*Jennifer Beals was born on this date in 1963. She is a Black actress and photographer. Early life Beals was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, in the Bronzseville community. She’s the daughter of Jeanne Anderson, an elementary school teacher, and Alfred Beals, who owned grocery stores. Beals’ father was Black, […]
learn more*Lynn Whitfield was born on this date in 1953. She is a Black actress. From Louisiana, Whitfield made her film debut in Dr. Detroit in 1983. Three years later, she played the title character in the fact-based TV movie Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI, the story of the first Black female FBI agent. After gaining recognition […]
learn more*Bob Dylan was born on this date in 1941. He is a white Jewish-American folk music singer, composer, artist, and activist. He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Range west of Lake Superior. Dylan’s paternal grandparents, Anna Kirghiz and Zigman Zimmerman emigrated from […]
learn more*The Black Arts Movement (BAM) is celebrated on this date in 1965. They were a Black-led art movement active during the 1960s and 1970s. BAM created new cultural institutions through activism and art and conveyed another message of black pride. The beginnings of the Black Arts Movement focus on when Amiri Baraka moved uptown to […]
learn more*William T. Williams was born on this date in 1942. He is a Black painter and art educator. William T. Williams was born in Cross Creek, North Carolina. His family moved to Queens, New York City, at age 4, though he spent his childhood summers in Spring Lake, North Carolina. After the family’s move to […]
learn more*Mary Lovelace O’Neal was born on this date in 1942. She is a Black artist and arts educator. Mary Lovelace was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and credits her father for nurturing her love of the arts. During her childhood and adolescence, O’Neal’s father, Ariel Lovelace, was the choir director and professor of music at Tougaloo […]
learn more*Gilbert Moses was born on this date in 1942. He was a Black activist, theater, television, and film actor and director. Gilbert Moses III was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and began acting as a child at Karamu House. He studied at Oberlin College and spent a year at Sorbonne University in Paris before leaving college […]
learn more*The Free Southern Theater (FST) is celebrated on this date in 1963. FST was a community theater group founded in 1963 at Tougaloo College by Gilbert Moses, Denise Nicholas, Doris Derby, and John O’Neal. In White America, their first production toured 16 towns and cities ranging in size from Mileston in Holmes County, Mississippi, to New Orleans. Gilbert Moses […]
learn more*John Milton O’Neal Jr. was born on this date in 1940. He was a Black playwright and activist. His father was a teacher from Mound City, Ill., as was his mother, Rosetta (Crenshaw) O’Neal. In 1962 he received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and English at Southern Illinois University. His daughter said that when he […]
learn more*’Brownie’ Brown was born on this date in 1916. He was a Black tap dancer and was the last surviving member of the Original Copasetics. Ernest “Brownie” Brown grew up in Chicago, and he and his longtime partner, Charles “Cookie” Cook, started dancing as pickaninnies in a vaudeville act called “Mammy and Her Picks.” During the […]
learn more
