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Blackout 2
November 2007
Don't Spend ANY money
— Show a sign of solidarity
Many people marched in Jena, LA,
last month in support of the 6 young men unjustly
charged with attempted murder for a school yard fight.
There are many situations all over the nation that
scream of injustice and unfair treatment of people in
this country.
There is the woman in West Virginia
who was raped and tortured for days with barely any
national coverage. They called her the N word but as of
this writing, they still had not confirmed they are
treating this as a hate crime. We all know the young
groom in NYC who was murdered by the NYPD on the eve of
his wedding. There is the teenage girl in Tex as who was
sentenced to jail time for an altercation with a school
official.
How about the teenage girl who was
sprayed with mace for missing curfew? You can see her in
the video restrained by a police officer twice her size.
She was in handcuffs when she was sprayed. Maybe you
heard of the California girl who had her arm broken by a
school security official when she refused to pick up a
piece of cake from the floor. It was filmed by a school
mate and is all over You Tube.
You may have heard
of the young man in Georgia who was sentenced to 10
years in prison for having consensual sex with a young
girl. He was 17, she was 15. There was also the young
brother in Florida who died in the custody of the state
when he was admitted to their boot camp. They said he
had diabetes but they couldn't explain his battered
body. All of these stories happened within the last year
or two.
Those are just a few instances where people in this
country have been treated unfairly, while 4 young men in
Raleigh, NC sue the state for 10 million dollars each
because they were "falsely" accused of rape. There are
people who spend YEARS in prison and are exonerated that
don't get nearly that much coin. By the way, who else is
tired of the Princess Diana wrongful death inquiry? I
mean, come on, it's very sad how she died but does her
death need to be the top news story 10 years and 2
months after her death?
On Friday, November 2, 2007, Warren Ballentine, Reverend
Al Sharpton and other civil rights leaders are calling
for a national boycott. Black people alone spend 2
billion dollars a day in the United States and we are
only approximately 12% of the population—2 billion
dollars a day, lining the pockets of companies that have
shown no interest in our interests. We ARE living in the
new civil rights movement.
We cannot allow the
march in Jena to be only an event. It MUST be a
movement. In the 1950s, the bus boycott was only
supposed to be for a few days or weeks. It ended up
being over a year.
The goal was for
fair treatment and bus integration. Our parents and
grandparents sacrificed and showed that with faith and
strength, they could show corporate America the power of
the community and demanded fair treatment. As we know,
those buses were integrated. This is not about color.
This is about class. The middle class and poor people in
this country are not treated as the Declaration of
Independence says we should be treated. It states that
"all men are created equal". Clearly the governing class
of the United States disagrees with their document.
Join us on Friday,
November 2, 2007 and don't spend ANY money. If you have
to shop, do it the day before or the day after. If you
need gas, get it the day before or the day after. We
have to join together as a community. You may be
thinking, it's only one day, what difference will it
make? I had the same thought at first, but just think
about it. If we all save our money that day, it WILL
make a difference. That day may become a weekend. That
weekend may become a week and that week a month. As we
showed in the 1950s, we can make a difference if we do
this together.
If you can pass the many dumb jokes and forwards we all
get, you most certainly can pass this important email to
all your friends and family.
Show a sign of solidarity.
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Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''—NYTimes
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
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1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
posted 18 October 2007
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