Issue #1,085 Today In Black History, Monday, October 12, 2026

This is a republished post from 2025.

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The Truth About Christopher Columbus

As many of us know, Christopher Columbus did not actually discover America. He reached some Caribbean islands, but never North America. Yet this country has officially celebrated Columbus Day for almost 100 years.

The current occupant of the White House recently declared that the second Monday in October will again be celebrated as Columbus Day, not as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, as President Joe Biden declared a few years ago.

The #ConvictedFelon and #AdjudicatedRapist also called Christopher Columbus “ ...an American hero…” even though Columbus never even reached North America, much less the area where the United States eventually came to be.

Of course, he would want to celebrate a fellow sexual predator.

Here’s what really happened:

The arrival of Christopher Columbus brought with it death, destruction, and devastation to the Indigenous nations. The first interactions with the Europeans introduced the Indigenous people to diseases for which they had no immunity, killing tens of thousands of them as a result. Although he set out in search of spices, seeing Indigenous people adorned in gold jewelry made Columbus greedy for their gold.

His new mission was to bring back as much gold as he could, and so his cruel rampage began. He tortured innocent Indigenous people for their gold, cutting off the hands of those who refused to give up their gold, and sometimes even burning down entire villages for the precious mineral.

Columbus was also a slave trader, forcing hundreds of the indigenous people he found here onto his ships to take them back as slaves to Spain. He also managed to kidnap Indigenous girls, preferring young girls between the ages of 8- 10, and force them into sexual slavery to provide pleasure for himself and his crew members.

Therefore, Indigenous Peoples’ Day should replace the current celebrations of Columbus Day, a day that continues to celebrate an individual who was directly responsible for genocide, inflicting pain, suffering, and torture on thousands of Native Americans, with a day that honors the original inhabitants.

The Italian Americans have many other great Italians to celebrate, including Galileo, Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Marconi. Christopher Columbus is not an Italian to celebrate.

The Difference Between “Native” and “Indigenous”

While “native” can refer to any person or thing (including plants and animals) in a particular place, “indigenous” is a more specific term for the earliest known inhabitants of a region, particularly before colonization. “Indigenous” carries more weight, often implying a strong cultural and spiritual connection to ancestral lands that predates foreign settlement, while “native” can be a more general, sometimes less-preferred term for someone from a place.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Day of Recognition and Reflection

Although Columbus Day is still a federal holiday, many states, including my home state of Michigan, have replaced “Columbus Day” with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is more than just a holiday; it’s a movement towards acknowledgment and respect. It recognizes the historical and ongoing injustices Indigenous communities face and celebrates their profound contributions to society—including their art, knowledge, culture, and longstanding, sustainable stewardship of the environment.

The Black Seminoles: A Testament to Shared Histories and Resistance

The Black Seminoles are African-descended people who forged deep, enduring alliances with the Seminole Indians in Florida.

The Black Seminoles were a community of African Americans, including formerly enslaved people and their descendants, who allied with the Seminole Nation in Florida. They lived, fought, and intermarried with the Seminole, creating a unique culture that combined African and Native American traditions. After the Seminole Wars, many were forced to relocate to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) but faced discrimination, leading some to flee to Texas and Mexico.

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Africans escaping slavery found refuge among the Seminole tribes in Florida. These runaways, often called Maroons, formed close-knit communities with the Seminoles, sharing their lives, cultures, and battles for freedom. Together, they resisted slave catchers, endured wars, and challenged the encroachment of European settlers and the U.S. government.

The Black Seminoles played a vital role in the Seminole Wars, the longest and costliest Indian Wars fought in the United States. Their courage and strategic acumen were instrumental in the Seminole resistance against removal and slavery.

Following the wars, after President Andrew Johnson enacted the Indian Removal Act, many Black Seminoles were forcibly moved to Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), as part of the Trail of Tears. There, they continued to face discrimination and the threat of re-enslavement.

Many Black Seminoles later migrated to Texas and northern Mexico, where they formed new communities, such as the Muscogos in Mexico.

Today, descendants of the Black Seminoles live in Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico, and the Bahamas. They continue to work to preserve their unique history and heritage.

Today In Black History

• In 1968, the African nation of Equatorial Guinea gained its independence from Spain.

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This past weekend, my wife and I attended a jazz concert in Pontiac, billed as a fundraiser for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, our candidate for Michigan’s next U.S. Senate seat, to fill the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Gary Peters. It was a great event, standing room only, and the music was fantastic. We saw the event posted on Facebook and decided we couldn't miss it.

But that post drew some interesting reactions. Predictably, some wanted to tear down Abdul. But more than once, I noticed a comment expressing the questionable sentiment that good music shouldn't be polluted or sullied by being associated with anything political.

In other words, can’t those musicians just shut up and perform for our entertainment? Why do they insist on being involved with what’s happening in their community? Don’t they know we only go to concerts to forget about the world's problems?

Kinda reminds me of when right-wing nutjob Laura Ingram told basketball superstar LeBron James to just “shut up and dribble” and stop making political statements. Just be the good trained monkey we pay you to be. Needless to say, Ingram was ignored.

But here’s the thing, just for those who may not be aware. Music isn’t just for the party people. Music has teeth. To quote a song from one of my favorite rap groups, Public Enemy, music has a long history of being used to Fight The Power. Check the lyrics:

As the rhythm designed to bounce
What counts is that the rhymes
Designed to fill your mind
Now that you’ve realized the pride’s arrived
We got to pump the stuff to make us tough

From the heart
It’s a start, a work of art
To revolutionize make a change nothing’s strange
People, people we are the same
No we’re not the same
‘Cause we don’t know the game
What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless
You say what is this?
My beloved lets get down to business
Mental self defensive fitness
Don’t rush the show
You gotta go for what you know
Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be
Lemme hear you say

Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
Fight the power
We’ve got to fight the powers that be

Indeed, the history of protest music can be traced back at least as far as slavery, when music was not only a means of survival and a way to emotionally endure horrific conditions, but also to send messages in code about planned escapes and other news in ways that the plantation owners and overseers couldn’t understand or decipher.

Here are some other examples of how music can be such a critical ingredient of protest and protest movements (Source: The Library of Congress):

Abolitionism: An Early American Example

The relationship between political protest and music predates the 1960s by more than a century. American abolitionists used music as part of the campaign against slavery. The Library of Congress identifies numerous anti-slavery hymnals and songbooks published between 1834 and 1856. Abolitionists understood that songs could communicate moral arguments against slavery and encourage people to take action.

One notable example was The Anti-Slavery Harp, which William Wells Brown compiled in 1848. Such publications demonstrate that music was part of the abolitionist movement’s communications infrastructure.

The Civil War

Music played an important role in creating political and military identity during the Civil War. Soldiers and civilians used songs at political rallies, in camps, and elsewhere to reinforce belonging and purpose.

Union-associated songs included “John Brown’s Body,” “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” and “Marching Through Georgia.” Confederate supporters used songs such as “Dixie.” The contrasting musical traditions demonstrate how music could help define what people believed they were fighting for.

Women’s Suffrage

The women’s suffrage movement also recognized music as a useful tool for organizing and communication. Suffragists adapted familiar tunes, hymns, and popular songs by giving them new political lyrics. Using melodies that audiences already knew made the new political messages easy to learn and sing.

This established a recurring pattern in protest music: movements often take something familiar and give it a new political meaning.

Labor Movements

The relationship between music and labor organizing is especially strong. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, workers and union organizers used songs to recruit members, maintain morale on picket lines, communicate grievances, encourage solidarity, and attract public sympathy.

Examples include:

· “Solidarity Forever”

· “Which Side Are You On?”

· “Bread and Roses”

· “I Am a Union Woman”

Music provided labor movements with a common emotional language that complemented speeches, pamphlets, and organizing activities.

African American Spirituals, Gospel, Blues, and Civil Rights

One of the most important American examples is the cultural continuum connecting African American spirituals, gospel, blues, freedom songs, soul, funk, and hip-hop. These traditions are not politically identical, but they share long histories of expressing suffering, resilience, identity, and resistance.

The Civil Rights Movement inherited a musical language that was already deeply embedded in Black American culture. Music therefore became a practical tool for organizing rather than simply a soundtrack to political activity.

The Civil Rights Movement

The relationship between protest and music reached an extraordinary level during the 1950s and 1960s. People sang songs at mass meetings, churches, demonstrations, marches, and in jails. They helped activists stay courageous and united while confronting harassment, intimidation, and violence.

“We Shall Overcome”

“We Shall Overcome” became one of the most recognizable musical symbols of the American Civil Rights Movement. Its origins trace back to African American spiritual and gospel traditions, including Charles Tindley’s “I’ll Overcome Someday.” The song was used repeatedly in the movement because its simple structure allowed large groups to sing together.

The important point is that freedom songs were not merely songs about civil rights. Activists actually used them while conducting civil-rights work. Music became part of the movement’s organizational infrastructure.

The March on Washington

At the 1963 March on Washington, music was integrated directly into the political event. Performers included Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Harry Belafonte. Approximately 250,000 people participated.

Music was not simply entertainment between political speeches. It helped create the demonstration's emotional and cultural environment.

Vietnam and the 1960s

The Vietnam era broadened the connection between music and political activism. Artists including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Nina Simone, and Marvin Gaye addressed war, racism, poverty, inequality, and political conflict.

Important examples include:

· Bob Dylan — “Blowin’ in the Wind”

· Bob Dylan — “Masters of War”

· Pete Seeger — “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

· Phil Ochs — “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”

· Marvin Gaye — “What’s Going On”

“What’s Going On” and the Expansion of Protest Music

Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album “What’s Going On” illustrates an important evolution. Rather than functioning primarily as a march song, it used soul music to address war, poverty, racism, environmental concerns, and social conflict.

This shows that protest music didn't have to sound like a traditional protest march. Political expression could be embedded in soul, funk, jazz, rock, and mainstream popular music.

Jazz and Protest

Jazz has also had a substantial relationship with social and political resistance. Examples include Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite,” Charles Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus,” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.”

Jazz could challenge political and social structures not only through lyrics but also through performance, artistic choices, and the music industry's organization. Producer and concert promoter Norman Granz, for example, used his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts to challenge segregation and racial discrimination.

Reggae and International Protest

Reggae developed in Jamaica amid significant social and political tensions. Artists such as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, and Jimmy Cliff addressed colonialism, poverty, political violence, racism, and social inequality.

Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” became an internationally recognized protest song. Reggae demonstrates how a musical style itself can become associated with resistance.

South Africa and Apartheid

Music played an important role in opposition to apartheid. Artists including Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, and Johnny Clegg helped bring South African racial and political issues to international audiences.

Music and dance accompanied liberation movements and served as vehicles for cultural identity, resistance and international communication.

Latin America and Nueva Canción

The Nueva Canción movement became especially important in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on folk traditions, artists addressed poverty, workers’ rights, indigenous rights, colonialism, political repression, and social justice.

The movement became particularly prominent in countries including Chile and Argentina and showed how traditional musical forms could adapt to contemporary political struggles.

Music is the heartbeat of revolution.

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Barry Cardwell, clockwise from the top: Osmosis Jones(2001), Pinky and the Brain, The Tigger Movie (2000), and Animaniacs.

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If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, Barry Caldwell probably made you laugh without you ever knowing his name. For more than forty years, he worked behind the scenes as a storyboard artist, writer, and director. He helped shape Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, Tiny Toon Adventures, and dozens of other shows and films that raised a generation. When he died in March 2026 at age 68, fans and fellow artists began giving him the credit he had never sought.

A Brooklyn Kid With a Stapler

Caldwell was born on June 19, 1957, in New York City and raised in Brooklyn. He grew up in the projects, but he remembered his childhood as “very safe…very loving.” As a boy, he made his own comic books, stapled the pages together, and sold them to classmates for a penny apiece.

He went on to the School of Visual Arts, planning to become a newspaper cartoonist. A class taught by the legendary comics artist Will Eisner opened his eyes to European comics and new ways of telling stories. From then on, Caldwell said, he was “much more interested in the storytelling aspect” than in drawing for its own sake.

From Fat Albert to the Warner Bros. Water Tower

Around 1980, Caldwell moved to Los Angeles and joined Filmation Studios during a hiring rush he later called a “storyboard cattle call.” His first job was fitting: an episode of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, one of the first Saturday-morning cartoons built around Black children. Through the 1980s, he storyboarded He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Smurfs, and Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers.

His biggest years came at Warner Bros. Animation. He worked on Tiny Toon Adventures, then became a key artist and director on Animaniacs and its spinoff, Pinky and the Brain. Those shows were fast, wordy, and packed with jokes for kids and parents alike. Storyboard artists decide how every scene looks on screen: where the camera sits, how a character moves, and how long a pause lasts before the punchline. Caldwell said composition, pacing, and character interaction all had to work at once. His work helped earn him an Emmy and a Peabody Award. He kept both in a display case at home next to a letter from Steven Spielberg, who produced the shows.

A Long, Quiet Career

Caldwell kept working through every change in the business. He storyboarded The Tigger Movie and Osmosis Jones, which he proudly called “the first animated buddy cop movie.” He also worked on Kim Possible, Curious George, Hop, and DreamWorks’ Dragons series.

He called himself an introvert who never chased the spotlight, and success never erased his self-doubt. “Apparently this never goes away,” he admitted. On hard days, he would look at his awards and tell himself, “They gave this to you…and they weren’t fooled.”

The Legacy of a Generous Artist

Younger artists sought Caldwell out for advice, and he gave it honestly. “I always told them the truth,” he said. Writer Paul Dini, who met him around 1980 and announced his death, called him “one of the finest artists I ever met, and easily one of the best people,” and “a genial giant of a guy that you liked from the moment you met him.”

Asked late in life what he hoped people would remember besides his work, Caldwell said he had tried to be “as good a friend and family member as I could be.” For a Black kid from Brooklyn who started out selling penny comics, that was a story worth telling. It’s also a reminder that Black artists have been shaping American animation all along, often from behind the screen, where the stories begin.

Sources: Cartoon Brew; TheWrap; TV Insider; Okayplayer; WION; Animation Magazine

Today In Black History

• In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first Black woman to be awarded the “Nobel Prize in Literature.”

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David Harold Blackwell spent his life on a question that sounds simple: how do we make good decisions when we can’t be sure what will happen? His answers helped shape modern statistics, game theory, and the mathematics behind today’s artificial intelligence. He did that work while facing doors that had been closed to him because he was Black.

Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Illinois. His father worked for the Illinois Central Railroad, and young David went to integrated schools, which was rare at the time. He didn’t care much for math until a high school geometry teacher showed him it could be about ideas rather than memorizing rules. He entered the University of Illinois at 16 and earned his bachelor’s degree, his master’s degree, and, in 1941, his Ph.D. at just 22. He was only the seventh African American to earn a doctorate in mathematics in the United States.

Doors That Would Not Open

After graduate school, Blackwell won a fellowship to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Fellows there were usually welcomed by nearby Princeton University, but the university objected to a Black scholar joining its ranks. In 1942, the statistician Jerzy Neyman tried to hire him at the University of California, Berkeley, and that effort was stopped by racial prejudice too. Blackwell later said he had sent letters to 105 historically Black colleges, assuming they were the only schools that would hire him.

He taught at Southern University and Clark College. In 1944, he joined Howard University, where he became chair of the mathematics department and stayed for ten years. During summers at the RAND Corporation, he began working in game theory, the study of strategy and competition. That became the start of his most important work.

A Career of Firsts

In 1955, Berkeley finally hired him, and Blackwell became the first Black tenured professor in the University of California’s history. Two years later, he chaired the statistics department. In 1965, he became the first African American elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He also served as president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and was the first Black member inducted into many of the field’s leading organizations.

His name is attached to some of statistics’ most widely used ideas. The Rao-Blackwell theorem shows how to turn a rough estimate into a better one. Blackwell’s work on comparing experiments helps researchers decide which kind of information is most useful. His approachability theorem explains how to reach a goal in a contest against an unpredictable opponent. His 1954 book with M. A. Girshick, Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions, became a standard text, and his 1969 textbook Basic Statistics was one of the first to teach beginners the Bayesian approach. Bayesian reasoning is now central to machine learning.

Blackwell said he wasn’t interested in doing research so much as in understanding things, and his students said that was how he taught. He was famous for making hard ideas clear. Over more than three decades at Berkeley, he supervised dozens of doctoral students, and he never stopped encouraging young Black mathematicians. He and his wife, Ann Madison, raised eight children.

Legacy

David Blackwell died on July 8, 2010, at age 91. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Science posthumously. The Blackwell-Tapia Prize, named for him and mathematician Richard Tapia, honors scholars who expand opportunities for underrepresented groups in the mathematical sciences. In 2024, the chipmaker NVIDIA named its newest generation of AI processors “Blackwell” in his honor. That put his name, eighty years after he was shut out of Princeton and Berkeley, on the technology that powers the AI age.

Sources: INFORMS Biographical Profile; UC Berkeley Department of Statistics; Journal of Blacks in Higher Education; The Actuary Magazine; Wikipedia

Today In Black History

• In 2022, Harvard University named Dr. Claudine Gay as its 30th and first Black President.

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When Rod Paige was sworn in as the seventh U.S. Secretary of Education in January 2001, he became the first African American to hold the post—a man who began his own schooling in the segregated classrooms of rural Mississippi. Over a career that ran from the football sidelines to the president’s Cabinet, Paige pressed one idea above all: a child’s color or zip code should never decide what that child can learn. He died on December 9, 2025, in Houston, at age 92.

Rooted in Monticello

Roderick Raynor Paige was born June 17, 1933, in Monticello, Mississippi, to two public school educators. Growing up under Jim Crow, he saw how little the state invested in its Black students and how much teachers like his parents gave anyway. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Jackson State, served in the U.S. Navy from 1955 to 1957, and later attended Indiana University, where he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in physical education.

From Coach to Dean

Paige first made his name in athletics, as head football coach at Jackson State from 1964 to 1968 and at Texas Southern University from 1971 to 1975. Coaching taught him discipline, preparation, and a habit of measuring results — lessons he carried into school leadership.

In 1984, he became dean of Texas Southern’s College of Education, a post he held for a decade. There he founded the Center for Excellence in Urban Education, focused on the city schools serving Black and Latino children.

Remaking Houston’s Schools

Paige joined the Houston Independent School District board in 1989, and in 1994 the board named him superintendent of one of the nation’s largest districts. He ran it like a turnaround: performance contracts for administrators, incentive pay for teachers, more charter schools, and accountability tied to results. He also created the nation’s first accredited school district police department. Rising scores drew national attention, and in 2002 Houston won the first Broad Prize for Urban Education.

The record drew scrutiny, too. A 2003 state audit found that some Houston schools had underreported dropouts, raising questions about how much of the “Houston miracle” held up.

In the Cabinet

President George W. Bush, who knew Paige’s work from his years as Texas governor, chose him to lead the Department of Education. Paige oversaw the rollout of the No Child Left Behind Act, signed in January 2002. The law required annual testing and, crucially, required states to report results by race, income, disability, and English proficiency, so gaps could no longer hide inside averages. Paige called closing those gaps the civil rights issue of our time.

His tenure had sharp edges. In 2004, he called the National Education Association a “terrorist organization,” then apologized. Critics said No Child Left Behind leaned too heavily on testing and punished struggling schools; supporters credited it with forcing honest attention on children who had long been overlooked. He left office in 2005.

Later Years

Paige kept writing and speaking. He published The War Against Hope (2006) and, with his sister Elaine Witty, The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing It Is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time (2010). In 2016, at 83, he returned to his alma mater as interim president of Jackson State University, serving into 2017. “I am a Jacksonian,” he said, “and I am interested in JSU being the greatest it can be.”

Legacy

“Rod worked hard to make sure that where a child was born didn’t determine whether they could succeed in school,” President Bush said after his death. Whatever one thinks of standardized testing, Paige changed the question American schools must answer — not just how students are doing on average, but how every group of students is doing. For a boy from segregated Monticello, insisting that every child be counted was personal.

Sources

• Rod Paige, first Black to serve as U.S. Secretary of Education, dies at 92, The Grio

• Rod Paige, education secretary who defended No Child Left Behind, dies at 92, The Boston Globe

• Rod Paige, education secretary, dies, Mississippi Today

• Rod Paige, nation’s first African American to serve as Secretary of Education, dies at 92, Scripps News

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Today In Black History

• In 1896, Booker T. Washington, the founder and first principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, gave his famous “Compromise Speech” at the Cotton States Exposition.

• In 1962, President John F. Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard to escort James H. Meredith to the University of Mississippi campus.

• In 1966, the African nation of Botswana gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

• In 1975, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought in the “Thrilla in Manila.” Ali won the fight.

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When most people picture Pilates today, they see sleek studios and reformer classes in every city. Few know that one of the people who shaped the method was a Black woman from Boston who came to it by way of Broadway, a knee injury, and a stubborn refusal to stop moving. Her name was Kathy Stanford Grant, and the Pilates world still calls her one of its elders.

Grant was born in Boston on August 1, 1921. At the age of nine, she became the first Black student to take ballet classes at the Boston Conservatory of Music. Talented and determined, she spent her teenage summers studying dance at Carnegie Hall in New York. By the mid-1940s, she had moved to the city for good, working as a chorus girl and dance captain at Harlem’s Zanzibar Club and sharing stages with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Pearl Bailey, and Cab Calloway.

In 1947, she joined the cast of Finian’s Rainbow, often described as Broadway’s first integrated production. More stage work followed, including Kiss Me, Kate and Carmen Jones, along with international tours through Europe and beyond. She also performed in New York with Arthur Mitchell and Donald McKayle, two giants of Black dance.

Then, in 1954, knee surgery after a performance injury slowed her recovery and left her uncertain. The dancer Pearl Lang sent her to Joseph Pilates, the German-born trainer whose system of “Contrology” was quietly popular among New York dancers. That referral changed her life.

Grant logged more than 2,000 hours of training under Joseph Pilates. In the 1960s, she and Lolita San Miguel became the only two people he ever certified to teach his method, through a program offered with the State University of New York. That distinction alone would have secured her place in fitness history. Grant did far more with it.

She taught alongside Carola Trier, another early Pilates teacher, and in 1972 opened the Pilates studio at the Henri Bendel department store in Manhattan. In 1988, she moved her studio to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she trained generations of dancers and actors and became the first Black woman to run a Pilates program of that stature.

Her influence reached well beyond the studio. She was the first administrative director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, directed the Clark Center for the Performing Arts, and became the first African American appointed to the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel. She traveled to Guinea as a cultural consultant on a Harry Belafonte project and helped organize the Dance Black America conference in 1983.

What set Grant apart as a teacher was how she saw each person. Students said she could spot a problem from across the room just by listening to the rhythm of their movement. Instead of forcing everybody into one fixed routine, she adapted the exercises to the person, creating props and variations that met students where they were. Many of her modifications are still taught today. She warned teachers against getting comfortable: “When you think you know Pilates, you should stop teaching. It means you are not present with the person in front of you.”

She kept teaching into her eighties, giving master classes around the country, and received a lifetime achievement award in 2003. Kathy Stanford Grant died in New York City on May 27, 2010, at 88.

Her legacy lives on in the method itself. Each time a Pilates instructor adjusts an exercise to fit the body in front of them, they are practicing what she taught. And each time a Black woman walks into a studio and sees herself there, she is walking a path Grant opened decades ago.

Sources

• Kathy Grant Timeline, Pilates Anytime

• Kathy Stanford Grant: The Black Woman Who Helped Revolutionize Pilates, The Root

• A Strong Presence: Memories of Kathy Grant, IDEA Health & Fitness

• How She Built This: Kathy Stanford Grant, BET

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Today In Black History

• In 1829, David Walker of Massachusetts, abolitionist and author, wrote his tract, “Walker’s Appeal to the Colored People of the World,” denouncing slavery and calling for Blacks to mobilize and rise up against it.

• In 1868, the Opelousas Massacre occurred in Louisiana, resulting in the deaths of around 300 Black Americans.

• In 1895, three Black Baptist groups merged and established the National Baptist Convention at a meeting in Atlanta.

• In 1961, playwright Ossie Davis’s “Purvis Victorious” opened on Broadway.

• In 1962, Governor Barnett was found guilty of civil contempt of the federal court. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered Barnett to purge himself of contempt or face arrest and a $ 10,000-a-day fine.

• In 1967, Walter Washington took office as the first mayor of Washington, D.C.

• In 1972, the Secretary of the Army cleared the military records of 167 Black soldiers who were dishonorably discharged in 1906 because they refused to identify alleged participants in the Brownsville Raid.

• In 1991, the National Civil Rights Museum officially opened at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN, where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968.

• In 2000, Venus and Serena Williams won the Olympic Gold Medal in women’s doubles tennis in Sidney, Australia. With this win, Venus Williams became the only woman to win gold in singles and doubles since 1924.

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The day the media put Trump on mute

A funny thing happened today when Trump participated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the White House on Monday; nobody could hear what he was saying except the hard hats surrounding him because there was no press pool.

The media should have put Trump on mute a long time ago, but this was still a wonderful thing to watch. Trump running his mouth, seemingly oblivious to the fact that nobody could hear him. Or cared.

But what made this comical scenario even better was knowing the story behind the silence; all the major news networks have essentially banded together to boycott Trump and his White House in protest of his toy dictator attempt to select which news organizations would be acceptable in his presence based on which ones were willing to bow down. None of them were.

There have been some unnerving actions taken by the major networks ever since Trump took office for his second term that made it fair to consider whether legitimate media could survive under the threat of fascism Trump was doing his best to impose on all of us. Most recently, CBS came under intense scrutiny when it became clear how much pressure was being exerted on the popular, long-running news program 60 Minutes, trying to force its reporters to become more compliant with the Trump effect. Widely-respected 60 Minutes news anchor Scott Pelley was fired in June for refusing to bend over, and referred to what was happening at his former place of work as a “massacre.” The New York Times did the interview as a podcast.

Three months later, it appears Scott Pelley may not be the only one who has had enough. Hopefully the major print media outlets will find a way to follow suit, because the only way the media can save itself is by standing together. Subservience is not salvation.

From Politico:

“The nation’s major television networks are declining to participate in White House pool duties moving forward in response to the Trump administration’s decision to bar CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House, Fox News Washington Bureau Chief and current TV pool chair Bryan Boughton wrote in an email to TV pool subscribers.

‘This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” Boughton wrote in the email, obtained by POLITICO. “This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place.’

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For four decades, Tony Brown sat across from presidents, scholars, activists, and ordinary people, asking the questions mainstream television rarely thought to ask. Through Black Journal and its successor, Tony Brown’s Journal, he built the longest-running Black news and public affairs series in television history. When he died on June 17, 2026, at his home in Newport News, Virginia, at age 93, he left behind nearly 1,000 preserved episodes — one of the most complete televised records of African American thought ever assembled.

From Charleston to Detroit

William Anthony Brown was born April 11, 1933, in Charleston, West Virginia, where he grew up knowing both poverty and segregation. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1953 to 1955, he headed to Detroit’s Wayne State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1959 and a master’s in psychiatric social work in 1961.

Journalism found him in Detroit. In 1962, he joined the Detroit Courier as a drama critic and later rose to city editor. A year later, in June 1963, he helped coordinate the Detroit Walk to Freedom, where some 125,000 people marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and heard an early version of the speech King would deliver at the March on Washington two months later. In 1968, Brown joined Detroit’s public television station, WTVS, and produced C.P.T., the station’s first program made for Black viewers.

Taking the Helm of Black Journal

Black Journal premiered on National Educational Television on June 12, 1968, created in the aftermath of the urban uprisings of 1967 as programming “for blacks, about blacks.” Under executive producer William Greaves, it won an Emmy in 1969. Brown moved to New York to lead the program, and by 1971 he was its executive producer and frequent host.

Brown pushed the show beyond headlines. Black Journal covered civil rights, Black Power, economics, education, and culture in a magazine format, and it trained Black apprentices in the technical side of television—camera, editing, and production jobs long closed to them. Brown believed that putting Black faces on screen was not enough; Black producers, writers, and executives had to shape the stories too.

That independence carried a price. As PBS stations grew uneasy with the show’s sharp viewpoints, Brown took it to commercial television in 1977 with sponsorship from Pepsi and renamed it Tony Brown’s Journal. In 1982, it returned to PBS, where it ran until 2008. Over the years, Brown estimated he interviewed more than 1,000 guests on subjects from the murder of Emmett Till to AIDS in Black communities.

Educator and Advocate

While running Black Journal, Brown became the founding dean of Howard University’s School of Communications. Decades later, from 2004 to 2009, he served as dean of Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications, shaping generations of Black journalists.

He also used his platform to organize. On September 29, 1980, he led the first Black College Day march in Washington, D.C., rallying thousands to defend historically Black colleges and universities as integration and budget pressures threatened their future. In 1985, he founded the Council for the Economic Development of Black Americans, promoting a “Buy Freedom” message of Black economic self-reliance. His politics drew debate — he joined the Republican Party in 1990 — but his theme of self-help stayed consistent through books like Black Lies, White Lies (1995) and What Mama Taught Me (2004).

Legacy

In 2002, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences inducted Brown into its Silver Circle. His greater honor is the archive he left and the journalists he trained. Tony Brown proved that Black audiences deserved serious, independent news on their own terms—and then spent a lifetime making sure it existed.

Sources

• Tony Brown (1933– ), BlackPast.org

• Tony Brown, Britannica

• Tony Brown’s legacy: Shaping Black voices in media, The Washington Informer

• Black College Day, Tony Brown’s Journal

• A Sense of Commitment and Festivity Marks First Black College Day March, The Washington Post

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Today In Black History

• In 1884, Black inventor J.W. Reed patented a dough kneader and roller.

• In 1961, President J.F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

• In 1979, Lou Brock became baseball’s all-time leading base stealer with 935 stolen bases.

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Few artists have set an entire people’s longing to music the way Rafael Hernández Marín did. The Afro-Puerto Rican songwriter, born in Aguadilla in 1892, wrote roughly 3,000 compositions over a life that carried him from a cigar-rolling childhood to the battlefields of France, the stages of Havana and Mexico City, and the crowded streets of Spanish Harlem. Two of his songs, “Lamento Borincano” and “Preciosa,” are still sung as unofficial anthems of Puerto Rico.

Humble Beginnings in Aguadilla

Hernández was born on October 24, 1892, in the Tamarindo sector of Aguadilla, into a family of Afro-Puerto Rican tobacco workers. Raised in poverty, he learned cigar-making as a child, but his grandmother recognized his gift and helped pay for formal music lessons in San Juan beginning at age twelve. He mastered the guitar, violin, piano, and several brass instruments, and by fourteen he was performing professionally with local orchestras.

A Hellfighter in France

In 1917, the celebrated African American bandleader James Reese Europe went looking for horn players who could read music and found them in Puerto Rico. Hernández and his brother Jesús were among about eighteen Puerto Rican musicians recruited to the 369th Infantry Regiment, a segregated unit known as the Harlem Hellfighters. The regiment earned France’s Croix de Guerre for gallantry and is credited with helping introduce jazz to Europe. Hernández mustered out as a sergeant and returned to civilian life in 1919, ready to build a career in music.

Songs of Longing

After the war, Hernández directed the orchestra at Havana’s Fausto Theater, then settled in New York City. In 1925, he formed the Trío Borincano, and his sister Victoria opened Casa Hernández, a music store that also served as a booking agency, on September 2, 1927. His groups toured across the United States and Latin America.

It was in Spanish Harlem, in 1929, that he wrote “Lamento Borincano,” the story of a jíbaro, a poor farmer, who travels to town hoping to sell his crops and finds no buyers. He returns home with nothing, a portrait of Puerto Rico’s hardship as the Great Depression closed in. The song, first recorded by Canario y Su Grupo, became an instant hit across Latin America. In 2018, the Library of Congress added the 1930 recording to the National Recording Registry.

In 1932, Hernández moved to Mexico, where he studied at the National Conservatory and composed for the country’s golden age of cinema. There, in 1937, he wrote “Preciosa,” a love letter to the island that celebrates Puerto Rican identity’s Spanish, African, and Taíno roots. Listeners of every political persuasion embrace it. His catalog also includes “El Cumbanchero,” “Capullito de Alhelí,” “Silencio,” and “Campanitas de Cristal.”

Honors and Legacy

Hernández returned to Puerto Rico in 1947, led the orchestra of the government radio station WIPR, and served as honorary president of the Authors and Composers Association. He died in San Juan on December 11, 1965, at age 73, and is buried in Old San Juan’s Santa María Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery.

Recognition has followed him ever since. Rafael Hernández Airport in Aguadilla bears his name, as do schools in New York, Boston, and Newark, the Hernandez Houses in New York City, and a museum at Interamerican University of Puerto Rico. He was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2014.

Sources:

• Rafael Hernández-Marín – Encyclopedia of Puerto Rico

• The Greatest Jibarito: Afro-Boricua Rafael Hernández – Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños

• Lamento Borincano – Wikipedia

• Preciosa (song) – Wikipedia

• Rafael Hernández – EBSCO Research Starters

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Today In Black History

• In 1872, John Henry Conyers became the first Black person to enter the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD.

• In 1891, Black inventor F.W. Leslie patented the envelope seal.

• In 1959, Juanita Kidd was appointed Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge and later elected to a full term, becoming the first Black woman elected judge in the United States.

• In 1989, General Colin Powell was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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The Democratic Party is supposed to be the “big tent” party, but the centrist and corporate establishment Democrats refuse to treat the progressive Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as equal members of the party.

A reminder that the establishment Democrats lost the 2016 and 2024 elections, both with women at the top of the ticket, to Donald Trump because they did not support those candidates enough to give Democratic voters enough reasons to vote for those candidates.

Democrats did win the 2020 election and, in the first two years of Joe Biden’s administration, passed some very important legislation, even with a 50-50 split in the Senate and a very slim majority in the House.

Conservative Senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) left the Senate during Biden’s term, and John Fetterman (PA) has often voted with Republicans, making it harder to pass bills.

Most importantly, the Democrats did not add justices to the U.S. Supreme Court when they had a chance, leaving us with an ultra-conservative Court that primarily does the bidding of Donald Trump.

As soon as Trump won the election both times, he and the Republicans repealed or significantly changed Biden’s legislative wins from his first two years. Now Trump and the Republicans are in charge of the entire government, including majorities in both houses of Congress and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and are quickly destroying our hard-won rights, our health and safety, the environment, and the very foundations of our democracy.

Both FDR and LBJ had large congressional majorities when they passed their major laws and policies, and we need to elect large majorities in the 2026 midterms to make the changes we need.

We need a unified Democratic Party, and we do not have that now, with less than seven weeks until November 3, 2026.

The Democratic Party is not supporting Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, who said he is not a socialist but is promoting very popular policies, such as Money Out of Politics, Money in Your Pocket, and Medicare for All. He won over the corporate Democrat Haley Stevens. Dr. El-Sayed has also said that, as a medical doctor and epidemiologist, he looks forward to calling HHS Secretary RFK Jr. out over his anti-science and anti-vaccine stances that are making Americans sick and actually killing people with the increase in measles cases.

The Democratic Party also isn’t supporting Florida State Representative Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialist and the Democratic candidate for Senate, who beat the corporate Democrat, Alexander Vindman. Representative Nixon’s proposed policies include Medicare for All, affordable housing, free child care and paid family and sick leave, getting money out of politics, a universal jobs program, and standing with workers.

Both El-Sayed and Nixon say that their programs will be paid for by taxing the billionaires, ending Citizens United, and spending money here in America instead of on wars and violence overseas.

Meanwhile, corporate establishment Democrats are not promoting those popular proposed policies and instead are still supporting the genocide in Gaza and depending on financial support from the corporations, including AIPAC and health company lobbyists, that are against those policies.

According to historian Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, ever since the late 19th century, corporate insiders have called anything and everything that actually helps people “socialism.” Some Democrats recently voted in Congress to be against “socialism” and never use that term.

The primary feature of socialism is that society, workers, or the state—rather than private owners—owns or controls the means of production, such as factories, land, and resources. That is exactly what today’s corporate elites do not want.

And of course, the entire country has seen the phenomenal success of NYC Mayor Zorhan Mamdani, who says he is a socialist and ran for office as a Democratic Socialist. He is not only the mayor of the largest city in America, but he is the most popular mayor in the country.

The corporate Democrats do not need to become actual socialists; they just need to realize that many of the popular policies that lean socialist are the policies that most people want. They need to listen to their voters, not the corporations paying them to pass their priorities.

Establishment Democrats also should not endorse Republican candidates over progressive Democrats.

We need to have a large majority after the midterms, and we need fighters in Congress, not weak and pathetic people who won’t do what We, the People, want and need them to do.

What are your thoughts on the current Democratic Party?

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Cassandra Wilson never sounded like anyone else, and she never tried to. Over four decades of recording, the Mississippi-born vocalist built a body of work that treated jazz standards, Delta blues, folk-rock, and pop songs as branches of the same tree—all filtered through a deep, smoky contralto that critics struggled to categorize and audiences never forgot. Wilson died on September 2, 2026, in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, at age 70, closing out a career that reshaped what a jazz singer could sound like.

Roots in Jackson

Born Cassandra Fowlkes on December 4, 1955, Wilson grew up in a household steeped in music. Her father was a jazz guitarist and bassist; her mother was an educator who loved music just as fiercely. She started piano lessons at six and picked up guitar at twelve, and by the time she studied theater arts and philosophy at Millsaps College — later earning a mass communications degree from Jackson State University — the sound of the Mississippi Delta was already woven into her musical instincts, even as her ambitions pointed toward jazz.

Finding Her Voice in New Orleans and New York

Wilson’s real education began after college. In New Orleans in 1981, she studied with Ellis Marsalis Jr. and other local jazz figures. A year later she moved to New York City, where she met saxophonist Steve Coleman and became a founding member of the M-Base Collective — a loose association of young musicians committed, as Wilson put it, to “creating your own voice” rather than replaying the past. She toured with Henry Threadgill’s avant-garde trio New Air and released her debut album, Point of View, in 1986. It was daring, angular music that put her on the map as a serious improviser well before she became a household name.

The Blue Note Years

Everything changed in 1993, when Wilson signed with Blue Note Records and released Blue Light ‘Til Dawn, an album that reintroduced her as something rarer than a jazz singer: a genre-dissolving song interpreter. She followed it with New Moon Daughter in 1996, which won her the first of two Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album. The record’s covers of Robert Johnson’s blues and Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” sat comfortably beside jazz standards, all rendered in that unmistakable low, unhurried voice. A decade later, Loverly (2008) brought her a second Grammy in the same category. In between, she lent her voice to Wynton Marsalis’s Blood on the Fields, the 1997 oratorio that won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and recorded with Pat Metheny, Dave Holland, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Angélique Kidjo.

Recognition and Legacy

The honors accumulated accordingly: DownBeat named her Female Jazz Vocalist of the Year in 1995 and 1996, Time magazine called her “America’s Best Singer” in 2001, and in 2022 the National Endowment for the Arts named her a Jazz Master, the nation’s highest honor in the field. Mississippi added its own tributes, including a marker on the state’s Blues Trail.

What set Wilson apart was never vocal acrobatics — she rarely reached for a high note when a held, textured low one would do. She approached every song, whether written by Muddy Waters or Cyndi Lauper, as a story to inhabit rather than a melody to perform. That patience, and that refusal to separate jazz from the blues and folk traditions that fed it, opened space for a generation of vocalists who followed her in refusing to be boxed into one genre. Cassandra Wilson didn’t just sing across boundaries — she quietly erased them, and jazz is wider for it.

Sources:

• NPR: Cassandra Wilson, Grammy-winning jazz vocalist, dies at 70

• National Endowment for the Arts: Cassandra Wilson

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Today In Black History

• In 1848, the French abolished Slavery in all of its territories.

• In 1915, Haiti became a de facto protectorate of the United States by treaty.

• In 1933, United Artists released “Emperor Jones,” starring Paul Robeson as Brutus Jones. This was Robeson’s first starring movie role and the first major Hollywood production starring an African American, with whites in supporting roles.

• In 1989, Debbie Turner became the third African American to be crowned Miss America since 1921.

• In 1990, Keenan Ivory Wayans ’ “In Living Color” won an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series.

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Every Friday until the end of 2026, we will publish a post about each of the 27 Amendments to the Constitution.

The Tenth Amendment is the last of the Bill of Rights that was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791. It defines the principle of “federalism,” meaning the national and state governments share power.

The 10th Amendment, with only 28 words, says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Throughout American history, conservatives and red states have always rushed to declare “States’ Rights” unless they want the federal government to take away the policies, rights, and privileges of the groups they don’t like.

The 10th Amendment is intended to limit the power of the Federal government.

As Donald Trump, the #ConvictedFelon and #AdjudicatedRapist, now occupying the People’s House, is trying to not only consolidate all powers to the Federal government, and particularly to himself and the Executive Branch, the 10th Amendment becomes especially important.

The Tenth Amendment emerged from an era of intense debate among the Founding Fathers about the scope of federal authority. The Articles of Confederation had fostered a government too weak to function effectively, leading to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. However, as the new Constitution proposed a stronger central government, fears of tyranny resurfaced among the states. The Bill of Rights, particularly the Tenth Amendment, was crafted to alleviate these anxieties by ensuring state sovereignty and protecting individual liberties.

Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson represented the spectrum of this debate. Hamilton advocated for a robust federal system, while Jefferson championed states' rights. The Tenth Amendment was a compromise, a reassuring promise to the states that their local powers and autonomy would remain intact.

The Tenth Amendment's language serves as a complex boundary marker. By stating that powers not explicitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people, it implicitly affirms that the federal government has only limited, enumerated powers.

Today, the Tenth Amendment sits at the center of several heated political and legal debates. From healthcare reforms to marijuana legalization and gun control, states often assert their rights to legislate independently of federal mandates. The amendment thus serves as a basis for legal challenges against perceived federal overreach.

By attempting to slow federal overreach, different laws across states also complicate things for individuals who may have rights in one state but are denied those same rights in another.

For instance, the Affordable Care Act faced scrutiny under the Tenth Amendment. While the Supreme Court upheld the law's constitutionality, dissenting opinions raised concerns about encroaching federal power. Similarly, as more states legalize marijuana, they do so in defiance of federal statutes, invoking states' rights as protected by the Tenth Amendment.

The issue of marriage equality, particularly regarding state versus federal authority to regulate marriage, relates directly to the Tenth Amendment because it emphasizes federalism and states' rights. This principle comes into play when evaluating who has the authority to legislate marriage laws.

Historically, states have predominantly regulated marriage, with each state setting its own laws on marriage licenses, age of consent, and more, because the Constitution does not explicitly grant the federal government the power to legislate marriage.

However, the federal government has, at times, intervened in marriage regulation, especially when issues of equality and civil rights were at stake. Notable examples include the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and landmark Supreme Court cases such as United States v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The latter case resulted in the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States, based on the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, effectively reducing the states' ability to regulate marriage exclusively.

Just as the Supreme Court reversed the Roe v Wade decision that gave a federal guarantee of abortion access, the right wing is now trying to get the Supreme Court to reverse the Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The Tenth Amendment exemplifies the ongoing balancing act between unity and diversity within the United States.

Critics argue that this decentralization can exacerbate inequalities, as state policies on education, healthcare, and civil rights can differ dramatically. Proponents, however, see it as a necessary safeguard against an overreaching federal state and a reflection of the diverse perspectives and needs of the American populace.

The Tenth Amendment, in preserving the rights of states and the autonomy of citizens, continues to shape the nation's legal and political landscape, reminding us that in America, POWER BEGINS WITH THE PEOPLE and flourishes through the states they inhabit.

Have you ever considered how the 10th Amendment applies to you?

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Introduction

This article was originally posted on September 3, 2023.

Today in Black History, we commemorate the dynamic intersection of the labor and jazz movements in Detroit, a vibrant hub for African American culture and activism.

As many of you know, I am continuously repping my hometown of Detroit, one of the largest majority-Black cities in America. I was born and raised in Detroit, and we still live here. And yes, I fully understand the ugly racist history of Detroit, but…

In this post, I reflect on the collective power and cultural richness that emerged from the historic alliance between labor and music in Detroit, showcasing how both movements shaped Detroit’s identity and contributed to the broader narrative of Black resilience and creativity in America.

I will also discuss how a wealthy native Detroiter, whose company was active in both the Labor Movement and the Jazz Movement, used her wealth to improve the musical lives of current and future jazz musicians.

The Labor Movement in Detroit

Detroit has long been recognized as a cornerstone of American industry, particularly during the early to mid-20th century. Known as the "Motor City," Detroit's automotive industry provided numerous job opportunities but also presented challenges, especially for African American workers who faced racial discrimination and inequitable working conditions.

Amidst these challenges, the labor movement in Detroit became a powerful force for change. African American workers actively participated in unions, with the United Auto Workers (UAW) leading efforts to secure fair wages and safe working conditions. The UAW instituted the “sit-down strike” efforts, which later became commonplace in other labor movements. Labor leaders such as Coleman Alexander Young, who later became Detroit’s first Black mayor, emerged from these efforts and advocated for civil rights and worker equality.

The labor movement in Detroit was more than just an economic struggle; it was a fight for dignity and equality, playing a critical role in the broader civil rights movement. The collaboration between Black workers and labor organizers laid the groundwork for significant social progress, making Detroit a focal point for labor activism.

The Jazz Movement in Detroit

Parallel to the labor movement, Detroit also experienced a flourishing jazz scene that became an integral part of the city's cultural fabric. Jazz originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

By the 1930s and 1940s, Detroit had become a hotbed for jazz, producing legendary artists such as Elvin Jones, Kenny Burrell, and Donald Byrd. The city's Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods were vibrant centers of music and nightlife, drawing both local and national talent.

Both of those areas in Detroit were destroyed in the 1950s by racist efforts to eliminate Black advancement in business and the arts, led by Detroit’s racist then-mayor, Albert Cobo, who ran on a platform of segregation and keeping Black people from moving into white neighborhoods in the City.

Jazz offered a creative outlet and a form of resistance for African Americans in Detroit, providing a space for cultural expression and solidarity. The genre's improvisational nature used music to overcome adversity and celebrate identity.

A Company Founded in Detroit Using Its Wealth to Uplift Jazz in Detroit

The Carhartt Company was founded in Detroit by Hamilton Carhartt in 1889 to build a better bib overall for railroad workers. The company is now also known worldwide for durable workwear and outerwear. According to its website, Carhartt is “…committed to supporting organizations that ensure this generation partners with the next to build an even better future.” Now headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, Carhartt employs over 3,000 associates worldwide.

Hamilton’s granddaughter, Gretchen Carhartt Valade, was born in 1925. She married Grosse Pointe native Robert C. Valade in 1948, and he would eventually serve as Carhartt’s president for four decades while they raised three children. Gretchen Valade remained an active participant and adviser in the business, serving on the board of directors since 1958. Upon her husband’s death in 1998, she took over as chairman of the board.

According to Gretchen’s obituary published in the Detroit Free Press, Gretchen Valade “…was also known among the regional arts community and beyond as ‘the angel of jazz’ for her long-lasting contributions to Detroit’s arts and culture scene as well as the global jazz community. At age 74, she founded the Mack Avenue Records jazz label, which subsequently earned 11 Grammy Awards and more than 50 nominations. At age 82, she opened the Dirty Dog Jazz Café, an award-winning jazz and dinner club in Grosse Pointe Farms.”

This weekend was the 47th Annual Detroit Jazz Festival, the largest free jazz festival in the world, held every Labor Day Weekend, while Detroit also celebrates its Labor Movement history.

There are festival musicians and audiences from all over the Detroit area, including Windsor, ON, the country, and the world, including Japan and Ukraine; all races, ages, sexual orientations, and religions, all getting along and having fun together for four days without incident—Donald Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s greatest fear. The Detroit Jazz Festival is live-streamed worldwide, with an estimated 1.5+ million viewers from over 37 countries experiencing the greatness and beauty of Detroit, its music, and its people.

The Gretchen C. Valade Foundation is the Detroit Jazz Festival's largest corporate sponsor and has been for the past several years.

In 2024, the Valade Foundation’s gifts, totaling $9.5 million, to jazz studies and performance at Wayne State University in Detroit funded the Gretchen C. Valade Jazz Center (GVJC), which features a main hall designed specifically for jazz performance and a club-style venue.

In addition, the Gretchen C. Valade Endowed Chair serves as the GVJC's artistic director. The Gretchen C. Valade Endowed Scholarship in Jazz Studies, a graduate assistantship that supports the endowed chair role, also supports jazz education and performance at the GVJC.

Gretchen Carhartt Valade was very wealthy. Not nearly as wealthy as Gates, Zuckerberg, or Musk, but she used her wealth and her foundation to enhance and support the arts, specifically jazz music, in her hometown of Detroit and the surrounding areas, including scholarships and mentorships for up-and-coming high school and college jazz musicians.

Other wealthy people and foundations could learn a lot from Detroit’s labor and music histories, as well as the Gretchen C. Valade Foundation.

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Of Lake America and Unicorns

Question: What do unicorns and Lake America have in common?

Answer: Neither of them exists.

When I came up with the idea for what (I think) is just such a clever opening line, I considered maybe this was the time for me to sign off on what would be the shortest op-ed of my career, and possibly of all time. Because, seriously, what else needs to be said? Last Thursday, August 27, Trump signed one of his executive orders proclaiming that, from now on, Lake Ontario should be called Lake America because he said so.

Well…no. And middle finger to you, sir.

However, as it relates to the U.S. government, unfortunately, Trump does have the power, through the Department of the Interior, to direct the Geographic Names Information System to update federal maps and databases. This means his executive order applies to all U.S. federal maps and documents. But internationally? The rest of the world calls bullshit, because that’s what it is.

And as far as that goes, even though Google does have a long-standing policy that says its maps should reflect names matching official government sources (extremely difficult to consider Trump an official government source, but whatever), there is no legal requirement.

But rather than risk the orange wrath of The Unhinged One, and even though the law would be on their side if they had chosen not to bend the knee, Google, in true yassuh boss fashion, immediately made the decision to fall in line. No questions asked. They made their best Nike impression:

Just do it.

I have read some news sources indicate that Trump’s tantrum lake renaming fit is related to a trade dispute we are apparently having with Canada, but I would beg to differ. Although throwing tariffs back and forth at one another is certainly not good for trade relations between the U.S. and a nation that once upon a time was actually our best friend in the world, Trump’s ongoing efforts to bend the confines of reality to fit within his comfort zone have nothing at all to do with trade. This is purely about Trump’s inability to exist in a world where there are consequences for incompetence. Trump figures renaming a large body of water like Lake Ontario – same as he tried with the Gulf of Mexico when he officially renamed it the Gulf of America on Jan. 20, 2025 – will strike fear into the hearts of (who, exactly?) while forcing clueless Americans to love him because (why, exactly?)

Welcome to America, Sept. 3, 2026, where reality is optional.

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As of Monday, August 31, 2026, because of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s incompetence, there is now NO civilian or Senate-confirmed leadership for the United States Army, and we are also in an ill-conceived and poorly run, unnecessary war with Iran. This has never happened in all of American history.

In August 1982, Roscoe Robinson Jr. pinned on his fourth star and became the first African American in the history of the United States Army to reach that rank — a milestone that came 34 years after he entered West Point as one of a small handful of Black cadets, and more than two centuries after Black soldiers first fought in America’s wars without any real chance of leading them.

From St. Louis to West Point

Robinson was born October 11, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Sumner High School in 1946. He spent a year at Saint Louis University before winning an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, entering in 1947 and graduating in 1951 with a degree in military engineering — commissioned as a second lieutenant into an Army that would not fully desegregate its ranks in practice for years after Truman’s 1948 executive order on paper ended the policy.

Korea and Vietnam

Robinson deployed to Korea in 1952, serving as a platoon leader, rifle company commander, and later battalion intelligence officer during some of the war’s hardest fighting, and came home with a Bronze Star. He returned to instruct in the Army’s Airborne Department before climbing through a series of staff and command assignments, earning a master’s degree in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh in 1964 and completing the National War College in 1969. By 1967, he was back in combat, commanding the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment — the same storied unit George Custer once led — through what his commendation called a period of “close and intense combat” in Vietnam. He came out of that command with the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, eleven Air Medals, and two Silver Stars.

Breaking the Ceiling

The promotions accelerated through the 1970s. Robinson took command of the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg in 1972, made brigadier general in 1973, and led the Army garrison on Okinawa starting in 1975. In 1976, he was promoted to major general and given command of the 82nd Airborne Division itself, becoming the first African American to lead that storied unit. Four years later, he pinned on his third star as a lieutenant general, commanding U.S. Army forces in Japan and IX Corps. Then, in 1982, came the fourth star and an assignment to match it: U.S. Military Representative to the NATO Military Committee in Brussels, a post that put an American general who had once served in a segregated-in-practice Army at the table representing the United States among its most powerful allies. He held that post until his retirement from the Army in 1985, closing out 34 years of service.

Legacy

Robinson died of leukemia on July 22, 1993, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, at age 64, and was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. That same year, West Point named him a Distinguished Graduate, and in 2000 the Academy dedicated the General Roscoe Robinson Jr. Auditorium in his honor; Fort Bragg also named a clinic for him.

Robinson had spent much of his later career chairing a formal Army review of the historical performance of African American combat units in Korea, insisting the record be set straight rather than left to old prejudices.

Nearly a decade before Colin Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Robinson had already proven a Black officer could rise to the Army’s very top — not by exception, but through command after command, war after war.

Sources:

• Roscoe Robinson, Jr. (1928-1993), BlackPast.org

• Gen. Roscoe Robinson Jr., Military.com

• Roscoe Robinson Jr.: First African American to Become Four-Star General in the U.S. Army, Black Then

• Celebrating Black History Month: Reflecting On The Achievements And Leadership Of General Roscoe Robinson, Jr., U.S. Army, Hoover Institution

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Today In Black History

• In 1884, Black inventor John Parker patented the “Parker Pulverizer,” a screw for tobacco presses.

• In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the National Guard to Central High School in Little Rock, blocking the Little Rock Nine from entering on the eve of the school year.

• In 1958, Black inventor Frederick McKinley Jones was granted a patent for a control device for internal combustion engines, part of the innovations behind his refrigeration work and the founding of Thermo King.

• In 1966, baseball player Frank Robinson was named MVP (“Most Valuable Player”) for the American League.

• In 1975, Joseph Woodrow Hatchett became the first Black state Supreme Court Justice in the South since Reconstruction when he was sworn in for Florida.

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On August 28, 2026, a March for Voting Rights took place in front of the Lincoln Memorial, commemorating the 63rd anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

When the March on Washington drew a quarter of a million people to the National Mall on August 28, 1963, it did not happen by accident. Anna Arnold Hedgeman spent months turning white churches across the country into a pipeline of marchers — and then watched the men she helped put on that stage decide there was no room on it for her or any other influential woman.

From Iowa Classrooms to City Hall

Born July 5, 1899, in Marshalltown, Iowa, and raised in Anoka, Minnesota, Hedgeman graduated from Hamline University in 1922, the first Black student ever to attend the school. Trained as a teacher, she found the doors of St. Paul’s segregated school system closed to her and instead taught for two years at Rust College in Mississippi before turning to social work.

Over the next two decades, she ran YWCA branches in Ohio, New Jersey, and Harlem, building programs that trained Black women for jobs and leadership at a time when most institutions offered them neither. In 1944, she became executive secretary of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, fighting to keep the wartime ban on employment discrimination alive after the war ended.

A decade later, in 1954, New York Mayor Robert Wagner named her to his cabinet, making Hedgeman the first Black woman ever to hold a mayoral cabinet post in New York City history — a post she used to push housing and welfare reform for Harlem.

Building the March, Pew by Pew

By 1963, Hedgeman was working as coordinator of special events for the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race, and when A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin began assembling the coalition behind the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, she became the only woman on its administrative committee.

Her assignment played directly to her decades of church organizing: convince white Protestant congregations, most of which had never marched for civil rights in their lives, that segregation was a moral emergency they could no longer sit out. She worked the phones and the pulpits, and by the day of the march, she had helped deliver an estimated 40,000 white Protestants to the Mall — a bloc of allies whose presence organizers credited with helping the march read as a genuinely national, interfaith demand rather than a Black-only protest that Washington could more easily dismiss.

A Seat on the Committee, Not the Stage

Hedgeman’s influence inside the planning rooms did not translate to influence on the program. Of the ten official march speakers, all were men. Weeks before the event, Hedgeman wrote to her fellow organizers pointing out the absurdity of a march for freedom that had no place for the women who had done so much of the work to build it. Her protest won a small concession: a brief “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom,” in which Daisy Bates spoke a few sentences from the podium — nothing close to the full addresses given to her male colleagues.

The day after the march, Hedgeman convened a gathering of Black women activists under the pointed title “After the March — What?,” an early acknowledgment that Black women would have to build their own platforms rather than wait to be handed one.

Legacy

Hedgeman kept building those platforms for the rest of her life, co-founding the National Organization for Women in 1966 and running for both Congress and New York City Council President on the strength of her civil rights record.

She died January 17, 1990, in Harlem, and today her portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery — recognition, finally, for the organizer who helped fill the Mall in 1963 and then insisted the movement reckon with who it left off the stage.

Sources:

• Biography: Anna Arnold Hedgeman, National Women’s History Museum

• The Morning After: Black Women and the March on Washington, African American Intellectual History Society

• Anna Arnold Hedgeman: The woman behind the March on Washington, IGNITE National

• Making the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, JFK Library Archives

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Today In Black History

• In 1836, Black inventor Henry Blair patented the cotton planter.

• In 1884, the Second Baptist Church, the oldest Black Baptist church in El Paso, Texas, was established.

• In 1945, a total of 1,154,720 Black men and women were inducted or drafted into the U.S. Armed Services.

• In 1962, the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago proclaimed its independence from Britain.

• In 1979, Donald McHenry succeeded Andrew Jackson Young, Jr., as United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

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Graphic is AI-generated. Article is human-written.

For the entire history of the United States, white people have been in the majority. Now, however, the white majority is rapidly shrinking. The fastest-growing demographic is Latino, and many Latinos are immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and other parts of Latin America. There are also immigrants from Africa and Asia, but fewer.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of whites in the U.S. population has declined since 1950, falling to 76 percent in 1990, 69 percent in 2000, 64 percent in 2010, and 61 percent in 2016—the lowest percentage ever recorded at that time.

Census Bureau projections show that the United States will be majority-minority by around 2044. In 2020 in the U.S., there were fewer white than nonwhite children.

The nonwhite (minority) population is growing much more rapidly than the white population. Between 2010 and 2016, minorities accounted for 92 percent of the U.S. population growth, with Latinos (often incorrectly referred to as Hispanics) making up just under half of the nation’s overall growth.

The number of white people is declining, and the number of nonwhites is increasing, primarily because of basic demography—births, deaths, and immigration.

• Whites have fewer births compared to nonwhites.

• Sixty-two percent of Latinas 15 years of age or older are in the childbearing ages, but only 42 percent of white women are in this age group.

• Whites accounted for 78 percent of all U.S. deaths occurring in 2015, and there were more white deaths than white births in 17 states in 2014.

• Of the more than 43 million foreign-born persons living in the U.S. in 2015, 82 percent originated in Latin America and Asia. Only 11 percent were born in Europe.

Because of these demographic differences and changes, the United States is undergoing major changes in its racial structure. The aging white population, alongside a more youthful minority population, especially in the case of Latinos, may result in the U.S. becoming a majority-minority country in about 2044.

This demographic shift in the United States has resulted in many whites proclaiming that they are losing “their” country. Many whites, including some white elected representatives, have insisted that America should be a “whites-only” country, and applaud the dangerous and deadly efforts of ICE against immigrants of color.

Donald Trump has capitalized on this sentiment and has further encouraged his supporters to express their racism and hatred toward people of color through his own racist words and actions.

White supremacist influencers and elected officials continually try to denigrate the terms “woke” and “DEI.” Today, the term “woke” is used as a political insult by conservatives to criticize progressive policies. This meaning comes from African American English, where it served for decades as a vital warning to stay vigilant about Black safety and civil rights. “DEI” stands for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and to be anti-DEI means you do not want diversity, equity, or inclusion in today’s American society.

White supremacy is a powerful system that still creates and perpetuates racial inequality in the United States. Following the end of slavery in 1865, the Jim Crow system was established to separate blacks from whites and to keep blacks at the bottom of society. After the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, whites used the court system to dismantle the socioeconomic and political gains of minorities and established massive incarceration that still disproportionately ensnares Blacks and Latinos in prisons.

As whites are becoming a numerical minority, they are doing everything they can to maintain their dominant position socioeconomically and politically. The massive economic resources and political power that whites have amassed will not erode as their numbers wane. As Black people and other people of color have increased their numbers, the white political machinery is already working to minimize the political power of nonwhites via such political ploys as gerrymandering (drawing political districts in ways that disadvantage people of color) and voter identification laws that thwart the political representation of groups of color.

And now, under the guise of “law and order,” the Trump administration, through ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection), is tracking, attacking, detaining, and deporting millions of immigrants, documented or not, and killing people, including American citizens, in their attempt to “make America White Again.” This is a reminder that being in the United States without documentation is a civil offense, similar to a traffic ticket.

ICE has been given a goal of detaining two million people per DAY, and has arrested mostly brown people, detained them without due process, and either put them into concentration camps or deported them to countries they have never been to. More than 94% of those detained, including babies and children, have no criminal record.

Our Choice: White supremacy, ICE, and the CBP must be ABOLISHED, not “reformed.” We MUST fight all voter suppression efforts for the 2026 Midterms by Trump, MAGA, and Republicans, and then vote in numbers too high to refute, and then make sure that the new Congress is installed in January 2027. It’s time for a CHANGE.

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Henry Johnson was born around 1892 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and later settled in Albany, New York, where he worked as a soda mixer, laborer, and railway station porter. In 1917, as the United States entered World War I, Johnson enlisted in the all-Black 15th New York National Guard Regiment. It would soon be redesignated the 369th United States Infantry Regiment — the unit history would remember as the Harlem Hellfighters.

The Hellfighters trained for combat like any American soldiers, but the U.S. Army had no intention of letting them fight alongside white troops. Rather than integrate them into American divisions, the Army handed the 369th over to the French Army, which was desperate for manpower and far less concerned with the color line. The French issued the regiment its own rifles, helmets, and equipment, and the men of the 369th spent more consecutive days in front-line combat than any other American regiment in the war—191 days. They never lost a foot of ground, and not a single man was taken prisoner. The regiment’s band, led by Lieutenant James Reese Europe, is widely credited with introducing jazz to European audiences during the war, seeding a musical influence that would echo across the continent for decades.

Henry Johnson’s defining moment came on the night of May 15, 1918, in France’s Argonne Forest. Standing sentry duty with fellow private Needham Roberts, Johnson came under attack from a German raiding party of more than a dozen soldiers. Roberts was badly wounded early in the fight. Rather than retreat, Johnson held his ground, firing his rifle until he ran out of ammunition, then throwing grenades, and finally fighting hand-to-hand with a bolo knife when the Germans closed in — killing several attackers and wounding others, preventing Roberts from being captured. Johnson suffered 21 wounds but survived, and the raiding party retreated.

The French government awarded Johnson its Croix de Guerre with bronze palm, making him one of the first Americans of any race to receive the honor in the war. German soldiers reportedly began calling him “Black Death.” Journalist Irvin S. Cobb, who had arrived in France skeptical of Black soldiers’ abilities, wrote an account of Johnson’s heroism that circulated widely in the American press and helped make him briefly famous.

That fame did not translate into recognition or support at home. Johnson returned to the United States with wounds that left him unable to continue his old work, but the Army denied him a disability pension and even a Purple Heart, and never entered his combat wounds in his official record. He struggled with poverty and declining health for the rest of his life and died in 1929, largely forgotten, at just 32 years old. He was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, but the honors due his actual battlefield service were still decades away.

The reckoning came slowly. Johnson received a posthumous Purple Heart in 1996, the Distinguished Service Cross in 2002, and finally the Medal of Honor in 2015, presented by President Barack Obama, who noted that Johnson had been denied the nation’s highest military honor for nearly a century largely because of his race.

Today, Henry Johnson and the Harlem Hellfighters stand as one of the most striking examples in American history of extraordinary valor met with willful national neglect — and of the long, often posthumous fight to set that record straight.

Sources:

• Harlem Hellfighter Henry Johnson awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor | HISTORY

• Harlem Hellfighter Hero: Henry Johnson | America Comes Alive

• WWI ‘Harlem Hellfighter’ Henry Johnson to Receive Medal of Honor | NBC News

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Today In Black History

• In 1943, William Dawson was elected as the first Black Democratic Party vice presidential candidate.

• In 1947, Dan Bankhead became the first Negro League pitcher in Major League Baseball.

• In 1968, Rev. Channing E. Phillips of Washington, D.C., was the first Black nominated for president by a major party at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, IL.

• In 1968, Julian Bond was nominated as the vice-presidential candidate at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, IL, but he withdrew his name because, at age 28, he did not meet the Constitutional age of 35.

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Every Tuesday until the end of 2026, we will publish a post about each of the 27 Amendments to the Constitution.

The 9th Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The 9th Amendment, primarily written by James Madison, was ratified as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791 to acknowledge that the people hold additional rights beyond those specifically mentioned.

The 9th Amendment is also interpreted to mean that certain rights in the Constitution should not be construed to mean that the Constitution does not protect unenumerated rights.

The 9th Amendment reminds us that the people inherently hold other fundamental rights, integral to the nation's ethos of liberty and justice.

Through the centuries, the 9th Amendment has remained on the periphery of constitutional interpretation, and courts have often been reluctant to ground decisions solely in this amendment because of its open-ended nature.

However, one notable Supreme Court case is Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), where the Court recognized a right to privacy. Although not explicitly stated in the Constitution, the decision underscored that such a right was implied by the broader principles of liberty enshrined in the document, including the 9th Amendment.

This right to privacy has been used in many ways over the years, including with issues such as digital privacy, reproductive rights, and emerging technologies.

The 9th Amendment encourages citizens and lawmakers to consider what rights are inherent and essential, even if they are not explicitly enumerated.

The 9th Amendment continues to safeguard the principle that individual rights are expansive and not confined to those formally articulated within the Constitution.

Have you ever considered how the 9th Amendment applies to you?

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Doris “Dorie” Miller was born October 12, 1919, on a farm outside Waco, Texas, the third of four sons in a sharecropping family. He grew up working the land, playing fullback for Waco’s A.J. Moore High School, and helping support his household — experience that built the physical strength that would later serve him, and his country, in a moment no one could have prepared him for.

Miller enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1939, partly to see the world and partly to earn money for his family. But the Navy of that era offered Black sailors almost no path beyond the galley. Under the segregation policies still enforced throughout the U.S. military, Black enlisted men were confined to the Messman Branch — cooking, serving, and cleaning for white officers — regardless of their skill, strength, or ambition. Miller became a mess attendant, and by 1941 he was a Ship’s Cook Third Class aboard the battleship USS West Virginia, barred by policy from formal weapons training even as tensions with Japan escalated.

That policy became irrelevant on the morning of December 7, 1941. When Japanese aircraft struck Pearl Harbor, Miller was collecting laundry aboard the West Virginia. As torpedoes and bombs tore into the ship, he rushed to his battle station, only to find it already destroyed. Instead, he moved through burning, oil-slicked wreckage to help carry wounded sailors to safety, including the ship’s mortally wounded commanding officer, Captain Mervyn Bennion. Then Miller did something he had never been trained to do: he took hold of an unmanned .50-caliber anti-aircraft machine gun and began firing at the attacking planes, continuing until he ran out of ammunition and was ordered to abandon ship. Accounts from fellow crew members credited him with downing several enemy aircraft, though the Navy’s official record left the exact number undetermined.

For his actions that day, Miller was awarded the Navy Cross, the Navy’s second-highest decoration for valor — the first ever given to a Black sailor. Fleet commander Admiral Chester Nimitz pinned the medal on Miller personally aboard the USS Enterprise on May 27, 1942, telling him, “This marks a new day for the Navy.” The citation praised his “distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety.” Miller also received the Purple Heart, the American Defense Service Medal, and other combat honors.

The Navy, still bound by segregation, sent Miller on a war bond and recruitment tour rather than offering him a combat command befitting his heroism. He was promoted to Mess Attendant First Class and later Ship’s Cook Third Class, but never granted the officer’s path his actions had earned in the public eye. In 1943, he was assigned to the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay. On November 24, 1943, off Butaritari Island near Tarawa, a Japanese submarine torpedo struck the ship’s bomb magazine, sinking it in minutes. Miller was among 646 crew members killed. He was 24 years old.

Doris Miller’s story became a turning point in the long fight to desegregate the U.S. armed forces, cited for years by advocates pressing for equal treatment of Black servicemen. The Navy has honored him repeatedly since: a frigate, USS Miller, was commissioned in his name in 1973, and in 2020 the Navy announced the aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller — the first carrier ever named for an enlisted sailor and the first named for a Black American. Congress has weighed posthumously awarding him the Medal of Honor, recognition many historians argue was denied him only because of his race.

As we all know, Donald Trump fired all the qualified and experienced military leaders who were in charge when he became president the second time and replaced them with loyalists. The current Secretary of the Navy has proposed renaming the aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller, an actual war hero who died while serving, after Donald Trump, a 5-time draft dodger. This would be atrocious.

Sources:

• Doris Miller | Biography, Facts, & Role at Pearl Harbor | Britannica

• Cook Third Class Doris Miller | Naval History and Heritage Command

• Doris Miller - Above and beyond the call of duty | VA History

• Doris Miller | Waco History

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Today In Black History

• In 1839, Joseph Cinque and the slaves who seized the slave ship Aminstad and killed its captain and most of its crew were taken into custody as the ship anchored at Culloden Point of Long Island, NY.

• In 1854, John V. DeGrasse, a prominent Black physician, was admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Society.

• In 1950, Chicago attorney Edith Sampson was named the first Black representative (alternate delegate) in the U.S. delegation to the United Nations.

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