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Thread: February is Black History Month:

  1. #1
    Good Doctor HST Guest

    February is Black History Month:

    Just a reminder that the month of February is devoted to the prominent African-Americans who have shaped our lives, by both artistic achievements and creating social change for all races.

    Today let's take a look at Ralph Ellison (courtesy of Biography.com):

    "Teacher, editor, and writer, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He studied at Harvard (1907 BA) and was the first African-American to attend Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar (1910 B Litt). He studied philosophy at the University of Berlin (1910-11) and attended lectures by Henri Bergson in Paris. Returning to the USA, he taught philosophy at Howard University (1912-17), gained his Ph D at Harvard (1918), and resumed his teaching career at Howard as professor of philosophy (1918-53). He first became known as the editor of The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), an anthology of African-American writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He published other anthologies featuring the literary work of African-Americans, as well as books, essays, and reviews that were influential in defining African-Americans' distinctive traditions and culture and the role they might play in bringing blacks into mainstream American society. In The Negro and His Music (1936) he placed African-Americans' music into the spectrum of African and world folk music, while his Negro in Art (1941) was one of the first works to stress the influence of African art on modern Western painting and sculpture."

    If you get a chance everyone, read (or reread) the novel "Invisible Man", another notable work from Mr. Ellison. A great story of a young black man's struggles against society and his corresponding self-discovery.

  2. #2
    princesskittypoo Guest
    february is also the month of LOVE :-)

  3. #3
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    John Lee Hooker - Musician

    The Best of Friends celebrates the collaborations and friendships between John Lee Hooker and the musicians he has worked with over the past decade. Together they created the landmark and award-winning albums The Healer (1989), Mr. Lucky (1991), Boom Boom (1993), Chill Out (1995) and Don't Look Back (1997). In addition to highlighted tracks from these five albums, The Best Of Friends features three new tracks recorded especially for this release with Ry Cooder, Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite and some other very special friends. Not only is every collaboration the result of friendship and mutual admiration, but every song has a story, as does the album itself and the period it celebrates.

    Fifteen years ago, Van Morrison, already a long-time friend, suggested producing a record for Hooker. Several years later, George Thorogood and Carlos Santana asked to be part of whatever project John Lee might next embark upon. The fruits of these seeds of inspiration resulted in 1989's The Healer. John Lee was captured performing duets with his friends and performing in solo and small ensemble formats. The concept, and the great response it received, appealed to even more friends and in the ensuing years a variety of artists who shared a deep mutual admiration for John Lee lined up to join the fun.

    Carlos Santana is featured on two songs co-written with Hooker, "The Healer" and "Chill Out (Things Gonna Change)," each title tracks of Grammy winning albums. Carlos' association started with his showing up at Hooker's Bay Area shows, first as a fan and then regularly as an onstage guest. Carlos was eager to bring Hooker's music to a wider audience and he saw that dream realized in songs that surprised many with the combination of the two artists' dissimilar styles. Hooker sees nothing unusual about the pairing, though, as he loves Carlos' playing, loves the passion he brings to the music and is always proud to call Carlos one of his best friends.

    "I'm In The Mood," Hooker's duet with long-time friend Bonnie Raitt, earned first-time Grammy Awards for both friends in 1989 in the Best Traditional Blues Recording category. Hooker's only other vocal duet partner in his past decade of hits was Van Morrison. Their duet on the title track to Don't Look Back, most of which was produced by Morrison, brought them a shared Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. That track also features the legendary Charles Brown on keyboards. The album itself won Hooker his fourth Grammy, for Best Traditional Blues Recording. Morrison is also captured here on Hooker's classic "I Cover The Waterfront," backed on Hammond B3 by the master of the instrument, Booker T. Jones.

    In the early 1980's Hooker fell in love with a tape of Robert Cray's Bad Influence while touring Europe. Months later, Cray was added as the unknown opening act on a US tour headlined by Hooker. They have since become warm friends and Bay Area neighbors and Cray and/or members of his band appear on four of the five albums released since The Healer. Their first recorded collaboration, "Baby Lee," is an upbeat, almost calypso style number that led to one of Hooker's most entertaining videos ever.

    Jimmie Vaughan joins Hooker on "Boom Boom," one of Hooker's biggest hits when it was first released on Vee Jay in 1961, and subsequently covered by The Yardbirds and The Animals. Hooker loved jamming onstage in Austin or anywhere else on the road with Jimmie or little brother Stevie Ray. Jimmie and John Lee nailed this track, which became the theme for a major ad campaign across Europe and helped the album of the same name to debut at #16 on the UK pop charts.

    Los Lobos were well versed in Hooker's style and, in fact, backed him on "The Boogie" when he joined them for their Greek Theatre 20th anniversary celebration in 1993. They showed that drive again with "Dimples," one of Hooker's all time biggest hits when it was originally released in 1956. Hooker re-recorded the song in 1996 with Los Lobos producing and playing, and the result was the driving lead track on Don't Look Back.

    Ry Cooder, who had performed a number of live duets with Hooker earlier this decade, as well as excelling as producer/guitarist on "This Is Hip" from Mr. Lucky, reprises those roles on a new version of the Hooker gem, "Big Legs, Tight Skirt," a track that also features keyboard work from the legendary Ike Turner.

    A relatively recent friendship with rising star Ben Harper began with a shared show at Marin County's legendary Sweetwater, just around the release of Ben's Virgin debut, Welcome To The Cruel World. Now friends, Ben brings an element to "Burnin' Hell" reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix, who credited Hooker as an influence, in turn had a significant influence on Harper. Also featured on the session is legendary harp player Charlie Musselwhite, one of Hooker's oldest and dearest friends (in fact, John Lee was best man at Charlie's wedding), matching Harper's licks as all three make the track truly burn.

    Capping the new tracks in grand style is a driving version of Hooker's first hit, "Boogie Chillen," featuring an all star lineup of players. "Boogie Chillen" was Hooker's first recording and it took off like a rocket exactly 50 years ago. This golden anniversary version features stellar sidepersons Jim Keltner on drums, Reggie McBride on bass, Little Feat's Bill Payne on keyboards and Johnny Lee Schell and John Lee's long-time sideman and best friend, Rich Kirch, on guitars. This great new version of "Boogie Chillen" caps a decade of collaborations and marks a half-century since Hooker's first big break.

    The one exception to the "Best Friends" theme is a solo track too good to leave behind. "Tupelo" captures Hooker at his finest, telling the story of a disastrous flood in Tupelo, Mississippi in the haunting, stark way that is Hooker's trademark and also showcases his delta roots. The actual recording of this track was captured for the prestigious South Bank Show's documentary on Hooker's life, just one of the many tributes paid to Hooker in the past decade.

    John Lee Hooker was 72 years old when The Healer was released in 1989. At an age when most artists are well past their retirement, Hooker's accomplishments in the past decade have numbered more on an annual basis than many achieve in a lifetime.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  4. #4
    Good Doctor HST Guest

    February 2nd....

    Today, let's examine the life of Sojourner Truth, the brave suffragist/abolitionist (courtesy of Galegroup):

    "Born Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, around 1797, she was freed by the New York State Emancipation Act of 1827 and lived in New York City for a time. After taking the name Sojourner Truth, which she felt God had given her, she assumed the "mission" of spreading "the Truth" across the country. She became famous as an itinerant preacher, drawing huge crowds with her oratory (and some said "mystical gifts") wherever she appeared. She became one of an active group of black women abolitionists, lectured before numerous abolitionist audiences, and was friends with such leading white abolitionists as James and Lucretia Mott and Harriet Beecher Stowe. With the outbreak of the Civil War she raised money to purchase gifts for the soldiers, distributing them herself in the camps. She also helped African Americans who had escaped to the North to find habitation and shelter. Age and ill health caused her to retire from the lecture circuit, and she spent her last days in a sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan."

    Her most famous words were uttered at a suffrage convention, directed at a male heckler....

    “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! Ain't I a woman?.... I have borne 13 children, and seen almost all of them sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, no one but Jesus heard me. And ain't I a woman?”

  5. #5
    Good Doctor HST Guest

    February 3rd...

    Today, let's look at Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam leader during the 1960's:

    (1897-1975)
    Black Nationalist, Nation of Islam Spiritual Leader



    Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, on October 10, 1897. His father, a Baptist preacher, had been a slave.

    As a boy, Elijah worked at various jobs involving manual labor. At the age of 26, he moved with his wife and two children (he was to have eight children in all) to Detroit. There in 1930, Poole met Fard Muhammad, also known as W.D. Fard, who had founded the Lost-Found Nation of Islam. Poole soon became Fard's chief assistant and in 1932 went to Chicago where he established the Nation of Islam's Temple, Number Two, which soon became the largest. In 1934, he returned to Detroit. When Fard disappeared that year, political and theological rivals accused Poole of foul play. He returned to Chicago where he organized his own movement, in which Fard was deified as Allah and Elijah (Poole) Muhammad became known as Allah's Messenger. This movement soon became known as the Black Muslims.

    During World War II, Elijah Muhammad expressed support for Japan, on the basis of its being a nonwhite country, and was jailed for sedition. The time Muhammad served in prison was probably significant in his later, successful attempts to convert large numbers of black prison inmates, including Malcolm X, to the Nation of Islam. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation grew under Muhammad's leadership. Internal differences between Muhammad and Malcolm X, followed by the break between the two men and Malcolm's assassination, for which three Black Muslim gunmen were convicted, provided a great deal of unfavorable media coverage, but this did not slow the growth of the movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Elijah Muhammad moderated the Nation's criticism of whites without compromising its message of black integrity. When Muhammad died on February 25, 1975, the Nation was an important religious, political, and economic force among America's blacks, especially in this country's major cities. Elijah Muhammad was not original in his rejection of Christianity as the religion of the oppressor. Noble Drew Ali and the Black Jews had arrived at this conclusion well before him. But Muhammad was the most successful salesman for this brand of African American religion. Thus he was able to build the first strong, black religious group in the United States that appealed primarily to the unemployed and underemployed city dweller, and ultimately to some in the black middle class. In addition, his message on the virtues of being black was explicit and uncompromising, and he sought with at least a little success to bolster the economic independence of African Americans by establishing schools and businesses under the auspices of the Nation of Islam.

  6. #6
    Good Doctor HST Guest

    February 4th....

    Today, let's look at a man who was born only about 20-25 miles from my hometown:



    Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a pioneer in open heart surgery was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. Attended formal schooling in Hare's Classical Academy in 1877 and received his M.D. from Chicago Medical College, Northwestern Medical School, in 1883. He helped to found the Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses.

    In 1893 Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open heart surgery by removing a knife from the heart of a stabbing victim. He sutured a wound to the pericardium (the fluid sac surrounding the myocardium), from which the patient recovered and lived for several years afterward. He established a training school for nurses. He was the first Surgeon in Chief to divide the Freemen's Hospital in Washington, D.C. into separate departments to treat specific conditions: Medical, Surgical, Gynecological , Obstetrical, Dermatological, Genito-Urinary, and Throat and Chest. In 1891 he founded the Provident Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago, the oldest free-standing black owned hospital in the United States. Dr. Williams was the only African-American in a group of 100 charter members of the American College of Surgeons in 1913. He founded and became the first vice-president of the national Medical Association. Dr. Williams was awarded by a bill in the United States Congress in 1970 that issued a commemorative stamp in his honor.

  7. #7
    Good Doctor HST Guest

    February 5th... In Memorandum

    Ossie Davis (1917-2005)

    NEW YORK (AP) -- Ossie Davis, the actor distinguished for roles dealing with racial injustice on stage, screen and in real life, has died, an aide said Friday. He was 87.

    Davis, the longtime husband and partner of actress Ruby Dee, was found dead Friday in his hotel room in Miami Beach, Florida, according to officials there. He was making a film called "Retirement," said Arminda Thomas, who works in his office in suburban New Rochelle and confirmed the death.

    Davis, who wrote, acted, directed and produced for the theater and Hollywood, was a central figure among black performers of the last five decades. He and Dee celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1998 with the publication of a dual autobiography, "In This Life Together."

    Both had key roles in the television series "Roots: The Next Generation" (1978), "Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum" (1986) and "The Stand" (1994). Davis appeared in several Spike Lee films, including "School Daze," "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle Fever," some with Dee.

    In 2004, Davis and Dee were among the artists selected to receive the Kennedy Center Honors.

    When not on stage or on camera, Davis and Dee were deeply involved in civil rights issues and efforts to promote the cause of blacks in the entertainment industry. They nearly ran afoul of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s, but were never openly accused of any wrongdoing.

    As black performers, they found themselves caught up in the social unrest fomented by the then-new Cold War and the growing debate over social and racial justice in the United States.

    "We young ones in the theater, trying to fathom even as we followed, were pulled this way and that by the swirling currents of these new dimensions of the Struggle," Davis wrote in the joint autobiography.

    He lined up with black socialist reformer DuBois and singer Paul Robeson, remaining fiercely loyal to the singer even after Robeson was denounced by other black political, sports and show business figures for his openly communist and pro-Soviet sympathies.

    While Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, the New York theater world became engulfed in McCarthyism and red-baiting controversies, Davis and Dee emerged from the anti-communist fervor unscathed and, in Davis' view, justifiably so.

    "We've never been, to our knowledge, guilty of anything -- other than being black -- that might upset anybody," he wrote.

  8. #8
    Good Doctor HST Guest

    February 6th....

    Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993)

    United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall built a distinguished career fighting for the cause of civil rights and equal opportunity. Ebony dubbed Marshall "the most important Black man of this century — a man who rose higher than any Black person before him and who has had more effect on Black lives than any other person, Black or White." The first African-American to serve on the Supreme Court, Marshall stood alone as the Supreme Court's liberal conscience toward the end of his career, the last impassioned spokesman for a left-wing view on such causes as affirmative action, abolishment of the death penalty, and due process. His retirement in 1991 left the Court in the hands of more conservative justices.
    Duke University professor John Hope Franklin told Ebony: "If you study the history of Marshall's career, the history of his rulings on the Supreme Court, even his dissents, you will understand that when he speaks, he is not speaking just for Black Americans but for Americans of all times. He reminds us constantly of the great promise this country has made of equality, and he reminds us that it has not been fulfilled. Through his life he has been a great watchdog, insisting that this nation live up to the Constitution."

    Joined NAACP Staff

    Representing the local NAACP, he negotiated with White store owners who sold to Blacks but would not hire them." Marshall also took the case of a would-be law student who wanted to attend the all-white University of Maryland law school. The case against the university was Marshall's first big one. His former professor came to town to help him argue it, and the judge gave them a favorable ruling. Soon thereafter, Marshall was invited to join the NAACP's national office in New York City as an assistant special counsel. Two years later, in 1938, he became the head special counsel for the powerful organization.

    "For the next 20 years," Williams wrote, "[Marshall] traveled the country using the Constitution to force state and federal courts to protect the rights of Black Americans. The work was dangerous, and Marshall frequently wondered if he might not end up dead or in the same jail holding those he was trying to defend." Marshall prepared cases against the University of Missouri and the University of Texas on behalf of black students. He petitioned the governor of Texas when a black was excluded from jury duty. During and after World War II, he was an outspoken opponent of the government detention of Japanese Americans, and in 1951 he investigated unfair court-martial practices aimed at blacks in the military in Korea and Japan. William H. Hastie, of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, told the New York Times: "Certainly no lawyer, and practically no member of the bench has Thurgood Marshall's grasp of the doctrine of law as it affects civil rights."

    Helped End School Segregation

    The limelight found Marshall in 1954, when he led the legal team that challenged public school segregation in the courts. The case advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a landmark ruling that ended a half-century of segregated schooling. Remembering those days when he worked on Brown vs. Board of Education, Marshall told Ebony that the Court's decision "probably did more than anything else to awaken the Negro from his apathy to demanding his right to equality." At the time, however, Marshall was an opponent of civil disobedience for blacks in the South, feeling that organized opposition might lead to white violence — as indeed it did.

    Eventually, after much opposition from Southern senators and even from Robert Kennedy, Marshall was named to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961. As the civil rights movement gained ground in the 1960s, so did Marshall. In 1965 he was given the post of United States solicitor general, a position in which he represented the government before the Supreme Court. His most important case during these years was the one leading to the adoption of the Miranda rule, which requires policemen to inform suspects of their rights.

    Named to Supreme Court

    Against stiff opposition even in his own (Democratic) party, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. Marshall's nomination was opposed most violently by four Southern senators on the Judiciary Committee, but nevertheless he was confirmed by a vote of 69 to 11. He was sworn in and took his seat on October 2, 1967, and he stayed until his failing health forced him to retire in 1991. Williams wrote: "Throughout his time on the court, Marshall has remained a strong advocate of individual rights.... He has remained a conscience on the bench, never wavering in his devotion to ending discrimination."

    Marshall was known as the most tart-tongued member of the court. He was never reticent with his opinions, especially on matters affecting the civil rights agenda. Former justice William Brennan, long Marshall's liberal ally on the court, told Ebony: "The only time Thurgood may make people uncomfortable, and perhaps it's when they should be made uncomfortable, is when he'll take off in a given case that he thinks ... is another expression of racism."

    It came as no surprise therefore that judge Marshall was a vocal critic of both Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Few justices have been known to speak out on political matters, and for years Marshall himself refused to grant interviews. Near the end of his service to the Court, however, Marshall did speak out when he was stung by court reversals on minority set-aside programs and affirmative action. In 1987 Marshall dismissed Reagan as "the bottom" in terms of his commitment to black Americans. He later told Ebony: "I wouldn't do the job of dogcatcher for Ronald Reagan." Marshall later heaped equal vitriol on the Bush administration after the president vetoed an important civil rights bill. The justice told Newsweek that the actions of Bush and Reagan reflect a return to the days "when we [blacks] really didn't have a chance."

    Liberal Voice in Changing Court

    During the more than a decade that Republicans controlled the White House, one by one, retiring judges were replaced with more conservative successors. For many years Marshall and Brennan teamed as the high court's true liberals, and Marshall was gravely disappointed when his colleague was forced to retire. Marshall remained the lone outspoken liberal on the nine-member court, suffering through heart attacks, pneumonia, blood clots, and glaucoma. Marshall steadfastly refused to consider stepping down before absolutely necessary because, as he told Ebony, "I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband." One of Marshall's law clerks told People magazine that Marshall felt compelled to remain on the court, perhaps at the expense of his health, because he saw himself as the champion of the underdog. "He's the conscience of the Court," the clerk said. Despite his predictions, Marshall's failing health finally impeded his ability to perform his duties. He retired in 1991 and died of heart failure on January 24, 1993.

    Marshall will be well remembered. Marshall served as a strong leader during the civil rights movement, as an architect of the legal strategy that ended racial segregation, and as the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist referred to the words inscribed above the front entrance to the Supreme Court — "Equal Justice for All" — stating in his eulogy that, "Surely no one individual did more to make these words a reality than Thurgood Marshall."

  9. #9
    Good Doctor HST Guest

    February 7th....

    Maya Angelou (1928-)

    Novelist, Poet



    Born Marguerite Johnson, Maya Angelou spent her formative years shuttling between St. Louis, Missouri, a tiny, totally segregated town in Arkansas, and San Francisco where she realized her ambition of becoming that city's first black streetcar conductor.

    During the 1950s, she studied dancing with Pearl Primus in New York, later appearing as a nightclub singer in New York and San Francisco. She worked as an editor for The Arab Observer, an English-language weekly published in Cairo; lived in Accra, Ghanna, where under the black nationalist regime of Kwame Nkrumah she taught music and drama; and studied cinematography in Sweden. She became a national celebrity in 1970 with the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first volume of her autobiography, which detailed her encounters with southern racism and a rape by her mother's lover.

    In 1971, she produced Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie: The Poetry of Maya Angelou; in 1975, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well; in 1979, And Still I Rise; and in 1983, Shaker Why Don't You Sing? In 1977, she was nominated for an Emmy award for her portrayal of Nyo Boto in the television adaptation of the best-selling novel "Roots."

    Three more volumes of her autobiography have been published: Gather Together in My Name (1974); Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976); and The Heart of a Woman (1981). In 1986, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes was published. Angelou's other works include Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, and Now Sheba Sings the Song.
    On January 20, 1993, Angelou read her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," during the inauguration of President Bill Clinton.



    "Wouldn't they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn't let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them, after all the things they said about "my daddy must of been a Chinaman" (I thought they meant made out of china, like a cup) because my eyes were so small and squinty. Then they would understand why I had never picked up a Southern accent, or spoke the common slang, and why I had to be forced to eat pigs' tails and snouts. Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil."

    "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult."

    -Excerpts from I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

  10. #10
    Good Doctor HST Guest

    February 8th....

    Jackie Joyner-Kersee 1962-

    Jackie Joyner-Kersee is often regarded as the best all-around female athlete in the world and the all-time greatest heptathlete.

    She has won three gold, one silver and one bronze Olympic medals. At 23 feet nine inches, she holds the American record for the long jump. With her score of 7,161, she was the first woman to earn more than 7,000 points in the heptathlon, and has held the heptathlon world record since 1986.

    Jacqueline Joyner was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, on March 3, 1962. She was inspired to compete in multiple events after seeing a 1975 television movie about "Babe" Didrikson.

    She won four consecutive National Junior Pentathlon Championships, the first at the age of 14, and also played volleyball in high school, but she excelled at basketball and accepted a basketball scholarship to UCLA. There she earned All-America honors as a four-year Bruins starter at forward.

    Her UCLA coach, Bob Kersee, saw her talent and encouraged her to train for multiple-event contests.

    Jackie represented the United States at the 1983 world championships in Helsinki, Finland, and later competed at the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where she won the silver medal in the heptathlon -- a two-day contest comprising the 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, and 200-meter race on the first day, and the long jump, javelin, and 800-meter race on the second day.

    Jackie married her coach, Bob Kersee, in 1986, the same year she gave up basketball for the heptathlon, setting two world records within one month. At the inaugural Goodwill Games In Moscow, she became the first woman ever to break the 7,000-point barrier.

    In 1987, Joyner-Kersee competed at the indoor and outdoor track and field championships in the United States, the Pan-American Games in Indianapolis and the world championships in Rome, where she won gold medals in the long jump and heptathlon.

    In 1988, she surpassed her own record, scoring 7,291 points in the Olympic heptathlon in Seoul, South Korea, winning the gold medal and setting the world, Olympic, and American records for the event. Joyner-Kersee also won the gold medal and set the Olympic record in the long jump at Seoul, with a leap of 24 feet three inches.

    In the '92 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, she won the heptathlon again and took third in the long jump. She later captured the heptathlon gold medal at the 1993 world championships in Stuttgart, Germany. A strong-willed competitor, Jackie Joyner-Kersee comes from a family of talented athletes. Her father, Alfred, was a hurdler and football player in high school, and her brother Al was also an Olympic athlete. Al's wife was Olympic sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner. Joyner-Kersee has received many awards, including the 1985 Broderick Cup as outstanding collegiate woman athlete, the James E. Sullivan Award in 1986 and the Jesse Owens Award in 1986 and '87. She was named Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year in 1987, and became the first woman to win The Sporting News Man of the Year Award in 1988.

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