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Black Facts for November 7th

1950 - Thenjiwe Mtintso

Thenjiwe Mtintso , (born November 7, 1950, Soweto, South Africa), South African antiapartheid activist and journalist who occupied various leadership positions within the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) and later served in multiracial governments in South Africa from 1994.

Mtintso was the daughter of Hanna Mtintso, a domestic worker, and Gana Makabeni, a labour leader and ANC activist. She left secondary school to help support her family, completing her education by correspondence courses while working in factories. In 1972 she entered the University of Fort Hare on a scholarship and joined the South African Students’ Organisation. After being expelled for political activities, she moved to King Williams Town and worked as a political organizer with the Black Consciousness movement leaders Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele. She was also a reporter for the Daily Dispatch, a liberal newspaper edited by the white antiapartheid campaigner Donald Woods. During the 1970s she was subjected to banning, detentions, solitary confinement, and severe torture by the South African police. After Biko was murdered while in police custody, she went into exile in 1978.

In Lesotho Mtintso joined the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Zulu and Xhosa: “Spear of the Nation”), the armed wing of the ANC, and the SACP. After receiving military training, including in Cuba, she worked in Lesotho with the Regional Political-Military Council, which coordinated the ANC’s political and military activities in that country, and later served as head of the Regional Political-Military Council in Botswana (1986–89) and as the ANC’s first chief representative to Uganda (1989–91).

In 1991 Mtintso was elected to the SACP Central Committee and Political Bureau. Following the country’s transition to a multiracial democracy in 1994, she was elected as a member of the South African Parliament. However, she turned down an offer of a ministry and chose not to contest her seat again. She was elected to the ANC National

2010 - Sewell, Terri (1965- )

Terryinca “Terri” Sewell, the current U.S. Representative for Alabama’s 7th district, was born January 1, 1965 in Huntsville, Alabama to Andrew and Nancy Sewell. Sewell grew up in Selma, Alabama where both of her parents were employed by the local school district. Her father, Andrew, was a high school math teacher and football coach, and her mother, Nancy, a librarian. Nancy Gardner Sewell was also the first black woman elected to the Selma city council.

Terri Sewell, who graduated from Selma High School in 1983, was the first black valedictorian in the school’s history.  She was also the first graduate of Selma High School to attend an Ivy League school.  After graduation Sewell attended Princeton University where she studied political science and graduated cum laude in 1986. While at Princeton Sewell wrote an award winning thesis titled “Black Women in Politics: Our Time Has Come,” for which she interviewed former Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first African American congresswoman. Upon graduation Sewell was awarded the Marshall/Commonwealth Scholarship to study political science at Oxford University in England. Sewell received her Master’s degree from Oxford in 1988 with first-class honors. In 1992 Sewell graduated from the Harvard Law School. During her time at Harvard Sewell worked as the editor of the Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review.

After her graduation from Harvard Law School, Sewell returned to Alabama to work as a judicial law clerk for Judge U.W.  Clemon  of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.  Shortly after, Sewell began her legal career working as a securities lawyer at the firm of Davis, Polk and Wardwell in New York City. In 2004 Sewell again returned to Alabama where she became a partner at the law offices of Maynard, Cooper & Gale, P.C. in Birmingham.  Taking that post made her at the time the only black finance lawyer in Alabama. During her time with Maynard and Cooper Sewell focused her efforts on helping historically black colleges restructure their debt.

On

1861 - Voices of the Civil War Episode 7: "The Day of the Big Gun Shoot"

Voices of the Civil War Episode 7: The Day of the Big Gun Shoot - YouTube

Voices of the Civil War Episode 7: The Day of the Big Gun Shoot

In episode 7, The Day of the Big Gun Shoot, we visit the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where cotton production flourished during slavery. As the Civil War unfolds, the islands become the site of the Battle of Port Royal on November 7, 1861. Armies attack, slave masters flee, and cotton and slaves remain, once again, left with the dust from where the cannon fire settles. The battle, originally a conflict over Southern seaports, becomes a training ground for future reconstruction and what to do with those enslaved.

Voices of the Civil War Episode 8: Battle of Antietam - Duration: 4:11. CHWMAAH 1,407 views

Civil War Life: Shot To Pieces - Duration: 1:18:43. Janson Media 304,588 views

Harriet Tubman & the Underground Railroad {Part 2} - Duration: 44:28. Judahs Back 69,095 views

Voices of the Civil War Episode 9: Port Royal Experiment - Duration: 6:29. CHWMAAH 3,928 views

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equian .. (FULL audiobook) - part 1 - Duration: 1:44:28. FULL audio books for everyone 37,310 views

Voices of the Civil War Episode 6: Overwhelming Numbers and Resources - Duration: 5:29. CHWMAAH 987 views

Voices of the Civil War Episode 18: New York Draft Riot - Duration: 5:27. CHWMAAH 8,900 views

Voices of the Civil War Episode 30: Battle of the Crater - Duration: 6:58. CHWMAAH 7,685 views

Slaves Christmas at Redcliffe - Duration: 2:33. Tom Grant 6,299 views

Voices of the Civil War Episode 27: Battle of Fort Pillow - Duration: 6:02. CHWMAAH 3,484 views

Voices of the Civil War Episode 24:African Americans in the Confederate Army - Duration: 7:02. CHWMAAH 11,595

2001 - Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: For His Times and Ours

In the article below Hilary Burrage, Executive Chair of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation, a United Kingdom (UK)-based non-profit organisation, describes the composer and how she came to regard and preserve his work and legacy.

It has taken three times the duration of his own lifetime for the reputation of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Britain’s greatest black classical composer, to begin to make an impact on our contemporary world.  At the time of his tragically early death in 1912, aged 37 from a chest infection, Coleridge-Taylor was a nationally feted musical figure.  His Hiawatha Trilogy of staged opera-cantatas based on the poem by Longfellow were massive commercial successes even though he gained almost nothing from them financially.  

After Coleridge-Taylor’s death, the works fell slowly from collective consciousness and favour.  Until the mid-1930s annual fortnight performances of Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall were a highlight of London’s cultural scene.  By the 1960s however, when as a (white) schoolgirl in Birmingham, UK, I was involved in a concert production of the cantata, my friends and I were totally unaware that the composer was a person of mixed race.

Nor did we know of the personal challenges Coleridge-Taylor had faced.  He was born illegitimate in 1875, in Holborn, a (then) harshly impoverished area of central London, to Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor (c1848-1904), a London-trained surgeon who returned home to Sierra Leone and probably never knew of Samuel’s existence, and eighteen-years-old Alice Hare Martin (1856-1953), daughter of Emily Ann Martin.

A year or two after Samuel’s birth, demolition of their squalid Holborn home saw Alice removed to Croydon just south of London. There, she continued to live with Benjamin Holmans (a farrier), his wife Sarah and their children, a ‘housekeeper,’ perhaps Emily Martin, and, later, with her (railway worker) husband George Evans and subsequent offspring. Conjecture suggests Benjamin may have been Samuel’s maternal grandfather since various members of