And see our Black History GAME CHANGERS for 2012 HERE!

See our Black History GAME CHANGERS for 2012 HERE!

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The first Black POTUS has always been considered the holy grail of African American achievements.  Most of us didn’t think we’d have a Black president for another 100 years.  We also didn’t consider the fact that the first Black president could have easily been a Republican (Former Secretary of State Colin Powell). Yet here we are, with some of us having more access to power than we’ve ever had before, and it’s turning into a mess.

One of the great challenges of being Black in America is that we sometimes become heavily dependent on our historical oppressors to validate our success.  We forget that the most successful African American on the plantation was not the one who made it into the big house; it was actually the one who escaped.

African Americans contributed heavily to the success of the Obama presidential campaign, but millions of white Americans had to give their stamp of approval before he was allowed into office.  So, to consider the first Black president to be the most accomplished African American in history moves us dangerously close to saying that getting approval from white America somehow makes you into a better human being.

Another thing we must be careful about is comparing Barack Obama to Martin Luther King, Jr. Not that one (a Civil Rights Activist) is better than the other (President of the United States), but in many cases, they are diametrically opposed.  No one can say what the relationship between Dr. King and President Obama would be if King were alive, but given that one of them (Dr. King) spoke endlessly about the ills of poverty, militarism and racial inequality, it’s not hard to imagine that the two might be at odds with one another.

A final area in which the Obama presidency has made its impact on Black history is through the tremendous divide that has been created in Black leadership.  The battle between Cornel West and Al Sharpton is both sad and counter-productive, as one man (West) has been marginalized by the administration and the other (Sharpton) has publicly stated that he refuses to say anything critical about the president (a promise that has never been made by any civil rights activist with access to the White House).

Both of these men have been politically neutered, as we live in a nation that refuses to listen to West and has simultaneously sought to control the voice of Sharpton.   If a man leaves his wife to date her sister, the sisters should not be fighting one another.  More plainly, Sharpton and West should be standing together, not battling one another as the White House sits without accountability for its actions.  Both men should be presenting a Black agenda to the president that is offered in exchange for their endorsements.  If the first job is to get Obama into office, then the second job should be pushing the administration to act on behalf of our community.

Obama is certainly an important part of Black history; we all know that.  But his presidency tells us more about our future than anything.  Similar to the Malcolm/Martin divide during integration, we are being invited to sit at important tables, as long as we are willing to eat the scraps.  We must be smarter now than we were 50 years ago, when we formed deep partnerships with our oppressors without stating our conditions in advance.

Black history is made, at least in part, by advances in the fight against racial inequality; so, racial inequality must be a consistent part of the national conversation to allow President Obama an opportunity to make more than a symbolic contribution to African American history.   Being a Black man in the big house is a wonderful thing, but it matters more that we get off the plantation.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Professor at Syracuse University. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.

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See more Black History from 1968 below!

And see our Black History GAME CHANGERS for 2012 HERE!

See our Black History GAME CHANGERS for 2012 HERE!

See more Black History from 1967 below!

And see our Black History GAME CHANGERS for 2012 HERE!

See our Black History GAME CHANGERS for 2012 HERE!

See more Black History from 1966 below!

And see our Black History GAME CHANGERS for 2012 HERE!

See our Black History GAME CHANGERS for 2012 HERE!

In the letter Jourdan Anderson offers a smart retort to P.H. Anderson’s request that he come back and work for his former slave master in Tennessee.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

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Every February, people throughout America take 28 days to learn about, remember, and celebrate the contributions of Black people to American society. During the more than four centuries that have passed since this nation took its first steps toward existence, people of African descent have been an integral part of the American story, playing key roles in the political, cultural, and scientific progress we’ve enjoyed thus far.

The Origins Of Black History Month

Black History Month began as “Negro History Week,” which historian Carter G. Woodson conceived in the second week of February because of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass’s birthdays (Feb. 12 and Feb. 14, respectively). It was expanded into a full month in 1976.

At NewsOne this month, we’ll celebrate Black achievement with profiles of historical figures, photo galleries exploring pivotal years in modern Black history, trivia quizzes, original pieces on the many facets of our history, and more. But we’ll also be doing something different: Celebrating the achievements of little-known, everyday folks who are making contributions to their community on the local and national level. They’re called GAME CHANGERS, and you can take a look at them here as we roll out all 28 over the course of February. Be sure to check back often!

A final note: Over the years, there has been much debate over whether Black History Month is necessary, and whether its existence is counterproductive to recognizing “Black” history as simply American. This month at NewsOne, even as we celebrate, we plan to explore and engage with those criticisms as well. We hope you’ll join the conversation and share your own opinions with us in the comments.

HAPPY BLACK HISTORY MONTH FROM NEWSONE.COM!!

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In the back, there’s a collection devoted to Jefferson Davis, one-time president of the Confederacy formed by the southern states which seceded from the United States in 1861, complete with his top hat and fancy shoes at the spot where his body once lay in state.

It’s all housed in a little red stone building next door to the bigger and much more heavily visited Ogden Museum of Southern Art and near the National World War II Museum. Yet 150 years after the Civil War, the little museum finds itself struggling — like others both in the North and South — to make changes and stay relevant with new generations.

For some museums, that means more displays on African-Americans or exhibits on the roles women played as combatants and spies. For others, it means adding digital maps and electronic displays to attract tech-savvy youth. Or it may simply mean adopting a wider, more holistic approach to the war — without taking sides.

But it’s not always easy for museums to update their exhibits because of the high costs, curators say. And some would-be visitors’ dollars are kept away by the perception that southern Civil War museums are one-sided — or even racist — because of the legacy of slavery in the South.

“It’s a challenge on several fronts, one is getting enough money for it,” said John Coski, historian and library director at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. “Most have recognized the need to make the transition to a more modern perspective, but for some that’s a struggle. Especially in the South, there are still strong feelings about some of these museums.”

Louisiana’s museum opened in 1891, then called “Confederate Memorial Hall: The Battle Abbey of the South.” The combative name was dropped in the 1960s and today it’s seeking a “more inclusive, broader” perspective, museum curator Patricia Ricci said. It has been invited to become affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, which will further spur the effort to showcase a more modern interpretation of the war.

“I think we will add some information on the Union effort here,” Ricci said. “And we will probably make some other additions with it. It always comes down to money, and we never have enough.”

Today, the museum has the second largest collection of Confederate artifacts in the U.S. Visitors can view the uniforms of eight Confederate generals from Louisiana, rare swords and rifles, more than 125 original battle flags and rare photographs.

Ricci, the museum’s curator of 31 years, notes that fewer people have visited the museum with each decade since the 1950s. But the 150th anniversary offers hope that a tide of new visitors will arrive. Attendance in December was up by 800 people over 2010, Ricci said.

The 150th anniversary observances began in April with the commemoration of the first shots fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. It will end in four years with remembrances of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in Virginia.

For now, the Confederate Museum draws just a fraction of the visitors who flock to bigger museums nearby, averaging about 16,000 people a year. That’s down from some 20,000 visitors before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.

The museum’s main revenue source is the $7 fee collected from each visitor, leaving it forever scrambling to make ends meet. Many of the artifacts are in need of restoration; the building needs a new slate roof and still hasn’t added the handicapped facilities it wants.

“We have to be very frugal,” Ricci said. “I look at the World War II museum which gets millions of visitors and wish we could get just part of that.”

Some visitors do stumble upon the museum after visiting the others nearby — and are surprised by its scope.

“I think it’s a very important part of our history,” said Rose Adams, 47, visiting from Dallas. “This is a wonderful display, full of such interesting things. I just happened on it after going to the World War II museum.”

Interest in the Civil War got a huge boost in 1990 with the airing of Ken Burns’ Public Broadcasting Service documentary on the war, still the most-watched public television series ever.

“One of the interesting things is that the series did in the North was it really provided a sense of ownership of the Civil War, which had been since 1865 the province of the South,” Burns said. “We ceded the interest generally to the South, which is unusual, because it’s usually the winners who write the history, not the losers.”

But he notes museums that may have once been shrines to one side or another are adapting new kinds of displays exploring the war from new angles.

“I think a lot of that is changing and getting more centered on the war and not a distorted idea of it,” Burns said. “Basically museums have started to interpret a more holistic look of the war.”

In Charleston, the National Park Service has worked to make anniversary events more hospitable to blacks, offering events featuring Gullah story tellers and basket weavers, discussions of slavery and programs with re-enactors portraying black units that fought for the North. Gullah is the culture of the descendants of slaves who live on the region’s sea islands.

Later this year the Charleston Museum will mount an exhibition about Robert Smalls, the slave who commandeered a Confederate transport vessel and piloted it past Southern batteries to the blockading Union fleet. He later served five terms in Congress from South Carolina.

Still, the feeling that southern museums dedicated to the war are racist is a lingering problem, said President and CEO of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, Waite Rawls.

“It’s still one of the greatest challenges Confederate museums face, and we are all working on it,” he said. “Unfortunately the Confederate flag was used as a symbol of white supremacy in the civil rights era. We got hit with a double whammy of the 1860s and the 1960s.”

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Monique Rivers Williams says her father died Monday night from pneumonia.

The Oklahoma native was a saxophonist, flutist and composer.

He started his career in Boston, where he performed with Herb Pomeroy’s big band in an ensemble that included future music producer Quincy Jones. In 1964, he moved to New York and was hired by Davis. He played with a diverse group of musicians there that included Gillespie, T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker.

He moved to Orlando in the early 1990s and regularly played with a group of jazz musicians whose day jobs were at Walt Disney World.

Plans are being made for a public memorial concert.

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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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One of the robes donated Monday comes from the family of the late writer Stetson Kennedy, who died in August some six decades after he infiltrated the KKK and exposed its secrets.

The second robe belonged to Phineas Miller Nathaniel Wilds, a chaplain in the Klan. It was donated by his great-great-grandson Richard Rousseau.

The $500 million museum is scheduled to open in 2015. Curators are planning exhibits spanning the journey of slaves from Africa, the Civil War, the civil rights movement and accomplishments in music, sports and culture.

Congress has pledged to provide about half of the cost.

Construction for the museum is scheduled to begin next year and a planned grand opening is set for 2015.

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Omni Shoreham Hotel in Northwest Washington an Urban Oasis

“We are grateful to Wal-Mart for its commitment to help educate people — all people — to the unique role African-Americans played in our nation’s growth and history,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Read more at BET.com

Here’s a list of five individuals we feel deserve this honor.

5. 4 Little Girls — Birmingham, Alabama.

Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair were 14-year-old girls who were spending a Sunday morning in church in 1963 when a bomb killed them. The bomb was planted by white supremacists from the Ku Klux Klan meant to frighten Black people from being involved with the civil rights movement.

A monuments for these girls would be a reminder of the cruelty and evil of racism as well as the good, young and innocent who fought and continue to fight it.

Read more on the 4 Little Girls

4. Fannie Lou Hamer

There is a drive to have a statue of Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville, Mississippi. Hamer was one of the most prominent organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Hamer famously led the delegation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the Democratic National Convention in 1964, which led to the Democratic Party’s support for Civil Rights and several southern racist Democrats leaving the party.

Read more on Fannie Lou Hamer

3. James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson was a great author, leader and activist. He wrote the Negro National Anthem, “Left Every Voice,” wrote “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” and worked with W.E.B. DuBois to fight lynching with the NAACP.

A true renaissance man, Weldon should be honored with his own statue.

Too often he is forgotten among the list of Black leaders who fought against racism. A monument should help solve that problem.

Read more on James Weldon Johnson

2. Stokely Carmichael

Stokley Carmichael was a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was a very powerful civil rights organizer.

He would later help with the Black Power movement, becoming “Honorary Prime Minister” and later would become an icon to the Pan Africanist movement, moving to Ghana and changing his name to Kwame Ture.

As an icon to generations of Black activism, Carmichael needs a statue of his own.

Read more on Stokley Carmichael

1. Nat Turner

Nat Turner led a slave revolt in Virginia that killed more than 100 people in 1831.

As slavery is part of America, it must be remembered and those who died fighting against it must be honored, whether they fought for their freedom or died facing it.

In order for America to really distance itself from slavery, it must honor the heroes who fought against it; and one of those heroes is Nat Turner.

Read more on Nat Turner

Virginia Starts Slave Database So Descendants Can Trace Ancestory

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Gov. Deval Patrick on Monday toured the renovated African Meeting House, a three-story brick building constructed in 1806 in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood and standing just blocks from the Massachusetts Statehouse.

The meeting house, a national historic landmark, is “an extraordinary piece of our Commonwealth’s history, the history of African-American people and the history of freedom in the western world,” said Patrick, the state’s first black governor.

During his tour, the governor was shown examples of the painstaking detail that went into the project, including the restoration or replication of all original pews, wall finishes and cast-iron posts in the 1,500-square-foot building.

John Waite, whose Albany, N.Y.-based architectural firm specializes in historical preservation, said paint chips were examined through a high-powered microscope and chemically analyzed in an effort to determine the color of the original paint on the walls so it could be duplicated in the restoration.

The site is scheduled to reopen to the public on Dec. 6, the 205th anniversary of the founding of the meeting house, said Beverly Morgan-Welch, executive director of the Museum of African American History.

“The meeting house was used, of course, as a place of worship, but also as a place of school, for lectures, for music, opera even,” Welch said. “But, most importantly, to gather around the discussions to bring slavery to an end in this nation.”

“When you walk inside and walk into that sanctuary, you’re going to walk directly up the aisle where Frederick Douglass walked and talked about what needed to be done to end slavery,” she said.

“On the very same floor boards,” Patrick added.

Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were among the leading abolitionists who spoke at the meeting house and helped form the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Leaders later met there to help create the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment, which fought in the Civil War and was chronicled in the 1989 film “Glory.”

About half of the $9.5 million cost of the restoration came from private donations, Welch said. The remainder was provided by the National Park Service, including the $4 million in stimulus funds.

Among the surprises discovered during the project was a chimney dating back to the time when the building was heated by cast-iron stoves; the chimney had stayed hidden behind a wall for decades.

Sold late in the 19th century, the building housed a Jewish synagogue until 1972, when it was purchased by the Museum of African American History.

Entertainment Weekly reports:

“Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers,” the statement read.The group of scholars took issue with novelist Kathryn Stockett’s use of “black” dialect, her nearly uniform portrayal of black men as cruel or absent, and the lack of attention paid to the sexual harassment that many black women endured in their white employers’ homes

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The quarterly, which chronicles African-American history, will unveil an 18-wheel mobile museum of Black history.

The exhibition is across from the Howard University bookstore and features photos, stories, artifacts, memorabilia and interactive learning stations that celebrate the story of Blacks in America.

Read more at BET.com

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At its height, Seneca Village was a robust community of nearly 300 people that existed between between the 1820s and 1850s. Though it was a predominately Black neighborhood, housing some of the first Black property owners in the city, it was also home to white European immigrants, who were coexisting peacefully with their African-American neighbors. The diverse community spanned from 81st to 89th street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues. But then came plans for Central Park, and Seneca Village, and the thriving community that lived there, was decimated.

Read More At BET.com

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The Aubrey Stewart Project tells the story of James Aubrey Stewart, a soldier from Piedmont, West Virginia, who along with 10 other black soliders sacrificed their lives to save a family during the Battle of the Bulge.

The Aubrey Stewart Project will showcase the story at schools, churches, and libraries throughout West Virginia. The project is also trying to petition Congress and the Senate for a national unity day in honor of Stewart.

Read more at The Grio.

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The majority of Oakland’s libraries are in danger of having their doors shut, as Mayor Jean Quan tackles with budget proposals to handle the city’s $58 million deficit.

One of them is the African American Museum And Library, which is home to rare books, papers and memorabilia documenting black life in the Bay Area since California was still part of Mexico.

InsideBayArea.com reports:

AAMLO is unique among Oakland’s 18 branches because it has a dual role of archive and museum. Consequently, it has a different mission and quieter profile than the others.

It is also a research library that serves scholars, researchers, journalists from around the world, as well as local individuals trying to trace their family tree. In addition, it hosts events such as a talk Wednesday by Isabel Wilkerson, author of the novel “The Warmth of Other Sons” about the migration of African-Americans from the South to cities like Oakland during World War II.

Supporters will find out whether the libraries will survive this round of cuts as they have repeatedly in the past on June 21, when the budget is due for adoption.

Internal Revenue Service records show that Barton’s nonprofit, Wallbuilder Presentations Inc., used a video project  about the moral heritage and political history of African Americans to claim its non-profit status.

A favorite among right wing conservatives, Barton’s controversial editing has posited a history where Thrugood Marshall is stripped from the history books and  where republicans are credited for passing the 1964 Civil Right Act and the 1965 Voting  Rights Act.

Read More At The Huffington Post.

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In this exclusive video for NewsOne, Radio One founder Cathy Hughes (who is the daughter of original Sweethearts band member Helen Jones Woods) discusses the legacy of these “freedom riders and freedom fighters,” and even reveals that Beyoncé found inspiration in their example:

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WASHINGTON, DC — The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, America’s first all-female racially-integrated band, are being interviewed onstage today at the Smithsonian Institution from 11 a.m. to noon ET as part of the launch of the museum’s Jazz Appreciation Month.

In this onstage conversation (and webcast), members of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm discuss the history of women in jazz and the legacy of the Sweethearts. Moderated by Frank Alkyer (publisher, Down Beat and Music, Inc.) and David Baker (maestro, Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra).

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Return to NewsOne over the next few days to see more behind-the-scenes of this historic event.

Click on the video below to begin watching:

Video streaming by Ustream

This week the Smithsonian Institution celebrates the Sweethearts’ legacy as part of the launch of the museum’s Jazz Appreciation Month.

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The Sweeethearts’ exhibit will be on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC from March 25 to May 31. Members of the Sweethearts, which included Black, white, Latino and Asian women, will participate in several events on March 29 and 30 at the museum. Radio One founder Cathy Hughes, whose mother Helen Jones Woods was an original band member, will also be a participant [NewsOne is a division of Radio One]:

Hughes, the Piney Woods School and Roz Cron (she had the largest collection) will participate in a “Donation Ceremony” to highlight their collection.  And then Ms. Hughes will facilitate an brief (10 minute) onstage discussion with six of the original Sweethearts who will participate in programming at the Smithsonian:  They are Helen Jones Woods (trombonist), Ms. Hughes’ mother; Willie Mae Wong Scott (saxophonist), the child of a Chinese father and mixed race Native American mother, she grew up on Mississippi in 1920s; Sadye Pankey Moore (trumpeter), African American; Johnnie Mae Rice Graham (pianist), African American; Lillie Keeler Sims (trombone), African American woman who played with the Sweethearts their first year but later served as an educator and administrator in the NYC school system 40 years;  and Roz Cron, one of the first white woman to join the band. On March 30th, the Sweethearts and Cathy Hughes will participate in a 60 minute discussion on the Sweetheart’s legacy that will be webcast via UStream.

NewsOne will provide continuing coverage and a deeper look into the Sweethearts’ history in the coming week.

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Alabama — Last summer, African-American man Worcy Crawford passed away at the age of 92. If you are unfamiliar with the name, you aren’t the only one.

With his passing, a civil rights story of epic proportions went untold.

When people think of buses and the civil rights era, they think of Rosa Parks. But many forget that there was a man who was busing around all the Blacks during the time of segregation. This man didn’t only bus Blacks, he owned the buses.

Read more at the NYTimes

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Here are NewsOne’s top 20 Black radio jockeys of all time, picked for their pioneering spirit and influence.

[DJs who made their name before becoming radio personalities have been excluded, but honorable mentions must go to folks like Steve Harvey, Rickey Smiley, and Yolanda Adams].

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1) Jack L. Cooper

Widely considered to be the first African-American radio announcer, Jack L. Cooper’s “All Negro” radio show aired in the 1930s on Chicago’s WSBC. Cooper was succeeded in Black Chicago radio by very important air personalities like Al Benson — who brought the blues and jazz to Chicago on WGES — and his colleague Herb Kent, who made his mark after his move to WVON, where he was a strong voice for progress during the tumultuous Civil Rights movement.

2) Jack “The Rapper” Gibson
Gibson got his start on the very first Black owned radio station, Atlanta’s WERD, in 1949. Embodying the fast talking style for which he was named, Gibson also went on to create one of the first Black radio trades, “Jack The Rapper,” and the infamous Black music convention of the same name.

3) Rufus Thomas
Rufus Thomas was the preeminent DJ of Memphis’ WDIA, the nation’s first radio station with an all-Black air staff. A triple-threat performer of song, dance, and comedy, Thomas’ nighttime show, “Hoot and Holler,” was an influential source of blues and R&B for a generation of white and Black listeners alike. Thomas also hosted amateur talent shows on Memphis’ famed Beale Street, premiering young talents like B.B. King, Ike Turner, and Bobby “Blue” Bland.

4) Jocko Henderson
A legendary disc jockey on the airwaves of Philadelphia and New York in the 1950s and 1960s, Douglas Wendell “Jocko” Henderson was a pioneer of the slick-talking, rapid-fire radio patter that influenced Black and White jockeys nationwide and laid a cultural foundation for “rap” music.

5) Petey Greene
Known as one of the original shock-jocks, Greene was a trailblazer of talk radio; and his influence was such that he has been credited with quashing the riots in Washington, D.C. in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Greene got an unusual start to his broadcasting career when he began DJing for the Virginia prison in which he was serving a five year sentence for armed robbery. Upon his release when he was hired to host his own show, Rapping With Petey Greene, at WOL in Washington D.C. His success led him to television where he hosted his own Emmy Award-winning show, Petey Greene’s Washington, on local WDCA-TV and BET.

6) Melvin Lindsey
Almost twenty years after his death, WHUR jock Marvin Lindsey’s “Quiet Storm” playlist remains an inspiration for imitators at radio stations across the country. Lindsey started out interning at Howard University’s WHUR, and got his first break filling in for a DJ who couldn’t make it in. The positive response for Lindsey’s impromptu show led WHUR station manager (and now Radio One founder) Cathy Hughes to give him his own time slot. Christening the show “Quiet Storm” after a hit single from Smokey Robinson, Lindsey’s smooth soulful playlist was an instant success, and may well have influenced the growth of the “smooth Jazz” sector of the music and radio business.

7) Dyanna Williams
Dynanna Williams is one of the earliest and most influential female air personalities in Black radio. Using the name “Ebony Moonbeams,” Williams started her career in broadcasting in 1973 when she was hired at Howard University’s WHUR. Two years later, Frankie Crocker hired Williams at WBLS-FM in her hometown, New York City. In 1978 she became the first African American woman rock DJ at WRQX-FM in Washington DC. In 1990 Williams launched the Association of African American Music Foundation to promote African American musicians, and currently hosts a weekly broadcast, “Soulful Sunday,” on Radio One’s 107.9 WRNB in Philadelphia.

8) Chuck Leonard
Leonard, another pioneer of Black jocks’ move into the mainstream, was the first African-American disc jockey on landmark pop station WABC-AM, where he stayed for 14 years doing late-night shifts before moving through a string of New York stations like WRKS, WBLS, and WJUX. Leonard caught the radio bug in college as program director of University of Illinois station WPGU.

9) Frankie Crocker
Crocker first became a household name on New York’s Black station, WWRL. But after becoming one of the first Black jocks to “cross over” into more mainstream radio (as one of WMCA’s “Good Guys”), Crocker crossed back when a Black-owned consortium hired him for a new FM station in New York called WBLS. Crocker assembled a huge, multiracial audience, and had a great influence on the mainstreaming of disco. Though resistant to rap, he played some of the first hip-hop records and hired hip-hop’s first legendary radio jock, Mr.Magic.

10) Mr. Magic
When John “Mr. Magic” Rivas created “Disco Showcase” in 1979 on a small pay-for-time FM station in New York called WHBI, he didn’t know he was starting what would become the very first rap radio show. A few years later, Magic took his “Rap Attack” to commercial station WBLS, and fostered the careers of producer Marley Marl, and artists like Biz Markie and Big Daddy Kane. Mr. Magic brought the first rap show to commercial radio on New York’s WBLS.

11) Red Alert
New York rival 98.7 Kiss-FM answered Frankie Crocker’s hiring of Mr. Magic when they asked Kool DJ Red Alert to craft his own rap show on weekends. Self-effacing where Magic was brash, Red Alert became a beloved figure of listeners and rappers alike. Red Alert fostered the careers of acts such as KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah and A Tribe Called Quest.

12) Greg Mack
Mack was already a successful air personality in Houston when a small AM station in Los Angeles called KDAY hired him to be disc jockey and music director. But Mack’s aggressive programming of rap music made KDAY the first station to embrace rap as a core part of its programming, and helped launch the L.A. rap scene. Mack gave the first airplay to now legendary acts like the LA Dream Team, Egyptian Lover, World Class Wreckin’ Cru, Dr. Dre, Eazy E, Ice T, Ice Cube, NWA, Tone Loc and dozens more.

13) Tom Joyner
In 1985, Tom Joyner earned his stripes as “The Hardest Working Man In Radio,” juggling two top-rated shows in separate cities over a thousand miles apart. For eight years Joyner would do a weekly morning show at K-104 in Dallas, and fly to Chicago every weekday afternoon for a show at WGCI. In 1994, “The Fly Jock” became the one of the first nationally syndicated Black DJs when was hired to host his own program, the Tom Joyner Morning Show, which spread to 29 stations. In 1998, Joyner became the first African-American inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.

14) Russ Parr
Russ Parr began his career as a stand-up comedian in California, and got his start in radio on Los Angeles’s famed KDAY. In the mid-1980s Parr also recorded with his band “Bobby Jimmy and The Critters.” In 1996, he became the second African-American giant of syndication in 1996 when his Russ Parr Morning Show on Radio One’s WKYS-FM became the base of operations for a network that eventually reached more than 3 million listeners daily on over 40 radio stations.

15) Robin Quivers
As the long-running Black female sidekick of white shock-jock Howard Stern, Quivers has held her own in a predominately male atmosphere for thirty years. Part cohost and part cosigner, Quivers has maintained a precarious and controversial role as foil for Stern’s arguably racist rants: Does her presence give Stern a “pass,” or does she keep him in check? Either way, Quivers has become one of the most recognized female radio personalities in the country.

16) Wendy Williams
Referring to herself as the “Queen of All Media,” Wendy Williams’ trademark mixture of oversized personality and merciless celebrity gossip created a new radio archetype and captured millions of fans. After college, Williams started her career in radio as an intern for Kiss 108 in Boston, and made the move to New York City’s Kiss-FM, where she eventually landed her own air shift; and then on to New York’s Hot 97. Williams was Billboard’s Best On-Air Radio Personality in 1993, and became the second African-American woman inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2009. Williams currently hosts her own daytime TV talk show.

17) Electrifying Mojo
Broadcasting first on WGPR in Detroit, Mojo challenged ideas about the role of a radio jockey. His unbridled and unusual music selection inspired legions of fans in Detroit, and Mojo is recognized for having introduced listeners to a number of artists that include Prince, The B-52’s, and Kraftwerk. Mojo was well known for his habit of playing lengthy recordings without interruption, and was hugely influential in the formation of the Detroit techno scene.

18) Star & Buc Wild
Star (Troi Torain) and his stepbrother Buc Wild (Timothy Joseph) started their radio journey in March of 2000 hosting the morning show on Hot 97 in New York City. Their aggressive and culturally mixed personas quickly surpassed Howard Stern for the number one spot among young listeners. Though often contentious, the show continues to capture new supporters while proving to be at the forefront of today’s changing media landscape. Star & Buc Wild currently host the morning show on Philadelphia ’s 100.3 The Beat.

19) David “Davey D” Cook
A nationally renowned pioneer blending hip-hop, radio and community activism, David Cook moved from the Bronx to the Bay Area shortly after the dawn of the hip-hop era. Cook eventually landed a radio show on Berkeley’s KALX. With his Bronx Science high school colleague Kevvy Kev Montague over at Stanford’s KZSU, and a number of other important DJs and shows at college and community stations across the Bay, Cook eventually became the ringleader of the Bay Area Hip-Hop Coalition, the first rap radio deejay collective in the world, with more hours of hip-hop on air than in any area of the country. When local pop station KMEL started playing hip-hop aggressively, Cook pioneered a new kind of prime time community affairs program, blending music with activism.

20) Sway
Sway Calloway, along with his partner King Tech, became the first to host a hip-hop radio show on a pop station when his Wake Up Show debuted on San Francisco’s KMEL-FM in 1990. The Wake Up Show eventually became internationally syndicated, reaching more than 20 different markets in five countries. Sway himself became the morning personality on KMEL-FM, and then was hired by MTV as an on-air host and journalist. Sway now hosts the morning show on Sirius satellite radio’s Shade 45.

Related: Top 9 Black Television Talk Show Hosts

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On the extended version of his 1988 single “I Wish U Heaven,” Prince sang “Take this beat / I don’t mind / Got plenty others / and they’re so fine!”

Apparently a few hip-hop producers got the message and began mining Prince’s catalog for samples!

Here are a few of our favorites!

Kanye West “Big Brother”

DJ Toomp produced Kanye West’s ode to his “big brother,” Jay-Z. The song replays a riff from Prince’s “It’s Gonna Be Lonely” from his 1979 self-titled album.

2Pac “Heartz Of Men”

Taken from the last album Tupac released before he was murdered, “Heartz Of Men” samples the end of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” that creepy backwards bit that probably scared Christian parents all over the country.

2Pac “What’z Ya Phone #”

The raunchy closing song on disc 1 of 2Pac’s All Eyez On Me album is built off of a loop from The Time’s “777-9311.” The Time was formed by Prince as an outlet for his funkier material. Prince produced, wrote, and performed most of The Time’s material with his friend Morris Day handling vocals.

Jay-Z & Beyoncé “’03 Bonnie & Clyde”

The Jiggaman launched The Blueprint 2 album with this Kanye West produced single featuring his then-girlfriend Beyoncé. The song features Beyoncé singing lyrics from Prince’s 1987 classic “If I Was Your Girlfriend.”

MC Lyte “Paper Thin”

MC Lyte’s classic “Paper Thin” features a sample from Prince & The Revolution’s “17 Days” which was the b-side of “When Doves Cry.”

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When slavery was finally outlawed during the Civil War, few Americans took the removal of the slaves’ shackles to mean that the African should be accorded equal status with the white man. Yet, in 1903, just 40 years after the Emancipation, one man dared to envision such a future. W.E.B. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” made its author the foremost Black thinker, writer and sociologist of the early 20th Century. More importantly, Du Bois initiated the “great debate” -integration versus segregation, the insistence of equality versus the accommodation of racism – that set in motion a chain of events, ultimately leading to the election of first Black President of the United States. The very election of Barack Obama is a vindication of the convictions and tireless work of W.E.B. Du Bois.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, MA, on February 23rd, 1868. Du Bois attended Fisk University, and became the first Black American in history to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. His intellectual upbringing informed his philosophies, as later expressed in “The Souls of Black Folk.” Du Bois coined the term “double consciousness” to describe the way that Black Americans led their lives as human beings, yet second-class citizens, in an America that was born on the concept that all men are created equal. Du Bois believed that the path to liberty would lie in educating the top echelon, or “Talented Tenth,” of African-Americans to lead the rest.

Du Bois’s main adversaries were Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington. Garvey believed that the quest for parity with white Americans was foolish, and proposed to repatriate freed Blacks to Africa. Washington believed that Du Bois’s tactics would antagonize whites and lead to a disastrous race war. Du Bois called Washington “the Great Accomodator.” Not surprisingly, Washington was favored among the white leaders of his day.

Du Bois was one of the initial founders of the National Association For The Advancement of Colored People, and thus laid the groundwork not only for the Civil Rights movement, but the very idea of partnership with liberal whites to achieve socio-political results.

Du Bois became more radical towards the end of his life, joining the Communist Party in the 1961 at the age of 93, and expatriating to Ghana shortly thereafter. W.E.B. Du Bois died in 1963, just one day before the March on Washington.

Du Bois’s intellect, his insistence on equal rights for Black Americans, and his willingness to form a coalition with whites to achieve his ends formed the model by which Barack Obama ascended to the highest office in the land, and in so doing, liberating us all from the tyranny of racism.

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U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States – studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn’t give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect – they violated the concept of “first do no harm,” a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

“When you give somebody a disease – even by the standards of their time – you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.

Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society – people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

“There was definitely a sense – that we don’t have today – that sacrifice for the nation was important,” said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.

The AP review of past research found:

-A federally funded study begun in 1942 injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later. It was co-authored by Dr. Jonas Salk, who a decade later would become famous as inventor of the polio vaccine.

Some of the men weren’t able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were “senile and debilitated.” Then it quickly moved on to the promising results.

-In federally funded studies in the 1940s, noted researcher Dr. W. Paul Havens Jr. exposed men to hepatitis in a series of experiments, including one using patients from mental institutions in Middletown and Norwich, Conn. Havens, a World Health Organization expert on viral diseases, was one of the first scientists to differentiate types of hepatitis and their causes.

A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.

-Researchers in the mid-1940s studied the transmission of a deadly stomach bug by having young men swallow unfiltered stool suspension. The study was conducted at the New York State Vocational Institution, a reformatory prison in West Coxsackie. The point was to see how well the disease spread that way as compared to spraying the germs and having test subjects breathe it. Swallowing it was a more effective way to spread the disease, the researchers concluded. The study doesn’t explain if the men were rewarded for this awful task.

-A University of Minnesota study in the late 1940s injected 11 public service employee volunteers with malaria, then starved them for five days. Some were also subjected to hard labor, and those men lost an average of 14 pounds. They were treated for malarial fevers with quinine sulfate. One of the authors was Ancel Keys, a noted dietary scientist who developed K-rations for the military and the Mediterranean diet for the public. But a search of various news archives found no mention of the study.

-For a study in 1957, when the Asian flu pandemic was spreading, federal researchers sprayed the virus in the noses of 23 inmates at Patuxent prison in Jessup, Md., to compare their reactions to those of 32 virus-exposed inmates who had been given a new vaccine.

-Government researchers in the 1950s tried to infect about two dozen volunteering prison inmates with gonorrhea using two different methods in an experiment at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The bacteria was pumped directly into the urinary tract through the penis, according to their paper.

The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn’t comparable to how men normally got infected – by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives.

Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.

Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. In 1915, the U.S. government’s Dr. Joseph Goldberger – today remembered as a public health hero – recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)

But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, “devitalized men” by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.

Newspapers wrote about Stanley’s experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.

“Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth – an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. All this has been done, is being done … by a surgeon with a scalpel,” began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.

Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. For example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.

It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the “Nuremberg Code,” a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities – not to American medicine.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.

But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public’s attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.

The first came to light in 1963. Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them.

The hospital director said the patients were not told they were being injected with cancer cells because there was no need – the cells were deemed harmless. But the experiment upset a lawyer named William Hyman who sat on the hospital’s board of directors. The state investigated, and the hospital ultimately said any such experiments would require the patient’s written consent.

At nearby Staten Island, from 1963 to 1966, a controversial medical study was conducted at the Willowbrook State School for children with mental retardation. The children were intentionally given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured with gamma globulin.

Those two studies – along with the Tuskegee experiment revealed in 1972 – proved to be a “holy trinity” that sparked extensive and critical media coverage and public disgust, said Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College historian who first discovered records of the syphilis study in Guatemala.

By the early 1970s, even experiments involving prisoners were considered scandalous. In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward “Yusef” Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison.

“I said ‘Oh my God, my back is on fire! Take this … off me!’” Anthony said in an interview with The Associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain.

The government responded with reforms. Among them: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the mid-1970s effectively excluded all research by drug companies and other outside agencies within federal prisons.

As the supply of prisoners and mental patients dried up, researchers looked to other countries.

It made sense. Clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules. And it was easy to find patients who were taking no medication, a factor that can complicate tests of other drugs.

Additional sets of ethical guidelines have been enacted, and few believe that another Guatemala study could happen today. “It’s not that we’re out infecting anybody with things,” Caplan said.

Still, in the last 15 years, two international studies sparked outrage.

One was likened to Tuskegee. U.S.-funded doctors failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns. U.S. health officials argued the study would answer questions about AZT’s use in the developing world.

The other study, by Pfizer Inc., gave an antibiotic named Trovan to children with meningitis in Nigeria, although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease. Critics blamed the experiment for the deaths of 11 children and the disabling of scores of others. Pfizer settled a lawsuit with Nigerian officials for $75 million but admitted no wrongdoing.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general reported that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown. The report also noted that U.S. regulators inspected fewer than 1 percent of foreign clinical trial sites.

Monitoring research is complicated, and rules that are too rigid could slow new drug development. But it’s often hard to get information on international trials, sometimes because of missing records and a paucity of audits, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine who has written on the ethics of international studies.

These issues were still being debated when, last October, the Guatemala study came to light.

In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.

The Guatemala study nauseated ethicists on multiple levels. Beyond infecting patients with a terrible illness, it was clear that people in the study did not understand what was being done to them or were not able to give their consent. Indeed, though it happened at a time when scientists were quick to publish research that showed frank disinterest in the rights of study participants, this study was buried in file drawers.

“It was unusually unethical, even at the time,” said Stark, the Wesleyan researcher.

“When the president was briefed on the details of the Guatemalan episode, one of his first questions was whether this sort of thing could still happen today,” said Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

That it occurred overseas was an opening for the Obama administration to have the bioethics panel seek a new evaluation of international medical studies. The president also asked the Institute of Medicine to further probe the Guatemala study, but the IOM relinquished the assignment in November, after reporting its own conflict of interest: In the 1940s, five members of one of the IOM’s sister organizations played prominent roles in federal syphilis research and had links to the Guatemala study.

So the bioethics commission gets both tasks. To focus on federally funded international studies, the commission has formed an international panel of about a dozen experts in ethics, science and clinical research. Regarding the look at the Guatemala study, the commission has hired 15 staff investigators and is working with additional historians and other consulting experts.

The panel is to send a report to Obama by September. Any further steps would be up to the administration.

Some experts say that given such a tight deadline, it would be a surprise if the commission produced substantive new information about past studies. “They face a really tough challenge,” Caplan said.

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Lewis Latimer (1848 – 1928)
Invention: Carbon filament for incandescent light bulbs
After serving in the US Navy, Lewis Latimer began working for a patent law firm. During his tenure at the law offices, he was promoted from office boy to head draftsman when his boss recognized his talent for sketching patent drawings. In 1874, he co-patented an improved toilet system for railroad cars called the Water Closet for Railroad Cars Alexander Graham Bell employed the young Latimer to draft sketches for Bell’s newest invention — the Bell telephone. Latimer later went on to work for a rival inventor of Thomas Edison and received a patent for the “Process of Manufacturing Carbons”, an improved method for the production of carbon filaments for the incandescent light bulb. This patent led to Latimer’s employment with The Edison Electric Light Company as Edison’s draftsman and patent litigation expert.

President’s Day: Meet The 5 Other Black Presidents In U.S. History

George Washington Carver (1864 – 1943)
Invention: Peanut Butter
George Washington Carver was born a slave in Missouri. Carver tirelessly pursued an education for himself, finally graduating from college when he was 30 years old. Carver researched and promoted farming alternatives to cotton, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes. Carver discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes, including peanut butter, paper, ink, and oils. He worked as a professor of agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute.

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (1856 – 1931)
Invention: Performed the first successful open-heart surgery
The son of a Pennsylvania barber, Daniel Hale Williams found his calling when he went from being a shoemaker’s apprentice to a medical apprentice. He graduated from the Chicago Medical School in 1883, and was one of only four African American doctors in the Chicago area. In an effort to combat the institutionalized racism keeping African Americans out of nursing schools, medical schools, and medical jobs, Dr. Williams founded the first African American owned hospital in the United States and the first nursing school for African Americans. Dr. Williams performed the first successful open-heart surgery on a patient with a stab wound to the chest in his hospital. The patient recovered and lived another twenty years.

Black History Month Profile: Oprah Winfrey

Madam C.J. Walker (1867 – 1919)
Invention: Hair-growing lotion
Born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, Walker overcame a childhood of slavery and abuse to found the C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. Unable to find products to treat the common scalp diseases caused by a lack of indoor plumbing and infrequent washing, Walker decided to create her own ointment and shampoo. In addition to a mail order business and door-to-door sales, Walker founded a beauty school to train women in hair care. She was the first self-made female millionaire.

Lonnie G. Johnson (1949 – )
Invention: The SuperSoaker
Engineer and inventor Lonnie George Johnson founded his own engineering firm that was ultimately purchased by Hasbro. The SuperSoaker was the top selling toy in 1991 and 1992 and has generated over $200 million in retail sales. In addition to his success as a toy inventor, Johnson also works to develop new energy technologies including new types of rechargeable batteries, solar power plants, and ocean thermal power generators.

Black History Month Profile: Ralph Ellison

Sarah E. Goode (1850 – 1905)
Invention: Folding cabinet bed
Sarah E. Goode was the first African American woman to be granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Tradesmark Office for her invention, the cabinet bed, on July 14, 1885. Freed at the end of the Civil War, Goode moved to Chicago and became an entrepreneur, owner of a furniture store. Her customers often expressed that they had little room for beds in their cramped apartments, and so Goode conceived the design of what we know today as the “hide away” bed. When not in use as a bed, Goode’s invention could also be used as a desk and was the precursor to popular pieces like Murphy beds and trundle beds today.

Elijah McCoy (1844 – 1929)
Invention: Steam engine lubricant
Elijah McCoy was an Edinburg educated inventor and engineer who eventually acquired 57 US patents. McCoy is most famous for inventing an automatic lubricator for oiling locomotive and boat steam engines that allowed these engines to run longer and faster. Elijah McCoy is the man behind the phrase “the real McCoy”, meaning “the real thing”. It is said that railroad engineers looking to avoid inferior copies of McCoy’s invention would inquire if a locomotive was fitted with “the real McCoy system”.

Garrett Morgan (1877 – 1963)
Invention: Gas mask
When Garrett Morgan was fourteen, he moved from his hometown in Kentucky to Ohio to pursue his destiny. Morgan worked as a sewing machine repairman, eventually opening up his own sewing machine, shoe repair, and tailor shop. After hearing about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Morgan patented a “safety hood and smoke protector”. Using this new invention, he and two other men gained national recognition as heros when they helped rescue workers trapped in a tunnel explosion under Lake Erie. He also patented his own version of the traffic signal, but it was never put into production.

As a noted surgeon and scientist, Charles Drew was responsible for creating the technology to store blood for long periods of time. His lifelong concern for the necessary transport and storage of blood and plasma made him a pioneer in his field and a valued scientist in world history. Drew saved thousands of soldiers’ lives in World War Two, when he developed his technology and techniques during the Battle of Britain; and millions more since then. At the same time, Drew battled segregation and bigory at home. Dr. Charles Drew and Barack Obama are, of course, alike in that they both accomplished legendary African-American firsts in the face of prejudice. But President Barack Obama may indeed accomplish a similar lifesaving legacy if he ends the bloody wars begun by the previous administration.

Charles Richard Drew was born on June 3rd, 1904 in Washington D.C. Drew first discovered his passion for medicine at Amherst College, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1926. Drew saved money for medical school by taking instruction jobs and working hard labor before enrolling at McGill University Medical School in Montreal. He finished his residency at Montreal General Hospital and then moved to his hometown of Washington D.C. to serve as a professor at Howard University. But it was during his fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian where he endeavored his groundbreaking research about blood transfusions. His thesis project, “Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation,” earned Drew a Doctorate of Science in medicine from Columbia University in 1940, and then proceeded to change the world.

At the outset of World War II, Drew’s work with plasma was critical in helping the United States and their allied forces to save soldiers’ lives. Drew became an integral member of the American Red Cross in 1941, but later denounced his affiliation when the U.S. War Department declared that blood should be segregated by race. After making his commitment to soldiers of all colors, Drew was disheartened that his countrymen would not support his efforts. In 1946, he was elected to the International College of Surgeons after winning the NAACP’s Spingard Medal two years prior. On his way to a conference at Tuskegee in 1950, Drew fell asleep at the wheel, and his car wrecked. He died on April 1st of that year. Drew did not, as myth has it, die because he was refused a blood transfusion.

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Born Sarah Breedlove, Walker descended from slaves who died when she was still a child. While many young children would have been too traumatized to overcome the death of two parents, she and her sister took jobs laboring in kitchens, and on farms until they could sustain themselves. In 1910, after forming the Hair Culturists’ Union of America in Indianapolis, she made it a point to find allies in the Black political community. She moved to New York in 1916, building (with the help of the first registered black architect) a palatial home that rivaled any in the Hudson River Valley.

How she came into the hair business was no coincidence. Walker may have suffered from alopecia, a rare ailment that is characterized by little or no hair growth on the body. As a response to her own condition, Walker created a formula (that she claimed had been delivered to her in a dream) to restore hair growth. While many say she did invent a metal “hot comb” specifically for Black women to straighten out the curl in their roots, that is not accurate. The primary cause of her hair loss was the result of a common problem of the era i.e. infrequent washing and products that were not designed for the hair of black women.

With her ingenious marketing in every Black publication, and her constant travel to trade shows, Walker became a household name. She interrupted Booker T. Washington’s prestigious National Negro Business League Convention after Washington had apparently ignored her requests to speak. As a woman who had founded and developed one of the nation’s most formidable businesses, she would not be denied the right to correlate with her peers on the same level.

Not one to horde her riches, Walker moved to create philanthropic projects that would help Black communities. She funded the YMCA building in Indianapolis where her business was, donated to the NAACP, and traveled to Woodrow Wilson’s White House to present an anti-lynching petition after violent outbursts had killed Blacks in an Illinois riot. She passed on her legacy of philanthropy to daughter A’Lelia, who was responsible for creating “The Dark Tower,” a salon that hosted Black writers and artists who would display their work during the Harlem Renaissance. Walker died of kidney disease, and bequeathed her estate to her female heirs.

In 1911 Madam Walker pledged $1000 toward the building fund of the black YMCA in Indianapolis. She was one of many funders.

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They started at a fountain where slaves were once sold, past the church that Martin Luther King Jr. led during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and ended at the Capitol steps, where Alabama’s old and modern history often collide.

It’s the spot where former Gov. George C. Wallace proclaimed “segregation forever” in 1963 and where King concluded the historic Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965.

The city no longer rolls out the red carpet for the Sons of Confederate Veterans like it did 50 years ago, when the centennial of Davis’ inauguration was a state-coordinated celebration with past and present governors and officials from all ranks of government.

On Saturday, state and city officials gave permission for the SCV to march, but had no role in the events. Elected officials from the governor to the mayor chose to stay home or go to other events.

The reception was even colder from African-American leaders in the state.

“The whole celebration is akin to celebrating the Holocaust,” state NAACP President Benard Simelton said.

Simelton said elected officials stayed away because they knew attendance would be viewed as a slap in the face to African-Americans, who make up one-fourth of Alabama’s population.

Black leaders had discussed holding a protest like the one held in December at a Secession Ball in Charleston, S.C., but decided against it.

“We didn’t want to give them more publicity,” said Rep. Alvin Holmes, the longest serving black member of the Alabama Legislature.

A downtown shopper, Shirley Williams of Montgomery, who is black, shook her head as she walked by the parade. She said she was offended the parade occurred during Black History Month.

“It represents things in the past that were not positive. Some things ought to be remembered, but this brings up too many painful things people went through,” she said.

Sons of Confederate Veterans members, who trace their history to ancestors who fought in the war, call it the “War Between the States” or the “War of Secession” rather than the Civil War. They say its origins have been distorted by modern historians.

SCV member Randy Beeler said he drove from Paducah, Ky., to “send a message the war was fought over states’ rights. Slavery was an issue, but it was not the main issue.”

“Yes, it was about states’ rights. It was about states’ rights to have slavery,” retorted Rep. Holmes, a retired college history teacher.

One of the organizers, Chuck McMichael, a past national commander of the SCV, called the comparison of the march to celebrating the Holocaust ludicrous.

“In many ways the Union Army acted more like the German army of the 1940s with its scorched earth policy,” said McMichael, a high school history teacher from Shreveport, La.

The Montgomery event is the biggest event planned by the SCV this year to mark the sesquicentennial. In 2012, McMichael said the action will switch to Richmond, Va., which replaced Montgomery as the capital of the Confederacy.

Holding up a Confederate flag near the end of the ceremony, he told the crowd, “As long as there blows a southern breeze, this flag will fly in it.”

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Led Zeppelin is considered by many to be one of the greatest bands in the history of rock music, but their roots clearly lie in the tradition of the blues.

Their blues influences got the best of them on a few occasions during their run in the late 60s and 70s. In 1972, the band was sued for copyright infringement by Arc Music, the music publishing company that handled the catalog of Chess Records, one of the premier blues record labels. At the center of the case were two Led Zeppelin songs, “Bring It On Home” and “The Lemon Song.”

Arc Music claimed that the intro to “Bring It On Home” borrowed liberally from Sonny Boy Williamson’s song of the same name written by Willie Dixon, and that “The Lemon Song” borrowed from Howlin’ Wolf’s song “Killing Floor.”

Compare the songs below:

Sonny Boy Williamson’s original version of “Bring It On Home” vs Led Zeppelin’s “Bring It On Home.”

The Electric Flag’s version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” vs Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song”

The case was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money. Ironically, Dixon himself didn’t receive any money from the settlement until he sued Arc Music over royalties and copyrights.

Dixon sued Led Zeppelin himself in 1985 in regards to another song he felt infringed on his copyrights, claiming that Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” ripped off lyrics from his song “You Need Love.” Again, a settlement was reached out of court, and Dixon was given credit as co-writer of “Whole Lotta Love.”

Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, commented on the band’s use of classic blues songs in an interview with Guitar World magazine.

I always tried to bring something fresh to anything that I used. I always made sure to come up with some variation. In fact, I think in most cases, you would never know what the original source could be. Maybe not in every case — but in most cases. So most of the comparisons rest on the lyrics. And Robert [Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin] was supposed to change the lyrics, and he didn’t always do that — which is what brought on most of the grief. They couldn’t get us on the guitar parts of the music, but they nailed us on the lyrics. We did, however, take some liberties, I must say [laughs]. But never mind; we did try to do the right thing.

Years later, many hip-hop artists would find themselves in a similar position as Led Zeppelin as the laws surrounding sampling became more strict, ultimately changing the sound of the genre forever.

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In 1940, one Black novelist dared to show America what white supremacy did to one Black man. When “Native Son” appeared on America’s bookshelves, it became an instant bestseller, the first title by an African-American author selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. It also introduced the world to the complicated protagonist of “Native Son,” Chicago’s Bigger Thomas, who was driven to murder a white woman through his terror of white people, not because of hate. Wright, as an accomplished writer, a prophet, and a leftist, helped cut the path on which Barack Obama walked into Chicago’s South Side, onto the local and national political stage, and now, the White House.

Richard Wright, the grandson of slaves, was born on a plantation in Mississippi in 1908. Shuffled between Mississippi and Memphis for most of his childhood, Wright published his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre,” when he was 15. In 1927, after graduating high school, Wright moved to Chicago, where he worked for the post office and wrote in his spare time. During the Great Depression, Wright affiliated with the Communist Party, and Wright penned many of his earliest works for leftist publications. Richard Wright’s career blossomed after he moved to New York in 1937. He mentored Ralph Ellison, published an acclaimed book of short stories called “Uncle Tom’s Children,” and with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote “Native Son,” published in 1940.

“Native Son” was criticized by many people for its violence. Black critics targeted Wright for writing a spectacle that seemed to confirm white America’s worst racist fantasies about Black men. But the book catapulted Wright to the top echelon of American letters. He published his autobiography, “Black Boy,” in 1945.

After World War II, Richard Wright expatriated to France, where he fell in with noted existentialist writer/philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He traveled to Africa in the 1950s, where he contracted dysentery. The illness contributed to Wright’s failing health before his death in Paris in 1960 of a heart attack. Wright was only 52.

Richard Wright greatly influenced the mindset of white liberals in the 1940s and 50s, and his work inspired the Black activists of the 1960s. “Wright,” said Amiri Baraka, “was one of the people who made me conscious of the need to struggle.” Without a doubt, Wright inspired Barack Obama, too.

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Cole was the first African-American to star in a network variety program and he attracted a constellation of major black singers and musicians as guests, including Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Sammy Davis Jr. and Cab Calloway.

Mel Torme, Peggy Lee and Tony Bennett were among the white performers who appeared.

“I knew these TV shows were too important to have something happen to them, so that’s why I held on them all these years,” Maria Cole said in a statement.

“Nat never looked or sounded better in those shows. It’s just a shame that the show lasted just a little more than a year.”

At least 25 episodes will be released, four a month, with a suggested retail price of $1.99 an episode for download and 99 cents an episode for video on demand or rental. Some videos will be available for sale.

Not all the show’s 64 original episodes have survived, according to a project spokesman.

Cole, who started as a jazz pianist, was a smoothly elegant vocalist who became a pop star in the 1940s. His hit songs included “Unforgettable,” “Mona Lisa” and “Walking My Baby Back Home.”

But viewers and advertisers snubbed his TV show, which debuted in November 1956. NBC kept it on the air despite low ratings and lack of national sponsors but it ended in December 1957.

“Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark,” Cole is quoted as saying later about advertisers’ racial skittishness.

TV historians have noted that variety shows with other celebrated singers, including Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, were short-lived.

But there was clearly an entrenched resistance to shows with black stars. It would be close to a decade before other series featuring African-Americans, including “I Spy” with Bill Cosby and “Julia” with Diahann Carroll, gained a place on network TV, and the medium still has an uneven grasp on ethnic diversity.

Cole died in 1965 at age 45. His daughter, Natalie Cole, recorded a Grammy-winning tribute album to her dad in 1991 that included a version of “Unforgettable” combining her voice with his recording of the song.

Before the battle for Civil Rights was waged in the South, it was fought in the North. And foremost among those northern Black leaders who spearheaded the charge for equality was Adam Clayton Powell Jr. As a local leader in pre-World War Two Harlem, Powell fought successfully to end discrimination in hiring and in public facilities. As the first- ever African-American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York, Powell placed himself at the forefront of the passage of Civil Rights and anti-poverty legislation. In a way, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was the archetype for the modern Black politician in America. As such, he took those first steps in the long walk that eventually led to Barack Obama crossing the threshold of the White House.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was born on November 29, 1908 in New Haven, Connecticut to Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Mattie Shaffer. After moving to Harlem, Powell, Jr. published a regular column called “The Soap Box” in the Amsterdam News, a well-reputed black newspaper for Harlemites, and was able to establish himself as a voice for the people. In 1937, he succeeded his father as the head pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. As a prominent leader of New York City’s Black community, Powell fought ceaselessly for the abolition of unfair, racist policies and practices. He led successful mass actions of all kinds: rent strikes, bus boycotts, and protests against the hiring practices of the 1939 World’s Fair and Harlem Hospital. Powell helped to create several organizations like the Harlem People’s Committee, who espoused his slogan “Don’t buy where you can’t work.” But Powell was not yet satisfied with the projects he saw to completion as a community leader, and ran for Congress in his district.

In 1944, he became the first African-American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York, and one of only two in the country at the time. Powell was a constant agitator in the House of Representatives and passed legislation to assure equal pay. He campaigned for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aligning himself with a class of New Deal Democrats who hoped to create jobs for the working poor. Powell also helped create a Minimum Wage Bill, the Manpower Development and Training Act and the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Powell also desegregated the “whites only” facilities of the U.S. Capitol.

While Powell’s critics often condemned his flamboyant style, it was the way he drew attention to social issues that may have been neglected otherwise that made him so successful. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. died in 1972 but has left a legacy with his sons and nephew of the same name who have gone on to lead their local political struggles. President Obama is surely an incarnation of the great Adam Clayton Powell, a community organizer who rose to become the first of his kind in high office, giving hope to legions of under-represented Americans.

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Despite the rough nature of his sport, Muhammad Ali was one of the smoothest persons ever to walk the Earth. His poetic verse and well-considered metaphors came out a time during the 1960s when boxers were
better known for punching than speaking. But Muhammad Ali did speak, and spoke intelligently – in a loud, boisterous and uncompromising voice. In this way, Ali was the public epitome of the Black man who
would not be denied and would not back down. Ali, in a way, made it okay to be that man. Barack Obama, and all Black men of his generation, inherited that legacy and that gift from Muhammad Ali.

Born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky in 1942, Muhammad Ali grewup as a Baptist. Clay took to the sport of amateur boxing at the age of 12, where he won two national Golden Gloves titles and eventually won the gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics. Ali won a staggering 100 matches with only 5 losses in his amateur career before turning pro in 1960. In his first title fight, Clay triumphed over Sonny Liston with a T.K.O., after having brazenly said he would “shock the world” by doing so. Ali would win many more professional fights in his pro career, 56 in all, in which his winning was no longer all that shocking.

Outside of the boxing ring, Clay was just as powerful. His conversion to Islam, which prompted his name change, made him extremely controversial. Muhammad Ali often publicly declared his allegiance to
Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad during a time when Elijah was regarded with a great deal of hostility by Americans. Ali also supported controversial Nation of Islam beliefs, such as separatism,
and he was also avidly against interracial marriage. Despite his contentious beliefs, Ali remained well regarded by the public.

Ali declared himself a conscientious objector during the height of the Vietnam War. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” Ali said. “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” In 1967, Ali was convicted of
draft evasion and stripped of his boxing license and titles. After a four-year legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971.

Ali was involved in two of the most prominent fights in the history of the sport. First in 1971, there was the “Fight of the Century” in which Ali and Joe Frazier faced each other in Madison Square Garden.
The fight was hyped by sportscasters, newspapers, and of course, Ali’s diatribes. Joe Frazier had become known for his backing of the Vietnam War, while Ali was, of course, vociferously against it. It was a match
of undefeated wills and opposing idealisms. Ultimately, Frazier would win, but in two rematches, Ali was the victor both times, accumulating wins that essentially cemented his legacy. Ali was also the winner of
the “Rumble in the Jungle”, where he knocked George Foreman out and was the impetus behind the term “Rope-A-Dope.”

Since his retirement in 1981, Ali has used his boxing as a pedestal. He has traveled the world many times over, lending both his name and his prestige to honorable causes, especially that of hunger.

Ali’s independent and brazen character during a time of great racial tension was a symbol for all those who admired him as a boxer and as a man. His endeavors helped him earn a Presidential Medal of Freedom and
helped blaze the path for a Black man to be himself in front of the entire nation, just as Barack Obama was throughout his run for the Presidency.

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American music has always been, at base, African-American music. Gospel, minstrelsy, vaudeville, jazz, blues, rhythm & blues and rock n’ roll — it’s all basically Black, no matter the color of the artist who performs it. But until the 1960s, Black people did not much control their culture, much less profit from it. That all changed with the emergence of Detroit’s Motown Records in 1960, and its legendary founder, Berry Gordy. Gordy’s Motown remained the largest Black-owned business in America for decades, until Reginald Lewis bought Beatrice Foods in 1987.

But Gordy did something even more significant. He was the first Black entertainment entrepreneur to cross his roster into the American mainstream, making Motown the sound of all young America. In creating this powerful crossover, in which both white and Black youth felt comfortable, Gordy set the cultural stage for the emergence of the multiracial society that elected a Black man, Barack Obama, as the 44th President of the United States.

Berry Gordy, Jr. was born November 29, 1929 in Detroit, Michigan. The seventh of eight children, Gordy became a high-school dropout with dreams of becoming a professional boxer. After serving in the Korean War, Gordy returned to Detroit to open a record shop, which failed. After working in the local Lincoln-Mercury auto plant, Gordy fell in with a local singer named Jackie Wilson. Gordy began writing songs for Wilson, and their partnership ultimately resulted in a Top 1-0 R&B single, “Lonely Teardrops.”

After discovering Smokey Robinson and The Miracles in the late 1950s, Gordy borrowed some money from his family and started his own record label, Tamla, in 1959. The next year, he incorporated it as Motown. The 1960s had begun.

With an acute ear for catchy tunes, and a spit-and-polish work ethic, Gordy transformed a small recording studio into “Hitsville U.S.A.,” and launched the careers of Diana Ross and The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, The Four Tops, and the Jackson 5, among many others. Gordy’s glossy production sound stood in stark counterpoint to the “gut-bucket” southern soul of Stax and Atlantic Records. But Gordy’s insistence on punctuality, rigorous stage training and even charm school for his performers created an aura around Motown artists of impeccable, Black royalty — a roster that inspired young Black Americans and seduced a generation of young white Americans. The artists and producers of Detroit’s Motown Records provided much of the soundtrack to the 1960s and beyond.

Motown’s influence waned somewhat in the 1970s, and dissipated altogether by the mid 1980s, with the aging of its roster and the emergence of the new sound of young America, hip-hop. But Motown’s influence is felt to this day in the election and inauguration of Barack Obama. When one looks back at how America’s racial attitudes changed in the 1960s, when one looks back at the birth of the modern Black business — both changes bringing us to this powerful climax in 2009 — one must see, and salute, Mr. Berry Gordy.

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Bill Cosby is a man of many “firsts.” Cosby was the first Black comedian to conquer white American audiences. He was the first African- American to take a starring role in a network television series in the 1960s, “I Spy”; and the first to star in and produce a #1 TV show in the 1980s, “The Cosby Show.” He became the first successful Black “pitchman” for American consumer products too, from Jell-O to Kodak to Coca-Cola. Bill Cosby both defined and defied what it meant to “cross over.” On the one hand, Cosby was undeniably the first Black celebrity to transcend race — he wasn’t America’s top Black TV star; he was America’s top TV star, period. On the other, Cosby’s mainstreaming was controversial. To some critics, Cosby’s refusal to “deal with racial issues” in his work was a dereliction of duty. But Cosby, even more than Oprah Winfrey, was the foremost archetype for the racially transcendent ascendance of Barack Obama, now the 44th President of the United States.

William Henry Cosby, Jr. was born in Philadelphia in 1937. As a student, Cosby was sub-par, but as a class cut-up, he was a star. Cosby became more serious about his studies after a sobering experience in the Navy, where he worked in the physical therapy wing of a hospital that treated servicemen injured during the Korean War. Cosby returned to Temple University to get a degree in physical education, supporting himself by tending bar at a Philadelphia club. It was here, at the Cellar, that Cosby’s offhand humor became a vocation.

In 1962, Cosby’s performances at the Gaslight Café in New York City attracted the attention of Carl Reiner, whose mentorship sent Cosby on a trajectory to the Holy Grail for American stand-up comedy, the “Tonight Show.” Cosby performed around the country and signed a contract with Warner Bros. Records. But his historic breakthrough came when he was tapped to co-star in “I Spy” with Robert Culp.

Even then, Cosby was dogged by suggestions that, perhaps, his on- screen character presented an opportunity to deal with issues of race. Cosby begged to differ, saying that his mere presence as a white man’s peer, without reference to race, had a transformative effect on the white American psyche.

In the 1970s, Cosby starred in successful films like “Uptown Saturday Night,” and forged his credentials as a children’s educator with his participation in PBS-show “The Electric Company” and his creation of the “Fat Albert” series. But Cosby truly became “America’s Dad” with the triumph of the “Cosby Show,” which ran for most of the 1980s. The fictional Huxtable family presented, again, the definition and defiance of crossover. The Huxtables never dealt with racism on their show. And yet, they were proudly Black, even Afrocenric at times. A reprise of the Cosby TV juggernaut in the 1990s was interrupted by the tragic murder of Cosby’s son, Ennis.

In the 21st Century, Cosby continues to be a controversial figure, especially among young Blacks of the hip-hop generation who take offense to his often pointed denouncements of today’s Black youth. But there can be no doubt that Cosby created a powerful American imprint with his work, and that before the Obamas could enter the White House, the Huxtables had to enter all of ours.

Click here to see video of Bill Cosby!

Click here to read about Black Fatherhood in the Age of Obama!

Explore the year 1988!

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In the Back to the Apollo, Uptown’s Showbiz Incubator article, writer Edward Rothstein points out  that while the exhibit provides interesting samples of history and heritage, there is less notice on Apollo traditions, crowd-performer interactions, and the phenomena around the  community’s convergence to the theater after the deaths of Michael Jackson and James Brown.

Rothstein:

“Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” an exhibition about the Apollo Theater.  The exhibition “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” which opens on Tuesday at the Museum of the City of New York, really ain’t anything like the real thing, but that is not really its fault. The “real thing” in this case is almost beyond the reach of a museum show.

The real thing is suggested in the exhibition’s subtitle — “How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment” — because the music that was made at that relatively nondescript 1,500-seat theater on 125th Street in Harlem really did transform American popular-music culture in the 20th century. A habitat and an incubator, the Apollo has also been one of the few institutions in which black American musical culture was consistently nurtured over the course of 75 years.

So much is encompassed, though, that you can easily feel that the real thing is slipping away. One problem is that concerts at the Apollo were not systematically recorded, and while the exhibition offers a decade-by-decade film survey of performers, each contains just a few examples that are neither long enough nor deep enough to communicate much.

Read whole story at NYtimes.com