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Root Song
for Daki
By
Melvin E. Brown
In us and through us forever
There are native sons living
And we must always touch their
origins
For they give us a pulse that
reminds us
of the strangers in our bone.
In us and thru us forever
There are future black selves
And we must always touch their
origins
For they give us the word that
informs us
Of the strangers in our tongue.
Against whole centuries of blood
dripping skies
Against the rape and burning flesh
and twisted sinew
Against today's murder and
oppression and indignities
While we struggle we must never
forget that
In us and thru us forever
There are african spirits moving
And we must always touch their
origins
For they give us heart that beats
for the lives
That are so unfamiliar and so exalted. |
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Melvin E. Brown was born and raised in
Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing
Seminars, Brown received his M.A. in 1977 to 1981. He was the
editor of Chicory Magazine, a publication of the Enoch
Pratt Free Library. he has also been a faculty member at
Sojourner Douglass College.
His first volume of poetry In the
First Place was published in 1974. Most recently, his poetry
appeared in In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of
African American Poetry. |
Blue Notes & Blessing
Songs
(Liberation House,1995)
Reviews
Melvin follows the tradition:
griot, storyteller, musician. His poems are straight, clear
thinking. In the words of Etheridge Knight, he too "sees
through stone." Celebrate this new good book.
--Lucille Clifton, Pulitzer Prize Nominee,
author of The Book of Light
Ooh, baby, baby--Melvin E. Brown,
at times, writes the way Smokey Robinson once sang. Brown's
latest volume is a book of remembrances. It's a collection of
poems "coated" with the blues and filled with a
special kind of love.
--E. Ethelbert Miller, Director, African
American Resource Center, Howard University
It ain't just poetry to me. I hear
the codes for honest living, the quest to become a better human
being. I hear the love of friendship and memory, and the love of
memorable friendships. I feel the caring, the hurting, the
loving, the healing, the hoping. It's the heart-to-heart that's
really got a hold on me. Unh, unh, it ain't just poetry to me.
--Peter J. Harris, author of Hand Me My
Griot Clothes: The Autobiography of Junior Baby * * * * *
The
Corner /
The Corner—DeAndre and Prop Joe
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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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music)
update
4 February 2012
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