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African Americans
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When the Great Depression struck America in 1929, African Americans were among the hardest hit. The years between 1929 and 1940 were marked by both progress and persistent problems for black people. At a time when a black leader like Mary McLeod Bethune could hold an influential appointment in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, African American workers had the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Moreover, while New Deal legislation displaced black sharecroppers in the South, the federal government ... offered unprecedented opportunities for African American artists and writers such as Aaron Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston. However, discrimination and racial violence, unemployment, and housing shortages remained complicated and dispiriting issues for African Americans. As the United States entered World War II in 1941, blacks seized this opportunity to demand full inclusion in American society.
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The history of African Americans in the news media is a relatively recent story of firsts. Consider Dorothy Gilliam, who in 1961 became the first black woman reporter hired by The Washington Post, or Bob Herbert, who in 1993 became the first black columnist at The New York Times, or even Mark Whitaker, who in 1998 became the first black editor of one of America's three major newsweeklies, Newsweek. These are just a few of the trailblazers who overcame obstacles to rise to the highest echelons of the media world. Prior to the 1960s... African Americans working for the predominantly white media were few and far between. After the subsiding of the dramatic civil rights demonstrations that shook most of America out of complacent acceptance of the status quo, the hiring of African-American news people slowed for a time before accelerating in the 1970, gaining real speed in the 1980s and 1990s. By the dawning of the new millennium, African Americans in the news media had achieved a sort of critical mass.
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It is a little known fact that five African Americans have had their signatures on currency. The four African American men whose signatures appeared on the currency were Blanche K. Bruce, Judson W. Lyons, William T. Vernon and James C. Napier. These men served as Registers of the Treasury. Until the series 1923 currency, the two signatures on almost all currency (except Fractional Currency and Demand Notes) were of the Treasurer and the Register. During this period four of the 17 registers were African American. The fifth African American whose signature appeared on currency was Azie Taylor Morton.
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African Americans are twice as likely to have diabetes than non-Hispanic whites, but one-third of them do not know they have the disease. The rate of diabetes among African Americans has tripled in the last 30 years. In Indianapolis, the chronic disease affects some 50,767 residents. Diabetes- both type 1 and type 2-accounts for $2,239,251,455.00 in total healthcare costs for the state annually.
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African Americans appear in nineteenth-century sheet music as composers, performers, emancipated slaves or freemen, and are frequently the subject of vaudeville or black-face minstrel show lyrics. By the 1860s African Americans such as Sam Lucas (at left, from "Ole' Nicker Demus, De Ruler ob de Jews"; Nicodemus, Kansas, was founded as an African American settlement in 1877) had begun to form their own minstrel troupes and California played its role in providing access to the stage. The Hyers sisters, soprano Anna Madah and contralto Emma Louise, were born in Sacramento in the 1850s and trained by a German pianist and Italian opera singer. Their debut at the Metropolitan Theater in Sacramento on April 22, 1867, received favorable reviews in the papers (San Francisco Chronicle: "rare natural gifts would insure for them a leading position among the prime donne of the age"). Their African American repertory company in the 1870s brought forth "one of the first musical shows to be produced by a black theatrical organization" (Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, 393) (In and Out of Bondage 1877; The Underground Railroad 1879). Black Patti (Matilda Sissieretta Joyner, 1869-1933) studied at the New England Conservatory and sang at the White House in 1892.
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Pennsylvania’s first African Americans lived in the Delaware River valley region as early as 1639. Philadelphia became the major Pennsylvania port for the arrival of slaves, at first from South Carolina and the Caribbean and later directly from Africa. In 1684, the ship Isabella landed in Philadelphia carrying 150 slaves from Africa by way of Bristol, England. About 1729, the market demand for slaves in Pennsylvania increased due to the greater utilization of Africans for skilled labor. Since a plantation economy did not develop in Pennsylvania as it did in the South, slaves were likely to work alongside their masters as sailmakers, bakers, carpenters, charcoal-iron workers, farmhands, or domestic servants. The start of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) slowed ethnic immigration to the state.
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African Americans