Mabel Hampton memorial mustard-horseradish roast

Today's slow cooker meal is dedicated to a fascinating gay black woman whose struggles serve as inspiration for generations to come. Be sure to read the short story of her life following the recipe.

A hearty beef roast slow cooked in a bracing mix of horseradish and stone ground mustard is just what the doctor ordered to fight off the in-climate weather. 

 

Ingredients:

1- 2-3 lbs beef roast

4 Garlic Cloves, minced

1 Onion, sliced

¼ Cup stone ground mustard

Olive Oil

2 Tbs. salt + 1 Tbs. Pepper

2 Tbs. Paprika +  2 Tbs. thyme

2 Tbs Worcestershire Sauce

3 Cups Low Sodium Beef Broth

¼ Cup horseradish sauce

5 oz sour cream

 Gravy (Optional) Following

 3 Tbs. Flour + 3 Tbs softened butter

Wipe out the slow cooker and spray, set on low heat.

Clean fat from roast, and pat dry with paper towels. Thin slice the onion, mince the garlic.

Heat oil in a large skillet. In a small bowl mix the salt, pepper, paprika and thyme. Rub roast with this.

Brown roast well on all sides.

Place roast in large slow cooker.

Mix garlic and stone ground mustard. Spread evenly over the roast and top with sliced onion.

Mix Worcestershire sauce into the beef broth and pour around the sides of the roast. Set your crock pot on low for 6 hours. Cover and let cook.

At the 6 hour mark, mix the horseradish with the sour cream and stir into the gravy in the pot.

Recover and cook for a final 1 hour.

This is a good time to fix the carrots!

When 7 hours are up, carefully lift out the roast and tent with foil. Allow it to rest while making gravy.

Mix 3 Tbs softened butter and 3 Tbs flour into a paste. Place 2 cups of broth from the crock pot in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir in the flour mix. Mix well, stirring constantly until gravy is thickened. About 3 minutes.

Serve with roast. Maybe a green vegetable along with the carrots.

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Honey Roasted Carrots

Ingredients:

• 8 carrots, peeled
• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• 1/4 cup honey
• Salt + pepper

Directions:

Preheat an oven to 400 degrees F. Line with foil and spray a baking dish.

Peel and cut the carrots at an angle in 2 inch pieces.

Throw the carrots in a big bowl. Drizzle with olive oil. Mix until the carrots are completely covered with olive oil. Pour on the honey, then season to taste with salt and pepper; mix until evenly coated. Cover with foil.

Bake in the preheated oven until just tender, or cooked to your desired degree of doneness, 40 minutes to 1 hour.

If you are pressed for time, you can broiled them for 15 minutes instead of baking.

Variation: Instead of honey, try real maple syrup and butter instead of oil. Maybe a squeeze of lemon juice. 

 

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh8eb_ACLl8
Happy to be serving my Master Indy

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon

============================

Mabel Hampton

An ordinary woman who's life and work serves as an inspiration to continuing generations of young gay black women everywhere.

Mabel Hampton was born in 1903 in North Carolina, and moved to New York City as an orphaned young girl. The uncle she had come to live with was abusive, and at the age of just eight years old, Mabel ran away.

Not knowing where to go, she took to the subway and ended up in New Jersey, where she was taken in and raised by a working-class black family.

Mabel turned seventeen in 1920, and soon returned to Harlem to find work. The Great Migration had spread black Southerners across the northern United States, and Harlem was becoming the center of black thought, literature, and arts. The Twenties were halcyon times and Mabel was right in the middle.

Mabel began her life on the stage as a dancer and singer with an all-black female ensemble on Coney Island. There, she met an older woman who introduced her to the word “lesbian.” Although she had fooled around with women before, this was the moment when Mabel realized there was a word for her desires, and for people like her. “I said to myself, well, if that’s what it is, I’m already in it!”. The two only had one night together. Of that night, all Mabel would say was, “she taught me quite a few things. I knew some of them, but she taught me the rest.”

In Harlem, Mabel performed at the Garden of Eden and the Lafayette Theater, and she spent her time with many prominent queer black women in the city: comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley, entertainer Gladys Bentley, singer Ethel Waters (and her girlfriend, dancer Ethel Williams), and heiress and socialite A’Lelia Walker. “I had so many different girlfriends it wasn’t funny,” Mabel recalled many years later.

In 1924, Mabel and a friend were set up by the police and arrested as prostitutes. At the time, being an un-escorted woman at a bar was often considered enough evidence to be convicted of prostitution. Mabel was sentenced to the Bedford Hills Reformatory for Women for three years.
Shortly after leaving Bedford Hills, Mabel also decided to leave the stage. Performing was just one of the few jobs that were available to a young black woman with an eighth-grade education. Afterward, Mabel worked as a house cleaner.

In 1932, Mabel met the love of her life, Lillian Foster. The two lived together in the Bronx until Lillian’s death in 1978. They were always at the center of a large social group of gay women, and eventually donated their personal papers to the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). Mabel become an integral part of the LHA; without their pioneering work preserving the stories and artifacts of queer women, we would know little about her life.

In 1984, Mabel was invited to address the audience at the New York City Pride Parade and she spoke about her decades of experience as a black lesbian in America:
“I, Mabel Hampton, have been a lesbian all my life, for eighty-two years, and I am proud of myself and my people. I would like all my people to be free in this country and all over the world, my gay people and my black people.”

For the last few years of her life, Mabel lived in the apartment that housed the first headquarters of the LHA. In 1989, she passed away after an extended battle with pneumonia. Her story, like so many others, needs to be remembered. It not only provides us with an account of early black lesbian life in New York City but also gives us a look at a fascinating woman would just would not give up!

Blake Brockington Green Beans & Potatoes

This classic mixture deserves another go around. Simple and plain yet comforting and satisfying. We name it in honor of a young leader lost too soon. Please read the short story of his life after the recipe. Fresh green beans, onions and potatoes: inexpensive comfort meal just the thing for when weather is questionable and you want to serve a meal of love and warmth. Ingredients: 2 lbs fresh green beans 8 oz seasoning ham 1 onion, diced 3-4 large yukon gold potatoes, peeled and diced 4 cups chicken broth 1 tsp pepper * *Hold off adding any salt because sometimes the seasoning ham is very salty. Directions: Wash and trim beans then cut into 2-inch pieces; set aside. Chop the onion. Peel and cut potatoes into large cubes In a skillet, heat and stir in the seasoning ham. Sometimes this has plenty of grease in it so watch and adjust accordingly. Cook until starting to brown, ( about 8 minutes). Add onion and beans then continue to sauté until onion is translucent. (about 3 more minutes) Remove from heat. Dump the potatoes into a Dutch oven. Add chicken broth, pepper and bean mixture (with pan drippings) to the pot then bring to a boil.    Once boiling, cover then reduce heat to medium-low and cook for 30-45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Let rest 10 minutes before serving. Notes: You can make this with canned beans (probably 4-5 cans). Drain the beans and skip sautéing them. Just mix the drained beans with the onion and bacon before adding everything to the potatoes. Canned beans aren't as good but they're still pretty tasty. You can also make this in a crock pot. Follow recipe except use a crock pot instead of the large pot or Dutch oven. Cook on low for 6-8 hours or high for 3-4 or until potatoes are tender. You can also use red potatoes. Don't use russet or baking potatoes. They won't hold up being boiled this long. A simple tasty southern favorite. Serve with an old fashioned side of cottage cheese & peaches. Maybe some warm bread. For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG3PnQ3tgzY&list=RDEhZba-P7R18&index=14

So honored to be Master Indy's slave.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by 

Dan White

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon 

 

======================================

Blake Brockington

Life was a constant battle for Blake Brockington, a young teen who became a leader before he was ready for it. He was born in 1996 and assigned as “female” at birth. Yet he always knew this was wrong.

Then in his high school sophomore year he started to do something about it. He said he always felt like a boy and chafed at being forced to wear dresses to church and family affairs.

“I felt like I’ve lived my entire life as a lie,” Blake says in a documentary. “I grew up in Charleston, S.C., in a Southern Baptist home. I’ve always been kind of different. It was always a bad thing in my family, but they never really said anything.

“I remember finding out when I was six that I wasn’t like the other boys. I remember being forced into dresses and under hot combs. ... I remember learning to play the piano, imagining that one day I’d be the piano man. I remember my first orchestra concert when I was eight and I cried because I wanted to wear a tux. ... I remember hating my name and hoping that maybe I could bleed it out of my life. I remember coming to terms with the fact that I’d never be enough. I remember being jealous of my nephew because he’d be tall and man enough for the world like the other beautiful men in our family. I remember hating my body so much that I wanted to burn it alive in the hopes that it would have the effect on me that fires have on forests. I remember when I lost faith in friendship because misunderstanding manifested disgust in my existence. I remember realizing that there was no place for me here. I remember finding myself and finally loving him. I remember it being too late.”

He came out publicly as transgender while attending high school as a tenth grade student. His family was not supportive of his decision to go FTM, so Brockington chose to live with a foster family during his transition.

He chose the name Blake after it came to him in a dream and because he liked how masculine it sounded. He was taking testosterone, which was covered by Medicaid, and had planned to get a mastectomy once he was able to afford it.

In 2014, Brockington received national attention for being the first openly transgender high school homecoming king in North Carolina after collecting the most money for the school's chosen charity. He later indicated the process had been tough on him, saying, "That was single-handedly the hardest part of my trans journey. Really hateful things were said on the Internet. It was hard. I saw how narrow-minded the world really is."

His reaction was to began publicly advocating for transgender and LGBT youth issues.

"I honestly feel like this is something I have to do," Brockington, who mentored several younger trans students, at the time he was named homecoming king. "Nobody should be scared to be themselves, and everybody should have an equal opportunity to have an enjoyable high school experience."

The numbers themselves have been staggering. National surveys show that 41 percent of transgender or gender nonconforming adults have self-reported a suicide attempt, compared with 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population. Transgender men have the highest rate, with 46 percent reporting suicide attempts.

For many years, the “T” in LGBT was an afterthought, and even some gays and lesbians haven’t always been accepting. However things are changing, thanks to people like Blake speaking out and mentoring others.

“Blake was a real hero to a lot of people,” Keisling said. “He was fairly high-profile for a teenager. ... He really stood up for himself and for all of us. He was just such a good, strong leader and spokesperson. But perhaps it was all a bit too much for our young hero.

“Blake was a figure. People saw Blake as part of a movement,” said O’Neale Atkinson, Time Out Youth’s director of youth programs. “There were a lot of expectations put on him to be a leader at a very young age.”

Prior to his death, Brockington had indicated that he had experienced years of depression and destructive behavior, such as self-harming. He also indicated that he had previously had suicidal thoughts.

Two months before his death, he posted on his Tumblr page "Even if I got better in my head, I would never want to continue on in a world like this." A month prior, he posted "I’m waiting on the moment when me and my darkness split from my body."

Yet no one stepped in. Brockington died on March 23, 2015 after being struck by several vehicles on the outer loop of Interstate 485 in Charlotte. The incident was considered a suicide.

Many have noted that what happened to Brockington fits a dangerous pattern of harmful behavior by transgender youth - who often face disproportionate amounts of bullying, harassment, discrimination, and violence. Josh Burford, assistant director for sexual and gender diversity at UNC Charlotte, who had worked with Brockington on the exhibit at the Levine Museum, told the press "What happened to Blake is part of a systemic problem, especially for trans students of color. He didn’t quit. He didn’t give up. ... He’s a victim of what happens every single day to these kids."

Other memorial services were held in cities such as Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and an additional service in Charlotte.

If you are a trans or gender-nonconforming person considering suicide, Trans Lifeline can be reached at 877-565-8860. LGBT youth (ages 24 and younger) can reach the Trevor Project Lifeline at 1-866-488-7386. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 can also be reached 24 hours a day by people of all ages and identities.

We can not afford to merely sit and wonder what might have been. We must work together to make things change. Somewhere a young person is watching.

E. Lynn Harris Crab and Havarti Dip

While the super bowl has passed, the parties are starting to pick up. This warm dip is named to honor a literary legend you may never have heard of. For Black History month lets remember this gay African-American. Be sure to read the short article following the recipe. 

 

Thanks to canned crab meat, you can make this rich dip any time of the year. It blends the flavors of the sea food with horseradish and the creamy Havarti cheese. Great for any chip, cracker, or other food you like to serve at your next get together. 

 

Ingredients

1 8 ounce package cream cheese, softened

¼ cups prepared horseradish

1 cup shredded Havarti cheese

1 pkg plain Greek style yogurt

¼ cup mayonnaise

two cans crab meat, drained, flaked, and any cartilage removed

1 cup shredded baby spinach

½ cup chopped onion

Bread sticks, flatbread, toasted baguette slices, and/or bagel chips

Directions

Chop up the onion and the spinach.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In a large bowl, combine cream cheese, yogurt and mayonnaise.

Spread the Havarti cheese into the bowl and blend well. Slave used a simple potato masher for this. Set aside.

In a skillet, heat oil and onions. Let cook until starting to turn transparent.

Stir in the spinach. Let cook over low heat for about 10 minutes stirring occasionally so it doesn't burn.

Remove from heat and mix into the cheese mixture. Gently stir in crab meat.

Transfer mixture to an ungreased 1-quart souffle dish or shallow baking dish. Bake about 25 minutes or until heated through. 

 

Serve with chips, crackers, raw vegetables, pretzels or any other foods you would have for your guests.

What a great gourmet surprise!

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDFPUUVB--A

So happy to be able to serve this for my Master.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon

 

===========================

E. Lynn Harris

 
Harris was an unlikely literary pioneer. He was a former IBM executive who decided to write about his life.

Initially unable to land a book deal with a publishing house for his first work, Invisible Life, he published it himself and sold copies from the trunk of his car to African-American beauty salons and bookstores.

He later was published by Doubleday, and ten of his novels achieved New York Times bestseller status.

Harris' first novel, Invisible Life finished in 1991, was a coming-of-age story dealing with then-taboo topics. Most important was that it openly questioned sexual identity and told the story of main character Raymond Tyler. The hero, torn between his married male lover and girlfriend Nicole, is a New York attorney struggling with identifying as a bisexual black man. He ultimately settles into the gay life.

He eventually became one of the nation's most popular writers with an estimated 4 million of his books in print.
In books like "Invisible Life," "A Love of My Own," and his New York Times best-selling memoir, "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted," Harris virtually invented a new genre: books that depicted black gay men living double lives.
This in a time when the black community was very homophobic! The public had never seen homosexual love in African-American men portrayed. It was playful, loving, and it wasn't hidden.
That very fact gave hope to untold millions. Harris held dinner parties for aspiring writers at his home. He loved meeting and hugging fans at book readings, and never seemed to let his fame change him. Sometimes he would answer up to 200 e-mails from his fans each day.

Harris had his share of personal pain. In his 2003 memoir, he wrote about enduring abuse by his stepfather and an attempted suicide in 1990.

Mr. Harris tapped a rich vein of interest with racy tales of affluent, ambitious, powerful black men who nonetheless struggled with their attraction to both men and women. His books shed light on a segment of society that had received little attention: black men on the down low — that is, men who are publicly heterosexual but secretly have sex with men.

Harris died July 23, 2009, while in Los Angeles for a business meeting. He was found unconscious at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, and was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. An autopsy determined that the cause of death was heart disease. 

 

The author who introduced millions of readers to the "invisible life" of black gay men, was a literary pioneer whose generosity was as huge as his courage. 
 
E. Lynn Harris deserves to be remembered for the wonderful literary contributions he has left us with and the enormous hope he still gives to generations.

Josephine Baker Lemon Chicken

For black history month we would like to dedicate this dish to a provocative bisexual singer of the early 20^th century, Josephine Baker. She rose from a Saint Louis slum to be the toast of Paris. A civil rights leader and war hero who may be largely forgotten today. Please read a quick story about her following the recipe. 

 

Lemon Chicken has long been a favorite in the finest restaurants of the world. Here is a quick and easy way to make this wonderful classic right on your own stove top! 

 

Ingredients:

2 boneless skinless chicken breasts

3 large lemons (1 sliced – 2 zested & squeezed)

1 cup reduced sodium chicken stock

4 cloves garlic (chopped)

½ cup dry white wine

2 Tbs oil + 2 Tbs butter

¼ c. non-fat half & half

1/3 package angel hair pasta

½ tsp oregano

2 pinches red pepper flakes

Directions:

Chop the garlic.

Cut the chicken breasts sideways in half. Slave prefers this to pounding the breasts flat. The idea is to make the pieces less thick so they cook easier. 

  

Slice one lemon. The other two should be “zested” and then cut & squeezed into another bowl. Always squeeze with cut side up so less chance of seeds falling into the bowl. Stir the red pepper flakes into the lemon juice & zest along with the oregano.

Note: the angle hair pasta cooks very quickly! Only about 3 and a half minutes, so get this ready but do not start to cook it yet.

Heat the oil & butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Sprinkle salt & pepper on the chicken and add to the hot grease. Let cook about 7 minutes on each side. This should remove any bacteria and pinkness but leave the natural chicken juices. You can check with a thermometer for a temp of about 155 degrees.

 

 

Remove from skillet and lay a piece of foil over the chicken. It will continue to cook and the temp should rise another 7 to 10 degrees!

Now stir the chopped garlic into the skillet and add the lemon juice mixture. Scrape up all the browned bits from the bottom of the skillet. (This stuff tastes great and makes it easier to clean up afterwards.)

Bring to a boil with the cup of chicken broth. Stir in the wine. Let simmer down for 10 – 15 minutes stirring occasionally. This lets the sauce thicken up nicely.

Now is a good time to cook the pasta and drain it well.

Stir in the half & half, turn off the heat and replace the chicken into the pan of sauce. This will bring the chicken back to temperature and allow the sauce to soak into the chicken. You do not want the mixture to boil.

Serve with a side of green vegetable, slave used plain green peas.

The pasta was served in a large bowl to form a bed in each guest's plate.

Arrange the chicken pieces with lemon slices and drizzle some of the sauce over the top. Serve the sauce on the side so everyone can add as much as they like.

This is such a simple dish to make yet tastes so elegant.

For our music tonight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvaAykoPj6Y

So happy to serve my Master.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

 Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon

=========================

Josephine Baker

Born in Saint Louis in 1906 Josephine Baker would become one of the most influential household names on both sides of the Atlantic. This BiSexual African American was indeed a trailblazer. One of the first to star in a major motion picture, one of the first to become a world-famous singer, one of the first black women to integrate an American concert hall, and she was the first American-born woman to receive the Croix de guerre, a high ranking French military honor of prestige. Haled as a great entertainer, she made contributions to the Civil Rights Movement and lent a hand to the French Resistance in the second World War.

Amazing future for this young girl who at times lived in a cardboard box, dancing in the streets of the worst Ghetto areas of Saint Louis.

Her mother, Carrie, was adopted in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1886 by Richard and Elvira McDonald, both of whom were former slaves of African and Native American descent.

The records of the city of St. Louis tell an interesting story. Josephine Baker's mother, Carrie McDonald, was admitted to the (exclusively white) Female Hospital on May 3, 1906, as pregnant. She was discharged six weeks latter along with her baby, Freda J. McDonald having been born two weeks earlier. Obviously, there had been complications with the pregnancy, but Carrie's chart reveals no details. The father was identified on the birth certificate simply as "Edw" ... Her father may have been white—Josephine thought so, so did her family. Reports say that her mother had worked for a German family around the time she became pregnant. He's the one who must have got her into that hospital and paid to keep her there all those weeks. Also, her baby's birth was registered by the head of the hospital at a time when most black births were not.

Josephine lived her early life in the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood of St. Louis, a mostly black low-income neighborhood near Union Station, consisting mainly of rooming houses, brothels and apartments with no indoor plumbing.

She left first husband, Willie Baker, when her vaudeville troupe was booked into a New York City venue and divorced him in 1925. It was during this time she began to see significant career success, and she continued to use his last name professionally for the rest of her life.

Baker was billed at the time as "the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville".

These performances landed Baker an opportunity to tour in Paris, which would become the place she called home until her final days.

"One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States.... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore.... I felt liberated in Paris."

In Paris, she became an instant success for her erotic dancing, and for appearing practically nude onstage. After a successful tour of Europe, she broke her contract and returned to France to star at the Folies Bergère, setting the standard for her future acts.

In later shows in Paris, she was often accompanied on stage by her pet cheetah, "Chiquita", who was adorned with a diamond collar. The cheetah frequently escaped into the orchestra pit, where it terrorized the musicians, adding another element of excitement to the show.

After a while, Baker was the most successful American entertainer working in France. Ernest Hemingway called her "the most sensational woman anyone ever saw."

In September 1939, when France declared war on Germany in response to the invasion of Poland, Baker was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, French military intelligence, as an "honorable correspondent". Baker collected what information she could about German troop locations from officials she met at parties. Her café-society fame enabled her to rub shoulders with those in the know, from high-ranking Japanese officials to Italian bureaucrats, and to report back what she heard. Notes were written in invisible ink on Baker's sheet music.

After the war, Baker received the Croix de guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance. She was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.

In 1949, a reinvented Baker returned in triumph to the Folies Bergere. Bolstered by recognition of her wartime heroics, Baker the performer assumed a new gravitas, unafraid to take on serious music or subject matter.

The engagement was a rousing success, and reestablished Baker as one of Paris' preeminent entertainers. In 1951 Baker was invited back to the United States for a nightclub engagement in Miami. After winning a public battle over desegregating the club's audience, Baker followed up her sold-out run at the club with a national tour. Rave reviews and enthusiastic audiences accompanied her everywhere, climaxed by a parade in front of 100,000 people in Harlem in honor of her new title: NAACP's "Woman of the Year". Her future looked bright but was short lived and her visa was canceled in response to her Civil Rights work.

During Baker's work with the Civil Rights Movement, she began adopting children, forming a family she often referred to as "The Rainbow Tribe". Baker wanted to prove that "children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers."

As early as 1920, when she was 14, she had already had same-sex relationships with other vaudeville performers. We know of at least six of her female lovers, all of whom she met on the black performing circuit during her early years in the United States, as well as fellow American black expatriate vaudeville performer Ada “Bricktop” Smith and the French novelist Colette. 

 

Josephine Baker was bisexual. However she rejected any sort of LGBT affiliation. Although Baker in her later years was rumored to have enjoyed the company of many young women, she was also rabidly homophobic, and once kicked one of her adopted sons out when she found out he was gay.

However we must remember she was a product of her time. We should not impose conventional wisdom on historical figures. When learning about something in the past we do not understand, we must simply state facts and not judge by today's standards.

So during this black history month, let's take time to learn about a very complex personality of Josephine Baker.