Black History 365 | # 130 Denise Oliver Velez

Denise Oliver Velez was involved in social movements such as the Civil Rights and AIDS awareness programs. Oliver-Velez was a member of both the Young Lords Party and the Black Panther Party. She became the highest-ranking woman in the Young Lords Party. After the Young Lords moved its headquarters from New York to Puerto Rico, Denise Oliver-Velez joined the Black Panther Party. As a member, she worked on the local Panther Party paper and participated in international travel and solidarity work. She is currently an adjunct Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at SUNY New Paltz, and is a Contributing Editor for the progressive political blog Daily Kos.

Black History 365 | # 129 Buddy Bolden

Buddy Bolden is widely known as the inventor of jazz music. While this is debatable, it is clear that Bolden’s music helped form the jazz movement. From New Orleans, from 1898 until 1906, he was known as the King, locally. He formed a band as the coronet player, two clarinet players, one guitarist, one bass player, and a drummer. No one in the band could read sheet music so all compositions played were either copied from other bands or created on the spot, helping to generate the spontaneous improvisation that would become a hallmark of jazz. 

Black History 365 | # 128 Rita Marley

Did you know that Rita Marley, the wife of Bob Marley has lived in Ghana for over 20 years? She moved to Ghana alongside Bob Marley's family in the 1990s and became a Ghanaian citizen in 2013. She now resides in Ghana and was several years ago enstooled as Nana Afua Adobea 1(Queen of Development) in the South-eastern Akwapim Region of Ghana.

Black History 365 | # 127 Bob Marley

Robert Nesta Marley was born on February 6, 1945, on his grandfather Omeriah Malcolm’s farm in the rural interior of the island of Jamaica at Nine Mile, Rhoden Hall, St. Ann Parish. His mother was an eighteen-year-old black Jamaican named Cedella Malcolm. His father was Captain Norval Sinclair Marley, a white British Army member in his early sixties. Bob spent most of the early part of his life in poverty and all of it without a father present. Marley died on May 11, 1981, at the age of thirty-six, from cancer in his stomach, lungs, and brain. Since 1991, ten years after his death, over 21 million Bob Marley records have been sold. Marley was also known for his belief in Rastafarianism, where Haile Selassie I is regarded by Rastafarians as the God of the Black race.

Black History 365 | # 126 Nina Simone

Nina Simone’s music provided a soundtrack for the civil rights movement and she used her “unapologetic rage and accusatory voice to name names and take no prisoners in the African-American struggle for equality in the early 60s.” Simone struck up close friendships with James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, Miriam Makeba, and Lorraine Hansberry, who became her political mentor and was a neighbor of Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz. She wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing that killed four young African-American girls. Simone also penned “Four Women,” chronicling the complex histories of a quartet of African-American female figures, and “Young, Gifted and Black,” borrowing the title of a play by Hansberry, which became a popular anthem. After the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Simone’s bassist Greg Taylor penned “Why (The King of Love Is Dead),” which was first performed by the singer and her band at the Westbury Music Festival.