Solomon Linda

Solomon Linda (1909-1962), South African musician. Solomon Popoli Linda was born near the town of Pomeroy, a member of the Zulu ethnic group. At the time of his birth, South Africa was ruled by a tiny white population that kept the black majority in an impoverished, oppressed state, stripped of their land, unable to vote, and barred from nearly all professions. He began singing at weddings and feasts at a young age, combining Zulu traditions with ideas that he learned from touring African American singers. In 1931 he moved to Johannesburg, where he worked in his uncle’s furniture store while singing in a group called the Evening Birds. The group won numerous competitions and rapidly grew in popularity due to its sense of style, which included pinstriped suits and bowler hats, but even more so because of its music. Linda almost singlehandedly created the isicathamiya musical style, including multiple bass singers and fasi pathi, a high falsetto lead part that he sang himself. In 1939, the Evening Birds were spotted by a talent scout and recorded several songs at Gallo Records, the only recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa. One of these was a song that Linda improvised on the spot and entitled “Mbube” (“lion”), inspired by a childhood memory of chasing lions away from the family cattle. “Mbube” eventually sold more than 100,000 copies; the original master recording was re-pressed so many times that it finally disintegrated. The Evening Birds also recorded other songs, including “Yetulisgqoko” (“Take off Your Hat”), which criticized police brutality and ended with the words sikhalela izwe lakithi (“we mourn for our country”).

After the group broke up in 1948, Linda continued to perform throughout South Africa while also raising a family. By then the racial oppression in his country had grown even worse and become known as apartheid ("separateness"). In 1952, the American folk singer Pete Seeger recorded his own version of “Mbube,” which he entitled “Wimoweh” (a misspelling of the chant “uyimbube”). It became even more popular in 1961 when it was re-written as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and recorded by the Tokens. The song went to number one on the American charts and has been recorded by more than 160 other musicians; one journalist describes it as “the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa…a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows.” Linda did not benefit from this, though, as he had sold his rights to the song to Gallo Records for less than $2; South African law did not allow blacks to own royalties. Seeger sent Linda a check for $1,000 and instructed his publishing company to send additional payments to Linda’s family, but this never happened. Even Linda did not realize that he had been swindled; “he was happy,” his daughter later recalled, “he didn’t know he was supposed to get something.” He collapsed on stage in 1959 and was diagnosed with kidney failure, which finally took his life three years later. When he died, he was so poor that his grave had no tombstone and his family could not pay for proper Zulu burial rites.

Under South African law, the rights to “Mbube” should have reverted to them in 1987, but they received no compensation, even after the song was introduced to a new generation in Disney’s 1994 film The Lion King. In 2000, though, a South African journalist wrote an article telling Linda’s story and estimating that the song had earned $15 million over the years. Linda’s family brought a lawsuit and in 2006 agreed to a settlement that included back royalties and additional payments for any future use; the publishing company also agreed to pay for a memorial to Linda. By then, he had also earned recognition as one of the pioneers of South African music, inspiring later artists such as Miriam Makeba and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Professor Rachel Isum Robinson

Professor Rachel Isum Robinson (1922- ), nurse, educator, and activist. Rachel Annetta Isum was born in Los Angeles. Her father, a World War I veteran, worked as a bookbinder and linotyper at the Los Angeles Times and on one occasion successfully sued a restaurant that tried to charge him higher prices than white customers. When an illness from his military service forced him to retire early, Rachel’s mother started a catering business, and Rachel also helped support the family by working in the business, working at the library, and sewing baby clothes. The Isums were one of the only black families in their neighborhoods, and she was forced to sit in the balcony when she went to the movie theater. After graduating from high school in 1940 Rachel entered the nursing program at UCLA, where she helped pay her tuition by working as a riveter in a factory that made airplanes for the World War II effort; she often worked the night shift, drove to campus at dawn, and then went to class. “The struggle to be someone despite what the society is saying about me and my people,” she recalled, “got implemented in me in a way that made me strive harder.” Her perspective on race relations was also shaped by watching her Japanese-American next-door neighbors be forced to sell their home and move into an internment camp; “I remember being just heartbroken about that and not understanding it at all,” she later said, “because they were American citizens.”

While at UCLA Rachel began dating a fellow student named Jackie Robinson, and the two were quickly engaged, but at her insistence they did not marry until she had finished her degree in 1945. Several months later, Jackie signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers and thus became the first African American in white professional baseball since 1884. A year later the Robinsons took were in the New Orleans airport on their way to spring training, and Rachel had her first experience with southern Jim Crow. Upon seeing a “Whites Only” sign outside the women’s restroom, she walked in anyway. Jackie soon integrated Major League Baseball, performing at a Hall of Fame level despite suffering horrible abuse from fans and other players, and Rachel provided the foundation that made it possible. One journalist wrote of her: “She was not simply the dutiful little wife. She was Jack’s co-pioneer. She had to live through the death threats, endure the vile screams of the fans and watch her husband get knocked down by pitch after pitch. And because he was under the strictest discipline not to [fight back], she was the one who had to absorb everything he brought home.” She herself said “I was the support person so often misidentified as the ‘little woman behind the great man,’ but I was neither little nor behind him. I felt powerful by his side as his partner, essential, challenged, and greatly loved.”

When Rachel tried to purchase a home in the New York suburbs, every property that she viewed was denied to her until a Jewish community activist intervened on their behalf and lodged them with her own family (including her young daughter and future music star Carly Simon) until the Robinsons were ready to move into their new place. Beginning in 1963, they used their home to host the Afternoon of Jazz, an annual concert that featured performers like Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie and which raised money for jailed civil rights protesters, Dr. King’s children after his assassination, and other activists. Rachel also took part in the 1963 March on Washington and other aspects of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1960 she resumed her nursing career, earning a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing from New York University; “I was always interested in,” she later said, “the combination of the mind, the body, and the soul. I was always concerned about trying to intervene and help.” She worked as a researcher and clinician at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York from 1960 to 1965, helping to start America’s first day psychiatric hospital, which enabled the mentally ill to receive treatment while still living at home. From 1965 to 1972 she was a professor at Yale School of Nursing, teaching graduate students and serving as director of their new community mental health center. During a two-year span between 1971 and 1973, though, Rachel endured the deaths of her oldest son, her husband, and her mother, but she emerged from her grief more determined to help the less fortunate. In 1972 she founded the Jackie Robinson Development Corporation, a real estate company that in ten years built more than 1,300 housing units for poor and working-class families. She also created the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which has provided $14 million in college scholarships, internships, mentoring, and other assistance to more than 1,400 minority students. The Foundation has also worked to preserve the memory of Jackie Robinson’s baseball career and activism, and its museum is scheduled to open in 2019. In 1996 she authored the biography Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait. She was instrumental in Major League Baseball’s decision to retire Jackie’s “42” uniform number (making him the first American professional athlete so honored) and in the production of the 2013 biographical film 42, and she has also pushed the league to hire more minority managers and executives. On her 75^th birthday, she celebrated by climbing 10,000 feet on Mount Kilimanjaro. Her numerous awards include: the Candace Award for Distinguished Service from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women; the Associated Black Charities Black History Makers Award; the UCLA Medal; the Commissioner’s Historic Achievement Award in 2007 (making her the first non-player recipient); the 2017 Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame; and twelve honorary doctorates. When asked why she and her husband had been so committed to the fight against inequality, the then-82 year old simply stated “You can’t stand still for that stuff.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Judge Fred "Duke" Slater

Judge Fred “Duke” Slater (1898-1966), athlete and lawyer. Nicknamed “Duke” after the family dog, Frederick Wayman Slater grew up in Normal, Illinois and Clinton, Iowa. His father, an AME minister, stressed the importance of education and hard work; when Duke declared that he wanted to quit school, the elder Slater got him a job cutting ice on the Mississippi River, and he quickly changed his mind. Duke was so large that when he joined the high school football team, his cleats had to be ordered from Chicago, and since the family could not afford a helmet as well, he played without one. Starring at the offensive and defensive tackle positions, Slater led Clinton High School to the 1914 state championship. Several years later, he became one of the first African Americans in college football when he enrolled at the University of Iowa. He was named to the All-Big Ten and All-American teams in three consecutive years, and during his senior year the Hawkeyes went undefeated, including an upset of Notre Dame in which he enabled his teammate to score the winning touchdown by blocking three defenders at once. Newspapers referred to him as the “colored colossus,” while a competitor said “Duke Slater was the best tackle I ever played against. I tried to block him throughout my college career but never once did I impede his progress to the ball carrier.”

After graduating in 1922, he decided to play in the recently founded National Football League. During his ten-year professional career, he starred for the Milwaukee Badgers, Rock Island Independents, and Chicago (now Arizona) Cardinals. As one of the only African Americans in the league, Slater faced numerous indignities; in 1924, for example, he sat out a game in Kansas City after objections by the home team. Despite these obstacles, he was named to the All-NFL team five times, and in 1929 his blocking enabled a teammate to set the all-time record with six touchdowns in a game against the Bears. He was also known for his sense of fair play even when the same was not extended to him. When asked why he did not hit a running back as hard as he could, for example, he replied “The little fellow was stopped – why should I hurt him?” Slater retired in 1932, just before the NFL expelled all of its black players; there would be no others until after World War II.

He had returned to Iowa after each season to work on a law degree, graduating in 1928, and he began practicing law full time after his football career ended. He also became active in local politics and was named an assistant district attorney in 1935. Thirteen years later, he ran for a Cook County municipal judgeship and was easily elected, receiving nearly a million votes. Slater was also active in Iowa alumni affairs, recruiting numerous other black student-athletes and speaking with the team before big games. In 1951, he was named an inaugural member of the Iowa Sports Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame, becoming their first African American member. Many football historians have also advocated for his induction into the NFL Hall of Fame, although the lack of statistics for linemen has hindered this effort. After Slater’s death from stomach cancer in 1966, a new student residence building on the University of Iowa campus was named for him (he is the only former student-athlete so honored), as were the Judge Slater Apartments on Chicago’s South Side. One sportswriter memorialized him by stating “that Slater must have been raised to stand on his own two feet! Proud in the knowledge that in America, as in no other country, a man regardless of creed or color can advance by the sweat of his brow and the muscle of his mind!”

© David Brodnax, Sr.

U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood

U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood (1986- ), nurse and politician. Lauren Ashley Underwood was born in the Cleveland suburb of Mayfield Heights and moved to the Chicago suburb of Naperville as a small child. Although she grew up in an overwhelmingly white community, she was inspired by Oprah Winfrey and then-Senator Carol Moseley Braun; “to me,” she later recalled, those were the two most powerful black women in the world. It made me feel I could do whatever I wanted to do.” She was also inspired to seek a career in health care by the doctors and nurses who helped her after she was diagnosed with a heart condition at the age of eight. While a student at Neuqua Valley High School, she served on the city’s fair housing advisory commission. She earned a degree in nursing from the University of Michigan, where a course on nursing politics led her to pursue a career in healthcare policy. After completing her bachelor’s degree she worked in pediatric intensive care, discharge planning, psychiatric programs, and medical-surgical units while also earning master’s degrees in nursing and public health from Johns Hopkins University.

In 2010 Underwood went to work at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), tasked with helping to implement the Affordable Care Act that had massively expanded Americans’ access to health care since its passage earlier that year. She also became an adjunct professor in advanced practice nursing at Georgetown University. In 2014 she was appointed a special assistant in President Barack Obama’s administration, working to address public health emergencies and disasters such as bioterror threats and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Two years later she was appointed to the position of senior advisor at HHS. In 2017 she returned to Naperville to work as senior director of strategy and regulatory affairs at Next Level Health, a managed care company in Chicago. That year she also took part in the first Women’s March, which was held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, brought more than three million people together in various cities around the country, and sought to mobilize women to get involved in politics. “I’m one of the women who marched in the Women’s March and decided to campaign,” she later said, “’Time Magazine called us ‘The Avengers.” What was very clear is that women have been mobilized in a very specific and concrete way to engage in our country.”

In 2017, Underwood decided to become even more involved in politics. Her Naperville home is part of Illinois’ 14^th Congressional District, a large, seven-county district that includes the far western Chicago suburbs, small towns, and largely rural areas. As of the 2010 census the district is 86% white, and the Democrats had won only three of thirty-five elections since 1938. This Republican dominance included staunch conservative Randy Hultgren, who had easily defeated his Democratic opponents in the previous four elections. In 2017 Underwood attended a public event at which Hultgren promised to protect health coverage for people with pre-existing conditions: medical conditions that occurred before the person sought or received health insurance. Later that year, though, he voted in favor of a bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act and make it easier for health insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, which included Underwood, many of her patients, and 25% of all Americans under the age of 65. Hultgren’s vote motivated her to challenge him for his seat in Congress; leaving the meeting, she told herself “It’s on. I’m running.” In the Democratic primary against six other candidates, all white men, she won 57% of the votes, with no other candidate receiving more than 13%. This meant that she would now go up against Hultgren in the general election in November 2018. Underwood ran on a platform that focused on health care, especially defending and improving the Affordable Care Act, but also on job creation, infrastructure, universal background checks for firearm purchases, greater funding for college education, environmental protection, immigration reform, and paid family leave. Although the racial and political demographics of her district were not in her favor, she told reporters, “I learned to be a black woman in this community. This is my home, and the idea that I might not be a good fit is an idea I never gave a lot of consideration to.” She sought to get female voters and young voters of all genders involved and to mobilize the support groups created after the Women’s March, she also traveled throughout her district, including the most rural and conservative areas, to reach out to those voters as well. She also received the endorsement of her former boss Barack Obama, who in 2008 had been the only Democratic presidential candidate in the 21^st century to win a majority of votes in the 14^th District. On 6 November 2018, Underwood defeated Hultgren, winning 156,035 votes (52.5%) to his 141,164 (47.5%). She was part of a national wave that saw the Democrats garner ten million more votes than the Republicans, pick up 40 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (their largest gain since 1974), and take back control of the House. On election night she told a crowd of supporters, “a regular middle-class woman, working full time, is able to…figure out how to get on the ballot, knock doors, get signatures, invite herself to political events and conversations…in the United States of America, we the people come together to make our community, our country, a better place, and tonight we the people have stood up to say that health care is a human right.”

Underwood was sworn into Congress on 3 January 2018. At the age of 32, she is the youngest black woman to ever serve in Congress. She is also the only black congressperson in Illinois history to represent a district entirely outside the Chicago city limits. The 116^th U.S. Congress is the most diverse in U.S. history, with the House now including 102 women, 56 African Americans, 44 Latinx, 15 Asian Americans, 4 Native Americans, and eight LGBT members. This Congress, she declared, “is what [she] always hoped the United States Congress could look like.” The same day that she was sworn in, the House passed a rules package that she co-wrote to combat sexual harassment against women working for members of Congress. “In the Democratic Majority, when the American people have elected the most diverse Congress with more women serving than before,” Underwood said, “we are demonstrating a commitment to conducting the business of our Nation with the highest standards of ethics and decency…’Time’s Up’ has come to the halls of Congress.”

© David Brodnax, Sr.