We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

Justine Lindsay is the first openly trans cheerleader in the NFL

The NFL season doesn’t start until September, but Justine Lindsay is making history in the off-season as the league’s first openly transgender cheerleader.

Lindsay, 29, announced that she had made the Carolina Panthers TopCats team earlier this year in an Instagram post.

“Cats Out the Bag you are looking at the newest member of the Carolina Panthers TopCats Cheerleader’s @topcats as the first Transgender female,” Lindsay wrote. “I would like to thank the beautiful and talented dancers who supported me along the way … This is a moment I will never forget and I cannot wait to show you all what this girl has to bring. Thank you @topcats a dream come true.”

Lindsay told BuzzFeed News that she was “so scared” to share the Instagram post in which she publicly came out.

“I just felt like when I posted it, whatever reaction I get from everyone, it does not matter,” Lindsay told BuzzFeed. “And then my phone started blowing up.”

Fans have sent messages of support to Lindsay on her Instagram posts, including telling her to block out any messages of hate or those questioning her spot on the squad.

TopCats director Chandalae Lanouette and the Panthers have both said Lindsay’s skills are what secured her spot on the team.

“Members of the TopCats are hired based on their qualifications and abilities,” the Panthers said in a statement to NPR. “Our organization is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate because of age, race, religion, color, disability, sex, sexual orientation, or national origin. We wish all the TopCats, including Justine Lindsay, an incredible season.”

Lindsay said she knows that her making the team as a Black trans woman is a big deal and is already speaking out against those who are trying to bring her down.

“Thank you to all my haters who think I’m bringing the organization down, clearly I don’t,” Lindsay said in an Instagram post on Monday. “The carolina panthers Organization is an excellent one, one that supports all people white, black , yellow trans, straight etc. at the end of the day myself and the other 29 members @topcats made the squad fair and square.”

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/07/1103426872/justine-lindsay-first-openly-trans-nfl-cheerleader

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Better late than never: the story of Beverly “Guitar” Watkins

By Polly Glass ( Classic Rock ) published July 08, 2020

Beverly “Guitar” Watkins didn’t record her first album until she was 60, but she was tearing up the blues circuit long before then

She played on songs that inspired the 60s wave of rock’n’roll. By the 80s she was cleaning offices and houses, and performing at a food court for tips. Then in the 90s a serendipitous series of steps led to her making her first record. 

Suddenly this woman from rural Georgia, whose ferocious guitar chops had always been in service to others, was up front. Off stage she could have been your friendly, church-going southern grandma; on stage Beverly “Guitar” Watkins had more in common with Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend. 

Screaming, top-of-the-neck wails, full-throttle riff assaults, soloing with the guitar round the back of her head… No wonder her former tour buddy Taj Mahal called her “a flat-out musician who can duke it out on stage with the best there is – man, woman or child prodigy”. 

“She’d been doing all that since the late 1950s,” Brett J Bonner, editor of Living Blues magazine, said in the New York Times, “but she wasn’t a star because she’d been a sideman most of her career, playing with bands that didn’t have hits. She was a fabulous guitar player.” 

Born in 1939 and raised in the country by her sharecropper grandparents (her mother died when she was three months old), Watkins was a “tomboy” who went fishing and rabbit hunting with her grandfather, and listened to her aunts sing in churches, as well as to the gospel and guitar stylings of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. 

When she was eight she was given her first guitar, which she took to “barn dances” where her grandfather and his friends would sit round a big fire playing banjos and drinking muscadine wine. When she was about 11 she went to live with her aunt in Atlanta. There she played trumpet in her high-school band, but had settled on the guitar by the time she started playing in local bands. 

At 16 she met William Lee ‘Piano Red’ Perryman, a larger-than-life black albino singer/pianist, who asked her to play rhythm guitar in his group Piano Red & The Meter-Tones. “He was like a father to us,” she said. “He taught me stage presence.”

Still, the group’s presence was felt. They opened for stars including James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, and their hit Mister Moonlight was covered by The Beatles, The Hollies and The Merseybeats. Johnny Kidd & The Pirates famously covered their song Dr. Feelgood (the band Dr. Feelgood took their name from that cover).

When Watkins was 24 she gave birth to her son, Stan, the product of a fling with an Atlanta musician. When work with Piano Red tailed off, she continued to play guitar for other musicians including Leroy Redding (cousin of Otis), as well as a stint playing bass with another Atlanta stalwart, Eddie Tigner, in Holiday Inn lounges for a year or so. When she wasn’t touring she supplemented her income by washing cars and cleaning offices. 

Towards the end of the 80s she got a regular gig at Underground Atlanta, a downtown shopping and entertainment district and a hot spot for street performers. It was here, in the mid-90s, that Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck (an Atlanta-based blues guitarist who’d been impressed by her playing) introduced her to Tim Duffy, a folklorist who with his wife Denise had started the Music Maker Relief Foundation to help struggling Southern musicians. 

“When Beverly performed, she moved people, but especially young women and girls,” Dudeck told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “She rocked harder than a man, and that was inspiring.”

Supported by Duffy and the foundation, Watkins went on tour with other Music Maker-affiliated artists, including Taj Mahal, and when she was 60 years old she was finally able to make her first record, 1999’s Back in Business, with blues producer Mike Vernon (best known for his work with John Mayall and Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac and starting British blues label Blue Horizon). 

“I put in so much hard work in this business,” she said. “And I made everybody else shine. It’s my time now.” 

The upside of her advanced age was being able to draw from the many sounds and scenes she’d absorbed throughout her life. These would gleam through her subsequent gigs and records, which carried scents of gospel, shit-kicking R&B, soul, funk, even jazz. 

She was very much a guitarist before she was a songwriter (not surprising, given that she’d spent most of her career playing guitar), but there’s a brightness and energy to her songs, informed by years of party blues and barrelhouse boogies with Piano Red. I’m Gonna Rock Some More, Right Don’t Wrong Nobody, Back In Business, Impeach Me Baby… This is music made to entertain, not for solemn chin-stroking.

Watkins’s latter career was hindered by health issues including cancer, a heart attack and a brain aneurysm, but she never stopped performing. Indeed most of the footage of Watkins that you’ll find online shows her in her 70s, still rocking hard, still inciting audience singalongs. 

During her final years she gave interviews from a seniors’ assisted living facility in Atlanta, and dreamed of owning a house and a Les Paul guitar. There will be others like her – gifted, often pioneering musicians who never made it beyond the margins. Today we’re used to hearing about hitherto unknowns because an A-list star scooped them up, but that never happened for Watkins. 

Inevitably her position as a woman striking out in her 60s – at a time when the blues was yet to have its next renaissance – didn’t help. And so her name has remained largely confined to Atlanta folklore and a niched circle of blues enthusiasts. Her final record, Don’t Mess With Miss Watkins, was released in 2010. 

Right up until her stroke in 2019, which preceded the heart attack that killed her at the age of 80, she continued to play in clubs and nursing homes across Atlanta, and, on the first Sunday of each month, at the church in Commerce, Georgia, where she was raised. Her faith never wavered. 

“He [God] took care of me when I didn’t take care of myself,” she said with a smile at her seventy-sixth birthday gig at the Northside Tavern in Atlanta. And yes, she was still playing with her guitar round the back of her head.

https://www.loudersound.com/features/better-late-than-never-the-story-of-beverly-guitar-watkins

Link includes links to videos of Beverly “Guitar” Watkins playing

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James Van Der Zee (1886-1983) was born in Lenox, Massachusetts and demonstrated an early gift for music, initially aspiring to a career as a professional violinist.  His other interest was photography. At the age of fourteen he received his first camera and took hundreds of photographs of his family and the town of Lenox.  As one of the first people in the town to own a camera he was able to provide a rich early documentation of community life in small town New England.  Van Der Zee moved to New York City in 1906 to work with his father and brother as waiters and elevator operators. By now a skilled pianist and aspiring professional violinist, he was also the primary creator and one of the five performers in a group known as the Harlem Orchestra. In 1915 Van Der Zee moved to Newark, New Jersey where he was employed as a darkroom assistant and later as a photographer in a portrait studio.  He returned to New York in 1916 and moved to Harlem just as large numbers of black migrants and immigrants were arriving in that section of the city.  He set up his first portrait studio in his sister’s music conservatory and two years later, with his second wife, Gaynella Greenlee, established the Guarantee Photo Studio in Harlem.  Quickly Van Der Zee became the most successful photographer in Harlem. Early 20th century black activist Marcus Garvey, black entertainer/ dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and renowned black poet Countee Cullen were among his more prominent subjects.
 

 By the early 1930s Van Der Zee’s income from his photography work declined partly because of the strained economic circumstances of many of his customers and partly because the growing popularity of personal cameras reduced the need for professional photography. Van Der Zee responded by shooting passport photos, doing photo restorations, and taking other miscellaneous photography jobs, an approach he would employ for over two decades.   In 1967 James Van Der Zee’s work was rediscovered by photographers and photo-historians and he then received attention far beyond his Harlem community.  Van Der Zee came out of retirement to photograph celebrities who in turn promoted his work in exhibits around the nation.  His images were also the subject of books and documentaries.   In 1993, the National Portrait Gallery exhibited his work as a posthumous tribute to his remarkable genius. 

https://www.howardgreenberg.com/artists/james-van-der-zee

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Dr. Marion Antoinette Richards Myles, a scientist with expertise in plant physiology, including the effects of drugs and hormones on plant growth, played a significant role in integrating higher education in the American south. In 1965, she became the first African American faculty member of the University of Mississippi Medical School, with an appointment as an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Research. Prior to accepting the position at Mississippi, Myles had both taught at numerous other colleges and universities and been awarded research fellowships to study at the California Institute of Technology and at the Institute of Nuclear Studies at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1917, Myles came from a large family with several brothers and sisters. Her father, Alfred Richards, an immigrant from Bermuda, worked as a rigger on the city wharves, while her mother Helen, was a native of Pennsylvania. According to census records, at about age 12, the Peterson family, also of Philadelphia, likely adopted Myles. Following high school graduation, she attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1937. She then completed a master’s degree at Atlanta University in Georgia in 1939.

From 1941 to 1943, Myles lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, teaching biology at Philander Smith College. In 1943, she began her doctoral studies at Iowa State University, receiving a research fellowship to support her scholarship in the area of plant physiology. In 1935, Iowa State had also awarded a PhD in Botany to Jesse Jarue Mark, among the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in the field.

Over the next two decades, Myles taught biology, botany, agronomy, and zoology, at several institutions including Tennessee State University, Fort Valley State College (now university) in Georgia, and Alcorn State University in Mississippi. In 1950, while serving as an Associate Professor of Agronomy at Tennessee State, she completed a special course on radioisotopes at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, planning to apply the technique to studies of plant nutrition and photosynthesis. In 1952, she won a Carnegie Foundation Research Grant and between 1959 and 1961, she served as a Research Associate in Enzymology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Professionally, Myles was active in many scientific societies and organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Botanical Society of America, the American Society of Plant Physiologists, and the National Education Association.

In 1965, Myles gained international attention when the University of Mississippi named her as its first African American faculty member. According to a July 15, 1965 article in Jet, her appointment as an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in the Medical School came over the objections of some members of the board of trustees of the State Institutions of Higher Learning, who opposed the selection of any black faculty. However, as a result of such discriminatory behavior, the school risked losing federal funding, as it was in violation of nondiscriminatory provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Myles passed away on October 18, 1969 at the age of 52. Her husband, Frank J. Myles, preceded her in death.

Marion Antoinette Richards Myles (1917-1969)

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Dewey Decimal Decolonizer

In 1932, Dorothy Porter earned an M.S. in library science from Columbia University and became their library school’s first black graduate. However, she may be best known as the librarian who changed how works by black writers are classified. Overall, Porter’s classification method challenged the inherent racism and colonial gatekeeping of knowledge within the Dewey Decimal System.

Most of Porter’s library career was spent building the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection on Black/Africana history and culture. A substantial portion of the library’s collection was gifted by Howard alumnus, Reverend Jesse E. Moorland and NAACP’s legal committee chairman Arthur B. Spingarn. These acquisitions were the backbone of the university’s library. Porter was concerned with assigning proper value and classification to the collection. However, at the time of acquisition, no other library in the country had expertise in properly classifying works by black authors.

Every library Porter consulted for classification guidance relied solely on the Dewey Decimal Classification. In that system, black scholarly work was classified using either the number 326 that meant slavery or the number 325 for colonization. For Porter, it became necessary to develop a satisfactory classification workaround for this collection that did not reimpose stereotypes of black culture that prevailed within the Dewey Decimal System. Porter classified works within the collection by genre and author in order to highlight the role of black people in all subject areas like art, education, history, medicine, music, and even literature. This approach helped to combat racist stereotypes and false narratives while celebrating black self-representation.

During her over 40-year library career, Dorothy Porter devoted herself to developing a modern research library at Howard University. Not only did she build a world-renowned library for special collections of the global black experience, she also became a pioneer in the field of library science through her challenge of the racial bias within the Dewey Decimal System.

13 Pioneering Black American Librarians You Oughta Know

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Willard Johnson, bacteriologist, science educator, and business proprietor, was born in Leavenworth Kansas, the third of the eleven children of Joseph Johnson and Hattie McClanahan. Taught by his high school’s founder, Blanche Kelso Bruce, nephew of the Reconstruction era Senator of the same name, he was the first in his family to go to college. Johnson attended Kansas University (KU), where he joined the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. In 1922, he was admitted to the Kansas University Medical School. Probably the second African American ever admitted, Willard struggled through nearly three years of medical course work but did not transfer to a black medical school to finish as KU required at the time.

Willard Johnson was awarded his Bachelor’s at KU in 1924 and then taught biological science courses at Rust College in Mississippi. In 1928 he completed a year of graduate work in bacteriology at the University of Chicago. In 1929, he joined the faculty of Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College in Nashville where he and his bride, Dorothy N. Stovall, of Humboldt, Kansas, had their first son, Richard E. He headed the Biology Department and taught zoology, comparative vertebrate anatomy, physiology, botany, hygiene, and bacteriology. In 1932 he did further graduate study at Emporia State College in Kansas.

The People’s Hospital of St. Louis, Missouri enticed him to move there in 1933, to establish and operate a private diagnostic laboratory. Soon thereafter, he assisted specialists sent from Washington, D.C., in combating an outbreak of sleeping sickness disease. Their second son, Willard R., and twin daughters, Alberta M., and D. Roberta, were born there. Then Johnson taught a variety of science courses at Stowe Teachers College, a predominately black institution in St. Louis. Soon thereafter, in 1937, placing at the very top of those taking the U.S. Health Service exams, but requiring the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt to actually get hired, he became the first black professional staff person at the Jefferson Barracks (Veteran’s) Hospital, in St. Louis. The hospital’s leadership rather quickly maneuvered to have him reassigned to the (Black) Veteran’s Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he achieved several promotions.

After WWII, Johnson was unsuccessful in seeking reassignment within the US Public Health Service. He resigned and moved to Pasadena, California where he helped establish and became sole proprietor of the private Avalon Boulevard Medical Diagnostic Laboratory in nearby Los Angeles which served African American physicians throughout the area. After nearly two decades, its profitable operations were disrupted by the “Watts Riots.” Shortly thereafter Johnson retired and closed the lab. Willard Johnson died in 1969 of cancer and is buried in Pasadena, with his wife Dorothy, who died of cancer ten years later.

Willard Johnson Sr. (1901-1969)

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Philip Louis Ulric Cross DSO DFC (1 May 1917 – 4 October 2013) was a Trinidadian jurist, diplomat and Royal Air Force (RAF) Navigator, recognised as possibly the most decorated West Indian of World War II.^[1][2] He is credited with helping to prevent some two hundred bombers from being shot down in a raid over Germany in 1943.^[3] He subsequently studied law at London’s Middle Temple, and went on to fulfil a distinguished international career as a jurist across Africa and within Trinidad and Tobago. He also served as a diplomat for Trinidad and Tobago to the United Kingdom.

Early years

Ulric Cross was born on 1 May 1917, in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Reginald Rufus and Maud Iris Cross.^[4] He was the second child in a family of nine.^[5] At the age of 11, he came first in Trinidad’s Government Exhibition Scholarship Examination, thus qualifying for five years of free secondary education,^[5] and went on to attend St Mary’s College.^[6] He was devastated by his mother’s death when he was just 13 years old.^[5][7][8] His academic focus was completely derailed, and so, after completing five years of college education, he left school. His first job was with the Trinidad Guardian as a copy editor. Then he worked for about four years as a clerk to Leo Pujadas, Solicitor. When Cross turned 21, he joined the Civil Service and worked for a while with the Trinidad Government Railways. In this job, his close colleague was J. O’Neil “Scottie” Lewis.^[9]

World War II service

In 1941, aged 24, Cross left Trinidad to join Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). He served with RAF Bomber Command during World War II, attaining the rank of Squadron Leader.^[10] In June 1944 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and in January 1945, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order^[2][11] in recognition of his “fine example of keenness and devotion to duty” and “exceptional navigational ability”.^[1] He was a member of the elite Pathfinder Force that perfected techniques for precision main force bombing. In his own words: “We did a lot of low-level daylight bombing. We flew at just 50 feet instead of the normal 25,000 feet. We dropped four 500-pound bombs. You flew in to your target at 50 feet and as you approached it you went up to 1,200 feet. You then did a shallow dive onto the target and released your bombs. The bomb had an 11-second delay, so you shot up to avoid the bomb blast. We went over in formation and we bombed in formation, but we came back independently.” Cross flew 80 missions over Germany and occupied Europe as Navigator of a Mosquito fighter-bomber,^[9] and was the model for the Black character, Squadron Leader Charles Ford, in Ken Follett‘s novel Hornet Flight.^[12][13][14]

Distinguished legal career

After the war, Cross studied law and was called to the Bar under the aegis of the Middle Temple, London, on 26 January 1949.^[15]

He then returned to Trinidad where, from 1949 to 1953, he was Legal Adviser to the Comptroller of Imports and Exports, Trinidad and Tobago. He also lectured in Trade Union History and Trade Union Law at the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, located in Trinidad.^[4] He subsequently returned to London, and worked for some time as a Talks Producer with the BBC (1953–1957).^[4]

Then Ulric Cross’ career took an entirely different turn. He went off to practise law in Ghana, Cameroon and Tanzania for many years. Between 1958 and 1960 he worked closely with Nkrumah in Ghana, where he was Crown Counsel and Senior Crown Counsel, and lectured in Criminal Law at the Ghana School of Law.^[4] Continuing his African journey, he served in West Cameroon (1960–1966), where he was elevated to Senior Crown Counsel and Attorney General, was a Member of the Cabinet, the House of Chiefs and the House of Assembly Avocat-General at the Federal Court of Justice of the Republic of Cameroon.^[4] In 1967, Cross became a High Court judge in Tanzania, where from 1968 to 1970 he was Chairman of the Permanent Labour Tribunal.^[4] He also served as a Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam.

Once again, Ulric Cross returned to Trinidad; this time in 1971 to serve as a High Court judge.^[2] In 1979, he was elevated to the Court of Appeal.^[16] He then became Chairman of the Law Reform Commission of Trinidad and Tobago from 1982 to 1983, in this position he made a significant contribution towards furthering the revision and development of the country’s laws.^[2][17] On his death, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, acknowledged his years spent on the judiciary of Trinidad and Tobago “Some of his judgments changed the landscape of Trinidad and Tobago”.^[18]

Diplomatic postings

In the United Kingdom, from 1990 to 1993, Ulric Cross served as High Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago at the Court of St James’s, UK, combining the position with that of Ambassador to both Germany and France.^[1] Previously, he had been appointed Chairman of the Commonwealth Foundation in 1983.^[4]

Community service

During his final return to Trinidad and Tobago, Ulric Cross co-founded — with his colleague, Desmond Allum SC in April 1993 — the charitable non-profit organization called the Cotton Tree Foundation (CTF),^[19] that still today works with some of the most deprived communities in Port-of-Spain in order to combat high levels of poverty and unemployment through counselling, self-help, education and training projects. On his 90th birthday in 2007, the Ulric Cross Cotton Tree Endowment Fund was launched,^[5] expanding the work of the Cotton Tree Foundation to include a legal aid clinic, a community sports programme and an art and music programme.^[20]

During these years also, as Squadron Leader Cross, he served as President of the Royal Air Forces Association Trinidad and Tobago Branch No. 1075 (established on 17 April 1953) from 2009 until his death in 2013.^[21] As President he was very active in running the Branch and inspired the vision to build a Military Veterans Complex for all veterans of military service on the Branch’s property at 20 Queen’s Park East, Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.^[22]

Awards and honours

Ulric Cross was the recipient of many awards and accolades. In 2011, at Trinidad and Tobago’s 49th Independence Day celebrations,^[23] he received the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, the nation’s highest award,^[24] for distinguished and outstanding service in the sphere of law.^[25][26][27] In June 2011, the Piarco Air Station was renamed the Ulric Cross Air Station.^[26][28] In July 2011 the President of Trinidad and Tobago. George Maxwell Richards, presented Cross with the Heroes Foundation first heroes medallion,^[26] and in 2012 a comic book entitled And Justice For All, The True Story Of A Local Hero was published in his honour by the Heroes Foundation, in their “Heroes of a Nation” series.^[8][29]

Ulric Cross’ remarkable life and career achievements are chronicled in a feature film that has won several international awards. Directed by Frances-Anne Solomon^[30][31] and entitled Hero: Inspired by the Extraordinary Life and Times of Mr. Ulric Cross, it was first released in 2019.^{[32][33][34][35][36]}

Personal life

Cross had two daughters — Nicola Cross, a filmmaker, and Susan Woodford-Hollick, an arts administrator — and a son, Richard Finch, an educator who works in South Africa.^[37]

Death

Ulric Cross died, aged 96, on 4 October 2013 at his home on Dere Street, Port of Spain, where, in his retirement, he lived with his daughter Nicola.^[37][38][39] A memorial service in his honour was held at Memorial Park, Port of Spain, on 10 October 2013.^[40][41] Paying tribute to Cross at the service, the British High Commissioner said: “Without the help of servicemen from the Commonwealth (like Cross), the outcome of World War II would have been entirely different.”^[42]

On 8 February 2014, a tribute to Ulric Cross was held in London by the Trinidad and Tobago High Commission at St Peter’s Church, Eaton Square,^[43] where the High Commissioner, His Excellency Garvin Nicholas spoke, saying: “Justice Ulric Cross was a man who not only served Trinidad and Tobago tirelessly, but dedicated his existence to the preservation of justice and democracy on an international scale … His was a distinguished life, a life very well lived. Now more than ever, our society dearly needs role models like Justice Ulric Cross.”^[44]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulric_Cross

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“We Are Needed”: A Counselor At Mississippi’s Only Abortion Clinic Shares Her Story

In the mid-1990s, Miss Betty Thompson retired from her job in state government, and started a second career working at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a counselor. By 2004, it was the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi.

Often faced with incredibly long distances to travel, and protesters on the ground upon their arrival, Betty helped all those who walked through the doors. 

In 2022, the clinic would become the center of the pending U.S. Supreme Court case challenging Roe v. Wade.

Betty worked there at the clinic for almost 25 years, but it was her own experiences as a teenager that brought her to the work. 

In 2016, she came to StoryCorps to share her story.

Transcript:

Kamilah Kashanie: 74-year-old Betty Thompson…is known as “Miss Betty” at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where she worked for almost twenty-five years. 

In 2004, it became the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi…and in 2022 it centered in the Supreme Court case aimed at overturning Roe v. Wade. 

She started working there as a counselor, soon after it opened in the mid-90s…

…and she came to StoryCorps to talk about what led her there…

Betty Thompson (BT): When I was 16, I didn’t tell my parents that I was pregnant. They told me. 

At that moment, my mom started to cry and said, ‘Girl, you’re pregnant’. My mouth flew open. I was devastated. 

You know, there are times when you want the floor to swallow you up. Well, that was so past embarrassing and nothing was swallowing me up. 

And then she sat me down in that chair to comb my hair, which she never combed my hair. She couldn’t say it was okay, but a touch can mean so much sometimes. And I think she forgave me at that moment she touched me. 

I kept my son, but my mom was the main caregiver. And so because of my family, I went back to finish high school and went to college.

It made me want to excel in a lot of things. However, I wish I had had the choice.

After 25 years, I retired from state government. And I happened to run into a friend that knew that this clinic was being opened. I suppose because of my background, I felt like I had something to give. So I jumped right in. 

You know, everybody can’t do this work. You have to be made for it. You have to love people.

So, I try to reach that teenager to let them know that it’s going to be okay. And I make sure I encourage the mom or the dad that’s with that teenager, you’re going to get through this – you love your daughter. She needs you now more than ever.

Sometimes I can see the mother look over at the daughter. Almost as if for the first time. It takes me back to that moment when my mom was doing my hair. 

We know that we are the only clinic in Mississippi and we are needed. And that’s why I’m here.

“We Are Needed”: A Counselor At Mississippi’s Only Abortion Clinic Shares Her Story

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Senate approves Lisa Cook as first Black woman on Federal Reserve board of governors

WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed economist Lisa Cook on Tuesday to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, making her the first Black woman to do so in the institution’s 108-year history.

Her approval was on a narrow, party-line vote of 51-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the decisive vote.

Senate Republicans argued that she is unqualified for the position, saying she doesn’t have sufficient experience with interest rate policy. They also said her testimony before the Senate Banking Committee suggested she wasn’t sufficiently committed to fighting inflation, which is running at four-decade highs.

Cook has a doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State since 2005. She was also a staff economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 to 2012 and was an adviser to President Biden’s transition team on the Fed and bank regulatory polic

Some of her most well-known research has focused on the impact of lynchings and racial violence on African American innovation.

Cook is only the second of Biden’s five nominees for the Fed to win Senate confirmation. His Fed choices have faced an unusual level of partisan opposition, given the Fed’s history as an independent agency that seeks to remain above politics.

Some critics charge, however, that the Fed has contributed to the increased scrutiny by addressing a broader range of issues in recent years, such as the role of climate change on financial stability and racial disparities in employment.

Biden called on the Senate early Tuesday to approve his nominees as the Fed seeks to combat inflation.

“I will never interfere with the Fed,” Biden said. “The Fed should do its job and will do its job, I’m convinced.”

Fed Chair Jerome Powell is currently serving in a temporary capacity after his term ended in February. He was approved by the Senate Banking Committee by a nearly unanimous vote in March.

Fed governor Lael Brainard was confirmed two weeks ago for the Fed’s influential vice chair position by a 52-43 vote.

Philip Jefferson, a economics professor and dean at Davidson College in North Carolina, has also been nominated by Biden for a governor slot and was approved unanimously by the Finance Committee. He would be the fourth Black man to serve on the Fed’s board.

Biden has also nominated Michael Barr, a former Treasury Department official, to be Fed’s top banking regulator, after a previous choice, Sarah Bloom Raskin, faced opposition from West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.

Cook, Jefferson, and Barr would join Brainard as Democratic appointees to the Fed. Yet most economists expect the Fed will continue on its path of steep rate hikes this year.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/10/1098105334/lisa-cook-federal-reserve

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Elton Clay Fax, a prolific African-American cartoonist, author, and illustrator, was born on October 9, 1909, in Baltimore, Maryland. His parents were Mark Oakland Fax, a clerk, and Willie Estelle Fax, a seamstress. Elton’s younger brother, Mark, was a music prodigy who worked as a composer later in life. Elton attended Claflin College, a historically black college in South Carolina and then transferred to Syracuse University in New York where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in 1931. In 1929 he married Grace Elizabeth Turner, with whom he had three children.

In 1935 Fax returned to Claflin College to teach art. After one year, he left Claflin and began teaching with the federal government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) in New York City until 1940, at which point he became a freelancer. Fax’s work gathered attention at several art showings, including a 1932 solo exhibition in Baltimore where two nude paintings stirred controversy; the Baltimore Art Museum in 1939; and the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

Several black newspapers ran Susabelle, Fax’s popular newspaper comic strip, starting in 1942. From 1949, Fax spent seven years delivering “chalk-talks,” stories accompanied by live illustrations. Fax and his family frequently traveled, living in Mexico from 1953 to 1956 and later visiting South America. During the following decades, Fax’s travels took him around the world, particularly to Africa. In his visits to African nations, he delivered his famous “chalk-talks,” often on the topic of the American civil rights struggle.

Throughout his career, Fax illustrated over thirty books and numerous magazine articles. He wrote extensively on black culture as well, publishing several books and regularly contributing essays to a variety of magazines and newspapers. West African Vignettes (1960), his first book, detailed his African travels; later, he wrote Through Black Eyes (1974) about his journeys in East Africa and the Soviet Union. Other notable books include Garvey (1972), a biography of Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, and Seventeen Black Artists (1971), for which he won the Coretta Scott King Award.

Many of Fax’s writings and artwork from 1930–1972 were compiled into the Elton Fax Papers, located in the archives of the New York Public Library, Boston University in Massachusetts, and Syracuse University. Elton Fax passed away on May 13, 1993, in Queens, New York.

Elton Fax (1909-1993)