‘Black First’ new book by Jessie Carney Smith
Long and slow. That’s how you’d describe every line you’ve ever stepped into.
Don’t you hate that? You’re waiting in line and you see a chance to go to a shorter queue so you change lanes. Suddenly, the line you just left looks like the Indianapolis speedway. And you know what happens if you switch again…
There are definite advantages to being first. In the new book “Black Firsts” by Jessie Carney Smith, you’ll find information on tens of thousands of folks who’ve gone before you – in a good way.
In your lifetime, you’ve seen a lot of big milestones: the first Olympic gold-winning African American gymnast; the first black head of National Security and, of course, Barack Obama as the first black U.S. President.
But Mr. Obama wasn’t the first African American to make White House news.
Read this book and you’ll see that pianist Thomas Greene Bethune was the first black artist to perform there in 1858. A baby named Thomas was the first black child born at the White House in 1806. Booker T. Washington was the first black American to be entertained at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue , and Sammy Davis, Jr. was the first known black entertainer to sleep there.
Speaking of entertainment, Ray Charles was the first person of any race to perform at the Georgia Assembly. This book will also tell you who was the first black singer to appear on TV and when the first recording of black music happened.
You’ll learn that your grandma’s favorite cartoon was drawn by America ’s first black cartoonist. Both Dave Chapelle and Chris Rock broke comedy records in this century. America ’s first black insurance company opened its doors in 1810 and the first black-owned car dealership opened 160 years later. The first known black bookseller started his business in 1834. The world’s first black professional model walked the catwalk in the 1950s and the first black Playboy bunny hopped on the scene in 1965. A black chef was reportedly the creator of potato chips. America ’s first black Mormon elder gained the priesthood in 1836.
And America ’s first black Millionaire lived in New Orleans in 1890.
It’s hard to imagine anything missing from “Black Firsts.” It’s so hard, in fact, that author Jessie Carney Smith challenges readers to find and notify her of other milestones in Black history – but not just in North American black history. You’ll find entries here of things that happened to African Americans, as well as black firsts in other countries around the world, too.
http://www.communityjournal.net/35773/
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I bookmarked this review some time ago, and I have the book on my "wish list!"
In 2008, the manuscript finally landed on the desk of Kate Medina, the associate publisher and executive editor of Random House, who worked on it with Ms. Wilkerson for the best part of another year. The book was long — it’s 622 pages in the published edition — and proved difficult to cut, so Ms. Medina finally went to the production department and asked if it could be printed on thinner paper. “I wanted it to look available,” she said. “I knew that if we could just get people to start it, this was a book they were going to want to read.”
Part of what made the book hard to cut was its unusual structure. “The Warmth of Other Suns” is neither traditional history nor oral history. “I could have done a Studs Terkel, but I didn’t want that,” Ms. Wilkerson said. “I loved and respected Studs, but I didn’t want the reader to be able to pick and choose what to read.” Instead the book, influenced both by Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and the films of Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh, rotates in a novelistic way among three main characters whose stories are interspersed with broader, more general inter-chapters.
The characters are each from a different decade of the migration, which lasted roughly from World War I to the 1970s, and each followed a one of the migration’s three main geographical currents. Ida Mae Gladney, a Mississippi sharecropper’s wife, left for Chicago in 1937 after her husband’s cousin was beaten by white planters for a theft he didn’t commit. George Starling, a Florida citrus picker, moved to New York in 1945 after learning that the growers were planning to lynch him for trying to organize the pickers. And Dr. Robert Foster, the book’s most vivid and complicated character, drove to Los Angeles from Louisiana in 1953 in search of glamour and a chance to practice medicine free from the caste and color restrictions of the South. He wound up as personal physician to Ray Charles, who wrote the song “Hide Nor Hair” about how the doctor stole his woman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/books/09wilkerson.html
The author looks to be a lovely woman--with excellent taste in pets, too!
Great minds think alike, it would seem!
and the photo!
Love that book!
