Curated playlist
African-American Catholics
- Billie HolidayBillie Holiday died with seventy cents in the bank. She earned $250,000 in the three years before her 1947 arrest.
- Kobe BryantKobe Bryant scored 81 points against Toronto in 2006, the second-highest NBA game total ever.
- Elvin HayesElvin Hayes scored 39 points and ended UCLA's 47-game winning streak in 1968. He held Lew Alcindor to 15 points.
- AaliyahAaliyah signed her first record deal at twelve. By 22 she had three albums and two films behind her.
- Lil WayneLil Wayne left school in tenth grade after his mother found a gun in his bag.
- Isiah ThomasIsiah Thomas scored 25 points in one Finals quarter on a badly sprained ankle. It was a 1988 NBA Finals record.
- LL Cool JLL Cool J became the first rapper to receive the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017.
- Tom MorelloTom Morello, the American guitarist behind Rage Against the Machine, once made an entire festival crowd listen to nothing but noise. At Lollapalooza in 1993, his band walked onstage naked. Their mouths were covered with duct tape, and…
- Simone BilesA day-care field trip first brought six-year-old Simone Biles into a gymnastics gym. She now has 11 Olympic medals.
- Frank LucasFrank Lucas liked to ask one question when he explained how he moved heroin. "Who the hell is gonna look in a dead soldier's coffin?" He put it that way in an interview for a New York magazine article published in 2000. Lucas operated in…
- Audre LordeAudre Lorde answered questions about her feelings by reciting a poem. She was a nearly blind child in Harlem.
- Keke PalmerKeke Palmer's famous nickname has nothing to do with her real name. Lauren Keyana Palmer took it from an imaginary friend called Keke, invented by her older sister, Loreal, before Palmer was even born. In an interview with Glamour in 2022,…