Black Celebrity Birthdays

Learn and Celebrate Juneteenth

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 18:55:00 GMT

Celebrating Juneteenth

Black Celebrity Birthdays bring you a collection of the best thoughtful Happy Juneteenth messages, greeting and Juneteenth history, and Juneteenth captions to help you wish your loved ones on this important day.

Today, June 19, 2022, marks the first time our nation will celebrate this new federal holiday. U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law on Thursday, June 17, 2021, making it the first federal holiday approved since 1983 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was created.

A Manual to Juneteenth

African Americans have celebrated Juneteenth since the late 1800s. The holiday has resonated in new ways across the United States in recent years.

Nicole Taylor, the author of the cookbook “Watermelon and Red Birds,” curated a choice of recipes to help you explore the flavors of Juneteenth.

Juneteenth, an annual commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War, has been celebrated by African Americans since the late 1800s.

President Biden signed legislation last year that made Juneteenth, which falls on June 19, a federal holiday after interest in the day was renewed during the summer of 2020 and the nationwide protests that followed the police killings of Black Americans, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Juneteenth celebrations across the United States have seen a noticeable increase in the Juneteenth celebrations over the past few years. With this year’s holiday coming just over a month after a white gunman killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent U.S. history, Juneteenth celebrations may resonate in new ways.

How did Juneteenth start?

How is Juneteenth celebrated?

Early celebrations involved prayer and family gatherings and later included annual pilgrimages to Galveston by formerly enslaved people and their families, according to Juneteenth.com.

In 1872, a group of African American ministers and businessmen in Houston purchased 10 acres of land and created Emancipation Park, which was intended to hold the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration.

Today, while some celebrations occur among families in backyards where food is an integral element, some cities, like Atlanta and Washington, hold more significant events, including parades and festivals with residents, local businesses, and more.

While celebrations in 2020 and 2021 were primarily subdued by the coronavirus pandemic, some cities this year are pressing forward with plans.

Galveston has remained a busy site for Juneteenth events over the years, said Douglas Matthews, who has helped coordinate them for over two decades.

After dedicating a 5,000-square-foot mural last year, in 2022, Galveston will celebrate the holiday with a banquet, poetry festival, parade, and picnic. Organizers in Atlanta will hold a march and music festival at Centennial Olympic Park, and similar events are scheduled in Baltimore, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The route to a national celebration

In 1980, Texas became the first state to appoint Juneteenth as a holiday. All 50 states and the District of Columbia now recognize the day in some form.

In the wake of the nationwide protests of police brutality in 2020, the push for federal recognition of Juneteenth gained new momentum, and Congress quickly pushed through legislation in the summer of 2021.

In the House, the measure passed by a vote of 415 to 14, with all the opposition coming from Republicans, some of whom argued that calling the new holiday Juneteenth Independence Day, echoing July 4, would create confusion and force Americans to choose a celebration of freedom based on their race.

On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed the bill into law, making Juneteenth the 11th holiday recognized by the federal government. At a White House ceremony, Mr. Biden singled out Opal Lee, an activist who, at the age of 89, walked from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., and called her “a grandmother of the movement to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.”

The law went into effect once, and the first federal Juneteenth holiday was celebrated the next day. (The holiday was observed on June 18, as June 19 fell on a Saturday.)

Why has Juneteenth become so vital?

Following the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died in the custody of the Minneapolis Police in May 2020, thousands of people around the United States poured onto the streets in protest. Mr. Floyd’s name and the names of Ms. Taylor, Mr. Arbery, David McAtee, and others became a rallying cry for change across the country, effectively re-energizing the Black Lives Matter movement.

That change came in waves. In Minneapolis, officials banned the use of chokeholds and strangleholds by the police and said officers must intervene and report any use of unauthorized force.

Democrats in Congress unveiled sweeping legislation targeting misconduct and racial discrimination by the police. The bill was the most expansive intervention into policing lawmakers have proposed recently.

Companies across the business spectrum voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement and either suspended or fired employees who mocked Mr. Floyd’s death or made racist remarks.

In April 2021, Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, was found guilty of two counts of murder in the death of Mr. Floyd. But two years on, many of the city’s residents say that genuine change has been slow.

Mark Anthony Neal, an African-American studies scholar at Duke University, said there are some comparisons between the end of the Civil War to the unrest that swept the country, adding that the moment felt like a “rupture.”

“The stakes are a little different,” Mr. Neal said.

“I think Juneteenth feels a little different now,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for folks to catch their breath about this incredible pace of change and shifting that we’ve seen.”

Resources

Tuskegee Airman Turning 100 Years Old on May 21st

Tue, 10 May 2022 19:11:03 GMT

Tuskegee Airman Turning 100 Deserves Birthday Cards

Victor W. Butler is believed to be the last surviving Tuskegee Airman in Rhode Island. (WJAR)

Retired Sgt. Victor W. Butler is believed to be the last surviving Tuskegee Airman in Rhode Island. People may remember the Tuskegee Airmen from the movie "Red Tails" with Cuba Gooding, Jr., Terrence Howard, David Oyelowo, Nate Parker, and Tristan Wilds.

The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of Black pilots and airmen that made history while fighting in World War II. They broke barriers and led the way for desegregation in the U.S. military.

"At first, I was going to join the Canadian Air Force with a friend of mine, but after I had signed up, my mother and father wouldn't approve of it. So, I joined with the American Air Force," said Butler.

Butler became a mechanic for the Tuskegee Airmen, working on legendary planes while dealing with racism.

"The airfield was very nice. It was the visit to the town that was bad," said Butler.

"Being in Tuskegee, Alabama, it wasn't very acceptable to white people for black soldiers to be walking around," he said.

He has awards, coins, and so much more documenting his accomplishments.

But he's looking for one more thing: birthday cards.

"It's just another day. That's all," said Butler.

Butler is turning 100 on May 21, 2022, and his wish is birthday cards - and he will each and every card he receives. As he waits on your cards, he will keep putting together these puzzles and sharing his wisdom: "Just enjoy life as it is. Be thankful. There are so many people that have lost their homes and I am very fortunate to have a nice home and wife and my family who come to visit me often. I'm thankful that I have a nice wife, and a nice home to live in." he said.

If you would like to send Butler a birthday card, you can mail it to, Victor W. Butler, C/O Gary Butler, P.O. box. 3523, Cranston, RI 02910.

via WJAR-10NBC's TEMI-TOPE ADELEYE.

Hip Hop's Hottest Hits 80s, 90s, 00s,Today

Tue, 10 May 2022 18:28:32 GMT

Hip Hop's Hottest Hits 80s, 90s, 00s,Today

LISTEN to DJ Foxee Coxxy's 500+ hand picked hottest hip hop hits.

101 Years Old Black Man Gets His High School Diploma

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 20:27:13 GMT

At age 101, he finally got his high school diploma

In segregated America in the 1930s, Merrill Pittman Cooper’s family was too poor for him to stay in school.

Merrill Pittman Cooper, 101, had a distinguished career as one of the first Black trolley car drivers in Philadelphia, and a powerful leader in the union. But when he was a teen during segregation in the 1930s, his single mother was too poor to pay his school tuition.

In 1938, he had just finished his junior year of high school at Storer College in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., a boarding school founded after the Civil War that initially educated formerly enslaved children.

Cooper said he realized that his mother, who worked as a live-in housekeeper, couldn’t afford to make the final tuition payment for his senior year. He encouraged her to move them to Philadelphia, where she had family.

“She worked so hard, and it all became so difficult that I just decided it would be best to give up continuing at the school,” he said.

He took a job at a women’s apparel store in Philadelphia to help pay the bills, then was hired in 1945 as a city trolley car operator, he said.

“It was tough when I first started,” said Cooper, remembering the racism he endured. “I wouldn’t want to repeat some of the things people said to me when they saw me operating the trolley. We had to have the National Guard on board to keep the peace.”

He was proud of his career, but there was always one thing that bothered him. He wished he had graduated from high school and received his diploma.

“As time went on, I thought it was probably too late, so I put it behind me and made the best of the situation,” said Cooper, who grew up in Shepherdstown, W.Va., near Harpers Ferry, and now lives in Union City, N.J.

“I got so involved in working and making a living that my dreams went out the window,” he said.

Now, 84 years later, he has been finally able to realize his long-held wish: His family arranged a surprise graduation ceremony in his honor on March 19 at a hotel in Jersey City.

Cooper’s son-in-law Rod Beckerink is a retired social studies teacher from Jamestown, N.Y., who has heard Cooper talk about the difficulty of getting an education as a Black teen in the 1930s.

He decided it was long past time that his father-in-law receive the diploma he’d missed when he dropped out just before his senior year.

It was a difficult journey for a young Black man who wanted a good education in 1938.

After Cooper finished the eighth grade at a two-room, segregated school in Shepherdstown, he passed a test that allowed him to continue his education at Storer College — a segregated school established in 1867 that counted Frederick Douglass as a trustee.

Cooper was an only child without a father in his life, he said, so his mother went to work as a live-in housekeeper for a family in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains to pay for his tuition and board at Storer College.

“We didn’t have a lot of money, but it was my dream to become an attorney,” said Cooper, adding that some of his teachers took him shopping for new school clothes and shoes.

“They knew I couldn’t afford it, so they’d take me downtown, then tell me not to tell the rest of the students,” he recalled. “The school had mostly Black teachers, and they looked out for me.”

He helped integrate the ranks of trolley operators, and when trolleys were phased out years later, Cooper became a bus driver and eventually ran for office in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s Local 234 union. He served in various union roles, including president, until he was hired in 1980 as vice president of what was then known as the International Transport Workers Union in New York City.

In 1978, he married Marion Karpeh, a single mom of three children who lived in a nearby neighborhood in Philadelphia and worked as a pharmacist.

They’d dated for 14 years and had fallen in love over long talks fueled by homemade poundcake, recalled Marion Beckerink, Cooper’s youngest stepdaughter. Her mother died in 2015, she said.

“My sister and brother and I were impressed as young people that [Merrill] had such a command of literature and was such a great orator,” said Beckerink, 63, now a retired lawyer.

“Mr. Cooper — that’s what we called him then — had such a wealth of knowledge,” she said. “He was constantly quoting famous orators like Kennedy or King. He would tell me and my sister, ‘I wish that I had been a lawyer so I could debate with you.’ But he did just fine.”

Beckerink’s sister, Enid Karpeh-Diaz, 64, remembers her stepfather often told them to “keep the heat on.”

“My mother and stepdad believed the key to economic stability and career advancement, particularly as an African American, was education,” she said. “Even though my dad did not have the opportunity to go to college — not having a high school diploma — he achieved a great deal of success in his lifetime.”

Cooper was presented his diploma by Jefferson County Schools superintendent Bondy Shay Gibson-Learn, who traveled from West Virginia for the occasion. Representatives from the Storer College Alumni Association and Harpers Ferry National Historical Park also gave speeches virtually from Harpers Ferry.

“I can’t think of a happier day,” said Cooper, who now displays his framed diploma on his bedroom dresser.

“Even though it took me awhile, I’m really happy to finally have it,” he said.

--VIA Washington Post