HBO will air ‘The Black List: Volume 3 tonight to celebrate Black History Month.
Photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sandersand critic Elvis Mitchell continue their exploration of what it means to be African-American today with the third volume of their acclaimed series The Black List.
The new edition features interviews with Oscar-winning actress and TV host Whoopi Goldberg, Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter John Legend, United Negro College Fund President Dr. Michael Lomax, actor Hill Harper, fashionmodel Beverly Johnson, CEO of BET Debra L. Lee, actor LaTanya Richardson and director-producer Lee Daniels.
Tags: African Americans, Black history month
Barbara Cheives, president and CEO of Converge & Associates Consulting, will host an interview series on WXEL public radio for the month of February. She will interview the featured speakers of The Spady Museum’s lecture series for Black History Month.
The interviews will air on WXEL every Friday in February during the show ‘Arts and Attractions Alive”. The show airs at 12:30 p.m. If you are local, the station is 90.7 FM. If not, you can hear it live at http://www.wxel.org/
Ms. Cheives’ first guest is nationally recognized jazz/blues recording artist Avery Sommers. At the Spady Ms. Sommers will discuss her career highlights and memories of performances with Nell Carter, Burt Reynolds and other legendary stars in a lecture on entertainment.
Be sure to to tune in and click here for the most up to date list of Black History Month Events.
Tags: Black history month
Greetings Palm Beach County,
The Palm Beach Association of Black Journalists and The Palm Beach Post are pleased to bring you Black Palm Beach, a blog about black history in Palm Beach County.
There are those who will question the necessity of this blog, contending that such mediums only serve to further separate us and discriminate against non-blacks.
We believe that until black history becomes a regular part of mainstream American history, there still is a need to tell our stories.
Though PBABJ will host the blog, it belongs to the community. We want to share your stories and memories of black life in Palm Beach County and South Florida. And, occasionally, we’ll bring you information about news and events outside our area, too!
If you have a story, memory, video or photo you’d like us to post, please contact Rhonda Swan at rhonda_swan@pbpost.com or call her at 561-820-4840. If you have an event you’d like us to list, please contact Sheaon Reid at sheaon_reid@pbpost.com or call her at 561-820-4401.
Roosevelt High School Homecoming Parade in West Palm Beach circa 1950s. Courtesy/Ineria Hudnell
Tags: African Americans, Black history month
A half century ago this week, a former maid who’d dabbled in writing was buried in a Fort Pierce pauper’s grave.
It’s only in the past few decades that Zora Neale Hurston earned the adulation she never got in life.
Hurston wrote with passion and poetry and humor about the joys and turmoils of blacks living and dying far beyond the main roads of central and south Florida.
“Miss Zora’’ rose to prominence, was gradually ostracized by her own people and died destitute in Fort Pierce, only to be reborn only as an artist can be — through her work.
She was raised in Eatonville, north of Orlando. It was America’s first all-black town when it was founded in 1887.
Her mother once said, “You jump at de sun.”
Her mother died and her father, a tenant farmer and pastor, handed her off to relatives. She was a maid, graduated high school, and went to Howard University in Washington.
She was 30 when she wrote her first story in 1921 but lied about her age by a decade, making her an undeserving prodigy. She moved to New York in 1925 and was swept up in the Harlem Renaissance.
Her career climaxed with 1937’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a swirling trail of a woman’s journey to independence that climaxes with the Glades’ great 1928 hurricane.
But fame didn’t always translate to fortune; she never made $1,000 on a book and once was a secretary to novelist Fanny Hurst.
Two marriages failed.
Peers accused her of Uncle Tomism after she became a political conservative, decrying integration.
Her last novel, Seraph on the Suwannee, was published in 1948.
She was a maid, a substitute teacher, and a columnist for the black weekly Fort Pierce Chronicle.
She died broke in a Fort Pierce nursing home in 1960. Friends donated for her funeral.
In 1973, Alice Walker (The Color Purple) paid for a marker for her grave.
Eatonville’s Zora Neale Hurston Center was opened in 1987, a monument to the woman who prophesied: “When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world.’’
Special thanks to Post staff writer Scott Eyman.
The gravesite of Zora Neale Hurston at the Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Fort Pierce has a marker paid for by author Alice Walker. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: 1928 Hurricane, African Americans, Black history month, black icons, celebrities
Last week we wrapped up Black History Month with the story of the Sunset, the lounge in northwest West Palm Beach that, in the 1940s and 1950s, drew top bands and hundreds of patrons, both black and white.
Count Basie and his orchestra perform at the Sunset Club in an undated photo. The club drew top bands and hundreds of patrons in the 1940s and 1950s. But in 1978, owners Dennis and Thelma Starks turned the cavernous second floor into apartments and rented out the first floor to a social fraternity.The downstairs lounge continued to draw the likes of James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner and eventually went disco. It still operates as a bar. New owner Vera Kaminester, who bought the property in 2006 for $446,622, says she’s waiting for the city to move on plans for a jazz district and the economy to recover before putting a million dollars into renovations to restore the Sunset to its former, hot and bopping glory. (Photo courtesy of Thelma Starks)
Integration killed the Sunset. Once performers could play where they wanted, and people could watch where they wanted, the club’s fame dwindled.
In 1978, owners Dennis and Thelma Starks turned the cavernous second floor into apartments.
Dennis retired and rented out the first floor to a social fraternity.
The downstairs lounge continued to draw the likes of James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner and eventually went disco. It still operates as a bar.
As decades passed, the neighborhood deteriorated.
Dennis Starks died in 1987; “his grave is worn out from him turning over,” Starks said in 2006.
The 75-plus-year-old lime-green and fuchsia building stands like a dinosaur a few blocks northwest of the Palm Beach County Courthouse.
In 2003, consultants for the city suggested creating a jazz district, with the Sunset as its keystone.
Three years later, the city included the idea in a planned $16.2 million renovation of the neighborhood.
There’s not been much movement since then, but the city says it’s now trying to gear up.
In 2006, records show, investors Vera and Joel Kaminester bought the property for $446,622. They said they expected to spend about $1 million to buy and restore the Sunset.
Vera Kaminester now says she’s waiting for the city to move and the economy to recover.
Thelma Starks, who spent most of her life working with the American Red Cross, died Aug. 24, 2008, at 91.
In 2006 Thelma Starks recalled the club she and husband Dennis ran in its heyday. Click the image below to listen to her recollections and see historic photos:
Read more about the Sunset:
Historic preservation project proposed for once-thriving black neighborhood, The Palm Beach Post, May 19, 2010.
Thelma Starks, black pioneer and owner of the Sunset Lounge, dead at 91, The Palm Beach Post, Aug. 28, 2008
Buyers predict sunshine for Sunset, The Palm Beach Post, March 16, 2006.
Can Sunset lounge reclaim glory?, The Palm Beach Post, Feb. 14, 2006.
Tags: African Americans, Black history month, Sunset Lounge
