Happy Birthday Dr. Du Bois
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
There is no way to discuss the impact, and contributions of one of our greatest black Americans in one post. I’m going to borrow from a tribute written here in 2010 and suggest you read Chitown Kev’s “Liberation Sociology.”
Born February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was a “civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar.” He was one of co-founders of the of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was Du Bois who suggested the use of the word “colored” in the group's name, rather than “black”, because he felt strongly, as an internationalist, that the term would include "dark skinned people everywhere.” Today we have embraced that usage, when referring to “people of color.” At the end of his life, in 1961, W.E.B. DuBois moved to Ghana, invited there by President Kwame Nkrumah. He became a Ghanaian citizen two years later. Upon his death on August 27, 1963 Du Bois was given a state funeral in Accra, where he is buried.
His life, work and activism was a link between multiple generations of change in the United States. Spanning reconstruction, the birth of civil rights movement, Pan-Africanism, two world wars, he remained an astute observer and participant in both national and international events as a sociologist, anthropologist, social critic and organizer, until his death.
Bill Moyers Journal presented a brief overview of Du Bois,and Jim Crow— narrated by Ozzie Davis and Ruby Dee, which covered Du Bois, his battles with Booker T. Washington and the founding of the Niagara Movement, which later gave birth to the NAACP. Ruby shares her mother's memories of DuBois—her mother was one of his students—and his positions on higher education for blacks.
Du Bois had harsh criticisms of other black leaders—and never pulled his punches. Though a leftist, he was also openly critical of the white left and white progressives who turned a blind eye to issues of race, of social democrats and trade unionists who failed to address racism and focused solely on "class."
We find ourselves proffering some of those same critiques today.
Socialism and the Negro Problem
The essence of Social Democracy is that there shall be no excluded or exploited classes in the Socialistic state; that there shall be no man or woman so poor, ignorant or black as not to count one. Is this simply a far-off ideal, or is it a possible program? I have come to believe that the test of any great movement toward social reform is the Excluded Class. Who is it that Reform does not propose to benefit? If you are saving dying babies, whose babies are you going to let die? If you are feeding the hungry, what folk are you (regretfully, perhaps, but nonetheless truly) going to let starve? If you are making a juster division of wealth, what people are you going to permit at present to remain in poverty? If you are giving all men votes (not only in the "political" but also in the economic world), what class of people are you going to allow to remain disfranchised?
Du Bois fought for higher education for blacks, in both Negro colleges and universities, and white schools like Harvard and Yale, and spoke loudly and clearly against the hypocrisy of a system that would bar them from obtaining it. His words written in 1902 in Of the Training of Black Men, could have been written today, as we look at the statistics of poverty and incarceration that persist in our community; while naysayers rant against affirmative education and deny the legacy of slavery – in essence saying "Oh that was over 150 years ago...get over it".
Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you shriek, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer, that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may wail: the rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in in-effaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar train, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin. abortion; that color and race are not crimes, and yet they it is which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West.
He chided those whose solution to "the negro problem" was simply "industrial training". He attacked racism, and white privilege.
Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the temporary and contingent in the Negro problem to the broader question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever recurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? And men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of the sinister signs in recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race prejudices, which keep brown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.
California Newsreel produced a four part biographical documentary on his life, narrated by Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka.
Part One: Black Folk and the New Century (1895-1915) Du Bois' first sociological work, The Philadelphia Negro, and, even more, The Souls of Black Folk, examined the cultural and political psychology of the American African Diaspora. During the same period, racism was institutionalized under the Jim Crow system. Du Bois emerged as the most outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington's advocacy of accommodation to segregation. He co-founded the Niagara Movement and then the NAACP to agitate for full equality between blacks and whites.
Part Two: The Crisis and the New Negro (1919-1929) Du Bois created the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, which became a vital organ in the burgeoning African American cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois also was a founder of the Pan African movement, organizing the first international congresses of leaders from Africa and the Diaspora.
Part Three: A Second Reconstruction? (1934-1948) Dismissed from the editorship of The Crisis for his radical views, Du Bois was forced to resume his academic career at age 68. It was now the Depression and he became more open to leftist ideology as reflected in his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction.
Part Four: Color, Democracy, Colonies and Peace (1949-1963) Du Bois' continuing anti-racist activism and growing leftist sympathies made him a target during the McCarthy years. He was indicted and for a time his passport was revoked. In 1961, Kwame Nkrumah, the president of the newly independent African state of Ghana, invited him to participate in that country's development; Du Bois accepted, living there for the remainder of his life.
As I stated earlier, there is too much on DuBois to cover here. I hope those of you not familiar with his life and work will take time to do more investigation at the links provided below.
Happy Birthday, Dr. Du Bois from Black Kos.
Du Bois Links:
UMass has an extensive Du Bois collection entitled Activist’s Life
Famous Sociologist's has this biography, Du Bois, William Edwards Burghardt
A Biographical Sketch
W.E.B. Du Bois.org
The Library of Congress has Du Bois Online resources
It’s time to add another item to the list of Black firsts: Yesterday (February 17), ABC announced that Channing Dungey is the television network’s new entertainment president. Variety reports that she is the first Black person to control programming for a major broadcast network.
You might not know Dungey’s name, but you know the shows she developed during her tenure as senior vice president of drama development. They include “Scandal,” “How to Get Away With Murder,” “Quantico” and “American Crime.”
Dungey has been with the network since 2009. Another Black woman, Nne Ebong, was promotedto take over her former duties in drama development. The Atlantic reports that Dungey may be in for a rough climb in the top spot. Her promotion comes at a time with the network’s ratings sit below those of NBC, CBS and FOX.
Black artists have been nominated for best actress or actor on 30 occasions. Over the last few weeks, I watched all of them. The New York Times: What Does the Academy Value in a Black Performance?
When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, revealing that not one black actor was in the running, the resulting furor touched on the performances that critics said should have been considered: What about Idris Elba in “Beasts of No Nation”? Michael B. Jordan in “Creed”? Will Smith in “Concussion,” or one of the stars of “Straight Outta Compton”?
The uproar over #OscarsSoWhite made me curious. What does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences value in black performance? Black artists have been nominated for best actress or actor on 30 occasions, for work spanning 28 films. Over the last few weeks, I watched all of them.
These movies have a lot in common, not least that most were directed by white men. Only three were directed by black men and none by women. Perhaps these numbers aren’t surprising, given the well-known demographics of the film industry. Other numbers are more eye-opening.
Consider: In the history of the Oscars, 10 black women have been nominated for best actress, and nine of them played characters who are homeless or might soon become so. (The exception is Viola Davis, for the 2011 drama “The Help.”)
***
The academy has tended to honor black men for different sorts of roles, and it has honored them more often. Black men have been up for best actor 20 times, with four nominations going to Denzel Washington, three to Morgan Freeman, and two each to Sidney Poitier and Mr. Smith.
Thirteen of the recognized performances involve being arrested or incarcerated. Picture Chiwetel Ejiofor as the newly kidnapped Solomon Northup in “12 Years a Slave” or Mr. Washington behind bars as Malcolm Little, soon to change his name to Malcolm X. (His other nominated characters all face arrest, even his corrupt detective Alonzo Harris, before he flees in the last few minutes of “Training Day.”) Picture the police bursting through the bedroom doors of Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles in “Ray” (2004) or James Earl Jones’s Jack Jefferson in “The Great White Hope” (1970). Most of the films deliver these men into bondage with the best of intentions — so we may identify with them, and hate the injustices done them. Nevertheless, the images seem endlessly — and sadistically — repeated.
In the early 1950s, the CIA liked to meddle in the American film industry. During Eisenhower’s presidency, historian Hugh Wilford explained, a CIA agent at Paramount studios engaged in an “astounding variety of clandestine activities” with the goal of influencing Hollywood motion pictures in order to enhance this country’s image abroad. The idea was to show the world that life in free, liberty-loving America was the polar opposite of repressive Russia, Cuba, and China. Subsequently identified as executive Luigi G. Luraschi, the studio’s Head of Foreign and Domestic Censorship, this particular CIA agent was strongly interested in countering “adverse publicity” about race relations in the US by trying to get African-American characters cast in films where they would be shown as the social equals of whites.
That was six decades ago, during the height of the Cold War. Earlier this week, Oscar-nominated actor Don Cheadle described his decade-long struggle to make a biopic about jazz legend Miles Davis. He raised about $360,000 via crowdfunding, but only cleared the final financing hurdle when he wrote in a fictional Rolling Stone reporter and cast Ewan (“young Obi-Wan”) McGregor in the role. Interviewed at the Berlin Film Fest, where “Miles Ahead” was screening out of competition, Cheadle said that casting a white actor in a leading role was “one of the realities of the business that we are in,” adding that “there is a lot of apocryphal, not proven evidence that black films don’t sell overseas.”
Superficially, based on these two descriptions alone, it would be easy to say that the PC police in Hollywood have won, and the tables have turned on the racial dynamics in Hollywood. Last century, conspiracy theorists might mutter, the government was secretly making liberal Hollywood cast Black actors in (white) films. This century, Black films are being forced to include white characters, because all-Black castings in films = racist or something, like The Wiz or Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime performance of her single, “Formation.” Karma’s a bitch? Nope. In both cases, there is the interesting role played by the rest-of-the-planet—the planet peopled by individuals who don’t reflexively share an American worldview–but the meaningful shift of emphasis isn’t sociopolitical, but geo-economic.
In the ‘50s, CIA agent and Paramount executive Luraschi could not dictate, only suggest castings. He was outranked by the director and studio head at Paramount, who refused to add Black characters to the Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin comedy, “The Caddy,” out of fear it would “upset southern white moviegoers.” In Hollywoodland, erasure was easier and less financially risky than inclusion. And for all the cheerful goofiness of those Lewis & Martin films full of country-club hi-jinks, it is sobering to realize they, and many more films sharing the same breezy message of all’s well here in the Good Old USA, were made around the same time that Miles Davis was beaten by a policeman outside of the New York City jazz club, Birdland.
Reporters later interviewed a dozen witnesses who said that the detective was drunk, that Davis was innocent, and that the beating was excessive. (“They beat me like a drum,” Davis complained.) One woman said that when she saw what they were doing to Davis, she hit one of the policemen herself.
“For many,” notes anthropologist and musicologist John Szwed, “it became a defining moment in race relations in New York.” By this time, Miles Davis was already world famous, and his arbitrary arrest came amid a spate of protests due to repeated incidents of police brutality in the North, along with a string of black church bombings and a surge of Klan activity in the South. Yet the press still focused on the white woman who’d been with Miles, whose womanhood the New York City policeman had stepped forward to protect. Thus Miles Davis, musical genius, was beaten into a bloody mess for being a black man with a white woman who wasn’t a girlfriend, a wife, or a band member, but was just sort of there. Davis accepted the beating as part of the price of being a Black man in America.
She found her inspiration in the overnight violence report sent every morning to her husband, a district leader for the Chicago public school system. It cataloged students who had been shot, stabbed and killed the night before.
Jacquie Gering said her husband wore that weight on his shoulders, and that they would watch the news, and the kids in those reports were never mentioned. She felt profoundly disturbed, so Gering did what she does best. She made a quilt.
It featured a 5-foot tall black handgun with blood dripping out of its muzzle and pooling beneath its trigger. She titled her quilt, "Bang You're Dead." She put the quilt on her blog and wrote that it was not meant to be humorous. It was meant to be final.
The finality of death, whether at the hands of a police officer or a rogue armed citizen, is at the heart of some striking quilts on display at QuiltCon West in Pasadena through Sunday. These quilts are a rarity at the show, where nearly 10,000 people from 49 states and 15 countries are expected to come largely to see more traditional designs. But work centered on racial inequality and the violence rooted in racism signals the strength of a modern quilt movement, which emphasizes individual feelings and experiences.
There are strategies, which Congress has rejected, that could help rescue a generation of young men from failure and oblivion. New York Times: The Crisis of Minority Unemployment.
The staggering problem of chronic unemployment among minority men was starkly presented in a report from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It found that in Los Angeles and New York City about 30 percent of 20- to 24-year-old black men were out of work and out of school in 2014. The situation is even more extreme in Chicago, where nearly half of black men in this age group were neither working nor in school; the rate was 20 percent for Hispanic men and 10 percent for white men in the same age group.
In Chicago, as elsewhere, the crisis of permanent joblessness is concentrated in minority neighborhoods where it feeds street violence, despondency, health problems and a socially corrosive brand of hopelessness among the young. The problem extracts a heavy social cost in those neighborhoods and threatens the viability of entire cities.
The outrage is that there are strategies, which Congress has rejected, that could help rescue a generation of young men from failure and oblivion. Among these is the employment subsidy program that was passed as part of the Recovery Act in 2009. It created more than 260,000 temporary jobs for young people and adults. Governors and employers were ecstatic. But Republicans in Congress denounced the program as useless a year later and blocked proposals that would have extended it.
With that rejection, the country missed a crucial opportunity. The Economic Mobility Corporation, a nonprofit organization, released an analysis in 2013 that looked at the program’s outcomes in California, Florida, Mississippi and Wisconsin. By subsidizing the hiring of temporary employees, the federal government lowered labor costs and kept some employers afloat through the recession. The program made a measurable difference in the lives of workers, 37 percent of whom performed so well that they were hired permanently after the subsidy period ended.
These promising results suggest that carefully targeted subsidies that place unemployed people into private-sector jobs can be a potent tool in reducing the devastating unemployment in minority areas of big cities where young people are disconnected from work and civic life.
A right-wing populist opposition in Jamaica challenges government austerity. The Economist: Let them eat goat.
IN THE heart of Montego Bay, his country’s tourist capital, on the night of February 7th Andrew Holness, the leader of the opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), was outlining his election plan to a throng of supporters when a burst of gunfire left three people dead. He and his supporters scurried for safety. Two days later, a bystander was killed and three were injured when a JLP motorcade drove through Flanker, a poor area of the town close to the airport.
The police were quick to blame the killings on feuding between local criminal gangs, rather than on party rivalries. “We asked specifically that no motorcade should come through Flanker,” said the chief of the local police. Nevertheless, the gunshots were an unpleasant echo of Jamaica’s 1980 election, when gang warfare linked to cold-war ideology and a crumbling economy pitted a Cuban-influenced People’s National Party (PNP) against a pro-American JLP.
The last whiffs of ideology have long since evaporated. Both of the main parties competing in the election, to be held on February 25th, are pragmatic, but the economy remains stagnant. Jamaica was once a regional powerhouse. Its income per head is now the lowest among Britain’s former Caribbean island colonies. Gang-linked gun crime continues unabated. Last year Jamaica suffered 1,207 murders, giving the island a murder rate almost ten times that of the United States.
The debt-ridden economy has been in the IMF’s care for years. Under Portia Simpson Miller, the prime minister since 2012, the PNP government has doggedly stuck to an austerity programme. Peter Phillips, the finance minister, has won praise for that. The fall in the price of oil, which Jamaica imports, has given him a little wriggle room. But next month’s budget is expected to contain another round of cuts in public-sector jobs, which may be why Mrs Simpson Miller called the election for 14 months before the deadline.
Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
A picture may indeed, be worth a thousand words. If done with precision though, a poem wouldn't nearly require that much verbiage for an image to occur.
Picture this.
The Photographer sets the camera focused on a crowded yet expansive vista. She adjusts the timer on the camera, moves and stands before it. She is determined as she raises her hands high and wide above her head, a moment before the time-trapping whirr and click of the shutter.
I waved a gun last night
In a city like some ancient Los Angeles.
It was dusk. There were two girls
I wanted to make apologize,
But the gun was uselessly heavy.
They looked sideways at each other
And tried to flatter me. I was angry.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to bury the pistol,
But I would've had to walk miles.
I would've had to learn to run.
I have finally become that girl
In the photo you keep among your things,
Steadying myself at the prow of a small boat.
It is always summer here, and I am
Always staring into the lens of your camera,
Which has not yet been stolen. Always
With this same expression. Meaning
I see your eye behind the camera's eye.
Meaning that in the time it takes
For the tiny guillotine
To open and fall shut, I will have decided
I am just about ready to love you.
Sun cuts sharp angles
Across the airshaft adjacent.
They kiss. They kiss again.
Faint clouds pass, disband.
Someone left a mirror
At the foot of the fire escape.
They look down. They kiss.
She will never be free
Because she is afraid. He
Will never be free
Because he has always
Been free.
Was kind of a rebel then.
Took two cars. Took
Bad advice. Watched people's
Asses. Sniffed their heads.
Just left, so it looked
Like those half sad cookouts,
Meats never meant to be
Flayed, meant nothing.
Made promises. Kept going.
Prayed for signs. Stooped
For coins. Needed them.
Had two definitions of family.
Had two families. Snooped.
Forgot easily. Well, didn't
Forget, but knew when it was safe
To remember. Woke some nights
Against a wet pillow, other nights
With the lights on, whispering
The truest things
Into the receiver.
A small dog scuttles past, like a wig
Drawn by an invisible cord. It is spring.
The pirates out selling fakes are finally
Able to draw a crowd. College girls,
Inspired by the possibility of sex,
Show bare skin in good faith. They crouch
Over heaps of bright purses, smiling,
Willing to pay. Their arms
Swing forward as they walk away, balancing
That new weight on naked shoulders.
The pirates smile, too, watching
Pair after pair of thighs carved in shadow
As girl after girl glides into the sun.
You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
I am invisible here, like I like it.
The language you taught me rolls
From your mouth into mine
The way kids will pass smoke
Between them. You feed it to me
Until my heart grows fat. I feed you
Tiny black eggs. I feed you
My very own soft truth. We believe.
We stay up talking all kinds of shit.
-- Tracy K. Smith
"Self-Portrait as the Letter Y"
WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH