THE
IN-CROWD: THE BLACK EDITION
contents 2 contents
Women in Black
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Lyrics in the black Black Athletes Black Politicians
Black Hollywood
Black Doctors 1
The In-Crowd: The Black Edition 
April 2010
women in black
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ould you rather be slightly overdressed or under dressed at a party? 57% of Black women would prefer to be slightly overdressed, compared to 44% of all other women. Almost a third of all Black women are Fashion Innovators, compared to less than one sixth of all other women. Given the impressive percentage of fashion-conscious Black women, it’s no surprise that fashion reporter Constance C. R. White says that “looking disheveled, no matter how creatively done, is never thought to be stylish in our Black culturebe it American, Caribbean, or African.” White is also the author of just-published StyleNoir, the first how-to guide to fashion written with Black women in mind. “Generally, one will find that Black women do love to dress up.”
p CEO of Bankable Productions, Supermodel Tyra Banks
Then why do 88% of Black women think casual Friday is appropriate-compared to 78% of all other women? “Many Black women of all ages like to express their culture in the way they dress,” says White. “Until the recent casual revolution, there was no room to do this in the workplace. Cornrows or a kente scarf could be misinterpreted as a political statement, when it’s just about fashion, looking beautiful, and feeling good when it’s just about fashion. The In-Crowd: The Black Edition
April 2010
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p Oprah Winfrey and First Lady Michelle Obama “In the 80’s, the corporate look was conservative, and generally limited to dark suits,” says Jennifer Keitt, hostess of “Today’s Black Woman,” a Miami-based radio show broadcast in seven cities, which gives personal, financial, and health advice. “Now, with the casualization of the workplace, women are able to bring their style to the office. I live in South Florida, and women will wear Caribbean-style prints on everything from scarves to skirts at work.” Style isn’t something women are born with it’s accumulated over time and is often perfected. But whether at work or elsewhere, Black women express their culture in a variety of different ways depending on age, ethnicity, location, profession.
Black is the new Black pThe chart represents the percentage of women who care about their appearance, have a major interest in fashion, regularly shop for clothing, uses fashion influences, and the importance of natural fibers in clothing worn.
Barometer Appearance Fashion Clothes Shopping External Influence Natural Fiber Pref.
Black woman 44.03 47.57 62.43 44.60 58.90
All other women 37.57 42.39 52.37 40.64 58.66
“At least one out of five black women have falling victim to bad fashion trends.”
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n 1997, Diahann Carroll became the first Black woman to debut a signature clothing line. The upper moderate line is designed with an eye towards the
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preferences, fashion sense, and sizing of today’s Black woman age 35 and older. The brand currently has over twelve licensees in categories that include career wear, evening
wear, weekend wear, sleepwear, socks, hosiery, handbags, hats, and jewelry. The line is sold at JC Penney, Macy’s East, Dillard’s, Lord & Taylor, and other stores.
The In-Crowd: The Black Edition
April 2010
“I’ve tried to incorporate information that I’ve gathered about simplicity and elegance from some very knowledgeable mentors through the years,” says Carroll. “I think I’ve found a happy medium between reflecting my own personal style in the line and helping the customer choose what she wants to resolve her needs. These are garments for an accomplished woman to wear to the theater, the office, the PTA meeting, and church.”
at Essence. “Essence fashion pages are new, fresh, and we feature great fashion at all price points for our reader and her unique body type.
More than any other group, Black women have a grass-roots style that comes from their community rather than trickling down from top designers,” says Constance White, author of StyleNoir. “They might take snatches of things from popular and designer culture, such as a Tommy Hilfiger polo shirt or Versace Jeans. But whether Black Sizes go up to 22. “More women women are wearing a kente head today who are large-sized are wrap and beads, a robustly colored quite visible, and not apologiz- matched suit, or baggy jeans and ing for their size,” says Carroll. a polo shirt, the style is always or“They do not want to live their ganic. lives worried about the size of “The Fashion Industry better their waistline.” But often size has less to do with dieting and more with body type. “Black women tend to be bustier than other women, and their bottoms are fuller,” says Sheffey-Brown
Black Fashionistas
p Pop singer Rihanna
watch out because we’re here!” - Chanel Iman
p UK singer Estelle
Fashion Mini Bio
K
imora Lee Simmons (born Kimora Lee Perkins on May 4, 1975) is an American fashion model, author, and the president and Creative Director for Phat Fashions. Formerly the Creative Director of Baby Phat, Simmons became CEO of Phat Fashions after ex-husband Russell Simmons stepped down. A 2007 reality television show, Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane, focuses on her life as a mother and CEO of Phat Fashions. She has appeared in music videos and was a judge on the first season of America’s Next Top Model. She was supposed to return but cancelled.
The In-Crowd: The Black Edition
April 2010
p R & B Singer Beyonce 4
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Music Mini Bio
ommon arrived on the hip-hop scene of the early-Nineties as Common Sense, a post-Native Tongues rapper who offered an alternative to the prevailing gangsta fare of contemporaries like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. With space-age effects, old-school beats, jazzand funk-influenced musical bedding and lyrics that often come off like spoken-word poetry, he helped kick off an underground hiphop movement that would gain steam — and new rappers — by the latter part of the decade. He was born Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., in Chicago on March 13, 1972, the son of a teacher and former basketball pro. During high school, Lynn formed the rap trio C.D.R., which opened for national acts including Big Daddy Kane and N.W.A.
lyrics in the black 5
The In-Crowd: The Black Edition
April 2010
“ We are what we create, and we create from our souls letting it all hang out!”
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he 1970s saw one of the greatest decades of black bands concerning melodic music. Album-oriented soul continued its popularity, while musicians like Smokey Robinson helped turn it into Quiet Storm music. Funk evolved into two strands, one a pop and soul fusion pioneered by Sly & the Family Stone, and the other a more experimental psychedelic and metal fusion led by George Clinton and his P-Funk ensemble.
ly funk, while MCs introduced tracks to. The dancing audience. Over time, DJs began isolating and repeating the percussion breaks, producing a constant, eminently dance-able beats, which the MCs began improvising more complex introductions and, eventually, lyrics.
“We aren’t just rappers, we’re lyricists!” - Rapper Lupe Fiasco
In the 1980s, Michael Jackson’s record-breaking success of his albums Off The Wall, Bad, and Thriller which currently remains the bestselling album of all time, transformed Black musicians achieved generally lit- popular music and united all races, tle mainstream success, though African ages, and genders and would eventually Americans had been instrumental in the lead a revolution that saw more sucinvention of disco, and some artists, like cessful crossover black solo artists inGloria Gaynor and Kool & the Gang, found cluding Lionel Richie, Whitney Houscrossover audiences. White listeners pre- ton, and Prince, who all sang a type of ferred country rock, singer-songwriters, pop dance-soul that fed into New Jack stadium rock and, in some subcultures, Swing by the end of the decade. These heavy metal and punk rock. artists are the most successful of the No music is dead, but if we choose to break boundaries we must think outside the box . The dozens, an urban African American tradition of using rhyming slang to put down your enemies (or friends) developed, through the smart-ass street jive of the early Seventies into a new form of music. In the South Bronx, the half speaking, half singing the rhythmic street talk of ‘rapping’ grew into the hugely successful cultural force known as Hip hop.[9] Hip Hop would become a multicultural movement. Jamaican immigrants like DJ Kool Herc and spoken word poets like Gil ScottHeron are often cited as the major innovators in early hip hop. Beginning at block parties in The Bronx, hip hop music arose as one facet of a large subculture with rebellious and progressive elements. At . calThe In-Crowd: The Black Edition
April 2010
pRapper/producer Kanye West era. Hip hop spread across the country and diversified. Techno, Dance, Miami bass, Chicago house, Los Angeles hard-core and Washington, D.C. Go Go developed during this period, with only Miami bass achieving mainstream success. But before long, Miami bass was relegated primarily to the Southeastern US, while Chicago house had made strong head ways on college campuses and dance arenas. The DC go-go sound like Miami bass became essentially a regional sound that didn’t muster much mass appeal.
pRappers T.I, Lil Wayne, and Jay-Z’s hit albums.
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BLAC
Black athletes:
A century in the making
HLETES T
he best of the best athletes of the 20th century include Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, who were the participants in the March 8, 1971, “Fight of the Century”; Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics and dashed Hitler’s theory of Aryan supremacy; Joe Louis, who held the heavy-weight boxing title longer than any other person; the first Black Wimbledon champion Althea Gibson, who later became an accomplished golfer; Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in the modern era and was named Rookie of the Year in 1947; and Michael Jordan, who led the Chicago Bulls to six championships, was a 10-time scoring champion and is considered by many to be the best player in NBA history.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who won two gold medals in the heptathlon, has been called “the greatest female athlete in history.” The century’s greatest Black athletes also include such spectacular performers as Florence Griffith Joyner, who was known as “the world’s fastest woman” after setting world records in the 100- and 200-meter dashes. Arthur Ashe, who was the U.S. singles champion in 1968, became the first Black male to win Wimbledon .
At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Wilma Rudolph became the first woman to win three gold medals at a single Olympiad. Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight champion. Many spectators still consider Willie Mays the best all-around player in baseball history. Carl Lewis won nine gold medals and one silver medal as a sprinter and long jumper in four Olympics. The NFL’s all-time rushing leader, Walter Payton, has the record, but Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns star who retired at age 29, is still the standard by which all running backs are judged. Despite the odds and racism, Hank Aaron broke baseball’s “unreachable” home run record in 87’. 7
pNFL Wide Reciever. Terrrell Owens
The In-Crowd: The Black Edition
April 2010
C black Politicians finally in the white house
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he first child born at the White House was the grandson of President Thomas Jefferson. The second child born there was his property - the African-American baby of Jefferson’s two slaves.
Slaves not only helped build the White House, but also for decades men and women in bondage served America’s presidents and first families as butlers, cooks and maids.
Two hundred years later, Barack Obama’s election as the 44th president - the first black chief executive - is casting a spotlight on the complicated history of African-Americans and the exalted place they called home - the White House.
Blacks in the White House pPresident of the United States, Barack Obama
pSecretary of State, Condelezza Rice
p Four-star general, Colin Powell
During and after slavery, black workers have made the White House function. Obama’s entry on Jan. 20, 2009, will be a moment for the ages that few of them could imagine. “I’m very proud of the fact we’re going to have an African-American president and I think the help is going to be pleased to be working for an African-American president,” said 89-year-old William Bowen Jr., a second-generation White House butler who worked for Presidents Dwight Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush. When Bowen started at the White House, the civil rights movement was still in its infancy, segregation was still legal and African-Americans were just penetrating the upper echelons of government service. People like Bowen, employed at the White House before the civil rights and feminist movements, were the “help.” Surrounded by presidential memorabilia in his suburban Maryland home - including a newspaper trumpeting Obama’s victory - Bowen is contemplating coming out of retirement to work for the first black president.
“I never thought, coming up, that this would ever happen. Not in my lifetime,” Bowen said. The In-Crowd: The Black Edition
April 2010
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Black Hollywood
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hen Hattie McDaniel, the first African American ever nominated for an Academy Award, arrived at the Ambassador Hotel for the 1940 ceremony, she was seated at a table on the extreme periphery of the auditorium. McDaniel had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress based on her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939). Though this seating
“Black actors have to work twice as hard to be accepted in Hollywood.” assignment was quite insulting, such slights were not uncommon, as McDaniel had also been forced to miss the film’s Atlanta premiere due to southern Jim Crow laws. McDaniel would go on to win the Academy Award that evening in 1940, becoming the first African American to ever win the prestigious award. It would be 24 years before another African American would be declared an Oscar winner. Roles come and go, what matters is what you do when you get it. 9
In the 61-year time span from 1940-2001, only five other African Americans—Sidney Poitier, Lou Gossett, Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg and Cuba Gooding (can we put an asterisk next to this one?)—won the distinct gold statuette in the prestigious acting categories. Of those six total awards, Sidney Poitier is the only one to have won in the Best Actor category.
Actress Mini Bio
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orn on August 16, 1958, Angela Bassett grew up in public housing in St. Petersburg, Florida. She was first truly electrified by acting when, in 1974, she went on a field trip to Washington D.C. There she saw the illustrious black thespian James Earl Jones in a Kennedy Center production of the play Of Mice and Men. “I just sat there after the play, boo-hoo crying, weeping,” Bassett recalled to Barbara Jones of Premiere. “I couldn’t move, and I remember thinking, ‘My gosh, if I could make somebody feel the way I feel right now!” The In-Crowd: The Black Edition
April 2010
BLACK
DOCTORS
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he pioneering leadership of virtually every professional area, routinely participated in by Africans Americans in the twentieth century, have antecedents in the nineteenth century. The first black physician in America, not professionally trained in a medical school, was James Derham. Derham, born a slave in Philadelphia in 1757, was owned by three doctors. Dr. Robert Love, his third owner, encouraged Derham to practice medicine.
“ We do our jobs and we do them well, point blank period.” Historians credit James McCune Smith as the individual who best exemplified the nineteenth century African-American physician-abolitionist. Smith has the distinction of being the first university-trained black physician. Smith attended the Free African School of New York. As a child, Smith showed flashes of brilliance. At the age of eleven, he was chosen to give the school’s address when General Lafayette visited the school in 1824. At age 19, the Rev. Peter Williams, a Episcopalian priest, helped Smith enroll in the University of Glasgow The In-Crowd: The Black Edition
in Scotland. He completed study for the B.A. degree in 1835, his M.A. degree in 1836, and his M.D. degree in 1837. Part of Smith’s education was sponsored by a British anti-slavery organization known as the Glasgow Emancipation Society.
during his stay in Scotland. When Smith took the floor, he stated, “I thank you for the sake of my countrymen-that part of them, especially, who participate in such an unholy prejudice--for it must prove to them that you, who also have a complexion as fair, if not fairer than their own-that you are not only free from such prejudice, but glory in being free from it.” With all of that going on, modern day heroes such as Dr. Ben Carson who is a world renowed neurologists, who is known for taking part in strategic surgeries.
p Neurologist Dr. Ben Carson
African Americans have broken major standards in the medical field. Unrestrained superlatives were given Smith for his stellar academic and private accomplishments
April 2010
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Designed By: Sean Johnson-Brewton
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The In-Crowd: The Black Edition 
April 2010