Embedded Files
Disruptor: /disˈrəptər/ a person or thing that interrupts an event, activity, or process by causing a disturbance or problem.
James Baldwin
James Baldwin
Disruptor: At-A-Glance
James Baldwin was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist. His essays, collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore the intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in the Western society of the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Some of Baldwin's essays are book-length, including The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976). An unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, was expanded and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award-nominated documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016). One of his novels, If Beale Street Could Talk, was adapted into the Academy-Award-winning film of the same name in 2018, directed and produced by Barry Jenkins.
Baldwin's novels, short stories, and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures. Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives that run parallel with some of the major political movements toward social change in mid-twentieth-century America, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. Baldwin's protagonists are often but not exclusively African American, while gay and bisexual men also frequently feature as protagonists in his literature. These characters often face internal and external obstacles in their search for social- and self-acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, which was written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement.
James' Bio:
James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was born to Emma Berdis Jones who had left Baldwin's biological father because of his drug abuse. She moved to Harlem where Baldwin was born in Harlem Hospital in New York. Jones married a Baptist preacher, David Baldwin with whom she had eight children between 1927 and 1943. Her husband also had a son from a previous marriage who was nine years older than James. The family was poor, and Baldwin's stepfather, to whom he referred in essays as his father, treated him more harshly than his other children. His intelligence, combined with the persecution he endured in his stepfather's home, drove Baldwin to spend much of his time alone in libraries.
By the time Baldwin had reached adolescence, he had discovered his passion for writing. His educators deemed him gifted, and in 1937, at the age of 13, he wrote his first article, titled "Harlem—Then and Now", which was published in his school's magazine, The Douglass Pilot.
Baldwin spent much time caring for his several younger brothers and sisters. At the age of 10, he was teased and abused by two New York police officers, an instance of the racist harassment by the NYPD that he would experience again as a teenager and document in his essays. His stepfather died of tuberculosis in the summer of 1943, on the day his last child was born, just before Baldwin turned 19. Not only would the day of the funeral be Baldwin's 19th birthday, but it would also be that of the Harlem riot of 1943, an event portrayed at the beginning of his "Notes of a Native Son" essay.
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Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday
Disruptor: At-A-Glance
In the 1930s, during her epic run at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society in Manhattan, she was introduced to the poem “Strange Fruit,” a horrific depiction of lynching in the Southern United States. The music was written just for Billie and it became the hallmark of her concerts. It’s considered by scholars to be the first protest song of the civil rights era. The lyric was so controversial that her record label wouldn’t record it. So she jumped over to the independent Commodore Records where she could record and sing as she pleased. “Strange Fruit” immediately became a cultural spark-point and a hit record too.
In 1939, with Arthur Herzog, Jr., she wrote “God Bless The Child”, a composition that transcends the ages and is now part of the great American songbook and jazz lexicon. In 1944 she signed with prestigious Decca Records, cutting still more classics and even a couple duets with her first musical hero Louis Armstrong – with whom she’d later star in the Hollywood film “New Orleans” (1949).
Billie's Bio:
Billie Holiday, born April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a superstar of her day. She first rose to prominence in the 1930s with a unique style that reinvented the conventions of modern singing and performance. More than 80 years after making her first recording Billie’s legacy continues to embody what is elegant and cool in contemporary music. Holiday’s complicated life and her genre-defining autobiography “Lady Sings the Blues” made her a cultural icon. The evocative, soulful voice which she boldly put forth as a force for good, turned any song she sang into her own. Today, Billie Holiday is remembered for her musical masterpieces, her songwriting skills, creativity, and courageous views on inequality and justice.
Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan Gough) grew up in jazz-soaked Baltimore of the 1920s. In her early teens, the beginning part of her “apprenticeship” was spent singing along with the records of iconoclasts Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. In 1929 Billie’s mother Sadie Fagan moved to New York in search of better jobs. Young Eleanora soon joined her there and began showing up at jazz clubs to audition and sing with resident pianists. She made debuts in obscure Harlem nightclubs, sharing tips with other dancers and comedians on the bill.
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Fred Hampton
Fred Hampton
Disruptor: At-A-Glance
Hampton was a black activist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. In this capacity, he founded the Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots, and the Young Lords, and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change.
In 1967, Hampton was identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a radical threat. The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among black progressive groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers. In December 1969, Hampton was shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; during the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded.
Fred's Bio:
Fredrick Allen Hampton Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, in present-day Summit, Illinois, and grew up in Maywood, both suburbs of Chicago. His parents had moved north from Louisiana, as part of the Great Migration of African Americans in the early 20th century out of the South. They both worked at the Argo Starch Company. As a youth, Hampton was gifted both in the classroom and athletically, and he hoped to play center field for the New York Yankees. Hampton graduated from Proviso East High School with honors and varsity letters and a Junior Achievement Award in 1966 and enrolled at Triton Junior College in nearby River Grove, Illinois, where he majored in pre-law. He planned to become more familiar with the legal system to use it as a defense against the police. When he and fellow Black Panthers later followed police in his community supervision program, watching out for police brutality, they used his knowledge of law as a defense.
Hampton became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and assumed leadership of its West Suburban Branch's Youth Council. In his capacity as an NAACP youth organizer, he began to demonstrate natural leadership abilities; from a community of 27,000, he was able to muster a youth group of 500-members strong. He worked to get more and better recreational facilities established in the neighborhoods and to improve educational resources for Maywood's impoverished black community. Through his involvement with the NAACP, Hampton hoped to achieve social change through community organizing and nonviolent activism.
Want to know more about Fred Hampton? Click link1 and link2.
Medgar Evers
Medgar Evers
Disruptor: At-A-Glance
Civil rights activist Medgar Evers served as the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi until his assassination in 1963.
After initially finding work as an insurance salesman, Evers soon became involved in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL). Proving up to the task in his first experience as a civil rights organizer, he spearheaded the group's boycott against gas stations that refused to let Black people use their restrooms. With his brother Charles, Evers also worked on behalf of the NAACP, organizing local affiliates.
Medgar Evers was the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As such, he organized voter-registration efforts and economic boycotts, and investigated crimes perpetrated against Black people. Evers was assassinated outside of his Mississippi home in 1963, and after years of on-again, off-again legal proceedings, his killer was sent to prison in 1994. In 2017, President Barack Obama designated Evers' home a national historic landmark.
Medgar's Bio:
Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, the third of five children (including elder brother Charles Evers) of Jesse (Wright) and James Evers. The family included Jesse's two children from a previous marriage. The Evers family owned a small farm and James also worked at a sawmill. Evers and his siblings walked 12 miles (19 kilometers) a day to attend segregated schools; eventually, Medgar earned his high school diploma.
Medgar Wiley Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi. Growing up in a Mississippi farming family, Evers was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. He fought in both France and Germany during World War II and received an honorable discharge in 1946.
Evers went on to enroll at Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University) in Lorman, Mississippi, in 1948. He married fellow student Myrlie Beasley during his senior year, before graduating in 1952.
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Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm
Disruptor: At-A-Glance
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was the first African American woman in Congress (1968) and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties (1972). Her motto and title of her autobiography—Unbossed and Unbought—illustrates her outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 1964, Chisholm ran for and became the second African American in the New York State Legislature. After court-ordered redistricting created a new, heavily Democratic, district in her neighborhood, in 1968 Chisholm sought—and won—a seat in Congress. There, “Fighting Shirley” introduced more than 50 pieces of legislation and championed racial and gender equality, the plight of the poor, and ending the Vietnam War. She was a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, and in 1977 became the first Black woman and second woman ever to serve on the powerful House Rules Committee.
Shirley's Bio:
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 30, 1924, Chisholm was the oldest of four daughters to immigrant parents Charles St. Hill, a factory worker from Guyana, and Ruby Seale St. Hill, a seamstress from Barbados. She graduated from Brooklyn Girls’ High in 1942 and from Brooklyn College cum laude in 1946, where she won prizes on the debate team. Although professors encouraged her to consider a political career, she replied that she faced a “double handicap” as both Black and female.
Initially, Chisholm worked as a nursery school teacher. In 1949, she married Conrad Q. Chisholm, a private investigator (they divorced in 1977). She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in early childhood education in 1951. By 1960, she was a consultant to the New York City Division of Day Care. Ever aware of racial and gender inequality, she joined local chapters of the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, as well as the Democratic Party club in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
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Bell Hooks
Bell Hooks
Disruptor: At-A-Glance
The focus of hooks' writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.
Her teaching career began in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. During her three years there, Golemics, a Los Angeles publisher, released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled And There We Wept (1978), written under the name "bell hooks". She adopted her maternal great-grandmother's name as a pen name because her great-grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which [she] greatly admired". She put the name in lowercase letters "to distinguish [herself from] her great-grandmother." She said that her unconventional lowercasing of her name signifies what is most important is her works: the "substance of books, not who I am."
She taught at several post-secondary institutions in the early 1980s and 1990s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Yale, Oberlin College, and City College of New York. In 1981 South End Press published her first major work, Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, though it was written years earlier while she was an undergraduate student. In the decades since its publication, Ain't I a Woman? has gained widespread recognition as an influential contribution to feminist thought.
Bell's Bio:
Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.
Born in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky to a working-class family, Watkins was one of six children of Rosa Bell (née Oldham) and Veodis Watkins. Her father was a custodian and her mother was a homemaker. An avid reader, Watkins was educated in racially segregated public schools and wrote of great adversities when making the transition to an integrated school, where teachers and students were predominantly white. She later graduated from Hopkinsville High School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She obtained her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973, and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976.
In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison.
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Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Disruptor: At-A-Glance
After his release from prison, Malcolm helped to lead the Nation of Islam during the period of its greatest growth and influence. He met Elijah Muhammad in Chicago in 1952 and then began organizing temples for the Nation in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and in cities in the South. He founded the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, which he printed in the basement of his home, and initiated the practice of requiring every male member of the Nation to sell an assigned number of newspapers on the street as a recruiting and fund-raising technique. He also articulated the Nation’s racial doctrines on the inherent evil of whites and the natural superiority of Blacks.
Malcolm rose rapidly to become the minister of Boston Temple No. 11, which he founded; he was later rewarded with the post of minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem, the largest and most prestigious temple in the Nation after the Chicago headquarters. Recognizing his talent and ability, Elijah Muhammad, who had a special affection for Malcolm, named him the National Representative of the Nation of Islam, second in rank to Muhammad himself. Under Malcolm’s lieutenancy, the Nation claimed a membership of 500,000. The actual number of members fluctuated, however, and the influence of the organization, refracted through the public persona of Malcolm X, always greatly exceeded its size.
An articulate public speaker, a charismatic personality, and an indefatigable organizer, Malcolm X expressed the pent-up anger, frustration, and bitterness of African Americans during the major phase of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965. He preached on the streets of Harlem and spoke at major universities such as Harvard University and the University of Oxford.
Malcolm's Bio:
Malcolm X, original name Malcolm Little, Muslim name El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, (born May 19, 1925, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died February 21, 1965, New York, New York), African American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam who articulated concepts of race pride and Black nationalism in the early 1960s. After his assassination, the widespread distribution of his life story— The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)—made him an ideological hero, especially among Black youth.
Born in Nebraska, while an infant Malcolm moved with his family to Lansing, Michigan. When Malcolm was six years old, his father, the Rev. Earl Little, a Baptist minister and former supporter of the early Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey died after being hit by a streetcar, quite possibly the victim of murder by whites. The surviving family was so poor that Malcolm’s mother, Louise Little, resorted to cooking dandelion greens from the street to feed her children. After she was committed to an insane asylum in 1939, Malcolm and his siblings were sent to foster homes or to live with family members.
Malcolm excelled in school, but after one of his eighth-grade teachers told him that he should become a carpenter instead of a lawyer, he lost interest and soon ended his formal education. As a rebellious youngster, Malcolm moved from the Michigan State Detention Home, a juvenile home in Mason, Michigan, to the Roxbury section of Boston to live with an older half-sister, Ella, from his father’s first marriage. There he became involved in petty criminal activities in his teenage years. Known as “Detroit Red” for the reddish tinge in his hair, he developed into a street hustler, drug dealer, and leader of a gang of thieves in Roxbury and Harlem (in New York City).
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John Lewis
John Lewis
Disruptor: At-A-Glance
On March 7, 1965, Lewis played a pivotal role in one the most important events in the history of the American civil rights movement when he and King lieutenant Hosea Williams led some 600 peaceful demonstrators on a march in support of voting rights that departed from Selma, with the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, as its destination.
At the beginning of the march, while still in Selma, as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, the protestors were confronted by a large force of sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, and deputized “posse-men” (some on horseback) who had been authorized by Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace to “take whatever means necessary” to prevent the march. Given two minutes to disperse, the marchers were almost immediately set upon.
They were quickly doused with tear gas, overrun by horses, and attacked with bullwhips and billy clubs. As a result of the brutal assault, more than 50 marchers were hospitalized, including Lewis, whose skull was fractured but who spoke to television reporters before going to the hospital, and called on Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson to take action in Alabama.
Millions of American television viewers witnessed the event, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” and within 48 hours demonstrations in support of the marchers had taken place in some 80 American cities. The resulting heightened awareness would contribute mightily to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law by Johnson on August 6, 1965.
John's Bio:
John Robert Lewis was born near Troy, Alabama, on February 21, 1940, the third of ten children of Willie Mae (née Carter) and Eddie Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama, of which Troy was (and still is) the county seat.
Lewis was the son of Alabama sharecroppers. He attended segregated schools and was encouraged by his parents not to challenge the inequities of the Jim Crow South. As a teenager, however, he was inspired by the courageous defiance of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., to whose attention Lewis came when he indicated his desire to desegregate Troy State College (now Troy University). Dissuaded from doing so by his parents, Lewis instead was educated in Nashville at the American Baptist Theological Institute and Fisk University (B.A. in religion and philosophy, 1967).
There Lewis undertook the study of nonviolent protest and became involved in sit-ins at lunch counters and other segregated public places. In 1961, while participating in the Freedom Rides that challenged the segregation of Southern interstate bus terminals, Lewis was beaten and arrested—experiences he would repeat often. In 1963 he was elected to replace Chuck McDew as the chairman of SNCC, a position he held until 1966 when he was succeeded by Stokely Carmichael, as the organization took a more militant direction. Also in 1963. Lewis played a key role in the historic March on Washington. Indeed, by that point, Lewis, though still in his early 20s, had already become such a prominent figure that he was considered one of the civil rights movement’s “Big Six” leaders, along with King, James Farmer, A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. In 1964 Lewis headed the SNCC’s efforts to register African American voters and organize communities in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer project.
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