Random Sh*t off of the Top of My Head
By Chitown Kev
I have no overarching themes today; no meticulously researched, linked and documented essay (or what we call here at The Porch “Miss Denise-style”). Part of it is no specific topic has really piqued my interest; another part is that I am working on a new thang (which I will talk about).
1) The Acquittal of Edward Nero in Baltimore- My position on the trials of the six Baltimore police officers accused of killing (murdering, if you ask me) Freddie Gray has always been that no white police officer will be convicted in this case. One or more of the officers will probably have to be convicted because of “riot insurance” reasons, more or less. The convicted officers will be African American.
Those officers that are convicted will deserve it. The usual suspects (here at DK and IRL) will proclaim that "justice” has been served.
And people will continue to wonder why African Americans are so pessimistic and cynical when it comes to matters of law and order.
And I will simply give them an eyeroll and carry on about my day, as I’ve been doing.
Plus ça change and all of that…
2) 240 days- In 240 days ( to the hour as I am writing this), my former United States Senator, President Barack Hussein Obama will become former President Barack Hussein Obama.
My nostalgia has fully kicked in.
Good job, PBO. Damn good job.
3) Apology accepted but…- Oklahoma City Thunder center Steven Adams issued an apology for calling the point guards of the Golden State Warriors "quick little monkeys."
OK, I get the New Zealand thing. I also understand that Mr. Adams is half-Tongan...so he’s not exactly “white” (whatever the hell that means).
I also know that casual racism isn’t unheard of in New Zealand.
Most importantly, Mr. Adams has been here in the States and has played alongside African-American teammates for some years now. I would think that given the uptick in racially divisive rhetoric since the 2008 elections, Mr. Adams is aware of the increasing racial rhetoric against President Obama and all people of color (and that racism has been extensively covered in the foreign press) and that he would know that language like “quick little monkeys” is not acceptable in any context...especially (but not exclusively) in the US.
4) The Return of WAYR- Tomorrow morning at 7:30 am (EST), the What Are You Reading? series returns.
And yes, you read correctly! I will be your host...with some yuuuuuuge shoes to fill because plf515 did a fantastic job in the previous incarnation of that series.
I’ve run across a couple of interesting historical items.
5) I am reading a book now that is set in Vichy France. Which lead me to the fascinating story of Henry Lémery.
6) This is a way too cool thing that I ran across by accident.
African Americans and Cuba's First Experiment in Tourism: The Joe Louis Commission in Post Revolutionary Havana, 1959-1960
During the spring of 1959, Castro contacted former boxing champion Joe Louis through Rowe-Louis-Fischer-Lockhart, Inc., an advertising firm based in New York City. Joe Louis and Billy Rowe, a former columnist with the Pittsburgh Courier, had been long-time friends and partners in this advertising business since 1935. The former heavyweight champion helped Rowe recruit clients, made commercial appearances, and participated in social and promotional events arranged by wealthy businessmen who wanted to bask in the fame and national prominence of the Brown Bomber.
Castro, who witnessed the glory years of Louis’s boxing career as a Cuban youth in the 1930s, also admired Louis’s athletic achievements and his struggle against overwhelming disadvantages as the son of an Alabama sharecropper and great grandson of a slave. The accomplishments of the former boxing champion captured the imagination of African America, elevated the Brown Bomber to the status of the first black hero in white America, and made Joe Louis an international celebrity among colonial subjects who had battled the ravages of American and European imperialism. The Cuban leader also understood that Joe Louis could provide the first serious link with middle-class African Americans. They had tourist dollars to spend but were prohibited by “Jim Crow” restrictions that were standard problems for African American travelers throughout resort venues in the Caribbean.
Louis eventually assembled an impressive delegation of seventy-one prominent leaders, personalities, and newspaper editors who were all well-known throughout black America. Noted members of this delegation included: John H. Sengstacke, Sr., publisher and general editor of the Chicago Daily Defender, the largest black owned daily in the world, and co-founder and past president of the National Negro Publishers Association; Attorney Loren Miller, the editor-publisher and legal counsel for the California Eagle; and Carl Murphy, editor and publisher of the Baltimore Afro-American. Other participants represented the Pittsburgh Courier, the New Orleans Louisiana Weekly, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Ohio Sentinel, the Philadelphia Tribune, Johnson Publications (Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine), the Cleveland Call Post, True Magazine, and the New York Amsterdam News.
No matter the extent to which African Americans became (unavoidably) inculcated with the dominant American version politics of The Cold War, most blacks that I know have had mad respect for Fidel Castro. There are reasons.
7) Are the primaries over yet? They can’t end soon enough. In fact, I’ve pretty much tuned them out already, to an extent...although I must confess that I like a good pie fight on occasion.
(Tossing a sawbuck in The Porch Cussjar on my way out...)
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Maternal grief has been a powerful weapon in the fight to show the world that black lives matter. But the toll it takes on the individuals involved can be severe. The Guardian: For black mothers, mourning in public is an added burden.
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About a year ago, I was standing on the south side of Chicago chatting with the mother of Rekia Boyd, the young woman who was shot in the head by an off-duty cop in 2012, while protesters yards away called for his firing.
While the “Say her name!” chant began to echo into the spring night, Boyd’s mother, Angela Helton, pointed to the T-shirts most protesters were wearing: they had Boyd’s face ironed on to them. She wasn’t wearing one.
“It’s so hard to mourn my daughter when her face is everywhere,” she told me, looking on from a short distance away.
As the movement to end police violence has raged over the past few years, even as the drumbeat of police violence goes on, faces co-opted as symbols for the cause continue to spring up: Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice.
But each of these faces has relatives, most often mothers, who are expected to stand in front of cameras, defending and lamenting the life of the loved one that was ripped away from them. And they are expected to not only be in the public eye, but also to mourn in it.
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NUBA MOUNTAINS, Sudan — “They surrounded us, killed kids and women, burnt the village. We waited until nightfall, and then we escaped to the mountains,” said Kawthar Ali Adelan, who sought refuge from a March offensive by Sudanese armed forces in a remote mountain cave. “We can’t go to get water because we still hear the shelling and see the planes flying around.”
The 25-year-old mother was wedged in a rock crevice with her cooking materials laid out before her. “The shrapnel finds us wherever we hide,” she said.
Assaults like the one on Adelan’s village, Alazrak, coupled with near-daily air bombardment by President Omar al-Bashir’s forces are the new normal in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. For five years now, the government has sought to defeat the rebel fighters who once fought alongside South Sudanese secessionists and now demand greater autonomy in their remote border region. Neither side has been able to gain the upper hand on the battlefield, resulting in a brutal, grinding conflict in which the rebel’s civilian communities are the ultimate victims.
The frontlines of this war have remained remarkably static since it broke out in 2011: Little has changed save for the body count, which has ticked steadily higher. But as Bashir’s government has fallen on increasingly tough economic times — the result of dwindling oil revenues and expensive wars not just in Nuba, but in the Darfur and Blue Nile regions as well — it has started to look for ways to cut military costs. To that end, it has repackaged the notorious Janjaweed militia from Darfur and dispatched it to the Nuba Mountains as a cheaper alternative to conventional troops. This Rapid Support Force (RSF), as it is now called, is under the direct control of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Service and thought to be leading operations against the rebels.
This year, the annual offensive that typically accompanies the beginning of the dry season — when vehicles can once again maneuver over the region’s swampy terrain — came several months later than expected. When it finally got underway, Sudanese forces were flanked by an unusually large number of heavily armed RSF forces, which are less accountable for the civilian casualties they inflict. In late March, these fighters took the lead in launching a massive attack on multiple rebel fronts, including the key towns of Alazrak, Um Serdiba, and Angarto, where fighting is ongoing.
“When they came into Alazrak, they burnt houses [and] food storages of the civilians; some older people who could not flee were killed with machetes,” said Omar Ibrahim, a rebel soldier who estimated the number of pro-government fighters in Alazrak at roughly 6,000.
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In 1838, 272 slaves were sold to help keep Georgetown University afloat. The New York Times helped some readers descended from the slaves piece together their families’ connection to the sale. New York Times: ‘A Million Questions’ From Descendants of Slaves Sold to Aid Georgetown.
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African-Americans have long lived with unanswered questions about their roots, missing branches in their family trees and stubborn silences from elders reluctant to delve into a painful past that extends back to slavery. This month, scores of readers wrote to us, saying they had finally found clues in an unexpected place: an articlepublished in The New York Times.
The story described the sale of 272 slaves in 1838. The men, women and children were owned by the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests. And they were sold — for about $3.3 million in today’s dollars — to help the college now known as Georgetown University stay afloat. We asked readers to contact us if they suspected that their ancestors were among those slaves, who had labored on Jesuit plantations in Maryland before being sold to new owners in Louisiana.
With the help of Judy Riffel, a genealogist hired by the Georgetown Memory Project, a group dedicated to supporting and identifying the descendants of the slaves, we were able to confirm the ancestry of several respondents. Here are their stories, edited and condensed for clarity.
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Violence is a public health problem.
At least that’s how Brooklyn, N.Y.-based emergency physician and community activist Dr. Robert Gore views it.
“You look at public health problems as problems having these identifiable risk factors, and if you can intervene, then you can change the outcome,” Gore, a clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at SUNY Downstate-Kings County Hospital, tells The Root.
“Why can’t we do the same thing with violence?” he says.
Gore knows he isn’t the first person to classify violence in communities as a public health issue. However, years of research and working in emergency departments in Chicago and New York have armed him with the knowledge and the experience to combat the issue differently.
“Working in the trauma center at Cook County Hospital [in Chicago], I had seen young men of color coming in—I wouldn’t say just injured, almost massacred—with multiple gunshot wounds to the head and to the abdomen and pelvis, stab wounds to the head; people beaten up with batons and sticks and any other object that you can possibly imagine,” Gore said.
“[I was] also looking at them like, ‘Wow, they look just like my relatives; they look just like me.’ And I’m wondering, had their circumstances been different, or if my circumstances would have been different, would they be the physicians and I be the patient? I kept on questioning that.”
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Can you dig it? Ebony takes us back into the days of Dolemite and more in this three-part series. Ebony: Black Films’ Rich, Resistant History.
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During the 1970s, many picture show palaces across America weren’t doing the same brisk business they were a decade before, so they quietly transformed into B-movie projecting grindhouses. In Chicago, there was the Fox; in Baltimore, there was the Hippodrome, and in New York City (my neck of the Harlem woods), there was the Tapia. Much like most of New York City back in the bad old days, the Tapia was a theater in decline, yet still retained a glimmer of its yesteryear glam.
Located on 147th Street and Broadway, the Tapia, with its slopped floors and mammoth screen, became the weekend haven for me and a crew that included my boys Beedie, Kyle and Darryl. Every Saturday or Sunday afternoon, after paying 75 cents, we watched all kinds of movies there, from weird sci-fi to bullet-ridden mafia movies to crazy kung-fu headkicks, but our favorite flicks were the ones that featured flamboyant flyboys decked-out in Flare Brothers suits and fur coats.
Munching on popcorn with my eyes glued to the screen, films like Shaft, Super Fly, Foxy Brown and The Mack meant more to us than a stack of Marvel comic books or a sack of McDonald’s burgers. After suffering setbacks in an entertainment system they once controlled before there was a TV in every apartment, major movie studios began allowing their producers to make different kinds of films in hopes of pulling the general public away from their homes. On one hand, cinema rebels Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) were crafting their classics, while down those mean streets, Dolemite was karate smashing, and Youngblood Priest (Super Fly) was making his last score.
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Voices and Soul
by
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Justice Putnam
Sissieretta Jones was the first African-American opera singer to perform at Carnegie Hall. Beloved across the United States, she met internationally acclaim as well, touring the West Indies, South America, Australia, India, and southern Africa. During a European tour in 1895 and 1896, she performed in London, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Milan, and Saint Petersburg.
Jones retired from performing in 1915, devoting the rest of her life to her Church and supporting her ailing mother. Shortly after her mother's death, Jones began to sell her belongings to survive. She died penniless in 1933, at the age of sixty-five.
Sissieretta Jones
Ad libitum
I sing this body ad libitum, Europe scraped raw between my teeth until, presto, “Ave Maria” floats to the surface from a Tituba tributary of “Swanee.” Until I’m a legato darkling whole note, my voice shimmering up from
the Atlantic’s hold; until I’m a coda of sail song whipped in salted wind; until my chorus swells like a lynched tongue; until the nocturnes boiling beneath the roof of my mouth extinguish each burning cross. I sing this life in
testimony to tempo rubato, to time stolen body by body by body by body from one passage to another; I sing tremolo to the opus of loss. I sing this story staccato and stretto, a fugue of blackface and blued-up arias. I sing
with one hand smoldering in the steely canon, the other lento, slow, languorous: lingered in the fields of “Babylon’s Falling” ...
-- Tyehimba Jess
"Sissieretta Jones"
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