Jazz great Dizzy Gillespie had a long and distinguished musical career as a trumpeter, composer, and bandleader. Unlike many jazz musicians whose lives were cut tragically short, Gillespie’s career spanned the 1930s to the 1980s, from the big band swing era of the 1930s through 1940s bebop, the Afro-Cuban jazz of the 1950s to the recording in 1989 – when he was 72 – of his United Nations Band performance “Live at Royal Festival Hall.” He is one of the most influential musicians in the history of jazz and is considered one of the founders of modern jazz. Gillespie and Charlie Parker are credited with the invention of bebop. Gillespie was born in 1917 in Cheraw, South Carolina, the youngest of nine children to James and Lottie Gillespie. Son of a bricklayer father who was a part-time musician, he began playing the piano at age four. In 1932, he won a scholarship to North Carolina’s Laurinburg Institute, where he practiced the trumpet and piano. He left school in 1935, joining his family, who had moved to Philadelphia. In 1937, after moving to New York, he made his first recording by age 20, playing trumpet in the Teddy Hill Band, and […]

This Dr. King-inspired working session, held in the very place where Dr. King was assassinated, will bring together some of the most influential leaders from business, finance, technology, policy, faith, and civil society to shape a modern blueprint for inclusive economic empowerment in America.

As a monumental figure in education and poetry, Mari Evans also played roles in shaping women’s history, politics, music, and drama.  Born on July 16, 1923, in Toledo, Ohio, Evans’ mother passed away when Evans was ten.  Her father immediately felt the need to encourage her in any way he could, cultivating her talent of writing that would later serve as her main career focus. After attending public schools in her hometown, Evans attended the University of Toledo in the 1940s where she studied fashion design but left without a degree.  Her interests shifted to writing poetry and by 1969 she was a writer in residence at Indiana University-Purdue where she taught courses in African American Literature.  In 1969 she published her first work Where Is All the Music? followed by her more famous I Am a Black Woman (1970).  During this time Evans also worked as a producer, writer, and director of The Black Experience (1968-1973), a history documentary which aired on prime time in Indianapolis.  She also worked in theatre, adapting the musical Eyes (1979) from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as well as writing a choreopoem, River of My Song, and a one-woman theatre […]