Did you guys know that Whoopi Goldberg real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson?  Did you also know that she made her film debut in The Color Purple (1985) playing Celie? A mistreated black woman in the south. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won her first Golden Globe Award for her role in the film. In 1990, she starred as Oda Mae Brown, a psychic helping a slain manPatrick Swayze find his killer in the blockbuster film Ghost. This performance won her a second Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Notable later films include Sister Act (1992) and Sister Act 2 (1993), Made in America (1993), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), Girl, Interrupted (1999) and Rat Race (2001). She is also acclaimed for her role as the bartender Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Goldberg has been nominated for 13 Emmy Awards for her work in television. She was the co-producer and center square of the latest edition game showHollywood Squares from 1998 to 2002. She has achieved success on Broadway and in the music industry, and is one of 10 people who have won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony (EGOT) Awards. In addition, she has won a British Academy Film Award, four People’s Choice Awards and has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Currently, Goldberg is moderator and co-host of The View, which earned her an Emmy in 2009. She is currently the producer of Head Games, a science themed game show.

On September 4, 2007, Goldberg became the new moderator and co-host of The View, replacing Rosie O’Donnell. O’Donnell stated on her official blog that she wanted Goldberg to be moderator. Goldberg’s debut as moderator drew 3.4 million viewers, 1 million fewer than O’Donnell’s debut ratings. After two weeks, however, The View was averaging 3.5 million total viewers under Goldberg, a 7% increase from 3.3 million under O’Donnell the previous season.

Goldberg’s first appearance on the show was controversial when she made statements about Michael Vick’s dogfighting as being “part of his cultural upbringing” and “not all that unusual” in parts of the South. Another comment that stirred controversy was the statement that the Chinese “have a very different relationship to cats” and that “you and I would be very pissed if somebody ate kitty.”

Some defended Goldberg, including her co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, saying that her comments were taken out of context by the press, because she repeated several times that she did not condone what Vick did.^[20]

On more than one occasion, Goldberg has expressed strong disagreement and irritation with different remarks made by Elisabeth Hasselbeck, such as on October 3, 2007, when Hasselbeck commented that Hillary Clinton’s proposed US$ 5,000 baby entitlement might lead to fewer abortions because of women wanting to keep the money.

Goldberg also created controversy when on September 28, 2009, during a discussion of Roman Polanski’s case, she opined that Polanski’s rape of a thirteen year old in 1977 was not “rape-rape”. Goldberg later reasoned that she was “only referring” to the legal charge against Polanksi at the time 30 years ago, which was later classified as statutory rape, i.e. unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and that her comment was not in support of his freedom.

Kudo’s to Whoopi a very accomplished woman who isn’t afraid to be herself.

Nelson (Rolihlahla) Mandela Biography (1918 – )

South African statesman and president (1994-99). Born Rolihlahla Mandela on July 18, 1918 in Transkei, South Africa. Mandela’s father had four wives and Mandela’s mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third. He spent most of his childhood with his mother’s family and was the first member to attend school. It was there that a Methodist teacher gave him the name Nelson, finding Rolihlahla too difficult to pronounce. Nelson’s father died when he was nine, and the boy was adopted by the Regent Jongintaba and groomed to assume high office. As Thembu royalty, Nelson attended Wesleyan mission school, Clarkebury Boarding Institute and Wesleyan college. He studied at Fort Hare University but was asked to leave after boycotting against university policies.

Fleeing an arranged marriage, Mandela ran away to Johannesburg, where he worked a variety of jobs, including guard and clerk, while completing his bachelor’s degree via correspondence. He then enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand to study law. He became actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement and joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1942.

Within the ANC, a small group of young Africans banded together calling themselves the African National Congress Youth League. Their goal was to transform the ANC into a mass grassroots movement, deriving strength from millions of rural peasants and working people who had no voice under the current regime. Specifically, the group believed that the ANC’s old tactics of polite petitioning were ineffective. In 1949, the ANC officially adopted the Youth League’s methods of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-cooperation with policy goals of full citizenship, redistribution of land, trade union rights, and free and compulsory education for all children, among others.

For 20 years, Mandela directed a campaign of peaceful, non-violent defiance against the South African government and its racist policies, including the 1952 Defiance Campaign and the 1955 Congress of the People. He founded the law firm Mandela and Tambo to provide free and low-cost legal counsel to unrepresented blacks.

In 1956, Mandela and 150 others were arrested and charged with treason for their political advocacy, though they were eventually acquitted. Meanwhile, the ANC was being challenged by the Africanists, a new breed of Black activists who believed that the pacifist method of the ANC was ineffective. By 1959, the ANC lost much of its militant support when the Africanists broke away to form the Pan Africanist Congress.

In 1961, Mandela, who was formerly committed to non-violent protest, began to believe that armed struggle was the only way to achieve change. He co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, also known as MK, an armed offshoot of the ANC dedicated to sabotage and guerilla war tactics to end apartheid. He orchestrated a three-day national workers strike in 1961 for which he was arrested in 1962. He was sentenced to five years in prison for the strike, and then brought to trial again in 1963. This time, he and 10 other ANC leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment for political offenses, including sabotage.

Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island for 18 of his 27 years in prison. As a black political prisoner, he received the lowest level of treatment. However, he was able to earn a Bachelor of Laws through a University of London correspondence program while incarcerated. Mandela continued to be such a potent symbol of black resistance that a coordinated international campaign for his release was launched. A 1981 memoir by South African intelligence agent Gordon Winter described a plot by the South African government to plan Mandela’s escape so as to shoot him during the recapture. The plot, which was foiled by British intelligence, exemplified the power and esteem Mandela had in the global political community.

In 1982, Mandela and other ANC leaders were moved to Pollsmoor Prison, allegedly to enable contact between them and the South African government. In 1985, President P.W. Botha offered Mandela’s release in exchange for renouncing armed struggle; the prisoner flatly rejected the offer. With increasing local and international pressure for his release, the government participated with several talks with Mandela over the years, but no deal was ever made. It wasn’t until Botha suffered a stroke and was replaced by Frederik Willem de Klerk that Mandela’s release was announced in February 1990. De Klerk unbanned the ANC, removed restrictions on political groups, and suspended executions.

Upon his release, Mandela immediately urged foreign powers not to reduce their pressure on the South African government for constitutional reform. While he stated his commitment to work toward peace, he declared that the ANC’s armed struggle would continue until the black majority received the right to vote.

Mandela was elected president of the African National Congress in 1991 with lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tombo, serving as National Chairperson. Mandela continued to negotiate with President F.W. de Klerk toward the country’s first multi-racial elections. The negotiations were often strained, and news of violent eruptions, including the assassination of ANC leader Chris Hani, continued throughout the country.

Negotiation prevailed, however, and on April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. Mandela was inaugurated at age 77 as the country’s first black president on May 10, 1994 with de Klerk as his first deputy. In 1993, Mandela shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with de Klerk for their work towards dismantling apartheid, and in 1995 he was awarded the Order of Merit.

Mandela retired from active politics at the 1999 general election but maintained a busy schedule, raising money for his Mandela Foundation to build schools and clinics in South Africa’s rural heartland and serving as a mediator in Burundi’s civil war. He was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in 2001 and in June 2004, at age 85, he announced his formal retirement from public life.

On July 18, 2007, Mandela convened a group of world leaders, including Graca Machel, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson and Muhammad Yunus to address the world’s toughest issues. Named “The Elders,” the group is committed to working publicly and privately to find solutions to problems around the globe. Mandela is also committed to the fight against AIDS, a disease that killed his son, Makgatho Mandela, in 2005.

Mandela was married three times: to Evelyn Ntoko Mase from until 1944-1957, they had four children; to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1958-1996), they had two daughters; and to Graça Machel in 1998.

© 2007 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.

Martin Luther, Jr King Biography (1929 – 1968)

Baptist minister and civil rights leader. Born Michael Luther King, Jr., on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. The grandson and son of Baptist ministers, King grew up singing in his church choir. In 1935, his father changed both of their names to Martin to honor the German Protestant. Young Martin attended segregated public schools and graduated from high school at age 15. In 1948, he received his B.A. degree from Morehouse College in Georgia, the alma mater of both is father and grandfather, and in 1951 he earned is B.D. from Crozer Theological Seminary. While at Crozer, King was elected president of a predominantly white senior class. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. from Boston University, where he also met his future wife, Coretta Scott , with whom he had four children.

King was ordained a minister in 1947 at his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1953 at age 24. Committed to black civil rights from an early age, King was an active member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Relatively untested when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in a bus in December 1955, King led the boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses for over a year. The situation became so intense that he was arrested, he and his family were threatened, and his home was bombed. But eventually the Supreme Court outlawed discrimination in public transportation and King emerged a prominent leader of the civil rights movement.

In 1957, King was elected president of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group designed to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in the interest of civil rights reform. His approach was based on the ideas of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi as well on Christian teachings. A trip to India in 1959 to meet the Gandhi family cemented his belief in nonviolent resistance and his commitment to civil rights in the United States.

In 1959, King moved to Atlanta to become co-pastor of his father’s church, and in the ensuing years gave much of his energies to organizing protest demonstrations and marches in such cities as Birmingham, Alabama (1963), St. Augustine, Florida (1964), and Selma, Alabama (1965). The marches were for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights. The protests won media attention and public sympathy for the indignities suffered by Southern blacks, providing what he called “a coalition of conscience” and bringing the civil rights movement to the forefront of American politics in the 1960s.

Between 1957 and 1968, King canvassed the country and appeared more than 2500 times to speak in protest against injustices toward his race. He wrote five books and numerous articles. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written in 1964, was a manifesto for the revolution, drawing on his experience as a preacher to galvanize and inspire an audience. During these years, King was arrested and jailed by Southern officials on several occasions, was stoned and physically attacked, and his house was bombed. He was also placed under secret surveillance by the FBI due to the strong prejudices of its director, J Edgar Hoover, who wanted to discredit King as both a leftist and a womanizer.

King’s finest hour came on August 28, 1963 when he led the great march in Washington, DC, that culminated with his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the cooperative effort of the Big Six civil rights organizations, SCLC, NAACP, Urban League, SNCC, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the Congress of Racial Equality. An unequivocal success, more than a quarter million people of all ethnicities attended the event, making it the largest gathering of protesters in Washington’s history.

Political success arrived with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At the height of his influence, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 at age 35, becoming the award’s youngest recipient. He turned over the prize money, $54,123, to the movement.

King then used his newfound powers and prestige to attack discrimination in the North. To educate themselves about the plight of Northern blacks, King and Ralph Abernathy moved to Chicago’s slums and helped found The Chicago Freedom Movement. Both reflected that the public reception in Chicago was much worse than in the South, the politics more corrupt, and the threat of violence more dire. Abernathy and King eventually returned to the South, leaving a young Jesse Jackson to continue their work.

Meanwhile, as the Vietnam War began to consume the country, King broadened his criticisms because he saw the impact of the war on the country’s resources and energies. In his April 1967 speech in New York City, King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” His outspoken criticism of American foreign policy caused mainstream American media, once an ally and advocate, to question him.

King was also an advocate of a government compensatory program seeking restitution of wages lost to slavery. In 1968, without the full support of the SCLC, King organized the Poor People’s Campaign, which included a march on Washington D.C. The organization demanded aid for the poorest communities in the United States and sought an economic bill of rights that provided for massive government job programs to reconstruct society. Critics called this switch in agenda a new brand of democratic socialism.

In the spring of 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, to show support for black city workers striking for higher wages and better treatment. He was shot and killed on April 4, 1968 as he stood on the balcony of his motel there. He was 39 years old. The assassination led to a wave of riots in cities nationwide, and President Johnson declared a national day of mourning in his honor. Two months after the shooting, escaped convict James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to the murder, although he later insisted he was innocent.

With an oratorical style that drew directly on the force of the Bible and a serene confidence derived from his non-violent philosophy, King advocated a program of moderation and inclusion. Although later generations would question some of his message, few could deny that he had been the guiding light for 15 of the most crucial years in America’s civil rights struggle. President Carter acknowledged King’s contributions by posthumously awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

© 2007 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.

Oprah Winfrey

(Born Jan. 29, 1954, Kosciusko, Miss., U.S.)

American television personality whose syndicated daily talk show was among the most popular of the genre.

Winfrey moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the age of six to live with her mother. Six years later she was sent to Nashville, Tennessee, to live with her father, who proved to be a positive influence in her life.

At age 19, Winfrey became a news anchor for the local CBS television station. Following her graduation from Tennessee State University in 1976, she was made reporter and coanchor for the ABC news affiliate in Baltimore, Maryland. She found herself constrained by the objectivity required of news reporting, and in 1977 she became cohost of the Baltimore morning show People Are Talking. Winfrey excelled in the casual and personal talk-show format, and in 1984 she moved to Chicago to host the faltering talk show A.M. Chicago. Winfrey’s honest and engaging personality quickly turned the program into a success, and in 1985 it was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. Syndicated nationally in 1986, the program became the highest-rated talk show in television and earned several Emmy Awards.

In 1985 Winfrey appeared in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple. Her critically acclaimed performance led to other roles, including a performance in the television miniseries The Women of Brewster Place (1989). Winfrey, who had formed her own television production company, Harpo Productions, in 1986, began buying film rights to literary works, including Connie May Fowler’s Before Women Had Wings, which appeared in 1997 with Winfrey as both star and producer.

Winfrey engaged in numerous philanthropic activities and was an outspoken crusader against child abuse. In 1986 she received the Woman of Achievement Award from the National Organization for Women. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also recognized Winfrey four times with its Image Award (1989–92), and in 1989 it named her Entertainer of the Year.

Winfrey broke new ground in 1997 by starting an on-air book club. She announced selections two to four weeks in advance and then discussed the book on her show with a select group of people. Each book chosen quickly rose to the top of the best-seller charts, and Winfrey’s effect on the publishing industry was significant.

Copyright © 2002 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Maya Angelou Biography (1928-)

Speaking on such topics as her Childhood, The Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., The JFK Assassination, Marilyn Monroe, Rosa Parks, The Space Race, and more.

Writer, dancer, African-American activist. Born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou spent her difficult formative years moving back and forth between her mother’s and grandmother’s. At age eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, who was subsequently killed by her uncles. The event caused the young girl to go mute for nearly six years, and her teens and early twenties were spent as a dancer, filled with isolation and experimentation.

At 16 she gave birth to a son, Guy, after which she toured Europe and Africa in the musical Porgy and Bess. On returning to New York City in the 1960s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and became involved in black activism. She then spent several years in Ghana as editor of African Review, where she began to take her life, her activism and her writing more seriously.

Maya Angelou’s five-volume autobiography commenced with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1970. The memoirs chronicle different eras of her life and were met with critical and popular success. Later books include All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) and My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken and Me (1994). She has published several volumes of verse, including And Still I Rise (1987) and Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1995). Her volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die (1971), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1993, Angelou read On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton’s Presidential inauguration, a poem written at his request. It was only the second time a poet had been asked to read at an inauguration, the first being Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. In 2006, Angelou agreed to host a weekly radio show on XM Satellite Radio’s Oprah & Friends channel. She also teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where she has a lifetime position as the Reynolds professor of American studies.

© 2007 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles – September 4, 1981

An award-winning singer, songwriter and actress is the first African-American woman to win the “Songwriter of the Year” award at the ASCAP Pop Music Awards in 2001 and also holds the record for the longest run on the Billboard Hot 100′s number one spot in 2003 with the songs “Crazy in Love” (8 weeks) and “Baby Boy” (9 weeks). Beyonce is ranked as the second best-selling female artist of the 21st century with record sales of over 37 million dollars.

Beyonce’s Bio Below

Born Beyoncé Giselle Knowles on September 4, 1981, in Houston, Texas, she began singing with the original members of the popular R&B group Destiny’s Child—LaToya Luckett, Kelly Rowland and LaTavia Roberson—as a pre-teen.

The girls went through various incarnations, singing a mix of gospel, rhythm and blues, and hip hop, before they officially became Destiny’s Child in 1995. Knowles’ father, Mathew, served as manager of the group.

After performing in the Houston area, the group appeared on Star Search, the popular television talent competition. Although they did not win the competition, a contract with Columbia Records soon followed.

Their first release, Destiny’s Child (1997), was a tremendous success in Europe. Upon the album’s release, the group kicked off a tour of sold-out shows there.

Their second effort, The Writing’s on the Wall (1999), brought them wider acclaim back home. The album generated three top-ten hits on the Billboard R&B singles chart.

In 2000, despite internal conflicts that resulted in the departure of Luckett and Roberson from the group, Destiny’s Child continued to promote their sophomore effort, playing as a supporting act for Christina Aguilera’s summer tour.

In 2001, still calling themselves Destiny’s Child, the group released their third album, Survivor. In 2004, after launching a successful solo career with Dangerously in Love , Knowles won five Grammy Awards, tying a record for most wins by a female artist.

Her second solo effort, B’Day, was released in September 2006 to coincide with the singer’s twenty-fifth birthday. In its first week, B’Day sold more than 540,000 copies in the U.S.

Beyoncé Knowles has also made a start in acting, making her debut in MTV’s Hip Hopera: Carmen in 2001 and co-starring as Foxxy Cleopatra in Mike Myers’ James Bond parody Goldmember in 2002. Other films include 2004′s The Fighting Temptations and 2006′s The Pink Panther.

Her starring role as Deena Jones, a Diana Ross-like character in the big-screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway hit musical Dreamgirls earned a Golden Globe nomination in 2006. Beyoncé’s song “Listen” was nominated for an Academy Award.

Knowles was romantically linked to hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, since September 2002.  They performed together in music videos for two of her hit singles, Crazy in Love and Deja Vu. The couple married in April 2008. Among the guests sighted at the wedding were Beyonce’s mother Tina Knowles, her father and manager Mathew, her sister Solange, Destiny’s Child members Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams, and friend Gwyneth Paltrow.

© 2008 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved

We all remember Flo Jo with her long nails and fast speed-I had all her dolls and watched every match that she had. I wanted to celebrate her accomplishments she achieved in her life time. Black History is about celebrating our founders old and young our history is not weighted on what’s big or small but what we have accomplished, NWMasssMedia wants to celebrate Flo Jo this month.

Florence Griffith Joyner Biography (1959 – 1998)

Born December 21, 1959 in south Los Angeles. Known for her world-record speed, form-fitting bodysuits, and six-inch fingernails. Griffith Joyner was a triple gold medalist at the 1988 Seoul Olympics who captivated the world with her blistering speed and flamboyant style. She still holds world records in the 100- and 200-meter dashes. She setthe 100 mark of 10.49 seconds at the quarter finals of the 1988 Olympic trials at Indianapolis. At Seoul, she won the gold medal in a wind-aided 10.54. She then smashed the world 200 record in the Olympic final, with a 21.34.

Griffith Joyner displayed a muscular physique, which prompted rumors of steroid use. She insisted she never used performance enhancers and she never failed a drug test. Griffith Joyner was voted The Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year for 1988 and also won the Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete. After retiring from track in the wake of the Seoul Games, she served for a time as co-chair of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness.

She died unexpectedly of heart failure at age thirty-eight on September 21, 1998. She and her husband had one daughter.

George Washington Carver Biography (1860 – 1943)

(Born 1861, near Diamond Grove, Mo., U.S.—died Jan. 5, 1943, Tuskegee, Ala.)

American agricultural chemist, agronomist, and experimenter whose development of new products derived from peanuts (groundnuts), sweet potatoes, and soybeans helped revolutionize the agricultural economy of the South. For most of his career he taught and conducted research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Ala.

Carver was the son of a slave woman owned by Moses Carver. During the Civil War, slave owners found it difficult to hold slaves in the border state of Missouri, and Moses Carver therefore sent his slaves, including the young child and his mother, to Arkansas. After the war, Moses Carver learned that all his former slaves had disappeared except for a child named George. Frail and sick, the motherless child was returned to his former master’s home and nursed back to health. The boy had a delicate sense of colour and form and learned to draw; later in life he devoted considerable time to painting flowers, plants, and landscapes. Though the Carvers told him he was no longer a slave, he remained on their plantation until he was about 10 or 12 years old, when he left to acquire an education. He spent some time wandering about, working with his hands and developing his keen interest in plants and animals.

By both books and experience, George acquired a fragmentary education while doing whatever work came to hand in order to subsist. He supported himself by varied occupations that included general household worker, hotel cook, laundryman, farm labourer, and homesteader. In his late 20s he managed to obtain a high school education in Minneapolis, Kan., while working as a farmhand. After a university in Kansas refused to admit him because he was black, Carver matriculated at Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa, where he studied piano and art, subsequently transferring to Iowa State Agricultural College (Ames, Iowa), where he received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science in 1894 and a master of science degree in 1896.

Carver left Iowa for Alabama in the fall of 1896 to direct the newly organized department of agriculture at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a school headed by the noted black American educator Booker T. Washington. At Tuskegee, Washington was trying to improve the lot of black Americans through education and the acquisition of useful skills rather than through political agitation; he stressed conciliation, compromise, and economic development as the paths for black advancement in American society. Despite many offers elsewhere, Carver would remain at Tuskegee for the rest of his life.

After becoming the institute’s director of agricultural research in 1896, Carver devoted his time to research projects aimed at helping Southern agriculture, demonstrating ways in which farmers could improve their economic situation. He conducted experiments in soil management and crop production and directed an experimental farm. At this time agriculture in the Deep South was in serious trouble because the unremitting single-crop cultivation of cotton had left the soil of many fields exhausted and worthless, and erosion had then taken its toll on areas that could no longer sustain any plant cover. As a remedy, Carver urged Southern farmers to plant peanuts and soybeans, which, since they belong to the legume family, could restore nitrogen to the soil while also providing the protein so badly needed in the diet of many Southerners. Carver found that Alabama’s soils were particularly well-suited to growing peanuts and sweet potatoes, but when the state’s farmers began cultivating these crops instead of cotton, they found little demand for them on the market. In response to this problem, Carver set about enlarging the commercial possibilities of the peanut and sweet potato through a long and ingenious program of laboratory research. He ultimately developed 300 derivative products from peanuts—among them cheese, milk, coffee, flour, ink, dyes, plastics, wood stains, soap, linoleum, medicinal oils, and cosmetics—and 118 from sweet potatoes, including flour, vinegar, molasses, rubber, ink, a synthetic rubber, and postage stamp glue.
In 1914, at a time when the boll weevil had almost ruined cotton growers, Carver revealed his experiments to the public, and increasing numbers of the South’s farmers began to turn to peanuts, sweet potatoes, and their derivatives for income. Much exhausted land was renewed, and the South became a major new supplier of agricultural products. When Carver arrived at Tuskegee in 1896, the peanut had not even been recognized as a crop, but within the next half century it became one of the six leading crops throughout the United States and, in the South, the second cash crop (after cotton) by 1940. In 1942 the U.S. government allotted 5,000,000 acres of peanuts to farmers. Carver’s efforts had finally helped liberate the South from its excessive dependence on cotton.

Among Carver’s many honours were his election to Britain’s Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (London) in 1916 and his receipt of the Spingarn Medal in 1923. Late in his career he declined an invitation to work for Thomas A. Edison at a salary of more than $100,000 a year. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt visited him, and his friends included Henry Ford and Mohandas K. Gandhi. Foreign governments requested his counsel on agricultural matters: Joseph Stalin, for example, in 1931 invited him to superintend cotton plantations in southern Russia and to make a tour of the Soviet Union, but Carver refused.

In 1940 Carver donated his life savings to the establishment of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee for continuing research in agriculture. During World War II he worked to replace the textile dyes formerly imported from Europe, and in all he produced dyes of 500 different shades.

Many scientists thought of Carver more as a concoctionist than as a contributor to scientific knowledge. Many of his fellow blacks were critical of what they regarded as his subservience. Certainly, this small, mild, soft-spoken, innately modest man, eccentric in dress and mannerism, seemed unbelievably heedless of the conventional pleasures and rewards of this life. But these qualities endeared Carver to many whites, who were almost invariably charmed by his humble demeanour and his quiet work in self-imposed segregation at Tuskegee. As a result of his accommodation to the mores of the South, whites came to regard him with a sort of patronizing adulation.

Carver thus increasingly came to stand for much of white America as a kind of saintly and comfortable symbol of the intellectual achievements of black Americans. Carver was evidently uninterested in the role his image played in the racial politics of the time. His great desire in later life was simply to serve humanity; and his work, which began for the sake of the poorest of the black sharecroppers, paved the way for a better life for the entire South. His efforts brought about a significant advance in agricultural training in an era when agriculture was the largest single occupation of Americans, and he extended Tuskegee’s influence throughout the South by encouraging improved farm methods, crop diversification, and soil conservation.

Copyright © 1994-2008 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Bessie Coleman Biography (1893 – 1926)

(born Jan. 26, 1893, Atlanta, Texas, U.S.—died April 30, 1926, Jacksonville, Fla.) American aviator and a star of early aviation exhibitions and air shows.

One of 13 children, Coleman grew up in Waxahatchie, Texas, where her mathematical aptitude freed her from working in the cotton fields. She attended college in Langston, Oklahoma, briefly, then moved to Chicago, where she worked as a manicurist and restaurant manager and became interested in the then-new profession of aviation.

Discrimination thwarted Coleman’s attempts to enter aviation schools in the United States. Undaunted, she learned French and at age 27 was accepted at the Caudron Brothers School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France. Black philanthropists Robert Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender, and Jesse Binga, a banker, assisted with her tuition. On June 15, 1921, she became the first American woman to obtain an international pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronitique Internationale. In further training in France, she specialized in stunt flying and parachuting; her exploits were captured on newsreel films. She returned to the United States, where racial and gender biases precluded her becoming a commercial pilot. Stunt flying, or barnstorming, was her only career option.

Coleman staged the first public flight by an African American woman in America on Labor Day, September 3, 1922. She became a popular flier at aerial shows, though she refused to perform before segregated audiences in the South. Speaking at schools and churches, she encouraged blacks’ interest in aviation; she also raised money to found a school to train black aviators. Before she could found her school, however, during a rehearsal for an aerial show, the plane carrying Coleman spun out of control, catapulting her 2,000 feet to her death.

Black History month only comes once a year and it’s hard to pick and chose what stories I should post. The Murder of Emmett Till shocked the nation as Mr. Till still a young man at the time, was  brutally murdered.  Roy and Carolyn Bryant a white couple, accused Till and said he whistled at Mrs. Bryant.  The events that lead up to this terrible murder are described below, today NWMasssMedia Celebrates Black History with The Emmett Till story.

The Emmett Till Story- July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955

In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till visited relatives in Mississippi. At Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a store owned by a white couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant, Till is said to have whistled at Mrs. Bryant. Several days later, on Aug. 28, Till was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, his mutilated corpse barely identifiable. Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, were arrested for the murder. The all-white jury in Sumner, Mississippi, took just over an hour to reach their verdict to acquit them. One juror said that they took a soda-pop break during the deliberations to stretch them out and “make it look good.” With double-jeopardy protecting them from being retried, the two later boasted about the murder in a Look magazine interview. (See the Look story.)

Although it was long believed that Bryant and Milam acted alone (both are now deceased), new evidence—much of it provided by a recent documentary about the case by Keith Beauchamp—indicates that numerous other individuals may have been involved—and several of those implicated are still alive. In May 2004, the Justice Department, calling the 1955 prosecution a “grotesque miscarriage of justice,” reopened the murder investigation.

In June 2005, the FBI exhumed Till’s body and had an autopsy performed. Beauchamp commented, “I truly believe there’s forensic evidence that could possibly link others who were involved. I’m hoping it will bring justice for the family and bring them closure.”

Case Closed
Two years later, the FBI and Mississippi prosecutors closed the book on the Till case. The statute of limitations prevented federal charges from being filed, and state prosecutors determined they did not have sufficient evidence to go after other suspects. Some family members still hold out hope that Mrs. Bryant will be held accountable for her role in the horrific murder (witnesses claimed she was on the truck the night Till was kidnapped, though she denies any involvement), while other relatives say the lengthy investigation has allowed them to put the matter to rest. And some express hope for a different kind of justice: “Eventually, in the end, I think they’re all going to pay for it,” said Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin.