Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977- ), Nigerian-American author. Adichie was born in the southeastern Nigeria city of Enugu and grew up in nearby Nsukka, home to the University of Nigeria, where her father was a statistics professor and her mother was the first female registrar. Both of her grandfathers had died in the late 1960s during the Biafran War, when her Igbo people seceded from Nigeria and briefly formed an independent nation. This chaos and bloodshed was followed by a military dictatorship that ended when she was two, only to be followed by another one that lasted from 1983 to 1999. Adichie was first inspired to become a writer by Things Fall Apart, the classic novel by fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe, and as a child she loved to write in her father’s study, later recalling “I didn’t choose writing, writing chose me.” Her feminist worldview was shaped in part by her great-grandmother, who in her words “may never have used that word [feminist] – obviously, that word doesn’t exist in Igbo – but she was because she pushed back against all of these sort of cultural ideas that held her back because she was a woman.” At age nineteen she came to the United States to attend college, graduating from Eastern Connecticut State University with highest honors in 2001. She and her sister were among the more than 277,000 Nigeria natives living in the U.S., with another 100,000 reporting Nigerian ancestry. The connection between the U.S. and Africa’s most populous nation began in the 1600s when thousands of Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, and others were brought to America as slaves; in the 1700s, for instance, 30,000 Igbo were brought to Virginia alone. Ironically, Nigerians and other Africans could enter the U.S. as slaves but not as free immigrants until the Civil Rights Movement ended racial restrictions on immigration. Since then, more black people have voluntarily entered the U.S. from Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe than the total number that were brought as slaves from 1620 to 1865, and Nigerian Americans ranked highest among all U.S. ethnic groups in formal education.

While still a student, Adichie began publishing poems, plays, and short stories such as “You in America” and “The American Embassy.” In 2003 she published her first novel Purple Hibiscus, whose main character is a Nigerian teenaged girl living under the oppression of the dictatorship and of her own father, who is financially successful and publicly pious but in private physically and psychologically terrorizes his family. The book reflected her views as a person of Christian faith who also argues that religion often oppresses women and divides people. Purple Hibiscus won several awards for best first novel and was nominated for the Best Books for Young Adults Award. Her second book, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), is set during the Biafran War and focuses on two sisters, their love interests, and the poor child who works for them until he is forced into the war. Adichie said of this novel that “The need to write about it came from growing up in its shadow. This thing that I didn’t quite understand was my legacy. It hovered over everything.” It received the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction, given to the best English-language novel written by a woman, and was named to the New York Times “100 Most Notable Books of the Year” list. In 2013 it was made into a feature film directed by fellow Nigerian Biyi Bandele, filmed in Nigeria (at the insistence of Adichie), and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, and John Boyega. Six years later, the novel was named the tenth best book published since 2000 by The Guardian and to the BBC’s list of “100 most inspiring novels” by the British Broadcasting Company. Her 2009 collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), like her earlier writing, focuses on characters are of Nigerian origin, but some of them are immigrants living in the U.S., making this Adichie’s first writing outside of her native country. This trend continued with her third novel Americanah (2013), in which the main character is a young Nigerian who comes to America to attend college and is forced to engage with American racism and black identity. It was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was the March 2017 selection for the “One Book, One New York” program, which encouraged all New York residents to read the same book in a single month. HBO is currently developing it as a miniseries starring Lupita Nyongo’o and Danai Gurira.

In addition to her novels, Adichie has also received wide acclaim for other works. Her 2009 TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” emphasized the importance of diverse narratives and of understanding others beyond outward appearances. This is expressed through her experiences as a child reading books without black characters, a college student in America stereotyped by her roommate, and as a Nigerian from a prosperous background who was surprised to learn that the brother of her family’s servant had made a basket because “It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.” This became one of the most widely viewed TED Talks of all time. Even more successful was her 2012 TED Talk “We should all be feminists,” which explores the ways that gender construction shapes and limits people. Beyoncé later sampled part of this talk in her song “Flawless.” Adichie’s academic accomplishments include two master’s degrees, fellowships at Princeton and Harvard, a 2008 “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, and being elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 she published Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, an extended version of an email that she had originally written to a friend who asked for advice on how to raise her daughter as a feminist and which begins with “Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not ‘if only. Not ‘as long as.’ I matter equally. Full stop.” In one of her numerous interviews and lectures on current events, she commented on the election and presidency of Donald Trump, who in 2020 banned further immigration from Nigeria, by stating that “I remember saying this fairly early on when he became president. That it felt like Americans…had given a toddler the keys to a very expensive and complicated car, and said to the toddler, ‘Okay, you drive.’…While I mourn all the ways in which I think America has failed and disappointed me, there’s a sense in me in which I don’t despair, because I’ve seen enough of how this has also propelled people to do things that can remake the world.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Edgar Amos Love

Bishop Edgar A. Love (1891-1974), minister and fraternity founder. Edgar Amos Love was born in Harrisburg, Virginia, the son of a minister, and grew up in Baltimore. He attended high school at the Academy of Morgan College before enrolling at Howard University. At the beginning of his junior year in 1911, Love and his close friends Frank Coleman and Oscar J. Cooper decided to form a Greek-letter fraternity. This was part of a broader movement in the black community to fight for racial equality through black institutions such as literary societies, women’s clubs, and now Greek-letter organizations, in part because African Americans were excluded from white groups but primarily because of a desire to have their own institutions that they could control and use in culturally a appropriate manner. Two other organizations had previously been founded at predominantly white universities, but the vast majority of black college students attended black universities like Howard, and Love and his friends felt that creating a fraternity at a historically black college could help inspire young African Americans to fight against discrimination. As he later remembered, the fraternity was “born out of a dream.” On the evening of November 17, 1911, Love, Cooper, Coleman and faculty member Ernest Everett Just founded Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, along with the motto “Friendship Is Essential to the Soul.” The men quickly inducted other members and selected officers. They initially met opposition from Howard’s administration, but Love’s perseverance eventually convinced the president and faculty to recognize them as an official campus organization and allow them to organize other chapters. In 1914, Omega Psi Phi was nationally incorporated, with Love serving as the first Grand Basileus (national leader). While still in college, he held this office for two terms, overseeing the creation of new chapters and induction of new members, including his brother John.

After completing his bachelor’s degree in 1913, with high honors for his scholarship, Love earned additional degrees from Howard and Boston University and also took graduate courses at the University of Chicago. When the United States entered World War I, he entered the Officers Training Camp at Fort Des Moines, where he was commissioned a first lieutenant and established a “War Chapter” to induct more men into the fraternity. He was sent to France as chaplain for the 368^th Infantry, displaying his manhood in several conflict zones despite being exposed to poison gas. Love also developed a literacy program for uneducated soldiers; this eventually grew into a full-fledged school. After leaving the service in 1919, Love worked at Morgan State University as a professor of history and the Bible and as athletic director. He then accepted a pastoral position at a Methodist Episcopal church in Fairmount Heights, Virginia, later serving other congregations in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Baltimore. During the 1950s, he was elevated to the level of bishop. He also sought to uplift the black community by working with the Maryland Interracial Commission, to which he was appointed by the governor. In addition to his fraternal service, Love was an active member of the American Legion, the Prince Hall Masons, president of the Alumni Association of Howard University School of Religion, president of the Inter-denominational Ministers Alliance of Washington, and district superintendent of the Washington District for the M.E. Church.  “It’s easy to go along with the crowd,” he reflected later in life, “but the man or woman who carries civilization afar is the individual who takes leadership and goes against the public opinion if it is not in harmony with the highest ideals of the individual.” Edgar Amos Love died in 1974, the last surviving founder of Omega Psi Phi. As of 2020, more than 250,000 men had been initiated into one of the 750 chapters around the world.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Charley Pride

Charley Pride (1934-2020), musician. Charley Frank Pride was born in the son of sharecroppers in Sledge, Mississippi, one of eleven children. He grew up picking cotton and attending segregated schools, later recalling that as he and his classmates recited the Pledge of Allegiance phrase “with liberty and justice for all,” he’d “look out the window and see that it wasn’t so.” He taught himself to play guitar as a child and listened to country music on the radio, but when Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947 he told himself “here’s my way out of the cotton fields.” In 1952 he signed with the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League as a pitcher. Although integration had caused the Negro Leagues to go into sharp decline, many young black players still started there before signing with the Major Leagues, and the Memphis franchise was still prosperous in part because the city had no Major League team. Pride signed a minor league contract with the New York Yankees in 1953, and if he had made it to the majors he would have become their first black player, but he an arm injury hindered his career. Over the next few years he played for several minor league and Negro League teams, becoming an all-star with Memphis in 1956, and also spending two years in the army. After being released by a team in Missoula, Montana in 1962, he moved to nearby Helena to work at a lead smelting plant and play for the semipro team, but he also began performing country music songs before each game and in local venues. He earned a popular local following, although he and his family were also denied service in a restaurant and by a real estate broker because of their race. Pride also traveled to Memphis to record at the legendary Sun Studios, and his demo tape drew the attention of country star Chet Atkins, who encouraged RCA Victor to give him a record deal in 1966. His first two songs on RCA did not sell well, but his third song “Just Between You and Me” reached number nine on the U.S. country charts and was nominated for a Grammy. All three songs were released without Pride’s photograph, leading many people then and now to believe that RCA did not want the overwhelmingly white and conservative country music fans to know Pride’s race. At one early show, for instance, fans applauded upon hearing his name and then fell into stunned silence when he took the stage, but he said “I realize that I’ve got that permanent tan, but my name’s Charley Pride and I am from Mississippi, my daddy was a farmer down there. And I sing country music. I want to entertain you if you’ll let me.” Knowledge of his racial identity became a moot point in 1967 when he performed at the Grand Ole Opry, a concert and radio broadcast venue in Nashville that since the 1920s had been the centerpiece of country music. Performing at the Opry was considered the crowning achievement of success, and Pride was the first African American to do so since 1941. Even so, some club promoters were reluctant to book or promote him, and even musicians who respected his ability did so in racist terms. One producer declared “I’m fixin’ to cut [a record with] this nigger,” while a fellow singer harmonized with him and exclaimed “I’m singing with a jig, and I don’t even mind it!” Pride navigated all of this through his quiet dignity, telling one man who insulted him “Sir, my name’s not Nigger. It’s Charley Pride.”

Pride’s first hit single and Opry appearance helped to launch one of the most successful careers in country music history. Between 1969 and 1982, 28 of his 42 singles reached the top spot on the U.S. Country Hit Parade charts, including every song he released between 1969 and 1973 except for several gospel records, and even those sold well. His biggest hit “Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’” sold a million copies, spent five weeks at the top of the country charts, made the top ten of the Adult Contemporary charts, and became his only song to reach the pop top-40, peaking at number 21. His 1970 song “All His Children” was included in the Paul Newman film Sometimes a Great Nation and received an Oscar nomination for best song, making Pride one of the first black musicians to be so honored. He would eventually have more than fifty songs that reached the top ten on the country charts. His albums were equally successful, with eleven of them going to number one on the Top Country Charts, another thirteen making the top ten, and eight making the top fifty of the Billboard 200, a further sign that he was popular with a wide variety of fans. Overall, Pride sold more records for RCA Victor than any other musician except Elvis Presley. The Country Music Association named him Entertainer of the Year in 1971 and Male Vocalist of the Year in 1971 and 1972, becoming the first artist to win the latter award twice and still one of only three to accomplish that goal. He was also awarded three Grammys, including two for his gospel recordings. His influence in country music was also seen in another way when songwriter Steve Goodman name-dropped him, along with fellow giants Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, in the satirical song “You Never Even Called Me by My Name.” In yet another example of country’s conflict between its legacy of racism and its embrace of Pride, the most popular version of this song was made by David Allan Coe, who also released several songs with the word “nigger.” Pride’s success was a reflection of several broader trends in American music and society. Country music had long been hugely popular among rural and working-class whites, and it had also sold well in the early days of the record charts, but by the mid-1950s it was eclipsed by other genres, including the rock music that it had helped to shape. In the late 1960s, though, it moved towards a more crossover sound with artists like Pride. At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement had helped increase the profile of black musicians in multiple genres. Even though country music was seen as outside of this progress and in fact was preferred by many whites who rejected rock, R&B, and the 1960s in general, the shift in American culture was so profound that it helped create space even for Charley Pride. His success also helped country music become an importance influence in R&B, with country songs now being recorded by artists like the Temptations, Dobie Gray, and Candi Staton. Additionally, although the Great Migration had shifted the black population from the rural South to the urban North and West, Pride’s music was a reminder that nearly all African Americans had once been rural southerners like him and that many still were.

Although Pride’s star began to fade after the mid-1970s, his songs and albums continued to sell well. In 1975 he traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland, which had been avoided by other performers because of religious violence, but his performance temporarily brought both sides together and encouraged other musicians to follow him. He sang the national anthem at the 1980 World Series, Super Bowl VIII in Houston, at the 2010 World Series (which included the Texas Rangers team of which he had become part owner), and at a Memphis Grizzlies game during their 2014 Martin Luther King Day celebrations. In 1983 he became a member of the Grand Ole Opry, only the second black artist to receive what is considered the highest honor in country music. He continued to perform and record even after suffering from bipolar disorder and having a tumor removed from his vocal cords. He was humorously introduced to a new generation of black music lovers in a 1994 episode of the TV show Martin in which Martin Lawrence’s radio personality character is forced to play country music and tries to remain true to his heritage without getting fired by playing Charley Pride records non-stop. To date his 47 studio albums, 11 compilation albums, and 72 singles have sold more than 70 million copies combined, including fourteen gold albums and a greatest hits collection that has sold four million. He has also received induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame and a 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys. Although country music still remains overwhelmingly white in its fan base and artists, Pride also helped pave the way for current stars Darius Rucker, Jimmie Allen, Kane Brown, and Lil Nas X. Charley Pride died of COVID-19 in 2020.
©David Brodnax, Sr.

U.S. Representative Val Demings

Representative Val Demings (1957- ), police officer and politician. Valdez Venita Butler was born and raised in a poor neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, the daughter of a custodian father and domestic servant mother. She became interested in law enforcement at her racially segregated junior high school, and she earned a degree in criminology from Florida State University in 1979, becoming the first member of her family to finish college. After college she worked as a social worker before joining the police department in Orlando. There she steadily rose up the ranks while also earning a master’s in public administration from Webster University Orlando. In 2007 she was appointed chief of the Orlando Police Department, becoming the first woman to serve in this position. Demings served as chief for four years and was credited with helping to bring the city’s crime rate down. In 2012 she resigned to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, seeking to represent Florida’s 10^th congressional district as a Democrat. This district included the greater Orlando area and since its creation had been represented entirely by white men, all but one of whom were Republicans, even as it became more liberal and ethnically diverse. Although Democratic voters held a slight majority across Florida, after the 2010 census Republicans redrew the congressional districts to help ensure that they would retain power. Voting rights groups sued on the grounds that this violated state law, and in 2014 a judge agreed and ordered that several districts, including the 10^th, be redrawn. Two years later Demings ran the seat again and won with 65% of the vote, becoming the fourth black woman and the eighth African American overall to represent Florida in Congress. She ran unopposed for reelection in 2018, part of an electoral wave that saw the Democrats win control of the House and thus also a majority on all House committees. This included the Homeland Security, Intelligence, and Judiciary committees on which Demings serves. Utilizing her law enforcement background, she quickly became a leading voice for gun control. In 2017 she advocated for the Gun Violence Restraining Order Act, which if passed would have better enabled law enforcement to temporarily confiscate guns from people who had been found to be a risk to themselves or others. She called for the repeal of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows civilians to use deadly force when they feel threatened and has led to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and other minority males. After the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in south Florida, which caused more fatalities than any other school shooting in American history, she rejected Republican proposals to arm teachers, saying that this would “[shift] the pain, the hurt, and the guilt to school staff who will find themselves out skilled and outgunned in active shooter situations.” One year later a Saudi national killed three people and injured eight others at a Pensacola naval base, and Demings co-sponsored a bill that would create stronger background checks for foreign nationals, stating “It’s simply common sense that people shouldn’t be able to get a gun anywhere, anytime. Nearly every American agrees with this basic principle, yet the gun lobby has left federal gun laws riddled with loopholes.”

Demings’ seat on the Judiciary Committee, though, has led to her involvement in some of the most consequential events in the history of the United States presidency; specifically, Donald Trump’s alleged interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections. In 2018 Congress heard testimony from Robert Mueller, who had investigated the events of 2016, and Demings asked “Isn’t it fair to say that the president’s written answers were not only inadequate and incomplete, because he didn’t answer many of your questions, but where he did his answers showed that he wasn’t always being truthful?” That investigation ended without clear proof of direct involvement by Trump, but a year later evidence of other possible wrongdoing emerged. Congress had allocated $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, but in 2019 witnesses and documents showed that Trump had refused to send the money or meet with Ukraine’s president unless he looked into discredited allegations of corruption by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden; in other words, that the president had illegally used taxpayers’ dollars as leverage to get foreign help against one of his political rivals. The House began the impeachment process, which as per the Constitution and Congressional policy began with investigations by various House committees, then a vote by the Judiciary Committee on whether or not to write articles of impeachment, then a vote by the entire House on whether or not to impeach, and finally a trial in the Senate with several House members serving as impeachment managers who would present the evidence and make their case. During the Judiciary Committee’s voting deliberations, Demings tweeted that “I am the descendant of slaves, who knew that they would not make it, but dreamed and prayed that one day I would make it. So despite America’s complicated history, my faith is in the Constitution. I’ve enforced the laws, and now I write the laws. Nobody is above the law.”

The committee wrote two articles of impeachment: abuse of power, related to the Ukraine activities; and obstruction of Congress, related to his refusal to cooperate with the investigation. The House then voted to approve both articles, making Trump only the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, following Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Because there were no African Americans in Congress in 1868 and because no black House members voted in favor of impeaching Clinton in 1998, Demings and her black Democratic colleagues were the first African Americans to ever cast a vote to impeach a president. When Senate Majority Leader and Trump ally Mitch McConnell declared that he would work closely with the White House during the trial, Demings demanded that he recuse himself; in her words, “The moment Senator McConnell takes the oath of impartiality required by the Constitution, he will be in violation of that oath. He has effectively promised to let President Trump manage his own impeachment trial. The senator must withdraw.” She was also chosen as one of seven impeachment managers; she is one of three women, one of two African Americans, one of two from a southern state, and the only one who is not an attorney. Because there were no women in Congress in 1868 and because no women were selected as managers in 1998, Demings is also one of the first three women to ever serve in this role. The trial is currently underway. During her presentation of evidence before the Senate, she asserted “As a career law enforcement officer, I have never seen anyone take such extreme steps to hide evidence allegedly proving his innocence. And I do not find that here today. The president is engaged in this cover-up because he is guilty, and he knows it.” Although she was largely unknown outside her district before the investigations began, her experience as a police officer, her tough public image, and Florida’s importance in the Electoral College have led some in the Democratic Party to see her as a potential vice-presidential nominee. She has declined to comment on this speculation, but in a recent speech she said “Only in this nation can a little black girl – from Jacksonville, Florida, the youngest of seven children, grew up in a two-bedroom, wood-frame house, mother cleaned houses for a living and father was a janitor who went to work every day – grow up to be the first woman to serve as chief at the Orlando Police Department and doggone it, be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown

Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown (1927-2011), nurse and educator. Hazel Winifred Johnson was born in the eastern Pennsylvania town of West Chester and grew up on a farm in nearby Malvern, one of seven children and part of the only black family in the area. Her parent’s strict childrearing practices and her responsibilities in helping to run the farm and care for her younger siblings helped her develop a sense of discipline that proved greatly useful later in life; “I was always a planner, she recalled, “I was always one that wanted to get things taken care of and in order.” Although she grew up during the Depression, her family’s ability to raise a wide variety of crops, including tomatoes that they sold to the Campbell’s soup company, kept them out of poverty; “We didn’t know anything about being hungry. We knew everything about not having any money,” she humorously remembered, “but we didn’t know anything about being hungry.” When their neighbors antagonized them with racial slurs, her parents told her that “You’re not that. Don’t even consider it. Someone else has a problem. That’s their problem; they don’t know who they are, and if they have that kind of insecurity, don’t buy into being insecure too.” A local nurse inspired her to pursue a nursing career, but when she applied to the nearby Chester School of Nursing, she was told that its program “we’ve never had a black person in our nursing program, and we never will.” The nurse who had inspired her helped her gain admission to the Harlem School of Nursing, from which she graduated in 1950. She then worked in the hospital’s emergency ward for three years, helping drug addicts and other members of the economically deprived neighborhood, before moving to Philadelphia, where she took courses at Villanova and worked in the cardiovascular ward at the Veterans Administration Hospital, rising to the rank of head nurse in three months.

In 1955 a military recruiter noticed Johnson-Brown’s organizational skills and encouraged her to join the U.S. Army, and she agreed to do so because it would give her the opportunity to travel. Her first assignment was in the surgical ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, followed by an obstetrical unit at Camp Zama in Japan. She briefly returned to civilian life at the VA hospital in Philadelphia before reenlisting in 1958. Upon resuming her military career, she served hospitals in Washington State and San Francisco while finishing her bachelor’s degree and earning a master’s degree in nursing education at Columbia University. She was also initiated into Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She was teaching at the hospital in San Francisco when the U.S. escalated its involvement in the Vietnam War, sending half a million troops and thousands of support personnel. One of them was meant to be Johnson-Brown, who was scheduled to work with a new type of portable hospital, but a lung infection prevented her from going. The nurse who was sent in her place was later killed in an attack. Johnson-Brown instead worked in supervisory roles at hospitals in Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington D.C., and Japan, including serving as project director at the U.S. Army Research and Development Command. In these roles she helped train nurses heading to Vietnam and developed new sterilization techniques that reduced surgical infections. This work remained vital even after the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam in 1973 due to the 150,000 veterans returning home with injuries. In 1976 she was named director and assistant dean of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing while also completing a Ph.D. in educational administration from Catholic University. In 1978 she was named chief nurse at a hospital in South Korea, but that assignment ended a year later when President Jimmy Carter nominated her to become the sixteenth chief of the Army Nurse Corps. She was confirmed to this position and simultaneously promoted to brigadier general. This made her the first African American to hold this role, the first chief to hold a doctoral degree, the fourth to hold the rank of brigadier general, and the first black female general in Army history.

While serving chief of the Army Nurse Corps from 1979 to 1983, General Johnson commanded 7,000 nurses in the Army National Guard and Army Reserves, eight Army medical centers, fifty-six community hospitals, and 143 clinics around the world. She helped to create scholarships and a summer nursing camp for ROTC nursing students, improved quality control at treatment facilities, encouraged Army nurses to pursue graduate degrees and to conduct and publish research, created management opportunities for nurses, and initiated a conference to help nurses help plan the future of the Corps. She later reflected on the leadership skills needed to manage such vast operations by stating “I never really thought about it as power. I thought of it more as being able to accomplish my job.” Although the armed forces had been officially desegregated several years before Johnson-Brown began her four decades of service, racism and sexism were still major obstacles. Her ability to solve problems and refusal to accept mistreatment earned the respect of most of her peers, though, and for the rest her message was “You have a problem, and you really need to think about dealing with it, because I’m moving on, and one of these days I might be your boss, so it might be smart to not be stupid.” On one occasion at a hot dog stand in Philadelphia, the server ignored her and her mother while attending to white customers who had come later, and when the food was finally delivered, she turned it away, saying “Now you eat it.” Johnson-Brown ended her military career in 1983, having received the Distinguished Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal with Oak Cluster, and Army Nurse of the Year award. She became an administrative consultant for the American Nurses’ Association, later rising to director of its office of governmental affairs. She also served as a professor in the nursing schools at Georgetown and George Mason University, co-founding the Center for Health Policy to help nurses become more involved in this aspect of medical care. When the U.S. went to war again in 1990 through Operation Desert Storm, the 63-year-old retired general volunteered to work in the surgical ward at the army hospital in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. She retired from teaching in 1997 but continued to serve on numerous university and health administration boards until Alzheimer’s disease took its toll. After her death in 2011, Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. An administrator at the Chester hospital that had once turned her away declared that she “demonstrated individual perseverance to rise above the many barriers facing African American women and men in the last century. We all have much to learn from her life. It is also important to be reminded of how far our society has advanced in the past 70 years, and the work that still lies before us.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Grant Fuhr

Grant Fuhr (1962- ), hockey player. Fuhr was born to a white teenage mother and adopted by a white couple in Spruce Grove, a small town near Edmonton in the province of Alberta. His parents were initially concerned that they would not be able to instill a sense of racial pride in their son, but as his mother later said, “We asked him to be fair in his judgments, to not judge a person – or himself – on social or economic standing, but on their honesty and integrity.” He began playing hockey at the age of five and immediately took to goaltending, later recalling, “There was something about the equipment I liked and something about the challenge.” Ironically, growing up in a predominantly white area benefited his future career; if he had lived in eastern Canada, he probably would have been steered towards basketball. In 1981, the Edmonton Oilers made him the 8^th overall pick in the NHL Entry Draft. Fuhr quickly established himself as one of the best goaltenders in hockey history. During his ten seasons in Edmonton, he was named to the All-Star Team five times, becoming the first black player so honored, and the Oilers won the Stanley Cup championship five times. He was especially dominant during the playoffs, giving up less than three goals per game during these games, and he was also skilled at getting the Oilers' high-scoring offense started; in 1984, he set the single-season record for points scored by a goaltender. His best overall year was 1987, when he led his country to victory in the Canada Cup (an international tournament that featured the six best hockey nations in the world), won another Stanley Cup, finished second in MVP voting, and was awarded the Vezina Trophy as the best goaltender in the league.

In the early 1990s, Fuhr began struggling with injuries and substance abuse and was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs, part of the dismantling of one of the greatest dynasties in NHL history. After moving on to the Buffalo Sabres, a team that had previously experienced little success, he led them to the second round of the playoffs in 1994. That year he was awarded the William M. Jennings Trophy for giving up the fewest goals of any goalkeeper in the league; due to his continuing injuries, he shared the award with his backup Dominik Hasek, who under Fuhr’s mentorship developed into a fellow all-time great. While playing for Buffalo, however, he was also denied membership in a nearby country club that had admitted several of his teammates, and although the club denied that racism was a factor, someone burned a swastika onto one of the golfing greens. The club eventually apologized to Fuhr and offered him a membership, which he rejected. In 1995 he signed with the St. Louis Blues, and despite his many injuries, he set NHL records by playing in 76 consecutive games and 79 games overall. In the playoffs that year, he suffered serious knee injuries that ended his season. He continued on for several more years, becoming the third winningest goaltender in Blues history and also playing for the Calgary Flames, where he earned his 400^th career win and mentored a fellow black Canadian and goalkeeper Fred Brathwaite, before retiring in 2000. His 403 career wins made him eighth all time in NHL history and currently ranks him fourteenth, and his 92 playoff victories and 31 shutouts also rank among the all-time greats. In 2003 he became the first black player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. During his induction speech, he reflected that “It’s an extra special honor to be the first man of color in the Hockey Hall of Fame. It just shows that hockey is such a diverse sport that anybody can be successful in it, and I’m proud of that.” He has become a role model for the NHL’s increasing number of black players, stating that he is “flattered” to be in this position. Nearly two decades after his retirement, only seven other black players have followed him in being named to the All-Star Team. He is also ranked 70^th on The Hockey News’ list of the 100 all-time greatest hockey players, and in 2003 his number 31 was retired by the Oilers. A year later, he became the goaltender coach for the Phoenix Coyotes, working alongside head coach and former teammate Wayne Gretzky, who has often stated that Fuhr is the best goaltender of all time. He served in that position until 2009 and since 2014 has been co-owner and director of golf at a country club in California. In 2015 he wrote his autobiography Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion, and in 2019 he became the subject of the documentary Making Coco: The Grant Fuhr Story, in which he summarizes his successes and challenges by stating simply “You make bad choices and you can still succeed in life even if you make bad choices. You have to live and learn.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua

Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua (c. 1742-1781), Peruvian revolutionary. Details on Bastidas’ early life are limited but suggest that she was born in Pampamarca, a community in southern Peru. This area had once been part of the Inka Empire, the largest empire in Native American history, which stretched 3,000 miles along the Andes Mountains in South America. In the 1500s, the Spanish conquered the empire and killed the last Inka emperor Thupaq Amaru (whose name is often Hispanicized as Túpac Amaru). War, disease, and the brutal Spanish labor system caused the Native American population of Peru to drop from 9 million in 1520 to 600,000 in 1650. In part because of this massive population decline, the Spanish also brought thousands of enslaved Africans to work on Peruvian farms and mines, and eventually there were many people of mixed Native American and African ancestry. One of these was Bastidas. Although some scholars have argued that she was of Native American and white ancestry or even completely white, this is due in part to the fact that respected people of mixed ancestry were officially labeled as mostly or wholly white so that they could receive certain privileges without running the risk of racial equality for all. Although the Spanish pressured both Native Americans and Africans to assimilate into Spanish culture, most people in places like where Bastidas grew up had preserved their Qhichwha (also spelled Quechua) language, Inka culture, and knowledge of their heritage, while African slaves had done the same with their cultures. There were dozens of rebellions against Spain throughout the 1700s, but anger at colonial rule grew even greater in the 1770s due to an economic decline and a tax increase that was levied to fund Spain’s involvement in the American War of Independence. This led to the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in 1780, led by Bastidas and her husband José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who claimed descent from the last Inka emperor and changed his name to Túpac Amaru II.

Although the rebels were inspired by their memory of the Inka past, Bastidas and Amaru created a diverse coalition of Inka, black slaves, free blacks, people of mixed ancestry, and whites, seeking to create a new, independent, multiracial country. While Amaru led troops in the field against Spain, Bastidas stayed in the city of San Felipe de Tungasuca and led the logistical efforts. This involved recruiting new troops, paying them, supplying villages and the troops with food and supplies, helping villagers travel safely, and enforcing loyalty to the rebellion. She spent a great deal of time fighting acts of banditry, arguing that the independence struggle would not be used as an excuse to further exploit Native Americans; “it is necessary,” she concluded, “that these thieves leave the town or pay with their own lives.” Another letter to local officials ordered them to help stop the mistreatment of Native Americans “to completely ruin the source of all the aggravation and bad government.” She also demanded that Catholic priests be protected because they were held in high esteem and because she did not want the Spanish to attack the rebellion as anti-religious. Bastidas personally led troops in battle on several occasions, writing Amaru that “The enemy from Paruro is in Acos; I am going forward to attack them, even if it costs me my life.” When she heard that he was in danger in a town twenty-two miles away, she walked there to rescue him or, as one witness later recalled, “to die where her husband died.” The troops called her La Reina (“the queen”) and carried wooden carvings of her likeness into battle, while local officials addressed her as Senora Gobernadora ("Madam Governor") or Muy Senora mia y toda mi veneracion ("My most venerated Lady”) and one grudgingly admitted that she commanded “with more authority and rigor than her husband.” In a time when both Inka and Spanish society saw women as second-class citizens and when most people of African descent were slaves or poor free people, Bastidas was likely the most powerful black and Native American woman, and possibly the most powerful woman of any race, in all of Latin America.

In 1781 Bastidas urged Amaru to attack the major city of Qosqo (also spelled “Cusco”), writing “I have warned you again and again not to dally…I am already a shadow, and of myself and beside myself with anxiety, and so I beg you to get on with this business.” His delay enabled the Spanish to bring in thousands more troops from throughout South America. This in turn caused some members of the rebellion to conclude that the war was lost and that they should save themselves by betraying its leaders. Bastidas and her family were captured, and although Spain typically did not try women for treason on the grounds that they were incapable of committing it, they made an exception for her. One witness stated that “In Micaela one could see more rebelliousness, arrogance and pride than in her husband; for that reason she became more terrible than he.” Some argued that because of her gender she should be imprisoned rather than executed, but court officials would only agree to her being strangled with an iron collar rather than hanged. After being forced to watch her son’s death Bastidas was placed in the collar, but her neck was too small for it to work properly, so she was strangled to death. Her head was placed on a pike in a public place, her body was burned, and her property was destroyed. She and her husband and son were among the roughly 100,000 people of Native American ancestry to die in the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II. The Spanish tried to prevent further uprisings by the gruesome public executions and by banning the Qhichwha language, the wearing of Inka clothing, and the mere mention of Inka culture and history. This proved unsuccessful. Resistance against Spain continued until Peru finally gained its independence in 1826. The new government abolished the African slave trade and created a plan to gradually free all remaining slaves, although this took until 1854 to complete and Peruvians of black and Native American ancestry continue to face discrimination to this day. Despite Spanish efforts to eradicate Inka and black cultures, Afro-Peruvian culture has become famous around the world, while Qhichwha is the world’s most widely spoken Native American language with more than 10 million speakers. In Bastidas’ native southern Peru, a district (equivalent to a county) and the Universidad Nacional Micaela Bastidas de Apurímac were named for her. In New York in 1972, Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua’s legacy of cultural pride and resistance to oppression lived on in a new way: the one-year old son of an African American revolutionary was renamed Tupac Amaru Shakur by his mother, who explained that “I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world. I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Keith "Guru" Elam

Keith “Guru” Elam (1966-2010), musician. Elam was born in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, the son of a judge and the co-director of the public school library system. He earned a degree in business administration from Morehouse College and also took courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology before deciding to pursue a career in music. He began rapping under the name MC Keithy E but quickly changed it to Guru, short for “Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal.” In 1987 he and a young producer named Christopher “DJ Premier” Martin founded the group Gang Starr, which released its debut album No More Mr. Nice Guy two years later. The duo became some of the first artists to combine hip hop and jazz elements; for example, their single “Manifest” included a sample from Dizzy Gillespie’s classic standard “A Night in Tunisia,” and a track entitled “Jazz Thing” was featured in Spike Lee’s 1990 film Mo’ Better Blues. Gang Starr went on to release four more critically acclaimed albums during the next decade: No More Mr. Nice Guy (1990), Daily Operation (1992), Hard to Earn (1994), and Moment of Truth (1998). Although many rap artists were criticized for violent, misogynistic or materialistic lyrics, Guru’s socially conscious rhymes earned him respect and acclaim. As one scholar of hip hop has written, “They just had that kind of an impact where anyone who ever heard them could never really think about approaching a song the same way after that, and that’s the sign of a truly legendary, groundbreaking group.’’ Using his trademark monotone style, he frequently commented on racism, black-on-black crime, sexism, racial pride, the black family, and other issues within the black community. On his song “Robin Hood Theory,” for example, he declared “If I wasn’t kicking rhymes, I’d be kicking in doors/Creating social justice and defending the poor,” while on “2 Deep” he declared “Unite or perish is the message that I cherish/That goes for my people of all religions/If we’re all black why have so many divisions?/Superficial divisions are tearing us apart/Don’t let it happen, let’s put some respect back in.” Despite the group’s refusal to create a more commercialized sound that would sell more records, Moment of Truth and a 1999 greatest hits compilation were both certified gold for more than 500,000 copies sold.

Guru also made guest appearances on songs by many other artists and mentored younger rappers such Jeru the Damaja and Bahamadia, while his lyrics and fusion of diverse musical styles helped to influence other socially conscious artists like Common, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, and Kendrick Lamar. Guru’s interest in jazz also resulted in the 1993 solo album Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1, which featured him rapping over beats provided by musicians such as Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, and N’Dea Davenport. The album’s success led to three other volumes in the Jazzmatazz series in 1995, 2000 and 2007, featuring collaborators such as Branford Marsalis, Chaka Khan, Bob James and Ronnie Laws. Georgia rapper Killer Mike later recalled the influence that these albums had on him in his tribute song “Guru Salute,” saying “Who’d of thought a country boy from deep in Atlanta, brah/Would be so affected by Jeru the Damaja/And by Guru, and by Primo/A half a million kids across the country to Chino/Learned about jazz ‘cause of Jazzmatazz/The Sony Walkman was the musical class.”

After the 2003 album The Ownerz, Gang Starr group disbanded due to creative differences. Guru continued his solo career with new producers, releasing two additional albums to mixed reviews and limited success. He and Premier began discussing a reunion, but these plans ended when he went into cardiac arrest and then a coma on February 28, 2010; it was later revealed that he had been suffering from multiple myeloma for several years. He died on April 19 at the age of 43, survived by his parents, wife, and son. Tributes came in from throughout the rap world, including his former partner Premier, who wrote “I will cherish everything we created together as Gang Starr, forever…His rhyme flows were insane, and I will never remove him from my heart and soul.” As time passed and hip hop music entered its fifth decade, Guru’s reputation as one of the all-time greats only grew; for instance, in the first season of the television show Luke Cage, all sixteen episodes were named after Gang Starr songs. In 2019 Premier took thirty unreleased Guru recordings, some only a few seconds long, and molded them into complete songs with new beats (including an appearance by Guru’s son) to create Gang Starr’s final album One of the Best Yet.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Paul R. Williams

Paul R. Williams (1894-1980), architect. Paul Revere Williams was born in Los Angeles, which was then a mid-sized city with a black population around 2,000. His parents, who had moved from Memphis to seek a better climate for their tuberculosis, died when he was four, but his foster mother provided a stable environment and encouraged his interests in art, while her builder friend exposed him to architecture. He was the only black student in his elementary school and high school, where he became known for carrying his sketchbooks and pencils with him everywhere. When he told a guidance counselor that he wanted to be an architect, the man “stared at me with as much astonishment as he would have had I proposed a rocket flight to Mars,” then exclaimed “Whoever heard of a Negro being an architect?” In response, the teenager decided that “If I allow the fact that I am a Negro to checkmate my will to do now, I will inevitably form the habit of being defeated…Therefore, I owe it to myself and to my people to accept this challenge.” After finishing high school, he took night classes at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and apprenticed at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, even while being told “Your own people can’t afford you, and White clients won’t hire you.” He used the phone book to create an alphabetical list of every architect in LA and then visited each one in search of a job, but he was only offered the position of office boy. After a week of working in this position without pay, though, he was promoted. In 1914 he won a student competition to design a civic center in Pasadena, the first of several such prizes that he would garner over the next few years. In order to strengthen his understanding of math and physics, he studied architectural engineering at the University of Southern California, designing other buildings while still in school and pledging Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

In 1921 Williams became the first certified black architect west of the Mississippi River. He worked for a white architect for several years, rising to the rank of chief draftsman and becoming the first black member of the American Institute of Architects, before leaving to start his own business. He later remarked that “Without having the wish to ‘show them,’ I developed a fierce desire to ‘show myself’…I wanted to vindicate every ability I had. I wanted to acquire new abilities. I wanted to prove that I, AS AN INDIVIDUAL, deserved a place in the world.” His career coincided with Los Angeles becoming one of the largest cities in the West due to the oil and motion picture industries, and Williams was in demand to help the city grow. Many of his early works were private homes for business executives and movie stars such as Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Lon Chaney, Barbara Stanwyck, and Danny Thomas. One real estate agent in the Beverly Hills area where many of these homes were built later called him “the Jackie Robinson of architecture.” As his reputation grew, Williams also began designing larger buildings for commercial, public, and broader occupancy use, including: the Los Angeles Superior Courthouse, the seat of government for Los Angeles County, the Beverly Sunset Medical Center, the Saks Fifth Avenue store, the Theme Building, the Beverly Hills Hotel, Perino’s restaurant, several schools, the MCA Building (which won him the AIA’s Award of Merit in 1939), and the Imperial Courts and Pueblo del Rio housing projects. The Los Angeles Times later reflected that ““If you have a picture in your mind of Southern California in the 1950s and early 1960s, you are quite likely picturing a building created by Paul Williams.” He also designed many structures for black community institutions, including: Angelus Funeral Home (the first incorporated black business in California), the 28^th Street YMCA, the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall, the First AME Church (the oldest black church in LA), the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building (the largest black insurance company in the West), Broadway Federal Savings and Loan (the oldest black bank west of the Mississippi), and Second Baptist Church. His desire for racial uplift also led him to serve on Los Angeles’ first housing commission. Although most of his designs were in the Los Angeles area, he also created the Hotel Nutibara in Colombia, several churches and hotels in Las Vegas, the Langston Terrace housing project in Washington D.C., several buildings at Howard University, and St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis. Some of these works are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which preserves buildings of architectural and/or historic significance.

Williams’ many designs earned notoriety for their diversity in size and use and in architectural styles. One critic noted that he was “remarkably sensitive to changes in architectural fashion. He endeavored to retain a foothold in the past while transforming it with a sense of contemporaneity.” He himself described his approach to design by stating that “Planning is thinking beforehand how something is to be made or done, and mixing imagination with the product – which in a broad sense makes all of us planners. The only difference is that some people get a license to get paid for thinking and the rest of us just contribute our good thoughts to our fellow man.” Neither his skills nor the need for these buildings, though, could overcome racial prejudice. Many prospective clients came to his office knowing his reputation but not his race, and in his words, “The moment…they met me and discovered they were dealing with a Negro, I could see many of them freeze. Their interest in discussing plans waned instantly and their one remaining concern was to discover a convenient exit without hurting my feelings.” Even those who hired him were uncomfortable sitting next to him while he drew designs for them, and so he mastered the art of drawing upside down so that they could sit across the table while he worked. Some of the subcontractors and artisans working on the home did not want to take orders from him. Many of the homes that he built were on land with had restrictive covenants which barred African Americans from living there; as his granddaughter later ironically remarked, “Here was this man designing mansions in places he couldn’t dream of living.”

During World War II, Williams worked for the Navy and designed a naval station in Long Beach. The war brought thousands of African Americans and millions of people overall to Los Angeles, and this and the growing Civil Rights Movement helped increase his national profile. His books The Small Home of Tomorrow and New Homes of Today to help returning veterans purchase their own homes, and he also wrote numerous essays on housing for Ebony magazine, whose editor later wrote that “He was very concerned with the problem of low-income housing, especially for African-Americans…He showed this by his tremendous commitment in writing and speaking about the issue. He was thinking about how you can build something for yourself with a small amount of money.” During the 1950s he received the Man of the Year award from Omega Psi Phi, the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, an award from Wisdom magazine for “contributions to knowledge and distinguished service to mankind,” and honorary doctorates from three universities. He also became the first black member of the AIA’s College of Fellows. When he retired in 1973, he had designed more than 3,000 structures. His health began to fail from diabetes, but when his family took him for drives around Los Angeles, he often saw one of his buildings, smiled, and said “That’s a fine piece of work.” His funeral was held in a church that he had created. Several years after his death, one of the mansions that he had designed earned new fame when it was used in the TV show The Colbys, a spinoff of Dynasty. In a sadly ironic commentary on race relations, many of his drawings and other records were accidentally destroyed during the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion, caused by the acquittal of police officers for the beating of black motorist Rodney King. In 2015 the city of Los Angeles built a memorial plaza for Williams near his Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building. Two years later he was given the Gold Medal by the AIA, whose leader noted that “His pioneering career has encouraged others to cross a chasm of historic biases. I can't think of another architect whose work embodies the spirit of the Gold Medal better. His recognition demonstrates a significant shift in the equity for the profession and the institute…Our profession desperately needs more architects like Paul Williams.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Claudia Jones

Claudia Jones (1915-1964), journalist and civil rights activist. Jones was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the daughter of a journalist. When the local economy collapsed after World War I, her family moved to Harlem. Her mother’s death and the onset of the Great Depression forced them into such impoverished living conditions that she contracted tuberculosis when she was only seventeen. Despite being an excellent student, a lack of funds prevented her from attending college, so she worked in a laundry, a factory, and several other jobs around Harlem. She also began writing a column called “Claudia Comments” for a local newspaper. In 1936 Jones joined the Communist Party, believing that it was more committed to racial justice than any of the mainstream political parties, and quickly rose up the organizational ladder with her writing and organizational skills. She lectured around the country on civil rights, human rights and economic justice and helped organized unemployed youth in Harlem. She also took a leadership role in civil rights organizations such as the National Negro Congress and the New Jersey Labor School. Her “Negro Affairs” column in the CP newspaper Daily Worker criticized colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, and the exploitation of working people, but she was especially concerned about poor black women, who she labeled victims of triple oppression.

All of this caused her to come under attack from the federal government. The FBI began monitoring her activity in 1943, and she was arrested three times, suffering a heart attack during her imprisonment. Despite rallies held in her support by thousands of other activists, she was finally deported to Britain (Trinidad was still a British colony at the time) in 1955. As part of the early wave of migration of Caribbean blacks to London, Jones immediately became involved in the struggle for social justice in Britain. She joined the British Communist Party and created the newspaper West Indian Gazette, which became a popular publication in the black community of Notting Hill. Through her columns, speeches and other activities, Jones fought racism in immigration laws, housing, education and employment. Still a committed Marxist, she also traveled to Russia and China to meet with political leaders there. After the murder of a young West Indian man and the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, in which more than 300 working-class white men attacked the neighborhood, Jones tried a new tactic. Saying that “a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom,” she organized the Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of West Indian culture; it was her belief that if white Brits became more educated about the heritage of the country’s new arrivals, intolerance would be replaced by multicultural understanding. Notting Hill Carnival is now one of the largest street festivals in Europe, drawing over 1 million people each year. Only a few years later, though, tuberculosis and heart disease finally caught up with her. Claudia Jones died on Christmas Eve in 1964 and was buried near the grave of Karl Marx in London. In 2002, the “Mother of Notting Hill Carnival” was named #39 on the British Broadcasting Company’s “100 Great Black Britons” list. Though largely unknown in the United States a half-century after her deportation, Claudia Jones is still revered by blacks and labor activists in England, having worked tirelessly during her short life on behalf of racial minorities and workers of all races on both sides of the Atlantic.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

John Kizell

John Kizell (c. 1760-?), international entrepreneur and abolitionist. Many of the details of Kizell’s early life, including his birth date and name, are unknown. He was born around 1760 in the Gallinas River region on the coast of West Africa. This era was the peak of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the largest forced migration in world history, in which 12 million people from West and Central Africa were sold to Europeans and taken to the Americas in slave ships, including 8,000 to South Carolina in the year 1773. One of those was probably thirteen-year-old Kizell, who was living with his uncle when he was seized by a neighboring ethnic group and sold as a domestic servant. Although Gallinas custom banned selling slaves to Europeans unless they had committed a crime, many masters got around the ban by falsely accusing their servants of crimes; in Kizell’s case, witchcraft. He survived the ship voyage across the Atlantic Ocean that killed on average 10-33% of the slaves before arriving in Charleston, home to one of the largest African populations in the Americas. There he was sold to a white family that owned a tavern and gave him the name John Kizell. He learned to speak, read, and write English, and like other Africans he developed a new identity not as a member of an ethnic group but as a black person, in part because of the legal and social climate which declared all people of African ancestry inferior to whites. He may have also been influenced by Charleston’s many slaves who operated small businesses on behalf of their owners. Kizell also arrived at a time of great political unrest that in 1775 erupted into the American War of Independence. Although white Patriot leaders like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had no intention of applying their ideas about liberty to African Americans, they became an important part of the war anyway. When Britain promised freedom to any Patriot-owned slave who fought for them, Kizell and thousands of others fled from their masters and joined the so-called Ethiopian Regiment. He became an army cook before being captured at the Battle of King’s Mountain but then escaped and fled to New York. When the war ended in 1783, the government of the new United States demanded that Kizell and the other Black Loyalists be returned to their masters, but the British government evacuated them from New York and sent many to Port Roseway, a small town in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Although they were free, the government did not give them the same land grants as it did to white veterans, their employers refused to pay them, they were forced to live in holes in the ground, and many died of disease and exposure. After several years Kizell and others decided that white society would never treat them fairly and that they should go to Africa. This was supported by many people in Britain, who hoped that sending free blacks to their ancestral continent would not only remove them from white society but also spread white culture in Africa. For this reason, in 1787 the British government established the colony of Sierra Leone. Five years later Kizell, his family, and nearly 1,200 other black Canadians sailed back across the ocean to the Sierra Leonean settlement of Granville Town. This was close to his home region on the Gallinas River, making him one of only a few former slaves who returned not just to Africa but to his specific place of origin.

In Granville Town Kizell helped establish a Baptist church and became one of its ministers, but he was also respectful of African customs and did not want Africans to simply assimilate into white culture. As historian Kevin G. Lowther has written, “[whites] regarded witchcraft and superstition as inherently wrong and emblematic of an inferior culture. Kizell, however, understood these in the context of the people’s worldview…[He] knew that witchcraft and magic were often manipulated for personal gain – to obtain slaves, for instance – but he also knew that these were more real than [whites] could credit.” He also hoped that West Africans could develop coffee and ginger crops that could be sold to Europeans and Americans, creating an international economy based on agriculture rather than slavery. This was part of his broader goal of making Sierra Leone an independent black nation where people of African descent could thrive free of whites. On one occasion he called on “all our Breathren who may Come from the British Colonies or from America and Become farmers in order to help us Cultivate the Land,” while on another he told a visiting American that “Africa is the land of black men, and to Africa they must and will come…They have not forfeited a right to the inheritance of their forefathers, by being carried by force from their country.” These efforts led him to meet with local African leaders to try to convince them to stop slave trading. He told one group “You must be sensible that the Slave Trade cannot be carried on much longer…[only farming will enable you to] rise above the poverty which renders you so dependent on Europe…If the inhabitants of Europe had sold each other…do you suppose that we should have the ships and fleets, and armies, and riches, as we now have?” On another occasion he drew on Biblical language to plead his case, declaring that “the blood of their people cried out against them, and that God had heard it. They had killed the poor of the land; the people that should work the land; and had sold them to fill their bellies. All their people were gone or going to other countries. They allowed the Slave Trade to stop their ears, and blind their eyes: for a little rum and tobacco they allowed their people to be carried off, and said nothing.” He also met with British officials in Sierra Leone and Europe, experimented with various crops, financed the construction of a sailing ship, ran a trading business, and partnered with an African American shipowner to establish trade networks between Africa and America. Unfortunately, most whites were not interested in ending slavery or in black economic independence. Even after Britain ended the slave trade in the 1800s, it made little effort to stop slave ships from working in a business that was now illegal. Kizell also had to deal with armed conflicts between the settlers and local Africans, the British government, and each other.  In 1794 he traveled to Britain to testify on behalf of settlers who had been falsely accused of treason, also using this trip to purchase merchandise to sell back home. In 1806 he mediated a truce between two slave traders and thus helped stabilize the region. He helped integrate freed captives from slave ships into the settler society and adopted one boy who like him had been stolen from his family as a teenager. When the United States created the neighboring settlement of Liberia, Kizell wrote one of its leaders to declare that “‘Rachel mourneth for her children,’ and ‘will not be comforted till they come home.’” His last known activity is an 1830 letter to the settler government informing them that he had taken a slave trader into custody. Nothing is known of his life or death after that. In the end, his efforts to create a strong, independent black nation were defeated by more powerful desires to continue exploiting Africa and its people. His ideas about blacks returning to Africa and gaining political and economic autonomy, though, helped pave the way for later activists like Marcus Garvey and Angela Davis, and in 1961 Sierra Leone finally gained its independence from British rule.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman

Anna Arnold Hedgeman (1899-1990), writer and activist. Anna Arnold was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, the granddaughter of former slaves. When she was young her family moved to Anoka, Minnesota, where they were the only African Americans in the area. She attended Hamline University, a small Methodist college in Minneapolis, where a visit by W.E.B. DuBois, who offered an “image of black men of poise, dignity and intelligence, who were determined to be free” inspired her to become an educator. After graduation she took a position teaching English and history at Rust College in Mississippi. It was here, though, that she also experienced racial segregation and rural black poverty for the first time, and she decided to return to the North and fight inequality there. She took a job with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Springfield, Ohio, but she quickly learned that African Americans were confined to segregated, inferior facilities. She then moved on to executive positions in Philadelphia and the New York area, where she had “equipment with which to work and the challenge of the largest Negro community in the nation.” Her efforts at the YWCA became even more important during the Great Depression, when the poverty that she had dedicated her life to fighting against became much greater.

During World War II, Hedgeman turned her attention to the problem of racism in the defense industry, fighting unsuccessfully for a federal law that would have banned discrimination by companies that had government contracts. After the war, she served as assistant dean of women at Howard University, worked for Harry Truman’s presidential election campaign, and became an administrator with the Office of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1954, Hedgeman was appointed the first African American woman member of a mayoral cabinet in New York, serving in Robert Wagner’s administration as a liaison for the city’s international guests. After leaving this position, she became an editor and columnist for the African American newspaper New York Age, also publishing two books: The Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership (1964) and The Gift of Chaos: Decades of American Discontent (1977). In 1960, she traveled to Ghana to give the keynote address for the first Conference of the Women of Africa and of African Descent. Three years later, Hedgeman took a position with the National Council of Churches, helping to mobilize more than 30,000 white Protestants to take part in the March on Washington later that year; she also protested the lack of women speakers at the historic event. Her work with the National Council of Churches also helped ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. In 1966, she co-founded the National Organization of Women (NOW), the nation’s largest feminist organization, and chaired its Task Force on Women in Poverty. In 1970, she and her husband founded Hedgeman Consultant Services, using this to facilitate her lecturing, teaching, and consulting on race relations at schools and universities throughout the over the next two decades. She was also involved in organizations such as the Child Study Association, Urban League, NAACP, United Nations Association, Advisory Committee on Alcoholism, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. She died in Harlem in 1990 after seventy years of public service, based on the four principles that her parents had instilled in her as a child: “education, religion, character, and service to mankind.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Marielle Franco

Marielle Franco (1979-2018), Brazilian activist and politician. Marielle Francisco da Silva was born to poor parents in Maré, one of the largest favelas (“slums”) in Brazil. The favelas were originally created by former slaves and other poor Brazilians in the hills outside Rio de Janeiro, and their millions of residents (favelados) have long suffered from unemployment, lack of sanitation and medical care, high crime rates, police brutality, and other problems. Franco often walked past dead bodies on her way to school and on some occasions had to stay home because of shootings. She began working when she was eleven to pay for her education and won a scholarship to the Pontifica Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro), one of the top universities in Latin America. Although more than half of Brazil's population is of African ancestry. Franco was one of only two black students at her institution, and she completed her degree in social sciences while also raising a daughter without support from the father. During her college years, the death of a close friend from a stray bullet fired in a shootout between police and gang members caused her to become more interested in attacking the country’s social ills. Her ideology was also shaped by involvement in a Catholic church that espoused the doctrine of liberation theology, which uses Jesus’ teachings to fight for economic and political justice. She earned a master's degree in public administration from Universidade Federal Fluminense (Fluminense Federal University), researching the militarization of Rio's police forces and occupation of the favelas. While completing this degree she began working for a state legislator, co-creating a leading a committee that focused on human rights issues. She also worked for non-profit human rights groups such as the Brazil Foundation and the Maré Center for Solidarity Studies and Action. She connected this work to global efforts towards racial, gender, and LGBT justice by learning English so that she could read the works of scholars like Angela Davis and bell hooks. “Black people are useful to serve coffee or clean the floor,” she asserted on one occasion, “If they don’t do that, they’re criminals.”

In 2016 Franco was elected to a seat on the Rio city council as part of the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (Socialism and Liberty Party), receiving the fifth-most votes of more than 1,500 candidates. Although Afro-Brazilians were nearly 50% of the city population, she was the only black woman on the council. During her time on the council she advocated for favelados and for the rights of Afro-Brazilians, LGBT people, women, and the poor throughout Rio. She helped pass bills that improved transportation in the favelas and that fought corruption in the handing out of government contracts to social health organizations. She also chaired the Women’s Defense Commission and supported other bills that would have: extended business hours for daycare centers so that mothers of small children could return to the workforce; improved maternity care; fought sexual harassment and sexual violence, increased low-income housing; increased pay for civil servants; fought the excessive incarceration of black youth; and created days of recognition in Rio for LGBT people, black women, and fugitive slave communities. She also gave a great deal of attention to the ways that militarized police forces, paramilitary groups, and the military itself were increasingly restricting people’s rights. For instance, in 2016 she led a committee that monitored the military’s efforts to keep the poor confined to their favelas during that year’s Summer Olympic Games. Many of these efforts became more difficult as Brazilian politics shifted in a far-right direction. Franco was quickly gaining in influence and notoriety, but she was greatly overshadowed by presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who said that non-Christian religions should be banned and that their practitioners were not “true citizens,” that black activists were “animals” who should “go back to the zoo,” that black and Middle Eastern immigrants were the “scum of humanity,” that one of his female political opponents was “too ugly to rape,” that the current president should be shot, and that he would rather see his sons die than be gay. This rhetoric helped cause increased violence against black, female, LGBT, poor, and politically liberal Brazilians. Nearly 200 politicians and activists were killed between 2013 and 2018, while the police killed more than 4,000 people in 2016 alone. When the military took control of policing in Rio in early 2018, Franco led a government commission to investigate. Shortly thereafter she filed a formal complaint when two young men were killed by the police. After another young man was shot by the police while leaving church, she tweeted “Quantos mais vão precisar morrer para que essa guerra acabe?” (“How many others will have to die for this war to end?”)

This proved to be her last social media statement. The next day she attended an event called Jovens Negras Movendo Estruturas (“Young Black Women Moving Power Structures””), telling the people in attendance “We have to occupy every space with our bodies.” While in her car several days later, another car approached and shot her four times in the head, also killing her driver and wounding another passenger. Because of her activism and because the car windows were tinted, people immediately speculated that she had been assassinated rather than the victim of random violence. Protests were held around the country, with one in Rio drawing 100,000 people. Her name appeared in three million tweets across the world in two days, often with the hastags #MariellePresente (“Marielle Is Here”) and #SayHerName. The question “Who killed Marielle Franco?” began appearing on banners and T-shirts and on graffiti in nearly every Rio neighborhood, as did murals bearing her face. One journalist wrote that “Her relentless and brave activism against the most lawless police battalions, her opposition to miltiary intervention, and, most threateningly of all, her growing power as a black, gay woman from the favela seeking not to join Brazil’s power structure, but to subvert it.” In Paris a public garden was named in her honor, while her political party changed its logo to include her sillhouette and the phrase “Marielle Presente!” The outrage over her death was also channeled into political action, and three other black women were elected to the state legislature; one of them, Franco’s former chief of staff, asserted that “Marielle still represents, if only in memory, a threat to the status quo,” while another said “She was an inspiration...Suddenly you’re no longer invisible in a space where we had always been invisible.” The demands for a proper investigation of her killing also led to the discovery that the bullets which killed her had been purchased by the police and then in March 2019 to the arrest on murder charges of two former police officers who had ties to the family of Bolsonaro, who was elected president that same year. Efforts to complete the work of Marielle Franco continue. In the words of one of her college classmates, “She died because she was a combative black woman...She was executed because she was a black favela dweller who fought against the murder of black favela dwellers. The genocide of the black population continues in this country.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.