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Books
by Afaa Michael Weaver
Water Song
(1985) / Multitudes (2000) /
Sandy Point (2000) /
The Ten Lights of God (2000) /
some days it's a slow walk to evening
These Hands I Know /
The Plum Flower Dance /
Multitudes /
Timber and Prayer /
Stations in a Dream /
The Ten Lights of God
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Industrial Me
The Wire Insider, Part III
By Afaa Michael
Weaver
The street on which my family lived was a major route to
a place we called “The Point,” a short version of
Sparrows Point, location of the Bethlehem Steel Company
plant that was at one time the largest steel plant in
the world. My father and uncles came to work there
during and after WWII, when steel was needed for the
war. There were about thirty thousand people, mostly
men, working in the mills in the late sixties. I took a
job in the 42” Skin Pass section of the tin mill, on the
cold side of the plant as opposed to the hot side where
they handled molten steel in places like the coke oven,
where some of my uncles worked. My father worked in the
pipe mill on the cold side for thirty-six years.
I was there for one year beginning in 1970, when I
dropped out of the University of Maryland at College
Park after two years. After that year I moved on to the
Procter & Gamble plant in Locust Point. The points are
these nautical areas strung along the Baltimore harbor,
the largest inland harbor on the east coast. There was a
time when slave ships pulled up to the docks, and
Frederick Douglass lived in Fells Point until he
escaped. I could look from the window of Procter &
Gamble and see where he lived.
The machines in the tin mill were massive, full of
metal’s heaviness. I worked in what was known as the
“labor gang,” a job category where you went wherever you
were needed on any given day. It was the bottom of the
rung. One day my supervisor walked me over to a pit of
dirty oil in the floor of the tin mill. My job for the
day was to get down in there and clean it out, which
meant dipping the slime for eight hours. But at least I
had work.
In Baltimore you could get a job at The Point or at
Social Security and be thought to be somewhat
successful. There was also the post office. I could not
abide the idea of being in an office all day, or worse,
in some cubicle.
Never mind the fact that I am in academia now.
Getting to the steel mill was easy. Many drivers
traveled up and down the street on which my parents had
the house they bought in 1957, during the national
blockbusting project of real estate companies all over
the country. They used scare tactics to tell white
neighbors the blacks were coming and then sold the
houses to us for a neat profit. Our white neighbors were
gone so fast I only remember a little girl who was my
playmate for what seemed like a microsecond. When my
father took his job in the mills, segregation was the
order of the day. Blacks and whites had separate lockers
and eating areas. Moreover, they hardly spoke to one
another. But getting there in the time I was a
steelworker was easy.
I just stood on the street and held out my brown paper
lunch bag. Before long, someone would pull over and ask
if I wanted a ride. For a week you gave the rider five
dollars or so for gas, and on Fridays nearly everyone
stopped at a cash checking place called Micky’s to get
cash and very often something to drink. One of my
riders, a short and somewhat corpulent man, drank a half
pint of Vodka on the way in to the job and at least that
much on the way home. It was as if he was using it to
clear the soot from his system.
This was the world that allowed men and women to support
themselves and send their children off to college. It
was a world that seemed as sure as the steady drumming
of the machines that made the products that fed the
burgeoning economic system that is the largest in the
world. Detroit, for example, was the largest
manufacturing city in recorded history, or so I have
been told. I do not doubt it.
If I worked at night in the tin mill and had the crane’s
helper job, I would put my sandwich on the top of the
heaters we had to keep us warm. The galvanized tin walls
increased the heat of summer and the cold of winter. The
same would be true in P&G’s warehouse, where I would
spend ten years before my manumission came in the form
of an NEA fellowship for poetry. But there in the tin
mill my sandwich was always ready after it sat on the
heater for a while. I followed the giant overhead
electric crane that could lift several tons at a time.
It was used to change the giant steel pins in the
processing plants that pressed the raw tin to where it
was smoother and shinier until it was eventually the
texture needed for tin cans. It was a job that required
vigilance, as you could lose your hand if it got caught
between the hoisting cables and the pins themselves.
Without seeing you, the operator could lift the whole
affair and tear your hand right off from your wrist or
mash your fingers until they were nothing but bloody
mush.
I was fortunate enough not to lose any limbs, but others
were not so lucky. My uncle Paul was killed in the coke
oven when I was nine years old. One of the vats of
molten steel tipped over on him while he and my cousin
Melvin were in the pit. Melvin tried to save him, and he
lingered in the hospital for a few days before passing.
When my mother got the news over the phone, she
screamed. I was in the back room of the basement playing
with my Civil War army set, things made of plastic to
represent things made of metal.
I left Bethlehem Steel for Procter & Gamble in the
spring of 1971, just after I returned from basic combat
training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. At that time the
Maryland Dry-dock company was also in Locust Point on
Key Highway, the street that eventually leads to Ft.
McHenry. On the way to P&G on the afternoon shift, I
often saw several hundred people crossing the street for
the change of shifts, and driving by there at night I
could see the ships in dry-dock lit like giant Christmas
trees. The sparks from the welders seemed celebratory,
as if these were little victories, the joining of one
metal thing to another.
In the tin mill, I concealed my books in brown lunch
bags and wrote on paper I brought from home or on the
backs of the tally sheets we used to weigh the tin coils
after they went through the process of being made
thinner and shinier. At P&G I kept the practice of
concealing my books, but it wasn’t until I got to the
warehouse in 1975 that I could find spaces to steal time
and really focus on poetry.
The city was changing rapidly. Drugs poured into the
communities as the industrial jobs began to disappear.
At P&G they constantly reminded us that costs had to be
cut, and one way of cutting costs was to get rid of the
dead weight of a plant that was doing substandard
performance. In the late nineteenth century, the rise of
industrial engineering brought with it the idea of a
perfect factory where machines had perfect efficiency
and humans worked like machines. The idea grew out of
mechanistic philosophy, an idea the thinkers of the
Enlightenment resurrected and developed more distinctly
as an aspect of the western march to accumulating
massive amounts of wealth through industrialism and
colonial expansion.
Now when I read about the deliberate campaign to make
people work like machines, I get angry. However, I am
immediately faced to a central paradox in our lives.
There is the incredible array of “stuff” available for
consumption. I have worked and lived on both sides of it
and have no real answers for the quandary we humans have
given ourselves, and I do see it as a collective act
inasmuch as I believe human consciousness is a massive
creative force. Otherwise I would sell this laptop and
try to get off the grid. However, it seems the grid has
become so self-aware that it preempts its own
deconstruction by allowing us the time and space to
ruminate over all the ironic constructs of life in this
postindustrial and postcolonial age in which we live
that gives us access to so many material goods, so many
things.
One day in the early eighties I was on my way to work on
the afternoon shift. I picked up a coworker who lived in
my old neighborhood, and we headed down Milton Avenue
toward the southeastern part of the city where P&G was
located. Just as we got onto Milton Avenue, we saw the
door of a house open with a black man bursting out and
running for his life. Behind him was another black man
chasing him and loading a double barrel shotgun as he
ran. By the time we got to the job, the man being chased
was dead, shot to death by the man following him. During
my adolescence I saw my neighborhood change. Friends
died or went to prison. The story was repeated in black
communities in large cities all over America.
The steady world of factory jobs like the ones my father
and uncles had were fading, and so was the stability
those jobs allowed. In the context of all of this, my
P&G job was thought to be one of the best. Men and women
retired from Procter & Gamble with small fortunes in
stock, but after retirement, the challenge was to find a
new life. Sometimes work and the routine of it was all
we knew as blue collar workers.
Every good warehouseman knows the value of a flashlight.
I have five of them now, including two medium size
Maglites. At Simmons, where I am a member of the English
department, I sometimes sit and watch the men working on
the construction of the new parking lot and school of
marketing. I love to get outside and walk when the
weather is nice, and the difficult reconciliation of
these two lives inside me is easier now than it used to
be, but only because I do not place so much value on the
responses of people when they learn about my factory
life. Proletarian minds are supposed to have limits that
do not include being a published poet and a professor.
I was processed as a poet among the masses, stripped
down and melted and crafted into the shape I would need
to go out in the world and grow and function as poet and
writer. As a lifelong factory worker my poetry would
have suffered. A poet needs more than two ten minute
coffee breaks and a half hour at lunchtime.
In
The
Wire the blighted areas you see—many
of which are in my old neighborhood—were
full of people and bustling with energy forty years ago,
before the gradual and steady disappearance of blue
collar jobs that had formed so much of the economy,
before the great decline in Baltimore. The days when my
father and uncles sat around in our kitchen eating my
mother’s hot chili or ox tail soup and sipping their
whiskey and Coca-Cola are gone along with the steady
lives they were able to give us children. Bless them.
5 July 2008
Source:
EastBaltimoreMuse
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The Wire—Season 1, Playing Chess
D'Angelo teaches
Wallace and Bodie how to play chess. Season 1 of the
Wire.
The Wire Season 1 Recap
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The
Wire Season One—The
Wire details crime in Baltimore, following the
process from both the police and criminal point of view.
The title refers to the espionage equipment used to
gather evidence against the criminals, which is the
focus of the investigation as presented. This isn’t beat
cops working the streets or lab rats analyzing DNA, this
is unglossed police work, monitoring phone calls, taking
surveillance photos, and waiting for an opening.
What makes the show
so original is the depth it goes into the story, with
each episode building on the next, slowly revealing
pieces of the bigger puzzle until it all begins to make
sense, all the while the entire case is threatening to
collapse under its weight and the political pressure
attached to it. In some ways, it isn’t a procedural at
all, in that it isn’t a mere series of cases introduced
and solved every week, using similar formulas to tell
similar stories. Instead, the entire 13 episodes focus
on one case, which begins on a lark, meant to be small,
then grows into something larger than anyone had
anticipated. Along the way, the series delves into all
aspects of the case, from the junior detectives working
surveillance all the way up to judges, the FBI, and
congressmen, and from the drug kingpin all the way down
to a kid drug runner working the corner.
It’s a stunning
feat of storytelling that I have never seen on this
level. The level of detail, the sprawling cast, the
intricate plotting, all of it operate on another level
that simply blew me away. Just when you think you’ve
seen all the medium is capable of, along comes a show
like this to shake things up.—AndytheSaint
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The Corner
The
bleak reality of drug addiction is
captured with unflinching authenticity
in
The Corner, an excellent,
reality-based HBO miniseries. Having
lived on the streets of West Baltimore,
Maryland, where this compelling drama
takes place, actor-director Charles S.
Dutton knows the territory, physically,
socially, and emotionally, and his
compassionate approach is vital to the
series' success. Dutton cares for his
characters deeply enough to give them a
realistic shred of hope, even when hope
is consistently dashed by the ravages of
addiction. This is, at its root, a
family tragedy, focusing on errant
father Gary (T.K. Carter, in a
heartbreaking performance) a
once-successful investor trapped in a
tailspin of heroin dependency. His
estranged wife Fran (Khandi Alexander)
was the first to get hooked, and she's
struggling to get clean, while their
15-year-old son DeAndre (Sean Nelson,
from the indie hit Fresh) deals drugs,
temporarily avoiding their deadly allure
while facing the challenge of premature
fatherhood. |
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Through revealing flashbacks and numerous local
characters, we see the explicit fallout of addiction, and while violence
occasionally erupts, its constant threat is secondary to Dutton's
dramatic vision, which remains steadfastly alert to the humanity and
neglected potential of these lost and searching souls.
The Corner is, essentially, the civilian flipside of HBO's
equally laudable series
The Wire,
which approaches a similar neighborhood from a police-squad perspective.
Performances are uniformly superb, details are uncannily perfect, and
for all of its human horror,
The Corner is riveting, not depressing. A closing interview with
the characters' real-life counterparts bears witness to the fact that
these lives--with inevitable exceptions--need not be lost forever.—Jeff
Shannon,
Amazon.com
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The Corner (YouTube video)
The Corner is a 2000
HBO television miniseries based on the book
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an
Inner-City Neighborhood by David
Simon and Ed Burns and adapted for
television by Simon and David Mills. The
Corner chronicles the life of a family
living in poverty amid the open-air drug
markets of West Baltimore.
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an
Inner-City Neighborhood
This is a powerful
book, a window on aspects of America most
people would rather ignore. To their great
credit, the authors--David Simon wrote
Homicide, the basis for the popular
television show; Edward Burns is a former
Baltimore police officer, now a public
school teacher--refuse to sensationalize
their subject or make its people into
stereotypes. |
For a year the two hung out in a West
Baltimore neighborhood that was a center of the drug
trade. At the center of the narrative is the McCullough
family—DeAndre, age 15, and his drug-addicted parents,
Gary and Fran. While reading
The Corner, there are times when we pity
them, times when they make us angry. The book's
strength, though, is that we always understand them.
This portrayal of a year in
drug-crazed West Baltimore will satisfy neither readers
looking for a perceptive witness to the urban crisis nor
those in search of social analysis. Simon (Homicide,
LJ 6/1/91), a crime reporter, and Burns, a Baltimore
police veteran and public school teacher, mask their
presence in the scene with an omniscient style that
strains credibility, and the chronological framework
blunts the impact of their most compelling themes. The
authors salute the courageous but futile efforts of
individual parents, educators, and police officers but
deny the possibility of a social solution to the
devastation they acknowledge is rooted in social policy.
A more compelling account is
Our America: Life and Death (LJ 6/1/97) on the
South Side of Chicago, based on interviews conducted by
13-year-old public housing residents LeAlan Jones and
Lloyd Newman in 1993. For larger public libraries.—Library
Journal
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Poem at Central Booking
By DeAndre McCullough
Silent screams and broken dreams
Addicts, junkies, pushers and fiends
Crowded spaces and sad faces
Never look back as the police chase us
Consumed slowly by chaos, a victim of the
streets,
Hungry for knowledge, but afraid to eat.
A life of destruction, it seems no one
cares,
A manchild alone with burdens to bear.
Trapped in a life of crime and hate,
It seems the ghetto will be my fate.
If I had just one wish it would surely be,
That God would send angels to set me free
Free from the madness, of a city running
wild,
Freed from the life of a ghetto child.
Source:
The Corner
(1997) by
David Simon and Edward Burns |
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The
Corner /
The Corner—DeAndre and Prop Joe
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The Corner—The Real Fran, DeAndre, Tyreeka and Blue!
The last ten minutes from the HBO
series
The Corner, where Charles S. Dutton, the
director talks to the real life characters, the story
was based on.
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Take This
Hammer
KQED's film unit
follows poet and activist James Baldwin in the spring of
1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with
members of the local African-American community. He is
escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director
Orville Luster and intent on discovering: "The real
situation of negroes in the city, as opposed to the
image San Francisco would like to present." He declares:
"There is no moral distance . . . between the facts of
life in San Francisco and the facts of life in
Birmingham. Someone's got to tell it like it is. And
that's where it's at." Includes frank exchanges with
local people on the street, meetings with community
leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a
moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western
Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial
inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront
and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man
by expressing his conviction that: "There will be a
negro president of this country but it will not be the
country that we are sitting in now." The TV Archive
would like to thank Darryl Cox for championing the
merits of this film and for his determination that it be
preserved and remastered for posterity.
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Straight Outta Hunters Point /
Malcolm X Birthday (1970)
KQED News report from May 19th 1970
on the Hunters Point community of San Francisco's
celebrations and remembrance for what would have been
the 45th birthday of political and human rights activist
Malcolm X. Features scenes of local residents describing
the personal impact that Malcom X had on their lives and
people enjoying live music. Ends with views of public
speakers addressing crowds outside the Federal
Courthouse in downtown San Francisco, including the
Reverend Cecil Williams who explains that: "We are
talking about the liberation of the people! And that's
what we want at this particular time."
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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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
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
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 /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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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 22 June
2010
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