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Inspirations Black History Month Bible Study Lessons
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Black History Month Historical Figure - "Stephanie Tubbs Jones"
In celebration of Black History Month, we will be highlighting important historical figures each week. This week we are Highlighting Stephanie Tubbs Jones. “Even six months later, they have not figured out how do we help the people from the area get housing.” - Stephanie Tubbs Jones Stephanie Tubbs Jones Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Ohio's 11th District On December 19, 2006, Tubbs Jones was named Chairwoman of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct for the 110th Congress. She was also a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. On August 19, 2008, Tubbs Jones was found unconscious in her car, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage due to a burst aneurysm in her brain. She was taken to an East Cleveland hospital, where she died the next day. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Tubbs Jones graduated from the city's public schools. She earned an undergraduate degree from Case Western Reserve University, graduating with a degree in Social Work from the Flora Stone Mather College in 1971. In 1974, she earned a J.D. from the Case Western Reserve University School of Law. On November 27, 1976, she married Mervyn L. Jones, Sr. Less than a year before they married, Mervyn Jones had been charged with aggravated murder and robbery. He eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser count of manslaughter and received "shock probation." The couple were married for 27 years until October 2, 2003, when Mervyn died. They had one son, Mervyn Leroy Jones, Jr. Tubbs Jones was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., dedicated to public service. She was actively involved in the National Five Point Thrust Programs of her sorority , particularly Social Action and Political Awareness as an integral part of "Delta Days at the Nations Capital". Tubbs Jones was Golden Life Member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Political and legal career Tubbs Jones was elected a judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court in 1981, and subsequently served on the Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County from 1983 to 1991. In 1990, she ran for Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio replacing Mary Cacioppo, the winner of the Democratic Primary, who withdrew for health reasons. She narrowly lost that race to Republican incumbent J. Craig Wright. She then served as the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor from 1991 until resigning in early 1999 to take her seat in Congress. She was succeeded as prosecutor by William D. Mason. Tubbs Jones served as board member of The Hawken School from 1996-2004. U.S. House of Representatives In 1998, Tubbs Jones won the Democratic nomination for the 11th District after 30-year incumbent Louis Stokes announced his retirement. This all but assured her of election in the heavily Democratic, black-majority 11th. She was reelected four times with no substantive opposition. Tubbs Jones was a co-chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. She opposed the Iraq war, voting in 2002 against the use of military force. Despite representing a heavily unionized district, she was a strong proponent of free trade. Tubbs Jones most recently took a lead role in the fight to pass the United States – Peru Trade Promotion Agreement in November 2007. In 2004, she served as the chairwoman of the platform committee at the Democratic National Convention and as a member of the Ohio delegation. She strongly supported Sen. John Kerry in his campaign to become President of the United States. On January 6, 2005, she joined U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in objecting to the certification of the 2004 U.S. presidential election results for Ohio. As the sponsor, she was one of the 31 who voted in the House to not count the electoral votes from Ohio in the 2004 election. In 2005, she came under fire from certain individuals after being named the congress-person with the fourth-highest (59) total trips sponsored by lobbyists. She was selected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi as chairperson of the House Ethics Committee to watch over the standards of ethical conduct for members of the House. Tubbs Jones was popular in her district, and was routinely reelected against nominal Republican opposition. She received 83.44% of the vote in her final general election in 2006, against Republican Lindsey String. She faced no opposition in the 2008 Ohio Democratic primary. Tubbs Jones appeared on The Colbert Report's "Better Know a District" in an episode which aired November 3, 2005. In the skit, Colbert suggested she create a spin-off vehicle for herself as "Judge Tubbs." She became a good friend of the show since the broadcast. Colbert paid tribute to Tubbs Jones at the close of his August 27, 2008 broadcast by airing her "Judge Tubbs" footage. We hope you have enjoyed this presentation. Please join us each week to learn about other important historical figures. Sincerely, Black History Month Historical Figure - "DANIEL PAYNE"
MR. PRESIDENT: "I move the adoption of the Report, because it is based upon the following propositions: American Slavery brutalizes man—destroys his moral agency, and subverts the moral government of God. Sir, I am opposed to slavery, not because it enslaves the black man, but because it enslaves man. And were all the slaveholders in this land men of color, and the slaves white men, I would be as thorough and uncompromising an abolitionist as I now am; for whatever and whenever I may see a being in the form of a man, enslaved by his fellow man, without respect to his complexion, I shall lift up my voice to plead his cause, against all the claims of his proud oppressor; and I shall do it not merely from the sympathy which man feels towards suffering man, but because God, the living God, whom I dare not disobey, has commanded me to open my mouth for the dumb, and to plead the cause of the oppressed." (Excerpt from Daniel Payne’s oration on the occasion of his ordination by the Franckean Synod of the Lutheran Church) Daniel Alexander Payne was a United States clergyman, educator, college administrator and author. He became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and was a major shaper of it in the 19th century. He was one of the founders of Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1863 he became its first president, and the first African-American president of a college in the United States. Early Life and Education Daniel Payne was born free in Charleston, South Carolina on February 24, 1811, of African, European and Native American descent. His parents London and Martha Payne were part of the "Brown Elite" of free blacks. Both died before he reached maturity. While his great aunt assumed Daniel's care, the Minors' Moralist Society assisted Payne's early education. Payne was raised in the Methodist Church like his parents. He also studied at home, teaching himself mathematics, physical science, and classical languages. In 1829 at the age of 18, he opened his first school. After the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, like other southern states South Carolina passed legislation restricting the rights of people of color and slaves. They enacted a law on April 1, 1835, which made teaching literacy to free people of color and slaves illegal, and subject to fines and imprisonment. With the passage of this law, Payne had to close his school. In May 1835, Payne sailed from Charleston to Philadelphia in search of further education. Declining the Methodists' offer, which was contingent on his going on a mission to Liberia, Payne studied at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. He did not complete ordination, having to drop out of school because of problems with eyesight. Marriage and Family Payne married in 1847, but his wife died during the first year of marriage from complications of childbirth. In 1854 he married again, to Eliza Clark of Cincinnati. Career in AME Church By 1840 Payne started another school. He joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in 1842, concluding like the founder, Richard Allen, that a visible and independent black church was a strong argument against slavery and racism. Payne worked to improve education for ministers, recommending a wide variety of classes so they could effectively lead the people. In the ensuing decades' debates about order and emotionalism in the Methodist Church, he sided consistently with order. The AME's first task was "to improve the ministry; the second to improve the people." At a denomination meeting in Baltimore in 1842, he recommended a full program of study for ministers, to include: English grammar, geography, arithmetic, ancient history, modern history, ecclesiastical history, and theology. At the 1844 AME General Conference, he called for a "regular course of study for prospective ordinees", in the belief they would thus lift up their parishioners. In 1845 Payne established a short-lived AME seminary, and succeeded in gradually raising preparation required for ministers. Payne also directed reforms at the style of music, introducing trained choirs and instrumental music to church practice. He supported the requirement that ministers be literate . Payne continued throughout his career to build the institution of the church, establishing literary and historic societies and encouraging order. At times he came into conflict with those who wanted to ensure that ordinary people could advance in the church. Especially after expansion of the church in the South, where different styles of worship had prevailed, there were continuing tensions about the direction of the denomination. Bishop and President In 1848 Bishop William Paul Quinn named Payne as the historiographer of the AME Church. In 1852 Rev. Payne was elected and consecrated the 6th Bishop in the AME denomination. Wilberforce was located in an area which had been a popular summer resort of white southern planters, who often brought their mistresses of color and multi-racial children. In one of the paradoxical results of slavery, by 1860 many of the college's 200 students were mixed-race offspring of wealthy southern planters, who paid for their children's education in Ohio as they could not get it in the South. The men were examples of white fathers who did not abandon their mixed-race children, but passed on important social capital in the form of education and inheritances. When the Civil War reduced both church support and the number of paying students, the college had to close temporarily because of financial difficulties. In 1863 Payne persuaded the AME Church to buy the debt and take over the college outright. They had to reinvest in it two years later, when a southern sympathizer damaged buildings by fire. Payne helped organize fundraising and rebuilding, including a $10,000 donation from founding board member Salmon P. Chase. Payne was selected as president, the first African-American college president in the United States. He led the college until 1877. In April 1865 Payne returned to the South for the first time in 30 years. Knowing how to build an organization, Bishop Payne took nine missionaries and worked with others in Charleston, South Carolina to establish the AME denomination. He organized missionaries, committees and teachers to bring the AME church to freedmen. A year later, the church had grown by 50,000 congregants. By the end of Reconstruction, AME congregations existed from Florida to Texas, and more than a quarter million new adherents had been brought into the church. While it had a northern center, the church was heavily influenced by this growth in the South and incorporation of many who had different practices and traditions. Worship and music styles in the South reflected its people's own culture and also shaped the national church We hope you have enjoyed this presentation. Please join us each week to learn about other important historical figures. Sincerely, Black History Month Historical Figure - "TONI MORRISON"
In celebration of Black History Month, we will be highlighting important historical figures each week. This week we are Highlighting TONI MORRISON. “I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people” - Toni Morrison.
Biography Early Life and Career In 1949 Morrison entered Howard University to study English. Morrison received a B.A. in English from Howard in 1953, then earned a Master of Arts degree, also in English, from Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (from 1955-57) then returned to Howard to teach English. She became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at Howard University. They had two children, Harold and Slade, and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. A year and a half later she went to work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House. As an editor, Morrison played an important role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. She edited books by such authors as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis and Gayl Jones. Writing Career Toni Morrison at the Miami Book Fair International of 1986 In 1975 her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1987 Morrison's novel Beloved became a critical success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, a number of writers protested over the omission. Shortly afterward, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. Beloved was adapted into the 1998 film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison later used Margaret Garner's life story again in an opera, Margaret Garner, with music by Richard Danielpour. In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Shortly afterwards, a fire destroyed her Rockland County, New York home. In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations," began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future," and cautioned against misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future. Morrison was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work." Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. She has stated that she thinks "it's off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things." In addition to her novels, Morrison has also co-written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who works as a painter and musician. Later Life Morrison taught English at two branches of the State University of New York. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. Though based in the Creative Writing Program, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she has conceived and developed the prestigious Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together talented students with critically acclaimed, world-famous artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration. In her position at Princeton, Morrison used her insights to encourage not merely new and emerging writers, but artists working to develop new forms of art through interdisciplinary play and cooperation. At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded her its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. Oxford University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in June 2005. In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre Museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home." Inspired by her curatorship, Morrison returned to Princeton in Fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home." She is currently a member of the editorial board of The Nation magazine. Politics In writing about the impeachment in 1998, Morrison wrote that, since Whitewater, Bill Clinton had been mistreated because of his "blackness": Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters such as on September 29, 2001, when the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its Annual Awards Dinner in Washington D.C., with the chair, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), telling the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president." In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to Time magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race." In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.
Novels
Children's Literature (with Slade Morrison)
Science Fiction
Play
Libretti
Non-Fiction
Articles
AWARDS & NOMINATIONS Awards
Nominations
For more quotes by Ms. Morrison: Toni Morrison We hope you have enjoyed this presentation. Please be sure to check back with us each week to learn about other important historical figures. Sincerely, |
In celebration of Black History Month, we will be highlighting important historical figures each week. This week we are Highlighting 
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