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Remembering the Largest Black Union
(The Root) — When the media noted the Aug. 15, 2012, death, at age 107, of Benjamin Isaacs, America’s oldest Pullman server, a spotlight was also trained on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American labor union to win bargaining rights from a major corporation. Isaacs, blind at his death, died of kidney…
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Saying Goodbye to Gil Noble
Eloquent tributes from a stream of religious leaders, elected officials, academics and celebrities punctuated a three-hour funeral service for journalist Gil Noble, who was gratefully remembered in New York City on Friday as the nation’s “electronic griot.” He died April 5 at the age of 80. At the service, held at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church,…
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Golf Phenom's Drive to Stardom
Ginger Howard, one of golf’s most celebrated phenoms, is sharpening her skills to excel against the game’s finest women players. The latest challenge for Howard, 17, the youngest African-American woman to turn professional, begins in March with the Symetra Tour (last year known as the Futures). If Howard finishes among the tour’s top 10 money winners, she’ll become just the fifth African-American woman to compete on the…
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Meet Brandon E. Turner, Rhodes Scholar
African Americans dismayed by the paucity of their own chosen for the prestigious Rhodes scholarships each year were not encouraged when most of the class of 2012 was announced in November. Only one African American — Brandon E. Turner, a senior biophysics major at Wake Forest University — gained entry to the select circle whose…
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L.A. Exhibit Salutes City's Elite Black Artists
Works by Los Angeles’ premier black artists, many signifying the political turmoil that marked the 1960 and 1970s, are finally on display in one of the city’s major exhibition spaces. The works, some 140 by 35 artists — many of them among the nation’s artistic crème de la crème — are currently on view at Westwood’s Hammer Museum in “Now…
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Now Dig This! Black Artists in Los Angeles
Betye Saar. Black Girl’s Window, 1969. Assemblage in window. 35 3⁄4 x 18 x 1 1⁄2 in. (90.8 x 45.7 x 3.8 cm). Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York. David Hammons. America the Beautiful, 1968. Lithograph and body print. 39 x 29 1⁄2 in. (99.1 x 74.9 cm). Oakland…
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Revisiting the Story of Black Los Angeles
Who was Los Angeles’ first black mayor? No, it wasn’t Tom Bradley, who served from 1973 to 1993. Nearly 200 years earlier, Francisco Reyes, an Afro-Mexican, led the fledgling city of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula (the Town of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels…
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Remembering Dr. Frank Hale, 84
Dr. Frank Hale, a pioneer in making graduate education accessible to African Americans, was remembered in a seven-hour funeral service last week in Columbus, Ohio. Some 36 speakers — including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Samuel DuBois Cook, president emeritus of Dillard University — lauded Hale, the charming visionary whose 60-year career left a bold,…
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Arrests in Central California Cross Burning
After a four-month investigation conducted by 13 law-enforcement agencies, Arroyo Grande, Calif., police on Friday charged four white transients with a March cross burning. The cross burning, only yards from the bedroom window of a home shared by a mixed-race teen and her Latina mother, shocked this bucolic, Central Coast tourist mecca. The cross burning…
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Chimp Emailer Apologizes but Keeps GOP Post
Marilyn Davenport, the Southern California GOP official who sent an email depicting President Obama and his parents as chimpanzees, has finally issued an apology. But despite calls for her resignation by Republican County Chair Scott Baugh, former state Chair Michael J. Schroeder and a chorus of civil rights activists, Davenport defiantly vowed to remain in office. “To my fellow Americans…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
