The Arts
“Pops”, “Dippermouth”, “Satchmo” or just Louis, his birthdate is traditionally July 4, 1900. One of the most familiar and beloved jazz musicians of all time, he was that genres first soloist and its first true singer. He left his mark on not only Jazz, but the entire world. Around the age of seven, he began to sing with various street bands in his hometown, New Orleans. In 1912, he was arrested for firing a gun into the air on New Year’s Eve. He was taken to the city’s Colored Waif’s Home where he received his musical education. After his release he began to perform in the city’s cabarets and soon fell under the wing of Joe “King” Oliver, the leader of the city’s best jazz band. He played in Chicago with Oliver, electrifying audiences with his talent as he grew more confident in his abilities. In 1924, he moved to New York where he set the pace that all other musicians at the time had to struggle to keep up with. Throughout his career he was continually striving to innovate, never failing to push himself as far and as hard as he could. He died in 1971.
Music
1911-1972
Mahalia Jackson, the “Queen of Gospel Music,” lett a legacy of gospel recordings and performances that remain unmatched to this day.
She grew up in New Orleans, and although she was familiar with the records of Bessie Smith and other blues singers, her father, who was a preacher, allowed only religious music to be played at home. Jackson made her first record in 1934, and eleven years later she achieved national fame with “Move On Up a Little Higher,” which sold a million copies. In 1950 she made her first appearance at Carnegie Hall.
Jackson has been credited with popularizing the gospel sound with her unforgettable recordings Precious Lord, Bless This Household, and Let the Church Roll On. She won Grammy Awards for her albums Great Songs of Love and Faith and Make a Joyful Noise.
The Arts
Born in 1883, Mamie Smith was the first vocalist to ever record a blues song. A vaudville and cabaret singer, her version of composer Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” was a national hit in 1920. The astounding success of the single sent record companies rushing to tap the new “race” market. Though she was not a true blues singer, she set the stage for other female vocalists and she also set the trend with her stylish look. Nearly every other female blues singer of the ’20s copied her appearance.
Religion
One of the world’s best-known advocates of nonviolent social change. King was born in Atlanta, Georgia. As a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and at Boston University, he deepened his understanding of theological scholarship and of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent strategy for social change. He became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954 and received a Ph.D. in theology in 1955.
In December 1955, after Montgomery civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to obey the city’s policy mandating segregation on buses, black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King as president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, gaining him national prominence for his exceptional oratorical skills and personal courage. His house was bombed, and he and other boycott leaders were convicted on charges of conspiring to interfere with the bus company’s operations. But, in December 1956, Montgomery’s buses were desegregated when the Supreme Court declared Alabama’s segregation laws unconstitutional.
In 1957, seeking to build upon the success in Montgomery, King and other black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president, King emphasized the goal of black voting rights when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. He traveled to West Africa to attend the independence celebration of Ghana and toured India, increasing his understanding of Gandhi’s ideas. At the end of 1959, he resigned from Dexter and returned to Atlanta where the SCLC headquarters were located.
Although increasingly portrayed as the preeminent black spokesman, King did not mobilize mass protest activity during SCLC’s first few years. Then southern black college students launched a wave of sit-in protests in 1960. Although King sympathized with their movement and spoke at the founding meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee SNCC in April 1960, he soon became the target of criticisms from SNCC activists. Even King’s joining a student sit-in and his subsequent arrest in October 1960 did not allay the tensions. (After the arrest, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s sympathetic telephone call to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, helped attract crucial black support for Kennedy’s campaign.)
King and his staff then initiated a major campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, where white police officials were notorious for their anti-black attitudes. In 1963, clashes between unarmed black demonstrators and police with attack dogs and fire hoses generated newspaper headlines throughout the world. Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities culminated in a march on August 28, 1963, attracting more than 250,000 protesters to Washington, D.C. Addressing the marchers from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” oration.
During the year following the march, King’s renown as a nonviolent leader grew, and, in 1964, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite the accolades, however, King faced strong challenges to his leadership. In 1966, King encountered strong criticism from “black power” proponent Stokely Carmichael. Shortly afterward, white counter-protestors in Chicago physically assaulted King during an unsuccessful effort to transfer nonviolent protest techniques to the North. Nevertheless, King remained committed to nonviolence.
King’s ability to achieve his objectives was also limited by the increasing resistance he encountered from national political leaders. As urban racial violence escalated, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover intensified his efforts to discredit King, and King’s public criticism of American intervention in the Vietnam War soured his relations with the Johnson administration. He delivered his last speech during a bitter sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis on April 3, 1968. The following evening, April 4, he was assassinated.
After his death, King remained a controversial symbol of the civil rights struggle, revered by many for his martyrdom on behalf of nonviolence and condemned by others for his insurgent views. In 1986, King’s birthday, January 15, became a federal holiday.
The Arts
Born in 1939, Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr. was a rebel. He resisted the iron fist rules of his minister father and suffered through the beatings that were meant to keep him in line. He began singing in his father’s church and also sang in various local groups including the Moonglows. In 1960 he moved to Detroit and found work as a Motown sessions drummer. Gaye was Motown’s most successful male solo act. He racked up more hits than anyone else there. The label’s leading sex symbol, he was paired with Mary Wells and then Kim Weston, but the duet concept didn’t catch on until 1967 when he joined Tammi Terrell.
The duo had six R&B chart toppers with their smoky sexual chemistry that had listeners convinced they were lovers. Unfortunatley, Tammi was diagnosed with a brain tumor after she collapsed on stage into Marvin’s arms. She died 2 years later and Marvin was never the same. After her death, he went into seclusion, coming out four years later to record an album with Diana Ross..but the chemistry wasn’t the same. Marvin was shot to death by his father while he was trying to stop his dad from beating his long suffering mother. He was 45.
Places
Born on July 10, 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune ranks high among great women in America. The last of seventeen children of sharecroppers, Mary Bethune lifted herself from the cotton field to the White House as an advisor to the President of the United States. Her greatest accomplishment, however, was almost single-handedly building Bethune-Cookman College in 1923.
With only one dollar and fifty cents, nerve and determination, she set out to build a school for the Blacks who were working in the railroad labor camps in Florida. Slowly the school emerged from old crate boxes and odd rooms of old houses near the Daytona Beach City Dump. Bethune served as the school’s president until 1942. Today Bethune-Cookman graduates thousands. In 1935, she received the NAACP Springarn Medal as a symbol of distinguished achievement. Also in 1935, President Roosevelt appointed her national director of the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs. She died on May 18, 1955 in Daytona Beach, Florida.
