James' World 2

APRIL 21, 2023, BY CONTRIBUTED BY: BLACKPAST AND LISA ROY Nora Holt was an important figure in the history of Black music in Chicago in the 1930s and was a noted musician, composer, and renowned singer and performer during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1940s. While employed as a music critic for the Chicago Defender from 1917-1921, she co-founded […]

NORA HOLT (1885 – JANUARY 25, 1974)

APRIL 29, 2023, BY CONTRIBUTED BY: OTIS ALEXANDER Thelma Marie Claybrooks Harper, born in Brentwood, Davidson County, Tennessee, on December 2, 1940, was the first African American woman State Senator in Tennessee. She was born to the Rev. William Claybrooks, Sr., and Clora Thomas Claybrooks, a sharecropper who parented eleven children. Her early education began in a […]

THELMA HARPER (1940-2021)

God will judge our sin, not our skin. – Tangie T. Woods

Saturday Afternoon Quote

APRIL 26, 2023, BY CONTRIBUTED BY: OTIS ALEXANDER Newark’s first Black woman municipal court judge, Golden Elizabeth Johnson, was born April 10, 1944, in Newark, New Jersey, to LeRoy Johnson, a civil rights activist and tenant president of a housing project, and Lucy Melton Johnson from Wilson, North Carolina. Golden had two sisters, Courtenaye Johnson Lawrence and […]

GOLDEN ELIZABETH JOHNSON (1944-2010)

JULY 24, 2022, BY CONTRIBUTED BY: VINCENT CHEN Clifford Wayne Houston is a nationally recognized microbiologist and became the first African American president of the American Society of Microbiology. Houston was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on December 3, 1949, to Mae Frances Hanley and Edgar Houston. He attended Gordon Oaks Elementary and John F. Kennedy Junior […]

CLIFFORD WAYNE HOUSTON (1949- )

SEPTEMBER 23, 2022, BY CONTRIBUTED BY: LAURA MERCER Marie Walker Johnson was a Black Creole civil rights activist in Oakland, California, during the 1960s. A mother of five and a nurse, she also played a crucial role in multiple grassroots groups in the East Bay area. In these organizations, she marched, wrote letters, gave speeches, attended court […]

MARIE CLARA DELPIT WALKER JOHNSON (1921-1974)

FEBRUARY 22, 2023, BY CONTRIBUTED BY: WENDY JONES Josephine Ebaugh Jones was a community activist and possibly the first Black woman in management at a Fortune 500 company. Born to sharecroppers Anna Nance and Scott Ebaugh on July 30, 1920, in Cross Hill, South Carolina, Josephine arrived in New York City in 1946 as a cook in […]

JOSEPHINE EBAUGH JONES (1920-2017)

Professor Charles Ogletree Jr., a prolific lawyer, advocate, scholar, and educator who endeavored to shed light on our nation’s history of racial injustice and its pernicious evolution in the criminal legal system, died today at age 70. Charles Ogletree became a lawyer because, he said, “A jury verdict changed my life.” The first in his […]

EJI Honors the Life and Memory of Charles Ogletree Jr.

The Little Mermaid is a musical romantic fantasy directed by Rob Marshall from a screenplay written by David Magee. Co-produced by Walt Disney Pictures, Lucamar Productions, and Marc Platt Productions, it is a live-action adaptation of Disney’s 1989 animated film of the same name, itself loosely based on the 1837 fairy tale of the same […]

THE LITTLE MERMAID (2023) – My rating: 9/10

APRIL 28, 2023, BY CONTRIBUTED BY: EUELL A. NIELSEN Diambi Kabatusuila is the traditional Queen of the Bakwa Luntu people of the Kingdom of Luba, located in the southern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. She also holds the title of Mukalenga Mukaji wa Nkashama wa Bakwa Luntu wa Baluba wa Congo, which means “The Woman […]

QUEEN DIAMBI (1970S – )