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CDs of Charlie Parker
The Essential Charlie Parker /
Charlie Parker: A Studio Chronicle 1940-1948 /
Charlie Parker with Strings /
Diz 'N Bird at Carnegie Hall /
The Best of Charlie Parker /
Jazz at Massey Hall /
Boss Bird
South of the Border /
Confirmation /
Ornithology /
YardBird Suite
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"The
New Journalism began on the Lower
East Side in the mid-sixties when poets
and fiction writers became reporters for
The East Village Other, mother of
the Underground Press.
David Henderson was one of the
pioneers of the style. He combines his
gifts as a poet and a reporter in 'Scuse
Me While I Kiss the Sky, and the
result is a rewarding and unique reading
experience. It is part thriller and part
lament for some tragic lives who
enlivened an exciting decade."—
Ishmael Reed
The
poet and writer
David
Henderson
was a founding member of the Umbra
Poets, an influential collective of
poets and writers who were central to
the Black Arts Movement. His books
include
De Mayor of Harlem and
Neo-California. He has been
widely published in anthologies and
magazines, including The Def Jam
Poetry Reader, The Paris Review,
and Essence. He has read from his
poetry for the permanent archives of the
Library of Congress. Born in Harlem and
raised in Harlem and the Bronx,
Henderson now lives in downtown New York
City. |
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Track List
1. Congo Square (9:01)
2. My Story, My Song (20:50)
3. Danny Banjo (4:32)
4. Miles Davis (10:26)
5. Hard News For Hip Harry (5:03)
6. Unfinished Blues (4:13)
7. Rainbows Come After The Rain
(2:21)/Negroidal Noise (15:53)
8. Intro (3:59)
9. The Whole History (3:14)
10. Negroidal Noise (5:39)
11. Waving At Ra (1:40)
12. Landing (1:21)
13. Good Luck (:04) |
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Nathan Hare—Great post, Rudy, but
you left out 1961 to 1966, my maiden
years, when some of us were thinking
black. Baraka was there all the way— as
Leroi Jones until 1967—and just about
everybody else. My first article was
"The Black Anglo Saxons" [The Negro
Digest, May 1962] something like
March of 1962. Negro Digest was a
godsend. Nothing like it now. Of course
none of the old publications, white or
black—even when they haven't folded—is
what it used to be. Of course people
have only to google the other years,
from 1961 to its switch to Black World
circa 1970. Black World in turn
went on to fold, as you know, switching
to First World. Editor-Founder
Hoyt Fuller soon died of a heart attack
at 53. A great loss. Hoyt was an
important person who should not be
forgotten. Thanks for posting this
notice of his stellar publication. P.S.
Negro Digest could even be found
on a few white drugstore racks, but it
was black for those days. Of course the
Black Arts Movement, by that name,
escalated art and blackness as such and
took it out of the magazine into places
like Black Dialogue after Black
Power came in 1966. |
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The Black Anglo Saxons
By Nathan Hare
Black Anglo Saxons are distinguished
chiefly by their endeavors to dis-identify
with the black race out of a thwarted
wish to be identified as white. This
underground classic is a penetrating
often humorous analysis of a particular
portion of the black middle class that
disidentifies with the black race in
search of psychological and social
distance from it, in preference for
identifying with the white Anglo Saxons.
Black Anglo Saxons are persons who have
become white minds in black bodies go to
sleep at night and dream that they will
wake up white, only to awake to the
indelible fact that they will never get
out of the black race alive. (Note that
some of them today are “afro-centric,”
called “Nouveau Blacks” in the late
1960s as chronicled by The Black Anglo
Saxons, though Nouveau Blacks may be
distinguished from “bourgies” and
“oreos” and “coconuts” per se). |
 |
The late
sociologist, Oliver Cox, placed The Black Anglo
Saxons in “the Black Bourgeoisie School” with E.
Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie (first
published in France as Borgeoisie Noir) and Carter
G. Woodson’s self-published black classic, The
Miseducation of the Negro. An underground classic,
The Black Anglo Saxons was first published in 1965,
by New York’s Marzani and Munsell (which the book
outlasted); a second edition, in 1970, was
distributed through Collier-Macmillan by Thunder and
Lighting Press, which the book also outlasted; the
Third World Press Edition has been in print since
1991. The Black Anglo Saxons may also be ordered
from Black Think Tank Books. BlackThinkTank
 |
Dr. Nathan Hare—the eminent sociologist
and psychotherapist—was born on April 9,
1933 in Slick, Oklahoma. He received an
A.B. degree in
sociology from Langston
University, Langston, Oklahoma; and an
M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the
University of Chicago. He also obtained
a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the
California School Of Professional
Psychology located in Berkeley,
California in
1975.
Hare planned on becoming a professional
boxer until one of his high school
teachers suggested he attend college. In
college, he began taking sociology
classes and switched his major from
English to sociology. He became an
instructor and assistant professor in
sociology at Howard University in
Washington, D.C. in 1961. Later in
September 1966, he wrote a letter to the
editor of the The Hilltop, Howard
University's student newspaper, that was
viewed as being unfavorable to the
college administration. Hare spoke
against then Howard University president
James Nabrit's plan to turn the
university's student body sixty percent
white by 1970. Hare was then fired in
1967. |
In 1968, Hare became the coordinator of the nation's
first Black Studies Program at San Francisco State
College. The following semester, the college decided
to make major cutbacks in the Black Studies Program,
cutting its courses from 16 to 9. As a result, Hare
and the Black Student Union went on strike for five
months. He was fired in 1969 after the strike was
called off. Nonetheless, the program's courses were
expanded and a Black Studies Department was
established. Needing a way to express his thoughts
and the ideas of others, he became the founding
publisher of The Black Scholar: A Journal of
Black Studies and Research from 1969 to 1975.
Expanding on his study of black relationships he has
worked as a clinical psychologist in community
health programs, hospitals and in private practice
since 1975. Along with his wife, Dr. Julia Hare, he
established The Black Think Tank in
1979, which focuses on issues affecting the
black family.
Source:
TheHistoryMakers
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Lance
Jeffers (1919–1985), poet, short fiction
writer, and novelist. Lance Jeffers might
accurately be described as a black
nationalist without a movement. While he
spanned the decades identified with the
Black Aesthetic and writers of the
1960s, he was not included in the circles of
those most associated with those militant
times (though Broadside Press, which
published many writers of the 1960s, did
publish a couple of his volumes). Yet
Jeffers's political stances as a poet are
culturally nationalistic and informed by a
consistent appreciation of the beauty and
possibilities in black people. Though a few
critics have paid attention to his work, he
is among many less well-known African
American writers whose works have not been
incorporated into the mainstream of critical
commentary on African American or American
literature. In addition to singly published
volumes, however, his works have appeared in
anthologies such as
The Best Short Stories of 1948,
Burning Spear,
A Galaxy of Black Writing,
New Black Voices, and
Black Fire, as well as in journals
such as
Phylon,
Quarto, and the
Tamarack Review. |
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Lance Jeffers was born in
Fremont, Nebraska, on 28 November 1919 to Henry
Nelson and Dorothy May Flippin; he was their only
child. His grandfather, Dr. George Albert Flippin,
raised him in Stromburg, Nebraska, from the time
Lance was one year old; it was this relative who
inspired Grandsire, one of Jeffers's volumes
of poetry. Lance lived in
Nebraska until his grandfather died in 1929.
These years turned out to be the most formative of
his career, and his grandfather proved to be perhaps
the strongest influence on his life, but Lance was
in essence separated from large numbers of black
people. Reclaiming ties to African heritage and
African peoples would occupy Jeffers for the rest of
his life. At the age of ten, Lance moved to San
Francisco to join his mother and stepfather, Forrest
Jeffers, who was a janitor in a building whose
tenants were white. Thus Jeffers did not immediately
encounter many more black people than he had living
with his grandfather and his white wife in Nebraska.
Forrest Jeffers encouraged Lance to seek out other
blacks, and he taught Jeffers the value of endurance
under racially difficult circumstances. . . . —Answers
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When I Know the Power of My Black Hands
By Lance Jeffers
I do not know the power of my hand, I do not
know the power of my black hand.
I sit slumped in the conviction that I am
powerless,
tolerate ceilings that make me bend.
My godly mind stoops, my ambition is
crippled;
I do not know the power of my hand.
I see my children stunted,
my young men slaughtered,
I do not know the mighty power of my hand.
I see the power over my life and death in
another man's hands, and sometimes I shake
my woolly head and wonder:
Lord have mercy. What would it be like . . .
to be free?
But when I know the mighty power of my black
hand
I will snatch my freedom from the tyrant's
mouth, know the first taste of freedom on my
eager tongue, sing the miracle of freedom
with all the force
of my lungs,
christen my black land with exuberant
creation, stand independent in the hall of
nations, root submission and dependence from
the soil of my soul and pitch the monument
of slavery from my back when I know the
mighty power of my hand! |
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Capitalism and Slavery
By
Eric Williams
Slavery
helped finance the Industrial Revolution in
England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders,
and merchants connected with the slave trade
accumulated vast fortunes that established
banks and heavy industry in Europe and
expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.
Eric
Williams advanced these powerful ideas in
Capitalism and Slavery, published in
1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound
critique became the foundation for studies
of imperialism and economic development.
Binding an economic view of history with
strong moral argument, Williams's study of
the role of slavery in financing the
Industrial Revolution refuted traditional
ideas of economic and moral progress and
firmly established the centrality of the
African slave trade in European economic
development. He also showed that mature
industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy
the slave system. |
 |
Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism
and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a
historicist vision that set the tone for future studies.
In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting
impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes
the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first
appeared.
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Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern
Caribbean
By
Colin A. Palmer
Born in
Trinidad, Eric Williams (1911-81) founded
the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago's first
modern political party in 1956, led the
country to independence from the British
culminating in 1962, and became the nation's
first prime minister. Before entering
politics, he was a professor at Howard
University and wrote several books,
including the classic
Capitalism and Slavery.
In the first scholarly biography of
Williams, Colin Palmer provides insights
into Williams's personality that illuminate
his life as a scholar and politician and his
tremendous influence on the historiography
and politics of the Caribbean.
Palmer focuses
primarily on the fourteen-year period of
struggles for independence in the Anglophone
Caribbean. |
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Africa
and Afro-American Identity
Problems and
Possibilities
By
Everett E. Goodwin
The 10 Biggest Myths About Black
History The Black
Experience in America is Unique
Folk
Life in Black and White
Guarding the Flame of Life
/
Strange Fruit Lynching Report
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The State of African Education
(April 200)
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own
History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on
Africans writing and accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A
teacher, psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
/
Part
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
/
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
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Books, Essays, Poems
Books
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Anthologies
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Sam
Greenlee—novelist, poet, screenwriter,
journalist, teacher and talk show host—was born 13 July 1930 in Chicago.
He attended Chicago public schools. At age fifteen, Greenlee
participated in his first sit-in and walked his first picked line. His
social activism continues. In 1952, Greenlee received his B.S. in
political science from the University of Wisconsin and the following
year attended law school. He transferred to the University of Chicago to
study international relations from 1954 to 1957. In 1957, he began a
seven-year career with the U.S. Information Agency as a foreign services
officer, serving in Iraq, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Greece, and in 1958
he was awarded the Meritorious Service Award for bravery during the
Baghdad revolution.
Greenlee's novel
The Spook Who Sat By the Door, was published in 1968.
Prize-winning its fictionalization of an urban-based war for African
American liberation became an underground favorite. Greenlee co-wrote a
screenplay adaptation of the novel, and in 1973
The Spook Who Sat by
the Door was released on film. The film was an overnight success
when it was released but was unexpectedly taken out of distribution.
Greenlee has written numerous novels, stage plays, screenplays and
poems. He moved back to Chicago after several years of voluntary exile
in Spain and West Africa and is hosted a radio talk show program. He is
presently working on his autobiography.
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William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
Directed by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler
The metamorphosis of
Kunstler, who died in 1995, from armchair liberal to middle-aged
hippie revolutionary reflected the volatile political climate of
the era. A general-practice lawyer who lived in Westchester
County, he became involved in the civil rights movement through
a local housing lawsuit in 1960; the following year he flew to
Mississippi at the behest of Rowland Watts, the legal director
of the
American Civil Liberties Union, to support the Freedom
Riders.
Later he defended the
Catonsville Nine—Roman Catholic activists, including Daniel and
Philip Berrigan —who burned draft files to protest the Vietnam
War. He achieved national notoriety as the lead counsel in the
theatrical trial of the Chicago Seven, who were accused of
conspiracy and inciting to riot during the 1968
Democratic National Convention. |
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It was the events surrounding that trial that
radicalized Kunstler, the film says. He was outraged by the treatment of
the Black Panther activist Bobby Seale, the eighth defendant, whose
trial was severed during the proceedings and who was bound and gagged in
the courtroom after hurling invective at Judge Julius Hoffman.
NYTimes
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Poet,
Activist,
Sonia
Sanchez
Reading
Toni
Cade
Bambara
Civil Rights Movement Veterans
Website—This website is of, by, and for
Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement during the years 1951-1968. It is
where we tell it like it was, the way we lived it. The mass media called it
the "Civil Rights Movement," but many of us who were involved in it prefer
the term "Freedom Movement" because it was about so much more than just
civil rights. Today, from what you see in the mass media and read in
textbooks and websites, you would think that the Freedom Movement only
existed in a few states of the deep South, — but that is not so. The Freedom
Movement lived and fought in every state and every city of America, North,
South, East, and West. There were some differences between the Southern and
Northern wings of the Movement, but those differences were minor compared to
the Movement's essence. North or South, it was the same movement everywhere.
http://www.crmvet.org/about1.htm
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Essays, Reports, Reviews,
Interviews, Excerpts
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The Assassination of Fred
Hampton
How the FBI and the Chicago
Police Murdered a Black Panther
By Jeffrey Haas
It’s around
7:00 A.M. on December 4, 1969,
and attorney Jeff Haas is in a
police lockup in Chicago,
interviewing Fred Hampton’s
fiancée. She is describing how
the police pulled her from the
room as Fred lay unconscious on
their bed. She heard one officer
say, “He’s still alive.” She
then heard two shots. A second
officer said, “He’s good and
dead now.” She looks at Jeff and
asks, “What can you do?”
The Assassination of Fred
Hampton is Haas’s personal
account of how he and People’s
Law Office partner Flint Taylor
pursued Hampton’s assassins,
ultimately prevailing over
unlimited government resources
and FBI conspiracy. Not only a
story of justice delivered, the
book puts Hampton in a new light
as a dynamic community leader
and an inspiration in the fight
against injustice. /
Also
Toward Freedom |
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So
we say—we always say in the
Black Panther Party that they
can do anything they want to to
us. We might not be back. I
might be in jail. I might be
anywhere. But when I leave,
you’ll remember I said, with the
last words on my lips, that I am
a revolutionary. And you’re
going to have to keep on saying
that. You’re going to have to
say that I am a proletariat, I
am the people. A lot of people
don’t understand the Black
Panthers Party’s relationship
with white mother country
radicals. A lot of people don’t
even understand the words that
Eldridge uses a lot. But what
we’re saying is that there are
white people in the mother
country that are for the same
types of things that we are for
stimulating revolution in the
mother country. And we say that
we will work with anybody and
form a coalition with anybody
that has revolution on their
mind. We’re not a racist
organization, because we
understand that racism is an
excuse used for capitalism, and
we know that racism is just—it’s
a byproduct of capitalism.
Everything would be alright if
everything was put back in the
hands of the people, and we’re
going to have to put it back in
the hands of the people.
Fred Hampton |
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Poems
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Carolyn Rodgers
met one of her mentors,
Hoyt Fuller, while working as a
social worker at the YMCA (1963-1966).
Rodgers exhibits clarity of expression
and a respect for well-crafted language
in her work,
how I got ovah: New and Selected Poems
(1975). Her work,
The Heart as Ever Green
(1978), incorporates themes of human
dignity, feminism, love, black
consciousness, and Christianity. Rodgers
has also published short stories such as
"Blackbird in a Cage" (1967), "A
Statistic, Trying to Make It Home"
(1969), and "One Time" (1975).
In her short stories, as in her poetry,
the dominating theme is survival, though
she interweaves the idea of adaptability
and conveys the concomitant message of
life's ever-changing avenues for black
people whom she sees as her special
audience. |
During her
career she [Carolyn
Rodgers]
has taught at Columbia College (1968-1969);
University of Washington (1970); Malcolm X Community
College (1972); Albany State College (1972); and
Indiana University (1973). She has also been a book
critic for the Chicago Daily News and a
columnist for the Milwaukee Courier. In 1967,
along with Haki R. Madhubuti, Johari Amini, and
Roschell Rich, Rodgers helped found Third World
Press, an outlet for African-American literature.
Rodgers is also a member of the Organization of
Black American Culture, a group that promotes a
city-wide impact on cultural activity in the arts.
African American Registry
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Artists On The
Cutting Edge: Jayne Cortez
New York poet
Jayne Cortez reads a selection of
her award-winning work, which
vividly reflects the energy,
passions, rhythms and tensions of
modern urban life from an
African-American feminist
perspective. Series: "Artists on the
Cutting Edge" [5/1997]
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Poetry & Music
By Jayne Cortez
A visionary and
socially conscious poetess with
feminist leanings, Cortez is as wise
a person as is out there. She was
married to Ornette Coleman.—Michael G. Nastos, All Music Guide
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Taking the Blues Back Home
Track Listings
-
Taking the Blues
Back Home
-
Bumblebee, You Saw
Big Mama
-
Mojo 96
-
Cultural Operations
-
Guitars I Used to
Know
-
Talk to Me
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7. I Have Been Searching
8. Global
Inequalities
9. Blues Bop for
Diz
10. You Can Be
11. Endangered
Species List Blues
12. Nobody
Knows a Thing |
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On the Imperial
Highway
New
and Selected Poems
By Jayne Cortez
Cortez has been
and continues to be an explorer,
probing the valleys and chasms of
human existence. No ravine is too
perilous, no abyss too threatening
for Jayne Cortez."--Maya Angelou "If
you haven't read Jayne Cortez,
you're missing some of the best that
life has to offer. A compellingly
original voice of fire and freedom.—Franklyn
Rosemont
Jayne Cortez's
poems are filled with images that
most of us are afraid to see.—Walter
Mosley |
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Jazz Fan Looks Back
By Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez is
the author of eleven books of poetry
and performer of her poems with
music on nine recordings. Her voice
is celebrated for its political,
surrealistic, dynamic innovations in
lyricism, and visceral sound. Cortez
has presented her work and ideas at
universities, museums, and festivals
around the world. Her poems have
been translated into many languages
and widely published in anthologies,
journals, and magazines. She is a
recipient of several awards
including: Arts International, the
National Endowment for the Arts, the
International African Festival
Award. |
The
Langston Hughes Medal, The American Book Award,
and the Thelma McAndless Distinguished
Professorship Award. Her most recent books are
THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK (Bola Press) and
Jazz Fan Looks Back(Hanging Loose
Press). Her latest CDs with the Firespitter Band
are
Find Your Own Voice Poetry and Music 1982-2003,
Borders of Disorderly Time (Bola
Press),
Taking the Blues Back Home, produced by
Harmolodic and by Verve Records. Cortez is
organizer of the international symposium "Slave
Routes: Resistance, Abolition & Creative
Progress" (NYU) and director of the film Yari
Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting
Globalization. She is co-founder and president
of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa,
Inc., and can be seen on screen in the films
Women In Jazz and Poetry In Motion.—Publisher,
Hanging Loose Press.
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Dr. Haki
Madhubuti, Founder & President
Third World Press
7822 South Dobson Avenue
Chicago, IL 60619
Dear Haki:
I so
vividly recall meeting you, albeit briefly,
at
John O. Killens’ 1967 Black Writers’
Conference at Fisk University. I was part of
a cadre of students, from the English
Department, who assisted with various tasks
related to the conference. Watching you and
Amiri Baraka
(Leroi Jones) call out
Ms. Brooks was a jarring moment and at
that time I couldn’t quite figure out what
hair had to do with it. Within months of
that conference, I came to learn that hair
had everything to do with it, our history
and who we are.
The
roots that you,
Johari Amini (Jewel C. Latimore) and
Carolyn Rodgers planted have grown
mightily like Banyan trees, under whose
branches, multiple generations have learned
about as well as taught black life, history
and culture. I am tickled black that you
have remained the “leading literary
institution of record,” publishing the bold
and brilliant voices of black poets,
philosophers and academics across the
country and around the world. I’m also
thrilled that in 1996 Third World Press
opted to reprint the 1970 Drum & Spear
classic Children of Africa by
Courtland Cox, Jennifer K. Lawson and me,
and illustrated by Jennifer K. Lawson.
As part
of the staff at Drum and Spear Bookstore and
Press, it was thrilling to sell and host
readings by you and your authors, while
playing an integral role in bringing the
works of
Gwendolyn Brooks,
Carolyn Rodgers, Willie Kgositsile, and
scores of other authors to the thousands of
people for whom Drum and Spear was a
destination.
|
My daughter, grandchildren and
students all have multiple
volumes of works published by
TWP in their libraries.
And, your publications now
reside in some of the most
prestigious public, private, and
academic libraries in the world.
You, and your staff, have
strategically built a fine
institution that I hope will
continue to play an invaluable
role in the education,
intellectual experiences and
consciousness raising of people
from around the world. I
delighted to join a host of
others who are coming together
to celebrate, honor and pay
tribute to your vision, tenacity
and intellect, as you move into
another “revolutionary” chapter
of your life. |
 |
Go
well,
Daphne Muse, Founder & Chief Visionary
Officer
Grandmothers Going Global
Harnessing our social capital, leadership
and creative vision worldwide
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Drum and Spear Bookstore Site
1371 Fairmont Street, NW - marked with a
plaque
Washington, DC
The
Drum and Spear Bookstore was founded in 1968
by Charlie Cobb, a former secretary for the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
It developed out of the civil rights/black
power movement in Washington, DC. Its
organizers set out to create a local as well
as national and international resource for
reliable information about the African
American and African world, aimed at people
of African descent, wherever they lived.
Drum and Spear specialized in books written
by black authors and books on Asian,
African, and African American subjects. It
quickly developed into a combination
bookstore, library, community center, and
“literary haven,” according to Professor
Daphne Muse of Mills College. Muse noted,
“It wasn't uncommon to see Toni Morrison and
Amiri Baraka browsing the shelves alongside
diplomats and regular folk.” According to
early board member Jennifer Lawson, the
store opened at a time just before black
studies took root in U.S. colleges and
universities, when only a handful of
Afro-centric bookstores operated in this
country.
The
founders took the name Afro-American
Resources, Inc., and operated Drum and Spear
Bookstore, Drum and Spear Press, and the
Center for Black Education. The center held
classes for community youth and sponsored
educational forums and speakers.
Afro-American Resources, Inc., originally
consisted of Cobb, Anthony Gittens, Don
Freeman, Courtland Cox, Ivanhoe Donaldson,
and Marvin Holloway. The bookstore and press
closed, said Lawson, because “all of its
managers were artists and activists and not
business people. We had created the
activities for the social good, not for
business purposes.”
The Drum
and Spear operated from 1371 Fairmont
Street, NW, until 1974. Cultural
Tourism DC
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* * *
* * Note: The above list was inspired by James Smethurst's
Appendix 2 (375-376) in
The Black Arts Movement. This list is a
Work-in-Progress, that is to say, it is incomplete and
much shorter than Smethurst's list, which contains over
100 names. * *
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Focus on modern injustice Belafonte tells SNCC reunion—'Where is
our voice?' "Where is our voice?" Belafonte asked. "Why are we so soft?"
A global activist, Belafonte turns up frequently in the Triangle. A
Habitat for Humanity development in Southeast Raleigh includes a
Belafonte Drive, just off Jimmy Carter Street.
Belafonte's words are rarely
gentle, even though he is 83. Four years ago, he called George W. Bush
"the greatest terrorist in the world" for the war he waged in Iraq, and
he has labeled Colin Powell a liar for his insistence that Iraqis were
harboring weapons of mass destruction.
In 2006, Belafonte spoke at Duke
University for a commemoration of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In
that speech, he suggested a moral equivalence between the Sept. 11
hijackers and the war in Iraq. "What is the difference between that
terror and other terrors?" he asked.
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Mamadou Lumumba Passes Over
Mamadou Lumumba [(Kenneth Freeman),
b. October 11, 1938 – d. October 20, 2009]
was editor of
Oakland-based Soulbook, a journal
"mainly political but included poetry in a
section ironically titled 'Reject Notes'." (“Historical
Overviews of The Black Arts Movement,”
Kalamu ya Salaam).
. . .
Memorial services:, December 12, 2pm, at the
Afrikan Children's Advanced Learning Center,
3268 San Pablo also known as 949 33rd Street
(corner of 33rd Street & San Pablo Avenue),
Oakland, CA 94607 (510) 923-0164. |
Mamadou Lumumba (Kenneth
Freeman; October 11, 1938 – October 20, 2009) was one of
the premier neo-black intellectuals of the 1960s. He was
the first black student to attend Bishop O Dowd high
school. He graduated from University of San Francisco in
1960, with graduate studies at the University of Mexico.
In Mexico he learned of the Cuban revolution and this
expanded his radical conscious and social activism. When
he returned to Oakland, he joined the group of young
radicals at Merritt College, including Bobby Seale, Huey
Newton, Ernie Allen, Isaac Moore, Ann Williams, Marvin X
and Carol Freeman, his wife. Mamadou became a member of
Donald Warden's Afro American Association, a Black
Nationalist organization. The AAA and the young radicals
studied world revolution, including events in South
Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and the Congo where the
first elected prime minister was assassinated.
Apparently his similarity to Congolese Patrice Lumumba,
made him adopt the name.
Mamadou
became editor of Soulbook, The Quarterly Journal of Revolutionary
Afro-America, one of the most radical publications of the 60s, a
leading theoretical journal in African revolutionary circles, a
publication of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).
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National Black Political Collection,
1972–1973—This
collection contains six folders of materials gathered by Guy E.
Russell. The materials relate, mostly, to the National Black Political
Convention held in Gary, Indiana on 10–12 March 1972 (folders 1–4). Of
particular note are a conference program, a fact sheet describing the
history of the organization, an outline of the delegate selection
process in Indiana (folder 1) and a transcript of a speech attributed to
Carl B. Stokes, former mayor of Cleveland (folder 2).
The
convention was an outgrowth of planning meetings conducted in 1971 by a
broad cross section of black leadership throughout the United States.
There are also materials that relate to state (Indiana State Black
Political Caucus) and regional (Mid-West Regional Coalition) initiatives
to form coalitions to address various issues pertaining to African
Americans. A 1972 anniversary booklet and a newsletter from the Indiana
State Black Caucus are in folder 4. The Mid-West Regional Coalition,
along with several other black organizations hosted the Black Unity
Conference held at Dunbar High School in Chicago on 13–15 April 1973. A
program of the conference is in folder 6.
Indiana History
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Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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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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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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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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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 5 January 2007
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