Juneteenth and not July 4th
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
As we move into summer, lots of folks I know celebrate the 4th of July as Independence Day. Not me.
I actually commemorate the 4th as Louis Armstrong's birthday.
Freedom day for me and mine will always be the nineteenth of June. Known to many as "Juneteenth"
The independence of the United States from England didn't free my family from forced servitude in perpetuity.
The stars and stripes represented the lash and the auction block.
The Constitution didn't count us black folks as fully human.
But on the 19th of June, something very special happened in our history, so this week's front porch celebration will honor it.
Juneteenth
Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.
Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All of which, or neither of these version could be true. Certainly, for some, President Lincoln's authority over the rebellious states was in question For whatever the reasons, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory.
Slavery and its aftermath, as I have often pointed out, is not ancient history for many of us. Some of us are old enough to have met a person, or have a great-grandparent who was enslaved. Stories from that terrible time are passed down in families.
A few families have preserved precious photos like the one of "John" which is shown in the news story below, sold recently at a NC auction after the owner of the picture died. John survived to gain his freedom. Many thousands did not.
Freedom is still a precious word - not to be taken lightly.
"Before I'll be a slave...I'll be buried in my grave..." are the words from an old spiritual "Oh Freedom" which got plenty use during the Civil Rights Movement.
Lest we forget...Oscar Brown Jr. reminds us in "Bid em In" of the inhumanity practiced in our nation - North and South, towards one large segment of founding fathers and mothers who were black of skin.
and Paul Robeson sang it profoundly in "No More Auction Block for Me"
The following video is a trailer from a documentary produced for PBS pm the history of Juneteenth.
"Juneteenth - A Celebration of Freedom" is an inspiring, historical documentary that captures the spirit of the Juneteenth experience and explains the origin and evolution of this important date in the history of our country. The documentary provides an insightful perspective about this significant day in American history that is often misunderstood and overlooked. This is a compelling program that all viewers will find interesting and informative.
History experts such as Dr. Maceo Dailey, Rep. Al Edwards, Dr. Roland Hays, Frank Jackson, Karen Riles, Eleanor Davis Thompson, and Dr. George C. Wright relate personal recollections of Juneteenth and offer historical background about the day. The documentary also includes a dramatic performance of slave narratives by the Charles Gilpin Players of Prairie View A&M University.
A Project of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture
And the School of Architecture at Prairie View A&M University
Executive Producer: Akel Kahera, Ph.D.
Directed by: Jim Bailey
Director of Photography: Mark Susman
Produced by Sunset Productions at Fast Cut Films
Edited by Mike Snow
I am sick and tired of hearing people say that we should "forget about slavery". That it's ancient history. As long as this country has one living racist we will live with its legacy. As long as this country has black people locked behind bars in inequitable numbers, it is alive and well in the USA.
Juneteenth was the beginning of a new era...but the story isn't finished. It's up to us to keep turning the pages until the book is closed, and we can write "The End".
So let us not forget history this week...and let us remember that no one is free until all of us are free.
We who believe in Freedom cannot rest...
Ella Baker
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This is no longer "becoming" an outrage, it is an outrage! Race Talk: African American Mississippi man starts record sixth murder trial!
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An African American man, Curtis Flowers, made history this week when he became the first person in U.S. history to ever go on trial for murder six times for the same crime. Mr. Flowers has been in jail in Mississippi since 1996, accused of the murder of four people at a furniture store. Jury selection started this week in tiny Winona Mississippi, population 5,482.
Mr. Flowers has been in jail since 1996 awaiting trial and was previously tried for these murders in 1997, 1999, 2004, 2007 and 2008. All either ended in hung juries or overturned convictions. The five previous trials have already cost the State of Mississippi over $300,000.
Winona, known as the "Crossroads of Mississippi," is a small town in a small poor rural county 120 miles south of Memphis and about 100 miles north of Jackson Mississippi. Winona is in Montgomery County. The total population of the county is just over 12,000. The county is 45 percent African American. The median home value in Winona is $51,000.
A 1997 conviction of Mr. Flowers was reversed by the Mississippi Supreme Court because the prosecution improperly used theatrics and irrelevant evidence of other crimes to inflame and prejudice the jury. A 1999 conviction was reversed because the prosecution used hearsay evidence and twisted the facts before the jury.
A 2004 conviction was reversed after the prosecutor exercised all fifteen of his peremptory strikes on African Americans. The Mississippi Supreme Court said that trial "presents us with as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen..."
The fourth and fifth trials ended in mistrials when the juries were not able to reach a unanimous verdict.
In the 2007 trial, five African American jurors voted to acquit and the seven white jurors voted to convict. In the 2008 trial, a retired African American teacher held out for acquittal. The prosecutor later charged that juror with perjury, only to drop the charge.
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Under pressure from local community leaders, the federal Office for Civil Rights will look at whether low academic achievement of African American students results from discrimination -- intentional or not -- by the Los Angeles Unified School District. LA Times: Black students added to discrimination probe at L.A. Unified.
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The probe, disclosed in a recent letter to community groups, expands an ongoing investigation into services provided to students who are learning English.
Black community leaders hailed the news at a Saturday community forum at the Southside Bethel Baptist Church in the Green Meadows neighborhood of South Los Angeles. But participants also said they were disappointed that their calls for an investigation took so long to bear fruit.
"To initially focus on one group and exclude others could have been divisive and counterproductive to overall reform," the Rev. Eric P. Lee said prior to the forum.
"It is unfortunate that it required the civil rights community to demand from the Department of Education that children be provided educational equality," added Lee, who is president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles.
Officials with the federal agency said in March that they would focus on English learners at L.A. Unified because the district has about 220,000 -- more than any other school system in the country. English learners, most of them Latino, make up a third of students in the nation’s second-largest school system. Black students make up 10.8% of enrollment.
Federal officials said they are pursuing potential discrimination concerns involving black students in other regions of the country. They added that evaluating programs for English learners should benefit all underserved students, especially the many black students who do not speak standard English.
Black community leaders were not satisfied. L.A. Unified enrolls more than 70,000 African American students, far more than any other school system in the state. And civil rights leaders have argued that black children never achieved the equality promised by integration and other past reform efforts.
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As legislation to help Haiti stalls in Congress, Haitian President René Préval is being called on to kick-start the election process. Miami Herald: Préval urged to set elections,
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Haitian President René Préval is being urged to move faster to schedule presidential and parliamentary elections in quake-battered Haiti or risk losing the confidence of the U.S. Congress.
8-PAGE REPORT
The warning comes from an influential member of Congress, who in an eight-page report obtained by The Miami Herald calls for Préval -- whose presidential mandate ends in 2011 -- to ``issue the appropriate decree establishing an official date for presidential and parliamentary elections, without delay.''
``Our government is sympathetic to the plight of Haitians, as demonstrated by the assistance our military, diplomats and development experts provided in the wake of the disaster,'' Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., ranking member of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, said. ``But the positive effect of assistance programs will be limited if Haiti lacks a responsible, popularly-elected government.''
Préval has repeatedly expressed his desire to hold elections, telling Haitians as recently as last week during an appearance in the Dominican Republic to prepare to go to the polls. And while he has been reluctant to announce a formal date, his advisors told The Miami Herald that a presidential decree authorizing the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) to schedule the elections for Nov. 28 is currently under review and should be published in the coming days.
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This issue is all over Caribbean Radio. Carib World News: Caribbean Diaspora Not Even A Blip On Radar of Caricom/Clinton Meeting.
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Caribbean ministers of foreign affairs and heads of delegation of 15 Caribbean countries again met with a top U.S. official on Thursday and yet again, the issues germane to the Caribbean Diaspora failed to make even a footnote on their agenda.
Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Heads of Delegation of Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, the Commonwealth of Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, the Republic of Guyana, the Republic of Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the Republic of Suriname, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago on Thursday met with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Bridgetown, Barbados to discuss issues of interest to the region.
But while regional issues, including not just Haiti and the oil spill, but health cooperation made the agenda, not a single mention was made of immigration reform, an issue germane to the region`s Diaspora, which has continued to prop up the GDP of many Caribbean nations through billions in remittances sent back annually.
Unlike their Latin American counterparts, who have used every opportunity to push not just domestic issues, but the issue of immigration reform for their Diaspora nationals, Caricom leaders again ignored their Diaspora and kept silent.
In Caribbean American Heritage Month, not a single mention was made of the issues of concern to this important bloc. Instead, all politics was kept local, as leaders pledged to `meet the common challenges of the 21st Century (by declaring) our intention to act in concert to improve the social and economic well-being of our peoples, to ensure the safety of all our citizens, to advance towards a secure and clean energy future, and to defend and strengthen our democratic institutions.
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Pambazuka News: June 13 will mark 30 years since Walter Rodney ‘the prophet of self-emancipation’ was murdered in Guyana at the hands of a brutal dictator acting in cahoots with the agents of international capital.
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In commemorating the life of Walter Rodney, it is our responsibility to contextualise his killing and to remind ourselves of the role of imperialism and the pivotal role of the big powers in his silencing.
It was not the first time in the modern history of the world that a defender of the people’s right to equality was silenced, nor would it be the last time. Walter Rodney’s killing can be compared to that of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Congo in 1961. It could be compared with the murder of Amilcar Cabral, leader of the African Party for the Independence and Union of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in 1973 at the hands of Portuguese agents. It could be compared with the killing in 1983 of Maurice Bishop, prime minister of Free Grenada, at the hands of overzealous counter revolutionary agents in his party, the New Jewel Movement. It could also be compared with the murder in 1973 of Salvador Allende, prime minister of Chile, at the hands of Pinochet acting in collusion with agents of international capital.
These and other leaders committed one single crime; they had a passion for real change. They drew their examples for change from the working people, and created new ways, new approaches for dealing with the unequal relationship between the ruling classes and the poor. These were change agents. They recognised the historical problem of racial, economic, social, and cultural inequality between the then called ‘third world’ and the ‘first world,’ and dedicated their lives to change the status quo in their respective countries. They exposed the role of local dictators who benefited from the status quo, and hence were invested in dictatorial processes that kept the working people in subjection.
These leaders, among many others, were killed by agents of foreign and local capital over the period 1960–1990 to send a message to the working people of the former colonial world. That message being that international capital and their local agents are not prepared and will not tolerate any real demands for changes in the economic, political, social, and cultural status quo of the former colonies. This accounts in part for stagnation, retrogression, and continuous deterioration today of the conditions of ordinary people in most areas of the former colonial world.
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A first-time visitor reacts to the harsh realities of life for the majority in South Africa. The Root: World Cup Report: Poverty and Promise in South Africa
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The new South Africa is a bountiful land, a country of extremes. Affluence lives next to poverty. I see this on my first visit.
My suburban accommodations are top-class: high walls, electrical fences, remote-controlled metal gates, panic buttons, security guards and manicured lawns. Less than five minutes away sits a shantytown. The nearest sign says Primrose. As an outsider looking in, I think, squalor, hell on earth. This unplanned, uninvited squatter settlement is part of Germiston, an old mining community. Little evidence remains of the gold rush. Broken dreams can exist only where hope once lived.
A cloud of smoke hangs low like an umbrella above the place, a glum symbol of the misery, poverty and blight that must inhabit the days and nights of the men, women and children who live there. Makeshift shacks no bigger than a single room house entire families. A man relieves himself under a shade tree. Portable toilets, normally deployed for special events or at construction sites, serve as public latrines. Here there is no running water except for when the rains return. Communal water quenches thirst but does not heal the communal suffering.
This shantytown is, unfortunately, still too much of South Africa. For generations, even before the adoption of apartheid in 1948, millions of men and women have come from the rural areas to toil in the gold and diamond mines, and to wait hand and foot on the white upper class. The white-minority government was always more interested in keeping the black majority in its place than meeting its basic needs. Excluded from white and colored-only areas, migrant workers created wood, cardboard and galvanize shantytowns that still squat outside each major South African city. Langa, a shantytown outside Cape Town, along the route to and from the airport, sits like a festering boil between the scenic Table Mountain range and the historic port city.
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The same debate that Hip Hop evokes in the states. The debate has intensified since lethal police raids in a slum that is the home turf of an alleged drugs and arms trafficker whose violent lifestyle is glorified in lyrics of a music called dancehall. LA Times: Jamaica music lyrics — trigger of violence?
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Ova di wall, Ova di wall
Put yuh AK ova di wall...
Blood a go run
Like Dunns River Fall.
Blood flowing like waterfalls. Brains floating like feathers out of a torn pillow. Women submitting to the whims of neighborhood "dons."
The images are typical of dancehall, a popular Jamaican music style that has sparked a furious debate over whether it merely reflects an increasingly violent society or somehow contributes to the mayhem.
Some of dancehall's most popular performers, including Elephant Man, who wrote "Ova di Wall," use hyperviolent lyrics that chronicle the exploits of "badmanism," the cult of gun-toting gangs. Some are also criticized as misogynistic and anti-gay.
The national debate has intensified in the aftermath of lethal police raids last month in the Tivoli Gardens slum that is the home turf of Christopher "Dudus" Coke, the alleged drugs and arms trafficker whose violent lifestyle is glorified in dancehall lyrics.
Community leader Henley Morgan, a pastor who runs a social outreach program in the lower-class Trenchtown district where reggae legend Bob Marley grew up, worries that the extreme songs of dancehall, a successor to ska, rocksteady and reggae, could be "dictating the culture."
"This is music that is coming out of what we call garrisons, or ghettos that have been politicized. Violent dancehall has a lot of profanity, glorifies guns and degrades women," Morgan said. "Not all dancehall promotes violence, but it's the songs with raunchy lyrics that get played."
Youths interviewed recently seemed torn between their enjoyment of a genre that is perfect "jumping up," or dance, music and their aversion to the lyrics' often explicit messages.
"These are things the Jamaican middle class doesn't want to hear, but they happen in our society," said Adrian Demetrius, a 20-year-old telemarketer who was interviewed one Saturday night amid the din of a popular dance club here called Quad. "Dancehall is just bringing it to the mainstream."
As the music's influence has grown, Jamaica's Broadcasting Commission has tried to impose rules on radio stations to limit explicit language. But dancehall's enormous popularity has frustrated those efforts fueled competition among the island's radio stations to play the most outrageous tunes, said Donna Hope, a Jamaican music expert and professor at the University of the West Indies.
Hope said the music is a reflection of inner city reality and a product of "the social environment from which it has emerged."
"It's the old chicken-and-egg question that doesn't have a clear answer," said Hope, who has written several books on Jamaica's musical heritage. "I don't believe the simplistic analysis that music is responsible for social violence. If we have a huge bloody set of incidents, you can be sure they will be documented in music, just as, I assure you, the Tivoli Gardens operation soon will be."
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Proper policing, better government and a stronger economy are starting to make a difference in the more violent and squalid districts of Brazil’s former capital. Economist: A magic moment for the city of God.
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THANKS to a film ("City of God") made in 2002, Cidade de Deus, a rundown housing project in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, became an internationally known symbol of the lawless urban squalor that has blighted Brazil’s most glamorous city for decades. The Comando Vermelho, a heavily armed gang of drug traffickers, dominated the lives of the 60,000 or so residents of Cidade de Deus and its surrounding favelas (the Brazilian term for the tightly packed self-built slums of the poor). The gangsters, some of them teenagers, could impose their reign of terror thanks to the brutal incompetence of the police and the venal indifference of the authorities.
Some of these problems are repeated across Brazil’s cities. But they are particularly acute in Rio de Janeiro, which has suffered chronic misgovernment and decline since the capital moved to Brasília in 1960. Ahead of Rio’s bagging of the 2016 Olympic games last autumn, rivals muttered about its criminal violence. In the week before the Olympic committee’s decision, the New Yorker magazine ran a chilling account of a Rio drug lord and his fief.
But Rio is undergoing a renaissance, one which even holds out hope for the 1m of the city’s 6m residents who live in favelas. Last year the police took control of Cidade de Deus—this time for keeps, they say. A force of 318 officers, backed by 25 patrol cars, is based in a new community-police station in a side street between two fetid, litter-strewn drainage channels. The result has been dramatic. In 2008 there were 29 murders in Cidade de Deus. So far this year there has been just one, and it involved a beating rather than a firearm, says José Beltrame, the security secretary in the Rio state government who is in charge of policing in the city. Other crime has fallen too.
Many residents are appreciative. "It was horror before," says Jeanne Barbosa, who runs a small bar on the ground floor of her house. "Bodies would be thrown out of passing cars, and there were kids with revolvers." Her niece was killed as she walked home, by a stray bullet from a firefight between the police and traffickers. "Now the children can play in the street." A dreadlocked unemployed welder who gives his name as Sérgio is more sceptical. He says the police commit abuses. His friend, who has the blank stare of a crack addict, adds with deranged precision: "89% of them are corrupt."
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A number of productions, from Fela! to Fences, featuring black performers, are nominated for a record number of Tony Awards this weekend. But notwithstanding the power of Denzel, most Broadway audiences remain overwhelmingly white. The Root: Why Aren't More Blacks in the Audience at Broadway Plays?
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Several plays that have been wooing audiences and critics alike and with particular interest to black folks are up for a record number of Tony Awards. So how well is Broadway--or Off Broadway, for that matter--doing in terms of attracting blacks?
About 75 percent of Broadway theatergoers are white, though according to the Broadway League, which co-sponsors the Tony Awards, audiences have become ''slightly more diverse over the past decade.'' Blacks, Latinos and Asians made up the balance. In the 2008-2009 season, when shows included In the Heights, Rent, Thurgood and Joe Turner's Come and Gone and the all-black version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, less than 3 percent of 12.15 million tickets sold were to black Broadway theatergoers. In recent years, when the lineup included the Oprah Winfrey-produced The Color Purple and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof--starring James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Terrence Howard and Anika Noni Rose and directed by Debbie Allen--black turnout was double that. (There was some overlap between seasons with Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.) The overall gross annual revenue is something like $700 million--even in these dire and confused economic times
Making it on Broadway is not easy. Even now Fela!, a musical about the life of the musician and Nigerian activist, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who died in 1997, is struggling to fill seats. Its audience, according to the New York Times, is full of white people, who apparently love the spectacle of blacks dancing and singing--even if they don't understand anything about Fela or Nigerian history. It is up for 11 Tonys, including several for Bill T. Jones, who wrote, directed and choreographed the production.
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Huffington Post: Slave Children Photo Found In North Carolina Attic.
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A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy.
Art historians believe it's an extremely rare Civil War-era photograph of children who were either slaves at the time or recently emancipated.
The photo, which may have been taken in the early 1860s, was a testament to a dark part of American history, said Will Stapp, a photographic historian and founding curator of the National Portrait Gallery's photographs department at the Smithsonian Institution.
"It's a very difficult and poignant piece of American history," he said. "What you are looking at when you look at this photo are two boys who were victims of that history."
In April, the photo was found at a moving sale in Charlotte, accompanied by a document detailing the sale of John for $1,150, not a small sum in 1854.
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This reminds of some arguments on the main page! Race Talk: Obama is black but he’d better not say so.
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It is now politically incorrect to call anyone a racist, even if they are. But how can you tell anymore? Those who used to be identifiable as black racists now have white friends and white racists have black friends.
I know a black guy in North Carolina who often drops in for a chat with his neighbor, who is a local Grand Dragon in the Klan. Seriously! So doesn’t that give the Grand Dragon plausible deniability of racism?
I know a Chinese woman whose best friend is black; but she doesn’t particularly like black people. In fact she doesn’t particularly like Chinese people. Is she a racist? Race is a really touchy subject all over the world right now.
I do a lot of international blogging and a man from Amsterdam, who I had come to know as quite racially liberal, was very offended because I referred to him as white. I had seen his photo. He is white.
A woman from Copenhagen was similarly outraged when I told her that we are likely to understand some things differently because she is white and I black. She had no problem with my social reality being different because of gender, nationality or mode of thinking.
"I don’t see you as black. You are simply a human being, and so am I," she wrote with seeming pride in her liberalism.
"No I am a black human being and you are a white human being. Our points of view will be different at times because of race," I said. But the more I tried to explain the angrier she got.
We exchanged three or four emails and eventually she wrote: "Because some bad white people did something awful to you in your childhood... I am not responsible for American racism and so I’m not going to feel sorry for you. Forget it! No!"
Wow! I furrowed my brow. I had not once asked her to feel sorry for me. I have an advanced degree from an Ivy League university. I worked at the Washington Post and New York Times. How could I convince her that "good" white people had done more for me than "bad" white people had done against me?
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
Returning with a drug habit he acquired while serving in Korea, Etheridge Knight was arrested for robbery and sentenced in 1960 to eight years in Indiana State Prison. While serving time, he began to write poetry and corresponded with members of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement; Gwendolyn Brooks was one and enthusiastically championed him and his prison poetry. His first volume "Poems From Prison" was published in 1968 while he was still incarcerated. It was an immediate success and he continued to write while out of prison, receiving grants and honoraria from The Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment of the Arts, among others. In 1990, at the age of 49, Knight earned a Bachelor's degree in American Poetry and Criminal Justice from Martin Center University in Indianapolis. He died the next year of lung cancer.
The Idea of Ancestry
Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.
I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins.I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).
I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,
and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say).He's discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space.My father's mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everbody's birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no
place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."
-- Etheridge Knight
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The Front Porch is now open.
We've got strawberry soda pop and barbecue in honor of Juneteeth. Grab a plate and step up to the grill.