Thursday, November 27, 2008 |
DR. ALEXA I. CANADY (1950-) is the first black female neurosurgeon.
Canady was born November 7, 1950, to Clinton and Elizabeth Canady. Her father was a dentist, and her mother served as president of Delta Sigma Theta sorority, in addition to other civic affairs. The family lived just outside Lansing, Michigan. Canady and her brother were the only two black students in their entire school.
Canady was an exceptional student and named a National Achievement Scholar in 1967. She attended the University of Michigan, earning her bachelor’s in zoology in 1971, although she had almost dropped out of college. She explains, “The summer after my junior year, I worked in Dr. Bloom’s lab in genetics and attended a genetic counseling clinic. I fell in love with medicine.”
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Thursday, November 20, 2008 |
GRANVILLE WOODS (1856 – 1910) was an inventor who received numerous patents for inventions that contributed to the development of the transportation and communication industries.
Woods, the son of Tailer and Martha Woods, was born April 23, 1856, in Columbus, Ohio. At the age of 10, he went to work with his father in a machine shop that made speed equipment for carriages and repaired equipment and machinery. Woods studied other machine workers in different pieces of equipment and was said to have paid workers to teach him electrical concepts.
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Thursday, November 13, 2008 |
Miriam Makeba (1932-2008), also known as Mama Afrika and the Empress of African Song, was one of the most visible and outspoken opponents of South Africa’s apartheid regime from the 1960s till its dismantling in the early 1990s.
A Grammy Award winning Afrobeat artist, Makeba died recently. She was 76.
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Thursday, November 6, 2008 |
DR. DANIEL HALE WILLIAMS (1856 – 1931) was the first black heart surgeon.
Williams was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to Daniel and Sarah Price Williams, a middle-class free black family. When his father died of tuberculosis, his mother realized she could not manage seven children and sent some of them to live with relatives. Daniel went to Baltimore and apprenticed to a shoemaker but ran away to join his mother who had moved to Rockford, Illinois. He later moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin, where he joined his sister and opened his own barber shop. After moving to nearby Janesville, Williams became fascinated with a local physician and decided to follow his career path.
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Thursday, October 30, 2008 |
ETHEL WATERS (1896 – 1977) was a blues/jazz singer and actress.
Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 31, 1896, to a thirteen-year-old mother who had been raped at knifepoint. She had a rough childhood, raised in a violent, impoverished home. She said of her childhood in the opening of her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow, “I was never a child. I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider…. Nobody brought me up.”
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Thursday, October 23, 2008 |
PAUL ROBESON (1898 – 1976) was an actor, athlete, civil rights activist, singer and one of the most gifted men of the 20th century.
Born on April 9, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul was the eighth child of Quaker abolitionist Maria Luisa Bustill and former slave and minister William Drew Robeson.
In 1915, Robeson graduated high school and received a scholarship to Rutgers College. He was the third black student accepted and the only black student during his time on campus. He excelled academically, becoming a junior-year Phi Beta Kappa, a champion debater, class valedictorian and gaining admission into Cap and Skull, Rutgers’ honor society in 1919. He also triumphed on the athletic field, earning 15 varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball and track and field. He was named All-American twice in football (1917 and 1918).
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Thursday, October 16, 2008 |
CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY (1921 – 2005) was a civil rights activist, lawyer, judge, state senator and borough president.
Born on September 14, 1921, in New Haven, Connecticut, Baker was the ninth of twelve children whose parents emigrated from the Caribbean island of Nevis. While attending school, she was active in the New Haven Youth Council and the New Haven Adult Community Council. Baker joined the local chapter of the (NAACP) when she was denied admission to a local skating rink and public beach. With the help of local philanthropist Clarence Blakeslee, Baker attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Tennessee, before deciding to transfer to New York University. She graduated in 1943 with a degree in economics and went on to receive her law degree from Columbia Law School in 1946 and married Joel Wilson Motley, a real estate and insurance broker.
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