Pan-African Chronology IV: 1930 Pan-African Chronology

1930

Pan-African Chronology

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January

*In South Africa, an African National Congress executive resigned in protest against President Josiah Gumede's close ties with communists.

January 23

*Derek Walcott, the 1992 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Castries, Saint Lucia.

January 27

*Bobby "Blue" Bland, a legendary blues singer, was born in Rosemark, Tennessee.

February 21

*Richard B. Harrison starred as "De Lawd" in The Green Pastures, which opened on Broadway.

February 26

*The President of the Dominican Republic Horacio Vasquez fled Santo Domingo as rebel forces led by General Rafael Trujillo, a person of African descent, toppled his government.

March 9

*Jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, the principal initiator and leading exponent of free jazz, was born in Fort Worth, Texas.

March 13

*Jazz trumpeter Richard "Blue" Mitchell was born in Miami, Florida.

March 22

*Willie Thrower, the first African American to appear at the quarterback position in the National Football League, was born in New Kensington, Pennsylvania.

March 24

*David Dacko, the first President of the Central African Republic, was born the village of Bouchia, near Mbaiki in the Lobaye region, which was then a part of the French Equatorial African territory of Moyen Congo (Middle Congo) (March 24).

March 31

*President Hoover appointed Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina, a known racist, to the Supreme Court. The NAACP launched a successful campaign against Parker's confirmation.

*Gugsa Welle, the husband of the Ethiopian Empress Zewditu and the Shum (Governor) of Begemder Province, was met by forces loyal to Negus Tafari (the future Haile Selassie) and was defeated at the Battle of Anchem. Gugsa Welle was killed in action.

April

*In South Africa, Pixley Seme replaced Josiah Gumede as President of the African National Congress.

April 2

*Zewditu (also spelled Zawditu or Zauditu; April 29, 1876 – April 2, 1930), the Empress of Ethiopia from 1916 to 1930, died.

May 4

*Katherine Esther Jackson (nee Scruse; born Kattie B. Screws), the matriarch of the Jackson musical family, was born in Clayton, Alabama.

May 6

*Charles Gilpin, a noted stage actor, died in Eldridge Park, New Jersey.

May 16

*Jazz singer Betty Carter, popularly known as "Betty Bebop" was born in Flint, Michigan.

May 19

*Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who will write A Raisin in the Sun, was born in Chicago,

June 7

*In a gesture meant to convey respect, the New York Times began capitalizing the word "Negro" in its pages.

June 11

*Charles Rangel, a New York Congressman, was born in New York City.

June 22

*Mary McLeod Bethune, a Florida African American educator, feminist leader, and civil rights spokesperson, was named one of America's fifty leading women by the historian Ida Tarbell. Bethune was born in Maysville, South Carolina in 1875. She studied at Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. In 1904, Bethune founded the Bethune-Cookman College at Daytona Beach, Florida. A recipient of the Medal of Merit from the Republic of Haiti and the NAACP Spingarn Award, Bethune was president of the National Council of Negro Women and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. She was a principal advisor as well as a friend to President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.

July 2

*Ahmad Jamal, (b. Frederick Russell Jones), an American jazz pianist known for his rendition of But Not ForMe, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

August 6

*Abbey Lincoln (b. Anna Marie Woolridge), an American jazz vocalist, songwriter, and actress, who wrote and performed her own compositions, was born in Chicago, Illinois. She was a civil rights advocate during the 1960s.

August 7

*Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were lynched in Marion, Indiana. There were hanged. James Cameron survived. This would be the last recorded lynching of African Americans in the Northern United States.

September 7

*Sonny Rollins (b. Theodore Walter Rollins), an American jazz tenor saxophonist, widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians, was born in New York, New York. A number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", "Pent-Up House", and "Airegin", became jazz standards.

September 9

*Frank Lucas, a former heroin dealer, who operated in Harlem during the late 1960s and early 1970s, was born in La Grange, North Carolina.

September 13

*Bola Ige (b. James Ajibola Idowu Ige, September 13, 1930 – d. December 23, 2001), a Nigerian lawyer and politician, was born in Zaria, Kaduna.

September 19

*Muhal Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, was born in Chicago, Illinois.

September 23

*Ray Charles, a jazz, soul, and pop singer, was born in Albany, Georgia. Blind by the age of six, he would become one of America's most-beloved performing artists.

September 24

*Cardiss Robertson Collins was born in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1973, she would be elected to the United States House of Representatives.

October 8

*The artist Faith Ringgold was born in New York.

October 14

*Mobutu Sese Seko, a President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was born in Lisala, Belgian Congo.

October 22

*Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1930 premiered at New York's Royal Theater with Ethel Waters and Cecil Mack's Choir. Songs in the musical include "Memories of You" by Eubie Blake with lyrics by Andy Razaf. The musical would have 57 performances.

October 29

*Omara Portuondo Peláez, a singer and dancer whose career spanned over half a century was born in Havana, Cuba. She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and performed with Ignacio Pineiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragon, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Alvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista ensemble, Pupy Pedroso, Chucho Valdes and Juan Formell.

November 2

*Ras Tafari, who took the name Haile Selassie when he was proclaimed Negus (King) in 1928, was crowned King of Kings at Addis Adaba. He would reign until 1974 and be regarded by Jamaican Rastafarians as the living God. He was seen as fulfilling a prophecy of Marcus Garvey, "Look to Africa, where a black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near."

November 6

*Derrick Albert Bell, Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011), the first tenured African American Professor of Law at Harvard Law School who is largely credited as one of the originators of critical race theory (CRT), was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law from 1991 until his death. He was also a dean of the University of Oregon School of Law.

*Leslie Lee, a Tony Award-nominated playwright, was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

November 10

*Clarence Pendleton, Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky. Pendleton would become the first African American chairperson of the United States Civil Rights Commission in 1981.

November 16

*Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian novelist whose first novel, Things Fall Apart, became the most widely read book in modern African literature, was born in Ogidi, Nigeria Protectorate.

December

*In South Africa, African National Congress "radicals" in the Western Cape formed an independent African National Congress.

December 6

*Daniel Muchiwa Lisulo, the Prime Minister of Zambia from June 1978 until February 1981, was born in Mongu, Zambia.

December 9

*Andrew "Rube" Foster, a baseball player, manager, and pioneer executive in the Negro Leagues, died in Kankakee, Illinois. Known as the "Father of Black Baseball", Foster was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981.

December 16

*In South Africa, Communist leader Johannes Nkosi was killed during a protest in Durban (December 16-17).

December 21

*Adebayo Adedeji (b. Ijebu-Ode, December 21, 1930), a Nigerian politician who was an Executive Secretary to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa from 1975 to 1978, and the United Nations Under-Secretary-General from 1978 until 1991, was born. He became the founding Executive Director of the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies (ACDESS) in 1991.

December 31

*Odetta, the folksinger and activist known as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement" was born in Birmingham, Alabama.

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The United States

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, southern African Americans in agriculture suffered more economic adversity than any other American group, black or white. In 1930, there were 1,112,510 African Americans employed as agricultural laborers: two-thirds of all southern African Americans. Ten years later, this number dropped to 780,312: a 30% reduction even though the affected population declined only 4%. In addition, the average wage earned by a southern African American agricultural laborer in 1940 was less than half what it was in 1930. Black migration from the South to the North came to a virtual standstill during this period because northern whites were taking the unskilled jobs formerly left for migrating African Americans to fill.

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Marcus Garvey

*Marcus Garvey was re-elected councilor for the Allman Town Division of the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation..

In September 1929, Marcus Garvey founded the People's Political Party (PPP), Jamaica's first modern political party, which focused on workers' rights, education, and aid to the poor. Also in 1929, Garvey was elected councilor for the Allman Town Division of the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC). In July 1929, the Jamaican property of the UNIA was seized on the orders of the Chief Justice. Garvey and his solicitor attempted to persuade people not to bid for the confiscated goods, claiming the sale was illegal and Garvey made a political speech in which he referred to corrupt judges. As a result, he was cited for contempt of court and again appeared before the Chief Justice. He received a prison sentence, as a consequence of which he lost his seat. However, in 1930, Garvey was re-elected, unopposed, along with two other PPP candidates.

*Marcus Mosiah Garvey, III, the son of Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, was born (September 17).

At the age of 32 in 1919, Garvey married his first wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey. Amy Ashwood Garvey was also a founder of The UNIA-ACL. She had saved Garvey in the Tyler assassination by quickly getting medical help. After four months of marriage, Garvey separated from her.

In 1922, he married again, to Amy Jacques Garvey, who was working as his secretary general. They had two sons together: Marcus Mosiah Garvey, III (born September 17, 1930) and Julius Winston (born 1933). Amy Jacques Garvey played an important role in his career, and would become a lead worker in Garvey's movement.

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Black Enterprise

*There were 944 African American banking and brokerage entrepreneurs and officials, clerks and accountants and 9,325 insurance executives, managers, etc. The first figure was less than 1 for every 600 European American workers in such positions, and the second represented about 2% of the national total of such workers.

*Seventy African American building and loan associations had assets of $6,600.000. These assets represented less than one percent of the total for all building and loan associations. The number of associations fell to 30 by 1938, and assets to $3,600,000.

*The Depression-related failure of four African American bands severely impacted the African American community in Chicago.

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Census

*There were 11,891,100 African Americans in the United States, representing 9.7% of the total population. The percentage of African Americans in the Northeast was 9.6%; in the North Central states, 10.6%; in the South , 78.7%; and in Western states, 1%.

*The foreign born African American population of the United States was 98,620 or 0.99% of the total African American population. Of all the African American immigrants in the United States, 73% were born in the West Indies. 91,677 foreign born African Americans, or 93% resided in urban areas. Of these, 65% lived in New York City.

*In the North and West, 88% of all African Americans lived in urban areas; 32% of the African Americans in the South livd in urban areas.

*African American illiteracy was 16.3%. Of the African American illiterates 93.6% lived in the South. Per capita expenditure per European American school child was $44.31 in areas where segregation was legally mandatory; for African American students it was $12.57.

*The Depression hit the Southern African Americans in agriculture the hardest. Two thirds of Southern African Americans were sharecroppers or wage laborers. In 1930, 1,112,510 African Americans were employed as agricultural laborers. By 1940, this figure had dropped to 780,212. Of the African Americans, 13.1% were owners or managers, in contrast to 42.4% of the European Americans in Southern agriculture.

*Between 1930 and 1940 the total African American rural farm population decreased 4.5%.

*The total number of African American policemen in the United States was 1,297. Only 7% of whom were employed in the Deep South. There were no African American policemen in Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Virginia.

*The 2,946 African American undertakers represented one-tenth of all United States undertakers.

*The number of African American contractors fell to 2,400, or 1.6% of the total number of contractors in the United States.

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The Communist Party

*The American Communist Party organized the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR). Langston Hughes was elected president. The league united several African American groups in a sweeping program to eliminate wrongs against African Americans, and envisioned the eventual establishment of an African American republic in America. However, the NAACP and the National Urban League, and the majority of African Americans steered clear of the LSNR. It, therefore, accomplished little.

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Crime and Punishment

*Between 1930 and 1939, there were 1,666 executions under civil authority in the United States. Of these, 827 were European American and 816 African American. In the two major crime categories, of a total 1,514 executed for murder, 804 were European American and 687 African American; of the total of 125 executions for rape, 10 were European American and 175 African American.

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Education

*Mary McLeod Bethune, educator and civil rights activist, was cited as one of America's 50 leading women by historian Ida Tarbell.

*Where public school segregation was legally mandated, $44.31 was spent annually on each European American child and $12.57 was spent annually on each African American child.

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Labor

*Approximately 22 major unions officially discriminated against African Americans. This figure was reduced to 13 by 1943, to 9 by 1949, and 2 by 1963.

*R. L. Mays, president of the Railway Men's International Benevolent Industrial Association, organized a convention of African American railway workers to fight discrimination in job appointments and promotions.

R. L. Mays, a Chicago African American, was president of the Railway Men's International Benevolent Industrial Association and executive officer of the Interstate Order of Locomotive Firemen, Yard and Train Service Employees and Railway Mechanics. He organized a convention of African American railway workers to combat "the tendency to eliminate from railway service our men now employed as skilled shop workers, trainmen, and locomotive firemen and yard switchmen," by organizing existing African American workmen's associations. Mays asked those in control of American industry to recognize character instead of color and to give jobs to African Americans. The convention met in Detroit, Michigan.

*Only one percent of the employees in the Southern oil and gas production field were African Americans, and only ten percent of the employees in automobile-created jobs were African Americans. Southern African Americans were principally employed as teamsters, drivers, maintenance and construction men on city and state projects and as menials in the wholesale and retail trade in banking brokerage houses and insurance. In the South, European Americans were the majority as workers in hotels, restaurants, and boarding houses. In the United States, African Americans employed as launderers and laundresses numbered 329,163 in 1930; by 1940 the fight had been reduced to 47,734. In 1930, some 107,739 African Americans were employed as iron and steel laborers; by 1940 African American employment in that industry was down to 40,818. In this period, there was one substantial increase in African American occupations: African American teamsters numbered 19,566 in 1930; by 1940 there were 137,121 African American teamsters.

*A small percentage of African Americans displaced from jobs in the South moved westward. The African American population in the Western states between 1930 and 1940 increased by 2.1%. Migration to Northern cities of Southern African Americans was relatively low as the general unemployment of unskilled workers was such that European Americans were now hired for traditionally African American jobs.

*Of the 116,000 African Americans in professional jobs, over two-thirds were teachers or ministers.

*The total number of African American policemen in the United States was 1,297; only seven percent of whom were employed in the Deep South. There were no African American policemen in Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Virginia.

*The 2,946 African American undertakers represented one-tenth of all United States undertakers.

*The number of African American contractors fell to 2,400 or 1.6% of the total number of contractors in the United States.

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Literature

The Depression changed the emphasis in African American writing from the race problem to class oppression. During the 1930's, left-wing and Communist periodicals such as The New Masses and The Nation were among the few to accept African American manuscripts and give the European American audience African American views.

*Langston Hughes published his novel Not Without Laughter.

*James Weldon Johnson published Black Manhattan.

*Edward S. Silvera contributed verse to the collection Four Lincoln Poets. His poems are free verse lyrics, similar in style to those of Emily Dickinson.

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The Media

*In a gesture meant to convey respect, the New York Times began capitalizing the word "Negro" (June 7).

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Music

*The National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., became the first major religious group to publicly endorse gospel music.

From this endorsement followed the first choruses, the first publishing houses, the first professional organizations, and the first paid gospel concerts. Thomas Dorsey (1899-1993), the "Father of Gospel," founded the first gospel choir in the world with Theodore Frye at Chicago's Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1931. Dorsey later established the first music publishing firm dedicated only to gospel music in 1932. The 1930 endorsement of gospel music b the Baptist convention, which had been carried away by Dorsey's "If You See My Savior," called public attention to a major change that had been taking place in the music of black churches. The 1930 endorsement is often considered the starting point for the history of gospel music.

The NAACP

*The NAACP successfully campaigned to defeat confirmation of Supreme Court nominee John H. Parker, who was on record in opposition to voting rights for African Americans.

John H. Parker, once an opponent of African American suffrage, was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Herbert Hoover. The NAACP protested and through a strong nation-wide campaign influenced the Senate to vote against Parker's confirmation. The NAACP then waged a campaign against those Senators who had voted for Judge Parker, and was credited with the defeat of eleven (11) of them when they ran for re-election.

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Nation of Islam

In the Summer of 1930, in the African American section of Detroit, a mysterious person known variously as Farad Mohammed, F. Mohammed Ali, Professor Ford, Wally Farad, and W. D. Fard, began to peddle to African Americans silks and other articles purported to be from Africa. He preached about the "home country" of the African Americans and about their "true religion" of Islam. Fard preached against the white race and against Christianity, and gained many converts, who hired a hall which they called the Temple of Islam. These people were the initiators of the movement later called the Nation of Islam or the Black Muslims.

Fard's origins, racial and national, are not known. Many thought him to be an Arab. In his teaching, Fard used the writings of Joseph F. "Judge" Rutherford, leader of the Jehovah's Witnesses; Hendrik van Loon's Story of Mankind; James Breasted's The Conquest of Civilization; the Qur'an; the Bible; etc. Fard wrote two manuals for his followers: The Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam, which was taught orally; and Teaching for the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way.

Fard founded a University of Islam, actually an elementary and secondary school. He created the Muslim Girls Training Class for teaching home economics and proper behavior as wife and mother. Fard founded the Fruit of Islam, a military protection group. He appointed ministers of Islam and assistant ministers. In 1934, Fard disappeared and was succeeded by Elijah Muhammad, born Elijah Poole in Georgia, one of Fard's earliest lieutenants. Muhammad moved the Muslim headquarters to Chicago. Elijah Muhammad became the Prophet, and Fard was identified with Allah.

Black Muslims, the members of the Nation of Islam, believed that Elijah Muhammad was the messenger of Allah, directly commissioned by Allah himself, who came in person under the name of Fard to awaken African Americans to their superiority over Europeans and European Americans. The tenets of the Nation of Islam held that all men were originally black with two sides to their natures, the white half represented the weaknesses and evils of man, the black half, the strengths and virtues. A scientist had separated the two halves. Whites had been given 6,070 years to rule and then the blacks would reign. The black hegemony was to begin in 1984.

It should not be lost that most Black Muslims in Detroit from 1930 to 1934 were recent immigrants from the rural South and were "functionally illiterate."

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Notable Births

*Muhal Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, was born in Chicago, Illinois (September 19).

Muhal Richard Abrams (b. September 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American educator, administrator, composer, arranger, clarinetist, cellist, and jazz pianist in the free jazz medium.

Abrams attended DuSable High School in Chicago. By 1946, he enrolled in music classes at Roosevelt University, but did not stay. He then decided to study independently. The books of Joseph Schillinger were very influential in Abrams' development.

Abrams' first gigs were playing the blues, R&B, and hard bop circuit in Chicago and working as a sideman with everyone from Dexter Gordon and Max Roach to Ruth Brown and Woody Shaw. In 1950 he began writing arrangements for the King Fleming Band, and in 1955 played in the hard-bop band Modern Jazz Two + Three, with tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris. After this group folded he kept a low profile until he organized the Experimental Band in 1962, a contrast to his earlier hard bop venture in its use of free jazz concepts. This band, with its fluctuating lineup, evolved into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), emerging in May 1965 with Abrams as its president. Rather than playing in smoky night clubs, AACM members often rented out theaters and lofts where they could perform for attentive and open-minded audiences. The album Levels and Degrees of Light (1967) was the landmark first recording under Abrams' leadership. On this set, Abrams was joined by the saxophonists Anthony Braxton, Maurice McIntyre, vibraphonist Gordon Emmanuel, violinist Leroy Jenkins, bassist Leonard Jones and vocalist Penelope Taylor. Abrams also played with saxophonists Eddie Harris, Gordon, and other more bop-oriented musicians during this era.

Abrams moved to New York permanently in 1975 where he was involved in the local Loft Jazz scene. In 1983, he established the New York chapter of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

In the 1970s, Abrams composed for symphony orchestras, string quartets, solo piano, voice, and big bands in addition to making a series of larger ensemble recordings that included harp and accordion. He is a widely influential artist, having played sides for many musicians early in his career, releasing important recordings as a leader, and writing classical works such as his "String Quartet No. 2", which was performed by the Kronos Quartet, on November 22, 1985, at the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. He has recorded extensively under his own name (frequently on the Black Saint label) and as a sideman on others' records. Notably regarding the latter he has recorded with Anthony Braxton (Duets 1976 on Arista Records), Marion Brown and Chico Freeman.

Abrams has recorded and toured the United States, Canada and Europe with his orchestra, sextet, quartet, duo and as a solo pianist. His musical affiliations is a "who's who" of the jazz world, including Max Roach, Dexter Gordon, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Art Farmer, Sonny Stitt, Anthony Braxton,The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Eddie Harris and many others. In 1990 Abrams won the Jazzpar Prize, an annual Danish prize within jazz. In 1997 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. In May 2009 the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Abrams would be one of the recipients of the 2010 NEA Jazz Masters Award. In June 2010, Abrams was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by New York City's premier jazz festival, known as the Vision Festival.

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*Derrick Albert Bell, Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011), the first tenured African American Professor of Law at Harvard Law School who is largely credited as one of the originators of critical race theory (CRT), was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law from 1991 until his death. He was also a dean of the University of Oregon School of Law.

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*Bobby "Blue" Bland, a legendary blues singer, was born in Rosemark, Tennessee (January 27).

Bobby “Blue” Bland, byname of Robert Calvin Bland (b. January 27, 1930, Rosemark, Tennessee, United States — d. June 23, 2013, Memphis, Tennessee), was an American blues singer noted for his rich baritone voice, sophisticated style, and sensual delivery.

Bland began his career in Memphis, Tennessee, with bluesman B. B. King and ballad singer Johnny Ace (all three were part of a loose aggregation of musicians known as the Beale Streeters). Influenced by gospel and by pop singers such as Tony Bennett and Andy Williams, as well as by rhythm and blues, Bland became famous with early 1960s hits for Duke Records such as “Cry Cry Cry,” “I Pity the Fool,” “Turn on Your Lovelight,” and “That’s the Way Love Is.” Joe Scott’s arrangements were pivotal to these successes in which Bland alternated between smooth, expertly modulated phrases and fiercely shouted, gospel-style ones. Long a particular favourite of female listeners, Bland for a time sang some disco material along with his blues ballads, and in later years he developed the curious habit of snorting between lines. While his recording output slowed in the early 2000s, Bland maintained an active touring schedule, and he was a guest performer with B.B. King and singer-songwriter Van Morrison. Bland was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and he was awarded a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1997.

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*Jazz singer Betty Carter, popularly known as "Betty Bebop" was born in Flint, Michigan (May 16).

Betty Carter (also known as Lillie Mae Jones, Lorraine Carter, Lorene Carter or Betty Bebop) (b. May 16, 1930, Flint, Michigan - d. September 26, 1998, Brooklyn, New York) was an American jazz singer who is best remembered for the scat and other complex musical interpretations that showcased her remarkable vocal flexibility and musical imagination.

Carter studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory of Music in her native Michigan. At age 16, she began singing in Detroit jazz clubs, and after 1946, she worked in African American bars and theaters in the Midwest, at first under the name Lorene Carter.

Influenced by the improvisational nature of bebop and inspired by vocalists Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. Carter strove to create a style of her own. Lionel Hampton asked Carter to join his band in 1948. However, her insistence on improvising annoyed Hampton and prompted him to fire her seven times in two and a half years. Carter left Hampton's band for good in 1951 and performed around the country in such jazz clubs as Harlem's Apollo Theater and the Vanguard in New York, the Showboat in Philadelphia, and Blues Alley in Washington, D. C., with such jazz artists as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, and Thelonious Monk.

After touring with Ray Charles from 1960 to 1963 and making a recording of duets with him in 1961, Carter put her career on hold to get married. Her marriage did not last, however, and she returned to the stage in 1969 backed by a small acoustic ensemble consisting of piano, drums, and bass. In 1971, she released her first album on her own label, Bet-Car Productions.

Beginning in the 1970s, Carter performed on the college circuit and conducted several jazz workshops. After appearing at Carnegie Hall as part of the Newport Jazz Festival in 1977 and 1978, she went on concert tours throughout the United States and Europe. Her solo albums include Betty Carter (1953), Out There (1958), The Modern Sound of Betty Carter (1960), The Audience with Betty Carter (1979), and Look What I Got! (1988), which won a Grammy Award. Determined to encourage an interest in jazz among younger people, in April 1993 Carter initiated a program she called Jazz Ahead, an annual event at which twenty young jazz musicians spend a week training and composing with her. In 1997, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts by United States President Bill Clinton.

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*Ray Charles, a jazz, soul, and pop singer, was born in Albany, Georgia (September 23). Blind by the age of six, he would become one of America's most-beloved performing artists.

Ray Charles (also known as Ray Charles Robinson) (b. September 23, 1930, Albany, Georgia - d. June 10, 2004, Beverly Hills, California) was an pianist, singer, composer, and bandleader, a leading African American entertainer billed as "the Genius." Charles was credited with the early development of soul music, a style based on a melding of gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz music.

When Charles was an infant his family moved to Greenville, Florida, and he began his musical career at age five on a piano in a neighborhood cafe. He began to go blind at six, possibly from glaucoma, and had completely lost his sight by age seven. He attended the St. Augustine School for the Deaf and Blind, where he concentrated on musical studies, but left school at age 15 to play the piano professionally after his mother died from cancer (his father had died when the boy was 10). Charles built a remarkable career based on the immediacy of emotion in his performances. After emerging as a blues and jazz pianist indebted to Nat King Cole's style in the late 1940s. Charles recorded the boogie-woogie classic "Mess Around" and the novelty song "It Should've Been Me" in 1952-53. His arrangement for Guitar Slim's "The Things That I Used To Do" became a blues million-seller in 1953. By 1954, Charles had created a successful combination of blues and gospel influences and signed on with Atlantic Records. Propelled by Charles' distinctive raspy voice,"I've Got a Woman" and "Hallelujah I Love You So" became hit records. "What'd I Say" led the rhythm and blues sales charts in 1959 and was Charles' own first million-seller.

Charles' rhythmic piano playing and band arranging revived the "funky" quality of jazz, but he also recorded in many other musical genres. He entered the pop market with the best-sellers "Georgia on My Mind" (1960) and "Hit the Road Jack" (1961). His album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962) sold more than a million copies, as did its single "I Can't Stop Loving You." Thereafter, his music emphasized jazz standards and renditions of pop and show tunes. From 1955, Charles toured extensively in the United States and elsewhere with his own big band nd in gospel-style female backup quartet called the Raeletts. He also appeared on television and worked in films such as Ballad in Blue (1964) and The Blues Brothers (1980) as a featured act and sound track composer. He formed his own custom recording labels, Tangerine in 1962 and Crossover Records in 1973. The recipient of many national and international awards, he received 13 Grammy Awards, including a lifetime achievement award in 1987. In 1986, Charles was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received a Kennedy Center Honor. He published an autobiography, Brother Ray, Ray Charles' Own Story (1978), written with David Ritz.

In 2003, Charles had successful hip replacement surgery and was planning to go back on tour, until he began suffering from other ailments. On June 10, 2004, as a result of acute liver disease, Charles died at his home in Los Angeles, California, surrounded by family and friends. He was 73 years old. His funeral took place on June 18, 2004, at the First AME Church in Los Angeles, with musical peers such as Little Richard in attendance. B. B. King, Glen Campbell, Stevie Wonder and Wynton Marsalis each played a tribute at Charles' funeral. Charles was interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery.

Ray Charles Robinson was sometimes referred to as "The Genius". He pioneered the genre of soul music during the 1950s by combining rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into the music he recorded for Atlantic Records. He also contributed to the racial integration of country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his two Modern Sounds albums. While he was with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be granted artistic control by a mainstream record company.

Charles was blind from the age of seven. Charles cited Nat King Cole as a primary influence, but his music was also influenced by jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and country artists of the day, including Art Tatum, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown and Louis Armstrong. Charles' playing reflected influences from country blues, barrelhouse and stride piano styles. His best friend in music was South Carolina-born James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul".

Frank Sinatra called him "the only true genius in show business", although Charles downplayed this notion. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Charles at number ten on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and number two on their November 2008 list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time".

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*Ornette Coleman, the principal initiator and leading exponent of free jazz, was born in Fort Worth, Texas (March 9).

Ornette Coleman (Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman) (b. March 9, 1930, Fort Worth, Texas), was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and bandleader who was the principal initiatior and leading exponent of free jazz in the late 1950s.

Coleman began playing alto, then tenor saxophone as a teenager and soon became a working musician in dance bands and rhythm-and-blues groups. Early in his career, his approach to harmony was already unorthodox and led to his rejection by established musicians in Los Angeles, where he lived for most of the 1950s. While working as an elevator operator, he studied harmony and played an inexpensive plastic alto saxophone at obscure nightclubs. Until the, all jazz improvisation had been based on fixed harmonic patterns. In the "harmolodic theory" that Coleman developed in the 1950s, however, improvisers abandoned harmonic patterns ("chord changes") in order to improvise more extensively and directly upon melodic and expressive elements. Because the tonal centers of such music changed at the improvisers' will, it became known as "free jazz."

In the late 1950s Coleman formed a group with trumpeter Don Cherry, drummery Billy Higgins, and bassist Charlie Haden, with whom he recorded his first album, Something Else (1958). His classic recordings, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century in 1959 preceded his move that year to New York City, where his radical conception of structure and the urgent emotionality of his improvisations aroused widespread controversy. His recordings Free Jazz (1960), which used two simultaneously improvising jazz quartets, and Beauty Is a Rare Thing (1961), in which he successfully experimented with free meters and tempos, also proved influential.

In the 1960s, Coleman taught himself to play the violin and trumpet, using unorthodox techniques. By the 1970s, he was performing only irregularly, preferring instead to compse. His most notable extended composition is the suite Skies of America, which was recorded in 1972 by the London Symphony Orchestra joined by Coleman on alto saxophone. Influenced by his experience of improvising with Rif musicians of Morocco in 1973, Coleman formed an electric band called Prime Time, whose music was a fusion of rock rhythms with harmonically free collective improvisations, this band remained his primary performance vehicle until the 1990s.

Coleman's early style influenced not only fellow saxophonists but also players of all other instruments in jazz. In recognition of such accomplishment, Coleman received the Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale prize for music in 2001. In 2005, with a quartet made up of two acoustic double bass players (one bowing his instrumennt, the other plucking), a drummer, and Coleman himself (playing alto saxophone, trumpet, and violin), he recorded Sound Grammar during a live performance in Italy; the work, which was said to hearken back to his music of the 1960s, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007.

Coleman was largely a self-taught musician, although in 1959 he attended the School of Jazz at Lenox, Massachusetts. Coleman first played with Peewee Cranton's Rhythm and Blues Band in New Orleans. From 1952 to 1954, he had his own band in Fort Worth, Texas. He then moved to Los Angeles and made his first recording in Hollywood on also saxophone. In 1959, he formed his own quartet. Coleman, a composer as well as a saxophonist, violinist and trumpeter, toured Europe and influenced European jazz. Though infrequently heard, and with only a few LP's, Coleman is, nevertheless, one of the giants of modern music, and was hailed as the first true innovator since bop.

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*Cardiss Robertson Collins was born in St. Louis, Missouri (September 24). In 1973, she would be elected to the United States House of Representatives.

Cardiss Hortense Collins, (née Robertson) (September 24, 1931 – February 3, 2013), was a Democratic politician from Illinois who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1973 to 1997. She was the first African American woman to represent the Midwest in Congress. Collins was elected to Congress in the June 5, 1973 special election to replace her husband, George, who had died in the December 8, 1972 United Airlines Flight 553 plane crash. The seat had been renumbered from the 6th district to the 7th when she took the seat. She had previously worked as an accountant in various state government positions.

Throughout her political career, she was a champion for women’s health and welfare issues. In 1975, she was instrumental in prompting the Social Security Administration to revise Medicare regulations to cover the cost of post-mastectomy breast prosthesis, which before then had been considered cosmetic. In 1979, she was elected as president of the Congressional Black Caucus, a position she used to become an occasional critic of President Jimmy Carter. She later became the caucus vice chairman. In the 1980s, Collins warded off two primary challenges from Alderman Danny K. Davis, who would finally be elected to replace her in 1996. In 1990, Collins, along with 15 other African-American women and men, formed the African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom. In 1991, Collins was named chair of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Her legislative interests were focused on establishing universal health insurance, providing for gender equity in college sports, reforming federal child care facilities. Collins gained a brief national prominence in 1993 as the chairwoman of a congressional committee investigating college sports and as a critic of the NCAA. During her last term (1995–1997), she served as ranking member of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee. She also engaged in an intense debate with Representative Henry Hyde over Medicaid funding of abortion that year.

Collins did not seek re-election in 1996, citing her age and the Republican majority in the House. In 2004, she was selected by Nielsen Media Research to head a task force examining the representation of African Americans in TV rating samples. Collins lived in Alexandria, Virginia until her death on February 3, 2013, at the age of 81.

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*Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who will write A Raisin in the Sun, was born in Chicago (May 19),

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (b. May 19, 1930, Chicago, Illinois – d. January 12, 1965, New York City, New York) was an American playwright and writer. Hansberry inspired Nina Simone's song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black".

She was the first black woman to write a play performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of African Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant and eventually provoking the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. The title of her most famous play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?"

After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggle for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry has been identified as a lesbian, and sexual freedom is an important topic in several of her works. She died of cancer at the age of 34.

Lorraine Hansberry was born in a comfortable, middle-class family in Chicago, and was educated at the University of Wisconsisn and Roosevelt University. She first appeared in print in Paul Robeson's Freedom, a monthly newspaper, during the early 1950's. In 1959, A Raisin in the Sun, her first play, was produced on Broadway. It was among the first full-length African American plays to be taken seriously by a European American audience.

The success of A Raisin in the Sun catapulted Hansberry to an early fame. She was expected to be a spokesperson for the African American poor, when in fact she was more attuned to the aspirations of the African American bourgeoisie. Hansberry was very militant about integration and not supportive of black nationalist or separatist movements.

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*Odetta, the folksinger and activist known as the "Voice of the Civil Rights Movement" was born in Birmingham, Alabama (December 31).

Odetta (also known as Odetta Holmes) (b. December 31, 1930, Birmingham, Alabama - d. December 2, 2008, New York, New York) was a folk singer who was noted especially for her versions of spirituals and who became for many the voice of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.

After her father's death in 1937, Odetta moved with her mother to Los Angeles. She began classical voice training at age 13, and she earned a degree in classicl music from Los Angeles City College. Though she had heard the music of the Deep South as a child. It was not until 1950, on a trip to San Francisco, that she began to appreciate and participate in the emergent folk scene. She soon learned to play, the guitar and began to perform traditional songs. Her distinctive blend of folk, blues, ballads, and spirituals was powered by her rich vocal style, wide range, and deep passion. Within a few years her career took off. In the early 1950s, she moved to New York City, where she met singers Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, who became loyal supporters. Her debut solo recording, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues (1956), was soon followed by At the Gate of Horn (1957). Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan later said that hear Odetta on record "turned me on to folk singing." She performed at the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival four times during 1959-65, and she subsequently appeared on television and in several films.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Odetta continued to record as a leading folk musician -- although recordings did not do her performances justice. Her music and her politics suited the growing civil rights movement, and in 1963, she sang at the historic March on Washington led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Inevitably, as the movement waned and interest in folk music declined, Odetta's following shrank, although she continued to perform. In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given in the arts in the United States, and in 2003 she was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

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*Katherine Esther Jackson (nee Scruse; born Kattie B. Screws on May 4, 1930), the matriarch of the Jackson musical family, was born in Clayton, Alabama.

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*Ahmad Jamal, (b. Frederick Russell Jones), an American jazz pianist known for his rendition of But Not ForMe, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (July 2).

Ahmad Jamal began playing piano at the age of three, when his uncle Lawrence challenged him to duplicate what he was doing on the piano. Jamal began formal piano training at the age of seven with Mary Cardwell Dawson, whom he describes as greatly influencing him. His Pittsburgh roots remained an important part of his identity ("Pittsburgh meant everything to me and it still does," he said in 2001) and it was there that he was immersed in the influence of jazz artists such as Earl Hines, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner. Jamal also studied with pianist James Miller and began playing piano professionally at the age of fourteen, at which point he was recognized as a "coming great" by the pianist Art Tatum.

Born to Baptist parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jamal did not discover Islam until his early 20s. While touring in Detroit (where there was a sizable Muslim community in the 1940s and 1950s), Jamal became interested in Islam and Islamic culture. He converted to Islam and changed his name to Ahmad Jamal in 1950. In an interview with The New York Times a few years later, Jamal said his decision to change his name stemmed from a desire to "re-establish my original name." In 1986, Jamal sued critic Leonard Feather for using his former name in a publication.

After the recording of the best-selling album But Not For Me, Jamal's music grew in popularity throughout the 1950s. In 1959, he took a tour of North Africa to explore investment options in Africa. Jamal, who was twenty-nine at the time, said he had a curiosity about the homeland of his ancestors, highly influenced by his conversion to the Muslim faith. He also said his religion had brought him peace of mind about his race, which accounted for his "growth in the field of music that has proved very lucrative for me."

Upon his return to the United States after a tour of North Africa, the financial success of Live at the Pershing: But Not For Me allowed Jamal to open a restaurant and club called The Alhambra in Chicago. In 1962, The Three Strings disbanded and Jamal moved to New York City, where, at the age of 32, he took a three-year hiatus from his musical career.

In 1964, Jamal resumed touring and recording, this time with the bassist Jamil Nasser and recorded a new album, Extensions, in 1965. Jamal and Nasser continued to play and record together from 1964 to 1972. He also joined forces with Vernel Fournier (again, but only for about a year) and drummer Frank Gant (1966–76), among others. He continued to play throughout the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in trios with piano, bass and drums, but he occasionally expanded the group to include guitar. One of his most long-standing gigs was as the band for the New Year's Eve celebrations at Blues Alley in Washington, D. C., from 1979 through the 1990s. Until 1970, he played acoustic piano exclusively. The final album on which he played acoustic piano in the regular sequence was The Awakening. In the 1970s, Jamal played electric piano as well. It was rumored that the Rhodes piano was a gift from someone in Switzerland.

In 1985, Jamal agreed to do an interview and recording session with his fellow jazz pianist, Marian McPartland on her NPR show Piano Jazz. Jamal, who said he rarely plays "But Not For Me" due to its popularity since his 1958 recording, played an improvised version of the tune – though only after noting that he has moved on to making ninety percent of his repertoire his own compositions. He said that when he grew in popularity from the Live at the Pershing album, he was severely criticized afterwards for not playing any of his own compositions.

In 1994, Mr. Jamal received the American Jazz Masters fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The same year he was named a Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale University, where he performed commissioned works with the Assai String Quartet.

In 2007 the French Government inducted Mr. Jamal into the prestigious Order of the Arts and Letters by French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, naming him Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Mr. Jamal’s previous recording A Quiet Time (Dreyfus Records), released in January 2010, was the number #1 CD on jazz radio for the year 2010 and continues to soar. Also this year the French Jazz Academy has voted "The Complete Ahmad Jamal Trio Argo Sessions 1956-1962" released by Mosaïc "Best reissue of the year with outstanding research work". His music remains, youthful, fresh, imaginative and always influential.

In December of 2011 Mr. Jamal was awarded with DownBeat’s 76th Reader’s Poll Hall of Fame.

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*Leslie Lee, a Tony Award-nominated playwright, was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (November 6).

Leslie Lee (b. November 6, 1930, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania - d. January 20, 2014, New York City)was a Tony Award-nominated playwright.

Leslie Lee was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on November 6, 1930. He was Executive Director of the Negro Ensemble Company and a founding artist of La Mama E.T.C. He was also Signature Theatre's Playwright-in-Residence during the 2008-2009 Season celebrating the Historic Negro Ensemble Company. His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway, and he wrote extensively for film and television.

After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology and English from The University of Pennsylvania, Lee worked for several years in cancer research at Wyeth Laboratories in Villanova, Pennsylvania. He earned his Master of Arts degree in Theatre from Villanova University.

Lee taught for The Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing Program at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, MiddleSex Community College, Hunter College, Wesleyan College, Rutgers University, The New School University, Goddard College, The Negro Ensemble Company, and The Frederick Douglas Playwriting Workshop. In 2008, the U.S. Department of State sent Lee as a Cultural Envoy to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe to teach Playwriting at the Intwasa Arts Festival.

Lee's acclaimed play The First Breeze of Summer, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and starring Leslie Uggams, enjoyed a successful revival in 2008 at Signature Theatre, winning nine Audelco Awards. The First Breeze of Summer was originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company and went on to win an Obie Award for Best New American Play as well as an Outer Critics Circle Award. Subsequently, the play moved to the Palace Theatre on Broadway, where it received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. Many of his plays have been produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, the Black Rep in St. Louis, and Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey. His plays include The War Party, Colored People's Time, Blues in a Broken Tongue, The Rabbit's Foot, Black Eagles, Elegy to a Down Queen, Cops and Robbers, Hannah Davis, The Ninth Wave, The Book of Lambert, Mina, Sundown Names and Night-Gone Things and the musicals Golden Boy with songs by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, and Phillis with Micki Grant. His new musical Before The Dream, written with Charles Strouse, had a recent reading in New York.

Lee's television and film work includes The Vernon Johns Story, with James Earl Jones and Mary Alice; Two Mothers, Two Sons; The Killing Floor, with Alfre Woodard and Moses Gunn; and adaptations of Richard Wright's short story Almos' A Man, with LeVar Burton, and The First Breeze of Summer. His documentary work includes Langston Hughes, the Dreamkeeper; The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment; Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey; and Culture Shock: Huckleberry Finn.

Leslie Lee passed away at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City due to complications from congestive heart failure on January 20, 2014, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, as he was making final revisions to his musical about King (written in collaboration with Charles Strouse).

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*Abbey Lincoln (b. Anna Marie Wooldridge, August 6, 1930, Chicago, Illinois – d, August 14, 2010, New York, New York), was an American jazz vocalist, songwriter, and actress, who wrote and performed her own compositions. She was a civil rights advocate during the 1960s.

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*Frank Lucas, a former heroin dealer, who operated in Harlem during the late 1960s and early 1970s, was born in La Grange, North Carolina (September 9). He was particularly known for cutting out middlemen in the drug trade and buying heroin directly from his source in the Golden Triangle. Rather than hide the drugs in the coffins, they Lucas hid drugs in the pallets underneath the coffins of dead American servicemen as depicted in the 2007 feature film American Gangster in which Lucas was played by Denzel Washington, although the film fictionalized elements of Lucas' life for dramatic effect.

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*Jazz trumpeter Richard "Blue" Mitchell was born in Miami, Florida (March 13).

Richard Allen (Blue) Mitchell (March 13, 1930 – May 21, 1979) was an American jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, rock, and funk trumpeter, known for many albums recorded as leader and sideman on Blue Note Records.

Mitchell was born and raised in Miami, Florida. He began playing trumpet in high school where he acquired his nickname, Blue.

After high school he played in the rhythm and blues ensembles of Paul Williams, Earl Bostic, and Chuck Willis. After returning to Miami he was noticed by Cannonball Adderley, with whom he recorded for Riverside Records in New York in 1958. He then joined the Horace Silver Quintet playing with tenor Junior Cook, bassist Gene Taylor and drummer Roy Brooks. Mitchell stayed with Silver’s group until the band’s break-up in 1964. After the Silver quintet disbanded, Mitchell formed a group employing members from the Silver quintet substituting the young pianist Chick Corea for Silver and replacing a then sick Brooks with drummer Al Foster. This group produced a number of records for Blue Note disbanding in 1969, after which Mitchell joined and toured with Ray Charles until 1971. From 1971 to 1973 Mitchell performed with John Mayall on Jazz Blues Fusion. From the mid – 70s he recorded, and worked as a session man, performed with the big band leaders Louie Bellson, Bill Holman and Bill Berry and was principal soloist for Tony Bennett and Lena Horne. Other band leaders Mitchell recorded with include Lou Donaldson, Grant Green, Philly Joe Jones, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Johnny Griffin, Al Cohn, Dexter Gordon and Jimmy Smith. Blue Mitchell kept his hard-bop playing going with the Harold Land quintet up until his death from cancer on May 21, 1979, in Los Angeles, at the age of 49.

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*Clarence Pendleton, Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky (November 10). Pendleton would become the first African American chairperson of the United States Civil Rights Commission in 1981.

Clarence McClane Pendleton, Jr. (November 10, 1930 - June 5, 1988), was the politically conservative African American chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, a position that he held from 1981 until his death during the administration of United States President Ronald W. Reagan.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Pendleton was raised in Washington, D. C., where he graduated from historically black Dunbar High School and then Howard University, where his father was the first swimming coach at the institution. After high school, Pendleton like his grandfather and father before him, enrolled at Howard, where in 1954 he earned a Bachelor of Science degree. After a three-year tour of duty in the United States Army during the Cold War, Pendleton returned to Howard, where he was on the physical education faculty and pursued his master's degree in education. Pendleton succeeded his father as the Howard swimming coach, and his teams procured ten championships in eleven years. He also coached rowing, football, and baseball at Howard.

From 1968 to 1970, Pendleton was the recreation coordinator under the Model Cities Program in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1970, he was named director of the urban affairs department of the National Recreation and Park Association. In 1972, then San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson, later a United States Senator and Governor California, recruited Pendleton to head the Model Cities program in San Diego, California. In 1975, Pendleton was named director of the San Diego branch of the National Urban League.

A former liberal Democrat, Pendleton switched to the Republican Party in 1980 and supported Reagan for President. Pendleton claimed that minorities had become dependent on government social programs which create a cycle of dependence. African Americans, he said, should build strong relations with the private sector and end ties to liberal bureaucrats and philosophies.

In his first year in office (on November 16, 1981), President Reagan named Pendleton to replace the liberal Republican commission chairman, Arthur Sherwood Flemming, who had been the United States Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare during the final years of the Eisenhower administration. The Republican-majority U.S. Senate approved the nomination, and Pendleton became the first black chairman of the commission. He supported the Reagan social agenda and hence came into conflict with long-established civil rights positions. He opposed the use of cross-town school busing to bring about racial balance among pupils. He challenged the need for affirmative action policies because he claimed that African Americans could succeed without special consideration being written into law. Pendleton was as outspoken on the political right as was the later Democratic chairman Mary Frances Berry on the left. Pendleton made headlines for saying black civil rights leaders were "the new racists" because they advocated affirmative action, racial quotas, and set-asides. He likened the feminist issue of equal pay for equal work, written into law in the Equal Pay Act of 1963, to be "like reparations for white women."

Pendleton denounced the feminist concept of comparable worth in the establishment of male and female pay scales as "probably the looniest idea since Looney Tunes came on the screen." The headlines from his remarks dominated and distorted the debate over the issue.

Under the Pendleton chairmanship, congressional funding for the agency was reduced. This prompted some staff members either to lose their positions or to leave the agency in discouragement. Pendleton was considered ascerbic by his liberal critics. William Bradford Reynolds, Reagan's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, described his friend Pendleton as "a man of candor who felt very deeply that the individuals in America should deal with one another as brothers and sisters totally without regard to race and background."

On December 23, 1983, with two Democratic members named by the House dissenting, Pendleton was re-elected to a second term as commission chairman.

Under Pendleton's tenure, the commission was split by an internal debate over fundamental principles of equality under the law. The commission narrowed the description of legal and political rights at the expense of social and economic claims. The debate centered principally between Pendleton and Mary Frances Berry, an original appointee of President Jimmy Carter. Democrat Morris B. Abram, also a Reagan appointee, was vice chairman under Pendleton. He described "an intellectual sea change" at the agency with the conservative view dominant at that time. Authorized under the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the commission was reconstituted by a 1983 law of Congress after Reagan dismissed three commissioners critical of his policies.

On June 5, 1988, Pendleton collapsed while working out at the San Diego Hilton Tennis Club. He died an hour later of a heart attack at a hospital. A memorial bench dedicated in Pendleton's honor is located in the De Anza Cove section of Mission Bay Park in San Diego.

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*Charles Rangel, a New York Congressman, was born in New York City (June 11).

Charles Bernard "Charlie" Rangel (b. June 11, 1930), the United States Representative for New York's 13th Congressional District. Rangel was the first African American Chair of the influential House Ways and Means Committee. He was also a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Rangel was born in Harlem in New York City. He earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service in the United States Army during the Korean War, where he led a group of soldiers out of a deadly Chinese army encirclement during the Battle of Kunu-ri in 1950. Rangel graduated from New York University in 1957 and St. John's University School of Law in 1960. He then worked as a private lawyer, Assistant United States Attorney, and legal counsel during the early-mid-1960s. He served two terms in the New York State Assembly, from 1967 to 1971, and then defeated long-time incumbent Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in a primary challenge on his way to being elected to the House of Representatives.

Once there, Rangel rose rapidly in the Democratic ranks, combining solidly liberal views with a pragmatic approach towards finding political and legislative compromises. His long-time concerns with battling the importation and effects of illegal drugs led to his becoming chair of the House Select Committee on Narcotics, where he helped define national policy on the issue during the 1980s. As one of Harlem's "Gang of Four", he also became a leader in New York City and State politics. He played a significant role in the creation of the 1995 Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation and the national Empowerment Zone Act, which helped change the economic face of Harlem and other inner-city areas. Rangel was known both for his genial manner, with an ability to win over fellow legislators, and for his blunt speaking; he has long been outspoken about his views and has been arrested several times as part of political demonstrations. He was a strong opponent of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, and he put forth proposals to reinstate the draft during the 2000s.

Beginning in 2008, Rangel faced a series of allegations of ethics violations and failures to comply with tax laws. The House Ethics Committee focused on whether Rangel improperly rented multiple rent-stabilized New York apartments, improperly used his office in raising money for the Rangel Center at the City College of New York, and failed to disclose rental income from his villa in the Dominican Republic. In March 2010, Rangel stepped aside as Ways and Means Chair. In November 2010, the Ethics Committee found Rangel guilty of 11 counts of violating House ethics rules, and on December 2, 2010, the full House approved a sanction of censure against him.

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*The artist Faith Ringgold was born in New York (October 8).

Faith Ringgold (b. October 8, 1930, New York, New York), was an artist and author who became famous for innovative, quilted marrations that communicate her political beliefs.

Ringgold grew up in New York City's Harlem, and while still in high school she decided to be an artist. She attended City College of New York, where she received B. S. (1955) and M. A. (1959) degrees. In the mid-1950s she began teaching art in New York public schools. By the 1960s, her work had matured, reflecting her burgeoning political consciousness, study of African arts and history, and appreciation for the freedom of form used by her young students.

In 1963 Ringgold began a body of paintings called the American People series, which portrays the civil rights movement from a female perspective. In the 1970s she created African-style masks, painted political posters, lectured frequently at feminist art conferences, and actively sought the racial integration of the New York art world. She originated a demonstration against the Whitney Museum of American Art and helped win admission for black artists to the exhibit schedule at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1970 she cofounded, with one of her daughters, the advocacy group Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation.

Among Ringgold’s most renowned works, her “story quilts” were inspired by the Tibetan tankas (paintings framed in cloth) that she viewed on a visit to museums in Amsterdam. She painted these quilts with narrative images and original stories set in the context of African American history. Her mother frequently collaborated with her on these. Examples of this work includes Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?(1984), Sonny’s Quilt (1986), and Tar Beach (1988), which Ringgold adapted into a children’s book in 1991. The latter book, which was named Caldecott Honor Book in 1992, tells of a young black girl in New York City who dreams about flying. Ringgold’s later books for children include Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) and My Dream of Martin Luther King (1995). Her memoirs, We Flew over the Bridge, were published in 1995.

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*Sonny Rollins (b. Theodore Walter Rollins, September 7, 1930), an American jazz tenor saxophonist, widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians, was born in New York, New York. A number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", "Pent-Up House", and "Airegin", became jazz standards.

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*Willie Thrower, the first African American to appear at the quarterback position in the National Football League, was born New Kensington, Pennsylvania (March 22).

Willie Lee Thrower (March 22, 1930 – February 20, 2002) was an American football quarterback. Born near Pittsburgh in new Kensington, Pennsylvania, Thrower was known as "Mitts" for his large hands and arm strength compared to his 5'11" frame. He was known to toss a football 70 yards. Thrower was part of the 1952 Michigan State Spartans who won the national championship. He became the first African American to appera at the quarterback position in the National Football League (NFL), playing for the Chicago Bears in 1953.

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Notable Deaths

*There were 20 recorded lynchings in the United States in 1930.

*Andrew "Rube" Foster, a baseball player, manager, and pioneer executive in the Negro Leagues, died in Kankakee, Illinois (December 9). He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981.

Andrew "Rube" Foster (b. September 17, 1879, Calvert, Texas – d. December 9, 1930, Kankakee, Illinois), considered by historians to have been perhaps the best African-American pitcher of the first decade of the 1900s, also founded and managed the Chicago American Giants, one of the most successful black baseball teams of the pre-integration era. Most notably, he organized the Negro National League, the first long-lasting professional league for African-American ballplayers, which operated from 1920 to 1931. He is known as the "father of Black Baseball."

Foster adopted his longtime nickname, "Rube", as his official middle name later in life.

*Charles Gilpin, a noted stage actor, died in Eldridge Park, New Jersey (May 6).

Charles Sidney Gilpin (b. November 20, 1878, Richmond, Virginia – d. May 6, 1930, Eldridge Park, New Jersey) was one of the most highly regarded stage actors of the 1920s. He played in critical debuts in New York: in the 1919 premier of John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln and played the lead role of Brutus Jones in the 1920 premier of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, also touring with the play. In 1920, he became the first African American to receive the Drama League of New York's annual award, as one of the ten people who had done the most that year for American theater.

In 1991, 61 years after his death, Charles Sidney Gilpin was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

*Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were lynched in Marion, Indiana (August 7). There were hanged. James Cameron survived. This would be the last recorded lynching of African Americans in the Northern United States.

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were African American men who were lynched on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana, after being taken from jail and beaten by a mob. They had been arrested that night as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case. A third African American suspect, 16-year-old James Cameron, had also been arrested and narrowly escaped being killed by the mob. He was helped by the intervention of an unknown woman and returned to jail. He was later convicted and sentenced as an accessory before the fact. After dedicating his life to civil rights activism, in 1991 he was pardoned by the state of Indiana.

The local chapter of the NAACP, and the State's Attorney General struggled to indict some of the lynch mob, but no one was ever charged for the murders of Shipp and Smith, nor the attack on Cameron.

The three suspects had been arrested the night before, charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker, Claude Deeter, and raping his white girlfriend, Mary Ball, who was with him at the time.

A large crowd broke into the jail with sledgehammers, pulled out the three suspects, beating them and hanging them. When Abram Smith tried to free himself from the noose as his body was hauled up, he was lowered and men broke his arms to prevent any other efforts to free himself. Police officers in the crowd cooperated in the lynching. A third person, 16-year-old James Cameron, narrowly escaped death after being strung up, thanks to an unidentified woman who said that the youth had nothing to do with the rape or murder. A local studio photographer, Lawrence Beitler, took a photograph of the dead men hanging from a tree surrounded by the large lynch mob that included women and children. He sold thousands of copies of the photograph in the next ten days.

Mary Ball later testified that she had not been raped. According to Cameron's 1982 memoir, the police had originally accused all three men of murder and rape. After the lynchings, and Mary Ball's testimony, the rape charge was dropped.

James Cameron was tried in 1931 as an accessory before the fact, convicted and sentenced to state prison for several years. After being released on parole, he moved to Detroit, worked and went to college. In the 1940s he worked in Indiana as a civil rights activist and headed a state agency for equal rights. In the 1950s he moved to Wisconsin. There in 1988, in Milwaukee, he founded America's Black Holocaust Museum, devoted to African-American history. Cameron intended it as a place for education and reconciliation.

Mrs. Flossie Bailey, a local NAACP official, and the State Attorney General worked to gain indictments against leaders of the mob in the lynchings, but were unsuccessful. No one was ever charged in the murders of Shipp and Smith, nor the assault on Cameron.

On the night of the lynching, studio photographer Lawrence Beitler took a photograph of the crowd by the bodies of the men hanging from a tree. He sold thousands of copies over the next 10 days, and it has become an iconic image of a lynching. In 1937, Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York and the adoptive father of the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, saw a copy of Beitler's 1930 photograph. Meeropol later said that the photograph "haunted me for days" and inspired his poem "Strange Fruit". It was published in the New York Teacher in 1937 and later in the magazine New Masses, in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. Meeropol set his poem to music, renaming it "Strange Fruit". He performed it at a labor meeting in Madison Square Garden. In 1939 it was performed, recorded and popularized by American singer Billie Holiday. The song reached 16th place on the charts in July 1939, and has since been recorded by numerous artists, continuing into the 21st century.

*****

Performing Arts

This decade saw a revival in attempts to create a local Harlem theater. In the early 1930's, Rose McClendon and Dick Campbell organized a Negro People's Theater at the Lafayette as a stock company. The Harlem Players presented African American versions of Sailor Beware and Front Page. Two other companies, Harlem Experimental Players and the Harlem Suitcase Theater, were also organized.

*Richard B. Harrison starred as "De Lawd" in The Green Pastures, which opened on Broadway (February 21).

The Green Pastures by Marc Connelly opened at New York's Mansfield Theater. The play is an adaptation of a 1928 collection of tales by Roark Bradford and it depicts heaven, the angels, and the Lord as envisioned by an African American country preacher for a Louisiana congregation. The play would have a run of 640 performances.

*Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1930 premiered at New York's Royal Theater with Ethel Waters and Cecil Mack's Choir (October 22). Songs in the musical include "Memories of You" by Eubie Blake with lyrics by Andy Razaf. The musical would have 57 performances.

*Blanche Calloway became the first African American woman to lead an all-male band.

Blanche Calloway (1902-1973) was one of the most successful bandleaders of the 1930s. For a while, she and her brother, Cab Calloway, had their own act.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, she studied at Morgan State College, and later moved to Miami, Florida, where she became the first woman disk jockey on American radio. Calloway toured from 1931 to 1944 with "The 12 Clouds of Joy" as a singer, dancer, and conductor.

*****

Politics

*In Detroit, 19.5% of the African Americans voted Democratic. The percentage increased to 36.7% in 1932, 63.5% in 1936, and reached 69.3% in 1940.

*****

Sports

*At age 19, Josh Gibson joined the Pittsburgh Homestead Grays and began a successful 15-year career as a catcher for various professional black baseball teams. He would achieve a .423 lifetime batting average and be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

*****

Statistics

*****

Visual Arts

*Painter William H. Johnson won the Harmon gold medal for his expressionistic landscapes.

*****

The Americas

Cuba

*Omara Portuondo Peláez, a singer and dancer whose career spanned over half a century was born in Havana, Cuba (October 29). She was one of the original members of the Cuarteto d'Aida, and performed with Ignacio Pineiro, Orquesta Anacaona, Orquesta Aragon, Nat King Cole, Adalberto Alvarez, Los Van Van, the Buena Vista ensemble, Pupy Pedroso, Chucho Valdes and Juan Formell.

Dominican Republic

*The President of the Dominican Republic Horacio Vasquez fled Santo Domingo as rebel forces led by General Rafael Trujillo, a person of African descent, toppled his government (February 26).

Jamaica

*****

*In Jamaica, Rastafarians hailed the new Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as the living God, the fulfillment of a prophecy by Marcus Garvey who was said to have declared, "Look to Africa, where a black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near." Members of the new sect withdrew from Jamaican society, called white religion a rejection of black culture, insisted that blacks leave "Babylon" (the Western world) and return to Africa, and contributed to Jamaican culture (notably to the island's reggae music) but Rasta extremists would traffic in ganja (marijuana) and engage in acts of violence.

*Una M. Marson had a first collection of poetry, Tropic Reveries, published. Subsequent collections appeared in 1931, 1937, and 1945.

Saint Lucia

*Derek Walcott, the 1992 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Saint Lucia (January 23).

Derek Alton Walcott, (b. 23 January 1930) is a Saint Lucian-Trinidadian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to having won the Nobel Prize, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets.^[5]

*****

Europe

Germany

*In 1930, there were between 20,000 and 25,000 people of African descent in Germany. Most prominent amongst the German people of African descent were the so-called "Rhineland Bastards".

"Rhineland Bastard" (German: Rheinlandbastard) was a derogatory term used in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany to describe Afro-German children, who were fathered by Africans serving as French colonial troops occupying the Rhineland after World War I. Under Nazism's racial theories, these children were considered inferior to Aryans and consigned to compulsory sterilization.

The term "Rhineland Bastard" can be traced back to 1919, just after World War I, when Entente troops, most of them French, occupied the Rhineland. A relatively high number of German women married soldiers from the occupying forces, while many others had children by them out of wedlock (hence the disparaging label "bastards"). The resulting children numbered from 16,000 to 18,000. The occupation itself had been regarded as a national disgrace by Germans across the political spectrum, and there was a widespread tendency to consider all forms of collaboration and fraternization with the occupiers as moral (if not legal) treason. The fact that it was carried out by what were viewed as "B-grade" troops (a notion that itself was drawn from colonial and racial stereotypes) increased the feelings of humiliation. In the Rhineland itself, local opinion of the troops was very different, and the soldiers were described as "courteous and often popular", possibly because French colonial soldiers harbored less ill-will towards Germans than war-weary French occupiers.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe." He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate." He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French, since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".

However, most of the small population of people of African descent in Germany at that time were children of German settlers and missionaries in the former German colonies in Africa and Melanesia, who had married local women or had children with them out of wedlock. With the loss of the German colonial empire after World War I, some of these colonists returned to Germany with their mixed-race families. While the black population of Germany at the time of the Third Reich was small at 20–25,000 in a population of over 65 million, the Nazis decided to take action against those in the Rhineland. They despised black culture, which they considered inferior, and even sought to prohibit "traditionally black" musical genres like jazz as being "corrupt negro music". No official laws were enacted against the black population, or against the children of mixed parentage, since they were the offspring of marriages and informal unions from before the Nuremberg laws of September 1935 which prohibited miscegenation. The law also deprived persons of mixed parentage their freedom to marry at all, or at least the spouse of their choice by banning future sexual relations and mixed marriages between Aryans and others. Instead, a group named "Commission Number 3" was created to resolve the problem of the "Rhineland Bastards" with the aim of preventing their further procreation in German society. Organized under Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, it was decided that the children would be sterilized under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.

The program began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all "Rhineland Bastards" under their jurisdiction. All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilized. This order applied only in the Rhineland. Other African-Germans or mixed race Germans were unaffected. According to Susan Samples, the Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilization and abortion program.

Africa

Nnamdi Azikiwe

*Nnamdi Azikiwe, the future President of Nigeria, graduated from Lincoln University, an historically black university located in Chester County, Pennsylvania in the United States.

Nnamdi Azikiwe (b. November 16, 1904, Zungeru, Nigeria — d. May 11, 1996, Enugu) was the first president of independent Nigeria (1963–66) and prominent nationalist figure.

Azikiwe attended various primary and secondary mission schools in Onitsha, Calabar, and Lagos. He arrived in the United States in 1925, where he attended several schools. Azikiwe earned multiple certificates and degrees, including bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and a second master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1934 he went to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where he founded a nationalist newspaper and was a mentor to Kwame Nkrumah (later the first president of Ghana) before returning to Nigeria in 1937. There he founded and edited newspapers and also became directly involved in politics, first with the Nigerian Youth Movement and later (1944) as a founder of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which became increasingly identified with the Igbo people of southern Nigeria after 1951. In 1948, with the backing of the NCNC, Azikiwe was elected to the Nigerian Legislative , and he later served as premier of the Eastern region (1954–59).

Azikiwe led the NCNC into the important 1959 federal elections, which preceded Nigerian independence. He was able to form a temporary government with the powerful Northern People’s Congress, but its deputy leader, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, took the key post of prime minister. Azikiwe received the largely honorary posts of president of the Senate, governor-general, and, finally, president.

In the conflict over Biafra (1967–70), Azikiwe first backed his fellow Igbo, traveling extensively in 1968 to win recognition of Biafra and help from other African countries. In 1969, however, realizing the hopelessness of the war, he threw his support to the federal government. After Olusegun Obasanjo turned the government over to civilian elections in 1979, Azikiwe ran unsuccessfully for president as the candidate of a newly formed Nigerian People’s Party (NPP). Prior to the 1983 elections, the NPP became part of an unofficial coalition of opposition parties known as the Progressive Parties Alliance (PPA). The coalition, which was tenuous at best, could not agree on one presidential candidate and decided to field two — Azikiwe, representing the NPP, and Obafemi Awolowo, representing the United Party of Nigeria (UPN). Awolowo, the leader of the UPN, was a political rival of Azikiwe, with whom he was often at odds. The coalition had largely deteriorated by the time of the election, and neither Azikiwe nor Awolowo won.

An important figure in the history of politics in Nigeria, Azikiwe had broad interests outside that realm. He served as chancellor of the University of Nigeria at Nsukka from 1961 to 1966, and he was the president of several sports organizations for football, boxing, and table tennis. Among his writings are Renascent Africa (1937) and an autobiography, My Odyssey (1970).

Central African Republic

*David Dacko, the first President of the Central African Republic, was born the village of Bouchia, near Mbaiki in the Lobaye region, which was then a part of the French Equatorial African territory of Moyen Congo (Middle Congo) (March 24).

David Dacko (b. March 24,1930 – d. November 20, 2003) was the first President of the Central African Republic from August 14, 1960 to January 1, 1966, and the third President from September 21,1979 to September 1, 1981. After his second removal from power in a coup d'etat led by General Andre Kolingba, he pursued an active career as an opposition politician and presidential candidate with many loyal supporters. Dacko was an important political figure in the country for over 50 years.

Democratic Republic of the Congo
(Belgian Congo)
(Zaire)

*Mobutu Sese Seko, a President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was born in Lisala, Belgian Congo (October 14).

Mobutu Sese Seko (aka Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, b. Joseph-Desiré Mobutu, October 14, 1930, Lisala, Belgian Congo – d. September 7, 1997, Rabat, Morocco), the military dictator and President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which Mobutu renamed Zaire in 1971) from 1965 to 1997, was born in Lisala, Belgian Congo. He also served as Chairperson of the Organization of African Unity from 1967–1968.

Once in power, Mobutu formed an authoritarian regime, amassed vast personal wealth, and attempted to purge the country of all colonial cultural influence, while enjoying considerable support from the United States due to his anti-communist stance.

During the Congo Crisis (1960-65), Belgian forces aided Mobutu in a coup against the nationalist government of Patrice Lumumba in 1960 to take control of the government. Lumumba was the first leader in the country to be democratically elected, but he was subsequently deposed in a coup d’état organized by Colonel Mobutu and executed by a Katangese firing squad led by Julien Gat, a Belgian mercenary. Mobutu then assumed the role of army chief of staff, before taking power directly in a second coup in 1965. As part of his program of "national authenticity," Mobutu changed the Congo's name to Zaire in 1971 and his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko in 1972.

Mobutu established a single-party state in which all power was concentrated in his hands. He also became the object of a pervasive cult of personality. During his reign, Mobutu built a highly centralized state and amassed a large personal fortune through economic exploitation and corruption, leading some to call his rule a "kleptocracy". The nation suffered from uncontrolled inflation, a large debt, and massive currency devaluations. By 1991, economic deterioration and unrest led him to agree to share power with opposition leaders, but he used the army to thwart change until May 1997, when rebel forces led by Laurent Kabila expelled him from the country. Already suffering from advanced prostate cancer, he died three months later in Morocco.

Mobutu became notorious for corruption, nepotism, and the embezzlement of between $4 billion and $15 billion (United States Dollars) during his reign, as well as extravagances such as Concorde-flown shopping trips to Paris. Mobutu presided over the country for over three decades, a period of widespread human rights violations. He has been described as the "archetypal African dictator."

Ethiopia

In early 1930, Gugsa Welle, the husband of the empress Zewditu and the Shum (Governor) of Begemder Province, raised an army and marched it from his governorate at Gondar towards Addis Adaba. On March 31, 1930, Gugsa Welle was met by forces loyal to Negus Tafari (the future Haile Selassie) and was defeated at the Battle of Anchem. Gugsa Welle was killed in action. News of Gugsa Welle's defeat and death had hardly spread through Addis Ababa when the empress died suddenly on April 2, 1930. Although it was long rumored that the empress was poisoned upon the defeat of her husband, or alternately that she died from shock upon hearing of the death of her estranged yet beloved husband, it has since been documented that the Empress succumbed to a flu-like fever and complications from diabetes.

With the passing of Zewditu, Tafari himself rose to emperor and was proclaimed Neguse Negest ze-'Ityopp'ya, "King of Kings of Ethiopia". He was crowned on November 2, 1930, at Addis Adaba's Cathedral of Saint George. The coronation was attended by royals and dignitaries from all over the world. Among those in attendance were George V's son the Duke of Gloucester, Marshal Franchet d'Esperey of France, and the Prince of Udine representing the King of Italy. Emissaries from the United States, Egypt, Turkey, Sweden, Belgium, and Japan were also present. British author Evelyn Waugh was also present, penning a contemporary report on the event, and American travel lecturer Burton Holmes shot the only known film footage of the event. One newspaper report suggested that the celebration may have incurred a cost in excess of $3,000,000. Many of those in attendance received lavish gifts. In one instance, the Christian emperor even sent a gold-encased Bible to an American bishop who had not attended the coronation, but who had dedicated a prayer to the emperor on the day of the coronation.

*On March 31, 1930, Gugsa Welle, the husband of the empress Zewditu and the Shum (Governor) of Begemder Province, was met by forces loyal to Negus Tafari (the future Haile Selassie) and was defeated at the Battle of Anchem. Gugsa Welle was killed in action.

*Zewditu (also spelled Zawditu or Zauditu; April 29, 1876 – April 2, 1930), the Empress of Ethiopia from 1916 to 1930, died.

The first female head of an internationally recognized state in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the first Empress regnant of the Ethiopian Empire perhaps since the legendary Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, her reign was noted for the reforms of her Regent and designated heir Ras Tafari Makonnen (who succeeded her as Emperor Haile Selassie I), about which she was at best ambivalent and often stridently opposed, due to her staunch conservatism and strong religious devotion.

*Ras Tafari, who took the name Haile Selassie when he was proclaimed Negus (King) two years ago, was crowned King of Kings at Addis Adaba (November 2). He would reign until 1974 and be regarded by Jamaican Rastafarians as the living God. He was seen as fulfilling a prophecy of Marcus Garvey, "Look to Africa, where a black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near."

On November 2, 1930, after the death of Empress Zewditu (on April 2), Ras Tafari was crowned Negusa Nagast, literally King of Kings, rendered in English as "Emperor". Upon his ascension, he took as his regnal name Haile Selassie I. Haile means in Ge'ez "Power of" and Selassie means trinity — therefore, Haile Selassie roughly translates to "Power of the Trinity". Haile Selassie's full title in office was "By the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings of Ethiopia, Elect of God". This title reflects Ethiopian dynastic traditions, which hold that all monarchs must trace their lineage to Menelik I, who in the Ethiopian tradition was the offspring of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Haile Selassie I, original name Tafari Makonnen (b. July 23, 1892, near Harer, Abyssinia (Ethiopia).— d. August 27, 1975, Addis Adaba, Ethiopia), was the emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974 who sought to modernize his country and who steered it into the mainstream of post-World War II African politics. He brought Ethiopia into the League of Nations and the United Nations and made Addis Ababa the major center for the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union).

Tafari was a great-grandson of Sahle Selassie of Shewa (Shoa) and a son of Ras (Prince) Makonnen, a chief adviser to Emperor Menelik II. Educated at home by French missionaries, Tafari at an early age favorably impressed the emperor with his intellectual abilities and was promoted accordingly. As governor of Sidamo and then of Harer province, he followed progressive policies, seeking to break the feudal power of the local nobility by increasing the authority of the central government — for example, by developing a salaried civil service. He thereby came to represent politically progressive elements of the population. In 1911 he married Wayzaro Menen, a great-granddaughter of Menelik II.

When Menelik II died in 1913, his grandson Lij Yasu succeeded to the throne, but the latter’s unreliability and his close association with Islam made him unpopular with the majority Christian population of Ethiopia. Tafari became the rallying point of the Christian resistance, and he deposed Lij Yasu in 1916. Zewditu (Zauditu), Menelik II’s daughter, thereupon became empress in 1917, and Ras Tafari was named regent and heir apparent to the throne.

While Zewditu was conservative in outlook, Ras Tafari was progressive and became the focus of the aspirations of the modernist younger generation. In 1923, he had a conspicuous success in the admission of Ethiopia to the League of Nations. In the following year, he visited Rome, Paris, and London, becoming the first Ethiopian ruler ever to go abroad. In 1928 he assumed the title of negus (“king”), and two years later, when Zewditu died, he was crowned emperor (November 2, 1930) and took the name of Haile Selassie (“Might of the Trinity”). In 1931 he promulgated a new constitution, which defined the limits of the Parliament. From the late 1920s on, Haile Selassie in effect was the Ethiopian government, and, by establishing provincial schools, strengthening the police forces, and progressively outlawing feudal taxation, he sought to both help his people and increase the authority of the central government.

When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Haile Selassie led the resistance, but in May 1936 he was forced into exile. He appealed for help from the League of Nations in a memorable speech that he delivered to that body in Geneva on June 30, 1936. With the advent of World War II, he secured British assistance in forming an army of Ethiopian exiles in the Sudan. British and Ethiopian forces invaded Ethiopia in January 1941 and recaptured Addis Ababa several months later. Although he was reinstated as emperor, Haile Selassie had to recreate the authority he had previously exercised. He again implemented social, economic, and educational reforms in an attempt to modernize Ethiopian government and society on a slow and gradual basis.

The Ethiopian government continued to be largely the expression of Haile Selassie’s personal authority. In 1955 he granted a new constitution giving him as much power as the previous one. Overt opposition to his rule surfaced in December 1960, when a dissident wing of the army secured control of Addis Ababa and was dislodged only after a sharp engagement with loyalist element.

Haile Selassie played a very important role in the establishment of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. His rule in Ethiopia continued until 1974, at which time famine, worsening unemployment, and the political stagnation of his government prompted segments of the army to mutiny. They deposed Haile Selassie and established a provisional military government that espoused Marxist ideologies. Haile Selassie was kept under house arrest in his own palace, where he spent the remainder of his life.

Haile Selassie was regarded as the messiah of the African race by the Rastafarian movement.

*Italy built a fort at the Welwel oasis (also Walwal, Italian: Ual-Ual) in the Ogaden and garrisoned it with Somali Ascari (dubats) (irregular frontier troops commanded by Italian officers).

The Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928 stated that the border between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia was twenty-one leagues parallel to the Benadir coast (approximately 118.3 kilometres [73.5 miles]). The fort at Welwel was well beyond the twenty-one league limit and the Italians were encroaching on Ethiopian territory.

*****

Liberia

*A United States and League of Nations commission reported that Liberia still had slavery (March 8).

*****

Nigeria

*Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian novelist whose first novel, Things Fall Apart, became the most widely read book in modern African literature, was born in Ogidi, Nigeria Protectorate (November 16).

Chinua Achebe (b. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, November 16, 1930, Ogidi, Nigeria Protectorate – d. March 21, 2013, Boston, Massachusetts) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) was considered his magnum opus, and is the most widely read book in modern African literature.

Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in South-Eastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature. In 1975, his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" featured a famous criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist". It was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy.

When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe became a supporter of Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new nation. The war ravaged the populace, and as starvation and violence took its toll, he appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but soon resigned due to frustration over the corruption and elitism he witnessed. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s, and returned to the United States in 1990 after a car accident left him partially disabled.

A titled Igbo chieftain himself, Achebe's novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of Western and traditional African values during and after the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. He also published a number of short stories, children's books, and essay collections. From 2009 until his death, he served as David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in the United States.

*Adebayo Adedeji (b. Ijebu-Ode, December 21, 1930), a Nigerian politician who was an Executive Secretary to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa from 1975 to 1978, and the United Nations Under-Secretary-General from 1978 until 1991, was born. He became the founding Executive Director of the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies (ACDESS) in 1991.

*Bola Ige (b. James Ajibola Idowu Ige, September 13, 1930 – d. December 23, 2001), a Nigerian lawyer and politician, was born in Zaria, Kaduna. He became Federal Minister of Justice for Nigeria. He was murdered in December 2001.

*Nnamdi Azikiwe, the future President of Nigeria, graduated from Lincoln University, an historically black university located in Chester County, Pennsylvania in the United States.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, (b. November 16, 1904, Zungeru, Nigeria — d. May 11, 1996, Enugu), first president of independent Nigeria (1963–66) and prominent nationalist figure.

South Africa

*South Africa's white women received the vote (May 19). However, blacks of both sexes remained disenfranchised.

The Women's Enfranchisement Act, 1930, was an act of the Parliament of South Africa which granted white women aged 21 and older the right to vote and to run for office. It also had the effect of diluting the limited voting power of non-white people (in the Cape Province) by effectively doubling the number of white voters. It was enacted by the National Party government of Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog.

The first general election at which women could vote was the election of May 17, 1933. At that election Leila Reitz (wife of Deneys Reitz) was elected as the first female Member of Parliament, representing Parktown for the South African Party.

The act enfranchised all white women, while certain property qualifications still applied to men. In June 1931 the Franchise Laws Amendment Act, 1931 enfranchised all white men while retaining the property qualifications for non-white voters, thus further diluting the non-white vote. The delimitation of electoral divisions was still based on the white male population until April 1937, when the Electoral Quota Act, 1937 altered it to be based on the whole white population.

The Women's Enfranchisement Act was repealed in 1946 when the franchise laws were consolidated into the Electoral Consolidation Act, 1946.

*An African National Congress executive resigned in protest against President Josiah Gumede's close ties with communists (January).

In 1928, the Communisty Party departed from its fruitless efforts to promote solidarity between black and white workers. Instead, it chose to concentrate on the concept of black liberation and the formation of a 'black republic.' This followed a successful campaign to expand its African membership. But although the party was predominantly black by 1929, few of their recruits -- many of whom were young and ill-educated -- were well versed in doctrine. Indeed, Eddie Roux, a prominent member of the party at that time, wrote: "It began to seem that the Party might be swamped by members who had little knowledge of Marxist principles and theory."

However, in a move aimed at preserving the "purity" of their doctrine. Moscow suggested that the party should remain a small and select body of trained revolutionaries who could give a clear lead to the masses on all questions.

The idea of a popular front for black liberation led to the establishment of the African League of Rights (ALR) in 1929. Drawing on the memberships of existing black political and labor organizations, the league succeeded in persuading ANC president Josiah Gumede to become its first president. It was a major coup for the communists -- especially when the new movement seemed set to grab the imagination of Africans -- in particular those who had been left without a political home after the virtual collapse of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU).

League activities began on a high note -- with the launch of a major anti-discrimination petition aimed at taking a million signatures to parliament. But just as the campaign began to get off the ground, Moscow did an about-turn: convinced that the capitalist system was about to collapse -- as a result of the Great Depression -- Communist Parties everywhere were ordered to terminate alliances with non-Marxist organizations. A telegram ordered the immediate dissolution of the ALR.

As petitions rolled in, they were thrown into the wastepaper basket.

The existence of the ALR, however, was viewed with consternation by a section of the ANC's membership. Amid fears that it would undermine the ANC's claims to the leadership of the African nationalist movement, and also dissatisfaction by the ANC's conservative faction over Gumede's continued romance with the communists, the ANC executive resigned in January 1930 in protest at Gumede's role as president of the ALR.

*Pixley Seme replaced Josiah Gumede as President of the African National Congress (April).

Josiah Gumede was challenged for the leadership of the African National Congress by Pixley Seme and, at a conference in April, the inevitable showdown came. Gumede - backed by the Transvaal communists, George Champion of the ICU yase Natal, and Bransby Ndobe and Elliot Tonjeni of the western Cape branch of the ANC -- reaffirmed his support for the communists, adding that the ANC's demands were too mild and that its appeals for justice to Britain were in vain.

Pixley Seme, on the other hand, cautioned against "the humbug of communism." He and his supporters felt that only the ANC should be permitted to articulate African political demands, and that equality of opportunity and participation in the system was what they sought. Their weapons were persuasion, moral force and consultation. They were not prepared to go over to mass confrontation. Seme won by 39 votes to 14.

*African National Congress "radicals" in the Western Cape formed an independent African National Congress (December).

The victory of the ANC "moderates" with the election of Pixley Seme as president led within eight months to the expulsion of Bransby Ndobe and Elliot Tonjeni and the formation in the Western Cape of the Independent African National Congress to continue the spirited, although losing battle against Boland farmers and police who regularly harassed their organizers and members.

*Communist leader Johannes Nkosi was killed during a protest in Durban (December 16-17).

During 1930, together with what remained of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), the Communist Party began to canvass support for a new Pass-burning campaign scheduled to begin in the main centers on December 16, 1930 -- a day on which Afrikaners commemorated their victory over Dingane, but which had also become a regular occasion for black political activities.

In Bloemfontein, hundreds of Africans joined the party and pledged their support. At a conference in Johannesburg. the ANC, the local ICU and other unions all endorsed the Pass-burning campaign and called for strikes. In Durban, the young African communist Johannes Nkosi, helped by the ICU yase Natal, was drumming up widespread support.

On December 7, 1930, in Bloemfontein, Kadalie, in a controversial return to the public spotlight, warned ICU followers not to take part in the Pass-burning.

The campaign in Natal was poorly supported, with only Durban giving any real backing. However, despite this, police and white vigilantes moved in on a protest meeting at Cartwright's Flats, and in the ensuing fracas Johannes Nkosi and three others were killed.

*****

Zambia

*Daniel Muchiwa Lisulo, the Prime Minister of Zambia from June 1978 until February 1981, was born in Mongu, Zambia (December 6).

Born in Mongu, Zambia, Daniel Muchiwa Lisulo (b. December 6, 1930, Mongu, Zambia - d. August 21, 2000, Johannesburg, South Africa) married Mary Mambo in 1967. She died in 1976, leaving Lisulo with two daughters. Lisulo served as the director of the Bank of Zambia from 1964 to 1977 before becoming Prime Minister. He was a member of Parliament from 1977 to 1983. After this, he went into private law practice. He died in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Pan-African Chronology IV

Monday, December 14, 2015

1930 Pan-African Chronology

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