Plan Right Law

12/13/2024

Check out my blog post https://wix.to/EWoprJN

Current Status of the Corporate Transparency Act Post-5th Circuit DecisionThe landscape of corporate transparency in the United States has seen significant upheaval following a recent judicial decision. On December 3, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a nationwid...

12/13/2024

Corporate Transparency Act update

07/16/2024

https://www.teamdgw.com/
Just finished our new website for Team DGW of York Howell. Please take a look and let me know if you have any suggestions as to content you'd like to see or changes you'd make. Thank you, FB friends!

Welcome to the York Howell - Team DGW website! David G. Wood and his legal team provide you some resources and helpful information about asset protection, estate planning, business structuring, tax advising, Medicaid pre-planning, and more. Get to know us and our approach to serving you. Thanks for....

07/09/2024

https://www.teamdgw.com/post/estate-planning-for-100

Time for Estate Planning Jeopardy!

04/30/2024

This month David Wood and the Plan Right Law team joined the law firm of York Howell

With over 25 years of experience as an attorney and business owner, David is a trusted advisor for: business owners seeking to optimize their estate, business, and tax structure; retired folks needing to protect their life’s savings and preserve their family legacy; and young families needing to c...

03/12/2024

Join us for a wonderful, comprehensive Estate Planning event this Thursday!

When: March 14, 6:30-7:30pm
Where: Elevated Retirement Office (11925 S 700 E, Draper, UT 84020)

Make sure to register ahead of time. This event will fill up. Visit https://elevatemyretirement.com or call us at (801) 432-7028.

02/26/2024

Our last spotlight for the year is Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to serve in Congress.

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, New York to immigrant parents who came to the United States from Barbados. Chisholm graduated from Brooklyn College and the Teachers College at Columbia University. In 1968, she became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress and represented New York's 12th congressional district for seven terms from 1969 to 1983.

Early on in her Congressional term, Chisholm was first assigned to the House Agriculture Committee. She soon found more relevant committee assignments that would better serve her constituents, where she worked to expand the food stamp program and help to create the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Legislation she introduced also focused on gender and racial equality, and ending the Vietnam War. In 1971, she became a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).

In the 1972 United States presidential election, she became the first Black candidate to seek a major party's nomination for President of the United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. After the unsuccessful bid for President, Chisholm continued serving in the House of Representatives. In 1977, she was elected as Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus. Chisholm retired from Congress in 1983, where she was succeeded by Major Owens. In 2015, Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

02/23/2024

Today's spotlight is Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (P.B.S. Pinchback), the first African-American governor.

P.B.S. PINCHBACK was born near Macon, Georgia on May 10, 1837. His father William, was a wealthy white planter, and his mother Elize, was his father’s former slave. Pinchback’s early education was attained in the public schools of Cincinnati, Ohio. He later studied law at Straight University in Louisiana, and in 1886, was admitted to the bar.

During the Civil War, he served as captain of Company A, in the 2nd Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards. Pinchback entered politics in 1867, serving as a delegate to the Louisiana Reconstruction Convention.

Pinchback also served as a member of the Louisiana State Senate from 1868 to 1871. Upon the death of Lieutenant Governor Oscar Dunn in 1871, Pinchback, who was president of the senate at the time, assumed the duties of the lieutenant governor’s office. He served in this capacity until 1872. Due to impeachment charges, Governor Henry C. Warmoth was removed from office on December 8, 1872, and Pinchback, who was lieutenant governor, assumed the office of the governorship. He served for thirty-six days, becoming the first African-American to serve any U.S. state as governor. During his short tenure, several appointments were granted, and ten legislative bills were sanctioned.

After leaving the governor’s office on January 13, 1873, Pinchback was elected to Congress, but was denied a seat. In 1879, he served as a delegate to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention. Four years later, he was appointed surveyor of customs for the port of New Orleans. He also was involved in the founding of Southern University, where he served for several years on the board of trustees. In his latter years, he moved to Washington, D.C. and practiced law.

02/20/2024

Today's spotlight is Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American to publish a book of poems.

Born around 1753 in Gambia, Africa, Wheatley was captured by enslavers and brought to America in 1761. Upon arrival, she was sold to the Wheatley family in Boston, Massachusetts. Her first name Phillis was derived from the ship that brought her to America, “the Phillis.”

The Wheatley family educated her and within sixteen months of her arrival in America she could read the Bible, Greek and Latin classics, and British literature. She also studied astronomy and geography. In her early teenage years, Wheatley began to write poetry, publishing her first poem in 1767. Publication of “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine George Whitefield” in 1770 brought her great notoriety. In 1773, with financial support from the English Countess of Huntingdon, Wheatley traveled to London with the Wheatley's son to publish her first collection of poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—the first book written by an enslaved Black woman in America. It included a forward, signed by John Hancock and other Boston notables—as well as a portrait of Wheatley—all designed to prove that the work was indeed written by a Black woman. She was emancipated shortly thereafter.

Wheatley’s poems reflected several influences on her life, among them the well-known poets she studied, such as Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray. Pride in her African heritage was also evident. Her writing style embraced the elegy, likely from her African roots, where it was the role of girls to sing and perform funeral dirges. Religion was also a key influence, and it led Protestants in America and England to enjoy her work. Enslavers and abolitionists both read her work; the former to convince the enslaved population to convert, the latter as proof of the intellectual abilities of people of color.

02/16/2024

Our spotlight for today is Mary Jane Patterson, the first African-American woman to graduate from college.

Educator Mary Jane Patterson is considered to be the first African American woman to receive a B.A. when she graduated from Oberlin College in 1862.

Although Patterson’s early years are unclear, it is believed that she was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1840. As a young girl, she arrived in Oberlin, Ohio with her family during the mid-1850s. In 1857 she completed a year of preparatory coursework at Oberlin College. Rather than transitioning into Oberlin’s two-year program for women, she enrolled in the school’s “gentlemen’s course,” a four-year program of classical studies that led to a Bachelor of Arts with high honors in 1862.

Patterson spent the next year as a teacher in the southern Ohio town of Chillicothe. At the age of 22 she left Ohio for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she taught at the Institute for Colored Youth for the next five years. In 1869 Patterson moved to Washington, D.C. to teach at the newly founded Preparatory High School for Colored Youth which was the first U.S. public high school for African Americans and the first public high school in Washington, D.C.

Two years later in 1871 Patterson became principal of the school, serving for one year before being appointed assistant principal when Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard University in Massachusetts, came on as principal. Greener left after one year, and Patterson resumed her position as principal, staying there until her resignation in 1884. During her tenure the school thrived and became well known as a prestigious institution for secondary education.

02/12/2024

Today's spotlight is Richard T. Greener, Harvard's first black graduate.

Born in Philadelphia in 1844, Richard T. Greener moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his parents at age nine. He dropped out of school at age 11 to help support the family, after his father went to seek fortune in the California Gold Rush and never returned.

Through his various jobs, the pre-teen Greener met and befriended Harvard-connected Boston elites like Judge Thomas Russell, who made his personal library available to Greener. Several years later, Greener’s employer, a jeweler named Augustus Batchelder, funded his education at Ohio’s Oberlin Academy and later the prestigious Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, all to prepare him for admission to Harvard. Batchelder “was itching to see the educational experiment of a black student succeeding at Andover carried on to Harvard.” Harvard President Thomas Hill admitted the 21-year-old Greener to the university in 1865.

Greener’s first year was difficult. He struggled in math and science and, as the only Black student at Harvard, he was lonely and isolated. He lived in College House, viewed at the time as the house for the “poor and struggling.” Greener recalled, in a speech delivered at the Harvard Club of New York in 1881, that white students spread rumors about him, including “that I had escaped from slavery with innumerable difficulties; that I came direct from the cotton field to college; that I was a scout in the Union army; the son of a Rebel general, etc.” Yet Greener also had early successes: A gifted orator, he won second place in the Lee Prize for excellence reading aloud.

Greener withdrew after his first term to pursue intensive math tutoring before returning to Harvard the following year. He performed well academically and was involved in extracurricular activities. He wrote for the literary magazine the Harvard Advocate and was a member of both the Pi Eta Society and the Thayer Club. He also won the Bowdoin Prize for a thesis on Irish land tenure. Greener graduated in 1870 with honors.