Thursday, March 27, 2008 |
Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) was the 31-year-old leading contributor to the sciences of aging and cancer, but she never knew it.
Born on Aug. 18, 1920, in Roanoke, Va., Lacks was a wife and mother of five who, on Feb. 1, 1951, went to Johns Hopkins Hospital because of a vaginal discharge; that day she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Treated in the hospital’s segregated ward for blacks, Lacks died on October 4, 1951, but she will live forever…
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Thursday, March 20, 2008 |
Ota Benga (ca. 1881-1916) was a 23-year-old Congolese who was featured in a 1906 human zoo exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, which was intended to promote the theory that humans evolved from primates and scientific racism.
Ota Benga (or Bi, which means ‘friend’ in his language) was born around 1881 in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time, the area was under control of the Belgians, who plundered the land for ivory and rubber. Upon returning from gathering ivory one day, Ota Benga found that his village had been destroyed and his wife and two children murdered.
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Thursday, March 13, 2008 |
Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman (ca. 1788-1816) is not a name most are familiar with, but it is a name we all will remember after this.
As mentioned in the video, after Baartman’s death in 1816, George Cuvier dissected her genitalia and brains and made a plaster cast of her body which were then placed on public display at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris as late as 1974, under the name “Hottentot Venus“. Baartman was one of many other skeletons, whose remains were gathered by European scientists to prove the “inherent inferiority” of non-white individuals.
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Thursday, March 6, 2008 |
Everyone is familiar with Rosa Parks. However, nine months before Parks became famous for refusing to obey a bus driver’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger, 15 year-old Claudette Colvin (1939-), was arrested for the same offense in Montgomery, AL.
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008 |
Dr. Benjamin S. Carson Sr., M.D (1951-) is a noted and prominent children’s neurosurgeon and motivational speaker. He became the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital when he was just 33 years old.
Born and raised in inner-city Detroit, Dr. Carson credits his mother Sonya’s influence with much of his success. She performed domestic work to keep her family financially afloat. With only a third grade education herself, Sonya Carson prayed diligently for wisdom to help Ben and his older brother Curtis success in school. Many had given up on Ben, including himself, but his mother never did. She encouraged him to do better and reach higher for his dreams.
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Monday, February 4, 2008 |
Many people know the story of THE Rosewood Massacre, but do you know the story about Black Wall Street?
During the oil boom of the 1910s, the area of northeast Oklahoma flourished -— including the Greenwood neighborhood, which came to be known as “the Negro Wall Street” (now commonly referred to as “the Black Wall Street”). The area was home to several prominent black businessmen and families, many of them multimillionaires.
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Friday, February 1, 2008 |
George L. Jackson (1941 – 1971) was a Black American revolutionary, activist, and theoretician who became a member of the Black Panther Party while in prison. Similar to Malcolm X, he studied while behind bars and became a leading figurehead behind the revolutionary prison movement.
Jackson was born in Chicago and moved with his family to Los Angeles at the age of fourteen. As a teenager he had numerous run-ins with the law and at the age of eighteen he was accused of stealing $70 from a gas station. Although there was evidence of his innocence, Jackson’s court appointed lawyer told him to plead guilty to the armed robbery charge because it would mean a lesser sentence. He did and received an indeterminate sentence of one year to life. Jackson was never granted parole and would ultimately be gunned down by prison guards.
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