* Today in Black History - May 25 *
1878 - Luther Robinson is born in Richmond, Virginia. He will later be
known as tapdancing legend Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. He will be
the best known and most highly paid African American entertainer
in the first half of the twentieth century. His long career will
mirror changes in American entertainment tastes and technology,
starting in the age of minstrel shows, moving to vaudeville,
Broadway, the recording industry, Hollywood radio, and television.
According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, "Robinson's contribution
to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes,
dancing upright and swinging", giving tap a "…hitherto-unknown
lightness and presence." His signature routine will be the stair
dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a
rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he
unsuccessfully attempted to patent. He is also credited with having
introduced a new word, copacetic, into popular culture, via his
repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances. A popular
figure in both the black and white entertainment worlds of his era,
he will be best known today for his dancing with Shirley Temple in a
series of films during the 1930s, and for starring in the musical
"Stormy Weather" (1943), loosely based on his own life, and selected
for preservation in the National Film Registry. He will use his
popularity to challenge and overcome numerous racial barriers,
including becoming 1) one of the first minstrel and vaudeville
performers to appear without the use of blackface makeup, 2) one of
the earliest African American performers to go solo, overcoming
vaudeville's two colored rule, 3) a headliner in Broadway shows, 4)
the first African American to appear in a Hollywood film in an
interracial dance team (with Temple in "The Little Colonel"), and
5) the first African American to headline a mixed-race Broadway
production. He will join the ancestors on November 25, 1949.
1905 - Dorothy Burnett (later Porter) is born in Warrenton, Virginia. She
will become a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the first African American
woman to receive a Masters of Library Science degree from Columbia
University, and will author several African American historical
works. She will be a long-time librarian at the Howard University
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and will be responsible for
developing it into one of the world's largest collections of material
authored by and about people of African descent. She will join the
ancestors on December 17, 1995.
1906 - Martin Dihigo is born in Havana, Cuba. He will become a baseball
player in the Negro Leagues and will be considered by some to be the
greatest all-around player of all-time of African descent. He will be
elected to the Cuban and Mexican Halls of Fame during his lifetime, and
will be posthumously elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in
1977. He will join the ancestors on May 20, 1971.
1919 - Millionaire Madame C.J. Walker joins the ancestors at the age of 52 at
Irvington-on-the-Hudson, New York. She was the founder of the Madame
C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the largest African American
haircare company of its time. After her death, a substantial portion
of her business's proceeds will be donated to African American
organizations and scholarships.
1932 - K.C. Jones is born in San Francisco, California. He will become a member
of the Olympic basketball team and help win the 1956 Olympic Gold Medal.
He will then become a professional basketball player with the Boston
Celtics, where he will help win eight NBA titles. He will then win two
championships as the coach of the Celtics. He will also be the head
coach of the Washington Bullets and the Seattle Supersonics. He will
have 522 wins as a NBA coach and in 1997 will become the coach of
American Basketball League women's team, the New England Blizzard.
After the league disbands, he will join the coaching staff of the
women's basketball team at the University of Rhode Island, at the age
of 67. He is the only African-American non-player head coach to win
multiple NBA championships. He will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial
Basketball Hall of Fame in 1989.
1935 - This is "the greatest day in the history of track," according to "The
New York Times." Jesse Owens of Ohio State University breaks two
world sprint records, ties a third, and breaks a long jump world
record in a meet at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, all in
one hour.
1936 - David Levering Lewis is born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He will become
a historian and biographer. Professor Lewis will receive his Ph.D. in
modern European history from the London School of Economics and
Political Science in 1962. His research and publications will focus
on African American history, conceptions of race and racism, and the
dynamics of European colonialism, especially in Africa. He will author
a biography of Du Bois entitled "W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race,"
which will win a Pulitzer prize in 1994. His other works include "King:
A Biography" (1970), "Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair" (1975),
"When Harlem Was in Vogue" (1982), "The Race to Fashoda: European
Colonialism and the African Resistance to the Scramble for Africa"
(1987), and "W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader" (1995). In 2003, he will be
appointed as the Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of
History at New York University.
1943 - Leslie Marian Uggams is born in the village of Harlem in New York City.
She will make her acting debut on television's "Beulah" and be a regular
on The Mitch Miller Show before achieving acclaim in Broadway's
"Hallelujah Baby". She will be best recognized for portraying Kizzy
Reynolds in the television miniseries "Roots" (1977), earning Golden Globe
and Emmy Award nominations for her performance. In 1979, she will star as
Lillian Rogers Parks in "Backstairs at the White House," a miniseries for
which she will be nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Actress. She will
also make guest appearances on such television programs as "Hollywood
Squares," "Fantasy," "The Muppet Show," "The Love Boat" and "Magnum, P.I.."
In 1996, she will play the role of Rose Keefer on "All My Children." Her
film career will include roles in "Skyjacked" (1972), "Black Girl" (1972)
and "Poor Pretty Eddie" (1975), in which she will play a popular singer who,
upon being stranded in the deep South, is abused and humiliated by the
perverse denizens of a backwoods town. She will later appear in "Sugar Hill"
(1994) opposite Wesley Snipes, and play Blind Al in "Deadpool" (2016) in
February, 2016. In April, 2016, she will portray Leah Walker, the bipolar
mother of Lucious Lyon in the hit Fox series "Empire."
1943 - A riot, started by white workers, occurs in a Mobile, Alabama shipyard
over the job upgrading of twelve African American workers.
1959 - The U.S. Supreme Court declares a Louisiana law enforcing a ban on
bouts between African American and white boxers to be unconstitutional.
1963 - The first observance of African Liberation Day occurs. It begins at
the founding conference of the Organization of African Unity in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia.
1964 - The closing of schools to avoid desegregation is ruled unconstitutional
by the U.S. Supreme Court. Prince Edward County, Virginia will have to
reopen and desegregate its schools.
1965 - A very short heavyweight title fight occurs in Lewiston, Maine. Cassius
Clay (later Muhammad Ali) knocks out challenger, Sonny Liston, in one
minute and 56 seconds of the first round. Liston never sees the punch
coming. Neither did an unbelieving crowd at ringside, nor those in
theatres all over the world watching the fight on closed-circuit TV.
1971 - A young African American woman, Jo Etha Collier, joins the ancestors
after being killed in Drew, Mississippi by a bullet fired from a passing
car. Three whites are arrested on May 26 and charged with the unprovoked
attack.
1994 - The United Nations Security Council lifts a 10-year-old ban on weapons
exports from South Africa, ending the last of its apartheid-era
embargos.
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