* Today in Black History - June 29 * 1868 - The Louisiana legislature meets in New Orleans. The temporary chairman of the house is an African American representative, R.H. Isabelle. Oscar J. Dunn presides over the senate. Seven of the thirty-six senators are African American. Thirty-five of the 101 representatives are African American. 1886 - James Van Der Zee is born in Lenox, Massachusetts. He will become one of America's foremost photographers and a major chronicler of the visual history of the Harlem Renaissance. His photographic subjects will include Marcus Garvey, Madame C.J. Walker, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Countee Cullen, Daddy Grace and many others. He will obtain national recognition at age 82 when his collection of 75,000 photographs, spanning a period of six decades of African American life, is discovered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His photos will be featured in 1969 as part of the "Harlem on my Mind" exhibition. From the 1970s until he joins the ancestors on May 15, 1983, Van Der Zee will photograph many celebrities who had come across his work and promoted him throughout the country. 1923 - Lloyd Richards is born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His family will move to Detroit, Michigan soon after he is born. After graduating from Wayne State University, he will start a theater group in Detroit with a handful of friends and classmates. At that time, the American theater will be entirely centered in New York City. Richards will move there in 1947 to pursue an acting career. Roles for African American actors will be hard to come by, but he will work on Broadway in "Freight and The Egghead" and on radio throughout the 1950s. He will also teach acting and direct off-Broadway productions. In 1958, he will become the first person of African descent to direct a Broadway play in modern times when he galvanizes Broadway with his production of Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun." This production, a realistic portrayal of a contemporary Black working class family in Chicago, will begin a new era in the representation of African Americans on the American stage. In the 1960s, he will direct the Broadway productions "The Long Dream," "The Moon Besieged," "I Had a Ball" and "The Yearling." In 1966, he will become head of the actor training program at New York University's School of the Arts. He will be Professor of Theater and Cinema at Hunter College in New York City when he is tapped to become dean of the prestigious Yale University School of Drama in 1979. At the same time he will become Artistic Director of the highly influential Yale Repertory theater. Throughout his career, he will seek to discover and develop new plays and playwrights, as Artistic Director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Center, as a member of the Playwrights' selection committee of the Rockefeller Foundation and of the New American Plays program of the Ford Foundation. His long search for a major new American playwright will bear fruit with the 1984 production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" by August Wilson. Throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, he will direct the Yale Rep and New York productions of the successive installments of August Wilson's multi-part chronicle of African American life. The plays in this cycle will include "Fences," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "The Piano Lesson," "Two Trains Running" and "Seven Guitars." His productions for television include segments of "Roots: The Next Generation," "Bill Moyers' Journal" and "Robeson," a presentation on the life of the African American actor and activist Paul Robeson, who will be an early inspiration for the young Lloyd Richards. He will also deal with Robeson's life and legacy in the 1977 theatrical production "Paul Robeson." He will be the recipient of the Pioneer Award of AUDELCO, the Frederick Douglass Award and, in 1993, will be awarded the National Medal of the Arts. He will also serve as President of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. In 1991, he will retire from his posts as Dean of the Yale University School of Drama and as Artistic Director of Yale Rep, but he will remain Professor Emeritus at Yale University, and continue to teach, direct, and search for new plays and playwrights. He will be inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 1987. 1943 - Eva Narcissus Boyd is born in Belhaven, North Carolina. She will move to Brighton Beach, New York at a young age. As a teenager, she will work as a babysitter for songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Amused by Eva's individual dancing style they wrote "The Loco-Motion" with Dee Dee Sharp in mind. She will record it as a demo and music producer Don Kirshner will be impressed by the song and Eva's voice and will release it as is. This will be the birth of "Little Eva". The song will become an instant hit after Little Eva demonstrates the song and dance steps on American Bandstand. It will reach #1 in the U.S. in 1962. After the success of "The Loco-Motion", Eva will be unfortunately stereotyped as a dance-craze singer and will be given limited material. The notorious 1962 single "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" was inspired by the abuse Eva suffered from her then-boyfriend. She will continued to tour and record throughout the sixties, but her commercial potential will plummet after 1964. Little Eva's other hits will be "Keep Your Hands Of My Baby", "Somekind Of Wonderful" and "Let's Turkey Trot". She will retire from the music business in 1971. She will return to live performing with other artists of her era on the cabaret and oldies circuits in the 1990's. She will continue performing until cervical cancer stops her in October of 2001. She will join the ancestors after succumbing to the illness on April 10, 2003 in Kinston, North Carolina. 1949 - South Africa begins its apartheid policy of racial segregation. This includes a ban against racially-mixed marriages. 1950 - Mabel Keaton Staupers of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses receives the Spingarn Medal in honor of her advocacy of integration of African American graduate nurses into the American workplace. 1964 - The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed. 1968 - Marlin Briscoe becomes the first African American quarterback to play professional football in the modern NFL. 1970 - NAACP chairman Stephen Gill Spottswood tells the NAACP annual convention that the Nixon administration is "anti-Negro" and is pressing "a calculated Policy" inimical to "the needs and aspirations of the large majority" of citizens. 1972 - U.S. Supreme Court rules, in a five to four decision, that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment which violates the Eighth Amendment. African Americans and members of other minority groups constitute 483 of the 600 persons awaiting execution. 1972 - The NAACP Annual Report states the unemployment of "urban Blacks in 1971 was worse than at anytime since the great depression of the thirties." The report also says that more school desegregation occurred in 1971 than in any other year since the 1954 school decision. 1983 - The Apollo Theatre, in Harlem, New York, is declared a cultural landmark. 1988 - Motown Records is sold for $ 61 million to an investment group that includes a venture-capital firm, record executive Jheryl Busby, and others. The company, which was founded by Berry Gordy in 1959, produced some of the biggest rhythm and blues performers of all time including the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops and Marvin Gaye. ______________________________________________________________ Munirah Chronicle is edited by Rene' A. 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