GM – FBF – Our story today is about one of the greatest writers of all time. I had a chase to meet with her because she came to Ewing High School, New Jersey to receive the Mickey Leland Award from my student club called The Spectrum Project and my Varsity Debate team from Red Bank Regional High School, New Jersey had a chase to sit in on one of her classes at Princeton University. She is both knowledgeable and kind and I hope that you enjoy her story. I won’t be able to return any response to your posts today last day of workshop. Make it a champion day!

Remember – “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” Toni Morrison

Today in our History – October 7, 1993 – Writer, Toni Morrison awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Toni Morrison, original name Chloe Anthony Wofford, (born February 18, 1931, Lorain, Ohio, U.S.), American writer noted for her examination of black experience (particularly black female experience) within the black community. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Morrison grew up in the American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. She attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955). After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. In 1965 she became a fiction editor. From 1984 she taught writing at the State University of New York at Albany, leaving in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University.

Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes. In 1973 a second novel, Sula, was published; it examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. Song of Solomon (1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity; its publication brought Morrison to national attention. Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex. The critically acclaimed Beloved (1987), which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. Jazz (1992) is a story of violence and passion set in New York City’s Harlem during the 1920s.

Subsequent novels are Paradise (1998), a richly detailed portrait of a black utopian community in Oklahoma, and Love (2003), an intricate family story that reveals the myriad facets of love and its ostensible opposite. A Mercy (2008) deals with slavery in 17th-century America. In the redemptive Home (2012), a traumatized Korean War veteran encounters racism after returning home and later overcomes apathy to rescue his sister. God Help the Child (2015) chronicles the ramifications of child abuse and neglect through the tale of Bride, a black girl with dark skin who is born to light-skinned parents.

A work of criticism, playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, was published in 1992. Many of her essays and speeches were collected in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (edited by Carolyn C. Denard), published in 2008. Additionally, Morrison released several children’s books, including Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? and who’s Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse?, both written with her son and published in 2003. Remember (2004) chronicles the hardships of black students during the integration of the American public school system; aimed at children, it uses archival photographs juxtaposed with captions speculating on the thoughts of their subjects. She also wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner (2005), an opera about the same story that inspired Beloved.

The central theme of Morrison’s novels is the black American experience; in an unjust society her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture.

In 2010 Morrison was made an officer of the French Legion of Honour. Two years later she was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Research more about great American Black writers and share with your babies and make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s lesson in our quest to find as many unsung Black history makers, was an U.S. Ambassador, Peace Corp worker , special envoy to Senegal where I was married. He comes from a musical family background. Worked at a HBCU and authored a book. Let’s learn more about him. Enjoy!

Remember –I have always viewed my role as a sort of ambassador or bridge between groups to help provide a dialog. – Will Mercer Cook

Today in our History – October 4 ,1987 Will Mercer Cook died of pneumonia at the age of 84 in a Washington, D.C. hospital.

Will Mercer Cook served as the United States ambassador to the Republic of Niger from 1961 to 1964. Cook directed U.S. economic, social, and cultural programs in Niger, which included the Peace Corps. During the mid-1960s he also became the special envoy to Gambia and Senegal. 
Will Mercer Cook was born on March 30, 1903, in Washington, D.C., to Will Marion Cook, a composer and Abbie Mitchell Cook, an actress and classical singer. Cook had one sibling, Abigail, an older sister. During his childhood, he frequently traveled with his family as they performed at various venues throughout the United States and abroad. Jazz superstar Duke Ellington lived on the same block in Cook’s middle class Washington, D.C. neighborhood.

Cook attended Washington, D.C. public schools and graduated from the historic Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in the city. In 1925 he earned his bachelor’s degree in French language and literature from Amherst College in Massachusetts and a teacher’s diploma the following year from the University of Paris in France. In 1929 Cook married Vashti Smith and they had two sons, Mercer and Jacques. Cook earned a master’s degree in French language and literature in 1931 from Brown University in Rhode Island and a doctorate from the same institution in 1936.

While still a graduate student, Cook was hired as an assistant professor of romance languages for one year at Howard University in Washington, D.C. After he earned his doctorate, Cook joined the foreign language faculty of Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia where he taught French until 1943.

During his career at Atlanta University, Cook received the prestigious Rosenwald Fellowship to conduct research abroad in Paris and the French West Indies. In 1943 Cook also became a professor at the University of Haiti. While in Haiti he authored the Handbook for Haitian Teachers of English and other studies related to the Haitian experience.

Cook completed his tenure in Haiti in 1943 and moved that same year to Washington, D.C. to accept what would become a permanent position as professor of romance languages at Howard University. While at Howard, Cook continued to produce scholarship on Haiti and he translated the works of African authors.

During the late 1950s Cook shifted his career to focus more on international relations. In 1958 he became foreign representative for the American Society of African Culture and later an administrator in the Congress of Cultural Freedom. President John F. Kennedy, in 1961, appointed Cook to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Niger, a position he held until 1964. Cook also served from 1964 to 1966 as special envoy to Senegal and Gambia.

Upon the completion of his foreign relations service, Cook rejoined the faculty of Howard, serving as chair of the department of romance languages. He also became a visiting professor at Harvard University. During the final phase of his teaching career, Cook continued to produce scholarship and translate texts of African and Caribbean scholars. In 1969, he co-authored with Stephen Henderson the groundbreaking anthology The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States. In 1970 Cook retired from teaching, but continued to publish books and articles.

On October 4, 1987, Will Mercer Cook died of pneumonia at the age of 84 in a Washington, D.C. hospital. Research more about Black Ambassadors and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – As the last quarter of the year 2018 is upon us, I would like to thank all of the readers who have come to this history page on a daily basis. Many of the stories you have never known about and some were just a reminder of something you knew but just forgotten and some to reinforce what you already know and maybe shared with your friends and families. Today’s story is no different a look at, a math wizard who earned a PHD in mathematics and ta. ught at some of the best colleges in America. He walked in circles that other blacks would not go and he demanded respect everywhere he went and would always say “ Black is beautiful” long before it became a standard in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. Enjoy!

Remember – “One of the noblest men I’ve ever known.”- Leo Zippin- former president of the American Mathematical Society
Today in our History – October 3, 1881 – Dudley Weldon Woodard was born

Dudley Woodard was a gifted teacher in mathematics. Always the scholar, Weldon earned numerous degrees and was the second African American to receive a PHD in mathematics. Woodard taught as such prestigious schools as the Tuskegee Institute, Howard University, and the University of Chicago. He attained he PHD from Penn in 1928. Dudley Woodard devoted his entire professional life to the promotion of excellence in mathematics through the advancement of his students, teaching and research.

Dudley Weldon Woodard was born October 3, 1881, in Galveston, Texas, where his father worked for the U. S. Postal Service. Woodard was a smart child whose curiosity was supported by his family. After finishing his primary education in his home state, Woodard attended Wilberforce College in Ohio, receiving a bachelor degree in mathematics in 1903, and an M. S. degree in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1907. From 1907 to 1914, Woodard taught mathematics at Tuskegee Institute and then moved to join the Wilberforce faculty from 1914-1920.

When Dudley Woodard enrolled in the Graduate School at Penn in 1927, he had already accumulated a remarkable set of achievements. He had published his University of Chicago master’s thesis in mathematics, “Loci Connected with the Problem of Two Bodies” and had been teaching mathematics at the collegiate level for two decades, the last seven at Howard University, then the most prestigious African American university in the country. At Howard, he also held the post of Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

In the early 1920s Dudley Woodard began taking advanced mathematics courses in the summer sessions at Columbia University. It then became clear that he was among the gifted mathematicians in the nation. Columbia’s loss was Penn’s gain when in 1927 Woodard took scholarly leave from Howard and spent a year at Penn, working under the direction of John R. Kline, one of the best and brightest of Penn’s mathematics faculty. On Wednesday, June 28, 1928, Woodard became the 38th person to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Penn. More significantly, Woodard was only the second African American in the nation to receive that degree.

Deane Montgomery, former president of the American Mathematical Society and the International Mathematical Union, described Woodard as, “an extremely nice man, well-balanced personally.” Leo Zippin, who was an internationally known specialist in Woodard’s field, said that he was “one of the noblest men I’ve ever known.

Dr. Woodard was not only a brilliant mathematician, but a man of dignity; he enjoyed life in spite of his racial environment. He used the phrase “Black is beautiful” in the 1930s; he often ignored the “colored” signs and visited any men’s restroom of his choice. He also ate at many “nice” restaurants and enjoyed the theaters of his choice in New York. He and his family once moved into what had been an all-white neighborhood because it was aesthetically nice and it was near Howard.

When he retired in 1947 as chairman of the department, he had led Howard’s mathematics faculty through a quarter century of steady advancement. In an age of discrimination, Dudley Weldon Woodard had competed and triumphed in the face of overwhelming odds. Penn is proud to claim him among its most distinguished alumni. Dudley Weldon Woodard died July 1, 1965 in his home in Cleveland Ohio. Research more about this great American and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!