Little Richard shatter racial divisions in the music industry. Little Richard was born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia. He was the third of twelve children of Leva Mae (née Stewart) and Charles "Bud" Penniman. His father was a church deacon who sold bootlegged moonshine on the side and owned a nightclub, the Tip In Inn. His mother was a member of Macon's New Hope Baptist Church. Initially, Little Richard's first name was supposed to have been "Ricardo" but an error resulted in "Richard" instead. The Penniman children were raised in a neighborhood of Macon called Pleasant Hill.
Nick Penniman and served as the Washington director of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, where he worked closely with broadcaster Bill Moyers. Moyers and Penniman first met in 1999, when Penniman was running a national grassroots organization called the Alliance for Democracy, which focused primarily on campaign finance reform and the effects of economic globalization. From 2005-2006, Penniman was the publisher of "The Washington Monthly" magazine. Before that he was the executive editor of a progressive news and opinion website called "TomPaine.com" perhaps best known for the "op ads" it regularly ran on the opinion page of the New York