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Flags Fly Half-Staff to Honor NJ Principal Who Died After Donating Bone Marrow to Help a Boy He Did Not Even Know

Flags were flown at half-staff Monday in Westfield, N.J., and a funeral is set for Tuesday to honor a beloved principal who lapsed into a monthlong coma and died after donating bone marrow for a boy in France he’d never even met.

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source https://www.theroot.com/flags-fly-half-staff-to-honor-nj-principal-who-died-aft-1834062873

Fast Food Mogul, Serial Entrepreneur La-Van Hawkins Dies at 61

La-Van Hawkins, a black entrepreneur in the food industry, just died at the age of 61, reports Crain’s. Hawkins was featured several times in BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine. In 1995, his business, La-Van Hawkins Inner City Foods, ranked No. 45 on the BE 100s listing of the nation’s most successful black-owned businesses. At the time, the business had sales totaling $39.1 million. His company then operated 36 Checkers drive-in restaurants.

He raised eyebrows in an interview with BE asserting that he would sell his company for the right price. This was during a time when the movement for black-owned companies to remain in black hands was gaining traction.

“Blacks go to white companies and white banking institutions for cash because black capital companies don’t fund black ventures,” he said in the interview. Hawkins also said he would definitely sell his company “if the price was right, but only if the new owners would continue to bring jobs to our community.” His company employed 1,500 people at the time.

According to Crain’s, Hawkins grew up in the Chicago projects and never finished high school. Yet he found entrepreneurial success in Atlanta as a fast food mogul—owning and operating several Burger King franchises in addition to his Checkers franchises. He eventually moved his business operations to Detroit and became the largest Pizza Hut franchisee in Michigan.

Hawkins went on to open a high-end, Southern-food restaurant, Sweet Georgia Brown, in downtown Detroit. The restaurant launched in 2002 and garnered $8.5 million in business according to Encyclopedia.com.

Hawkins also ran into legal troubles. He served 18 months in federal prison for perjury and fraud associated with a corruption case in Philadelphia. Undaunted by the conviction, Hawkins would go on to launch Detroit’s Cheesecake Bistro in 2012. The restaurant closed in 2013.

“The 18 months is probably the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life because what it did was it allowed God to humble me,” he said about his conviction in an interview with Blac Detroit.

“See, the transformation and the change that God needs to do on the inside of you can’t take place until he puts you through something. … So in my process of becoming gold, God had to refine me. And those 18 months were the refinement that he told me what it was that he wanted me to do. He told me the assignment that he has me on.”

The family will hold a funeral service on Sunday, April 14 at the James H. Cole Home for Funerals in Detroit.

 

 

 

 

The post Fast Food Mogul, Serial Entrepreneur La-Van Hawkins Dies at 61 appeared first on Black Enterprise.

With Bankruptcy Filing, An End of An Era at Johnson Publishing

Creating shockwaves throughout the African American community, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Co., the once-iconic publishing company that for years had been one of the nation’s largest black-owned business, filed for bankruptcy yesterday. After years of trying to remake the former BE 100s company that launched such brands as Ebony and Jet magazines, it succumbed after failing to find new funding sources.

The liquidation of its assets marks the end of an era.

According to the Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition, filed in the Northern District of Illinois, JPC has between 200 and 999 creditors, as well as between $10 million and $50 million in both assets and liabilities. In making the announcement, the company said in a press release that it was “caught in a tidal wave of marketplace changes and business issues which, despite exhaustive efforts, could not be overcome.”

Over the years, financial troubles forced the firm to sell major assets. In 2016, the company sold Ebony and Jet magazines to Texas-based private equity firm CVG Group LLC, which still manages those media properties, and sold its headquarters in 2010. The company, which still owns the Fashion Fair cosmetics business as well as an expansive archive of about 4 million images and thousands of videos, will place those properties on the auction block.

The Legacy of John H. Johnson

For close to 50 years, BLACK ENTERPRISE has covered the company, founded in 1942 by John H. Johnson, who was named one of the most important African Americans in business. Under Johnson’s stewardship, JPC’s publications touched the lives of millions of African Americans in every facet of life, sharing with the world their talents and potential, exposing injustice and racism, and shattering social and commercial barriers.

Johnson Publishing Founder John H. Johnson

BE named Johnson its Entrepreneur of the Decade in 1987 for building JPC into a global powerhouse, chronicled as one of the greatest moments in black business in 2017. That article noted that the founder, chairman, and publisher of the storied enterprise served as an inspirational force for generations of African American entrepreneurs:

As an eager young man, Johnson got his start when his mother used her furniture as collateral for a $500 loan to start his first publication, Negro Digest, in 1942, which served as the launching pad for him to create the largest African American publishing company in the world. Seemingly, there wasn’t a single African American household in late 20^th century America in which you could not find a copy of Ebony or Jet on the coffee table. And to share the impact his publications had, one can point to a powerful example that predates his inclusion on the BE 100s by roughly two decades that BE shared in our October 2005 tribute on this legendary force:

 

In September 1955, Johnson made a decision that forever shook the world. Not one to vacillate on any issue, he revealed to millions the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, a Chicago youngster who had been bludgeoned and shot in Mississippi for reportedly whistling at a white woman. Readers found the heinous example of Jim Crow-brutality on the pages of Jet, Johnson’s 4-year-old weekly news digest. Shortly thereafter, other black publications followed Jet’s lead in publishing the photos. It galvanized clusters of African Americans nationwide to protest such senseless acts of violence. In one bold move, the determined 37-year-old publisher helped launch the civil rights movement.

That was but one example of Johnson’s power. For six decades, he made full use of his wealth and influence to shape American history, while using his publications—primarily Jet and his flagship, Ebony—to cover the battle for civil rights and chronicle every major event that depicted the trials and triumphs of African Americans.

By 1987, when he was fittingly honored on the 15^th anniversary of the rankings of the nation’s largest black businesses at a gala in downtown Manhattan, this rugged individualist had built an empire that touched the lives of millions through publications, radio stations, television programs, fashion shows, and haircare and cosmetic products. He also owned Supreme Life Insurance Co., his former employer and one of the nation’s largest black financial services firms listed on the BE INSURANCE COMPANIES list. In addition to his collection of companies, Johnson held a 20% stake in another iconic BE 100s company: Essence Communications Inc., publisher of the black women’s magazine Essence.

How did he do it? It took sweat, intellect, and moxie. When the company first appeared on our list in 1973, JPC grossed $23.1 million. In 1987, it had grown to an enterprise that grossed $173.5 million and employed 1,800 people. Despite its size and stature, it was still very much a family-owned business: His wife, Eunice, among other areas, ran the Fashion Fair cosmetics line, and his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, rose through the ranks to eventually take its helm.

Linda Johnson Rice

In sharing his greatest inspiration as an entrepreneur, he said: In a broad sense, I admire any black man who succeeds. There are so many obstacles throughout life that I am surprised that black businessmen have done as well as they have. I guess I am inspired by every black man who meets payroll, every black man who continues to overcome barriers and beat the odds.

The post With Bankruptcy Filing, An End of An Era at Johnson Publishing appeared first on Black Enterprise.

COLLECTING AFRICAN AMERICAN ART: FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE TO THE OBAMA ERA

 CONTRIBUTED BY: PATRICIA BANKS

In the following article sociologist and African American Studies professor Patricia A. Banks describes the rise of private art collectors and collections among African Americans. Her article also shows the growing acceptance of African American art and artists in major museums and galleries across the nation.

On October 16, 1943 Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting Flight into Egypt (see illustration) was hanging in the entrance hall of a home located at 127 Randolph Place in Washington, D.C. The occasion was the opening of the Barnett-Aden Gallery which was founded by James Herring, an artist and art professor at Howard University along with Alonzo Aden, curator of the University’s Gallery of Art. Works such as Jacob Lawrence’s watercolor Trees, Aaron Douglas’s painting Alta Knitting, and Lois Mailou Jones’s painting Still Life with Green Apples, were also displayed in the inaugural exhibition. During the next two decades Aden and Herring held gallery shows in Aden’s Washington home and purchased works from each exhibition for the Barnett-Aden Collection. Herring and Aden were part of a long tradition of African Americans who individually, and in partnership with black and non-black family members, collected work by African American artists. They were also among a distinct group of collectors who acquired work by African American artists and shared it with the public. These publicly oriented collectors presented their chosen treasures to the community by opening their homes, loaning works for exhibitions, and making donations to museums. In doing so they played an important role in shaping the value of African American art.

While many observers believe that the value of art is determined by its intrinsic properties, in reality what separates great art from less valued art is partly influenced by societal arrangements. Rare and unusual talent is not enough to vault an artist from obscurity to the spotlight. For art to be recognized as worthy it must have champions, such as collectors, who nudge it forward to be granted entrance into the canon. For several decades, the public patronage of African American collectors has played a critical role in the valorization of art by African American artists. Their commitment to these artists took on added significance because race has often made the path to consecration especially challenging for artists of African descent.

Collectors such as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (aka Arthur Schomburg) helped to sustain and memorialize visual art from the Harlem Renaissance. During this period of cultural flowering and emergent racial consciousness in the 1920s, Schomburg amassed a large collection of artifacts and art. Like other collectors of this and future eras, Schomburg was determined to excavate and preserve the historical and cultural contributions of African Americans. Concerned about the financial prospects of black artists, Schomburg purchased prints by artists such as Albert Alexander Smith and William Ernest Braxton. Combining his passion for history with his interest in art, he commissioned Braxton to create etchings of historical figures like Frederick Douglass. Schomburg’s private collection became public patrimony in 1926 when the Carnegie Foundation agreed to purchase the collection for the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. The collection was housed in the Harlem library’s Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints. The Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints would in 1940 be renamed the Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature in honor of this early collector.  In subsequent decades the library was given its current name of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  Other collectors such as poet Countee Cullen also helped to sustain the visual production of the Harlem Renaissance. A central literary figure in this cultural movement himself, Cullen collected the work of his friends such as Augusta Savage, Palmer Hayden, and Hale Woodruff.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, African American collectors continued to support African American artists. While the Federal Arts Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA) was an important source of government patronage for African American artists during its run from 1935 to 1946, opportunities for African American artists continued to be restricted by racial barriers. Indeed, it was racial segregation in 1940s Washington, D.C. that partly led Aden and Herring to establish the Barnett-Aden Gallery. They hoped to redress racial segregation in the city’s art world by showing the work of African American artists alongside white artists and artists from other racial and ethnic groups.

In the 1960s and 1970s the political forces that were transforming all other sectors of American life also rocked the art world.  The African American museum movement was in its infancy and institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, founded in 1968, began to appear in major cities across the United States. Protesters also picketed outside major museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art to publicly contest the lack of diversity in exhibitions and acquisitions. Black artists in groups such as Spiral created work that responded to shifts in the sociopolitical order. Detroit, Michigan gallerist George N’Namdi, who started his personal collection in the 1960s, describes how the political spirit of the day informed his collecting ethos: “One of the reasons I started collecting was that the rebellion of the 60s induced in me this strong desire to preserve the culture of African-American people and I began to wonder specifically how I could preserve the culture through supporting and preserving visual arts, theater, dance and so on.”

Paul Jones of Atlanta, Georgia first started acquiring art in 1967. He made a commitment to focus on African American artists after noticing that they were rarely represented by galleries and their work had scant representation in museum exhibitions and collections. Among Jones’s first acquisitions were works that he selected from the Atlanta University Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Prints by Negro Artists. The Atlanta Annuals, which ended soon after Jones started collecting, was one of the few juried art shows for African American artists during the course of its run from 1942 to 1970. In the 1970s The Barnett-Aden Collection, which was then under the care of Adolphus Ealey, was shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Collection was also exhibited at two institutions that were part of the first wave of the black museum movement—the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

By the 1980s and 1990s multicultural values, though still contested, infused all sectors of the art world. Museums presented exhibitions that highlighted racial and ethnic minority themes. Acquisitions at non-ethnically specific museums also became more diverse as support groups like the African American Art Alliance at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin and the African American Art Advisory Association at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston were established. African American collectors both influenced and were influenced by this newfound level of institutional diversity.  In 1986/1987, Hidden Heritage: Afro-American Art, 1800-1950 showed at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas. After seeing the show, Harriet and Harmon Kelley were inspired to begin collecting African American art in their home city of San Antonio. Almost a decade later their collection was presented in a touring exhibition, The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art, that showed at the San Antonio Museum of Art in 1994. In the 1990s the acquisitions of other major collectors of African American art also toured the United States. The collection of David Driskell, an artist, curator, and art historian who was then a professor at the University of Maryland, was presented in the exhibition Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection. The exhibition showed at museums such as the University of Maryland Art Gallery and the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine.

The increasingly growing field of African American museums was also bolstered through private collections in the 1980s and 1990s. As part of the growing yet still stalled effort to establish a national African American museum in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution renewed efforts to exhibit African American culture and history in existing buildings. In 1995, an exhibition of the Kelley’s collection—The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art—was shown as part of the National African American Museum Project in the Arts and Industries Building. African American museums also acquired major private collections of African American art. In 1986 the Hampton University Museum purchased the Countee Cullen Art Collection. At that time the collection not only included works selected by Countee Cullen before his death but also those by his wife, Ida Cullen Cooper, who further developed the collection.

In the late 1990s John and Vivian Hewitt sold their collection of African American art to NationsBank (which in 1998 merged with Bank of America). The bank pledged the collection to the Afro-American Cultural Center (now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture) in Charlotte, North Carolina. In the years prior to the cultural center’s re-opening the Hewitt collection toured nationally. The Barnett-Aden collection was also the leading collection for a newly founded African American museum. In 1989 the Florida Education Fund purchased the collection for the Museum of African-American Art in Tampa, Florida. After the museum closed, Washington D.C. entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), bought the collection in 1998.

Significant public patronage by collectors of African American art continued into the 21st century. For over a decade the African American art and artifacts collection of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey of Los Angeles, California has toured nationally. The Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Collection in San Francisco will embark on a national tour in Fall 2017. This collection is distinguished by its focus on abstract work by artists from the African Diaspora such as Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Mark Bradford.

Major private collections of African American art have also been gifted to museums by African Americans in the first decades of the 21st century. The University of Alabama and the University Museums at the University of Delaware acquired work from Paul Jones’s collection; Walter O. Evans of Detroit bequeathed works from his collection of African American art to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD); and Larry and Brenda Thompson of Atlanta gave works from their collection to the Georgia Museum of Art. The donations are part of broader efforts to institutionalize African American art at these institutions. The Paul Jones Initiative, which supports teaching and research about African American art, was launched at the University of Delaware. SCAD opened The Walter O. Evans Center for African-American Studies and the Thompsons funded an endowed curatorial position focused on art from the African Diaspora at the Georgia Museum of Art. In 2001, The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora opened at the University of Maryland. The Center houses The David C. Driskell Archive of African American Art.

On September 24, 2016 efforts to establish a national African American museum were realized when President Barack Obama presided over the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. A year earlier, Robert L. Johnson, a member of the museum’s council, donated works from the Barnett-Aden Collection to the museum. Among the works finding a new home at NMAAHC was Tanner’s Flight into Egyptwhich was hanging in the entrance hall when the Barnett-Aden gallery opened almost a quarter-century prior.