Respect where it's due: BM/WW IR in History

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Former Defense Secretary William Cohen wand wife Author Janet Langhart Cohen

Cohen was born in Bangor, Maine. His father, Reuben Cohen, was a Russian-Jewish immigrant and life long baker (Bangor Rye Company). His mother, Clara, was of Irish-Protestant ancestry.
After graduating from Bangor High School in 1958, Cohen attended Bowdoin College, graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Latin in 1962.
While in high school and college Cohen was a basketball player, and was named to the Maine all-state high school and college basketball team, and at Bowdoin was inducted into the New England All-Star Hall of Fame. Cohen attended law school at the Boston University School of LawLL.B (law degree) cum laude in 1965. graduating with a
Cohen filed for divorce from his first wife Diana Dunn, on Feb. 15, 1987.
On February 14, 1996 Cohen and Janet Langhart[1] were married. Langhart is a former model, Boston television personality, and BET correspondent. Janet Langhart was known as the "First Lady of the Pentagon" during Cohen's tenure as Secretary.

Langhart began her career in Chicago as a model, where she worked for Marshall Field's and the Ebony Fashion Fair, and she was named Miss Chicagoland. At 28, she became the first black "weathergirl" for WBBM-TV. She became a noted black television journalist at a variety of outlets, and interviewed personalities including Rosa Parks and David Duke. She became friends with Muhammad Ali and F. Lee Bailey, and considered Martin Luther King a personal mentor. Her multiracial background hampered her at times, as she was allegedly "too black for a white audience, too white for a black audience."[2]
She worked on a television show called 9 Broadcast Plaza alongside Richard Bey. She was fired from Entertainment Tonight in 1990 after she asked Arnold Schwarzenegger, apparently violating an agreement he had with producers, about his father Gustav Schwarzenegger's war service for Nazi Germany. "I was terminated by The Terminator", she remarked. Later, she was a commentator on Black Entertainment Television. She has also worked for the Boston Globe and WCVB-TV in Boston.[5], and she has been a spokeswoman for U.S. News and World Report and Avon Cosmetics.[4]

Senator Cohen served as a best man in then-Senate Naval Liaison John McCain's second wedding (Gary Hart was a groomsman). McCain later became his Senate colleague (Info Taken from Wikipedia)
 
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Versatile American actor Giancarlo Esposito was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, but grew up in Manhattan from the age of six. His mother was an African-American nightclub singer (who once shared a bill with Josephine Baker) and his father was an Italian stagehand. In show business most of his life, Esposito made his Broadway debut in a 1966 production of +Maggie Flynn. His other stage credits include +Sacrilege, +Miss Moffatt, and +Balm in Gilead. He won a 1981 Theatre World Award for his performance in +Zooman and the Sign. (Info Taken from Starpulse)
 
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Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin & Natalya Nikolaenvna Pushkin


Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin was a Russian Romantic author who is considered to be the GREATEST RUSSIAN POET and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers.
Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo. Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals; in the early 1820s he clashed with the government, which sent him into exile in southern Russia. While under the strict surveillance of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will, he wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov, but could not publish it until years later. His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was published serially from 1825 to 1832.
Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, later became regulars of court society. In 1837, while falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later. (Info taken from Wikipedia)
 
Although these two are on a number of threads in this forum this should have been the first on this thread...

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Mildred Loving, a black woman whose anger over being banished from Virginia for marrying a white man led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, died on May 2 at her home in Central Point, Va. She was 68. Mildred and Richard Loving, in 1967, were arrested in Virginia.

Peggy Fortune, her daughter, said the cause was pneumonia.
The Supreme Court ruling, in 1967, struck down the last group of segregation laws to remain on the books — those requiring separation of the races in marriage. The ruling was unanimous, its opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who in 1954 wrote the court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional.

In Loving v. Virginia, Warren wrote that miscegenation laws violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. “We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race,” he said.

By their own widely reported accounts, Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, were in bed in their modest house in Central Point in the early morning of July 11, 1958, five weeks after their wedding, when the county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening voice demanded, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?”
Mrs. Loving answered, “I’m his wife.”

Mr. Loving pointed to the couple’s marriage certificate hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, “That’s no good here.”
The certificate was from Washington, D.C., and under Virginia law, a marriage between people of different races performed outside Virginia was as invalid as one done in Virginia. At the time, it was one of 16 states that barred marriages between races.

After Mr. Loving spent a night in jail and his wife several more, the couple pleaded guilty to violating the Virginia law, the Racial Integrity Act. Under a plea bargain, their one-year prison sentences were suspended on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together or at the same time for 25 years.
Judge Leon M. Bazile, in language Chief Justice Warren would recall, said that if God had meant for whites and blacks to mix, he would have not placed them on different continents. Judge Bazile reminded the defendants that “as long as you live you will be known as a felon.”

They paid court fees of $36.29 each, moved to Washington and had three children. They returned home occasionally, never together. But times were tough financially, and the Lovings missed family, friends and their easy country lifestyle in the rolling Virginia hills.
By 1963, Mrs. Loving could stand the ostracism no longer. Inspired by the civil rights movement and its march on Washington, she wrote Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and asked for help. He wrote her back, and referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The A.C.L.U. took the case. Its lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, faced an immediate problem: the Lovings had pleaded guilty and had no right to appeal. So they asked Judge Bazile to set aside his original verdict. When he refused, they appealed. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the lower court, and the case went to the United States Supreme Court.

 Mr. Cohen recounted telling Mr. Loving about various legal theories applying to the case. Mr. Loving replied, “Mr. Cohen, tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”
Mildred Delores Jeter’s family had lived in Caroline County, Va., for generations, as had the family of Richard Perry Loving. The area was known for friendly relations between races, even though marriages were forbidden. Many people were visibly of mixed race, with Ebony magazine reporting in 1967 that black “youngsters easily passed for white in neighboring towns.”

Mildred’s mother was part Rappahannock Indian, and her father was part Cherokee. She preferred to think of herself as Indian rather than black.
Mildred and Richard began spending time together when he was a rugged-looking 17 and she was a skinny 11-year-old known as Bean. He attended an all-white high school for a year, and she reached 11th grade at an all-black school.

When Mildred became pregnant at 18, they decided to do what was elsewhere deemed the right thing and get married. They both said their initial motive was not to challenge Virginia law.
“We have thought about other people,” Mr. Loving said in an interview with Life magazine in 1966, “but we are not doing it just because somebody had to do it and we wanted to be the ones. We are doing it for us.”
In his classic study of segregation, “An American Dilemma,” Gunnar Myrdal wrote that “the whole system of segregation and discrimination is designed to prevent eventual inbreeding of the races.”

But miscegenation laws struck deeper than other segregation acts, and the theory behind them leads to chaos in other facets of law. This is because they make any affected marriage void from its inception. Thus, all children are illegitimate; spouses have no inheritance rights; and heirs cannot receive death benefits.

“When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1958.
Virginia’s law had been on the books since 1662, adopted a year after Maryland enacted the first such statute. At one time or another, 38 states had miscegenation laws. State and federal courts consistently upheld the prohibitions, until 1948, when the California Supreme Court overturned California’s law.

Though the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in the Loving case struck down miscegenation laws, Southern states were sometimes slow to change their constitutions; Alabama became the last state to do so, in 2000.
Mr. Loving died in a car accident in 1975, and the Lovings’ son Donald died in 2000. In addition to her daughter, Peggy Fortune, who lives in Milford, Va., Mrs. Loving is survived by her son, Sidney, of Tappahannock, Va.; eight grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Loving stopped giving interviews, but last year issued a statement on the 40th anniversary of the announcement of the Supreme Court ruling, urging that gay men and lesbians be allowed to marry. (Taken from the NY Times)
 
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Arcieri was born in San Francisco, California, the daughter of an Italian American father and African-American mother.Arcieri spent the better part of her childhood in Sebastopol, located in California's wine and redwood country. Shyness was a major obstacle in Leila's early life, one that she tried to overcome by throwing herself into high-school cheerleading. Upon graduating from high school, she moved to San Francisco, where she dabbled with both graphic design and photographymake-up artist. before becoming a make-up artist.

Arcieri was crowned Miss San Francisco in 1997, and soon after she began appearing in both commercials (including 1-800-COLLECT and Starburst) and music videos with the likes of Boyz II Men, and Q-Tip. Such work eventually brought her to the attention of writer-producer Timothy Stack, who cast her in the role of Jamaica St. Croix in his new series, Son of the Beach, a parody of Baywatch. That same year Leila was selected as the Coors Lite Beer 2000 spokesmodel. She reprised her role in XXX for the Director's Cut release in a short film containing the death of Xander.

In 2005, she was voted #65 on Maxim magazine's Hot 100 list. (Info taken from Starpulse)
 
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Alexandre Pere Dumas (Du-mah) A celebrated French novelist who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and dramatist was born at Villers-Cotterets (Aisne) on the 24th of July 1802. His father, the French general, Thomas Alexandre Dumas, also known as Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie -- was born in Saint Domingo, the natural son of Antoine Alexandre Davy, marquis de la Pailleterie, by a negress, Marie Cessette Dumas, who died in 1772. In 1780 he accompanied the marquis to France, and there the father made a mésalliance which drove the son into enlisting in a dragoon regiment.

Thomas Alexandre Dumas was still a private at the outbreak of the revolution, but he rose rapidly and became general of division in 1793. He was general-in-chief of the army of the western Pyrenees, and was transferred later to commands in the Alps and in La Vendée. Among his many exploits was the defeat of the Austrians at the bridge of Clausen on the 22nd of April 1797, where he commanded Joubert's cavalry. He lost Napoleon's favor by plain speaking in the Egyptian campaign, and presently returned to France to spend the rest of his days in retirement at Villers Cotterets, where he had married in 1792 Marie Elisabeth Laboret.

The novelist, who was the offspring of this union, was not four years old when General Dumas died, leaving his family with no further resource than 30 acres of land. Mme. Dumas tried to obtain help from Napoleon, but in vain, and lived with her parents in narrow circumstances.

Alexandre received the rudiments of education from a priest, and entered the office of a local solicitor. His chief friend was Adolphe de Leuven, the son of an exiled Swedish nobleman implicated in the assassination of Gustavus III of Sweden, and the two collaborated in various vaudevilles and other pieces which never saw the footlights. Leuven returned to Paris, and Dumas was sent to the office of a solicitor at Crépy. When in 1823 Dumas contrived to visit his friend in Paris, he was received to his great delight by Talma.

He returned home only to break with his employer, and to arrange to seek his fortune in Paris, where he sought help without success from his father's old friends. An introduction to the deputy of his department, General Foy, procured for him, however, a place as clerk in the service of the duke of Orleans at a salary of 1200 francs. He set to work to rectify his lack of education and to collaborate with Leuven in the production of vaudevilles and melodramas. Madame Dumas presently joined her son in Paris, where she died in 1838.
 
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Helen Folasade Adu, OBE, (born 16 January 1959), better known as Sade (pronounced "shah-day," ????de?), is a Nigerian/British singer-songwriter, composer, and record producer. She has achieved success in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as the frontwoman and lead vocalist of the popular Grammy Award winning English group Sade.

Sade was born in Ibadan, ?y? State, Nigeria. Her name, Folasade, means honor confers a crown. Her parents, Bisi Adu, a Nigerian lecturer in economics of Yoruba background, and Anne Hayes, an English nurse, met in London and moved to west Africa. Later, when the marriage ran into difficulties, Anne returned to Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, England, taking four-year-old Sade and her older brother Banji to live with her parents. Living in Colchester, Essex, Sade read a good deal, developed an interest in fashion, acquired a taste for dancing and listened to soul artists like Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, and Marvin Gaye.

In 1977, Sade arrived in London for a three-year course in fashion designSt. Martin's College. On graduating, she set up a small fashion company, making men's clothes, in London's Chalk Farm, with a friend, Gioia Mellor.She also found work as a photographic model.

In 1982, she joined Ray St. John's band Pride, which also included guitarist Stuart Matthewman, bassist Paul Denman, and drummer Paul Cooke. However, St. John left Pride shortly after, later resurfacing in the band Halo James, and Pride eventually petered out.

The other four members then formed a new group, the eponymous "Sade" and began to write their own material. Keyboardist Andrew Hale joined the band as a keyboard player in mid-1983, and in 1983 she signed a solo deal with Epic Records and sister imprint Portrait Records for the U.S. and Canada until In 1985 Sade appeared in the film Absolute Beginners, directed by Julien Temple. She played singer Athene Duncannon, performing "Killer Blow," co-written by her with Simon Booth of soul/jazzWorking Week.

On 11 February 1989, in the old castle of Viñuelas in Guadalajara, she married Carlos Scola, a Spanish film-maker.In 1994 Sade divorced Scola.In 1995 Sade moved to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, where she lived with Bob Morgan, a Jamaican producer. On 21 July 1996 she gave birth to her daughter Ila.
In 1997 Sade was cited for dangerous driving and disobeying a police officer in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Later a Jamaican court issued an arrest warrant for Sade after she failed to appear in court to face charges, but medical proof of her daughter's hospitalization allowed the arrest warrant to be stayed.

In 2005, Sade recorded a new track, "Mum", which she had performed at the Voices for Darfur charity concert on 8 December 2004 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, to raise awareness and funding for the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region at band
 
I absolutely love Sade i have 2 of her albums, i did already know that she was half Nigerian ie a Nigerian told me lol, anyway thanks for the little bit extra i will never go to Clacton on Sea again without knowing that its Sade's old stomping ground.:D
 
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Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence

Despite the many portraits of this 16th century Italian Renaissance figure, his African heritage is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Alessandro wielded great power as the first duke of Florence. He was the patron of some of the leading artists of the era and is one of the two Medici princes whose remains are buried in the famous tomb by Michaelangelo. The ethnic make up of this Medici Prince makes him the first black head of state in the modern western world.


Alessandro was born in 1510 to a black serving woman in the Medici household who, after her subsequent marriage to a muleteer, is simply referred to in existing documents as Simonetta da Collavechio. Historians today are convinced that Alessandro was fathered by the seventeen year old Cardinal Giulio de Medici who later became Pope Clement VII. Cardinal Giulio was the nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent.


On being elected Pope in 1523, Cardinal Giulio was forced to relinquish the lordship of Florence but he appointed a regent for his thirteen year old son Alessandro who had just been created Duke of Penna, and a nephew, Ipollito. Even though both were bastards, they were the last of what has come to be referred to as the elder line of the family.


Republicanism had grown in Florence under the regent and when Emperor Charles V sacked Rome in 1527, the Florentines took advantage of the situation to install a more democratic form of government and both Alessandro and Ipollito fled. When peace was finally made two years later between the Papal and the Imperial factions, Charles V agreed to militarily restore Florence to the Medici. After a siege of eleven months Alessandro was finally brought back as the Emperor's designated head of state.



In 1532, the new Florentine constitution declared Alessandro hereditary Duke and perpetual gonfalonier of the republic. Though his common sense and his feeling for justice won his subjects' affection, those in sympathy with the exiled opposition hated Alessandro and accused him of using his power to sexually exploit the citizenry. However, only two illegitimate children with the possibility of a third, have been attributed to him and even these he fathered with one woman, Taddea Malespina, a distant cousin of his.


With the death of his father, the Pope, in 1534, the exiles attempted to oust the Duke Alessandro from Florence. But the Emperor decided to uphold Alessandro and in an obvious show of support, gave Alessandro his own illegitimate daughter, Margaret of Austria, as wife.
Despite the security this kind of support should have given him, Alessandro was finally assassinated a few months after his wedding by Lorenzaccio de Medici, a distant cousin who had ingratiated himself in order to win his confidence.



According to the declaration he later published, Lorenzaccio claimed that he had executed Alessandro for the sake of the republic and that he had been able to disarm him of his personal bodyguards by setting up a sexual liaison for him as a trap. When the anti-Medici faction failed to use this occasion to overthrow the ducal government, Lorenzaccio fled in dismay. He was himself eventually murdered some twelve years later.

Allessandro's Children:

Although the initial reaction to the assassination on the part of the Ducal party had been to set up a regency for Alessandro's four year-old son, Giulio, they instead turned to Cosimo of the cadet branch of the family who as young man of seventeen they felt would be able to bring some equilibrium to the political instability that confronted them.
Since they were his cousins and since Cosimo had to consolidate the authority of the Medici family, Cosimo raised Alessandro's children in his own household and continued as their guardian until adulthood.

Despite the awkward presence at his court of a potential pretender to the duchy of Florence, Cosimo apparently regarded his young wards with true affection.Giulio married Lucrezia Gaetani in 1561 and a year later, Cosimo appointed him First Admiral of the Knights of San Stephano, an order especially founded to fight the Turks.

Info provided by Frontline...
 
Just visited The Imperial War Museum and saw a exibition of the involvement of Caribbean people in the two world wars. Some of them married interracially.
 
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Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833) was an influential African American religious leader who argued against slavery
Little is known of his early life. He was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, to a reportedly Caucasian mother of some status and a man named Haynes, who was said to be "of some form of African extraction".
At the age of five months, Lemuel Haynes was given over to indentured servitude in Granville, Massachusetts. Although serving as an agricultural worker, part of the agreement required educating him. Through accompanying his masters to church, he became exposed to CalvinistAurora Borealis, and, fearing the approach of the Day of Judgment as a result, he soon accepted Christianity.


Following the Revolutionary War some Black veterans were able to join the ruling class. An example is Lemuel Haynes. He was a freeman born in 1753 in what was to become West Hartford, but ended up in Massachusets as a servant. When the War began, he enlisted as Minuteman in 1774 and fought at Lexington, the siege of Boston, and went on the Ticonderoga expedition in New York.

His military experience left him with ambitions. He studied theology under a clergyman in Canaan, Connecticut, and was eventually ordained in Litchfield in November, 1785. He went on to become a minister in Torrington and then in Rutland, Vermont, where he preached more than thirty years. He was a preacher much sought after in New England, and his color made no difference. This was because the old attitudes still prevailed, for despite humble beginnings, he had become a professional and hence a respected member of the ruling class. It would not be long, though, before one's personal qualities could not overcome the fact of one's being Black.

Of course, such such success stories in which Black individuals folded smoothly into white society were necessarily exceptional, and their significance today as models of behavior is in proportion to the liklihood of a typical Black person rising to the heights of social status and power.

Reverend Haynes' sucessful career within the church should not obscure the early role of the church, which was not the liberation of Black people, but its prevention. At the time, the church institution was controlled by whites who aimed to "civilize" Blacks in the sense that their struggles for progress could only be in terms of prevailing white values and institutions.
The concept "civilization" had appeared in the previous century as an important part of emerging bourgeois ideology.

It served as an antidote to the notion of the sovereign individual, for there was need to counterbalance the anarchy implied by eighteenth-century social atomism, whether that anarchy was moral, economic or political (once the revolution was over). Civilization was therefore invented to refer to a willing submission of autonomous property owners to laws of their own devising so that they could enter into "rational" social relations. The empirical effect of "rationality" - and civilization more broadly - was an increase in one's personal property and the wealth of nations.


An important civilizing force was found in religion, for the art of voluntarily restraining one's autonomy, natural inclinations or appetites in the name of higher principle or law was sanctioned by Christian belief. Naturally, the early revolutionary indifference or even hostility to organized religion gave way to its warm accomodation once the new ruling class felt itself to be secure. The ruling bourgeosie had every reason to encourage education in the Black community as a potent instrument of social control, and since Blacks did not have access to what little public education was available in Hartford, the City fathers were in favor of elementary education in Black churches. If this sounds a little cynical, keep in mind that neither political life nor, to any extent, employment required an education. It was costly then as it is today, and one can never take its existence for granted as either a natural right or as intrinsically beneficial.

In the 1830's there were riots in which Black confronted white. One assumes this encouraged the provision of some education in the Black churches. The principal example was the school set up in the A.M.E. Zion Church that had existed on Pearl Street since 1836. Classes here for the Black children living in the nearby community along the Park River were taught by the Black author Ann Plato.

By current standards, the building was an impressive; classes were taught by a sophisticated woman. At the time women were seen as civilizers of their husbands' baser instincts, and so it was mandatory that women be employed as teachers to "civilize" their pupils. However, having noted this social function of education in the Black community, it remains that some graduates from this school undoubtedly drew upon their education as a basis of a career in the the white world, and in a few cases actually joined the ruling bourgeoisie themselves.



 
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Boris Kodjoe was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Ursula, a German psychologist, and Eric Kodjoe, a Ghanaian physician. He is Jewish through his mother and maternal grandmother.[1] Kodjoe is fluent in German, French, English and Spanish. He has a brother named Patrick and a sister named Nadja. Kodjoe aspired to be a professional tennis player and attended Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, VA, where he played tennis for the Rams. His brother Patrick played for VCU's basketball team. A back injury ended his tennis aspirations, but he was quickly signed as a model and soon after entered acting.

Named one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" by People Magazine in 2002, Kodjoe is perhaps best known as one of the seven regular cast members from the Showtime drama Soul Food, which aired from 2000 to 2004. He starred in the short-lived sitcom Second Time Around with his Soul Food co-star Nicole Ari Parker, whom he eventually married. He played the role of David Taylor, the wayward son of Pastor Fred Taylor in the October 2005 film The Gospel. He was in a play called Whatever She Wants starring Vivica A. Fox. He will make an appearance on the 5th season of Nip/Tuck.
 
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