything she put on the page was carefully constructed. We feel at home in the pages of her novel because her work is orchestral in scope and yet, especially in the audiobooks, there is always this enchanting intimacy that pulls you in. The books are important and mighty works of American literature, and yet somehow, it feels like she is speaking, writing, singing, just to you.

Published Apr 07, 1992, 229 pp.

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ebruary 18, 2021 would have been Toni Morrison's 90th birthday. As we approach the anniversary of a global pandemic that has changed our lives in every way, it seems a fine time to dive back into the world of Toni Morrison.

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New US Museum Traces History of Black Music Across Genres

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New US Museum Traces History of Black Music Across Genres

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NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE - A new museum two decades in the making is telling the interconnected story of Black musical genres through the lens of American history.

The National Museum of African American Music, which opened with a virtual ribbon-cutting on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, is seated in the heart of Nashville's musical tourism district, alongside honky-tonks and the famed Ryman Auditorium and blocks from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Even as Nashville has long celebrated its role in the history of music, the new museum fills a gap by telling an important and often overlooked story about the roots of American popular music, including gospel, blues, jazz, R&B and hip-hop.

"When we think of the history of African American music and the important part it has played in our country, it was long overdue to honor it in this type of way," said gospel great CeCe Winans, who serves as a national chair for the museum.

The idea for the museum came from two Nashville business and civic leaders, Francis Guess and T.B. Boyd, back in 1998, who wanted a museum dedicated to Black arts and culture. And while there are museums around the country that focus on certain aspects of Black music, this museum bills itself as the first of its kind to be all encompassing.

"Most music museums deal with a label, a genre or an artist," said H. Beecher Hicks III, the museum's president and CEO. "So it's one thing to say that I'm a hip-hop fan or I'm a blues fan, but why? What was going on in our country and our lived experience and our political environment that made that music so moving, so inspirational, such the soundtrack for that part of our lives?"

The museum tells a chronological story of Black music starting in the 1600s through present day and framed around major cultural movements including the music and instruments brought by African slaves, the emergence of blues through the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement.

When Winans recently took a tour of the museum, she saw her own family of gospel singers, The Winans, represented in the museum's exhibit on spiritual music alongside the artists that influenced her own musical career.

"You never start out doing what you're doing to be a part of history or even be a part of a museum," said the 12-time Grammy-winning singer.

She noted that the museum put gospel music in context with how it inspired social change, especially during the civil rights era.

"When you look at all the different movements that have happened down through the years, and Martin Luther King Jr., it was always with the church behind them," said Winans. "It was the gospel music that inspired us to love one another, to build bridges."

The museum has 1,600 artifacts in its collection, including clothes and a Grammy Award belonging to Ella Fitzgerald, a guitar owned by B.B. King and a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong. To make the best use of the space, the exhibits are layered with interactive features, including 25 stations that allow visitors to virtually explore the music.

Visitors can learn choreographed dance moves with a virtual instructor, sing "Oh Happy Day" with a choir led by gospel legend Bobby Jones and make their own hip-hop beats. Visitors can take home their recordings to share via a personal RFID wristband.

There will be a changing exhibit gallery, with the first topic to be the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an a cappella group originally formed in 1871 to raise money for Fisk University. The group sang slave spirituals at its concerts. The tradition continues today.

After a year of racial reckoning through the movement of Black Lives Matter, Hicks said the timing couldn't be more perfect to highlight the contributions of Black music to our shared American experience.

"[It] is not an accident that we are able to finish and get the museum open in this moment, in this moment where we need to be reminded, perhaps more than others or more than in the recent past, that we are brothers and we share more together than we do our differences," said Hicks.

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national museum of african american music

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New US Museum Traces History of Black Music Across Genres

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A new museum two decades in the making is telling the interconnected story of Black musical genres through the lens of American history. The National Museum of African American Music, which opened with a virtual ribbon-cutting on Martin Luther King Jr.