Henry McNeal Turner – The CamaraIfe Maktaba

May 17, 2015 KRLemmons African American History

May 8 African American Historical Events

* Today in Black History – May 8 *

1771 – Phillis Wheatley sails for England. Two years later, her
book of poetry, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
Moral,” will be published in London.

1858 – John Brown holds an antislavery convention, which is
attended by twelve whites and thirty-four African
Americans, in Chatham, Canada.

1858 – “The Escape,” first play by an African American, is
published by William Wells Brown.

1910 – Mary Elfrieda Scruggs is born in Atlanta, Georgia. She will
become a professional piano player at the age of 6 in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After marrying musician and band
leader, John Williams, she will perform as Mary Lou
Williams. She will become an accomplished arranger and
composer and be a music educator in her later years. In
1957, she will form Mary Records, becoming the first
woman to establish a record company. She will join the
ancestors on May 28, 1981 in Durham, North Carolina.

1911 – Robert Leroy Johnson is born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. He
will become a legendary blues musician while remaining
relatively obscure during his short lifetime. Recordings of
Johnson, made by by Columbia Records between 1936 and 1937,
will be the foundation for his reputation after he joins
the ancestors on August 18, 1938. The songs he recorded will
influence the bluesmen of the 1960’s during the revival of
the blues. He will be inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame in 1986.

1915 – Henry McNeal Turner joins the ancestors in Windsor, Canada.
He was an influential minister in the AME Church and was
appointed the first African American chaplain in the U.S.
Army.

1917 – An African American, Jesse Washington, is burned alive in a
public square in Waco, Texas. Fifteen thousand will look
on in the incident known later as the “Waco Horror.”

1925 – A. Philip Randolph organizes the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters after failing to integrate the American Federation
of Labor.

1932 – Charles (Sonny) Liston is born in St. Frances County,
Arkansas. After spending time as juvenile delinquent, he
will be convicted of armed robbery in 1950 and sentenced to
prison. While in prison, he will develop an interest in
boxing. He will win the 1953 Golden Gloves championship,
after serving his sentence. He will become a professional
boxer and will win the World Heavyweight Boxing crown
in 1962 and defend it until he is defeated by Cassius Clay
(later named Muhammad Ali) in 1964. He will join the
ancestors on December 30, 1970 and be inducted into the
International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1991.

1951 – Philip Bailey is born in Denver, Colorado. He will become a
Rhythm and Blues singer and will enjoy his first fame with
the group Earth, Wind and Fire, which he joins in 1972. He
will develop his unique four-octave voice into a trademark
sound and will be the hallmark of the group’s hits such as
“Reasons,” “Shining Star,” “All ‘N’ All,” and “After The
Love Has Gone.” In 1983, he will start his solo career and
will enjoy success in both Rhythm and Blues and Gospel
venues. On March 6, 2000 he will appear with Earth, Wind
and Fire when they are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame.

1958 – President Eisenhower orders federalized National Guard
troops removed from Central High School in Little Rock,
Arkansas.

1965 – The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is
founded by Muhal Richard Abrams.

1967 – Muhammad Ali is indicted for refusing induction in the U.S.
Army.

2003 – Sam Lacy joins the ancestors at the age of 99, after
succumbing to esophageal disorder. He had been one of the
nation’s first African American sportswriters and was a
chronicler of sports integration.

Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Mr. Rene’ A. Perry.

February 4, 2015 KRLemmons African American History

February 1 African American Historical Events

* Today in Black History – February 1 *

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1810 – Charles Lenox Remond is born in Salem, Massachusetts to free
parents. He will become one of the most prominent of the
African American abolitionist crusaders. Charles Remond will
begin his activism in opposition to slavery while in his
twenties as an orator speaking at public gatherings and
conferences in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New York
and Pennsylvania. In 1838 the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery
Society, will choose him as one of its agents. As a delegate
from the American Anti-Slavery Society, he will go with William
Lloyd Garrison to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London
in 1840. He will have a reputation as an eloquent lecturer and
reported to be the first Black public speaker on abolition.
He will recruit Black soldiers in Massachusetts for the Union
Army during the Civil War, particularly for the famed 54th and
55th Massachusetts Infantry. He will also be active in recruiting
for the U.S. Colored Troops. After the Civil War ends, he will
work as a clerk in the Boston Customs House, and as a street lamp
inspector. He will later purchase a farm in South Reading (now
Wakefield), Massachusetts. He will join the ancestors on December
22, 1873.

1810 – The first insurance company managed by African Americans, the
American Insurance Company of Philadelphia, is established.

1833 – Henry McNeal Turner is born in Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina.
He will become one of the first Bishops in the African American
Episcopal Church. He will also be an army chaplain, political
organizer, magazine editor, and college chancellor. He will be
inspired by a Methodist revival and swear to become a pastor. In
1858, he will transfer his membership to the African Methodist
Church and study the classics, Hebrew and divinity at Trinity
College. In 1880, he will become a bishop in the African Methodist
Episcopal Church. During the American Civil War, he will be
appointed a Chaplain to one of the first Federal regiments of Black
troops (Company B of the First United States Colored Troops). He
will be the first of only 14 Black Chaplains to be appointed during
the Civil War. This appointment will come directly from President
Abraham Lincoln in 1863. He will also be appointed by President
Andrew Johnson to work with the Freedman’s Bureau in Georgia during
Reconstruction. Following the Civil War, he will become steadily
more disenchanted with the lack of progress in the status of the
country’s African Americans. During this time, he will move to the
state of Georgia. It is here that he will become involved in Radical
Republican politics. He will help found the Republican Party of
Georgia. After attempts to overcome certain Supreme Court decisions,
he will become disgusted and end his attempts to bring equality to
the United States. Instead, he will become a proponent of the “back
to Africa” and “African American colonization” movements. He will
travel to Africa and be impressed by the differences in the attitude
of Africans who have never known the degradation of slavery. He will
organize four annual conferences in Africa. He will write extensively
about the Civil war and about the condition of his parishioners. He
will join the ancestors while visiting Windsor, Ontario on May 15, 1915.
He will be highly regarded in the Afro-American and the Afro-Canadian
community and a large number of churches will be named in his honor.
He will join the ancestors on May 8, 1915 while visiting Windsor,
Ontario, Canada.

1865 – John S. Rock becomes the first African American attorney
allowed to practice before the United States Supreme Court.
Due to his poor health, he never actually argued a case
before the court, succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of
41.

1870 – Jonathan Jasper Wright is elected to the South Carolina
Supreme Court. He is the first African American to hold a
major judicial position.

1871 – Jefferson Franklin Long, Republican congressman from Georgia,
makes the first speech by an African American on the floor
of Congress. His text is to oppose leniency to former
Confederates.

1902 – Langston Hughes is born in Joplin, Missouri. He will be
known as one of the most prolific American poets of the
20th century and a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance.
In addition to his poetry, Hughes will achieve success as
an anthologist and juvenile author, write plays and
librettos, found theater groups, and be a widely read
columnist and humorist. Among his honors will be the
NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1960. He will join the ancestors
on May 22, 1967.

1938 – Sherman Hemsley is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
will become an actor and will known for his roles in the TV
shows “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” and “Amen.” He
will join the ancestors on July 24, 2012.

1948 – James Ambrose Johnson, Jr. is born in Buffalo, New York. He
will become a singer, songwriter, producer, and musician
working under the name “Rick James.” He will be best known
for his recording of “Super Freak” and produce Teena Marie,
the gold-certified Mary Jane Girls, Eddie Murphy, and others.
He will join the ancestors on August 6, 2004.

1957 – P.H. Young becomes the first African American pilot, flying on
an United States scheduled passenger airline.

1960 – Four African American college students from North Carolina A&T
College in Greensboro, North Carolina sit at a “whites-only”
Woolworth’s lunch counter and refuse to leave when denied
service, beginning a sit-in protest.

1963 – Nyasaland (now Malawi) becomes a self-governing nation.

1965 – More than seven hundred demonstrators, including Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., are arrested in Selma, Alabama.

1965 – Ruby Dee becomes the first African American thespian to play a
major role at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford,
Connecticut.

1978 – The first stamp of the United States Postal Service’s Black
Heritage USA series honors Harriet Tubman, famed abolitionist
and “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.

1982 – The nations of Senegal & Gambia form a loose confederation
named Senegambia.

1991 – President F.W. de Klerk of South Africa, states that he will
repeal all apartheid laws.

1992 – Barry Bonds signs baseball’s highest single year contract to
date ($4.7 million).

1997 – BET Holdings and Encore Media Corp. launch BET Movie/Starz,
the first 24 hour African American movie channel.

2003 – Lt. Colonel Michael P. Anderson, NASA astronaut, joins the
ancestors at the age of 43, when the Space Shuttle Columbia
explodes during re-entry.

2003 – Ramon “Mongo” Santamaria, joins the ancestors in Miami,
Florida from stroke complications at the age of 85. He had
been considered one of the most influential percussionists of
his generation.

2012 – Don Cornelius, the founder of the “Soul Train” television show,
joins the ancestors, succumbing to an apparent self-inflicted
gunshot wound to his head, at the age of 75.

Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Mr. Rene’ A. Perry.

September 8, 2014 KRLemmons African American History

September 3 African American Historical Events

* Today in Black History – September 3 *

1783 – Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church, purchases his freedom with his earnings as a
self-employed teamster.

1838 – Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, disguised as a
sailor, escapes from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland to
New Bedford, Massachusetts via New York City. He will
take the name Douglass, after the hero of Sir Walter
Scott’s poem “Lady of the Lake”.

1865 – The Union Army commander in South Carolina orders the
Freedmen’s Bureau personnel to stop seizing land.

1868 – Henry McNeal Turner delivers a speech before the Georgia
legislature defending African Americans’ rights to hold
state office. The lower house of the Georgia
legislature, rules that African Americans were ineligible
to hold office, and expels twenty-eight representatives.
Ten days later the senate expels three African Americans.
Congress will refuse to re-admit the state to the Union
until the legislature seats the African American
representatives.

1891 – John Stephens Durham, assistant editor of the Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin, is named minister to Haiti.

1891 – Cotton pickers organize a union and stage a strike for
higher wages in Texas.

1895 – Charles Hamilton Houston is born in Washington, DC. He will
become a prominent African American lawyer, Dean of Howard
University Law School, and NAACP Litigation Director who
will play a significant role in dismantling the Jim Crow
laws, which will earned him the title “The Man Who Killed
Jim Crow”. He will also be well known for having trained
future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Through his
work at the NAACP, He will play a role in nearly every civil
rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown
v. Board of Education (1954). His plan to attack and defeat
Jim Crow segregation by demonstrating the inequality in the
“separate but equal” doctrine from the Supreme Court’s Plessy
v. Ferguson decision as it pertained to public education in
the United States will be the masterstroke that brings about
the landmark Brown decision. In the documentary “The Road to
Brown”, Hon. Juanita Kidd Stout describes his strategy, “When
he attacked the “separate but equal” theory his real thought
behind it was that “All right, if you want it separate but
equal, I will make it so expensive for it to be separate that
you will have to abandon your separateness.” And so that was
the reason he started demanding equalization of salaries for
teachers, equal facilities in the schools and all of that.”
He will take a movie camera across South Carolina to document
the inequalities between African American and white education.
Then, as Special Counsel to the NAACP he will dispatch
Thurgood Marshall, Oliver Hill and other young attorneys to
work to equalize teachers’ salaries. From 1935 to 1940, he
will serve as special counsel for the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), arguing several
important civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1939), he will argue that
it was unconstitutional for Missouri to exclude blacks from
the state’s university law school when, under the “separate
but equal” provision, no comparable facility for blacks
existed within the state. His efforts to dismantle the legal
theory of “separate but equal” came to fruition after he joins
the ancestors on April 22, 1950 with the historic Brown v.
Board of Education (1954) decision, which prohibited
segregation in public schools.

1910 – Dorothy Leigh Mainor (later Maynor) is born in Norfolk,
Virginia. She will become a renown soprano and will sing
with all of the major American and European orchestras.
She will found the Harlem School of the Arts in 1963, after
ending her performing career. She will retire as executive
director of the school in 1979. She will join the ancestors
on February 19, 1996 in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

1918 – Five African American soldiers are hanged for alleged
participation in the Houston riot of 1917.

1919 – The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, owned by African
Americans Noble Johnson and Clarence Brooks, releases its
first feature-length film, “A Man’s Duty”.

1970 – Representatives from 27 African nations, Caribbean nations,
four South American countries, Australia, and the United
States meet in Atlanta, Georgia, for the first Congress of
African People.

1970 – Billy Williams ends the longest National League consecutive
streak at 1,117 games.

1974 – NBA guard, Oscar Robinson, retires from professional
basketball.

1984 – A new South African constitution comes into effect, setting
up a three-chamber, racially divided parliament – White,
Indian and Colored (mixed race) people.

1990 – Jonathan A. Rodgers becomes president of CBS’s Television
Stations Division, the highest-ranking African American to
date in network television. Rodgers had been general
manager of WBBM-TV, CBS’s Chicago station.

2012 – Michael Clarke Duncan, nominated for an Academy Award for his
role in the 1999 film “The Green Mile,” joins the ancestors
at the age of 54. He suffered a myocardial infarction on
July 13 and never fully recovered.

Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Rene’ A. Perry.

May 15, 2014 KRLemmons African American History

May 8 African American Historical Events

* Today in Black History – May 8 *

1771 – Phillis Wheatley sails for England. Two years later, her
book of poetry, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
Moral,” will be published in London.

1858 – John Brown holds an antislavery convention, which is
attended by twelve whites and thirty-four African
Americans, in Chatham, Canada.

1858 – “The Escape,” first play by an African American, is
published by William Wells Brown.

1911 – Robert Leroy Johnson is born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. He
will become a legendary blues musician while remaining
relatively obscure during his short lifetime. Recordings of
Johnson, made by by Columbia Records between 1936 and 1937,
will be the foundation for his reputation after he joins
the ancestors in 1938. The songs he recorded will
influence the bluesmen of the 1960’s during the revival of
the blues. He will be inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame in 1986.

1915 – Henry McNeal Turner joins the ancestors in Windsor, Canada.
He was an influential minister in the AME Church and was
appointed the first African American chaplain in the U.S.
Army.

1917 – An African American, Jesse Washington, is burned alive in a
public square in Waco, Texas. Fifteen thousand will look
on in the incident known later as the “Waco Horror.”

1925 – A. Philip Randolph organizes the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters after failing to integrate the American Federation
of Labor.

1958 – President Eisenhower orders federalized National Guard
troops removed from Central High School in Little Rock,
Arkansas.

1965 – The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is
founded by Muhal Richard Abrams.

1967 – Muhammad Ali is indicted for refusing induction in the U.S.
Army.

Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Rene’ A. Perry.

February 2, 2014February 2, 2014 KRLemmons African American History

February 1 African American Historical Events

Today in Black History – February 1*

1810 – The first insurance company managed by African Americans, the
American Insurance Company of Philadelphia, is established.

1870 – Jonathan Jasper Wright is elected to the South Carolina
Supreme Court. He is the first African American to hold a
major judicial position.

1871 – Jefferson Franklin Long, Republican congressman from Georgia,
makes the first speech by an African American on the floor
of Congress. His text is to oppose leniency to former
Confederates.

1902 – Langston Hughes is born in Joplin, Missouri. He will be
known as one of the most prolific American poets of the
20th century and a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance.
In addition to his poetry, Hughes will achieve success as
an anthologist and juvenile author, write plays and
librettos, found theater groups, and be a widely read
columnist and humorist. Among his honors will be the NAACP’s
Spingarn Medal in 1960. He will join the ancestors on May 22, 1967.

1938 – Sherman Hemsley is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
will become an actor and will known for his roles in the TV
shows “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” and “Amen.”