The Arts
Born in 1917, John Birks Gillespie began playing the trumpet as a child. He formed his own band at the age of 14. He garnered a music scholarship to Laurinburg Institute, but he left before his senior year. He moved to Philadelphia and began his professional career. He began developing bebop while jamming with such names as Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. After playing for different bands for several years, he formed his own label, Dee Gee Records.
When the company folded he continued to play with other jazz greats including Charles Mingus, Max Roach and Charlie Parker. In 1953, someone fell on his trumpet, bending it skyward. He kept it that way, liking the sound it produced. After winning several Grammy Awards and writing his autobiography, Gillespie died in 1993..still touted as one of the greatest jazz musicians ever.
The Arts
Born Edward Kennedy Ellington in 1899, “Duke” was a tour de force in the world of big band jazz. Pianist-composer-bandleader, he used his band like an instrument and the sounds he made with it were revolutionary to jazz. He studied music theory and harmony at an early age and he wrote his first composition “The Soda Fountain Rag” when he was 17. During the 20s he spent 4 years at the famous Cotton Club, building his popularity.
Ellington used only the very best musicians and understood completely that it was their talent that focused his. In the 50s when money problems closed down many of the big jazz bands, he used his composing royalties to keep his own afloat. More than most bandleaders, Duke wrote with his musicians in mind. It was part of his genius and it was the reason that many of his musicians stayed with him for over 20 years. His sound characterized the big band jazz sound until he died in 1974.
Duke Ellington won Springarn Medal for his musical achievements, 1959
The Arts
1845c. 1890
Details of her early life are uncertain. Her father was a black American and her mother an Ojibwa Indian who named her Wildfire. Lewis changed her name to Mary Edmonia while studying at Oberlin College. At the school, Lewis was accused of theft and of trying to poison two classmates. Although she was acquitted of both charges, she was not allowed to graduate.
In 1863, Lewis moved to Boston and became a sculptor, specializing in abolitionists and Civil War heroes. Forever Free (1867), a marble sculpture now at the Howard University Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, is her most famous work. Lewis reached the peak of her fame when The Death of Cleopatra was presented at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. It is now in the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. The end of her life remains a mystery. Lewis was last reported living in Rome in 1911.
Religion
Elijah Muhammad’s original name was Elijah Poole. He was born on Oct. 7, 1897, in Sandersville, Ga.. He passed away on Feb. 25, 1975, in Chicago. He was the leader of the black separatist religious movement known as the Nation of Islam (sometimes called Black Muslims) in the United States.
Elijah was the son of sharecroppers and former slaves. In 1923, Muhammad moved to Detroit to find work. Around 1930 he became an assistant minister to the founder of the sect, Wallace D. Fard, at Temple No. 1. When Fard disappeared in 1934 Muhammad succeeded him as head of the movement, with the title “Minister of Islam.” Because of dissension within the Detroit temple, he moved to Chicago where he established Temple No. 2. During World War II he advised followers to avoid the draft, as a result of which he was charged with violating the Selective Service Act and was jailed (1942-46).
Muhammad slowly built up the membership of the Black Muslims through assiduous recruitment in the postwar decades. His program called for the establishment of a separate nation for black Americans and the adoption of a religion based on the worship of Allah and on the belief that blacks are his chosen people. Muhammad became known especially for his flamboyant rhetoric directed at white people, whom he called “blue-eyed devils.” In his later years, however, he moderated his antiwhite tone and stressed self-help among blacks rather than confrontation between the races. Because of Muhammad’s separatist views, his most prominent disciple, Malcolm X, broke with the group. Before his assassination in 1965, helped to lend an identity to the group (once known as the American Muslim Mission and now part of the worldwide orthodox Muslim community) that split from the Nation of Islam after Muhammad’s death in 1975.
Another group, retaining both the name and the founding principles of Elijah Muhammad’s original Nation of Islam, was established under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan, another minister of Elijah. The original Nation of Islam is now referred to as The Lost Found Nation of Islam.
Music
An outstanding and groundbreaking jazz vocalist, she was also the first African American woman to win a Grammy award.
