Word: africanizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...list, which will be published in the magazine's January issue, touts the top 50 schools "where African Americans are most likely to succeed." Black Enterprise compiled the rankings, its first ever, after surveying 1,077 black professionals in higher education. Harvard ranked 28th...
Trade unions have a mixed record in civil rights--but not Reuther, who from early on was an ardent advocate. He organized the Citizens Committee for Equal Opportunity and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. Reuther was one of the few non-African Americans invited to speak at the March on Washington in 1963. A favorite anecdote concerned his introduction to the crowd. Standing close to the podium were two elderly women. As he was introduced, one of the women was overheard asking her friend, "Who is Walter Reuther?" The response: "Walter Reuther? He's the white Martin Luther...
...could write a political history of African Americans based on changes in hairstyles, ranging from kinky and short to kinky and long, from greased and "pressed" (with a stocking cap) to straightened, waved or jerry-curled. But it was Madam C.J. Walker, as the historian Rayford W. Logan maintains, who "made straight hair 'good hair,'" and in doing so, made a fortune for herself and a decent standard of living for a work force of "agents" that numbered 20,000 in the U.S. and the Caribbean...
Walker's grooming products, she insisted, did not "straighten" hair--even then, a politically controversial process--but she also sold a "hot comb," which did in fact straighten kinky hair, consciously tapping into a racial aesthetic that favored Caucasian features over "African" physical characteristics. Such celebrities as Nat King Cole, Sugar Ray Robinson and Michael Jackson would become cases in point. Walker's products, aided by before-and-after ads that rivaled anything Madison Avenue would invent, made their way into virtually every black home...
...when unskilled white workers earned about $11 a week, Walker's agents were making $5 to $15 a day, pioneering a system of multilevel marketing that Walker and her associates perfected for the black market. More than any other single businessperson, Walker unveiled the vast economic potential of an African-American economy, even one stifled and suffocating under Jim Crow segregation...