1930 The United States

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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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Civil Rights

*National Guardsmen in Huntsville, Alabama, attacked a crowd around the Madison County jail with tear gas bombs (September 29). The mob was trying to storm the jail where an African-American man was being held in connection with the murder of a businessman.

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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 U.S. Senate rejected President Hoover's Supreme Court Justice nominee John J. Parker by a vote of 41–39 (May 7).  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.

*****

*Pat Hare, a blues guitarist and singer, was born in Cherry Valley, Arkansas (December 20).

Auburn "Pat" Hare (b. December 20, 1930, Cherry Valley, Arkansas - d. September 26, 1980, St. Paul, Minnesota), was a Memphis electric blues guitarist and singer.  His heavily distorted, power chord-driven electric guitar music in the early 1950s is considered an important precursor to heavy metal music.  His guitar work with Little Junior's Blue Flames had a major influence on the rockabilly style, while his guitar playing on blues records by artists such as Muddy Waters was influential among 1960s British Invasion blues rock bands such as The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds. 

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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.

*****

*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.  

*****

*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).

*****

*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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*Eddie Locke (August 2, 1930 – September 7, 2009, Ramsey, New Jersey), a jazz drummer who became a member of the Coleman Hawkins Quartet in the 1960s, was born.

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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.

*****

*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. 

*****

*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.

*****

*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. 

*****

*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. 

*****

*Mel Triplett, a star running back for the New York Giants, was born in Indianola, Mississippi (December 24).

Melvin C. Triplett (b. December 24, 1930, Indianola, Mississippi – d. July 26, 2002, Toledo, Ohio) was a football running back in the National Football League who played for six seasons with the New York Giants.  He played high school football at Girard High School in Girard, Ohio. He graduated from Girard in 1951 and was inducted into the Girard Hall of Fame in 1997. He played college football at the University of Toledo and was drafted by the Giants in the 1955 National Football League Draft, where he played for six seasons. He scored the opening touchdown against the Chicago Bears in the 1956 championship game, won by the Giantes 47-7. He was named New York's outstanding offensive player in the game. He left the Giants for the Minnesota Vikings, where he played in 1961 and 1962. Including both teams, he totaled 2,857 yards and 14 touchdowns in his NFL career.

Among the fans of Mel Triplett during his days on the New York Giants was a young basketball player in New York named Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  Abdul-Jabbar says in his 1983 memoir Giant Steps that it was largely Triplett's wearing of uniform #33 that made Abdul-Jabbar adopt #33 as well, a number Abdul-Jabbar made famous in another sport.

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Notable Deaths

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

*Walter Cohen, a Republican politician and businessman, died in New Orleans, Louisiana (December 29).

Walter L. Cohen, Sr. (b. January 22, 1860, New Orleans, Louisiana – d. December 29, 1930, New Orleans, Louisiana) was an African-American Republican politician and businessman in the United States State of Louisiana.  

The New Orleans native was the son of Bernard Cohen and the former Amelia Bingaman. Like his better-known compatriot Homer Adolph Plessy, Cohen was a free black prior to passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.   A Catholic, Cohen noted that he was part of the most-hated ethnic group and most-hated religious group by the resurging Ku Klux Klan.  

Educated in New Orleans, Cohen was married to the former Antonia Manadé, and the couple had three children: Walter Cohen, Jr., Bernard J. Cohen, and Margot C. Farrell.

Cohen's political activity mushroomed in the 1890s, after the Reconstruction era, when he became one of the few blacks to hold appointed office into the 20th century. United States President William McKinley named Cohen a customs inspector in New Orleans. McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, appointed him register of the federal land office. (Louisiana at the time elected a register of state lands, among them the first woman in statewide elected office in the 20th century, Lucille May Grace.)

Even when the African-American-dominated Black and Tan faction lost power after 1912 to the Lily-White Movement within the Republican Party, Cohen obtained the position of comptroller of customs by appointment from President Warren G. Harding. He succeeded A.W. Newlin as comptroller of customs.  The New York Times referred to the office as "one of the most lucrative federal offices" in the United States South.  Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, renewed Cohen's appointment.  Though he had been a delegate to all Republican National Conventions between 1896 and 1924, Cohen was later ousted as secretary of the Louisiana State Republican Central Committee and instead headed a dissenting group. In 1928, Cohen favored United States Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas for the Republican presidential nomination, but the party selection went nearly unanimously to Herbert Hoover, the outgoing secretary of commerce.  Curtis then became the Republican vice presidential nominee. In 1928, Coolidge offered Cohen the position of minister to Liberia, but he declined the offer.

A successful businessman, Cohen was the founder and president of the People's Life Insurance Company in New Orleans, a large industrial company whose clients were African Americans. Cohen was a member of Corpus Christi Catholic Church in New Orleans. He died in New Orleans and is interred there at St. Louis Cemetery III.

Cohen's death came some six years before African American voters began a longstanding shift in allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party with the re-election in 1936 of Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

*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.

*A mob in Sherman, Texas, burned down a courthouse during the trial of George Hughes, an African-American man who was accused of assaulting his boss' wife, a white woman (May 9). The mob attacked the courthouse vault, retrieved the dead body of Hughes, dragged it behind an automobile and hanged it from a tree. National Guard troops were sent to Sherman to restore order as the mob looted stores in the African American business district.

*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.

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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.

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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.

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Social Organizations

*The National Pan-Hellenic Council was formed on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D. C. (May 10).

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.

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Statistics

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Visual Arts

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