Akilah Davis, a local news anchor chose Juneteenth to share her journey to hair freedom and to unveil her locs because she wants to be true to herself on the job. She hopes to inspire women and little girls struggling to embrace their roots. It's hair freedom she's always wanted.
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| Morgan School Charlotte North Carolina |
Grants from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund advance ongoing preservation activities for historic places such as homes, museums, and landscapes that represent African American cultural heritage. To date, the program has supported 242 historic African American places and invested more than $20 million to help preserve significant sites imbued with Black life, humanity, and cultural heritage.
With amounts ranging from $50,000 to $155,000, these Action Fund grants support preservation work in four primary areas: Capital Projects, Organizational Capacity Building, Project Planning, and Programming and Interpretation. This year’s grant announcement also includes three grant programs:
National Grant Program
Conserving Black Modernism
HBCU Cultural Heritage Stewardship Initiative
Read the list of grant recipients here: SavingPlaces.Org
Pope Francis has advanced the sainthood cause of Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, a Black religious sister who founded the country’s first African American religious congregation in Baltimore in 1829.
The recognition of Lange’s heroic virtue and the advancement of her cause from servant of God to venerable was announced by the Vatican in a decree signed on June 22. The Church will now need to approve a miracle attributed to her intercession before she can be beatified.
Elizabeth Lange, as she was named, immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the early 1800s. Recognizing the lack of education for the children of her fellow Black immigrants, with a friend she established St. Frances Academy in her own home and with her own money to offer free schooling to Baltimore’s African American children.
With the support of Baltimore Archbishop James Whitfield, she founded a school for “girls of color” and then the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first religious community for women of African descent.
The congregation’s purpose was to provide religious and general education to African Americans. Lange and the other sisters also responded to other needs they encountered over time, including taking in orphans and widows, educating freed slaves, nursing people dying during the cholera epidemic, and cleaning at St. Mary’s Seminary.
Lange took the religious name of Mary and served as the congregation’s superior general for two terms.
Lange founded the Oblate Sisters more than three decades before the Civil War and its resulting abolition of slavery within the United States. Although Maryland supported the Union, it was a slave state when Lange arrived there.
“Mother Mary Lange practiced faith to an extraordinary degree. In fact, it was her deep faith which enabled her to persevere against all odds,” the Mother Mary Lange Guild notes in an online biography. “To her Black brothers and sisters, she gave of herself and her material possessions until she was empty of all but Jesus, whom she shared generously with all by being a living witness to his teaching.”
Lange died on Feb. 3, 1882, at the age of 92 or 93, and her cause for beatification was opened over a century later, in 1991, by Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler.
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers special remarks during CNN’s second annual “Juneteenth: A Global Celebration for Freedom” concert.
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers special remarks during CNN’s second annual “Juneteenth: A Global Celebration for Freedom” concert. pic.twitter.com/h3eBUHo3Gj
— CNN (@CNN) June 20, 2023
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| USS PHILADELPHIA |
“This simply was the right decision,” said Parker. “I believe acknowledging and addressing past injustice only makes us stronger, because it brings us ever closer to the ideals upon which our nation was founded.”
The ‘Philadelphia 15’ were fifteen African-American Sailors assigned to USS Philadelphia who, in October 1940, authored a letter published in the Pittsburgh Courier describing the racial discrimination, abuse, and inability to advance into other, higher-ranking positions. They urged African-American mothers not to let their sons join the Navy and were subsequently discharged because of the letter with “bad conduct discharges,” or “undesirable” charges.
After thorough review of the case by leadership within the DON, it was deemed appropriate and necessary to correct the record and upgrade the discharges of these Sailors.
“The record contained evidence that suggested the race of these sailors may have been a factor that impermissibly motivated some of the decisions made by the Navy regarding these sailors,” said Bobby Hogue, Principal Deputy ASN M&RA. “That was enough for me to initiate the case.”
If any family members of the Philadelphia 15 would like to reach out to the DON for future notifications on the topic or more information, please reach out to PTGN_CHINFOnewsdesk@navy.mil or 703-697-5342.
Members of the Philadelphia 15:
Ernest Bosley, Arval Perry Cooper, Shannon Goodwin, Theodore Hansbrough, Byron Johnson, Floyd Owens, John Ponder, James Ponder, James Porter, George Rice, Otto Robinson, Floyd St. Clair, Fred Tucker, Robert Turner, and Jesse Watford.
