It’s 1983 and Sammy Davis reflects on his television interview with me in 1971. Sammy Davis responded, “I’ve survived where other cats would have been down the tubes. A lot of people don’t like themselves. I’ve stopped trying to adjust because its uncomfortable, let me be the best me I can be.” Tony Brown offers…
The great debate between Black psychiatrist Dr. Frances Welsing (who believes Whites are genetically inferior) and Nobel Prize winner Dr. William Shockley (who believes Blacks are genetically inferior). Back in the 1970s, a man named Dr. William Shockley embarked upon the mission of proving to the world that Black people were genetically inferior, without the…
Circumstances surrounding the trial, the assassination itself, accounts in the Press and subsequent official actions were peculiar, and to this day, the question of who killed Malcolm is still with us. In 1981, in an intimate talk, I interviewed Talmadge Hayer from his prison cell. Hayer explained in 1981 what his and his co-conspirators’ motivations…
The Black Valentino: Lorenzo Tucker … Lorenzo Tucker, a Race Movie superstar of the 30’s, was often billed as the “Black Valentino” or the “Colored John Gilbert.” In 1924, lured by the taste for show business, Tucker withdrew from his studies at Temple University where he had contemplated medicine, and moved to Atlantic City in…
Black Hollywood: Part 3 — The Middle Years: Part 3 of this examination of the history of independently produced Black movies and the establishment of a Black film era, “The Middle Years,” picks up during the Depression years as independent filmmakers struggle for survival. The exclusion of Blacks from the motion picture industry and the…
TBJ SHOW #618 – BLACK HOLLYWOOD: PART 2 — FADING IN: Part 2, “Fading In,” the second installment of the Black Hollywood four-part series, begins with the decision by the NAACP to answer D.W. Griffith’s racist epic, “The Birth of a Nation,” by producing a film that would highlight and celebrate Black progress. “The Birth…
TonyBrownsJournal.com Presents … The first episode of this fantastic glimpse into the archives of the motion picture industry, “Burnt Cork,” journeys back to the beginning with the invention of the first moving picture and follows the impact of African Americans in its development. As part of the film industry’s early beginnings, the Black image was…
Black Royalty … The informal king and queen of this artistic wing during much of this inspiring era of self-reliance from a conspicuously talented sociographic and intellectual expatriate colony of diverse descendants of Africa was the brilliant and legendary duo of Ossie Davis (born Raiford Chatman Davis on December 18, 1917, in Cogdell, Ga.) and…
African-American women in military service also did not receive proper recognition for their service. Reflecting that apartheid custom, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was the only African-American WAC unit to serve overseas in WWII. This unit was responsible for redirecting the mail to the GIs on the battlefield, a Sisyphean feat, considering that troops…
TBJ #631 – “Mrs. Norman, We Love You”: Garnet High School in Charleston, West Virginia was Tony Brown’s high school. It was one of the most academically rigorous high schools in the nation and, as a result, in 1951, his freshman entrance exam to Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan was waived essentially because of…
