UNLABELED

UNLABELED

By Jerome WilliamsSociety & Culture
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UNLABELED episodes

  • "A Rose is Still a Rose"

    Slow News Week but we have a few things to discuss.  https://anchor.fm/unlabeled/support. Don't forget to grab merch at: https://www.nolabelmerch.com

    1 hr 4 min
  • WWJD "What Would Juwan Howard Do?"

    On today's episode we talk about Part two of Netflix docuseries Jeen Yuhs, Ukraine and much much more.   https://anchor.fm/unlabeled/support. Don't forget to grab merch at: https://www.nolabelmerch.com

    48 min
  • "We Need to talk about Bill Cosby"

    On today's episode we talk about Showtimes "We need to talk about Bill Cosby" docuseries, Dave Chappelle's new Netflix specials and much much more.   https://anchor.fm/unlabeled/support. Don't forget to grab merch at: https://www.nolabelmerch.com

    1 hr 11 min
  • Tommie Smith and John Carlos

    There wasn’t a specific plan on that day in Mexico City in October 1968, when 24-year-old Tommie Smith won the Olympic gold medal in the men’s 200 meters and approached the podium alongside fellow American John Carlos. But both men knew they would protest racial injustice in some form.

    What they didn’t know is that their actions would spark a legacy of athlete activism for decades to come.

    “We were preparing to walk across the track and get on the victory stand and receive the award. John Carlos and I had talked and we knew we were going to do something,” says Smith, now 76. “But nobody knew exactly what Tommie Smith and John Carlos were going to do, including Tommie Smith and John Carlos.”

    Smith and Carlos’ gesture on a warm October night has become immortalized in Olympic lore over the last five decades. Their fists in the air have come to symbolize strength in the face of injustice, solidarity against our society’s greatest ills. The raising of Smith’s fist was a truly spontaneous act. Though the plan for a demonstration had been years in the making.

    Smith, the son of a field worker and cowboy in north Texas, made his way to California in 1965 as he joined the San Jose State track team. And he quickly helped the program become a national powerhouse. Smith set a world-record in May 1966 as he ran the 200 meters straight in 19.5 seconds, and he won the NCAA men’s outdoor track and field championship one month later. Yet Smith’s excellence didn’t lead to admiration throughout the community. Smith and his fellow athletes were treated as second-class citizens the second they left the track.

    “San Jose State was the strongest track and field team in history. But nothing was really done about the negatives of being treated less than,” Smith says. “We would break a world record or run a good meet and we would still be relegated back to second-class status when we returned to campus or returned to our communities.”

    The athletes at San Jose State quickly became tired of the treatment they received outside of the track. And in October 1967, Smith and Co. chose to fight back. Smith and Carlos joined the the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a group founded by sociologist Harry Edwards in an attempt to protest against racial segregation in America and abroad. The group’s aims weren’t radical, especially by modern standards. But to Smith, they were revolutionary.


    4 min
  • "Jeen-Yuhs" Part 1

    On today's episode we talk about Kanye West new Netflix documentary, Tinder Swindler and much much more.   https://anchor.fm/unlabeled/support. Don't forget to grab merch at: https://www.nolabelmerch.com

    58 min
  • "Sarah Rector"

    Born as the daughter of freedmen in 1902, Sarah Rector rose from humble beginnings to reportedly become the wealthiest black girl in the nation at the age of 11.

    Rector and her family where African American members of the Muscogee Creek Nation who lived in a modest cabin in the predominantly black town of Taft, Oklahoma, which, at the time, was considered Indian Territory. Following the Civil War, Rector’s parents, who were formerly enslaved by Creek Tribe members, were entitled to land allotments under the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887. As a result, hundreds of black children, or “Creek Freedmen minors,” were each granted 160 acres of land as Indian Territory integrated with Oklahoma Territory to form the State of Oklahoma in 1907. While lands granted to former slaves were usually rocky and infertile, Rector’s allotment from the Creek Indian Nation was in r the middle of the Glenn Pool oil field and was initially valued at $556.50. Strapped for cash, Rector’s father leased his daughter’s parcel to a major oil company in February 1911 to help him pay the $30 annual property tax. Two years later, Rector’s fortune took a major turn when independent oil driller B.B. Jones produced a “gusher” on her land that brought in 2,500 barrels or 105,000 gallons per day. According to Tonya Bolden, author of Searching for Sarah Rector: The Richest Black Girl in America (Harry N. Abrams; $21.95), Rector began earning more than $300 a day in 1913. That equates to $7,000 – $8,000 today. She even generated $11,567 in October 1913.

    Rector’s notoriety ballooned just as quickly as her wealth. In September 1913, The Kansas City Star local newspaper published the headline, “Millions to a Negro Girl – Sarah Rector, 10-Year-Old, Has Income of $300 A Day from Oil,” reports Face 2 Face Africa. In January 1914, the newspaper wrote, “Oil Made Pickaninny Rich – Oklahoma Girl With $15,000 A Month gets Many Proposals – Four White Men in Germany Want to Marry the Negro Child That They Might Share Her Fortune.” Meanwhile, the Savannah Tribune wrote, “Oil Well Produces Neat Income – Negro Girl’s $112,000 A Year”. Another newspaper dubbed her “the richest negro in the world.” Her fame became widespread, and she received numerous requests for loans, money gifts, and four marriage proposals.

    At the time, a law required Native Americans, black adults, and children who were citizens of Indian Territory with significant property and money were to be assigned “well-respected” white guardians. As a result, Rector’s guardianship switched from her parents to a white man named T.J. Porter. Concerned with her wellbeing and her white financial guardian, early NAACP leaders fought to protect her and her fortune.

    In 1922, she married Kenneth Campbell, the second African American to own an auto dealership. The couple had three sons and were recognized as local royalty, driving expensive cars and entertaining elites like Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie at their home. They divorced in 1930 and Rector remarried in 1934.

    Rectors lost most of her wealth during The Great Depression. When she died at age 65 on July 22, 1967, she only had some working oil wells and real estate holdings.

    5 min
  • "Richard Williams"

    “When something bad happens, you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”

    Richard Dove Williams embodies that statement born February 14, 1942, Richard is an American tennis coach and the father of Venus and Serena Williams. He took tennis lessons from a man known as "Old Whiskey" and decided his future daughters would be tennis professionals when he saw Virginia Ruzici playing on television. Williams says that he wrote up an 85-page plan and started giving lessons to Venus and Serena when they were four and a half and began taking them to the public tennis courts. He would later add that he felt like he took them too early, and the age of six would have been more suitable. Soon he got them into Shreveport tennis tournaments. In 1995, Williams pulled them out of a tennis academy, and coached them himself.

    Serena won the US Open in 1999; Venus beat Lindsay Davenport to win the 2000 Wimbledon title. After that victory, Richard shouted "Straight Outta Compton!", in reference to a song by N.W.A based in Compton, California, the same area in Los Angeles where the family once resided. He jumped over the NBC broadcasting booth, catching Chris Evert by surprise and performing a triumphant dance. Evert said that the broadcasters "thought the roof was coming down.

    As a coach Richard has 122 singles titles and 28 doubles titles Thanks to his two amazing daughters. If you would like to learn more about Richard, check out 2021’s King Richard starring Will Smith. Or check out 2014’s Black and White: The Way I see It Which chronicles his extraordinary life and his relationship with daughters and tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams.

    3 min
  • "Toni Morrison"
    Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, black family, was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford.Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15, a group of white people lynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him." Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. Traumatized by his experiences of racism, in a 2015 interview Morrison said her father hated whites so much he would not let them in the house.
    In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals. It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time. She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. Her master's thesis was titled "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated."She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years.
    The Bluest Eye was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39. It was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry ... But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music." The novel did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new Black studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales
    Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old.A memorial tribute was held for Morrison on November 21, 2019, At this gathering she was eulogized by Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
    6 min
  • Stokely Carmichael

    Kwame Ture born Stokely Carmichael; June 29, 1941, was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global Pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. He was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and last as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

    Carmichael was one of the original SNCC freedom riders of 1961 under Diane Nash's leadership. He became a major voting rights activist in Mississippi and Alabama after being mentored by Ella Baker and Bob Moses. Like most young people in the SNCC, he became disillusioned with the two-party system after the 1964 Democratic National Convention failed to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as official delegates from the state.

    Carmichael eventually decided to develop independent all-black political organizations, such as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and, for a time, the national Black Panther Party. Inspired by Malcolm X's example, he articulated a philosophy of Black Power, and popularized it both by provocative speeches and more sober writings. Carmichael became one of the most popular and controversial Black leaders of the late 1960s. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, secretly identified Carmichael as the man most likely to succeed Malcolm X as America's "black messiah”. The FBI targeted him for personal destruction through its COINTELPRO program, so Carmichael moved to Africa in 1968. He reestablished himself in Ghana, and then Guinea by 1969. There he adopted the name Kwame Ture, and began campaigning internationally for revolutionary socialist Pan-Africanism.

    Ture died of prostate cancer in 1998 at the age of 57.

    5 min

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