Black Pride Productions

Black Pride Productions The African American journey from the slave ship to the first African American in the White House.

Daily facts on the accomplishments and achievements of African Americans here in America. True, well researched stories about the people and places, about the roads that have been taken by Black men and women on the road to becoming first-class citizens; We tell stories that honor our past and our ancestors who chose to survive while creating a legacy for their decendants.

10/02/2025

October 1, 1952...Joe Black became the first Black pitcher to win a World Series Game. He started with the Dodgers in 1952. He became the first Black pitcher to start the first game of the World Series. the Dodgers won 4-2. Joe Black began his baseball career playing with the Negro Leagues for the Baltimore Elite Giants. He and Jackie Robinson pushed for a pension plan for Negro League players and was instrumental in getting the plan to include retired players who had played in the leagues before 1944. He joined the major league five years after Robinson.

02/05/2025

February 5, 1957...Perry H. Young became the first African American to captain on a scheduled commercial airline.

02/05/2025

Black Pride Calendars has researched and produced Black History Calendars since 1995. Using Black History reference books each fact has been researched and verified with at least three references. Each day henceforth will include a Black fact of accomplishments and triumphs. I believe that it is up to us to teach what the system has refused to teach. So, this is my contribution to filling the gap for our omitted history. This is not all there is, so I ask each of you seek the oldest person in your families, or communities and listen to their stories. Each one, teach one, and then pass it on. They cannot cancel our history is we don't let them. Thank you

01/28/2025

The democratic idea is founded in human nature and comes from the nature of God who made human nature. To carry it out politically is to execute justice, which is the will of God. This idea in its realization leads to a democracy, as government of all, for all, by all. Such a government aims to give every man all his natural rights; it desires to have political power in all hands, property in all hands, wisdom in all heads, goodness in all hearts, religion in all souls.
taken from: Theodore Parker's State of the Nation sermon given on Thanksgiving Day, 1850.
I read this many years ago and I wonder if the founding fathers had this in mind? Then I wonder if they realize that we have fallen short of this goal...

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams became the first Black elected to the American College of Surgery. 1913
11/13/2023

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams became the first Black elected to the American College of Surgery. 1913

07/12/2022

Slavery was real and it was brutal; that is a truth. Emancipation Proclamation was real but it did not give us freedom; that is a truth. Share cropping from the same people who owned slaves was real and it too was brutally unfair; that is a truth. The fact that education was denied and we were not ignorant, just unlearned; that is a truth. Separate but equal was the law, but never was it equal; that is a truth. Lynching and burning black men and women by racist terrorist was evil and real; that is a truth. That our ancestors were brought from the Motherland as believers with gifts and talents that were used to build this country by forced labor is a fact ; that is a truth. America has only told a portion of its history. We need to make sure that those coming after us know the part that has been omitted. America's history should be told in all of its colors, Red, Black, Brown, and Yellow not just white.

06/13/2022

Lincoln, the Great Emancipator (or not)

Abraham Lincoln walked into the presidency and suddenly the atmosphere of hate, bitterness, and loathing was completely on his shoulders. He was inaugurated in March 1861, and Fort Sumter was fired on in April, 1861 thus beginning what would be called the Civil War, the War Between the States, or the War of Rebellion and the War of Aggression. But the story of Lincoln’s relation to African Americans began before the war by whatever name it was called. He involved himself into the lives and the plans for the future of the lives of free African Americans as a senator from Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln was the Republican senator who debated Stephen Douglass the incumbent Democratic senator from August to October 1858. The major question for the time, was the one concerning the spreading of slavery into new national territories. Southerner wanted those territories to decide for themselves if the wanted to continue the system of human slavery rather than leaving it up to the government to decide. Douglass believed that each territory should be allowed the decision for themselves while Lincoln spoke his opinion in these words; “ a house divided against itself cannot stand…this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” He took a stand which propelled him into the white house but not into the hearts of the southern population. “Slavery,” as stated by a southern politician in 1860, “is our truth. Slavery is our king. Slavery is our divine right.” These opposing beliefs set the stage for the war that took too many lives to accurately count.
Abraham Lincoln after winning the election and after the bombing of Fort Sumter had to deal with not only the Southern slave owners but found that he had to deal face to face with the Black population whether slave or free. First of all, there were Black men working in the white house and after the Union forces marched into the South, Blacks began walking away from their plantations into the Union camps. What was the Union to do with them. The laws said they were to be sent back to their owners, but the Union generals refused to do that. They became contraband of the Union camps. They worked and daily their numbers increased. They offered their services to join ranks and fight with the Union but Lincoln could not imagine white soldiers willingly standing side by side with Negroes and fighting. But when the tides of war turned and the Union lost battle after battle, the offer for the Negroes to join looked better and better. Our ancestors were given muskets, uniforms, and the privilege to fight for what they knew was their freedom.
At the start of the war, Lincoln’s stand was that he was fighting for the Union. He refused to allow the Union to be broken. He blamed the presence of Negroes for the war. “If Blacks leave, all will be well,” Lincoln touted. “Sacrifice something of your present comfort,” he advised, asking the group of leaders that he called to the White House. He asked them to “press your fellow Blacks to make the trek to Liberia and start anew. To refuse would be extremely selfish. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and, is not either to save or destroy slavery.” …”What I do about slavery and the Colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” I write this asking all to keep in mind that he was only trying to rid the country of free Blacks, because they upset the slave population just as the American Colonization Society said in 1816. Free Blacks were a danger to the system.
The day before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he made a deal and signed a contract with a cotton planter from Florida, Bernard K**k. Mr. K**k was an entrepreneur who knew that Lincoln wanted to rid the country of all free Blacks, so he made arrangements in Haiti for them to be moved there and raise cotton in that country’s fertile ground. The ex-slaves would work raising cotton for four years and after that time would be given 16 acres of land of their own. The plan was to move as many as 5000 men women and children there to begin this project. Lincoln just did not believe that two races could live together in America and share in the white man’s society without problems. Issuing the Emancipation Proclamation would be releasing approximately 4,000,000 ex-slaves free and America to Lincoln’s mind would not stand for that. Colonization was the best plan. So, when K**k shared his idea with Lincoln, the two thought it the solution to Lincoln’s problem and the way for K**k to become rich.
The plan did not work. Only 500 African Americans left our shores for Haiti but more than two hundred of them died before reaching their goal. Nothing panned out and the remaining Blacks revolted after having to sleep on the ground instead of the housing promised them and K**k ran away. President Lincoln ended up sending a ship to bring the remaining Blacks back to America and the plan was put aside.
Lincoln is not the only name that can be added to beliefs that Blacks were not able to assimilate into America society. As far back as the beginning after some had fought for the Revolution against the British forces. Thomas Jefferson thought Toussaint Louverture and other Haitian leaders, “cannibals of the terrible Republic.” The general idea was that Negroes that have been free were a problem. They were a disturbance to the enslaved population and needed to be sent from the country. Discrimination, segregation, and old Jim Crow was supposed to force them to chose to go but our ancestors were a stubborn lot. America was supposed to be home of the brave and land of the free and they intended to stay and they did.
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation but never signed the order for reimbursing the slave owners for property that had joined the Union forces. Nor did he compensate them for those who were still living on the plantations. Neither did Lincoln make any plans for the millions of Blacks who were freed with the 13th amendment. Our ancestors were freed without ‘pot nor window’. They had nothing; nowhere to go, nothing to eat, no work, and no choices. We are proof today that they were just as determined in freedom as they were in slavery. We are proof today that the same God who saved Daniel from the lion’s den, protected and saved them from whatever vices freedom had for them. We are proof…God was with them, and he is with us today. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued but we don’t know what his future plans were. John Wilkes Booth made sure that we would never know, but we do know that Lincoln did not believe we should call America our country.

06/13/2022

The Fire Burns Still
Carolyn Cousar
June 11, 2022

Students of American History question the how and why of slavery. How did so few slave owners keep so many enslaved men and women in chains? How was it possible that Black men allowed a whip to prevent them from protecting the women they loved and the children they fathered. The questions are rational and in order for students to understand they need to understand the history of American slavery and freedom. Crumbs of America’s history has been taught but for students to get a true picture of our history, it must include the stories of all of its peoples, and we need to let all know that what we have been told is only a partial history beginning with the men who we called founders. We have been taught the segment of history that shows American leaders in a favorable light. We need to know and understand that the men that have been hailed as men of honor and integrity, men who were called gentlemen were flawed and weak. So too, then are the Black men that we were taught were rogues and enemies to the American way were really heroes that should be placed on a pedestal and praised for their bravery. Nat Turner was not a terrorist, he wanted the same thing that Patrick Henry wanted, freedom. Harriett Tubman and Frederick Douglass and so many others were not criminals that a price should have been placed on their lives, they just wanted to breathe free.
First and foremost, our history does not begin on a slave ship! Our history that for whatever reason was ignored, discounted or was not known by Pope Nicholas the Fifth in 1440 when he gave permission to the Portuguese to invade the African continent and rob it of its peoples. The Pope called the inhabitants of the ‘Dark Continent’ as Africa was called, infidels saying that they were heathens without knowledge of Christ. Did he not know, or did he chose to ignore, according to Ecclesiastical History, John of Ephesus recorded the Christianization of Nubia officially began about a decade before the start of the 6th century, between the years AD 538 and 546. That was decidedly before the 1440s. The men who did the robbing, did not care whether our African forbears were Christian or not, their goal was the money that was being made for transporting the people with Black skin. For them it was never a matter of right or wrong, it was a matter of becoming rich. They took people out of their natural habitat and then called them ignorant because they did not understand what was happening or what was being said and done. To their eye, the African’s dress code was not appropriate for civilized society, so they were labeled uncivilized and because those captains of trade did not understand their behavior, they were called uncultured. Thusly, our African forbears came to the new world with such labels placed on them by persons who had no clue as to their spiritual beliefs, no understanding of their mode of dress , and no respect for their way of life, their culture. But those captains of trade, the kidnappers, were white and right, superior in their own minds.
All that was left behind was a vast, golden history that had been passed down to each generation by word of mouth, by the stories of each family and village. The socialization process for Africa’s young people included sessions with village elders who shared the cultural material necessary for life in the clan or tribe. Intellectual continuity flowed not through the study of great or sacred books but through recitation, lectures, and dialogue. That is a value that America did not appreciate. It was said by the industrious captains that brought Africans to these shores that the Africans came with nothing to enhance life here denying Black Americans the significance of their contributions to the budding culture of a new nation.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863 but not confirmed and accepted until the Civil War ended and the 13th amendment was ratified in December of 1865. With freedom Black men were (on paper) were given the right to suffrage, they could vote. The problem was the persons who were to administer the justice system allowing us to practice our rights and privileges were the same people who for three hundred years had held us in bo***ge and did not want us to have any rights as American born citizens. The struggle was not over. Those who believed themselves to be superior were still in charge. But there was a difference, the door of citizenship was cracked open, and we had taken part in forming a more perfect Union with more than 270,000 Black men who fought in the Civil War helping to ensure domestic tranquility and so on as laid out in the preamble to the Constitution. The door was cracked open for us who were now counted as full persons rather than 3/5 a person and who could remind our white brothers and sisters that as the Declaration of Independence states in its beginning that “all men are created equal” and are endowed with certain unalienable rights which include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We knew this because ten years after the end of the Civil War, illiteracy rates in the Black population were dropping and with each opportunity Blacks were attending any school provided for them and they were learning to read for themselves. But the struggle was not over.
Battles were won, Reconstruction period when so many of our Historically Black Colleges and Universities were established, attending school was not as difficult for generations after freedom, but the struggle was not over. Share cropping replaced slavery and the Klu Klux Klan was formed to keep our ancestors in their proper inferior places. But the Underground Railroad was replaced with broken down jalopies and feet and even a few train tickets allowing millions to ride or walk, hop a freight train, or any other way they could get away from the land of their torment and misery. They recognized that the struggle was not over but they were not sitting and waiting for the next vestige of life’s hard knocks to happen. They went looking for a new Promised Land in the North, West, and some even went to Mexico seeking for their better day.
The Civil Rights Movement came and went. Changes were fought for and some were won. But today we realize that the struggle is not over yet. In the last national election Blacks finally saw the need and the advantage of getting out and voting. We did and made a difference. America rather than accept that difference as right and just, are trying everything they know to block our Constitution given rights to the election process. From 1865 to 2022, we are still laboring for the right to vote. The tactics have changed, we no longer fear violence for going to the polls, but we wonder will we have polls to go to. The struggle is not over, but we have to show America that we like our ancestors are not giving in to their unjust shenanigans. We are at least as strong and as determined as the men and women who raised us, and we should be determined not to let their efforts have been in vain. We have not forgotten the mothers and fathers who scrubbed and swept floors so we could attend school. We have not forgotten the teachers who patted us on the backs in our segregated schools and encouraged us to reach higher. We have not forgotten the neighborhoods where every adult took responsibility for every child and cared for us. We have not forgotten the neighbors where we were sent to borrow a cup of sugar when there was none at our house. The struggle is in our hands, and we have not forgotten.
We remember, that every African village, town, hamlet, clan or tribe had a Griot. The Griot was important to the future of his people because he held in his head the legacy of survival, of labor, of successes and of failures. In each of our communities, churches, community groups or whatever we call our gatherings, we need such a person. We need to stop letting others write our stories because what is important to the narrative, may not be as important to the legacy. It may sound better to omit some parts that are not favorable to the writer but could be more crucial to the future of the listener. It is our responsibility to tell our stories to include our failures and our successes; to include those whose efforts propelled us forward and those whose efforts attempted to hold us back. We need to share our good times, what we were thankful for and what we had to overcome. The baton of struggle is now in our hands, and we need to show the strength of our African forebears and the determination of our African American ancestors, and most of all the spiritual legacy of the blood that flows within our veins.

W.E.B. DuBois, “An Appeal to the World : A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of citizens of ...
10/21/2017

W.E.B. DuBois, “An Appeal to the World : A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress.”

The following passages are excerpts from W. E. B. DuBois’ Statement of Denial, “ An Appeal to the World” , the statement of protest, sent to the United Nations in 1947. DuBois’ voice arose out the necessity to make the world aware that the American Negro (as we were called then) was living in but not allowed to participate in a democratic society. He wanted the world to know and understand that America and Great Britain were talking the talk of democracy but were not walking the walk of democracy. He became a spokesman for African Americans during the time that Booker T. Washington was urging us to be patient with America after three hundred years of bo***ge and suffering. He spoke up through a voice that was often called militant and a pen that was deemed radical, revolutionary, or sometimes rebellious. What Washington was willing to be patient for, DuBois wanted immediately. The rights that Washington felt had to be earned, DuBois felt that they had been earned by generations before the present. Years after the death of Booker T. Washington, DuBois was still speaking, writing, fighting, and demanding equal rights for all of America’s children. As the editor of the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine, his words were read far and wide, and he continued his tireless efforts for civil rights for African Americans. To know your history, you know that DuBois wore the sign of RESIST, many years ago. He expected the future generations to pick up and wear it until equality was won, until justice was just, and until we were considered by the content of our character and not the color of our skin.

“The so-called American Negro group, therefore, while it is in no sense absolutely set off physically from its fellow Americans, has nevertheless a strong, hereditary cultural unity, born of slavery, of common suffering, prolonged prescription and curtailment of political and civil rights; and especially because of economic and social disabilities. Largely from this fact have arisen their cultural gifts to America—their rhythm, music and folk-song’ their religious faith and customs; their contribution to American art and literature; their defense of their country in every war, on land and sea; and especially the hard, continuous toil upon which the prosperity and wealth of this continent has largely been built.”

“If however the effect of the color caste system on the American Negro has been both good and bad, its effect on white America has been disastrous. It has repeatedly led the greatest modern attempt at democratic government to deny its political ideals, to falsify its philanthropic assertions, and to make its religion a vast hypocrisy. A nation which boldly declared “All men equal,” proceeded to build its economy on chattel slavery; masters who declared race-mixture impossible, sold their own children into slavery and left a mulatto progeny which neither law nor science can today disentangle; churches which excused slavery as calling the heathen to God, refused to recognize the freedom of converts or admit them to equal communion. Sectional strife over the vast profits of slave labor and conscientious revolt against making human beings real estate led to bloody civil war, and to a partial emancipation of slaves which nevertheless even to this day is not complete. Poverty, ignorance, disease, and crime have been forced on these unfortunate victims of greed to an extent far beyond any social necessity; and a great nation, which today ought to be in the forefront of the march toward peace and democracy, finds itself continuously making common cause with race hate, prejudiced exploitation and oppression of the common man. Its high and noble words are tuned against it, because they are contradicted in every syllable by the treatment of the American Negro for three hundred and twenty-seven years.”

“We appeal to the world to witness that this attitude of America is far more dangerous to mankind than the Atom bomb; and far, far more clamorous for attention than disarmament or treaty. To disarm the hidebound minds of men is the only path to peace; and as long as Great Britain and the United States profess democracy with one hand and deny it to millions with the other, they convince none of their sincerity, least of all themselves. Not only that, but they encourage the aggression of smaller nations: so long as the Union of South Africa defends Humanity and lets two million whites enslave ten million colored people, its voice spells hypocrisy. So long as Belgium holds in both economic and intellectual bo***ge, a territory seventy-five times her own size and larger in population, no one can sympathize with her loss of dividends based on serf labor at twenty-five to fifty cents a day. Seven million “white” Australians cannot yell themselves into championship of democracy for seven hundred million Asiatics.”

“Therefore, Peoples of the World, we American Negroes appeal to you; our treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy; of discrimination because of race and color; and as such it demands your attention and action. No nation is so great that the world can afford to let it continue to be deliberately unjust, cruel and unfair toward its own citizens.”

10/20/2017

"Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?"
Francis Scott Key 1837

The opening paragraph are the words of Francis Scott Key, the illustrious and renowned composer of our nation’s anthem. He is recognized with honor and respect for having penned the words to our anthem following the bombing of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. The words bring our emotions straight from our hearts to our eyes. We sing this song and pride rises up in us for belonging to a country that in its infancy was not only able to stand up to the tyranny of the British and win once, but to fight the strongest and the largest army and navy twice and to win both times is awe inspiring. But that’s not the full story of Mr. Francis Scott Key.
Francis Scott Key was a Marylander who was raised on his father’s estate and attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Upon his graduation he pondered several avenues for his life’s journey. He considered starting a national newspaper and reflected seriously on entering the ministry, but finally he chose a legal career and became a lawyer. During his legal career he partnered with Roger Taney who in later years would write the now famous Dred Scott decision in 1857 and take America one step closer to the Civil War.
In 1816 two men, Charles Fenton Mercer, a white antislavery legislator from Virginia, and white New Jersey clergyman Robert Finley founded the American Colonization Society. The idea and purpose of this society was to remove all free African Americans back to Africa. It did not matter to them that many of the free Black men and women were actually born in America. These men and some who supported the new society disliked slavery but the thought of free Black men and women seeking equality and citizenship was too scary for them. Although he was a slaveholder, Francis Scott Key was one of the earliest supporters. He did not believe slavery was right, but he was a slaveholder; he also detested the abolitionist movement. He thought they were dangerous to the life in America that he and his white citizens were creating. He fought against them in and out of court.
Francis Scott Key was a man of contradictory principles. He considered Black people inferior but he knew that slavery was against his moral beliefs. Yet instead of working with the men and women who would free slaves, the abolitionist, he fought against them. The statement at the beginning of this writing are words that were spoken by Key during a trial where he tried Dr. Crandall from the North for bringing abolitionist pamphlets to Washington, D. C. As District of Attorney appointed by President Jackson, Key tried cases vehemently against many who called themselves the Black man’s friend. The founding of the American Colonization Society helped to spur the abolitionist movement into action. Many free African Americans knew that the plan to remove them from America was an act to rid America of those who would fight against the peculiar and vicious system of slavery and not a move to benefit them.
Many of the names we have learned in our history classes were supporters of the ACS; Secretary of State, Henry Clay; President Thomas Jefferson (even though he owned many slaves and even fathered some) Daniel Webster, and President James Monroe, and Abraham Lincoln. African Americans were the first to reject the society’s plans to ship them away from their homes. A meeting of black Americans in Philadelphia in 1831 condemned the attempt to compel an “unprotected and harmless portion of our bretheren” to leave their homes and go abroad, since they claimed the United States as the “birthplace of our fathers…our own native land.” Francis Scott Key disappeared from the public eye once he lost the case against Dr. Crandall, but for the rest of his life he worked against the abolitionist movement and supported the ACS.

For those of you who live in Harford County and know Union United Methodist Church, the ACS almost caused out doors to close many when many of the members answered the call and joined the move back to Africa. But through the strength and tenacity of the members who stayed, the doors remained open and the church continued to live and to serve.
The Society was successful in establishing a colony in Liberia. President Monroe, a supporter of colonization, used the Slave Trade Act to appropriate money for “returning” free black Americans to Africa. Although the first effort to establish a colony proved disastrous as disease decimated the settlers, Lieutenant Robert Stockton finally succeeded in gaining land (albeit, through extortion) on the Western Coast of Africa. Cape Mesurado was not a colony of the U.S., and had no legal status. By the late 1820s, after initial difficulties with surrounding native Africans, the colony was able to trade with local tribes. The settlement was named Monrovia in honor of the president.

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