Jack Daniel’s is undisputedly Kentucky’s best whiskey. It was created by the first Black master Distiller Nathan “Nearest” Green. This is a true but rarely shared vignette of American history. “I don’t think it was ever a conscious decision” to leave the Greens out of the company’s story,” Phil Epps, the global brand director at Brown-Forman, told The New York Times in a 2016 interview. The Brown-Forman Corporation has owned the Jack Daniel Distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee since 1956. Nathan’s obscurity was a side effect of the post Civil War “Jim Crow” marketing. History shows that including a Black man in the story would have been deleterious to profit.
Browsing: Lost Black History
After decades of debate, Rock and Roll is clearly the progeny of Blues and Gospel music. This is the red clay, picking cotton from Sunrise till Sunset and nothing to eat but scraps Blues! An often ignored contribution to this aural feast was the soul of a Queer Black woman in the 1940s named Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was there before Elvis, Little Richard and the Beatles rocked their guitars.
Motown is as homogenous as “Ice Cream and Apple Pie.” If you haven’t heard a Motown song you like, then you just haven’t heard the right song. That affection placed Berry Gordy’s record label as the vanguard musical advent for the Civil Rights movement. We all learned in school the story of how an $800 loan turned into a global passion for Soul music. What schools do not teach is the impact Motown had on the Civil Rights movement.
The Lone Ranger’s slogan is “Hi-yo, Silver! Away!” The Guardian wrote, “Historians estimate that 20% to 25% of the people who settled the continental US west – a region from Washington state to Montana and New Mexico to California – were Black men and women. They moved cattle on horseback, settled towns, kept the peace and delivered the mail in the wild, wild west. But Black cowgirls and cowboys have been pretty much invisible to most. For nearly 200 years, two separate cowboy narratives, one Black and one White, have trotted side by side in the US.”
In 1860, at the start of the Civil War, there were an estimated 4.5 million Blacks (16%) in the US. Debate rested on what to do with the Blacks: emancipate, continue slavery or repatriate back to Africa? A successful campaign was put together to repatriate free and enslaved Blacks. The American Colonization Society (ACS) was the lead group. Britannica chronicled the Society, “It was founded in 1816 by Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister, and some of the country’s most influential men, including Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, and Bushrod Washington (nephew of George Washington and the society’s first president)…”
The National Negro Business League (NNBL), was the brainchild of Booker T. Washington. It was founded in 1900, with the mission statement, “Black America should improve itself from within to earn White America’s acceptance…” The NNBL promotes Black-owned businesses as the key to economic advancement. The league, which predated the United States Chamber of Commerce by 12 years, was formally incorporated in 1901 in New York, and successfully established hundreds of chapters across the United States. In 1966, the National Negro Business League was reincorporated in Washington, D.C. and renamed the National Business League.
By Don Valentine “It occurred to me shortly after that that it was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality, because if I didn’t I…
In 1913 an allotment of Oklahoma land made 11-year old Sarah Rector rich! This serendipity came from the ‘Dawes Allotment Act” of 1887. Natives and their descendents were entitled to land allotments under the Treaty of 1866 made by the United States with the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Oklahoma Territory.
Schools in America don’t teach the history of the only successful Black slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. The audacious leadership of a former slave Toussaint L’ouverture wove the path to create Haiti. It was a masterful real life chess match with France, Spain, England and America. The History Channel wrote, “Saint-Domingue in the late 18th century thrived as the wealthiest colony in the Americas…” Black Past noted, “In the 18th century, Saint Domingue, as Haiti was then known, had become France’s wealthiest overseas colony, generating more revenue for France than all 13 North American colonies for Great Britain.”
In the military annals, the mythical unicorn is a Black father-son Generals and it has only happened once in U.S. history. The first Black Army General Benjamin O. Davis Sr. (Brigadier General 1940) and his son the first Black Air Force General (1998) are unicorns. General Davis Jr., made his father proud by attending West Point in 1932 and graduating in the top 12% in 1936. That made him the fourth Black cadet to graduate from West Point and the first in the 20th century.