Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
Angelina Grimké, devoted daughter to one of the most iconoclastic leaders of racial equality of the 19th and early 20th centuries, advanced the cause in her own right, though in a much more quiet but equally powerful way as her father.
Archibald Grimké was born into slavery in South Carolina in the mid-1800’s to
Nancy Weston, a slave, and Henry Grimke, her owner. After his father’s death, he and his brother lived as freemen for eight years, when under subterfuge, their half-brother Montague, offered them employ as servants, but enslaved them again, instead. Archibald escaped and hid with his mother’s relatives until Charleston fell to the Union in 1865. In 1872, he became one of the first Black students at Harvard Law School, and later in private practice, became an ardent supporter of women’s suffrage and Black civil rights. Archibald married a white woman, Sarah Stanley, and Angelina was born in 1880, but the couple soon separated. Unable to reconcile, Angelina began living with her father exclusively at age seven, and Sarah poisoned herself in 1898.
At odds with Booker T Washington for his “accommodationist” approach to the race problem, with its emphasis on manual labor, and a strained relationship with DuBois because he did not feel W.E.B.’s
Niagara Movement fought hard enough for blacks’ rights, Grimké became a founding member of the NAACP in 1909.
Named after her great-aunt,
the abolitionist and suffragist Angelina Grimké Weld, Weld Grimké embarked on a teaching career where she first began to write. Cited as one of the first Black lesbian poets of the Harlem Renaissance, her poetry, short stories and essays were published in
The Crisis, Alain Locke’s
The New Negro, in Countee Cullen’s
Caroling Dusk and in
Robert Kerlin’s Negro Poets and Their Poems, but she is best known for her play
“Rachel”,
a three–act drama that was performed by an all-black cast and served as a vehicle for the NAACP to rally support against the KKK-centric film originally entitled, “The Clansman”, but more commonly known as, “The Birth of a Nation.”
Dying in 1958, Angelina was not a poet of the Harlem Renaissance but rather an inspiration to those poets. Her shoulders were the shoulders others would stand upon in a cultural awakening of Black art and expression that the “clansmen” of today are only too happy to burn to the ground.
I have just seen a most beautiful thing
Slim and still
Against a gold, gold sky,
A black finger
Pointing upwards.
Why, beautiful still finger, are you black?
And why arc you pointing upwards?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The country’s richest, most prestigious university has set up a $100 million fund as an attempt to make amends for its own role in American slavery.
Officials at Harvard University, which has produced eight U.S. presidents and has an endowment worth $53.2 billion, announced the fund yesterday along with a 134-page report detailing the institution’s ties to the trafficking and enslavement of Africans on its campus and elsewhere.
The announcement was the culmination of the work of a committee commissioned by the institution’s president and it acknowledges ugly truths about how Harvard, like so many other American institutions, rose to prominence on forced Black labor.
A few key findings from the report’s summary:
- Slavery—of Indigenous and of African people—was an integral part of life in Massachusetts and at Harvard during the colonial era.
- Between the University’s founding in 1636 and the end of slavery in the Commonwealth in 1783, Harvard faculty, staff, and leaders enslaved more than 70 individuals, whose names are listed in Appendix I.
- Some of the enslaved worked and lived on campus, where they cared for Harvard presidents and professors and fed generations of Harvard students.
- Through connections to multiple donors, the University had extensive financial ties to, and profited from, slavery during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
- Legacies of slavery persisted at Harvard, and throughout American society, after the Constitution and laws officially proscribed human bondage. Such legacies, including racial segregation, exclusion, and discrimination, were a part of campus life well into the 20th century.
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On Tuesday, Latifah revisited her birthplace of Newark for a South Ward real estate development groundbreaking ceremony spearheaded by BlueSugar Corp., of which Latifah is co-president, alongside builders Life Assets Development and GonSosa Development.
Latifah — born Dana Elaine Owens at St. Michael's Hospital — said she started looking to invest in the properties in 2006. The development project was revealed publicly in 2016, and construction was supposed to begin two years ago, but hurdles cropped up.
“I’m proud to be from here,” Latifah said, joined for the ceremony by New Jersey Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and other leaders.
“I grew up around here playing in West Side Park, a block away," Latifah reminisced. "My grandfather’s hardware store was blocks from here. I drove past this block. I saw what was needed on this block, houses that weren’t lived in. Some were really dilapidated, and so I thought, 'Why not here?' ”
Situated along Springfield Avenue outside of the city’s downtown, the 76-unit mixed-use project will include 20 three-family townhomes at market rate prices, with rents starting at $1,800 a month.
The need for affordable housing in Newark is dire. The Brick City needs an additional 16,000 low-rent units to meet the city’s demand, according to a 2021 study by the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality, and Metropolitan Equity. Nearly 60% of Newark renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than a third of their incomes on housing.
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The Republican party continues the legislative crusade to bend history to its warped view of America. Georgia governor Brian Kemp signed a few education bills into law, including one that targets “divisive concepts” in the classroom, as reported by CNN.
House Bill 1084 or the “Protect Students First Act” outlines divisive concepts as being “those that teach “the United States of America is fundamentally racist; an individual, by virtue of his or her race, is inherently or consciously racist or oppressive toward individuals of other races,” and “an individual, solely by virtue of his or her race, bears individual responsibility for actions committed in the past by other individuals of the same race.”
The ACLU of Georgia fired back and said parents want their children to be taught accurate curricula.
“Whether you are white, Black, Hispanic or Asian— most parents want their children to learn about history the way they learn about math— as accurately as possible” Andrea Young, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.
Kemp also signed HB 1178, or the “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which provides greater transparency to parents and legal guardians regarding what their students are being taught, and SB 226, which bans literature or books deemed offensive from school libraries. HB 1084 will set up “an athletic executive oversight committee” in the state that has the authority to establish a ban on transgender women participating on sports teams consistent with their gender at high schools in the state.
In a statement, The Democratic Party of Georgia said new laws will “will pit parents against teachers, attack educators, politicize Georgia schools, and jeopardize kids’ education – all for Kemp’s own political gain.”
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As the sun rose over Rio’s breathtaking granite and quartz landscape, José Leonardo da Silva set off from home dressed as a 6ft 2in box of Viagra.
His destination: a beach-sidestreet party called the Cosmic Trumpets where hundreds of half-clothed revellers had gathered to celebrate their first carnival since Covid. His message: that the scandal involving the purchase of tens of thousands of erectile dysfunction tablets by President Jair Bolsonaro’s defense ministry was an intolerable affront.
“Carnival is politics too,” said Silva, a 43-year-old psychologist for Brazil’s health service, as he prepared to spend the day denouncing Bolsonaro’s “completely fascist” government by disguising himself as a packet of 50mg impotence pills.
Silva was not the only one with politics on his mind this week as bacchanalia gripped Rio’s streets for the first time since February 2020.
With a bruising electoral battle for Brazil’s soul less than six months away, many saw carnival as a chance to vent their spleen at Brazil’s far-right president, who retains a ferociously loyal support base but is repudiated by more than half of voters.
Loud cries of “Bolsonaro out!” erupted at Rio’s Sambadrome on Friday night as the city’s top samba schools held their first processions since the coronavirus pandemic began. The president’s son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, was stalked and taunted by angry revellers while trying to watch the parades while a banner demanding his father’s removal was unfurled from one of the stands.
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