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The Struggle Continues
By Kaleb F.A. Tshamba
They are coming, coming, coming
coming those Afrikans.
They are coming, coming, coming
coming those Black militants.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming those Afrikan freedom fighters.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming--hear the beat of the drum.
They are coming, coming, coming.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming with their bows and arrows.
They are coming, coming, coming
with their spears and guns.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming with their tactics of hit and run.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming with a pierce of lead
in the palm of their hands.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming to destroy the man,
to make hum dead.
They are coming, coming, coming,
to overthrow a racist colonial system,
that separates people by color and race.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming with a war of resistance.
They are coming, coming, coming,
for independence and self-determination.
They are coming, coming, coming,
seeking freedom and liberation.
They are coming, coming, coming,
to create and build a new nation.
They are coming, coming, coming,
those Black Revolutionaries.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming and can not be stopped.
They are coming, coming, coming,
coming, look at your door step,
they are here . . .
Source:
Eyes of a Poet |
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I have witnessed police brutality by racist cops and their
unprovoked attacks on Afrikan-Amerikan men with my own eyes. I
myself was once a victim of a crude game of Russian roulette,
was threatened and called a nigger by two white police officers
who had picked me up from the Carroll Park Golf Course. I still
can remember those wooden telephone poles on Annapolis Road with
homemade mannequin models of Afrikan-Amerikan men hanging from a
rope tied around their necks, and at night in Westport's big
park there were cross burnings.
. . . Through my poetry I began expressing my activism and my
protest. |
I have been invited to perform at numerous protest
demonstrations outside the prisons, at City Hall, the State
House, at recreation centers and parks, at colleges and
universities, and a large number of churches and radio stations
throughout Baltimore City by reading my political poetry. . . .
Poetry can be used to educate as well as entertain the listener
or the reader. . . . To understand me is to understand my story.
These poems are part of my story and my evolution.—Kalb
Faouly Attimn Tshamba,
Preface to
Eyes of a Poet
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Facing
a possible arrest over the fatal shooting of
an unarmed former Marine after a night of
club-hopping, Baltimore Police Officer
Gahiji A. Tshamba continues to pop in to the
Eastern District station where he worked for
years. Here, the 15-year veteran is among
friends and colleagues, known not as a
killer enraged by slights over a woman but
as the quiet, studious-looking officer who,
as one colleague put it, would "do anything
to help you." . . .
Tshamba,
a reserved and smallish man who in
photographs looks more like an R&B singer
than a streetwise officer, grew up in the
Baltimore area and has three siblings,
including twin brothers, records indicate.
No one responded when reporters visited
their homes, scattered from North
Baltimore's Winston-Gardens to Bolton Hill.
They and others, including the father's
ex-wife, who lives in Woodlawn, did not
respond to interview requests. |
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Facing a possible arrest over the
fatal shooting of an unarmed former Marine after a night
of club-hopping, Baltimore Police Officer Gahiji A.
Tshamba continues to pop in to the Eastern District
station where he worked for years.
Here, the 15-year veteran is among
friends and colleagues, known not as a killer enraged by
slights over a woman but as the quiet, studious-looking
officer who, as one colleague put it, would "do anything
to help you." . . . .
Tshamba, a reserved
and smallish man who in photographs looks more like an
R&B singer than a streetwise officer, grew up in the
Baltimore area and has three siblings, including twin
brothers, records indicate. No one responded when
reporters visited their homes, scattered from North
Baltimore's Winston-Gardens to Bolton Hill. They and
others, including the father's ex-wife, who lives in
Woodlawn, did not respond to interview requests.
Public records for
family members point back to the same three-story brick
rowhouse on West North Avenue owned by Kaleb Tshamba,
identified in a court divorce file as the officer's
60-year-old father. Virtually every relative has listed
that address as a residence at one time or another over
the past decade. The home appears occupied, but nobody
has answered the door on repeated visits or responded to
notes requesting interviews.
Plants hang in the
windows and flowers bloom in a pot outside. A sign in
the window warns: "No loitering or sitting on the steps.
Will result in your arrest. By order of the Baltimore
Police Department."
The home's
answering machine asks callers to leave a message if
they want to schedule an event at the Arch Social Club,
located a few blocks to the east at West North and
Pennsylvania avenues. Founded in 1912, it is one of the
city's oldest African-American clubs and was once a
venue for famous jazz musicians.
Kaleb Tshamba keeps a poetry
journal on an Internet site called
ChickenBones, described as a
literary publication of African-American themes. The
elder Tshamba has written a—
lengthy personal history
describing growing up in southern Baltimore's Westport
public housing developments and being one of the first
black families there in 1956.
He writes about racism at the hands
of white police officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and of
working for a defunct glass company after graduating
from Edmondson High School.
In the late 1970s, the father
writes, he became a "full-fledged social conscious
political poet" who spoke at demonstrations outside
Baltimore prisons, City Hall, the State House, churches
and universities. His personal history does not contain
any references to family or to his son the police
officer.—Officer
in shooting led turbulent life, Trouble on and off the
force
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Tshamba's turbulent past /
Justified Ltr - Non-fatal Shooting of George McAleer (Tshamba)
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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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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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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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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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updated 11 January 2012
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