Actor / Comedian

Bill Cosby began as a stand-up comic, went on to become one of Americas most beloved television stars, and then saw his reputation and career disintegrate under the weight of dozens of sexual assault allegations from five decades. Bill Cosby began doing stand-up in the early 1960s while attending Temple University, and his comedy career was kick-started by a 1963 appearance on Johnny Carsons Tonight Show. His first comedy album was Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow... Right! in 1964, and Cosby won multiple Grammy Awards for comedy recordings throughout the 1960s. He was particularly known for routines about childhood friends like Fat Albert and Old Weird Harold (both of whom later appeared in the 1970s cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids). Bill Cosby starred with Robert Culp in the spoofy TV series I Spy from 1965-68, winning three Emmy Awards and becoming one of the few African-American stars on primetime TV. Cosby appeared in many other TV shows (including the PBS educational show The Electric Company) and in movies including Uptown Saturday Night (1974, with Sidney Poitier) and Mother, Juggs and Speed (1976, with Raquel Welch). From 1984-92, Bill Cosby dominated Americas primetime TV ratings with The Cosby Show, a family comedy in which he and Phylicia Rashad starred as Cliff and Claire Huxtable, and upscale New York couple raising their lovable and exasperating children. The show was a huge hit and, along with the 1986 book Fatherhood, re-established Bill Cosby as a leading comedian. From 1996-2000 he starred in a similar sitcom, Cosby, again with Rashad playing his wife. He is the author of many books, including the 1986 bestseller Fatherhood. He was given Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002. Beginning in about 2014, however, Cosby faced a new surge of publicity around longstanding rumors of rape and other sexually inapproprite behavior. More than 40 women eventually came forward with stories stretching back to the 1960s that shared a

Anderson Ruffin Abbott, Canada’s first black doctor, was born April 7, 1837 in Toronto, Ontario.  He was the son of free black property owners William Ruffin Abbott and his wife Ellen (Toyer) Abbott who left Alabama after their store had been destroyed.  They settled briefly in New York until racial tensions forced them to relocate to Toronto, Canada in 1835.  William Abbott began buying property in and around Toronto and the family became wealthy.

Having access to the best education, because of his family’s wealth, Abbott attended private and public schools including William King’s School in North Buxton, Ontario, the Toronto Academy, and Oberlin College in the United States. In 1860 Abbott graduated from the Toronto School of Medicine at the age of twenty-three.  After graduating he studied for four years under Alexander Thomas Augusta, a black U.S.-born doctor who was then working in Toronto.  In 1861 Abbott received his license to practice medicine from the Medical Board of Upper Canada, becoming the first Canadian-born black doctor.  

In February 1863, during the U.S. Civil War, Abbott applied for a commission as an assistant surgeon in the Union Army but was refused.  He reapplied as a medical cadet in the newly-formed U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), all-black regiment and was hired as a civilian surgeon.  Abbott served in several U.S. hospitals between June 1863 and August 1865 including Freedmens Hospital which eventually became part of Howard University.  In 1865 he was assigned to administer a hospital in Arlington, Virginia. Dr. Abbott was one of several doctors in attendance when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865.  Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of the President, later presented Abbott a plaid shawl worn by Lincoln at his first inauguration in appreciation for his attempt to save the Presidents life.   

Abbott resigned from the Arlington hospital in 1866 and returned to Toronto, Canada.  In 1871 he opened his own medical practice and on August 9 of that year he married Mary Ann

In September 2011, Prime Minister Bruce Golding resigned. Goldings political standing never recovered after his handling of the Christopher Coke case. For nine months, Golding resisted a request from the United States to hand over Coke. His resignation was seen as an effort to help the Jamaica Labour Party, his party, in the upcoming general election.

Golding was replaced by Andrew Holness. However, Holness was only Prime Minister for ten weeks. Holness called for the 2012 general election to be held on December 29, 2011. He lost the election to Portia Simpson Miller. Having already served one term as Prime Minister, Simpson Miller won in a landslide victory. Her party, the Peoples National Party, took 42 out of 63 seats. Simpson Millers previous term was from March 2006 to September 2007.

See also Encyclopedia: Jamaica .

U.S. State Dept. Country Notes: Jamaica

Statistical Institute of Jamaica www.statinja.com/ .

Dr. Rosalie Reddick Miller was the first African American woman dentist to practice in the State of Washington.  She was born on December 29, 1925 in Waycross, Georgia.  She attended the all-black public schools in Columbus, Georgia and in 1946 received a B. A. degree from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.    She enrolled at Meharry Medical College and received her D.D.S. in 1951.  Returning to Columbus, she took over her father’s dental practice and her husband, Dr. Earl V. Miller-- who she married in 1947-- began a practice of general medicine. 

During the early 1950s and before the civil rights movement, Miller and her husband fought discrimination and segregation in Nashville.  She was an active participant in the struggle for voting rights and spearheaded a voter registration movement among blacks in the city.   After moving with her husband in 1957 to the University of Iowa, she received a certificate in periodontology and he received board certification in urology.  Rosalie Miller served on the faculty teaching dental hygiene.  In 1959 the Millers moved to Seattle. 

From 1964 until 1971 Rosalie Reddick Miller practiced dentistry in Seattle at the Group Health Dental Cooperative.  She received a Masters in Public Health from the University of Washington in 1972 and for the next five years she served as director of dental programs for the Community Health Board of Model Cities.  From 1976 until her retirement in 1991, Dr. Miller was Assistant Professor of Dentistry at the University of Washington in the Department of Oral Medicine. Despite these professional accomplishments her greatest pride was in being the mother of five children and in being married to the same man for more than 50 years. 

Independent Historian

Texas became a slave state.

Robert Weaver, born on this day, beacme the first Black appointed to a presidential cabinet when President Lyndon B. Johnson named him to head the newly created Departmentof Housing and Urban Development.

Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995), a scholar-librarian and bibliographer was born in Warrenton, Virginia in 1905, to her father, Hayes Joseph Burnett, a physician, and her mother, Bertha Ball Burnett, a tennis champion.  After receiving her A.B., from Howard University in 1928, she became the first African American woman to complete her graduate studies at Columbia University receiving a Bachelors (1931) and a Masters (1932) of Science in Library Science.  

Dorothy Bennett joined the library staff at Howard University in 1928, and on December 29, 1929 married James Amos Porter. In 1930 University President W. Mordecai Johnson appointed her to organize and administer a Library of Negro Life and History incorporating the 3,000 titles presented in 1914 by Jesse Moorland.  The library opened in 1933 as the Moorland Foundation.  In 1946 Howard University purchased the Arthur Spingarn Collection.  By the time Porter retired in 1973 the library, which was now called the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, had over 180,000 books, pamphlets, manuscripts and other primary sources.  Over 43 years, Porter had successfully created a leading modern research library that served an international community of scholars.  

As a scholar, avid writer and researcher, Porter developed a wide variety of research tools and authoritative bibliographies based on her vast knowledge in the field that would become known as Black Studies. A Selected List of Books by and about the Negro (1936), was one of the seeds of the field of African American Studies.  Other publications included Early American Negro Writings: A Bibliographical Study, published in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1945); North American Negro Poets (1945); A Working Bibliography on the Negro in the United States (1969); Early Negro Writing, 1760 to 1837 (1970); Afro-Braziliana; A Working Bibliography (1978); The Remonds of Salem, Massachusetts: A Nineteenth Century Family Revisited (1983); and William Cooper Nell: Nineteenth-Century African American

Thomas Bradley was born on this day in Calvert, Texas and went on to become mayor of Los Angeles by winning 56% of the vote.

In “Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture” Maulana Karenga (the creator of Kwanzaa) describes cooperative economics (ujamaa) as a sum of the three main concepts of “shared wealth and work”, “economic self-reliance” and “obligation of generosity”.

Regarding the concept of “economic self-reliance”, Karenga defines it as “the building, strengthening and controlling of the economics of our own community”.

And to be clear, this act of cultural self-sufficiency does not mean that we must refuse and exclude assistance from other people, or not work with other cultures.

We absolutely must work with all people and cultures for the good of our community, others and the world; but we must do so without losing our identity, goals and self-reliance in the process.

Reference:  “Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture”, by Maulana Karenga,   University of Sankore Press, Los Angeles, California.