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Mahalia Jackson CDs
Gospels, Spirituals & Hymns /
The Best of Mahalia Jackson /
Black, Brown and Beige /
The Best Loved Spirituals
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Mahalia Jackson: Saturday Night Rhythms
and Sunday Morning Lyrics
By Cornish Rogers
Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson,
who died in Chicago on January 27 [1972], symbolized
through her life and music the pilgrimage of black
people in the United States during the past half
century.
Born in New Orleans in 1911,
she early in life became as intimately acquainted
with the cadences of black Baptist worship as she
was with the daily routine of scrubbing floors in
white people's homes. the daughter of a
stevedore-preacher, young Mahalia perceived within
her won life a tension expressed musically in the
dichotomy between the blues and the spirituals.
After moving to Chicago in 1927 (joining hundreds of
thousands of other blacks in the migration to
northern cities), she worked during the week as a
beautician and on Sundays became an ardent performer
of a developing form of church music that melded
Baptist lyrics and a "sanctified beat" with the
style of blues and jazz.
Gospel -- as it was called --
was born on Chicago's south side more than 40 years
ago; but because of its jazz-styled delivery the
music was for many years shunned by middle-class
black churches. Sung chiefly by storefront
Pentecostal, Holiness and sanctified congregations,
gospel languished relatively unnoticed by the larger
white society until it was brought to public
attention in the 40s by such popular singers as
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who managed to attract both
churchgoing folk and more worldly black audiences
with her winsome combination of Saturday night
rhythms and Sunday morning lyrics. It was not until
1946 that Mahalia, who had recorded her first songs
ten years earlier, became nationally recognized; by
1953 she received international acclaim on a
European concert tour.
Like the gospel music she sang,
Mahalia bridged the gap between the sacred and the
secular in her own life without compromising her
deep-rooted fundamentalist faith. Moving easily
among people from both worlds, she embodied the
truth of James Cone's contention (expressed in his
soon to-be-published book
The Spirituals and the Blues) that both secular
blues and sacred spirituals "flow from the same
bedrock of experience," though the blues deal only
with the existential while the spirituals look to
the supernatural.
Mahalia numbered among her most
cherished friends from both ends of the theological
and political spectrums. For instance,
J.H. Jackson (president (president of the
National Baptist Convention) and Martin Luther King,
Jr. -- leaders who were often at odds with each
other -- both counted themselves as close friends
and admirers of hers. It was she who sang "I been 'buked
and I been scorned" before a half-million people at
the Lincoln memorial in 1963 just preceding Dr.
King's now-famous
"I Have a Dream" speech at the greatest of all
civil rights demonstrations; and it was J.H. Jackson
who delivered the eulogy at her funeral.
But it was the singer's
insistence upon remaining unalterably herself that
marked her as unique. Unashamed of her humble
origins, she projected through her down-to-earth
personality and her unassuming manner that quality
which black people call "homebodyness" -- as though
she were a close relative from "down home." Like her
friend Louis Armstrong, she achieved a universality
by living faithfully within the confines she aspired
to become the best. because Mahalia's life rang true
to itself, it rings true for all of us.
Source: The Christian
Century (1 March 1972)* * *
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Hands on the Freedom Plow
Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
By
Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan
Judy Richardson, Betty Garman
Robinson, et al.
The book opens
a window onto the organizing tradition of the
Southern civil rights movement. That tradition,
rooted in the courage and persistence of ordinary
people, has been obscured by the characterization of
the civil rights struggle as consisting primarily of
protest marches. In rural Dawson, Ga., Carolyn
Daniels housed SNCC workers organizing for voter
registration, and whites retaliated by bombing her
home. But at the end of a vivid depiction of this
and other anti-black terrorist acts, she writes, in
an apt summary of the grass-roots organizing that is
the real explanation for civil rights victories, "We
just kept going and going." |
Organizing involved the
kind of commitment and willingness to face risk that Penny Patch
conveys in only a few short sentences describing covert
nighttime meetings in plantation sharecropper shacks. Patch is
white. But that did not lessen the fear or reduce the danger of
remaining seated while poll watching in a country store as
whites came in and out, giving her and her black co-worker
menacing stares.
Full journalistic
disclosure requires me to say that many of these women are
friends and former comrades. But knowing the movement that we
were all a part of also demands that I share my observation:
While these pages look back, looking forward from them reveals
that there are many useful lessons for today in the strength of
these women.—Charles
E. Cobb Jr.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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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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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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updated 28 July 2008
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