KIMORA LEE SIMMONS

“People should know whatever it is you love to do. I am a living testament to the fact that you can do it.  You can do whatever it is you put your mind to and you can do it in stilettos.”

– KIMORA LEE SIMMONS

Kimora Lee Simmons (born Kimora Lee Perkins on May 4, 1975) is an American model, author, and the president and creative director for Phat Fashions. Formerly creative director of Baby Phat, Simmons became CEO of Phat Fashions after her ex-husband Russell Simmons stepped down.

Simmons was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She is of Asian and African American descent. Her mother is Joanne Perkins (who was adopted by an American serviceman during the Korean War and renamed Joanne Perkins), who now goes by the Japanese name “Kyoko”, which she asserts was her “full blooded Japanese” mother’s name. Her father is African American Vernon Whitlock Jr., who previously worked as a federal marshal, a social security administrator, and then a barber in St. Louis.

Growing up in the north St. Louis suburb of Florissant, Missouri, Simmons was very self-conscious about being a “geek.” Other children called her “chinky giraffe” because of her height and Asian ancestry. By the time she was 10 years old, she was 5-feet 8-inches tall, and became the target of schoolyard taunts and teasing. With no Asian population in her community, she had difficulty fitting in with the mostly black student body who shunned her because of her Asian ancestry. Hoping to boost her confidence, Simmons’ mother enrolled her daughter in a modeling class when she was eleven years old.

Two years later, at the age of thirteen, she was discovered by Marie-Christine Kollock (a representative for seminal Paris Agency Glamour) at a Model Search in St. Louis (organized by Kay Mitchell) and sent to Paris. Simmons was awarded an exclusive modeling contract with Chanel and just after her thirteenth birthday, to work under the tutelage of famed Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld.

She quickly gained attention in the fashion world when Lagerfeld closed his haute couture show with Simmons, who strutted down the runway decked out as a child bride. “Everything people thought was weird about me before,” Simmons told People Weekly, “was now good”. By age 14, her stature had grown to a height of six feet, and she became a self-professed muse for Lagerfeld. She and three other Lagerfeld models (Bernadette Jurkowski, Shoshanna Fitzgerald and Olga Sobolewska) were dubbed “the four Karlettes”.

On December 20, 1998, she married Russell Simmons and lived in the town of Saddle River, New Jersey. They had two daughters – Ming Lee (born January 2000) and Aoki Lee (born August 2002). Both Ming Lee and Aoki Lee model for Baby Phat Kids Collection.

In 2004 Russell Simmons sold Phat Farm to Kellwood Company for $140 million. When Russell stepped down as CEO of Phat Fashions LLC in September 2007, Kimora — who was already Creative Director of Baby Phat — was promoted by Kellwood to President and Creative Director of Phat Fashions. It is Simmons’ goal to fashion Baby Phat, launched in 1999, into an “aspirational lifestyle brand.” She also stated she wants to get more Baby Phat into discount stores such as TJ Maxx and Goodwill.

A book written by Simmons, Fabulosity: What It Is and How to Get It, was published by HarperEntertainment in February 2006. The book is set to function as a ‘lifestyle manual’ on everything from spirituality and finances to fashion and beauty. As shown on her TV show, she makes all of her executives read her book.

In February 2007, Kimora Lee Simmons Barbie doll was launched, created under the direction of Simmons. She has also launched four perfumes for women: Goddess, Golden Goddess, Seductive Goddess and recently, Baby Phat Fabulosity.

She has appeared in Ginuwine’s video for “In Those Jeans” with model Devon Aoki and Usher’s video for “Nice & Slow”. She has also appeared in the motion picture Beauty Shop along with Queen Latifah. Kimora Lee is also a playable character in the fighting game Def Jam: Fight for NY. She has also appeared in Waist Deep. She was one of the judges in America’s Next Top Model for season one. Simmons has also been a co-host of Sony Television‘s syndicated talk show Life & Style.

By March 2007, Simmons was dating two time Oscar-nominated actor and model Djimon Hounsou and in late March officially filed for divorce from her husband. On August 5, 2007 her reality TV show premiered on Style Network. Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane chronicles her daily life and routine, along with her relationship with her two daughters Ming Lee and Aoki Lee Simmons. It now re-airs on E! Entertainment Television. Season two aired on April 20, 2008 on the Style network. On October 3, 2008, s biographical documentary TV series (E! True Hollywood Story) documented her experiences as an entrepreneur, author, model, and mother. In January 2009, US Magazine reported that Kimora and Hounsou are expecting a child together in 2009. Kimora and Russell got officially divorced on January 28, 2009.

She established the Kimora Lee Simmons Scholarship Fund at her high school alma mater in St. Louis to provide college tuition support for academically successful girls with financial needs and is an active member of youth advocacy organizations including Amfar, The G&P Foundation, Keep a Child Alive, Hetrick-Martin Institute and Rush Philanthropic where she is on the Board of Directors. The mayor of St. Louis presented Simmons the key to the city and named March 18, 2008 “Kimora Day” in St. Louis.

SOURCE: Wikipedia,Tampabay.com

KIMORA LEE SIMMONS IN MOTION

SISTER SOULJAH

Sister Souljah (born as Lisa Williamson in 1964, Bronx, New York) is an American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer. She is best known for Bill Clinton’s criticism of her remarks about race in the United States during the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton’s well-known repudiation of her comments led to what is now known in politics as a Sister Souljah moment.

Souljah was the executive director of Daddy’s House Social Programs Inc., a not-for-profit corporation for urban youth, financed by Sean Combs and Bad Boy Entertainment.

She recounts in her autobiography that she was born into poverty and raised on welfare. At age 10 she moved with her family to the suburbs of Englewood, New Jersey, a wealthy suburb of New Jersey with tree-lined streets, which is also home to other famous Black artists such as George Benson, Eddie Murphy, and Regina Belle.

Souljah disliked what American students were being taught in school systems across America. She felt that the school systems purposely left out the African origins of civilization. Also, she criticized the absence of a comprehensive curriculum of African American history, which she felt all students, black and white need to learn and understand in order to be properly educated.. She felt that she was being taught very little of her history, since the junior high school and high school left out Black history, art, and culture. The Englewood school district took an active role recruiting Black educators and administrators.

Souljah took a very active and special interest in learning everything she could about African history, which she felt was left out of the education curriculum in this country purposely: “I supplemented my education in the white American school system by reading African history, which was intentionally left out of the curriculum of American students.^” While at Dwight Morrow High School, a school that had a relatively even distribution of Blacks, Latinos, and Jewish student enrollment, and a majority Black administration during the time of her studies, from 1978 to 1981. She was a legislative intern in the House of Representatives.Souljah was also the recipient of several honors during her teenage years. She won the American Legion’s Constitutional Oratory Contest, a scholarship to attend Cornell University’s Advanced Summer Program.

Throughout college she traveled, visiting Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Finland, and Russia. Her academic accomplishments were reinforced with first-hand experiences as she worked in a medical center in Mtepa Tepa, a village located in Zimbabwe, and assisted refugee children from Mozambique. She also traveled to South Africa and Zambia. She graduated from Rutgers University with degrees in American History and African Studies. She became a well-known and outspoken voice on campus and active writer for the school newspaper. One of her noted campus initiatives was spearheading a campaign to bring Jesse Jackson to Rutgers to speak against the university’s controversial investments in South Africa at the time, when divestiture from apartheid-era South Africa was a heated political issue. Sister Souljah was part of the Rutgers Coalition for Divestment which successfully organized the Rutgers University administration to divest 3.6 million dollars in their financial holding companies doing business in racist pre-Nelson Mandela, South Africa. Sister Souljah and students across the state of New Jersey also pressured and organized a successful campaign to get the state of New Jersey to divest more than 1 Billion dollars of it’s financial holdings in apartheid South Africa.

In 1985, during her senior year at Rutgers University, she was offered a job by Reverend Benjamin Chavis of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. She spent the next three years developing, organizing, and financing programs such as African Survival Camp, a 6-week summer sleep-away camp in Enfield, North Carolina. She also became the organizer of the National African Youth-Student Alliance and outspoken voice against Racially Motivated Violence in cases such as Howard Beach, Yusuf Hawkins etc.

Sister Souljah became a controversial figure during the 1990s as a frequent guest on American televisions and radio talk shows. Sister Souljah became known for being unrelenting in promoting and protecting the interest of African People in America, the Caribbean and in the diaspora. Since she was a young intelligent, popular, and stylish, her frank talk on race issues became popular across the nation.

She appeared on several tracks as a featured guest with the hip-hop group Public Enemy, and she became a full member of the group when Professor Griff left the group after allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks. In 1992, she released her only album, 360 Degrees of Power. Both of her videos, “The Final Solution: Slavery’s Back in Effect” and “The Hate that Hate Produced,” were banned by MTV because of their inflammatory imagery. Her album sold only 27,000 copies, and so her label, Epic/SME Records, dropped her. It is believed that the album sold poorly due to public backlash from her comments in response to the beating of Rodney King, but it also received terrible reviews in the music press.

In 1995, at the age of 31, she published a volume of autobiography titled No Disrespect (Times/Crown/Random House). In 1999, she made her debut as a novelist with The Coldest Winter Ever (Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-671-02578-3). The latter was praised by The New Yorker. An indirect sequel of the novel, titled Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (Atria/Simon & Schuster), originally scheduled for October 14, 2008, was published November 4, 2008.^[8] Another novel, Porsche Santiaga, is due in 2010.Sister Souljah is a New York Times Bestselling author. Her novel Midnight, entered the New York Times list at #7 its first week out and remains there as of February 2009.

She also does occasional pieces for Essence Magazine and has written for The New Yorker.