Jeff Parker, Florida Today.
IN REMEMBRANCE: 9-4-2011
DAVID HONEYBOY EDWARDS, DELTA BLUESMAN
Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
David Honeyboy Edwards performing in New York in 1991.
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
Published: August 29, 2011
David Honeyboy Edwards, believed to have been the oldest surviving member of the first generation of Delta blues singers, died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 96.
His death was announced by his manager, Michael Frank.
Mr. Edwards’s career spanned nearly the entire recorded history of the blues, from its early years in the Mississippi Delta to its migration to the nightclubs of Chicago and its emergence as an international phenomenon.
Over eight decades Mr. Edwards knew or played with virtually every major figure who worked in the idiom, including Charley Patton, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. He was probably best known, though, as the last living link to Robert Johnson, widely hailed as the King of the Delta Blues. The two traveled together, performing on street corners and at picnics, dances and fish fries during the 1930s.
“We would walk through the country with our guitars on our shoulders, stop at people’s houses, play a little music, walk on,” Mr. Edwards said in an interview with the blues historian Robert Palmer, recalling his peripatetic years with Johnson. “We could hitchhike, transfer from truck to truck, or, if we couldn’t catch one of them, we’d go to the train yard, ’cause the railroad was all through that part of the country then.” He added, “Man, we played for a lot of peoples.”
Mr. Edwards had earlier apprenticed with the country bluesman Big Joe Williams. Unlike Williams and many of his other peers, however, Mr. Edwards did not record commercially until after World War II. Field recordings he made for the Library of Congress under the supervision of the folklorist Alan Lomax in 1942 are the only documents of Mr. Edwards’s music from his years in the Delta.
Citing the interplay between his coarse, keening vocals and his syncopated “talking” guitar on recordings like “Wind Howling Blues,” many historians regard these performances as classic examples of the deep, down-home blues that shaped rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.
Mr. Edwards was especially renowned for his intricate fingerpicking and his slashing bottleneck-slide guitar work. Though he played in much the same traditional style throughout his career, he also enjoyed the distinction of being one of the first Delta blues musicians to perform with a saxophonist and drummer.
David Edwards was born June 28, 1915, in Shaw, Miss., in the Delta region. His parents, who worked as sharecroppers, gave him the nickname Honey, which later became Honeyboy. His mother played the guitar; his father, a fiddler and guitarist, performed at local social events. Mr. Edwards’s father bought him his first guitar and taught him to play traditional folk ballads.
His first real exposure to the blues came in 1929, when the celebrated country bluesman Tommy Johnson came to pick cotton at Wildwood Plantation, the farm near Greenwood where the Edwards family lived at the time.
“They’d pick cotton all through the day, and at night they’d sit around and play the guitars,” Mr. Edwards recalled in his autobiography, “The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing” (Chicago Review Press, 1997). “Drinking that white whiskey, that moonshine, I’d just sit and look at them. I’d say, ‘I wish I could play.’ ”
After spending the better part of two decades as an itinerant musician, Mr. Edwards made Chicago his permanent home in the 1950s. He performed frequently in its clubs and at the open-air market on Maxwell Street, but he recorded only sporadically during his first years there, notably for the independent Artist and Chess labels.
Mr. Edwards achieved new popularity during the blues revival of the 1960s. Near the end of the decade he appeared with Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy on sessions that produced both volumes of the album “Blues Jam in Chicago” by the British rock band Fleetwood Mac.
In 1972 Mr. Edwards met Mr. Frank, a blues aficionado and harmonica player, who would be his booking agent, manager and collaborator, on both stage and record, for the rest of his life.
Mr. Edwards was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996 and named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002. In 2007 he appeared as himself in the movie “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”
Survivors include a daughter, a stepdaughter and several grandchildren.
Mr. Edwards won a Grammy Award in 2008 for the album “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas,” a collaboration with Henry Townsend, Pinetop Perkins (who died in March) and Robert Lockwood Jr., and a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2010.
He was still playing as many as 100 shows a year when he stopped touring, in 2008, and he continued to perform occasionally until this year. His last appearance was at a blues festival in Clarksdale, Miss., in April.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com
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STETSON KENNEDY, WHO INFILTRATED AND EXPOSED THE KLAN
Published: August 30, 2011
Stetson Kennedy, a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” died on Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94.
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Keystone Features/Getty Images
Stetson Kennedy, author of “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” with a Klan pamphlet in February 1947.
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Times Topic:Ku Klux Klan
The cause was complications of bleeding of the brain, said his wife, Sandra Parks.
Mr. Kennedy developed his sense of racial injustice early. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he saw the hardships of black Floridians when he knocked on doors collecting payments for his father’s furniture store. His social concerns developed further when he began collecting folklore data for the Federal Writers’ Project in Key West, Tampa and camps for turpentine workers in north Florida, where conditions were close to slavery.
After being rejected by the Army because of a bad back, he threw himself into unmasking the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Columbians, a Georgia neo-Nazi group. He was inspired in part by a tale told by an interview subject whose friend had been the victim of a racial murder in Key West.
As an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, infiltrated the Klavern in Stone Mountain and worked as a Klavalier, or Klan strong-arm man. He leaked his findings to, among others, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, the Anti-Defamation League and the producers of the radio show “Superman,” who used information about the Klan’s rituals and code words in a multi-episode story titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”
In a celebrated exploit, he stole financial information from a wastebasket outside the office of the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, Sam Roper, in Atlanta.
The information led the Internal Revenue Service to challenge the group’s status as a charitable organization and demand nearly $700,000 in back taxes. He helped draft the brief that Georgia used to revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947.
After writing a series of articles on the Klan for the left-wing newspaper The Daily Compass — some with datelines like “Inside the Invisible Empire” and “Somewhere in Klan Territory” — he published “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan” in 1954. It was republished in 1990 as “The Klan Unmasked.”
In 2006, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the authors of “Freakonomics,” reported in The New York Times that Mr. Kennedy had greatly exaggerated and dramatized his Klan-busting. The authors had interviewed Mr. Kennedy for their book and used his information about Klan symbolism, language and gestures to illustrate an economic point, but in telling Mr. Kennedy’s story they elicited new interest in his claims, especially from a Florida writer, Ben Green.
Mr. Green, while researching the life of Harry T. Moore, a black civil rights advocate murdered in 1952, and collaborating for a time with Mr. Kennedy on the project, read Mr. Kennedy’s archives in Atlanta and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
Mr. Green concluded that Mr. Kennedy had relied heavily on the experiences of a man identified by the pseudonym John Brown, a union worker and former Klan official who had changed his ways and offered to infiltrate the Klan. Mr. Kennedy later confirmed that he had relied in part on an informant and that he had woven some of his testimony into his first-person account to make it more compelling. But he was unapologetic.
“I wanted to show what was happening at the time,” he told The Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville in 2006. “Who gives a damn how it’s written? It is the one and only document of the working Klan.”
William Stetson Kennedy was born on Oct. 5, 1916, in Jacksonville, where he developed an interest in local turns of phrase and sayings that he called “folksays,” jotting them down in notebooks.
While attending the University of Florida, where he took a writing course with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, he struck out on his own to do field work in Key West. There he married the first of his seven wives, a Cuban who gave him entree into the local émigré community for his folklore work. While gathering material for the Federal Writers’ Project, he traveled across Florida with the writer Zora Neale Hurston.
His Florida research found its way into “Palmetto Country” (1942), a folkloric survey of territory from southern Alabama and Georgia down to Key West, and the series American Folkways, edited by Erskine Caldwell. In 1994 he returned to folklore in “South Florida Folklife,” written with Peggy Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas, and “Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West” (2008).
Most of his writing was devoted to campaigns for social justice. A series on racial segregation written with Elizabeth Gardner for The Daily Compass in 1949 formed the basis of “Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.” His other books included “Passage to Violence” (1954), a fictionalized version of his Klan experiences; “Southern Exposure” (1946), and “After Appomattox: How the South Won the War” (1995).
In addition to his wife, Sandra, Mr. Kennedy is survived by a son, Loren; a grandson, and several stepchildren.
Mr. Kennedy pursued the Klan and racist politicians through a variety of means. In 1950 he ran a write-in campaign for senator. Woody Guthrie, who lived on Mr. Kennedy’s lakeside property near Jacksonville, writing 88 songs there, composed a campaign song for him, titled “Stetson Kennedy,” declaring:
Stetson Kennedy, he’s that man;
Walks and talks across our land;
Talkin’ out against the Ku Klux Klan.
For every fiery cross and note;
I’ll get Kennedy a hundred votes.
Ridicule, too, formed part of Mr. Kennedy’s arsenal. In 1947 he tried, unsuccessfully, to incorporate his own shadow Klan so that he could sue the real Klan whenever it used the same name. He appointed himself Imperial Wizard and installed, as senior officers, an African-American, a Roman Catholic, a Jew, a Japanese-American and a Cherokee.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese Nationalist Leader, Dies at 79
(Sept. 2, 1969)
Frank Capra, Academy Award-Winning Director, Dies at 94
(Sept. 3, 1991)
Albert Schweitzer, Doctor Who Won Nobel Peace Prize, Dies at 90
(Sept. 4, 1965)
Everett McKinley Dirksen, Political Phenomenon, Dies at 73
(Sept. 7, 1969)
Mao Tse-tung, Communist Ruler of China, Dies at 82
(Sept. 9, 1976)
Nikita S. Khrushchev, Communist Ruler of Soviet Union, Dies at 76
(Sept. 11, 1971)
William McKinley, 25th U.S. President, Dies at 58
(Sept. 14, 1901)
Robert Penn Warren, Poet and Author, Dies at 84
(Sept. 15, 1989)
Jean Piaget, Swiss Psychologist, Dies at 84
(Sept. 17, 1980)
Sean O’Casey, Irish Playwright, Dies at 84
(Sept. 18, 1964)
Fiorello H. La Guardia, Three-Time Mayor of New York, Dies at 64
(Sept. 20, 1947)
Ring Lardner, Sports Writer, Author and Playwright, Dies at 48
(Sept. 25, 1933)
Emily Post, Writer and Arbiter of Etiquette, Dies at 86
(Sept. 25, 1960)
Babe Zaharias, Famed Woman Athlete, Dies at 42
(Sept. 27, 1956)
Miles Davis, Jazz Genius, Dies at 65
(Sept. 28, 1991)
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Dashing Fighter for Canada, Dies at 80
(Sept. 28, 2000)
Ross Granville Harrison, Yale Zoologist, Dies at 89
(Sept. 30 , 1959)
Filed under Uncategorized
SKYWATCH: SUPERNOVA, A COMET, AN OCCULTATION … WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT?
News
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Bulletin at a GlanceNews |
Sue French’s New Book
September 2, 2011 | Deep-Sky Wonders, the new book by Sue French, is now available for pre-order. > read more
Dark Skies in Ohio
August 31, 2011 | Where can you go in the Mid-West to view the night sky unimpeded by light pollution? Ohio has just the spot for you. > read more
Comet Elenin Self-Destructs
August 30, 2011 | It was going to be the celestial highlight of 2011. Now Comet Elenin appears to have broken into pieces just two weeks prior to its perihelion. > read more
Sky & Telescope October 2011
August 28, 2011 | Sky & Telescope‘s October 2011 issue is now available to digital subscribers. > read more
Observing
International Occultation Timing Association
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Watch a Star Wink Out on September 3rd
July 20, 2011 | On the evening of Saturday, September 3rd, the dark edge of the Moon will cover the 2.3-magnitude star Delta Scorpii from the eastern and southern U.S. to northern Venezuela. > read more
Supernova Erupts in Pinwheel Galaxy
August 25, 2011 | An exploding star, first spotted just hours after its destruction, is in reach of backyard telescopes and still brightening. The host galaxy is M101 just north of the Big Dipper’s handle. > read more
Trusty Comet Garradd
August 31, 2011 | Comet Garradd was already a fine telescopic sight at the end of August. It promises to brighten in September and then shine steadily for the next six months. > read more
Ceres and Vesta in 2011
May 20, 2011 | The two brightest asteroids are in fine view for binoculars or a telescope. Here are instructions and charts to find them. > read more
Tour September’s Sky by Eye and Ear!
August 31, 2011 | This is a month of transition: Northern summer becomes autumn, Saturn sets just before Jupiter rises, and Venus is moving from the morning sky before dawn to the evening sky. > read more
This Week’s Sky at a Glance
Sky & Telescope diagram
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This Week’s Sky at a Glance
September 2, 2011 | Jupiter is up big and bright by late evening. The waxing Moon occults a 2nd-magnitude star. And the supernova in M101 just keeps brightening! > read more
Community
Nick Howes
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Lots Going On in the Sky
September 1, 2011 | The first week of September will be a memorable time for observers in the Northern Hemisphere. > read more
Let the Star Parties Begin!
April 14, 2011 | Want to gaze at the Milky Way all night or peer into the eyepiece of a 12-foot-tall telescope? Then escape the city lights and head for the nearest “star party.” > read more
Filed under Uncategorized
COLORLINES: A GUIDE TO GOP BIGOTRY IN 2012 CAMPAIGN
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Filed under Uncategorized
HATEWATCH: NATIVIST LEADER CLARIFIES VIOLENCE STATEMENT, SORT OF
Nativist Leader Clarifies Violence Statement, Sort Of
by Leah Nelson — on August 25, 2011
William Gheen, head of the nativist extremist group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), has certainly made a spectacle of himself this week. Shocked at the backlash from his proclamation Monday that “illegal and violent” “extra-political activities” might be the only way to save “white America” from “Dictator Barack Obama,” he is scrambling with all the effectiveness of a bug stuck on a pin to pretend he didn’t say what he said.
Gheen’s remarks, first reported Monday by Right Wing Watch, spread rapidly across the web, appearing on Media Matters, Daily Kos, Mother Jones, this blog, and myriad smaller venues. By Tuesday evening, he was in full defense mode, backpedalling and accusing the media of deliberately twisting his words.
Radio host Alan Colmes, who had linked to the interview with right-wing radio host Janet Mefferd on his own radio site under the headline, “William Gheen: Violent, Illegal Activities May Be Needed to Bring Down Obama,” Tuesday evening gave him an opportunity to clarify.
Breathless and agitated, Gheen told Colmes that that 80% of Americans agree with ALIPAC’s position on immigration, and that he himself has so thoroughly demonstrated his commitment to peace that it’s “ridiculous” that anyone would imagine he thought violence might be the only way to stop Obama.
Here’s a sample exchange:
Colmes: “Your words were, ‘violent’ and…”
Gheen: “I never said that was needed. I never said that was needed to bring down Obama like you said on your website.”
Colmes: “Well, tell me what you mean.”
Gheen: “I was reporting the condition of the American people.”
Colmes: “That’s not you said on that show.”
Gheen: “Well, I don’t have to!”
Colmes: “How am I supposed to know what you mean? What am I, psychic? … Mr. Gheen, I’m only repeating your own words.”
Ultimately, Gheen conceded: “I was speaking off the cuff and I should have prepared my comments a little bit better so they would not be exploited by my political opposition.” Colmes objected to the word “exploited,” but let him let him off fairly easy: “The rhetoric you used on this show seemed to probably not reflect what you truly in your heart believe, and thus you may have been misinterpreted, but they are your own words that you did use.”
Those weren’t Gheen’s only words. In the same Monday interview in which he suggested that those who wished to save “white America” from dictatorship might have to resort to violence, he also proposed that a military coup would do the trick.
“I didn’t say just impeachment. I said remove him from office because some people are also leaning to the words ‘treason’ and talking about the military coming in or somebody just coming in taking this guy into some form of arrest if we’re doing this,” he told Meferd.
“What does a nation do when this happens? We may have to try to gather in the streets and demand that Obama step down. But you know when you talk about doing that, you’re gonna gather in the streets of Washington D.C., which where Obama has a support rate of 88% of the blacks and Hispanics who live there.”
Strange words from a non-racist pacifist.
A “clarification” posted Tuesday on ALIPAC’s forum was more of the same. “What peaceful and political hope do we have for any future border or immigration enforcement in America? Those responsible for this well organized invasion and betrayal of the American citizenry know the answer to that…. NONE!”
He continued: “I am greatly saddened that anyone would place Americans in positions to chose between submission and violent revolt, but I am not the one creating that horrible situation, and I consider both options to be deplorable.”
Gheen has made himself perfectly clear. As he sees it, there is no “peaceful and political” way to resolve things, and violence is the only alternative for Americans who don’t want to submit to dictatorship.
Which is exactly what he said in the first place.
Perhaps it will comfort him to know that his rant brought in at least one new supporter. In a post titled, “Congratulations, William Gheen,” Hunter Wallace of the white nationalist hate site Occidental Dissent (motto: “Outlaw Conservatism in Black Run Amerika”) wrote yesterday: “I have quarreled with William Gheen in the past over his support for ‘legal immigration’ from Latin America and his tireless attempts to distance ALIPAC from ‘extremist groups,’ but I now believe that Mr. Gheen is starting to realize the true magnitude of the crisis we are facing.”
SOURCE: http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/08/25/nativist-leader-clarifies-violence-statement-sort-of/
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Yes, yes, yes. Here we go with the backpedaling. Face it, Gheen, you’re a racist seditious traitor:
“……………headline, “William Gheen: Violent, Illegal Activities May Be Needed to Bring Down Obama,”
As he sees it, there is no “peaceful and political” way to resolve things, and violence is the only alternative for Americans who don’t want to submit to dictatorship.
Which is exactly what he said in the first place.”
Your words, Mr. Gheen.
Since you feel that Obama “must be taken down”, your words are seditious and treasonous and are an attempt on the life of the President of the United States. Now you are trying to call those venomous seditious words back, but, they are out there, and you cannot change what you uttered with your own mouth.
“Look out how you use proud words.
When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.
They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can’t hear you calling–
Look out how you use proud words.”
Filed under Uncategorized
CARTOON: GOVERNOR RICK PERRY, ‘THE TEXAS MIRACLE’
John Cole, Scranton, PA. The Times.
Filed under Uncategorized
BLACK WOMEN IN AMERICA: BLACK AMERICAN WOMEN IN WORLD WAR II
Much has been written of the daring and patriotic exploits of Black American men who have served in World War II.
But, less known are the stories of Black American military women of WW II who joined in the fight to “make the world safe for democracy”. Here are just a few of the stories of these women whose valor, whose loyalty to their country, and whose courage under fire showed forth their patriotism.
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Not known to many people in the history of WWII are the Black women who served in the military. Yes, they did not fight on the battle lines as the men did, but, they still made a major impact in their dedicated service in WWI II. Black American women also fought to serve in the war effort as nurses. Despite early protests that black nurses treating white soldiers would not be appropriate, the War Department relented, and the first group of Black American nurses in the Army Nurse Corps arrived in England in 1944.
Not well known is the important efforts of the famous 6888TH Central Postal Battalion:
-6888TH (aka the “Six Triple Eight”) Central Postal Battalion:
148. “The first Negro WACs to arrive [on] the continent of Europe were 800 girls of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Bn, who had also been the first to arrive in England. After the battalion had set up its facilities at Rouen, France, it held an `open house’, which was attended by hundreds of Negro soldiers. Pvt. Ruth L. James,…of the battalion area is on duty at the gate.” May 26, 1945.Pfc. Stedman. 111-SC-23707. (african_americans_wwii_148.jpg)
Lt.(jg.) Harriet Ida Pickens and Ens. Frances Wills, the first African-American Waves to be commissioned. December 21, 1944
147. “Capt. Della H. Raney, Army Nurse Corps, who now heads the nursing staff at the station hospital at Camp Beale, CA, has the distinction of being the first Negro nurse to report to yuty in the present war…” April 11, 1945. 208-PU-161K-1. (african_americans_wwii_147.jpg)
145. “Auxiliaries Ruth Wade and Lucille Mayo (left to right) further demonstrate their ability to service trucks as taught them during the processing period at Fort Des Moines and put into practice at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.” December 8, 1942. Oster. 111-SC-16246. (african_americans_wwii_145.jpg)
152. “Lt. Florie E. Gant…tends a patient at a prisoner-of war hospital somewhere in England.” October 7, 1944. 112-SGA-Nurses-44-1676. (african_americans_wwii_152.jpg)
158. “Cmdr. Thomas A. Gaylord, USN (Ret’d), administers oath to five new Navy nurses commissioned in New York…” Phyllis Mae Dailey, the Navy’s first African-American nurse, is second from the right. March 8, 1945. 80-G-4836. (african_americans_wwii_158.jpg)
There were also Black women pilots as well. Many of you may know of the valiant courage under fire that was exemplified by the Black men of the Tuskegee Airmen fame, but, how many of you know of Ms. Janet Harmon Waterford Bragg? She was one of the few Black women pilots who became a pilot through the Tuskegee Airmen pilot program.
In addition to being denied entrance into the WASPS, where one White woman (Vice President of the Ninety-Nines) stated that she “did not know what to do with a Black woman”, Ms. Bragg was also denied her licence by the first examiner because as he put it, he had never given a Black woman a licence to fly, and he was not going to start doing it then. Ms. Bragg later went on to receive her licence from another instructor.
Janet Harmon Waterford Bragg
(1907-1993)
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I’m not afraid of tomorrow because I’ve seen yesterday, and today is beautiful.” – Janet Bragg (1991) In 1939, when the National Airmen’s Association of America was formed, two women were among the founding members, both determined young African- Americans eager to learn and enter the still evolving world of aviation. One was Willa Brown, the other Janet Bragg. Born Janet Harmon in Griffin, Georgia on March 24, 1907, she gained her interest in aviation while still in her formative years. “As a child I always wanted to fly . . . I used to watch the birds – – how they would take off and land,” she said in an interview with the Arizona Historical Society in 1989. One day in 1933 in Chicago, she saw a billboard across the street with a drawing of a bird building a nest with chicks inside. The caption on the billboard read: “Birds learn to fly. Why can’t you” That day she knew where her future lay. A registered nurse who received her degree and training from Spellman College and MacBicar Hospital, both Black institutions respectively, Bragg enrolled at Curtis Wright School of Aeronautics in 1933. Despite constant harassment by fellow students, she completed her course work and helped build an airport and hangar in Robbins, Illinois. She bought the hangar’s first plane.
Like many African Americans during a time of rigid segregation, Bragg continued to meet opposition in her pursuit of a career in commercial and military aviation. She was denied entry into the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots (WASPs), being told by Ethel Sheehy, then vice president of the ’99s and Women’s Flying Training Detachment executive officer, that she didn’t know what to do with a Black woman. Undaunted, she flew to Tuskegee, .Alabama to train with Charles Alfred “Chief” Anderson and his instructors in the civilian program so that she could be given an exam for her commercial pilot’s license. However, the white examiner denied her this right after she landed from her trial flight. He exclaimed to Anderson that, “Well, I tell you Chief, she gave me a ride I’ll put up with any of your flight instructors. I’ve never given a colored girl a commercial pilot’s license, I don’t intend to now-.” The same year (1942), however, she was awarded her license by another examiner after 30-40 minutes of flight.
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Bragg continued to fly as a hobby and encouraged others to pursue careers in aviation, even after being denied entry into the military nurse corps because the quota for Black nurses was filled. She wrote a weekly column ( 1930s), for the Chicago Defender entitled “Negro in Aviation”, reporting on the exploits of Col. John Robinson, a Black American aviator in charge of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Forces in Addis Ababa under Emperor Haile Selassie. Bragg was a founding and charter member of the Challenger Air Pilots’ Association (1931), a national organization of Black American aviators, inspired by the legacy of Bessie Coleman. Bragg, along with Willa Brown, Cornelius Coffey and Dale White, established an annual memorial flight over Bessie Coleman’s grave in 1935, a tradition that continued for many years.
Janet Harmon Waterford Bragg retired from flying in 1965 and retired as a nurse seven years later. A resident of Tucson, Arizona for several years, she died in Chicago in April of 1993. Aviation buffs, students and historians may want to visit the Pima Air Museum for a visual display of her life or read a copy of an interview conducted by the Arizona Historical Society, both located in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition, an autobiography on her life is being written through the Smithsonian Institute Press.
Even more left out of the picture, are the thousands of Black women “Rosie the Riveter” workers back home in America doing their part to help the war effort along. The White face of Rosie the Riveter is well-known, but, as seen here, the Rosies came in many racial groups.
But, there were many Black women who helped in the production of armaments for the war. Many Black women left the menial life of domestic servitude to earn better salaries, provide for their families, and help the men fighting overseas in Europe, North Africa and Asia.
A real-life “Rosie the Riveter” operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, TN, working on an A-31 Vengeance dive bomber, February, 1943. (Author: Alfred T. Palmer, U.S. Office of War Information).
Juanita E. Gray, a former domestic worker, learns to operate a lathe at the War Production and Training Center in Washington, D.C. She was one of hundreds of African-American women trained at the center.
Welders Alivia Scott, Hattie Carpenter, and Flossie Burtos are about to weld their first piece of steel on the ship SS George Washington Carver at Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California. 1943
Women workers at quartermaster depot. The tradition of Betsy Ross is being kept alive in this quatermaster corps depot where this young woman worker assists in the creation of American flags for military activitities. Philadelphia Quartermaster Corps. (SOURCE)
New Britain, Connecticut. Women welders at the Landers, Frary, and Clark plant. (SOURCE)
D-Day. V-E Day. V-J Day. Battle of the Bulge. Pacific Theater.
So many battles that still wear a whiteface.
The dedication that many Black American women showed during WWII is exemplary.
That they fought two enemies—–overseas, and back in America—-is a true testament to their courage and bravery.
Patriotism has no color.
REFERENCES:
BOOKS GOOGLE: “BITTER FRUIT: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN WORLD WAR II“
“THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROSIE THE RIVETER: INVISIBLE WORKING WOMEN“, BY SUE DAVENPORT
BLACK AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE MILITARY AND AT WAR: REFERENCE GUIDES
PICTURES OF AFRICAN AMERICANS DURING WORLD WAR 2
ROSIE PICTURES: SELECT IMAGES RELATING TO AMERICAN WOMEN WORKERS DURING WWII
Invisible Warriors: African American Women in World War II — Home
1.
BITTER FRUIT: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN WORLD WAR II – Paperback (Nov. 25, 1999) by MAUREEN HONEY
(2.
No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II by Diane Burke Fessler(May 31, 1997 (6)
Filed under Uncategorized
EMMETT LOUIS TILL: IN MEMORIAM
Emmett Till.
This past July 25, would have been the 70th birthday of Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till. His young and innocent life was savagely taken from him by J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, two racist murderers who were set free by an all-White, all-male jury in Sumner, Mississippi in 1955.
This year marks the 56th anniversary of the death of Emmett.
Emmett’s death mobilized the Civil Rights Movement, galvanized a people who had more than had enough of the dehumanizing reign of Jane Crow segregation, as well as revealed to the world the brutality of America’s mistreatment of her Black citizens.
Emmett Louis Till.
Rest in peace, Emmett.
Rest in peace.
Filed under Uncategorized
IN REMEMBRANCE: 8-28-2011
ESTHER GORDY EDWARDS, SISTER OF MOTOWN RECORDS FOUNDER
By Valerie J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times
August 28, 2011
As Motown and its Detroit headquarters turned into a pop-soul powerhouse, she served as a company executive who guided a young Stevie Wonder and managed the careers of such era-defining artists as Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye and the Supremes.
Esther Gordy Edwards is photographed in 1988 inside Motown Records’ original offices in Detroit, once known as Hitsville USA. It’s now the Motown Historical Museum and is full of the artificts she had collected over the years. (Steven R. Nickerson, AP / August 28, 2011)When Berry Gordy Jr. wanted to borrow $800 from his family to found Motown Recordsin 1959, he knew that the most formidable resistance would come from his oldest sister, Esther.”You’re 29 years old and what have you done with your life?” his sister snapped as the pair squabbled over his request, her brother later recalled. Edwards assented, but only after Gordy signed a contract pledging future royalties as security.
As Motown and its Detroit headquarters turned into a pop-soul powerhouse, Esther Gordy Edwards served as a company executive who guided a young Stevie Wonder and managed the careers of such era-defining artists as Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye and the Supremes.
Yet Edwards made her most enduring mark after the company moved to Los Angeles in 1972. She stayed behind and in 1985 turned the original offices known as Hitsville USA into the Motown Historical Museum. Then she packed it with the artifacts she had pointedly saved along the way.
Edwards died Wednesday in Detroit of natural causes, the museum announced. She was 91.
“Whatever she did, it was with the highest standards,” her brother said in a statement. “She preserved Motown memorabilia before it was memorabilia, collecting our history long before we knew we were making it.”
Wonder said he was “taken back by the loss” of Edwards, whom he regarded as “another mother.”
When Wonder came to Motown as a boy, Edwards helped him manage his money, arranged for tutors and enrolled him at the Michigan School of the Blind.
“She believed in me — when I was 14 years old,” Wonder said in a statement. “She championed me being in Motown. I shared with her many of my songs first before anyone else.”
Edwards played a key role managing young acts in the 1960s. Eventually she rose to vice president and directed Motown’s international operations.
“Poor kids from broken homes would rush here after school and hang out all night,” Edwards said of Hitsville in a 1989 Times article. “Between 1959 and 1972, this little house was like home for a lot of kids. Without Motown, most of the talent discovered in this building would have been overlooked by society.”
Edwards was “born bossy,” her brother once said, on April 25, 1920, in Oconee, Ga. She was one of eight children of Berry and Bertha Gordy and as a toddler moved to Detroit with her family.
Esther attended both Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Wayne State University in Detroit.
She married in the early 1940s and had a son before divorcing.
In 1951, she married George H. Edwards, who went on to serve in the Michigan Legislature. He died in 1980.
She had helped set up the Gordy family savings club as a source of financing for business ventures when her brother sought the loan that led to the “Motown Sound.”
Inside Motown, the 4-foot-10 Edwards was called a “pack rat,” teased for squirreling away everything she could — concert posters, fliers, stage costumes and other would-be collectibles — during her 30 years with the company.
“We used to laugh at Mrs. Edwards because everywhere we went on those tours, she saved everything. She saved all the pictures, all the placards,” Robinson told the Detroit Free Press in 2005. “But what a wonderful thing she did. Because of her we have that museum, we have that place where people can go and see that history.”
More than 40,000 people visit each year, according to the museum. Exhibits have included girl-group gowns, record covers, Michael Jackson’s sequined glove and the upstairs quarters where Berry once lived.
The need for such a museum dawned on Edwards over time as tourists dropped by the offices she kept at Hitsville after the company had moved west.
Once about 50 men sporting white sailor uniforms and British accents showed up, explaining that they had rented vans to drive the 60 miles to Motown after their ship had docked in Toledo, Ohio, she told Smithsonian magazine in 1994.
“That was the turning point,” Edwards said. “I thought, ‘Well, gosh, maybe we did make history here.'”
In addition to her brother, Berry, Edwards is survived by her son, Robert Berry Bullock; stepson Harry T. Edwards; two other siblings, Anna Gordy Gaye and Robert L. Gordy; three granddaughters; and six great-grandchildren.
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NICK ASHFORD, SINGER-SONGWRITER OF ASHFORD & SIMPSON FAME
Richard Termine for The New York Times
Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson performing in 2006 at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan.
By BEN SISARIO
Published: August 22, 2011
Nick Ashford, who with Valerie Simpson, his songwriting partner and later wife, wrote some of Motown’s biggest hits, like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough“ and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and later recorded their own hits and toured as a duo, died Monday at a hospital in New York City. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Ashford had throat cancer and was undergoing treatment, but the cause of his death was not immediately known. His death was announced by Liz Rosenberg, a friend who is a longtime music publicist.
One of the primary songwriting and producing teams of Motown, Ashford & Simpson specialized in romantic duets of the most dramatic kind, professing the power of true love and the comforts of sweet talk. In “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” from 1967, their first of several hits for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, lovers in close harmony proclaim their determination that “no wind, no rain, no winter’s cold, can stop me, baby,” but also make cuter promises: “If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be there on the double.”
Gaye and Terrell also sang the duo’s songs “Your Precious Love,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” and “You’re All I Need to Get By.” Diana Ross sang their “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand,” and when she rerecorded “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough“ in 1970, it became the former Supreme’s first No. 1 hit as a solo artist.
“They had magic, and that’s what creates those wonderful hits, that magic,” Verdine White of Earth, Wind and Fire told The Associated Press after learning of his friend’s death. “Without those songs, those artists wouldn’t have been able to go to the next level.”
Nickolas Ashford was born in Fairfield, S.C., and raised in Willow Run, Mich., where his father, Calvin, was a construction worker. He got his musical start at Willow Run Baptist Church, singing and writing songs for the gospel choir. He briefly attended Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, before heading to New York, where he tried but failed to find success as a dancer.
In 1964, while homeless, Mr. Ashford went to White Rock Baptist Church in Harlem, where he met Ms. Simpson, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate who was studying music. They began writing songs together, selling the first bunch for $64. In 1966, after Ray Charles sang “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” a song Ashford & Simpson wrote with Joey Armstead, the duo signed on with Motown as staff writers and producers.
They wrote for virtually every major act on the label, including Gladys Knight and the Pips (“Didn’t You Know You’d Have to Cry Sometime”) and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (“Who’s Gonna Take the Blame”).
While writing for Motown, Ashford & Simpson nursed a desire to perform, which Berry Gordy Jr., the founder and patriarch of the label, discouraged. They left the label in 1973 and married in 1974.
Ashford & Simpson’s initial collaborations sold poorly, but by the late ‘70s, songs like “Don’t Cost You Nothing,” “It Seems to Hang On” and “Found a Cure” became hits on the R&B charts. Their biggest hit as a solo act was “Solid,” which reached No. 12 on the pop chart and No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1984.
They also continued to write hits for other people. “I’m Every Woman“ was a hit for Chaka Khan in 1978, and later for Whitney Houston on the soundtrack to the 1992 film “The Bodyguard.” In 1996, they opened the Sugar Bar on West 72nd Street in Manhattan, where they often presided over open mic nights. Recently, they received a songwriting credit on Amy Winehouse’s song “Tears Dry on Their Own,” which contains a sample from “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
Besides his wife, Mr. Ashford is survived by two daughters, Nicole and Asia; his brothers Paul, Albert and Frank; and his mother, Alice Ashford.
Ashford & Simpson toured throughout their career, their harmony and vocal interplay illustrating the passion of their lyrics and of their life together.
“When Ms. Simpson sits down at the piano and begins to sing in a bright pop-gospel voice, unchanged since the 1970s,” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote in a review in 2007, “she awakens the spirit and tosses it to Mr. Ashford, whose quirkier voice, with its airy falsetto, has gained in strength from the old days. Soon they are urging each other on. By the time their romantic relay winds to a close, both are sweating profusely, and the audience is delirious.”
They were always “Solid as a Rock”. Nick and Valerie—the epitome of class, style, and distinction.
Mr. Ashford was a singer/songwriter who wrote beautiful songs of love and devotion. He and his wife, Ms. Valerie Simpson, proved “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”.
My condolences to Ms. Valerie Simpson-Ashford. May she have strength to weather this time of grieving in her loss.
Rest in peace, Mr. Ashford.
Rest in peace.
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JERRY LEIBER, ROCK ‘N’ ROLL PIONEER LYRICIST
Business Wire
From left, Mike Stoller, Elvis Presley and Jerry Leiber at MGM Studios in 1957.
Published: August 22, 2011
Jerry Leiber, the lyricist who, with his partner, Mike Stoller, wrote some of the most enduring classics in the history of rock ’n’ roll, including “Hound Dog,” “Yakety Yak,” “Stand By Me” and “On Broadway,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 78.
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Editorial | Appreciations: An American Songbook(August 24, 2011)
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Danny Moloshok/Reuters
Mr. Stoller, left, and Mr. Leiber at an awards ceremony in 2008.
The cause was cardio-pulmonary failure, said Randy Poe, president of Leiber & Stoller Music Publishing.
The team of Leiber and Stoller was formed in 1950, when Mr. Leiber was still a student at Fairfax High in Los Angeles and Mr. Stoller, a fellow rhythm-and-blues fanatic, was a freshman at Los Angeles City College. With Mr. Leiber contributing catchy, street-savvy lyrics and Mr. Stoller, a pianist, composing infectious, bluesy tunes, they set about writing songs with black singers and groups in mind.
In 1952, they wrote “Hound Dog” for the blues singer Big Mama Thornton. The song became an enormous hit for Elvis Presley in 1956 and made Leiber and Stoller the hottest songwriting team in rock ’n’ roll. They later wrote “Jailhouse Rock,” “Loving You,” “Don’t,” “Treat Me Nice,” “King Creole” and other songs for Presley, despite their loathing for his interpretation of “Hound Dog.”
In the late 1950s, having relocated to New York and taken their place among the constellation of talents associated with the Brill Building, they emerged as perhaps the most potent songwriting team in the genre.
Their hits for the Drifters remain some of the most admired songs in the rock ’n’ roll canon, notably “On Broadway,” written with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. “Spanish Harlem,” which Mr. Leiber wrote with Phil Spector, gave Ben E. King his first hit after leaving the Drifters. Mr. King’s most famous recording, “Stand By Me,” was a Leiber-Stoller song on which he collaborated.
They wrote a series of hits for the Coasters, including “Charlie Brown,” “Young Blood” with Doc Pomus, “Searchin’,” “Poison Ivy” and “Yakety Yak.”
“Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” a 1954 hit written for the Robins, became the title of a Broadway musical based on the Leiber and Stoller songbook. In 1987, the partners were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller have written some of the most spirited and enduring rock ’n’ roll songs,” the hall said in a statement when they were inducted. “Leiber and Stoller advanced rock ’n’ roll to new heights of wit and musical sophistication.”
Jerome Leiber was born on April 25, 1933, in Baltimore, where his parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, ran a general store. When Jerry was 5, his father died and his mother tried, with little success, to run a small store in one of the city’s worst slums. When he was 12, she took him to Los Angeles.
It was while attending Fairfax High in Los Angeles and working in Norty’s Record Shop that he met Lester Sill, a promoter for Modern Records, and confessed that he wanted to be a songwriter. After Sill urged him to find a pianist who could help him put his ideas onto sheet music he met Mr. Stoller through a friend, and the two began writing together
“Often I would have a start, two or four lines,” Mr. Leiber told Robert Palmer, the author of “Baby, That Was Rock & Roll: The Legendary Leiber and Stoller” (1978). “Mike would sit at the piano and start to jam, just playing, fooling around, and I’d throw out a line. He’d accommodate the line — metrically, rhythmically.”
Within a few years they had written modestly successful songs for several rhythm-and-blues singers: “K.C. Lovin’ ” for Little Willie Littlefield, which under the title “Kansas City” became a No. 1 hit for Wilbert Harrison in 1959.
In 1952, Sill arranged for Mr. Leiber and Mr. Stoller to visit the bandleader Johnny Otis and to listen to several of the rhythm-and-blues acts who worked with him, including Big Mama Thornton, who sang “Ball and Chain” for them. Inspired, the partners went back to Mr. Stoller’s house and wrote “Hound Dog.”
“I yelled, he played,” Mr. Leiber told Josh Alan Friedman, the author of “Tell the Truth Until They Bleed: Coming Clean in the Dirty World of Blues and Rock ’n’ Roll” (2008). “The groove came together and we finished in 12 minutes flat. I work fast. We raced right back to lay the song on Big Mama.”
In 1953 they formed Spark Records, an independent label, with Sill, but without national distribution it failed to score major hits. Atlantic Records, which had bought the Leiber and Stoller song “Ruby Baby” and “Fools Fall in Love” for the Drifters, signed them to an unusual agreement that allowed them to produce for other labels. The golden age of Leiber and Stoller began.
Their seemingly endless list of hit songs from this period included “Love Potion No. 9” for the Clovers (later a hit for the Searchers).
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Leiber and Mr. Stoller concentrated on production. They founded Red Bird Records, where they turned out hit records by girl groups like the Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”) and the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack,” “Walking in the Sand”).
They sold the label in 1966 and worked as independent producers and writers. Peggy Lee, who had recorded their song “I’m a Woman” in 1963, recorded “Is that All There Is?” in 1969.
Mr. Leiber is survived by three sons, Jed, Oliver and Jake, and two grandchildren.
With Mr. Stoller and David Ritz, Mr. Leiber wrote a 2009 memoir, “Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 24, 2011
An obituary on Tuesday about the lyricist Jerry Leiber misstated the given name of a record executive who helped him early in his career. He was Lester Sill, not Leonard. The obituary also referred incorrectly to the recording of the original versions of the songs “Stand by Me” and “Spanish Harlem,” both of which Mr. Leiber co-wrote. They were recorded by Ben E. King — not by the Drifters, for whom he had been the lead singer. (Mr. King recorded both songs shortly after leaving the group.)
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JOEY VENTO, FOUNDER OF GENO’S STEAKS INSTITUTION
Published: August 24, 2011
Joey Vento, the founder of Geno’s Steaks, a stand-in-line takeout establishment that is one of the pillars of the cheese-steak mecca of South Philadelphia, died Tuesday at his home in Shamong, N.J. He was 71.
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Matt Rourke/Associated Press
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Joey Vento, whose Philadelphia restaurant, Geno’s, stands opposite the rival Pat’s.
Matt Rourke/Associated Press
Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia.
The cause was a heart attack, said his son, Geno (who was named after the food stand).
The bulging, dripping cheese-steak sandwich, while hardly a rival to the hamburger, the hot dog or the pizza slice, has etched a niche for itself nationally in the last half-century. And the predominantly Italian-American neighborhood that is considered its birthplace is a draw for local devotees and throngs of tourists detouring from Independence Hall.
Geno’s Steaks is considered one of the Big Three of the Philly cheese-steak establishments. It stands at the southern end of the Italian Market, where Ninth Street, Wharton Street and Passyunk Avenue intersect. Diagonally across the way is its chief rival, Pat’s King of Steaks, while the also renowned Jim’s Steaks is closer to the city’s center.
Started by Mr. Vento in 1967, Geno’s — like Pat’s — is open 24-7, its patrons inching up to the windows and usually saying, “Whiz, with,” indicating that they want the paper-thin strips of sizzled beef on a hero topped with Cheez Whiz and grilled onions.
“Without” means hold the onions.
While Pat’s opened in the 1930s, both establishments claimed to have been the first to slather cheese atop the beef.
Still, as R. W. Apple Jr. wrote in The New York Times in 2003: “Geno’s steaks are almost self-effacing. The cheese dissolves into a runny sauce; the strips of beef are laid precisely on the roll, rather than in a tangle; and the onions are sparsely applied.”
So many customers have ordered those belly-bending sandwiches since 1966, when they cost 35 cents apiece, that Mr. Vento became a millionaire. These days, the basic sandwich costs $9.
Mr. Vento was no stranger to controversy. In 2005 he posted signs at Geno’s that read, “This is America: When ordering please speak English.” Critics asserted that the signs were discriminatory. In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Vento said the critics were ignoring the word “please,” adding: “I am not demanding it. It just makes things a lot easier. And the bottom line is, like I said before, nobody gets refused.”
In 2008, the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations ruled, 2-to-1, that the signs did not violate the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance.
Joseph Anthony Vento was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 18, 1939, to James and Eva Vento. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade and went to work at his father’s restaurant. With $6, two boxes of steaks and some hot dogs, the family says, he opened Geno’s — a name that he took after spotting it on the building’s back door.
Besides his son, Mr. Vento is survived by his wife of 51 years, the former Eileen Perno; his sister, Marie Vento; and his brother, James.
The rivalry between Geno’s and Pat’s never waned. But in an interview with Fortune magazine in 2003, Frank Olivieri, the owner of Pat’s, was asked what he would do if Geno’s ever closed.
“I’d feel a void — that’d be hard,” he said. Then he added: “I’d buy the place and open it up again. And call it Geno’s. And fight with myself.”
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/us/25vento.html?ref=obituaries
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SKYWATCH: SUPERNOVA IN M101, DIAMOND PLANET, AND MORE
News
Swinburne Astronomy Productions
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Bulletin at a GlanceNews |
A Planet Made of Diamond
August 25, 2011 | Astronomers have discovered another weird exoplanet – this one made of diamond. What’s more? The planet may have once been a massive star. > read more
Webb Telescope: Progress and Problems
August 26, 2011 | Despite threats by the House of Representatives to cut funding, the James Webb Space Telescope plans move ahead. > read more
The Moon’s Uncertain Age
August 23, 2011 | Is the lunar crust only 4.36 billion years old, as new results suggest, or at least 4.43 billion years old, as most researchers believe? The difference isn’t much — but the implications for early lunar history are profound. > read more
Observing
Joseph Brimacombe
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Supernova Erupts in Pinwheel Galaxy
August 25, 2011 | An exploding star, apparently captured just hours after its destruction, is already within reach of medium-size backyard telescopes and still brightening. The host galaxy is M101, perched just north of the Big Dipper’s handle. > read more
Ceres and Vesta in 2011
May 20, 2011 | The two brightest asteroids are in fine view for binoculars or a telescope. Here are instructions and charts to find them. > read more
This Week’s Sky at a Glance
Sky & Telescope diagram
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This Week’s Sky at a Glance
August 26, 2011 | Jupiter rises earlier and higher week by week. The crescent Moon returns low in twilight and occults a 2nd-magnitude star. And there’s the new supernova in M101…. > read more
Community
Todd Hargis / Ron Ronhaar
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Let the Star Parties Begin!
April 14, 2011 | Want to gaze at the Milky Way all night or peer into the eyepiece of a 12-foot-tall telescope? Then escape the city lights and head for the nearest “star party.” > read more
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BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 