Black America Web News
NEW YORK (AP) — Papa John’s has a new pitchman: Shaquille O’Neal. The chain says basketball Hall of Famer will appear on TV commercials and promote Papa John’s in other ways. He will also join the com [...]
ATLANTA (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is set to speak Sunday at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. once occupied the pulpit. Other 2 [...]
![4-Year-Old With Spina Bifida Walks For First Time As Friends Cheer Her On [Video]](https://ioneblackamericaweb.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/kenydii-parker-ig-1.jpg?quality=99&strip=all&crop=0px%2C8px%2C439px%2C251px&resize=560%2C320)
All kids have dreams and for Four-year-old Kenydii Parker, that dream was to walk. Kenydii’s father, Kenneth Parker, told PEOPLE she was born with Spina bifida and has been using a wheelchair. But Ken [...]
A Las Vegas police officer will face felony police misconduct charges after she was caught running background checks for her friends, making racist and homophobic jokes and sharing demeaning videos of [...]
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker has netted the first endorsement from a sitting lawmaker in the crucial early-voting state of South Carolina. State Rep. John King t [...]
![16-Year-Old Accepted Into 9 Law Schools [VIDEO]](https://ioneblackamericaweb.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/school-desk-books-660.jpg?quality=99&strip=all&w=560&h=320&crop=1)
Via Bossip: Another brilliant Black girl will make you deeply assess what you’re doing with your life. According to Texas Lawyer, Haley Taylor Schlitz is a 16-year-old who’s already on track to gradua [...]
PITTSBURGH (AP) — East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld did everything by the book in his fatal encounter with an unarmed black teenager outside Pittsburgh last summer, a defense expert says. [...]
ATLANTA (AP) — Nearly four decades after voters unceremoniously rejected then-President Jimmy Carter’s bid for a second term, the 39th president has reached a milestone that electoral math cannot disp [...]
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A man convicted of a 1982 rape in Louisiana‘s capital city walked free Thursday after 35 years in prison, following his exoneration using an updated fingerprint database. The I [...]
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union sued the FBI on Thursday for records related to a divisive 2017 report that said black extremists were on the rise following the shooting deaths [...]
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday requiring U.S. colleges to protect free speech on their campuses or risk losing federal research funding. The new order directs federal agenci [...]
Boeing will make standard on its troubled new airliner a safety feature that might have helped the crew of a jet that crashed shortly after takeoff last year in Indonesia, killing everyone on board. T [...]
ATLANTA (AP) — Atlanta’s mayor and police chief are leading a push to re-examine evidence from a string of murders that terrorized the city’s black community between 1979 and 1981. Mayor Keisha Lance [...]
CHIMANIMANI, Zimbabwe (AP) — Reports from the United Nations and African governments say Cyclone Idai’s death toll has risen to over 550 people. A U.N. official says Cyclone Idai has killed 242 people [...]
Julisha Wyatt, 19, was taken by ambulance to the hospital after the incident caused minor burns on her body as well. [...]
PITTSBURGH (AP) — After prosecutors wrapped up their case, the lawyer for a white former police officer charged in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager asked a judge Thursday to issue an ac [...]
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook had stored millions of user passwords in plain text for years, the social media company confirmed on Thursday after a security researcher posted about the issue online. F [...]
The Kansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday asked state officials to investigate after a black man was detained by police while moving into his home, then allegedly harassed f [...]
Two brothers have been charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after shooting a 20-year-old pregnant woman Thursday, according to KHOU. Kwan Tayes, 21, and Nickolaus Collins, 19, were arr [...]
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Gov. Phil Bryant says he’s not worried about lawsuits as Mississippi prepares to enact one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation. The Republican governor is scheduled to s [...]
Omega Psi Phi Fraternity
Omega Psi Phi Founders
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
b.1862 – d.1931. Anti-lynching crusader, journalist, and advocate for racial justice and women’s suffrage. For Wells-Barnett, overcoming racism and halting the violent murder of black men was a central mission among her wide-ranging struggles for justice and human dignity. Born in Mississippi, she was educated at Rust University, actually a high school and industrial school. From 1884 to 1891, she taught in a rural school near Memphis and attended summer classes at Fisk University in Nashville.
A pattern of resistance to racial subordination was set early in Wells’ life. In 1887, she purchased a railroad ticket in Memphis and took a seat in the section reserved for whites. When she refused to move, she was physically thrown off the train. She successfully sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad for damages. Upon appeal, however, the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed the lower court’s ruling. Continue reading
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity
Alpha Phi Alpha (ΑΦΑ) is the first Black, Inter-Collegiate Greek-Lettered fraternity. It was founded on December 4, 1906 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Its founders are known as the “Seven Jewels”. Alpha Phi Alpha developed a model that was used by the many Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs) that soon followed in its footsteps. It employs an icon from Ancient Egypt, the Great Sphinx of Giza as its symbol, and its aims are “manly deeds, scholarship, and love for all mankind,” and its motto is First of All, Servants of All, We Shall Transcend All. Its archives are preserved at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
Florence ‘Flo Jo’ Joyner-Kersey
At the 1988 Olympic trials, while outfitted in a one-legged purple track suit and sporting four inch fingernails, she set a world record in the 100 meters, running it at 10.49 seconds, knocking more than a quarter of a second off her best-ever time despite not even being one of the country’s best in the event a year earlier.
Flo Jo at the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988
Florence Delorez Griffith grew up in a housing project in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles as the seventh of eleven children. From an early age, Griffith enjoyed competition and sought attention. She held handstand competitions, rode around on a unicycle, designed unique clothes for her Barbie doll, wore strange hairdos and owned a trained pet rat. And she was fast. Florence’s father often told a story about taking the kids to the nearby Mojave Desert when she was five and challenging them to chase jackrabbits. Florence caught one. “Jackrabbit” became her nickname.
By age 7, she was competing in track. In high school, she set records in sprints and the long jump. Following graduation, she competed at Cal State Northridge under the legendary sprint coach Bob Kersee and helped them win the national championship in 1978. Continue reading
The Vanport Flood & Racial Change in Portland
On Memorial Day in 1948, the Columbia River, swirling fifteen feet above normal, punched a hole in a railroad embankment that served as a dike, starting a flood that would leave 18,000 people homeless and alter race relations in Portland forever.
For eight years, the embankment had kept the river out of a newly developed 648-acre complex called Vanport, then the largest public housing project in the United States. Originally meant to be temporary, Vanport was shipbuilding-magnate Henry Kaiser’s answer to a lack of local housing in the early days of World War II, when he was importing men and women from across the United States to work in his Portland-area shipyards. At the height of the war in 1944, close to 40,000 people lived in Vanport, including 6,000 African Americans, three times as many as had lived in all of Portland two years before. Continue reading