Celebrate the Day!: Esther Rolle

Jean Toomer (born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, December 26, 1894 - March 30, 1967) was best known for his 1923 novel Cane, and its reprint soon after his death led to an increased interest in his poetry, essays, and other writings. The setting for the novel is based on his experience in 1921 as principal of Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Sparta, Georgia, although he was primarily raised in mostly- white neighborhoods in Washington D.C. and New York by his maternal grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, the first African American governor in the United States. His estranged father's family lived in the Sparta area and many appear as thinly-disguised characters in the novel. Toomer was published in literary and socialist political journals during the Harlem Renaissance. His writing took on more of a spiritual nature as he studied under Russian mystic George Gurdjieff and read the works of Carl Jung. He became a Quaker in 1940, and wrote little more for publication.

Birthdays

Bazoline Estelle Usher (December 26, 1885 - February 8, 1992) graduated from Atlanta University and had a 40-year career in the Atlanta public school system as a teacher, principal, and Supervisor of Education for Minority Pupils. She also led a group of about 25 women who created the first African American Girl Scout troops in Atlanta.

Una Mae Carlisle (December 26, 1915 - November 7, 1956) played piano at the age of three and was performing publicly by the time she was 10. She was discovered at 16 by Fats Waller while she worked as a local Cincinnati performer live and on radio. Her piano style was much influenced by Waller's; she played in a boogie-woogie/stride style and incorporated humor into her sets. She played solo from 1937, touring Europe repeatedly and recording with Waller late in the 1930s. In the 1940s Carlisle recorded as a leader for Bluebird Records, with sidemen such as Lester Young, Benny Carter, and John Kirby.

Lonne Elder III (December 26, 1927 - June 11, 1996) first received acclaim for his play, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, produced in 1969 by the Negro Ensemble Company. It won him a Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Subsequent productions of the play nurtured the stage careers of several prominent actors, including Denzel Washington, Billy Dee Williams, Keith David, and Laurence Fishburne. Elder also wrote the screenplay for the film Sounder, based on the novel by William H. Armstrong. The film was nominated for four academy awards including Best Adapted Screenplay. Elder was the first African American male to receive this honor and went on to write the sequel.

Harold Cash (born December 26, 1948) retired from bull and bronco riding in 1995 and currently serves as president of The Over The Hill and Future Cowboys Rodeo Association, which puts on two rodeos a year with proceeds used to place new head stones on cowboys' graves. He also sponsors the annual Harold Cash Spring Rodeo Roundup, held at the Galveston County Fairgrounds in Hitchcock. Proceeds from the rodeo go to scholarships for underprivileged children. Cash holds a degree in Industrial Technology from Prairie View A&M and in 1982 he and Myrtis Dightman opened the first black country-western club in Houston.

Osborne Earl "Ozzie" Smith (born December 26, 1954) is a former shortstop who played for the San Diego Padres and St. Louis Cardinals from 1978 to 1996. Nicknamed "The Wizard" for his defensive brilliance, Smith set major league records for career assists (8,375) and double plays (1,590) by a shortstop (the latter since broken by Omar Vizquel), as well as the National League (NL) record with 2,511 career games at the position; Smith won the NL Gold Glove Award for play at shortstop for 13 consecutive seasons (1980–92). He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 2002.

Events

On December 26, 1908 Jack Johnson became the first African American to win the world heavyweight boxing title. Johnson knocked out Canadian Tommy Burns in the 14th round in a championship fight near Sydney, Australia. Whites hated Johnson, who held the heavyweight title until 1915, for his defiance of the "Jim Crow" racial segregation and oppression of early 20th-century America.

On December 26, 1944, First Lieutenant John Robert Fox of the 366th Infantry Regiment was killed in action when he deliberately called for artillery fire on his own position, after his position was overrun, in order to defeat a German attack in the vicinity of Sommocolonia, northern Italy during World War II. Fox's sacrifice gained time for the U.S. forces to organize a counterattack and retake the village. When they did so, they found Fox’s body as well as about one hundred dead German soldiers. He posthumously received the Medal of Honor in 1997 after it was determined that African American soldiers had been denied consideration for the Medal of Honor because of their race.

On December 26, 1966 Kwanzaa was first celebrated by Ron Karenga. His goal was to "give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society." It is a 7-day celebration inspired by African "first fruit" traditions, and the name is derived from the name for the Swahili first fruit celebration, “matunda ya kwanza.” The principle represented by the first day is Umoja (unity).

Publications

Myra Rigaud, A Xavier University Graduate, Covers Jet - Jet Magazine December 26, 1963

James Brown, Jet Magazine, December 26, 1968

Diahann Carroll and Fred Williamson on the cover of the Dec. 26-Jan 1, 1971 issue of TV Guide.

Jet Magazine, December 26, 1974: Esther Rolle

Words with Wings: A Treasury of African-American Poetry and Art by Belinda Rochelle. $14.24. 48 pages. Publisher: Amistad (December 26, 2000).

From Private to General: An African American Soldier Rises Through the Ranks by Jerry Curry. $13.49. Publisher: Believe Books (December 26, 2006).

Horace Mann Bond (November 8, 1904 - December 21, 1972) graduated with honors from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania at age 19. He also held MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation on black education in Alabama won the Rosenberger Prize in 1936. He taught at Langston, Fisk, and Dillard Universities before being named president of Fort Valley State College in Georgia. He was the first African American president of Lincoln University (1945-1957) and finished his career as dean of the Atlanta University School of Education. As early as 1924, Dr. Bond began writing rebuttals to findings that African Americans were intellectually inferior to whites, noting that IQ scores for white southerners were equally low in comparison to national averages, and he collaborated with historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward on research for the NAACP's landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). After a group of white southern congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto in opposition to school integration, he wrote a widely-read parody of his 1924 article questioning the intellect of the southern politicians and their constituents. Dr. Bond was the father of Congressman and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond.

Birthdays

Gen. Oliver Otis Howard (November 8, 1830 – October 26, 1909) was head of the Freedmen's Bureau from 1865 to 1874, devising programs and guidelines including social welfare in the form of rations, schooling, courts, and medical care. The Bureau was also instrumental in gaining the vote for African Americans during this time. Howard was a strong proponent of education, becoming the founding president and namesake of Howard University in 1869. During the Civil War he served as a major general comnanding the the XI Corps, which fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. He was wounded at Seven Pines, losing his right arm.

Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson (November 8,1853 - January 20, 1904) was from a prominent Quaker family in Philadelphia where her great-grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, was a wealthy businessman and a founder of the Free Africa Society. She attended Lincoln University where she met and married William Drew Robeson. Her family disapproved of the marriage because Robeson had escaped from slavery in North Carolina and was very dark-skinned. Their youngest son, Paul, was born only six years before Mrs. Robeson died as the result of a kitchen fire. Her sister Gertrude also married a Lincoln graduate, Nathan Francis Mossell, who became a Philadalephia physician and was the brother of attorney Aaron Mossell.

Eartha White (November 8, 1876 - January 18, 1974) was a Jacksonville, businesswoman and real estate broker who used most of her substantial income to create organizations serving the African American community in the area. She founded the first public school in Bayard for African American children and taught there sixteen years, as well as at her her alma mater, the Stanton School. She and her mother started the Clara White Mission providing meals and shelter to the homeless, which as one time was the largest employer of African Americans in Jacksonville. They also founded the "Colored Old Folks Home", which became the "Eartha White Nursing Home", and is now called "Eartha M. M. White Health Care, Inc.", a 125-bed, $780,000 facility, begun when Eartha was 89. Her other endeavors included establishing Mercy (tuberculosis) Hospital, the Boy's Improvement Club (to reduce delinquency), establishing Oakland Park (the first public park in Jacksonville for African Americans), a halfway house for alcoholics in recovery, a program for released prisoners to help re-enter society, a comprehensive maternity program with a home for unwed mothers, an orphanage and an adoption agency, and a child care center. She never married, saying "I was too busy -- and what man would put up with me?"

Esther Rolle (November 8, 1920 - November 17, 1998) was best known as Florida Evans on the TV sitcom Good Times (1974-79), a character originally introduced on another Norman Lear show, Maude. She insisted that the character be married, later saying, "I told them (the producers) I couldn't compound the lie that Black fathers don`t care about their children. I was proud of the family life I was able to introduce to television." She was a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company and appeared in the 1973 Melvin Van Peebles play, Don't Play Us Cheap and as Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles' Haitian-influenced version of Macbeth. She was in a number of made-for-TV movies and won the first Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or a Special in 1979 for Summer of My German Soldier.

Minnie Riperton (November 8, 1947 – July 12, 1979) sang backup for Chess Records stars such as Etta James, Fontella Bass, Ramsey Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters before her 1975 hit Lovin' You. The next year she was one of the first celebrities to go public with a breast cancer diagnosis and in 1978 received the American Cancer Society's Courage Award which was presented to her at the White House by President Jimmy Carter. She is shown here with daughter Maya Rudolph, who created this tribute to her mother's original cover art on the Perfect Angel album.

Alfre Woodard (born November 8, 1952) began her acting career in theater. After her breakthrough role in the Off-Broadway play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1977), she made her film debut in Remember My Name (1978). She has appeared extensively on television beginning with an Emmy-winning guest appearance in the premiere of L.A. Law (1983) and ina recurring role on St. Elsewhere (1986) opposite Denzel Washington. To date she has been nominated once for an Academy Award and Grammy Award, 18 times for an Emmy Award (winning four), and has also won a Golden Globe Award and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. She is a founder of Artists for a New South Africa, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating the African AIDS pandemic and advancing democracy and equality in South Africa.

Events

On November 8, 1966, Edward Brooke was elected from Massachusetts as the first African American Senator since Reconstruction, and the first elected by popular vote. He served two terms and had previously been the state's Attorney General. Upon the death of Harry F. Byrd Jr. on July 30, 2013, he became the oldest living former Senator, and remained so until his death on January 3, 2015.

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