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2023 BLACK HISTORY MONTH HIGHLIGHTS
A series highlighting Black/African American individuals who made amazing contributions to the United States in honor of Black History Month 2023.
Much of our focus for the 2023 Black History Month is Black Californians who were influential in some field.
Katherine Johnson
Mathematician
Black History Month 2023 Profile
Produced by the Multicultural & Community Engagement Center at Glendale Community College
Being handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson's long and remarkable life.
Born in West Virginia in 1918, her intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By 13, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College.
At 18, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics. She graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia.
When she was only 34 years old when she applied for and landed a job as a mathematician at NASA (then known as National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). One of her biggest accomplishments at NASA was helping calculate the trajectory, or path, of the country’s first human spaceflight in 1961, making sure astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., had a safe trip. A year later she helped figure out John Glenn’s orbit of the planet, another American first. In 1969, she calculated the trajectories of Neil Armstrong’s historic mission to the moon on Apollo 11.
Yet unlike the white male astronauts she helped launch into space, no one knew of the groundbreaking work Johnson and dozens of other Black women did for NASA and space exploration. It wasn’t until the 2016 release of the movie Hidden Figures that these women received widespread recognition.
She also worked on the Space Shuttle and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after 33 years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she said. In 2015, at age 97, Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.
Johnson died on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101. In her honor, NASA had dedicated the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at the Langley Research Center to commemorate the hard work she did to help take them to the stars.
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Gordon Parks,
Photographer (and artist in multiple media)
Black History Month 2023 Profile
Produced by the Multicultural & Community Engagement Center
at Glendale Community College
For much of the mid-1900s, it seemed like the world learned about Black America through the eyes of Gordon Parks.
His creative endeavors were astoundingly versatile. Parks performed as a jazz pianist, composed musical scores, wrote 15 books and co-founded Essence magazine.
He adapted his novel “The Learning Tree” into a 1969 film, becoming the first African American to direct a movie for a major studio, and later directed “Shaft,” a hit film that spawned the Blaxploitation genre.
But he reached his artistic peak as a photographer, and his intimate photos of African American life are his most enduring legacy. After buying a camera from a pawn shop at 25, Parks began snapping away. His images of life on Chicago’s South Side in the early 1940s won him a job documenting rural poverty for the federal government.
Parks’ photos evoked the humanity of his subjects, inspiring empathy and activism. A 1948 photo essay about a Harlem gang leader landed him a gig as Life magazine’s first Black staff photographer.
In the decades that followed, Parks traveled the country capturing iconic images of the segregated South, the civil rights movement and such figures as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. His images now grace the permanent collections of major art museums.
Parks famously called the camera his “weapon of choice,” a tool to fight poverty, racism and other societal ills. As he once put it to an interviewer, “I pointed my camera at people mostly who needed someone to say something for them.” He also commented, "I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sort of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera."
He continued many creative endeavors throughout his life. In 1989, he produced, directed, and composed the music for a ballet called Martin which was dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. He passed away in 2016. You can find an archive of his iconic work in the last link below.
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Belva Davis, Journalist
Black History Month 2023 Profile
Produced by the Multicultural & Community Engagement Center at Glendale Community College
Broadcast journalist Belva Davis was born on October 13, 1932. She attended Berkeley High in Berkeley, California, graduating in 1951. Even though she was accepted at San Francisco State University her family could not afford the tuition, and so Davis began working at the Naval Supply Center in Oakland. She still remained fully focused on becoming a journalist.
Davis's first paid writing job was as a freelance writer for Jet magazine. She soon found work with several weekly black newspapers, including the Bay Area Independent and the San Francisco Sun-Reporter. Davis's career in broadcasting began at radio station KSAN, where she read newspaper clips on the air, becoming the first black female at KSAN. Davis left KSAN to work for another radio station, KDIA. Here she had a regular two-hour radio show which featured music, studio interviews and political coverage.
In 1966, Davis was hired to replace television news anchor Nancy Reynolds on KPIX-TV, San Francisco's CBS affiliate. This made Davis the first female African American television reporter on the west coast. Davis also hosted and helped to create All Together Now, one of the country's first prime-time public affairs programs to focus on ethnic communities. In 1977, left KPIX to work at the PBS affiliate in San Francisco, KQED. She anchored A Closer Look and then Evening Edition from 1977 to 1981. She next took a job as anchor and urban affairs specialist for KRON-4, where she worked full time until 1999, when she became a special projects reporter for the television station.
Davis has received countless awards for her contributions to the field of journalism. These awards include national recognition from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, San Francisco State University and the National Education Writers Association. She received the Northern California Chapter of National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' highest lifetime achievement award, the Governor's Award, in 1996. Davis is also well known for her work as a labor activist, vice president of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and for being active within the community.
During her career, she soldiered in the trenches in the battle for racial equality, and brought stories of black Americans out of the shadows and into the light of day. And along the way, she encountered a cavalcade of cultural icons: Malcolm X, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Nancy Reagan, Huey Newton, Muhammad Ali, Alex Haley, Fidel Castro, Dianne Feinstein, Condoleezza Rice and more.
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Octavia Estelle Butler
Author
Black History Month 2023 Profile
Produced by the Multicultural & Community Engagement Center at Glendale Community College
Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California in 1947. She was one of the first African American women science fiction writers. Her work included such themes as injustice towards African Americans, global warming, women's rights and political parity.
Butler began to find “companionship in words,” and she recalled that by the time she was ten she could be found carrying around a large notebook, writing down stories whenever she got a free moment. Whenever she wrote stories for school, they were so unusual that many of her teachers assumed she had copied them from published works. One teacher recognized her talents and encouraged the then 13-year-old Butler to submit one of her stories to a science fiction magazine for publication. That submission was the first of many and solidified her desire to—and her belief that she could—become a professional writer.
She attended Pasadena City College, Cal State Los Angeles, and UCLA. While she loved writing, she enjoyed all learning and her academics included studying anthropology, psychology, physics, biology, and geology, etc. She once said in an interview, “I wrote myself in, since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing. I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.” Butler’s writing became an early pillar of the subgenre of Afrofuturism, which UCLA defines, “as a wide-ranging social, political and artistic movement that dares to imagine a world where African-descended peoples and their cultures play a central role in the creation of that world”.
Butler won numerous prestigious awards for her writing. In 1995, she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant—the only science fiction writer to receive this award. She won Nebula and Hugo Awards, the two highest honors for science fiction, a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and the City College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal in 2005. As a pioneer in science fiction, she opened up the genre to many other African American and female writers.
Butler died suddenly in her home in Seattle from a fall on February 24, 2006. Since her passing, her books have continued to rise in popularity and many have forthcoming TV or movie adaptations. She once told PBS that her oath was, “‘Do the thing that you love and do it as well as you possibly can and be persistent about it.’”
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Black History Month 2023 Profile
Produced by the Multicultural & Community Engagement Center
at Glendale Community College
This year, much of our focus will be Black Californians who were influential in some field. And what more “California” can you ask for than surfing.
Nick Gabaldón
Legendary Surfer
As you all might know, California is and has been a surfing haven for decades. However, you may not be aware that much of the California surfing culture was influenced by Nick Gabaldón.
You may also not know that California beaches were segregated at one time and there were very specific beaches for the Black community. Although no official laws were on the books, the segregation came in the form of harassment and intimidation of Black beachgoers. Nick Gabaldon became the first documented Black surfer during this period. He taught himself surfing by borrowing a paddleboard from a lifeguard and was tenacious in his desire to participate in the sport.
At that time, Santa Monica beach was designated as a beach for the Black community to enjoy. However, knowing that the better surfing waves were in Malibu (which was segregated), Nick paddled 12 miles from Santa Monica to Malibu to be able to surf with his white surfer friends.
Throughout his surfing career, Gabaldon was harassed and intimidated by other surfers but he did not give up. Despite the abuse he took, he continued to break the barrier for other Black surfers by refusing to be intimidated. In his honor, a group was organized in 2013 known as the Black Surfers Collective which gives free first lessons to aspiring young Black surfers. The event now draws hundreds of people from all over Los Angeles.
Nick's life was cut short (he passed away at the age of 24 - On June 6, 1951 - in a surfing accident in Santa Monica), but he made a huge impact on the surfing world, particularly due to being bicultural (he was part Latinx). Please see the YouTube link below for the documentary about his life and impact, called 12 Miles North.
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