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Dunbar Hotel
The Dunbar Hotel, originally known as the Hotel Somerville, was the focal point of the Central Avenue African-American community in Los Angeles, California, during the 1930s and 1940s. Built in 1928 by John Alexander Somerville, it was known for its first year as the Hotel Somerville. Upon its opening, it hosted the first national convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to be held in the western United States. In 1930, the hotel was renamed the Dunbar, and it became the most prestigious hotel in LA's African-American community. In the early 1930s, a nightclub opened at the Dunbar, and it became the center of the Central Avenue jazz scene in the 1930s and 1940s. The Dunbar hosted Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Lena Horne, and many other jazz legends. Other noteworthy people who stayed at the Dunbar include W. E. B. Du Bois, Joe Louis, Ray Charles, and Thurgood Marshall. Former ...
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Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world's most populous megacities. Los Angeles is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. With a population of roughly 3.9 million residents within the city limits , Los Angeles is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic and cultural diversity, being the home of the Hollywood film industry, and its sprawling metropolitan area. The city of Los Angeles lies in a basin in Southern California adjacent to the Pacific Ocean in the west and extending through the Santa Monica Mountains and north into the San Fernando Valley, with the city bordering the San Gabriel Valley to it's east. It covers about , and is the county seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an estim ...
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Vada Somerville
Vada Watson Somerville, D.D.S. (November 1, 1885 – October 28, 1972) was a civil rights activist and the second African-American woman in California to receive a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree. Personal life and family Vada Somerville was born on November 1, 1885, in Pomona, California. Her mother was Dorothy Watson McDonald, a migrant from Arkansas. Education In 1903, Somerville received a scholarship through the Los Angeles Times to the University of Southern California (USC). After graduating from USC, Somerville worked as a book keeper and a telephone operator. In 1912, she married John Alexander Somerville, a Doctor of Dental Surgery who she met while in college. A graduate of the USC School of Dentistry, John Somerville originally planned to return to his native Jamaica to practice dentistry. After their marriage, the couple decided to stay in Los Angeles. In 1914, the couple founded the NAACP Los Angeles center. After the United States entered World War I, Vad ...
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Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
The ''Los Angeles Herald Examiner'' was a major Los Angeles daily newspaper, published in the afternoon from Monday to Friday and in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. It was part of the Hearst syndicate. It was formed when the afternoon '' Herald-Express'' and the morning ''Los Angeles Examiner'', both of which were published there since the turn of the 20th century, merged in 1962. For a few years after the merger, the ''Los Angeles Herald Examiner'' had the largest afternoon-newspaper circulation in the US. It published its last edition on November 2, 1989. Early years William Randolph Hearst founded the ''Los Angeles Examiner'' in 1903, in order to assist his campaign for the presidential nomination on the Democratic ticket, complement his ''San Francisco Examiner'', and provide a union-friendly answer to the ''Los Angeles Times''. At its peak in 1960, the ''Examiner'' had a circulation of 381,037. It attracted the top newspapermen and women of the day. The ''Examiner' ...
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Cotton Club
The Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940. It was located on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue (1923–1936), then briefly in the midtown Theater District (1936–1940).Elizabeth Winter"Cotton Club of Harlem (1923- )" Black Past (retrieved September 9, 2014). The club operated during the United States' era of Prohibition and Jim Crow era racial segregation. Black people initially could not patronize the Cotton Club, but the venue featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the era, including musicians Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Willie Bryant; vocalists Adelaide Hall,Iain Cameron Williams, Chapter 15, ''Underneath A Harlem Moon: The Harlem to Paris Years of Adelaide Hall'', Continuum, 2002. Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Aida Ward, Avon Long, the Dandridge Sisters, the Will Vodery Choir, The Mills Brothers, Nina Mae McKinney, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, ...
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Waldorf-Astoria
The Waldorf Astoria New York is a luxury hotel and condominium residence in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. The structure, at 301 Park Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, is a 47-story Art Deco landmark designed by architects Schultze and Weaver, which was completed in 1931. The building was the world's tallest hotel from 1931 until 1963 when it was surpassed by Moscow's Hotel Ukraina by . An icon of glamour and luxury, the Waldorf Astoria is one of the world's most prestigious and best-known hotels. Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts is a division of Hilton Hotels, and a portfolio of high-end properties around the world operates under the name, including in New York City. Both the exterior and the interior of the Waldorf Astoria are designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission as official landmarks. The original Waldorf–Astoria was built in two stages along Fifth Avenue and opened in 1893; it was demolished in 1929 to make way for the construc ...
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Billie Holiday 5
Billie may refer to: People * Billie Allen (1925-2015), American actress * Billie Bird (1908-2002), American actress and comedian * Billie Burke (1884-1970), American actress * Billie Joe Armstrong (born 1972), American singer and guitarist for the band Green Day * Billie Dove (1903–1997), American actress * Billie Eilish (born 2001), American singer-songwriter * Billie Fleming (1914–2014), British long-distance cycling record-holder * Billie Frechette (1907–1969), American Métis singer, waitress, convict, and lecturer known for her relationship with the bank robber John Dillinger * Billie Holiday (1915–1959), American jazz singer * Billie Jean King (born 1943), American professional tennis player and gender equality advocate * Billie Lourd (born 1992), American actress * Billie Moore (1943–2022), American basketball coach * Billie Mae Richards (1921-2010), Canadian actress * Billie Piper (born 1982), British singer and actress, who first recorded under the name Billie ...
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Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began writing stories and verse when he was a child. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper, and served as president of his high school's literary society. Dunbar's popularity increased rapidly after his work was praised by William Dean Howells, a leading editor associated with ''Harper's Weekly''. Dunbar became one of the first African-American writers to establish an international reputation. In addition to his poems, short stories, and novels, he also wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy ''In Dahomey'' (1903), the first all-African-American musical produced on Broadway in New York. The musical later toured in the United States and the United Kingdom. Suffering from tuberculosis, which the ...
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Downtown Los Angeles
Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) contains the central business district of Los Angeles. In addition, it contains a diverse residential area of some 85,000 people, and covers . A 2013 study found that the district is home to over 500,000 jobs. It is also part of Central Los Angeles. Downtown Los Angeles is divided into neighborhoods and districts, some overlapping. Most districts are named for the activities concentrated there now or historically, e.g. the Arts, Civic Center, Fashion, Banking, Theater, Toy, and Jewelry districts. It is the hub for the city's urban rail transit system plus the Pacific Surfliner and Metrolink commuter rail system for Southern California. Banks, department stores, and movie palaces at one time drew residents and visitors of all socioeconomic classes downtown, but the area declined economically especially after the 1950s. It remained an important center—in the Civic Center, of government business; on Bunker Hill, of banking, and along Broadway, of ...
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New York Amsterdam News
The ''Amsterdam News'' (also known as ''New York Amsterdam News'') is a weekly Black-owned newspaper serving New York City. It is one of the oldest newspapers geared toward African Americans in the United States and has published columns by such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and was the first to recognize and publish Malcolm X. Foundation The ''Amsterdam News'' was founded on December 4, 1909, and is headquartered in the Harlem neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. The newspaper takes its name from its original location one block east of Amsterdam Avenue, at West 65th Street and Broadway. An investment of US$10 in 1909 () turned the ''Amsterdam News'' into one of New York's largest and most influential black-owned-and-operated business institutions, and one of the nation's most prominent ethnic publications. It was later reported that James Henry Anderson published the first copy: "...with a dream in mind, $10 in his pocket, six sheets of ...
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Roy Wilkins
Roy Ottoway Wilkins (August 30, 1901 – September 8, 1981) was a prominent activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Wilkins' most notable role was his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in which he held the title of Executive Secretary from 1955 to 1963 and Executive Director from 1964 to 1977. Wilkins was a central figure in many notable marches of the civil rights movement. He made valuable contributions in the world of African-American literature, and his voice was used to further the efforts in the fight for equality. Wilkins' pursuit of social justice also touched the lives of veterans and active service members, through his awards and recognition of exemplary military personnel. Early life Wilkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 30, 1901. His father was not present for his birth, having fled the town in fear of being lynched after he refused demands to step away and ...
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Arcade (architecture)
An arcade is a succession of contiguous arches, with each arch supported by a colonnade of columns or piers. Exterior arcades are designed to provide a sheltered walkway for pedestrians. The walkway may be lined with retail stores. An arcade may feature arches on both sides of the walkway. Alternatively, a blind arcade superimposes arcading against a solid wall. Blind arcades are a feature of Romanesque architecture that influenced Gothic architecture. In the Gothic architectural tradition, the arcade can be located in the interior, in the lowest part of the wall of the nave, supporting the triforium and the clerestory in a cathedral, or on the exterior, in which they are usually part of the walkways that surround the courtyard and cloisters. Many medieval arcades housed shops or stalls, either in the arcaded space itself, or set into the main wall behind. From this, "arcade" has become a general word for a group of shops in a single building, regardless of the architectural f ...
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Art Deco
Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the United States and Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Through styling and design of the exterior and interior of anything from large structures to small objects, including how people look (clothing, fashion and jewelry), Art Deco has influenced bridges, buildings (from skyscrapers to cinemas), ships, ocean liners, trains, cars, trucks, buses, furniture, and everyday objects like radios and vacuum cleaners. It got its name after the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) held in Paris. Art Deco combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials. During its heyday, it represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in socia ...
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