Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I was involved in a rather spirited discussion recently, with some former classmates whose brains have been consumed by the ghastly TeaBircher walking dead; and have become mouth-gnawing-bone-breaking-mindless-shuffling-toward-any-loud-noise-or-smell-of-blood Zombies themselves.
It was sad to see once beautiful and sexy women reduced to spittle-flecked, red-eyed rage; and once lithe and athletic men now gray and bloody and mad; frantically tearing at corpses long void of any discernible nourishment.
These weren't Zombies from some Caribbean Mythic conjuring though; so I had no choice but to retreat to the high ground to gain some better bearings.
One would think, that if these Zombies looked in the mirror, they would know their mortal coil has been conquered, that their Souls have left the vessel; that their broken and flailing limbs, their skulls absent of brain tissue, the ganglia hanging loose and dripping a slimy green liquid; you would think that would give them a clue to their predicament. But they only respond to a bright flash, a jarring thud and the smell of raw meat. So they shuffle and grasp and mouth senseless words that are mere recitations embedded in a lizard-center of a forgotten hormonal gland activated by Fox News wireless electrical shocks.
Maybe it's cruel for me to say so, maybe it's inflammatory to call these folks the walking dead and use such ghastly, grade-b monster movie metaphor.
Maybe it's simplifying matters to call these folks mindless Zombies; when they know damn well what they are doing. Just as the Good Germans, they so mightily resemble, did before, during and after the fall of the Third Reich.
These TeaBirchers complain of brown people harrassing them with cupped hands begging for something not due them. These TeaBirchers complain of the jobless as losers who should be left to disappear in some other ether; just don't park on their street or ask for a job at their shop. These TeaBirchers consume the most and give back the least; and cheer when doctors are assassinated while advocating for a woman's right to choose.
The TeaBirchers say they harken to the Silent Majority from the time of Nixon and Reagan. Rather than silent, they are a cruel majority; a cruel majority that would rather see a child die of sickness than extend healthcare. A cruel majority that will kick a man or woman when they are down and then penalize them for complaining about it. A cruel majority that expects the unflinching fealty any bully demands, from any who comes between them and what they wish to possess.
A Poem for the Cruel Majority
The cruel majority emerges!
Hail to the cruel majority!
They will punish the poor for being poor.
They will punish the dead for having died.
Nothing can make the dark turn into light
for the cruel majority.
Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror.
If the cruel majority would only cup their ears
the sea would wash over them.
The sea would help them forget their wayward children.
It would weave a lullaby for young & old.
(See the cruel majority with hands cupped to their ears,
one foot is in the water, one foot is on the clouds.)
One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud
between his thumb & middle finger,
to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps.
He is a little god but not a poet.
(See how his body heaves.)
The cruel majority love crowds & picnics.
The cruel majority fill up their parks with little flags.
The cruel majority celebrate their birthday.
Hail to the cruel majority again!
The cruel majority weep for their unborn children,
they weep for the children that they will never bear.
The cruel majority are overwhelmed by sorrow.
(Then why are the cruel majority always laughing?
Is it because night has covered up the city's walls?
Because the poor lie hidden in the darkness?
The maimed no longer come to show their wounds?)
Today the cruel majority vote to enlarge the darkness.
They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds
Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass.
The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel majority.
Hail to the cruel majority!
Hail! hail! to the cruel majority!
The mountains skip like lambs, the hills like rams.
The cruel majority tear up the earth for the cruel majority.
Then the cruel majority line up to be buried.
Those who love death will love the cruel majority.
Those who know themselves will know the fear
the cruel majority feel when they look in the mirror.
The cruel majority order the poor to stay poor.
They order the sun to shine only on weekdays.
The god of the cruel majority is hanging from a tree.
Their god's voice is the tree screaming as it bends.
The tree's voice is as quick as lightning as it streaks across the sky.
(If the cruel majority go to sleep inside their shadows,
they will wake to find their beds filled up with glass.)
Hail to the god of the cruel majority!
Hail to the eyes in the head of their screaming god!
Hail to his face in the mirror!
Hail to their faces as they float around him!
Hail to their blood & to his!
Hail to the blood of the poor they need to feed them!
Hail to their world & their god!
Hail & farewell!
Hail & farewell!
Hail & farewell!
-- Jerome Rothenberg
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Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Samuel Massie Jr. (1919-2005)overcame racial barriers to become one of America’s greatest chemists in research and teaching. As a doctoral candidate during World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project with Henry Gilman at Iowa State University in the development of uranium isotopes for the atomic bomb. In 1966, the U.S. Naval Academy appointed him as its first black faculty member. Massie’s research over fifty years led to the development of drugs to treat mental illness, malaria, meningitis, gonorrhea, herpes, and cancer. Chemical and Engineering News in 1998 named him one of the top seventy-five chemists of all time, along with Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, George Washington Carver, and DNA pioneers James Watson and Francis Crick.
Samuel Massie was born on July 3, 1919, to school teachers Samuel Proctor and Earlee Jacko Massie of North Little Rock (Pulaski County). He had one younger brother. He quickly advanced to high school and graduated second in his class from Dunbar High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County) by age thirteen. Early on, he wanted to be a chemist to find a cure for his father’s asthma.
After working for a year at Horton’s Grocery Store across the street from his home in North Little Rock, Massie had saved enough to afford tuition of $15 per semester at Dunbar Junior College. A year later, in 1934, the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) turned down his application for admission because he was black. He enrolled at Arkansas AM&N (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff); earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a minor in mathematics in 1937; and, with the aid of a federal National Youth Administration scholarship, finished a master’s degree in chemistry in 1940 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught a year at Arkansas AM&N before gaining admission to a doctorate program in chemistry at Iowa State University.
Racial discrimination did not make Massie’s life any easier in Iowa. The closest housing available for African Americans was three miles from campus, requiring him to hitchhike to classes. He noted that he was assigned to a separate lab space "next to the rats in the basement" until he proved himself.
But he almost did not get to complete his doctoral program. Massie returned to Arkansas in 1943 to attend his father’s funeral and to renew his draft deferment. According to his autobiography, a member of the draft board in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) decided that he had too much education for a black man and would be drafted. Massie quickly contacted Dr. Gilman, who assigned him to his research team working on the atomic bomb. In 1946, Massie received his PhD in organic chemistry.....Read More
(emphasis mine)
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos, Managing Editor
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Bob Herbert NYT: This Raging Fire
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When I was a kid my Uncle Robert, for whom I was named, used to say that blacks needed to "fight on all fronts, at home and abroad."
Uncle Robert (my father always called him Jim — don’t ask) died many years ago, but he came to mind as I was going over the dismal information in a new report about the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of America’s black population, especially black males.
We know by now, of course, that the situation is grave. We know that more than a third of black children live in poverty; that more than 70 percent are born to unwed mothers; that by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. We know all this, but no one seems to know how to turn things around. No one has been able to stop this steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.
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The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a jewel in the New York Public Library system. The Root: Harlem's Schomburg Research Center Gets A New Director
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The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a jewel in the New York Public Library system. It is also a revered touchstone for black nationalists and the combination often made any change at the institution a contentious event. But the announcement today may make the transition to a new leader the least controversial in years. The library announced that Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a scholar in African-American history who is an assistant professor at Indiana University, will succeed Howard Dodson as the next director.
Muhammad has stellar credentials as a scholar. His book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America was recently published by Harvard University Press. But his best defense against the rabid nationalists may be his blood line. He is the great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam. He will take over from Dodson, who has held the post for 25 years, in July 2011
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College to Own First Black-Owned Building in Chicago's Loop. Maynard Institute: Johnson Publishing Sells Historic Headquarters
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Johnson Publishing Co. has sold its historic building on Chicago's Michigan Avenue to Columbia College Chicago, the company announced on Tuesday.
It has not yet selected a new home and is to remain in the building for 18 months.
"The sale of 820 S. Michigan is part of the continuing evolution of the company that my father and mother started in the early 1942s," Linda Johnson Rice, Johnson Publishing Co. chairman, said in a statement.
"Just as when JPC moved to this location in 1972, my father would be the first to say it makes good business sense to relocate to space that serves the current needs of the company."
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Picture are worth a thousand words NYT: Homecoming for Stark Record of Apartheid
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When he was only in his 20s Ernest Cole, a black photographer who stood barely five feet tall, created one of the most harrowing pictorial records of what it was like to be black in apartheid South Africa. He went into exile in 1966, and the next year his work was published in the United States in a book, "House of Bondage," but his photographs were banned in his homeland where he and his work have remained little known.
The Ernest Cole Family Trust/Hasselblad Foundation Collection
"Boy in School" by Ernest Cole. More Photos »
In exile Mr. Cole’s life crumbled. For much of the late 1970s and 1980s he was homeless in New York, bereft of even his cameras. "His life had become a shadow," a friend later said. Mr. Cole died at 49 in 1990, just a week after Nelson Mandela walked free. His sister flew back to South Africa with his ashes on her lap.
Mr. Cole is at last having another kind of homecoming. The largest retrospective of his work ever mounted is now on display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, built in the neo-Classical style almost a century ago in an era when South Africa’s great mining fortunes were being made on the backs of black labor. It is a collection of images that still possesses the power to shock and anger.
"How could white people do this to us?" asked Lebogang Malebana, 14, as he stood before a photograph of nude gold-mine recruits who had been herded into a grimy room for examination. "How could they put naked black men on display like that?"
The Ernest Cole Family Trust/Hasselblad Foundation Collection
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Chicago's Urban Prep is a shining example of how same-sex education can and does work for young black males, and it might be the key to closing the dismal achievement gap. The Root: A Case for Same-Sex Education
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Here are the latest depressing reports on the plight of African Americans: Only 12 percent of our fourth-grade boys are proficient readers, compared with 38 percent of white fourth-grade boys. By eighth grade, reading proficiency falls to just 9 percent for black males, 33 percent for whites.
Clearly, this is a crisis situation, with black males almost twice as likely as white males to drop out of high school, and a dropout rate of about 50 percent in some big cities. Black males make up about 5 percent of college enrollment nationally but about 30 percent of the prison population. Based on this depressing achievement gap, the demand for prison beds could remain strong for the foreseeable future.
Or we could open our minds to a different, controversial approach, such as the route taken by Urban Prep Academy, an all-boys charter school in Chicago. While there are pros and cons of same-sex education, we should consider the success of Urban Prep and try to replicate it on a wide scale. Any school that places 107 out of 107 seniors into college is worthy of emulation. Considering the fact that those seniors hail from some of Chicago's most disadvantaged, impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods, Urban Preps should be popping up across the nation as we speak.
Hemera
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[] Tea Party Racists And The Lynching of President Obama by JapanJack
[] When They Don't Bother with the Dog Whistle by Mokurai
[] Are Democrats Nearing Extinction in Some Parts of the U.S.? by RogerShuler