HEY HEY! HOW ARE Y'ALL DOIN? YEAH IT'S APRIL 1ST, WE'RE IN A RECESSION...AND I'M SO THANKFUL TO BE NICE & FULL RIGHT NOW.
OK SO, MY RESOLUTION THIS YEAR WAS TO BE A VEGETARIAN FOR 6 MONTHS OUT OF THIS YEAR.
I'VE ACCOMPLISHED MY GOAL FOR 3 CONSECUTIVE MONTHS. YAAAYY! BUT ON THE REAL, IT'S KILLIN' ME SO MUCH I'VE BEEN WHORING OUT ON CARBS...UGH. SO RIGHT NOW, IT'S APRIL 1ST. I'M AT THE OFFICE GOING ALL THE WAY IN STUFFING MY FACE WITH CURRY GOAT...HELLO. I'VE DECIDED TO PICK UP THE OTHER 3 MONTHS STARTING JULY 1ST TO FULFILL MY 6 MONTH VEGETARIAN COMMITTMENT. BEING CELIBATE & BEING A VEGETARIAN SIMULTANEOUSLY IS HELL! ABSOLUTELY NO MEAT IN THE DIET... UMMM. AIN'T IT. SO I'VE GIVEN INTO THE FOOD.
I DIDN'T REALIZE THAT FOOD IS SO INFLUENTAL IN YOUR MOODS & I'M HAPPY AS A KID IN A CANDY STORE RIGHT NOW. I WONDER WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN WHEN I FIND MY OTHER PIECE OF MEAT.

IN THE STUDIO ALL DAY TODAY. BUT I'M PARTYING ALL NIGHT TONIGHT.
COME HANG OUT AT CLUB "LOVE"! 11pm- 2:30am. COLLEGE NIGHT..HAAAYYY.
SEE YOU THERE.

SPRING IS FINALLY HERE... THANK GOD! THOUGH, SNOW CAN BE BEAUTIFUL, I CAN'T STAND THE COLD FOR NOTHIN'. I'M IN NY AT THE MOMENT...ON THE GRIND. TO GET A CLOSER GLIMPSE OF WHAT I'M UP TO, YOU CAN FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER. www.twitter.com/missmya. SHOT OUT TO BEAR BEAR, RAMBO, PEPPER & MELLOW. MISS YOU GUYS.

2009 Barack Obama becomes 44th U.S. president
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; he is the first African American to hold that office. The product of an interracial marriage—his father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother in Kansas—Obama grew up in Hawaii but discovered his civic calling in Chicago, where he worked for several years as a community organizer on the city’s largely black South Side. After studying at Harvard Law School and practicing constitutional law in Chicago, he began his political career in 1996 in the Illinois State Senate and in 2004 announced his candidacy for a newly vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. He delivered a rousing keynote speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention, attracting national attention with his eloquent call for national unity and cooperation across party lines. In February 2007, just months after he became only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. After withstanding a tight Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, Obama defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona in the general election that November. Obama’s appearances in both the primaries and the general election drew impressive crowds, and his message of hope and change—embodied by the slogan —Yes We Can”—inspired thousands of new voters, many young and black, to cast their vote for the first time in the historic election.

2001 Colin Powell becomes secretary of state
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993—the first African American to hold that position—the Vietnam veteran and four–star U.S. Army general Colin Powell played an integral role in planning and executing the first Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush. After his retirement from the military in 1993, many people began floating his name as a possible presidential candidate. He decided against running, but soon became a prominent fixture in the Republican Party. In 2001, George W. Bush appointed Powell as secretary of state, making him the first African American to serve as America’s top diplomat. Powell sought to build international support for the controversial U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003, delivering a divisive speech to the United Nations regarding that country’s possession of weapons material that was later revealed to be based on faulty intelligence. He resigned after Bush’s reelection in 2004. In another history–making appointment, Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s longtime foreign policy adviser and the former head of the National Security Council, succeeded Powell, becoming the first African–American woman to serve as secretary of state. Though he largely stayed out of the political spotlight after stepping down, Powell remained an admired figure in Washington and beyond. Though he continued to brush off any speculation of a possible future presidential run, Powell made headlines during the 2008 presidential campaign when he broke from the Republican party to endorse Barack Obama, the eventual winner and the first African American to be elected president of the United States.

2002 Triumph in Hollywood
The history of African Americans in Hollywood began at a low point—the first bonafide blockbuster, D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation (1915), glorified white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan—and continued in that vein for years, with black characters portrayed onscreen largely limited to maids, butlers, slaves and other relatively demeaning roles. In 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first African–American performer to win an Academy Award (the film industry’s highest honor) for her portrayal of a loyal slave governess in Gone With the Wind. After World War II, more talented black performers built careers that spanned music, stage and screen, including Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Dorothy Dandridge (who earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for 1954’s Carmen Jones), Sammy Davis Jr. and Harry Belafonte. The most celebrated of these was Sidney Poitier, who became the first black Best Actor winner (for 1964’s Lilies of the Field). The 74th annual Academy Awards, in March 2002, marked the greatest Oscar triumph in history for African–American performers. Halle Berry, star of Monster’s Ball, took home the statuette in the Best Actress category (the first black actress to do so), while Denzel Washington (a winner in the Best Supporting Actor category for 1989’s Civil War drama Glory, about the heroic all–black 54th Massachusetts regiment) became the first black actor since Poitier to win an Oscar for Best Actor, for Training Day. In her emotional acceptance speech, Berry called the moment —so much bigger than me. This moment is for&.every nameless faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

1992 South Central riots
In March 1991, officers with the California Highway Patrol attempted to pull an African–American man named Rodney King over for speeding on a Los Angeles freeway. King, who was on probation for robbery and had been drinking, led them on a high–speed chase, and by the time the patrolmen caught up to his car, several officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were on the scene. After King allegedly resisted arrest and threatened them, four LAPD officers shot him with a TASER gun and severely beat him. Caught on videotape by an onlooker and broadcast around the world, the beating inspired widespread outrage in the city’s African–American community, who had long condemned the racial profiling and abuse its members suffered at the hands of the police force. Many demanded that the unpopular L.A. police chief, Daryl Gates, be fired and that the four officers be brought to justice for their use of excessive force. The King case was eventually tried in the suburb of Simi Valley, and in April 1992 a jury of 11 whites and one Hispanic found the officers not guilty. Rage over the verdict sparked four days of riots, beginning in the mostly black South Central neighborhood. By the time the riots subsided, some 55 people were dead, more than 2,300 injured, and more than 1,000 buildings had been burned. Authorities later estimated the total damage at around $1 billion. The next year, two of the four LAPD officers involved in the beating were retried and convicted in a federal court for violating King’s civil rights; he eventually received $3.8 million from the city in a settlement.

1995 Million Man March
In October 1995, hundreds of thousands of black men gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March, one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the capital’s history. Its organizer, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had called for —a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement.” Farrakhan, who had asserted control over the Nation of Islam (commonly known as the Black Muslims) in the late 1970s and reasserted its original principles of black separatism, may have been an incendiary figure, but the idea behind the Million Man March was one most blacks—and many whites—could get behind. The march was intended to bring about a kind of spiritual renewal among black men, and to instill them with a sense of solidarity and of personal responsibility to improve their own condition. It would also, organizers believed, disprove some of the stereotypical negative images of black men that existed in American society. By that time, the U.S. government’s —war on drugs” had sent a disproportionate number of African Americans to prison, and by 2000, more black men were incarcerated than in college. Estimates of the number of participants in the Million Man March ranged from 400,000 to more than 1 million, and its success spurred the organization of a Million Woman March, which took place in 1997 in Philadelphia.

1984 Jesse Jackson galvanizes black voters
As a young man, Jesse Jackson left his studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary to join Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its crusade for black civil rights in the South; when King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, Jackson was at his side. In 1971, Jackson founded PUSH, or People United to Save Humanity (later changed to People United to Serve Humanity), an organization that advocated self–reliance for African Americans and sought to establish racial parity in the business and financial community. He was a leading voice for blacks in America during the early 1980s, urging them to be more politically active and heading up a voter registration drive that led to the election of Harold Washington as the first black mayor of Chicago in 1983. The following year, Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president. On the strength of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he placed third in the primaries, propelled by a surge of black voter participation. He ran again in 1988 and received 6.6 million votes, or 24 percent of the total primary vote, winning seven states and finishing second behind the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Jackson’s continued influence in the Democratic Party in the decades that followed ensured that African–American issues had an important role in the party’s platform. Throughout his long career, Jackson has inspired both admiration and criticism for his tireless efforts on behalf of the black community and his outspoken public persona. His son, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois in 1995.

1986 Oprah Winfrey launches syndicated talk show
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the success of the long–running sitcom The Cosby Show—featuring popular comedian Bill Cosby as the doctor patriarch of a close–knit middle–class African–American family—helped redefine the image of black characters on mainstream American television. Suddenly, there was no lack of educated, upwardly mobile, family–oriented black characters for TV viewers to look to, both in fiction and in life. In 1980, entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television (BET), which he later sold to entertainment giant Viacom for some $3 billion. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon, however, was the rise of Oprah Winfrey. Born in rural Mississippi to a poor unwed teenage mother, Winfrey got her start in television news before taking over a morning talk show in Chicago in 1984. Two years later, she launched her own nationally syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, which would go on to become the highest–rated in TV history. Celebrated for her ability to talk candidly about a wide range of issues, Winfrey spun her talk–show success into a one–woman empire—including acting, film and television production and publishing. She notably promoted the work of black female writers, forming a film company to produce movies based on novels like The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, and Beloved, by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison (she starred in both). One of the most influential individuals in entertainment and the first black female billionaire, Winfrey is also an active philanthropist, giving generously to black South Africans and to the historically black Morehouse College, among other causes.

1972: Shirley Chisholm runs for president
By the early 1970s, the advances of the civil rights movement had combined with the rise of the feminist movement to create an African–American women’s movement. —There can’t be liberation for half a race,” declared Margaret Sloan, one of the women behind the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973. A year earlier, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became a national symbol of both movements as the first major party African–American candidate and the first female candidate for president of the United States. A former educational consultant and a founder of the National Women’s Caucus, Chisholm became the first black woman in Congress in 1968, when she was elected to the House from her Brooklyn district. Though she failed to win a primary, Chisholm received more than 150 votes at the Democratic National Convention. She claimed she never expected to win the nomination. It went to George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in the general election. The outspoken Chisholm, who attracted little support among African–American men during her presidential campaign, later told the press: —I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black. When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.”

http://www.history.com/minisites/blackhistory/timeline/assets/images/large/1972_shirley_chisholm.jpg

1978: The Bakke decision and affirmative action
Beginning in the 1960s, the term —affirmative action” was used to refer to policies and initiatives aimed at compensating for past discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion or national origin. President John F. Kennedy first used the phrase in 1961, in an executive order calling on the federal government to hire more African Americans. By the mid–,,70s, many universities were seeking to increase the presence of minority and female faculty and students on their campuses. The University of California at Davis, for example, designated 16 percent of its medical school’s admissions spots for minority applicants. After Allan Bakke, a white California man, applied twice without success, he sued UC Davis, claiming that his grades and test scores were higher than those of minority students who were admitted and accusing UC Davis of —reverse discrimination.” In June 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and that Bakke should be admitted; on the other hand, it held that institutions of higher education could rightfully use race as a criterion in admissions decisions in order to ensure diversity. In the wake of the Bakke verdict, affirmative action continued to be a controversial and divisive issue, with a growing opposition movement claiming that the so–called —racial playing field” was now equal and that African Americans no longer needed special consideration to overcome their disadvantages. In subsequent decisions over the next decades, the Court limited the scope of affirmative action programs, while several U.S. states prohibited racially based affirmative action.

Fair Housing Act – April 1968
The Fair Housing Act of 1968, meant as a follow–up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. After the bill passed the Senate by an exceedingly narrow margin in early April, it was thought that the increasingly conservative House of Representatives,,wary of the growing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement,,would weaken it considerably. On the day of the Senate vote, however, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Pressure to pass the bill increased amid the wave of national remorse that followed, and after a strictly limited debate the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10. President Johnson signed it into law the following day. Over the next years, however, there was little decrease in housing segregation, and violence arose from black efforts to seek housing in white neighborhoods. From 1950 to 1980, the total black population in America’s urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million; during this same time period, white Americans steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking with them many of the employment opportunities blacks needed. In this way, the ghetto—an inner city community plagued by high unemployment, crime and other social ills—became an ever more prevalent fact of urban black life.

MLK assassinated – April 4, 1968
On April 4, 1968, the world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike. King’s death opened a huge rift between white and black Americans, as many blacks saw the killing as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed. In more than 100 cities, several days of riots, burning and looting followed his death. The accused killer, a white man named James Earl Ray, was captured and tried immediately; he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in prison; no testimony was heard. Ray later recanted his confession, and despite several inquiries into the matter by the U.S. government, many continued to believe that the speedy trial had been a cover–up for a larger conspiracy. King’s assassination, along with the killing of Malcolm X three years earlier, radicalized many moderate African American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party. The success of conservative politicians that year—including Richard Nixon’s election as president and the third–party candidacy of the ardent segregationist George Wallace, who won 13 percent of the vote—further discouraged African Americans, many of whom felt that the tide was turning against the civil rights movement.

Rise of Black Power
After the heady rush of the civil rights movement’s first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality—social, economic and political—still eluded them. In the late 1960s and early ,,70s, this frustration fueled the rise of the Black Power movement. According to then–SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, who first popularized the term —black power” in 1966, the traditional civil rights movement and its emphasis on nonviolence, did not go far enough, and the federal legislation it had achieved failed to address the economic and social disadvantages facing blacks in America. Black Power was a form of both self–definition and self–defense for African Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America—which were believed to be inherently racist—and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education. Also in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, college students in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther Party. While its original mission was to protect blacks from white brutality by sending patrol groups into black neighborhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full employment, decent housing and control over their own communities. Clashes ensued between the Panthers and police in California, New York and Chicago, and in 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after killing a police officer. His trial brought national attention to the organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s boasted some 2,000 members.
for video click: http://link.history.com/services/link/bcpid9953004001/bctid9952081001

Loving v. Virginia – April 1967
Soon after getting married in the District of Columbia in 1958, high–school sweethearts Mildred and Richard Loving returned to their hometown in Virginia, unaware that the state was one of 16 in the U.S. at the time with laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Mildred, a half–black, half–Native American woman, and Richard, a white man, were in bed on July 11, 1958, when police burst into their home. Charged with unlawful cohabitation, the Lovings pleaded guilty to violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act; a one–year prison sentence was suspended when they agreed to leave the state for 25 years. Back in D.C., a frustrated Mildred Loving wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for help: —We know we can’t live [in Virginia], but we would like to go back once and awhile [sic] to visit our families & friends.” In 1964, a landmark year for civil rights legislation, the ACLU took on the Lovings’ case, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In April 1967, the Court ruled unanimously that long–standing state laws against miscegenation—the last segregation laws on the books—were in violation of the Constitution. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had also written the court’s opinion in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, delivered the majority opinion, affirming that —We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race.” Some southern states, however, were extremely slow to change their constitutions to reflect the Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia: Alabama became the last state to do so in 2000.