Today is Gloria Richardson Day in Maryland
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I am always curious about who gets attention during Black History Month and who are the people who don’t become household names. No disrespect meant to iconic folks like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, however the list of those folks who are not well known, invisible, or misrepresented like Rosa Parks (who was not just some tired old lady who sat down on a bus one day) piques my interest.
Coverage of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), which is de rigueur for February, is one of my major irritants. Irritating because it erases so many of the very people who made it happen.
Not much attention is paid to the long list of Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement in the south — though they have a movement archive; covering organizers, volunteers, local participants, and protesters who were involved in CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, SCEF, SSOC, Delta Ministry, Deacons for Defense, and other Southern Freedom Movement organizations during the years 1951-1968.
Over the years here at Daily Kos, I have attempted to write about some lesser known history, as well as featuring some of the people whose actions and commitment inspired me to join the ongoing struggle.
Last year, I wrote about Gloria Hayes Richardson.
I recycled that story for twitter today:
I wanted to call attention to the fact that today is Gloria Richardson Day, in the state of Maryland.
This was the 2017 announcement:
Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford celebrated Black History Month in Cambridge Saturday, and presented a proclamation to civil rights leader Gloria Richardson, declaring Feb. 11 Gloria Richardson Day in Maryland.
Richardson, 94, a Cambridge native, now lives in New York and was unable to attend the ceremony at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in person due to a snowstorm. The snow did not stop Richardson from being part of the ceremony as Rutherford was able to present the proclamation from Gov. Larry Hogan to her in front of a large-screen TV via Skype.
She is credited with leading civil rights demonstrations in Cambridge during the 1960s with a nonviolent approach, focusing on public accommodations and continuing the cause with other activists in the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee when segregation remained in the city.
“Maryland recognizes the courageous leadership and commitment of Gloria H. Richardson during the civil rights moment of the 1960s,” Rutherford said. “During a time of racial segregation, Gloria H. Richardson became one of the strongest advocates for economic rights, as well as desegregation. Maryland is proud to join in honoring Gloria H. Richardson for her contributions in the fight to achieve racial equality during a defining era of our nation’s struggle for civil rights for all.”
A great read here on Richardson
When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) visited Cambridge in 1961, Richardson was already half a generation older than the mostly college-aged members—but she was inspired by their efforts and actions. As she witnessed youth confronting the police and refusing to post bail after being arrested in order to protest a corrupt system, Richardson committed herself to deepening her political knowledge and her own leadership. She also found herself drawn closer to activism by her daughter, Donna. Through witnessing various demonstrations in support of her daughter’s activism, Richardson struggled to remain silent in the face of the rabid counter-protestors that jeered and jostled non-violent Civil Rights groups.
Richardson, who ran her family’s businesses at the time, decided to become a student again. She attended workshops and special sessions where activists methodically trained themselves to withstand the pure hatred of mobs that used everything from slurs to fists in order to keep protestors from peaceful gatherings, where they demanded what was supposed to be secured by the Constitution. While co-chairing the local Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, Richardson learned about who she could or could not trust in the process of negotiating the expansion of black rights in Cambridge. She attended SNCC meetings in other cities, and while her efforts were supported, the paradoxes of Cambridge made it difficult for people to realize the depth of Richardson’s tasks and the chaos that would befall the town. Nevertheless, the forces she was up against were as insidious and violent as those that made Selma, AL a household name.
What is also important about Richardson is she still walks with us. No need to wade through other folks interpretations of her. If I had a dollar for every person currently using out of context quotes from MLK to justify or promote their own agendas, I’d be rich.
I love this mural — where Richardson (in yellow) is painted standing in front of Tubman.
For those of you who want to do some more serious reading — I’m reposting this from last year:
It wasn’t until 2018 that a full biography of Richardson detailing her contributions to the struggle for freedom was published.
The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation (Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century), by Joseph R. Fitzgerald.
Many prominent and well-known figures greatly impacted the civil rights movement, but one of the most influential and unsung leaders of that period was Gloria Richardson. As the leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), a multifaceted liberation campaign formed to target segregation and racial inequality in Cambridge, Maryland, Richardson advocated for economic justice and tactics beyond nonviolent demonstrations. Her philosophies and strategies -- including her belief that black people had a right to self--defense -- were adopted, often without credit, by a number of civil rights and black power leaders and activists.
The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation explores the largely forgotten but deeply significant life of this central figure and her determination to improve the lives of black people. Using a wide range of source materials, including interviews with Richardson and her personal papers, as well as interviews with dozens of her friends, relatives, and civil rights colleagues, Joseph R. Fitzgerald presents an all-encompassing narrative. From Richardson's childhood, when her parents taught her the importance of racial pride, through the next eight decades, Fitzgerald relates a detailed and compelling story of her life. He reveals how Richardson's human rights activism extended far beyond Cambridge and how her leadership style and vision for liberation were embraced by the younger activists of the black power movement, who would carry the struggle on throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s.
You can read an excerpt from the book here.
When Gloria Richardson was asked how she would like to be remembered, she replied: “I guess I would like for them to say I was true to my belief in black people as a race.” Her answer reveals a deep commitment to the struggle for black liberation, grounded in an understanding that since colonial times, millions of black people have been forced to sacrifice life and limb in the building and enriching of this nation. Because of this, white America should dismantle its racial hierarchy. Richardson believes so strongly in black people’s entitlement to real and meaningful freedom that she never thought twice about risking her life during the civil rights movement. Still, she knew that bravery alone would not be enough to bring about societal change, so she used her leadership abilities and sociological training to further the cause of human rights, and in doing so, she carried on her family’s tradition of race service. Richardson’s activist work was so important to her that, when asked if she could live at any time in American history, when that would be, she chose the mid-1960s because “there was a lot of ferment and ideas and struggles to finish freeing black people in the progression from slavery . . . a lot of ground was covered at that time.”
In “Black Women Freedom Fighters: An Interview with Keith Gilyard and Joseph R. Fitzgerald,” Fitzgerald comments:
I wrote this biography of Gloria Richardson as a guidebook of sorts for today’s activists to show them that they should consider replicating the type of grassroots, group-centered, and non-ideological approach to human rights work that Richardson used. Foremost among this is the expectation that all successful human rights work arises from local, grassroots struggles consisting of people who know better than anyone else what their issues are and how they should be addressed. The grassroots people should be the ones driving their freedom campaigns and no one—be they a politician, business person, entertainer, religious leader, or media “anointed” or self-appointed spokesperson—should expect local people to subordinate their goals to those of outside people or organizations.
The timeless lesson here is that in the Twenty-First Century, activists in local struggles will have to continue to focus on their own problems that, incidentally, may not be present across the entire nation. What is an issue for people in Albany, New York may not be so for people in Albany, Georgia. Therefore, it is critically important that as people struggle for justice, they do not apply a one-size-fits-all approach to their work. Richardson’s story shows today’s activists the value of knowing this important fact.
I was elated when the book was published. I added a tiny bit to the research when Fitzgerald was tracking down Richardson’s genealogy.
Mrs. Richardson has a wonderful ability to talk to young people and stress the contributions of youth in the movement. The event in the video below was covered by the Dorchester Star in an article titled “Civil Rights Leader Gloria Richardson Dandridge Gives Oral History.”
Robert Kennedy and the Treaty of Cambridge
Richardson Dandridge said she and others on the executive committee of CNAC spent weeks in Washington, D.C., negotiating the terms of the so-called Treaty of Cambridge.
“People actually think that maybe I just did the whole negotiation myself, but that was not true,” she said. “The executive committee of CNAC, they all went back and forth before that day we made the arrangements with Robert Kennedy.”
She elicited laughs from the crowd when she shared that the first time she went to meet with Kennedy, she thought he was the janitor because of his plain clothes, and nearly walked right by him.
The treaty was one of the pieces that made the situation in Cambridge stand out. In many places, the uprising of the Civil Rights Movement was quelled by verbal agreements and promises. For Richardson Dandridge and her fellows in Cambridge, that would not be enough.
“I told him, ‘They’re treating us just like they treated you all as Irish, when you came to this country,’” she said. “That made him stop. Then we gave him the (CNAC) survey report, and it went on from there. We thought that he would be the proper person because, when his brother was running for president, they said he could really get nasty and push people around.”
(See photos of the Cambridge Treaty meetings in Robert F. Kennedy’s Education on Race)
Civil rights leader Gloria Richardson talks about her time in Cambridge Maryland in the early 1960s. She is interviewed by Kisha Petticolas of the Eastern Shore Network for Change. Charismatic and outspoken Ms Richardson was the first woman outside of the deep south to lead a grass roots civil right campaign. Recorded on Thursday July 20, 2017 at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge Md.
There is a wealth of first-person civil rights narrative material available online thanks to The Civil Rights History Project of the Library of Congress.
On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directs the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans and to record new interviews with people who participated in the struggle, over a five year period beginning in 2010.
The activists interviewed for this project belong to a wide range of occupations, including lawyers, judges, doctors, farmers, journalists, professors, and musicians, among others. The video recordings of their recollections cover a wide variety of topics within the civil rights movement, such as the influence of the labor movement, nonviolence and self-defense, religious faith, music, and the experiences of young activists. Actions and events discussed in the interviews include the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963), the Albany Movement (1961), the Freedom Rides (1961), the Selma to Montgomery Rights March (1965), the Orangeburg Massacre (1968), sit-ins, voter registration drives in the South, and the murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till in 1955, a horrific event that galvanized many young people into joining the freedom movement.
Many interviewees were active in national organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Other interviewees were key members of specialized and local groups including the Medical Committee for Human Rights, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Cambridge (Maryland) Nonviolent Action Committee, and the Newark Community Union Project. Several interviews include men and women who were on the front lines of the struggle in places not well-known for their civil rights movement activity such as Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Saint Augustine, Florida; and Bogalusa, Louisiana. Several of the interviews were conducted with the children of local civil rights leaders including Clara Luper, Robert Hicks, and Gayle Jenkins.
(Transcript)
Gloria Hayes Richardson oral history interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier in New York, New York, 2011-07-19.
Summary: Gloria Richardson recalls growing up in Cambridge, Maryland, attending Howard University, and joining Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with her daughter, Donna, after returning to Cambridge and running her father's drug store. She recalls traveling to the South with her family to assist SNCC with voter registration, organizing the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, assisting E. Franklin Frazier with research on African Americans, and marching in a protest where the police used cyanogen gas.
No person in leadership, engaged in struggle, should be viewed as disconnected from the context of the times. To gain a deeper understanding of Richardson; Cambridge, Maryland; and the forces of both racist oppression and resistance, read historian Peter B. Levy’s Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland.
Civil War on Race Street, so named because Race Street was the road that divided blacks and whites in Cambridge, Maryland, is a detailed examination of one of the most vibrant locally based struggles for racial equality during the 1960s. Beginning with an overview of Cambridge, particularly its history of racial and class relations, Peter Levy traces the emergence of the modern civil rights movement in this city on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Catalyzed by the arrival of freedom in 1962, the movement in Cambridge expanded in 1963 and 1964 under the leadership of Gloria Richardson, one of the most prominent (and one of the few female) civil rights leaders in the nation.
In his detailed review of the book, historian Patrick Jones writes:
Throughout its early history, Cambridge stood at America's racial crossroads, pulled in two directions. Prior to the Civil War, Cambridge was both the sight of a major slave trading post and home to many free people of color. After the war, black people enjoyed a relatively secure franchise and representation on the city council as early as 1881 but contended daily with a stultifying color line. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Cambridge grew into a significant industrial center and class divisions increasingly challenged racial caste as the primary determinant of community relations. The Phillips Packing Company, one of the largest producers of canned fruit and vegetables in the United States and the biggest employer in the region, dominated Cambridge politics and economics until after the Second World War. Even though most black workers remained in a subordinate position within the local industrial economy, white and black workers occasionally united to challenge the power of the industrial elite--as in a large 1937 strike. Despite the potential for class-consciousness to override caste barriers at work, the black experience in Cambridge was severely circumscribed by pervasive poverty and segregation in jobs, housing, and education. African Americans remained "excluded from virtually every social activity in town--with the exception of those held in public spaces". Yet, most local white people felt that they lived in a relatively progressive community compared to the Deep South, a view that persisted throughout the civil rights era despite mounting black protest. Following the Second World War, a variety of forces--particularly the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and the collapse of the Phillips Packing Company--destabilized Cambridge and paved the way for a renegotiation of economic, social, and political relations in the community. As local elites struggled to maintain their advantage, they found themselves vulnerable to grassroots challenges from African Americans and working-class whites.
It was this fluid circumstance that provided the opportunity for a new, assertive African American leadership to challenge more cautious black leaders and the racial status quo. International politics provided the immediate spark for civil rights activism in Cambridge. In 1961, the ambassador from Chad, one of several newly independent African nations, complained to the Kennedy White House that he had been refused service at a Maryland restaurant while en route from the United Nations to Washington, D.C. Civil rights activists responded with a series of sit-ins and "Freedom Rides" along the route. The demonstrations prompted several Cambridge residents to investigate the racial situation in their city. In 1962, they formed the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC, pronounced "see-nack") to target segregation in restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations. When sit-ins at local establishments provoked white violence and arrests but little concrete change occurred, causing many young activists to become increasingly disillusioned. Sensing this frustration, Gloria Richardson, whose cousin and daughter had participated in the protests, took a more active role in the movement by agreeing to serve as CNAC's adult supervisor. Richardson was one of the few militant female civil rights leaders in the nation and she quickly expanded CNAC's campaign into an all-out attack on racial inequality, from inadequate health care to discrimination in employment, housing, and education--a move that made many traditional black leaders uncomfortable.
Allied with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and aided by students from Swarthmore, Brown, Morgan State, Maryland State, and Goucher College, CNAC organized sit-ins, pickets, and protests that resulted in eight arrests. After court-ordered negotiations between activists and city officials broke down, violence flared, resulting in the shootings of two white men and the arson of several white businesses. As tensions grew, Richardson urged more demonstrations as well as federal intervention. When a mob of whites chased a group of African-American demonstrators into the black section of town, state troopers and National Guardsmen moved in to restore order and remained for three weeks. More violence ensued when the Guardsmen left, necessitating their redeployment for almost a year along Race Street--the physical boundary between the white and black communities in Cambridge. During the failed negotiations, city officials agreed to an incremental desegregation program in local schools as well as in public accommodations and to form an interracial committee to work on other problems, if CNAC agreed to call off the demonstrations. Gloria Richardson and CNAC refused to comply with this gradualist approach, stating that they would accept nothing short of full desegregation and equal opportunity in employment and housing. Months of pleadings and warnings by Richardson finally spurred the Kennedy Administration to action. The move came as a surprise considering the administration's steadfast refusal to intercede in other local racial conflicts like the one in Albany, Georgia. According to Levy, "[Cambridge] represented the most direct intervention of the Kennedy Administration in the racial affairs of a single community, paling its involvement in Birmingham, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi". Cambridge's proximity to Washington, D.C., the severity of the conflict there (among the worst of a bloody 1963), Kennedy's recent public denunciation of racism in a nationally televised address, and the pending Civil Rights Bill in Congress, all accounted for this unprecedented involvement.
On July 22, 1963, Gloria Richardson, several state government representatives, and SNCC Chairman John Lewis met with Robert F. Kennedy at the Justice Department to hammer out an agreement. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and most prominent white liberals, Richardson bristled at compromise, in part because she did not share the same stake in the status quo that they had as office holders, ministers, and business people. Moreover, Richardson believed the Kennedy Administration was more focused on ending violence than ensuring racial justice. Even so, the group ultimately came to an agreement--the "Treaty of Cambridge," as it was called--to overhaul race relations in the divided city. The treaty established a local human rights commission, sped up the desegregation of public schools and the construction of public housing, amended the city charter to make racial discrimination in public accommodations illegal, and created an innovative job-training program.
Gloria Richardson is just one of the powerful women who did the work of fighting for freedom that we hear so little about. The voices of women from organizations like SNCC are but a memory to some, and for most others do not exist. I strongly suggest that you read this collection of herstories.
Gloria Richardson Dandridge, “The Energy of the People Passing through Me,” Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, edited by Faith S. Holsaert, et al. (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 2010), 273-297
In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.
The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive.
The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large.
Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."
Happy Gloria Richardson Day to Mrs. Richardson, and for us all.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Santu Mofokeng, a giant of South African photography whose focus was the black citizens of his country during the post-apartheid era, has died at 64, according to the Agence France-Presse. A cause of death was not listed by AFP, though a report by the South African publication City Press last year said that he was suffering from progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare brain disorder.
Mofokeng’s black-and-white photography elegantly documented streetscapes often paying particular attention to the psychologies of the people he witnessed. Primarily working in Johannesburg’s Soweto township, Mofokeng crafted poetic images that allude, often obliquely, to longstanding histories of racism that pervade South Africa. “I have always held Soweto to be the litmus that I use in order to survey or navigate my way through in the world,” he once wrote.
Like many South African photographers, Mofokeng started out working under the sign of his teacher, David Goldblatt, who is considered the country’s most important documentarian of apartheid. Goldblatt’s works are often pointed and outwardly political, while Mofokeng’s pictures tended toward a sensibility marked by somberness and feelings of alienation. Whereas Goldblatt’s compositions are careful and precise, in a way that recalls Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work, Mofokeng’s are often intentionally askew, even occasionally awkward. As the photography critic Teju Cole once wrote, “Mofokeng seems to test how many eccentricities a picture can tolerate before it breaks apart.”
In the process, Mofokeng portrayed the feelings of black South Africans, and in doing so examined their country’s collective subconscious. His long-running “Billboards” series, completed between 1991 and 2009, focused on advertisements and the people who live around them.
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The 2020 Oscar nominations felt, to many, like the return of a trend the awards were supposed to have moved past: a non-diverse slate of nominees.
In the wake of two straight years without any acting nominees of color (in 2015 and 2016), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which oversees the Oscars) made structural changes to its membership, inviting in thousands of new, younger voters who were notably more diverse than the traditionally older, whiter, maler Oscar voting body.
The Academy remains very old and white and male, but those changes did result in three straight years when the nominations slate was notably more diverse than it had ever been. More people of color were nominated for and won acting Oscars. Women and people of color were nominated in the directing category more frequently (though still all too rarely). The first woman ever was nominated in the Cinematography category.
The 2020 nominations seem to have brought that progress to a screeching halt. Only one performer of color was nominated across all four acting categories. The directing lineup features no women, despite numerous acclaimed films (and one Best Picture nominee — Greta Gerwig’s Little Women) having been directed by women.
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Jamaican-born author and poet Claude McKay died in 1948, but his name is in the news as anticipation builds for the release of his book “Romance in Marseille,” to be published by Penguin Random House on February 11.
Described as “ahead of its time” by The New York Times, McKay reportedly started writing the manuscript in 1929 and put it down in 1933. “Romance in Marseille” is a novel about “physical disability, transatlantic travel and Black international politics,” according to the publisher, which calls it “a vital document of Black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African-American tradition.”
Set in the Jazz Age, mostly at the Vieux Port in Marseille, France, the novel follows dancer Lafala, a stowaway on a transatlantic freighter, who loses both of his legs to frostbite after being locked in a frigid closet. He then wins a huge lawsuit against the liner for the tragedy. “He’s writing about the underclass,” Diana Lachatanere of the Faith Childs Literary Agency, which handles McKay’s estate, told The Times.
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As the clock ticked toward 3 am, Ngozi Okaro could be found bent over her sewing machine. During her father’s recovery from a stroke and heart failure, Okaro had flown him back from Nigeria to the U.S. in 2014 to be his primary caretaker — a role full of stressors. She hadn’t touched the machine in 25 years, but it became Okaro’s outlet to decompress during still nighttime hours.
The lawyer turned nonprofit fundraiser would tinker with custom designs that a Guinean seamstress, Mariama, had constructed for her. One morning, Okaro’s father asked her what she’d stayed up late engineering. She wasn’t engineering anything, she said — just sewing her own clothes — but he insisted she start a business.
The idea stuck, and left her wondering if she couldn’t help talented seamstresses like Mariama professionalize their skills, scale home businesses and connect to larger markets for their custom designs.
The 50-year-old Maryland native was always searching for a way to orient work with her sense of purpose — but practicing law, working as a gifts fundraiser in higher education and nonprofit consulting hadn’t quite satisfied her itch. In 2015, Okaro launched Custom Collaborative, a workforce development and incubator program that trains women from low-income and immigrant communities to launch careers and businesses as designers, fashion entrepreneurs, pattern-makers and seamstresses. Based in Manhattan, the nonprofit is made up of a three-legged stool: a 14-week training institute where women design clothing and develop an entrepreneurial business plan, a business skills incubator and an employee-owned cooperative. Meanwhile, repurposed and upcycled textiles make up 90 percent of Custom Collaborative’s pieces, which are customized and designed to last so they can follow people over their lifetimes.
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As more and more states legalize the recreational use of marijuana, there exists a bit of conflict within the black community. On one had, it’s good to know that partaking of the sticky-icky will no longer result in us being locked up and trapped in the probation racket. On the other hand, knowing how many black people have been jailed for selling and consuming weed and how, now that it’s being legalized, the proprietors of weed shops and profiteers of said legalization will more that likely be white, leaves many of us appropriately embittered.
So it will always warm the heart to know that there are at least a small number of cannabis companies that are owned and operated by black people.
Such is the case in Boston, MA, where recreational marijuana use was legalized in November 2018. According to NBC Boston, the city’s first retail pot shop was approved Thursday, more than a year after the first shops opened elsewhere in the state. And surprisingly — given the city’s history of racism which rivals any state below the Mason Dixon that you can think of — the shop is owned by two black men.
Pure Oasis is the name of Boston’s first weed dispensary owned by Kevin Hart (no, not that one) and Kobie Evens, two black entrepreneurs who say that it’s been a long journey but that they are excited to see it finally bear fruit.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.