BLACK PRIDE

Thank you Lou for the many years of entertainment, the joy of absorbing your thespian skills are fond memories!

www.ctvnews.ca

Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the seminal TV miniseries 'Roots,' has died. He was 87.

Movies

Iron Eagle

1986

www.cbc.ca

Known as Canada's first lady of jazz, Eleanor Collins broke barriers by headlining her own national television series and worked with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Oscar Peterson.

"Collins was born on Nov. 21, 1919, in Edmonton. Her parents had joined hundreds of Black homesteaders who migrated from Oklahoma and settled on the Prairies. By 15, Collins won a singing contest which led her to sing on radio station CFRN.

By the late 1930s she moved to Vancouver, where she sang on the radio with the gospel group Swing Low Quartet."

Here she is singing Look to the Rainbow.

"Flexner Report — a landmark document in U.S. medical history that had a devastating effect on the number of Black physicians in this country."

Fletcher was a racist and although his findings in the Canadian and American medical schools brought about needed changes, his racism had a devastating affect.

Post publication of the above report in 1910, "After the Flexner Report, five of the seven Black medical schools in the United States were forced to close, leaving only Howard and Meharry."

Read the rest of this incredible story and tribute.

"Race is one of those topics that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail."

"Even though white men make up just 30 percent of the U.S. population, they hold 70 percent of all corporate board seats. Of the Fortune 250, there are only seven CEOs that are minorities, and of the thousands of publicly traded companies today, thousands, only two are chaired by black women, and you're looking at one of them."

Mellody Hobson