Medicine
Vivien T. Thomas was a key player in pioneering the anastomosis of the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery.The surgical work he performed with Alfred Blalock paved the way for the successful outcome of the Blalock-Taussig shunt.
In January 1930, Vivien Thomas, a young African-American who was forced for lack of funds to leave his first year of college, came to work for Blalock in his laboratory. At that point Blalock’s increasing obligations were cutting into the time he could spend in the laboratory and he needed a surgical assistant. A more fortunate choice could not have been made. Vivien Thomas learned to perform the surgical operations and chemical determinations needed for their experiments, to calculate the results, and to keep precise records; he remained an invaluable associate throughout Blalock’s career.
The Arts
Born in 1915, Muddy Waters was the king of Postwar Chicago Blues. One of 10 children and the son of a sharecropper, he got his nickname because he loved to play down by a muddy creek as a child. He learned to sing out in the cotton fields he worked in and started playing the guitar when he was 17. Inspired by Son House and Robert Johnson, he began to build his style. Waters left his mark on untold numbers of bluesmen and blues rockers, both American and British. He was responsible for the melding of the Mississippi Delta Blues and the urban Chicago Blues. To many blues fans, he IS the blues. His first recording was in 1941. Muddy Waters died of a heart attack in his sleep in 1983.
The Arts
(b. c. 1753, Senegal, West Africa–d. Dec. 5, 1784, Boston, Mass., U.S.), the first black woman poet of note in the United States.
She was sold from a slave ship in Boston in 1761 to work for the family of John Wheatley, a merchant. The Wheatleys soon recognized her talents and gave her privileges unusual for a slave, allowing her to learn to read and write. At the age of 14 she began to write poetry, and her first published work, “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine . . . George Whitefield” (1770), attracted much attention. In 1773 her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in England under the sponsorship of the Countess of Huntingdon, and Wheatley’s reputation spread in Europe as well as in America. A poem published in 1776, dedicated to George Washington, brought her further acclaim.
The dissolution of the Wheatley family by death left Phillis Wheatley alone, and in April 1778 she married John Peters, a free black man who failed in business and apparently also failed to support Phillis and her children. At the end of her life she was working as a servant, and she died in poverty.
Wheatley’s poetry, largely concerned with morality and piety, was conventional for its time. Her significance stems from the attention that she drew to her successful education. Her poems were reissued in the 1830s by Abolitionists eager to prove the human potential of blacks.
The Arts
One of the most celebrated Blues figures in history is Robert Johnson. Born in 1911, he lived only 27 years old and produced a grand total of 29 tracks, but his legacy is one that is still felt in the blues today. Both scholars and critics agree that even with so little material to study, Johnson was a blues genius. According to the myth, Johnson sold his soul to the Devil to obtain his amazing guitar skills. Arguably, no one has been able to surpass his unconvential approach to the guitar since. Johnson’s only two recording sessions occured only a couple of years before his death. Not long after those sessions, he resumed his wandering and was poisoned with strychnine-laced whiskey after having an affair with the wife of a local bar-owner. He was inducted into the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
Politics
b. 1926
Born in Cedros, Trinidad, Mervyn Dymally emigrated to the United States in 1946 to study at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in education from California State University in 1954 and began teaching school in Los Angeles.
Subsequently, he began a political career and became the first black elected to the California senate, the only black to serve as lieutenant governor of the state (1975), and the first foreign-born black to serve in Congress (1980). Dymally defeated four other candidates to win the primary in California’s Thirty-First Congressional District.
From 1987 to 1989, he was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Today, Dymally heads an international consulting firm in Los Angeles.
Literature
John S. Abbott learned the printing trade at the Hampton Institute (1892-1896). He later earned a law degree from Kent College of Law in Chicago (1898). Abbott founded the Chicago Defender (1905) and Abbott’s Monthly. He later became a Freemason.
