Born on the December 4, 1973, Tyra Lynne Banks is one of the most famous American television personalities. Better known for her flawless career as a model, she has also been a producer, actress and author. She appeared twice on the cover for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and was one of Victoria’s Secrets’ first angels. She is a native of Inglewood, California and she has one brother, Devin who is five years older to her. She was six when her parents got divorced and was often the target of calls such as “ugly duckling” but she shed thirty pounds and grew three inches within three months when she turned eleven.

Tyra Banks started her career as a model when she was fifteen years old. She was still a school going girl at that time. She faced rejection in her early career; more specifically, she was rejected by four agencies. However at 16, she switched to Elite Model Management and once she got an opportunity to move to Milan, she did while putting college on hold. She was a massive success in the 1991 Paris Fashion Week and booked a total of twenty five shows. She did runway shows for Chanel, Fendi, Valentino and others.

From runway modeling, Banks shifted to advertisements and magazine covers. She did commercials for Dolce & Gabbana, Ralph Lauren and Nike. She was on the cover of Teen Vogue, Vogue as well as Elle. After taking Europe by storm, she moved back to United States.  Once back, she was the first African American woman to be on the covers of GQ and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and was the recipient of the VH1 “Supermodel of the Year” award in 1997. She was also one of the first ever African-American to be chosen as Victoria’s Secret cover for the catalog. After her move back to the states, she started with her career in films and television. She has also been repeatedly ranked in the list of The World’s Most Influential People by TIME magazine.

Tyra’s film and television career started with her being featured in The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. She plays Will Smith’s old friend. She also starred

South Carolina Constitutional Convention adopted new constitution with understanding clause designed to eliminate Black voters.

In the 1890s, southern states began to systematically and completely disfranchise black males by imposing voter registration restrictions, such as literacy tests, poll taxes, the grandfather clause, and the white primary (only whites could vote in the Democratic Party primary contests). Such provisions did not violate the Fifteenth Amendment because they applied to all voters regardless of race. In reality, however, the provisions were more strictly enforced on blacks, especially in those areas dominated by lower-class whites. The so-called understanding clause, which allowed illiterate, white voters to register if they understood specific texts in the state constitution to the satisfaction of white registrars, was widely recognized to be a loophole provision for illiterate whites. It was crafted to protect the suffrage of those whites who might otherwise have been excluded from voting by the literacy qualification for registering to vote. In point of fact, tens of thousands of poor white farmers were also disfranchised because of non-payment of the poll tax, for which there were no loopholes provided.

George Washington gives his farewell address to his troops at Fraunces Tavern in NYC owned by ,Samuel Black Sam Fraunces a wealthy West Indian of African and French descent who aided Revolutionary forces with food and money

From what is known, Samuel Fraunces left the French West Indies to make his way in New York City in the 1750s. As the owner first of the Masons Arms Tavern and later of the Queens Head, he was truly an original. Nicknamed Black Sam, he was friendly and a connoisseur of good food and drink, and he eventually became one of the better hosts in the colonies.

His tavern became hugely popular as a meeting place for revolutionaries -- at great risk to Fraunces. British troops kept him under house arrest during the war. Yet he kept his tavern open and found ways to aid American prisoners of war held by the British.

At the end of the war, the Americans held a victory parade along lower Broadway (close to the tavern). Black Sam renamed his establishment Fraunces Tavern and organized the first public dinner for Gen. George Washington. Later, it was here that Washington said farewell to his troops and leading officers.

When Washington was called back to serve as president, he appointed Samuel Fraunces his chief steward. He reclaimed his popular tavern after Washington left the presidency. Originally built in 1719, it was restored in 1904, and some of the original bricks are intact.

This is a stunning Georgian building with a dark slate roof, a balustrade, dormers and chimneys. Dining is on the first floor, and the top floors offer several museum rooms with artifacts from the Revolutionary War and from Fraunces personal items.

Lloyd Bacon , in full Lloyd Francis Bacon (born December 4, 1889, San Jose, California, U.

Pulitzer Prize for photography awarded to Moneta Sleet Jr. of Ebony magazine. He was the first Black male cited by the Pulitzer committee.

In 1969 Moneta J. Sleet Jr. became the first African American male and the first African American photographer to win a Pulitzer Prize. He served as staff photographer for the Johnson Publishing Company for over four decades, covering some of the most important events of twentieth-century history. Sleets Pulitzer Prize-winning photographic portrait of Coretta Scott King and her youngest child, Bernice, was taken during Martin Luther King Jr.s funeral. In one split second Sleet captured what words could never adequately express. Whether he was creating images of celebrities or the largely anonymous, all were photographed with the care and sensitivity that are Moneta Sleet trademarks, in the words of an Ebony article of January 1987.

Cassandra Wilson (born. Dec 4, 1955) is a best known as an American songwriter, singer, jazz musician and music producer who hails from Jackson, Mississippi. Wilson, whose ancestry includes Welsh, Eastern European and West African blood is the third youngest child of jazz musician Herman Fowlkes Jr. Wilson grew up with a taste for music from a very early age, given how her own parents had always adored music; her father had studied jazz music and her mother had adored Motown. Hence it was hardly surprising when Wilson expressed her own interest in learning to play the guitar; her father was adamant that she learn on her own and thus the young aspiring musician developed her own intuitive approach when it came to playing the guitar. Wilson graduated with a degree in mass communication from Millsaps College and attended Jackson State University. It would be in 2007 that she would go on to receive her PhD in Arts from Millsap College.

It was when Wilson performed behop with the Black Arts Music Society which was founded by John Reese that she made her first dive into the world of professional music. As Assistant for Public Affairs Director for WDSU which was a local television station in New Orleans, Wilson moved to the city in 1981 and it was there that she met Ellis Marsalis, Alvin Batiste and Earl Turbinton who all encouraged her to move to New York to pursue her interest in jazz music. In NYC, Cassandra Wilson did ear training which helped her refine her scat and vocal phrasing. Wilson went on to become one of the founding members and vocalists for the M-Base Collective which was a musical group that helped redefine both soul and funk, within the contexts of avant garde/traditional jazz.  She released her first recording in 1986. Wilson also co-wrote with well known musicians of the day such as Jean-Paul Bourelly, James Weidman and Steve Coleman. It was as she worked with them that Wilson managed to develop the ability to elongate syllables, bend pitches, and manipulate tones from hollow to dusky and vice

Death of Prince Hall, activist and Masonic leader, in Boston.

Born in the British West Indies, Prince Hall migrated to Boston during his youth and rose to become one of the Black communitys most influential members. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Hall enlisted in the Medford militia and served in the armed forces. On this day in 1787, Hall received a charter from the Grand Lodge of England and organized what is now the oldest Black fraternal organization in America, African Lodge Number 459 of the Freemasonry, by obtaining a charter from England. His beliefs in education and support of his fellowman are still present in chapters of his organization today. As one of Americas first abolitionists, Hall was a primary force in a petition sent to the Massachusetts House of Representatives to end slavery. His argument used all the principles for

Prince Hall

which the settlers of America broke away from England. He also petitioned against the kidnapping and sale of free Blacks into slavery. At the time of his death, Hall not only had full voting rights, but was also a property owner. Because of his many contributions, many Masonic lodges observe September 7 as Prince Hall Day.

Duke Ellington opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem.

In 1923, Edward Kennedy Duke Ellington first began to make his mark in New York with his band The Washingtonians, which took its name from his home city. He soon assembled a remarkable corpus of talented instrumentalists, whose qualities he exploited not only by showcasing them in dynamic solo passages, but also by joining them in astonishingly varied and colorful combinations of a kind never before heard in jazz. These achievements, in addition to Ellingtons expertise as an originator of intellectually satisfying musical structures, made him the most celebrated and critically acclaimed of all jazz composers.

Ellingtons orchestra began its four-year residency at Harlems famous Cotton Club in 1927, providing music for sumptuous stage routines in which exotically dressed black dancers performed for an exclusively white audience. The band developed a new style of jungle music for these dances, which featured a growl technique of brass playing developed by trumpeter Bubber Miley and trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton. Ellingtons other notable sidemen in these early years were alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges (famous for his sensuous tone), baritone saxophonist Harry Carney (whose agility on his potentially ponderous instrument was phenomenal) and clarinetist Barney Bigard (who personified a direct link with old New Orleans). In 1929, the virtuoso Cootie Williams succeeded Miley as principal trumpet.

A succession of popular radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club brought Ellington national fame, and his name became known around the globe after the successes of Mood Indigo (1930) and It Dont Mean a Thing (If it Aint Got that Swing) (1932). In 1933 he took his band on their first tour of Europe. By this time singer Cab Calloway had succeeded Ellington at the Cotton Club, and Calloway was in turn succeeded by Jimmie Lunceford in 1934. Racial unrest in Harlem in the following year forced the club to close down temporarily, but it re-opened in a different

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Two Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark - killed in Chicago police raid. Civil rights leaders said the two men were murdered in their beds.

Hampton founded the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party in November 1968. He immediately established a community service program. This included the provision of free breakfasts for schoolchildren and a medical clinic that did not charge patients for treatment. Hampton also taught political education classes and instigated a community control of police project.

One of Hamptons greatest achievements was to persuade Chicagos most powerful street gangs to stop fighting against each other. In May 1969 Hampton held a press conference where he announced a nonaggression pact between the gangs and the formation of what he called a rainbow coalition (a multiracial alliance of black, Puerto Rican, and poor youths).

Later that year Hampton was arrested and charged with stealing $71 worth of sweets, which he then allegedly gave away to local children. Hampton was initially convicted of the crime but the decision was eventually overturned.

The activities of the Black Panthers in Chicago came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover described the Panthers as the greatest threat to the internal security of the country and urged the Chicago police to launch an all-out assault on the organization. In 1969 the Panther party headquarters on West Monroe Street was raided three times and over 100 members were arrested.

In the early hours of the 4th December, 1969, the Panther headquarters was raided by the police for the fourth time. The police later claimed that the Panthers opened fire and a shoot-out took place. During the next ten minutes Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed. Witnesses claimed that Hampton was wounded in the shoulder and then executed by a shot to the head.

The panthers left alive, including Deborah Johnson, Hamptons girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant at the time, were arrested and charged with attempting to

Clarence Mitchell Jr., director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP, awarded the Spingarn Medal for the pivotal role he....played in enactment of civil rights legislation.

The Spingarn Medal owes its existence to Joel Elias Spingarn, who was elected Chairman of the Board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1914. The purpose of this medal is twofold — first to call the attention of the American people to the existence of distinguished merit and achievement among American Negroes, and secondly, to serve as a reward for such achievement, and as a stimulus to the ambition of colored youth.

This prestigious award is in the form of a gold medal that is valued at one hundred dollars. To make certain that this award is continued on an indefinite basis, Joel E. Spingarn bequeathed in his will twenty thousand dollars to the NAACP “to perpetuate the lifelong interest of my brother, Arthur B. Spingarn, of my wife, Amy E. Spingarn, and of myself in the achievements of the American Negro.” If this organization fails to continue, the Spingarn Medal is to be managed by the president of Howard or Fisk University.

In 1915, the NAACP set up a committee that consisted of several prominent persons, such as John Hope, who was president of Morehouse College, John Hurst, who was Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and William H. Taft, who was President of the United States of America, to select the recipients of the Spingarn Medal.

The first person to receive this award was Ernest Everett Just, a former professor of biology at Howard University, in 1915. Since that time, there has been a recipient each year except one (1938).

He was born as Shawn Corey Carter on December 4, 1969 but is better known by his stage name of Jay-Z.

Ku Klux Klan received charter from Fulton County, Ga., Superior Court. Modern Klan spread to Alabama and other Southern state and reached height of its influence in the twenties. By 1924 the organization was strong in Oklahoma, Indiana, California, Oregon, Indiana, and Ohio. At the height of its influence, the organization had an estimated four million members.

NAACP led protest demonstrations against the showing of the movie Birth of a Nation.

The racism that African Americans experienced in both the South and the North during the war years could be glimpsed in many arenas of American life, including the movies. It is not surprising, perhaps, that The Birth of a Nation, which appeared in March 1915, was both one of the landmarks in the history of American cinema and a landmark in American racism.

Historian Thomas Cripps has characterized The Birth of a Nation as “at once a major stride for cinema and a sacrifice of black humanity to the cause of racism.” Based on two historical novels, The Clansman, An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) and The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865­1900 (1902), and a play, The Clansman (1906), written by a North Carolina lawyer turned preacher, Thomas Dixon Jr.,

The Birth of a Nation recounts the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction through the eyes and experiences of Southern whites who vehemently opposed the political and social progress made by newly freed African Americans after the Civil War. Much of the novel’s tone, which Cripps describes as “a nightmare of interracial brutality, rape and castigation,” found its way into The Birth of a Nation.

American Anti-Slavery Society organized.

The Anti-Slavery Movement began in Europe during the 1770s and rapidly spread to the United States during the American Revolutionary War. After the Revolutionary War, the Mason-Dixon, which had been surveyed in 1667 to establish a boundary between the English colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania, eventually became the boundary between the Northern (Free) States and the Southern (Slavery) States.

The Anti-Slavery Movement in the United States, also known as the Abolitionist Movement, was already in its infancy during the early 1780s, when the settlement of the Northwest Territory was being contemplated. It is impossible to separate the Anti-Slavery Movement from the Underground Railroad.

The Anti-Slavery Movement influenced the United States Constitution and the Northwest Territory in many subtle and not so subtle ways. It is important not to confuse the Anti-Slavery Movement with the American Anti-Slavery Society, which became formalized in 1831. Of course the Anti-Slavery Society was formed because of the Anti- Slavery Movement, but the Anti-Slavery Movement represents a world-wide sentiment.

Spingarn Medal awarded to Anthony Overton, publisher, insurance executive and cosmetics manufacturer, for his achievements as a businessman.

The Spingarn Medal owes its existence to Joel Elias Spingarn, who was elected Chairman of the Board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1914. The purpose of this medal is twofold — first to call the attention of the American people to the existence of distinguished merit and achievement among American Negroes, and secondly, to serve as a reward for such achievement, and as a stimulus to the ambition of colored youth.

This prestigious award is in the form of a gold medal that is valued at one hundred dollars. To make certain that this award is continued on an indefinite basis, Joel E. Spingarn bequeathed in his will twenty thousand dollars to the NAACP “to perpetuate the lifelong interest of my brother, Arthur B. Spingarn, of my wife, Amy E. Spingarn, and of myself in the achievements of the American Negro.” If this organization fails to continue, the Spingarn Medal is to be managed by the president of Howard or Fisk University.

In 1915, the NAACP set up a committee that consisted of several prominent persons, such as John Hope, who was president of Morehouse College, John Hurst, who was Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and William H. Taft, who was President of the United States of America, to select the recipients of the Spingarn Medal.

The first person to receive this award was Ernest Everett Just, a former professor of biology at Howard University, in 1915. Since that time, there has been a recipient each year except one (1938).

The New York newspaper Amsterdam News is founded.

The year 1909 was an eventful one for African Americans: W. E. B. Du Bois and associates organized the NAACP; Matthew Henson, a Black man, accompanied explorer Robert Peary on the first successful expedition to the North Pole; and a relatively unknown South Carolina native founded the New York Amsterdam News.

James Henry Anderson was born shortly after the Civil War but ran away from his farm home in South Carolina at age 12. After working at a variety of jobs including bellhopping and a stint in the Navy, Anderson settled in New York and decided to try his hand at publishing a newspaper for the Black constituency.

At the time only about 50 Black newspapers were being published in the United States. But Anderson parlayed a $10 investment, six sheets of paper and two pencils into his venture and launched one of the most influential publications in the annals of the Black press. Using his wifes 5 x 4 - foot dressmakers table in the basement of his home at 135 W. 65th Street, Anderson named and produced his paper for the Amsterdam neighborhood where he lived. The Amsterdam News began life as a 2-cent per copy six-page weekly that covered city items, Black social organizations and local YMCA events.

The Jena Six were six black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, convicted in the 2006 beating of Justin Barker, a white student at the local Jena High School, which they also attended. Barker was injured on December 4, 2006, by the members of the Jena Six, and received treatment at an emergency room. While the case was pending, it was often cited by some media commentators as an example of racial injustice in the United States. Some commentators believed that the defendants had been charged initially with too-serious offenses and had been treated unfairly.

A number of events had taken place in and around Jena in the months before the Barker assault, which the media have associated with an alleged escalation of local racial tensions. These events included the hanging of rope nooses from a tree in the high school courtyard, two violent confrontations between white and black youths, and the destruction by fire of the main building of Jena High School. Extensive news coverage related to the Jena Six often reported these events as linked.[1] Federal and parish attorneys concluded from their investigations that assessment was inaccurate for some of the events; for instance, the burning of the high school was an attempt to destroy grade records.

Six students (Robert Bailey, then aged 17; Mychal Bell, then 16; Carwin Jones, then 18; Bryant Purvis, then 17; Jesse Ray Beard, then 14; and Theo Shaw, then 17) were arrested in the assault of Barker. Mychal Bell was initially convicted as an adult of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. His convictions were overturned on the grounds that he should have been tried as a juvenile. Before a retrial in juvenile court, Bell pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of simple battery. The other five defendants later pleaded no contest to the same offense, and were convicted.

The Jena Six case sparked protests by people who considered the arrests and subsequent charges, initially attempted second-degree murder (though later reduced), as excessive and racially

Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. was founded on December 4, 1906 on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York by seven college men who recognized the need for a strong bond of Brotherhood among African descendants in this country. The visionary founders, known as the Jewels of the Fraternity, are Henry Arthur Callis, Charles Henry ChAPman, Eugene Kinckle Jones, George Biddle Kelley, Nathaniel Allison Murray, Robert Harold Ogle, and Vertner Woodson Tandy.

The Great Migration began. Approximately two million Southern Blacks moved to Northern industrial centers in the following decades.

Between the turn of the century and 1930, more than 1 million black southerners set out on one of Americas most important mass movements. These people migrated from the Souths countryside to the cities in the North. They hoped to find better jobs, a new sense of citizenship, and a new respect for themselves, their families, and their people in the North.

In 1910 the North and the South were so dissimilar that they could have passed for two different countries. The southern states were isolated, economically backward, had fewer schools, and higher rates of illiteracy. Their northern counterparts boasted cultural attractions and booming industries.

Many blacks used the path to the north as an escape route from the menacing racism of the South. Racial segregation was the norm, and blacks were restricted to colored facilities that were inferior to the ones marked white. Black southerners were also politically powerless and were terrorized by whites. From the last decade the 19th century through the first of the 20th century, more black people were lynched than in any other period of American history.

Other circumstances also drew black people away from the rural South. New farm machinery was created which could perform the field work, that had once been done by hand, faster and more efficiently. This pushed thousands of poor tenant farmers off the land and toward the city. In 1915, a severe boll weevil infestation destroyed millions of acres of cotton along with the jobs of those who raised it. New machinery and the boll weevil pushed the blacks away from the South, and World War I pulled the blacks toward the north.

In 1914, the war prevented European laborers from emigrating to the United States, so northern industries turned to the South for workers. Recruiting scouts were sent to the South and they found that recruiting was an effortless task. There was never a

Lecture 18 of Clay Carsons Introduction to African-American History Course (HIST 166) concentrating on the Modern Freedom Struggle (Fall 2007). This lecture is entitled Tupac Shakurs Thug Life. Recorded December 4, 2007 at Stanford University.

This course introduces the viewer to African-American history, with particular emphasis on the political thought and protest movements of the period after 1930, focusing on selected individuals who have shaped and been shaped by modern African-American struggles for freedom and justice. Clayborne Carson is a professor in the History Department at Stanford University.

Complete playlist for the course:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...

Course syllabus:

http://www.stanford.edu/~ccarson/Hist...

More on Clayborne Carson:

http://www.stanford.edu/~ccarson/

Stanford University channel on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/stanford

After the death of Prince Hall, on December 4, 1807, the brethren organized the African Grand Lodge on June 24, 1808, including the Philadelphia, Providence and Boston lodges.

Townsend was born on December 4, 1895, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Willard and Cora Elizabeth Townsend.