Stand Tall and Proud. Tell Them You Know Your History Today, January 24, In Black History • January 24, 1874 Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, historian, writer and activist, was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico. While in grade school, one of his teachers claimed that Black people had no history, heroes, or accomplishments. This inspired Schomburg to prove the teacher wrong. Schomburg was educated at St. Thomas College in the Virgin Islands where he studied Negro literature. He immigrated to New York City in 1891 and began teaching Spanish in 1896. Schomburg co-founded the Negro Society for Historical Research in 1911 and later became president of the American Negro Academy. In 1925, Schomburg published his widely read and influential essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past” in 1925. In 1928, the New York Public Library system purchased his collection of literature, art, and other materials and appointed him curator of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and Art (later renamed the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Schomburg died June 8, 1938. His biography, “Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile & Collector,” was published in 1989. Schomburg’s name is enshrined in the Ring of Genealogy at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. • January 24, 1885 Martin Robinson Delany, abolitionist and the first African American field officer in the United States Army, died. Delany was born May 6, 1812 in Charles Town, West Virginia. Because it was illegal to teach Black people to read or write,upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Delany.jpg/220px-Delany.jpg he and his siblings taught themselves. Delany became more actively involved in political matters in 1835 and attended his first Negro Conference. He began publishing “The Mystery,” a Black controlled newspaper, in 1843 and on December 3, 1847, together with Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, began publishing the “North Star” newspaper. In the 1850s, Delany became convinced that White people would not allow deserving persons of color to become leaders in society and in his book, “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered” (1852), argued that Black people had no future in the United States and should leave and found a new nation elsewhere. In 1863, he began recruiting Black men for the Union Army to fight in the Civil War, raising thousands of enlistees, and in 1865 was commissioned as a major, the first Black field officer in the U. S. Army. Following the war and the demise of the Reconstruction period, Delany helped form the Liberia Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company with the intent to immigrate to Africa. However, he had to withdraw from the project due to family obligations. Delany’s biography, “Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism,” was published in 1971. • January 24, 1900 Wilson Brown, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, died. Brown was born in 1841 in Natchez, Mississippi. During the Civil War, he enlisted in the Union Navy and was assigned as a landsman to the USS Hartford. On August 5, 1864, during the Battle of Mobile Bay, Brown and five other sailors worked on the Hartford’s berth deck loading and operating the shell whip, a device that lifted boxes of gunpowder up to the gun deck. Brown’s citation reads, “Knocked unconscious into the hold of the ship when an enemy shellburst fatally wounded a man on the ladder above him, Brown, upon regaining consciousness, promptly returned to the shell whip on the berth deck and zealously continued to perform his duties through 4 of 6 men at his station had been killed or wounded by the enemy’s terrific fire.” For his actions, Brown was awarded the medal December 31, 1864. Not much else is known of Brown’s life. • January 24, 1917 Howard “Sandman” Sims, tap dancer and actor, was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas but raised in Los Angeles, California. Sims started tap dancing at three and danced on the streets for money. He earned his stage name by dancing on sand sprinkled on the floor. He discovered this technique accidently while training as a boxer and shuffling his feet in a rosin box. Sims moved to New York City in 1947 and danced at the Apollo Theater for 17 years. He became the theater’s executioner, chasing unpopular acts off the stage on amateur nights, in the mid-1950s and served in that capacity for more than three decades. Sims also owned a café in Harlem. During the 1980s, Sims danced in 53 countries as an ambassador for the United States State Department. He also appeared in the films “The Cotton Club” (1984), “Harlem Nights” (1989), and “Tap” (1989). Sims died May 20, 2003. • January 24, 1938 Julius Arthur Hemphill, hall of fame jazz composer and saxophonist, was born in Fort Worth, Texas. Hemphill moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 1968 and co-founded the Black Artists’ Group, a multi-disciplinary arts collective. He moved to New York City in the mid-1970s and founded the World Saxophone Quartet in 1976. Hemphill left the group in the early 1990s. He recorded over 20 albums as a leader, including “Dogon A. D.” (1972), “Buster Bee” (1978), and “Five Chord Stud” (1993). Ill health forced Hemphill to stop playing the saxophone but he continued writing music until his death April 2, 1995. He was posthumously inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame that same year. A multi-hour oral history interview that he conducted for the Smithsonian Institute in 1994 is held at the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History. • January 24, 1953 Benjamin Harrison Taylor, hall of fame Negro Baseball League player and manager, died. Taylor was born July 1, 1888 in Anderson, South Carolina. He began playing professionally in 1913 and batted over .300 in all but one of the 16 seasons that he played. Taylor retired as a player in 1929 but continued to coach and manage until 1940. After retiring, Taylor was a successful businessman. Taylor was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. • January 24, 1986 Flora Jean “Flo” Hyman, hall of fame volleyball player, died. Hyman was born July 31, 1954 in Inglewood, California. By 17, she had reached 6 feet 5 inches in height. Hyman attended the University of Houston as that school’s first female scholarship athlete and was a three-time All-American volleyball selection. Hyman was a member of the United States volleyball team that won the Silver medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games. Hyman was the most famous volleyball player of her time, with a spike that traveled up to 110 miles per hour. She died while playing in Japan from an aortic dissection resulting from previously undiagnosed Marfan Syndrome. The Women’s Sports Foundation established the annual Flo Hyman Award in 1987 which is given “to a female athlete who captures Hyman’s dignity, spirit and commitment to excellence” and she was posthumously inducted into the Volleyball Hall of Fame in 1988. • January 24, 1993 Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, died. Marshall was born July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Lincoln University in 1930 and his Bachelor of Laws degree from Howard University School of Law in 1933. In 1934, he began working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He won his first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson, in 1936 and his first case before the U. S. Supreme Court, Chambers v. Florida, in 1940. In total, he won 29 of 32 cases he argued before the U. S. Supreme Court. His most famous case was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in which the court ruled that separate but equal public education could never be truly equal. Marshall was the 1946 recipient of the NAACP Spingarn Medal. President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1963 and President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the U. S. Supreme Court June 13, 1967. Marshall served on the court for 24 years before retiring. There are numerous memorials to Marshall around the country, including the main office building of the federal court system which is named in his honor and has a statue of him in the atrium. Texas Southern University named their law school after him in 1976 and the University of Maryland School of Law opened the Thurgood Marshall Law Library in 1980. On November 30, 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President William J. Clinton. The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp in his honor in 2003. Biographies of Marshall include “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” (1998) and “Thurgood Marshall” (2002). Marshall’s name is enshrined in the Ring of Genealogy at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. • January 24, 2006 Fayard Antonio Nicholas, half of the hall of fame Nicholas Brothers dance team, died. Nicholas was born October 20, 1914 in Mobile, Alabama but grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He, nor his younger brother, had any formal dance training but by 1932 were the featured act at the Cotton Club in New York City. They made their Hollywood film debut in 1934 in “Kid Millions” and made their Broadway debut in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. Over the next four decades, they alternated between movies, Broadway, television, nightclubs, and tours of Latin America, Africa, and Europe. One of their signature moves was to dance down a flight of stairs, leapfrogging over each other and landing in a split on each step. They performed the move in the movie “Stormy Weather” (1943) and Fred Astaire declared that it was the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen. Gregory Hines declared that if their biography was ever filmed, their dance numbers would have to be computer generated because no one could duplicate them. Mikhail Baryshnikov called them the most amazing dancers he had ever seen. The brothers also taught dance at Harvard University. Among their students were Debbie Allen, Janet Jackson, and Michael Jackson. The brothers received numerous awards, including honorary doctorate degrees from Harvard University, Kennedy Center Honors in 1991, and induction into the National Museum of Dance’s Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in 2001. The brother’s home movies were included in the National Film Registry in 2011 as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films.” “Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers” was published in 2000.(Source:The Wright Museum)
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 17:50:20 +0000
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