Day 12, Original Post: April 15-16, 2015 {Read Psalm 119:89-96} Today is the energy of Humility in Discipline. Know that without the Creator there is nothing you can do. Today all day get out of the way and make room for the Light.
~Karen Berg
Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah)
It doesn’t matter if you’re Black, White, or Brown..male or female…Jew, Gentile,…etc. As we make room for the Light of God to come into our lives, let us also remember the loss of millions of lives, because of “our” own injustice and prejudice. Yes, I used the word “our” because it is the responsibility of all of Humanity to let in the Light and Love of God!
Prejudice is built on Judgement, the exact opposite of true discernment. One way to describe the energy for today is, “Splendid Diversity”! When we consider our role as Human BEings – we will allow others to just “BE” and celebrate the diversity that God created within each and every one of us.
However, this takes a great amount of humility to put into practice. Today, let’s get out of Gods way. The position of God has already been applied for and assumed…so, our hatred, Judgements, and opinions of others and even ourselves – are not asked for nor even needed! Get Humble. Stay Humble…and JUST BE!
Certainly, it was a splendid diversity of children, women and men who died in the Holocaust. As we remember them today, we are grateful for their lives, their legacies, and their example to make room for the Light of God!
Dwayne B. Neal
Biblical Affirmation and Meditations For
DAY 12
Everyday after sundown, starting from the second evening of Passover – until the night before (what we call) Pentecost; the following blessing is recited just prior to starting the count of the Omer:
STEP 1:
Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the counting of the Omer.
Today is Day 12 of the Omer.
STEP 2:
After this blessing is affirmed and the count declared – it is tradition to recite this short prayer:
O Compassionate One! May Christ return for us the Service of the Temple to its Place, speedily and in Our time! AMEN.
STEP 3: READ PSALM 67
STEP 4:Read, Meditate and Live (1) Karen Berg’s Quote above, and (2)The following Scriptures:
Scripture Verses For Day 12:
Ezra 6:22 (ESV) – And they kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with joy, for the Lord had made them joyful and had turned the heart of the king of Assyria to them, so that he aided them in the work of the house of God, the God of Israel.
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James 3:8-12 (KJV)
8 But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.
9 Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God.
10 Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
11 Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?
12 Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh.
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Dwayne B. Neal – Team N.A.M.E.S.“Knowledge is power, but ACTION is King!”
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To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.
1Have mercy upon me, O God, According to Your lovingkindness; According to the multitude of Your tender mercies, Blot out my transgressions. 2Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, And cleanse me from my sin.
3For I acknowledge my transgressions, And my sin is always before me. 4Against You, You only, have I sinned, And done this evil in Your sight— That You may be found just when You speak,[a] And blameless when You judge.
5Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me. 6Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, And in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom.
7Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 8Make me hear joy and gladness, That the bones You have broken may rejoice. 9Hide Your face from my sins, And blot out all my iniquities.
10Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me. 11Do not cast me away from Your presence, And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.
12Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, And uphold me by Your generous Spirit. 13Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, And sinners shall be converted to You.
14Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, The God of my salvation, And my tongue shall sing aloud of Your righteousness. 15O Lord, open my lips, And my mouth shall show forth Your praise. 16For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, A broken and a contrite heart— These, O God, You will not despise.
18Do good in Your good pleasure to Zion; Build the walls of Jerusalem. 19Then You shall be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, With burnt offering and whole burnt offering; Then they shall offer bulls on Your altar.
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Celebrate Black History
This Day In Black History (Feb. 25):
1. 1ST BLACK TO SERVE IN US SENATE (1870) – Hirman R. Revels of Mississippi sworn in as first Black U.S. senator and first Black representative in Congress.
2. ELIJAH MUHAMMAD DIES (1975) – Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death. Elijah Muhammad died from congestive heart failure at age 77 on February 25, 1975, the day before Saviours’ Day, at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
“Sharing actions are like water; they spread quickly and get everyone wet…We are also like water—water doesn’t think of pouring itself, it just does because this is its nature. This is the reason for its creation. In the same way, sharing needs to become a natural habit, something we do without thinking. Nor should we ask for a reward for having done it. The sea doesn’t wait for any of us to give it thanks!”
Yael Yardeni
Sharing is our natural State of Being. It is our ACTION. The reason and purpose for our existence is share and empower others. {Matthew 5:16} However, for most of us, we give power to the EGO and put rules and stipulations on how we will give – or how we share. How many of us often say, “If I win the lottery…then I will start doing good -and be a blessing to others.” Some of us, even “pay” our tithes rather than “giving” tithe – and yes, there is a difference. We say things, like “If I had it – then I would give it”…etc.
Wanting to share and actually sharing are two different things. In order to be like God, sharing MUST become our first nature, it must be an intrinsic part of our BEING! In fact, it is more unnatural for us receive for ourselves alone, than it is to share.
Malachi 3:8 (New International Version)
“Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. “But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ “In tithes and offerings.
Because God is all, in all and through all – it is not possible for us to rob Him (anthropomorphically speaking) of anything. However, since the essence of God, is the infinite ACTION of sharing, we rob Him (again anthropomorphically speaking) of the opportunity to share and give to others through us. This robbery takes place when we consult our EGO rather than our Soul.
Good intentions do not always show up on our record. Just because we say that we want to share, doesn’t mean that we will. God tests us everyday by using our very own EGO! Allowing the opportunity to ‘put our money where our mouth is’! Yeah, it’s easy to share when we think we have it. But, the true test comes, when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient for us to share. {Mark 12:41-44}
Our own EGO waits for others to ask us for help – before we give; it is our EGO that will tell us to “let somebody else do it”! But a person of ACTION – will proactively ask “howcan I give, where can I share?”. If this is not your current State of Being – then you my friend – are robbing God!!
When our nature comes into alignment with the nature of God, we would share automatically, and without hesitation. We would not react with our EGO; waiting on somebody to ask us to give – or if and when, they do ask – we would go beyond that which they were asking for! {Matthew 5: 40-41}
Now, I’m not trying to put you blast; nor am I judging as to whether – you’re a good person or not. And I’m definitely not suggesting that – you wouldn’t share when given the “right opportunity” – that is not at all what I’m saying.
The point I’m trying to convey is: we all have within us the power to expand and transform our EGO nature! Each day we get the chance – to become more and more like God. Furthermore, ANY thought or activity, that tells us, things like: ” I don’t have enough to share”, or “they didn’t ask”, or that “I’ve already given enough”…etc. – then we know that these thoughts or feelings – is the enemy to our true Nature. The more we become aware of this, the more we can overcome our EGO; and the more we overcome our EGO, the more we take on the Nature of God. Now, this in turn will naturally, give us to share without being prompted, coerced, or asked.
Here are a few of examples to proactively defeat our Ego (the enemy of our True Nature):
Volunteering (food bank, homeless shelter…etc.)
Buy a random person at Starbucks a cup of coffee
When you wake up in the morning – after you Thank God for another day: ask the Universe, “How can I give; where can I serve?” and throughout the day — you WILL be presented with opportunities to share.
Now, that we know this, let’s stop working for the enemy (our EGO) and start becoming a BEING of Sharing – which we were designed to do, anyway!!
1. 1ST BLACK WOMEN TO RECEIVE AN M.D. (1864) – Rebecca Lee Crumpler becomes the first black woman to receive an M.D. degree. She graduated from the New England Female Medical College.
2. PRESIDENT OUSTED (1966) – On this day in 1966; Elected leader and first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, was ousted in military coup while he is away on a peace mission to Vietnam.
3. BOXING GREAT FLOYD MAYWEATHER IS BORN (1977) – Boxer FloydMayweather Jr. arguably rated as the number one ‘pound-for-pound’ boxer in the world, was born on this day. On May 2, 2015 – he gets the opportunity to perhaps solidify this belief by boxing against another ‘pound-for-pound’ great Manny Pacquiao! Tune In…this should be a great fight!!
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Submitted by:
Dwayne B. Neal – Team N.A.M.E.S.“Knowledge is power, but ACTION is King!”
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On a spiritual level, the universe is a giant cosmic bank where we make withdrawals and deposits on a daily basis.
Our withdrawals include health, security, love, the breath that we take, even the fact that we can open our eyes in the morning!
We make deposits in the bank when we volunteer, help others, or do small kindnesses like saying hello to someone we don’t necessarily know well or even care about. Every day that we do actions of sharing beyond our comfort zone, or extend ourselves as a good friend, or pray not only for ourselves but for others as well, we are making a deposit into our cosmic bank account.
The cosmic bank is open 24/7, and our thoughts, words, and actions are constantly adding to or subtracting from our account. But we have to keep making deposits; we can’t rely on some good deed we did three years ago, hoping it will tide us over. Just as we need to eat every day, we need to share every day, too.
Today, take a moment to check the status of your account. Are you taking time every day to make a deposit?
Written by:
Karen Berg – Spiritual Director of The Kabbalah Centre
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Celebrate Black History
This Day In Black History (Feb. 23):
1. LOUIS STOKES BORN (1950) – Politician Louis Stokes born in Cleveland, Ohio. He served in the United States House of Representatives.
He was elected to the House in 1968, representing the 21st District on Cleveland’s East Side. He shifted to the newly created 11th District, covering much of the same area following a 1992 redistricting. Stokes served 15 terms in total, retiring in 1999.
He is ironically a cousin of Rick James.
2. 1ST BLACK TO PLAY FOR THE N.Y. YANKEES IS BORN (1929-1980) – Baseball catcher Elston Gene Howard born in St. Louis, Missouri. On April 14, 1955 Howard became the first African American to play for the Yankees. One of the most regular World Series participants in history, he appeared in 10 fall classics and ranks among the Series career leaders in several categories.
3. 1ST BLACK GENERAL IN THE MARINE CORPS (1979) – Frank E. Peterson Jr. named the first Black general in the Marine Corps.
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Submitted by:
Dwayne B. Neal – Team N.A.M.E.S.“Knowledge is power, but ACTION is King!”
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Please Share Inspirational Injection With Your Friends:
Martin Luther King, Jr.(January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience. King has become a national icon in the history of American progressivism.
A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history. He also established his reputation as a radical, and became an object of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO for the rest of his life. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion, mailed King a threatening anonymous letter that he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.
On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches and the following year, he took the movement north to Chicago. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled “Beyond Vietnam”. King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People’s Campaign. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting, and the jury of a 1999 civil trial found Loyd Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King.
King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor. A memorial statue on the National Mall was opened to the public in 2011.
Florida teenager Trayvon Martin is shot and killed.
There’s no telling what Trayvon Martin could have become and sadly the world will never know. But his tragic death at the hands of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman on Feb. 26, 2012, will forever be a part of the nation’s still-controversial history in race relations.
Just 17, Trayvon was walking back to his father’s home in Sanford, Florida, after buying a bag of Skittles and a soft drink when he encountered Zimmerman, 28, who was patrolling the neighborhood. Zimmerman, who is widely believed to have racially profiled the hoodie-wearing teen, called the Sanford police department’s non-emergency line to report that that the “Black male” looked suspicious.
Even though the dispatcher told him to not follow the boy, he ignored their advice and entered into an altercation with him. Claiming he felt threatened and buoyed by the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law, Zimmerman shot the teenager. Six weeks passed before he was arrested. On July 13, 2013, a jury found Zimmerman not guilty of any crime.
The tragedy roiled the nation and sparked a wide-ranging debate over the dangers of “Stand Your Ground” laws in states around the U.S and a Justice for Trayvon movement.
“If [he] was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?” President Obama said during moving remarks at a press conference in response to the Zimmerman verdict. “And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”
Trayvon’s parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, have created a foundation in their son’s honor “to create awareness of how violent crime impacts the families of the victims and to provide support and advocacy for those families.”
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No federal charges for Zimmerman in Trayvon Martin death
The Justice Department said Tuesday its independent investigation found “insufficient evidence” to charge George Zimmerman with federal civil rights violations in the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the evidence did not meet the “high standard for a federal hate crime prosecution,” but the decision should not end efforts to explore racial tensions in the justice system. The decision closes the federal investigation.
“This young man’s premature death necessitates that we continue the dialogue and be unafraid of confronting the issues and tensions his passing brought to the surface,” Holder said in a statement. “We, as a nation, must take concrete steps to ensure that such incidents do not occur in the future.”
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Submitted by:
Dwayne B. Neal – Team N.A.M.E.S.“Knowledge is power, but ACTION is King!”
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On September 18, 1895, African-American spokesman and leader Booker T. Washington spoke before a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His “Atlanta Compromise” address, as it came to be called, was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. Although the organizers of the exposition worried that “public sentiment was not prepared for such an advanced step,” they decided that inviting a black speaker would impress Northern visitors with the evidence of racial progress in the South. Washington soothed his listeners’ concerns about “uppity” blacks by claiming that his race would content itself with living “by the productions of our hands.”
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board of Directors and Citizens:
One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success. I but convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent Exposition at every stage of its progress. It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom.
Not only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal,“Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race,“Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per cent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed—blessing him that gives and him that takes. There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable:
The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed;
And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast…
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third [of] its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.
Gentlemen of the Exposition, as we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect overmuch. Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources), remember the path that has led from these to the inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam-engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores and banks, has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles. While we take pride in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall far short of your expectations but for the constant help that has come to our educational life, not only from the Southern states, but especially from Northern philanthropists, who have made their gifts a constant stream of blessing and encouragement.
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.
In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement, and drawn us so near to you of the white race, as this opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this he constantly in mind, that, while from representations in these buildings of the product of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law. This, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.
Source: Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 3, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 583–587.
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Dwayne B. Neal – Team N.A.M.E.S.“Knowledge is power, but ACTION is King!”
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Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of ChicagoLaw School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, running unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives in 2000.
Barack Obama was born to a white American mother, Ann Dunham, and a black Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr., who were both young college students at the University of Hawaii. When his father left for Harvard, she and Barack stayed behind, and his father ultimately returned alone to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist. Barack’s mother remarried an Indonesian oil manager and moved to Jakarta when Barack was six. He later recounted Indonesia as simultaneously lush and a harrowing exposure to tropical poverty. He returned to Hawaii, where he was brought up largely by his grandparents. The family lived in a small apartment – his grandfather was a furniture salesman and an unsuccessful insurance agent and his grandmother worked in a bank – but Barack managed to get into Punahou School, Hawaii’s top prep academy. His father wrote to him regularly but, though he traveled around the world on official business for Kenya, he visited only once, when Barack was ten.
Obama attended Columbia University, but found New York’s racial tension inescapable. He became a community organizer for a small Chicago church-based group for three years, helping poor South Side residents cope with a wave of plant closings. He then attended Harvard Law School, and in 1990 became the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He turned down a prestigious judicial clerkship, choosing instead to practice civil-rights law back in Chicago, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation. He also began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, and married Michelle Robinson, a fellow attorney. Eventually he was elected to the Illinois state senate, where his district included both Hyde Park and some of the poorest ghettos on the South Side.
In 2004 Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, representing Illinois, and he gained national attention by giving a rousing and well-received keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. In 2008 he ran for President, and despite having only four years of national political experience, he won. In January 2009, he was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, and the first African-American ever elected to that position. Obama was reelected to a second term in November 2012.
“I believe in an America where no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter who you love, you can pursue your own version of happiness, and you can make it here if you try” ~Barack Obama
THE KING OF POP TAKES 8 (1984) – On this day and date, Michael Jackson wins eight Grammy Awards for his critical and commercially successful album, “Thriller” which still remains one of the top-grossing albums of all time.
Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American singer-songwriter, entertainer, dancer, arranger, music producer, choreographer, actor, businessman, musician, and philanthropist. Often referred to as the “King of Pop“, or by his initials MJ, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records. His contributions to music, dance, and fashion, along with a much-publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades.
American television host, actress, producer and philanthropist Oprah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi. After a troubled adolescence in a small farming community, where she was sexually abused by a number of male relatives and friends of her mother, Vernita, she moved to Nashville to live with her father, Vernon, a barber and businessman. She entered Tennessee State University in 1971 and began working in radio and television broadcasting in Nashville.
In 1976, Oprah Winfrey moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she hosted the TV chat show People Are Talking. The show became a hit and Winfrey stayed with it for eight years, after which she was recruited by a Chicago TV station to host her own morning show, A.M. Chicago. Her major competitor in the time slot was Phil Donahue. Within several months, Winfrey’s open, warm-hearted personal style had won her 100,000 more viewers than Donahue and had taken her show from last place to first in the ratings. Her success led to nationwide fame and a role in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film The Color Purple, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Winfrey launched the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1986 as a nationally syndicated program. With its placement on 120 channels and an audience of 10 million people, the show grossed $125 million by the end of its first year, of which Winfrey received $30 million. She soon gained ownership of the program from ABC, drawing it under the control of her new production company, Harpo Productions (‘Oprah’ spelled backwards) and making more and more money from syndication.
” Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.” ~Oprah Winfrey
Oprah made her debut as a film actress in the 1985 period drama film, The Color Purple. Oprah played a troubled housewife named, Sofia. Oprah was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. This movie went on to become a Broadway musical adaptation. In 1998 Oprah starred in the movie, Beloved which she also produced. Winfrey played the character Sethe who was a former slave. Winfrey has also acted in several movies such as Charlotte’s Web, Bee Movie, and The Princess And The Frog.
Oprah Winfrey in 1998 received an Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In 2011 Oprah Winfrey received a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences.
In the early years of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the program was classified as a tabloid talk show. In the mid-1990s, Winfrey adopted a less tabloid-oriented format, hosting shows on broader topics such as heart disease, geopolitics, spirituality and meditation, interviewing celebrities on social issues they were directly involved with, such as cancer, charity work, or substance abuse, and hosting televised giveaways including shows where every audience member received a new car (donated by General Motors) or a trip to Australia (donated by Australian tourism bodies).
In addition to her talk show, Winfrey also produced and co-starred in the 1989 drama miniseries The Women of Brewster Place, as well as a short-lived spin-off, Brewster Place. As well as hosting and appearing on television shows, Winfrey co-founded the women’s cable television network Oxygen. She is also the president of HarpoProductions (Oprah spelled backwards). On January 15, 2008, Winfrey and Discovery Communications announced plans to change Discovery Health Channel into a new channel called OWN: OprahWinfrey Network. It was scheduled to launch in 2009, but was delayed, and actually launched on January 1, 2011.
Winfrey’s career choice in media would not have surprised her grandmother, who once said that ever since Winfrey could talk, she was on stage. As a child, she played games interviewing her corncob doll and the crows on the fence of her family’s property. Winfrey later acknowledged her grandmother’s influence, saying it was Hattie Mae who had encouraged her to speak in public and “gave me a positive sense of myself”
Oprah Winfrey will forever be remembered as an innovator through the landmarks she made, becoming the first African American to host a television show. Inspiring millions of people across the world, discussing significant issues on her show such as equal rights toward genders, racism, poverty, and many others. Oprah will be seen as an icon someone who paved the way for others to become successful.
1. BIRTH & DEATH OF WALLACE FARAD (1900-1934) – Wallace Fard Muhammad (possibly born in 1893) was a preacher and founder of the Nation of Islam (NOI). He established the Nation of Islam’s first mosque in Detroit, Michigan in 1930 and preached his distinctive religion there for three years before mysteriously disappearing in 1934. He was later proclaimed to have been Allah on earth by Elijah Muhammad.
2. CASSIUS CLAY BECOMES MUHAMMAD ALI (1964) – On this day in 1964; The heavyweight boxer then known as Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali after converting to Islam. “I believe in the religion of Islam. I believe in Allah and in peace…I’m not a Christian anymore.”
3. 1ST FEDERAL RESERVE GOVERNOR (1966) – President Lynodn Johnson appoints Andrew Brimmer as the first African-American governor of the Federal Reserve Board.
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Submitted by:
Dwayne B. Neal – Team N.A.M.E.S.“Knowledge is power, but ACTION is King!”
Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), bornMalcolm Littleand also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. Detractors accused him of preaching racism, black supremacy, and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.
Malcolm X’s father died—killed by white supremacists, it was rumored—when he was young, and at least one of his uncles was lynched. When he was thirteen, his mother was placed in a mental hospital, and he was placed in a series of foster homes. In 1946, at age 20, he went to prison for breaking and entering.
In prison, Malcolm X became a member of the Nation of Islam; after his parole in 1952, he quickly rose to become one of its leaders. For a dozen years, Malcolm X was the public face of the controversial group, but disillusionment with Nation of Islam head Elijah Muhammad led him to leave the Nation in March 1964. After a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, he returned to the United States, where he founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. In February 1965, less than a year after leaving the Nation of Islam, he was assassinated by three members of the group.
Malcolm X’s expressed beliefs changed substantially over time. As a spokesman for the Nation of Islam he taught black supremacy and advocated separation of black and whiteAmericans—in contrast to the civil rights movement‘s emphasis on integration. After breaking with the Nation of Islam in 1964—saying of his association with it, “I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then … pointed in a certain direction and told to march”—and becoming a Sunni Muslim, he disavowed racism and expressed willingness to work with civil rights leaders, though still emphasizing black self-determination and self-defense.
Civil Rights Activist. Malcolm X was born as Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of eight children born to Louise and Earl Little. Louise was a homemaker and Earl was a preacher who was also an active member of the local chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and avid supporter of the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Because of Earl Little’s civil rights activism, the family faced frequent harassment from white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and one of its splinter factions, the Black Legion. In fact, Malcolm X had his first encounter with racism before he was even born. “When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later,” he said, “a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home… Brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out.” The harassment continued; when Malcolm X was four years old, local Klan members smashed all of the family’s windows, causing Earl Little to decide to move the family from Omaha to East Lansing, Michigan.
However, the racism the family encountered in East Lansing proved even greater than in Omaha. Shortly after the Littles moved in, in 1929, a racist mob set their house on fire, and the town’s all-white emergency responders refused to do anything. “The white police and firemen came and stood around watching as the house burned to the ground,” Malcolm X remembered.
Two years later, in 1931, things got much, much worse. Earl Little’s dead body was discovered laid out on the municipal streetcar tracks. Although Malcolm X’s father was very likely murdered by white supremacists, from whom he had received frequent death threats, the police officially ruled his death a suicide, thereby voiding the large life insurance policy he had purchased in order to provide for his family in the event of his death. Malcolm X’s mother never recovered from the shock and grief of her husband’s death. In 1937, she was committed to a mental institution and Malcolm X left home to live with family friends.
Malcolm Little excelled in junior high school but dropped out after a white teacher told him that practicing law, his aspiration at the time, was “no realistic goal for a nigger”. It made Malcolm feel that the white world offered no place for a career-oriented black man, regardless of his talent.
After living in a series of foster homes, at age 15 Little went to live with a half-sister, Ella Little Collins, in Roxbury, a largely African-American neighborhood of Boston, where he held a variety of jobs. After a short time in Flint, Michigan, Little moved to Harlem, New York, in 1943, where he engaged in drug dealing, gambling, racketeering, robbery, and pimping; according to recent biographies, he also occasionally had sex with other men, usually for money. He was called “Detroit Red” because of the reddish hair he inherited from his Scottish maternal grandfather. Little was declared “mentally disqualified for military service” after he told draft board officials he was eager to “steal us some guns, and kill us [some] crackers”.
In late 1945, Little returned to Boston, where he embarked on a series of burglaries targeting wealthy white families. In 1946, he was arrested while picking up a stolen watch he had left for repairs at a jewelry shop, and in February began serving an eight-to-ten year sentence at Charlestown State Prison. There he met John Bembry, a self-educated man he would later describe as “the first man I had ever seen command total respect … with words”; under Bembry’s influence, Little developed a voracious appetite for reading.
During Little’s imprisonment several of his siblings wrote to him about the Nation of Islam, a relatively new religious movement preaching black self-reliance and, ultimately, unification of the African diaspora, free from white American and European domination. He showed scant interest at first, but after his brother Reginald wrote in 1948, “Malcolm, don’t eat any more pork and don’t smoke any more cigarettes. I’ll show you how to get out of prison,” he quit smoking and began to refuse pork. After a visit in which Reginald described the group’s teachings, including the belief that white people are devils, Little came to the conclusion that every relationship he’d had with whites had been tainted by dishonesty, injustice, greed, and hatred. Little, whose hostility to religion had earned him the prison nickname “Satan”, began to reconsider his dismissal of all religion and he became receptive to the message of the Nation of Islam.
By the early 1960s, Malcolm X had emerged as a leading voice of a radicalized wing of the civil rights movement, presenting an alternative to Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of a racially integrated society achieved by peaceful means. Dr. King was highly critical of what he viewed as Malcolm X’s destructive demagoguery. “I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice,” he said.
Philosophical differences with King were one thing; a rupture with Elijah Muhammad proved much more traumatic. In 1963, Malcolm X became deeply disillusioned when he learned that his hero and mentor had violated many of his own teachings, most flagrantly by carrying on many extramarital affairs; Muhammad had, in fact, fathered several children out of wedlock.
On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X publicly announced his break from the Nation of Islam. He said that he was still a Muslim, but he felt the Nation of Islam had “gone as far as it can” because of its rigid religious teachings. Malcolm X said he was going to organize a black nationalist organization that would try to “heighten the political consciousness” of African Americans. He also expressed his desire to work with other civil rights leaders and said that Elijah Muhammad had prevented him from doing so in the past.
That same year, Malcolm X embarked on an extended trip through North Africa and the Middle East. The journey proved to be both a political and spiritual turning point in his life. After his epiphany at Mecca, Malcolm X returned to the United States less angry and more optimistic about the prospects for peaceful resolution to America’s race problems. “The true brotherhood I had seen had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision,” he said. “America is the first country… that can actually have a bloodless revolution.” Tragically, just as Malcolm X appeared to be embarking on an ideological transformation with the potential to dramatically alter the course of the American civil rights movement, he was assassinated.
On the evening of February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, where Malcolm X was about to deliver a speech, three gunmen rushed the stage and shot him 15 times at point blank range. Malcolm X was pronounced dead on arrival at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital shortly thereafter. He was 39 years old. The three men convicted of the assassination of Malcolm X were all members of the Nation of Islam: Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson.
1. 1ST BLACK TO SERVE IN US SENATE (1870) – Hirman R. Revels of Mississippi sworn in as first Black U.S. senator and first Black representative in Congress.
2. ELIJAH MUHAMMAD DIES (1975) – Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death. Elijah Muhammad died from congestive heart failure at age 77 on February 25, 1975, the day before Saviours’ Day, at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
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Submitted by:
Dwayne B. Neal – Team N.A.M.E.S.“Knowledge is power, but ACTION is King!”
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