2018 Year In Review
Commentary by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
I’m ever the optimist, but I’m also a student of history. Every forward progression of racial justice, has been met with an inevitable racial backlash. We’ve seen it over an over again (Jim Crow after Reconstruction, the “South Strategy” after the Civil Rights Ear, etc) but the thing that gives me hope is that the march of American history has over the long term been toward more inclusion and diversity. History and freedom are not some inevitable thing as many people assume, instead they have to be fought for, won, and then defended. Black Kos will always be at the forefront of defending those gains as well as pushing for a better future. Thankfully just this past November with Democrats retaking the US House, the resistance awoke, and the forces wanting to take us forward won a victory over those wanting to take us backwards, like a distant memory. But I still feel we serve a useful purpose and are a welcoming community.
With the election of President Trump, a man whom openly espouses bigotry, America seems more racially divided. But maybe it’s really because we’re more aware of our racial shortcomings. Many white Americans have a shocked response to claims of white privileged, unfairness and discrimination. Maybe they have this reaction because it’s outside their daily experience. If you ask many white people, “Do you think traffic stops are done unfairly?” the majority of whites probably would say “NO” because it’s not something they experience. It’s not because of racism; it’s just that it’s not something that they see. Unfortunately personal experiences often are the most powerful foundations of belief systems.
According to the General Social Survey (taken before the 2016 election), only a quarter of whites would choose to live in a neighborhood that was half black. 1 in 5 whites would choose an all-white neighborhood as their ideal neighborhood, while 1 in 4 would choose a neighborhood without any blacks. A plurality of whites still say blacks aren’t hard working, or at least, not as hard working as whites. Pew also notes, a majority of whites say the country has “done enough to give blacks equal rights with whites.” Those facts are why I often write, we shouldn’t confuse my SUNNY optimism about race relations (or, again, how whites view blacks and other groups) with my cautious optimism about racial progress (how groups fare in relation to each other). Trump’s Presidency thus far, I hope has illustrated the difference between the those two main points. People who were not paying attention to the attitudes measured in those General Social Surveys, or thought most people “don’t see race” got a massive awakening with a Republican candidate who first ran on a white (racial) identity platform, and has openly governed on that platform.
But with that being said, we here at Black Kos, have come to the time of the year, when we the editors take our annual holiday season break. We will not be returning until Friday January 11th, 2019. Before we go, I would like to once again thank everyone who reads and participates in Black Kos for continuing to support us. Putting these diaries together takes both a group effort and a lot of individual work. I have always seen it as a real blessing that our diaries are so well received.
But as for 2018, let’s look back at this year. We covered a lot of ground on Black Kos this year, from criminal justice and protest, to history and law, politics and international events, prose and poetry, great black scientists and vile right-wing racists (um excuse me I meant, "I'm not a racist, ‘cause I have black friends, BUT....." rightwingers).
One of the things I have always enjoyed is to spend a little time each year looking back at the great work this team has put together. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s edition of Black Kos. So on behalf of sephius1, Deoliver47, Justice Putnam, and Chitown Kev I would like to say thank you to all our readers. Have a safe holiday season, and a happy new year.
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"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
Before writing this year’s opener I first had to look back at the last two years of Black Kos openers.
When I wrote the opening to Black Kos 2016 what stuck out to me most was how hopeful I was at the beginning of that year. When in the opening commentary on Friday Jan 8th, 2016 “Why I’m still hopeful and optimistic about race relations in America. “ I wrote:
If to your eyes and ears, America seems more racially divided, maybe it’s because we’re all more aware of our racial shortcomings. Many white Americans have a shocked response to claims of white privileged, unfairness and discrimination. Maybe they have this reaction because it’s outside their daily experience. If you ask many white people, “Do you think traffic stops are done unfairly?” the majority of whites probably would say “NO” because it’s not something they experience. It’s not because of racism; it’s just that it’s not something that they see. Unfortunately personal experiences often are the most powerful foundations of belief systems.
I would be a liar if I didn’t say the results of November 8th 2016 didn’t give my optimism pause and make me question my conviction. I believe that’s why on the 2017 opening I wrote on Tuesday January 10, 2017:
But it is also true that I’m less stunned than many of my fellow travelers on the left, because I’ve always been a mix of both optimism and realism. As I’ve often written over the years, every major American advance of racial progress has been met with a stiff resistance and then a backlash. I never been a believer in the idea of a “post racial” America. Ideas of race do and are changing over time, just as they always have and always will, but the social concept of race and everything that idea entails is still with us. Denying that hard fact doesn’t make it disappear. As I’ve written America’s racial history is a series of advancements and then set backs.
Initially blacks and poor white Scot-Irish worked together to develop the “New World” only to see slave codes that prevented further side-by-side progress. The American Revolution saw both black and white Americans fighting together under the belief that all men were created equal only to see that all men legally were not treated equally. After the Civil War for a time black and whites equally participated in rebuilding America, as Mississippi elected two black Senators, and Louisiana elected a black governor who started to enact land reform. But the backlash to Reconstruction lead to Jim Crow. The optimism of post WWI “rag-time” America, was followed by record numbers of lynchings during the Great Depression. The Civil Rights era was followed by the “Southern Backlash”. On and on this pattern repeats itself. So now we find the Obama era followed by the election of Donald Trump.
Progress. Two Steps Forward. Backlash. One Step Back.
The wheel of time of racial progress continues to turn and follow this pattern throughout time. But being a student of history I often take and borrow hope from those kept hope during dark times. But just as the election of Donald Trump gave my optimism pause, the rise of the resistance has given me a hope that tempers my realism.
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Afterword on the King Holiday
Commentary by Chitown Kev
“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” James Baldwin
At least twice a year, usually on the January holiday commemorating the work and accomplishments of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and on the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, I make it a point to read HamdenRice’s diary, Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did.
I enjoy reading the diary simply because it does a great job of adding color and texture to history; a history that seems, at least to me, to have become increasingly burdened to becoming simply a tool of whatever happens to be the ideology of the storyteller of the moment.
There’s also a personal reason that I read the diary and the comments; HR’s bone-chilling assessment of the enormity Dr. King’s achievement
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
As a child growing up in Detroit, I knew that my people were from the South and that they migrated from Alabama to Detroit in the mid-1920’s; my grandmother was the only one of her surviving siblings that was born in Alabama (Granny had an older brother that died as a child; there remains in the family archives a picture of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather holding this child, my great-uncle, that I grew up believing was a baby picture of my grandmother; later as a teenager, I was told that it was actually a picture of Granny’s older brother). My great-grandmother and great-grandfather moved north to Detroit when my grandmother was about three years old and, as far as I know, Granny had no memory of living in Alabama.
I also knew, vaguely, that part of the reason that my family moved from Alabama to Detroit is that my great-great grandfather and great-great grandmother were directly threatened by the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1920’s.
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We have to take stronger steps against Republican poll taxes and voter suppression
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Today is the anniversary of the ratification of the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1964, which eliminated the poll tax.
The problem we face today is that it wasn’t really eliminated — we now have poll taxes by another name — a way to disenfranchise poor and predominantly black voters.
Robert Reich posted this at Salon:
The new poll tax is sweeping across the South
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are being denied the right to vote because they are poor.
In nine states, Republican legislators have enacted laws that disenfranchise anyone with outstanding legal fees or court fines. For example, in Alabama more than 100,000 people who owe money — roughly 3 percent of the state’s voting-age population – have been struck from voting rolls.
This is unconstitutional. In 1964, the 24th amendment abolished the poll tax, a Jim Crow tactic used to bar poor blacks from voting. These new laws are a modern reincarnation of that unconstitutional system, disproportionately disenfranchising people of color. Income and wealth should have no bearing on the right to vote. Many Americans are struggling to make ends meet. But they still have a constitutional right to make their voices heard.
Preventing people from voting because they owe legal fees or court fines muzzle low-income Americans at a time in our nation’s history when the rich have more political power than ever.
These state laws are another form of voter suppression — like gerrymandering, voter ID requirements, and bars on anyone with felony convictions from voting.
We must not let them stand.
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By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
John P. Parker (1827 – February 4, 1900) was an African-American abolitionist, inventor, iron moulder and industrialist who helped hundreds of slaves to freedom in the Underground Railroad resistance movement based in Ripley, Ohio. He rescued fugitive slaves for nearly fifteen years. He was one of the few blacks to patent his inventions before 1900. His house in Ripley has been designated a National Historic Landmark and restored.
Parker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a slave mother and white father. Born into slavery under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, at the age of eight John was forced to walk to Richmond, where he was sold at the slave market to a doctor from Mobile, Alabama.
While working in the doctor's house as a domestic servant, John was taught to read and write by the doctor's family, although the law forbade slaves' being educated. During his apprenticeship in a foundry, John attempted escape and had conflicts with officials. He asked one of the doctor's patients, a widow, to purchase him. After taking title to him, she allowed him to hire out to earn money, and he purchased his freedom from her for $1,800 in 1845. He earned the money through his work in two of Mobile's iron foundries and occasional odd jobs.
The historian Stuart Seely Sprague has researched much information about Parker and his life. Beginning as an iron moulder, Parker developed and patented a number of mechanical and industrial inventions, including the John P. Parker tobacco press and harrow (or pulverizer), patented in 1884 and 1885. He had invented the pulverizer while still a young man in Mobile in the 1840s. Parker was one of the few blacks to patent an invention before 1900.
In 1865 with a partner, he bought a foundry company, which they called the Ripley Foundry and Machine Company. Parker managed the company, which manufactured engines, Dorsey's patent reaper and mower, and sugar mill. In 1876 he brought in a partner to manufacture threshers, and the company became Belchamber and Parker. Although they dissolved the partnership two years later, Parker continued to grow his business, adding a blacksmith shop and machine shop. In 1890, after a destructive fire at his first facility, Parker built the Phoenix Foundry. It was the largest between Cincinnati and Portsmouth, Ohio........Read More
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Celebrating Bob Marley’s birthday.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
In these times of trouble and strife, with racism run rampant, and war, destruction, death and inequalities are global phenomena — for our souls and sanity we need to take time to celebrate — to unleash joy and the righteousness of brother and sisterhood.
Today, we come together to celebrate the life and soul of Bob Marley. who would have been 73 today. He left this earthly realm at the age of 36, however his legacy in song remains alive and well and continues to inspire and motivate new generations of young people around the world.
There are numerous biographies of Marley, a ton of information on his official site, and a feature documentary as well:
Last year another book was added to the growing collection.
“So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley,” by Roger Steffens with an introduction by British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
A revelatory, myth-shattering history of one of the most influential musicians of all time, told in the words of those who knew him best.
Roger Steffens is one of the world’s leading Bob Marley experts. He toured with the Wailers in the 1970s and was closely acquainted with Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh and the rest of the band members. Over several decades he has interviewed more than seventy-five friends, business managers, relatives and confidants—many speaking publicly for the first time. Forty years in the making, So Much Things to Say weaves this rich testimony into a definitive telling of the life of the reggae king—the full, inside account of how a boy from the slums of Kingston, Jamaica, became a cultural icon and inspiration to millions around the world.
The intimacy of the voices and the frankness of their revelations will astonish even longtime Marley fans. Readers see the intense bonds of teenage friendship among Peter, Bunny and Bob, the vibrant early sessions with the original Wailers (as witnessed by members Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso and Cherry Green) and the tumultuous relationships with Rita Marley and Cindy Breakspeare.
With unprecedented candor, these interviews tell dramatic, little-known stories, from the writing of some of Marley’s most beloved songs to the Wailers’ violent confrontation involving producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, Bob’s intensive musical training with star singer Johnny Nash and the harrowing assassination attempt at 56 Hope Road in Kingston, which led to Marley’s defiant performance two nights later with a bullet lodged in his arm.
Readers witness Marley’s rise to international fame in London, his triumphant visit to Zimbabwe to sing for freedom fighters inspired by his anthems and the devastating moment of his collapse while jogging in New York’s Central Park. Steffens masterfully conducts the story of Marley’s last months, as Marley poignantly sings “Another One Bites the Dust” during the sound check before his final concert in Pittsburgh, followed by his tragic death at the age of thirty-six.
So Much Things to Say explores major controversies, examining who actually ordered the shooting attack on Hope Road, scrutinizing claims of CIA involvement and investigating why Marley’s fatal cancer wasn’t diagnosed sooner. Featuring Steffens’s own candid photographs of Marley and his circle, this magisterial work preserves an invaluable, transformative slice of music history: the life of the legendary performer who brought reggae to the international stage
Touré reviewed the book for The New York Times:
Marley introduced reggae and Rastafarianism to much of the globe, making him a crucial ambassador for those subcultures, and he is the face of Jamaica, by far its most famous son. If he is a Cultural Senator, then that’s part of his delivering for his constituents— he spread an image of Jamaica around the world, and now everyone has a soft spot in his or her heart for that magical island. But at the same time Marley’s politics were revolutionary.
In “War”Marley declares war on racism, and you get the sense that he does not mean war in a purely symbolic way. In “Redemption Song” he challenges us to respond to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X — “How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?” In “Them Belly Full (but We Hungry)” he criticizes the class system in Jamaica. In “Zimbabwe” he calls for liberating Africa’s nations. In “Burnin’ and Lootin’” he refers to violent resistance. Marley was speaking for the downtrodden and urging oppressed people throughout the African diaspora to revolt by any means necessary.
Whether your Bob Marley is the spirit of “One Love” or of “Redemption Song” no one can deny his impact on the global body politic.
I was smiling last night as I looked over pictures of our POTUS’ visit to the Bob Marley Museum in Jamaica.
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COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Gerald Anderson "Jerry" Lawson (December 1, 1940 – April 9, 2011) was an American electronic engineer, and one of the few African-American engineers in the industry at that time. He is known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console as well as inventing the video game cartridge.
Lawson was born in Queens, New York City on December 1, 1940. His father Blanton was a longshoreman with an interest in science, while his mother Mannings worked for the city, and also served on the PTA for the local school and made sure that he received a good education. Both encouraged his interests in scientific hobbies, including ham radio and chemistry. Lawson said that his first-grade teacher helped him encourage his path to be someone influential similar to George Washington Carver. While in high school, he earned money by repairing television sets. He attended both Queens College and City College of New York, but did not complete a degree at either.
In 1970, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor in San Francisco as an applications engineering consultant within their sales division. While there, he created the early arcade game Demolition Derby out of his garage. In the mid-1970s, Lawson was made Chief Hardware Engineer and director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild's video game division. There, he led the development of the Fairchild Channel F console, released in 1976 and specifically designed to use swappable game cartridges. At the time, most game systems had the game programming stored on ROM storage soldered onto the game hardware, which could not be removed. Lawson and his team figured out how to move the ROM to a cartridge that could be inserted and removed from a console unit repeatedly, and without electrically shocking the user. This would allow users to buy into a library of games, and provided a new revenue stream for the console manufacturers through sales of these games. The Channel F was not a commercially successful product, but the cartridge approach was picked up by other console manufacturers, popularized with the Atari 2600 released in 1977......Read More
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In Order to keep a Personal Promise…
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Back on September 13th of last year, I noted that one of the weaker subject areas of my ‘’fubu-style’’ education was my knowledge of the history of Negro League Baseball. Frankly, I’ve read little about the Negro Leagues since the posting of that diary; something that I vaguely recalled when Miss Denise posted a tweet a few weeks later honoring the birth, I believe, of one of baseball history’s greatest power-hitters, Josh Gibson.
Again.
Did not follow up.
Last night, I noticed that today, February 13, is the 98th anniversary of the founding of the Negro National League by Baseball Hall of Famer Andrew ‘’Rube’’ Foster.
From the Baseball Hall of Fame website:
On Feb. 13, 1920 – 96 years ago this month – Hall of Famer Andrew “Rube” Foster and his fellow team owners filled that void when they came together to create the Negro National League.
When baseball first became organized in the 1860s, a small handful of African-American players took the diamond alongside their white teammates. But with Jim Crow laws and prevalent segregationist sentiment still left over from the Civil War, the careers of talented African Americans like Moses Fleetwood Walker, Bud Fowler and Frank Grant were short-lived. By the turn of the 20th century, unwritten rules and “gentleman’s agreements” between owners had effectively shut black ballplayers out of big league competition.
Still craving a means to play, African Americans formed their own teams and barnstormed across the country to find competition. It was in this environment that Rube Foster made a name for himself as a player and then a manager. A dominant pitcher, he won 44 games in a row for the Philadelphia Cuban X-Giants in 1902 and began a legendary career that inspired fans to call him the “Black Christy Mathewson.”
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
With the brutal killings of high schoolers and the outrage amplified by the victims and survivors themselves, an outrage that has mobilized a generation to turn the tables of the moneychangers and the gun merchants in their Temple of Doom and its five percent per annum return, it might be difficult to remember that the Student Movement that arose out of outrage over the senseless killings of their peers was begun by Black Lives Matter, in a much similar way as the Civil Rights Movement was, in many ways, a Student Movement itself, one that presaged the Student Movements that manifested into the Anti War Movement.
This current resurrection of the Student Movement is reminiscent of those equally brutal times. When the power of two becomes the actions of a community aligned against the inequities perpetuated by The Merchants of Death and Profit, as those movements proved in our past, the sleeping giant of America awakens to a powerful realization of itself.
It is always up to the youth to awaken the giant from it’s supine slumber. It is always up to the youth to carry on what we began in our youth, which heartened the elders, who in their youth, fought fascism in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade, had bones broken fighting for a 40 hour week, and had family and friends publicly lynched for merely deigning themselves equal in the Great Experiment.
It is up to the youth to remind the moribund among us, we can lend a hand, or get out of the way.
bijan been dead 11 months & my blue margin reduced to arterial, there’s a party at my house, a house held by legislation vocabulary & trill. but hell, it’s ours & it sparkle on the corner of view park, a channel of blk electric. danny wants to walk to the ledge up the block, & we an open river of flex: we know what time it is. on the ledge, folk give up neck & dismantle gray navigation for some slice of body. it’s june. it’s what we do.
walk down the middle of our road, & given view park, a lining of dubois’ 10th, a jack n jill feast, & good blk area, it be our road. we own it. I’m sayin’ with money. our milk neighbors, collaborate in the happy task of surveillance. they new. they pivot function. they call the khaki uniforms. i swift. review the architecture of desire spun clean, & I could see how we all look like ghosts.
3 squad cars roll up at my door & it’s a fucking joke cuz exactly no squad cars rolled up to the mcdonald’s bijan was shot at & exactly no squad cars rolled up to find the murders & exactly no one did what could be categorized as they “job,” depending on how you define time spent for money earned for property & it didn’t make me feel like I could see less of the gun in her holster because she was blk & short & a woman, too. she go,
this your house?
I say yeah. she go,
can you prove it?
It say it mine.
she go ID? I say it mine.
she go backup on the sly
& interview me going all what’s your address—don’t look!
& hugh say I feel wild disrespected.
& white go can you explain that?
& danny say how far the nearest precinct?
& christian say fuck that.
& white go can you explain that?
I cross my arms. I’m bored & headlights quit being interesting after I called 911 when I was 2 years old because it was the only phone number I knew by heart.
”my dad asks, ‘how come black people can’t just write about flowers?’
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The Philadelphia MOVE Police Bombing
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
The MOVE organization is often labeled as a black liberation group or a black power group, but it’s more complex than that. The group's name, MOVE, is not an acronym. The group was originally called the Christian Movement for Life when it was founded in 1972 by John Africa. After a protracted, contentious relationship with Philadelphia police, MOVE’s communal home was bombed in 1985, killing most of the inhabitants including children.
MOVE’s founder John Africa dictated a document called The Guideline to Donald Glassey, a social worker from the University of Pennsylvania. The Guideline codified the group’s beliefs and philosophy on paper. John Africa and his movement’s mostly African-American followers wore their hair in dreadlocks, inspired by the Rastafari movement they learned about from Caribbean immigrants living in Philadelphia. MOVE advocated a radical form of pseudo-green politics and a return to a hunter-gatherer society, while stating their opposition to Western science, medicine, and technology. Inspired by the example as John Africa had done, his devotees changed their surnames to Africa to show reverence to what they regarded as their mother continent, and to reject their “slave names”.
John Africa's MOVE members initially lived in a commune in a house owned by Glassey in the Powelton Village section of West Philadelphia. From their they staged bullhorn-amplified, strongly worded demonstrations against institutions that they opposed, including such zoos (MOVE had strong views on animal rights), and speakers whose views they opposed. as a result of their activities MOVE drew close scrutiny from law enforcement authorities.
In 1977 the police gained a court order requiring MOVE to vacate their Powelton Village house. Nearly a year later, they had come to a standoff with members of the community, who had not left. When the police attempted entry to the house, shooting erupted. Philadelphia police officer James J. Ramp was killed by a shot to the back of the neck. MOVE representatives claimed that he was facing the house at the time and they denied MOVE's responsibility for his death. Seven other police officers, five firefighters, three MOVE members, and three bystanders were also injured.
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Women’s History Month: Harriet Robinson Scott and other enslaved black women fought in the courts for their freedom.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Today is the anniversary of one of the most horrific decisions ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court — which has come to be known as “The Dred Scott decision.” (Dred Scott v. Sandford).
I’ve written about Dred Scott here in the past, however it wasn’t until my trip to St. Louis where I visited the statue shown above that I became curious about Harrier Scott. The State Historical Society of Missouri has a detailed biography on their website: Harriet Robinson Scott (1815? – 1876) and the Dred Scott Heritage Foundationhelped discover her burial location. All of this readily accessible information is quite recent. I cannot even remember her name being mentioned when we covered the Dred Scott decision when I was in high school and a college undergraduate.
Due to a shift in how history is now told — thanks to the influence of Black and Women’s Studies, we are beginning to have a body of “herstories” to make up for the male dominated portraits of the past. Such is the case for Harriet Robinson Scott, whose story, along with those of others is detailed in Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier, by Lea VanderVelde
Among the most infamous U.S. Supreme Court decisions is Dred Scott v. Sandford . Despite the case's signal importance as a turning point in America's history, the lives of the slave litigants have receded to the margins of the record, as conventional accounts have focused on the case's judges and lawyers. In telling the life of Harriet, Dred's wife and co-litigant in the case, this book provides a compensatory history to the generations of work that missed key sources only recently brought to light. Moreover, it gives insight into the reasons and ways that slaves used the courts to establish their freedom.
A remarkable piece of historical detective work, Mrs. Dred Scott chronicles Harriet's life from her adolescence on the 1830s Minnesota-Wisconsin frontier, to slavery-era St. Louis, through the eleven years of legal wrangling that ended with the high court's notorious decision. The book not only recovers her story, but also reveals that Harriet may well have been the lynchpin in this pivotal episode in American legal history.
Reconstructing Harriet Scott's life through innovative readings of journals, military records, court dockets, and even frontier store ledgers, VanderVelde offers a stunningly detailed account that is at once a rich portrait of slave life, an engrossing legal drama, and a provocative reassessment of a central event in U.S. constitutional history. More than a biography, the book is a deep social history that freshly illuminates some of the major issues confronting antebellum America, including the status of women, slaves, Free Blacks, and Native Americans.
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Celebrating Soul Food
BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
Soul Food is a term used for an ethnic cuisine traditionally prepared and eaten by African Americans of the Southern United States. Many of the various dishes and ingredients included in "soul food" are also regional meals and comprise a part of other traditional Southern US cooking. The style of now known as soul food originated during the times of American slavery. African slaves were given only the "leftover" and "undesirable" cuts of meat from their masters (while the white slave owners got the meatiest cuts of ham, roasts, etc.). Finding tasty but creative uses of this food, combined with traditional methods they brought with them from the African continent gave birth to this cuisine.
Soul food is common in areas with a history of slave-based plantations and has maintained popularity among the Black American and American Deep-South "cotton state" communities for centuries; it is now the most common regional cuisine in southern cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, New Orleans, Houston, Charlotte North Carolina, Birmingham, and Atlanta. Traditional soul food influences can be commonly found as far north as Richmond Virginia, as far east as Jacksonville Florida, and as far west as Houston.
During slavery, besides the "leftover" meat cuts, slaves on American plantations only had vegetables they could grown for themselves in small gardens. After emancipation, most newly free African Americans, being poor, could only afford “off-cuts” of meat, along with offal. Farming, hunting and fishing provided fresh vegetables, fish and wild game, such as possum, rabbit, squirrel and sometimes waterfowl. The intersectionality of African food preparations preserved by being passed on from generation to generation, Jim Crow laws that prevented equal access, and an innate innovative survival culture, all shaped the development of soul food. Africans living in America at the time (and since) more than made do with the food choices they had to work with.
When enslaved people reached North America (5% of Africans who were enslaved in the transatlantic trade were sent to non-Caribbean North America), rations were often used as a powerful form of control on many plantations. By supervising food, slave-owners could regularly establish their authority over enslaved people, while also attempting to prove their “generosity” toward their slaves. Slaves’ diets were frequently a primary point of debate between abolitionists and slaveholders, with pro-slavery supporters using rations to “prove” the good quality of life African Americans had under slavery. James Madison defended slavery by arguing that slaves have better diets than the lower classes in Europe:
“They are better fed, better clad, better lodged, and better treated in every respect…With respect to the great article of food particularly it is a common remark among those who have visited Europe, that it [slave diet] includes a much greater proportion of the animal ingredient, than is attainable by the free labourers even in that quarter of the Globe.” ((“From James Madison to Robert Walsh Jr., 2 March 1819,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-01-02-0378, ver. 2014-05-09). Source: The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series, vol. 1, 4 March 1817 – 31 January 1820, ed. David B. Mattern, J. C. A. Stagg, Mary Parke Johnson, and Anne Mandeville Colony. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009, pp. 427–432.))
The labor on plantations was excruciating. Slaves had to tend to their gardening or other food procurement on their own time at night, after working on the plantation for a full day. Though slave-owners demanded these skills be used first and foremost on the plantation fields, slaves also cared for their own personal gardens and pass down practices and preferences to their families. Gardening gave slaves an avenue to make their own choices about their diets.
Coming from diverse regions and communities, Africans adapted their cultures to the influences, resources and severe restrictions they experienced in slavery. Though rations took away the power of choice, slaves could supplement their meals by hunting, fishing and gardening. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, West African agriculture had already incorporated many of the same crops as the South, such as rice. ((Robert L. Hall, “Africa and the American South: Culinary
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Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Marjorie Stewart Joyner (October 24, 1896 – December 27, 1994) was an American businesswoman. She was born in 1896, in Monterey, Virginia. She was the granddaughter of a white slave owner and a slave. In 1912, she moved to Chicago and began studying cosmetology. She graduated A.B. Molar Beauty School in Chicago in 1916, the first African American to achieve this. There she met Madam C. J. Walker, an African American beauty entrepreneur, and the owner of a cosmetic empire. Always an advocate of beauty for women, Joyner went to work for her and oversaw 200 of Madame Walker's beauty schools as the national adviser. A major role was sending Walker's hair stylists door-to-door, dressed in black skirts and white blouses with black satchels containing a range of beauty products that were applied in the customer's house. Joyner taught some 15,000 stylists over her fifty-year career. She was also a leader in developing new products, such as her permanent wave machine. She helped write the first cosmetology laws for the state of Illinois, and founded both a sorority and a national association for black beauticians. Joyner was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, and helped found the National Council of Negro Women. She was an advisor to the Democratic National Committee in the 1940s, and advised several New Deal agencies trying to reach out to black women. Joyner was highly visible in the Chicago black community, as head of the Chicago Defender Charity network, and fundraiser for various schools. In 1987 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington opened an exhibit featuring Joyner's permanent wave machine and a replica of her original salon.
In 1939, she started looking for an easier way for black women to straighten their hair, taking her inspiration from a pot roast cooking with paper pins to quicken preparation time. Joyner experimented initially with these paper rods and soon designed a table that could be used to curl or straighten hair by wrapping it on rods above the person's head and then cooking them to set the hair.
This method allowed hairstyles to last several days. At the beginning of her invention was to complain that it was uncomfortable. That is when Marjorie improved it with the simple idea of having a scalp protector while the lady is curling her hair. Her patent for this design, (U.S. pat. #1,693,515) established her as the first African American woman to receive a patent. This claim is disputed by some who say that Sarah E. Goode was the first African American woman to hold a patent.
.....Read More
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Liberia — America’s former colony in Africa.
Commentary
By Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
The Orange Dastard in the White House recently announced the end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for Liberians here in the United States. His announcement was met by consternation from those affected — approximately 4,000 Liberians here in the U.S. and their supporters.
From The Guardian:
Many Liberians have been covered by either Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or DED from the US government since 1991, the power of which rests with the office of the president.
But last Tuesday, after months of fearful speculation and the program set to expire on 31 March, the Trump administration announced it plans to end DED. Trump will allow beneficiaries one year to get their affairs in order before they have to leave the country voluntarily or face deportation…
George W Bush granted DED to Liberians who, like Menyongaro, had arrived before October 2002 and whose TPS was expiring in 2007. The program was later extended by Obama. In practice, as Patrice Lawrence, the national policy and advocacy director of the advocacy group UndocuBlack Network, explained in national press call many DED holders have been in the country for more than two decades.
Following the news on twitter of Trump’s latest action taken to appeal to his black and brown hating base, his supporters jumped in to cheer his action, spewing the usual filth and bile against Liberians — and chortling gleefully about the upcoming deportations (I won’t link to the slime). Granted, none of the MAGA-idjits have probably ever cracked a history book and get all their news and information from FOX, and doubtful any of them could point to Liberia on a map.
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Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
One of the things that really urkes me is that we will never truly know all the inventions by blacks who couldn't protect there work because patents were not given out, and in some cases the inventions were stolen by whites that the black people worked for. This has so many ramifications since innovation leads to entrepreneurship and wealth building. However some freed blacks were able to punch some holes in the system.
One such man is Thomas Jennings
Thomas Jennings stands in history as a noteworthy figure for being the first Black person to ever receive a patent, but his life should serve as an example of what was, and what could have been, for Black people in the earliest years of the United States.
Thomas Jennings was born in 1791 and worked in a number of jobs before focusing on what would become his chosen career... as a tailor. Jennings' skills were so admired that people near and far came to him to alter or custom-tailor items of clothing for them. Eventually, Jennings reputation grew such that he was able to open his own store on Church street which grew into one of the largest clothing stores in New York City.
Jennings, of course, found that many of his customers were dismayed when their clothing became soiled, and because of the material used, were unable to use conventional means to clean them. Conventional methods would often ruin the fabric, leaving the person to either continue wearing the items in their soiled condition or to simply discard them. While this would have provided a boon to his business through increased sales, Jennings also hated to see the items, which he worked so hard to create, thrown away. He thus set out experimenting with different solutions and cleaning agents, testing them on various fabrics until he found the right combination to effectively treat and clean them. He called his method "dry-scouring" and it is the process that we now refer to as dry-cleaning.
In 1820, Jennings applied for a patent for his dry-scouring process. In light of the times, he was fortunate that he was a free man....Read More >>
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I Got Nothing Today
by Chitown Kev
This is exhausting.
I simply have to say it today.
In place of the competent, professional (but not perfect, of course) leadership that ran this country for eight years, we now have a damn fool racist sexist criminal treasoneous Occupier and a co-equal branch of government that’s willing to do the fiddling for the ‘’La-Z-Boy President.’’
Every day...no...every hour, there’s some new scandal,, raids on the lawyer’s office, a son-in-law selling information to a foriegn power, a portion of the United States that has remained in darkness for months, grift, hate attacks by some fine people, I am sure.
And disgusting racism as the ultimate ‘’distraction’’ of everything.
This is exhausting...and I don’t particularly feel like hearing, ‘’You can’t give up, you HAVE to fight it,’’ sermons else I would really go into ‘’I ain’t GOTS to do nothin’ but stay black and die’’ mode.
Yes, this day and time in this country IS exhausting to the mind, body, and spirit; a wide-ranging multi-faceted assault on this country’s soul which, from my perspective, was never all that noble in the first place.
Sometimes...I feel as if I have to say “I'm tired" in a moment, knowing that the moment will pass before getting back to doing the civic duty.
So...I got nothing today, fam, but the longing of the days of yore when the president was so competent and professional that his simply wearing a tan suit (as is presidential tradition, of course) was the news of the day.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
She is a specter, a ghostly presence that we can ignore until we can't and it is always too late. She is pushing a ragged shopping cart, she is stumbling with a cane, she is walking in the slow elegance of the elderly matron, yet we don't see her, even though we move out of her way. She lives next door, down the street, across the river and under a freeway overpass. She is our mother, sister, cousin, aunt and grandmother. She is the Queen of the Ages and the Madonna of our Salvation and libraries should hold volumes upon volumes attesting to her compassion and her knowledge and her protection, but they don’t.
She might have been great once and she might still be, but we don't see her, we don't hear her. When we should be exalting her, we ignore her, until we can't, like we always have, and when it is always too late.
Venerable black women
You of yesterday, you of today.
Black mothers of tomorrow yet to be
These lines are homage to you, for you.
Magnificent black women
The poets and singers have been remiss
Have sung too few poems and songs of you
And the image makers have not recorded your beauty.
Sheba, Nefertiti, Zaiditu, Cleopatra.
Black women, Mothers of humanity, Mother original
Your black children here salute you.
You, bartered, sold, insulted, raped and defiled,
Debased and debauched for four centuries.
Strong women, Gannet, Tubman and Truth.
Weary black women
Your breasts gaunt from nurturing theirs first
And later sustaining yours, caring for theirs
At the same instance providing for yours also.
Women forgotten, Mandy, Melindy, Cindy, and Lisa.
Gentle black women
While being hated, yet teaching love
Being scorned, yet teaching respect
Being humiliated and teaching Compassion.
Humble women, Bessie, Mattie, Lucey, Ann and Willie Mae.
Resourceful black women, with tact
Managing to make do, alter clothing,
Stretch meals, Making room, Prodding, Bolstering
Nudging us on, Protecting, teaching survival.
Laney, Bethune, Keckley, Terrel and Brown.
Militant black women, defending yours with fury
Standing firm, picketing and demonstrating
Kneeling in, sitting in and wading in
Standing, walking, marching and boycotting.
Parks, Wells, Pleasant and Louvestre.
Discerning black women, women of genius
Setting your children a proper example
Teaching that each generation must do its part
To improve life for those coming after.
Nannie, Gaines, Burroughs, Maggie Walker.
Courageous black women, brave and fearless
Seeking to make a home among the unfriendly
Sending your children off to school
To pass unscathed through walls of hate.
Lucy, Bates, Richardson, and Hamer.
Angry black women and understanding
Aware of efforts to stunt your men
Yet urging them manhood again.
Diana, Gloria, Thelma, Ethel, Eva and Marion.
Heroic black women, women of glory
Not turning back, never giving up
Equalling, surpassing the stature
Of any race of women, anywhere, any time.
Billie, Ella, Dinah, Sis-Sirretta, Mahalia.
Black women of genius, brilliant women
Walking through the hateful valleys
In dignity, strength and such serene composure
That even your enemies tremble insecure.
Hansberry, Talbert, Bonds and Baker.
Magnificent black women, hopeful women
Believing that trouble doesn't last always
Knowing this truth, that those who are slaves today
May well be the masters tomorrow, even sooner.
Sisters with all women, black women
Your sufferings echo those of all the oppressed.
Join together all of you in a universal cry
For Peace and the good life for all. The world listens.
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Instead — my entire trending list was about Beyoncé and things related to her epic performance at Coachella — which included:
#HBeyCU, #Beychella, #DestinysChild, #ThankYouGod, #Beyhive, and a few more I’ve missed here.
I went to look for clips, watched and then sat here in my office thinking about what I’d just seen. I knew the live audience at Coachella was almost all white. The content of Beyonce’s performance was emphatically black. One person tweeted:
That blackness banished Trump and his bigots from twitter space for some magical moments. The man must be having major indigestion (hah!) over a black woman trumpin’ his bigot self.
Most folks here at Daily Kos weren’t paying attention. Black popular culture isn’t usually covered — except here in Black Kos. Those of a political bent need to wake up and understand the politics of contemporary black political pop culture, given that black folks are part of the backbone of the Democratic Party and that demographic is getting younger. I include myself in that criticism — if it wasn’t for my students — I would be clueless.
I gathered a few reaction headlines like:
Twitter melts down in praise of #Beychella, Beyoncé’s history-making Coachella set and Beyoncé fans are ready to enroll in the HBeyCU after Coachella and Amen! Beyoncé’s Coachella Performance Was The Ultimate Celebration Of HBCUs and Black Women.
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The Arab presence in Sub-Saharan Africa — Part 1 The Arab slave trade in Africa
Occupying the vast intercontinental space between Africa, Europe, Persia, and India, the Arab world came to dominate the primary trade routs between sub-Saharan Africa and the wider world of antiquity. Arabian traders brought many positive advances including writing, technology, religion, and new crops. Africans in turn supplied gold, ivory, salt, hardwood, and unfortunately slaves.
Elikia M'bokolo, wrote in the renown French newspaper Le Monde (diplomatique). "The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic.
He continues writing "Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean".
In the first part of this look at the Arab presence in Africa, I’ll write about the Arab slave trade, and how it differed from more widely known (in the West) trans-Atlantic slave trade that brought slaves from West Africa to the New World. In a later diary, i’ll look at positive aspects of the Arab presence in Africa.
Already by the 8th century, the African continent was dominated by Arab-Berbers in the north: Islam started to move southwards along the Nile and also along desert trails through the Sahara. Thus began at least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth). The Arab trade of Zanj (ethnic-Bantu) slaves in Southeast Africa is one of the oldest slave trades, predating the European transatlantic slave trade by 700 years. Just as a side note in the Arabic world ethnic-Bantu, means black Africans but excluding Ethiopians, Somalis, and North Sudanese (they are considered Cushitic people). I will follow that nomenclature.
The main slave routes in Africa during the Middle Ages
Male slaves were often forced to work as servants, soldiers, or laborers by their owners, while female slaves, including those from Africa, were long traded to the Middle Eastern countries and kingdoms by Arab and other traders from the orient as concubines and servants. Arab, African, and Middle Eastern traders were involved in the capture and transport of slaves northward across the Sahara desert and the Indian Ocean region into the Middle East, Persia and the Far East.
From the 7th century until around the early 20th, the Arab slave trade continued in one form or another. Historical accounts and references to slave-owning nobility in Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere are frequent into the early 1920s.
The conditions of the enslaved Africans under Islamic Arabs, according to Ronald Segal (Islam’s Black Slaves, Atlantic Books 2003) was very different from the conditions imposed by Europeans Christians. The most fundamental difference between the two being that under Islam enslaved Africans were still considered human beings with some rights. Additionally unlike European Christian based slavery where even people who converted to Christianity were kept in perpetual bondage, the children of slaves who converted to Islam were born free.
The Arab slave trade, across the Sahara desert and across Indian Ocean, began after Muslim Arab and Swahili traders won control of the Swahili Coast (East Africa from the horn to Swaziland) and sea routes during the 9th century, especially from the Sultanate of Zanzibar, located on the island of Zanzibar (off the coast of Tanzania). These traders captured African ethnic Bantu peoples (Zanj) from the interior in present-day Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania and brought them to the coast (William Robert Ochieng. Eastern Kenya and Its Invaders). There, the slaves gradually assimilated in the rural areas, particularly on Zanzibar (Unguja and Pemba islands of the coast of modern Tanzania).
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Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As the 24 hour news cycle moves on, leaving Waffle House domestic terrorist Travis Reinking out of the headlines — I applaud The Root, and Felice León for this take on the white men who commit murder and fall quickly off the radar.
Her video was a follow-up to VSB’s Damon Young’s read on the issue:
A few months ago, during a conversation on Facebook about one of the many mass shootings committed by a white man (I forget which one), the homie Sai Grundy wrote that (paraphrasing) one of the byproducts of the criminalization of blackness is that white people are often able to elude suspicion by virtue of their whiteness. While we capture all of the attention, they sneak on by.
The most prominent recent example of this I can think of is Stephen Paddock, the (white) man who killed 58 people in Las Vegas. Imagine how invisible to everyone you must be—and how aware of your invisibility you must be—to somehow be able to collect 23 rifles in a hotel room in one of the busiest and most densely populated places in the world. He amassed a freakin’ arsenal and was able to do so without anyone stopping to ask him a question or inspect his room.
Anyway, the more we learn about Travis Reinking—the man who allegedly mowed down four people at a Tennessee Waffle House—the harder it is to imagine any of this happening if he had happened to be black.
When I think of invisible men — I immediately jump mentally to Ralph Ellison, and his seminal work, Invisible Man.
This white invisibility is of course another benefit of privilege and a different kind of erasure. “White” does not equal criminal, carries no stigma, is normative, and non-threatening in the lexicon of the majority.
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Meh.
A Rebel Yell
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Don’t get me wrong, fam, I still think that Kanye West is both a jack*ss and a damn fool; I haven’t retreated from that position.
And I agree with many of the analyses of West’s comments to TMZ and to Charlemagne tha God, including, for the most part, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic essay, I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye (linked and excerpted in dopper’s News Round-Up below this essay); links to Mr. Coates’ essay blew up my Twitter feed yesterday.
But...I have to be honest: Mr. Coates’ chronicle of the vicissitudes of black achievement, fame and what that all means made me viscerally cringe almost as much as of any Kanye’s recent comments.
Now Coates is surely right with this
West might plead ignorance—“I don’t have all the answers that a celebrity is supposed to have,” he told Charlamagne. But no citizen claiming such a large portion of the public square as West can be granted reprieve. The planks of Trumpism are clear—the better banning of Muslims, the improved scapegoatingof Latinos, the endorsement of racist conspiracy, the denialism of science, the cheering of economic charlatans, the urging on of barbarian cops and barbarian bosses, the cheering of torture, and the condemnation of whole countries. The pain of these policies is not equally distributed. Indeed the rule of Donald Trump is predicated on the infliction of maximum misery on West’s most ardent parishioners, the portions of America, the muck, that made the god Kanye possible.
And I suppose that Coates is right that Kanye, through the sheer force and magnitude of ‘’the consistent, amazing, near-peerless quality of his work,’’ has became a member of a pantheon of black popular music icons that includes Michael Jackson (in that scenario, I guess that Jackson remains a sort of Zeus-like figure).
Part of my cringe at Coates’ essay, I suppose, is that he gets part of the ‘’enigma and wonder’’ of Jackson wrong.
Or, to be more precise, incomplete.
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Part of the difficulty in looking at the Arab presence in Africa is how broad (or loose?) a definition of Arab to use. Where as today countries like Egypt and Morocco are clearly part of the Arab world, in the age of antiquity they were culturally separate. Same thing for “North” Sudan. Secondly after the rise of Islam in the 7th century the history of the Arab presence in Africa and the Islamic presence in Africa become intimately intertwined. So I will use a broad definition and will often not strictly differentiate between strictly Islamic and Arabic culture in sub-Saharan Africa.
With that be said let’s review part one of my look at the Arab presence in Africa ( The Arab slave trade in Africa)
The Arab slave trade originated before Islam and lasted more than a millennium. The slave trade began to meet the demand for intense difficult plantation labor, these captured “Zanj” slaves were shipped across the Middle East.
- The Sahara was thinly populated. Nevertheless, since ancient times there had been cities living on a trade in salt, gold, slaves, cloth, and on agriculture enabled by irrigation.
- In the Middle Ages, the general Arabic term bilâd as-sûdân ("Land of the Blacks") was used for the vast Sudan region (an expression denoting West and Central Africa, or sometimes extending from the coast of West Africa to Western Sudan. It provided a pool of manual labor for North and Saharan Africa. This region was dominated by certain states and people: the Ghana Empire, the Empire of Mali, the Kanem-Bornu Empire, the Fulani and Hausa.
- In the Horn of Africa, the coasts of the Red Sea and Indian Oceans were controlled by local
Somali and other native Muslim converts. Yemen and Oman (on the Arabian peninsula) had merchant posts along the coasts. The Ethiopian coast had long been a hub for the exportation of slaves from the interior by the Kingdom of Aksum and earlier lands. The port and most coastal areas were largely Muslim, and the port itself was home to a number of Arab and Indian merchants. Ethiopia often exported Nilotic slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered southern provinces.The Somali and Afar Muslim sultanates, such as the Adal Sultanate, also exported Nilotic slaves that they captured from the interior, as well as foes vanquished during battles.
- In the African Great Lakes region, Oman and Yemen traders set up slave-trading posts along the southeastern coast of the Indian Ocean; most notably in the archipelago of Zanzibar, along the coast of present-day Tanzania. The Zanj region or Swahili Coast flanking the Indian Ocean continued to be an important area for the Arab slave trade up until the 19th century.
- British explorers under Stanley Livingston were then the first Europeans to penetrate to the interior of the Congo Basin and to discover the scale of slavery there. The Arab Tippu Tip extended his influence there and captured many people as slaves. After Europeans had settled in the West Africa (Gulf of Guinea), the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan Hamoud bin Mohammed.
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Arabic as Africa’s Language of Learning
Although in East Africa both Ethiopia and Nubia had their own native written languages. most of West Africa used Arabic as their primary literary script. Arabic was used by West Africa’s nobility in a manner similar to how Greek, Latin and later German served as the written language of the educated nobility of Europe. Latin especially was used by many European nations until they developed written versions of their native tongues.
As a side note European slave traders who purchased slaves from West Africa knew that many of the slaves they purchased were Muslims (approximately 20%). But after the "trouble" Brazil had with Muslim slaves in the 19th century, that information was furiously suppressed.
Why was Kunta Kinte forced to be called Toby? — Roots
The Malê revolt also known as The Great Revolt is perhaps the most significant slave rebellion in Brazil. On a Sunday during Ramadan in January 1835, in the city of Salvador da Bahia, a small group of black slaves and freedmen, inspired by Muslim teachers, rose up against the government. Muslims were called malê in Bahia at this time, from Yoruba imale that designated a Yoruba Muslim.
The uprising took place on the feast day of Our Lady of Guidance, a celebration in the Bonfim’s church’s cycle of religious holidays. As a result, many worshipers traveled to Bonfirm for the weekend to pray or celebrate. Authorities were in Bonfim in order to keep the celebrations in line. Consequently, there would be fewer people and authorities in Salvador, making it easier for the rebels to occupy the city.The slaves knew about the Haitian Revolution (1791−1804) and wore necklaces bearing the image of President Dessalines, who had declared Haitian independence.
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Rudy G. and Donnie T. Two racist pricks in a pod
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Due to all the recent media coverage of the seemingly endless piles of steaming mess surrounding Donald Trump and the verbal braying of his new legal team member and bloviating booster— former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — I’ve been forced to think about similarities between the two New Yorkers. Those of us black folks who had to suffer through “the reign of Rudy” would probably recognize them, though I haven’t seen it mentioned.
Both of these men have chosen to build their political capital and their fan base demeaning and denigrating the achievements of their predecessors — while at the same time co-opting those achievements as their own.
By now it should be clear to everyone not blinded by Trump bling and lies that he loathes President Barack Obama — and cannot stand the fact that a black man is more beloved than he is, and will go down in history with a legacy of accomplishments dwarfing all of Trump’s efforts to undo them.
No coincidence that Trump has embraced racist fellow traveler Giuliani.
Trump fires up his crowds of bigots as “the anti-Obama” while his slobbering adherents spew the n-word. Those of you not from New York, or who are too young, may not remember that this was a Giuliani tactic that propelled him into the mayoral office and Gracie Mansion.
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Rest in Peace
To our brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico — Rest in Peace/Descanse en Paz
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
There are really no words to say to the living that can heal the pain of losing loved ones. There is even more pain when one knows that certain deaths were preventable.
There is no way to apologize adequately for the failures of the U.S. government, its elected officials, the news media, and a mainland populace that has failed you and allowed so many to die.
When the news broke today in The Washington Post with a new count of the numbers who died, 4,465 so far, I failed to speak to the families when I wrote about it.
I want to do that now.
I know you are living with pain. That pain increases each day that we here on the mainland who are not Puerto Rican don’t seem to give a damn.
You deal with the pain of the loss of loved ones, and the pain of being abandoned by your government.
Somehow, so many of you go on each day, fighting to live and love.
Sadly, we know the deaths continue.
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Prelude to Resistance
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I’ve now settled down into doing two pretty big projects of a historical nature (one of them should be completed and posted when you next see me in this space on The Porch) so that I have done little but see the headiines zoom past as I look up from the pages of my book or as I click the tab of Daily Kos or other news sites.
We have a presidential administration that has shown what should be a criminal and continued depraved indifference to the new estimates of deaths and ongoing tragedies in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria.
We have a news media that would rather focus on arguments over obscenties rather than the very high probablity that the numbers of American citizens that died because of Hurricane Maria nearly equals the number of persons that died in the September 11th attacks and Hurricane Katrina combined.
There’s the continued faux outrage of The Occupant over NFL players exercising their right to free speech by kneeling during the singing of the national anthem; probably a song that The Occupant doesn’t even know the words to.
We have thousands of migrant children separated from from their parents and placed in detention facilities that could easily become-and may already be-concenntration camps.
About 1500 migrant children seem to have disappeared out of ‘’the system’’ altogether.
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Why we still need Historically Black Colleges and Universities
BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
America’s overall college enrollment numbers have once again continued to rise. Meanwhile black student’s college enrollment numbers are at their highest levels ever. Never the less the role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, (HBCUs) has come into question in some quarters. Before the Civil Rights Movement, and even as recently as two decades ago, an increase in the number of young black adults with college aspirations would have been welcome news for HBCUs.
But today, more black college students does not automatically translate into higher enrollment at HBCUs because the college landscape has changed so drastically since the golden era of these institutions. Diversity recruitment programs at traditional colleges, the ease of online degree programs, and the rising credibility and offerings at community colleges has served to eclipse the market that was once enjoyed almost excursively by HBCUs.
As a result, some “concerned” educators and pundits have suggested that HBCUs are no longer relevant and that their purpose is now outdated and unnecessary for minorities students. But when measured against the many low quality non-HBCU higher education institutions, you could argue that HBCUs are more relevant than ever and are in many ways even MORE necessary than their counterparts. Here’s why:
HBCUs are still some of the best havens for disadvantaged students.
The achievement gap in K-12 learning may be narrowing, but it is still exists. Even minority students who end up graduating from high school drop out of college at higher rates than their white peers.
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A Philadelphia Negro
Review by Chitown Kev
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 932 pp., $39.95
In 2014, the Washington Post reported that the ashes of the eminent Howard University philosophy professor, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, and theprimary architect of The Harlem Renaissance, Dr. Alain Locke, had been contained in a paper bag located in Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. The ashes were stored with the papers that Dr. Locke bequeathed to Howard upon the occasion of his death in 1954. Primarily with the assistance of other African American Rhodes Scholars, Dr Locke’s ashes were interred in Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.
Prior to the internment of Dr. Locke’s cremated remains, his total body of work, a syncretism of philosophical pragmatism and value theory, social science, literary and cultural criticism and race studies, was increasingly becoming a part of undergraduate and graduate school curricula nationwide. Locke’s contributions to and editing of The New Negro (which featured early works by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and others) is, of course, well-known and has been a staple of black literary studies and even, recently, studies of modernism in literature, art, and culture. In the past twenty-five years, collections of Dr. Locke’s essays have been published as well as critical studies spanning the entirety of Locke’s storied career. A biography of Dr. Locke titled Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher, written by Purdue University philosophy professor Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, appeared in 2008. Now Jeffrey C. Stewart, professor of Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has written, perhaps, the most definitive biography Dr. Locke yet; The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke.
Alain LeRoy Locke was born September 13, 1885 in Philadelphia; the ‘’sickly, tiny baby’’ of Pliny and Mary Hawkins Locke, both descendents of free blacks. Prior to marrying Mary Shorter Hawkins, Alain’s father, Pliny, graduated at the top of his law school class at Howard, had worked for the Freedman’s Bureau in Tennessee, and prior to achieving one of the highest scores on a civil service exam and was selected to be a clerk at the Post Office over several white applicants. Mary was the daughter of one of the black upper class families of ‘’Black Victorian Philadelphia.’’ Stewart paints a vivid picture of the black upper class families that adhered strictly to the morals of the era; an ’’Anglo-American love of class, home, and strict public behavior’’ that, for blacks, carried the hope of fending off attacks from racist whites, especially in the era of increased racist hostilities against black people of the 1870’s and 1880’s.
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Rep. Maxine Waters standing tall - and speaking out - as always.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Congresswoman Maxine Waters is righteously pissed about the fate of the children who have been removed from their parents at the border, thanks to Donald Trump. As she should be. As all of us should be.
Many thanks to Sis Joan Mar for posting, Auntie Maxine always has the last word! She responds to faux outrage #Civility which raises the issues I wrote about (and am ranting about) today.
My comments today are linked to a hashtag on twitter, which only represents a deeper issue — the dedication and persistence of my sister’s — black women, who are the backbone of the Democratic Party. We are the only electoral demographic that votes — almost unanimously for our party of choice.
Warning — this commentary will be twitter heavy, because much of our daily drama plays out on that platform.
I’ve written about this before — here’s a brief refresher. In Black women vote—and bring home wins in Virginia, I included this graphic:
In Dear Democrats: Time to wake up and smell the black coffee. We remember, I wrote
In spite of concerted and ongoing efforts by white people to suppress and disenfranchise the black vote—not just in Alabama—we continue to be the most dependable Democratic Party voting block. Period. Especially black women, though our brothers are far more often disallowed from voting due to having a record or being incarcerated.
While we have been dismissed, ‘buked, scorned and dubbed “low info,” and “not progressive” especially those of us who live in what are called “red states”—why is it you don’t get the fact that those states have been painted red with our blood ‘cause they are rigged for white racists?
Last year, I wrote about Maxine Waters, for her birth month of August:
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Santeria
Afro-Caribbean Religions
By dopper0189, Black Kos, Managing Editor
Religion is one of the most important cultural markers that links Afro-Caribbean people to their African ancestors. Scattered over a 3,000 mile long archipelago, the Caribbean basin was from the 15th through 19th centuries, the site of an extended historical encounter between Europe, Africa, and the Americas with Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, France, and the Britain competing with each other for control of the Caribbean islands (as well as nearby Central and South American coasts).
Major European colonies in the Caribbean basin included Cuba, Grenada,Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, as well as mainland colonies such as Belize, Honduras, Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana. In addition to enslaving the Native American populations, the colonizers brought Africans from Central and Western Africa as slaves to the region to provide labor on tobacco and sugar plantations and sought to convert them to Christianity.
Candomble
The vast majority of people in the Caribbean are part of a “creole culture” an intersection of African, European, and Native American cultures. The religions I will explore in this diary are Afro-Caribbean in nature, forged by the powerful force of countless multitudes of Africa’s children forced to work on plantations “remixing” how their religion was and is practiced. Outside of the Caribbean ideas and stereotypes of Caribbean religions and its people run wild. When European (and later American) in the 1700’s began writing about the religion practiced around the Caribbean, their writing reflected their strong anti-African biases, their own ignorance of African culture, and their intolerance of non-Christian beliefs.
Today most Caribbean people consider themselves to be Christians (as well as large numbers of Muslims, Hindu, and Buddhist) this is true even in Haiti (the country with the strongest Afro-Caribbean religious tradition Vodou) and Cuba (where Santeria is very widely practiced). Until recently “cultured” Caribbean elites were taught to look down upon these native religions. But beginning in the 1960’s, a combination of independence movements and cultural awakenings lead Caribbean people to show renewed pride in their African origins, and with it their African derived religions.
Sculpture of the loa Legba, who serves as the intermediary between the loa and humanity. Legba often appears as an old man in the Caribbean in West Africa he was young
Beginning with Columbus’ 1492 conquest, throughout the colonies of the Caribbean basin, Christian religions (such as the Anglican and Dutch Reformed churches or the national Catholic churches of France, Portugal, and Spain) became the state religions. Christian sects other than these state churches suffered persecution and non-Christian religions such as Islam, American Indian religions, and traditional African religions were actively suppressed. Nevertheless, some indigenous Caribbean and African populations resisted conversion and held onto their own religious beliefs while incorporating elements of Christianity. This process resulted in the creation of a variety of religious forms that incorporate elements from indigenous Caribbean beliefs and West and Central African religions, as well as institutional and popular forms of Christianity and even folk religious traditions practiced in Europe.
One example of this form of integration involves the role of Catholic saints in Afro-Caribbean religious traditions. In some instances, slaves from Africa would continue to worship their own spirits or deities, called lwa (also called Loa) by connecting them to Catholic saints, using the saints to hide the continuation of their religious practices in plain site. In other instances, Catholic saints were truly integrated into Afro-Caribbean religious traditions and given the status of lwa.
Voodon festival -Haiti
According to the US Census’ American Community Survey, as of 2016, about 4,000,000 people residing in the United States are direct Caribbean immigrants (Caribbean Immigrants in the United State) importantly this number excludes their children born in the US. Additionally according to PEW and additional 4.9 million Hispanics of Puerto Rican origin resided in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (remember this only a count of Puerto Ricans on the mainland), according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
The Afro-Caribbean population is most prominent in Miami, New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Boston. Of these, it is extremely difficult to determine how many actively practice Afro-Caribbean religions, also known as African Diasporic Religious Traditions. Furthermore, it is important to note that individuals who do not self-identify as Afro-Carribbean may practice African Diasporic Religious Traditions.
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This wall was designed to keep people in...and I think that Trump's mythical wall would be designed for that implicit purpose as well.
A rambling note on walls and veils
A Freestyle by Chitown Kev
i still feel a little worn out from doing that Alain Locke book review (which I still have to add a section about Locke’s encounters at Oxford). I have been digging IN a bit, lately, into Dr. Locke’s thoughts on cosmopolitianism.
At the same time, I just finished reading a novel by a Chilean novelist...which has piqued my interest in other Chilean authors (especially this one) and I am reading an Anthony Bourdain book that’s been laying around the house for awhile.
And then I start thinking of The Wall….
The First Da*n Fool’s wall, that is (with all due apologies to da*n fools, of course); the one he promised to his rabid base to protect them from all sorts of imagined things and events.
Frankly, the idea of a wall on the Mexican border is a simple yet evocative image that lends itself easily to metaphors.
Walls are much like veils; by design, walls and veils protect you; The Veil in W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow are the best literary examples I can think of that concept of a veil or a wall off of the top of my head.
But...walls and veils also decrease your vision.
And, as with The Berlin Wall and, to a lesser extent, I think, The Great Wall of China, walls can also be designed to keep you in.
The Wall of Racial Segregation and Jim Crow that existed officially in this country for decades and which still unofficially exists in many places works in a similar manner.
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"... Anyway your grades weren’t all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything, no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless... " -- Patricia Smith “10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine”
Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
We Americans have a peculiar habit of building up our Heroes, only so we can tear them to shreds at the smallest imperfection. So it always seemed odd to me to put a woman on a pedestal. Take the Statue of Liberty, for instance. I figured it was only a matter of time before virulent haters would tear her to shreds, and I was right. But stand on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and call for the reunification of children ripped from their parent’s embrace, and those same haters will muster in the millions to cries of sacrilege perpetuated on the most sacred of national icons and how dare she endanger the lives of first responders who were pulled from abusing six year-olds who were illegally speaking Spanish without a green card the army of vermin infesting our shores shouldn’t have anyway. How dare she remind us of what we do to our own children in God’s name. How dare she.
“10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine”
Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book
itty-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl
and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder
spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall
above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train
engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.
Who shot you, baby?
I don’t know. I was playing.
You didn’t see anyone?
I was playing with my friend Sharon.
I was on the swing
and she was—
Are you sure you didn’t—
No, I ain’t seen nobody but Sharon. I heard
people yelling though, and—
Each bullet repainted you against the brick, kicked
you a little sideways, made you need air differently.
You leaked something that still goldens the boulevard.
I ain’t seen nobody, I told you.
And at A. Lincoln Elementary on Washington Street,
or Jefferson Elementary on Madison Street, or Adams
Elementary just off the Eisenhower Expressway,
we gather the ingredients, if not the desire, for pathos:
an imploded homeroom, your empty seat pulsating
with drooped celebrity, the sometime counselor
underpaid and elsewhere, a harried teacher struggling
toward your full name. Anyway your grades weren’t
all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything,
no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers
through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce
the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless.
Oh, and they’ve finally located your mama, who
will soon burst in with her cut-rate cure of stammering
Jesus’ name. Beneath the bandages, your chest crawls
shut. Perky ol’ Thomas winks a bold-faced lie from
his clacking track, and your heart monitor hums
a wry tune no one will admit they’ve already heard.
Elsewhere, 23 seconds rumble again and again through
Sharon’s body. Boom, boom, she says to no one.
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I’m getting really tired of racist Whypipo.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I really wish that white folks would start taking responsibility for their rogue and rabid flock members so that I don’t have to see story, after story, after story, about foaming at the mouth bigots who act like they have an inalienable right to spew and puke all over unwitting Black folks and Latinx and Muslims and LBGT folks — simply “because.”
I’m tired of folks making excuses for them — they are drunk or they are crazy ...so friggin’ what? That doesn’t erase the racism.
When I saw the video of the young woman in the Puerto Rico tee-shirt getting attacked by a drunk ‘ignant’ white dude — and also watched a white cop stand there and let it happen — I thought about all the times I’ve worn my Puerto Rico tee-shirts and never thought about the fact that it’s like waving a red flag at the bigot bulls.
Hell — after 9/11 I had to push my husband to put on Puerto Rico tee-shirts to protect him from trigger happy troopers who thought he looked like a “Muslim Terrorist”
Yes — I know the cop’s failure is being “investigated”:
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Barbara Jean Lee, Democrat, U.S. Representative for California's 13th congressional district.
Backing Barbara Lee (D-CA) for Democratic Caucus Chair
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
When I saw the news that Congresswoman Barbara Lee is running for House Democratic Caucus chair, my first response was “it’s about time.”
I have frequently expressed my feelings and opinions about the role and impact of Black women in the Democratic Party, most recently last Sunday.
I’ve also been annoyed (read pissed off) by the characterization of black folks as somehow not part of what is viewed as “progressive,” which seems to be the mantle draped on mostly white shoulders these days. I remember being surprised when I realized that quite a few readers here knew nothing about the history of Ron Dellums — who was a Democratic Socialist — elected as a Democrat. Congresswoman Lee got her start in politics working for him.
U.S. Congresswoman Honorable Barbara Lee was born on July 16, 1946 in El Paso, Texas. Her biological father, James Lewis, was a veteran of the Korean War; her mother, Mildred Massey, a clerk. In 1960, Lee’s family moved to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California. As a teenager, she immersed herself in music and won two music achievement awards from the Rotary Club and the Bank of America. Lee graduated from San Fernando High School in 1964. She worked for one year in the California Department of Labor Statistics, and then went on to receive her B.A. degree in psychology from Mills College in 1973 and her M.A. degree in social work from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975.
Upon graduation, Lee worked for Congressman Ronald V. Dellums after serving as a legislative intern there during graduate school. While there, she managed Congressman Dellums’ offices in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California for eleven years and eventually rose to the position of senior adviser. In 1990, Lee was elected to the California State Assembly; and, in 1996, she was elected to the California State Senate. As a Democrat, she worked successfully with California’s Republican administration in those years and sponsored sixty-seven bills that were signed into law by then-Republican Governor Pete Wilson. Lee’s political agenda focused on issues such as education, public safety, environmental protection, health, labor, and women’s rights. In 1998, she became the first woman to represent the State of California’s then-9th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives and served as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus from 2009 to 2011. She was later elected as the first woman to represent the California’s now-13th Congressional District in 2013. Lee also published a memoir, Renegade for Peace and Justice: A Memoir of Political and Personal Courage (2008).
Many people nation-wide got their first good look at Lee when she became the lone vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF) in 2001.
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Voices & Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
In October of 1991, while conducting an archeological survey and excavation for the construction of a $275 million dollar federal office building at 290 Broadway in Manhattan, the General Services Agency announced the discovery of intact remains in a vast burial site. As it became clear the site was a slave graveyard that was conveniently unreported for God knows how long, with remains dating from before the 1700’s, the community took measures to halt construction and redirect efforts, so as to give voice to the voiceless. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, and after much litigation and Community Activism, control of the burial site was transferred from the City to Howard University, for study at the Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory. Funds were approved by Congress in 2003 to build a memorial, which was dedicated in 2007. A visitor center opened in 2010, and it is highly recommended as a must stop in the Big Apple, docents and other volunteers provide a comprehensive interpretation of the role of the vast Diaspora in colonial and federal, New York City.
They came as Congo, Guinea, & Angola,
feet tuned to rhythms of a thumb piano.
They came to work fields of barley & flax,
livestock, stone & slab, brick & mortar,
to make wooden barrels, some going
from slave to servant & half-freeman.
They built tongue & groove — wedged
into their place in New Amsterdam.
Decades of seasons changed the city
from Dutch to York, & dream-footed
hard work rattled their bones.
They danced Ashanti. They lived
& died. Shrouded in cloth, in cedar
& pine coffins, Trinity Church
owned them in six & a half acres
of sloping soil. Before speculators
arrived grass & weeds overtook
what was most easily forgotten,
& tannery shops drained there.
Did descendants & newcomers
shoulder rock & heave loose gravel
into the landfill before building crews
came, their guitars & harmonicas
chasing away ghosts at lunch break?
Soon, footsteps of lower Manhattan
strutted overhead, back & forth
between old denials & new arrivals,
going from major to minor pieties,
always on the go. The click of heels
the tap of a drum awaking the dead.
-- Yusef Komunyakaa
"The African Burial Ground"
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Senator Kamala Harris speaking at Netroots Nation 2018
“Identity Politics.” Senator Kamala Harris at Netroots Nation
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
Finally! A Democratic Senator standing up and pushing back against the way the term “identity politics” has been used as a bludgeon to shut up and dismiss those of us in the Democratic party who are people of color, women, LGBTQ. and immigrants.
Thank you Senator Harris.
In December of 2016 I wrote, “My 'identity' can get me killed” stating:
During the last couple of weeks, following the election of an openly white supremacist-endorsing man to the highest office in our land, I’ve been listening to and reading people’s comments and responses to that election. Included in remarks from some Democrats and left/liberal pundits have been critiques of “identity politics,” and calls for us to abandon them as central to our party’s future electoral strategies. A key issue in the commentary has been the raging debate about whether or not those predominantly white people who voted for that man and his Klanvention (aka cabinet-to-be) are “racists.”
My position is that they are. Some of his voters have been overt. Others heard the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny and ignored it—and enabled it—which essentially boils down to the same result. That’s not a shocking conclusion, since I’ve lived my entire life with an awareness of the prevalence of racism here in this country my ancestors helped build on their backs. In many ways, I’ve felt that the discussions have become detached from both a historical and present-day reality of life in the U.S.A. for those of us whose lives are most endangered by this step backwards—the real lives of real people whose “identities” cannot be removed like a change of clothes.
Since that time, though more people are waking up to just how vile and white supremacist Trump and the Republican cabal are — there are still far too many of our so-called allies who continue to beat the drum of excusing the white working class, attributing their support of Trump to economic anxiety, and who persist in throwing us and our concerns under the bus in pursuit of outreach to those who would happily see us dead. Many of those who call themselves “progressives” are trapped in a mind-set of a dogmatic and obdurate solely class analysis which from my pov as a black woman is regressive.
Thus, it was with joy that I listened to Senator Kamala Harris at Netroots Nation in New Orleans when she took the bullshit by the horns and spoke out on it — forcefully and clearly.
I have been searching (in vain) for a transcript of her entire speech — and sadly, the majority of the news coverage got what she was saying — wrong.
In essence she pointed out that what Democrats should be about are the issues that affect us deeply — that those who don’t want us to talk about race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or reproductive rights or immigration use the term “identity politics” as a pejorative, to shut us up.
It gets used by both the right and a mostly white male segment of the left.
What has bothered me for a very long time is the fact that most people these days are not aware of where the term originated as political theory — from the Combahee River collective.
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COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTIST AND INVENTORS
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Mathematician and professor of mathematics Trachette Jackson was born on July 24, 1972. She attended a large public high school and spent her summers at a math-science honors program hosted by Arizona State University where she developed her passion for mathematics. Jackson was an excellent student and graduated in the top twenty of her class. In 1994, she received her B.S. degree in mathematics from Arizona State University. Jackson earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington in 1996 and 1998, respectively. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Mathematical Models in Two-Step Cancer Chemotherapy." She completed postdoctoral positions with the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota, and at Duke University.
In 2000, Jackson joined the faculty at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in the mathematics department. She was promoted to associate professor in 2003. In 2006, Jackson was appointed as the co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded University of Michigan SUBMERGE (Supplying Undergraduate Biology and Mathematics Education Research Group Experiences) program. SUBMERGE is an interdisciplinary program in math and biology that exposes undergraduates to experimental biology within mathematical modeling and gives exposure to quantitative analysis in biology courses. In 2008, she became a full professor in Michigan's mathematics department. Jackson is the co-founder, and is the co-director, of the the Mathematics Biology Research Group (MBRG). The group organizes lectures, conferences, and workshops for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, among other activities. The main focus of her research in mathematical oncology is combining mathematical modeling and in vivo tumor vascularization to gain deeper understanding of tumor growth and the vascular structure of molecular, cellular and tissue levels......Read More
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The one and only Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin...and her hat...at the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, January 20, 2009.
Let It Be
Commentary by ChItown Kev
As news that the Queen of Soul, Detroit's very own Aretha Louise Franklin, was near death began filtering out, I remembered that Aretha had recorded a cover of The Beatles' ''Let It Be'' and it seems...appropriate now.
I decided to do a little digging on Aretha’s recording of this iconic Beatles song and learned that...well, this wasn’t exactly a cover of The Beatles at all.
In the liner notes to Aretha Franklin’s 2007 boxset, Rare & Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign of The Queen of Soul, producer Jerry Wexler recalled how Aretha’s “Let It Be” came to be:
“Paul McCartney had sent me an acetate of ‘Let It Be’ with a note that it was written for Aretha. We recorded it. Afterwards, though, Aretha told us to hold up the release. She liked the melody but wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. Time passed and the boys from Liverpool were tired of waiting. They put me on legal notice that we no longer had right of first release. They cut it themselves and, of course, enjoyed a huge hit. By 1970 Aretha saw the light and allowed us to include it, along with ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ on This Girl’s In Love With You.
Even with her hesitation, Aretha still beat the Fab Four by a couple of months. Her album came out in January 1970, while The Beatles issued “Let It Be” as a single in March. The aforementioned Aretha rarities collection unearthed a third Lennon/McCartney composition recorded during the same sessions for This Girl’s In Love With You, “The Fool On The Hill.” Even casual students of The Beatles are sure to note that all three tunes Aretha covered were principally the work of Sir Paul.
The Paul McCartney-written ‘’Let It Be’’ is one of my favorite Beatles’ songs.
I like Aretha’s version better.
I like Aretha’s version better.
How many times have I...and so many others... said those exact words?
Sang it Aretha…
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SPADES, THE MOST POPULAR CARD GAME FOR AFRICAN-AMERICANS
BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
A staple of social gatherings the world over, the card game Spades is a favorite for many because of the strategy involved in mastering the game. But what’s also very interesting about Spades, is how it has become especially popular in the Black community. In fact no other card game h
as as central a role in African-American culture as Spades. While the root causes of this popularity may be difficult to ever fully uncover, a brief review of the game’s origins and rules may provide some insights.
Spades was created in the United States sometime in the 1930’s. This card game became popular right before World War II in the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. The game of Spades quickly spread throughout the rest of Midwest, and then in both the South and North East especially in African-American communities. Spades became the card game of choice for black troops killing time stationed abroad in World War II in between battles. Once it took hold there it became a national Black American pastime, as returning Black GI’s quickly shared their popular pastime throughout black communities in the US.
Until relatively recently the game of Spades was little known outside the USA; except of course in a few places where American troops were stationed. For example in parts of Germany near American military bases Spades became a popular game as American troops stationed their taught the game to the local German inhabitants. However, since the mid 1990's Spades has become popular internationally because of its easy availability in on-line card rooms on the Internet.
A group of people playing spades
Growing up in a Caribbean family and community my first game of choice was dominoes. When I went to college in the Midwest I quickly learned the centrality of Spades at primarily African-American gathering. As my good friends from Detroit put it 1) Music 2) Food 3) Drink 4) Spades 5) More Food (in that order) are the essential ingredients at any African-American party. I recently reminisced about this because of a popular meme that went viral last month. I was once the college kid on the receiving end of this meme.
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Stupid racist whypepo losing their minds about Nike ad featuring Colin Kaepernick
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Okay — so I have a long term interest in the anthropology and sociology of advertising and media campaigns. I’m one of those people who watches the Super Bowl to see the ads. Yeah — I know, advertising is part of the whole capitalist package — still doesn’t change my interest in examining its power — specifically as it relates to the use of black people and other people of color.
Hence, while spending the long weekend recuperating from my bronchitis, awash in funerals — Aretha’s Homecoming and the send off for McCain — with anger that flared because there as yet have been no flags lowered or national acknowledgement of Puerto Rico’s dead — I also looked for a bit of humor.
I found it in the over the top mouth foaming (again) about Colin Kaepernick and the announcement of his role in Nike’s 30th anniversary of it’s “Just Do it” slogan.
Colin Kaepernick is back -- at least as far as Madison Avenue is concerned.
The former NFL quarterback, who is suing NFL owners for allegedly colluding to keep him out of the league, is one of the faces of a new Nike campaign meant to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the brand's iconic "Just Do It" motto.
...
Nike signed Kaepernick in 2011 and kept him on its endorsement roster over the years. The company had not used him in the past two years.
"We believe Colin is one of the most inspirational athletes of this generation, who has leveraged the power of sport to help move the world forward," Gino Fisanotti, Nike's vice president of brand for North America, told ESPN.
Other athletes in the "Just Do It" campaign include Odell Beckham Jr., Shaquem Griffin, Lacey Baker, Serena Williams and LeBron James.
"We wanted to energize its meaning and introduce 'Just Do It' to a new generation of athletes," Fisanotti said.
Fisanotti said the new version of the campaign is meant to specifically speak to 15- to 17-year olds.
Kaepernick's protests of racial injustice -- which began in August 2016 with sitting and later kneeling during the national anthem -- launched a movement across the NFL. No team signed him as a free agent in 2017.
I have no intention of debating about #TakeAKnee or #PlayerProtests or the NFL today. I’m simply enjoying the response from black twitter — who no matter how serious the subject manage to bring a smile to my face when I need one. It isn’t all from black twitter either. Sane white folks are all up in it too.
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Commentary: Great African American
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer, serving as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the Court's 96th justice and its first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he successfully argued several cases before the Supreme Court.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall graduated from the Howard University School of Law in 1933. He established a private legal practice in Baltimore before founding the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he served as executive director. In that position, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Smith v. Allwright, Shelley v. Kraemer, and Brown v. Board of Education, which held that racial segregation in public education is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as the United States Solicitor General. In 1967, Johnson successfully nominated Marshall to succeed retiring Associate Justice Tom C. Clark. Marshall retired during the administration of President George H. W. Bush, and was succeeded by Clarence Thomas.
LAW CAREER
After graduating from law school, Marshall started a private law practice in Baltimore. He began his 25-year affiliation with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1934 by representing the organization in the law school discrimination suit Murray v. Pearson. In 1936, Marshall became part of the national staff of the NAACP.
In Murray v. Pearson, Marshall represented Donald Gaines Murray, a black Amherst College graduate with excellent credentials, who was denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of its segregation policy. Black students in Maryland wanting to study law had to attend segregated establishments, Morgan College, the Princess Anne Academy, or out-of-state black institutions. Using the strategy developed by Nathan Margold, Marshall argued that Maryland's segregation policy violated the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson because the state did not provide a comparable educational opportunity at a state-run black institution.
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A flyer from the abolitionist resistance.
The Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850 was a concession to the southern states in return for the admission of the Mexican war territories (California, especially) into the Union as nonslave states.The Act made it easy for slaveowners to recapture ex-slaves or simply to pick up blacks they claimed had run away. Northern blacks organized resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, denouncing President Fillmore, who signed it, and Senator Daniel Webster, who supported it. One of these was J. W. Loguen, son of a slave mother and her white owner. He had escaped to freedom on his master's horse, gone to college, and was now a minister in Syracuse, New York. He spoke to a meeting in that city in 1850:
The time has come to change the tones of submission into tones of defiance-and to tell Mr. Fillmore and Mr. Webster, if they propose to execute this measure upon us, to send on their blood-hounds. ...I received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the command to defend my title to it. ... I don't respect this law-I don't fear it-I won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it.... I will not live a slave, and if force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man. ... Your decision tonight in favor of resistance will give vent to the spirit of liberty,and it will break the bands of party, and shout for joy all over the North. ... Heaven knows that this act of noble daring will break out somewhere-and may God grant that Syracuse be the honored spot, whence it shall send an earthquake voice through the land!
The following year, Syracuse had its chance. A runaway slave named Jerry was captured and put on trial. A crowd used crowbars and a battering ram to break into the courthouse, defying marshals with drawn guns, and set Jerry free.
Loguen made his home in Syracuse a major station on the Underground Railroad. It was said that he helped 1,500 slaves on their way to Canada. His memoir of slavery came to the attention of his former mistress, and she wrote to him, asking him either to return or to send her $1,000 in compensation. Loguen's reply to her was printed in the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator:
Mrs. Sarah Logue. .. . You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, "You know we raised you as we did our own children." Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping post? Did you raise them to be driven off, bound to a coffle in chains? ... Shame on you!
But you say I am a thief, because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got to learn that I had a better right to the old mare, as you call her, than Manasseth Logue had to me? Is it a greater sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob my mother's cradle, and steal me? . .. Have you got to learn that human rights are mutual and reciprocal, and if you take my liberty and life, you forfeit your own liberty and life? Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here, and lay their hands on me to enslave me.. . .
Yours, etc. J. W. Loguen
You can read Loguen’s full narrative online:
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The Battle of Adwa, the battle that kept Ethiopia a free country
By dopper0189, Black Kos, Managing Editor
Battle of Adwa
The Battle of Adwa was fought on March 1st 1896 between the Ethiopian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy near the town of Adwa, Ethiopia, in Tigray. Ethiopia’s victory in this battle sent shock waves around the world (“The pope is greatly disturbed,” reported The New York Times) and turned the narrative of colonialism on its head.
Prior to the 1850s, modern Ethiopia and Italy really didn’t exist as nation states. But shortly there after, over the course of several decades, the two nations began to take shape on maps and most importantly in the minds of their citizens, as chieftains and princes jostled for power. As the 20th century dawned, Africa had been carved up among the European powers at the Berlin Conference. The only two independent exceptions were the former America colony the Republic of Liberia in West Africa and Ethiopia (then still known as Abyssinia), in the eastern Horn of Africa region.
East Africa circa 1930
The newly unified Kingdom of Italy was a relative newcomer to the European imperialist scramble for Africa. Italy had recently obtained two African territories: Eritrea and Italian Somalia. Both were near Ethiopia on the Horn of Africa. Italy sought to increase its territory in Africa by conquering Ethiopia and joining it with its two territories. Menelik II as the contemporary Ethiopian leader pitted Italy against its European rivals while stockpiling weapons to defend Ethiopia against the Italians.
The Italians fortified several bases near the Red Sea and then gradually ventured inland. “Taking a page from the British book of colonial domination,” writes Theodore Vestal in The Battle of Adwa: Reflections on Ethiopia’s Historic Victory Against European Colonialism, they “pursued a policy of divide and conquer,” providing arms to any chiefs hostile to Yohannes IV, Ethiopia’s emperor until he was killed in battle in 1889. It was then that the Italians immediately moved to solidify their foothold by negotiating with the new emperor, Menelik II.
Menelik, from Ethiopia’s historically weaker southern region, owed much to his wife, Taytu. Raymond Jonas, author of The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire wrote heir marriage was “one of the great political unions of modern times.” She came from a wealthy northern family, which “added geographical balance to the ticket,” and she possessed a cunning political mind and a deep mistrust of Europeans
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Mary Prince’s 230th Birthday celebrated by Google Doodle. Prince, who was born into slavery, was the first woman to present an anti-slavery petition to Parliament in the UK
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Black History Month in the United Kingdom is celebrated in the month of October. Google Doodle kicked off the month with a celebration of the 230th birthday of Mary Prince, who was born into slavery in Bermuda in 1788.
Here is the text:
On this day in 1788, Mary Prince was born in Brackish Pond, Bermuda. Sold from master to master throughout her life, Prince ended up on the island of Antigua in 1815 where she joined the Moravian church in 1817 and learned to read. Despite not having received a formal education, Prince went on to be recognized as a National Hero of Bermuda for her work to abolish slavery.
In December 1826 Prince married Daniel James, a former slave who had managed to buy his freedom. Her master at the time punished her for marrying a free black man with permission and in two years time the husband and wife were separated because Prince’s family moved to England taking her with them.
After the passage of Great Britain’s Slave Trade Act in 1808, slavery was no longer allowed in England, although the institution of slavery continued in the British colonies. Prince was legally free on British soil, but she had no means to support herself. Under the prevailing rules of the time, if she tried to return home to her husband, she would risk being enslaved again.
In 1829 Prince became the first woman to present a petition to Parliament, arguing for her human right to freedom. That same year some of her associates in the anti-slavery “abolitionist” movement introduced a bill proposing that any West Indian slave brought to England by his or her owners must be freed. It did not pass, but momentum was beginning to shift in favor of the abolitionist cause.
Two years later Prince published her autobiography, making her the first black woman to publish a slave narrative in England. Her book played a decisive role in turning British public opinion against the centuries-old institution of human enslavement.
“I have been a slave myself,” Prince wrote in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. “I know what slaves feel—I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery—that they don't want to be free—that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so.”
Published in 1731, the book caused a sensation, going through three printings in the first year alone. In one of the book’s many heartbreaking passages, Mary recalled being sold “like sheep or cattle” on the same day as her younger sisters Hannah and Dina were sold to different masters. “When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, begging of us to keep up a good heart, and do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing.”
Two lawsuits for libel were filed against the book’s publisher in 1833, and Mary Prince testified at both, effectively rebuking any claims that the book was inaccurate or defamatory. After that there is no record of her movements—she may have stayed in England or returned home to her husband in Bermuda.
On August 1, 1838, some 800,000 slaves living in British colonies throughout the Caribbean were finally set free, following the passage of Great Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act, which was passed by Parliament two years after the publication of Mary Prince’s book.
Happy Birthday Mary Prince!
I am re-posting this segment of a Black Kos diary on Black Abolitionists I wrote in 2013, using materials I taught in a course, “Women in the Caribbean”:
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To some, apparently, the cold-blooded murder of Laquan McDonald was simply another form of entertainment, I guess.
Panem et Circenses
Commentary by Chitown Kev
As every one knows, last weekend in the news was a crispy hot mess in many ways.
Nothing...and I mean nothing made me sadder and angrier and more depressed than this article about reactions to the Jason Van Dyke verdict at the Chicago Sun-Times.
In Mount Greenwood, blue ribbons showing support for law enforcement remain tied around nearly every utility pole, streetlight and many trees along main avenues in the neighborhood. While many residents declined to share their reaction to the verdict Friday, others agreed that Van Dyke was the victim of politics and said they were worried about what it meant for the future of law enforcement.
“He’s a political prisoner. A sacrificial lamb,” said resident Tim Horner, a 47-year-old relative of police officers who work in the south suburbs. “This anti-police movement has gotten so strong these last few years and they made Van Dyke take the fall.
“Do you think he went out that night wanting to kill someone? He was faced with a threat and he had to act. It’s not murder,” Horner said while outside Lanigan’s Irish Pub, 3119 W. 111th. “People don’t understand how hard it is to be a police officer.”
OK, so a young black man was murdered in cold blood with ‘’extenuating circumstances’’ and some people cannot even bring themselves to acknowledge Laquan McDonald’s basic humanity, that he was a son and father to someone.
I mean, where I live, I see white boys, on some occasions, walking around the street just as loaded...if not even more so than Mr. McDonald was that night.
I have the feeling that these very same people would not feel the same way about the police if this was their son...then again, I doubt that the police would react to their own sons and daughters the same way that Jason Van Dyke acted when he murdered Laquan McDonald in cold blood.
I swear, I am sick and tired of white people feeling that black folks have to defend their basic humanity to them.
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Statue of Peter Norman, Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture
50 years ago. It could be yesterday.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
“When I watched U.S. Olympic champions Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Australian Peter Norman mount the dais on October 16th, 1968 in Mexico City, all three wearing human rights badges on their jackets, and the two black Americans solemnly raised their black gloved fists in the air, heads bowed as the Star Spangled Banner played— time stopped for me.”
Six years have passed since I wrote those words here.
Since that time black athletes have continued to raise the issues facing us here in the USA, and as long as objective conditions for black folks in America are still dire, I hope they will continue to do so.
From the BBC archives:
Two black American athletes have made history at the Mexico Olympics by staging a silent protest against racial discrimination.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medallists in the 200m, stood with their heads bowed and a black-gloved hand raised as the American National Anthem played during the victory ceremony.
The pair both wore black socks and no shoes and Smith wore a black scarf around his neck. They were demonstrating against continuing racial discrimination of black people in the United States.
As they left the podium at the end of the ceremony they were booed by many in the crowd.
'Black America will understand'
At a press conference after the event Tommie Smith, who holds seven world records, said: "If I win I am an American, not a black American. But if I did something bad then they would say 'a Negro'. We are black and we are proud of being black.
"Black America will understand what we did tonight."
Smith said he had raised his right fist to represent black power in America, while Carlos raised his left fist to represent black unity. Together they formed an arch of unity and power.
He said the black scarf represented black pride and the black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America.
Bow your head and raise a fist, or take a knee.
Then organize, keep fighting, protest, and vote, to end white supremacy.
I have nothing more to say.
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Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
BY BLACK KOS EDITOR, SEPHIUS1
Fred McKinley Jones (1893-1961) is certainly one of the most important Black inventors ever based on the sheer number of inventions he formulated as well as their diversity.
Fred Jones was born on May 17, 1893 in Covington, Kentucky. His father was a white railroad worker of Irish descent and his mother was Black. It is believed that his mother died while he was young and Fred was raised by his father. When Fred was eight years old, his father took him to Cincinnati, Ohio to where they visited St. Mary's Catholic Church rectory. Fred's father urged Father Edward A. Ryan to take Fred in in order to expose him to an environment where he might have a better opportunity for gaining an education. Fred performed chores around the church in return for being fed and housed, cutting the grass, shoveling snow, scrubbing floors and learning to cook. At an early age, Fred demonstrated a great interest in mechanical working, whether taking apart a toy, a watch or a kitchen appliance. Eventually he became interested in automobiles, so much so that upon turning 12 years of age, he ran away from his home at the rectory and began working at the R.C. Crothers Garage.
Initially hired to sweep and clean the garage, Fred spent much of his time observing the mechanics as they worked on cars. His observation, along with a voracious appetite for learning through reading developed within Fred an incredible base of knowledge about automobiles and their inner workings. Within three years, Fred had become the foreman of the garage. The garage was primarily designed to repair automobiles brought in by customers but also served as a studio for building racing cars. After a few years of building these cars, Fred desired to drive them and soon became one of the most well known racers in the Great Lakes region. After brief stints working aboard a steamship and a hotel, Jones moved to Hallock, Minnesota began designing and building racecars which he drove them at local tracks and at county fairs. His favorite car was known as Number 15 and it was so well designed it not only defeated other automobile but once triumphed in a race against an airplane.
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Victoria Gray, Civil and voting rights activist and organizer. November 5, 1926 – August 12, 2006
Victoria Gray and Unita Blackwell fought so that we could register and vote. Honor their struggle. Vote!
Commentary by Black Kos Editor, Denise Oliver-Velez
The following two recently published public service announcements —urging people to vote, need to be shared widely.
Too many young people (and some older folks too) don’t know the names and the faces linked to the life and death battles we’ve had to fight just to register and vote. This is not ancient history, and it’s clearly linked to all the racist voter suppression efforts we see today.
Please go to youtube, like, favorite and share these via your social networks:
Victoria Gray saw the all-white politics of 1964 Mississippi, and refused to accept that it was impossible to change it. So she helped start a new political party, The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And she ran for the Senate under its banner, challenging one of the most powerful politicians in America, Senator John Stennis. She lost that election. But she forced a change in the nation’s politics and four years later, her new political party became the official Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Some background: Victoria Gray was a field secretary in Mississippi for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was one of the most important figures in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and played a key role in the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Along with Annie Devine and Fannie Lou Hamer she was one of the “Big Three” of the Mississippi Movement. All three went to Washington in 1965 to challenge the seating in Congress of the politicians who opposed them, since black voters had been barred from the polls. This was known as “The Congressional Challenge”. The Congress seated the white politicians, but also warned them to stop the all-white primaries that prohibited participation by black voters. Together with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this Congressional Challenge was a key factor in forcing Mississippi to open its political system to all its citizens, regardless of color.
Unita Blackwell joined the Civil Rights movement when she realized that her poverty was connected to the laws that prevented her from voting, because she was black. She talks here about the importance of taking that first step in voting – registration. In 1960s Mississippi, voter registration was both difficult and dangerous if you were black.The interview with Ms. Blackwell is from 1997. But the struggle for fair voting laws and procedures continues today. Many states are again making it difficult to register and vote. Unita Blackwell explains that if someone is trying to take away your right to vote, it's because that vote means something important, and rather than giving up, you should fight for your right to share in the political power and the rights of citizenship that comes from your vote.Unita Blackwell became an organizer for SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. And in the 1976 she became Mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi. Despite being the County Seat for Issaquena County, there were no paved road, sewage or water systems. Residents also had no good housing. Mayor Blackwell changed all that, incorporating the town for the first time, which qualified it for Federal grants. She then paved the roads, named the streets, put in sewage and water systems, built new housing and created a city park where cotton fields once stood. She demonstrated the power of the vote.
Kudos to the producer.
This Public Service Announcement was produced by Passage Film, Inc. The 1997 interview made with Ms. Blackwell by Passage Film’s owner, Kent Moorhead. This PSA is copyrighted to protect the interview with Unita Blackwell from being used in another context. But if you are an individual or group promoting voting rights, Passage Film, inc. encourages you to share or embed this video, free of charge.
For more history read, “How black women helped shape history and today's Democratic Party”
GOTV. GOTV. GOTV.
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"... one of the concessions won by slave riots was the right to a funeral. whitefolk were confused at how the Africans sometimes wore white, smiled, shouted like joy. they seen funerals. not homegoings... " -- Nate Marshall "on caskets"
Voices and Soul
By
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
When I was 26 years old, I embarked on an epic bicycle trip with two other friends. Starting in Malibu, we peddled north to the Canadian border. Camping along the way, we scaled the more prominent peaks of the Pacific Crest Trail, but mostly we followed the decidedly flatter Highway 99 as it snaked along the central valleys of California, Oregon and Washington.
I had been intrigued by old graveyards since I was a child in Oregon, and California has thousands of old little graveyards. Some mostly forgotten, some maintained by small forgotten towns along mostly forgotten stretches of Highway 99. I had taken auto trips across California and we would stumble on such graveyards occasionally, but that bike trip revealed the multitude of graveyards that exist in the state. Travelling slow causes one to notice more of the landscape and more of the people who live and die there.
I was always struck by the ages of the deceased. Some graveyards held mostly children under the age of 10, with a smattering of elderly. The dates of the interred gave a clue to why so many children died during certain years and certain seasons. Simple research at a local library showed what was suspected, small pox and influenza ravaged entire communities, killing whole families of their young children.
I often wonder what some traveler will think of our graveyards now, filled with the young, dead too soon from maladies that will only be guessed at.
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COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Jesse Ernest Wilkins, Jr. (November 27, 1923 – May 1, 2011) was an African American nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer and mathematician, who gained first fame on entering the University of Chicago at age 13, becoming its youngest ever student. His intelligence led to him being referred to as a "negro genius" in the media.
As part of a widely varied and notable career, Wilkins contributed to the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. He also gained fame working in and conducting nuclear physics research in both academia and industry. He wrote numerous scientific papers, served in various important posts, earned several significant awards and helped recruit minority students into the sciences. His career spanned seven decades and included significant contributions to pure and applied mathematics, civil and nuclear engineering, and optics.
Despite his stature and fame during his various careers he was not unaffected by the prevalent racism that existed for much of his life.
J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.
In 1940 Wilkins completed his B.Sc. in mathematics at age 17, then his M.Sc. at age 18, and finally went on to complete a Ph.D in mathematics at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1942 at age 19. In order to improve his rapport with the nuclear engineers reporting to him, Wilkins later received both Bachelor's and Master's degrees in mechanical engineering from New York University in 1957 and 1960, thus earning five science degrees during his life.
In 1944 he returned to the University of Chicago where he served first as an associate mathematical physicist and then as a physicist in its Metallurgical Laboratory, as part of the Manhattan Project. Working under the direction of Arthur Holly Compton and Enrico Fermi, Wilkins researched the extraction of fissionable nuclear materials, but was not told of the research group's ultimate goal until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Wilkins was the codiscoverer or discoverer of a number of phenomena in physics such as the Wilkins Effect, plus the Wigner-Wilkins and Wilkins
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Housing Segregation in America.
Commentary By Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
When we think about Lorraine Hansberry, we automatically jump to her best known work, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which was inspired by Hansberry’s experiences growing up in a segregated Chicago.
Today is the anniversary of the 1940 Supreme Court ruling in Hansberry v Lee.
Fighting for Home: The Roots of A Raisin in the Sun
When real estate developer Carl Augustus Hansberry sought to buy a better home for his family in 1938, he settled on a turreted brick structure at 6140 South Rhodes Avenue in the Washington Park area of Chicago. In doing so, he directly confronted one of the most entrenched realities of urban segregation: restrictive covenants. These agreements, signed by the property holders of Chicago’s white neighborhoods, stipulated the exclusion of all black residents with the insulting exception of “janitors, chauffeurs, or house servants.” By 1938, restrictive covenants covered over 85% of the city, crowding its African-American population into dismal, overpriced housing. City leaders at many levels framed such restrictions as a necessary bulwark against racial disharmony. “However unsatisfactory [the covenants] may be,” declared Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, “they are the only means at present available by which the members of the associations can stabilize the conditions under which they desire to live.” Those who defied the covenants, writes Chicago historian Arnold Hirsch, faced not only “mere examples of anti-Black animus,” but an entire system of “sophisticated psychological warfare” intended to keep them caged in the ghettoes.
Ironically, even as the covenants grew stricter, the economic situation worked against them. By 1937, Chicago had 50,000 more African-American residents than apartments where their occupancy was permitted. White property owners capitalized on the great demand, at times extracting exorbitantly high rent from black tenants in violation of the covenants. James T. Burke, the prior owner of the house that Hansberry purchased, was one such landlord. He asserted that he would “put negroes in every block of that property.” In the end, it took only Carl Hansberry’s occupancy to set off an uproar. Predictably, the local property owners association challenged Hansberry’s residency, claiming that “unless an injunction is granted, said neighborhood [would] become mixed, both white and colored with its attendant evils.” But Hansberry fought back, using his own real estate expertise and enlisting the aid of experienced NAACP lawyers. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that since an earlier case had upheld the legality of the covenant, the issue was res judicata — already adjudicated and not subject to further decisions. On these grounds, it ordered the family to “remove from the premises.” Undaunted, Hansberry appealed, and the case ultimately landed before the United States Supreme Court in October 1940.
While the legal battle raged in Washington, Hansberry’s family was fighting a far more brutal war from their new home. His daughter Lorraine, ten years old at the time, would later describe how her mother, Nannie Louise Hansberry, stayed up nights clutching a pistol to defend her children from the “hellishly hostile” mobs, thrown bricks, and threats of arson that besieged them. After two weeks, the Supreme Court finally reached a verdict, reversing the Illinois decision and securing the Hansberrys’ residency. However, wary of openly addressing the racial roots of the case, the Court abstained from ruling against restrictive covenants in general.
I have always been interested in the events that took place in Chicago at that time. My grandparents knew the Hansberry’s and my grandmother — who was white, and angry about Chicago’s segregation, joined a group of activists — who began to buy houses in all white areas and sell them to black families. She became an “acceptable” buyer. This was not “blockbusting” which realtors used to encourage white flight.
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The Personal and Political
Review by Chitown Kev
Writer and activist DeRay McKesson
On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope
by DeRay McKesson
Viking, 240pp., $26.00
To this occasional student of theology and perpetual theo-skeptic, there initially seemed to be something rather... formulaic in the manner in which activist DeRay McKesson lays out, in the opening chapter of On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope, his collection of personal essays, the distinction between faith and hope.
After all, one can read enough black theology and other materials within the scope of African American studies to get tired of black folks forever hoping for better days and a more just world...it makes you want to scream, at times. This is even and, perhaps, especially true when black folks are doing something. It’s as if the opening of doors leads to an infinite regression of closed doors. But McKesson’s own outline of the theology of hope; ultimately, the idea that hope is ‘’rooted’’ in a ‘’possibility’’ that, succinctly, requires ‘’work’’ also happens to be the lesson of The Book of Job.
One cannot live forever in a state where one curses the day that he or she was born. Nor can one live passively ‘’patient’’ waiting for the Lord God, a whirlwind, or any other of the ‘’powers that be’’ to do right. Most importantly, one cannot and must not accept given narratives that renders one without hope and with very little (if any) faith; one must either find alternative narratives or create one’s own.
It is in that search and in that journey for one’s own narrative that one finds whatever mix of hope and faith necessary to survive.
In On the Other Side of Freedom, McKesson weaves some rather startling ‘’hard data’’ (there were fourteen police departments, all large metropolitan areas, where the police ‘’exclusively killed black people’’ in 2015), personal activist experiences (being served a lawsuit filed by the Baton Rouge police department upon arriving at his home in Baltimore), personal memories (being abandoned by an alcoholic mother, sexual abuse) and imagination and nostalgia (McKesson feels the same way about the X-Man Storm that I do about Reed Richards).
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Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
As a world food, potatoes are second in human consumption only to rice. And as thin, salted, crisp chips, they are America's favorite snack food. Thus, every time a person crunches into a potato chip, he or she is enjoying the delicious taste of one of the world's most famous snacks – a treat that might not exist without the contribution of black inventor George Crum.
The son of an African-American father and a Native American mother, Crum was working as the head chef in the summer of 1853 at the Moon's Lake House, a resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. At work one hot summer day in August, Crum was in his kitchen when a patron ordered a plate of French-fried potatoes. Cooked to perfection, the potatoes were delivered to the customer, who, turning his nose up, complained that the potatoes were too thick and too soft. Crum cut and fried a thinner batch, but these, too, met with disapproval. Exasperated, Crum decided to rile the guest by producing French fries too thin and crisp to skewer with a fork. Slicing potatoes paper thin, Crum over fried them to a crisp and seasoned them with an excess of salt. Crum then gave the chips to the customer, who, to his surprise loved them.
Almost overnight, Crum's invention became widely popular. Known as Saratoga Chips, the delectably salty treats resulted in a booming business and Crum was able to open his own restaurant in Saratoga Lake in 1860 with the profits he made selling his crisps. As a tribute to the snack that got him started, Crum made sure that customers to his restaurant were greeted with basket of chips on every table. Crum's restaurant flourished and within a few years he was catering to wealthy clients including William Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Henry Hilton.....Read More
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Number Four
Commentary by Chitown Kev
It’s getting close to the end of the year and, like most people, I tend to get a little more reflective about the year that has nearly passed and the year to come.
I have to confess that, generally, I haven’t been as satisfied with my 2018 commentaries here at Black Kos as I was in past years. A new job and then increased and changing hours made for some sudden adjustments that affected my ability to take time out for proper research of some subjects. Sometimes, I became so caught up in the issues and crises and outrages of these days that some prepared work went to the wind and I didn’t return to it.
In other cases, I was flat-out lazy and I know...I know that I am a notorious procrastinator.
I am also the harshest critic of myself that I know.
However, I’ve looked over my 2018 body of work here at Black Kos and I have to confess that I was a little more pleased with it than I expected. I was especially pleased with the fact that I covered a pretty broad range of subjects from pop culture to history to current events to sports and my first love, literature (granted that I did not do as many book reviews as I might have liked). I also liked the fact that I occasionally took up controversial positions with which many people did not agree; the comment section of this commentary on Ta-Nehisi Coates and his overview of the trials and tribulations of Kanye West is untypically confrontational of me.
One of the best things about this space here at Black Kos is that we do disagree...often vehemently but never disrespectfully.
Another thing that I liked is that I disclosed more than I remembered about myself and my life experiences; my commentary on the controversy surrounding Tamika Mallory is probably the best example of that particular autobiographical genre along with Black at the Track.
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THANK YOU EVERYONE SEE YOU IN 2019
THE PORCH IS NOW CLOSED