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The altercation went down like this, according to The Sun:

Cox told the court that the fight broke out about 11 a.m. at the store. He said witnesses reported first seeing the two women pulling each other’s hair, then seeing Odoms spraying something at Jefferson.

Jefferson then reached for a bottle of bleach from a shelf, opened the bottle and poured the bleach on Odoms, Cox said. Odoms then grabbed a bottle of Pine-Sol and spilled it on Jefferson, he said.

The two chemicals combined to create fumes that sickened some customers. The store was closed for cleaning and ventilation, and reopened at 2 p.m.

In October, Theresa M. Jefferson and 38-year old Ebony Odoms were involved in a fracas inside the store, shutting down the Wal-Mart for several hours. Jefferson would plead guilty to second-degree assault charges, later being slapped with the sentence in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

Judge Robert E. Cathill ordered Jefferson during the hearing earlier today to “stay out of Wal-Mart.” As reported by the “Baltimore Sun,” Jefferson must stay away from all local Wal-Marts during her 5-year probation period. During the fight, the store had to be closed as several patrons fell ill due to the combination of fumes caused by the bleach and Pine-Sol mixing. Jefferson was remorseful regarding her involvement in the fight, vowing that there will not be a repeat of her actions.

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I definitely would apologize that the incident escalated to the level it did,” said Jefferson. She further added that the fight was “a humiliating and embarrassing experience, one that won’t happen again.”

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For this group – some descended from U.S. slaves, some immigrants with a separate history – “African-American” is not the sign of progress hailed when the term was popularized in the late 1980s. Instead, it’s a misleading connection to a distant culture.

The debate has waxed and waned since African-American went mainstream, and gained new significance after the son of a black Kenyan and a white American moved into the White House. President Barack Obama’s identity has been contested from all sides, renewing questions that have followed millions of darker Americans:

What are you? Where are you from? And how do you fit into this country?

“I prefer to be called black,” said Shawn Smith, an accountant from Houston. “How I really feel is, I’m American.”

“I don’t like African-American. It denotes something else to me than who I am,” said Smith, whose parents are from Mississippi and North Carolina. “I can’t recall any of them telling me anything about Africa. They told me a whole lot about where they grew up in Macomb County and Shelby, N.C.”

Gibre George, an entrepreneur from Miami, started a Facebook page called “Don’t Call Me African-American” on a whim. It now has about 300 “likes.”

“We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us,” George said. “We’re several generations down the line. If anyone were to ship us back to Africa, we’d be like fish out of water.”

“It just doesn’t sit well with a younger generation of black people,” continued George, who is 38. “Africa was a long time ago. Are we always going to be tethered to Africa? Spiritually I’m American. When the war starts, I’m fighting for America.”

Joan Morgan, a writer born in Jamaica who moved to New York City as a girl, remembers the first time she publicly corrected someone about the term: at a book signing, when she was introduced as African-American and her family members in the front rows were appalled and hurt.

“That act of calling me African-American completely erased their history and the sacrifice and contributions it took to make me an author,” said Morgan, a longtime U.S. citizen who calls herself Black-Caribbean American. (Some insist Black should be capitalized.)

She said people struggle with the fact that black people have multiple ethnicities because it challenges America’s original black-white classifications. In her view, forcing everyone into a name meant for descendants of American slaves distorts the nature of the contributions of immigrants like her black countrymen Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay.

Morgan acknowledges that her homeland of Jamaica is populated by the descendants of African slaves. “But I am not African, and Africans are not African-American,” she said.

In Latin, a forerunner of the English language, the color black is “niger.” In 1619, the first African captives in America were described as “negars,” which became the epithet still used by some today.

The Spanish word “negro” means black. That was the label applied by white Americans for centuries.

The word black also was given many pejorative connotations – a black mood, a blackened reputation, a black heart. “Colored” seemed better, until the civil rights movement insisted on Negro, with a capital N.

Then, in the 1960s, “black” came back – as an expression of pride, a strategy to defy oppression.

“Every time black had been mentioned since slavery, it was bad,” says Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Reclaiming the word “was a grass-roots move, and it was oppositional. It was like, `In your face.’”

Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s, and lingers today in the names of some newspapers and university departments. But it was soon overshadowed by African-American, which first sprouted among the black intelligentsia.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American mainstream in 1988, before his second presidential run.

Berry remembers being at a 1988 gathering of civil rights groups organized by Jackson in Chicago when Ramona Edelin, then president of the National Urban Coalition, urged those assembled to declare that black people should be called African-American.

Edelin says today that there was no intent to exclude people born in other countries, or to eliminate the use of black: “It was an attempt to start a cultural offensive, because we were clearly at that time always on the defensive.”

“We said, this is kind of a compromise term,” she continued. “There are those among us who don’t want to be referred to as African. And there also those among us who don’t want to be referred to as American. This was a way of bridging divisions among us or in our ideologies so we can move forward as a group.”

Jackson, who at the time may have been the most-quoted black man in America, followed through with the plan.

“Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical, cultural base,” Jackson told reporters at the time. “African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”

The effect was immediate. “Back in those days we didn’t talk about things going viral, but that’s what you would say today. It was quite remarkable,” said the columnist Clarence Page, then a reporter. “It was kind of like when Black Power first came in the `60s, there was all kinds of buzz among black folks and white folks about whether or not I like this.”

Page liked it – he still uses it interchangeably with black – and sees an advantage to changing names.

“If we couldn’t control anything else, at least we could control what people call us,” Page said. “That’s the most fundamental right any human being has, over what other people call you. (African-American) had a lot of psychic value from that point of view.”

It also has historical value, said Irv Randolph, managing editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, a black newspaper that uses both terms: “It’s a historical fact that we are people of African descent.”

“African-American embraces where we came from and where we are now,” he said. “We are Americans, no doubt about that. But to deny where we came from doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Jackson agrees about such denial. “It shows a willful ignorance of our roots, our heritage and our lineage,” he said Tuesday. “A fruit without a root is dying.”

He observed that the history of how captives were brought here from Africa is unchangeable, and that Senegal is almost as close to New York as Los Angeles.

“If a chicken is born in the oven,” Jackson said, “that doesn’t make it a biscuit.”

Today, 24 years after Jackson popularized African-American, it’s unclear what term is preferred by the community. A series of Gallup polls from 1991 to 2007 showed no strong consensus for either black or African-American. In a January 2011 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 42 percent of respondents said they preferred black, 35 percent said African-American, 13 percent said it doesn’t make any difference, and 7 percent chose “some other term.”

Meanwhile, a record number of black people in America – almost 1 in 10 – were born abroad, according to census figures.

Tomi Obaro is one of them. Her Nigerian-born parents brought her to America from England as a girl, and she became a citizen last year. Although she is literally African-American, the University of Chicago senior says the label implies she is descended from slaves. It also feels vague and liberal to her.

“It just sort of screams this political correctness,” Obaro said. She and her black friends rarely use it to refer to themselves, only when they’re speaking in “proper company.”

“Or it’s a word that people who aren’t black use to describe black people,” she said.

Or it’s a political tool. In a Senate race against Obama in 2004, Alan Keyes implied that Obama could not claim to share Keyes’ “African-American heritage” because Keyes’ ancestors were slaves. During the Democratic presidential primary, some Hillary Clinton supporters made the same charge.

Last year, Herman Cain, then a Republican presidential candidate, sought to contrast his roots in the Jim Crow south with Obama’s history, and he shunned the label African-American in favor of “American black conservative.” Rush Limbaugh mocked Obama as a “halfrican-American.”

Then there are some white Americans who were born in Africa.

Paulo Seriodo is a U.S. citizen born in Mozambique to parents from Portugal. In 2009 he filed a lawsuit against his medical school, which he said suspended him after a dispute with black classmates over whether Seriodo could call himself African-American.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m from Africa, and they are not!” Seriodo wrote at the time. “They are not allowing me to be African-American!”

And so the saga of names continues.

“I think it’s still evolving,” said Edelin, the activist who helped popularize African-American. “I’m content, for now, with African and American.”

“But,” she added, “that’s not to say that it won’t change again.”

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1. Oprah Winfrey

While her OWN network might be struggling, we have to commend Oprah for creating it. Oprah has continued to be a grand worldwide philanthropist, helping out in countries like Haiti and South Africa. In all, Oprah has contributed more that $300 million to national and worldwide causes.

2. Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In a world where basketball players and rappers are idolized and scientists are ignored, Neil Degrasse Tyson has become a popular astrophysicist, hosting the “NOVA scienceNOW” on PBS, and serving as the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. This year, Tyson announced that he will be hosting a sequel to his mentor Carl Sagan‘s show, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

3. Cory Booker

Cory Booker is smart, hardworking, and one of the driving forces in the transformation of Newark, N.J. Booker has done a lot for the city, including cleaning up snow, using Twitter to address the concerns of his constituents, and having Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg, pledge millions of dollars to help Newark’s struggling schools. Booker has a bright future in politics and hopefully he can expand what he has done for Newark to the whole country.

4. Ben Jealous

Ben Jealous has made the NAACP relevant again in the 21st century. Whether it be through making the Tea Party responsible for their racism or pushing against voter ID laws that would disenfranchise Black voters, Jealous has made the NAACP a powerful force. Jealous has also been a powerful advocate for making sure that African Americans get the education they deserve.

5. Michelle Obama

The First Lady has done an excellent job as an advocate for military wives, home gardening and healthful eating — all while supporting the man with the toughest job in America. While we would like to see Michelle use some of her Harvard and Princeton education to take on substantial issues, like Hillary Clinton did when Bill was in the White House, she has become a shining example of Black motherhood and womanhood.

6. Charles Woodson

After helping the Green Bay Packers win a Superbowl in February, Charles Woodson continued his leadership and defensive skills by helping the team become contenders again with an excellent season so far. While many NFL players make news for breaking the law, Woodson made news by donating $2 million to a Michigan hospital in 2009.

7. Al Sharpton

After years of being an activist and advocate for African Americans, Al Sharpton has taken his role to the mainstream, becoming the first Black talk show host on MSNBC. Sharpton has also continued to champion Black causes, such as Troy Davis and police brutality, all while becoming one of President Barack Obama‘s most enthusiastic supporters in the media.

8. Barack Obama

Though we may not agree with every decision Barack Obama has made this year, he was weathered the storm of the tumultuous economy and a Republican Party that is more concerned with taking him down than helping the country. Obama has fulfilled his campaign promises of withdrawing troops from Iraq and getting Osama Bin Laden all while keeping his trademark cool. Obama has also proven to be a competent and steady president and an excellent role model for children around the world.

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Suddenly the pager — a device developed nearly 40 years ago to quiet the constant noise of hospital’s telecom systems — quickly became a drug dealer’s best way to supply the constant demand of his fiends, while also avoiding the surveillance of the cops.

Time Magazine captured this moment in a 1986 article called “Street Smart: Drug Dealers Turn On To Beepers.” Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Curtis Hazell said:

Beepers are the single most-common tool of the drug trade.

At the same time that doctors and drug dealers were utilizing the technology for work and hustle, Black youth were adopting and co-opting pagers as a social tool used to stay in constant contact with friends. As they did, the black matte plastic devices that doctors toted started changing color, transforming the pager from a mobile communication device into a popular fashion accessory.

By 1990, popular hip-hop artists were referencing the burgeoning mobile technology, fueling its popularity to the point where more than 22-million pagers were in use. Four years later, the number of pagers being used had skyrocketed to more than 60 million. During the rise of the pager, various artists, including Sir Mix-A -Lot and A Tribe Called Quest, released songs paying homage to and detailing the importance of the wireless communication device.

As is the case with many new technologies, African Americans, through experimentation and innovation, have helped to diffuse such innovations to the masses. The pager is just one example of the trend, where young, savvy African Americans adopt, then shift the intended use and turn a new technology into a valuable social tool that gets integrated into one’s personal life.

As with the pager, hip-hop and its adoption and appropriation of hardware, such as the turntable, synthesizer, drum machine, boom box and the sampler, have in each instance worked to revolutionize the use, leading to improvements and ultimately popularizing these technologies.

It is a trend marketers have come to understand in a framework they call the “technology adoption life cycle,” a model that details the adoption and acceptance of new products and innovations. Its bell curve details the psychographic profile of five adoption groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

When it comes to the introduction of new technologies, young African Americans quite often prove to be the early adopters and trendsetters who use technology in new ways that helps companies refine their products. This realization has shaped the way companies do business, with marketers now knowing that where young African Americans lead, the world follows.

For instance, a number of prepay mobile providers have entered the game looking to serve Black customers who, according to the latest census data, make roughly 1.7 times less than whites yet run up more mobile voice minutes per month (1,261 minutes on average than any other ethnic group).

Boost Mobile, a wireless prepay mobile provider that began its business by courting the surf culture of Australia, bullied its way into the U.S. mobile market in 2006, spending millions on a marketing strategy that featured prominent rap artists like Kanye West, the Game and Ludacris in a campaign called “Where You At,” highlighting the mobile-communication customs of urban Black youth.

Darryl Cobbin, then-CMO of Boost Mobile who was responsible for spearheading the brand’s U.S. marketing efforts, details the insight that led to Boost:

We knew that if we captured this market not would they influence Black youth, but they would influence other youth and everyone else.

By designing what Cobbin called “fly” phones and amassing a distribution network with smaller cell carriers who serviced prepay customers, Boost quickly became the fastest-growing wireless brand in the prepaid category.

African Americans not only adopt the latest hardware, but also adopt and appropriate the newest software especially with the web. Before Myspace, Facebook and Twitter dominated the social media landscape, BlackPlanet became one of the most-frequented online destinations for Black youth. While not the first social network, many insiders credit BlackPlanet and its loyal trendsetting audience with bringing the obscure trend (yet to be called “social networking”) to the mainstream.

The guys who started Myspace were quoted in Business Week magazine saying that they looked at BlackPlanet as a model for Myspace and thought there was an opportunity to do a general market version of what BlackPlanet was,” Omar Wasow, the founder of BlackPlanet told Complex magazine.

Myspace went on to build its own loyal following, becoming one of the hottest properties on the web and sparking a bidding war before being bought by Newscorp for $580 million in 2005. A year later, Myspace briefly surpassed Google as the most-visited website in the United States. And to no one’s surprise, much of its audience was African-American youth. Soon thereafter, Facebook and Twitter grew to become the next Internet Goliaths, and once again, African Americans are fueling their growth.

Twitter, the popular microblogging site, is a another example. According to a new 2011 Pew Center study, 25 percent of online African-Americans are now using Twitter, compared with only 9 percent of online whites. While similar research conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 1 in 10 African-American Internet users now use Twitter on a typical day, which is double the rate for Latinos and almost four times the rate for whites.

A 2010 Slate article credits young African Americans with creating the Twitter culture we know today, where replies and retweets have not only made the site a robust conversational tool, but also the new unofficial language of the web.

Brendan Meeder, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University who analyzed the tweets of more than 100-million users to see how Twitter users interact with one another, found that African Americans on Twitter have taken to forming tight-knit groups that propel and virtually dominate Twitter memes, otherwise know as trending topics.

It’s my impression that these hashtags start in dense communities — people who are highly connected to each other,” Meeder told Slate. “If you have 50 of these people talking about it, think about the number of outsiders who follow at least one of those 50 — it’s pretty high at that point. So you can actually get a pretty big network effect by having high density.

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1) Hattie McDaniel

Hattie McDaniel is best-known for winning the 1940 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as “Mammy” in “Gone with the Wind.” While her role is widely considered demeaning to blacks, viewing McDaniel’s performance through such a narrow lens overlooks the dignity with which she handled her limited-acting opportunities.  McDaniel’s Oscar acceptance speech showed a grace and class that should have put the racist directors, executives, producers and actors of Hollywood to shame.

Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar Acceptance Speech

2) Fannie Lou Hamer (pictured)

Fannie Lou Hamer was easily one of the hardest-working women during the Civil Rights Movement. She was a plain-spoken and devout woman known for her fiery speeches at the various civil rights conferences she attended. Hamer was critical in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Summer, a 1964 effort to register as many black voters as possible. At the time, voter registration was a dangerous task that could easily get one killed by white segregationists determined to keep blacks powerless. Later, she reflected on her fearless work:

I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared – but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.

Now that is what we call “hard core”!

3) Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells was a journalist and civil rights activist back in the late 1800s, when blacks could still remember being slaves. Wells, who was born just before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, is credited for documenting lynchings in the South and researching how white segregationists used violent methods to keep African Americans “in their place.”

Wells was also known for being outspoken and unafraid to challenge whites, an attitude that could have easily gotten her lynched. During an 1884 train ride, Wells was asked to give up her seat to a white passenger and refused, which occurred more than 70 years before Rosa Parks. After the conductors dragged her out of the train car, she sued the train company — and won!

Though the ruling was overturned, Wells proved that she could unabashedly stare racism dead in the eye.

4) Sojourner Truth

An abolitionist and women’s rights activist, Sojourner Truth escaped from slavery in her late 20s with her infant son. At the time, Truth was forced to leave her other children behind, and one of them was sold to another slave master in Alabama. Never backing down, Truth took the master to court, won the case and got her son back. She is one of the first black women to take a white man to court and win. Known for her speech, “Ain’t I a Woman,” Truth spent the rest of her free life speaking at anti-slavery and women’s suffrage conferences and was one of black America’s first-leading women who spoke against slavery long before the system ended.

5) Vivian Malone

One of the first two African Americans to enroll at the University of Alabama, Vivian Malone faced down a menacing George Wallace who vowed to never allow blacks to enroll in the all-white institution. Not only enrolling and graduating, Malone went on to retire as director of civil rights and urban affairs and director of environmental justice for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 2000, the University of Alabama awarded her a doctorate of humane letters.

Any woman who could stand up to a segregationist governor should be on anyone’s list. See a short clip of Gov. Wallace’s infamous speech on segregation below.

6) Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman led about 70 slaves to northern freedom through the Underground Railroad. At age 29, Tubman escaped slavery but eventually returned for the rest of her family after several trips. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was enacted, Tubman lead slaves to Canada, where slavery was prohibited. Years later, when discussing her dangerous missions, Tubman said:

I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.

7) Elizabeth Eckford

A member of the Little Rock Nine, Elizabeth Eckford was one of nine high school students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. On the tumultuous day, racist white crowds accosted Eckford and the rest of the teens, making their first day of school one of the worst educational experiences any child could ever have.

But what puts Eckford on this list is her steely resolve in this iconic photo. She was as solid as a rock.

8) Mary McLeod Bethune

How many women, of any race, will be able to say that they founded a nationally recognized university that flourished well after their death? Mary McLeod Bethune is one of them. Like many universities founded not too long after slavery, Bethune Cookman-University began as a school that taught basic math and reading and eventually grew into a college over the years.

Now the university has a sizable sports program, a graduate school and thousands of alumni who have Mrs. Bethune to thank for their upwardly mobile careers and lifestyles.

9) Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey will always be remembered for having the strongest grip on white female television viewers ever. A dark-skinned black woman who struggled with fluctuating weight issues defied the stereotypical notions of what it takes to dominate prime-time television. There are very few people, of any color, who can make an up-and-coming author or business person an instant millionaire just by saying of their product, “I like it.”  Now that’s power.

10) Women of the Civil Rights Movement

Social activist Julian Bond says of women during the Civil Rights Movement:

There’s a Chinese saying, ‘Women hold up half the world.’ In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, it’s probably three-quarters of the world.

And he’s right. In an Msnbc.com article, civil rights leaders from that era admit that women were marginalized within the movement. For example, when major speeches took place, you seldom heard a female voice. The names of women who should be memorialized will likely never be known.

So to those women who went unrecognized for their laborious efforts to perfect America, we say thank you.

Did we miss anyone? Feel free to recommend some women who made the race proud and America better.

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Using a unique measure which combines each honorees’ reach and substance, the list highlights the most influential African Americans between 25 and 45.

We checked news, blogs, critical reviews, awards and our own sharp editorial instincts to nail down the substance score. Folks who were big time in early 2010 but didn’t knock us out with great work into 2011 got low scores. If Obama were 45, he’d nail a 10 substance score. We won’t tell you who got the zeros.

See more at the Root.

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