OCTAVIA BUTLER

“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”

– OCTAVIA BUTLER

Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer.

Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. Since her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (Octavia M. Butler) who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Butler was “an introspective, only child in a strict Baptist household” and “was drawn early to magazines such as Amazing, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy and soon began reading all the science fiction classics.”

Octavia Jr., nicknamed Junie, was paralytically shy and a daydreamer, and was later diagnosed as being dyslexic. She began writing at the age of 10 “to escape loneliness and boredom”; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction. “I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars,” she told the journal Black Scholar, “and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I’ve been writing science fiction ever since.”

After getting an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1968 , she next enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles. She eventually left CalState and took writing classes through UCLA extension.

Butler would later credit two writing workshops for giving her “the most valuable help I received with my writing”. 1969–1970: The Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters’ Guild of America, West, a program designed to mentor Latino and African American writers. Through Open Door she met the noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.And in 1970: The Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, (introduced to her by Ellison), where she first met Samuel R. Delany.

Her first published story, “Crossover,” appeared in Clarion’s 1971 anthology; another short story, “Childfinder,” was bought by Harlan Ellison for the never-published collection The Last Dangerous Visions. (Like other stories purchased for that volume, it has yet to appear anywhere.)

In 1974, the author started the novel Patternmaster (reportedly related to the story she started after watching Devil Girl from Mars), which became her first published book in 1976 (though it would become the fifth in the Patternist series). Over the next eight years, she would publish four more novels in the same story line, though the publication dates of the novels do not match the internal order of the series.

n 1979, she published Kindred, a novel that uses the science-fiction staple of time travel to explore slavery in the United States. In this story, Dana, an African American woman, is inexplicably transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, an African American woman who was born free but forced into slavery later in life. This novel is often shelved in the literature or African-American literature sections of bookstores instead of science fiction—Butler herself categorized the novel not as science fiction but rather as a “grim fantasy,” as there was “absolutely no science in it”. Kindred became the most popular of all her books, with 250,000 copies currently in print. “I think people really need to think what it’s like to have all of society arrayed against you,” she said of the novel.

Wild Seed, the first book in the Patternist series, was published in 1980. In Wild Seed, Butler contrasts how two potentially immortal characters go about building families. The male character, Doro, engages in a breeding program to create people with stronger psychic powers both as food, and as potential companions. The female character, Anyanwu, creates villages. Yet Doro and Anyanwu, in spite of their differences grow to need each other, as the only immortal/extremely long-lived beings in the world. This book also explores the psychodynamics of power and enslavement.

In 1994, her dystopian novel Parable of the Sower was nominated for a Nebula for best novel, an award she finally took home in 1999 for a sequel, Parable of the Talents. The two novels provide the origin of the fictional religion Earthseed. Octavia had originally planned to write a third Parable novel, tentatively titled Parable of the Trickster, mentioning her work on it in a number of interviews, but at some point encountered a form of writer’s block, going seven years without publishing a new novel.

Butler also moved to Seattle, Washington, in November 1999 and eventually shifted her creative attention, resulting in the 2005 novel, Fledgling, a vampire novel with a science-fiction context. Although Butler herself passed Fledgling off as a lark, the novel is connected to her other works through its exploration of race, sexuality, and what it means to be a member of a community. Moreover, the novel continues the theme, raised explicitly in Parable of the Sower, that diversity is a biological imperative.

She described herself as “comfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Seattle—a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” Themes of both racial and sexual ambiguity are apparent throughout her work.

She died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, at the age of 58. Some news accounts have stated that she died of head injuries after falling and striking her head on her walkway, while others report that she apparently suffered a stroke as a result of those injuries.

The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established in Butler’s memory in 2006 by the Carl Brandon Society. Its goal is to provide an annual scholarship to enable writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops where Butler got her start. The first scholarships were awarded in 2007.

SOURCE: Wikipedia, brainyquote.com

OCTAVIA BUTLER IN MOTION

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE

“The medals don’t mean anything and the glory doesn’t last. It’s all about your happiness. The rewards are going to come, but my happiness is just loving the sport and having fun performing”

– JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE

Jackie Joyner-Kersee  is a retired American athlete, ranked among the all-time greatest athletes in the women’s heptathlon as well as in the women’s long jump.

Jacqueline Joyner was born March 3, 1962, in East St. Louis, Illinois. She was named after Jacqueline Kennedy by her grandmother. She was inspired to compete in multi-disciplinary track & field events after seeing a 1975 made-for-TV movie about Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Interestingly, the trackster, basketball player, and pro golfer Didrikson was chosen the “Greatest Female Athlete of the First Half of the 20th Century. Fifty years later, “Sports Illustrated for Women” magazine voted Joyner-Kersee the greatest female athlete of “all time”.

Joyner-Kersee attended college at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she starred in both track & field and in women’s basketball from 1980-1985.

Joyner-Kersee competed in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and won the silver medal in the heptathlon. She was the first woman to score over 7,000 points in a heptathlon event (during the 1986 Goodwill Games). Jackie married her track coach, Bob Kersee, in 1986. That same year, she received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States. In the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea, Joyner-Kersee earned gold medals in both the heptathlon and the long jump. At the 1988 Games in Seoul, she set the still-standing heptathlon world record of 7,291 points. The silver and bronze medalists were Sabine John and Anke Vater-Behmer, both of whom were representing East Germany. Five days later, Joyner won her second gold medal, leaping to an Olympic record 24 feet, 3 1/2 inches, in the long jump. In 1988, Jackie established the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation, which provides youth, adults, and families with the resources to improve their quality of life with special attention directed to East St. Louis, Illinois.

In 1991, she was the red hot favorite to retain both her World titles earned four years earlier in Rome. However her challenge was dramatically halted when, having won the long jump easily with a 7.32m jump no one would beat, she slipped on the take off board and careened head first into the pit, luckily avoiding serious injury. She did, however, strain a hamstring, which led to her having to pull out of the heptathlon during the 200m at the end of the first day. In the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, Joyner-Kersee earned her third Olympic medal in the heptathlon (one silver and two gold medals). She also won the bronze medal in the long jump – that event was won by her friend Heike Drechsler of Germany. At the 1996 Olympic Trials, Joyner-Kersee sustained an injury to her right hamstring. When the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia began, Joyner-Kersee was not fully recovered by the time the heptathlon started. After running the first event, the 100m hurdles, the pain was unbearable and she withdrew. She was able to recover well enough to compete in the long jump and qualify for the final, but was in sixth place in the final with one jump remaining. Her final jump, of 22′ 11 3/4″, was long enough for her to win the bronze medal. The Atlanta Olympics would be the last Olympic trials of Joyner-Kersee’s long competitive career.

In 1996 she signed on to play pro basketball for the Richmond Rage of the fledgling American Basketball League. Although she was very popular with the fans, she was less successful on the court. She appeared in only 17 games, and scored no more than four points in any game. Returning to track, Joyner-Kersee won the heptathlon again at the 1998 Goodwill Games, scoring 6,502 points. Joyner-Kersee made her final bow in track & field competition in 2000. She was sixth in the long jump (21-10.75) at the Olympic Trials, closing one of the greatest careers in U.S. track & field history.

In April 2001, the track star was voted the “Top Woman Collegiate Athlete of the Past 25 Years.” The vote was conducted among the 976 NCAA member schools.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee along with Andre Agassi, Muhammad Ali, Lance Armstrong, Warrick Dunn, Mia Hamm, Jeff Gordon, Tony Hawk, Andrea Jaeger, Mario Lemieux, Alonzo Mourning, and Cal Ripken, Jr. founded the “Athletes for Hope” in 2007, a charitable organization, which helps professional athletes get involved in charitable causes and inspires millions of non-athletes to volunteer and support the community.

As of August 2008^[update], Joyner-Kersee holds the world record in heptathlon along with six all time best results and her long jump record of 7.49 m is second on the long jump all time list. In addition to heptathlon and long jump, she was a world class athlete in 100 m hurdles and 200 meters being as of June 2006^[update] in top 60 all time in those events. Sports Illustrated voted her the greatest female athlete of the 20th century.

SOURCE: Wikipedia, about.com

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE IN MOTION

VANESSA WILLIAMS

“Success is the sweetest revenge.”

– VANESSA WILLIAMS

Vanessa Lynn Williams (born March 18, 1963) is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. Williams made history on September 17, 1983 when she became the first woman of African American descent to be crowned Miss America.

Williams was born in Tarrytown, New York, the daughter of music teachers Helen and Milton Augustine Williams Jr. Williams and her younger brother Chris, who is also an actor, grew up in the predominantly white middle-class suburban area of Millwood, New York. Prophetically, her parents put “Here she is: Miss America” on her birth announcement.

Williams studied piano and French horn growing up, but was most interested in singing. She received a scholarship and attended Syracuse University as a Theatre Arts major from 1981 to 1983. She discontinued her education at Syracuse during her sophomore year to fulfill her duties as Miss America, and then subsequently left the university to focus on her entertainment career. Twenty-five years later she graduated from Syracuse by earning her remaining college credits through her life experience with two long running Broadway shows and a Tony Award nomination under her belt. Williams delivered the convocation address on May 10, 2008, with 480 other students in the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Williams began competing in beauty pageants in the early 1980s. Williams won Miss New York in 1983, and went to the Miss America national pageant in Atlantic City. She was crowned Miss America 1984 on September 17, 1983 making her the first-ever African American Miss America. Prior to the final night of competition, Williams won both the Preliminary Talent and Swimsuit Competitions from earlier in the week. Williams’ reign as Miss America was not without its challenges and controversies. For the first time in pageant history, a reigning Miss America was the target of death threats and angry racist hate mail.

Ten months into her reign as Miss America, she received an anonymous phone call stating that nude photos of her taken by a photographer prior to her pageant days had surfaced. Williams believed the photographs were private and had been destroyed; she claims she never signed a release permitting the photos to be used.

The genesis of the photos dated back to 1982, when she worked as an assistant and makeup artist for Mount Kisco, New York photographer Tom Chiapel. According to Williams, Chiapel advised her that he wanted to try a “new concept of silhouettes with two models.” He photographed Williams and another woman in several nude poses.

Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, was initially offered the photos, but turned them down. Later Hefner would explain why in People Weekly, “Vanessa Williams is a beautiful woman. There was never any question of our interest in the photos. But they clearly weren’t authorized and because they would be the source of considerable embarrassment to her, we decided not to publish them. We were also mindful that she was the first black Miss America.” Days later, Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, announced that his magazine would publish the photos in their September 1984 issue, and paid Chiapel for the rights to them without Williams’ consent. According to the PBS documentary Miss America, the Vanessa Williams issue of Penthouse would ultimately bring Guccione a $14 million windfall.

After days of media frenzy and sponsors threatening to pull out of the upcoming 1985 pageant, Williams felt pressured by Miss America Pageant officials to resign, and did so in a press conference on July 23, 1984. The title subsequently went to first-runner up, African-Italian Suzette Charles. In early September 1984, Vanessa filed an unheralded $500 million lawsuit against Chiapel and Guccione. According to a Williams family representative, she eventually dropped the suit to avoid further legal battles choosing to move on with her life. Vanessa is quoted as saying “the best revenge is success.”

Although she resigned from fulfilling the duties of a current Miss America, she was allowed to keep the bejeweled crown and scholarship money and is officially recognized by the Miss America Organization today as “Miss America 1984” and Suzette Charles as “Miss America 1984b.”

After time out of the spotlight, Williams secured a record deal, and released her debut album, The Right Stuff in 1988. The first single, “The Right Stuff”, found major success on the R&B Chart while the second single “(He’s Got) The Look” found similar success on the R&B charts. The third single, “Dreamin'”, was a pop hit becoming Williams’ first top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #8, and her first number one single on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The album reached gold status in the US and earned her three Grammy Award nominations, including one for Best New Artist.

Her second album The Comfort Zone became the biggest success in her music career. The lead single Running Back to You reached top twenty on the Hot 100, and the top position of Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart on October 5, 1991. Other singles included “The Comfort Zone” (#2 R&B), “Just for Tonight” (#26 Pop), “Work To Do” and the club-only hit “Freedom Dance (Get Free!)”. The most successful single from the album, as well as her biggest hit to date is “Save the Best for Last”. The song was #1 in the United States for five weeks, as well as #1 in Australia, the Netherlands, and Canada and was in the top 5 in Japan and the United Kingdom. The album sold 2.2 million copies in the US at its time of release and has since been certified three times platinum in the United States by the RIAA, gold in Canada by the CRIA, and platinum in the United Kingdom by the BPI. The Comfort Zone earned Williams five Grammy Award nominations.

The Sweetest Days, her third album, was released in 1994 to rave reviews. The Sweetest Days saw Williams branch out and sample other styles of music that included jazz, hip-hop, rock, and Latin-themed recordings such as “Betcha Never” and “You Can’t Run”, both written and produced by Babyface. Other singles from the album included the Adult Contemporary and Dance hit “The Way That You Love” and the title track “The Sweetest Days”. The album was certified platinum in the US by the RIAA and earned her two Grammy Award nominations.

Williams parlayed her ascendant music career into a theatrical role when she was cast in the Broadway production of Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1994.

Other albums include two Christmas albums, Star Bright released in 1996 and Silver and Gold in 2004; Next in 1997, and Everlasting Love in 2005, along with a greatest hits compilation released in 1998 and a host of other compilations released over the years.

Notable chart performances from subsequent albums, motion picture and television soundtracks have included the songs “Love Is”, “Colors of the Wind”, “Where Do We Go From Here“, and “Oh How the Years Go By”. In total, Williams has sold over six million records and received fifteen Grammy Award nominations.

Williams has appeared in several feature films. Her most prominent role was in the film Soul Food (1997), for which she won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture. She was also featured in the Tony-nominated and Drama Desk Award nominated performance as the Witch in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods in a revival of the show in 2002, which included songs revised for her.

In 2007,  it was also announced that Williams had signed with Concord Records. This same year, Williams also returned to the big screen starring in two independent motion pictures. The first being My Brother, for which she won Best Actress honors at the Harlem International Film Festival, the African-American Women in Cinema Film Festival and at the Santa Barbara African Heritage Film Festival, and the second being And Then Came Love. Williams received considerable media attention for her comic/villainess role as former magazine creative director turned editor-in-chief Wilhelmina Slater in the ABC comedy series Ugly Betty, produced by Salma Hayek. Her performance on the series resulted in a nomination for outstanding supporting actress at the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards.  In 2008, she was again nominated for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series for Ugly Betty.

Vanessa has been married twice. Her first marriage, to her then-manager Ramon Hervey II, was from 1987 to 1997. They have three children: Melanie (born 1987), Jillian (born 1989), and Devin (born 1993). Her second marriage was to former NBA basketball player Rick Fox. They married in September 1999 and have a daughter, Sasha Gabriella (born May 2000).

SOURCE: Wikipedia, brainyquote.com

VANESSA WILLIAMS IN MOTION

OPRAH WINFREY

The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.

– OPRAH WINFREY

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American television presenter, media mogul and philanthropist. Her internationally-syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, has earned her multiple Emmy Awards and is the highest-rated talk show in the history of television. She is also an influential book critic, an Academy Award nominated actress, and a magazine publisher. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century, the most philanthropic African American of all time. S he is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

Though there are conflicting reports as to how her name became “Oprah”, Winfrey was originally named Orpah after the Biblical character in the Book of Ruth, Orpah. According to an interview with the Academy of Achievement, Winfrey claimed that her family and friends’ inability to pronounce “Orpah” caused them to put the “P” before the “R” in every place else other than the birth certificate. However, there is the account that the midwife transposed letters while filling out the newborn’s birth certificate.

Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi to unmarried parents. She later explained that her conception was due to a single sexual encounter that her two teenage parents had; they quickly broke up not long after. Her mother, Vernita Lee, was a housemaid, and her father, Vernon Winfrey, was a coal miner and later worked as a barber before becoming a city councilman. Winfrey’s father was in the Armed Forces when she was born.

After her birth, Winfrey’s mother traveled north and Winfrey spent her first six years living in rural poverty with her grandmother, Hattie Mae Lee, who was so poor that Winfrey often wore dresses made of potato sacks, for which the local children made fun of her. Her grandmother taught her to read before the age of three and took her to the local church, where she was nicknamed “The Preacher” for her ability to recite Bible verses. When Winfrey was a child, her grandmother would take a switch and would hit her with it when she didn’t do chores or if she misbehaved in any way.

At age six, Winfrey moved to an inner-city neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her mother, who was less supportive and encouraging than her grandmother had been, due in large part to the long hours Vernita Lee worked as a maid. Winfrey has stated that she was molested by her cousin, her uncle, and a family friend, starting when she was nine years old, something she first revealed to her viewers on a 1986 episode of her TV show, when sexual abuse was being discussed.

Despite her dysfunctional home life, Winfrey skipped two of her earliest grades, became the teacher’s pet, and by the time she was 13 received a scholarship to attend Nicolet High School in the Milwaukee suburb of Glendale, Wisconsin^{[citation needed]}. After suffering years of abuse, at 13 Winfrey ran away from home. When she was 14, she became pregnant, but her son died shortly after birth. Also at that age, her frustrated mother sent her to live with her father in Nashville, Tennessee. Vernon was strict, but encouraging and made her education a priority. Winfrey became an honors student, was voted Most Popular Girl, joined her high school speech team at East Nashville High School, and placed second in the nation in dramatic interpretation. She won an oratory contest, which secured her a full scholarship to Tennessee State University, a historically black institution, where she studied communication. At age 17, Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant. She also attracted the attention of the local black radio station, WVOL, which hired her to do the news part-time. She worked there during her senior year of high school, and again while in her first two years of college.

Winfrey’s career choice in media did not surprise her grandmother, who once said that ever since Winfrey could talk, she was on stage. As a child she played games interviewing her corncob doll and the crows on the fence of her family’s property. Winfrey later acknowledged her grandmother’s influence, saying it was Hattie Mae who had encouraged her to speak in public and “gave me a positive sense of myself.”

Working in local media, she was both the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at Nashville’s WLAC-TV. She moved to Baltimore‘s WJZ-TV in 1976 to co-anchor the six o’clock news. She was then recruited to join Richard Sher as co-host of WJZ’s local talk show People Are Talking, which premiered on August 14, 1978. She also hosted the local version of Dialing for Dollars there as well. In 1983, Winfrey relocated to Chicago to host WLS-TV’s low-rated half-hour morning talk-show, AM Chicago. The first episode aired on January 2, 1984. Within months after Winfrey took over, the show went from last place in the ratings to overtaking Donahue as the highest rated talk show in Chicago.

In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg’s epic film adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple. She earned immediate acclaim as Sofia, the distraught housewife. The following year Winfrey was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but she lost to Anjelica Huston.

The Oprah Winfrey Show, expanded to a full hour, and broadcast nationally beginning September 8, 1986. Already having surpassed Donahue in the local market, Winfrey’s syndicated show quickly doubled his national audience, displacing Donahue as the number one day-time talk show in America. Their much publicized contest was the subject of enormous scrutiny.

Time magazine wrote, “Few people would have bet on Oprah Winfrey’s swift rise to host of the most popular talk show on TV. In a field dominated by white males, she is a black female of ample bulk. As interviewers go, she is no match for, say, Phil Donahue . . . What she lacks in journalistic toughness, she makes up for in plainspoken curiosity, robust humor and, above all empathy. Guests with sad stories to tell are apt to rouse a tear in Oprah’s eye . . . They, in turn, often find themselves revealing things they would not imagine telling anyone, much less a national TV audience. It is the talk show as a group therapy session.”

In the mid-1990s, Winfrey adopted a less tabloid-oriented format, doing shows about heart disease in women, geopolitics with Lisa Ling, spirituality and meditation, and gift-giving and home decorating shows. She often interviews celebrities on issues that directly involve them in some way, such as cancer, charity work, or substance abuse. In addition, she interviews ordinary people who have done extraordinary things or been involved in important current issues.

In 1993, Winfrey hosted a rare prime-time interview with Michael Jackson which became the fourth most watched event in American television history as well as the most watched interview ever, with an audience of one hundred million. In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film Beloved, based upon Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. To prepare for her role as Sethe, the protagonist and former slave, Winfrey experienced a 24-hour simulation of the experience of slavery, which included being tied up and blindfolded and left alone in the woods.

In late 1996, Winfrey introduced a new segment on her television show: Oprah’s Book Club. The segment focused on new books and classics, and often brought obscure novels to popular attention. The book club became such a powerful force that whenever Winfrey introduced a new book as her book-club selection, it instantly became a best-seller (known as the Oprah Effect) and also when she selected the classic John Steinbeck novel East of Eden, it soared to the top of the book charts.  In 1998, Winfrey began Oprah’s Angel Network, a charity aimed at encouraging people around the world to make a difference in the lives of underprivileged others. Accordingly, Oprah’s Angel Network supports charitable projects and provides grants to nonprofit organizations around the world that share this vision. To date, Oprah’s Angel Network has raised more than $51,000,000. Winfrey personally covers all administrative costs associated with the charity, so 100% of all funds raised go to charity programs.

During a lawsuit against Winfrey, she hired Dr. Phil McGraw’s company Courtroom Sciences, Inc. to help her analyze and read the jury. Dr. Phil made such an impression on Winfrey that she invited him to appear on her show. He accepted the invitation and was a resounding success. McGraw appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show for several years before launching his own show, Dr. Phil, in 2002, which was created by Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Productions, in partnership with CBS Paramount which produced the show.

She has co-authored five books and also  publishes two magazines: O, The Oprah Magazine and O at Home.  In 2002 Fortune called O, the Oprah Magazine the most successful start-up ever in the industry. In 2005, Harpo Productions released another film adaptation of a famous American novel, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The made-for-television film Their Eyes Were Watching God was based upon a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks, and starred Halle Berry in the lead female role. On February 9, 2006 it was announced that Winfrey had signed a three-year, $55 million contract with XM Satellite Radio to establish a new radio channel. The channel, Oprah & Friends, features popular contributors to The Oprah Winfrey Show and O, The Oprah Magazine including Nate Berkus, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Bob Greene, Dr. Robin Smith and Marianne Williamson. Oprah & Friends began broadcasting on September 25, 2006, from a new studio at Winfrey’s Chicago headquarters. The channel broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week on XM Radio Channel 156.

Winfrey invested $40 million and much of her time establishing the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls near Johannesburg in South Africa. The school opened in January 2007. Nelson Mandela praised Winfrey for overcoming her own disadvantaged youth to become a benefactor for others and for investing in the future of South Africa.

Winfrey recently made a deal to extend her television talk show until the 2010–2011 season, by which time it will have been on the air for twenty-five years. On January 15, 2008, Winfrey and Discovery Communications announced plans to change Discovery Health Channel into a new channel called OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. OWN will debut at an unspecified time in 2009. It will be available in more than 70 million homes because of the present position of Discovery Health Channel. This was a non-cash deal with Winfrey turning control of her website Oprah.com to Discovery Communications.

Forbes’ international rich list has listed Winfrey as the world’s only black billionaire in 2004, 2005, and 2006 and as the first black woman billionaire in world history. According to Forbes, Winfrey is worth over $2.7 billion, as of September 2008, and has overtaken former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman as the richest self-made woman in America. At the end of the 20th century Life listed Winfrey as both the most influential woman and the most influential black person of her generation, and in a cover story profile the magazine called her “America’s most powerful woman”. Ladies Home Journal also ranked Winfrey number one in their list of the most powerful women in America and President Barack Obama has said she “may be the most influential woman in the country”.

SOURCE: Wikipedia, quotationspage.com

OPRAH WINFREY IN MOTION

GLENDA HATCHETT

“I just grew up in a household with someone always doing something for others. It wasn’t enough to just do something for your own family; you had to look for ways to do for others. My parents truly lived by the rule, ‘To whom much is given, much is required.’ So my role models were right there at hand.”

– GLENDA HATCHETT

Glenda A. Hatchett (born December 14, 1951) is the star of the television show, Judge Hatchett.

Hatchett was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in a low-income Atlanta neighborhood. Her mother, a teacher, was resourceful with the family’s limited resources and her father “instilled in her the feeling that there was nothing in the world she couldn’t do,” according to Black Living online.

She received her B.A. in political science from Mount Holyoke College in 1973 and law degree from Emory University School of Law in 1977. After graduating from Emory University School of Law and completing a coveted clerkship in the U.S. Federal Courts, Glenda Hatchett accepted a position at Delta Air Lines, as the company’s highest-ranking African-American woman. She served in dual roles as a senior attorney for Delta, litigating cases in federal courts throughout the country, and Manager of Public Relations, supervising global crisis management, and media relations for all of Europe, Asia and the United States.

In fact, her outstanding contributions were recognized by Ebony Magazine, which named Glenda Hatchett one of the “100 Best and Brightest Women in Corporate America.” She made the difficult decision to leave Delta Air Lines in order to accept an appointment as Chief Presiding Judge of the Fulton County, Georgia Juvenile Court.

Upon accepting the position, Glenda Hatchett became Georgia’s first African-American Chief Presiding Judge of a state court and the department head of one of the largest juvenile court systems in the country. Glenda Hatchett is a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College and has been recognized as a distinguished alumni and awarded an honorary degree by the college. She also attended Emory University School of Law and because of her commitment to excellence and service within the community, Glenda was awarded the Emory Medal, the highest award given to an alum by the university.

Hatchett’s interests extended beyond the bench. As an activist, she developed partnerships with organizations such as the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs and the Urban League to provide support to children and families after they have left her courtroom. She called on such Atlanta groups as the Junior League to create the Court Appointed Special Advocates and Guardian Ad Litem programs for children living in group homes or in foster care. As a juvenile court judge, Hatchett did not need statistics to tell her that truancy is the prime indication for future criminal activity. In 1990 Hatchett helped found the Truancy Project with the help of the Atlanta Bar Association and Alston & Bird, one of Atlanta’s largest law firms. Recognized as an expert on social and juvenile issues, Hatchett has appeared on such television programs as Nightline, Good Morning America, MacNeil/Lehrer, and on CNN.

In 1998, Hatchett made news when she went head-to-head with then-Governor Zell Miller. Hatchett refused to vacate the Fulton County juvenile court and move to a temporary facility until a new building was completed. She argued that the setup would create unreasonable hardships for her fellow judges, the 22,000 cases, and the 15,000 troubled young people who passed through an already difficult court system. Though she had been reappointed to her third four-year term by the state Supreme Court, Hatchett resigned several months after the incident. In a statement, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Chief Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore said Hatchett “has been a strong yet compassionate voice for children in the Fulton County Justice system. She will be missed.”

Though some could speculate that she stepped down from the Fulton bench to follow the allure of the television lights, the truth is she had decided to take a year off to spend time at home with her two sons, Christopher and Charles. Producers at Columbia/Tri-Star Television contacted her after she stepped down and proposed she star in her own show, an offer she turned down flat. “… if you had told me that this is what I would be doing after I left, I would have told you to get a grip,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Hatchett continued, “I have high regard for the work judges must do, and I was not interested in doing what I saw on TV or trivializing that in any way.”

She was swayed after meeting with television executives in Los Angeles, and was convinced that she could create a new and different kind of judge show. “I feel very strongly that this is a medium through which I can do some good stuff,” she said in the Journal-Constitution. “Otherwise it’s just one more court TV show, and I’m just not going to do that.” Hatchett maintained a residence in New York City and another in Atlanta, where she relied on her mother, Clemmie, and a housekeeper to hold down the fort while she was away taping her show.

Though her newest courtroom was a stage set in a studio off-Broadway in New York City, with a live audience instead of a jury, Hatchett’s commitment to her young charges remained as unwavering as it was in Fulton County. Hatchett has taken the responsibilities of the bench very seriously. Hatchett’s daily half-hour program competed with about a dozen other reality-based courtroom shows. Like most television judges, Hatchett settled family disputes and small-claims cases involving adults, but most of her shows focused on rebellious teens and their sometimes out-of-control parents, situations which Hatchett became adept at handling on the bench in Fulton.

Hatchett, unlike the other television judges, who are known for browbeating defendants and plaintiffs, has taken a more laid-back approach. “Many of the litigants on the shows, and some of the judges, hurl around crass, cynical, and demeaning comments,” writer Leah Ward Sears opined in Christian Science Monitor. “Foul language and insults are spewed and endured without so much as a blush.” But, Sears noted, “Judge Hatchett is respectful, reverent, stable, moderate, and able to find and apply the law. She also seems more than willing to find long-term solutions to the problems facing the folks appearing before her. But, sadly, far too many courtroom shows aren’t as responsible as Glenda Hatchett’s.”

Currently, Glenda Hatchett presides over the syndicated show, “Judge Hatchett” and is author of the national best-seller, “Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say” (HarperCollins).  She has previously served on the Board of Directors of Gap, Inc. the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), and The Service Master Company. Presently, Glenda Hatchett is a board member of the Atlanta Falcons Football Organization and serves on the Board of Advisors for Play Pumps International. She also serves on the Boys and Girls Clubs of America National Board of Governors.

She has received recognition and numerous awards, including being named the Outstanding Jurist of the Year by Atlanta affiliate of the National Bar Association, the Roscoe Pound Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, an Outstanding Community Service Award from Spelman College, and the Thurgood Marshall Award from the NAACP.

Judge Hatchett resides in Atlanta, Georgia with her two sons.

SOURCE: Wikipedia, glendahatchett.com, answers.com

GLENDA HATCHETT IN MOTION

CORETTA SCOTT KING

“I’m fulfilled in what I do… I never thought that a lot of money or fine clothes — the finer things of life — would make you happy. My concept of happiness is to be filled in a spiritual sense.”

-CORETTA SCOTT KING

Coretta Scott King (April 27, 1927 – January 30, 2006) was an American author and activist, and widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. Alongside her husband, Coretta Scott King helped lead the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Scott King’s most prominent role may have been in the years after her husband’s 1968 assassination; following Dr. King’s death, Mrs. King was responsible for finding a new leader of the civil rights movement.

Coretta Scott King was the second of three children born to Obediah “Obie” Scott (1899-1998) and Bernice McMurray Scott (1904-1996) in Perry County, Alabama. She had an older sister named Edythe, born in 1925, and a younger brother named Obediah Leonard, born in 1930. The Scotts owned a farm, which had been in the family since the American Civil War, but were not particularly wealthy. During the Great Depression the Scott children picked cotton to help earn money. Obie was the first black in their neighborhood to own a truck. He had a barber shop in their home. He also owned a lumber mill, which was burned down by white neighbors.

Though uneducated themselves, King’s parents intended for all of their children to be educated. King quoted her mother as having said, “My children are going to college, even if it means I only have but one dress to put on.” The Scott children attended a one room elementary school 5 miles (8 km) from their home and were later bussed to Lincoln Normal School, a high school in Marion, Alabama, 9 mi (14 km) from their home. The bus was driven by Bernice Scott, who bussed all the local black teenagers to the Marion high school, as it was the closest black high school.

King graduated valedictorian of Lincoln Normal School in 1945 and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Edythe Scott already attended Antioch as part of the Antioch Program for Interracial Education, which recruited non-white students and gave them full scholarships in an attempt to diversify the historically white campus. King said of her first college:

“Antioch had envisioned itself as a laboratory in democracy, but had no black students. (Edythe) became the first African American to attend Antioch on a completely integrated basis, and was joined by two other black female students in the fall of 1943. Pioneering is never easy, and all of us who followed my sister at Antioch owe her a great debt of gratitude^.”

She studied music with Walter Anderson, the first non-white chair of an academic department in a historically white college. King also became politically active, due largely to her experience of racial discrimination by the local school board. She became active in the nascent civil rights movement; she joined the Antioch chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the college’s Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. The board denied her request to perform her second year of required practice teaching at Yellow Springs public schools, for her teaching certificate King appealed to the Antioch College administration, which was unwilling or unable to change the situation in the local school system and instead employed her at the college’s associated laboratory school for a second year.

King transferred out of Antioch when she won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met Martin Luther King, Jr. In her early life King was as well known as a singer as she was as a civil rights activist, and often incorporated music into her civil rights work.

Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr., were married on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her mothers’ house; the ceremony was performed by King’s father, Martin Luther King, Sr.. After completing her degree in voice and violin at the New England Conservatory, she moved with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama in September 1954. The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955 – May 15, 2007), Martin Luther III (born October 23, 1957), Dexter Scott (born January 30, 1961), and Bernice Albertine (born March 28, 1963 ).

Coretta Scott King played an extremely important role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Martin wrote of her that, “I am indebted to my wife Coretta, without whose love, sacrifices, and loyalty neither life nor work would bring fulfillment. She has given me words of consolation when I needed them and a well-ordered home where Christian love is a reality.” However, Martin and Coretta did conflict over her public role in the movement. Martin wanted Coretta to focus on raising their four children, while Coretta wanted to take a more public leadership role.

Coretta Scott King took part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and took an active role in advocating for civil rights legislation. Most prominently, perhaps, she worked hard to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Established in 1968 by Coretta Scott King, The King Center is the official memorial dedicated to the advancement of the legacy and ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of a nonviolent movement for justice, equality and peace. She handed the reins as CEO and president of the King Center down to her son, Dexter Scott King (who still runs the center today).

Not long after her husband’s death on April 4, 1968, Coretta approached the African American entertainer and activist Josephine Baker to take her husband’s place as leader of The Civil Rights Movement. After many days of thinking it over Baker declined, stating that her twelve adopted children (known as the “rainbow tribe”) were “. . . too young to lose their mother.”

Coretta Scott King decided to take the helm of the movement herself after her husband’s assassination in 1968, although she broadened her focus to include women’s rights, LGBT rights, economic issues, world peace, and various other causes. As early as December 1968, she called for women to “unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war,” during a Solidarity Day speech.

As leader of the movement, Scott King founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She served as the center’s president and CEO from its inception until she passed the reigns of leadership to son Dexter Scott King. She published her memoirs, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1969. n 1970, the American Library Association began awarding a medal named for Coretta Scott King to outstanding African American writers and illustrators of children’s literature.

Coretta Scott King was also under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1968 until 1972. Her husband’s activities had been monitored during his lifetime. Documents obtained by a Houston, Texas television station show that the FBI worried that King would “tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement.” A spokesman for the King family said that they were aware of the surveillance, but had not realized how extensive it was.

After her husband was assassinated, she began attending a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to mark her husband’s birth every January 15 and fought for years to make it a national holiday. Murray M. Silver, an Atlanta attorney, made the appeal at the services on January 14, 1979. Coretta Scott King later confirmed that it was the “. . . best, most productive appeal ever…” King was finally successful in this in 1986, when Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.

Coretta Scott King attended the state funeral of Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1973, as a very close friend of the former president, himself a contributor to civil rights. She was also present when President Ronald Reagan signed legislation establishing Martin Luther King Day. During the 1980s, King reaffirmed her long-standing opposition to apartheid, participating in a series of sit-in protests in Washington, D.C. that prompted nationwide demonstrations against South African racial policies. In 1986, she traveled to South Africa and met with Winnie Mandela, while Mandela’s husband Nelson Mandela was still a political prisoner on Robben Island. She declined invitations from Pik Botha and moderate Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Upon her return to the United States, she urged Reagan to approve economic sanctions against South Africa.

By the end of her 77th year, King began experiencing health problems. Hospitalized in April 2005, she was diagnosed with a heart condition and was discharged on her 78th and final birthday. Later, King suffered several small strokes. On August 16 2005, she was hospitalized after suffering a stroke and a mild heart attack. Initially, she was unable to speak or move her right side. She was released from Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta on September 22, 2005, after regaining some of her speech and continued physiotherapy at home. Due to continuing health problems, King cancelled a number of speaking and traveling engagements throughout the remainder of 2005. On January 14, 2006, King made her last public appearance in Atlanta at a dinner honoring her husband’s memory

King died in the late evening of January 30, 2006at a rehabilitation center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, where she was undergoing holistic therapy for her stroke and advanced stage ovarian cancer. The main cause of King’s death, however, is believed to be respiratory failure due to complications from ovarian cancer. The clinic at which she died was called the Hospital Santa Monica, but was licensed as Clinica Santo Tomas. Newspaper reports indicated that it was not legally licensed to “perform surgery, take X-rays, perform laboratory work or run an internal pharmacy, all of which it was doing.” It was also founded, owned, and operated by San Diego resident, and highly controversial alternative medicine figure, Kurt Donsbach.^[12][13] Days after Mrs. King’s death, the Baja California, Mexico state medical commissioner, Dr. Francisco Vera, shut down the clinic.

King was the recipient of various honors and tributes both before and after her death. She received honorary degrees from many institutions, including Princeton University, Duke University, and Bates College. She was honored by both of her alma maters in 2004, receiving a Horace Mann Award from Antioch College and an Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory of Music.

SOURCE: Wikipedia, thinkexist.com

CORETTA SCOTT KING IN MOTION

TARAJI P. HENSON

” . . . the only way to live life is to live it. The only way to understand it is to look at it backwards. That’s why when you get older you’re so wise because you learned from all your mistakes . . . hopefully. But even if you don’t learn, you’re aware.”

– TARAJI P. HENSON

Taraji Penda Henson (born September 11, 1970) is an Academy Award-nominated American actress. She is best known for her roles as Yvette in Baby Boy (2001), Shug in Hustle and Flow (2005), and Queenie in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

Henson was born in Southeast Washington, DC, the daughter of Bernice, a manager at Woodward & Lothrop, and Boris Henson, a janitor. She is the great-granddaughter of Matthew Henson, one of the explorers who discovered the Geographic North Pole. Her first and middle name are of Swahili origin with her first name meaning “hope” and her middle name meaning “love.”

Henson attended Oxon Hill High School in Oxon Hill, MD. She first attended NC A&T, where she started a major in Electrical Engineering. She later transferred to Howard University. She worked two jobs — in the morning as a secretary at the Pentagon and in the night as a singing and dancing waitress on a dinner cruise ship – The Spirit of Washington- to pay for Howard University. She graduated with a degree in Theater Arts. Her son Marcel was born in 1995; his father, M.J. was murdered in 1997.

Henson has said in an interview that her philosophy in life is: “Love as often as you can. Dance like nobody’s watching. Travel. Eat. Try new foods because, like my character says, you never know what’s coming for you and when it’s time to let go, you got to let go.”

Ms. Henson has appeared in the films Four Brothers (2005), Talk To Me (2007), Smokin’ Aces (2007), Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys (2008),^[8] and Not Easily Broken (2009). In late 2008, she starred opposite Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Henson plays the role of Queenie, Benjamin’s mother, in a performance which has garnered critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She noted in an interview that, “Queenie is the embodiment of unconditional love.”

Henson has also been a cast member on several television shows, including Lifetime Television’s The Division and ABC’s Boston Legal for one season. Her recurring appearances in television include the character Angela Scott on the ABC television show “Eli Stone” in December 2008. She has guest-starred on several television shows, such as The WB show Smart Guy playing the role of Monique (1997–1998), the Fox Television show House in 2005 and the CBS Television show CSI in 2006.

Taraji  made her singing debut in Hustle & Flow; she provided the vocals for the Three 6 Mafia track “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp“. The song won an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2006, giving Three 6 the distinction of becoming the first Black hip-hop act to win in the category. Henson performed the song at the Oscars on March 5, 2006 with the group.

Henson has made several appearances on music videos. Henson appeared in the rapper Common‘s music video called Testify in 2005 as the wife of a soon to be convicted murderer. On December 5, 2008, Jamie Foxx premiered his new music video “Just Like Me” on TBS featuring Henson and T.I.

Taraji has also won numerous awards, including, an NAACP Image Award, a Gotham Award, Black Movie Award, BET Award, and Austin Film Critics Association Award.

SOURCES: Wikipedia, Shakefire.com

TARAJI P. HENSON IN MOTION

TRACY REESE

” . . . You can spend your whole day wondering about racism, but in most cases I find it is just better to ignore it–rise above racism.”

– TRACY REESE

Tracy Reese was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 12, 1964. Reese ranks as one of the fashion industry’s most successful African-American women whose realm is not relegated to the runway.

In a business where few designer labels seem to make it past their fifth anniversary, Reese has two clothing lines, TR and Plenty, which have been sold at Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, and other top retailers since the mid-1990s. Her company’s sales topped $12 million in 2003, and it launched a Plenty-label home line that same year and a footwear collection the following. Reese has an unerring eye for what women will buy. “I don’t want to design a skirt just because a skirt is needed to go with a particular jacket,” she told Joy Duckett Cain in Essence. “The skirt itself has to make you want to buy it.”

Her mother, Pat, was a modern dance teacher and enrolled Reese and her two sisters in weekend enrichment classes at the city’s art museum. The women in the family also liked to sew and would sometimes hold contests in which they raced to finish an outfit first. The loser had to pay for fabric, and it was here that Reese’s future career direction first emerged. “Although I generally won,” she joked in an interview with another Essence writer, Deborah Gregory, “I still spent every dime I had buying fabric.”

Reese attended Cass Technical High School, the elite public high school in the Detroit system. Students there focused on either the arts or academics and, as Reese recalled in another profile in Essence, “I actually thought I’d be an architect or an interior designer,” she told Vanessa Bush. Cass Tech, she continued, “had a fashion-design department, and I took a couple of classes, but I didn’t take it as my concentration because I thought it was kind of flaky.” But Reese was encouraged by a teacher to apply for a scholarship to a summer program for high-schoolers at New York City’s Parsons School of Design, one of the top U.S. colleges for future fashion-design professionals. She won a slot and enjoyed her summer experience, as well as New York City. After graduating from Cass Tech, she entered Parsons full-time.

Reese earned her design degree in 1984 and found a terrific job right away, as an apprentice to the French designer Martine Sitbon in New York City. She was assigned to Sitbon’s Arlequin line, and Sitbon encouraged her talents and even allowed her to sketch designs, a plumnovice. After two years on the job, Reese decided to strike out on her own, and her father Claud provided some of the start-up funds to launch her own line. “I thought I knew everything, but I learned quickly that I really didn’t and knew I had to learn more about business.” She could not maintain enough revenue to meet her production costs, and was forced to close her business in 1989. assignment for a venture even for an experienced fashion pro. She produced two collections, both of which were well liked by store buyers, and the line was sold in stores such as Barneys New York, Bergdorf Goodman, and Ann Taylor. Reese was just 23 years old at the time. “I had the energy and the drive to run the company,” she recalled in an interview with Julee Greenberg for WWD. “I thought I knew everything, but I learned quickly that I really didn’t and knew I had to learn more about business.” She could not maintain enough revenue to meet her production costs, and was forced to close her business in 1989.

A heartbroken Reese was able to land a job with Perry Ellis Portfolio thanks to Marc Jacobs, her former schoolmate at Parsons. At the time, Jacobs was the vice president of design for the Perry Ellis women’s line, and working at a thriving design firm–one which also had its share of financial ups and downs–was instrumental in teaching Reese the business basics she needed to learn. She also teamed with sportswear designer Gordon Henderson, an African American who had worked for Calvin Klein before launching his own line in the mid-1980s. Henderson, Reese has said, was an important mentor who shared much of his own experience with her about running a successful start-up line.

In the early 1990s, Reese won a head-designer job with new label called Magaschoni. It was owned by Magtague, a Hong Kong manufacturer that produced clothes for Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, and other well-known names. She was tapped to design Magaschoni’s bridge, or mid-priced line, and it was not that exciting of a job, she later confessed in the Essence showroom in a building on Seventh Avenue, the center of New York’s Garment District. The line had terrific sales at retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, but Reese was still determined to run her own business again someday.  “It was definitely not my style, but I knew this was the kind of company that could provide me with major backing of my own label,” she said, and once sales hit a respectable $4 million-mark for 1991, Magtague executives gave Reese her own label, “Tracy Reese for Magaschoni.”

She stepped closer to that goal in 1995, when she struck a deal with mass retailer The Limited for her own line. That gave her some of the start-up funds for her new label, Tracy Reese Meridian, a contemporary sportswear line that was launched in the spring of 1996. She had learned much from her previous experience a decade before, but still struggled to meet production costs, and finally her lawyer introduced her to an accountant with ties to textile manufacturers in his native India. Om Batheja invested funds in Meridian, which eventually became just “Tracy Reese.” They then launched a more informal, free-spirited line aimed at younger customers called Plenty. By 2002 Reese had opened a corporate showroom, and sales at her company had more than doubled over the previous year to $12 million. Her collections, which grew to include resort and swimwear lines, were shown during New York Fashion Week, the series of events at Bryant Park tents onto which the world’s fashion journalists and store buyers descend to preview the next season’s looks and place store orders. Reese’s designs collections earned good reviews, and have been featured on the pages of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Lucky.

In late 2004, Reese’s company launched Plenty Home, a line of bedding, curtains, and throws that used many of the same lushly patterned Indian textiles from the original Plenty line. It seemed a natural step, she explained to WWD‘s Greenberg. “When I’m designing the line,” said Reese, “I always think about how I would love to have sheets in these fabrics, curtains in these fabrics.” Shoes and accessories came next, both of which were launched in the fall of 2005.

Reese lives in the Murray Hill area of Manhattan, and is one of a handful of African-American women designers to run their own label. When asked if she had ever encountered racism in the industry, she did tell Essence writer Teri Agins that once she had a booth at fabric trade show in Paris, and was having a hard time with the event-management people. An American colleague saw what was happening, and stepped in to help. “I don’t know the exact reason they initially ignored me,” Reese told Agins. “It could have been racism or maybe it was just the French way. You can spend your whole day wondering about racism, but in most cases I find it is just better to ignore it-rise above racism.”

SOURCE: Answers.com

TRACY REESE IN MOTION

MAE JEMISON

Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American physician and a former NASA astronaut. She became the first African American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Mae Jemison on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Mae Carol Jemison was born in Jamaca Decatur, Alabama, the youngest child to Charlie Jemison and Dorothy Green. Her father was a maintenance supervisor for a charity organization, and her mother worked most of her career as an elementary school teacher of English and math at the Beethoven School in Chicago. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, when Jemison was 3 to take advantage of better educational opportunities there. Jemison says that as a young girl growing up in Chicago she always assumed she would get into space. “I thought, by now, we’d be going into space like you were going to work.” She said it was easier to apply to be a shuttle astronaut, “rather than waiting around in a cornfield, waiting for ET to pick me up or something.”

As a child growing up, Jemison learned to make connections to science by studying nature. “It sounds a little gross, but I was fascinated with pus,” Jemison said. Once when a splinter infected her thumb as a little girl, Jemison’s mother turned it into a learning experience. She ended up doing a whole project about pus. Jemison wouldn’t let anyone dissuade her from pursuing a career in science.”In kindergarten, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her a scientist,” Jemison says. “She said, ‘Don’t you mean a nurse?’ Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a nurse, but that’s not what I wanted to be.”

Jemison says she was inspired by Martin Luther King but to her King’s dream wasn’t an illusive fantasy but a call to action. “Too often people paint him like Santa — smiley and inoffensive,” says Jemison. “But when I think of Martin Luther King Jn. I think of attitude, audacity, and bravery.” Jemison thinks the civil rights movement was all about breaking down the barriers to human potential. “The best way to make dreams come true is to wake up,” says Jemison.

Jemison loved science growing up but she also loved the arts. Jemison began dancing at the age of 9. During high school she auditioned for the leading role of “Maria” in West Side Story.^[8] She didn’t get the part but Jemison’s dancing skills did get her into the line up as a background dancer. Later during her senior year in college, she was trying to decide whether to go to New York to medical school or become a professional dancer. Her mother told her, “You can always dance if you’re a doctor, but you can’t doctor if you’re a dancer.”

Jemison graduated from Chicago’s Morgan Park High School in 1973 and entered Stanford University at age 16. Jemison graduated from Stanford in 1977, receiving a B.S. in chemical engineering and fulfilling the requirements for a B.A. in African and Afro-American Studies. Jemison said that majoring in engineering as a black woman was difficult because race is always an issue in the United States. “Some professors would just pretend I wasn’t there. I would ask a question and a professor would act as if it was just so dumb, the dumbest question he had ever heard. Then, when a white guy would ask the same question, the professor would say, “That’s a very astute observation.” In an interview with the Des Moines Register in 2008 Jemison said that it was difficult to go to Stanford at 16, but thinks her youthful arrogance may have helped her. “I did have to say, ‘I’m going to do this and I don’t give a damn.'” 

Jemison obtained her Doctor of Medicine degree in 1981 from Cornell Medical College (now Weill Medical College of Cornell University) She interned at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center and later worked as a general practitioner.During medical school Jemison traveled to Cuba, Kenya and Thailand, to provide primary medical care to people living there. During her years at Cornell Medical College, Jemison took lessons in modern dance at the Alvin Ailey school. Jemison later built a dance studio in her home and has choreographed and produced several shows of modern jazz and African dance.

After completing her medical internship, Jemison joined the staff of the Peace Corps and served as a Peace Corps Medical Officer from 1983 to 1985 responsible for the health of Peace Corps Volunteers serving in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Jemison’s work in the Peace Corps included supervising the pharmacy, laboratory, medical staff as well as providing medical care, writing self-care manuals, and developing and implementing guidelines for health and safety issues.Jemison also worked with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) helping with research for various vaccines.

In 1985 Jemison returned to the United States, entered private practice in Los Angeles as a general practitioner with CIGNA Health Plans of California then did engineering courses. After the flight of Sally Ride in 1983, Jemison felt the astronaut program had opened up enough for her to apply. Jemison’s inspiration for joining NASA was African-American actress Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed Commander Uhura on Star Trek. Jemsion was turned down on her first application to NASA, but in 1987 Jemison was accepted on her second application and became one of the fifteen candidates accepted from over 2,000 applicants. “I got a call saying ‘Are you still interested?’ and I said ‘Yeah’,” says Jemison.

Her work with NASA before her shuttle launch included launch support activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and verification of Shuttle computer software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL).

Jemison flew her only space mission from September 12 to 20, 1992 as a Mission Specialist on STS-47. “The first thing I saw from space was Chicago, my hometown,” said Jemison. “I was working on the middeck where there aren’t many windows, and as we passed over Chicago, the commander called me up to the flight deck. It was such a significant moment because since I was a little girl I had always assumed I would go into space,” Jemison added. “When I grew up in the 1960s the only American astronauts were men. Looking out the window of that space shuttle, I thought if that little girl growing up in Chicago could see her older self now, she would have a huge grin on her face.”

Because of her love of dance and as a salute to creativity, Jemison took a poster from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company along with her on the flight. Jemison also took several small art objects from West African countries to symbolize that space belongs to all nations. Also on this flight, according to Bessie Coleman biographer Doris L. Rich, Ms. Jemison also took into orbit a photo of Bessie Coleman–Coleman was the very first Afro-American woman to ever fly an airplane. Tragically, Coleman died after falling from her Curtiss Biplane in 1926.

STS-47 was a cooperative mission between the United States and Japan that included 44 Japanese and United States life science and materials processing experiments. The international crew was divided into red and blue teams for around the clock operations. Jemison was the co-investigator for the bone cell research experiment that investigated how space flight causes changes in bone cell function to better understand why bones become weaker during space flight. Jemison logged 190 hours, 30 minutes, 23 seconds in space.

Jemison resigned from NASA in March 1993. “I left NASA because I’m very interested in how social sciences interact with technologies,” says Jemison. “People always think of technology as something having silicon in it. But a pencil is technology. Any language is technology. Technology is a tool we use to accomplish a particular task and when one talks about appropriate technology in developing countries, appropriate may mean anything from fire to solar electricity.” Although Jemison’s departure from NASA was amicable, NASA was not thrilled to see her leave. “NASA had spent a lot of money training her; she also filled a niche, obviously, being a woman of color,” says Hiram Hickam, a training manager for NASA’s space station efforts. In an interview with the Des Moines Register on October 16, 2008 Jemison said that she was not driven to be the “first black woman to go into space.” “I wouldn’t have cared less if 2,000 people had gone up before me … I would still have had my hand up, ‘I want to do this.'”

In 1993 Jemison started her own company, the Jemison Group that researches, markets, and develops science and technology for daily life. In 1993, Jemison also appeared on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. LeVar Burton found out, from a friend that Jemison was a big “Star Trek” fan and asked her if she’d be interested in being on the show, and she said, “Yeah!!”The result was an appearance in the episode “Second Chances.” Jemison has the distinction of being the first real astronaut ever to appear on Star Trek.

In 1994, Jemison founded the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence and named the foundation in honor of her mother. “My parents were the best scientists I knew,” Jemison said, “because they were always asking questions. “One of the projects of Jemison’s foundation is The Earth We Share (TEWS), an international science camp where students, ages 12 to 16, work to solve current global problems, like “How Many People Can the Earth Hold” and “Predict the Hot Public Stocks of The Year 2030.” The four-week residential program helps students build critical thinking skills and learn to solve solving problems through an experiential curriculum. Camps have been held at Dartmouth College, Colorado School of Mines, Choate Rosemary Hall and other sites around the United States. TEWS was introduced internationally to high school students in day programs in South Africa and Tunisia. In 1999, TEWS was expanded overseas to adults at the Zermatt Creativity and Leadership Symposium held in Switzerland.

In 1999 Jemison founded BioSentient Corp and has been working to develop a portable device that allows mobile monitoring of the involuntary nervous system. Biosentient has obtained the license to commercialize NASA’s space-age technology known as Autogenic Feedback Training Exercise (AFTE), a patented technique that uses biofeedback and autogenic therapy to allow patients to monitor and control their physiology as a possible treatment for anxiety and stress related disorders. “BioSentient is examining AFTE as a treatment for anxiety, nausea, migraine and tension headaches, chronic pain, hypertension and hypotension, and stress-related disorders,” says Jemison.

In 2007, diagnostic test provider Gen-Probe Inc. announced that they would not accept the resignation of Jemison from their Board of Directors. Jemison had failed to be re-elected to the board in a vote of the shareholders of the company at the company’s May 31 annual stockholders meeting. The company said it believes Jemison’s failed re-election was the result of a recommendation by advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services that shareholders vote against her due to her poor attendance at board meetings. Gen-Probe determined that Jemison’s two absences in 2006 were for valid reasons and said Jemison had attended all regular and special board and committee meetings since September.

On February 17, 2008 Jemison was the featured speaker for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. Jemison paid tribute to Alpha Kappa Alpha by carrying the sorority’s banner with her on her shuttle flight. Jemison’s space suit is a part of the sorority’s national traveling Centennial Exhibit. Jemison is an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a sorority founded in 1908 at Howard University to address the social issues of the time and promote scholarship among black women.

The Des Moines Register interviewed Jemison on October 16, 2008 and reported that she has mixed feelings about the term “role model”. “Here’s the deal: Everybody’s a role model. … Role models can be good or bad, positive or negative.” Jemison is an active public speaker who appears before private and public groups promoting science and technology as well as providing an inspirational and educational message for young people.

Jemison is a Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and was a professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College from 1995 to 2002. Jemison continues to advocate strongly in favor of science education and getting minority students interested in science. She sees science and technology as being very much a part of society, and African-Americans as having been deeply involved in U.S. science and technology from the beginning.

SOURCE: Wikipedia