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Gerri Whittington
Geraldine Whittington (September 11, 1931 – January 24, 1993) was the personal executive secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was the first African-American secretary in the White House. Johnson was famous for working long hours and insisting his assistants worked long hours as well. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson became president, he requested a new slate of secretaries. He saw Whittington working in a government office, and requested that his assistant Jack Valenti get her home phone number. Johnson called her unannounced one evening, and requested that she come in that night for an interview. According to audiotapes of Johnson's phone calls, Whittington at first thought the call was a joke, but came to believe that it really was the president on the line. She applied for the job and was offered the position. Having a black woman in the White House was very unusual in the early 1960s. Johnson wanted to advertise the fact that he had hired a bla ...
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Secretary To The President Of The United States
The Secretary to the President (sometimes dubbed the president's Private Secretary or Personal Secretary) was a 19th- and early 20th-century White House position that carried out all the tasks now spread throughout the modern White House Office. The Secretary would act as a buffer between the president and the public, keeping the president's schedules and appointments, managing his correspondence, managing the staff, communicating to the press as well as being a close aide and advisor to the president in a manner that often required great skill and discretion. In terms of rank it is a precursor to the modern White House Chief of Staff. Stature Every American president had a private secretary, but the position was not an official one until the McKinley administration. At the time of its peak the Secretary to the President was a much admired government office held by men of high ability and considered as worthy as a cabinet rank; it even merited an oath of office. Three private secr ...
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Arlene Francis
Arlene Francis (born Arline Francis Kazanjian; October 20, 1907 – May 31, 2001) was an American actress, radio and television talk show host, and game show panelist. She is known for her long-running role as a panelist on the television game show '' What's My Line?'', on which she regularly appeared for 25 years, from 1950 to 1975, on both the network and syndicated versions of the show. Early life Francis was born on October 20, 1907, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Leah (née Davis) and Aram Kazanjian. Her Armenian father was studying art in Paris at the age of 16 when he learned that both his parents had died in one of the massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman government in Turkey between 1894 and 1896, known as the Hamidian Massacres. He emigrated to the United States and became a portrait photographer, opening his own studio in Boston in the early 20th century. Later in life, Kazanjian painted canvases of dogwoods, "rabbits in flight", and other nature scen ...
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African-American Women In Politics
Black women have been involved in American socio-political issues and advocating for the community since the American Civil War era through organizations, clubs, community-based social services, and advocacy. Black women are currently underrepresented in the United States in both elected offices and in policy made by elected officials. Although data shows that women do not run for office in large numbers when compared to men, Black women have been involved in issues concerning identity, human rights, child welfare, and misogynoir within the political dialogue for decades. History Black women's suffrage, voting rights and racism The U.S. women’s rights movements involved many Black women suffragists who were simultaneously fighting for the abolishment of slavery and women's rights. Formerly enslaved and free Black women like Mary Church Terrell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Tubman, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Maria W. Stewart advocated for their rights by involving thems ...
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1993 Deaths
File:1993 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The Oslo I Accord is signed in an attempt to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; The White House (Moscow), Russian White House is shelled during the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis; Czechoslovakia is peacefully Dissolution of Czechoslovakia, dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia; In the United States, the ATF Waco siege, besieges a compound belonging to David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in a search for illegal weapons, which ends in the building being set alight and killing most inside; Eritrea gains independence; A major 1993 Storm of the Century, snow storm passes over the United States and Canada, leading to over 300 fatalities; Drug lord and narcoterrorism, narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar is killed by Military Forces of Colombia, Colombian special forces; Ramzi Yousef and other Islamic terrorism, Islamic terrorists 1993 World Trade Center bombing, detonate a truck bomb in the subterranean garage of List of t ...
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1931 Births
Events January * January 2 – South Dakota native Ernest Lawrence invents the cyclotron, used to accelerate particles to study nuclear physics. * January 4 – German pilot Elly Beinhorn begins her flight to Africa. * January 22 – Sir Isaac Isaacs is sworn in as the first Australian-born Governor-General of Australia. * January 25 – Mohandas Gandhi is again released from imprisonment in India. * January 27 – Pierre Laval forms a government in France. February * February 4 – Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gives a speech calling for rapid industrialization, arguing that only strong industrialized countries will win wars, while "weak" nations are "beaten". Stalin states: "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us." The first five-year plan in the Soviet Union is intensified, for the industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. * February 10 – Official ...
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Justice Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall coordinated the assault on racial segregation in schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in '' Brown v. Board of Education'', which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall attended Lincoln University and the Howard Universi ...
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Supreme Court Of The United States
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point of federal law. It also has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party." The court holds the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law. However, it may act only within the context of a case in an area of law over which it has jurisdiction. The court may decide cases having political overtones, but has ruled that it does not have power to decide non-justiciable political questions. Established by Article Three of the United State ...
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Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall coordinated the assault on racial segregation in schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in '' Brown v. Board of Education'', which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall attended Lincoln University and the Howard Univ ...
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Sepia (magazine)
''Sepia'' was a photojournalistic magazine featuring articles based primarily on achievements of African Americans. The magazine was founded in 1946 as ''Negro Achievements'' by Horace J. Blackwell, an African-American clothing merchant of Fort Worth, Texas. He had already founded ''The World's Messenger'' in 1942. George Levitan, a Jewish American and plumbing merchant in Fort Worth, bought Blackwell's magazines and Good Publishing Company (aka Sepia Publishing) in 1950. He changed the magazine's name gradually; in 1954 he named it ''Sepia,'' and published it until his death in 1976. He changed the name of ''Messenger'' to ''Bronze Thrills'' and had success with that for some time as well, also publishing black-audience magazines ''Hep'' and ''Jive''. After Levitan's death, ''Sepia'' was bought by Beatrice Pringle, who had been part of Blackwell's founding editorial team. She continued it until 1983, closing it despite respectable circulation. It was always overshadowed by ''Ebo ...
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Jet (magazine)
''Jet'' is an American weekly digital magazine focusing on news, culture, and entertainment related to the African-American community. Founded in November 1951 by John H. Johnson of the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago, Illinois, the magazine was billed as "The Weekly Negro News Magazine". ''Jet'' chronicled the civil rights movement from its earliest years, including the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the activities of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. ''Jet'' was printed from November 1, 1951, in digest-sized format in all or mostly black-and-white until its December 27, 1999, issue. In 2009, ''Jet'' expanded one of the weekly issues to a double issue published once each month. Johnson Publishing Company struggled with the same loss of circulation and advertising as other magazines and newspapers in the digital age, and the final print issue of ''Jet'' was published on June 23, 2014, continuing solely as a digital magazine app. In 2016, J ...
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Bennett Cerf
Bennett Alfred Cerf (May 25, 1898 – August 27, 1971) was an American writer, publisher, and co-founder of the American publishing firm Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his weekly television appearances for over 17 years on the panel game show ''What's My Line?'' Biography Cerf was born on May 25, 1898, in Manhattan, New York, to a Jewish family of Alsatian and German origin. Cerf's father Gustave Cerf was a lithographer; his mother, Frederika Wise, was heiress to a tobacco-distribution fortune. She died when Bennett was 15; shortly afterward, her brother Herbert moved into the Cerf household and became a strong literary and social influence on the teenager. Cerf graduated from Townsend Harris High School in 1916, the same public school as publisher Richard Simon, author Herman Wouk, and playwright Howard Dietz. He spent his teenage years at 790 Riversi ...
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