Directions: Read the Following Paragraph and Answer the Questions Below

Name: ______Date: ______

Directions: Read the following paragraph and answer the questions below.

Dwyane Wade

Occupation: Basketball Player

Born: 17 January 1982

Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois

Best known as: Miami Heat guard called "Flash" and "D-Wade"

Name at birth: Dwyane Tyrone Wade, Jr.

After only three years in the NBA, guard Dwyane Wade led the Miami Heat to the 2006 championship and was drawing comparisons to basketball legend Michael Jordan. Wade grew up around Chicago, Illinois and was a stand-out player at Richards High School in Oak Lawn. Recruited by Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was a star college player for two seasons before becoming the fifth overall pick in the 2003 NBA draft. Wade, considered an undersized guard at 6' 4", averaged 35 minutes and 16.2 points per game in his first season with the Heat. While playing with Miami center Shaquille O'Neal, Wade emerged as one of the league's best players, a fearless competitor whose speed and athleticism offset what critics call an unreliable mid-range shot. He has been an All-Star twice, played for the U.S. team in the 2004 Olympics and was named the Most Valuable Player of the 2006 Finals. He had knee and shoulder surgery in 2007, but returned for the new season. Miami had a bad season in 2007-08, O'Neal was traded to the Phoenix suns and Wade's knee was enough of a problem he didn't finish the season after March. Despite the rocky season, Wade averaged almost 25 points per game (51 games).

Extra credit: Wade, called "Flash" or "D-Wade," endorses Converse shoes... He is off-court pals with fellow competitors LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, both of whom joined the NBA the same year Wade did... His first name is pronounced "Dwayne."

Name: ______Date: ______

Barack Obama

Occupation: U.S. President
Born: Aug. 4, 1961
Birthplace: Honolulu, Hawaii

Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Nov. 4, 2008, prevailing over Arizona Senator John McCain. He took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, and became the first black U.S. president.

He had previously edged out Senator Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in a long and often bitter primary season. Obama cast Clinton as the establishment candidate and himself as the candidate of change. The move worked, and after his election Obama sought to mend fences by making Clinton his Secretary of State.

Obama took office in the midst of a severe recession for the U.S. economy. His first major piece of legislative was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion spending bill, or "stimulus package," designed to create jobs and reignite the economy.

He also acted quickly to bring about the change from the policies of the Bush administration that he had promised during the campaign. Two days after his inauguration he signed an executive order to close the controversial detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba within the year. Soon to follow were executive orders that reversed Bush's policies on stem cell research and interrogation techniques for enemy detainees.

Wins the Nobel Peace Prize

Nine months into his presidency, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee cited him for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" and his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons." The award came as somewhat as a shock to the White House and beyond, as few of Obama's proposed international policy changes have yet to be realized. Indeed, North Korea continues to taunt the world with missile tests and nuclear bravado, Iran only recently agreed to engage in talks about its nuclear program, and his Afghanistan policy is a work in progress. However, Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said, "We would hope this [the Peace Prize] will enhance what he is trying to do."

Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 to an American mother and a Kenyan father. When he was two, his parents, who had met as students at the University of Hawaii, divorced. Obama's Harvard-educated father then returned to Kenya, where he worked in the economics ministry. Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather for part of his childhood, returning to Hawaii to finish high school. He graduated from Columbia University, where he majored in political science and specialized in international relations. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduated magna cum laude, and served as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he worked as a community organizer and a civil rights lawyer in Chicago. He also taught at the University of Chicago Law School as a senior lecturer specializing in constitutional law. Obama represented the South Side of Chicago in the Illinois State Senate from 1996–2004 as a Democrat. In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, winning with 70% of the vote against the conservative black Republican, Alan Keyes. Obama became the only African-American serving in the U.S. Senate (and the fifth in U.S. history). Obama's idealism, commitment to civil rights, and telegenic good looks generated enormous media attention for his Senate campaign. The eloquence of his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Nation Convention in Boston, Mass., confirmed his status as one of the Democratic party's freshest and most inspirational new leaders.

A Best-Selling Author

Obama published an autobiography, Dreams From My Father, in 1995; it became a best-seller during his 2004 Senate campaign. His next autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, became a bestseller after its Oct. 2006 publication, and won both the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Awards and the NAACP Image Awards in 2007. He is married to Michelle Obama, a Chicago native who also graduated from Harvard Law School. They have two daughters: Malia Ann and Sasha.

Douglass, Frederick

Douglass, Frederick (dŭg'lus) [key], c.1817–1895, American abolitionist, b. near Easton, Md. The son of a black slave, Harriet Bailey, and an unknown white father, he took the name of Douglass (from Scott's hero in The Lady of the Lake) after his second, and successful, attempt to escape from slavery in 1838. At New Bedford, Mass., he found work as a day laborer. An extemporaneous speech before a meeting at Nantucket of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841 was so effective that he was made one of its agents. Douglass, who had learned to read and write while in the service of a kind mistress in Baltimore, published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845. Fearing capture as a fugitive slave, he spent several years in England and Ireland and returned in 1847, after English friends had purchased his freedom. At Rochester, N.Y., he established the North Star and edited it for 17 years in the abolitionist cause. Unlike William L. Garrison, he favored the use of political methods and thus became a follower of James G. Birney. In the Civil War he helped organize two regiments of Massachusetts African Americans and urged other blacks to join the Union ranks. During Reconstruction he continued to urge civil rights for African Americans. He was secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission (1871), marshal of the District of Columbia (1877–81), recorder of deeds for the same district (1881–86), and minister to Haiti (1889–91). Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1962) is a revised edition of his autobiography, which has also been published as My Bondage and My Freedom.

Charles Richard Drew

Charles Richard Drew was born on June 3, 1904 in Washington, D.C. He was an African American physician who developed ways to process and store blood plasma in blood banks. He directed the blood plasma programs of the United States and Great Britain in World War II, but resigned after a ruling that the blood of African Americans would be segregated. He died in 1950

Profile

(born June 3, 1904, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died April 1, 1950, near Burlington, N.C.) African American physician and surgeon who was an authority on the preservation of human blood for transfusion.

Drew was educated at Amherst College (graduated 1926), McGill University, Montreal (1933), and Columbia University (1940). While earning his doctorate at Columbia in the late 1930s, he conducted research into the properties and preservation of blood plasma. He soon developed efficient ways to process and store large quantities of blood plasma in “blood banks.” As the leading authority in the field, he organized and directed the blood-plasma programs of the United States and Great Britain in the early years of World War II, while also agitating the authorities to stop excluding the blood of African Americans from plasma-supply networks.

Drew resigned his official posts in 1942 after the armed forces ruled that the blood of African Americans would be accepted but would have to be stored separately from that of whites. He then became a surgeon and professor of medicine at Freedmen's Hospital, Washington, D.C., and Howard University (1942–50). He was fatally injured in an automobile accident in 1950.