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Girl, 5, channels iconic women for Black History Month

Every day in February Lola's mother, Cristi Smith-Jones, has been posting a photo to Twitter of her daughter dressed as a different famous black woman from history. Together, the images have a thing or two to show the world about #blackgirlmagic.

Smith-Jones, who lives in Kent, Washington, says that from the start it's been about empowering Lola with the legacies of boundary-breaking women.

It all started on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, when Lola came home from school and told her parents that she had learned about the civil rights leader. Her parents recognized an opportunity to talk to their daughter about slavery and civil rights.

"She seemed to understand where we were coming from. But how do you explain a long history of oppression and injustice to a 5-year-old? Since it's a heavy topic, we wanted to find a way to make learning about black history fun for her." Cristi Smith-Jones told CNN.

So the family decided to take advantage of Lola's love for dress-up.




Lola, left, in a photo paying homage to civil rights hero Rosa Parks.




Lola, left, in a photo paying homage to Dr. Mae Jemison.




Lola, left, in a photo paying homage to Shirley Chisholm.



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Katherine G. Johnson, NASA's Human Computer

Black History Month

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: What Is Your Life's Blueprint?

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Coretta Scott King

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Marcus Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, one of the most influential 20th Century black nationalist and Pan-Africanist leaders, was born on August 17, 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, and died in 1940. Greatly influenced by Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up From Slavery, Garvey began to support industrial education, economic separatism, and social segregation as strategies that would enable the assent of Blacks.

In 1914, Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica. UNIA promised black economic uplift via self-reliance, political equality via self-determination, and the “liberation of Africa from European colonialism via a Black army marching under the Red, Black, and Green flag of Black manhood.” Africa’s redemption, according to UNIA supporters was foretold in the messianic Biblical Psalms 68:31 “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” However, it was Garvey’s ability to convey, in his vivid and powerful speeches, the distinct possibility of achieving these goals that led the UNIA to become an organization of millions. Garvey’s most ambitious effort was the establishment of the Black Star Steamship Line. Garvey hoped that this joint stock corporation would develop lucrative commercial networks between the United States, the Caribbean, and the continent of Africa. He also hoped that his three ships would help in the return of millions of blacks in the “Diaspora” to Mother Africa. However, because of heavy debt and mismanagement, the steamship line went bankrupt and Garvey was charged with using the US Mail to defraud stock investors.



Marcus Garvey's son,Julius W. Garvey, M.D., is a NY-based cardiothoracic and vascular surgeon who is leading the Justice4Garvey effort seeking a posthumous presidential pardon from Obama for his father.



The first black agent's name was James Wormley Jones, known as Jack Jones. He was known by the code number "800". His job was to go into Harlem and to infiltrate the Garvey movement and to try and find evidence that could be used to build the legal case for ultimately getting rid of Garvey.



A. Philip Randolph, who had introduced Garvey to his first American audience on a Harlem street corner, said Garvey had "succeeded in making the Negro the laughingstock of the world."

Federal investigations into the finances of the Black Star Line, along with a blistering analysis of the shipping line by W.E.B. Du Bois in the NAACP's Crisis magazine, gave fuel to Garvey's black critics. Randolph personally critiqued the economic feasibility of the Black Star Line in The Messenger , an influential magazine he co-edited with Chandler Owen, and accused Garvey of squandering the hard-earned money of his hard-working, poor supporters.

Black opposition to Garvey coalesced into what came to be known as the "Garvey Must Go" Campaign. Supporters of the campaign, known collectively as the Friends of Negro Freedom, intended to unmask Garvey as a fraud before his black supporters. They also appealed to the federal government to step up investigations of irregularities in the Black Star Line, and to look into alleged acts of violence on the part of Garvey's inner circle.

Garvey would eventually be convicted of mail fraud charges in 1923. He was jailed in the Atlanta federal penitentiary in February 1925, where he would serve almost three years of a five-year sentence. And in 1927, Garvey would be deported from the United States, never to return.





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Loretta Lynch, First Black Woman U.S. Attorney General

Loretta E. Lynch was confirmed by the Senate on April 23, 2015 and sworn in by VP Biden on April 27, 2015 as the 83rd Attorney General of the United States. President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate Ms. Lynch on November 8, 2014.

Ms. Lynch received her A.B., cum laude, from Harvard College in 1981, and her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984. In 1990, after a period in private practice, Ms. Lynch joined the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York—the city she considers her adopted home. There, she forged an impressive career prosecuting cases involving narcotics, violent crimes, public corruption, and civil rights. In one notable instance, she served on the prosecution team in the high-profile civil rights case of Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was sexually assaulted by uniformed police officers in a Brooklyn police precinct in 1997.

In 1999, President Clinton appointed her to lead the office as United States Attorney—a post she held until 2001. In 2002, she joined Hogan & Hartson LLP (now Hogan Lovells) as a partner in the firm’s New York office. While in private practice, Ms. Lynch performed extensive pro bono work for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established to prosecute those responsible for human rights violations in the 1994 genocide in that country. As Special Counsel to the Tribunal, she was responsible for investigating allegations of witness tampering and false testimony.

In 2010, President Obama asked Ms. Lynch to resume her leadership of the United States Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. Under her direction, the office successfully prosecuted numerous corrupt public officials, terrorists, cybercriminals and human traffickers, among other important cases.

Ms. Lynch is the daughter of Lorenzo and Lorine Lynch of Durham, N.C., a retired minister and a librarian whose commitment to justice and public service has been the inspiration for her life’s work.

Ms. Lynch enjoys spending her free time with her husband, Stephen Hargrove, and their two children.



Timeline

1959: Lynch was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1959.

1981: Loretta E. Lynch graduated from Harvard College in 1981.

1990: Lynch first joined the Eastern District as a staff attorney in 1990.

1999: In 1999, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to serve as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

2001: In 2001, Lynch left the office to become a partner at Hogan & Hartson (later Hogan Lovells).

2010: She remained there until January 20, 2010, when President Barack Obama nominated Lynch to again serve as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

2014: In September 2014 when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his intention to step down, Lynch was speculated as being a potential candidate as the next United States Attorney General.



Biography

Dr. Ben Carson

Benjamin S. Carson, neurosurgeon and Republican Presidential Candidate in 2016, was born on September 18, 1951 in Detroit, Michigan. Carson was raised in a single parent home when his father deserted the family in 1959 when he was eight years old, leaving his mother, Sonya, and his older brother, Curtis. Because of the turmoil in the family, Carson and his brother fell behind in school and he was labeled a “dummy” by his classmates in fifth grade. Once his mother saw their failing grades, she stepped in to turn their lives around. They were only allowed to watch two or three television programs a week and were required to read two books per week and write a book report for her despite her own limited reading skills. Carson developed a love for books and scholarship and eventually graduated third in his high school class. He enrolled in and graduated from Yale University and from there completed medical school at the University of Michigan after training to become a neurosurgeon.

Benjamin Carson joined the medical staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1985 he revived a little used surgical procedure, the hemispherectomy, which involved removing half the brain of a child who had experienced numerous seizures. This procedure had been stopped in the 1970s after hundreds of failed attempts. Dr. Carson, however, was able to complete it successfully. He made medical history again in 1987 when he led a team of 140 surgeons and nurses in a 22 hour surgery that successfully separated Siamese twins who were conjoined at the back of the head.