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We
Still Chasing Trim
By Rudolph Lewis
Baltimore A-RABS peddle sweet melons from wagons
since Amos
‘n’ Andy was on radio & every Negro
clowned
like Howlin Wolf on the killing floor
& slugged
like Joe Louis. What black storyteller forgets
one-room
rural schools for negro boys and girls, standing
up on
buses, “For Colored” signs, polish jokes, bleaching
cream used
on South Freemont in Nigger Town. Whites
weep still
when Miss Holiday sings about stars in Alabama
sit
raptured by by Louie’s voice in "Mack the Knife" neither sad
nor blue.
Our origins can be traced back to Sugar Hill, down
the street,
& dead like all the dicty hi-yellas who moved
to the
county. There blue lights flash only when the Reverend
and his
cutie pie calls her pimp. He ain’t as rigid as he used to
be. She
lifts her head & closes her eyes. Blood ain’t as black
as Jamaica
when its roots are not in a hood. No one sweats on
a
plantation like Fannie Lou and her husband, anymore. No one
speaks of
rivers, fires, & backlash since Langston’s demise. Inner
Harbor up
scale hotels welcome even black writers & critics who
overlook
strikes & criminals. Still wagging tail at the back
of the bus,
we can voice openly our fantasies about fanfares
when collection plates discover new ways
of fucking America.
30 January 2006/revised 3
December 2011 |
Responses
Sometimes you make me laugh sometimes I feel
like I'm gonna cry. When a writer can do that to a reader, it
means they're damn good! (You bad!) LOL! trim! I haven't heard
that word in 30 years.—Anita
nice imagery—Kam
BRAVO!—Jennifer
Brown Banks Writer/Poet/Author/Consultant,
WriterGazette
That has to be one of my favorite of your poems.
It swings and calls up so many memories, especially the "blue
lights flashing"—reminds me of the Baptists preachers who
used to screw the girls in the house across from the Baptist
college where I taught. Turned me off of the church
completely. Do the Arabs still peddle in the Baltimore
streets?—
Miriam
Rudy, Greetings! By now, you surely must
have enough poems to make up a book! Am I right? Your poetry
is full of heart, and there is a hard but warm truthfulness
and sincerity to it, mostly because you care. Take care!—Rose
Ure Mezu
posted 5 February 2006
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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 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) |
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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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Negro Digest /
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Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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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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