Dante Learns New Black History: Ida Bell Wells

Today I am gonna write about Ida Bell Wells-Barnett. What I will write is just a taste of her life. This lady did more before she died than I will accomplish if you gave me three more runs at the nonsense I have called my life. Source: me. She was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16th, 1862. Yeesh. I hear 18-anything and shudder. Her father was born a slave to his father who hired him out as a slave throughout town. Her mother was sold away from her own family and was never able to locate them. And don't forget, since her father was a slave Ida was also a slave. She was later “freed” after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. By the time she was 16 she had lost her parents and her brother because of the yellow fever. God, every time I do one of these posts I feel both miserable and happy that people existed and exist these days that did so much good shit even though their lives whomped. She took care of her other brothers and sisters while working as a teacher living with her grandmother. Ida was also one of the founding members of the NAACP which some say is debatable.

In 1884 she filed a lawsuit against a train car company for unfair treatment. She won the case but federally they were like “Nah.” Ida wrote about lynchings in America which did not make people happy. She pointed out how it was aimed towards Blacks when it was feared that they were doing well. So of course they ended up burning her newspaper office down. She brought this up after one of her friends was lynched by a mob. She traveled the world telling about how America was lynching the fuck out of Black people. She also spoke about White women that sat by ignoring the lynchings. They didn't like that. She was fighting for Black rights and the rights of women but each of those groups had issues with her. She created the NACWC (National Association of Colored Women's Club) that dealt with civil rights issues and issues for women. I hope theme music played whenever this lady entered the room. I would imagine Rock Steady by Aretha Franklin.

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Dante Learns New Black History: Cathay Williams

It is time to play catch up because it is already the 4th day of Black History Month and my ass haven't posted in days. Today I heard about this lady named Cathay Williams who was born in September 1844. She was the first Black woman to enlist in the United States Army...as a man! That's right! She used the name William Cathay. Surprise, y'all! She was born in Independence, Missouri to a father that was free and a mother that was a slave. Which means that she was a slave. Isn't it fucked up how that works? While working as a slave in Jefferson City the Union forces would straight up claim Black folk as contraband and and force them to help support the military as nurses and cooks.

Women were not allowed to serve in the military so Cathay used a fake name and served for three years. She passed a medical examination which makes me wonder what these consisted of. Probably made sure you could hold a weapon or lift something kinda heavy. It is said only two people knew she was a lady: a friend and a cousin. Y'all be sleeping on how loyal cousins are! Keep your brothers and sisters. Cousins are the shit. After her enlistment she got smallpox and then joined her unit. She started getting sick more often and after having surgery the doctor discovered that Cathay was a woman. She was then discharged and her life got pretty miserable after that. Why? She was a Black woman living in the 1800's, that's why. In September in 1893 a doctor said that she did not qualify for disability payments despite the fact that she served in the military, had a nerve disease, and diabetes where she had all her toes amputated. There are two other not Black women who were able to get coverage but...yeah. Black. 1800's. Eventually I am gonna cover something that is really cool or funny. I mean, its cool that she was able to do what she did and fight in the military back then. But damn. Also it seems I wrote about her five years ago...

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Dante Learns New Black History: Onesimus

I have written about Famous Black Firsts. Cool Shit Black People Invented. And Random Civil Rights Moments. I have not done any posts about Black History Month in a few years. No particular reason other than being a lazy ass. By the time I finish this I'll come up with some title for it. Until then let me talk a little bit about a guy named Onesimus. I have never heard of this guy and am not sure how to even pronounce his name. One-Si-Mus? O-Knee-Suh-Miss? Either way no one is sure when he was born or where. All's we know is that he was born in the late 1600's. He was first documented as a slave living in the colonies in 1706. Onesimus was given as a gift to a Puritan minister named Cotton Mather. Read that sentence again. A human was given as a gift. This Mather fellow was also a big part of the Salem Witch Trials. I'm not gonna even get into that. Mather saw something special in Onesimus and taught him to read and write though at the time that was associated with religion and business so he learned but it was likely for note taking and work. Sounds fun. Also, he was named after a slave in the bible. That's some bullshit.

In 1721 Boston got a taste of the smallpox. Mather's got the idea to inoculate people based off of what he learned from Onesimus. It is said that before being sold into slavery that Onesimus was once inoculated based off of a long practice of doing so back in Africa by sub-Saharan folks. As Mather put it when reporting what Onesimus told him “People take Juice of Small-Pox; and Cutty-skin, and Putt in a Drop.” Mather and Onesimus thought that this disease was a punishment from God and that this cure was a gift. Mather also wanted more religion in politics. People were skeptical because racism and did not trust African methods and thought they would try to overthrow White people. There was even a thing called The Acts And Resolves that was passed in Boston that had race based punishments. Eventually the medical community got tired of watching people just die because they were being stubborn. Out of 242 patients only 2 died compared to 844 out of 5,899 that were not inoculated. It wasn't until 1796 that someone else made a vaccination for smallpox By 1980 smallpox was no longer a thing. Until one of you people decide to not vaccinate your kid and all that weird old school shit returns. If you don't know what smallpox looks like don't look that shit up.

Random Civil Rights Moments: James Leonard Farmer Jr.

James Leonard Farmer Jr. was born on January 12th, 1920 in Marshall Texas. He was a damn good student in school and became the first Black to get a doctorate in his state, and was even a college freshman at 14 years old. He earned a divinity degree (didn't know that was a thing) from Howard University, choosing to follow his fathers path. He began to learn about Mahatma Gandhi and his teachings regarding non-violence. 

Eventually Farmer ended up living in Chicago and become a TV screenwriter and writing for a magazine. In 1942 he and some other similar thinking people did a sit-in at a segregated restaurant. They ended up creating the Committee of Racial Equality (CORE) which then became the Congress Of Racial Equality which at the start consisted mostly of Northern Whites. Farmer then began working on the Freedom Rides which were trying to stop segregation while traveling on interstates. The first ride they made in May of 1961 ended with the bus being firebombed after it reached Alabama because 1960's. Members of the group were also beaten and attacked and thanks to television the nation was able to see this. The Interstate Commerce Commission, enforced by Robert Kennedy, an attorney general, made it so that segregation was no longer allowed on public transportation in the South. Farmer resigned after a few years and deaths of his colleagues. He began teaching at Lincoln University, ran for Congress, and eventually worked for the Richard Nixon administration but left that.

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Random Civil Rights Moments: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois also known as W.E.B Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He was identified as mixed and grew up attending schools with White students in a mostly White town. By 1885 he moved to Nashville, Tennessee and was like “Oh. Black people have it rough.” Jim Crow Laws were in full effect and he was getting his first taste of it. After getting a bachelor degree he went to Harvard. After getting his master's degree he headed to Germany and while speaking with social scientists he learned different ways of looking at the world. 

By 1895 he became the first Black to earn a Ph. D. from Harvard. In 1899 he published The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study that examined what he called “the talented tenth” which was a term regarding one in ten Black men becoming leaders of their race. While working at Atlanta University he opposed Booker T. Washington and his Atlanta Compromise. This got him a lot of attention as he felt that Blacks should be granted equality based on the 14th Amendment. He began fighting for the rights of women and the idea of White superiority and in 1909 he co-founded the NAACP. 

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Random Civil Rights Moments: Jim Crow Laws

In my last post I mentioned the Jim Crow Laws. Now I never really quite learned what these were about in school so I decided to give a jackass version of it that hopefully I'll understand as well as you.In 1892 the phrase Jim Crow was attributed to the song and dance character “Jump Jim Crow.” In it a White actor by the name of Thomas D. Rice wore blackface and performed as well as a comic strip making fun of Andrew Jackson's views. These laws were used to enforce segregation in the South. During the Reconstruction period these laws started and kept on going until the mid 1960's. That's fucking nuts. In 1890 a separate but equal status was given to Blacks. This meant that schooling, housing, banking, and anything else that was given to Whites were scarce or unavailable for Blacks by law. Even though Blacks were being put into public offices more laws were being made to slow this down or flat out stop it.

All public transportation, schools, and public places were segregated. This is the whole Blacks in the back of the bus stuff. The all Black schools if any. Whites only water fountains. During the mid 1950's these laws were considered unconstitutional but that didn't stop Blacks from being attacked or killed if they tried to act as if they were equal. The rest of the Jim Crow laws were changed by the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Still, that did not stop attacks and discrimination though committees were started to track the amount of Blacks that turned out to vote to ensure that they were not being kept away. There are some saying that the new anti-drug laws being used in the U.S are the new Jim Crow Laws as they specifically target Black men.

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Random Civil Rights Moments: Ella Jo Baker

One thing I am noticing while looking through civil rights people for these posts is that there were a lot of women involved. This one is about Ella Jo Baker. She was born on December 13th 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia. Hearing stories about her grandmother that was a slave inspired her to fight for justice. While studying at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina she fought against unfair school policies. She graduated as a valedictorian and continued fighting not just for Black rights but rights for women as well by joining Young Negroes Cooperative League. This was a battle that women like her had that sucked because she was dealing with two strong social issues at once. 

By 1940 she was involved with the NAACP as a field secretary and then as a director of branches for a few years. In 1955 she co-founded In Friendship which was an organization to fight Jim Crow Laws (I'll have to do a whole 'nother post about those). There is a quote of her that I really like and think people can take a lot from today. “You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders.”

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Random Civil Rights Moments: Claudette Colvin

For the past few years for Black History month I have done posts like Famous Black Firsts as well as Cool Shit Black People Invented. This year I decided to look into some people and moments in civil rights history. Not sure of a title yet but by the time I finish this I'll have come up with something. Hopefully. This post is going to be about Claudette Colvin. I didn't know that this girl existed until watching an episode of Drunk History. Sows how well they were teaching this stuff in school. 

Claudette was 15 years old on March 2nd, 1955 when while riding the bus in Montgomery, Alabama she refused to leave her seat. Again. 1955. Doing something like that back then was extremely dangerous especially if you were some 15 year old Black girl in Alabama. In school she was learning about Black leaders and felt all kinds of inspired. Today kids learn about Drake and get inspired to...I don't know. Go to Canada?

Claudette was arrested and put in jail. She and a few other women had done this at the time but all we know about is Rosa Parks and her refusal to leave her seat when asked. Why? Politics, man! The NAACP, whom Parks was a secretary for at the time, thought that Parks would be a better representative for the fight against these laws. So there you have this 15 year old girl doing something because she felt she was fighting the good fight and getting hardly any recognition and then you have a 42 year old woman who is married to a member and working for this huge organization that planned out the whole thing. Didn't help she was pregnant by a married man at the time. She once said “Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all.”  

Famous Black Firsts: Rebecca Davis Lee

Rebecca Davis Lee was born in 1831 Delaware. She was raised by her aunt in Pennsylvania that took care of sick neighbors during a time where poor sick Blacks were not a concern. After moving to Massachusetts she started nursing by 1852 and by 1860 she was accepted into the New England Female Medical College at a time where this was not happening much at all. When she graduated in 1864 she was the first Black woman in the US to earn a M.D degree and the only Black woman to graduate from the college. 

After the Civil War ended in 1865 she went to Richmond, Virginia and began missionary work for poor Blacks and worked for the Freedmen's Bureau to give medical care to freed slaves. During this time male doctors would ignore her and pharmacists would not fill prescriptions she requested. With her husband Dr. Arthur Crumpler while living in Boston she took in sick patients in her community. In 1883 she published Book Of Medical Discourse which was for women teaching them how to care for their families. There are no pictures of Lee and the ones you see online are of Mary Eliza Mahoney as if no one bothered to check past one page on Google. I found an image of a wax statue made of her.

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Famous Black Firsts: Diahann Caroll

Diahann Caroll was born on July 17th 1935 as Carol Diahann Johnson in the Bronx, New York. As a child her parents enrolled her in dance, modeling, and singing classes. When she was 15 years old she was already 6 feet tall and modeling for Ebony magazine. After high school she went to NYU and majored in sociology. At 18 she appeared on a program called Chance of a Lifetime. She won $1,000 for her performance of “Why Was I Born?” and won for the next four weeks. She soon began performing at nightclubs. 

She debuted in film in the movie Carmen Jones as a supporting role in 1954. In 1958 she made it to Broadway in the musical House of Flowers. She performed in more series and plays and won a Tony Award for best actress for the musical No Strings which was the first for a Black woman. In 1974 she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in the movie Claudine. 

She became known for her role in the 1968 series Julia. This show made her the first Black actress to star in her own television series where she was not portraying a domestic worker. For that she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1969.

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Famous Black Firsts: Astronaut Guion Stewart Bluford Jr.

Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. was born November 22nd 1942 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Penn State in 1964 studying aerospace engineering he joined the Air Force and served during the Vietnam War. There he flew over 140 combat mission and won medals because that is what you do. 

After the war he went to the Air Force Institute of Technology and got a master's degree in aerospace engineering and got a Ph.D in 1978. 

That same year he was chosen for N.A.S.A. In August of 1983 Buford became the first Black person to travel into space. He was a mission specialist on the Challenger shuttle and participated in the first night launch. Funny. I've never thought about that before. 

He orbited the planet 98 times in 145 hours. That sounds insane. He went on three more space mission, his last two were in 1991 and 1992. He retired in 1993 after spending more than 688 hours in space. I haven't even spent that much time in water! He was inducted into the International Hall of Fame in 1997.

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Famous Black Firsts: Alexander Lucius Twilight

Alexander Lucius Twilight not only has one of the coolest names ever created, he was also the first Black person in the US to get a degree from college. Born on September 23rd 1795 in Corinth, Vermont his parents were both free. His father was mixed race and a Revolutionary War veteran. 

When he was 8 he started working on a nearby farm and until he was 20 read and learned mathematics. From there for the next six years he completed all secondary school courses and the first two of college level courses. When he graduated in 1823 it wasn't even widely known that he was the first Black to get a baccalaureate degree until someone else claimed that they were three years later. He began a career as a teacher in New York while studying theology and ministry. 

After four years of teaching he moved to Vermont to continue teaching during the week and holding church services on the weekend. In 1829 he was hired as a principal and served as a minister. He then raised money and designed a dormitory for out of town students. In 1836 he was elected to the Vermont General Assembly making him the first Black to be elected to state legislature.

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Famous Black Firsts: Lillian Lincoln Lambert

Lillian Lincoln Lambert is known as the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Business School. Born in Ballsville, Virginia she moved to New York after high school. The only work she could find was as a maid so she moved to Washington, D.C and worked in typing pools for the government and went to teachers college. When she was 22 she went to Howard University. There she met H. Naylor Fitzhugh who was one of the first Blacks to go to HBS and he became her mentor and eventually he convinced her to apply. 

When she arrived at the school she realized that she was the only Black woman there. In her class of 1,600 only 1 of 9 were Black and 35 of them were women. “In hindsight, it was best that I did not know. Had I known, I’m not sure I would have gone. It was a tumultuous time for the country. This was the era of the civil rights and women's rights movements. Martin Luther King would be assassinated the following spring.”They started a African-American Student Union to get the number of Blacks attending to increase. They increased the number within two years. Before she graduated she had not been interviewed for any jobs. She went back to her previous job and eventually became executive vice president of Unified Services. In 1976 she started her own company, Centennial One. What began with 20 part-time employees and an office that was formally her garage became one with 1,200 employees and made $20 million. By 1995 she was the first woman to serve the president of an international association of service contractors.

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Famous Black Firsts: Director Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks was born November 30th 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas. The school he went to was segregated because the town was so small that they couldn't afford to be non-segregated when he was a teen and while there Black were not allowed to play sports of go to any extracurricular activities. Parks says that once a teacher told him that going to college would be a waste of money. Sounds legit. 

When he was 14 his mother passed away and he moved in with other family members who quickly put him out on the streets. His first job was as a piano player in a brothel. I swear, those places must have been so much more prevalent back in the day. At the age of 25 he became inspired to start a career in photography. In 1940 he was encouraged to move to Chicago and he started a portrait business specializing in photos of rich women. In the 1950's he started working as a consultant on film production. Later on he directed his own documentaries about life as a Black in the ghetto. As well as being a photographer and a writer, he ended up directing his own book The Learning Tree in 1969 making him Hollywood's first Black director. Yeah. It took that long for that to happen. He also composed the music for the movie. His most well known film is Shaft. He's a bad mutha...

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Famous Black Firsts: Performer Ethel Waters

Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on October 31st 1896. Some say that she was actually born in 1900. Her mother, Louise Anderson, was around 13 when she gave birth to Ethel after being raped by a man named John Waters that knew the family. Ethel was raised in poor neighborhoods and moved frequently. When talking about her childhood she said “I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family.” She was about 5 foot 9 ½ as a teenager which is worth noting because that is pretty tall for a chick period let alone back then. She got married when she was 13 years old but left her husband after abuse and worked as a maid. At 17 she attended a costume party and after being asked to sing wowed everyone to the point she was offered professional work at the Lincoln Theater located in Baltimore. 

She later toured the vaudeville circuit and despite being this successful at such a young age she fell on hard times and began traveling with a carnival in freight cars. By 1919 she moved to Harlem and became a famous performer during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1949 she was nominated for an Academy Award for the movie Pinky making her the second Black after Hattie McDaniel to do such. In 1950 she starred in the television series Beulah but left the show after disagreeing with the portrayal of Blacks on the series. This show was the very first series to star a Black person. Oddly enough Hattie eventually replaced her.

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Famous Black Firsts: Banker Maggie Lena Walker

Maggie Lena Walker was born on July 15th 1867 in Richmond, Virginia. Her mother was a former slave and assistant cook in a mansion and her father was a butler and a writer. After the death of her father, she says murder the law says suicide, she and her mother moved. Her mother started a laundry business to support themselves. It is said that during this time she saw the huge difference between how Blacks and Whites were treated. Later in her life she taught grade school for a few years but was forced to leave after marrying. It was illegal for teachers to be married at the school. Don't ask me. 

In 1895 she began working with the Order of St. Luke's and quickly became their grand secretary. When she started they were on the verge of bankruptcy and a few years later she made a speech detailing what she had planned to save them and it worked. In 1902 she started the St . Luke Herald newspaper to spread news of what they were doing. In 1903 she opened the St. Luke Penny Saving Bank making her not just the first Black woman to open and run a bank, but the first woman period in the US. Two years later she opened St. Luke Emporium that gave Black women the chance to work and gave Black communities the chance to buy cheaper products.

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Famous Black Firsts: Entrepreneur Madam CJ Walker

Sarah Breedlove better known as Madam C.J . Walker was born on December 23rd 1867 in Delta, Louisiana and is regarded as the first female self-made millionaire. Her parents and siblings were all born into slavery and she was the first born free after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This is where it gets kinda weird. At the age of 14 she married her brother to escape her step-mom's bad treatment and three years later had a daughter. Hmm. Okay. 

A few years later she moved and began working with her brothers who were all barbers. She worked as a washer barely making a dollar a day. She experienced hair issues because back then taking care of Black hair was a nightmare. In 1904 she began selling products for Annie Turnbo Malone who was a Black hair care entrepreneur. She later began making her own products and married a newspaper advertising salesman named Charles Joseph Walker. She then trained women in the art of selling hair care products. Her business grew and by 1917 she held her first Madam Walker Beauty Culturists convention. This is said to be the first national meeting of women in America brought together to discuss business practices. She let everyone know that getting involved in politics and philanthropy were important. Her business eventually expanded to Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Haiti, and Jamaica.

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Famous Black Firsts: Thomas Mundy Peterson

Thomas Mundy Peterson was born on October 6th 1824 in Metuchen, New Jersey. It is not known if his father was a slave but his mother was and by the age of 21 she was freed according to her owners will. Peterson was a school custodian and handyman as well as a Republican. My, how times have changed. The only Black Republicans you hear about now have money. 

Under the new 15th Amendment he was able to vote in an election making him the first Black person to vote on March 31st 1870 stating “I was working for Mr. T. L. Kearny on the morning of the day of election, and did not think of voting until he came out to the stable where I was attending to the horses and advised me to go to the polls and exercise a citizen's privilege.” 

He was also the first Black person to serve on a jury and hold an elected office on the Middlesex County Commission. Peterson was given a gold medal as an award for being the first Black voter. $70 was raised for it which translates to over $1,000 now. Financial problems forced him to pawn it multiple times but it is now housed at the African American Xavier University of Louisiana.

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Famous Black Firsts: Nurse Mary Eliza Mahoney

Mary Eliza Mahoney was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 7th 1845 to recently freed slaves from North Carolina. When she was 18 years she decided that she wanted to become a nurse. She began studying and by 1878 at the age of 33 she was accepted to the New England Hospital for Women and Children nursing school making her the first Black professional nurse in the US. This was also the first professional nursing program in America as well. By 1950 the hospital was equipped to handle male patients. Out of 42 students that started training she was one of the four that actually graduated. This training required a year working at the hospital's surgical, maternity, and medical wards as well as attend lectures. Oh, and they had to work as private nurses for four months. 

Mahoney was known by the families that she worked for privately for her calmness and professionalism. During this time, you know, the 1800's and all, she was also required to do household tasks as well as nurse. She was like “Pffft!” and didn't eat her meals with the staff. Her reputation grew and she started getting requests to work all around the country. She later became one of the first Black members of the American Nurses Association and when they were taking too long to bring in more Black nurses she supported the creation of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. For the next ten years she helped recruit nurses and by 1910 the number of Black women nurses was around 2,400. 1911 ran an orphanage in New York. She then fought for the right to vote for women and at the age of 76 was able to vote. She passed away in 1936 of breast cancer and a few years later the number of Black nurses doubled. She was inducted into the A.N.A Hall of Fame in 1976.

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Famous Black Firsts: Recognized Physician James Durham

This one is a good example of why it is not as easy to do these as you'd think. Though James Durham did something great, the dates of his birth and death are different depending on where you look and there are no pictures of him. Anywhere. Lots of folks have written about this guy and they are using a picture of James McCune Smith who was the first formally trained Black doctor. Durham was the first Black to practice medicine without a degree. Get it together, people. 

Born a slave in 1762 and having 10 siblings he was owned by different doctors. By the time he was 11 one of his masters hired him to help out with medical services. At the age of 20 he was making $3,000 a year which sounded real low until I did the conversion and saw that it came out to about $75,870 a year. If I made that much now I'd be happy let alone in the 1700's. 

Working as a nurse at the age of 21 he was able to buy his own freedom and set up his own medical business in New Orleans. It is said that he was popular due to the fact that he was able to speak three languages: English, Spanish, and French. In 1789 he saved more patients than any other physician from yellow fever after previously meeting Benjamin Rush who is known as the father of American medicine. In Philadelphia he learned that climate and disease were related. In 1801 his practice was restricted even though he knew what he was doing and good at his job because he did not have a formal medical degree. It is said that disappeared after 1801 or 1802 and died of a heart attack.

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