Famous People Who Attended Tennessee State University

Jason Kempin
HBCU Pride will always be one of the cornerstones here at Black America Web , and we get much joy in highlighting the contributions of historically Black colleges and universities in any way possible. This time around, we're putting a spotlight on the prestigious Tennessee State University as they celebrate over a century of being one of our culture's go-to institutions for a higher education.
We join all Tigers, Lady Tigers, current students, alumni and alumnae alike in giving a huge milestone anniversary shoutout to Tennessee State University!
RELATED: Famous People Who Attended Alabama A&M University
What proves to be more impressive than TSU's immense century of culture are the extensive amount of famous faces who once walked those historic halls. The amount of college athletes who went on to become Olympic medalists, NBA icons and an almost unbelievable sum of NFL legends is astonishingly impressive to say the least. Oh, and then there's Oprah Winfrey — what else is there to say?! Having the Queen Of Media as an alumna clearly comes with its advantages, and the Class of 2023 got a lesson in that when Lady O spoke at their commencement ceremony. Lucky!
Take a look below at an excerpt from her speech that really stood out to us, via Oprah Daily :
'I don't care how hard life after college gets—and it's gonna get hard—we need you to dream big! We need audacious thinkers. Use my example; I was one good TSU teacher—Mr. Cox—and one timely phone call away from a career that would absolutely change my life. That story's not just my own. What dream are you one or two steps away from?
We also need generosity of spirit; we need high standards and open minds and untamed imagination. That's how you make a difference in the world. Using who you are and what you stand for to make changes big and small. And there will be times when making the next right decision will be scary. I'll tell you a secret: That's how I've gotten through every challenge without being overwhelmed. By asking what is the next right move. You don't have to know all the right moves—you just need to know the next one.'
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Photos: S.F. Juneteenth Parade a joyful celebration of Black freedom and heritage

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Hamilton Spectator

4 hours ago

• Hamilton Spectator

Stories about the end of the world feel like a relief to me. Here's why

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Even Cormac McCarthy's 'emotionally shattering' 'The Road' ends with the adoption of the newly orphaned boy in the wake of his dead father's command to go on. The moral of the stories: We, humanity, shall overcome. Rumaan Alam's apocalyptic novel 'Leave the World Behind' enchants for a different reason. By painting a picture of total human annihilation — no plucky survivors, no one spared by design or by chance — the book offers the relief of surrender. Alam's novel begins with a white, middle-class family arriving at a bucolic vacation home east of New York City. The family splashes in the pool and fantasizes about owning marble countertops , solid oak floors, ample space. The mom, Amanda, can't resist checking her work email. Clay, the dad, sneaks cigarettes in the driveway. The kids — Rose, 10, and Archie, 13 — look at their phones. The centrality of technology is true to life and crucial to the plot. Cell signals, the internet and cable television stop working shortly after the family lands in the countryside. Probably, they think, their remote vacation spot is beyond reach of satellite networks. That night, though, when the owners of the house, the Washingtons , a kind, elderly Black couple, show up and ask to stay, Clay and Amanda learn that the loss of service is widespread. Drama unfolds on two tracks. There is tension between the families. Clay and Amanda are suspicious of the Washingtons , which has as much to do with the white couple's latent racism as with the unexpected appearance of the homeowners. Who has the right to call the shots: the white renters or the Black deed-holders? At what point does valid speculation about the crisis slide into harmful paranoia? On a second narrative track, the world is ending. The reader understands this early in the book more clearly than the characters ever do. There's plenty of evidence on Long Island that something is wrong. The blackout, communication breakdown, a deafening noise overhead, terrified neighbours, flamingos in the pool. A few days after the vacation begins, Archie's teeth fall out. The families know there is trouble, they are in trouble, but they never understand the extent of it. Not knowing is part of their terror. Around the novel's midpoint, a horrifying noise erupts from the sky. The noise divides the families' lives in two: 'the period before they'd heard the noise and the period after.' Inside the novel, no one discovers the source of the sound. However, readers learn from the Voice of God narrator ( VOG ) that top-secret fighter jets are scrambling toward a new era of battle over the eastern seaboard. If there were no VOG interruptions, no recurring omniscient assurances anchoring the contingencies of the interpersonal plot to the certainty of global apocalypse, 'Leave the World Behind' would be an anxiety novel. Is Armageddon nigh or not? Some of my favourite books are anxiety novels. Arguably, the end-of-the-world anxiety novel is scarier than speculative end-of-the-world fiction. Anxiety is torturous, paralyzing. It's a truism of the horror genre that anticipating the arrival of the monster can be more terrifying than the beast's appearance. But the uncertainty driving the anxiety novel, the book's ultimate source of terror, can't help but leave open the possibility that things might not be as bad as they seem. Nothing left to do but camp: Prince Amponsah, left, and Mackenzie Davis in the HBO Max television adaptation of the post-apocalyptic novel 'Station Eleven.' In 'Leave the World Behind,' there is no uncertainty. Because if the bombs are already in the air, the electrical grid is already down for the final time, the life-destroying echoes of the noise are already in your body, there is no future that isn't mass slaughter. As if to put a fine point on the guarantee of imminent death, the futility of resistance, Alam bores an unnoticed tick into Archie's ankle long before the boy is dying from noise-sickness. Why does Alam's crushing story captivate me? Why am I thrilled by the promise that we're on the edge of extinction? I think the book delights by allowing us to revel in the pleasures of giving up. Quit your job, break dinner plans, stop exercising, leave the relationship. What joy there is in not having to do the thing we thought we had to do. The world is ending and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it . In his essay 'On Giving Up,' the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes: 'We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation toward what is shameful and fearful.' However, Phillips argues, there is such a thing as 'a tyranny of completion, of finishing things, which can narrow our minds unduly.' The refusal to give up can be harmful, murderous. Phillips interprets 'Macbeth,' 'Lear,' and 'Othello' as tragic dramatizations of the tyranny of completion. My earliest memory of the desire to give up ends with my mother rejecting it. I was nine or 10 years old and wanted to quit the school choir. Mom and I stood in the kitchen before breakfast. I don't remember why it felt so important to quit, but I was crying, shaking, desperate for the relief of not having to sing that afternoon. Mom's response was sympathetic but stern: No. We don't quit things partway through. No negotiation. I felt like puking. I have quit things, though. And I've loved it. Oh, the joy of leaving that troubled 10-year relationship! I imagine it's what Scrooge felt waking on Christmas morning, learning that he has another chance. I instantly recall the butterflies, the excitement of quitting what seemed like a life destined for permanent frustration. The breakup was terrible. I hated hurting her. The logistics of moving were complicated, and she trashed the house when she left the final time. But I don't feel the pain of those hurtful memories as intensely as I feel the pleasure of the memory of giving up. Essayist, author and Wilfrid Laurier University professor James Cairns. The incredible thing is that most of the time, people don't give up. They struggle, they overcome, they get by, they make do. Why don't people kill themselves, asks Camus at the start of 'The Myth of Sisyphus.' Life is absurd; what's the point of living? Notwithstanding its obviousness, Camus's conclusion is profound: the nature of the human condition is to keep going, to not give up. That doesn't mean we don't fantasize about quitting, maybe even about leaving the world behind. It's the pleasure in the dream of quitting, not the politics of mass death, that I desire. In imagining the end of the world, I experience the release of countless other pressures. My own anxieties get transferred to the novel, where they disappear, if only for a fraction of a moment, in the blackout, the sound, the carnage of the plot. Research shows that watching horror movies can relieve psychological tension. There are better apocalyptic novels than 'Leave the World Behind.' For portraying social collapse as gradual and incomplete, Butler's 'Parable of the Sower' and Emily St. John Mandel's 'Station Eleven' are doubtless more realistic depictions of how modern society falls apart. The spirit of those books reminds me of Andreas Malm's admonition to fight climate change no matter the chances of victory. In 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline,' Malm argues that even if we know for certain that the climate crisis cannot be stopped there remains a moral imperative — a species-defining need — to fight until our last breath. 'Better to die blowing up a pipeline than to burn impassively,' writes Malm . The words could've come from Lauren Olamina's mouth. In Rice's 'Moon of the Crusted Snow,' once it's clear that widespread disaster has struck in 'the south' (the heartland of Canada, and, presumably, the world), Aileen, a community elder, says to her neighbour, Evan: 'In Crisis, on Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times' James Cairns 226 pages Wolsak and Wynn $22.00 ' What a silly word (apocalypse). I can tell you there's no word like that in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders anyway ... Our world isn't ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash (white man) came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that's when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here ... But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That's when our world ended again. And that wasn't the last time.' Aileen is very likely right in assuming that the world will not end all at once. In 'Station Eleven,' 20 years after the pandemic killed 99.99 per cent of the human species, characters refer to themselves as living in the world after the end of the world. In the final pages of 'Prophet Song,' Paul Lynch writes that 'the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event.' Viewed in one light, the world will not end even if it does. Of course, in a different light, one capable of simultaneously illuminating past, present, and future, the world will end, is ending . It's just a matter of time. In an essay about art's ability to alter experiences of time, Karl Ove Knausgård writes: 'We see the changes in the clouds but not the changes in the mountains,' because the 'now' of human perception excludes geologic time. In reality, mountains are moving, just more slowly than rivers and rabbits. It's anyone's guess how life on Earth is eventually snuffed out for good. Fire? Ice? Alien invasion? In any case, the party won't last forever. Butler and Mandel's realistic depictions of the gradual, uneven nature of collapse can make Alam's Big Bang version of the final crisis look foolish by comparison. But Alam is not wrong that one day it will all end in the passage of one second to the next. The light will be on, as it has been for millennia, and then, the light will go out. Alam's innovation is drawing that uniquely decisive moment from the (hopefully far-off) future and placing it in the now. Lights out tomorrow or next week. Whereas Butler, Mandel and Rice's main characters brim with insights about societal change and social justice, Alam's self-absorbed middle-class cast lusts over money and searches for Coca-Cola. Yet while stories of reproducing lives and communities in the aftermath of civilizational collapse are inspiring, admirable and satisfying, they're also exhausting, and not only because there are fires to build, continents to trudge across and gangs of murderous thieves to avoid. There's also the intense, inescapable fear on every page that survival won't work out. Nothing is guaranteed. By contrast, Alam's book guarantees the sudden and utter end of it all. There's catharsis in the swiftness and totality of such destruction. Amid today's overlapping political, economic and ecological crises, art's cathartic power is needed more urgently than ever. Show us the world vanishing on the page, and we may more clearly see sustainable paths ahead. Release in us the pleasure of giving up, and we may find new strength to struggle on. From 'In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times' by James Cairns. ©2025. Reproduced with the permission of Wolsak & Wynn, 2025.

USA Today

13 hours ago

• USA Today

Lynn Hamilton, 'Sanford and Son\

Lynn Hamilton, an actress known for her roles on "Sanford and Son" and "The Waltons," has died. She was 95. Hamilton's death was confirmed in a statement on Facebook and Instagram from her former manager and publicist, Rev. Calvin Carson, who said that the actress died on June 19 "surrounded by her grandchildren, loved ones and caregivers." "With profound gratitude and admiration, we celebrate the extraordinary life of iconic actress Alzenia 'Lynn' Hamilton-Jenkins, whose remarkable legacy continues to uplift and inspire," Carson said. "Her illustrious career, spanning over five decades, has left an indelible mark on the world of entertainment, motivating audiences across the globe through her work as a model, stage, film, and television actress." Hamilton starred as nurse Donna Harris, girlfriend of Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx), on the classic sitcom "Sanford and Son" beginning in 1972. The influential show, which aired on NBC, also starred Demond Wilson and LaWanda Page. Hamilton also portrayed Verdie on the CBS drama "The Waltons," beginning in 1973. She reprised the role in the television movies "A Walton Thanksgiving Reunion" and "A Walton Easter." 'Sanford and Son': Looking back at the 'double-edged' Black sitcom pioneer 50 years later The actress made her on-screen debut in the 1958 John Cassavetes film "Shadows," and throughout her career, she appeared on shows like "Dangerous Women," "Room 222," "Mannix," "Gunsmoke," "Hawaii Five-O," "Good Times," "Starsky and Hutch," "The Rockford Files" and "Roots: The Next Generation." She also starred on the NBC soap opera "Generations." On the film side, Hamilton had roles in movies like "Lady Sings the Blues," starring Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams, and "Buck and the Preacher," starring Sidney Poitier. Hamilton continued to act into the 2000s with roles on "NYPD Blue," "The Practice" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Nathaniel Taylor, best known as Rollo on 'Sanford and Son,' dies at 80 Hamilton was married to writer Frank Jenkins until his death in 2014. They worked together on theater productions such as "Nobody" and "The Bert Williams Story," according to Carson, who said that their "partnership was a shining example of creativity, love, and dedication."