“He went to my high school!” I gestured excitedly in the movie theater last night. It was during the preview of “Won’t Back Down,” a film scheduled for release in late September. The cast includes Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ving Rhames and Holly Hunter. And it also features Bill Nunn, whose father and grandfather worked with my father at the Pittsburgh Courier. Bill, well, we called him “Bubby,” also is a Morehouse grad.
Bill Nunn with Elizabeth Banks in Spider-man. Source: The Pittsburgh Courier
What I hadn’t noticed until I got home to read up on the film, is that it was shot in Pittsburgh.
And it’s about parents who take a stand to make sure their kids get the quality education they are entitled to. Gotta love that.
I haven’t seen the movie yet. I’ll try not to judge it based on the trailer, which seems pretty high on cheese.
I’ll go see it, though, just to see Bubby, who plays the school principal, and the Pittsburgh skyline, which makes my heart flutter.
My nephew, actor Lamman Rucker was in Barbados last week and was the talk of the town. Several local news outlets and blogs noted his arrival. Nationnews.com did a nice write up on him. Check it out.
He also did a nice video for Amtrak’s Black History month series “My Black Journey.”
*Editors note. Lamman mentions in the video that Ebenezer worked for the New York Amsterdam News. He actually spent most of his years in Harlem at the New York Age, the rival Harlem paper at the time. Of course, since this is a continuing journey and we don’t know the whole story, I can’t say definitively that he never worked for the Amsterdam News.
When I was a kid. The Pittsburgh Courier was the place my father worked. It was one of several newspapers on the coffee table, albeit the only one that featured people who looked like me or people we knew. Later, it was the employer that issued rubber paychecks, the company that kept my ailing father on the payroll as long as it could, the source of my mother’s conflicted feelings about black-owned publications. (When I called her from a pay phone in Rockefeller Plaza in 1981, breathless that I’d just landed my dream job at Essence, my mother’s response was, “Will you have health insurance?”)
But the Courier and the people who worked there shaped my personal and professional life far more than I would know. More importantly, it shaped the history of America, particularly in politics and sports.
The Courier was founded in 1910 by Nathaniel Harleston – a security guard at the pickle factory, H.J. Heinz Company – and several other black Americans. Around that time, African Americans were pouring into Pittsburgh from the South to take jobs in the city’s booming steel mills.
Robert L. Vann, who as an undergraduate at what is now the University of Pittsburgh was the first black man to serve as editor of the university’s student newspaper and later was the first black to earn a law degree from there, started out as the Courier’s incorporating attorney. Shortly thereafter, however, he became its editor, its principal stockholder and its publisher. Vann was key to building the paper’s readership and propelling it into its role as a national leader in national and international politics.
According to an article in Pitt Magazine, the newspaper was the “top-selling and most widely circulated newspaper for blacks nationwide in the 1930s with 14 separate editions delivered nationally every week.” At one point, it also had readers in Europe, Cuba, Canada and the West Indies.
Samuel W. Black, curator of African-American collections at Pittsburgh's Heinz History Center, where "America's Best Weekly: A Century of the Pittsburgh Courier" is currently on exhibit until June 2, 2012.
Samuel W. Black, curator of African-American collections at the Heinz History Center, where America’s Best Weekly: A Century of the Pittsburgh Courier, is currently on exhibit, said the Courier was one of the first black weeklies to engage foreign correspondents. Author Joel Augustus “J.A.” Rogers, for instance, traveled to Europe and other parts of the world, covering blacks in the military during the world wars and interviewing such figures as Emperor Haile Sellassi during the Italian Ethiopian war. Other reporters were hired to go undercover to report on the Ku Klux Klan.
Even as Vann built the paper’s circulation to hundreds of thousands, he leveraged his legal and political skills. Before the 1932 presidential election, most African Americans leaned Republican, the party of Lincoln. But Vann urged readers to “turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall,” and throw their support behind the Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Vann’s influence significantly helped Roosevelt to win the election, and the president appointed Vann a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general. While in that role from 1933 to 1935, Vann wrote regularly to FDR urging him to establish a standing black unit in the army commanded by an African American. Vann argued that it would provide a basis for black advancement in the military.
“He had been urging Roosevelt to do this for a long time,” Black said. “Two things came out of this, one was the appointment of Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. and the other was the establishment of what became the Tuskegee Airmen.”
According to ExplorePAHistory.com, it was not until after Vann’s death in Oct. 1940 that FDR appointed Davis, Sr. to be the first African-American brigadier general in American history. And even after Vann’s death the paper continued its legacy of advocacy. “In the spirit of its deceased editor, the Courier, in the same issue that it ran Vann’s obituary, editorialized that the elevation of Davis and two other African Americans in the Roosevelt administration was ‘too little and too late.’”
Ultimately, though, Davis, Sr.’s son, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. would command the legendary all-black flying unit.
During a visit to the Heinz history center last fall, Black offered a fact-filled history of the Courier from its founding to its current iteration as the New Pittsburgh Courier. My primary interest was in the years leading up to and during my father’s tenure as a printer there.
Here are some highlights:
Dorie Miller Gets His Due.
According to Black, it was the Courier that was responsible shining a spotlight on Dorie Miller. An African American cook in the U. S. Navy who rescued wounded soldiers during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Miller also took up arms against the Japanese, even though he had no weapons training.
“It was actually the Pittsburgh Courier that made Dorie Miller’s name famous,” Black said, noting that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the War Department filed reports on Miller’s heroics, but never made them public. “In press conferences they mentioned some of the white people, but they never mentioned Miller. The Courier decided to read the report, and it was the Courier who first started talking about Dorie Miller, which forced the Navy to honor him.”
In 1942, Miller was given the Navy Cross, the third highest honor for the Navy at that time, which Black says was a direct result of the Courier’s coverage.
The Double V Campaign
Shortly after the United States entered World War II, The Courier launched The Double V Campaign, under the theme of “Democracy: Victory at Home, Victory Abroad.” The campaign’s message was that while blacks were patriotic in their support of the war, they should have full rights on American soil.
When the Courier came out with the Double V Campaign, Black says, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to charge the paper with sedition, accusing it of undermining the war effort.
“The Courier was very open with the FBI and challenged them to find anyone who would say that they were against the war effort because of the Double V Campaign,” Black said, adding that the paper argued that the campaign was in fact an effort to recruit black support for the war. Black said the FBI interviewed everybody on the paper’s staff. “The FBI never really backed down, but they at least stopped posting agents outside the Courier offices.”
Today is my sister Malaya’s birthday. She is my parents’ second born, a dancer, storyteller, stage mother, earth mother – an artist in every sense of the word. It was preordained. Before she was Nana Malaya Rucker-Oparabea, the name she uses now, she was Marian, named for Marian Anderson.
Marian-Malaya Rucker-Oparabea
I always knew my mother revered the renowned contralto. My mother admired Anderson’s quiet dignity in the face of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), who refused let Anderson sing before an integrated audience in Washington’s Constitution Hall. To my mother, Anderson’s victorious concert on Easter Sunday 1939, before a crowd of 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial was a milestone in black history.
But for my father the connection may have been more personal. Marian Anderson was his contemporary. They were both born at the end of the 19th century. I believe he was smitten.
“With scores of her elated and admiring auditors standing at the footlights literally drinking the melodious strains which flowed from the fountain of her golden voice, Marian Anderson, internationally acclaimed contralto, sang a farewell number on Sunday evening last, he wrote in a review that appeared on the front page of the New York Age on May 14, 1938. “This was Miss Anderson’s final appearance in America this season and was given at the Carnegie Hall.”
After that concert, my father wrote, well wishers “of both races then repaired to her dressing room to shake hands with her and tender their congratulations. She was presented with a beautiful bouquet of tea roses.” I suppose he witnessed this firsthand. (Did he offer the roses?)
In a Nov. 13, 1943 review of a Pittsburgh concert, also written for the New York Age, Ebenezer called Anderson the “world’s greatest contralto.”
“Miss Anderson was in excellent voice and charmingly gowned,” he wrote. His only complaint was that the “motley” Pittsburgh audience was too subdued. Yes, there were plenty of compliments from the audience as they left Pittsburgh’s Syria Mosque, where the performance was held.
“To this erstwhile New Yorker, however, two things were missing from this recital. There were no shouts of ‘Bravo’ from the ‘peanut gallery,’ which was only two tiers up, and there were no American Beauty roses, nor orchids. In brief, Miss Anderson received no flowers. But this is Pittsburgh!”
Ebenezer would come to love, or at least accept, Pittsburgh. He would fall in love with my mother and out of that love would come three daughters, the second of whom was born on this date.
Malaya is very different from her namesake. She leans more toward classical African and Caribbean beats than Scarlatti or Schubert. Of course, these two women came of age in different times. I can only imagine what Malaya would have told the DAR. She might have even taken over the stage.
I’ve often wondered why the only one of the three of us who was named after a historical figure would change her name. The answer is simple. Malaya always has been, and will forever be, her own person.
Kymberly Wimberly, a 2011 graduate of McGehee Secondary School in Arkansas, is suing her school district and its officials, claiming they violated her constitutional right to equal treatment under the law.
According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit claims that a school counselor told Wimberly’s mother in May that the girl had the school’s highest grade point average in the graduating class, but later the mother, who works at the school, overheard a conversation in which staff said there would be a “big mess” if a black girl stood alone as valedictorian. A white female student was selected to serve as “co-valedictorian,” and both gave speeches at their May 13 graduation.
(According to reports, the school, whose black population is about 46 percent, has had a black valedictorian before, but not since 1989.)
The district’s superintendent, who is black, told an Arkansas television station that “the second girl took more classes and that a school rule prevents extra course work from penalizing students when calculating grade point averages.” After they did the math, the superintendent said, the two students’ GPAs were the same.
Sounds like fuzzy math to me, but now it’s in the hands of the court.
Fannetta Nelson Gordon
This tale brings to mind the story of the late Fannetta Nelson Gordon, who in April of this year posthumously received the valedictory recognition she had been denied for 75 years.
Nelson Gordon, who happens to have been the aunt of my oldest friend, Rev. Melana Nelson-Amaker, attended Pittsburgh’s Westinghouse High School and in 1936 would have been the school’s second black valedictorian. Her sister, Sophia Phillips Nelson, now in her 90s, was the school’s first black valedictorian in 1934. According to a story in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, “the principal said the school would not have another black valedictorian. So, he pressured a music teacher to change her grades.”
Ebenezer Ray, The New York Age, Oct. 31, 1936
Both sisters were honored by the high school’s alumni association this spring, and the story made national news. We all felt good that even though Nelson Gordon did not live to receive the recognition, an injustice had been righted.
But now we have the Wimberly case. ColorofChange.org is encouraging those who find this case troubling to write to school district officials. It’s not just about Wimberly, they say:
“McGehee and other school districts around the country should be encouraging all prepared students to challenge themselves academically. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. Last year, Black students made up 15 percent of graduating seniors, but accounted for just 9 percent of students taking AP exams. Black students trail far behind White, Asian and Latino students in terms of participation in AP classes, and educators have a responsibility to provide equal access to and preparation for college-level coursework. Kymberly is the rare example of the student whose family believed she could excel in high-level classes, despite what some adults at school told her and students who look like her.”
And however the lawsuit turns out, Wimberly has already won.
Not only did she take — and ace — Advanced Placement and honors courses, earning only one B in her entire high school career, according to reports, she had a baby during her junior year and still excelled. (Which, in addition to race, is likely the other elephant in McGehee’s living room.)
“My teachers thought I’d fall flat on my face, but I kept trying to succeed,” she said.
Congratulations, Kymberly, and as they say, “Keep gettin’ up.”
I confess. I am under the spell of Riley, Warrior Princess. I wait with bated breath for the next time I can get to see her don an invisibility cloak, disappear under a press conference table, then reappear, headband gone, ready for her next conquest. I, like the rest of the world, watch as […]
From the moment she was born, my daughter, Zuri Adele, talked with her eyes. They took in everything, registered centuries of wisdom, expressed a range of emotion she could not logically understand. I remember watching her at a birthday party with a group of kids she didn’t know well. They were taking turns acting out […]
My sister Malaya Rucker-Oparabea, a dancer and storyteller, and her son, actor, producer and entrepreneur Lamman Rucker, have devoted their lives to their art. On Sunday, May 15, they talked about their relationship on an online radio program “Phenomenal Saging Mothers.”
“Pioneering did not frighten me. I was accustomed to studying and living with white teachers at Spelman and to reaching for high standards in all areas.”
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