Major LeRoy Homer, Jr.

Major LeRoy Homer, Jr. (1965-2001), pilot. LeRoy Wilton Homer, Jr. was the son of an African American serviceman and a German woman. His father died when he was twelve, and his mother raised him and his eight siblings on Long Island. He was fascinated with flight from an early age, building model airplanes and reading books about aviation. He worked after school to pay for flying lessons and took his first solo flight at the age of fifteen, then earned his pilot’s license three years later. In 1987, Homer graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy. During his eight years of active duty in the Air Force, he rose to the rank of captain, flew the Lockheed C-141 Starlifter in the Gulf War and Somalia, and was named 1993 Aircrew Instructor of the Year in his unit. Upon his honorable discharge in 1995 he joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve, where he continued instructing in the C-141, recruited candidates for the Air Force Academy and Air Force Reserve Officer Corps, and rose to the rank of major. Homer also became a pilot for United Airlines, starting as a Second Officer on the Boeing 727 and within a year becoming First Officer for the Boeing 757 and 767. He used the travel opportunities provided by his work to visit museums around the world, also taking his mother back to Germany to visit family members. Although he had lost his religious faith after his father’s death, he now regained it with support from his wife. He was respected by peers in the military and civilian worlds for his calm demeanor and ability to get along with nearly everyone, living by his mother’s advice: “Never put anyone down…You can’t throw stones, they might be thrown back at you.”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Homer was on United Airlines Flight 93, which was scheduled to travel from Newark to San Francisco. The seven crew members and thirty-seven passengers included four members of al-Qaeda, a terrorist group that intended to hijack four planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Within thirty minutes of Flight 93’s departure at 8:42am, the first two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. While at home with their infant daughter, Homer’s wife Melody saw the attacks on the news and had a message transmitted to him stating “Just wanted to make sure you are okay,” while an aviation official warned the crew “Beware any cockpit intrusion – two a/c hit World Trade Center.” Five minutes later, the terrorists hijacked Flight 93 and turned it around towards Washington D.C., although Homer and the other pilots managed to send emergency messages. The passengers fought back and had nearly succeeded in entering the cockpit when the terrorists crashed the plane into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. This saved countless other lives in Washington D.C., which was only twenty minutes away; “He was a very brave man,” his wife later stated, “I know he would have done whatever he could do to not have that plane harm any more people.” All forty-four people on Flight 93 died, part of the 2,977 victims of the September 11 attacks. Homer received several posthumous awards, including honorary membership in the Tuskegee Airmen, and he is memorialized at the Flight 93 National Memorial on the crash site, at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, and in the films “Flight 93” and “United 93.” His widow serves as president of the LeRoy W. Homer, Jr. Foundation, which provides information and scholarships to young people interested in aviation careers.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Nicholas Said

Nicholas Said (1836-1882), international traveler, soldier, and educator. Mohammed Ali bin Said was born in Kukawa, the capital of the Kanem-Bornu Empire, which included parts of present-day Chad, Nigeria, Libya, Niger, and Cameroon. His father was a prominent military leader, while his mother was the daughter of the leader of the Mandra people, and the two had married in an effort to make peace between the two nations. The Kanem-Bornu kingdom had once been one of the most powerful in West Africa, but by the 1800s it had declined due to internal conflict, war with other African nations, and slavery. For centuries Africa’s human resources were depleted by two international slave trades: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which brought 12 million people to the Americas between 1502 and 1888; and the Arab Slave Trade, which from 650 to the early 1900s brought 11-18 million to North Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. One of those was Said, who around 1851 was gathering fruit in the woods when slave traders captured him. He was purchased by an Arab merchant for the equivalent of $10 and forced to walk across the Sahara Desert to Libya, nearly dying along the way due to hunger, dehydration, and bleeding feet. He worked as a field laborer, suffering constant beatings from his supervisor, before being sold to a Turkish military officer who sent him to Tripoli. They later traveled to the Islamic holy city of Mecca, seeing the Egyptian pyramids along the way and surviving a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, jackals in the Ethiopian mountains, and robbers in the Sudan. He was sold to another Turkish officer and worked as a domestic servant in the Greek city of Smyrna and in Istanbul until he was sold again, this time to a Russian diplomat who took him to Odessa and St. Petersburg, where he was loaned to a prince who became his final master. The prince took him to most of the major cities of Europe, including Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, Munich, Amsterdam, Milan, Rome, Paris, and London. These travels and Said’s natural talent for languages led him to become fluent in Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Armenian, German, Italian, French, English, and his native Kanuri and Mandara. He also converted to Christianity and changed his first name to Nicholas. Although his work as a servant was relatively mild, he became homesick and while in London in 1859 persuaded the prince to free him.

In order to raise money for his trip home, he became the paid servant for a Dutch businessman who was traveling to the Americas. Said had his first experience with American racism in New York City while he and his employer attended a Dutch Reformed Church, where he was forced to sit in the balcony. They then traveled to the British West Indies and Haiti, and Said later recalled that he was “exceedingly delighted to be in the country where the heroes [of] the ‘Haitian Independence’ contended with the armies of Napoleon. I had always admired the exploits of…negro leaders, whose heroism and military talents are an honor to the African race.” While in Montreal, however, his employer fled without paying their hotel bill, and the manager took all of Said’s money and possessions as compensation. A local minister encouraged him to move to Detroit, where “there were a great number of colored people,” and he used his linguistic skills to work as a teacher for black families. Although more than a half million African slaves had been brought to the U.S., the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808 meant that by 1860 nearly all African Americans had been born in America, so Said was one of the few of African birth. He was further distinguished from other African Americans by his travels and because neither he nor his ancestors had ever been enslaved in the Americas. Nevertheless, like all other free blacks, law and custom denied him the same rights and opportunities that whites enjoyed. He had also arrived just before American tensions over slavery erupted into the Civil War. Although African Americans were initially barred from joining the military, by 1863 the army began forming black regiments collectively known as the United States Colored Troops. Among the first of these regiments was the 55^th Massachusetts Infantry, which included black men from throughout the North. One of those was Said, who joined “because all his folks seemed to be doing so.” Said’s “curious and romantic history” and linguistic ability made him a popular subject in abolitionist newspapers, one writing that his “acquisitions and behavior go far to dispel ignorant and vulgar prejudices against the colored race.” He organized a school for his fellow enlisted men and was promoted to sergeant, making him one of the few black officers in the 55^th, but he quickly decided that years of working as a servant had made him unfit for this position and requested a reduction back to private.

When the war ended, Said moved to the South. His reasons for doing so were not recorded, but historian Douglas Egerton theorizes that he was more comfortable in the black majority regions of the southeast coast. He taught in Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama and gave speaking tours to black audiences on “Africa and its resources”; this frequent movement paid his bills and enabled him to share his experiences, combat stereotypes about black people, and continue his travels. He also decided to write an autobiography describing his “adventures,” motivated by his “honest and ardent desire…to render myself useful to my race wherever it may be.” When he opened a bank account in Tallahassee to help fund this project, he identified his place of birth as “Soudan” and his occupation as “Teacher,” but when asked where he lived, he simply said “Traveler.” By then the clerk had realized who the new customer was and wrote on the application “This is the wonderful Nickolas Said doubtless.” In 1873 The Autobiography of Nicholas Said; A Native of Bornou, Eastern Soudan, Central Africa was published. Its introduction describes his wish to “show the world the possibilities that may be accomplished by the African, and the hope that my humble example may stimulate some at least of my people to systematic efforts in the direction of mental culture and improvement.” The book vividly describes the peoples, cultures, and physical environments, of the many places he had traveled, but unlike other travelers’ biographies of the time, it gave a great deal of attention to Africa and provided a black person’s perspective on Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Nevertheless, some southern white journalists accused him of lying on the grounds that a black man could not have done what he did; one wrote, for instance, that “A semi-civilized party of the African persuasion…is devoting his valuable time at present to swindling the newspapers.” He eventually ceased lecturing and publishing, and little information is available about his later life aside from the 1880 census, which showed him teaching in Brownsville, Tennessee. Nicholas Said died two years later, ending a life as perhaps the most widely traveled person of African descent until the emergence of internationally known black celebrities and scholars in the late 20^th century.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Isaiah Schoels

Isaiah Shoels (1980-1999), student. Isaiah Eamon Shoels was the second of five children born to a Denver record label executive and his wife. He underwent open heart surgery at the age of seven months to repair a congenital heart defect, and doctors warned that he might not live to the age of five. Despite a childhood of heart-related ailments, he played on his junior high school football team and on the school weightlifting team at Columbine High School in the Denver suburbs. Although Isaiah was only 4’11” and 120 pounds, he set a school record by bench pressing twice his weight. His father later stated that “Isaiah was a winner. He was a pretty rounded kid. That’s why I call him my small warrior. He was small in stature, but he had a big heart.” He and his younger brother were among less than two dozen black students in the school, and he experienced some racial troubles, but he was generally well liked by most. Isaiah also played the keyboard and planned to attend the Denver Arts Institute after graduation with an ultimate goal of becoming a record producer.

In the spring of his senior year, his classmates Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who had been treated for mental illness and been bullied by other students, decided to make a name for themselves. Shortly before noon on 20 April 1999, the duo entered Columbine High with guns and improvised explosive devices. Isaiah was in the library working on a school paper when the shooting began and took cover under a table. Some accounts state that Klebold and Harris yelled “Where’s that little nigger?” as they entered the library, while others state that Klebold discovered his hiding place and called out to Harris, “Reb! There’s a nigger over here.” Both boys offered additional racial taunts before Harris shot Isaiah in the chest, killing him instantly. He was ultimately the sixth of thirteen people to die, not including the two killers, who committed suicide; these deaths and the twenty-seven injuries made the Columbine High School Massacre the fifth-deadliest school killing in American history and the deadliest at a high school. Evidence later emerged that Isaiah, the only black victim, had been targeted not only because of his race but because he was popular and a student-athlete. Nearly 7,000 people attended his funeral in Denver, where he lay in the cap and gown that he would have worn less than a month later at his graduation. At the services, the governor of Colorado declared “We have to resolve to do everything we can, no matter what our color, no matter what our religion, no matter what school we go to, no matter what we have done in the past, that we do what we can to try to say no more.” His parents undertook a speaking tour entitled “Let’s Stomp Out the Hate Before It’s Too Late” before eventually moving to Texas. Investigators quickly learned that Harris and Klebold had illegally purchased several guns, persuaded a friend to buy others for them (they were not yet eighteen), and had illegally modified their weapons for greater concealment, while one of the sellers had failed to keep proper records of the transaction. Despite numerous calls for stronger gun control laws and more effective policies to deal with mental illness, particularly among young males, few concrete steps towards prevention were taken by state or federal legislatures. In the years since Isaiah Shoels’ death, numerous additional mass killings have occurred at schools, theaters, and other locations throughout the country.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley

U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (1974- ), politician. Ayanna Soyini Pressley was born in Cincinnati and grew up on the north side of Chicago. Her father was largely absent from her childhood due to legal and addiction struggles, but her mother worked multiple jobs while also fighting for tenants’ rights as a community organizer and cultivating Pressley’s interest in politics by taking her into the voting booth for every election. Pressley attended Francis W. Parker School, where she was on the debate team, served as commencement speaker, and was voted “most likely to be mayor of Chicago.” She studied at Boston University for two years but then had to withdraw to financially support her mother. One of her jobs included an internship with U.S. Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, helping senior citizens, veterans, and disabled persons with Social Security claims. She later became his scheduler and constituency director before moving to the staff of U.S. Senator John Kerry, working as his political director. That same year she became a candidate for public office for the first time, seeking an at-large seat on the Boston City Council. She was the only woman among fifteen candidates, and her victory made her the first woman of color to ever serve on the Council. She was later reelected four times by wide margins. In her nine years on the Council, Pressley helped to develop a new sex education and health curriculum for public schools, advocated for reform in liquor licensing, and formed a committee to combat child abuse, domestic abuse, and human trafficking. This latter work and her partnership with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center was motivated in part by having survived a sexual assault when she was a college student; in her words, “I just wanted to put a face to the issue for the millions of women who suffer in silence.”

In 2018 Pressley ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, seeking election in Massachusetts’ 7^th Congressional District, which includes most of Boston and is the only one in the state where most of the residents are people of color. In one debate she declared “I happen to be black and a woman and unapologetically proud to be both. But that is not the totality of my identity. But I’m not going to pretend that representation doesn’t matter…it matters because it informs the issues that are spotlighted and emphasized and leads to more innovative solutions. You cannot have a government by and for the people if it is not represented by all of the people.” Despite being a political newcomer going up against an established politician who had represented the district for twenty years, she won the primary by a wide margin, in part because of many new Latinx and Asian-American voters who had not voted in previous primaries. The Republican Party decided not to even field a candidate against her (it had not done so in her district since 1998), and so in November 2018 she won the general election unopposed. This made Pressley the first black woman ever elected to Congress from Massachusetts and one of only two from any New England state. She was part of a national wave in which anti-Trump sentiment led to a record number of victories for women and racial, religious, and sexual minorities, including several other races where liberal white male Democrats were replaced by even more progressive minority women. In her victory speech she stated “Tonight in Massachusetts and across the country, we are standing in our power, the same power that my mother told me we had, the same power that compelled me to raise my head and to not ask permission to lead…When those tectonic plates of revolution shift below our feet, when our communities deserve and these times require bold vision, activist leadership, a movement builds, and a citizen activist rises, and they are a force to be reckoned with.”

Upon taking office in January 2019, Pressley was appointed the Committee on Financial Services, which oversees banks and other segments of the financial services industry, and the Committee on Oversight and Reform, which is the House’s main investigative committee. She also co-founded “The Squad,” an unofficial group which consists of Pressley and three other new representatives: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who moved from Somalia to Minnesota as a teenager and became the first African-born member of Congress; Rashida Tlaib, who was born in Michigan to Palestinian immigrants and along with Omar was the first ever Muslim female congresswoman; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent. The Squad gained a great deal of media attention due to its diverse composition, young age (the nickname itself came from hip hop culture) and liberal politics. Pressley proposed legislation that would lower the voting age to sixteen, but this failed in part because some Democrats voted against it. She also co-sponsored a bill to expand Medicaid coverage for pregnant women and another bill to combat sexual harassment in the workplace and abolish the tipped minimum wage. The Squad also endorsed Medicare expansion, fighting climate change and economic inequality through massive government spending (known as the “Green Deal”), abolishing the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency that had become notorious for its treatment of immigrant communities and asylum seekers, and impeaching Trump. During a government shutdown caused by the president’s insistence on funding for a border wall, Pressley took the House floor to tell him “You devalue the life of the immigrant, the worker and the survivor. I see right through you and so do the American people…Today I rise as one and I stand as thousands.”

These and other actions sometimes put Pressley and the Squad at odds with the more moderate leadership of the Democratic party. In July 2019 Trump stepped into this internal debate and both voiced and amplified the feelings of his base, tweeting “So interesting to see ‘progressive’ Democrat congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe…now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came?” This tweet and subsequent actions by Trump and his supporters gained massive international criticism, including from many who did not support the Squad’s politics. It was frequently noted that three of the four lawmakers were born in the United States and that Pressley in particular, as the descendant of black slaves, came from a family that had been in the country far longer than Trump’s. In one of her several personal responses, she declared “I’m proud to be an American. I love this country. I challenge it because I want it to live up to its ideals and its promises that it espouses, and I do that from a place of love.” She also gave the official response by the Squad, stating “we are grateful for your solidarity, your encouragement and your support in the face of the most recent xenophobic, bigoted remarks from the occupant of our White House. I will always refer to him as the occupant as he is only occupying space. He does not embody the grace, the empathy, the compassion, the integrity that that office requires and that the American people deserve. That being said, I encourage the American people and all of us in this room and beyond to not take the bait. This is a disruptive distraction from the issues of care, concern, and consequence to the American people that we were sent here with a decisive mandate from our constituents to work on…Our squad is big. Our squad includes any person committed to building more equitable and just world, and that is the work that we want to get back to. And given the size of this squad, and this great nation, we cannot, we will not, be silenced.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Dr. Aída Cartagena Portalatín

Dr. Aída Cartagena Portalatín (1918-1994), Dominican writer. Aída Cartagena was born in the town of Moca. Two years before her birth, the United States Marines had seized control of her country and placed it under a military government, and although they left in 1924, in 1930 an American-supported general named Rafael Trujillo began a violent, racially fueled thirty-one year reign as military dictator. Despite these circumstances, she completed high school and college in Moca, then earned a Ph.D. in humanities at UASD (Autonomous University of Santo Domingo) and did post-graduate work in music and theory at the Louvre in Paris. She and other Dominican writers had to find ways to express themselves under a government that jailed or murdered anyone who criticized it or its conservative values. In the mid-1940s she helped create the poesía sorprendida (“surprised poetry”) movement, which featured surrealistic poems that indirectly addressed the problems of society. Her 1945 poem “Como llorar la muerte de una rosa” (“How to Cry the Death of a Rose”), for instance, appears to be about the passing beauty of a rose but on a deeper level asks why people do not show pain at the deaths of others. Many of her works were published in the journal Poesía Sorprendida, which lasted from 1943 to 1948.

Cartagena Portalatín faced criticism not only from the government but also both from fellow writers who thought that women should not publish literature. In her writing, she challenged the common views of women as submissive, confined to the home, and defined only by their physical attractiveness and domestic skills. In “Una mujer está sola” (“A woman is alone”), the first openly feminist poem in Dominican history, she declares: “A woman is alone/Alone with her stature./With her eyes open./With her arms open./With her heart open like a wide silence.” She also criticized racism in her country and in the United States through works like La tierra escrita (The Written Land, 1967) and the short story La llamaban Aurora (“They Called Her Aurora,” 1992). The latter work is written from the point of view of a Dominican schoolgirl and au pair in New York; in it, the main character states, “I try to put up my hair, kinky, stiff, if that’s what I was born with, that’s the way it’ll stay. What doesn’t make sense is how they can put me down while at the same time they brag about my smarts…They filled my head with ideas about this being the Free World, and I find myself here exploited.” By writing about and celebrating black identity, she challenged the national myth that the Dominican Republic was a white country. In 1961, she founded the journal Brigadas Dominicanas (Dominican Brigades) which helped local authors get published. Her Escalera para Electra (Stairs for Electra, 1969) was the first Dominican novel to explore the issue of national identity after Trujillo’s death, and it was awarded a prize as one of the best Spanish-language novels in the world that year. She further explored Dominican identity in her 1981 poem collection Yania Tierra, in which the title character is a female representation of the country; this is also one of her only works to be translated into English. Cartagena Portalatín’s more than twenty other books include Víspera del sueño (Dream’s eve, 1945), La voz destaca (The unleashed voice, 1961), and the essay collection Culturas africanas: Rebeldes concausa (African Cultures: Rebels with a Cause, 1985). She also taught at UASD, worked with the United Nations’ cultural branch in Paris, and served as director of the Museo de Antropología (Anthropological Museum). She remained active in literary and cultural activities until her death from heart disease in 1994.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot

Mayor Lori Lightfoot (1962- ), attorney and politician. Lori Elaine Lightfoot was born in Massillon, Ohio, and her interest in politics was shaped in part by watching the Watergate hearings in the early 1970s. When she was young her father suffered a serious illness that put him in a coma for nearly a year and left him with a permanent hearing loss, but he supported the family as a barber and laborer, while her mother was a home healthcare aide who also served on the school board. At her predominantly white high school she was elected class president and played in the school band and on the basketball team. She earned a political science degree from the University of Michigan with honors in 1984, then worked for several members of Congress before enrolling at the University of Chicago Law School. There she served as student body president, clerked for a member of the Michigan Supreme Court, and led efforts to ban a prominent law firm from campus after one of its recruiters made racist and sexist remarks to a student. After graduating in 1989 Lightfoot went to work for Mayer Brown, one of the largest law firms in the world, where she represented clients on both sides of issues such as police brutality and racial gerrymandering and also chaired the firm’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. After several years she left private service to become a federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Illinois, motivated in part by a desire to bring more diversity to the office and by her family’s past difficulties with the criminal justice system. As a federal prosecutor, she fought violent crime, bankruptcy fraud, and public corruption, most notably Operation Silver Shovel, an FBI investigation that led to the convictions of six alderman and twelve other individuals. From 2002 to 2004 Lightfoot served as chief administrator of the Chicago Police Department Office of Professional Standards, which investigated charges of police misconduct such as shootings of unarmed civilians. She then moved to the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and the Chicago Department of Procurement Services, where she acted against corruption in the Illinois governor’s office. In 2015 Lightfoot was appointed president of the Chicago Police Board, which replaced the Office of Professional Standards as the institution responsible for investigating police misconduct and proposing reforms such greater community oversight and bans on chokeholds and shooting into crowds. Her work received international attention after a black teenager named Laquan McDonald was shot by a police officer while walking away and then shot fifteen more times while lying on the ground. More than a year later, video footage led to what Lightfoot called an “utter lack of a culture of accountability” and a culture that had “essentially turned the code of silence into official policy.” The outcry over this murder and the broader problem of police brutality led to the conviction of McDonald’s killer and effectively ended the careers of several Chicago politicians. 

In May 2018 Lightfoot resigned from the Police Board and announced that she would run for Chicago mayor. She was initially considered a longshot in a field of fourteen candidates that included establishment politicians such as the son and brother of former mayors, the former heads of the Illinois Board of Education and the Chicago Public Schools, and Tony Preckwinkle, the president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Lightfoot, however, ran as an outsider who would bring reform, combat crime, and increase access to housing, and the desire for change amongst voters increased with the arrest of an alderman who had ties to several of the other candidates. In the February 2019 election Lightfoot received the most votes, 17% of the total, but because no candidate had received more than 50% city law required a run-off election two months later. Her opponent was be Preckwinkle, thus guaranteeing that the next mayor would be a black woman, and this divided Chicago’s black community, with some activists and politicians charging that she had not done enough to advocate for African Americans. At the same time, she received the endorsement of both the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, as well as the African American publication N’Digo, several dozen labor unions, the LGBTQ Victory Fund, Father Michael Pfleger, and seven candidates who had been eliminated after the first round. In April 2019 Lightfoot received 73% of the votes, winning all fifty voting wards and 2,049 of 2,069 voting precincts. This made her Chicago’s second female mayor (following Jane Byrne), third African American mayor (following Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer), first black female mayor, and first LGBT mayor. She was also one of only eighteen black woman and one of six openly LGBT people in history to serve as mayor of a city ranked in the top 100 in population. On election night she stood next to her wife, whom she had married in 2014 on the first day that same-sex marriage was legalized in Illinois, and declared “out there tonight, a lot of little girls and boys are watching. They’re watching us, and they’re seeing the beginning of something, well, a little bit different. They’re seeing a city reborn, a city where it doesn’t matter what color you are…where it doesn’t matter who you love just as long as you love with all your heart.”

After taking office in May 2019 her first act was an executive order that ended the tradition of aldermanic prerogative, which gave members of the City Council veto power over bills that impacted their wards. Her other proposals to combat Council corruption included live streaming of committee meetings, banning alderpersons from most outside employment, increasing fines for ethics violations, having the ward boundary map drawn by an independent commission rather than the Council itself, and enabling the city inspector general to audit alderpersons. “This is a first of many changes that we’ll ultimately make over the course of the four years,” she declared, “people who are elected officials and appointed officials have to put the peoples’ work first.” She renegotiated a multi-billon dollar development plan on the North Side so that the development company would hire more minority and female contractors, and she created the new position of chief equity officer to address racial inequality. Her efforts to combat crime include increasing police patrols and park district youth programs during the traditionally violent Memorial Day weekend and a new community policing initiative to strengthen connections between law enforcement and local business leaders. Other plans include raising minimum wage to $15 an hour, reducing the city’s deficit, and increasing civilian oversight in the police department. As the Democratic mayor of America’s third-largest city, she has also been asked to comment in national political issues, and when recently asked about the upcoming presidential election she responded “[Democrats need] an agenda that defends human rights, our planet and our economy. We’ve got to inspire and mobilize folks in 2020. This is no time for defeatism. It’s a time for courage. And we’ve got to stand for more than we are against Donald Trump.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

U.S. Representative Rev. Richard H. Cain

U.S. Representative Rev. Richard H. Cain (1825-1887), minister and politician. Richard Harvey Cain was born in Greenbrier County, Virginia (now West Virginia), the son of free parents, and grew up in Gallipolis, Ohio. Cain learned to read and write in Sunday School and worked as a barber before attending divinity school in Missouri. He was licensed to preach by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, but he was frustrated by the denomination’s racial policies and so moved to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). In 1859, he received his first ministerial assignment in Muscatine, Iowa, which had one of the first black churches founded west of the Mississippi River. He pastored a church in Brooklyn during the Civil War, and when the war ended he went to Charleston to help the recently freed slaves as superintendent of missions. His congregation grew to more than 4,000 members, and in the words of one biographer, “Church after church sprang into existence as if by magic under his charge.” He also operated a school for former slaves, edited the newspaper Missionary Record, and called for greater rights for African Americans in his 1868 article “Address to the People of South Carolina.” Black South Carolinians in fact did gain the right to vote that year, and Cain was nominated to serve as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. Many whites were so strongly opposed to his nomination and to any black political activity that his school was forced to close and there were several attempted attacks against his family and property; “He was compelled to have a bodyguard wherever he went,” his daughter later recalled. In response to the threats, Cain publicly declared that African Americans were “prepared to stand by their liberties...and see that the liberties of their children are guarded with sleepless vigilance. Let their foes be aware!”

He helped create a new state constitution with greater rights for African Americans, then earned election to the state legislature, where he became a strong advocate for racial equality and black economic empowerment. In 1869, he created a proposal to help former slaves purchase government land, and when the government failed to provide funding, he used his own money. The community known as Lincolnville prospered for several years but then failed when Cain was unable to keep up the mortgage payments. In 1870, he helped create the black-owned Enterprise Railroad and served as its president. Two years later, he became one of the first African Americans elected to the United States Congress, winning 71% of the vote in a four-way race. U.S. Congressman Cain focused his energies on passing a civil rights law to ban racial discrimination in restaurants, public transportation, and other venues. In several speeches before Congress, he described his own experience of being denied a train seat while traveling to Washington D.C. and stated that “There will be no real and enduring peace so long as the rights of any class of men are trampled under foot.”

During his second term, he introduced a bill to fund public schools through the sale of government land, arguing “The education of the nation is paramount, and should not be neglected…It is an accepted axiom, I believe everywhere, that the more intelligent the citizen is the better citizen he is.” By the mid-1870s, though, southern blacks were losing their hard-fought political rights due to racial violence and indifference by the federal government. Between 1871 and 1901 there were twenty-three African Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives, all in the Deep South. After African Americans lost the ability to vote in the South, there were no more black members of Congress anywhere in the country until the Great Migration helped launch the careers of black politicians in the urban North, and it was not until after the Civil Rights Movement that southern blacks returned to Congress. As part of this late 19th-century movement back towards white supremacy, Cain was not nominated for reelection in 1880. He briefly considered moving to Liberia but instead went to Texas, where he distanced himself from politics and focused on church affairs. He was elevated to the position of bishop and also served as president of Paul Quinn College, the oldest black university west of the Mississippi River. In 1884 he returned to Washington D.C., where he served as a bishop for that district until his death in 1887. Upon his passing, a group of fellow ministers and activists declared: “Full of mercy and good fruits he gave himself...He died in the Lord; ‘he rests from his labors; his works do follow him.’”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Herbert Julian

Herbert Julian (1897-1983), pilot and promoter. Julian was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, part of a prosperous family, and was educated in England and Canada. While in Montreal he learned to fly an airplane, which had been invented less than two decades earlier. Although pilots of African descent had recently served in World War I for European countries, when Julian made a solo flight in 1919 he became the first to do so in North America. He later wrote of flying that “at the controls of a plane you feel free, complete master of your own destiny for once, clear of all the petty restrictions and annoyances of the world below…[this is] the one place where all men really are equal, where it makes no difference what colour a man’s skin may happen to be, where all that matters is your own skill.” Julian also invented a new parachute, but when he traveled to Washington D.C. to file the patent, the office clerk refused to believe that a black person could invent anything and said “What do you want to file, music?” He then tried to register his patent in Canada under the name “parachuttagravepresista,” but the authorities used the less flamboyant term “aeroplane safety device.” Julian sold his invention for $25,000 and moved to New York, arriving in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He was one of tens of thousands of black people who came to New York from the South and the Caribbean during the 1910s and 1920s, making the Big Apple one of the world’s most prominent centers of black culture, economics, and politics.

In 1923 Julian planned a parachute jump into Harlem, placing signs around Harlem that read “Watch the clouds” and renting a lot with the advertisement “Watch the clouds this Sunday – Julian is arriving from the sky here.” In order to fund the jump he secured endorsements from numerous black businesses, including a mortician who paid $100 for the right to display his body if the parachute did not open. As his pilot flew over the city, he exploded noise bombs to gain the attention of people in the streets below, climbed onto the wing, and jumped off. Thousands of people chased after him on the ground as he descended from the sky in a scarlet-colored “devil costume,” opened a bag of flour to create a “dramatic long white trail,” unfurled a banner advertising a local eye doctor, barely missed ramming into an elevated train station, and landed on the roof of the post office. He was carried to the nearby headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), an organization founded by fellow West Indian migrant Marcus Garvey to promote black economic and cultural independence. There Julian read advertisements for his sponsors and encouraged the audience to support black businesses until he was arrested for disorderly conduct. At his trial he passed out cards reading “Hubert Julian, M.D., World’s Champion Daredevil Parachutist,” later explaining that “M.D.” stood for “Mechanical Designer,” and was banned from flying over New York for six months. Exactly six months later he made another jump, this time while playing a gold-plated saxophone produced by one of his new sponsors. In the decade of the “Roaring Twenties” when celebrities were achieving unprecedented fame and the term “Harlem Renaissance” came to symbolize a flowering of northern black cultural expression, Julian’s jumps made him one of the most famous African Americans in the country and a symbol of the country’s most prominent black community. As historians Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White wrote of him: “Julian’s embrace of modernity, his love of speed and the machine, even the way he exploited, to a quite remarkable extent, the new art of advertising, all seemed to usher in a new age for African Americans, one full of possibilities.” White newspapers initially mocked him as the “Ace of Spades,” but a black writer gave him the nickname “The Black Eagle of Harlem.” This title became so widely known that for decades the post office delivered to his home letters addressed “The Black Eagle, U.S.A.”

In 1924 Julian announced that he would make a 4,600-mile solo flight from New York to Liberia. Several white pilots had already made transatlantic flights, but none had flown solo, and all had taken the much shorter trip between North America and Europe. Julian would be the first pilot to make the trip alone and the first one of color to do it at all, and his destination was also symbolically important to people of African descent as one of only two African countries that was not under European colonial rule. He purchased an old plane, named it Ethiopia I in honor of the only other independent nation in Africa, and painted on its side “Dedicated to the advancement of the Negro race.” In order to finance his flight he started a fundraising drive in black newspapers asking each reader to donate one dollar for this “scientific undertaking” and charged admission to see “the mighty Ethiopia I that I am going to attempt to fly to Africa, land of our fathers.” On Independence Day, 30,000 people crowded the streets and shores of Harlem to watch the flight. Unfortunately, the plane crashed into the sea due to mechanical failure after traveling only 1,500 feet and Julian suffered a broken leg. His plans for future transatlantic flights fell through due to a lack of funding, but he made shorter flights and parachute jumps throughout the United States. During the 1927 funeral procession of entertainer Florence Mills, he dropped rose petals on the 200,000 mourners. He also appeared at UNIA events, at gatherings of the religious leader Father Divine, and with an all-black flying group called The Five Blackbirds. He later stated that “though you may think that parachute jumps over Harlem were a strange way of working for racial advancement, I honestly believe it really did contribute something useful and valuable.” In 1930 he was invited to Ethiopia for the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, and during the ceremony he parachuted to within fifty feet of the throne. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Julian helped to train more than 3,000 troops in defense of the country but then returned to Harlem when the resistance failed. During World War II he worked with the air force of Finland and challenged Herman Göring, a top German official and former fighter pilot, to a plane duel in order to avenge the Nazi’s “cowardly insult to the honor of my race.” He also worked with Oscar Micheaux, one of the only black filmmakers of the time, on the 1940 film The Notorious Elinor Lee. They planned a film about Julian’s life, but the funding fell through; Hollywood would not make a biopic about an African American until the early 1950s. All of this generated a huge amount of publicly, as did his expensive wardrobe, which included a monocle, walking stick, and silk umbrella. One writer called him “a publicist without peer.”

After World War II Julian founded the import-export business Black Eagle Associates. When the company began selling weapons in war-torn regions around the world, Julian became wealthy, but his international reputation was permanently tarnished. When he was arrested in the Congo in 1962, a Ghanaian working for the United Nations told him “This is one of the saddest days of my life. When I was an undergraduate, I worshipped you as a hero. Most of my African contemporaries did the same.” He was released but banned from returning to the Congo. He remained in the public eye by appearing on television talk shows, writing the autobiography Black Eagle in 1965, attending a Muhammad Ali fight in London in 1966, and telling Jet Magazine in 1974 that he was, at the age of 77, planning a rescue of the recently-deposed Emperor Selassie. Herbert Julian died in New York in 1983. In Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz, which is set in Harlem during the 1920s, one of the first lines reads “A colored man floats down out of the sky blowing a saxophone,” and in 2017 his story was told anew in the documentary The Black Eagle of Harlem. His efforts as one of the first black pilots helped pave the way for later aviators like Bessie Coleman, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Ronald McNair, and while Muhammad Ali, Billy Porter, and others carried on his tradition of combining self-promotion with international racial uplift and economic empowerment.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Viola Davis Desmond

Viola Davis Desmond (1914-1965), Canadian entrepreneur and activist. Viola Irene Davis was born in Halifax, the largest city in the province of Nova Scotia. Part of a prominent middle-class family, her grandfather had been a barber and her father operated a real estate agency and car dealership. After high school, Davis taught in Halifax’s segregated schools while saving money to open her own beauty parlor. Because the local beauty schools did not admit blacks, she studied at the Field Beauty Culture School in Montreal and the Apex College of Beauty Culture and Hairdressing in New Jersey. In 1937 Desmond opened Vi’s Studio of Beauty Culture, which became one of the most important businesses in Halifax’s black community. One resident later recalled that she “took all of us kids from this area under her wing, and was like a mother to us all.” She studied chemistry and began selling her own hair care products, selling them throughout Nova Scotia to black women who were denied service by white hairdressers. Canada had no laws requiring racial segregation, but there were no laws banning it either, and so most businesses chose to segregate or reject black customers. She also opened the Desmond School of Beauty Culture, making plans to establish franchises operated by her graduates.

In 1946 her car broke down in the town of New Glasgow, and while it was being repaired she went to the local movie theater. The employees required her to purchase a balcony ticket, stating “I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.” She sat on the ground floor anyway and refused to move until the police forcibly removed her, causing knee and hip injuries. She was then further humiliated by being placed in a cell with male prisoners, but she put on her white gloves and sat upright for more than twelve hours. Because Canada had no laws that either required or banned racial segregation, so Desmond was instead tried for tax evasion: the tax on ground floor tickets at the theater cost one cent more than the tax on the balcony tickets. The local magistrate insisted that the matter had nothing to do with race and found Desmond guilty, fining her $26 dollars. She appealed the case to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, telling one reporter “I didn’t realize a thing like this could happen in Nova Scotia – or any other part of Canada.” Although one judge argued that her arrest may have been a “surreptitious endeavour to enforce a Jim Crow rule by misuse of a public statute,” it affirmed her conviction because of an error by her attorney.

The case helped inspire other black Canadians to press for civil rights laws, which finally passed in the 1960s. It also, however, took a heavy toll on Desmond. Her sister later wrote “A person like my sister, who was such a hard worker, had always been told if you do hard work, you’re going to win…She felt that she should have won the case, and she was bitterly disappointed.” Her marriage ended, and she closed her businesses in Halifax and moved to Montreal. She later relocated to New York, hoping to work as a consultant for the entertainment industry, and died there suddenly of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage at the age of fifty. In 2010, the government of Nova Scotia granted Desmond a formal apology and posthumous pardon, the first in Canadian history; it was signed by the lieutenant governor, who was also the first black and the second woman to hold that post. Her sister declared “What happened to my sister is part of our history, and needs to remain intact…We must learn from our history so we do not repeat it. If my parents were here today, it would warm their hearts to see Viola recognized as a true Canadian hero.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan

U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan (1936-1996), lawmaker. Barbara Charline Jordan was born in Houston, the daughter of a Baptist minister and a housewife. While in high school, a speech by the prominent black attorney Edith S. Sampson inspired her to pursue a legal career. She was also shaped by her grandfather, who taught her “the lesson of independence and being one’s own person…I never had to apologize for whatever I was doing…I didn’t look around for excuses for non-achievement. I just decided that what one wants to do, one proceeds to do it.” At Texas Southern University, she became a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority and a nationally ranked debater who helped her school defeat Yale and tie Harvard. After graduating in 1956 with a history-political science double major, she graduated from Boston University School of Law in 1959, then taught political science at Tuskegee University for a year before opening a private practice in Houston. She first gained the attention of Democratic Party leaders by helping to organize black voters for John F. Kennedy’s successful 1960 presidential campaign. The Civil Rights Movement was bringing an end to the practices that had prevented southern blacks from voting since the late 1800s, and after making two unsuccessful runs for the Texas House of Representatives in 1962 and 1964, in 1966 she was elected to the Texas State Senate, making her Texas’ first black state senator since 1883 and its first ever black female member. During her two terms in the state senate she helped pass laws that created the Texas Fair Employment Practices Commission, established the state’s first minimum wage law, and required antidiscrimination clauses in business contracts. In 1972 her colleagues elected her president pro term: the person who leads the senate in the absence of the lieutenant governor. Texas had a tradition of honoring the president pro term each year by naming them “Governor for a Day,” and Jordan was so honored on 10 June 1972, making her the first and still only African American woman to serve as governor of a state.

In 1972 Jordan was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a district that included most of downtown and inner city Houston. She became the second black woman to serve in Congress and the first black congressperson from a former Confederate state since 1901. She worked with the several other black and female congresspersons but also established close relations with white lawmakers, especially fellow Texans, in an effort to gain power and influence within the system. This resulted in her being appointed to the House Judiciary Committee. In July 1974, this committee held hearings on whether or not to approve articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon for interfering with an investigation into his allegedly illegal activity, including firing government officials who were part of the investigation, and for failing to pay taxes. In a speech given during these hearings, Jordan laid out the concept of constitutional government and how it applied to the current situation. She began by noting that when the Constitution was initially written, “I was not included in that ‘We, the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included.” She then addressed the specific pieces of evidence against Nixon, using quotes from James Madison and a former Supreme Court Justice for each one to argue that they supported impeachment.  In closing, she stated “If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth century paper shredder.” This speech helped persuade the Judiciary Committee to approve three articles of impeachment. A week later, Nixon resigned from office. Despite having served in Congress for less than two years, she had become one of the most prominent politicians in the country. One billboard in Houston read “Thank you, Barbara Jordan, for explaining the Constitution to us.”

During her three terms in Congress, Jordan sponsored or cosponsored more than 300 bills and resolutions, including the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which required banks to improve their efforts to make loans and other services available to poor and minority communities, and expanding the Voting Rights Act to include people of Asian, Native American, and Latinx ancestry. In 1975 she served on the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, which is in charge of appointing Democratic representatives to various committees and advising party leaders on policy. During the 1976 presidential election season, she was briefly considered as a vice presidential candidate and asked to give a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Like her Judiciary Committee speech two years earlier, she noted how her very presence represented changes in American society, beginning “It was one hundred and forty-four years ago that members of the Democratic Party first met in convention to select a Presidential candidate…But there is something different about tonight. There is something different about tonight. What is different? What is special? I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker…I feel that notwithstanding the past my presence here is one additional piece of evidence that the American Dream need not forever be deferred.” She also addressed ongoing problems of inequality and the government’s role in addressing them, asserting “We believe that the government which represents the authority of all the people, not just one interest group, but all the people, has an obligation to actively – underscore actively – seek to remove those obstacles which would block individual achievement – obstacles emanating from race, sex, economic condition. The government must remove them, seek to remove them.” In 2009, the American Rhetoric organization ranked this speech fifth “Top 100 Speeches of the 20^th Century” list; her 1974 Judiciary Committee speech is ranked thirteenth.

Jordan decided not to seek reelection in 1978. She became a professor of ethics and public policy at the University of Texas and served as a member of the Board of Jurors for the Peabody Awards. She published her autobiography Barbara Jordan, a Self-Portrait in 1979. She was elected to the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in 1984 and the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990. In 1992 she was again a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, giving her speech from a wheelchair due to her long struggles with multiple sclerosis and leukemia. The candidate nominated there, Bill Clinton, awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 and also considered nominating her to the U.S. Supreme Court but decided not to do so due to her poor health. In the last few years of her life she chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which attacked “hostility and discrimination against immigrants as antithetical to the traditions and interests of the country” but also drew criticism for recommending that immigration be reduced. Barbara Jordan died of pneumonia in Austin, Texas in 1996. After her death, it was revealed that she had been a closeted lesbian; although this was not known at the time, this also made her the first lesbian to serve in the Texas legislature, to serve in the U.S. Congress, and to give a keynote address at a major party political convention. She was the first black woman buried in the Texas State Cemetery, which was originally a burial ground for Confederate soldiers. Named in her honor are the main terminal at the Austin airport, several K-12 schools in Texas, and the Jordan/Rustin Coalition, which mobilized African Americans in California to advocate for marriage equality.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Blanche Calloway

Blanche Calloway (1902-1978), musician and entrepreneur. Blanche Dorothea Jones Calloway was born in Rochester, New York, the daughter of a lawyer and a music teacher, and as a child moved to Baltimore after her father died. She grew up at a time when recorded music and the new genres of jazz and blues were still in their early stages. As a child she sang in church, won talent contests, and was inspired by jazz pioneer Florence Mills and by her mother, who gave her music lessons but also discouraged her from pursuing a career in music. Calloway studied at Morgan State University but then left to join a cabaret troupe called the Smarter Set Co., starting as a “Bronze Beauty” but making her way up to chorus girl and then featured singer. In 1921 she joined the musical Shuffle Along, which was one of the first black productions on Broadway and also helped launch the careers of Fredi Washington, Paul Robeson, and Josephine Baker. Two years she later got her first major notoriety with another black musical, Plantation Days, which toured around the country. When it ended in Chicago in 1927, Calloway decided to stay there and became one of the featured performers at the Sunset Café, one of the leading jazz clubs in the country. She also formed her own band, Blanche Calloway and Her Joy Boys, which included future legends Louis Armstrong, Cozy Cole, and Ben Webster. In the late 1920s she moved to Philadelphia and joined another group called Andy Kirk and the Clouds of Joy, experiencing success there until Kirk dismissed her. The reasons for her firing are unclear; some accounts say that the owner of the theater where the group performed saw that she was more popular than Kirk and encouraged her to take over the group, while other accounts say that she herself decided that she could run the group more successfully and decided to take over. In either case, she then reformed the Joy Boys with new musicians. This made her the first woman to ever lead an otherwise all-male jazz band.

During the 1930s Calloway’s band recorded more than three dozen songs, including many of her own compositions. Her 1931 recording of “Just a Crazy Song” included the call and response “Hi hi hi/ho de ho de ho”; this likely inspired her younger brother Cab Calloway’s song “Minnie the Moocher,” which was released later that year and became one of the most popular jazz songs of all time. Her composition “Growlin’ Dan” was a response record, featuring an interaction between “Dan” and “Minnie” in its lyrics. The lyrics of “There’s Rhythm in the River” had a strong religious component: “He wasn’t on the level/He’s going to the devil/Deep down where the evil spirits roar/”Cause he kept on repeating/His lying and his cheating, oh Lord!/There’s rhythm in the river, rhythm in the river/Forty days and nights my tears have poured,/My heart is all a’quiver,/Rhythm in the river, oh, Lord!” Other songs were somewhat suggestive; for instance, “I Need Lovin’” and “Catch On,” which stated in part “Now I ain’t good and I ain’t bad/Just a brown-skinned girl who can’t be had.” Nearly all of her compositions featured strong-willing women, challenging the dominant image of passive, demure femininity; “Louisiana Liza,” for instance, describes a “Southern maid, I’m afraid, is sure to make you fall/She knows her stuff, calls your bluff, and brother, that ain’t all!” This was also true of Calloway’s stage high-energy, animated performing style, which heavily influenced her brother’s public persona. In an era when jazz was a hugely popular musical genre, critics praised the Joy Boys as one of the top jazz groups in the country, with the black newspaper Pittsburgh Courier calling her “one of the most progressive performers in the profession.” During her tours around the country, though, she also faced racial and gender discrimination, the latter coming not only from whites but also from black men who thought that women should not lead a band or serve in any musical capacity except singer or dancer. When the Joy Boys stopped at a gas station in Yazoo, Mississippi, she used the washroom reserved for white women only, leading the police to pistol whip one of her band members and to place him and her under arrest. While they were in jail another band member fled with the money, forcing Calloway to disband the group and sell her car in order to get out of the state. Over the next few years she formed several other groups, including one consisting entirely of women, but they struggled to get bookings and she was forced to declare bankruptcy. By the early 1940s, her performing and recording career was largely over.

Calloway briefly returned to Philadelphia, becoming active in Democratic politics, before resettling in Washington D.C. There she managed the nightclub Crystal Caverns, where she helped launch the career of R&B star Ruth Brown by signing her to perform at the club and then facilitating a record deal with Atlantic Records. Calloway later moved to Miami, where she became one of the only female disk jockeys in the country at WMBM, the most prominent black radio station in the city. She quickly moved up to program director and served in that capacity for twenty years. Over the next two decades she also worked with the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Urban League. Although black men had gained the right to vote in 1870 and black women in 1920, racism prevented nearly all African Americans in the South from exercising this right until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but one story holds that Calloway cast a ballot seven years earlier in 1958 and thus became the first black woman in Miami to vote. In 1968 she founded Afram House, a mail-order cosmetics company for black women. She lived the last few years of her life in Baltimore, where she died of breast cancer in 1978. In 2003 her niece wrote and starred in a biographical musical called “Blanche and Her Joy Boys.” “The mission of an artist in the 21^st century is to heal,” the younger Calloway declared, “I’m grateful to be the channel. That’s what Aunt Blanche was, that’s what Daddy was. The Calloway entertainment tradition is about bringing joy to people.” Blanche Calloway’s career was comparatively short and less memorable than that of her brother or other male jazz musicians of the pre-World War II era, but she was nevertheless the first African American woman to find success as a singer, songwriter, bandleader, performer, and executive, paving the way for Sylvia Robinson, Janet Jackson, Janelle Monáe, Beyoncé, and others.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Pharaoh Hatshepsut

Pharaoh Hatshepsut (1508–1458 B.C.), Egyptian monarch. Hatshepsut was born the daughter of Pharaoh Thutmose I; her name means “foremost of noble ladies” in ancient Egyptian. When her father died, Hatshepsut and her half-brother Thutmose II became co-rulers of Egypt. Her brother also died several years later, leaving a young son. Following Egyptian tradition, Hatshepsut continued to rule Egypt as its regent until her nephew was old enough to take the throne, but while he was still young she took the unprecedented step of declaring herself pharaoh. Although several other women had also ruled Egypt, Hatshepsut was the first to take power in a time of stability rather than during a crisis. She also reigned much longer than any woman before her: more than twenty-two years. Under her leadership, Egypt entered a new era of peace and stability. Hatshepsut renewed trade with the nation of Punt (now Somalia), which no Egyptian had visited for more than 500 years, and her agents brought back ivory, leopard skins, and myrrh trees. The increased wealth from trade led to hundreds of building projects that made Egyptian architecture among the best in the world. These achievements included the world’s tallest obelisks and her burial temple Djeser-Djesru (“sublime of sublimes” or “holy of holies”), which was built into the side of a cliff. These buildings, along with the accompanying art pieces, were also used to defend Hatshepsut’s right as a woman to rule the country. Carvings on temple walls, for example, declared that her father and the gods had intended for her to become pharaoh since the time that she was conceived, and statutes of Hatshepsut depicted her in the same clothes that male pharaohs wore, including a false beard. Although Egypt was largely at peace, there were also successful military campaigns in Syria, Nubia (now the Sudan) and the eastern Mediterranean, with Thutmose III serving as the head of her armies. After Hatshepsut’s death, though, subsequent pharaohs tried to take credit for her accomplishments or erase her from the historical record, even destroying her statues and chiseling her name and images from her buildings. Some scholars have concluded that they were concerned about “future generations of potentially strong female kings...not remaining content with their traditional lot as wife, sister and…mother.” These efforts were successful. Hatshepsut’s story was largely unknown for many centuries, and many people believed that Cleopatra had been Egypt’s only long-ruling female leader until new artifacts surfaced in the 1800s, more than 3000 years after her death. In recent years, some scholars believe that they have identified her mummy, although this is still being debated.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

James Parker

James Parker (1857-1908), police officer and entrepreneur. James Benjamin Parker was born a slave in Georgia and gained his freedom when the Civil War ended. Details about his early life are scarce, but various reports later stated that he worked as a police officer, train porter, journalist, mail carrier, newspaper salesman, and waiter in his home town, Chicago, Saratoga Springs, and New York City. In 1901 he was in Buffalo, working as a waiter for a catering company. Buffalo was then hosting an international fair called the Pan-American Exposition, and among the eight million visitors was U.S. President William McKinley, who greeted members of the public on September 6. Parker stood in the long line to meet McKinley, who had an underwhelming record on civil rights but was still more progressive than the previous president and was also symbolically important to African Americans as a Civil War veteran. Just in front of Parker was Leon Czolgosz, who approached the president and fired a hidden pistol, hitting McKinley twice at point blank range. Parker, who was said to be well over six feet tall and 200 pounds and was nicknamed “Big Jim,” immediately attacked Czolgosz. The accounts vary on the specific details. One Secret Service agent said that Parker punched Czolgosz in the neck and tackled him to the ground. Another witness said “with one quick shift of his clenched fist, he knocked the pistol from the assassin’s hand. With another, he spun the man around like a top and with a third, he broke Czolgosz’s nose. A fourth split the assassin’s lip and knocked out several teeth.” At first it appeared that McKinley would recover from his injuries, and Parker was praised around the country as the “tawny lion of the Exposition” who had saved the president’s life by preventing Czolgosz from firing more shots. In an interview several days later, he said “just think, Father Abe freed me, and now I saved his successor from death, provided that bullet he got into the president don’t kill him.” In another interview he declared “I heard the shots. I did what every citizen of this country should have done. I am told that I broke his nose – I wish it had been his neck. I am sorry I did not see him four seconds before…I am a Negro, and am glad that the Ethiopian race has what ever credit comes with what I did. If I did anything, the colored people should get the credit.” He also declined offers to sell his photograph or to appear in museums or on stage, telling one newspaper “I do not think that the American people would like me to make capital out of the unfortunate circumstances. I am glad that I was able to be of service to the country” and another “Many [African Americans] have written to me, telling me they were proud of me, and I could not after that turn myself into a dime museum freak.”

Some political leaders called for him to be offered a government job as reward for his actions. He was especially lauded by other African Americans, who noted that even as their race suffered from voting disenfranchisement, segregation, employment discrimination, racial violence, and impoverished conditions little better than slavery, a black man had stepped in to protect the leader of the country. This contrast was highlighted by the fact that Parker was a former slave, that McKinley was a Civil War veteran, and that in the decades since the war many white Americans had forgotten or chosen to ignore the loyalty of African Americans, the rebellion of white southerners, and the indifference or betrayal of some white northerners. Booker T. Washington praised him in a speech, black residents of Savannah made plans to “present a substantial testimonial,” and the black newspaper Savannah Tribune wrote “the life of our chief magistrate was saved by a Negro. No other class of citizens is more loyal to this country than the Negro.” This article turned out to be inaccurately premature, as eight days after the shooting McKinley died from gangrene and inflammation of the pancreas. In spite of this, many continued to praise Parker for his actions. Black Journalist John Mitchell noted that in the South, Czolgosz would be given rights that were denied to Parker and argued that white America’s failure to stop violence against African Americans had finally led to one of their own being killed, writing “President McKinley is the victim of the same lawlessness which he and the nation have tolerated.” The Rev. Lena Doolin Mason used Parker’s example to call for equal rights in her poem “A Negro In It,” writing:

“He knocked the murderer to the floor,

He struck his nose, the blood did flow;

He held him fast, all nearby saw,

When for the right, the Negro in it.

J.B. Parker is his name,

He from the state of Georgia came;

he worked in Buffalo, for his bread,

And there he saw McKinley dead.

White man, stop lynching and burning

This black race, trying to thin it,

For if you go to heaven or hell

You will find some Negroes in it.

You may try to shut the Negro out,

The courts, they have begun it;

But when we meet at the judgment bar

God will tell you the Negro is in it.”

When Czolgosz went on trial, though, Parker was not called to testify and the white witnesses denied his role. Some white newspapers now claimed that Parker had lied to get money and fame. African Americans became convinced that the Secret Service guards had conspired to lie because they were ashamed that a black man had done their job, and Parker himself said that “it looks mighty funny” that he had not been called to the witness stand. Although he was included in a widely produced 1905 drawing of the assassination, the offers of a government job never materialized. Black hopes that his heroism would lead to better race relations did not materialize. Only a month after McKinley’s death new president Teddy Roosevelt had dinner with Booker T. Washington at the White House, and a southern senator declared “we shall have to kill a thousand niggers to get them back in their places.” Parker left Buffalo and became a public lecturer on the East Coast; some reports state that he also became a traveling salesman for the black magazine Gazetteer and Guide. His experiences in 1901, though, helped lead to mental illness and alcoholism. He was placed in a mental hospital in 1907, and after he died a year later, his body was given to a medical school to be dissected. Although he was largely forgotten, his actions became part of a long narrative of African American loyalty in the face of racism that eventually led to victories against that racism.

©David Brodnax, Sr.