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african american history month
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Before Barack Obama, Hiram Revels and Shirley Chisholm helped govern the nation. William Wells Brown wrote a novel before Toni Morrison. Phillis Wheatley published poems before Langston Hughes. And Oscar Micheaux made films before Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay.
We have to wait until the summer of 2028 for Los Angeles to host the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad, but when we do, we will join Paris and London as only the third city to host the Summer Games three times, having previously done so in 1932 and famously, in 1984.
Whether you want it hot or cool, swingin’ or slow, Dixieland or experimental, there’s jazz to fit your mood, mellow you out, pick you up. Jazz was born in New Orleans—the only place in the U.S. in the 1800s where slaves were allowed to own drums.
Over 25 years ago, while organizing the photo collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, librarian Carolyn Kozo Cole found many photos that documented the city’s political and professional history—political rallies, building construction, front page stories—but few images showing the personal side of it
Black History Month is a time to remember the contributions that African Americans have left on our country and world. This year’s theme, Black Migrations, explores the impact the African diaspora has made around the globe.
Born in Louisiana in 1922, Rolland J. Curtis came to Los Angeles with his wife in 1946 after serving in the Marines during WWII.
They work in Watts, Chicago, Oakland, and Harlem, go on vacation in Provincetown, MA, and return home to Otis, South Carolina (pop. 5,000). They include an Ivy League professor, an ex-CIA agent, a volatile ex-cop, a journalist, a domestic worker, an attorney, a Ph.D.
The Liberator is an early 20th-century Los Angeles African American newspaper, whose owner and editor, Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, was formerly enslaved and spent twenty years in bondage before Emancipation.
In 1920s Los Angeles, insurance companies considered black Americans to be either uninsurable or extremely high risk. As a result, black people were routinely denied coverage or charged exorbitant premiums.