Tag: historical

Black History Fun Fact Friday – Lucy Craft Laney

Welcome back to Black History Fun Fact Friday. Today, we learn about Lucy Craft Laney.

Lucy Craft Laney was a famous educator in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She opened her own school in 1883, which became known as Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia where she served as teacher and principle for 50 years.

Laney was born on April 13, 1854, one of ten children, to Louisa and David Laney. Laney was not enslaved as David Laney purchased his freedom twenty years before Laney’s birth and then purchased his wife’s freedom sometime after their marriage. Laney was taught to read by her mother at the early age of four. By 12 Laney could translate passages in Latin. She attended Lewis (later Ballard) High School in Macon, GA which was sponsored by the American Missionary Association.

Laney prepared to be a teacher at Atlanta University in 1889 (later Clark Atlanta University), graduating from the Normal Department (teacher’s training) in 1873.

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Sewing class at Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, Augusta, Georgia

Laney’s school started out small with just a handful of students. She began her school in 1883 in Augusta. Her school was chartered by the state three years later and named the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute. Originally, Laney intended to admit only girls, but several boys appeared and she could not turn them away. By the end of the second year, there were more than 200 Black students enrolled in Laney’s school.

Over the years, Laney made many improvements and additions to the school. In the 1890s, the school was one of the first to offer kindergarten classes for African-American children in the South. She also opened a training center so that black women could train as nurses. The school’s curriculum provided the students with traditional liberal arts courses as well as vocational programs, which was groundbreaking at the time, but that’s not all. Laney’s school also acted as a cultural center for the Black community, hosting lectures by nationally famous guests, and various social events.

Black History Fun Fact Friday – James Shober

 

James Shober was an African American doctor and the first Black doctor in North Carolina. James was born on August 23, 1853, in what is now Winston-Salem, North Carolina. James father Francis Edwin was a white businessman and politician who served in the North Carolina state legislature and the United States Congress. His mother was an 18-year-old enslaved woman named Betsy Ann.

Betsy was of mixed race who lived in Salem and passed away in 1859 when Shober was between six and seven-years-old. He was sent back to the Waugh Plantation near Waughtown, North Carolina, where his grandmother lived with other family relatives.

Educated at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, Shober then enrolled in the Howard University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. where he was one of the forty-eight graduates in 1878.

Image from State Library
Image from Library of State, James Shober

After graduation, he began practicing medicine in his home in Wilmington, then the state’s largest city. Shober was the only Black doctor in a city of more than 10,000. There were only a handful of licensed black doctors across the United States following the Civil War. Shober now joined those ranks in 1878 and became the first professionally trained Black physician in North Carolina.

On June 28, 1881, James married Anna Maria Taylor, an educator who taught at the Peabody School in Wilmington, and they became the parents of two daughters, Mary Louise and Emily Lillian. His daughters both graduated from Fisk University and pursued a number of professions. James Shober died young, at just 36 years-old on January 1, 1889.

Black Indie Readers: African American Historical Fiction is Important Too

Kanye West, Waffle-House, Childish Gambino, Roseanne, and elderly Black women being manhandled by police is but a snippet of what’s going on. I can turn on my television or more precisely, open my computer, and see a similar scene as a 1960s protest march. I see people sitting in again at restaurants, I see people marching down the streets, I see cops fighting young black boys, and I hear of black bodies being found hanging from trees again (often ruled as suicides.)

This is America.

They say a people without knowledge of its past are doomed to repeat it. I wonder how many of us realize that the past is repeating itself? And I am reminded this is why I write the kinds of stories that I write and why I think Black Historical Fiction is important (and also maybe a tad bit underrated). Often, I see Romance, Urban Fiction and Street Lit praised as the epitome of Black Literature among many Self-Publishers / Indie Authors and Indie readers. But let’s not forget that black history is important too, and should not be left out of the Indie Author revolution.

After my most recent book release, I was amazed at how many people (Israelites, so-called African Americans, Blacks) didn’t know who Marcus Garvey was, what the Universal Negro Improvement Association was, or could make the Marcus and Malcolm connection in the book. (More on this later but briefly, Malcolm X father was a follower of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm’s nickname was Red among other names. I named Nora’s boyfriend after Malcolm X in his honor and gave him some of his characteristics.)

I know that many of us have been awakened to the true knowledge of who we are and have reclaimed parts of our lost, ancient and biblical heritage. We are waking up in droves and understanding the important role that identity plays in the state of Black America today. I am talking about the Hebrew Israelite movement and the number of people returning to the bible as a source, not of religion, but of black history and instruction on how to live on the earth. But that does mean we should toss aside our history in this land as unimportant since it has all played a role in who we are and where we stand today.

To be a true educator, you must first be educated and with extensive knowledge of what you’re teaching and if this is history, it’s even more critical to understand it all. (I am no one special and I don’t know everything. I am only repeating what I have already told myself about how important it is that I study history. All of it.)

Yes, it’s important to know who Moses was, King Solomon, Queen Esther, King David, and all the prophets, prophetesses and servants (who were all Black). But, it’s also important to know who Mansa Musa was and his influence in Timbuktu, Queen Yaa Asantewaa (Phonetic spelling Yah asante wah), Haitian Revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Hannibal, Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells and so on. These are the people whose shoulders we stand on and knowing their stories are still important. As well as other facts. If we talk about the European Slave Trade let’s also talk about Islamic slavery. If we talk about white slave owners, let’s also discuss Jewish and Native American slave owners as well.

History is important in general because if you don’t know what happened before, how can you properly arm yourself against ensuring that the bad things do not happen again? You cannot focus on repeating only the good things if you don’t know what is good.

Dear Black Indie Readers, African American Historical Fiction is important too.

“Once you change your philosophy you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern. And then you go on into some action.” – Malcolm X

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” – Marcus Garvey
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For more Black History Fun Facts, be sure to visit the Black History Fun Fact Friday page and to follow this blog for Black History all year around! Revolution, part 2 in The Nora White Story is also now available on Amazon. Free with Kindle Unlimited.

Black History Fun Fact Friday – Black Wall Street and the Power of Community

On June 1, 1921, the systematic destruction of years of building was made manifest in less than 24 hours. Also known as “Little Africa,” the black business district of north Tulsa, Oklahoma lay fuming—a model community destroyed, mansions melted down to the ground, hope stretching its mournful arms forward in a desperate attempt to hold on to its dear Greenwood.

It began the same way it always has, with a black man accused of accosting a white woman. On May 31, 1921, “the Tulsa Tribune reported that a black man, Dick Rowland, attempted to rape a white woman, Sarah Page. Whites in the area refused to wait for the investigative process to play out, sparking two days of unprecedented racial violence. Thirty-five city blocks went up in flames, 300 people died, and 800 were injured.” (Fain, Kimberly, 2017)

This was the beginning of what culminated in the destruction of the Greenwood community.

Greenwood is a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was one of the most successful and wealthiest black communities in the United States during the early 20th Century. It was popularly known as America’s “Black Wall Street” because its financial success mirrored Wall Street. During the oil boom of the 1910s, which gained the town such titles as “Oil Capital of the World,” the area of northeast Oklahoma around Tulsa flourished, including the Greenwood neighborhood. Home to several prominent Black business people, the community held many multimillionaires.

Greenwood boasted a variety of thriving businesses that were very successful up until the Tulsa Race Massacre. Not only did blacks want to contribute to the success of their own shops, but also the racial segregation laws prevented us from shopping anywhere other than Greenwood, forcing us to be in support of our own people and thus contribute to the success of our own people.

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Greenwood became the mecca of opportunity to build up what Black people had been denied access to. Instead of complaining, we were not included in the all-white Newspaper we created our own (two). Blacks were discouraged from using the new Carnegie Library downtown for whites, so they built their own smaller all Black branch libraries. Not stressing over being left out of restaurants, grocery stores, and public schools, they made their own on the backs of a drive toward honest entrepreneurship.

Clothes bought at Elliot & Hooker’s clothing at 124 N. Greenwood could be fitted across the street at H.L. Byars tailor shop at 105 N Greenwood, and then cleaned around the corner at Hope Watson’s cleaners at 322 E. Archer. The dollar in this community rotated 36-100 times, taking as long as a year before it left the community (today, the dollar leaves the black community in less than 15mins).

These were not people who started wealthy; they were neither businessmen nor businesswomen, but being locked out the whole of society (stripped from employment in the oil industry and from most of Tulsa’s manufacturing facilities), these men and women toiled at troublesome, often dirty, jobs. They worked long hours under trying conditions, but their paychecks built Greenwood, and their hard work helped build Tulsa.

Following the massacre, the area was rebuilt and continued to thrive until the 1960s, when integration allowed blacks to shop in once restricted areas.

“By the 1940s, the Greenwood District was rebuilt, but due to integration during the Civil Rights era, never regained as much prominence.” – Kimberly Fain, 2017

This community is one example of the power of support, not just for black businesses but for entrepreneurship in general. While liking social media posts is beautiful, it is financial support, dedication, and consistency that ultimately helps small businesses grow into larger companies, support and hire their own, thrive, and empower a community.

 

Check out more black history fun facts here!