* Today in Black History - December 14 *
1829 - John Mercer Langston is born in Louisa County, Virginia.
He will have a distinguished career as an attorney,
educator, recruiter of soldiers for the all African
American 5th Ohio, 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments,
dean of the law school and president of Howard University,
diplomat, and U.S. congressman. He will join the ancestors
on November 15, 1897 in Washington, DC.
1920 - Clark Terry is born in St. Louis, Missouri. He will become
a trumpeteer and flugelhorn player who will be known for
his association with Duke Ellington in the 1950's, his
innovative flugelhorn sound, and unusual mumbling scat
singing. He will be one of the most recorded musicians in
the history of jazz, with more than nine hundred recordings.
His discography will read like a “Who’s Who In Jazz,” with
personnel that will include greats such as Quincy Jones,
Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah
Washington, Ben Webster, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Barnet,
Doc Severinsen, Ray Charles, Billy Strayhorn, Dexter Gordon,
Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Gerry Mulligan, Sarah
Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Zoot Sims, Milt Jackson, Bob
Brookmeyer, and Dianne Reeves. Among his numerous recordings,
he will be featured with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Count
Basie Orchestra, Dutch Metropole Orchestra, Chicago Jazz
Orchestra, Woody Herman Orchestra, Herbie Mann Orchestra,
Donald Byrd Orchestra, and many other large ensembles – high
school and college ensembles, his own duos, trios, quartets,
quintets, sextets, octets, and two big bands – Clark Terry’s
Big Bad Band and Clark Terry’s Young Titans of Jazz. His
career in jazz will span more than seventy years. He will
join the ancestors on February 21, 2015.
1939 - Ernest "Ernie" Davis is born in New Salem, Pennsylvania.
He will become the first African American to win the
Heisman Trophy (1961). He will join the ancestors on May
18, 1963, succumbing to acute monotypic leukemia before
he is able to play in the National Football League.
1945 - Stanley Crouch is born in Los Angeles, California. He will
become a drummer, poet, and writer for "The Village Voice."
He will befriend Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who will
influence his thinking in a direction less centered on race.
He will state with regard to Murray's influence, "I saw how
important it is to free yourself from ideology. When you look
at things solely in terms of race or class, you miss what is
really going on." He will make a final, public break with
black nationalist ideology in 1979, in an exchange with Amiri
Baraka in the Village Voice. He will also emerge as a public
critic of recent cultural and artistic trends that he sees as
empty, phony, or corrupt. His targets will include the fusion
and avant-garde movements in jazz (including his own
participation in the latter) and works of letters that he saw
as hiding their lack of merit behind racial posturing. As a
writer for the Voice from 1980 to 1988, he will be known for
his blunt criticisms of his targets and tendency to excoriate
their participants. It will be during this period that he
becomes a friend and intellectual mentor to Wynton Marsalis,
and an advocate of the neotraditionalist movement that he sees
as reviving the core values of jazz. In 1987, he will become an
artistic consultant for the Jazz at Lincoln Center program,
joined by Marsalis, who will later become artistic director, in
1991. After his stint at the Voice, he will publish "Notes of a
Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989," which will gain
his ideas prominence among a wide audience and be selected by
"The Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook" as the best book of essays
published in 1990. That will be followed by receipt of a Whiting
Award in 1991, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and the
Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in
1993. He will continue to be an active author producing works of
fiction and nonfiction, articles for periodicals, and newspaper
columns. He will be a columnist for the New York Daily News and a
syndicated columnist. He will also be featured as a source in
documentaries and a guest in televised discussions. In 2004, he
will be invited to be on a panel of judges for the PEN/Newman's
Own Award, a $25,000 award designed to protect speech as it applies
to the written word. In 2005, he will be selected as one of the
inaugural fellows by the Fletcher Foundation, which awards annual
fellowships to people working on issues of race and civil rights.
The fellowship program will be directed by Professor Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. of Harvard University. He will be the President of the
Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation and in 2009, will become a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
1963 - Singer Dinah Washington joins the ancestors after a sleeping
pill overdose at the age of 39 in Detroit, Michigan. She
popularized many, many great songs, including "What a
Diff'rence a Day Makes", "Unforgettable" and several hits
with Brook Benton, including "Baby (You've Got What it
Takes)" and "A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around and Fall
in Love)".
1968 - Sammy Davis Jr. is awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for his
"superb and many-faceted talent," and his contributions to the
civil rights movement.
1968 - Classes of San Francisco State University are suspended after
demonstrations by the Black Student Union and Third World
Liberation Front.
1972 - Johnny Rodgers, a running back with the University of Nebraska, is
awarded the Heisman Trophy. He gained a total of 5,586 yards for
the Cornhuskers in three years.
1980 - Elston Howard, a New York Yankee catcher for many years, joins the
ancestors.
1991 - Desmond Howard, of the University of Michigan wins the Heisman trophy.
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