Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. She was born in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, the sixth of eight children in a poor family. She began playing piano at the age of three or four and performed at her local church. She performed at her first concert recital when she was twelve years old. Her music teacher helped Simone by setting up a fund to help pay for her education, and she was able to attend the Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina. After she graduated from high school as class valedictorian, her family moved to Philadelphia because she planned to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Simone spent some time studying at Juilliard in New York City before applying to the Curtis Institute, but her hopes for an education in the arts were dashed when that estimable music school rejected her application. She found work as a photographer''s assistant and taught piano from her home to help fund private piano lessons with one of the professors from the Curtis Institute, and also began playing at nightclubs to help to further defray expenses.
Word soon spread about Simone''s talent, and she developed a fan base. She scored a hit in 1958 with her rendition of "I Loves You, Porgy" from the musical Porgy and Bess. She then recorded her debut album Little Girl Blue in 1959. Following its success, she recorded a number of records over the next few years and began playing in clubs in New York City''s Greenwich Village. Eventually, Nina Simone played her music all over the world. In 1964, she began recording and performing protest songs to address racial inequality. She also spoke and performed at civil rights protests and marches throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1993, Simone settled in southern France, where she died in 2003.
As she said, "There''s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were." "You''ve got to learn to leave the table when love''s no longer being served." --Nina Simone, civil rights activist as well as famed American singer, songwriter, musician, and arranger who could play anything by ear. After the Alabama church bombing in 1963, she realized she could use her music to protest in a way that couldn''t go unseen or unheard. *** Although Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in Berkeley, California, she was raised in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received a BA in 1999, followed in 2000 by an MA in media studies, both from Stanford University. Soon after she received an MFA in creative writing in 2005 from the University of Michigan, she and her family had their home in DeLisle severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina. While working at the University of New Orleans, Ward had to commute daily through neighborhoods that had been destroyed by the hurricane.
Continually reminded of the tragedy, she was unable to write creatively for three years; in 2008, just when she was about to give up on writing and enroll in a nursing program, her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds , was accepted for publication. It was quickly recognized as significant, and in 2009, it received a Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) Honor Award. Both her fiction and nonfiction are largely centered around the experience and struggles of Black individuals living in the rural Gulf Coast. Her two later novels, Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), both won National Book awards for fiction. Between the publication of these two fiction works, her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. Other recognition followed, including a MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize, among other accolades. Ward also edited The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (2016), a modern analysis that carries into the present the concerns and observations of James Baldwin''s classic 1993 examination of racism in America. Ward is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
*** Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an African American journalist and advocate of women''s rights, including the right to vote. Though she was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, only six months later the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves. Even though they were legally free citizens, her family faced racial prejudice and discrimination while living in Mississippi. Her father helped start Shaw University, and Ida received schooling there, but when she was sixteen, her parents and one of her siblings died of yellow fever. This meant that as the eldest, Ida had to stop going to school and start taking care of her eight sisters and brothers. Since the family desperately needed money, Ida ingeniously convinced a county school official that she was eighteen and managed to obtain a job as a teacher. In 1882, she moved to her aunt''s in Nashville, living there with several siblings, and at last was able to continue her education at Fisk University. A direct experience of prejudice in 1884 electrifyingly catalyzed Wells''s sense of the need to advocate for justice.
While traveling from Memphis to Nashville, she bought a first-class train ticket, but was outraged when the crew told her to move to the car for African Americans. Refusing, Wells was forced off the train bodily; rather than giving in and giving up, she sued the railroad in circuit court and gained a judgment forcing them to pay her $500. Sadly, the state Supreme Court later overturned the decision; but this experience motivated her to write about Southern racial politics and prejudice. Various Black publications published her articles, written under the nom-de-plume "Iola." Wells later became an owner of two papers, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and Free Speech . Besides her journalistic and publishing work, she also worked as a teacher at one of Memphis''s Black-only public schools. She became a vocal critic of the condition of these segregated schools. This advocacy caused her to be fired from her job in 1891.
The next year, three African Americans who were partners in owning a store clashed with the white owner of a store nearby who felt they were competing too successfully for local business; when the white store owner showed up with several allies and attacked their store, the Black store owners ended up shooting several white men while defending their business. The three Black men were taken to jail, but never had their day in court--a lynch mob dragged them out and murdered all three men. Moved to action by this horrible tragedy, Wells started writing about the lynchings of a friend and others and went on to do in-depth investigative reporting of lynching in America, risking her life to do so. While away in New York, Wells was told that her office had been trashed by a mob, and that if she ever came back to Memphis, she would be killed. She remained in the North and published an in-depth article on lynching for the New York Age , a paper owned by a former slave; she then toured abroad, lecturing on the issue in the hope of enlisting the support of pro-reform whites. When she found out that Black exhibitors were banned at the 1893 World''s Columbian Exposition, she published a pamphlet with the support and backing of famed freed slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, as well as "A Red Record," a personal report on lynchings in America. In 1896, Wells founded the National Association of Colored Women; and in 1898, she took her anti-lynching campaign to the White House and led a protest in Washington, DC, to urge President McKinley to act. She was a founding member of the NAACP, but later cut ties with the organization, feeling that it wasn''t sufficiently focused on taking action.
Wells also worked on behalf of all women and was a part of the National Equal Rights League; she continuously fought for women''s suffrage. She even ran for the state senate in 1930, but her health failed the next year, and she died of kidney disease at the age of sixty-eight. Well''s life is a testament to courage in the face of danger. "I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit."--Ida B. Wells *** Lauren Anderson (born 1965) was a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet.
Having been told as a young adult that her body was too muscular for ballet and that she would be better suited to musical theater, Anderson adopted a meatless diet to slim down and began taking Pilates classes to lengthen her muscles. Her sacrifices paid off. It was a historic milestone in American ballet when she emerged as the first Black principal dancer for a major company in 1990. She was also one of the few Black ballerinas ever to take the helm of a major ballet company anywhere in the world. Her ballet roles included Don Quixote , Cleopatra , and The Nutcracker . After retiring from the Houston Ballet in 2006, she retired completely from the dance industry in 2009. Anderson revealed that she had been an alcoholic until July 2009. After being pulled over for speeding, she soon found herself in county jail.
Anderson was given a wake-up call by the judge after winding up in court. Since then, Anderson has been living sober and attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day, no matter where she is. In the spring of 2016, the Smithsonian''s National Museum of African American Histor.