Decades before Hollywood discovered this Academy Award winner, his 1982 performance on Tony Brown’s Journal as Malcolm X (the physical resemblance is stunning) marked the striving-actor young Denzel Washington’s place in history. It was his first performance before a national audience, thanks to stage producer Woodie King, Jr. The New York Off-Broadway play produced by…
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…
In 2007, Dr. Carol M. Swain, a professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University and author of “Debating Immigration,” sat down and explored with me the nuances of contemporary immigration and citizenship affecting the U. S. (TBJ #3017 — Blacks Divided) Debating Immigration presents 18 original essays, written by some of the world’s…
Dr. Khalid Abduallah Tariq Al-Mansour is an international attorney and businessman. His college education was obtained at Howard University, where he majored in Philosophy and Logic, and the University of California School of Law at Berkeley, where he received his Doctor of Jurisprudence degree. Dr. Al-Mansour is also a Phi Beta Kappa scholarship recipient. THIS…
ON April 11, 2023, I WILL CELEBRATE the 90th anniversary of my miracle. I am, perhaps, exceptional, both by mundane standards of variable physical health and esoteric knowledge of what’s going on behind the current cosmic energy scene and the deeper human behavior studies of our collective psyche. I have known since my birth, at…
