Muralizing our dead, our martyrs, and our heroes.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Many of you have probably seen images of this mural over the last few days — flashed on TV screens, or on social media. I sit here wondering if we are going to run out of wall space for all the martyrs we accumulate over time.
Curious about the genesis of this latest community memorial to our slain and fallen at the hands of white power, I searched and found this story.
Artists Paint George Floyd Mural at Cup Foods
Xena Goldman, Greta McLain, and Cadex Herrera made the mural to give the community a place to mourn on 38th & Chicago.
On a wall of the Cup Foods at 38th & Chicago, where the horrifying video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd emerged, is a moving mural bearing Floyd’s name, face, the names of many other black people slain by the police, and the phrase, “I can breathe now.”
The mural has a light blue background, giving way to a sunflower with Floyd’s face and upper body in the head of the flower; with the names of others, including Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Breona Taylor, Michael Brown, Jamar Clark, and more, surrounding him. Large, block orange letters read ‘George Floyd’ with outlines of people in each letter, raising their fists to the sky. On Thursday, people began to gather around the in-work memorial, placing flowers and signs around the mural and writing messages on the sidewalk.
Xena Goldman, Greta McLain, and Cadex Herrera began painting around 7 a.m. on Thursday and completed the mural Friday. Speaking to Fox 9, the artists said they wanted to give the community a place to mourn Floyd, with Herrera adding, “It’s devastating. I hope, at least, some piece can come from this, to reflect on the life of a human being that was unnecessarily taken away.”
Goldman told KARE 11, “Hopefully, it’s a reminder that this should never happen again, and people need to step up in every way that they can to stand up against these corrupt systems.”
I often take for granted the murals I have seen over the years in the cities I have lived in and visited. Some are still there after decades, others disappear as buildings are demolished, or neighborhoods are gentrified.
In this video we take a look at a photo exhibit about a 1967 project called Wall Of Respect. Which was a mural covering a two story building that was the collaborative work done by a radical African American arts organization called the Organization for Black American Culture.
They are not all about death. Many celebrate life, achievement, history and culture. There’s a wonderful book that covers some of the large body of work of Black Muralists.
Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride: African American Murals
by James Prigoff (Author), Robin J.Dunitz (Author), Floyd Coleman (Contributor), and Michael Harris (Contributor)
Two hundred African American murals representing the breadth of the country�s urban landscape--from New York to Los Angeles, Milwaukee to Atlanta�are gathered for the first time in this striking collection. Recounting a tradition of thirty years of mural art, from the creation in 1967 of Chicago's landmark "Wall of Respect " to the hip-hop renderings of the nineties, the book also introduces many new works--some published for the first time.
Walls of Heritage showcases the work of such renowned artists as Charles White, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Hale Woodruff, and John Biggers, as well as the work of extraordinary muralists such as William Walker, Calvin Jones, Mitchell Caton, and Dewey Crumpler. The book also brings the voices of the muralists to the fore, including descriptive narratives by the artists themselves. The book includes artist biographies, an extensive state-by-state listing of the murals in the United States, and informative essays by art historians Floyd Coleman, Ph.D. and Michael Harris, Ph.D
For those of you not familiar with Philly (aka Philadelphia) it is a city of mural riches — thanks to Jane Golden, and Mural Arts Philadelphia
Baltimore is no slouch when it comes to murals either, and has a strong mural arts program.
In Oakland California, the Black and Brown Unity Mural “Black & Brown Dreams” brought two communities together — through art.
The mural is large and covers many themes, concepts and details. In general, the idea was to portray the legacies of pride, resistance and culture that Black and Brown people come from on the ends of the left and right end of the mural. This includes portraits of the late great Maya Angelou, Pastor Emeritus J. Alfred Smith, Sr., a Zulu Warrior, a Black Panther Party member, and an actual black panther. On the left side of the Mural, this was represented for the Latino community as Pastor Ruben Hurtado, an indigenous elder, a Brown Beret, An Aztec Warrior, and a Jaguar.
Along the border of the mural, we placed Indigenous Meso-American and African symbols with a legend explaining their meanings on the adjacent wall. The mural includes painful images - of family separation, Police violence, incarceration, Alcohol, Slavery and wage slavery. It also contains symbols of resistance, power and beauty such as the Scarab Beetle and the Monarch Butterfly, the Sankofa, and the Hummingbird.
The mid-right side of the wall contains the most painful images of incarceration and exploitation, and the mid left side contains families around a bonfire with Black and Latino women braiding their children's hair. Out of the smoke of the fire we see silhouettes of Senegalese Dancers and Aztec Dancers. Maya Angelou's poem, Still I Rise, is quoted on a ribbon flying across the right over the images of violence.
The centerpiece of the Mural is a Scarab Beetle with an African/Meso-American floral arrangement. In the middle of the Beetle, a dark fist symbolizes resistance, and it comes out of the spinal cord on a race-less figure and eventually becomes a tree whose roots reach out throughout the mural pulling back the hands of oppression. Below the roots and the centerpiece are the words: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
There are far too many of these murals in our cities for me to cover them all. I hope you’ll share about some of them you know of, in comments.
You may wonder why — with all that is going down right now, I decided to write about art. I’ve been immersed in music too, each Sunday. The why is simple. I’ve been through Jim Crow and deaths, the Civil Rights Movement and deaths, the Vietnam War and deaths, the burning of cities across the U.S in uprisings, with the deaths that came as part of the package, and to be honest — I’m on mental overload. I have no more tears and I’m attempting to tamp down on my rage. I don’t want to see any more videos that are dead black people porn.
So I’m sitting here looking at murals.
Hoping that one day, the mural art will reflect a world where there is peace, and justice, and beauty.
Until then — I hope the memorials to our dead, bring some measure of comfort to family, friends and community.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students made history this month when they elected the school's first-ever black woman student body president.
Danielle Geathers and running mate Yu Jing Chen won the student government election earlier this month, becoming the president and vice president of the Undergraduate Association.
Geathers just finished her sophomore year and is a major in mechanical engineering,
according to CNN. Last year, she served as the Undergraduate Association's diversity officer.
"In terms of coming from that diversity space and being focused on promoting equity across MIT, it would kind of be important to have someone in the President's role who's focused on that," she said.
CNN reports that she plans to make the school as inclusive as possible in her role.
"Although some people think it is just a figurehead role, figureheads can matter in terms of people seeing themselves in terms of representation," she said. "Seeing yourself at a college is kind of an important part of the admissions process."
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Former President Barack Obama released a statement on the unrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and across the country over the police killing of George Floyd.
Obama called on everyone — including law enforcement — to work together to create a “new normal” that overcomes bigotry and unequal treatment of black Americans.
“It’s natural to wish for life ‘to just get back to normal’ as a pandemic and economic crisis upend everything around us,” said Obama in the statement. “But we have to remember that for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly, ‘normal.’ ... This shouldn’t be normal in 2020 America.”
The statement, released on Twitter Friday, references an email the former president received from a middle-aged African American businessman explaining his distress over the Floyd killing. “The ‘knee on the neck’ is a metaphor for how the system so cavalierly holds black folks down, ignoring the cries for help. People don’t care. Truly tragic,’” read the email quoted in Obama’s statement.
Obama also references another conversation he had with a friend who used the lyrics from 12-year-old Keedron Bryant’s viral song about the Floyd killing to explain the frustration the friend was feeling over the current circumstances. Though Obama doesn’t specify which particular lyrics he’s referring to, Bryant’s song has gotten attention for how it expresses the fears and hopes of black Americans.
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Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, says President Trump barely gave him a chance to speak during a recent phone conversation about the killing of his brother by police in Minneapolis.
Philonise described his call with the president as “fast” in an interview with Al Sharpton on MSNBC.
“He didn’t give me the opportunity to even speak. It was hard. I was trying to talk to him but he just kept like pushing me off like ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about,” Floyd said. “I just told him I want justice. I said that I can’t believe that they committed a modern-day lynching in broad daylight.”
Trump said on Friday that he had spoken to members of George Floyd’s family and that they were “terrific people,” CNN reports.
It remains to be seen if he will pivot to attacking them on social media since his lackluster attempt to mimic empathy has been revealed as a failure.
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Almost as soon as a cellphone video appeared on social media showing a black man struggling to breathe — and finally going silent — with his neck under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer, African Americans in the city’s Longfellow neighborhood took to the streets calling for justice.
Within days, the city was smoldering as protestors started fires and torched stores and a police station. Demonstrations swiftly spread to Los Angeles, where activists blocked a highway, and Atlanta, where protesters set a police vehicle on fire and smashed the windows of the CNN Center.
Watching it all play out on the news, Christie Peters, a 43-year-old general contractor in Atlanta, cried for three days straight.
“It’s just a lot to carry,” she said. “I think it just comes from a place of feeling ineffectual, because what you're asking black people to do is have faith in a system where almost every position of power in this system is led by people who look like, speak like, vote like the very people who are perpetrating this against us.
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George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police has become emblematic of the potentially deadly risk of being black in America. But it’s not just his death that illustrates the country’s racial disparities. His life, especially amid the coronavirus, did as well.
Floyd, 46, had lost his job as a restaurant bouncer due to stay-at-home orders in his state. Of the millions of Americans laid off or furloughed during the coronavirus crisis, black workers are likelier to be affected than whites.
The medical examiner who examined Floyd’s body said that “underlying conditions” likely contributed to his death, which came after now-former police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground with his knee for several minutes. They are among the underlying health conditions that black Americans disproportionately suffer from and that have contributed to higher rates of illness and death from Covid-19.
Centuries of racism and systemic inequality continuously disadvantage, disrupt, and cut short black lives in the United States. Currently, black Americans are experiencing multiple crises layered on top of one another. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and, most recently, Floyd have lost their lives to white violence and police in recent weeks. Now mass protests are sweeping the country as a pandemic is wreaking havoc specifically on black communities, in terms of both health and economics.
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute delves into the myriad ways racial and economic inequality have exacerbated the impact of the coronavirus crisis on black communities.
Millions of black workers have lost their jobs during the pandemic, putting them at a high degree of economic insecurity, in part because they’ve had lower incomes and less savings already.
Of those who’ve kept their jobs, many more are putting their health at risk — black workers are less likely to have jobs that allow them to work from home — a risk magnified by inequalities in the health care system and a higher prevalence of underlying health conditions.
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Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro area has one of the country’s highest standards of living by many measures but the Twin Cities also have some of the largest racial inequities in the U.S. New York Times: ‘The Minnesota Paradox’ And what
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Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro area has one of the country’s highest standards of living by many measures: high incomes, long life expectancy, a large number of corporate headquarters and a rich cultural scene.
But these headline statistics hide a problem: The Twin Cities also have some of the largest racial inequities in the U.S.
Incomes for white families are similar to those in other affluent metro areas, like Atlanta and Los Angeles. Incomes for black families are close to those in poorer regions like Cleveland and New Orleans:
Samuel L. Myers Jr., an economist at the University of Minnesota, has named this combination “the Minnesota paradox.” Because the area is predominantly white, the racial gaps can get lost in the overall numbers.
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Yucca chips, quinoa bao buns, rice milk hibiscus raspberry swirl and dragon fruit lemonade... not the typical menu items that you expect to see in a Harlem eatery.
“Communities that look like me do not typically provide healthy, wholesome food to their people,” says Beard Award-winning chef and owner of Field Trip Restaurant, Chef JJ Johnson.
“Big brands have been making big money within our communities for the past fifty years. I took a big risk on a concept that I call Conscious Eating in a corridor that has the highest unemployment rate in New York City.”
Conscious eating, according to Chef JJ, Is the practice of making educated nutritional choices and paying attention to what you eat. “People in our communities want to eat well,” he says.
And never has it been more important to consume healthy food.
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In the midst of constant news about Black death at the hands of police, emboldened neighborhood racists or disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infections, we need reminders of Black resilience for historical context and our collective psyche. While the story of Black Wall Street and the upcoming anniversary of the 1921 massacre illustrates the brutality of unchecked white supremacy, it also asserts the robust spirit of the Black community and entrepreneurship.
Ninety-nine years ago on May 31, 1921, a white supremacist mob burned down “Black Wall Street,” a prosperous neighborhood of Black-owned businesses, churches and homes in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Racially charged allegations of a young African-American man assaulting a young white woman combined with ongoing resentment of Black success ignited a White mob to kill hundreds of Black Tulsans and destroy acres of their property. It was one of the worst racial mass killings in American history; resulting in the mass exodus of thousands of Black Tulsans. Its aftereffects still deeply impact every aspect of the city.
While segregation by neighborhood and a dwindling Black middle class are the generational repercussions of the “Black Wall Street Massacre” (it was not “a riot” as it is often referred to), many Black Tulsans have an enduring respect for entrepreneurship and a commitment to carrying on this legacy.
“Black Wall Street is not a geographical location, it’s a mindset…it can be anywhere,” explained Phil Armstrong, project manager for the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. The commission is planning a series of events and activities for 2021 designed to educate Oklahomans and the country about Black Wall Street while supporting local entrepreneurship and encouraging cultural tourism. Amstrong’s passion for preserving history and sharing it beyond the city is palpable. He said that within five years of the massacre, Black Tulsans rebuilt the Greenwood District to 75 percent of what it was by pooling their resources, despite being blocked from insurance claims or government assistance. “It’s the spirit of determination and resilience, that’s what made Black Wall Street so viable,” he said.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
After about a dozen racist Qanon posts were published on the Rogue River, Oregon Community FB page with no push back, and instead was promoted and widely shared, I posted a small list of about 70 race riots since just before Reconstruction that the admin took down, but he left the racist bs up, though he did turn off the comments. This is how fascism exists in small town America, you have these f’in little burgermeisters in these f’in little racist burgs thinking they can shut us up. The post was considered "race-baiting" by the racists, of course. Racists can’t stand the truth. I merely responded to posts that were in clear violation of the page “rules,” but the posts and comments that even called for neighbors to be shot if they support antifa remain for all to see. But my somewhat less than comprehensive rundown of race riots against black communities since just before Reconstruction as an historical explanation for why the protests are occurring is deleted. Because, what would you expect from some idiot racist dipshits? I'll repeat, the history of race riots was deleted from the page, but the racist youtube conspiracies and calls to "kill antifa & BLM” remain. Oh, I did report the calls for violence to FB. They haven't gotten to it yet, but they have never muted a racist I've reported yet, though I was suspended by FB for a month for harassment at the beginning of the March for calling the GOP a bunch of F'in Vichy Collaborators. I’d call them Snowflake Wimps, but that would be insulting microscopic crystalline structures.
shall i tell you, then, that we exist?
there came a light, blue and white careening.
the police like wailing angels
to bitter me.
and so this:
dark matter is hypothetical. know
that it cannot be seen
in the gunpowder of a flower,
in a worm that raisins on the concrete,
in a man that wills himself not to speak.
gags, oh gags.
for a shadow cannot breathe.
it deprives them of nothing. pride
is born in the black and then dies in it.
i hear our shadow, low treble
of the clasping of our hands.
dark matter is invisible.
we infer it: how light bends around a black body,
and still you do not see black halos, even here,
my having told you plainly where they are.
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