Maya Angelou explains her recent health issue.

American icon and poet Maya Angelou had to back out of a Major League Baseball Civil Rights Game ceremony due to health issues. She left a post on her Facebook page giving an explanation for not being able to attend.

On her Facebook page she posted:

Post by Maya Angelou.

While she does not give any details on what the illness was it is great to read that she is getting better each day.

George Cook AfricanAmericanReports.com

Herb Jeffries the black singing cowboy dies at the age of 100

Herb Jeffries, the first black singing cowboy of the movies, who starred in such 1930s films as Harlem on the Prairie and The Bronze Buckaroo, has died, the Los Angeles Times reported. He was 100.

Jeffries, who later became a recording star as a member of Duke Ellington's orchestra, died of heart failure Sunday at West Hills (Calif.) Hospital & Medical Center, Raymond Strait, who had been working with the actor on his autobiography, told the newspaper.

Read more: Herb Jeffries, Pioneering Black Singing Cowboy of the Movies, Dies at 100

Nigerian defense chief says abducted girls located

Nigeria's military has located nearly 300 school girls abducted by Islamic extremists but fears using force to try to free them could get them killed, the country's chief of defense said Monday.

Air Marshal Alex Badeh told demonstrators supporting the much criticized military that Nigerian troops can save the girls. But he added, "we can't go and kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back."

He spoke to thousands of demonstrators who marched to Defense Ministry headquarters in Abuja, the capital. Many were brought in on buses, indicating it was an organized event.

Mp>Asked by reporters where they had found the girls, Badeh refused to elaborate.

Read more: Nigerian defense chief says abducted girls located

Former slaves started what is now known as Memorial Day

A black historian David W. Blight has discovered evidence that the first celebration of what came to be known as Memorial Day was conducted by former slaves. Over time that history was whitewashed to give others credit for the origins of Memorial Day. Oddly enough many of those those sources that credit others with the creation of Memorial Day mention the "Decoration Day" ceremony of the former slaves giving Blight's claims same credence.David W. Blight teaches American History at Yale University where he is the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Blights' blog on this topic:

...Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing "John Brown's Body." The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens' choir sang "We'll Rally around the Flag," the "Star-Spangled Banner," and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: "for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession."

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders' republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers' valor and sacrifice.

Coalition Of Black Pastors Speaks Out Against Gay Marriage

*Note: I strongly oppose the actions of this pastors. I don't see how a group that knows discrimination first hand can condone it being done to another group. But my opposition does not mean that this is not newsworthy. George Cook AfricanAmericanReports.com.

A coalition of black pastors have condemned gay marriage, saying it's incorrect to compare the fight for equal marriage rights to the civil rights movement. The Christian, conservative Thomas More Law Center filed an amicus brief in Michigan's gay marriage trial Wednesday on behalf of 110 black pastors from Detroit, elsewhere in Michigan, and Ohio. Watch more on this story below: