"When my grandmother found out that I was playing jazz in one of the sporting houses in the District, she told me that I had disgraced the family and forbade me to live at the house... She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall, but I just couldn't put it behind me."
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe was born September 20, 1895 in New Orleans accordings to statements by himself and his siblings, although other accounts give a date of October 20, 1890. He took the last name of Morton from his stepfather; it may have been an Anglicized version of Mouton.
Morton played the harmonica, guitar and trombone as young child and by age 14 was playing piano in the brothels of Storyville. He was mentored there by ragtime pianist and composer Tony Jackson, and claimed that their after-hours jam sessions were the beginnings of jazz. It was at this time that he began using the nickname "Jelly Roll". By 1904 he was touring the South playing in minstrel shows and honky-tonks.
Settling in Chicago in 1914, Morton began writing down his compositions with Jelly Roll Blues being the first published jazz sheet music. After living in Los Angeles and Vancouver he returned to Chicago in 1923 and began recording on the Victor label with his band, The Red Hot Peppers, becoming the most widely-known jazz musician of the day. The depression and the rise of swing music put an end to his recording career and he started touring with burlesque shows until 1935 when he was hired as the manager and piano player for a bar in the Shaw area of Washington DC.
Morton was asked by folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax to record music and interviews for the Library of Congress in 1938, producing over eight hours of tapes. These were released as a CD boxed set in 2005, winning two Grammy Awards, as well as a lifetime achievement award for Morton.
During the time of Lomax's interviews, Morton was stabbed in a bar fight, worsening previous lung problems. He moved to California to live in a more moderate climate, and died in Los Angeles on July 10, 1941.
Please God, forgive these people because even if they say those mean things they don't know what they're doing. So you can forgive them just like you did those folks along time ago when they said terrible things about you.
Ruby Bridges Hall was born September 8, 1954 near Tylerton, Mississippi and moved to New Orleans with her family when she was four. In 1960 she was one of six African American children chosen to integrate the New Orleans school system and the only one to attend William Frantz Elementary. The first day of court-ordered desegregation was November 14, and U. S. Marshals took her to school. She recalls that day, "Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras."
White parents removed their children from the school, and teachers refused to have Bridges in their classroom. She spent her first-grade year as the only student of Barbara Henry, a newly-hired teacher from Boston. The marshals continued to escort her amid threats, and her mother suggested that she pray on the way to school. Her father lost his job for sending her to the all-white school, although supporters found him another one, and her grandparents in Mississippi were evicted from the farm where they sharecropped.
Norman Rockwell painted "The Problem We All Live With", showing Bridges dressed in white and surrounded by the marshals. The painting has been on loan to the White House from the Norman Rockwell Museum since June. It was also the cover of the January 1964 Look magazine. A White House blog said that Rockwell
" ...was a longtime supporter of the goals of equality and tolerance. In his early career, editorial policies governed the placement of minorities in his illustrations (restricting them to service industry positions only). However, in 1963 Rockwell confronted the issue of prejudice head-on with this, one of his most powerful paintings.”
Bridges is the subject of a children's biography, The Story of Ruby Bridges, by Robert Coles (the child psychologist who counseled her in first grade), a 1998 TV movie, and the song Ruby's Shoes by Lori McKenna. She currently lives in New Orleans and has four grown sons as well as four nieces she raised after their father's death. She worked as a travel agent and is the chair of the Ruby Bridges Foundation which has the slogan "Racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it."
For as long as we have segregated schools... we will have a biracial standard, and the Negro one will inevitably be lower. ~ Alice Dunbar Nelson, in Facing Life Squarely
Born to Creole parents in New Orleans on July 19, 1875, Alice Ruth Moore received a teaching certificate from Straight University (now Dillard University) in 1892 and taught English in the New Orleans public school system. Her first collection of verse and short stories, Violets and Other Tales, was published in 1895. She began a correspondence with poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the two married in 1898. Her second collection, Goodness of St. Roque and Other Stories, was published as a companion to his Poems of Cabin and Field.
They separated in 1902, and she moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught at Howard High School and directed summer classes at the State College for Colored Students and Hampton Institute. She also co-edited and wrote for the A.M.E. Review. In 1916 she married poet and civil rights activist Robert J. Nelson.
She was active in feminist issues of the day, and was a women's suffrage movement field organizer for the mid-Atlantic states. During World War I she served with the Women's Commission on the Council of National Defense and the Circle of Negro War Relief. In 1924 she campaigned for the passage of the Dyer anti-Lynching Bill.
Her essays and reviews were published in newspapers, academic journals and magazines such as the Urban League's Opportunity and the NAACP's Crisis. Her writing often dealt with issues of race, class and gender, as did her later poems such as "The Proletariat Speaks" and "I Sit and Sew". She died in Philadelphia on September 18, 1935 at the age of 60.
I Sit and Sew
I sit and sew -- a useless task it seems
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—
The panoply of war, the martial tred of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath—
But—I must sit and sew.
I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe—
But—I must sit and sew.
The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
