Respect where it's due: BM/WW IR in History

Mae West & William "Gorilla" Jones





William Landon Jones enjoyed a close friendship with MAE WEST for 50 years.
• • Born in Memphis, Tennessee on 12 May 1906, he was known in boxing by the moniker "Gorilla" Jones. This weekend, the five-foot-nine fighter will be inducted posthumously into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y. He died at age 75 on 4 January 1982. After Mae's death, it's said he lost the will to live.
• • The 22-year-old Jones met Mae West in a New York night club during 1928. He had enjoyed a long career in the ring and was about to come into the big time in 1929, when he would earn a $100,000 purse — — about $1.2 million in today's money — — for winning a bout in Madison Square Garden.
• • Often photographed in a ringsize seat, the daughter of "Battling Jack" also befriended other black pugilists such as Chalky Wright and Joe Louis.
• • In a colorful feature for the Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, reporter Mark J. Price covers the career of Gorilla Jones as well as his private life with Mae West. Many pleasures await you.
• • Mark J. Price writes: Outside the boxing ring, Gorilla Jones was an unforgettable personality. He wore impeccable suits, flashed diamond rings, drove a Lincoln coupe, consorted with a Hollywood vixen — — Mae West — — and walked a lion cub on a leash.
• • Inside the ring, stripped of all excess, he was equally memorable — — except perhaps to the dozens of fighters he knocked out. They were excused for not recalling a thing after Jones' right glove cratered their faces.
• • One of the greatest boxers in Akron's history, Jones won the world middleweight title twice in the 1930s. He will be inducted posthumously this weekend into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y.
• • Jones fought in 138 professional bouts, winning 101, losing 24 and drawing 13. He KO'd 52 opponents, but never suffered a knockout or serious injury.
• • ''I have been blessed with a mind that works rapidly in the ring and hands that work as rapidly as my mind tells them,'' Jones told the Beacon Journal early in his career. ''I think I can figure fight moves a bit faster than can the fellows I am fighting, and once figured out, my hands move as they should to carry me to victory.''
• • Why did they call him "Gorilla"? • •
• • The nickname ''Gorilla,'' politically incorrect in today's world, was attributed to Jones' long reach — 75 inches — in the ring. In 1932, Beacon Journal sports scribe Jim Schlemmer said the Gorilla moniker didn't fit ''in looks or actions,'' and called Jones ''as classy a piece of fighting machinery as the game has known.''
• • ''He is an unusual type of fighter,'' Schlemmer wrote. ''He doesn't like to hurt anybody. He wishes every fellow he fights could be as good or nearly as good as himself.''
• • William Landon Jones was born in 1906 in Memphis, Tenn. He confessed to doing a lot of things wrong in his youth, such as giving up on education after grammar school. He worked for a bootlegger, ran with a tough crowd and learned to fight.
• • The ring was his way out. At age 18, Jones started boxing for $7.50 a bout. He stood 5 feet 9 inches and tipped the scales at 145 pounds.
• • Jones' first fight outside Memphis was at the Akron Armory in 1927. He beat welterweight K.O. Kelly and won $100. Unfortunately, Jones tried to add to his earnings in a late-night dice game and lost everything.
• • He begged Akron boxing promoter Suey Welch for another fight so he could buy a train ticket to Memphis.
• • Jones won the rematch, but stayed in Akron after the promoter offered to be his manager and train him at the Welch Athletic Club at 219 S. Main St.
• • Welch called Jones ''the greatest fighter in the world, pound for pound.'' The two made a fortune together.
• • Jones pummeled his way through a long line of foes: Sailor Maxwell, Mickey Fedor, Tommy Freeman, Bucky Lawless, Al Mello, Izzy Grove, Jackie Horner, Nick Testo, Meyer Grace, Jock Malone. The purses grew larger, and soon he was fighting as a middleweight at Madison Square Garden in New York.
• • In 1929, Jones earned $100,000 — about $1.2 million in today's money — and went on a spending spree. He bought his parents a Ford sedan and $10,000 home in Memphis, then rewarded himself with a $5,400 Lincoln. He bought three suits after each bout, giving away older outfits to pals. He added a diamond-collared lion to his act, walking the cub on a leash to matches and personal appearances.
• • ''In 1929 when I was in the so-called 'big' money, I spent too much,'' he later recalled. ''I liked fast horses, fast autos, fast airplanes. I had too many friends who helped me spend.''
• • Jones hit the big time in January 1932 with a sixth-round knockout of Italian boxer Oddone Piazza in Milwaukee for the National Boxing Association middleweight crown. A cheering crowd greeted him at Union Depot as he returned to Akron.
• • Five months later, he lost the title to Marcel Thil before 70,000 spectators in Paris, but regained it in 1933 by knocking out Sammy Slaughter at Cleveland Public Hall. He declined to defend the title after that.
• • Jones boxed for seven more years, but his right punch lost its sting. His final fight at the Akron Armory was a 1938 loss to Babe Risko. Jones retired in 1940 after losing a bout in Idaho. ''Gorilla Jones will never stay in the fight game until he's ready to cut paper dolls,'' Jones vowed.
• • Mae West met Gorilla Jones in a nightspot in 1928 • •
• • In many respects, the next chapter of his life was flashier than boxing. He went to work as Hollywood legend Mae West's chauffeur and bodyguard.
• • He first met the wise-cracking actress at a New York nightclub in 1928. Mae West's father had been a prizefighter, and she enjoyed bankrolling boxers.
• • ''The boxers had a hard time, even some of them who were pretty good,'' West told biographer Charlotte Chandler in 1979. ''There was one I backed named Gorilla Jones. I don't know why he was called 'Gorilla.' He wasn't that kind of fighter. I saw he was getting pounded too much, and he really didn't like fighting anymore, but he didn't know what else to do.''
• • She asked him if he could drive a car. Sure, he could. Even with a lion cub in the back seat.
• • ''So I hired him as my chauffeur,'' West said. ''He turned out to be a very good driver — — and he was also protection.''
• • Mae West also employed Jones' mother, Daisy, as a wardrobe assistant when the actress traveled. She bought homes for the boxer and his mother in Los Angeles, and served as Jones' financial manager and personal manager.
• • Biographers agree that the relationship wasn't all business. West and Jones remained close companions for 40 years. In public, he referred to her as ''The Lady,'' never by her name.
• • One time, a heckler made a bawdy remark to the actress, and the boxer threatened to rearrange the man's face.
• • ''Let 'em talk,'' Mae West told him. ''It's good for business.''
• • According to Hollywood lore, West got aggravated when house managers tried to block Jones from visiting her sixth-floor suite in the Ravenswood apartment complex. She bought the building and hired new staff.
• • ''A motion picture company offered me a quarter-million to film my story, but they wanted to make me say I was her lover,'' Jones told Jet magazine in 1974. ''That would be a lie because she was my manager and my friend. All the money in the world would be no good without a friend who has done everything to keep me on top and let me live the life I wanted to live.''
• • When Jones began to suffer from diabetes and lose his eyesight, West kept him on the payroll and handled his bills.
• • Jones was devastated in 1980 when West died in Ravenswood at age 87. She left him two apartment buildings and three houses.
• • Acquaintances said Jones gave up the will to live after ''The Lady'' passed away.
• • As his health deteriorated, his weight plunged to 102 pounds. In 1982, William ''Gorilla'' Jones died of arteriosclerosis at age 75.
• • The final bell sounded for an Akron boxing legend.

 

Thanks NobleD for the info on West and Jones. I had heard of Phiippa Schuyler and her dad George Schuyler. They were well know in Black America from the 1930's to the 60's. George Schuyler hanged with J.A.Rogers and other Black notables. Also he was controversial when he dissed Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. The house slaves of Sowell,Williams,Connelly and Elder can't hold a candle to Schuyler.

 

i heard mae west loved the bros

 

Philippa Schuyler



So Young, So Gifted, So Sad

By Carolyn See

Nov. 24, 1995

This one's a heartbreaker. This one will make you wring your hands about America, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be black. In case you ever harbored any utopian ideals about how -- with hard work and good intentions -- we might make this a better country, this book will certainly disabuse you of any daydreams in that regard. Also, if you ever had any mushy, personal thoughts about fame -- how, if you ever managed to get your picture in Time magazine, you could transcend your own personal history and achieve a secular heaven of success -- this book will disabuse you of that, too.


Philippa Duke Schuyler was born in 1931 to a black journalist father and a wealthy Southern white mother who sold themselves on the idea that only by miscegenation could the race question in America be solved. (Or, more accurately, Josephine, the mom, wrote that down in her diary. George Schuyler may have had another whole agenda.) Josephine had gone from man to man and wanted to make a statement, put some kind of meaning in her life. She married that black man, scandalized her folks, fed her daughter on raw liver and brains and began keeping scrapbooks on her "hybrid experiment."


The raw liver must have worked because in no time Philippa was walking, talking, reading, writing. Her IQ tested out at 180, and by age 4 she was playing Mozart. Her dad was already fooling around with the ladies, but her mother had found her life's work, the creation of a musical genius.
Here, Philippa's story takes a terrible turn. Her mother whipped her regularly. She never had any friends because she hardly ever got to go to school. When she did go, she was years ahead of the other kids, and she was the only person "of color" for miles around. Thanks to her journalist father, she had her picture in the magazines as a talented "Negro" prodigy, but in day-to-day life it was only Philippa and her mother, locked in an isolated, manipulative struggle. Even her piano teachers, who might have offered her various windows onto the world, were dismissed by her mother as soon as there was any emotional attachment between them and Philippa.


The prodigy and her mother went on tour. The reviews were almost always good. But both Philippa and her mother were incredibly slow learners about the nature of the outside world: As a woman, Philippa would have a terribly hard time making it as a concert pianist; as a mulatto she would find it almost impossible. She would do well enough as a child prodigy, but there would come a time when she would hit the wall.


Had her mother turned out a genius or a freak of nature? Kathryn Talalay, the author of this sad and thoughtful biography, doesn't jump to conclusions; she just lets the story play out. When Philippa is presented, in her early teens, with the scrapbooks that chronicle her life, she's horrified; she understands that from her parents' point of view, she's been a genetic experiment. She can't even take credit for her own "genius" since her mother has been so relentlessly pulling the strings in her life. But she has no recourse; her whole existence has been playing the piano, dolling up in the spotlight and then either working for, with, or against her mother. There is no way out.
After Philippa is grown, her touring takes her through South America, Europe, Africa. She's well received, but her life is at once adventurous and intensely narrow. She rarely has the time to have fun or even see where she's touring. In Africa, she's tormented by all that it means to be black. She sees women toiling, disregarded, disrespected. Indeed, as time goes by, she decides she really isn't black. "I am not a Negro!" she writes her mother, and using mental sleight-of-hand, she decides that her father came from Madagascar, and that she's really "Malay-American-Indian and European."


So desperate was she not to be "colored" that she took out a passport in another name, Felipa Monterro y Schuyler, suggesting that she had an Iberian heritage. Her politics had by this time become so strange that she lectured regularly to the John Birch Society. She had strings of suitors who treated her badly, and the one man who loved her she couldn't abide. She was, in a phrase, totally screwed up. She was unable to resolve the elements of black and white in her own life, unable to shake off her demon mother, unable to love or be loved. She died in 1967 in a helicopter accident in Vietnam, where she had gone in her new career as a reporter. And yet, for hundreds, thousands of black kids in the '40s and '50s, she was a role model, a reason to take piano lessons. This is a bleak, extraordinarily weird American life. Kathryn Talalay has done a gorgeous job with this unique material.


Taken from the Washington Post

 

Lani Guinier

Born in New York City in 1950, Guinier is the daughter of a Jewish mother, Eugenia Paprin, and the Jamaican-born scholar Ewart Guinier, who also served as Harvard professor (and chair) of the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969. Guinier has said that she wanted to be a civil rights lawyer since she was twelve years old. [citation needed] After graduating from Radcliffe College and Yale Law School, she joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) as an assistant counsel. She left the LDF for four years to serve as special assistant to then Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days in the Civil Rights DivisionCarter Administration. After Ronald Reagan took office, she left the Justice Department and rejoined the LDF, eventually becoming head of its Voting Rights project

in the In July 1998 when she joined the faculty, Lani Guinier became the first black woman tenured professor in Harvard Law School’s history. Her appointment was another milestone in a distinguished legal career. There was personal irony attending Guinier’s Harvard appointment: Her Jamaican-born father Ewart Guinier was appointed chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard in 1969, more than 35 years after leaving there as a disillusioned student who was not spoken to by any of his white classmates or called on in class and was not allowed to live on campus. The elder Guinier continued his education, earning advanced degrees from Columbia University and New York University.

Professor Guinier first came to public attention in 1993 when President Clinton nominated her to be the first black woman to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She had been a civil rights attorney for more than ten years and had served in the Civil Rights Division during the Carter Administration as special assistant to then Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days. Immediately after her name was put forward in 1993, conservatives virulently attacked Guinier’s views on democracy and voting, driving Clinton to withdraw her nomination without a confirmation hearing. That experience led Guinier to use her subsequent public platform to speak out on issues of race, gender and democratic decision-making and to call for candid public discourse on these issues. She is one of the nation’s most sought after speakers on these subjects. Guinier has written extensively in law review articles, books (The Tyranny of the Majority, 1994; Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law Schools and Institutional Change, 1995), and op-ed pieces about new ways of approaching old problems, including issues of affirmative action, the “testocracy,” gender equity, and race conscious political districting. She also authored a personal and political memoir, Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (Simon and Schuster 1999, in which she uses the nomination debacle as a window on the civil rights movement past, present, and future. She is presently working on a new book with University of Texas colleague Gerald Torres, THE MINERS CANARY: Rethinking Race and Power, published by Harvard University Press in 2002.

A graduate of Radcliffe College and Yale University Law School, Guinier was inspired at a young age by trailblazing civil rights attorney, Constance Baker Motley. As a youth, Guinier saw Baker Motley on television courageously escorting James Meredith through a jeering white crowd to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962. Following in Baker Motley’s footsteps, Guinier joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In the 1980’s, she headed LDF’s Voting Rights program, litigating cases throughout the South.

Before joining the Harvard Law School faculty, Guinier was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 10 years. At Harvard, Prof. Guinier teaches courses on professional responsibility for public lawyers, law and the political process, and critical perspectives on race, gender, class and social change. Guinier has been recognized for her achievements with many awards and accolades, including: the Champion of Democracy Award from the National Women's Political Caucus; the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award from the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession; the Rosa Parks Award from the American Association of Affirmative Action; the Big Sisters Award; the Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence from Harvard Law School; and the Harvey Levin Teaching Award, given to her by her students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Taken from Wiki & Minerscanary.org

 

Very well done

Thank for all the intell finally got to see a picture of Fred wife thank everyone.

 

Jack Johnson

 

Frank Sinatra was the person responsible for the official desegregation of Las Vegas and he brought his all black band the Cab Calloway Orchestra to venues that had banned blacks throughout the nation. Later he was the NAACP man of the year twice. He is responsible for sending hundreds of blacks to college not just his friends kids. His many charitable efforts went directly to blacks. Also he was the one who convinced Sammie Davis Jr. to marry May Britt a beautiful Swedish showgirl after Sammie got her pregnant. Frank gave her away at the marriage and was Sammie's best man. He was a good one indeed.

 

George Lucas and Melody Hopkins

Robin Thicke and his wife Paula Patton

The Pearl Bailey and her husband

 

We should pay special tribute to Mr. and Mrs. Loving whose Supreme Court ruling made it possible for interracial couples to marry in all states.

 

he looks mean as hell, but the couple did serve a good purpose. Doesn't matter if you're a WW/BM, BW/WM, asian-indian. Everyone benefited from that ruling. It was a shitty ban to begin with.

 

Yes I have wondered that myself.I have no idea really why this is.There is just intense chemistry but it's even more than that.It is the way we relate as people too.

 

Billie Holiday & Tallulah Bankhead!

February 03, 2009

GETTIN' FUNKY WITH BILLIE HOLIDAY AND TALLULAH BANKHEAD!


Dear Miss Bankhead:
I thought I was a friend of yours. That's why there was nothing in my book that was unfriendly to you, unkind or libelous. Because I didn't want to drag you, I tried six times last month to talk to you on the damn phone, and tell you about the book just as a matter of courtesy. That bitch you have who impersonates you kept telling me to call back and when I did, it was the same deal until I gave up. But while I was working out of town, you didn't mind talking to Doubleday and suggesting behind my damned back that I had flipped and/or made up those little mentions of you in my book. Baby, Cliff Allen and Billy Heywood are still around. My maid who was with me at the Strand isn't dead either. There are plenty of others around who remember how you carried on so you almost got me fired out of the place. And if you want to get shitty, we can make it a big shitty party. We can all get funky together!
I don't know whether you've got one of those damn lawyers telling you what to do or not. But I'm writing this to give you a chance to answer back quick and apologize to me and to Doubleday. Read my book over again. I understand they sent you a duplicate manuscript. There's nothing in it to hurt you. If you think so, let's talk about it like I wanted to last month. It's going to press right now so there is no time for monkeying around. Straighten up and fly right, Banky! Nobody's trying to drag you.
Billie Holiday.
____________________________________________________________________
Miss Bankhead as in Tallulah Bankhead, the glamourous Broadway and sometimes movie actress, equally well-known for her death-stinging tongue, odd eccentricities, and for her alcoholic & drug laden tirades. Bille Holiday, the great jazz singing innovator known as Lady Day also equally known for her death-stinging tongue, strange eccentricities, and booze and drug laden tirades. Both of them forces not to be played with. Both notoriously bisexual. And both lovers for a short time, but as Holiday's ghost-written autobiography was going to press, Banky was denying that she even knew Billie Holiday well at all!
The truth of the matter is that the evidence strongly suggests they probably first met in the early 1930's during Bankhead's Harlem rent party and nightclub-slumming days, well before Holiday ever became famous. What is known is that by 1948 they were bosom buddies. A year earlier, Holiday entered the Alderson Federal Reformatoy for Women to serve her famous "one day and a year" sentence after being found guilty on dope charges. Four months after her release in 1948, Holiday was appearing at New York's Strand Theater with Count Basie on the first leg of a cross-country tour. At the same time, Tallulah Bankhead was nearby on Broadway starring in her hit play, Private Lives. Bankhead caused quite a commotion every night thundering late down the ailse during Billie's show to sit in her special seat to stare in amazement at the gifted & stunningly beautiful Lady Day. Because Holiday's license to perform in nightclubs where liquor was being served had been revoked (and not renewed) she was forced to earn her living in gruelling tours on the road. For months after the Strand performance, Bankhead traveled with her whenever she could. Also on the tour was dancer/comedian James "Stump Daddy" Cross - nicknamed after his wooden leg, who joined the two famous ladies to make a treacherous threesome.
Everyone knows Bankhead was with Holiday in Hollywood at a nightclub when a fight broke out and Billie was arrested and charged with opium possession. Now a felon (as well as a well-known user) Holiday was in serious jeopardy again, and it was Bankhead to the rescue. She bailed Holiday out, paid for a psychiatrist after Billie threatened suicide, and was generally very loving and supportive. She also wrote a useless letter to J. Edgar Hoover pleading Billie's case "As my Negro Mammy used to say 'When you pray, you pray to God don't you......I had only met Billie Holiday twice in my life....and feel the most profound compassion for her...she is essentially a child at heart whose troubles have made her psychologically unable to cope with the world in which she finds herself...poor thing, you know I did everything within the law to lighten her burden".
It is agreed that after this incident the two women dissolved their friendship, and in 1952, Bankhead's own autobiography was ghost-written and nary a mention of Holiday was made. In fact, Tallulah began a campaign to clean up her image and concentrated more on the opposite sex - no matter that they were all gay -whose "duties" as paid "caddies" included spraying her with Chanel No. 5 as she lay in the bath. In 1956, Billie's Lady Sings The Blues hit the bookstores, and before it was released, Tallulah Bankhead received a copy of the manuscript. Apparently, Billie spoke of her at some length, and Bankhead hit the roof. Or the shyt hit the fan. Bankhead fired off a no-nonsense epistle of warning to the book's editor. Opening with her trademark "Dahlings, if you publish that stuff about me in the Billie Holiday book, I'll sue you for every goddamned cent that Doubleday can make". Billie did not fake the funk in her speedy reply (letter above - Jan 12, 1955) but she did not receive a reply from Bankhead. But you can bet that when the book finally saw its release, Bankhead was only honorably mentioned as just "a friend who sometimes came around to the house to eat spaghetti".
Practically all of Holiday's biographers insist a love affair between the singer and the actress primarily due to "Stump Daddy's" testimony of being a third party to all of their shenanigans. A pimp & friend of Holiday's named Detroit Red would also offer compelling evidence, but Bankhead's biographer's are adamant that the rumors are "unsubstantiated" ignoring Holiday's letter (which first appeared in Lady Day: The Many Faces Of Billie Holiday, a wonderful pictorial history by Robert O' Meally ) and the eyewitness accounts of Cross, and others who were there during that time.
Billie Holiday died in New York in 1959, a shell of her former glory and beauty. It is said she had $500 stuck in her vagina as she lay dying (and handcuffed) to a hospital bed. She has continued to inspire generations of singers such as Erykah Badu and Corrine Bailey Rae. Tallulah Bankhead died in New York in 1968. Holidays friend, Detroit Red said her family members quickly shipped her body south so that all of her Harlem friends could not attend the funeral. Her last discernible words were "codeine" and "bourbon". Bankhead was also romantically linked with movie maid Hattie McDaniel (WTF) and actress Barbara Stanwyick.

 

im gone print dat out and read it while i take a shit

 

Frederick Douglass had a long time affair with a German/Jewish intellectual named Ottilie Assing. Confident Frederick would marry her, she committed suicide when he instead married Hellen Pitts.

 

damn ole Frederick was keepin it real as shit in the bed...

biddies seriously getting strung out on that dick

 

Don't know if Someone Mentioned him already But Daniel hill and his wife.



Daniel Grafton Hill III, OC, O.Ont (November 23, 1923 – June 26, 2003) was a Canadian sociologist, civil servant, human rights specialist, and Black Canadian historian.

Born in Independence, Missouri, he grew up in the western United States. In 1948, he graduated with a BA from Howard University. In 1950, he moved to Canada to study sociology at the University of Toronto. He received an M.A. in 1951 and a Ph.D in 1960.

From 1955 to 1958, he was a researcher for the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto. From 1958 to 1960, he was Executive Secretary of the North York Social Planning Council. In 1960, he was the assistant director of the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Research Foundation. From 1961 to 1962, he taught in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto.

In 1962, he was the first full time director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. In 1972, he became Ontario Human Rights Commissioner. In 1973, he resigned to found his own human rights consulting firm. From 1984 to 1989, he was the Ontario Ombudsman.

He founded the Ontario Black History Society. In 1981, he wrote the book, The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada.

In 1993, he was awarded the Order of Ontario. In 1999, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

In 1953, he married Donna Bender. They had three children: Lawrence, Karen, and Dan.

(Copy and pasted from Wikipedia..lol)

 

Wow...that's incredible. I wonder how much of Canada actually know that black people have some impact in the country?

Well, I guess when you have the guy who basically felt that healthcare is a right as the most important figure, no one stands before him?

 

Noble,I read in Dick Gregory's book "N*gger" that Miss Bankhead treat him like a regular person and when they met she said "Richard Dahling."

 

POJ,did you get that book about Douglas and Assing called Love Across the Color Lines? A professor found letters written by Assing to Douglas. It is a good book to read.