January 7

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) left home at the age of 17, finished high school in Baltimore, and went on to study at Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University before becoming one of the most prolific writers in the Harlem Renaissance. Her works included novels, essays, plays, and studies in folklore and anthropology. She is most remembered for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She did graduate work in anthropology from Columbia University where she studied under Franz Boaz and was a classmate of Margaret Mead.


Birthdays

Rayford W. Logan (January 7, 1897 - November 4, 1982) taught history at Howard University from 1938 to 1965. During World War I he was a first lieutenant in the all-black 93rd infantry Division, and stayed in Europe after the war where he helped to co-ordinate the 2nd Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1921. In 1932, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to his Black Cabinet where Logan drafted Roosevelt's executive order prohibiting the exclusion of blacks from the military in World War II. In 1950 he became Director of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and was known for his study of post-Reconstruction America, a period he termed "the nadir of American race relations".

Henry James "Red" Allen (January 7, 1908 – April 17, 1967) began playing trumpet in New Orleans jazz bands and he went to Chicago in 1927 to join King Oliver's band. Around this time he made recordings on the side in the band of Clarence Williams He later played with Luis Russell, Fletcher Henderson, and Lucky Millinder. He also recorded under his own name and also with Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton and accompanied such vocalists as Victoria Spivey and Billie Holiday.

Butterfly McQueen (January 7, 1911 - December 22, 1995) was an actress best know for her role as Prissy in Gone With the Wind. She began her career as a dancer with Katherine Dunham, Geoffrey Holder, and Janet Collins. She retired from acting in 1952 because of the lack of roles for African Americans,living in relative obscurity and earning a degree in political science at the age of 65. She died in a house fire started by a kerosene heater.

Ulysses Kay (January 7, 1917 - May 20, 1995) attended the University of Arizona, where he was encouraged by the African-American composer William Grant Still. He went for graduate work to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and there worked under Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers. As a composer Kay was known primarily for his symphonic and choral compositions. He also wrote five operas. His final opera, Frederick Douglass, was mounted in April 1991 at the New Jersey State Opera with Kevin Maynor in the title role and Klara Barlow as Helen Pitts Douglass. He taught at  Lehman College of the City University of New York for 20 years and was the nephew of jazz musician King Oliver.

Dorothy Lavinia Brown (January 7, 1919 – June 13, 2004 ) was the chief surgeon at the now-defunct Riverside Hospital in Nashville from 1957 to 1983, and the first African American woman in the south to be a surgeon. She was a graduate of Meharry Medical School where she later served on the faculty. Dr. Brown was also elected to the Tennessee General Assembly in 1966 where she served a two-year term. Before beginning her medical career she was a domestic and did defense work during World War II, and graduated from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Frederick Drew Gregory (born January 7, 1941), (Col, USAF, Ret.), is a former United States Air Force pilot, military engineer, test pilot, and NASA astronaut as well as former NASA Deputy Administrator. He also served briefly as NASA Acting Administrator in early 2005, covering the period between the departure of Sean O'Keefe and the swearing in of Michael Griffin. He was the first African American to command a space mission, and is the nephew of Dr. Charles Drew and the great-grandson of James Monroe Gregory, dean of Howard University.



Events

On January 7, 1927, the Harlem Globetrotters played their first game in Hinckley, Illinois before a crowd of 300 people, and made a profit of $75. Over the years they have played more than 26,000 exhibition games in 122 countries and territories, including a nine-game series in Moscow in 1959.

Marian Anderson debuted at the Metropolitan Opera as Ulrica in "Un Ballo in Maschera," by Giuseppe Verdi on January 7, 1955, marking the first vocal performance by an African American on that stage. Although she never appeared with the company again after this production, Anderson was named a permanent member of the Metropolitan Opera company. The following year she published her autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning, which became a bestseller.

On January 7, 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was arrested for the 1964 murder of voting rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. On June 21, 2005, a jury convicted Killen on three counts of manslaughter; he was described as the man who planned and directed the killing of the civil rights workers. Killen, then 80 years old, was sentenced to three consecutive terms of 20 years in prison.

Photo Gallery

Sammy Davis Jr & Nancy Wilson (January 7, 1966)

7 January 2009: US President George W Bush stands with President-elect Barack Obama, former President George HW Bush, former President Bill Clinton and former President Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office of the White House. Bush, acting on a suggestion by Obama, invited the former Presidents and President-elect for lunch, the first time since 1981 that all living presidents have been together at the White House

Publications

Jet Magazine, January 7, 1954

Brown University Alumni Club Bans Fritz Pollard (Brown Football Star) - Jet Magazine, January 7, 1954

The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing The Promise by National Museum African American History. $25.29. 224 pages. Publisher: Smithsonian Books (January 7, 2009).

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December 22

Then Came the Rain, illustration from Black Cowboy, Wild Horses, Jerry Pinkney, 1998.  Pinckney,  born December 22, 1935 is a five-time Caldecott medal winner  for his illustrations of children's  books

Chancellor Williams (December 22, 1898 - December 7, 1992) was a sociologist, historian and writer. He held a master's degree in history from Howard University (1935) and a doctorate in sociology from American University (1949), and taught in the Washington D.C. public schools and at Howard. His research focused on pre-colonial Africa and he is best known as the author of The Destruction of Black Civilization (1971). "I was very sensitive about the position of Black people in the town... I wanted to know how you explain this great difference. How is it that we were in such low circumstances as compared to the whites? And when they answered 'slavery' as the explanation, then I wanted to know where we came from."



Birthdays

Edward Hatch (December 22, 1832 – April 11, 1889) served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He served under General Ulysses S. Grant in the South. After commanding the entire cavalry division in the Army of the Tennessee, he was made brigadier general in early 1864. After the war, he transferred from the volunteer to the Regular Army as colonel of the 9th U.S. Cavalry Regiment (1866). He succeeded General Gordon Granger as commander of the Department of Arizona (which included New Mexico Territory) in 1876, negotiated a treaty with the Ute Indians in 1880, and became widely known as an Indian fighter.

Arthur Wergs Mitchell (December 22, 1883 – May 9, 1968) was a U.S. Representative from Illinois. In 1934 he was the first African American to be elected to the United States Congress as a Democrat. He introduced bills banning lynching and against discrimination. He filed a lawsuit against the Illinois Central and Rock Island Railroads after he was forced into a segregated train car just before it passed into Arkansas. Mitchell's suit was advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court as case Mitchell v. United States, which ruled that the railroad violated the Interstate Commerce Act.

Saint Elmo Brady (December 22, 1884 - December 25, 1966) was the first African American to obtain a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in the United States, which he earned in 1916 from the University of Illinois. He taught at Tuskegee Institute and  Howard University before joining the faculty of Fisk Univeristy where he chaired the school's chemistry department from 1927 until his retirement in 1952. After his retirement from Fisk, he taught at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi.

James Amos Porter (December 22, 1905 - February 28, 1970) was on the faculty of Howard University for over 40 years and was a pioneer in establishing the field of African-American art history. Modern Negro Art, published in 1943, was the first comprehensive study in the United States of African-American art. It was an extension of his thesis for his M.A. in Art History from New York University in 1937. While doing research at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library he met and married Dorothy Burnett, who worked with him throughout his career as well as serving as director of the Moorland Foundation, later known as the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard.

James Amos Porter - Fish Vendors at Bar Beach, Lagos

Lil Green (December 22, 1919 – April 14, 1954) was an American blues singer and songwriter. She was among the leading female rhythm and blues singers of the 1940s, possessed with an ability to bring power to ordinary material and compose superior songs of her own.  Her two biggest hits were her own composition, "Romance in the Dark", which was later covered by many artists, such as Dinah Washington and Nina Simone and her 1941 version of Kansas Joe McCoy's minor key blues and jazz influenced song, "Why Don't You Do Right?", which was covered by Peggy Lee in 1942.

Jerry Pinkney (born December 22, 1939) is an illustrator of children’s books. He has won the Caldecott Medal five times, most recently in 2010 for The Lion & the Mouse, a wordless version of Aesop's fable. For his contribution as a children's illustrator, Pinkney was U.S. nominee in 1998 for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for creators of children's books.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 - August 12, 1988) first attracted attention for his graffiti in in the late 1970s, under the name "SAMO", and sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets of his native New York. He is credited with bringing the African American and Latino experience to the elite art world. Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, he drew much of his inspiration from his diverse heritage. He collaborated with famed pop artist Andy Warhol, which resulted in a show of their work that featured a series of corporate logos and cartoon characters. Basquiat died of a drug overdose at the age of 27.

Self-Portrait 1982, Jean-Michel Basquiat

Events

On December 22, 1870, Jefferson Franklin Long became Georgia's first African American congressman. He is the first African American to speak on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Prior to beginning his political career, he was an entrepreneur and activist. Long also urged former slaves to register to vote and was active in the AME church.


Photo Gallery

Sasha Obama, daughter of US President Barack Obama, plays with the fsmily dog Bo prior to reading a book to children during a visit to the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC, on December 22, 2009. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Publications

Jean Thompson is Crowned Queen of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Black and White Ball in Los Angeles, California - Jet Magazine, December 22, 1955

Gail Fisher (Later of the TV Show Mannix) Wins Press Photographer's Queen Contest - Jet Magazine, December 22, 1955

The Start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott - Jet Magazine, December 22, 1955

SOUL — America's Most Soulful Newspaper, December 22, 1975 — The O'Jays

This is a newspaper clipping from the New York Times announcing the death of Thelma 'Butterfly' McQueen on December 22, 1995.

Jet Magazine- December 22, 1997

Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, The Demands of Transcendence by Gregory S. S. Parks. $28.81. Author: Stefan M. Bradley. 416 pages. Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky (December 22, 2011)

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