#black women in history
Essence Magazine : PBS Documentary On Revolutionary Playwright Lorraine Hansberry To Premiere In January 2018 Dec, 04, 2017 The highly-anticipated PBS documentary on famed playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry is officially on the way. After releasing the trailer for the documentary, Sigthed Eyes/Feeling Heart, in September 2017, PBS announced on Monday that viewers can expect to see the project air in full on January 19, 2018. As part of the network’s American Master’s “Inspiring Woman” campaign, the program will chronicle the little-known story of Hansberry’s upbringing and delve deeper into several significant moments before, during and after her journey to becoming the first Black woman to create a play that was performed on Broadway. Narrarated by talented actress LaTanya Richardson-Jackson, the documentary will feature rare interviews with some of the most revered Black entertainers of our time, including Ruby Dee, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Louis Gossett Jr. Award-winning actress Anika Noni Rose will be heard as the voice of Hansberry throughout the program. In addition to the many history-making accolades she received as the mastermind playwright behind A Raisin in the Sun , Hansberry was also known as a feminist and outspoken civil rights advocate who never hesitated to incorporate her activism into her art. A close friend of iconic songstress and a fellow activist Nina Simone, Hansberry was also the inspiration behind Simone’s infamous song, “To Be Young, Gifted And Black,” which Simone released as a tribute to Hansberry following her death from pancreatic cancer in 1965 at just 34 years old. American Masters – Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart premieres nationwide on Friday, January 19 at 9 p.m. on PBS. https://www.essence.com/entertainment/lorraine-hansberry-documentary-pbs-air-date GIVKV PNVHICIHCHCIG OVOVOHVOHVOHCOH
Valaida Snow was detained in a Nazi Concentration Camp For 2 Years. Snow was the top female trumpet player in the U.S. and Europe, she was on top of the world until the Nazi’s captured her after a performance in Germany.
According to Louis Armstrong: “Valaida Snow is the world’s second best jazz trumpet player, besides me.”
After her release, she was never the same and sunk into oblivion. It’s rumored that she got on drugs to ease the traumatic pain before her death.
The fate of black people from 1933 to 1945 in Nazi Germany and in German-occupied territories ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality, and murder. However, there was no systematic program for their elimination as there was for Jews and other groups.
After World War I, the Allies stripped Germany of its African colonies. The German military stationed in Africa (Schutztruppen), as well as missionaries, colonial bureaucrats, and settlers, returned to Germany and took with them their racist attitudes. Separation of whites and blacks was mandated by the Reichstag (German parliament), which enacted a law against mixed marriages in the African colonies.
Following World War I and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the victorious Allies occupied the Rhineland in western Germany. The use of French colonial troops, some of whom were black, in these occupation forces exacerbated anti-black racism in Germany. Racist propaganda against black soldiers depicted them as rapists of German women and carriers of venereal and other diseases. The children of black soldiers and German women were called “Rhineland Bastards.”
The Nazis, at the time a small political movement, viewed them as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler charged that “the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardization.”
African German mulatto children were marginalized in German society, isolated socially and economically, and not allowed to attend university. Racial discrimination prohibited them from seeking most jobs, including service in the military. With the Nazi rise to power they became a target of racial and population policy. By 1937, the Gestapo (German secret state police) had secretly rounded up and forcibly sterilized many of them. Some were subjected to medical experiments; others mysteriously “disappeared.”
The racist nature of Adolf Hitler’s regime was disguised briefly during the Olympic Games in Berlin in August 1936, when Hitler allowed 18 African American athletes to compete for the U.S. team. However, permission to compete was granted by the International Olympic Committee and not by the host country.
Adult African Germans were also victims. Both before and after World War I, many Africans came to Germany as students, artisans, entertainers, former soldiers, or low-level colonial officials, such as tax collectors, who had worked for the imperial colonial government.
Some African Americans, caught in German-occupied Europe during World War II, also became victims of the Nazi regime. Many, like female jazz artist Valaida Snow, were imprisoned in Axis internment camps for alien nationals. The artist Josef Nassy, living in Belgium, was arrested as an enemy alien and held for seven months in the Beverloo transit camp in German-occupied Belgium. He was later transferred to Germany, where he spent the rest of the war in the Laufen internment camp and its subcamp, Tittmoning, both in Upper Bavaria.
European and American blacks were also interned in the Nazi concentration camp system.
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Sister Rosetta Tharpe []. Godmother of Rock and Roll. A small Zine. Shredding since 1938. Happy Black History month! Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, Johnny Cash, among others have this woman to look up to.
