GM – FBF – Today’s American Champions were the first 33 African-American members of the Georgia General Assembly who were elected to office in 1868, during the Reconstruction era. They were among the first African-American state legislators in the United States. Twenty-four of the members were ministers.After most of the legislators voted for losing candidates in the legislature’s elections for the U.S. Senate, the white majority conspired to remove the black and mixed-ethnicity members from the Assembly. Most of the black delegates to the state’s post-war constitutional convention voted against including into the constitution the right of black legislators to hold office, a vote which Rep. Henry McNeal Turner came to regret.The members were expelled by September 1868. The ex-legislators petitioned the federal government and state courts to intervene. In White v. Clements (June 1869), the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled 2-1 that black people did have a right to hold office in Georgia. In January 1870, commanding general of the District of Georgia Alfred H. Terry began “Terry’s Purge”, removing ex-Confederates from the General Assembly, replacing them with Republican runners-up and reinstating the black legislators, resulting in a Republican majority in both houses. From that point, the General Assembly accomplished the ratification of the 15th Amendment, chose new senators to go to Washington, and adopted public education.The work of the Republican majority was short-lived, after the “Redeemer” Democrats won majorities in both houses in December 1870. The Republican governor, Rufus Bullock, after trying and failing to reinstate federal military rule in Georgia, fled the state. After the Democrats took office they began to enact harsh recriminations against Republicans and African Americans, using terror, intimidation, and the Ku Klux Klan, leading to disenfranchisement by the 1890s. One quarter of the black legislators were killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. The last African-American legislator, W. H. Rogers, resigned in 1907. Afterwards, no African American held a seat in the Georgia legislature until civil rights attorney Leroy Johnson, a Democrat, was elected to the state senate in 1962.The 33 are commemorated in the sculpture Expelled Because of Color on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol.Today in our History – October 6, 1868 – The “Original 33” were the first 33 African-American members of the Georgia General Assembly who were elected to office in 1868, during the Reconstruction era.Black men participated in Georgia politics for the first time during Congressional Reconstruction (1867-76). Between 1867 and 1872 sixty-nine African Americans served as delegates to the constitutional convention (1867-68) or as members of the state legislature. Jefferson Franklin Long, a tailor from Bibb County, sat in the U.S. Congress from December 1870 to March 1871. The three most prominent Black state legislators were Henry McNeal Turner, Tunis Campbell, and Aaron A. Bradley.Turner came to Georgia from Washington, D.C., in 1865 to win Black congregations to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). He was the most successful Black politician in organizing the Black Republican vote and attracted other ministers into politics. He was a delegate to the Georgia constitutional convention of 1867 and was elected to two terms in the Georgia legislature, beginning in 1868.Campbell, a native of New Jersey, was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In 1864 he was appointed an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau on the Georgia Sea Islands. He later moved to the mainland. In 1867 he was elected to the state constitutional convention. The next year he became a state senator from the Second Congressional District. He built an impressive political machine in and around Darien in McIntosh County.Born in South Carolina, Bradley was a shoemaker in Augusta. Sometime around 1834 he ran away to the North, where he became a lawyer. In 1865 he returned to Georgia. He was the most outspoken member of the Black delegation to the constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected state senator from the First District. Despite a checkered past, he rallied plantation workers around Savannah with his insistence that the formery enslaved people be given land.The church, with the enthusiastic support of Black women, who were still disenfranchised, was the center of African American political activity. Twenty-four legislators were ministers.However, religion, with its emphasis on the other world, predisposed some Black politicians to become too conciliatory. Most Black delegates to the constitutional convention voted against including in the constitution the right of Blacks to hold office. Turner later bitterly regretted that vote.In September 1868 the legislature, dominated by Republicans, expelled its African American members. Energized, the Black legislators, led by Turner, successfully lobbied the federal government to reseat them. They continued to concentrate on political and civil rights. For many of them, education had been their highest priority since 1865. With their solid support, Georgia adopted public education.Conservatives used terror, intimidation, and the Ku Klux Klan to “redeem” the state. One quarter of the Black legislators were killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. In the December 1870 elections the Democrats won an overwhelming victory. In 1906 W. H. Rogers from McIntosh County was the last Black legislator to be elected before Black voters were legally disenfranchised in 1908. In 1976, the Original 33 were honored by the Black Caucus of the Georgia General Assembly with a statue that depicts the rise of African-American politicians. It is on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta.The “Expelled Because of Their Color” monument is located near the Capitol Avenue entrance of the Georgia State Capitol. It was dedicated to the 33 original African-American Georgia legislators who were elected during the Reconstruction period. In the first election (1868) after the Civil war, blacks were allowed to vote. But even though former slaves could now vote, there was no law that allowed black representatives to hold office. So, the 33 black men who were elected to the General Assembly were expelled. The construction of this monument was funded by the Black Caucus of the Georgia General Assembly, a group of African-American State representatives and senators who are committed to the principles and ideals of the Civil Rights Movement organized in 1975. The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus commissioned the sculpture in March 1976 (Boutwell). John Riddle, the Sculptor of this monument, was also a painter and printmaker known for artwork that acknowledged the struggles of African-Americans through history.Inscribed on the base of Riddle’s sculpture are the names of the 33 black pioneer legislators of the Georgia General Assembly elected and expelled in 1868 and reinstated in 1870 by an Act of Congress.The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus continues to hold annual events honoring the Original 33. Research more about these great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM –FBF –Today’s American Champion an American politician and lawyer from California. She was the first African-American woman to represent the West Coast in Congress. She served in the U.S. Congress from 1973 until January 1979. She was the Los Angeles County Supervisor representing the 2nd District (1992–2008). She has served as the Chair three times (1993–94, 1997–98, 2002–03). Her husband is William Burke, a prominent philanthropist and creator of the Los Angeles MarathonIn 1973, she became the first member of the U.S. Congress to give birth while in office, and she was the first person to be granted maternity leave by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Amtrak, having been appointed to the position by President Barack Obama in 2012.Today in our HISTORY – OCTOBER 4, 1932 – Yvonne Burke was born.Burke was born on October 5, 1932, in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in political science from the University of California at Los Angeles and a juris doctorate from the University of Southern California Law School. After graduating, she found that no law firms would hire an African-American woman and so began her own private practice. In addition, she served as the state’s deputy corporation commissioner and as a hearing officer for the Los Angeles Police Commission. In 1965, after the Watts riots in Los Angeles, Burke played a key role in organizing the legal defense for those charged in the riots, and was appointed to the McCone Commission, which was charged with determining the cause of the riots.Burke began her political career as a member of the California State Assembly, representing Los Angeles’ 63rd District from 1966 to 1972. In 1972, Burke served as vice-chairperson of the 1972 Democratic National Convention, the first African-American to hold that position. She served in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing California’s 37th District from 1973 to 1975 and the 28th District from 1975 to 1979. She did not seek re-election to Congress in 1978, instead running for California attorney general, losing in the general election. In 1979, she was appointed to fill a vacancy on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for District 4, but was defeated in her bid for a full term in 1980 and returned to practicing law. In 1992, Burke ran for and won a seat on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for District 2, serving until her retirement in 2008. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was known as “The Father of Community Policing,” became the first African American Mayor of Houston, Texas in 1997.Today in our History – October 4, 1937 – Lee Patrick Brown is born in Wewoka, Oklahoma.The first African American Mayor of Houston, Texas, Lee Patrick Brown was born on October 4, 1937, in Wewoka, Oklahoma. His parents, Andrew and Zelma Brown were small farmers. A high school athlete, Brown started his professional life as a police officer in San Jose, California in 1960.That same year, he graduated from Fresno State University with his B.S. degree in criminology. In 1964, Brown earned a master’s degree in sociology from San Jose State University where he became assistant professor in 1968. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned his master’s degree in criminology in 1968 and his PhD in 1970.Brown became chairman and professor of the Department of Administration of Justice at Portland State University in 1968. In 1972, he was appointed associate director, Institute of Urban Affairs and Research and professor of Public Administration and director of Criminal Justice programs at Howard University. In 1974, Brown was named Sheriff of Multnomah County, Oregon, and in 1976, director of the Department of Justice Services. As public safety commissioner of Atlanta, Georgia, from 1978 to 1982, Brown and his staff cracked the Atlanta Child Murders case.As Houston, Texas’ chief of police, from 1982 to 1990, Brown developed Neighborhood Oriented Policing, a program employing community policing techniques. From 1990 to 1992, he was police commissioner of New York City. President Clinton appointed Brown director of the White House Office of National Drug Policy or “Drug Czar”, a cabinet level position from 1993 to 1996.After spending some time teaching at Texas Southern University and Rice University, Brown was elected mayor of Houston, Texas, in 1998. As mayor, he was able to build the Metro light rail system, attract a new NFL team, and expand his philosophy of neighborhood oriented government.A founder of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), Brown has organized around the needs of African American police executives. Today, Brown is chairman and CEO of Brown Group International, which uses the extensive expertise of its founder to develop solutions to complex problems in public safety, homeland security, crisis management, government relations, international trade, and other concerns.The father of four grown children with his late wife, Yvonne, Brown now lives with his wife Frances in Houston. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was an American artist known for his chronicling of African American related subjects in paintings, drawings, lithographs, and murals. He is best known work is The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy, a mural at Hampton University. In 2018, the centenary year of his birth, the first major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art.Today in our History – October 3, 1979 – Charles Wilbert White, Jr. (April 2, 1918 – October 3, 1979) died.Charles Wilbert White was born on April 2, 1918, to Ethelene Gary, a domestic worker, and Charles White Sr, a railroad and construction worker, on the South Side of Chicago. His parents never married and his mother raised him—as she had no child care, she would often leave him at the public library. There White developed an affinity for art and reading at a young age. White’s mother bought him a set of oil paints when he was seven years old, which hooked White on painting. White also played music as a child, studied modern dance, and was part of theatre groups; however, he stated that art was his true passion.White’s mother also took him to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he would read and look at paintings—developing a particular interest in the works of Winslow Homer and George Inness. Since White had little money growing up, he often painted on whatever surfaces he could find including shirts, cardboard, and window blinds. During the Great Depression, young White tried to conceal his passion for art in fear of embarrassment; however, this ended when White got a job painting signs at the age of fourteen. White learned how to mix paints by sitting-in every day for a week on an Art Institute sponsored painting class that as taking place at a park near his home. His mother re-married when White’s father died in 1926. She married a steel mill worker who would become an abusive alcoholic, especially towards a young White, leaving him to escape into art. This is also the same year his mother began sending him to Mississippi twice a year to his aunts, Hasty Baines and Harriet Baines, where he would learn about his heritage and African American Southern folklore – these themes would heavily influence his art for the rest of his career as an artist. An early activist, as a teenager, he volunteered his talents and became the house artist at the National Negro Congress in Chicago. Later, in a union with fellow black artists, White was arrested while picketing. White won a grant during the seventh grade to attend Saturday art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. After reading Alain Locke’s book The New Negro: An Interpretation, a critique of the Harlem Renaissance, White’s social views changed. He learned after reading Locke’s text about important African American figures in American history, and questioned his teachers on why they were not taught to students in school, causing some to label him a “rebel problematic child”. White did not graduate from high school, having lost a year due to his refusal to attend class after being disillusioned with the teaching system. While he was encouraged by his art teachers to submit his art works and won various scholarships, these would later be taken away from him as an “error” and given to whites instead. He was admitted to two art schools, each then pulled his acceptance because of his race. White ultimately received a full scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, White identified Mitchell Siporin, Francis Chapin, and Aaron Bohrod as his influences. He was an excellent draftsman, completing five drawing courses and received a final “A grade”. To pay the costs of art supplies, White became a cook, using his mother’s instruction and recipes. White later became an art teacher at St. Elizabeth Catholic High School. In 1938, White was hired by the Illinois Art Project, a state affiliate of the Works Progress Administration. His work received an extended showing at the Chicago Coliseum during the Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro, which was part of the American Negro Exposition commemorating the 75th anniversary of Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery. An important figure in what became known as the Chicago Black Renaissance, White taught art classes at the Southside Community Art Center. Following his first show at Paragon Studios in Cincinnati in 1938, White’s work was exhibited widely throughout the United States, including, among many others, exhibitions at the Roko Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1939 he produced his WPA mural Five Great American Negroes, now at Howard University Gallery of Art. White also showed at the Palace of Culture in Warsaw and the Pushkin Museum. In 1976 his work was featured in Two Centuries of Black American Art, LACMA’s first exhibition devoted exclusively to African-American Artists. White moved to New Orleans in 1941 to teach at Dillard University. Beginning in that year, he was married briefly to famed sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, who also taught at Dillard. He served in the US Army during WWII, but was discharged when he contracted tuberculosis (TB). White and Catlett moved to New York City and also studied together at an arts collective in Mexico City. While in New York City White learned lithography and etching techniques at the Arts Student League, taking direction from renowned artist Harry Sternberg who encouraged him to move beyond “stylization to individuation in his figures”. Taking Sternberg advice to heart White would go on to paint The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy. Printmaking enabled White to reach a wider public more directly and allowed him to bring together his social commitment and artistic practice. Although he had long been aware of art’s social utility, with his lithographs and linocuts he was finally able to communicate with a large, cross-national community of black workers and socialist artists, as opposed to his paintings, which were generally tied to individual purchasers. He started providing political cartoons for the Daily Worker and, in 1953, he published in association with Masses and Mainstream a portfolio of six reproductions of his ink-and-charcoal drawings, entitled ‘Charles White: Six Drawings’. Priced at only $3, this portfolio aimed at getting art to the people, a main concern for progressive artists of the period. In this respect it was a great success, and White himself acknowledged this as he learned that a group of workers in Alabama combined their savings to buy a portfolio and shared the pictures among themselves. In 1956, due to continued breathing problems (perhaps arising from the earlier case of TB), White moved to Los Angeles for its drier, more mild climate. From 1965 to his death in 1979, White taught at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. On faculty at Otis, he was a beacon for African American artists who came to study with him. Among those he taught were Alonzo Davis, David Hammons, and Kerry James Marshall. An elementary school was named after him and is located on the former Otis College campus. Later in life White moved to Altadena, California where he remained until his death in 1979.White’s best known work is the mural The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy at Hampton University. Measuring around 12 feet by seven feet, the mural depicts a number of notable African-Americans including Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Peter Salem, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Marian Anderson. White was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1972.White’s works are in the collections of a number of institutions, including Atlanta University, the Barnett Aden Gallery, the Deutsche Academie der Kunste, the Dresden Museum of Art, Howard University, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Oakland Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Syracuse University and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The CEJJES Institute of Pomona, New York, owns a number of White’s works and has established a dedicated Charles W. White Gallery. White’s popularity faded after his death both because he was a person of color in an industry that unfairly favored white artists and preferred more abstract and conceptual styles in direct opposition to White’s style of figurative art. However White’s popularity and legacy lives on in Altadena, California where he spent a great deal of his later years. Shortly after his death a park was re-named after him and it remains today the only park to be named after an American born artist. The Charles White Park hosted an annual event “Charles White Memorial Arts Festival” which brought African American and local artists into the community until its discontinuation in the 1990s. Currently members of the Altadena Arts council are working with local community and other stake holders to bring the event back to the community. In 1982 a retrospective exhibition of White’s work was held at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the 1990s, the idea of staging a major traveling retrospective exhibition arose. Ultimately, over approximately a ten year period, staff from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art attempted to locate various White pieces to put together an extensive exhibition of his work. The exhibition opened in Chicago in 2018, traveling to New York City and Los Angeles. White “was a humanist, drawn to the physical body and more literal representations of the lives of African-Americans”, according to Lauren Warnecke for the Chicago Tribune. While this put him out of step with the abstract movement in art, the power of his work is undeniable according to the Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Knight, especially White’s graphic work in graphite, charcoal, crayon and ink. The Washington Post art critic, Philip Kennicott finds White’s work central to American art. “Grace, passion, coolness, toughness, [and] beauty” mark White’s work, according to Holland Cotter in The New York Times; White had “the hand of an angel” and “the eye of a sage”.In November 2019, two works by White went up for the first time in Christie’s and Sotheby’s main-seasonal New York City contemporary art auctions. Both works, Banner for Willie J. (1976) — a portrait of White’s cousin, who was killed—and Ye Shall Inherit the Earth (1953) — a charcoal drawing of civil rights icon Rosa Lee Ingram with a babe-in-arms—made sales records for the artist’s work. Research more of this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion is an American actor, director, singer, and educator. He is best known for his television roles as Captain Benjamin Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as Hawk on Spenser: For Hire and its spinoff A Man Called Hawk, and as Dr. Bob Sweeney in the Academy Award-nominated film American History X. While he was teaching at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., I had the honor of sitting in his classes as an adjunct professor. I will never forget those days.Today in our History – October 2, 1948 – Avery Franklin Brooks (born October 2, 1948 was born.Avery Brooks was born in Evansville, Indiana, the son of Eva Lydia (née Crawford), a choral conductor and music instructor, and Samuel Brooks, a union official and tool and die worker. His maternal grandfather, Samuel Travis Crawford, was also a singer who graduated from Tougaloo College in 1901. When Avery was eight years old his family moved to Gary, Indiana, after his father had been laid off from International Harvester. Brooks has said: “I was born in Evansville… but it was Gary, Indiana that made me.”The Brooks household was filled with music. His mother, who was among the first African-American women to earn a master’s degree in music at Northwestern University, taught music wherever the family lived. His father was in the choir Wings over Jordan, performing on CBS radio from 1937 to 1947. His maternal uncle Samuel Travis Crawford was a member of the Delta Rhythm Boys. “Music is all around me and in me, as I am in it,” Brooks has said.Brooks attended Indiana University and Oberlin College. He later completed his bachelor of arts, plus a master of fine arts from Rutgers University in 1976, becoming the first African American to receive an MFA in acting and directing from Rutgers.Spenser: for Hire: HawkIn 1985, Brooks assumed the role of Hawk on the ABC television detective series Spenser: For Hire, based on the mystery series published by Robert Parker. Hawk became a popular character, and after three seasons, Brooks in 1989 received his own, short-lived spinoff series, A Man Called Hawk.Brooks said of his role as Hawk: “I never thought of myself as the sidekick… I’ve never been the side of anything. I just assumed that I was equal.”Brooks returned to play Hawk in four Spenser television movies: Spenser: Ceremony, Spenser: Pale Kings and Princes, Spenser: The Judas Goat and Spenser: A Savage Place.Star Trek: Benjamin SiskoBrooks is best known in popular culture for his role as Commander, and later Captain, Benjamin Sisko on the syndicated science-fiction television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which ran for seven seasons from 1993 to 1999.Brooks won the role of Commander Benjamin Sisko by beating 100 other actors from all racial backgrounds to become the first Black-American captain to lead a Star Trek series.In landing the role, Brooks also became the first Black-American male actor in a starring role in a first-run television drama since Clarence Williams III had starred as undercover police detective Linc Hayes in the iconic ABC “hippie” cop drama The Mod Squad from 1968 to 1973. Brooks was the second in American television history to do so since Bill Cosby co-starred with Robert Culp in the NBC spy series I Spy from 1965 to 1968. Brooks also directed nine episodes of the series, including “Far Beyond the Stars”, an episode focusing on racial injustice.Avery, like his character (Sisko), is a very complex man. He is not a demanding or ego-driven actor, rather he is a thoughtful and intelligent man who sometimes has insights into the character that no one else has thought about. He has also been unfailingly polite and a classy guy in all my dealings with him.Other rolesIn 1984, Brooks received critical praise for his featured role in PBS’s American Playhouse production of Half Slave, Half Free: Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, directed by Gordon Parks. The story chronicled the life of Solomon Northup, a free man from New York kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841 and held until 1853, when he regained his freedom with the help of family and friends. It was adapted from Northup’s memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (1853).Brooks appeared in the 1985 television movie adaptation of Finnegan Begin Again. In 1987, he starred in the role of Uncle Tom in the Showtime production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A third project that allowed Brooks to highlight the history of African Americans was his performance in the 1988 television movie Roots: The Gift, which featured his fellow Star Trek actors LeVar Burton, Kate Mulgrew, and Tim Russ.In 1998, he appeared in the motion picture American History X, which also stars another Star Trek actor, Jennifer Lien. He also played the role of Paris in the 1998 film The Big Hit.In animated films, he supplied the voice of King Maximus in Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, and Nokkar in an episode of Disney’s Gargoyles.In 2001, Brooks was the voice-over and appeared in a series of IBM commercials for its software business unit. Reserach more about this great American Champion and share with your babies. 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GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was an African American inventor, physicist, engineer and space scientist. Carruthers perfected a compact and very powerful ultraviolet camera/spectrograph for NASA to use when it launched Apollo 16 in 1972. He designed it so astronauts could use it on the lunar surface, making all adjustments inside their bulky space suits.Upon instructions from Carruthers, they used the camera to record the Earth’s outermost atmosphere, noting its variations, and also mapped portions of the far-ultraviolet sky recording stars and galaxies, and the gaseous media between them. In 1970, sending his instruments aboard Aerobee sounding rockets, he had demonstrated that molecular hydrogen exists in the interstellar medium.Among numerous citations and awards, in 2003, Carruthers was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame. He received an honorary doctorate for Engineering from Michigan Technological University, and in 2013 the 2012 National Medal for Technology and Invention from President Barack Obama.Today in our History – George Robert Carruthers (October 1, 1939 – December 26, 2020) was born. Scientist George Carruthers created inventions, such as the ultraviolet camera, or spectograph, which was used by NASA in the 1972 Apollo 16 flight, revealing the mysteries of space and the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientist George Carruthers built his first telescope at the age of 10. He earned his Ph.D. in aeronautical and astronautical engineering at the University of Illinois in 1964 and began working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. His telescope and image converter was used to identify molecular hydrogen in space and his ultraviolet camera/spectograph was used by Apollo 16 during the flight to the moon. Scientist George Carruthers was born on October 1, 1939, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest of George and Sophia Carruthers’ four children. George Carruthers, Sr. was a civil engineer with the U.S. Army Air Corps, and encouraged his son’s early interests in science. By the age of 10, the young Carruthers had constructed his own telescope with cardboard tubing and mail-order lenses he bought with money he earned as a delivery boy.Carruthers’ father died when the boy was only 12. After his death, the family moved to Chicago, where Sophia went to work for the U.S. Postal Service. Despite the emotional setback, Carruthers continued pursuing science. As one of only a handful of African-Americans competing in Chicago’s high school science fairs, he won three awards, including first prize for a telescope that he designed and built.In 1957, Carruthers graduated from Chicago’s Englewood High School and entered the engineering program at the University of Illinois’ Champaign-Urbana campus. While an undergraduate, Carruthers focused on aerospace engineering and astronomy. After earning his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1961, Carruthers stayed on at the University of Illinois, earning his master’s in nuclear engineering in 1962, and his Ph.D. in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 1964.In 1964, he went to work for the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow. Two years later he became a full-time research physicist at the NRL’s E. O. Hurlburt Center for Space Research. Please research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s North American Champion was a Canadian track and field sprinter and physical education teacher. He won a bronze medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and set a total of seven world records over the course of his career.Today in our History – September 30, 1940 – “Harry” Winston Jerome was born.Harry Jerome was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, the son of Harry Vincent Jerome and Elsie Ellen Howard, and moved to North Vancouver, British Columbia, at age 12. His grandfather was John Howard, an American-born railway porter who represented Canada in the 1912 Summer Olympics. Harry’s sister, Valerie Jerome, was also an Olympian who competed for Canada at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.Jerome competed at the university level for Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon. He was a member of the Canadian track and field team at the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Summer Olympics, winning 100 meter bronze in 1964. Jerome wore his University of Oregon sweats, rather than the contemporary practice of an official national outfit for all Olympic appearances, to warm up for the Olympic 100 meters in Tokyo. He won the gold in the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games.During his career, Jerome set a total of seven world records, including tying the 100 meter record at 10.0 seconds in 1960, equaling the mark established a month earlier by Germany’s Armin Hary. Later he tied the world record for the 100-yard dash at 9.3 seconds (1961), making Jerome one of the few athletes to own both the 100 yard and 100 meter world record simultaneously.Jerome was a member of the University of Oregon 4 × 100 m relay team that tied the world record of 40.0 seconds in 1962; during the 1962 season Harry ran 9.2s at the 100-yard dash 2 times. In 1966 he again tied a world record with a 9.1 time in the 100 yard. From 1963 to 1966 he held or equaled four world records concurrently. He remains the only man to have held the 100 yard world record with 3 different times & is the oldest 100y world record holder – 25 years old; the youngest is Houston McTear at 9.0s he was 18 years old. Jerome never owned the 100y or 100m WR solely but matched his contemporaries.Jerome continued to sprint successfully until the late 1960s, despite suffering an injury so severe at the Perth Commonwealth Games in 1962 that doctors initially believed he would be crippled for life.[citation needed]Jerome received a bachelor’s degree in physical education from the University of Oregon in 1964 and taught with the Richmond School Board (1964–65) and then with the Vancouver School Board (1965–68). In 1968, he received a master’s in physical education from Oregon.After retiring from athletics in 1969, Jerome was invited by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to help create Canada’s new Ministry of Sport. Jerome held a number of senior positions in the ministry but resigned over the government’s cancellation of a large public-private partnership he had negotiated with Kellogg’s to promote youth participation in athletics. During the 1980s, Jerome headed the Premier’s Sport Award program in British Columbia.Jerome died of a brain aneurysm on December 7, 1982, at the age of 42, in North Vancouver.In 1970, Jerome was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. The following year he was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame. Jerome was posthumously inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2001 and was named a Person of National Historical Significance in 2010.In 1984, the Labatts International Track Classic Pre-Olympic meet was renamed the Harry Jerome International Track Classic. The meet is held annually at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby, British Columbia. The Harry Jerome Sports Complex in North Vancouver, one block from North Vancouver High School where he first went out for track in 1958, and the Harry Jerome Sports Centre, home to the Burnaby Velodrome, are named after Jerome, as are the weight room at the University of Oregon and the track and field stadium in Prince Albert.The Stanley Park sea wall in Vancouver is graced with a 2.7-metre (9 ft) bronze statue of Jerome. The annual Harry Jerome Awards, the national awards dinner for Canada’s black community organized by the Black Business and Professionals Association (BBPA), is named after him.Another meet, called the Harry Jerome Indoor Games was created in 2011. It is held at the Richmond Olympic Oval, once used for Speed Skating events at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, but now a multi-purpose sports facility. The meet is mainly attended by high school students representing lower mainland clubs, as well as some university student-athletes, and younger athletes.On September 30, 2019, Google celebrated Harry Jerome’s 79th birthday with a Google Doodle.Production began in April 2009 on a feature-length biographical documentary entitled Mighty Jerome. Directed by Charles Officer and produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in Vancouver, the film was inspired by Fil Fraser’s book on Jerome, entitled Running Uphill.NFB producer Selwyn Jacob had approached Officer — along with four other directors — in 2007 with idea of making a documentary about Jerome. Officer’s proposal was selected by Jacob and the NFB, despite the fact that he had never directed a documentary before.The black and white film uses archival footage, interviews and dramatizations to explore Jerome’s life and career. Officer recreated museum installations in Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver to interview Jerome’s contemporaries and family members. Jerome’s sister Valerie refused to participate in the film due to objections over his portrayal in Fraser’s book. The film premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival on October 8, 2010.Jerome’s 100 meter bronze medal performance at the Tokyo 1964 Summer Olympics is captured in the documentary film Tokyo Olympiad (1965) directed by Kon Ichikawa. Slow motion close-up footage of Jerome (along with other athletes) preparing for the race begins at the 26-minute mark and then the race is shown in its entirety at full speed. Research more about this great North American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American champion was an American singer whose style encompassed Chicago blues, electric blues, rhythm and blues and soul blues. Sometimes called “The Queen of the Blues”, she was known for her rough, powerful vocals.Today in our History – September 28 1828, Koko Taylor (born Cora Anna Walton, was born.Born on a farm near Memphis, Tennessee, Taylor was the daughter of a sharecropper. She left Tennessee for Chicago in 1952 with her husband, Robert “Pops” Taylor, a truck driver. In the late 1950s, she began singing in blues clubs in Chicago. She was spotted by Willie Dixon in 1962, and this led to more opportunities for performing and her first recordings. In 1963 she had a single on USA Records, and in 1964 a cut on a Chicago blues collection on Spivey Records, called Chicago Blues. In 1964 Dixon brought Taylor to Checker Records, a subsidiary label of Chess Records, for which she recorded “Wang Dang Doodle”, a song written by Dixon and recorded by Howlin’ Wolf five years earlier. The record became a hit, reaching number four on the R&B chart and number 58 on the pop chart in 1966, and selling a million copies. She recorded several versions of the song over the years, including a live rendition at the 1967 American Folk Blues Festival, with the harmonica player Little Walter and the guitarist Hound Dog Taylor. Her subsequent recordings, both original songs and covers, did not achieve as much success on the charts.”Taylor sounds like you always wanted those women with Big in front of their names to sound—powerful, even rough, without ever altogether abandoning her rather feminine register.”— Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981) Taylor became better known by touring in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and she became accessible to a wider record-buying public when she signed a recording contract with Alligator Records in 1975. She recorded nine albums for Alligator, eight of which were nominated for Grammy awards, and came to dominate ranks of female blues singers, winning twenty-nine W. C. Handy/Blues Music Awards. She survived a near-fatal car crash in 1989. In the 1990s, she appeared in the films Blues Brothers 2000 and Wild at Heart. She opened a blues club on Division Street in Chicago in 1994, which relocated to Wabash Avenue, in Chicago’s South Loop, in 2000 (the club is now closed).In 2003, she appeared as a guest with Taj Mahal in an episode of the television series Arthur. In 2009, she performed with Umphrey’s McGee at the band’s New Year’s Eve concert at the Auditorium Theater, in Chicago.Taylor influenced Bonnie Raitt, Shemekia Copeland, Janis Joplin, Shannon Curfman, and Susan Tedeschi.In her later years, she performed over 70 concerts a year and resided just south of Chicago, in Country Club Hills, Illinois.In 2008, the Internal Revenue Service said that Taylor owed $400,000 in unpaid taxes, penalties and interest, for the years 1998, 2000 and 2001. In those years combined, her adjusted gross income was $949,000. Taylor’s final performance was at the Blues Music Awards, on May 7, 2009. She suffered complications from surgery for gastrointestinal bleeding on May 19 and died on June 3. On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Koko Taylor among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make It A Champion Day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion has always been a favorite of mine. Unless you were taken music classes back in the day, you might have heard about him. I learned about him from my great Uncle Leon Busby from Berlin, NJ. Besides watching cowboy movies or listening to him play his “Mouth Organ”, he would share all of the great black people that were not in our history books. Uncle lived to be over 100 years’ old and I miss him but he opened my mind to researching our back heritage. So here is this great story: Today in our History – September 27, 1912 – W. C. Handy published “Memphis Blues.”Do you listen to the blues? If you haven’t, you’ve definitely heard music influenced by the blues (a song of sadness in which the second line often repeats the words of the first). Artists such as John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, and Koko Taylor have made that sultry blues sound legendary, but before them, William Christopher Handy, the “Father of the Blues,” brought the African-American folk tradition into mainstream music. The publication of his song “The Memphis Blues” on September 28, 1912, changed the course of American popular song.By the 1960s, the blues sound had significantly influenced the development of jazz, classical music, and the rock and roll of such performers as Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones. Do the blues influence any of your favorite songs?Born in Alabama in 1873, W.C. Handy found his true calling when he began playing cornet with dance bands traveling the Mississippi Delta. Along the road, Handy wrote down and collected blues songs he heard in the 1890s. Audiences, however, wanted to hear ragtime dance tunes, the lively and popular music of the day, so that’s what he played. When he settled in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1909, Handy found a sophisticated population with a limitless appetite for music. Music was so popular in Memphis that an aspiring mayor, E.H. Crump, hired Handy as the bandleader for his campaign.Handy’s original tune, titled “Mr. Crump,” merged the blues sound with popular ragtime style. Overwhelmingly popular, the song led Crump to the mayor’s office and Handy to musical success. Changing the song’s name to “The Memphis Blues,” he watched the sheet music go on sale in department stores on September 28, 1912. The first thousand copies sold out in just three days. But Handy’s publisher deceived him and told him that the song had flopped, offering him just $50 to buy the rights. The composer agreed. Though cheated out of his first big hit, Handy went on to produce many other popular works, such as the “Yellow Dog Rag.” W.C. Handy became recognized around the world as the “Father of the Blues.” What other blues musicians do you know?In 1903 William Christopher Handy was leading a band called the Colored Knights of Pythias based in Clarksdale, in Mississippi’s Delta country, when one day he paid a visit to the little town of Tutwiler.”A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me… His face had on it the sadness of the ages,” Handy writes in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues.”As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars… The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.”The music was “weird” because it was new.The blues is not, as some imagine, as old as the hills. According to David Wondrich, author of Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, it was “a particular creature of the 1890s”.Handy describes the 12-bar form “with its three-chord basic structure (tonic-subdominant-dominant seventh)” as one widely used “by Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of their underprivileged but undaunted clan from Missouri to the Gulf [of Mexico]”.It had become, he says, “a common medium through which any such individual might express his personal feelings in a sort of a musical soliloquy”.Handy himself was from a very different world. A skilled, musically-literate, and well-travelled band leader from northern Alabama, he nonetheless saw the possibilities in this form of music, and when in 1909 he moved to Memphis, Tennessee, he took some of the music he had heard in Mississippi and rearranged it for his band.”It did the business too,” writes Handy. “Folks went wild about it.”In 1912, with the recording industry still in its infancy, Handy published one of his compositions on paper as Memphis Blues. It was a hit.”Handy’s Memphis Blues was hugely significant,” says Elijah Wald, author of The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. “It started the blues craze and made the blues a key marketing term.”Memphis Blues became the song of 1912, the song people were asking to hear in dance halls nationwide.”Memphis Blues was spread by the sale of sheet music and by the fact that every dance band in America was being asked to play it, and was playing it,” says Wald.For Handy, writing in the late 1930s, Memphis Blues “was the first of all the many published ‘blues’ and it set a new fashion in American popular music and contributed to the rise of jazz, or, if you prefer, swing, and even boogie-woogie”.As originally published, Memphis Blues is an instrumental piece, about three minutes long in the earliest recording.It contained both 16-bar melodies that the audience was used to, and innovative 12-bar sections, and mixed regular two-four time with the Afro-Cuban habanera dance rhythm.As for the melody, it uses “what have since become known as ‘blue notes’,” said Handy, “the transitional flat thirds and sevenths… by which I was attempting to suggest the typical slurs of the Negro voice”.From the moment it emerged into US mass culture, blues was popular music for both blacks and whites.Black dance styles had already been popular in white society for two decades. Teddy Roosevelt had even led a cakewalk – a former slaves’ dance – in the White House during his presidency (1901-1909).”It was an exaggerated dance and very hard to do. It was like the thing you used to see on Soul Train,” says Wondrich.The cakewalk paved the way for a host of other dances, including the turkey trot, the possum trot, and the grizzly bear. “These all came out of low music halls, dive bars and whorehouses, basically,” says Wondrich.If you had wanted to see such dancing in 1894, you would have had to go to red-light districts. But less than a decade later, these dances had been toned down and were being popularised by people such as the ballroom dancing enthusiasts Irene and Vernon Castle.Vernon was an Englishman from Norwich, Irene a white New Yorker, and together they became leaders of fashion in New York City. The dance that the Castles promoted was the foxtrot, which was invented in 1914. It was a little more sedate than the earlier animal dances but still had some of their sexy energy.The Castles had a night club near New York’s Times Square and they hired a black band leader, James Reese Europe, to supply the music. Europe’s Society Orchestra played the latest black dance music, including by 1914 Handy’s Memphis Blues. So the blues and the foxtrot emerged hand in hand.In 1914, Handy followed up Memphis Blues with his next hit, another 12-bar blues piece with a 16-bar habanera section. The song was called St Louis Blues. It was even more popular and influential than its predecessor and it went on to become a jazz standard played by musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and, the queen of 1920s blues, Bessie Smith.Part of the success of the blues can be attributed to changes in the role of black people and women in US society.Blacks had fought with distinction in the Spanish-American War and would enlist en masse during World War I. One key difference between Handy’s blues and earlier black-inflected popular music, says Chris Kjorness of Longwood University, was that it was no longer played for laughs. It lacked the white mockery of the minstrel show.Women, meanwhile, were going out to work in ever larger numbers, especially in the big cities, in offices and department stores. They wanted to have fun.”Before the teens (1910-1920), the idea of going out dancing un-chaperoned didn’t exist,” says Wald. “But from the mid-teens you start to see dance halls where unmarried young people can go out to dance.”By 1917, records (78 rpm singles) had come of age. The Original Dixieland Jass [sic] Band – a white quintet from New Orleans – released Livery Stable Blues, which is thought to have sold as many as a million copies. Bessie Smith’s version of St Louis Blues was even filmed in a kind of predecessor of today’s music videos – she acts out the part of a woman knocked to the ground by a two-timing boyfriend, and then moves to a bar to sing the blues.There has always been more than one school of blues playing – the commercial and the non-commercial, the band and the solo performer – and the various schools have influenced and cross-fertilised each other.”The style that emerged in the 1910s and ’20s was largely created by professional entertainers and greeted by audiences as a modern pop trend,” says Wald.Blind Lemon Jefferson, the star of 1920s country blues, who sang and accompanied himself on the guitar, “devoted the overwhelming majority of his records to material that reflected the commercial blues craze,” Wald adds.A very different kind of musician also acknowledged his debt to Handy.”In a letter to Handy, George Gershwin thanked him for helping him to write Rhapsody in Blue,” says Barbara Broach, director of the W C Handy museum in Florence, Alabama.The blues went on to have a major influence on jazz, soul, rock and roll, and heavy metal.Handy did not invent the blues. As a musical style, it had deep roots in African-American culture. But the Memphis Blues did start the commercial blues craze. In Handy’s words, the song introduced “the blues form to the general public”, and the American public introduced it to the world. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!