Congressman John Lewis honors the legacy of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
There are living legends among us. No need to open history books — we simply have to listen and learn. John Lewis—civil rights activist and Congressman is one of those who not only talks the talk—he has walked the walk. We are blessed to have him— alive —to tell us his story and serve as a power of example.
Lewis recently delivered the keynote address to graduates at Bates College.
Bates, located in Lewiston Maine seems at first look to be an odd place for Lewis to be giving a keynote speech at graduation. We learn through his address the Bates connection to the civil rights movement.
Civil rights hero John Lewis to Class of ’16: ‘Get in trouble — good trouble’
A dynamic speaker, Lewis dedicated most of his time to autobiographical episodes intended as inspiration and exhortation for the Bates students. But he began by recognizing the role of a founding father of the modern civil rights movement — the Rev. Benjamin E. Mays, Class of 1920 — and Bates’ role in shaping that civil rights theorist and King mentor.
“I feel more than honored, I feel more than lucky, I feel blessed to be standing here on this campus to speak to you, the graduates, where a man by the name of Benjamin Mays once stood,” Lewis said. “Many, many years ago I got to know Dr. Mays. He was part of my inspiration, he was my friend, my leader.”
Lewis cited Mays’ statement that Bates did not emancipate him, but instead enabled him to emancipate himself. “This is the great power of education, and Dr. Benjmain Mays is a shining example,” Lewis said. “I want to thank Bates College for what you did, and continue to do, to free and liberate humankind.”
Lewis never fails to speak of those man and women upon whose shoulders we stand.
For those of you who don’t know his history — meet Dr. Benjamin Mays.
Benjamin Mays (1894-1984) was a minister, educator, scholar and social activist. He was known as the "Father of the Civil Rights Movement."
Mays was born the youngest in his family and his parents were both former slaves. He grew up in Epworth, South Carolina, just a few miles from Greenwood in a time in history of rigid segregation. This became the defining period of his life and he longed to get an education.
After pleading with his father he was allowed to go to SC State College to finish his high school degree. He decided he would get a college degree up north where he would have more opportunity. (**That college was Bates, in Lewiston Maine.)
The defining moment in Mays career was as president of Morehouse College where he would meet a young Martin Luther King Jr. He was an advisor to US presidents and was recognized internationally as a leader. Mays died in Atlanta on March 28, 1984.
Bates played a key role in Mays’ education.
After spending a year at Virginia Union University, Mays grew weary of the segregated south and needed a place that ensured physical and emotional safety for him to pursue his studies. Professors at his university spoke highly of a small liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine called Bates College, saying it provided "the best education available for an ambitious man like him." Mays' personal attraction to the college was tied to the college's debate team, which at the time was considered the best in the country, and his ability to have the "same opportunity to excel as an equal with other students."
He moved north to attend Bates in 1917. He was one of few black students at Bates, but he encountered little racial prejudice at the college and felt as through he was an equal. He said, of his time at Bates, "For the first time...I felt at home in the universe." While at Bates, he was captain of the debate team and played on the football team. In his sophomore year he became captain of the Bates Forum and served as the Class Day Speaker. He graduated from the college in 1920, with a B.A., as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate. Shortly after graduating from Bates, he married his first wife, Ellen Harvin, who died in 1923, following an operation. Approximately seventeen years later, the college extended an honorary degree, Doctor of Laws, and gave him the first-ever "Alumnus of Merit Award", subsequently renamed the "Benjamin E. Mays Medal", the college's highest honor.
To learn more about Dr. Mays, I suggest his autobiography, “Born to Rebel”
Born the son of a sharecropper in 1894 near Ninety Six, South Carolina, Benjamin E. Mays went on to serve as president of Morehouse College for twenty-seven years and as the first president of the Atlanta School Board. His earliest memory, of a lynching party storming through his county, taunting but not killing his father, became for Mays an enduring image of black-white relations in the South. Born to Rebel is the moving chronicle of his life, a story that interlaces achievement with the rebuke he continually confronted.
At the graduation, Congressman Lewis also told stories about his childhood, exhibiting his sense of humor.
Typical of Lewis’ humor was the story he told about raising chickens on his parents’ farm in Alabama. Wanting to be a minister, he’d preach to the birds in the chicken yard while his siblings and cousins watched.
“Some of those chickens would bow their heads, some of those chickens would shake their heads, but they’d never quite say amen,” he said. “But I’m convinced that some of the chickens that I preached to in the ’40s and the ’50s tended to listen to me much better than some of my colleagues listen to me today in the Congress. Some of those chickens were a little more productive.”
Recounting his first meeting with King, Lewis said that the great civil rights leader “inspired me to stand up, to speak up, and speak out. And I got in the way, I got in trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble.”
So, he told the graduates, “You must find a way to get in the way and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. … You have a moral obligation, a mission and a mandate, when you leave here, to go out and seek justice for all. You can do it. You must do it.”
You can listen to the full address here.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Newcomers say gentrification is about wealth, not race. But that’s a distinction without a difference. New York Times: The End of Black Harlem.
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I HAVE lived in Harlem for half my life — 30 years. I have seen it in all its complexities: a cultural nexus of black America, the landing place for Senegalese immigrants and Southern transplants, a home for people fleeing oppression and seeking opportunity. Harlem is the birthplace of so much poetry and music and beauty, but in the eyes of many who have never set foot here, it has long been a swamp of pain and suffering.
It is also changing, rapidly. A few years ago I was on Eighth Avenue, also known as Frederick Douglass Boulevard, picketing a fund-raiser for a politician who was pushing for denser mixed-use zoning along 125th Street, the “Main Street” of my sprawling neighborhood. Harlem has seen an influx of tourists, developers and stroller-pushing young families, described in the media as “urban pioneers,” attracted by city tax abatements. New high-end housing and hip restaurants have also played their part. So have various public improvements, like new landscaping and yoga studios. In general all this activity has helped spruce the place up. Not surprisingly, on that day a few passers-by shot us ugly looks, as if to say, “Why can’t you accept a good thing?”
But even then, a few boys passing by on their bikes understood what was at stake. As we chanted, “Save Harlem now!” one of them inquired, “Why are y’all yelling that?” We explained that the city was encouraging housing on the historic, retail-centered 125th Street, as well as taller buildings. Housing’s good, in theory, but because the median income in Harlem is less than $37,000 a year, many of these new apartments would be too expensive for those of us who already live here.
Hearing this, making a quick calculation, one boy in glasses shot back at his companions, “You see, I told you they didn’t plant those trees for us.”
It was painful to realize how even a kid could see in every new building, every historic renovation, every boutique clothing shop — indeed in every tree and every flower in every park improvement — not a life-enhancing benefit, but a harbinger of his own displacement.
In fact, it’s already happening. Rents are rising; historic buildings are coming down. The Renaissance, where Duke Ellington performed, and the Childs Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ, where Malcolm X’s funeral was held, have all been demolished. Night life fixtures like Smalls’ Paradise and Lenox Lounge are gone.
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Mic.com travels through rural Mississippi to show how poverty and race can play a role in lack of access to the internet EBONY: Bridging the Digital Divide Where Bridges are Few.
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During the trip, I visited the Stone Elementary School in Wiggins, Mississippi, where Dr. Roberto Gallardo, a grassroots organizer and scholar from Mississippi State University, helped implement a robotics program. Gallardo is working to ensure that the most marginalized communities in the state can access and adopt fixed, high-speed internet. He crisscrosses the state educating elected officials and the broader public about technology with the intent of bridging the digital divide.
I asked 11-year-old Phillip Walker, a participant in the program, to teach me how to code. Like any self-assured 11-year-old born into a world of technological gadgets, he was baffled.
"How do you not know how to code?" he asked. "How'd you get this job then?
Phillip and I are miles and years apart. So, too, are our digital literacies. I can only imagine how much the gap will expand as time goes on. I am also left to wonder how anyone disconnected from the wave of new technologies can thrive.
The people most at-risk for being left behind in the digital age are those who already suffer the effects of racism, economic disenfranchisement and lack of access to resources because of where they live. In the case of Mississippi, Black and poor people, especially those who live in the rural Mississippi Delta, are most affected.
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The history of African Americans has been shaped by two great journeys.
The first brought millions of Africans to the southern United States as slaves. The second, known as the Great Migration, began around 1910, when six million African Americans left the South for New York, Chicago and other cities across the country.
In a study published Friday in PLOS Genetics, a team of geneticists explored how these journeys have left genetic clues in the DNA of living African-Americans. The variations in their genes carry clues about the cruelties of slavery and the routes many took to escape it.
But Dr. Esteban G. Burchard, a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, said its importance went well beyond history. A detailed map of genetic variations in African-Americans will help show how genes influence their risk for diseases.
“This has tremendous medical relevance,” he said.
Until recently, most research into the link between genes and disease has focused on people of European descent. “We’re missing out on a lot of biology and diversity,” said Simon Gravel, a geneticist at McGill University.
The history of African-Americans poses special challenges for geneticists like Dr. Gravel. During the slave trade, their ancestors were captured from genetically diverse populations across a swath of West Africa.
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Chad’s former dictator is to learn his fate on Monday after a 26-year battle by his alleged victims to bring him to justice.
A court in Dakar will decide whether Hissène Habré is guilty of murder, torture, rape and crimes against humanity in the culmination of a five-month trial.
The landmark case is the first time the courts of one country have prosecuted the former leader of another for alleged human rights crimes. Activists say it gives hope to the victims of dictators that it is possible to bring their tormentors to justice.
Habré, hiding his face behind sunglasses and a voluminous white turban, sat in court each day to hear dozens of Chadians describe the horrors they suffered at the hands of his officials.
On one of the most dramatic days of the trial, a woman who had been imprisoned at the presidential palace revealed a secret she said she had been hiding for 30 years: she accused Habré of raping her four times.
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AS THE sun sets on a Friday in a smart new suburb of Lagos, Harim Obidike dons hiskippah and opens up a prayer book. It is the start of shabbat, the Jewish holy day, and as he croons through the psalms, a gaggle of youngsters sing along. “We are Israelites,” he says after bread has been broken and the candles lit.
Nigeria is a devout country split loosely between a Muslim north and a Christian south: two halves which were brought together by colonialists and still butt heads today. A couple of decades ago, modern Judaism was almost unheard of. But this household is one of a growing number that are taking to the Torah. In Abuja, the capital, there are at least four small communities of Igbo-speakers that have opened synagogues. (Jews joke that every town needs at least two so that members can hold a grudge, and refuse to attend one of them.) In one, on the outskirts of the city, there is a gospel lilt to the songs: members taught themselves to read Hebrew and then had to make up the tunes, says one.
Yet the embrace by these communities of the laws of Moses has not been warmly reciprocated by the Orthodox establishment in Israel. Unlike proselytising religions such as Christianity, the guardians of Orthodox Judaism go out of their way to make conversion difficult, insisting on a two-year programme of study and lifestyle changes.It might seem odd that people would sign up to join a small faith whose members have suffered centuries of oppression. Yet Uri Palti, Israel’s ambassador to Nigeria, reckons there are more than 40 such communities across the country. Daniel Lis, an academic, thinks there may be thousands of Nigerians who practise Judaism. Millions more of the Igbo tribe believe that they are descended from biblical Israelites. Across Africa as a whole there may be thousands more self-declared Jews. One community in eastern Uganda, the Abayudaya, adopted the faith almost a century ago. Its rabbi was recently elected the country’s first Jewish member of parliament.
Still, officialdom is shifting. Israel’s Jewish Agency last month recognised the Abayudaya as Jews, meaning that they are allowed to emigrate to Israel. There is a precedent. Since the 1980s more than 90,000 Ethiopian Jews (known to some as Falashas) did so after Israel’s rabbis accepted them into the fold.
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