A BLOGSITE FOR THE PRAISING OF ALL THINGS BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME IN HONOR OF ALL BLACK WOMEN. "ONLY THE BLACK WOMAN CAN SAY "WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER, IN THE QUIET, UNDISPUTED DIGNITY OF MY WOMANHOOD, WITHOUT SUING, OR SPECIAL PATRONAGE, THEN AND THERE THE WHOLE. . .RACE ENTERS WITH ME."
ANNA JULIA COOPER, 1892
Georgia police chief apologizes 76 years after lynching
Lagrange, Georgia Police Chief Lou Dekmar apologizing on night of January 26, 2017 for failure lof his department to protect black man Austin Galloway before he was lynched some 76 years ago
WRBL-TV
LAGRANGE, Ga. – Police Chief Lou Dekmar publicly apologized Thursday night more than 76 years after the brutal slaying of a black man here.
Dekmar says the path to the apology began when an investigator told him two elderly African-American women pointed to a historical picture saying, “They killed our people a few years ago.”
He says that in September, 1940, a group of armed, masked men took Austin Callaway from a jail and drove him away.
The next morning, a passerby found Callaway bleeding to death from gunshot wounds. He died hours later.
“What was done was wrong,” Dekmar told a diverse crowd in a Methodist church.
He apologized for the police department’s lack of response concerning the 18 year old’s murder.
“I, on behalf of the Lagrange Police Department and the city of Lagrange, want to acknowledge the police department’s failure to take crucial action in its obligation to protect Austin Callaway on September 8, 1940,” he said.
“An acknowledgment and apology is necessary to aid in healing wounds of past brutalities and injustice,” he continued.
Callaway’s family was there for the apology, including his second cousin, Glenn Dowell.
“Here comes Lagrange, Georgia, which has previously been kind of an oligarchy, ruled by an oligarchy in the community, changing. It has changed for the best,” Dowell said.
He described it as an emotional night, saying, “The tensions in the African-American (are) super-high because they’ve never seen anything like this in Lagrange before. They’ve never seen anything like this.”
Dekmar said the apology works toward bringing a deeper trust between the community and public safety officers.
“This is just one more step that is a significant step, but it’s not the concluding step,” Dekmar remarked to WRBL.
The local NAACP announced that its members accept Dekmar’s apology.
Dekamr’s mayor and some other city officials also spoke.
Mary Tyler Moore brought a new depiction of the American woman to both “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Virginia Heffernan, a contributing writer for The New York Times, discusses Ms. Moore’s roles and their influence.
By ROBIN LINDSAY and VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN on Publish Date January 25, 2017. . Watch in Times Video »
Mary Tyler Moore, whose witty and graceful performances on two top-rated television shows in the 1960s and ’70s helped define a new vision of American womanhood, died on Wednesday in Greenwich, Conn. She was 80.
Her family said her death, at Greenwich Hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest after she had contracted pneumonia.
Ms. Moore faced more than her share of private sorrow, and she went on to more serious fare, including an Oscar-nominated role in the 1980 film “Ordinary People” as a frosty, resentful mother whose son has died. But she was most indelibly known as the incomparably spunky Mary Richards on the CBS hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Broadcast from 1970 to 1977, it was produced by both Ms. Moore and her second husband, Grant Tinker, who later ran NBC and who died on Nov. 28.
At least a decade before the twin figures of the harried working woman and the neurotic, unwed 30-something became media preoccupations, Ms. Moore’s portrayal — for which she won four of her seven Emmy Awards — expressed both the exuberance and the melancholy of the single career woman who could plot her own course without reference to cultural archetypes.
The show, and her portrayal of Mary as a sisterly presence in the office, as well as a source of ingenuity and humor, was a balm to widespread anxieties about women in the work force.
It modeled a productive style of coed collegiality, with Ms. Moore teasing out the various ironies known to any smart woman trying to keep from cracking up in a world of scowling male bosses and preening male soloists.
“Mary Tyler Moore became a feminist icon as Mary Richards,” said Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, the author of “Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And All the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic.”
“She only wanted to play a great character, and she did so. That character also happened to be single, female, over 30, professional, independent, and not particularly obsessed with getting married. Mary had America facing such issues as equal pay, birth control, and sexual independence way back in the ’70s.”
The influence of Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards can be seen in the performances of almost all the great female sitcom stars who followed her, from Jennifer Aniston to Debra Messing to Tina Fey, who has said that she developed her acclaimed sitcom “30 Rock” and her character, the harried television writer Liz Lemon, by watching episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Many nonactresses also said that Ms. Moore — by playing a working single woman with such compassion and brio — inspired their performances in real life.
Ms. Moore had earlier, in a decidedly different era, played another beloved television character: Laura Petrie, the stylish wife of the comedy writer played by Dick Van Dyke on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Also on CBS, the show ran from 1961 to 1966.
Ms. Moore was the lesser star in those days, but she shared Mr. Van Dyke’s background in song and dance, and as a comedy duo they magnified each other’s charm. Ms. Moore transformed and tamed the vaudeville style that had dominated sitcoms, perfecting a comic housewifely hysteria in Laura, made visible in the way she often appeared to be fighting back tears. Her “Dick Van Dyke Show” performance won her two Emmys.
“I heard something in her voice that got to me,” Carl Reiner, who created and produced the show, once said. “I think the fact that Mary and Dick were dancers gave the whole program a grace that very few programs have.”
Mary Tyler Moore was born on Dec. 29, 1936, in Brooklyn Heights. After living in Queens and Brooklyn, her family moved to California when she was 8. Her father, George Tyler Moore, a clerk, and her mother, the former Margery Hackett, were both alcoholics and, Ms. Moore often said, imperfect parents. The eldest of their three children, Mary would outlive both her sister, Elizabeth Moore, who died of a drug and alcohol overdose in 1978, and her brother, John Hackett Moore, who died of cancer in 1992 after Ms. Moore had assisted him in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
While she was still a child in Los Angeles, Ms. Moore arranged to live with an aunt, choosing to see her parents only on special occasions.
At 17, she was hired to appear in a series of commercials for Hotpoint appliances in the role of Happy Hotpoint, a caped dancing elf in a body stocking. The ad was shown during episodes of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”
Mary Tyler Moore Dancing as Happy Hotpoint (1956) – Classic TV CommercialVideo by All Classic Video
In 1955, she married Richard Meeker, a salesman. That same year, she became pregnant, which compromised her effectiveness as an androgynous elf in a fitted costume. Her only child, Richard Jr., was born in 1956. He died in 1980 when a gun with a hair trigger went off in his hands; the gun model was later removed from the market.
After the birth of her son, Ms. Moore danced in various television shows before turning to acting. She had small parts on series like “Bourbon Street Beat,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Steve Canyon” and “Hawaiian Eye.” As the answering-service girl Sam on “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” she was more heard than seen: Her character existed only in sexy close-ups of parts of her body, including her mouth, her hands and her elegant legs.
It was another body part, her nose, that was said to have disqualified her from playing Danny Thomas’s daughter on his sitcom “Make Room for Daddy.” She was up for the role, but Mr. Thomas, who took pride in his exaggerated features, decided that her nose was too small to belong to a member of his family.
“The Dick Van Dyke Show” made Ms. Moore, who looked sylphlike in capri pants, a sensation. At Mr. Van Dyke’s behest, however, the series ended in 1966, at the height of its popularity.
Ms. Moore’s marriage to Mr. Meeker had dissolved by 1961, and she met Mr. Tinker, who was then an executive at 20th Century Fox, in 1962. They were married, in Las Vegas, the same year. Together they formed MTM Enterprises, and in the late ’60s, they hit upon an idea for a custom-made showcase.
Mary Tyler Moore in 1970 before the premiere of her television series “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”Credit Associated Press
MTM’s on-air mascot was a meowing kitten, whose image evoked, and gently satirized, MGM’s roaring lion, and the branding clicked. Mr. Tinker and Ms. Moore pitched a show to CBS about a recently divorced woman who was working and living on her own, and the network liked it.
The executives’ only reservation concerned the subject of divorce, which was still forbidden on network television. Some even feared that viewers would assume that Laura Petrie, from “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” had divorced Rob, which was unthinkable. A solution was reached: Ms. Moore’s character would be newly single but not divorced, having recently broken up with a fiancé.
In the show, Mary Richards was an associate news producer at WJM, a local television station in Minneapolis. Ed Asner played her boss, Lou Grant, who was gruff, though essentially tenderhearted; Gavin MacLeod was Murray Slaughter, a news writer with a boring life; Ted Knight was the vain, dimwit anchorman, Ted Baxter.
The female characters, as finely drawn as the men, were Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), Mary’s neighbor, also single; Phyllis Lindstrom (Cloris Leachman), Mary’s manipulative landlady; Georgette Franklin (Georgia Engel), Ted’s baby-voiced girlfriend (and later his wife); and Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White), the husband-stealing hostess of “The Happy Homemaker.”
That Rhoda was Jewish — as was Lou, the show sometimes implied — was unusual for network television at the time. Similarly novel were hints that Mary was sexually active.
The characters all revolved around Mary, whose naïveté and enthusiasm supplied a generous assist for the others’ eccentricities. Just as she had on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Ms. Moore could always make a joke her own when she needed to — and the episodes that put Mary’s humor center stage were the best.
In “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” which is on many lists of the best television episodes of all time (TV Guide ranked it No. 3), Mary is appalled by her colleagues’ irreverent response to the undignified death of Chuckles the Clown, the host of a children’s show on their station. But at his funeral, it’s she who can’t control her giggles. Her struggle to suppress laughter is a comic tour de force. (David Lloyd won an Emmy for writing the episode, one of 29 the show won over all.)
Chuckles the Clown’s Funeral – the Mary Tyler Moore ShowVideo by IfIWereEvil
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which forsook the gag-a-minute sitcom formula in favor of more character-driven humor, soon became one of the most popular shows in television history, aided only partly by its position in CBS’s winning Saturday-night lineup, which also included “M*A*S*H*,” “All in the Family” and “The Carol Burnett Show.”
On “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Ms. Moore played Laura Petrie, the stylish wife of a comedy writer played by Dick Van Dyke.Credit Don Brin/Associated Press
The writers and producers who worked on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” went on to develop a raft of other hit sitcoms, including “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “The Simpsons.”
Among the show’s many memorable flourishes was its theme song, “Love Is All Around,” written and performed by Sonny Curtis. The lyrics were rewritten after the first season. The opening lines — “How will you make it on your own?/This world is awfully big, and girl, this time you’re all alone” — were revised to reflect the show’s optimism and devotion to its star:
“Who can turn the world on with her smile?/Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?”
The adorableness of Mary Richards as a character — with her pluck and her world-brightening smile — was a mixed blessing for Ms. Moore. After the show was canceled in 1977, she set out to demonstrate her range as an actress, choosing roles in television, theater and film that distanced her from the sweetheart characters for which she had become famous.
Her efforts paid off impressively in “Ordinary People.” Her performance as the stony, guilt-ridden mother Beth Jarrett brought her a Golden Globe award as well as the Academy Award nomination. Afterward she said she based the performance on her aloof father.
Robert Redford, who directed the movie, said he had cast Ms. Moore after seeing her walking alone on a beach and realizing that she had a serious side.
In the meantime, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” fractured into spinoffs: the sitcoms “Rhoda” and “Phyllis” and the acclaimed drama “Lou Grant,” a rare example of an hourlong series spun off from a half-hour sitcom.
Ms. Moore’s performance on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” for which she won four of her seven Emmy Awards, expressed the exuberance and the melancholy of the single career woman.Credit Pioneers of Television Archives, via PBS
This period represented a winning streak for MTM Enterprises, which was overseen almost exclusively by Mr. Tinker. The company produced not only those spinoffs but also the critical and popular hits “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Newhart,” “WKRP in Cincinnati,” “Hill Street Blues” “St. Elsewhere,” “Remington Steele” and “Rescue 911.”
On Broadway, MTM Enterprises produced Michael Frayn’s farce “Noises Off.”
In the 1980s, Ms. Moore admitted to having a drinking problem. It had started, she said, when she was starring in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and had finally reached untenable levels. (In 2000, Mr. Van Dyke told Larry King that he was also an alcoholic and that he had also started drinking heavily while working on the show.) Ms. Moore entered the Betty Ford Center for treatment in 1984.
She had had Type 1 diabetes since her 30s and in 2011 underwent brain surgery to remove a benign tumor.
From the late 1970s into the ’80s, Ms. Moore had a string of lackluster, low-rated shows, including a 1978 variety hour, “Mary.” It lasted only three episodes and is notable mainly because David Letterman and Michael Keaton were among the regulars. It was followed that season by a hybrid variety-comedy show, “The Mary Tyler Moore Hour,” which was gone after 11 episodes. None of her shows in those years lasted more than one season.
She also sought roles that would let her express the gravitas she had shown in “Ordinary People.” In 1980, she was given a special Tony Award for her performance on Broadway as a quadriplegic who wanted to die in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?”
On television, she played a breast cancer survivor in “First You Cry,” Mary Todd Lincoln in “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln” and the cruel director of an orphanage in “Stolen Babies,” for which she won her seventh Emmy.
In 1995, in an interview with The Times, Ms. Moore was asked if she resented being asked by reporters about Mary Richards. “I think some of them may be trying to find some way to instruct, or to make a judgment about, or in some way set themselves above me,” she said.
Ms. Moore in 2011 at her home in Connecticut.Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
“I’ve come to the point in my life where I don’t have to work,” she continued. “I work because I enjoy it. I only enjoy doing things that frighten me a little bit. And I am an actress. I think I am an actress as well as a personality. And I’ve got to keep the actress in me happy.”
In the 1996 movie “Flirting With Disaster,” Ms. Moore played with aplomb the mortifying adoptive mother of Ben Stiller’s character, who at one point lifts her shirt to show her son’s girlfriend how a bra should fit. In 2001, she was executive producer of a macabre television movie, “Like Mother Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes,” in which she also starred as the killer mom Sante.
She also became more willing to indulge in nostalgia. The 2001 television movie “Mary and Rhoda” brought Ms. Moore and Ms. Harper together again, playing older versions of their 1970s characters. (Mary was widowed, and Rhoda divorced.)
A more successful reunion came in 2003, when she starred with Mr. Van Dyke in a PBS adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Gin Game.” In 2004, she and Mr. Van Dyke reunited again on “The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited.”
She went on to make several guest appearances in 2006 as a TV host on “That ’70s Show,” which was shot on the soundstage that once belonged to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” In 2013, she was reunited with all four of her female “Mary Tyler Moore Show” co-stars on an episode of the sitcom “Hot in Cleveland,” whose cast included Betty White and Georgia Engel. Ms. Moore at last seemed to accept and even embrace the pop significance of the Mary Richards era.
In 2012, the Screen Actors Guild gave Ms. Moore a lifetime achievement award. Ms. Moore and Mr. Tinker divorced in 1981, although they remained friends. In 1983, she married Dr. Robert Levine, a physician, who is her only immediate survivor. The couple lived in Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn.
Outside her performing career, she was chairwoman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International and spoke openly about her own struggle with the disease, diagnosed in the 1960s. A vegetarian, she was also an outspoken proponent of animal welfare, and she established funds for arts scholarships.
The airborne tam o’shanter that appears in a freeze frame at the end of the opening credits on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” came to symbolize the here-goes-nothingism that Mary Richards, as well as Mary Tyler Moore, always conveyed. In 2002, a statue showing Ms. Moore tossing the hat was unveiled in downtown Minneapolis.
Correction: January 25, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the network that Ms. Moore’s ex-husband Grant Tinker ran. It was NBC, not CBS.
Correction: January 28, 2017 An obituary on Thursday about Mary Tyler Moore misspelled the surname of the actor who played Murray Slaughter on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He is Gavin MacLeod, not McLeod. Because of an editing error, the obituary referred imprecisely to the Tony Award Ms. Moore received in 1980 for her performance in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” She was given a special Tony; she did not win in a competitive acting category. And because of another editing error, the obituary gave outdated information about where Ms. Moore and her husband, Dr. Robert Levine, lived. They had a home in Greenwich, Conn.; they no longer lived on a farm in upstate New York.
FILE – In this Aug. 28, 2015 file photo, the grave marker of Emmett Till has a photo of Till and coins placed on it during a gravesite ceremony at the Burr Oak Cemetery marking the 60th anniversary of the murder of Till in Mississippi, in Alsip, Ill. The woman at the center of the trial of Emmett Till’s alleged killers has acknowledged that she falsely testified he made physical and verbal threats, according to a new book. Historian Timothy B. Tyson told The Associated Press on Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017, that Carolyn Donham broke her long public silence in an interview with him in 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Key Till witness gave false testimony, historian says
NEW YORK (AP) — The woman at the center of the trial of Emmett Till’s alleged killers has acknowledged that she falsely testified he made physical and verbal threats, according to a new book.
Historian Timothy B. Tyson told The Associated Press on Saturday that Carolyn Donham broke her long public silence in an interview with him in 2008. His book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” comes out next week.
“She told me that ‘Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,'” said Tyson, a Duke University research scholar whose previous books include “Blood Done Sign My Name” and “Radio Free Dixie.”
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black tortured and killed in 1955 in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman, then known as Carolyn Bryant.
His murder became national news, was a galvanizing event in the civil rights movement and has been the subject of numerous books and movies. During the trial, Bryant said that he had grabbed her, and, in profane terms, bragged about his history with white woman. The jury was not present when she testified.
Donham’s then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted by the all-white jury. Both men, who later told Look magazine they did murder Till, have since died. Milam’s widow, Juanita Milam, would later tell the FBI she believed that Carolyn Bryant had fabricated her story. Juanita Milam died in 2014. The Justice Department re-examined the case a decade ago, but no one was indicted as a murderer or an accomplice.
On Saturday, the maker of a documentary on Till said he had long been sure that Bryant’s story was false.
“His mother had mentioned that Emmett had a speech impediment and that the things Bryant claimed he was saying he could not have said easily,” said Keith Beauchamp, whose “The Untold Story of Emmett Till” came out in 2005.
Tyson said that he spoke with Donham after her daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, contacted him. Bryant had read “Blood Done Sign My Name,” about a racist murder during his childhood in Oxford, North Carolina, and invited Tyson to meet with her and Donham.
Tyson said he and Donham had two conversations, both lasting 2-3 hours, and that he planned at the time to place the material in the archives at the University of North Carolina. Asked why he waited so long to publicize his findings, he responded that historians think in different terms than do journalists.
“I’m more interested in what speaks to the ages than in what is the latest media thing,” he said.
He added that he wasn’t sure whether Donham knew about the book. He said he had fallen out of touch with the family and that when he last spoke with Bryant, a few years ago, she said Donham was in poor health.
Till was a fun-loving teenager from Chicago visiting the Mississippi Delta and helping out on his great-uncle Mose Wright’s farm. On Aug. 24, 1955, Till and some other kids drove to a local store, Bryant’s, for refreshments. At Bryant’s, some of the kids stayed on the porch, watching a game of checkers, while the others filed inside to buy bubble gum and sodas. Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old wife of proprietor Roy Bryant, was behind the counter.
Accounts of what happened next differ.
Mrs. Bryant claimed Emmett bragged about dating white women up north. She said he grabbed her and asked her, “How about a date, baby?” Simeon Wright, his cousin, heard none of this. But there is no doubt about what he heard when they left the store, he told the AP in 2005.
Standing on the front porch, Emmett let out a wolf whistle.
Carolyn Donham’s whereabouts have long been a mystery, but North Carolina voter rolls list a Carolyn Holloway Donham. Holloway is her maiden name.
The address is for a green, split-level home in Raleigh at the mouth of a neat cul-de-sac just two turns off a busy four-lane thoroughfare. The well-tended house has burnt-orange shutters and a front-facing brick chimney decorated with a large metal sunburst. Orange flags emblazed with the word “Google” dot the lawn.
A woman, who appeared to be of late middle age, and a small barking dog appeared at the front door. When a reporter asked if this was the Bryant family home, the woman replied, “Yes.”
When asked if Carolyn Donham was at home, the woman replied, “She’s not available.”
At first, she refused to accept a business card, but relented after hearing about the upcoming book.
The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation has shared news reports about the book on Instagram and asked if Donham would have the “decency and courage” to speak with Till’s relatives.
___
AP National Writer Allen Breed contributed to this report from North Carolina
A White woman who lied and caused the brutal murder of an innocent Black male.
Oh, and the planet Venus is hot.
No surprise.
White women have been lying on Black men and Black boys for centuries.
Racist white supremacist White women through the years have been lying down with Black men and spreading their legs East, West, North, and South and then jumping up and crying rape when White male relatives walked in on the consensual sex.
White women who wanted the black penis because they smoldered in anger at their White male relatives who raped and brutalized defenseless Black women and little 7-, 10-, 13-year-old Black girls.
But, that discussion is for an upcoming post I am working on.
After the trial, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant confessed about the murder and because of double jeopardy could not be retried on Emmett Till’s murder.
As for Juanita Milam , whatever she knew about little Emmett’s lynching, she took that to her grave. I find it hard that those four did not sit around discussing the murder after the farce of a trial ended.
The murder of Emmett took him from the loving arms of his mother, Mrs. Mamie Till.
Mamie Till Mobley collapses when her son Emmett’s body arrives at the old Illinois Central Railroad after his murder by racists in Mississippi.On her left, with the white collar, is Alva Doris Roberts’ husband, Bishop Isaiah L. Roberts, who presided over the funeral. On the right, also dressed in clerical black, is Bishop Louis Henry Ford, who did the youth’s eulogy. An Illinois freeway is named after Bishop Ford. | Sun-Times library
She may think her recanting and confessing all these years later will guarantee her a seat in Heaven. No such thing is guaranteed when you have offended the Most High and expect a quick recanting means all is forgiven at the last moment when you are near death. The Creator sees though that hypocrisy just as much as He does any other abomination.
Nazi war criminals into this century can still be brought to justice, but, the racist murdering savage rapists and murderers of so many innocent Black people—they are still allowed to roam the earth.
Carolyn Bryant
She may not be able to be brought to justice for murdering a young and innocent child, but, there iskismet that exists in the universe, and payback is a bitch.
Say it ain’t so! The shock and dazzle of Iridium flares will soon be a thing of the past. Here’s how to make the most of seeing them before a new generation of spacecraft replaces the Iridium satellites.
You won’t want to miss S&T‘s live webinar this Saturday, January 28th. Hear Alan Stern’s personal take on how NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft got to Pluto and what we learned once it got there.
Rinku Sen reflects on real feminist organizing and rejects the notion that women of color were just window dressing at the Women’s March on Washington.
Even though he passed on from this world, George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) still rules when it comes to telling it like it is.
Here are three videos where he speaks like the very talented, humorous, critically thinking and intelligent man that he was.
The first is an excerpt from George Carlin on Charlie Rose: 3-26-1996.
He is right that people in the end get just what they deserve, especially in the 2016 elections of those who not only voted against the lives and value of their fellows citizens, but, also voted against their own best interests.
Nothing like a pissing contest to start wars and destroy everyone and everything the world over.
Then there are the pro-lifers who don’t give a damn about the living children walking around. Children they would piss and shit on instead working to make life better for these defenseless ones.
The year 2016 has given the viewingpublic many various films to whet its movie-going appetite.
Up for possible nominations for the 89TH Academy Awards are films about a group of highly skilled mathematical genius women who happen to be Black–Black women who worked during the time of Jane Crow segregation at NASA and through it all, managed to help land a man on the Moon with Apollo 11; a working class Black sanitation worker who was once a champion in the disbanded Negro Baseball League and the family members who live in his world; a young Polynesian girl who defies all odds to bring help to her people and take them to a new land; a divorced husband who writes a novel that may or not be a veiled threat against his former wife; a film about two men who have been in denial of their homosexuality and how it affects their lives through the years; and a sci-fi film about beings who come to Earth who may or may not have a sinister motive for arriving to our planet.
In 2016 before the Oscars telecasted, on one side, there was the “Why don’t you White Oscar voters nominate films by and starring Blacks!”; on the other side, there were the “Well, ya’ll just don’t make any quality films then we just might nominate them!”
This year is a whole lot different where films are concerned.
Contenders on the list for everyone’s dollars are Manchester By the Sea, Moonlight, Fences, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Arrival, Moana, Nocturnal Animals, to name just a few.
Photo of Manchester by the Sea still movie poster.
Moonlight poster.
Photo still from Moonlight.
Poster of Fences.
Photo still from Fences.
Photo still of Hidden Figures from 20TH Century Fox Studios.
Photo still from Hidden Figures.
Poster of La La Land.
Arrival film poster.
Moana film poster.
Nocturnal Animals film poster.
Many of the films I have not seen yet, some I have seen: Hidden Figures, Fences, Moana, Moonlight, Arrival, and Nocturnal Animals.
Wow.
I have not seen that many films in a 6 month and less time period in decades.
Just shows that once in a Harvest Moon, Hollyweird can actually put out some films that can earn my hard earned dollar.
Most notable on this list are many films that address issues that affect the Black community as well as point out those parts ofeveryone’s life that revolve on a universal note.
Films which bring to light hitherto unknown and unheralded eras in this nation’s history as well as the usual Hollywood fare.
At the top of the list are films which some might consider so-called black films: Hidden Figures, Moonlight, and Fences.
Hidden Figures tells of the story of the wonderful Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA in the early days of America’s space race and exploration in helping to get astronauts into space, a man on the Moon, and to put the United States ahead in the era of spaceflight. I originally wrote on the West Computer Black women here.
Fences, starring Viola Davis and starring and directed by Oscar winner Denzel Washington, is based on the late and great American playwright August Wilson’s Tony-winning play. The film tells of the life of Troy Maxson and his family, and it took years to bring this play to the silver screen because Mr. Wilson stipulated that if his play Fences was ever given the Hollywood treatment, it must be directed by a Black director.
Then there is Moonlight, a story of two young Black men groping their way through youth, trials and tribulations, adulthood, and coming to terms with their homosexuality.
Unlike last year’s #Oscar So White, when there were no strong contenders nominated that involved Black actors, directors, and producers, 2017 has many great films that will surely test the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hand.
Will Fences take home a sweep of Oscars?
Will Hidden Figures upset all the other nominees?
Will Moonlight be the dark horse in what seems to be an #Oscar So Black year?
Will any of these films even get nominated for any Oscars?
It remains to be seen if this year of 2017 will be just another soooooooo very, very white Oscar night.
On January 27 each year, the United Nations (UN) remembers the Holocaust that affected many people of Jewish origin during World War II. This day is called the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. It also commemorates when the Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland on January 27, 1945.
Holocaust survivors and various leaders make their voices heard on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. Many of them speak publicly about the Holocaust or their experiences around the event, its aftermath and why the world should never forget what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Many statements emphasize the need for future generations to learn about and remember the Holocaust and for everyone to work towards preventing genocide.
The UN organizes and supports events such as: concerts by musicians who survived the Holocaust or are survivors’ descendants; art exhibitions influenced by the Holocaust; presentations of special stamps; the introduction of special educational programs; and film screening and book signing focused on the Holocaust.
Israel and many countries in Europe and North America mark the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. Many academics present discussion papers or hold seminars or round table discussions on the Holocaust and its legacy in the modern world. Schools or colleges may also have special lessons on the Holocaust. The Holocaust and how people commemorate it receive special attention on the Internet, television, radio, print media.
Public Life
The International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
The Holocaust, or Shoah (Sho’ah, Shoa), is the term used to describe the deliberate murder and desecration of millions of people prior to and during World War II in Germany and German occupied areas in Europe. Many of them were Jewish but the Roma people, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, ethnic Poles, people with disabilities, homosexuals and political and religious opponents were also killed. Many people died in concentration and death camps spread across Nazi-occupied Europe. One of the most notorious camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Oświęcim, Poland. More than one million people died in Auschwitz-Birkenau before Soviet troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.
On January 24, 2005, the UN General Assembly commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Following this session, a UN resolution was drafted to designate January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. The resolution called for education programs on the Holocaust to help prevent genocide. It also rejected denials that the Holocaust occurred. On November 1, 2005, the assembly adopted this resolution so the day could be observed each year. It was first observed on January 27, 2006.
Many Jewish groups, particularly in Israel, also observe Yom HaShoah, which is a day of mourning for Holocaust victims on 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which falls in April or May of the Gregorian calendar.
Symbols
The symbol of the “Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme” consists of four elements on a solid black background. Two elements are the words “Remembrance and Beyond” and the UN symbol, both depicted in white. The UN symbol consists of a projection of the globe centered on the North Pole surrounded by two olive branches.
The other two elements are a piece of barbed wire and two white roses. The strands of the barbed wire merge into the stems of the roses. The barbed wire represents: the concentration camps; the loss of freedom of Jewish people and many other groups before and during World War II; and their pain and suffering.
The white roses represent peace, freedom and remembrance. These flowers also remind people of the White Rose, a non-violent resistance movement that was active in Germany from June 1942 until February 1943. In the United States and United Kingdom, white roses symbolize the investigation, remembrance and prevention of genocide.
2017 Theme: “Holocaust Remembrance: Educating for a Better Future”
Lois Dickson Rice with her daughter, Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, in 2015.Credit Alex Wong/Getty Images
Lois Dickson Rice, a janitor’s daughter who became a trailblazing corporate executive and helped persuade Congress to provide federal subsidies, known as Pell grants, to tens of millions of needy college students, died on Jan. 4 in Washington. She was 83.
The cause was pneumonia and cancer, her daughter, Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser to President Obama, said.
In the business world, Lois Rice was a director on several major company boards, including those of Firestone, McGraw-Hill and the Control Data Corporation, the supercomputer manufacturer. She was also a senior vice president of Control Data.
She joined the College Entrance Examination Board (now known as the College Board) in 1959. As an executive there, she promoted and helped shape the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant Program, whose chief sponsor was Senator Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island.
The program, begun in 1972, awards grants rather than loans, mostly to undergraduates, on the basis of financial need. (A grant is designed to fill the gap between the cost of college and the family’s estimated contribution. This academic year, the maximum grant is $5,815.)
Ms. Rice continued to promote the program as director of the board’s Washington office and as its national vice president from 1973 to 1981.
Mr. Pell died in 2009. His grandson Clay Pell IV, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Education Department, said in a statement after Ms. Rice’s death, “This program was not inevitable, and it would not have come into existence without her, nor survived in the decades since without her passionate advocacy.”
Lois Anne Dickson was born on Feb. 28, 1933, in Portland, Me., the daughter of David Augustus Dickson and the former Mary Daly. Her father was a janitor at a music store; her mother was a maid. Both were Jamaican immigrants who sent all five of their children to college.
She graduated in 1954 from Radcliffe College, where she majored in history and literature and was president of the student body.
Her marriage to Emmett J. Rice, an economist and a governor of the Federal Reserve, ended in divorce. In addition to her daughter, from that marriage, she is survived by a son, E. John Rice Jr., the chief executive of Management Leadership for Tomorrow; four stepchildren; and four grandchildren. Dr. Rice died in 2011.
Ms. Rice later married Alfred B. Fitt, general counsel of the Congressional Budget Office and of the Army. He died in 1992.
Since 1991, Ms. Rice had been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, researching higher-education policy and promoting racial diversity. Last June, she and Susan Rice, a former Brookings senior fellow, were honored as the only mother-daughter research duo in the think tank’s history.
“Lois was a giant in the field of education,” Arne Duncan, the former secretary of education, said in a statement. “For so many of us, she was a hero, a role model and an example of what true service is all about. She helped create a pathway to college for literally millions of low-income and first-generation college goers, changing the trajectories of their families forever.”
Eugene A. Cernan on the last human mission on the moon’s surface, in December 1972.Credit Harrison H. Schmitt/NASA
Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission in 1972 and the last human to walk on the moon, died on Monday in Houston. He was 82.
His death was announced by NASA.
A ferocious competitor with a test pilot’s reckless streak, Mr. Cernan (pronounced SIR-nun) rocketed into space three times, was the second American to drift weightless around the world on a tether, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon.
He also slid down a banister on a visit to the White House and once crashed a helicopter in the Atlantic while chasing a dolphin. Skimming the lunar surface in a rehearsal for the first manned landing, he erupted with salty language heard by millions when his craft briefly spun out of control.
But he made spacewalks and romps over the lunar surface look routine, and in a way they were.
Three and a half years after Neil A. Armstrong took mankind’s first step onto the lunar surface in 1969, Mr. Cernan, a Navy captain and one of the nation’s most experienced astronauts, landed with a geologist-astronaut near the Sea of Serenity in the final chapter of the Apollo program, America’s audacious venture to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to put Americans on the moon.
Captain Cernan was the last of 12 Americans to set foot on the moon in six Apollo landings. Two other missions were lunar orbital test runs, and Apollo 13 was an aborted landing after a malfunction. While Apollo 17 conveyed the drama of televised moonwalks, the awesome historicity of the Armstrong flight had faded, along with public interest in lunar missions that by 1972 had begun to seem repetitive.
They Walked on the Moon
Eugene A. Cernan, who died on Monday at the age of 82, was the last of a dozen men to leave footprints on the moon. He did so almost 45 years ago. Here is a look at the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface.
Still, his mission was a technological triumph. While Ronald E. Evans, a Navy commander, piloted a command ship in lunar orbit, Captain Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt, the first scientist to go to the moon, descended to the virtually airless, soundless surface in a four-legged lander that settled in a narrow valley of boulders and craters. After a 250,000-mile voyage from Earth, they put down 300 feet from their target.
“The Challenger has landed,” Captain Cernan announced in a broadcast to the world the Apollo crew saw hanging in the sky. “I’d like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible.”
He and Dr. Schmitt found themselves in a desolate but recognizable landscape near the Taurus Mountains and the Littrow Crater, a region of hills, cliffs and escarpments littered with tumbled rocks. After establishing a nuclear-powered base station, they set up scientific experiments and began three days of explorations on foot and in a battery-powered rover mounted with a television camera.
As color video pictures streamed across the gulf of space, the astronauts collected bluish-gray and tan rocks four billion years old, drilled eight-foot heat-probe holes and journeyed to a 7,000-foot mountain called the South Massif and to the edge of a deep crater. There they found a fumarole, an ancient vent for volcanic gases, and collected strange orange and red soil samples.
On three rover excursions that took them 21 miles to craters, rock slides and mountain walls, and in 22 hours of moonwalks, they collected 250 pounds of rocks and soil to carry home and left experiments that delivered data for years. The captain also scratched his daughter’s initials — TDC, for Teresa Dawn Cernan — in the lunar dust, a talisman that might last eons on a lifeless world.
The mission completed, the captain took his last steps on the lunar surface and spoke for posterity.
“America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow,” he said in words slightly garbled on recordings. “And as we leave the moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”
Eugene A. Cernan preparing for a simulation in 1970 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In 1972, he commanded the Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission.Credit NASA
Dr. Schmitt climbed into the lander, followed by Captain Cernan. With a graceless farewell from the captain — “Let’s get this mother out of here” — the two astronauts blasted off and rejoined the orbiting command module. The trip back to Earth and the splashdown in the South Pacific, on Dec. 19, 1972, went like clockwork.
In the decades since the Apollo program, the wonder of America’s early achievements in space has been overtaken by space shuttles, international space stations, unmanned explorations of the solar system’s outer worlds and the possibility of a landing by humans on Mars.
Captain Cernan’s name has sometimes been linked with Armstrong’s as the first and last humans to walk on the moon. But with budget constraints and other worlds beckoning, his lofty hopes for another generation to return have not been realized. No human has set foot on the moon in the 44 years since his mission, and there are no plans to return.
Eugene Andrew Cernan was born in Chicago on March 14, 1934, to Andrew Cernan, a supervisor at a naval installation, and the former Rose Cihlar.
He graduated from Proviso Township High School in Maywood, Ill., in 1952, and received an electrical engineering degree from Purdue in 1956 and a master’s in aeronautical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., in 1963. As a naval aviator, he logged 5,000 hours of flying time and 200 landings on aircraft carriers.
In 1961, he married Barbara Jean Atchley. They divorced in 1981. He later married Jan Nanna, who survives him, as do his daughter, Teresa Cernan Woolie; two stepdaughters, Kelly Nanna Taff and Danielle Nanna Ellis; nine grandchildren; and a sister, Dolores Riley.
The first and last men to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, left, and Mr. Cernan, appeared on Capitol Hill in 2011 to testify on human spaceflight.Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Captain Cernan became a NASA astronaut in 1963. In his first spaceflight, Gemini 9 in 1966, he joined Col. Thomas Stafford of the Air Force on a three-day orbital mission testing rendezvous and docking procedures. He also circled the world twice as a tethered spacewalker. At 32, he was the youngest American to go into space.
His second spaceflight, with Colonel Stafford and Cmdr. John W. Young of the Navy in 1969, was Apollo 10, the final rehearsal for Apollo 11, which months later landed Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. The eight-day Apollo 10 trip included a Cernan-Stafford descent in a lunar module to within eight nautical miles of the surface. It did everything but land. It also photographed landing sites and sent back the first live color television pictures from the moon.
Captain Cernan’s final spaceflight, the capstone of the Apollo series, did not generate the worldwide excitement of the Armstrong-Aldrin adventure. But it did set records: the longest lunar landing flight (nearly 302 hours) and the longest lunar surface extravehicular activities (22 hours and 6 minutes). Captain Cernan also set a career record of 566 hours in space, 73 of them on the moon’s surface.
After Apollo 17, Captain Cernan helped develop the United States-Soviet project Apollo-Soyuz. In 1976, he retired from the Navy and NASA and became an executive of Coral Petroleum in Houston. He founded the Cernan Corporation, an energy and aerospace consultant, in 1981 and was chairman of the Johnson Engineering Corporation from 1994 to 2000.
Mr. Cernan, who lived in Piney Point, a suburb of Houston, contributed to ABC’s coverage of space-related news; narrated and was featured in documentaries; and wrote (with Don Davis) an autobiography, “The Last Man on the Moon,” published in 1999.
In 2010 congressional testimony, he and Armstrong, who died in 2012, criticized President Obama’s plan to cancel NASA’s program to send astronauts back to the moon and later to Mars and to invest in private companies for new space technologies. Mr. Cernan called the budgetary decision a “slide to mediocrity” and “a blueprint for a mission to nowhere.”
Correction: January 20, 2017 An obituary on Tuesday about Eugene A. Cernan, the last person to walk on the moon, erroneously attributed a distinction to him. When he first went into space, in 1966, he was the youngest American to do so, not the youngest man. (Mr. Cernan was 32 at the time. A number of Soviet cosmonauts had preceded him in space at earlier ages; Gherman Titov, who was 25 when he orbited the earth in 1961, was the youngest.) The obituary also referred incorrectly to the live television pictures sent by Apollo 10, Mr. Cernan’s second spaceflight, in 1969. They were the first color pictures from the moon — not the first pictures of any kind. (Those had been sent by Apollo 8 in December 1968.)
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BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 