CALENDAR OF EVENTS

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President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

President-Elect Of The United States

Born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961

 

The first African American to be elected President of the United States, Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from 2005 until he resigned on November 16, 2008, following his election to the Presidency. His term of office as the forty-fourth U.S. president will begin on January 20, 2009. On June 3, 2008 with the Democratic Party became the first African American Presumptive Presidential nominee of any major American political party for the 2008 presidential election.

 

November 3, 2008 Barack Obama's grandmother, whose personality and bearing shaped much of the life of the Democratic presidential contender died, Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86.

A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama worked as a community organizer, served as a law school professor, and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House Of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003.
After winning a landslide primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Conventional in July 2004. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote.

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was born and raised in a small village in Kenya, where he grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British.

Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Patton's army. Her mother went to work on a bomber assembly line, and after the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved west to Hawaii.

It was there, at the University of Hawaii, where Barack's parents met. His mother was a student there, and his father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams in America.
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File:Michelle Obama official portrait headshot.jpg

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama                

January 17, 1964

The current First Lady of The United States

Michelle L. R. Obama is the current First Lady of The United States,  and the wife of the forty-fourth President of the United States Barack Obama. She is the first African American First Lady.
She was born and grew up on the South Side  of Chicago and graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School.  After completing her formal education, she returned to Chicago and accepted a position with the law firm Sidley Austin, and subsequently worked as part of the staff of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, and for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
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Following law school, she was an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin, where she first met her future husband. At the firm, she worked on marketing and intellectual property. Subsequently, she held public sector positions in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor, and as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies. She worked there nearly four years and set fundraising records for the organization that still stood a dozen years after she left.

In 1996, she served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she developed the University's Community Service Center. In 2002, she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as executive director for community affairs and, beginning May 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs. She continued to hold the University of Chicago Hospitals position during the primary campaign, but cut back to part time in order to spend time with her daughters as well as work for her husband's election; she subsequently took a leave of absence from her job. According to the couple’s 2006 income tax return, Michelle's salary was $273,618 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, while her husband had a salary of $157,082 from the United States Senate. The total Obama income, however, was $991,296 which included $51,200 she earned as a member of the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, and investments and royalties from his books.

She served as a salaried board member of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. (NYSE: THS), a major Wal-Mart supplier with whom she cut ties immediately after her husband made comments critical of Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO forum in Trenton, New Jersey, on May 14, 2007. She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

 

 

 

 

 
 

Colin Luther Powell,

April 5, 1937-

Colin Luther Powell, April 5, 1937- an African American. In the United States Department of Defense was appointed as a General in the U.S. Army, Powell also served as National Security Advisor (1987–1989) Powell was promoted in 1989 to a four-star general, becoming the first African American to hold that rank, and was also named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Powell retired as the Four Star General in the United States Army and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993), holding the latter position during the Gulf War. Powell was appointed by President George W.Bush as the 65th United States Secretary of State in 2001 until his retirement in 2005.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Condoleezza Rice

(1954- )
 Secretary of State

(2005-2009)


Born November 14, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice became The First African American Secretary of State on January 26, 2005. Prior to this, she was the Assistant to President George Bush for National Security Affairs, commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor, since January.

 

Dr. Rice earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the National Defense University in 2002, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003, the University of Louisville and Michigan State University in 2004. She resides in Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Joseph Jackson
"The King Of Pop"

(1958-2009)

 

MIchael Jackson (August 29, 1958 - June 25, 2009) was an American recording artist, entertainer, businessman and humanitarian. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he made his debut as a performer in 1964 as a member of The Jackson Brothers who were subsequently renamed The Jackson 5. He began a solo career in 1971 while still a member of the group, and that successful career led to him being dubbed the “King of Pop" in subsequent years. Jackson's 1982 album Thriller remains the world’s best-selling album of all time, and four of his other solo studio albums are among the world's best-selling records: Off the Wall (1979), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991) and History  (1995)

 

 

 

Ivan_Van_Sertima-1.jpg image by krissydiamond

"We have come to reclaim the house of history.  We are dedicated to the revision of the role of the African in the world's great civilizations, the contribution of Africa to the achievement of man in the arts and sciences.  We shall emphasize what Africa has given to the world, not what it has lost." Dr. Ivan Van Sertima

Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (January 26, 1935 - May 25, 2009) He was born in Kitty Village, Guyana, when Guyana was still a British colony. He remained a British citizen. Little is known of his childhood. Dr. Ivan G. Van Sertima was a British historian,linguist and an anthropologist at Rutgers University in the United States.He was noted for his Afro centric theory of pre-Columbian contract between Africa and the Americas. His 1976 book, They Came Before Columbus, was a bestseller and achieved widespread fame for his claims of prehistoric African influences in Central and South America. It was criticized by academic specialists. His critics contend that by asserting African origins for prehistoric Olmec culture in present-day Mexico, Van Sertima ignored the work of Central American scholars. Moreover, his critics claimed no evidence emerged of prehistoric African influence in controlled archeological excavations and they contended that while Olmec stone heads superficially appear to be African they were not similar to Nubian populations Van Sertima claimed as originators.

Van Sertima also treated the topic of African scientific contributions in his essay for the volume African Renaissance, published in 1999. This was a record of the conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa in September 1998 on the theme of the African Renaissance. His article was entitled The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview. In it he presents early African advances in metallurgy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, engineering, agriculture, navigation, medicine and writing. He claimed that higher learning, in Africa as elsewhere, was the preserve of elites in the centers of civilizations, rendering them very vulnerable in the event (as happened in Africa) of the destruction of those centers.

On July 7, 1987 Van Sertima appeared before a United States Congressional committee in opposition to crediting the discovery of America to Christopher Columbus.

Chancellor James Williams (December 22, 1898-December 7, 1992)

Chancellor J. Williams was born in Bennettsville, South Carolina. He was a writer, university professor, and historian. His book “The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race Between 4500 B.C. and 2000 A. D. became a book which has become a cornerstone of the field of academics known as Afro-centrism.

Of the recent towering figures in the struggle to completely eradicate the pervasive racial myths clinging to the origins of Nile Valley Civilization, few scholars have had the impact of Dr. Chancellor James Williams (1898-1992).  Chancellor Williams, the youngest of five children, was born in Bennetsville, South Carolina December 22, 1898. His father had been a slave; his mother a cook, nurse, and evangelist. A stirring writer, Chancellor Williams achieved wide acclaim as the author of the 1971 publication, The Destruction of Black Civilization--Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.

Totally uncompromising, highly controversial, broadly sweeping in its range and immensely powerful in its scope, there have been few books published during the past half-century focusing on the African presence in antiquity that have so profoundly affected the consciousness of African people in search of their historical identity.  Dr. John Henrik Clarke, now an ancestor and a contemporary of Dr. Williams and one of our most outstanding scholars, described The Destruction of Black Civilization as "a foundation and new approach to the history of our race."  In The Destruction of Black Civilization Chancellor Williams successfully "shifted the main focus from the history of Arabs and Europeans in Africa to the Africans themselves--a history of the Blacks that is a history of Blacks."

The career of Chancellor Williams was spacious and varied; university professor, novelist, and author-historian.  He was the father of fourteen children.  Blind and in poor health, the last years of Dr. Williams' life were spent in a nursing home in Washington, D.C.  His contributions to the reconstruction of African civilization, however, stand as monuments and beacons reflecting the past, present and future of African people.

SOURCES:
The Destruction Of Black Civilization, by Chancellor Williams
Egypt: Child Of Africa, Edited by Ivan Van Sertima

 

Dr. Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan

(1918- )

Yosef Ben-Jochannan

Yosef Alfredo Antonio ben-Jochannan affectionately known as "Dr. Ben" was born on December 31, 1918, to a Puerto Rican mother Julia Matta and an Ethiopian father Kriston ben-Jochannan in what is known as the "Falasha" Hebrew community in Gondar, Ethiopia. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to St. Croix, Virgin Islands where he grew up as an only child. Ben-Jochannan attended the Christian Stead School in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. He enjoyed playing cricket and working on his uncle's sugar cane farm.

After graduation from high school in 1934, ben-Jochannan attended the University of Puerto Rico where, in 1938, he received a B.S. degree in civil engineering. During that summer, ben-Jochannan's father sent him to Ethiopia to study firsthand the ancient history of African people. He returned home and received a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Havana in 1939. Ben-Jochannan holds Ph.D. degrees in cultural anthropology and Moorish history from the University of Havana and the University of Barcelona. He is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic. He can read Greek and hieroglyphics.

Ben-Jochannan came to the United States in the early 1940s. He found work as a draftsman and continued his studies. He began leading educational tours to Egypt in 1947 and these tours would span decades.

Ben-Jochannan's teaching career began in 1950 at Malcolm King College then City College in New York City. He would become an adjunct professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, for over a decade (1976-1987). He has written and published over 49 books and papers, revealing much of the information unearthed while he was in Egypt. Two of his better known works include, Black Man of the Nile and His Family and Africa: Mother of Major Western Religions.

Ben-Jochannan lives in Harlem, New York with his wife, Gertrude.

Ben-Jochannan was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on November 5, 2006.


Lt. Governor of Florida

Jennifer Carroll

2011

jennifer carroll

 

Jennifer Carroll (born August 27, 1959) is a Trinidadian-born American politician who is the 18th and current Lieutenant Governor of the U.S. state of Florida. The first African-American and the first woman elected to the position, she assumed the office on January 4, 2011. She is the second woman to hold the position, following Toni Jennings, who was appointed in 2003 to finish the term of Frank Brogan. Carroll previously served in the Florida House of Representatives from 2003 until 2010.

Source politifact.com. St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald. http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2010/sep/03/rick-scott/jennifer-carroll-could-make-history-if-elected-li/. Retrieved January 5, 2011.