Camille A. Nelson

To celebrate his birthday, I'll start today's entry with a relevant quote from Mark Twain:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” —Mark Twain, 1857

Now, on to Camille A. Nelson!

Country of origin: Jamaica

Camille A. Nelson is a Jamaican academic, and the current and 12th Dean of Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts. Nelson graduated with her Bachelors from the University of Toronto, her law degree from the University of Ottawa and a LLM from Columbia University. Camille Nelson was the first black woman to clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, and is the first woman and first person of color to become Dean at Suffolk University Law School; she became Dean in 2010.

Above quoted from Wikipedia. To read an article about Camille A. Nelson, visit boston.com.

Marcus Garvey

Country of origin: Jamaica

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940) was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He founded the Black Star Line, part of the Back-to-Africa movement, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.

To read more about Marcus Garvey, visit his page on Wikipedia.

Orlando Patterson

Country of origin: Jamaica

Orlando Patterson (born 1940) is a Jamaica-born American historical and cultural sociologist known for his work regarding issues of race in the America, as well as the sociology of development, currently holding the John Cowles chair in Sociology at Harvard University. Patterson took his B.Sc in Economics from the University of London and his Ph.D. in Sociology at the London School of Economics in 1965.

Earlier in his career, Patterson was concerned with the economic and political development of his home country, Jamaica. He served as Special advisor to Michael Manley, the then Prime Minister of Jamaica, from 1972 to 1979.

Patterson has appeared on PBS and has been a guest columnist in The New York Times.

To read more about Orlando Patterson, see his biograph at Harvard.edu, or visit his page on Wikipedia.

Patrick Ewing

Country of origin: Jamaica

Patrick Ewing was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1962. His father, Carl, was a mechanic at the time, and his mother, Dorothy, was a homemaker. Dorothy conceived of a better life for her children in the United States, and she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971 to pave the way for a family move there. She took a job as a kitchen worker in a hospital, and brought her family over one by one. In 1975, at twelve years of age, Patrick Ewing joined his mother and four of his siblings who had immigrated before him. His father eventually found work in a rubber hose factory.

Ewing had never even seen a basketball before his arrival in the United States, much less played the game that was later to make him famous. Soccer is the sport most played in Jamaica, and that was the game he played as a youngster. But he became fascinated by basketball only weeks into his new life as an American. Walking past a playground where other children played basketball, he would often stop and watch. One day, he was asked by the other kids if he wanted to join a game, and he began what was to become a career. Playing basketball did not come easily for the future superstar. "I knew that it was something I'd have to work at," he later told Roy S. Johnson in the New York Times.

Patrick Ewing - Born In Jamaica.

In addition to being part of the Olympic gold medal winning basketball team, Patrick Ewing has supported the Children's Health Fund and is a proponent of organ donation, including offering to donate his own kidney to friend and rival Alonzo Mourning back in 2000.

More sources of information for Patrick Ewing can be found at these links:

Wikipedia
NBA
jrank.org