University of Tennessee admitted first Black student.

Two and a half years since the January 12, 2010 earthquake hit Haiti, the nation was still knee-deep in recovery mode. Despite billions of dollars in aid, many people were still without safe, permanent housing in the fall of 2012. In fact, hundreds of thousands were still living in tent camps while tens of thousands were staying in buildings badly damaged during the earthquake.

Prime Minister Lamothe resigned due to personal reasons in December 2014. Former Democratic United Committee president Evans Paul became Haitis new prime minister the following month.

With a runoff presidential election indefinitely postponed, President Michel Martellys term ended and he left office on Feb. 7, 2016, without his replacement chosen. Parliament would elect an interim president by mid-Feb. In the meantime, Prime Minister Evans Paul would act as head of state.

See also Encyclopedia: Haiti .

U.S. State Dept. Country Notes: Haiti

James Farmer,79,Civil rights leader,born Marshall, TX Jan 12, 1920

The Congressional Black Caucus organized.

Lorraine Hansberry- author and dramatist Dies.

Jacques Dominique Wilkins is a retired professional basketball player who is known as one of the best dunkers in NBA history. He was born on January 12, 1960 in Paris, France as his father was an Air Force Officer who was stationed there at the time of his birth. His family moved back to the United States soon after his birth, where they first relocated to Dallas and Baltimore before settling down in Washington. He attended high school there where he played basketball and was voted the Most Valuable Player (MVP) for two years straight in the State Championships. He had an outstanding high school record and was also featured in Sports Illustrated magazine. In 1979, he enrolled at the University of Georgia where he was named SEC Men’s Basketball Player of the Year in 1981. In 1982, he was drafted by the National Basketball Association (NBA) by the team Utah Jazz.

Within months, he left Utah and transferred to the Atlanta Hawks. He started off with an extremely impressive record, never averaging fewer than 20 points per game, a record he was to maintain throughout most of his career. During the 1984 – 1985 season, he won his first Slam-Dunk Championship at the NBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis. His shooting percentage from the free throw line was never lower than 80 percent for 10 consecutive seasons. He was the also best in the NBA in field goal attempts. However, the Hawks failed to make it to the NBA Playoffs. During the 1985 – 1986 season, Wilkins won the NBA scoring title with an average of 30.3 points per game. He was also voted an NBA All-Star and named to the All-NBA First Team. He was the first Atlanta Hawks player to start in an NBA All-Star Game since 1981.

His team managed to make it to the Playoffs but lost to the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Dominique Wilkins record was still spectacular, averaging 28.6 points in the Playoffs and finishing second in overall scoring after Michael Jordan. In the 1987 – 1988 season, he had the highest scoring average of his career with an

U.S. Supreme Court decision (Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents) said an state must afford Blacks an opportunity to commence the study of law at a state institution at the same time as [other] citizens.

Former heavyweight boxing champion Joseph Smoking Joe Frazier was born in Beaufort, South Carolina. Frazier was a 1964 Olympic gold medalist who won the heavyweight championship in 1968.

Lorraine Hansberry , (born May 19, 1930, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died January 12, 1965, New York, New York), American playwright whose A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first drama by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway.

Hansberry was interested in writing from an early age and while in high school was drawn especially to the theatre. She attended the University of Wisconsin in 1948–50 and then briefly the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Roosevelt University (Chicago). After moving to New York City, she held various minor jobs and studied at the New School for Social Research while refining her writing skills.

In 1958 she raised funds to produce her play A Raisin in the Sun, which opened in March 1959 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, meeting with great success. A penetrating psychological study of the personalities and emotional conflicts within a working-class black family in Chicago, A Raisin in the Sun was directed by actor Lloyd Richards, the first African American to direct a play on Broadway since 1907. It won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the film version of 1961 received a special award at the Cannes festival. Hansberry’s next play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a drama of political questioning and affirmation set in Greenwich Village, New York City, where she had long made her home, had only a modest run on Broadway in 1964. Her promising career was cut short by her early death from pancreatic cancer.

In 1969 a selection of her writings, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (to whom Hansberry was married from 1953 to 1964), was produced on Broadway as To Be Young, Gifted, and Black and was published in book form in 1970.

Jacques Dominique Wilkins, 39, basketball player, born Paris, France, Jan 12, 1960

Sports historian Clay Moyle describes Canadian-born Sam Langford as one of the most successful and yet little known boxers of the 20th Century.  In the excerpt below, drawn from his recently publisher book titled Sam Langford: Boxing’s Greatest Uncrowned Champion, Moyle makes his case for that claim.

Pound for pound, who was the world’s greatest boxer?

Whenever boxing fans debate the question, the name most often mentioned is that of Sugar Ray Robinson. However, many boxing historians would argue in favor of Sam Langford, a lesser-known fighter born in Weymouth, Nova Scotia, in 1886.

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the prospect of facing the five-foot-seven-inch dynamo, who weighed no more than 175 pounds at his peak, struck terror in the hearts of most of his contemporaries, including heavyweight champions Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey.

In June 1916, the 21-year-old Dempsey quickly declined an opportunity to face an aging Langford. Recalling the incident years later in his autobiography, Dempsey wrote, “The Hell I feared no man. There was one man, he was even smaller than I, and I wouldn’t fight because I knew he would flatten me. I was afraid of Sam Langford.”

Jack Johnson, on the other hand, did face Langford, once, in April 1906, when Langford was only a 20-year-old lightweight who gave up over 40 pounds to the 28-year- old heavyweight contender. Johnson won a convincing 15-round decision over the youngster, but discovered just how tough the smaller fighter was and what kind of dynamite he carried in his fists.

Two and a half years later, Johnson won the heavyweight championship by defeating Tommy Burns. Over the ensuing years, Langford and his manager, Joe Woodman, hounded Johnson in futile pursuit of an opportunity to fight for the title.

“Nobody will pay to see two black men fight for the title,” Johnson said  However, when Johnson grew weary of Australian boxing promoter Hugh “Huge Deal”’ McIntosh’s efforts to arrange a match with Langford, he admitted that he had no wish to

Jack L. Cooper is widelyacknowledged as the first African American radio broadcaster. Cooper, born inMemphis, Tennessee on September 18,1888, was the youngest of 10 children. He was raised in a poor, single-parenthome, and, at the age of 10, quit school and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to work at a racetrack. Aside fromhis work at the racetrack, Cooper worked a number of odd jobs as a teen and wasa successful boxer, winning the Ohio Negro welterweight title in the late 1910s.Cooper began his entertainment career as a dancer and comic on the TheaterOwners Booking Association, a popular African American vaudeville circuit inthe 1920s and 1930s. Here he met his first wife, Estelle Mansfield (MadamLamar) Cooper, and they created the Cooper and Lamar Music Company.

Cooper’s entry into radio was due not to his early career as an entertainer,but to his work as a journalist. While he toured with Madam Lamar Cooper, hewrote for black newspapers in Memphis and Indianapolis, Indiana . In 1924, this led to the position of assistant theatereditor at the influential ChicagoDefender in Chicago, Illinois .Cooper wrote a weekly column, “Coop’s Chatter,” and the newspaper selected himto help open up its new Washington, D.C.office in 1925. Later that year, the producer of a show on WCAP in Washington,D.C. hired Cooper to help write and perform comedy skits based on Negrodialect. The show, although successful, required Cooper to perform a sort ofradio minstrel show aimed at white consumers where his role was to creativelymock African American language.

Because of these restraints, Cooper quit his job at WCAP and returned toChicago with the goal of creating a radio program that would attract a blackaudience. Cooper developed an idea for a weekly variety show, but had no luckfinding a station that would take his show. In 1929, Joseph Silverstein, ownerof WSBC, a low-power station that catered mainly to Chicago’s large immigrantpopulation, agreed to air Cooper’s The All-NegroHour. At the start,   The All-NegroHour focused on live music

Dates: May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965

Lorraine Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin for two years, then left to work for Paul Robeson's newspaper, Freedom, first as a writer and then associate editor.

Sheila Jackson-Lee was born on January 12, 1950 in Queens, New York.   She graduated from Jamaica High School in Queens, New York in 1968.  She then graduated from Yale University in Connecticut with a B.A. in political science in 1972 followed in 1975 by a J.D. from the University of Virginia Law School.     

After graduating from law school Jackson-Lee moved to Houston, Texas after her husband, Dr. Elwyn C. Lee accepted a job offer from the University of Houston.  Dr. Lee is currently Vice Chancellor and Vice President for Student Affairs at the University of Houston.  Jackson-Lee was in private practice from 1975 to 1987 when she was elected a Houston municipal judge.  Jackson-Lee then ran for a seat on the Houston City Council in 1990.  In 1994 Shelia Jackson-Lee was elected as a Democrat to represent the 18th Congressional District of Texas.  She currently holds that seat. 

Jackson-Lee currently serves on the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives and is the first vice-chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.  She is a strong advocate of civil rights and abortion rights.  She has also used her position in Congress to raise awareness about racism and poverty in Africa.  Jackson-Lee has been a particularly strong opponent of the genocide in Darfur and has backed sanctions against Sudan.   In April 2006, Jackson-Lee was one of five members of Congress arrested, along with six other anti-genocide activists, while protesting outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C. 

Jackson-Lee is also the House Committee on Homeland Security and chairs its Subcommittee on Transportation Security and Infrastructure Protection.  Here the Congresswoman has called for increased security on rail and mass transit systems.  She has also worked to improve security around the nation’s nuclear and chemical plants as well as the electric grid.  Jackson-Lee serves on the House Science Committee and the subcommittee that oversees space policy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

He was born on January 12, 1944 and was the youngest of several children.

Katherine Stockett’s excellent novel, The Help, is about the African American maids who worked in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s. Stockett reflects the brutal realties of 20th Century slavery being carried out in pretentious southern white households that continued from the Slave Era through Emancipation and Reconstruction and the Jim Crow Era to the modern Civil Rights Movement. Pray that Hollywood does not attempt a film adaptation or we will see yet another white-wash of racial reality.

Whether Hollywood is an art form or a commercial enterprise seems unworthy of debate. It is all about the money. But is the motion picture “Power Elite” still as staunch in its belief that movie-goers must always ethnically identify with the screen protagonist for a film to be profitable? The 2009 rags-to-riches Bollywood feature, Slum Dog Millionaire directed by Englishman Danny Boyle, made much money and received much praise, though it did not surpass the intelligence of Mira Nair’s gritty and independent Salaam Bombay (1988). Ashutosh Gouariker’s big budget Lagaan (2001), which was set in Victorian-era India, generated white cross-over appeal as well, as had Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) and Gurinda Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham (2002).

Racist and anti-Semitic websites and blogs abound on the internet. Many of these missives reflect a notion that there exists an overwhelming presence of Jews in Hollywood and imply that a Jewish presence influences the images in Hollywood films. To deny that social and political realities are independent of Hollywood imagery would be a direct contradiction of this particular blog. But the issue is less “so what” than to plead for caution in playing into the hands of bigotry.

One would think that in 21st century Hollywood, the image of the Asian female as exotic and sexually subservient would have moved way beyond such a racist and sexist stereotype. Anna May Wong (1905-1961), the famous Asian American actress who spanned the silent and sound

Martin Robison Delany was an African American abolitionist, the first African American Field Officer in the U.S Army, and one of the earliest African Americans to encourage a return to Africa.

Delany was born in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia) to a slave father and a free mother.  Delany’s mother took her children to Pennsylvania in 1822 to avoid their enslavement and persecution brought on by attempting to teach her children to read and write, which was illegal in the state at that time. In 1833 Martin Delany began an apprenticeship with a Pittsburgh physician and soon opened a successful medical practice in cupping and leeching (it was not necessary to be certified to practice medicine prior to 1850).  In 1843 he began publishing a newspaper in Pittsburgh called The Mystery, Later Delany joined Frederick Douglass to produce and promote The North Star in Rochester, New York.    

Martin R. Delany entered Harvard Medical School in 1850 to finish his formal medical education (along with two other black students) but was dismissed from the institution after only three weeks as a result of petitions to the school from white students.  Two years later he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, claiming that even abolitionists would never accept blacks as equals and thus the solution to the black condition lay in the emigration of all African Americans back to Africa.  In 1859 Delany led an emigration commission to West Africa to explore possible sites for a new black nation along the Niger River, “We are a nation within a nation, we must go from our oppressors,” he wrote.  

When the Civil War began in 1861 Delany returned to the United States.  Jettisoning for a time his emigrationist views, Delany recruited thousands of men for the Union Army.  In February 1865, after meeting with President Abraham Lincoln to persuade the administration to create an all-black Corps led by African American officers, Delaney was

Educator, Mordecai W Johnson was born, 1890