Billie Holiday

On August 24, 1955, Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. He reportedly flirted with a white cashier women at a grocery store. Four days later, two white men kidnapped Till, beat him and shot him in the head. With the current events in the media today regarding racial profiling and police brutality it is only fit to choose, A Wreath for Emmett Till, by Marilyn Nelson’s. On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an African American man, was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri after…

Abolitionism emerged in United Stated through different figures and characters, one of them would be the highly influential speaker Frederick Douglass who in an open letter in 1852 refers to the 4th of July as the celebration of the United States biggest sin. He gives a reflection of the cruelty exercised over Black communities, and how people have been decided to leave behind or just ignored the pain. He calls “AMERICA SLAVERY” (9) as a protest for all the injustice that happens, and the fact…

I don’t know much about Malcolm X, but I was given little of his past childhood, some of his criminal life, his change from prison, and his assassination. His past is a hard time before his death. His childhood last name was Malcolm Little before he changed his last name to Malcolm X. He is a Negro, but his skin is light because his mother has a light skin, but was rape by a white man that cause his skin. His father was a preacher and either anyone knows or not, but during Malcolm age of 6 or 7,…

adopting the name the Harlem Renaissance. During this period there was an outburst of creative activity from African Americans that occurred throughout the different fields of art. Many African Americans such as Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, and Zora Neale Hurston, to name a few, had an impact on modern day arts during the Harlem Renaissance. William H. Johnson was one artist that made an impact during the Harlem Renaissance. He was a painter born March 18, 1901 in Florence,…

name out among other musicians and record companies. This way of advertisement proved to be quite successful for Sonny, as he received many requests to be a sideman by several musicians. Sonny performed with jazz legends such as John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and Donald Byrd to name a few. The title of sideman did not stick around for long and soon Clark became the leader. As the leader Sonny recorded a total of nine albums for Blue Note Records that were a combination of minor blues and hard…

There was not a single piece of leather furniture that lacked an intricate map I had scratched into it with my grubby four-year-old fingernails. Every wall and flat surface had Sharpie murals of vast cotton candy skies and family trees made of dogs as soon as I discovered how to hold a pen. My parents never tried to stifle my creativity. They urged me to pursue artistry and offered every tool conceivable to develop my creative skills. Growing up hearing my father jam out on guitar and watching…

Introduction Since the advent of racialized slavery, music has been a safe haven of sorts for Black Americans. In the beginning, in times of slavery, music was used, among other methods, as a means of communication between slaves. As music evolved, it remained an important aspect of black culture in America, from gospel music in black churches, to jazz and other more modern musical styles throughout the early and mid 1900s, and finally to the birth of rap and hip-hop music in the post-Civil…

in the Jazz Age. African Americans became very prideful of the heritage and race in the twenties because of Renaissance happening in Harlem, NY.15 African Americans of Harlem were producing incredible amounts of jazz music, art, and literature. Billie Holiday was one of the great Harlem Musicians of the Jazz Age, and Zora Neale Hurston was one of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The youth, women, and African Americans flourished in the 1920s and had a great impact on…

Since its existence, the American dream has turned out to be not for everyone. An individual's race and background play a vital role in economic and social class mobility. This comes from the routine cycle of oppression that has strived to remove the stripped the joys of life from people of color. The societal hatred towards certain ethnicities is so evident in America, that the wounds from America's slavery days are still fresh. This hate towards those of color has been passed down from family…

endeavors into amusing troops, particularly in the US. Jazz, huge band, and swing were still strongly prominent with specialists, for example, Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Count Basie, Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters, Dorsey Brothers, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, and Ella Fitzgerald making…