Thursday, March 28, 2024
ADVT 
Artists

Women's Hall of Fame honours Aretha Franklin, Morrison, Lacks

Darpan News Desk The Canadian Press, 10 Dec, 2020 12:44 AM
  • Women's Hall of Fame honours Aretha Franklin, Morrison, Lacks

“Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin and Nobel laureate and “Beloved” author Toni Morrison will be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame Thursday as part of a posthumous class of Black honorees that also includes Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were widely used in biomedical research; Barbara Hillary, the first Black woman to travel to both the North and South Poles, and civil rights activists Barbara Rose Johns Powell and Mary Church Terrell.

The evening ceremony will be the first in a series of planned virtual inductions meant to correct a lack of diversity among honorees, hall officials said in a news release.

“In order to openly acknowledge and amend the disparities within the nomination pool, the virtual induction series will recognize and induct other marginalized women of achievement including those from the Latinx, Asian, Native American, LGBTQ+ sisterhoods, as well as additional Black women,” it said.

The National Women's Hall of Fame was founded in 1969 in Seneca Falls, the site of the first women’s rights convention.

Franklin had dozens of hits over a half-century and her signature song, “Respect,” has stood as a cultural icon. She won 18 Grammy awards and, in 1987, became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Franklin died of pancreatic cancer at her home in Detroit in 2018. She was 76.

Morrison helped raise American multiculturalism to the world stage. She was nearly 40 when her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” was published. After just six novels, Morrison in 1993 became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, earning praise from the Swedish academy for her “visionary force.”

In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Morrison a Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was 88 years old when she died last year.

The case of Henrietta Lacks was the subject of a bestselling 2010 book and a 2017 HBO film. It began when researchers took a sample of cancer cells without her permission while she was under anesthesia and found they could be grown indefinitely.

The so-called “HeLa” cells became crucial for understanding viruses, cancer treatments, in vitro fertilization and development of vaccines, including the polio vaccine. She died in 1951 at just 31.

The adventurer Hillary became fascinated with travel after retiring from a nursing career. She was 75 years old when she became the first Black woman to set foot on the North Pole, and stood on the South Pole five years later. She died at 88 in 2019.

Johns Powell was 16 years old in 1951, when she led a student strike for equal education at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. The students' cause gained the support of NAACP lawyers, who filed a lawsuit that would become one of the five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. The high court's landmark 1954 decision declared “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional.

Johns Powell died at 56 in 1991.

Born during the Civil War, Terrell was a dedicated suffragist whose civil rights activism continued up until her death in 1954 at the age of 90.

Terrell was the first Black woman in the United States appointed to the school board of a major city, the District of Columbia. She was a founding member and the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Colored Women's League of Washington.

MORE Artists ARTICLES

PACL Case: Sonu Nigam Barred From Selling 54-acre Land In Raigad

PACL Case: Sonu Nigam Barred From Selling 54-acre Land In Raigad
Security markets regulator Sebi has prohibited Bollywood singer Sonu Nigam from selling and transferring 54-acre agricultural land at Pinglas village in Raigad district of Maharashtra, which he had purchased from the crisis-hit PACL Group.  

PACL Case: Sonu Nigam Barred From Selling 54-acre Land In Raigad

Ramayan Actors Were 'Approached' For Racy Photoshoots, Offered 'Hefty Amounts', Reveals Arun Govil

Ramayan Actors Were 'Approached' For Racy Photoshoots, Offered 'Hefty Amounts', Reveals Arun Govil
Actor Arun Govil, who became a national icon in the eighties playing Ram in the eighties serial "Ramayan", recalled there was a time when the cast of the series was approached for sensuous photoshoots!

Ramayan Actors Were 'Approached' For Racy Photoshoots, Offered 'Hefty Amounts', Reveals Arun Govil

Now After Many Years, I Feel Comfortable And Safe Enough To Open Up And Say Whatever I Want: Shruti Haasan

Now After Many Years, I Feel Comfortable And Safe Enough To Open Up And Say Whatever I Want: Shruti Haasan
Shruti Haasan is the daughter of Kamal Haasan and Sarika

Now After Many Years, I Feel Comfortable And Safe Enough To Open Up And Say Whatever I Want: Shruti Haasan

Javed Akhtar Questions Shekhar Kapur's Claim Over Mr India: It Wasn’t Your Idea

Akhtar contends the film is actually his idea and that he had given it to Kapur.

Javed Akhtar Questions Shekhar Kapur's Claim Over Mr India: It Wasn’t Your Idea

SRK Should Make DDLJ2: Gauri On Trump Mentioning Film In Speech

Does SRK give her suggestions on interior designing? "Now, he should stop working in movies and start designing projects!" Gauri replied with a laugh, adding: "May be one day that will happen, but not yet."

SRK Should Make DDLJ2: Gauri On Trump Mentioning Film In Speech

‘This Is My Life, My Face’: Shruti Haasan On Body Shaming, Plastic Surgery And Hormonal Pain

In a long yet brave post, Kamal Haasan's daughter said: "I'm not one driven by other people's opinions of me but the constant commenting and she's too fat now she's too thin is so avoidable.

‘This Is My Life, My Face’: Shruti Haasan On Body Shaming, Plastic Surgery And Hormonal Pain