Lift Ev'ry Voice

Lift Ev’ry Voice

Lillian M. Whitlow

Copyright © 2014 by Lillian M. Whitlow.

Copyright © 1996 by Reeve Lindbergh.

Reprinted by the permission of Dunham Literary as agents for the author

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014914952

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-6310-3

                Softcover        978-1-4990-6312-7

                eBook              978-1-4990-6311-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 01/28/2016

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MARIAN ANDERSON

DR. MAYA ANGELOU

LOUIS SATCHMO ARMSTRONG

ARTHUR ASHE

PEARL BAILEY

JOSEPHINE BAKER

JAMES BALDWIN

JAMES HUBERT (EUBIE) BLAKE

JAMES BROWN

RALPH BUNCHE

CAB CALLOWAY

GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

RAY CHARLES

NAT KING COLE

QUEEN BESS

COTTON CLUB (NEW YORK)

SAMMY DAVIS JR.

DOROTHY DANDRIDGE

BO DIDDLEY

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

DR. CHARLES DREW

W.E.B. DU BOIS

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

KATHERINE DUNHAM

RALPH WALDO ELLISON

DUKE ELLINGTON

ELLA FITZGERALD

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

ALEX HALEY

FANNIE LOU HAMER

W. C. HANDY

LORRAINE HANSBERRY

BILLIE HOLIDAY

LANGSTON HUGHES

ALBERTA HUNTER

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

MAHALIA JACKSON

MICHAEL JACKSON

JACK JOHNSON

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

SCOTT JOPLIN

BARBARA JORDAN

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

LEWIS LATIMER

JACOB LAWRENCE

ALAIN LEROY LOCKE

JOE LOUIS

THURGOOD MARSHALL

JAN MATZELIGER

ELIJAH McCOY

HATTIE McDANIEL

GARRETT A. MORGAN

CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY

JESSE OWENS

SATCHEL PAIGE

CHARLIE PARKER

ROSA LOUISE McCAULEY PARKS

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

PAUL LEROY BUSTILL ROBESON

BESSIE SMITH

WILLIAM GRANT STILL

MARY BURNETT TALBERT

MARY CHURCH TERRELL

AUGUSTINE JOHN TOLTON

VENERABLE PIERRE TOUSSAINT

SOJOURNER TRUTH

HARRIET TUBMAN

FATS WALLER

BOOKER TALIAFERRO WASHINGTON

ETHEL WATERS

MUDDY WATERS

IDA B. WELLS

DANIEL HALE WILLIAMS

PHILLIS WHEATLEY

AUGUST WILSON

CARTER G. WOODSON

MALCOLM X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

S pecial thanks for the support of members of the Maya Angelou Writers’ Guild: John Wolfe, O. B. Hill, Mario DePriest, Lillian Whitlow, Emma Ford, D’Norgia Price, Susan Banyas, and Nancy Woods.

I am also grateful to LaVerne B. Brown for editing some of Lift Ev’ry Voice and for her support. Another appreciation to Mario DePriest for helping me with my problems with my computer, for there were many.

S pecial thanks to Reeve Lindbergh for permitting the use of her poem, Nobody Owns the Sky.

Dedicated to my children:

Leo

Leon

Leona

MARIAN ANDERSON

M arian Anderson was the eldest daughter of three children born to John Rucker Anderson and the former Anna Delilah Rucker Anderson. She was born February 27, 1897, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Marian was a contralto and perhaps best remembered for her performance in 1939 on Easter Sunday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. She had two younger sisters, Alice and Ethel, who also became singers. Ethel was the mother of James DePreist, conductor of the Oregon Symphony (1980–2005) in Portland, Oregon.

When the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini heard Marian sing, he was so impressed with her vocal talent that he said, You have a voice heard once in a hundred years. In 1934, famed impresario Sol Hurok offered Marian a more lucrative contract than the one enacted previously with manager Arthur Judson. Hurok would become her manager for the rest of her performing career.

In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow Ms. Anderson permission to sing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. The District of Columbia Board of Education also declined a formal request to use the auditorium of an all-white public high school.

Because the DAR refused to grant Marian Anderson permission to sing in Constitution Hall, thousands of DAR members, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned. The Roosevelts, along with Sol Hurok and Walter White, then executive secretary of the NAACP, persuaded then Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes to arrange an outdoor concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial featuring Marian Anderson. The concert, commencing with a stirring rendition of America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee), attracted a crowd of more than seventy-five thousand of all races and was a sensation, reaching a national radio audience of millions.

At the historic performance, she was accompanied by Finnish pianist and composer Kosti Vehanen. Vehanen would later introduce Marian to Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, who was so overwhelmed with Anderson’s performance prowess that he not only asked his wife to bring champagne to a private reception in place of the traditional coffee but immediately began composing songs for Anderson, who was delighted to have met and impressed a composer of his stature and renown.

The DAR ironically invited Marian to sing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall in 1943 as part of a benefit for the American Red Cross. Sadly, the federal government continued to bar her from using the high school auditorium in the District of Columbia. That same year Anderson married designer Orpheus Fisher. The couple had purchased a hundred-acre farm in Danbury, Connecticut, three years earlier in 1940 after an exhaustive search encompassing properties in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Many purchases were attempted, but realtors wouldn’t sell to them due directly and indirectly to discriminatory practices.

The seller initially disputed the eventual Danbury property acquisition after he discovered that the purchasing couple was African American. Throughout the ensuing years Fisher built many outbuildings and extensions on the property that eventually became known as Marianna Farm. This incidentally included an acoustic rehearsal studio he designed for his wife. The compound remained their home for over fifty years. Fisher died in 1986.

In July 1992, Marian moved to Portland, Oregon, to live with her nephew, James DePreist, then conductor of the prestigious Oregon Symphony. The following spring she suffered a stroke and was restricted to a wheelchair. On April 8, 1993, Marian Anderson died of heart failure at age ninety-six. In June of 1993 over two thousand admirers attended a memorial service at Carnegie Hall in her honor. During her illustrious career, she was given many prestigious honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Congressional Gold Medal, Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, and the National Medal of Arts in 1986.

DR. MAYA ANGELOU

A voice that was known globally for her poetry, inspiration, and commitment to civil rights has been silenced. Dr. Maya Angelou died at her home in Winston Salem, North Carolina, on a Wednesday morning at 8:00 on May 28, 2014. She left behind volumes of important artistic works that influenced many generations. She was praised for being a good person, a woman who pushed for justice, education, and equality. She was born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and naval dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse practitioner and part-time card dealer. Her brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite Maya, derived from his term of affection my-a sister. Maya’s parents ended their marriage when Maya was three and her brother four years of age. Their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, unescorted on a train to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson.

In spite of the hard times brought on by the Great Depression in the early thirties, their grandmother prospered financially during the Depression era and on into the years after World War II. This was due primarily to wise and honest investments coupled with a general store ownership, which through the years provided basic commodities to patrons. As a result, Maya and Bailey never experienced abject poverty with Grandmother Annie.

After four years with Grandmother Annie, their father came to Stamps without warning and returned them to their mother in St. Louis. At age eight, while living with her mother, Maya was sexually abused and raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Freeman. She told her brother, and subsequently Bailey courageously told the family. Freeman was tried and found guilty but was jailed for only one day. Four days after his release, he was found murdered, perhaps by her uncles, though the assailant was never identified. As a result of this traumatic experience, Maya chose to remain silent for nearly five years. She believed that she alone was responsible for Freeman’s death. I thought my voice killed him. I killed that man because I told his name. I thought I would never speak again because my voice might kill someone, she would later explain. During this period of silence, Maya developed an extraordinary memory. She had a love for literature, and she had the ability to listen to and observe the world around her.

Soon after Freeman’s murder, Maya and her brother were sent back to their grandmother. A friend of the family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, who was a teacher, painstakingly helped Maya to speak again. Mrs. Flowers introduced Maya to authors such as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson. These authors would later directly contribute to her creative life and literary career. African American female artists such as Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jesse Fauset would also have great influences on Maya’s future career.

When Maya was fourteen, she and her brother once again moved to Oakland, California, to live with their mother. During World War II, she attended George Washington High School and studied dance. She then studied drama on a scholarship at California Labor School. Before graduating she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Three weeks after completing school, at the age of seventeen, she gave birth to her son, Clyde, who later changed his name to Guy Johnson.

In Maya’s second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she recounts her life from age seventeen to nineteen and describes her experiences as a single mother who out of necessity slid down the social ladder into a life of poverty and crime. Maya worked as a madam and manager of prostitutes, a restaurant cook, and a prostitute herself. She moved through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempted to raise her son without job training or an advanced education. In her biographies, she didn’t hold back anything in regard to the intricate and sordid details of her life. She taught others that it was all right to tell the good, the bad, and the ugly about your life experiences. Since then, others have opened up and revealed details about the painful but truthful experiences in their lives.

In 1951, Maya married Tosh Angelos, a Greek electrician, former sailor, and aspiring musician despite the condemnation of interracial relationships at the time. Her mother also disapproved of the marriage. Maya took modern dance classes during this time and met dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford. Maya and Alvin formed a dance team, calling themselves, Al and Rita, and performed modern dance at fraternal black organizations throughout San Francisco. Unfortunately as a duo they never became successful. Maya, her husband and son then moved to New York City so she could study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus. They returned to San Francisco a year later.

Maya’s marriage to Tosh ended in 1954. She began to dance professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub The Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to calypso music. Up to that time she went by her name of Marguerite Johnson, or Rita. But at the suggestion of her managers and supporters at The Purple Onion, she then changed her professional name to Maya Angelou, a distinctive name that set her apart from the traditional and simultaneously captured the aesthetic feel of her calypso dance performances.

During the years 1954 and 1955, Maya toured Europe with a production of Porgy and Bess. During her travels through foreign countries she studied and eventually learned to speak several foreign languages.

She met novelist James O. Killens in 1959. He urged her to move once again to New York to concentrate on a literary career. After moving to New York, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met several major African American authors, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield. There she was published for the first time.

In 1960, after meeting civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and after hearing him speak, she and Killens organized The Legendary, Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), where she was named SCLC’s northern coordinator. Her contribution to the organization as a fund raiser was successful.

In 1961, Maya performed in The Blacks by Jean Genet. Her costars were James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett Jr., Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson. That same year she met Vusumzi Make, who was a South African freedom fighter. They were married in 1960 and she and her son moved to Cairo with Make, where she worked as an associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper The Arab Observer.

In 1963, her relationship with Make ended in divorce and she and Guy moved to Accra, Ghana, where he attended college. Unfortunately, there he was seriously injured in an automobile accident. Maya remained there during his recovery until 1965. In Accra, she became a close friend with El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) during his visit in the early 1960s. She returned to the United States in 1965 to help him build a new civil rights organization, The Organization of Afro-American Unity. Unfortunately the organization never came to fruition. Malcolm was assassinated shortly afterward. Devastated about his sudden and tragic death, she joined her brother in Hawaii where she resumed her singing career. Subsequently, she moved back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing career.

In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked Maya to organize a march. She agreed, but it was also postponed. He was assassinated on her fortieth birthday (April 4). She was devastated once again. Author James Baldwin personally stood by Maya and encouraged her out of her depressed state.

For Maya 1968 was a year of pain, loss, and sadness. It was also the year that America recognized the depth of Maya Angelou’s creativity and qualitative genius. Without any experience she wrote, produced, and narrated Blacks, Blues, Black, where she served as writer, producer, and host of ten one-hour programs for National Education Television. This ten-part series of documentaries focused on the connection between blues music and black Americans’ African heritage and was what Maya Angelou called the Africanisms. Also, in 1968, inspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife, and after a direct challenge from Random House Publishing editor Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which was published in 1969. This autobiography brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou’s Georgia, Georgia was produced by a Swedish film company and was filmed in Sweden. This was the first screenplay written by a black woman in history to be filmed. It was released in 1972. She also wrote the film’s soundtrack.

Maya married a Welsh carpenter named Paul Du Feu in 1973. He was the ex-husband of Germaine Greer in San Francisco. This marriage later ended in divorce. In the next ten years, as Gillespie has stated, she had composing movie scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts and documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry. She produced plays and was named visiting professor of several colleges and universities. Maya Angelou was given many awards during this period, including over thirty honorary degrees from colleges and universities all over the world.

In late 1970s, Maya Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Oprah was TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland. She would later become Winfrey’s mentor and long-lasting friendship.

In 1993, Maya recited her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. Her recitation resulted in more fame and recognition for her previous works and broadened her appeal across racial, economic, and educational boundaries. The recording of the poem was awarded a Grammy Award. In June 1995, she delivered what Richard Long called her second public poem, entitled, A Brave and Startling Truth, which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations.

Maya Angelou achieved her goal of directing a feature film in 1996, Down in the Delta, which featured actors such as Alfre Woodard and Wesley Snipes. Since 1990s Angelou actively participated in the lecture circuit in a customized tour bus, something she continued into her eighties. In 2000, she created a successful collection of products for Hallmark, including greeting cards and decorative household items. Over thirty years after she began writing her life story, she completed her sixth autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in 2002.

Angelou campaigned for Senator Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party in the 2008 presidential primaries. When Hillary Clinton’s campaign ended, she put her support behind Senator Barack Obama, who went on to win the election and became the first African American president of the United States. She stated, We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism. In late 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers and career memorabilia to the Schomburg Center in Harlem for Research in Black Culture.

This donation consists of over 340 boxes of documents that featured her handwritten notes on yellow legal pads for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a 1982 telegram from Coretta King, fan mail, and personal and professional correspondence from colleagues, such as her editor, Robert Loomis. Maya Angelou accomplished more than a score of others in a lifetime. If she had a mission on this planet, she fulfilled it well. She received many honors from presidents and honorary degrees from colleges. She never received a college degree, but she had many honorable doctor degrees. She preferred to be called Dr. Angelou.

In addition to her literary works, she left a few powerful quotes to live by:

1. You learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back.

Source: USA Today

2. Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

Source: Maya Angelou Facebook Page

3. If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love.

Source: Oprah.Com

4. I encourage courtesy. To accept nothing less than courtesy, and to give nothing less than courtesy. If we accept being talked to any kind of way, we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.

Source: Psychology Today

5. If you get, give. If you learn, teach.

Source: New York Women in Communications

6. You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

Source: New York Women in Communications

7. All great achievements require time.

Source: New York Women in Communications

8. Courage allows the successful women to fail and learn powerful lessons from the failure, so that in the end, she didn’t fail at all.

Source: New York Women in Communications.

9. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Source: New York Women in Communications

10. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.

Source. New York Women in Communications

11. I know for sure that love saves me, and that it is here to save all.

Source: Huffington Post

12. Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.

Source: ABC News

13. Nothing will work unless you do.

Source: ABC News

14. If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

Resource: ABC News

LOUIS SATCHMO ARMSTRONG

L ouis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His nickname was Satchmo or Satch, which described his embouchure , which is the position and use of the lips, tongue, and teeth in playing woodwind and brass instruments. He became well known in the 1920s as an innovative cornet and trumpet virtuoso. He was an influence on jazz, shifting the music’s focus from collective improvisation to solo performers. He had a distinctive, gravelly voice, and he was an influential singer. He demonstrated great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing or wordless vocalizing.

Louis was from a very poor family and was sent to reform school when he was twelve after firing a gun in the air on New Year’s Eve. While he was in the reform school, he learned to play the cornet.

He was fourteen years old when he was released from reform school. He soon got a job selling papers, unloading boats, and selling coal from a cart. He didn’t own an instrument, but he continued to listen to bands at clubs. Joe King Oliver was his favorite, and the older man acted as a father to Louis, even giving him his first real cornet and instructing him on the instrument. By 1917, he played in an Oliver-inspired group at dive bars in New Orleans’s Storyville Section. In 1919, he left New Orleans for the first time to join Fate Marable’s Band in St. Louis. Marable led a band that played on the Streckfus Mississippi River boat lines.

When the boat left from New Orleans, Armstrong played regular gigs in Kid Ory’s Band. He stayed with Marable until 1921. He returned to New Orleans the same year and played with drummer Zutty Singleton. He also played in parades with the Allen Brass Band and on the bandstand with Papa Celestine’s Tuxedo Orchestra and the Silver Leaf Band.

King Oliver left the city in 1919 to go to Chicago, and Louis took his place in Kid Ory’s Band. In 1922, Louis received a telegram from his mentor Joe Oliver, asking him to join his Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens in Chicago. This was a dream come true for Armstrong, and his amazing playing in the band soon made him a sensation among other musicians in Chicago. The New Orleans style of music took the town by storm, and soon many other bands from down south made their way north to Chicago.

Armstrong moved back to Chicago in 1925, and joined his wife Lillian’s band at the Dreamland Café. He played in Erskine Tate’s Vendome Orchestra and then with Carroll Dickenson’s Orchestra at the Sunset Café. He recorded his first Hot Five records that same year. This was the first time Armstrong had made records under his own name. The records made by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven are considered to be absolute jazz classics and demonstrate his creative powers.

By 1929, Louis had become a very big star. He toured with the show Hot Chocolates and appeared occasionally with the Luis Russell Orchestra with Dave Peyton and Fletcher Henderson. Armstrong moved to Los Angeles in 1930, where he fronted a band called Louis Armstrong and His Sebastian New Cotton Club Orchestra.

In 1931, he returned to Chicago and assembled his own band for touring purposes. In June of that year, he returned to New Orleans for the first time since he left in 1922 to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz band. In 1931, Louis and Lil separated. In 1932, he returned to California, before leaving for England, where he was a great success. For the next three years, Armstrong was usually on the road. He crisscrossed the United States dozens of times and returned to Europe, playing in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland, and England.

In 1935, he returned to the United States and hired Joe Glaser to be his manager, whom he had known when Glaser was allegedly connected to the Al Capone mob, but he proved a great manager and friend for Louis. Glaser remained Armstrong’s manager until his death in 1969. Glaser took care of the business end of things, leaving Armstrong free to concentrate on his music. He also hired the Luis Russell Orchestra as Louis’s backup band with Russell as the musical director. This was like going home for Armstrong. Russell’s Orchestra was made up of predominantly New Orleans musicians, many of whom had also played with King Oliver.

The band was renamed Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra and was one of the most popular acts of the swing era. Glaser put the band to work, and they toured constantly for the next ten years. During this period, Armstrong became one of the most famous men in America.

Critics complained that Armstrong was becoming too commercial. Therefore, in 1947, Glaser fired the orchestra and replaced them with a small group that became one of the greatest and most popular bands in history. The group was called the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, and over the years it featured exceptional musicians like Barney Bigard, Jack Teagarden, Sidney Catlett, vocalist Velma Middleton, and Earl Hines. The band went through a number of personnel changes over the years but remained extremely popular worldwide.

They toured extensively, traveling to Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America for the next twenty years until Louis’s failing health caused them to disband. Armstrong became known as America’s Ambassador. In 1963, Armstrong scored a huge international hit with his version of Hello Dolly. This number, a single, even knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts. In 1968, he recorded another number-one hit with the touchingly optimistic What a Wonderful World. Armstrong’s health began to fail him. He was hospitalized several times over the remaining three years of his life, but he continued playing and recording. On July 6, 1971, the world’s greatest jazz musician died in his sleep at his home in Queens, New York. Armstrong often said that he was born July 4, 1901, a date noted in many biographies. He died in 1971, and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that researcher Tad Jones through the examination of baptismal records discovered his true birth date of August 4, 1901.

ARTHUR ASHE

A rthur Ashe was the first African American man to win a major tennis tournament. He was on the United States Davis Cup Team from 1963 through 1984, first as a player and then as a coach. Ashe was coached by Ronald Charity and later Walter Johnson. He accepted an offer from a Saint Louis, Missouri tennis official to move there and attend Sumner High School. Sports Illustrated recognized Young Ashe for his superb playing.

Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia, to Mattie Cunningham Ashe and Arthur Ashe Sr. He began to play tennis at age ten under the direction of Dr. Walter Johnson. Johnson also taught the game to the 1957 Wimbledon Women’s Champion, Althea Gibson. Ashe went on to attend the University of California.

Ashe became the first African American to play on the Davis Cup National Tennis Team in 1963. Two years later, he won the United States Intercollegiate Singles Championship, leading UCLA to the national Collegiate Athletic Association team championship. After graduating from UCLA in 1966 with a degree in business administration, Ashe was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve. During his period of active service, Ashe was stationed at the United States Military Academy and continued to play for the Davis Cup Team.

Ashe won several tournaments during his service time, including the United Stated Clay-Court Championship in 1967 and the United States Amateur Championship in 1968. In 1968, the major tennis tournaments opened their competitions to professionals, but Ashe remained an amateur because of his military status. At the United States Open that year, he defeated several professional players and won the men’s singles title. Ashe became the only amateur ever to win the United States Amateur Championship and United States Open Titles during the same year.

After receiving an honorable discharge as a first lieutenant, Ashe joined the professional tennis circuit in 1969. That same year, he and several other players formed the group that became the Association of Tennis Professionals, the governing body that oversees rankings, prize money, and international tennis events. Ashe won his second major tennis championship in 1970 by capturing the Australian Open singles title.

His best season was in 1975 when he upset fellow American Jimmy Connors for the Wimbledon singles title and attained the number-one ranking in the United States. Ashe also won doubles championships at the French Open in 1971 and at the Australian Open in 1977.

On February 20, 1977, Ashe married Jeanne Moutoussamy, a photographer he had met four months earlier. Andrew Young, the US ambassador to the United Nations, performed the ceremony at the UN Chapel in New York. Arthur and Jeanne adopted one child, a daughter, who was born on December 21, 1986. She was named Camera after her mother’s profession.

In 1979, Ashe suffered a heart attack, an event that surprised the public in view of his high level of fitness as an athlete. His condition drew attention to the hereditary aspect of heart disease. He underwent a quadruple coronary-bypass operation, performed by Dr. John Hutchinson on December 13, 1979. Ashe reported that Dr. Hutchinson removed veins from his legs and implanted them in his chest to take over the functions of his clogged arteries.

A few months after the operation, Ashe was on the verge of making his return to professional tennis. While on a family trip in Cairo, Egypt, Ashe saw his dreams of returning quickly fade away. He was running one afternoon when chest pain struck again. He stopped running and returned to see physician and close friend Douglas Stein, who had accompanied the family on the trip. Stein urged Ashe to return to New York City so he could be close to his cardiologist and surgeon.

In 1988, Ashe discovered he had contracted HIV during the blood transfusions he had received during one of his two heart surgeries. He and his wife kept his illness private until April 8, 1992, when reports that the newspaper USA Today was about to publish a story about his condition forced him to make a public announcement that he had the disease.

Ashe survived heart surgery in 1979 and announced his retirement from competition a year later. He then served as the unpaid captain of the United States Davis Cup Team from 1981 to 1984. Ashe also became involved in various charitable and the youth-oriented activities, such as the National Junior Tennis League and the ABC Cities Tennis Program.

In the last year of his life, Ashe did much to call attention to AIDS sufferers worldwide. Two months before his death, he founded the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health to help address issues of inadequate health care delivery and was named Sports Illustrated magazine’s sportsman of the year. He also spent much of the last years of his life writing his memoir, Days of Grace, finishing the manuscript less than a week before his death.

Arthur Ashe also wrote A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete. Ashe died on February 6, 1993. In 1997, the United States Tennis Center’s main stadium in New York was named Arthur Ashe Stadium in honor of his many contributions to the game.

PEARL BAILEY

P earl Bailey was born to Rev. Joseph and Ella Mae Bailey in Southampton County in southeastern Virginia on March 29, 1918. She was raised in the Bloodfields neighborhood of Newport News, Virginia. Pearl made her stage-singing debut when she was fifteen years old. Her brother, Bill Bailey, was beginning his own career as a tap dancer and suggested that she enter an amateur contest at Philadelphia’s Pearl Theater. She entered and won first prize. Later, she won a similar contest at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater and decided to pursue a career in entertainment.

Pearl began her career by singing and dancing in Philadelphia’s black nightclubs in the 1930s and soon started performing in other parts of the East Coast. In 1941, during World War II, she toured the country with the USO, performing for American troops. After the tour, she settled in New York. Her solo successes as a nightclub performer were followed by acts with such entertainers as Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. In 1946, she made her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman. Pearl continued to tour and record albums in between her stage and screen performances.

Pearl took the role of Frankie in the film version of Carmen Jones, and her rendition of Beat out That Rhythm of the Drum is one of the highlights of the film. She also starred in the Broadway musical House of Flowers. In 1959, she played the role of Maria in the film version of Porgy and Bess, starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge. That same year, she also played the role of Aunt Hagar in the movie St. Louis Blues, alongside Mahalia Jackson, Eartha Kitt, and Nat King Cole. She was originally considered for the part of Annie Johnson in the 1959 film Imitation of Life. The part went to Juanita Moore. Juanita received an Academy Award nomination.

In 1967, Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway headlined an all-black cast version of Hello Dolly! The touring version was so successful, producer David Merrick took it to Broadway, where it played to sold-out houses and revitalized the long-running musical. Pearl Bailey was awarded a special Tony Award for her role, and RCA made a second original cast album. That is the only recording of the score to have an overture, which was written especially for that recording.

Later in her career, Pearl Bailey was a fixture as a spokesperson in a series of Duncan Hines commercials, singing Bill Bailey Won’t You Come Home.

Pearl married jazz drummer Louie Bellson in London on November 19, 1952. They adopted a child, Tony, in the mid-1950s and subsequently, a girl, DeeDee J. Bellson, born April 20, 1960. Tony Bellson died in 2004, and DeeDee died of a heart attack at home five months later on July 4, 2009 at age forty-eight.

President Richard Nixon appointed Pearl Bailey as America’s Ambassador of Love in 1970. Pearl was also a Republican. She attended several meetings of the United Nations and later took part in a campaign ad for President Gerald Ford in the 1976 election. She was awarded the Bronze Medallion (New York City Award), in 1968 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom on October 17, 1988.

Pearl Bailey died at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia on August 17, 1990. Dr. Emanuel Rubin, professor and chairman of the Department of pathology at Jefferson Medical College, announced, after performing an autopsy, that the cause of death was arteriosclerotic coronary artery disease with significant narrowing of the coronary artery. Pearl Bailey is buried at Rolling Green Memorial Park in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

JOSEPHINE BAKER

J osephine Baker was a Parisian dancer and singer. She was the most famous American expatriate in France. Josephine was born in a poor, black slum in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906, to a twenty-one-year-old Carrie MacDonald, who was adopted in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886 by two former slaves: Charles and Elvira McDonald.

Josephine’s mother Carrie wanted to be a dancer. Meanwhile, she was forced to take in laundry. Carrie was of mixed ethnic background: Indian and Negro. She descended from Apalachee Indians and black slaves in South Carolina. Olive-skinned Eddie Carson, her father, was a vaudeville drummer and was not seen much by his daughter.

At age eight, Josephine was hired out to a white woman as a maid. She was forced to sleep in the coal cellar with a pet dog and was scalded on the hands when she used too much soap in the laundry. When she returned to school at the age of ten, she told her classmates, There is no Santa Claus. I’m Santa Claus. Josephine witnessed the cruel East St. Louis race in 1917. She moved from the St. Louis area when she was thirteen and emigrated out of the United States at age nineteen. That such a childhood produced an expatriate is not surprising, one of her biographers, Phyllis Rose, commented.

Josephine started her career as a street performer, dancing in the street as a child. She entered vaudeville, joining the St. Louis Chorus at fifteen. She then headed to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, performing at the Plantation Club and in the chorus of the popular Broadway revues Shuffle Along in 1921 and the Chocolate Dandies in 1924. She performed as the last dancer in a chorus line, a position in which the dancer traditionally performed in a comic manner, as if they were unable to remember the dance, until the encore, at which point they would and also not only perform it correctly, but with additional complexity. She was then billed as the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville.

On October 2, 1925, she opened in Paris at the Theatre des champs-Elysees, where she became an instant success for her erotic dancing and for appearing practically nude on stage. After a successful tour of Europe, she reneged on her contract and returned to France to star at the Follies Bergeres, setting the standard for her future acts. She performed the Danse Sauvage, wearing a costume consisting of a skirt made of a string of artificial bananas. Josephine’s success coincided with the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes which marked the high point of the first phase of Art Deco and was a renewal of interest in ethnic forms of art, including Africa. Therefore, Josephine Baker also represented one aspect of this fashion.

In later shows in Paris she was often accompanied onstage by her pet leopard Chiquita who was adorned with a diamond collar. The leopard frequently escaped into the orchestra pit, where it terrorized the musicians, adding another element of excitement to the show.

In a short while, Josephine Baker was the most successful American entertainer working in France. Ernest Hemingway called her The most sensational woman anyone ever saw. In addition to being a musical star, Baker also starred in three films, which found success only in Europe: the silent film, Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zouzou (1934), and Princesse Tam (1935).

Afterward, she scored her greatest song hit, J’ai Deux Amours (1931), and became a muse for contemporary authors, painters, designers, and sculptors including Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior.

Though based in France, she supported the American civil rights movement during the 1950s. She protested in her own way against racism, adopting twelve multiethnic orphans, whom she called her Rainbow Tribe. Her adopted children were Akio (Korean son), Janot (Japanese son), Luis (Colombian son), Jarru (Finnish son), Jean-Claude (Canadian son) Moise (French Jewish son) Brahim (Ahab, Algerian son), Arianne (French daughter), Koffi (Cote d’lvoirean son), Mara (Venezuelan son), Noel (French son), and Stellina (Moroccan daughter).

She refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States. Her insistence on mixed audiences helped to integrate shows in Las Vegas, Nevada. Nevertheless, she was near bankruptcy until she was given an apartment and financial assistance by her close friend Princess Grace of Monaco. She also worked with NAACP. In 1963, she spoke at the march on Washington at the side of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Wearing her Free French uniform with her Legion of Honor decoration, she was the only woman to speak at the rally.

On April 8, 1975, Baker starred in a retrospective revue at the Bobino in Paris, where she celebrated her fifty years in show business. The revue, backed by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, opened to rave reviews and became the rage of Paris. Demand for seating reached such an extent that foldout chairs had to be added to accommodate spectators. The opening night audience included Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, Sophia Loren, Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, Dianne Ross, and Liza Minnelli.

On the morning of April 10, Baker was found lying peacefully in her bed surrounded by newspapers with glowing reviews of her performance. She had slipped into a coma. She was taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where she died at the age of sixty-eight on April 12, 1975. Her funeral was held at L’Eglise de la Madeleine. Paris came to a standstill on the day of her funeral, and twenty thousand people filled the streets to watch her procession. She was interred at the Cimetiere de Monaco in Monte Carlo.

JAMES BALDWIN

J ames Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York in 1924 to a single mother, Emma Berdis Jones. Baldwin was the first of Emma’s nine children. He became an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist. He never met his biological father and may never have even known the man’s identity. When he was still young, his mother married a preacher, David Baldwin, who adopted James. The family was poor, and James and his adopted father had a difficult relationship.

James attended the prestigious DeWitt Clinton High School in New York.

When he was fourteen, he joined the Pentecostal Church and became a Pentecostal preacher.

When he was seventeen years old, he turned away from religion and moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood famous for its artists and writers. He supported himself by doing odd jobs. He began to write short stories, essays, and book reviews, many of which were later collected in the volume Notes of a Native Son (1955).

James’s stepfather, David Baldwin, was a factory worker and a storefront preacher. James considered his stepfather, who was very cruel at home, his father figure. While his father opposed his literary aspirations, Baldwin found support from a teacher as well from the mayor of New York City, Fiorello H. M. LaGuardia.

He received support from an admired older writer named Richard Wright, whom he called the greatest black writer in the world for me. Wright and Baldwin became friends for a short time, and Wright helped him to secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin titled a collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, in clear reference to Wright’s Native Son. However, Baldwin’s 1949 essay, Everybody’s Protest Novel ended the two authors’ friendship because Baldwin asserted that Wright’s novel Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, lacked credible characters and psychological complexity. However, during an interview with Julius Lester, Baldwin explained that his adoration for Wright remained. I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him. I was trying to clarify something for myself.

Beauford Delaney was another major influence on Baldwin’s life. Delaney was an African American painter. In The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin describes Delaney as the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, and example of courage and integrity, humility and passion.

Nina Simone, singer, pianist, and civil rights activist, became a close friend of Baldwin. Together with Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin is responsible for making Simone aware of the racial inequality the time and the groups that were forming to fight against this. He also provided her with literary references to expand her knowledge on this point.

Baldwin left the United States in 1948 to live in Paris. When he returned to the United States, he became actively involved in the civil rights movement. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Washington, DC. During the early 1980s, Baldwin was on the faculty of the Five Colleges in Western Massachusetts. While there, he mentored Mount Holyoke College future playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. Baldwin did not remain in the United States long, however, and he was a repeated expatriate for the rest of his life, spending long stints in Istanbul, Turkey, and in St-Paul-de-Vence in Southern France, where he died of esophageal cancer in 1987 at age sixty-three.

His writings during the 1970’s and 1980’s have been largely overlooked by critics. The assassinations of black leaders in the 1960s as well as Eldridge Cleaver’s vicious homophobic attack on Baldwin in Soul on Ice, along with his return to southern France, contributed to the sense that he was not in touch with his readership. Always true to his own convictions rather than to the tastes of others, Baldwin continued to write what he wanted to write. His two novels written in the 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk and The Evidence of Things Not Seen, which was an extended meditation inspired by the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s.

Baldwin’s influence on other writers has been profound. Toni Morrison edited the Library of America Editions of Baldwin’s fiction and essays, and recent collection of critical essays links these two writers. In 1987 Kevin Brown, a photojournalist from Baltimore, Maryland, founded the National James