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Black Facts for November 20th

1827 - Dede, Edmund (1827-1903)

Musician and composer Edmund Dede was born on November 20, 1827 in New Orleans, Louisiana. His parents were free Creoles of color who moved to New Orleans from the French West Indies around 1809. Dede took his first music lessons from his father who was a bandmaster for a local military group.

Dede soon became a violin prodigy after studying under Italian-born composer and theater-orchestra conductor Ludovico Gabici, and conductor of the New Orleans Free Creoles of Color Philharmonic Society Christian Debergue. Dede advanced his technique studies in New Orleans under Eugene Prevost, French-born winner of 1831 Prix de Rome and conductor of Orchestras at the Theater d’Orleans, and Charles Richard Lambert, who was a free black musician, music teacher, and conductor from New York who had moved to New Orleans.

In 1848 Dede moved to Mexico, as did many free Creoles of color after race relations in New Orleans worsened following the end of the Mexican-American War. Dede returned to New Orleans in 1851 where he wrote and published “Mon Pauvre Coeur” (My Poor Heart), which is considered the oldest piece of sheet music published by a New Orleans free Creole of color.

Dede worked as a cigar-maker, which allowed him to earn enough money to move to Europe to further pursue his music education. In 1857 he entered the Paris Conservatory for Advanced Musical Study. He then moved to Bordeaux where he became conductor for the L’Alcazar orchestra. Good trade relations between Bordeaux and Louisiana meant a large number of free Creoles of color settled in the French town, and Dede experienced less racial prejudice in France than in the United States.

During his years in Bordeaux Dede was a popular and prolific music composer, writing ballets, operettas, opera-comiques, overtures, and more than 250 dances and songs. The vast majority of the surviving copies of Dede’s works are from this period of his life, stored at the National Library of France in Paris. Despite his enormous popularity in France, the performance of Dede’s

1904 - Taylor, George Edwin (1857-1925)

Born in the pre-Civil War South to a mother who was free and a father who was enslaved, George Edwin Taylor would become the first African American selected by a political party to be its candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Taylor was born on August 4, 1857 in Little Rock, Arkansas to Amanda Hines and Bryant (Nathan) Taylor. At the age of two, George Taylor moved with his mother from Arkansas to Illinois. When Amanda died a few years later, George fended for himself until arriving in Wisconsin by paddleboat in 1865. Raised in and near La Crosse by a politically active black family, he attended Wayland University in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin from 1877 to 1879, after which he returned to La Crosse where he went to work for the La Crosse Free Press and then the La Crosse Evening Star. During the years 1880 to 1885 he produced newspaper columns for local papers as well as articles for the Chicago Inter Ocean.

Taylor’s newspaper work brought him into politics—especially labor politics. He sided with one of the competing labor factions in La Crosse and helped re-elect the pro-labor mayor, Frank “White Beaver” Powell, in 1886. In the months that followed, Taylor became a leader and office holder in Wisconsin’s statewide Union Labor Party, and his own newspaper, the Wisconsin Labor Advocate, became one of the newspapers of the party.

In 1887 Taylor was a member of the Wisconsin delegation to the first national convention of the Union Labor Party, which met in Ohio in April, and refocused his newspaper on national political issues. As his prominence increased, his race became an issue, and Taylor responded to the criticism by increasingly writing about African American issues.  Sometime in 1887 or 1888 his paper ceased publication.

In 1891 Taylor moved to Oskaloosa, Iowa where he continued his interest in politics, first in the Republican Party and then with the Democrats.  While in Iowa Taylor owned and edited the Negro Solicitor, and became president of the National Colored Men’s Protective Association

1976 - Dominique Dawes

One of the most renowned names in the history of American gymnastics, Dominique Dawes was born in November 20, 1976 in Silver Spring, Maryland. Dawes recognized her passion for gymnastics at an early age of 6 years and attended lessons with Kelli Hill who remained her coach for the rest of Dawes’ gymnastics career.

With her skills and determination, Dawes soon became a force to be reckoned with in the field of gymnastics and at the young age of 12, became the first African American to earn a spot in the national women’s team. In 1992, Dawes joined the U.S. Olympic artistic gymnastics team which won the bronze medal in Barcelona. In the 1994 National Championships, she won all-around gold and four individual events, vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise, becoming the first gymnast to win all five gold medals since 1969.

Making the cut for the 1996 U.S. Olympic team, Dawes led the Magnificent Seven to the first position, making the squad the first U.S. women’s gymnastics team to do so in the history of Olympics. A few small mistakes, including a fall, hindered Dawes’ contention for the all-around competition medal. However, she earned herself the title of the first African American to win an individual medal in women’s gymnastics by displaying the best floor performance.

Dawes successfully maintained a balance between her academic and sports careers, attending Standford University on an athletic scholarship which she had received upon graduating from Gaithersburg High School but had deferred her enrollment until after the 1996 Olympics. Being an all-rounder, she also began pursuing a career in arts around the same time, involving herself in acting, television production and modeling. Appearing in the famous Broadway musical, Grease, Dominique Dawes  also worked for Disney Television and one of Prince’s music videos.

Justifying to her reputation of Awesome Dawesome, Dawes continued to train while gaining higher education in 2000 and made it to U.S. Olympic team for a third time. Initially finishing

1963 - Racism

AIDS stigma

Adultism

Anti-albinism

Anti-autism

Anti-homelessness

Anti-intellectualism

Anti-intersex

Anti-left handedness

Anti-Masonry

Audism

Binarism

Biphobia

Cronyism

Elitism

Ephebiphobia

Fatism

Genderism

Gerontophobia

Heteronormativity

Heterosexism

Homophobia

Leprosy stigma

Lesbophobia

Mentalism

Misandry

Misogyny

Nepotism

Pedophobia

Pregnancy

Reverse

Sectarianism

Shadism

Transmisogyny

Transphobia

Xenophobia

Racism is discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. Today, the use of the term racism does not easily fall under a single definition.[1]

The ideology underlying racist practices often includes the idea that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different due to their social behavior and their innate capacities as well as the idea that they can be ranked as inferior or superior.[2] The Holocaust is a classic example of institutionalized racism which led to the death of millions of people based on race. While the concepts of race and ethnicity are considered to be separate in contemporary social science, the two terms have a long history of equivalence in both popular usage and older social science literature. Ethnicity is often used in a sense close to one traditionally attributed to race: the division of human groups based on qualities assumed to be essential or innate to the group (e.g. shared ancestry or shared behavior). Therefore, racism and racial discrimination are often used to describe discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of whether these differences are described as racial. According to a United Nations convention on racial discrimination, there is no distinction between the terms racial and ethnic discrimination. The UN convention further concludes that superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and there is no justification for racial discrimination, anywhere, in theory or in practice.[3]

Racist