When: Tuesday August 10, 2010

6:00pm – 9:30pm

Where: Chesapeake Commons – Court Yard

601 Eutaw St.

Contact: 410-332-8200 Ext: 0348

Donation: $20.00

Special Guests: Konan, Lil Black, Dre Johnson, Ajaya,

Travis Winkey & Company, Ms.Maybelle, Tree, & Kendal Leonard

Plus … Door prizes, a buffet from Culinary Innovations

This is a ladee dadee and everybody should come and join in the celebration!

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Rafer  Lewis Johnson was born Aug. 18, 1935, Hillsboro, Texas, U.S.) U.S. decathlete. While a student at UCLA, he won the decathlon gold medal at the 1955 Pan-American Games. At the 1960 Olympic Games he became the first African American athlete to carry the U.S. flag in the Olympic procession, and he captured the decathlon gold medal.

Rafer Johnson made his decathlon début in 1954 and the next year he won the Pan American Games title and set the first of his three world decathlon records. Johnson, who competed for UCLA and the Southern California Striders, won the AAU decathlon in 1956, 1958, and 1960 and after placing second to Milt Campbell at the 1956 Olympics, never lost another decathlon. He was injured at the 1956 Games, which forced him to withdraw from the Olympic long jump, for which he had also qualified. After his retirement in 1960 he acted in a few movies, and served for many years as a commercial spokesman for many products. The plaintiff cry moment’s after Robert Kennedy’s assassination was, “Get the gun, Rafer!”, and it was Rafer Johnson to whom the voice beckoned. Johnson and football star Rosey Grier were rabid Kennedy supporters and were standing next to him that fateful night. In 1984 Rafer Johnson was chosen to light the Olympic Flame at the Opening Ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics.

Personal Bests: 100 – 10.3 (1957); 220y – 21.0 (1956); 400 – 47.9 (1956); 110H – 13.8 (1956); HJ – 6-2½ (1.89) (1955); PV – 13-5¼ (4.09) (1960); LJ – 25-5½ (7.76) (1956); SP – 54-11½ (16.75) (1958); DT – 172-3 (52.50) (1960); JT – 251-9 (76.73) (1960); Dec – 7982 (1960).

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Awards and Accomplishments

When: Tuesday August 10, 2010

6:00pm – 9:30pm

Where: Chesapeake Commons – Court Yard

601 Eutaw St.

Contact: 410-332-8200 Ext: 0348

Donation: $20.00

Special Guests: Konan, Lil Black, Dre Johnson, Ajaya,

Travis Winkey & Company, Ms.Maybelle, Tree, & Kendal Leonard

Plus … Door prizes, a buffet from Culinary Innovations

This is a ladee dadee and everybody should come and join in the celebration!

National healthcare reform is expected to save the state $829 million over the next ten years and provide coverage to nearly 350,000 people. The plan will provide insurance to half of the state’s uninsured.

Nearly 40 percent of Marylanders, about 700,000 people, are currently uninsured. That will fall to about 6.7 percent with national reform. Those expected to be left uninsured would be illegal immigrants and those who choose not to be covered.

For more on this story, click here.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and Republican Robert Ehrlich are running side by side according to polls this week. O’Malley led with 45 percent to Ehrlich’s 42 percent, which has an error margin of 3.5 percentage points. 807 registered voters were polled between July 13 and July 21.

Via: WJZ-TV

John Wagner, 34, and Lavelva Merritt, 24, were arrested in the stabbing death of 23-year-old Stephan Pitcairn. Pitcairn was returning from a weekend trip to New York when the two suspects robbed the victim of his wallet, duffel bag, iPod and money. Pitcairn was leaving Penn Station and was on the phone with his mother, in Florida,  at the time of the incident. The Hopkin’s researcher had moved to Baltimore to become a doctor. He would have turned 24 Tuesday.

Shortly after 11 p.m. officers were called to the 2600 block of St. Paul Street for a robbery that turned into a murder. A witness heard the victim screaming, ran to him and stayed with him until the police arrived.

For more on this tragic story, click here.

January 27, 1869 – July 20,1944

One of the most important figures in pre-jazz African-American music, Will Marion Cook is also one of its better known personalities. As a composer, conductor, performer, teacher, and producer he had his hand in nearly every aspect of the black music of his time and worked with nearly every other important musician in his fields. Uncompromising and difficult to work with, he still commanded respect from his peers for his abilities and accomplishments.

Cook was born to middle class parents in Washington, D.C., on January 27, 1869. In 1881 he was sent to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to live with his grandfather where he heard black folk music for the first time. However, Cook’s early career remained focused on classical music and violin performance. When he was 15, Cook studied violin at Oberlin College.

Frederick Douglass helped organize a fundraiser to send Cook to study in Europe. As a result, Cook studied from 1887-89 at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik with Joseph Joachim, the famous violinist and associate of Brahms. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1890, however, his classical career went nowhere, undoubtedly because of racism. Since he was unable to find employment at any musical institution, he began to teach music privately; among his students was Clarence Cameron White, who later became famous as a violinist and composer.

Cook’s earliest composition was Scenes from the Opera of Uncle Tom’s Cabin–intended for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, but which was not performed. In 1894-95 he continued his studies at the National Conservatory for Music where Antonin Dvorak and John White were teaching.

Cook turned to popular music as his classical career was not successful. He began writing songs and formed the Gotham-Attucks Publishing Company with R. C. McPherson. His first big success was the musical Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898). The lyricist and librettist for this show was Paul Lawrence Dunbar who wrote (perhaps at Cook’s insistence) in a dialect style. Cook managed to get Clorindy performed as an extended afterpiece at the Casino Roof Garden on Broadway. When the show began there were only 50 people in the rooftop audience but people coming out of the main show downstairs heard magnificent choral singing coming from the roof and rushed up to see who was performing. By the end of the opening chorus, the house was packed and the performers were given a 10-minute ovation.

Cook remained an important figure in the new century. He wrote and published many songs, was prominent as a conductor, and as the musical director for Bert Williams and George Walker’s string of groundbreaking musicals, including The Sons of Ham (1900), In Dahomey (1903), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandana Land (1908). He also worked with Ernest Hogan on a musical Jes Lak White Fo’ks (1899) and with Hogan’s Memphis Students performance troup, with whom he toured Europe in 1905.

What: Larry Young’s 14^th Anniversary with Radio One

When: Tuesday August 10, 2010

6:00pm – 9:30pm

Where: Chesapeake Commons – Court Yard

601 Eutaw St.

Contact: 410-332-8200 Ext: 0348

Donation: $20.00

Special Guests: Konan, Lil Black , Dre Johnson, Ajaya ,

Travis Winkey & Company , Ms.Maybelle, Tree , & Kendal Leonard

Plus … Door prizes, a buffet from Culinary Innovations

This is a ladee dadee and everybody should come and join in the celebration!

1903 – He was born 30 March , but it has been difficult for scholars to place exactly where he was born, with whom he spent the very earliest years of his childhood, and where he spent them. New York City and Baltimore have been given as birthplaces.

1918 – Cullen was adopted by the Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle (Mitchell) Cullen.

1921 – He became Countee P. Cullen and eventually just Countee Cullen.

1918 – 1921 Cullen was an outstanding student at DeWitt Clinton High School . He edited the school’s newspaper, assisted in editing the literary magazine, Magpie, and began to write poetry that achieved notice. While in high school Cullen won his first contest, a citywide competition, with the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Life,” a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”

1925-1927 – After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from NYU, Cullen earned a masters degree in English and French from Harvard

1928 – On 9 April married Yolande Du Bois, only child of W E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish weddings in black New York history.

1930 – He  & Yolande divorced.

1946 – Died January 9^th from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning .

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Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s: first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry contest in 1925, Poetry magazine’s John Reed Memorial Prize, the Amy Spingarn Award of the Crisis magazine, second prize in Opportunity magazine’s first poetry contest, and second prize in the poetry contest of Palms. In addition, he was the second black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Just some of his works of poetry…

A Brown Girl Dead

From the Dark Tower

Heritage

Incident

Karenge ya Marenge

Lines to My Father

Saturday’s Child

Thoughts in a Zoo

To Certain Critics

Uncle Jim

Yet Do I Marvel