American soprano Kathleen Battle was born on August 13, 1948 in Portsmouth, Ohio. Battle’s father was a steelworker and her mother was an active participant in the gospel choir at the family’s local African Methodist Episcopal Church. Battle attended Portsmouth High School and upon graduation was awarded a scholarship to the College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. She received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1970, and an M.A. degree the following year.  After graduation, Battle taught music to 5th and 6th graders at inner city public schools in Cincinnati. She also continued to study voice privately which furthered her interest in singing.

In 1972, Kathleen Battle began her professional singing career at The Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. She continued to sing in several other orchestras in New York, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. Shortly after, in 1973, Battle received a grant from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund which allowed her to continue pursuing a career in music. In 1975 she made her opera debut as “Rosina” in Rossini’s II Barbiere di Siviglia with the Michigan Opera Theatre.

Battle won numerous awards in the 1980s and 1990s including the 1985 Laurence Olivier Award for “Best Performance in a New Opera Production” for her work with the Royal Opera in London. She won five Grammy Awards between 1986 and 1993. Battle also won an Emmy for “Outstanding Individual Achievement in Classical Music/Dance Programming and Performance” for her work with the Metropolitan Opera for their Silver Anniversary Gala.

Battle continues to pursue many diverse projects, including the works of popular composers such as Stevie Wonder and George Gershwin. In the last decade Battle has received honorary doctorates from six different American universities, including the University of Cincinnati.  In 1999 she was presented the “Hall of Fame Award” from the NAACP.

Kathleen Battle lives in New York City and continues to perform around the world.

Surgeon General, was born Minnie Lee Jones in Schaal, Arkansas on August 13, 1933 to Curtis and Hailer Jones; she added the name Joycelyn when she was in college.

March is a comic book-style trilogy that recounts the experiences of Congressman John Lewis in the nations struggle for civil rights. The graphics in this memoir make the text engaging for its target audience, students in grades eight-12. Teachers can use the slim paperbacks (under 150 pages) in the social studies classroom because of the content and/or in the language arts classroom as a new form in the genre of memoir.

March is the collaboration between Congressman Lewis, his Congressional staffer Andrew Aydin, and the comic book artist  Nate Powell. The project began in 2008 after Congressman Lewis described the powerful impact a 1957 comic book titled Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story had on people like himself who were engaged in the civil rights movement.

Congressman Lewis, Representative from the 5th District in Georgia, is well respected for his work for Civil Rights during the 1960s when he served as the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  Aydin convinced Congressman Lewis that his own life story could serve as the basis for a new comic book, a graphic memoir that would highlight the major events in the struggle for Civil Rights.  Aydin worked with Lewis to develop the trilogys storyline: Lewis youth as a sharecropper’s son, his dreams of becoming a preacher, his nonviolent participation in the sit-ins at department-store lunch counters of Nashville, and in coordinating the 1963 March on Washington to end segregation.

Once Lewis agreed to coauthor the memoir, Aydin reached out to Powell, a best-selling graphic novelist who started his own career by self-publishing when he was 14 years old.

The graphic novel memoir  March: Book 1 was released  August 13, 2013. This first book in the trilogy begins with a flashback, a dream sequence that illustrates the brutality of the police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 1965 Selma-Montgomery March.

The action then cuts to Congressman Lewis as he prepares to watch the inauguration of President Barack Obama in

Born: August 13, 1919

Died: October 21, 1994

Birthplace: St. Louis, Missouri

Charles Edward Anderson was born on a farm in University City, near St. Louis, Missouri on August 13, 1919. He graduated

as valedictorian from Sumner High School in 1937. He received a Bachelor of Science from Lincoln University, Jefferson City,

Missouri in 1941. He was Certified in Meteorology (masters degree) from the University of Chicago in 1943. Charles

Anderson also earned a Master of Science in Chemistry in 1948 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York. In

1960, Mr. Anderson earned a Ph.D. in Meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, Massachusetts.

Charles Edward Anderson was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in Meteorology. Dr. Anderson worked at the Chief

Cloud Physics Branch at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center, Massachusetts from 1948 to 1961. He served as a

captain in the Army Air Forces in World War II and was the weather officer for the Tuskegee Airmen regiment, Tuskegee,

Alabama. From 1961-65, Dr. Anderson worked at the Atmospheric Science Branch of Douglas Aircraft Company, California.

He served as Director of the Office of Federal Coordination in Meteorology in the Environmental Science Service

Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce, from 1965 to 1966. From 1967 to 1969, Charles Anderson was

appointed as Professor of Space Science and Engineering. From 1966 - 1987, Professor Anderson served as the Professor of

Meteorology and Chairman of Contemporary Trends Course at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. In 1970,

Professor Anderson was appointed Professor of Afro-American Studies and Chairman of the Meteorology Department. In

1978 Professor Anderson was elevated to Associate Dean at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Anderson was a

professor in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C.,

from 1987 until he retired in 1990. He was a major contributor to a program at the

Black soldiers raided Brownsville, Texas, in retaliation for racial insults. One white man killed, two wounded.

Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper made its first, 1892

James B. Parsons, first African American appointed to a lifetime federal judgeship in the U.S. (1961) , born

The first African American nursing school opens at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga.

Named Career Ambassador, a title equivalent to a four-star general, U.S. ambassador to six different countries, Terence A. Todman was an outstanding diplomat in the service of the United States. He challenged the racial prejudice he encountered at the State Department, paving the way for hiring of more people of color there and he was a pioneer in integrating human rights issues into foreign policy.

Clarence Alphonso Todman was born on March 13, 1926, in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands to parents Alphonso and Rachael Todman, grocery clerk/stevedore, and laundress/maid. He attended the local university for one year and then was drafted into the US Army.  He served four years in the Army and when stationed in post-World War II Japan, he helped organize that defeated nation’s first post-war elections.

Returning to finish college at Polytechnic Institute, Puerto Rico, he received a Master’s Degree from Syracuse University (New York) in 1951 and passed the Foreign Service Exam for a career in the U.S. State Department the following year.  Although initially denied employment there because his accent was not 100 percent American,” Todman soon found only low level positions were open to blacks in the State Department. He fought this practice and the long standing assumption that black State Department employees would only be accepted for postings in Africa.

Todman served first at the United Nations Interim Program between 1952 and 1957 and in India between 1957 and 1960.  He took intensive training in Arabic in Tunis, Tunisia between 1960 and 1962. He later became fluent in French, Spanish, and Russian and sought to learn the cultures of the nations where he was posted.  

In 1969 Todman took his first ambassadorial assignment in the country of Chad, serving there until 1972.  Over his forty year career he was also U.S. ambassador to Guinea, Costa Rica, Spain, Denmark, and Argentina. During the Carter Administration he was named assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American affairs. He served as envoy to Spain from 1978

President Eisenhower established Government Contract Compliance Committee to supervise anti-discrimination regulations in government contracts.

1948 : Kathleen Battle, operatic soprano, winner of Grammy awards in 1987 and 1988, born