I love Black Panther, it easily ranks among the best superhero films ever, easily in the top five. And yet there are a few problems that continue to bother me. At this time, I have seen it twice in theatre and some of these items I only noticed on the second viewing. Many of this […]

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was born in Alabama but raised in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, where she would later set many of her stories. All of her grandparents had been born into slavery. Her mother was a school teacher while her father worked as a sharecropper, carpenter, preacher and briefly the mayor of […]

Apologies, work got in the way and so now I have the time to finish my last three entries. Paul Williams (1894-1980) was orphaned at four years old and was raised in Los Angeles by Charles and Emily Clarkson. He went to the Los Angeles School of Arts and then the LA branch of the […]

Ossie Davis (1917-2005) was born in Georgia and Ruby Dee (1922-2014) was born in Harlem. Ossie Went to Howard university but dropped out to pursue acting in New York. He served in the Medical corp in WWII and returned to acting in Harlem after the war. Ruby graduated from Hunter college in 1945 and began […]

Grandmaster Flash (1958) Was born in Bridgetown Barbados but grew up in the Bronx. His father had an extensive record collection, largely of Caribbean and black American artists. His mother encouraged him to learn how to work with electronics and he attended a vocational high-school on the subject. The creation of the music that would […]

Miriam Makeba (1932-2008) was born in a black township outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Her mother, of Swazi background, was a traditional healer and her father, of Xhosa background, was a teacher and he would die when Miriam was six. Miriam would sing with the choir at her primary school in Pretoria. She would sing in […]

Bill Robinson (1878-1949) was born in Virginia and raised by his grandmother after the death of his parents when he was eight. At an early age he began “hoofing” or busking in local beer gardens. He was spotted by a promoter who hired him as a pickaninny in a minstrel show where his job was […]