Essential The Official African American Thread#2
- Thread starter Rhapture
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A newly discovered photo of Harriet Tubman taken around 1865 found in the scrap book of Quaker abolitionist Emily Howland.
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In 1937, William Edmondson became the first African American artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Misty Danielle Copeland was born in Kansas City, Missouri on September 10th, 1982. One of six children, Misty moved around from place to place before settling in San Pedro, California. She began her ballet studies at the San Pedro Dance Center at the late age of thirteen. In three months, she was already en pointe. She moved in with her ballet teacher Cynthia Bradley to continue dancing. At fourteen, Misty was the winner of a national ballet contest and had won her first solo role. She performed as Clara in The Nutcracker after studying for only eight months. She also played Kitri in Don Quixote and had a role in Debbie Allen’s The Chocolate Nutcracker. At fifteen, she won first place in the Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Awards in 1998. She was after recognized by the Los Angeles Times as the best young dancer in the Greater Los Angeles area. She turned down an opportunity to become a full-time student at the San Francisco Ballet School, still dreaming of the American Ballet Theatre. Her wish came true when she was asked to join the ABT Studio Company at the end of her 1999 summer program. She officially joined in 2000 after finishing up high school and became part of its Corps de ballet the following year. In 2009, Misty danced in Prince’s Crimson and Clover music video and was invited Welcome 2 Tour. She performed a beautiful pas de deux en pointe to his Beautiful Ones. She launched her line of dancewear M by Misty in 2011. Misty was the first African American woman to dance the role of the Firebird for a major dance company. She has two published works: a memoir Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina and Firebird, a children’s book. She was the first Black woman to dance as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake with ABT. On June 30th, 2015, Misty Copeland became the first African American woman to be a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre; the first ever in the company’s seventy-plus year history.
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The Golden Thirteen, the first African-American U.S. Navy Officers. Photographed 17 March 1944. They are (bottom row, left to right): Ensign James E. Hare, USNR; Ensign Samuel E. Barnes, USNR; Ensign George C. Cooper, USNR; Ensign William S. White, USNR; Ensign Dennis D. Nelson, USNR; (middle row, left to right): Ensign Graham E. Martin, USNR; Warrant Officer Charles B. Lear, USNR; Ensign Phillip G. Barnes, USNR; Ensign Reginald E. Goodwin, USNR; (top row, left to right): Ensign John W. Reagan, USNR; Ensign Jesse W. Arbor, USNR; Ensign Dalton L. Baugh, USNR; Ensign Frank E. Sublett, USNR. Courtesy of Surface Warfare Magazine, 1982. U.S. Naval History & Heritage Command Photograph.
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An American slave who eventually bought his freedom, Free Frank became a saltpeter manufacturer and businessman. He saw particularly high success during the War of 1812 when saltpeter was in high demand. Because of his success, he was able to buy the freedom of 16 members of his family – with many more even after his death (his heirs used his inheritance to free more relatives). Free Frank is also known to be the first African-American to found a town in the United States; in 1836, he founded the town of New Philadelphia in Illinois.
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Operatic singing sensation Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, known in her day as “The Black Patti” (in reference to Italian singer Adelina Patti). She was the first African-American to perform at Carnegie Hall.
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Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906) was an American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dunbar was one of the first African-American writers to establish an international reputation. He wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy In Dahomey (1903), the first all-African-American musical produced on Broadway.
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Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to become a physician in the United States; in 1883 she published “A book of Medical Discourses” which was one of the first medical books written by an African American.
Born in 1831, Crumpler, was raised by her aunt who cared for infirm neighbors. She later attended West Newton English and Classical School in Massachusetts. After graduating, Crumpler moved to Charlestown where she met her husband, Wyatt Lee. For the next eight years, Crumpler was employed as a nurse until she enrolled at the New England Female Medical College, a move that was extremely rare at that time considering she was both African American and a woman.
Her husband died in 1863 and Crumpler was forced to quit school once the Civil War started. However, she eventually returned back to school with the aid of the Wade Scholarship Fund. Once the Civil War ended she moved to Richmond Virginia with her husband Richard Crumpler, a former fugitive slave.
Believing that the south would be “a proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children. During my stay there nearly every hour was improved in that sphere of labor. The last quarter of the year 1866, I was enabled… to have access each day to a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored.” Crumpler worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide medical care to freed slaves; she was, however, subjected to extreme racism: “men doctors snubbed her, druggist balked at filling her prescriptions, and some people wisecracked that the M.D. behind her name stood for nothing more than ‘Mule Driver’”. Eventually she moved back to Boston her neighborhood in Joy Street Beacon Hill, which had become a predominantly African-American community. She “entered into the work with renewed vigor, practicing outside, and receiving children in the house for treatment; regardless, in a measure, of remuneration.”
The Rebecca Lee Society, one of the first medical societies for African-American women, was named in her honor.
Made Myself A Boss
#Trolltruck
It's almost African American history month
Fixed
http://m.tmz.com/2017/02/02/black-history-month-african-american-donald-trump/
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
She also needs her own movie.
Cathay Williams
Only Known Female Buffalo Soldier —
FROM HER HUMBLE start in Missouri, Cathay Williams made her way into the record books of military history as the only known and documented female buffalo soldier.
Williams was born a slave in Jackson County and moved to Jefferson City with her family and master as a small child. In 1862, as the Union soldiers moved through Jefferson City, several slaves, including Williams, were confiscated by the 8th Indiana Infantry as ”contraband“ and taken to Arkansas. While with the 8th Indiana Infantry, she worked as a cook and laundress. After the war was over, Williams found work as a cook at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis. Not long after this, she decided she was going to join the army so that she could make her own way and not be dependent on others.
On Nov. 15, 1866, she enlisted in the 38th Infantry, Company A as William Cathay, a man. She performed regular duties that others in the company did such as working garrison duty or guarding railroads. In an article about her in the St. Louis Times, Williams was described as ”tall and powerfully built.“
After serving almost two years, the post surgeon discovered she was a woman and she was discharged. She eventually worked her way out to Colorado hoping she would get a land bounty for her military service. It isn’t likely that she ever received one since records indicate that her pension claims were denied in 1891.
Cathay Williams
Cathay Williams
Only Known Female Buffalo Soldier —
FROM HER HUMBLE start in Missouri, Cathay Williams made her way into the record books of military history as the only known and documented female buffalo soldier.
Williams was born a slave in Jackson County and moved to Jefferson City with her family and master as a small child. In 1862, as the Union soldiers moved through Jefferson City, several slaves, including Williams, were confiscated by the 8th Indiana Infantry as ”contraband“ and taken to Arkansas. While with the 8th Indiana Infantry, she worked as a cook and laundress. After the war was over, Williams found work as a cook at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis. Not long after this, she decided she was going to join the army so that she could make her own way and not be dependent on others.
On Nov. 15, 1866, she enlisted in the 38th Infantry, Company A as William Cathay, a man. She performed regular duties that others in the company did such as working garrison duty or guarding railroads. In an article about her in the St. Louis Times, Williams was described as ”tall and powerfully built.“
After serving almost two years, the post surgeon discovered she was a woman and she was discharged. She eventually worked her way out to Colorado hoping she would get a land bounty for her military service. It isn’t likely that she ever received one since records indicate that her pension claims were denied in 1891.
Cathay Williams
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Alexa Canady was the first woman and the first African American to become a neurosurgeon. She was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1950 to parents who were graduates of black colleges – her father from the Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry and her mother from Fisk University. She and her brother were the only black students at the local schools where she graduated as a National Achievement Scholar in 1967. Canady entered the University of Michigan as a math major, but when the opportunity arose, she transferred into the school’s pre-med program. She graduated in 1971 and was accepted into Michigan’s College of Medicine where she graduated magna cum laude in 1975. Canady interned at New Haven Hospital, Yale’s primary teaching hospital, before she became America’s first female and first black neurosurgeon as a resident at the University of Minnesota.
After five years of training Canady accepted a fellowship in Pediatric Neurosurgery at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia from 1981-82 where she taught at the Pennsylvania College of Medicine at the same time. In 1983 she retuned to Michigan as a neurosurgeon at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. She also joined the staff of Children’s Hospital of Michigan as a pediatric neurosurgeon. Three years later Canady, at the age of 36, became the chief of staff, a position she retained until 2001. Later Canady taught at Wayne State University and in 1997 became the Medical School’s clinical professor of neurosurgery. In 1993 Canady was named the American Medical Women’s Medical Association Woman of the Year and was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.
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Alexander Thomas Augusta was the highest-ranking black officer in the Union Army during the Civil War. He was also the first African American head of a hospital (Freedmen’s Hospital) and the first black professor of medicine (Howard University in Washington, D.C.).
Augusta was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1825 to free African American parents. He moved to Baltimore, Maryland as a youth to work as a barber while pursuing a medical education. The University of Pennsylvania would not accept him but a faculty member took interest in him and taught him privately. In 1847 he married Mary O. Burgoin, a Native American. By 1850, Augusta and his wife moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada where he was accepted by the Medical College at the University of Toronto where he received an M.B. in 1856. He was appointed head of the Toronto City Hospital and was also in charge of an industrial school.
On April 14, 1863, Augusta was commissioned (the first out of eight other black officers in the Civil War) as a major in the Union army and appointed head surgeon in the 7th U.S. Colored Infantry. His pay of $7 a month, however, was lower than that of white privates. He wrote Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson who raised his pay to the appropriate level for commissioned officers.
Augusta also experienced white violence when he was mobbed in Baltimore for publicly wearing his officer’s uniform. When his white assistants, also surgeons, complained about being subordinate to a black officer, President Lincoln placed him in charge of the Freedman’s Hospital at Camp Barker near Washington, D.C. Augusta wrote a letter to his commanding general protesting his segregation on trains when he left Baltimore and requested the protection of the President for other black soldiers and families In 1865, Augusta was promoted to lieutenant colonel, at the time the highest-ranking black officer in the U.S. military. He was mustered out of service in 1866.
After the military, Augusta was in charge of the Lincoln Hospital in Savannah, Georgia until 1868 when he started his own practice in Washington, D.C. He then became the first black medical professor as one of the original faculty members of the newly formed Medical College at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Despite the financial hardships of the young institution, Augusta remained there until 1877. He also served at the Smallpox Hospital and Freedman’s Hospital, both in D.C. Despite being denied recognition as a physician by the American Medical Association, Augusta encouraged young black medical students to persevere and helped make Howard University an early success. Alexander T. Augusta died in Washington in 1890. He was the first black officer to be buried in the Arlington National Cemetery.
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
A newly discovered photo of Harriet Tubman taken around 1865 found in the scrap book of Quaker abolitionist Emily Howland.
