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BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2007:

BLACK MAN CREATED FIRST TAXI CAB SERVICE IN CANADA IN THE 1800's:

Lucie and Thornton Blackburn’s house was of modest size on a small lot at 54 Eastern Avenue, at Sumach Street, now the south-east corner of the playground of the Sackville Street School, which was built in 1887.  Their home had long since been demolished and the couple all but forgotten, when, in 1985, Karolyn Smardz Frost and others, supported by The Toronto Board of Education, found out that the property had belonged to the Blackburns from old street directories and decided to excavate the corner of the school yard as they were fascinated with the Underground Railroad and the educational possibilities presented.  Thus the Lucie and Thornton Blackburn Public Archaeology Project was initiated.

The Blackburns were African American slaves who fled from Louisville Kentucky, via the Underground Railway. Their journey first took them to Detroit, where they stayed for a couple of years.  Unfortunately they were recognized and jailed. They escaped with the help of Detroit's black residents and arrived in the new City of Toronto in 1834, where they became prominent and prosperous members of Toronto's Black community.  The escape from Detroit was not without incident.  Two women visited Lucie Blackburn in jail. While there one of them exchanged clothes with her, and she was able to walk undetected. She was then whisked across the Detroit River into Canada. Thornton’s escape was more difficult as he was heavily guarded, bound and shackled. A crowd of 400 men had to storm the jail to free him; this was that city's first race riot.  In Upper Canada, Lieutenant-Governor Colborne refused extradition back to the United States, noting that a person could not steal himself.

Shortly after they arrived here, the Blackburns built a small one-storey frame house at #54 Eastern Avenue at the corner of Sackville Street, where they lived for over fifty years.  His first job was waiting at the Osgoode Hall dining room, but they decided to go into business for themselves.  Having learned about the taxi cabs in Montreal, he got hold of the plans for one and contracted with Paul Bishop, a skilful mechanic, whose shop was in the neighbourhood, for a cab to be made of this design.  Blackburn called his one-horse cab the "City" and painted it yellow and red. It was entered from the back, and accommodated four passengers.  The driver sat on his box in front. This was the first taxi cab in Upper Canada.  His cab business was very successful and many others followed his example. At his death in 1890, he left Lucie $17,000, which was a considerable sum in those days.  Many people remembered and wrote about special trips they took in the "City."  The Blackburns participated in antislavery and community activities, and donated both time and money to help other fugitive slaves settle in their adopted home.

In 1999, the Canadian government designated the Blackburns "Persons of National Historic Significance" for their important contribution to the growth of Toronto and, in 2002, plaques in their honour were erected in Louisville, Kentucky, and in Toronto.  This site has been fully excavated by the Archaeological Resource Centre under the Board of Education, SEED, Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, and the Ontario Heritage Foundation in the summer of 1985. The school building is now used by the Inglenook Community School, an alternative high school.

Actor Eddie "Rochester" Anderson was the richest black man in America in 1942.  He grossed $100,000 per year as a sidekick on the "Jack Benny Show."  Among the most highly paid African-American performers of his time, Anderson invested wisely and became extremely wealthy.  His mansion became a showplace for Black Hollywood with a large dance floor for parties and a home theater for viewing movies.   Upstairs was a library flowing with books, including investment manuals.  During the war years, downstairs became a bomb shelter.  Anderson died in 1977.  Source: "Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams," by Donald Bogle

Mahalia Jackson, the greatest gospel singer in history, started out as a laundress and studied beauty culture at Madame C.J. Walker’s beauty school. Madame Walker’s business savvy must have rubbed off on Mahalia because when she died, her estate was worth over $2 million dollars in the early 70’s and during that time it wasn’t much money in gospel. Mahalia had invested in prime real estate and stocks over the years. When Martin Luther King, Jr. asked her ‘how much she would charge to perform at the March on Washington?’ Mahalia replied, ‘I never charge when it benefits the civil rights movement.’

Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright who wrote “Raisin In The Sun,” was once asked by an friend, Lorraine, 'Why do you wear that same sweater so often?' Miss Hansberry replied, ‘I don’t even think about buying new clothes when my people are suffering and struggling throughout this country, all of my extra income goes towards the movement.’ Whenever “A Raisin In The Sun,” opens across the country, Hansberry’s family is always in attendance on opening night.

Hazel Washington (no photo available) was a one-time maid of Greta Garbo and a personal assistant to Rosalind Russell in the 1950’s. Washington also became of the early black licensed hairdressers employed by the studios to tend to the hairstyles of black actresses on such movies as “Cabin In The Sky,” and “Stormy Weather.” Washington partnered with white actress Rosalind Russell to open a leather good store in Beverly Hills that was quite profitable. This was an unheard venture for an African-American woman in the 1950’s. Washington became the first black woman to have any type of ownership of business in Beverly Hills during this era.  Source: "Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams," by Donald Bogle

Black History Month Tidbit...Lewis H. Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1848. Along with Granville T. Woods, Latimer was one of the first major African American inventors. He first worked as an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell. Some have claimed that "Latimer, not Bell, actually invented the telephone."

Later, Latimer became a member of Thomas Edison's elite research team, "Edison's Pioneers." Here Latimer made his most important scientific contributions, by improving the light bulb invented by Edison.

Edison's prototypical light bulb was lit by a glowing, electrified filament made of paper, which unfortunately burnt out rather quickly. Latimer created a light bulb with a filament made of the much more durable carbon and the light bulb burned much longer.

The First Black Ice Hockey Players -1820 to 1870.  Comprised of the sons and grandsons of runaway American slaves, the league helped pioneer the sport of ice hockey changing this winter game from the primitive "gentleman's past-time" of the nineteenth century to the modern fast moving game of today. In an era when many believed blacks could not endure cold, possessed ankles too weak to effectively skate, and lacked the intelligence for organized sport, these men defied the defined myths

The first recorded mention of all-Black hockey teams appears in 1895. Games between Black club teams were arranged by formal invitation. By 1900, The Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes had been created, headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  Despite hardships and prejudice, the league would exist until the mid-1920s. Historically speaking, The Colored Hockey League was like no other hockey or sports league before or since. Primarily located in a province, reputed to be the birthplace of Canadian hockey, the league would in time produce a quality of player and athlete that would rival the best of White Canada. Such was the skill of the teams that they would be seen by as worthy candidates for local representation in the annual national quest for Canadian hockey's ultimate prize - the Stanley Cup.

Each week tens of thousands of diners eat at an Olive Garden or Red Lobster Restaurant. Few of these diners know that the CEO heading these large restaurant chains is a black man. Clarence Otis Jr. (pictured above) is the CEO of Darden Restaurants Inc., the largest casual dining operator in the nation. The firm operates nearly 1,400 company-owned restaurants coast to coast serving 300 million meals annually. Darden employs 150,000 workers and has annual revenues of $6 billion.

Born in Vicksburg , Mississippi Otis moved to Los Angeles when he was 6 years old. His father was a high school dropout who worked as a janitor. The family lived in Watts at the time of the 1965 riots. In the post Watts period, Otis recalls being stopped and questioned by police several times a year because of the color of his skin.

A high school guidance counselor recommended him for a scholarship at Williams College, the highly selective liberal arts institution in Massachusetts. Otis graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams and went on to earn a law degree at Stanford. Otis landed on Wall Street as a merger and acquisitions attorney for J.P.Morgan Securities. He joined Darden Restaurants in 1995 as corporate treasurer. He became CEO in 2004. Photo Credit: Nathan Mandell

*Women are currently celebrated in some cultures for having big derriere’s, similar to J-Lo. Sadly, a black woman by the name of Sara Baartman was treated in a vile, degrading and inhuman manner for possessing an extremely full-figure.

When 20-year old Sara Baartman (pictured above) got on a boat that was to take her from Cape Town to London in 1810, she could not have known that she would would never see her family again. Nor, as she stood on the deck and saw her homeland disappear behind her could she have known that she would become the icon of racial inferiority and black female sexuality for the next 100 years.

Baartman was born in 1789. She was working as a slave in Cape Town when she was “discovered” by British ship’s doctor William Dunlop, who persuaded her to travel with him to England. He promised her a job to earn money that she could send to her family.

But it’s clear what Dunlop had in mind – to display her as a “freak," a "scientific curiosity," and make money from these shows, some of which he promised to give to her. He never kept that promise.

Baartman had unusually large buttocks and genitals, and in the early 1800s Europeans were arrogantly obsessed with their own superiority, and with proving that others, particularly blacks, were inferior and oversexed.

Baartman’s physical characteristics, not unusual for Khoisan women, although her features were larger than normal, were “evidence” of this prejudice, and she was treated like a freak exhibit in London.

She was put on display, in a circus atmosphere where whites came to gawk at her full-figure. She was even subjected to people probing her genitals and derriere.

In 1814 she was taken to France, and became the object of scientific and medical research that formed the bedrock of European ideas about black female sexuality. She died the next year, on December 29, 1815, of an inflammatory ailment, possibly smallpox. But even after her death, Sara Baartman remained an object of imperialist scientific investigation.

An autopsy was conducted and the findings published by French anatomist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville in 1816 and by Cuvier in the Memoires du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1817. Cuvier notes in his monograph that Baartman was an intelligent woman who had an excellent memory and spoke Dutch fluently. Her skeleton, preserved genitals and brain were placed on display in Paris's Musée de l'Homme until 1974.

There were sporadic calls for the return of her remains beginning in the 1940s but the case became prominent only after US biologist Stephen Jay Gould published an account, The Hottentot Venus, in the 1980s.

When Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994, he formally requested that France return the remains. After much legal wrangling and debates in the French National Assembly, France acceded to the request on 6 March 2002.

Baartman became an icon in South Africa as representative of so many aspects of their history. Her remains were returned to her land of birth, the Gamtoos Valley, on 3 May 2002. Second photo, above.

In the early 1900’s, Mary Turner was upset about the lynching of her husband who was wrongly accused of killing a white man. Even white authorities stated that he was not in the vicinity of the crime.

Mary was eight months pregnant when she made the comment that she would get even with those who hung her husband and would sign arrest warrants against the killers and she planned to call Federal authorities.

The white residents of Valdosta, Georgia decided to teach her a lesson for being uppity enough to be vocal about her pain. A white mob abducted her and tied her upside down to a tree, doused her with gasoline and burned her alive. One of the crowd members took a knife and split her belly open letting the baby fall out. Another member of the crowd smashed the baby’s head with his foot.

Then the crowd took out their guns and filled the burning body of Mary Turner with bullets.

Unbelievingly, the ‘Associated Press’ wrote that Mary Turner had made unwise remarks about the execution of her husband.

Years later, in 1933, California Governor James Rolph Jr. released a statement saying, “Lynching is a fine lesson for the whole nation.”

*The photo above is of an unidentified woman.

PROMINENT BLACK DOCTOR PROTECTS HOME FROM ANGRY WHITE MOB:

Ossian Sweet (pictured above) was an African American doctor notable for his self-defense of his newly-purchased home against a white mob attempting to force him out in Detroit in 1925. Sweet was born in Florida.

He earned his undergraduate degree from Wilberforce University and studied medicine at Howard University. He practiced in Detroit, then studied further in Vienna and Paris.

He returned to Detroit from France in 1924 and started to work at Detroit's first black hospital, Dunbar. Having saved enough money, he moved his family in 1925 from his wife's parent's home in an all-white neighborhood to 2905 Garland Street, another all-white neighborhood at Garland and Charlevoix.

In the following days, Sweet's house was repeatedly surrounded by white mobs, encouraged by the "Waterworks Improvement Association," which gathered outside Sweet's home to force him to move from the neighborhood.

At around 10 p.m. on Thursday, September 9, 1925, Leon Breiner, one member of the mob of at least 1,000, was “shot dead,” and another was injured. The shots were fired from within Sweet's house.

All eleven occupants of the house (Sweet, his wife Gladys, two brothers and a number of friends who were helping Sweet to defend his home) were arrested and tried for murder.

Ossian's younger brother who had admitted to actually firing the gun, was tried first and defended again by Clarence Darrow.

He was acquitted after a deliberation of less than four hours. The prosecution then dropped the charges against the remaining ten defendants.

Ossian Sweet's later life was troubled. His daughter Iva died at the age of 2 in 1926, and his wife died soon after, both from tuberculosis. Breiner's widow sued for $150,000, (civil suit) but the case was dismissed.

Sweet ran for office four times, but lost each time. He remarried twice, but both marriages ended in divorce.

Sweet committed suicide in 1960.

LESLIE, Mich. - A man widely believed to be the model for the smiling chef on Cream of Wheat boxes finally has a grave marker bearing his name.

Frank L. White died in 1938, and until this week, his grave in Woodlawn Cemetery bore only a tiny concrete marker with no name.

Last Wednesday, a granite gravestone was placed at his burial site. It bears his name and an etching taken from the man depicted on the Cream of Wheat box.

Jesse Lasorda, a family researcher from Lansing, started the campaign to put the marker and etching on White's grave.

"Everybody deserves a headstone," Lasorda told the Lansing State Journal. He discovered that White was born about 1867 in Barbados, came to the U.S. in 1875 and became a citizen in 1890.

When White died Feb. 15, 1938, the Leslie Local-Republican described him as a "famous chef" who "posed for an advertisement of a well-known breakfast food."

White lived in Leslie for about the last 20 years of his life, and the story of his posing for the Cream of Wheat picture was known in the city of 2,000 located between Jackson and Lansing and about 70 miles west of Detroit.

The chef was photographed about 1900 while working in a Chicago restaurant. His name was not recorded. White was a chef, traveled a lot, was about the right age and told neighbors that he was the Cream of Wheat model, the Jackson Citizen Patriot said.

Source: AP

Elizabeth Hobbs was born a slave in Virginia in 1818. She was the property of Colonel Burwell and when she was fourteen she was sent to work for his son, who was a Presbyterian minister in North Carolina. Elizabeth was later sold to another man in St. Louis. When she was twenty-one she was raped by a white man and gave birth to a son.

In 1855 Elizabeth had saved enough money to buy her freedom. She she moved to Washington where she worked as a dressmaker for the wife of President Abraham Lincoln. In 1868 she published her autobiography, "Thirty Years a Slave."

Elizabeth Keckley, who served as president of the Contraband Relief Association, died in 1907.

(CIVIL RIGHTS)

Lester Maddox (above, far left) brandishes a pistol during an unsuccessful attempt by three black men to desegregate his restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia, the day after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in 1964.

Lester Maddox, was notorious as the defiant ax handle- wielding segregationist. He once confronted two black couples in the parking lot of his restaurant, as they got out of the car, he wildly swung an ax at them to prevent them from entering his restaurant.

In 1944, Maddox, along with his wife, the former Virginia Cox, used $400 they had saved to open up a combination grocery store/restaurant. Building on that success, the couple then bought property on Hemphill Avenue off the Georgia Tech campus to open up the "Pickrick Cafeteria."

Maddox made the Pickrick a family affair with his wife and children working side-by-side with him. The restaurant became known for its simple, inexpensive food, including its specialty, skillet-fried chicken.

It soon became a thriving business.

Due to the "Civil Rights Act," Maddox was informed that he had to allow blacks in his restaurant, he steadfastly refused despite the law.

He later closed his restaurant rather than serve African-Americans.

Ax handles became his symbol.

"FIRST IVY LEAGUE AFRICAN-AMERICAN"

George Franklin Grant (September 15, 1846 – 1910) was the first African American professor at Harvard. He was also a Boston dentist, and an inventor of a wooden golf tee.

He was born in September 15, 1846 in Oswego, New York to Phillis Pitt and Tudor Elandor.

He entered the Harvard School of Dental Medicine in 1868, and graduated in 1870.

He then took a position in the department of Mechanical Dentistry in 1871, making him the Harvard University's first African-American faculty member, where he served for 19 years.

He was a founding member and later the president of the Harvard Odontological Society and was a member of the Harvard Dental Alumni Association.

Grant was elected president of the Alumni Association in 1881.

Dr. Grant died in 1910 at his vacation home in New Hampshire of liver disease.

In 1991 the USGA (United States Golf Association) recognized him as the original inventor of the wooden tee.

THE RISE & FALL OF JESSE BINGA: ONCE THE RICHEST BLACK MAN IN THE U.S.

Jesse Binga’s pioneering ventures in banking and real estate made him a nationally known figure of black business achievement in the early 20th Century. A native of Detroit, he moved to Chicago in the early 1890s. Buying a succession of run-down buildings, he repaired them as rentals. White-owned banks refused to lend to African-Americans, inspiring Binga to establish his own bank in 1908 at the southeast corner of State and 36th Streets.

Thousands of African-Americans opened accounts, and the Binga Bank prospered. It attained a state charter in 1921, and eventually occupied imposing buildings at the northwest corner of State and 35th Streets. With the success of his businesses, Binga purchased a home at 5922 South Park Avenue (now King Drive), in what was then an exclusively white neighborhood. Though the house was bombed five times by disgruntled neighbors, Binga and his family remained steadfast. In 1929, he built the grand Binga Arcade, with offices, shops and a dance floor, at 35th and State Streets.

The Great Depression of the 1930s as well as racism and jealousy led to the failure of Binga’s businesses.

Accused (same say falsely) and convicted of financial irregularities, Binga began serving a ten-year jail sentence in 1935. Three years later, the petitions of appreciative Bronzeville residents and famed attorney Clarence Darrow secured his release.

Binga’s last years were spent as a janitor and handyman at St. Anselm’s Church.

Source: Chicago Tribute.com

Introduction:

I remember reading a story years ago about Darryl Strawberry and a few other black baseball players. Allegedly, on Jackie Robinson's birthday, a reporter was in the locker room and asked Strawberry how did Jackie Robinson influence his career as a baseball player and a black man? Sadly, Strawberry and a few other younger players didn't even know who Jackie Robinson was according to the reporter. If this is true, it's a tragedy.

THE COURT-MARTIAL OF JACKIE ROBINSON:

Shortly after his college days, America entered World War II, and Jackie Robinson was drafted. In the Army, as in most of America at the time, blacks suffered the indignation of segregation. Jim Crow laws – the name given to the laws that created whites only restaurants, hotels, restrooms and other segregation – held sway in the Army, too.

Jim Crow rules called for white officers to lead black men in their segregated outfits. But the necessities of war were beginning to change things. Jackie was accepted to an integrated Officer Candidate School and assigned to Camp Hood, in Texas. It was there that he became entangled in an incident that nearly ended his military career and the future that he didn’t know awaited him.

One evening, while boarding a camp bus into town, he dutifully began moving to the back, as blacks were required to do. On his way down the aisle, he saw the wife of a friend sitting mid-way back, and sat down with her.

After about five blocks, the driver, a white man, turned in his seat and ordered Jackie to move to the back of the bus. Robinson refused. The driver threatened to make trouble for him when the bus reached the station, but Jackie wouldn’t budge.

The exchanges between Robinson and the driver grew more heated. When the bus reached the station, another passenger, a white woman, told Jackie that she intended to press charges against him. Someone called the MP’s, and during the process of sorting out the bus incident, Jackie was treated rudely and was called a "nigger" by both the military personnel and civilians involved. Unbelievably, Jackie was arrested and faced a court martial.

Jackie himself took the witness stand, and offered an inspired explanation of his angry reaction at being called a nigger. {Rappers, read the next statement carefully}. "My grandmother was a slave. She told me a nigger was a low, ignorant, dumb witted, uncouth person, and pertains to no one in particular; but I don’t consider that I am low, ignorant, slow witted or uncouth. I am a Negro, but not a nigger."

In summing up, the defense insisted to the panel that the case involved no violations as charged, but was "simply a situation in which a few individuals sought to vent their bigotry on a Negro they considered ‘uppity’ because he had the audacity to seek to exercise rights that belonged to him as an American and as a soldier."

Jackie got the necessary votes for acquittal, and was found "not guilty of all specifications and charges." He had stood up against the humiliating and unjust Jim Crow laws and won.

Only a few years later, he would step onto a baseball field in Brooklyn and strike an even bigger blow for equality, earning more than just a place among the greatest athletes of the century.

(FIRST BLACK WEST POINT GRADUATE)

Henry Ossian Flipper (March 21, 1856–May 3, 1940) was an American soldier and the first black American cadet to graduate from the United States Military Academy (West Point)

Flipper was born into slavery in Thomasville, Georgia on March 21, 1856, the eldest of five brothers. His mother was a slave of the Reverend Reuben H. Lucky, a Methodist minister, and his father, Festus Flipper, a shoemaker and carriage-trimmer, was slave of Ephraim G. Ponder, a wealthy slave dealer.

Flipper attended Atlanta University during Reconstruction. There, as a freshman, Representative J.C. Freeman appointed him to attend West Point, where there were already four other black cadets. The small group had a difficult time at the academy, where they were rejected by the white students. Nevertheless, Flipper persevered and in 1877 became the first of the group to graduate, becoming a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army cavalry.

In 1880, while serving as quartermaster at Fort Davis, Texas, he was brought before a court martial, after money went missing from the post commissary. Realizing that this could be used against him by officers intent on forcing him out of the army, he attempted to hide the discrepancy, which was later discovered. He was charged with embezzlement, and although he was eventually acquitted, he was found guilty of "conduct unbecoming an officer" and in 1882 given a dismissal, the officer equivalent of dishonorable discharge.

For the rest of his life, up until his death in 1940, Flipper contested the charges and fought to regain his commission.

On February 19, 1999, President Bill Clinton posthumously pardoned Henry O. Flipper. The pardon came 59 years after his death and 117 years after he was found guilty.

Susie King Taylor (above) was born in 1848 in Savannah, Georgia. She was a slave and was not allowed an education. Black women taught her how to read and write. She taught other African Americans when she was just 14 years old. In 1862 she moved to Port Royal Island off the coast of South Carolina. There, her husband joined the First South Carolina Volunteers, an all-black army .The army was made up of former slaves from the Sea Islands and was one of the first African-American military units. They needed medical help. Susie was working in her husband's military company, even though she had no training. She was the first black army nurse and she also taught many of the black soldiers how to read and write. She worked on the battlefield for four years. Other black women would follow in Taylor's footsteps and join the army as nurses like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Taylor's husband died at the end of the Civil War. She moved north to Boston, Massachusetts. There she met and married Russell Taylor. She died in 1912.

"LAST AMERICAN PUBLIC HANGING"

Rainey Bethea (October 16, 1909– August 14, 1936) was the last person to be publicly executed in the United States. Bethea confessed to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old white woman named Lischia Edwards, and after being convicted of her rape, he was publicly hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in front of 15,000 people (2nd photo). Mistakes in executing the hanging and the surrounding media circus contributed to the end of public executions in the United States.

Although the crime was infamous in the surrounding areas, it came to nationwide attention due to one fact — the sheriff of Daviess County was a woman. Florence Thompson had become sheriff on April 13, 1936 after her husband, Everett, who was elected sheriff in 1933, unexpectedly died of pneumonia on April 10, 1936. As sheriff of the county, it was her duty to hang Bethea.

Among the hundreds of letters that Sheriff Thompson received after it came to public attention she would perform the hanging was one from Arthur L. Hash, a former Louisville police officer, who offered his services free of charge to perform the execution. Thompson quickly decided to accept this offer. He only asked that she not make his name public.

Rainey Bethea's last meal consisted of fried chicken, pork chops, mashed potatoes, pickled cucumbers, cornbread, lemon pie, and ice cream, which he ate at 4:00 p.m. on August 13 in Louisville.

On August 14, 1936, G. Phil Hanna (who assisted in hangings across the country) placed the noose around Bethea's neck, adjusted it, and then signaled to Arthur L. Hash (cop) to pull the trigger. Instead, Hash, who was drunk, did nothing. Hanna shouted at Hash, "Do it!" and a deputy leaned onto the trigger which sprung the trap door. Throughout all of this, the crowd was hushed. Bethea fell eight feet, and his neck was instantly broken. About 14 minutes later, two doctors confirmed Bethea was dead. After the noose was removed, his body was taken to Andrew & Wheatley Funeral Home. He had wanted his body sent to his sister in South Carolina. Instead, he was buried in a pauper's grave at the Elmwood Cemetery in Owensboro.

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