Category: Black Excellence

https://www.steverayladson.net/bio

Steve Ray is an artist, actor, vocalist, music producer, songwriter, arranger, and musician. His musical talents include banjo, Dobro, piano, Hammond organ, lead guitar, bass guitar, accordion, spoons, and the harmonica. He has written, produced, and is currently traveling the world with 6-time Grammy Award winners and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners, “The Blind Boys of Alabama.” He also sings and plays with 4-time Grammy nominee Robert Randolph and the Family Band.​​

https://www.npr.org/people/302983377/bobby-carter

Bobby Carter is the host and series producer for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.

In 2014, Carter produced his first Tiny Desk concert. Since then, his work has been at the intersection of music, technology, and engagement. He turned a modest Tiny Desk celebration of Black History Month in 2021 into a cross-cultural event combining music, film, photojournalism, and commentary. Carter leveraged this template to pull new teams together to bring a multi-dimensional, multi-continent, multi-platform celebration of Black Music Month, LatinX Heritage Month, Asian American/Pacific Islander Month and Indigenous People Month.

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

Titus Kaphar is an American contemporary painter and filmmaker whose work reconfigures and regenerates art history to include African-American subjects. His paintings are held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, New Britain Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and University of Michigan Museum of Art.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}

https://www.npr.org/sections/the-picture-show/2025/06/19/nx-s1-5439338/a-former-plantation-becomes-a-space-for-healing-art-and-reparative-history

NPR’s Picture Show spoke with Tyler Jones who is part of a narrative studio based in Birmingham called 1504. They have been collaborating with the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation to recenter the stories of Black descendant communities through creative, embodied storytelling.

https://council.nyc.gov/district-36

Chi Ossé is the Council Member for New York City’s 36th District, representing Bedford-Stuyvesant and North Crown Heights. He entered politics as an organizer and prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter movement. At 23 years old, Ossé was elected in 2021 as the youngest member of this Council and its only member hailing from Gen-Z.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Hamilton_(actress)

Alzenia Lynn Hamilton (April 25, 1930 – June 19, 2025)^[1] was an American actress. She was best known for her recurring roles as Donna Harris, Fred Sanford‘s girlfriend and later fiancée on the sitcom Sanford and Son (1972–1977) and Verdie Grant Foster on The Waltons (1973–1981). She also portrayed cousin Georgia Anderson in Roots: The Next Generations.

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

Otis Crandall Davis (July 12, 1932 – September 14, 2024) was an American athlete, winner of two gold medals for record-breaking performances in the 400 m and 4 × 400 m relay at the 1960 Summer Olympics. He set a new world record of 44.9 seconds in the 400 m and became the first person to break the 45-second barrier.^[1]

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/06/17/poet-laureate-charleston-church-shooting

Ten years after a white supremacist killed nine parishioners of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the community is still coping with the loss and navigating the impact of the racial attack.

Marcus Amaker, the first poet laureate of Charleston, South Carolina, said many Black residents of South Carolina became afraid to go to church, a fear that lingers to this day.

“Going to church, especially for people in the south, especially for Black people in the south, has always been a safe haven,” Amaker said. “So for that to be sort of laced and infused with anxiety is a really hard thing for a lot of people to deal with, and I don’t really feel like a lot of us talk about it that much.”

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

Tia Fuller (born March 27, 1976) is an American saxophonist, composer, and educator, and a member of the all-female band touring with Beyoncé. Fuller is currently a faculty member in the ensembles department at Berklee College of Music.^[1] Fuller was a Featured Jazz Musician in Pixar‘s animated film Soul. For the film Fuller plays an alto saxophone with a Vandoren mouthpiece for the character Dorothea Williams. The appearance of Dorothea Williams is influenced by Fuller, and the character’s speaking lines are voiced by Angela Bassett.^[2]

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

Anna Marie Wooldridge (August 6, 1930 – August 14, 2010),^[1] known professionally as Abbey Lincoln, was an American jazz vocalist and songwriter. She was a civil rights activist beginning in the 1960s.^[2][3] Lincoln made a career out of delivering deeply felt presentations of standards, as well as writing and singing her own material.