Late August 2016 Information on History

Ella Baker was a heroic icon. She stood up from the truth and believed in justice for all. In order for us to understand the past, the present, and fight for a better future, then we must understand the life story of the courageous Sister Ella Baker. Ella Baker promoted leadership based on consensus, community organizing, strategy, and democratic power sharing. She didn’t want a hierarchal system where one person dominated people. She wanted bottom up development of power and she always respected the youth. She encouraged the youth to form their own independent organizations. That is why she is the Mother of SNCC or the Student Non-violent Coordinating SNCC from April of 1960. She is one of the Mothers of the Civil Rights Movement in general. For over 50 years, she organized, developed strategies, and gave eloquent speeches that gave hope, inspiration, and guidance to humanity. She worked with some of the famous civil rights leaders from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to A. Philip Randolph, but she was also key in helping unsung heroes as well. She was a mentor to many activists like Diane Nash, Rosa Parks, Bob Moses, Kwame Ture, etc. She is without question the most influential woman of the Civil Rights Movement. She was born in December 13, 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia. Her parents were Georgiana and Blake Baker. By the age of 7, her family moved into Littleton, North Carolina, which was her mother’s hometown. It was a rural area. As a girl, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. Baker's maternal grandmother Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross, had been enslaved and was whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave master. Ella Baker always questioned and opposed unjust authority. She graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina as valedictorian in 1927 at the age of 24. She fought against unfair school policies. She moved to New York City after her graduation. She was an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News from 1929-1930. She also was the editorial assistant at the Negro National News. Ella Baker joined the YNCL or the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League to promote black economic power via collective planning. She became a friend of George Schuyler (or the founder of the YNCL in 1930). Later, Schulyer would be an arch conservative. Ella Baker was the group’s national director. She also involved herself with several women's organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, "People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job."

Shirley Chisholm was a great hero of black people and of humanity in general. For decades, she fought for freedom and justice. Now, in our generation, we give honor to her life and legacy. She was not only a political person. She was an educator and an author. She was the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress in 1968. She represented New York’s 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1973. She was born in November 30, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York City. Her parents were immigrants from the Caribbean. She had three younger sisters. Two of them were born within three years after Shirley, one later. His mother was Ruby Seale from Barbados. His father was Charles Christopher St. Hill and he was born in British Guiana and lived in Barbados for a while. Shirley Chisholm lived in Barbados at the age of 5 to live with her material grandmother’s farm. Her name was Emaline Seale. They lived on the grandmother's farm in the Vauxhall village in Christ Church, where she attended a one-room schoolhouse that took education seriously. She returned to New York on May 19, 1934 from the SS Nerissa. She spoke with a West Indian accent throughout her life. Shirley Chisholm would consider herself a Barbadian American. She talked about her grandmother in glowing terms. She attended Girls’ High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1939. The school was an integrated school that girls from throughout Brooklyn attended. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College in 1946, where she won prizes for her debating skills. During the late 1940’s, she met Conrad O. Chisholm. He came to America from Jamaica in 1946 and he would later be a private investigator. He worked in negligence-based lawsuits. Shirley Chisholm and Conrad O. Chisholm married in 1949 in a West-Indian style wedding. Shirley Chisholm taught in a nursery school while furthering her education, learning her MA in elementary education from Teachers at Columbia University in 1952. She loved education. That is why from 1953 to 1959, she was the director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brownsville, Brooklyn and of the Hamiliton-Madison Child Care Center in lower Manhattan. From 1959 to 1964, she was an educational consultant on issues involving early education and child welfare. She was interested in politics too. She worked in political clubs as a volunteer in Brooklyn. She worked with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League and the League of Women Voters. Shirley Chisholm later was the Democratic member of the New York State Assembly from 1965 to 1968. She was in the 175th, 176th, and 177th New York State Legislatures. She was successful in the legislature to get unemployment benefits extended to domestic workers. She also sponsored the introduction of a SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) to the state, which provided disadvantaged students the chance to enter college while receiving intensive remedial education.
In August 1968, she was elected as the Democratic National Committeewoman from New York State,


The Armenian Genocide killed tons of people and ruined lives forever. Many members of the Ottoman Empire were complicit in it. After World War I, the Ottoman Empire would soon end. Many people spoke out against the genocide like Alice Stone Blackwell, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and even former President Theodore Roosevelt. In memoirs that he completed during 1918, Morgenthau wrote, "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact ..." The memoirs and reports vividly described the methods used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities committed against the Christian minority. Germany was an ally of the Ottoman Empire using WWI. Many people have accused some Germans of witnessing Armenians being exterminated and doing nothing about it. According to Bat Ye'or, an Israeli historian, the Germans also witnessed Armenians being burned to death. She writes: "The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War ... saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes.” Other Germans openly supported the Ottoman policy against the Armenians.  In a genocide conference held in 2001, Professor Wolfgang Wipperman of the Free University of Berlin introduced documents evidencing that the German High Command was aware of the mass killings at the time but chose not to interfere or speak out. In his reports to Berlin in 1917, General Hans von Seeckt supported the reforming efforts of the Young Turks, writing that "the inner weakness of Turkey in their entirety, call for the history and custom of the new Turkish empire to be written." Seeckt added that "Only a few moments of the destruction are still mentioned. The upper levels of society had become unwarlike, the main reason being the increasing mixing with foreign elements of a long standing unculture." Seeckt blamed all of the problems of the Ottoman Empire on the Jewish people and the Armenians, whom he portrayed as a fifth column working for the Allies. The evil of anti-Semitism is still in existence today during the early 21st century. In July 1918, Seeckt sent a message to Berlin stating that "It is an impossible state of affairs to be allied with the Turks and to stand up for the Armenians. In my view any consideration, Christian, sentimental, and political should be eclipsed by a hard, but clear necessity for war." One photograph shows two unidentified German army officers, in company of three Turkish soldiers and a Kurdish man, standing amidst human remains. Most Germans weren’t involved in the Armenian Genocide, but some of the German witnesses to the Armenian holocaust would play a later role in the Nazi regime. For example, Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, who was attached to the Turkish 4th Army in 1915 with instructions to monitor "operations" against the Armenians, later became Hitler's foreign minister and "Protector of Bohemia and Moravia" during Reinhard Heydrich's terror in Czechoslovakia. What happened to the Armenians consists of genocide. Twenty-nine countries and forty-three U.S. states have adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as a bona fide historical event.

The African Diaspora is an important part of our identity as human beings. It is always important for anyone who wants to understand Africa more comprehensively to study the African Diaspora. The African Diaspora includes the communities worldwide that are made up of people of black African descent. Therefore, as a black American, I am a member of the African Diaspora. The African Diaspora is found in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and other areas across the Earth. Many people of the African Diaspora are descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved by evil people and shipped to the Americas during the Maafa from the 16th century to the 19th centuries. During the 1990’s, the African Diaspora was coined. Also, the African Diaspora existed before the 16th century as African migrations out of Africa existed thousands of years ago.  People of the African Diaspora have made key roles in shaping world history. Historians, scholars, and anthropologists document the impact of the African Diaspora in music, science, politics, athletics, and other aspects of human cultural development. The African Diaspora is huge too. In Brazil, there are over 55 million black and multiracial people. In the United States of America, there are over 42 million black people, in Haiti, there is almost 9 million black people. There are millions of people of black African descent in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, France, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Cuba, Italy, Puerto Rico, Peru, Germany, Canada, Spain, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, etc. People of black African descent also live in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. The more that we study about the African Diaspora, the more that we find out about ourselves since all peoples are descended from human beings from Africa thousands of years ago.

Africa is the homeland of my ancestors. It is the Motherland. It is made up of diverse peoples, languages, ethnic groups, cultures, and nations. Throughout my life, I have researched many facts about Africa in great detail. It is the second largest continent on Earth in land and in population. It has 11.7 million square miles. Right now, Africa has more than 1.1 billion people, therefore, Africa accounts for about 15% of the world’s population. Some of its largest cities are Lagos, Cairo, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, Alexandria, Abidjan, Kano, and Casablanca. The north of the continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea. There is the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and the Sinai Peninsula along the northeast of Africa. The Indian Ocean is found in the southeast of Africa. The Atlantic Ocean borders on the West of Africa. Africa has the youngest population of any continent in the world. Algeria is the largest country of Africa in land size. Nigeria has the largest population of Africa. Nigeria also has the most amount of people of black African descent than any nation in the world. Africa is the origin of human beings. Modern Homo sapiens sapiens migrated out of Africa and populated the rest of the globe. Once, the Sahara was a green fertile valley. After the Ice Age and by 5,000 B.C., the Sahara region became more dry and warm. The rapid desertification of the Sahara came about in ca. 3,500 B.C. due to a tilt in the Earth’s orbit. Today, many African nations are growing rapidly economically in the 21st century. There are issues of democratic rights, economic development, trade, and other issues that are discussed and debated in our generation. We see massive improvements and problems in Africa. One thing is certainly true. Tons of Africans are fighting for justice and are dedicated to the liberation of Africa in 2016 and beyond.