The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Growing up in Detroit, I have many many memories of riding through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and (less often) across the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, Ontario, Canada, mostly so Mom could go to the bingo hall of her choice or (less frequently) to Windsor Raceway for harness racing. When we were old enough, Mom would toss us a few dollars and allow me and my brother to roam the immediate neighborhood for a bite to eat or a visit to the Windsor library and, one time, to a thrift store where my brother contemplated stealing an eroded authentic Nazi arm patch.
I don’t know if we thought all that much about what had to be hundreds of trips across the U.S.-Canadian border to Windsor, Ontario. It was certainly cleaner than Detroit, overwhelmingly white but with nice white people, it seemed. There were a few Black people here and there but since we were mostly in the bingo halls, I assumed that most the Black people were from across the river in Detroit. No crime that I can remember...just an entirely different vibe from home across the river.
About all that I knew of the Black history of the Windsor-Essex region of Ontario, Canada is that Windsor was a very important stop on the Underground Railroad; I figure that this was increasingly so after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. I knew that Canada was part of the British Commonwealth and subject to laws abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833 with Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act.
I just found out this morning that Emancipation Day celebrations for Afro-Canadians began August 1, 1834 and that Windsor used to host a BIG four-day Emancipation festival attended, sometimes, by over 100,000 people and attended on several occasions by people like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, Benjamin Mays, Joe Louis, the Supremes. Held from 1932 to 1967 (the year I was born) the three-day festival/celebration was dubbed simply “The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth.”
A University of Windsor alumni page from 2021 explains
It was billed as the Greatest Freedom Show on Earth and that was no hyperbole.
From its inception in 1932 until the mid 1960s, Windsor’s Emancipation Day celebration rivalled any festival on the globe. The population of Windsor would double as people from as far south as Alabama and Mississippi would flock to the city for what had grown into a four-day festival.
Blacks, whites, and people of all nationalities would line up five deep along Ouellette Avenue to watch the marching bands from big American schools parade by. A midway that included a full-sized Ferris wheel would rise seemingly overnight in Jackson Park. The aroma of barbecue wafting through the summer air led visitors to the centre of the action.
Martin Luther King Jr. attended when he was 27. United States first lady Eleanor Roosevelt came, too. Concerts by Motown legends like Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, and the Temptations would pack the grandstands.
“It was great,” said Ron Jones (BA 2018), a former Windsor city councillor. “It was the party nobody wanted to miss.”
I knew nothing about these celebrations until about 2am this morning.
In 2020, Preston Chase, a native of Windsor, directed a documentary about his descendant Walker Perry, the creator and organizer of the Emancipation festival. I could not get to the research library over at Northwestern to see the entire film, titled Mr. Emancipation: The Walter Perry Story, but I did find a trailer of the film on YouTube.
There are also several interviews of Preston Chase. Here is my favorite one (so far, anyway).
Sadly, the four-day festival was canceled in 1967 and 1968 because of the Detroit Race Riots. Since then, the festival has been relocated and scaled back from its heyday years during the mid 20th century but it is still going strong.
Reading all of this this morning reminds me that I kinda have been right all along: Windsor is a part of Detroit and I delight in this discovery as much as I would if it took place in Detroit simply because it is Detroit, at least to me.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Kelsey Davis had what might seem to be an odd reaction to seeing blatant racism on her computer screen: She was elated.
Davis is the founder and CEO of CLLCTVE, a tech company based in Tulsa, Okla. She was one of hundreds of hackers probing artificial intelligence technology for bias as part of the largest-ever public red-teaming challenge during Def Con, an annual hacking convention in Las Vegas.
"This is a really cool way to just roll up our sleeves," Davis told NPR. "You are helping the process of engineering something that is more equitable and inclusive."
Red-teaming — the process of testing technology to find the inaccuracies and biases within it — is something that more typically happens internally at technology companies. But as AI rapidly develops and becomes more widespread, the White House encouraged top tech companies like Google and OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, to have their models tested by independent hackers like Davis.
During the challenge, Davis was looking for demographic stereotypes, so she asked the chatbot questions to try to yield racist or inaccurate answers. She started by asking it to define blackface, and to describe whether it was good or bad. The chatbot was easily able to appropriately answer those questions.
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Afropunk Brooklyn: Circus of Soul featured performances by Teyana Taylor, Baby Tate, Joey Bada$$, and more as the annual festival moved its location for the first time in over a decade. The Grio: Afropunk Brooklyn 2023: new venue, new attractions, same vibes
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Afropunk has expanded from a modest collective of societal misfits and outcasts looking for a communal and artistic outlet to becoming a multimedia business, with festivals in Brazil, South Africa, Minneapolis, and Miami, for instance. But Brooklyn is always Afropunk’s home, evident in the 2023 Afropunk Brooklyn: Circus of Soul on Aug. 26 and Aug. 27.
Teyana Taylor, Joey Bada$$, Flying Lotus, and more were the draw for some. Still, for others, it was the annual opportunity to cut loose with dynamic costumes and outfits and partake in delicious food and purchase from Black-owned businesses. The hallmark of Afropunk is inclusion, welcoming patrons, artists, and artisans regardless of sexual orientation, creed, or otherwise. This year’s edition was no exception, although there were a few new things to consider.
A lot has changed over the years for Afropunk Brooklyn. It’s no longer free; attractions like the ramps for BMX bikers, and skaters are gone, but this year, more significant changes happened. For this year’s Circus of Soul theme, fans got glimpses of fire jugglers, trapeze artists, and stilt walkers to give off the circus motif.
The most significant difference is the location switching from the familiar Commodore Barry Park near Fort Greene to the Greenpoint Terminal Park in Greenpoint. Patrons were sprawled out on the hard concrete ground of the terminal with their blankets and folding chairs rather than the grassy knolls of Commodore Barry Park’s baseball fields.
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On Saturday, a white gunman in Jacksonville, Florida, killed three Black people at a Dollar General store in what authorities have described as an anti-Black hate crime. The shooter wrote a racist manifesto ahead of the attack, used racist slurs in his writings, and drew swastikas on his firearm.
“This shooting was racially motivated, and he hated Black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said at a press conference. The three victims, two of whom were shoppers and one of whom was a Dollar General employee, are Angela Michelle Carr, 52; Jerrald Gallion, 29; and Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr, 19. The shooter died of an apparent suicide following the rampage.
The shooting is the latest in a string of racist attacks in which perpetrators have targeted Black people in recent years, including a mass shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo that killed 10 people in 2022 and a mass shooting at a historically Black church in Charleston that killed nine people in 2015. Prior to his attack at Dollar General, the gunman was flagged by a security guard near the campus of Edward Waters University in Jacksonville, a historically Black institution. After the guard approached him, the shooter drove away.
FBI data on hate crimes also shows that there’s been an uptick in hate crimes directed at Black Americans and other racial groups in recent years. Though the FBI’s data is incomplete and therefore somewhat unreliable, it remains one of the most comprehensive sources of hate crime data available. It shows that in 2020, hate crimes toward Black Americans were up 49 percent, compared to 2019, and that in 2021 — the latest period for which data is available — hate crimes toward Black Americans were up another 14 percent compared to 2020.
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Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) taking part in this week’s celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington hope to use the event to highlight the threats to teaching Black history that are percolating across the nation.
The threats take different forms, including new state laws attacking critical race theory, the academic theory that laws and movements are shaped by race and systemic racism, to increasing books bans.
Almost one-third of the nearly 1,500 books banned this year are about race, racism or include characters of color — and four of the most banned books are written by authors of color, according to PEN America.
And in Florida, the fight over critical race theory has been at the heart of a battle over educational standards. Florida’s Board of Education in late July approved controversial standards that include the provision that students be taught about the skills slaves learned during slavery. That specific provision became a flashpoint in the GOP presidential race as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came under criticism over it from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who is Black. Both men are running for the GOP nomination.
“We want to highlight that history and then talk about what can be done … to push back against these attempts to erase Black history,” said Clarissa Myrick-Harris, professor of Africana Studies at Morehouse College and head of the Committee to Commemorate the Atlanta Student Movement. The Atlanta Student Movement was formed in 1960 by college students to fight for civil rights.
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Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa has been declared victor in the country’s second competitive election, though multiple reports of intimidation and fraud are calling the result of this week’s contest into doubt.
The potential impacts of a fraught election could mean lower turn out in the future and bigger challenges for a country already struggling with poverty, crushing debt, inflation, and a lack of access to education and nutrition.
Mnangagwa, the head of the ZANU-PF party, declared victory on Saturday night with just over 52 percent of the vote, posting on the platform X Sunday that he was, “Grateful for the trust you’ve placed in me through the election.” Opposition leader Nelson Chamisa, of the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC), garnered only 44 percent and quickly alleged “blatant and gigantic fraud” in the elections, which were called two days ahead of schedule.
“The months and weeks leading up to the elections have been marred by widespread intimidation, arrests, and violence by the ZANU-PF against the CCC, as well as bans on opposition rallies,” according to a recent report from the advocacy organization Freedom House. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, the government body overseeing elections, refused accreditation to local election observers and those from the Southern Africa Human Rights Defenders Network, barred some international journalists from covering the elections, and deported four observers from Good Governance Africa sent to monitor conditions before the elections.
Prior to this week’s contest, Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court also barred presidential candidate Saviour Kasukuwere from running in the election, Voice of America reported in July. A lower court also dismissed 12 of the CCC’s parliamentary candidates, though the Supreme Court later reinstated them.
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