THE MUNIRAH CHRONICLE
******* Today in Black History – October 24, 2020 *******
1892 - 25,000 African
American workers strike in New Orleans,
Louisiana. This is the first major job stoppage in U.S.
labor history by African Americans.
1923 - The U.S. Department
of Labor issues a report stating that
approximately 500,000 African Americans had left the South
in the preceding twelve months.
1935 - Langston Hughes's
play "Mulatto" opens on Broadway. It will
have the longest run of any play by an African American
until Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun."
1935 - Italy invades
Ethiopia. African Americans hold mass meetings
of protest and raise funds for the Ethiopian defenders.
1936 - The Boston Chronicle
blasts the soon-to-be-released movie
"The Big Broadcast" of 1937 for featuring a white
pianist
who appears in the movie while Teddy Wilson actually plays
the music: "The form of racial discrimination and
falsification of acts...is frequently duplicated by many
whites in their daily dealings with Negroes...Negro farm
hands and laborers in other fields of industry produce
billions of dollars of wealth, but the white landowners and
sweat shop operators get all the profit."
1942 - In recognition of the
influence of so-called race music,
Billboard magazine creates its first ratings chart devoted
to African American music, The Harlem Hit Parade. The
number-one record is "Take It & Git" by Andy
Kirk and His
Twelve Clouds of Joy, featuring Mary Lou Williams on piano.
1948 - Frizzel Gerald Gray
is born in Baltimore, Maryland. He will be
better known as Kweisi Mfume, an adopted African name that
means "Conquering Son of Kings." In 1978, he will
be elected
to the Baltimore City Council, serving there until 1986. His
political stance will be against that of then-mayor William
Donald Schaefer, who he believed had ignored the many poor
neighborhoods of the city. It will be a contentious matter,
but
despite his strong opinions, he will learn the art of
political
compromise. He will be perceived by many to have had some
success during his stay in office, a fact perhaps reflected
by
his subsequent election to the United States House of
Representatives in 1986, despite a torrent of criticism,
directed in no small part against his early past. Serving in
Maryland's 7th Congressional district for five terms, he will
make
himself known as a Democrat with an apparent balance between
strong progressive ideologies and a capacity for practical
compromise, representing a district that included both West
Baltimore and suburban and rural communities, though his
primary
goal was an increase in federal aid to American inner cities.
In
his fourth term, he will be made chairman of the Congressional
Black Caucus. In February 1996, he will leave the House to
accept
the presidency of the National Association for the
Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), stating that he could do more to
improve
American civil rights there than in the Congress. He will
reform
the association's finances to pay off its considerable debt
while
pursuing the cause of civil rights advancement for African
Americans. Many citizens in Baltimore will want him to run
for
mayor in the 1999 election, but he will stay with the NAACP.
He will
serve in this position for nine years before stepping down in
2004.
He will run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2006. In
May 2013,
he will be named Chairman of his alma mater, Morgan State
University,
assuming the position on July 1, 2013.
1964 - Kenneth David Kuanda
becomes President of Zambia as Zambia (Northern
Rhodesia) gains independence from Great Britain.
1972 - Jack Roosevelt
"Jackie" Robinson joins the ancestors at the age of 53
in Stamford, Connecticut.
1980 - Monica Denise Arnold
is born in College Park, Georgia. She will become
a singer, songwriter, actress, and businesswoman. She will
begin
performing as a child and became part of a traveling gospel
choir at
the age of ten. She will rise to prominence after she signs
with
Rowdy Records in 1993 and releases her debut album "Miss
Thang" two
years later. She will follow it with a series of successful
albums,
including the global bestseller "The Boy Is Mine (1998)
as well as
the number-one albums "After the Storm" (2003),
"The Makings of Me"
(2006) and "Still Standing" (2010). Throughout her
career, several
of her singles will become number-one hits on the pop and
R&B
record charts, including "Before You Walk Out of My
Life", "Don't
Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)", "Like
This and Like That",
"The Boy Is Mine", "The First Night",
"Angel of Mine", "So Gone",
and "Everything to Me". Her popularity will be
further enhanced by
her roles in television series such as Living Single,
Felicity,
and American Dreams, and films including Boys and Girls
(2000),
Love Song (2000), and Pastor Brown (2009). A contributor to
the
NBC talent show The Voice, in 2008, she will appear in the
Peachtree TV reality show special Monica: The Single which
tracked
the recording of the song "Still Standing" along
with her personal
life and resulted in her own highly rated BET series Monica:
Still
Standing, containing a similar concept. She will sell 5.3
million
albums in the United States and will be recognized as one of
the
most successful urban R&B female vocalists to emerge in
the mid to
late 1990s. According to Billboard, she is the youngest
recording
act to ever have two consecutive chart-topping hits on the
Billboard Top R&B Singles chart, as well as the first
artist to
top the US Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart over the
span of
three consecutive decades (1990s, 2000s, and 2010s). In 2010,
Billboard will list her at number 24 on its list of the Top
50
R&B and Hip Hop Artists of the past 25 years. A four-time
nominee, she will win a Grammy Award for Best R&B
Performance by
a Duo or Group with Vocals for "The Boy Is Mine" at
the 41st
awards ceremony and will be the recipient of one Billboard
Music
Award, one BET Award, and two BMI Pop Awards.
1986 - Aubrey Drake Graham
is born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He will
become a rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, actor,
and
businessman. He will gain recognition as an actor on the teen
drama
television series Degrassi: The Next Generation in the early
2000s.
Intent on pursuing a career in music, he will leave the
series in
2007 after releasing his debut mixtape, "Room for
Improvement." He
will release two further independent projects, "Comeback
Season"
and "So Far Gone," before signing to Lil Wayne's
Young Money
Entertainment in June 2009. He will release his debut studio
album
"Thank Me Later" in 2010, which will debut at
number one on the US
Billboard 200 and will be soon certified platinum. His next
two
releases, 2011's "Take Care" and 2013's
"Nothing Was the Same,"
will be critically and commercially successful; the former
earning
him his first Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. In 2015, he
will
release two mixtapes—the trap-influenced "If You're
Reading This
It's Too Late" and a collaboration with Future titled
"What a
Time to Be Alive"—both of which will earn platinum
certification
in the U.S. His fourth album, "Views" (2016), will
break several
chart records. The dancehall-influenced album will sit atop
the
Billboard 200 for 13 nonconsecutive weeks, becoming the first
album by a male solo artist to do so in over 10 years. The
album's
second single, "One Dance", will top the charts in
several
countries, and will become his first number-one single as a
lead
artist. That year, he will lead both the Billboard Hot 100
and
the Billboard 200 charts simultaneously for eight weeks.
Among
the world's best-selling music artists, with over 170 million
records sold worldwide, he will be ranked by the Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA) as the world's
highest-
certified digital singles artist. He will hold several
Billboard
chart records. He will have the most charted songs (205)
among
solo artists in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, the
most
simultaneously charted Hot 100 songs in a single week (27),
the
most time on the Hot 100 (431 weeks) and the most Hot 100
debuts
in a week (22). He will also have the most number one singles
on the Hot Rap Songs, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and
Rhythmic
Charts. He will also win four Grammy Awards, six American
Music
Awards, twenty-seven Billboard Music Awards and three Juno
Awards. As an entrepreneur, he will found the OVO Sound record
label with longtime collaborator 40 in 2012.
2017 - Robert Guillaume,
Emmy Award-winning actor best known as the title
character in the TV sitcom "Benson", joins the
ancestors at the age
of 89 after succumbing to prostate cancer.
*********************************************************
The source for these facts are "Encyclopedia Britannica,
"Before the
Mayflower", "Black Firsts" and independent
research by Mr. Rene’ A. Perry, I.
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EVERY MONTH SHOULD BE BLACK HISTORY MONTH! CHECK OUT THESE OTHER BLACK HISTORY SITES ON THE WEB
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