The poet, novelist, and screenwriter Sam Greenlee was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 13, 1930 after his family recently migrated from the South to the city. Greenlee attended inner city schools in Chicago and became politically active at a very young age. He participated … Read MoreSam Greenlee (1930-2014)
From approximately 1000 to 1500 AD, a number of city-states on the eastern coast of Africa participated in an international trade network and became cosmopolitan Islamic cultural centers. The major autonomous, but symbiotic, city-states stretched over 1,500 miles from Mogadishu (in modern day Somalia) in … Read MoreEast African City States (1000-1500)
The Afro-Asian Conference, known generally as the Bandung Conference, was to that date the largest gathering of Asian and African nations. On April 18 to 24, 1955, twenty-nine representatives of nations from Africa and Asia came together in Bandung, Indonesia, to promote African and Asian … Read MoreBandung Conference, 1955
Jazz great Dizzy Gillespie had a long and distinguished musical career as a trumpeter, composer, and bandleader. Unlike many jazz musicians whose lives were cut tragically short, Gillespie’s career spanned the 1930s to the 1980s, from the big band swing era of the 1930s, through … Read MoreDizzy Gillespie (John Birks Gillespie) (1917-1993)
