Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
I purchased and built my first crystal radio with an ear-set with funds gifted to me on my birthday in March of 1963. I was eight years old. It took a couple of weeks before the components arrived in the mail, and I set out to put the thing together. The radio was small and fit in the pocket of my coveralls, while a thin cord snaked its way to my left ear. We lived on the farm in Philomouth outside of Corvallis and I had many chores to do before the bus picked me up for school. That radio kept me linked to the world while I milked the farm's only cow, slopped slop for the pigs, fed the geese and chickens, collected eggs and churned butter from the cream of that only cow. The strongest frequency the radio picked up during those early morning duties was a station that broadcast local news, early morning weather and farm reports; and the conservative, baritone intonations of Paul Harvey ("... this is Paul Harvey... good day!"). I attended Saint Mary's Catholic School in Corvallis and like many Catholics of the day ( and even now, not so surprisingly), photographs of JFK were prominent at home and school. There was something about Harvey that bugged me as an eight year old. His halting, yet dulcet vocal delivery were pleasant enough, but the content of his broadcasts grated. Later that year, after the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young school girls. Harvey attempted to diminish the tragedy by explaining that no matter how brutal the murders were, they were to be expected. Murdering four black school girls was an expectation in America? Even as an eight year old, I knew that wasn't and shouldn't be correct. A year later, a Great Uncle helped install the antennae for the short wave radio he gave me. I could now listen to the BBC, music from Paris and New York and I discovered Studs Terkel in Chicago. Though both Terkel and Harvey broadcast from Chicago, they were worlds apart. Terkel's interviews with Bob Dylan and Mahalia Jackson still resonate in a deep seated radio tape loop in the middle of my cerebelum. We never owned a television in Oregon, reception being poor or non-existent where we lived. When we moved to Southern California in the summer of 1965, when my father began a 35 year professorship at Cal State Fullerton, we purchased a television shortly after settling in. Later, we purchased one of the first generations of color televisions. I would match the news from the three broadcast networks with that of the BBC, that I listened to on the short wave radio, (it was a big argument about dismantling and moving the antennae from Oregon to California, but my dad prevailed on my mom that it was a good idea). I began to triangulate information before I even knew the word. It just seemed the prudent thing to do. As a child, I couldn't get enough information. It remains the same today. With each new technological advancement, the ability to gather info increases and I anticipate it strongly. With events unfolding in the Congo, Syria, the Gaza and even in Houston, Texas, with social networks in the forefront, it is proved that change need not be exacted by the barrel of a gun, but by the wide distribution of information. We don't need a hotel heiress or government lackey to set the tone for when and how we get our information, or even from an Apartheid Blood Emerald Heir with US government contracts to brainwash us before destroying Democracy. All we need is the ability of the spoken word to travel the ether, and for it to slice through the psyops, the divisiveness and the distractions of the concussive cacophony of the deep fake.
while visiting Templo Mayor in Mexico City, I reckon:
walking the same land Cortés did/walked/tried to own.
in the shadow of his Cathedral,
I shudder.
Templo Mayor is now a museum.
are there records of Black people
visiting plantations and crying?
no history is interchangeable. I am grasping.
Templo Mayor is open 9AM - 5PM today.
what makes people want to tour the "end"
of something? Archaeologists
had to break the temple walls in order to learn more about them,
fracturing further violence.
across from the Cathedral, someone sells Aztec
designs on t-shirts.
no mention of genocide spiritual or otherwise
so
everyone runs
their fingers along the tourist attraction.
the Cathedral's holier house
waits its turn to sink
& my classmate remarks
on the tour guide's "good English."
I enter the Cathedral
so I cannot be afraid of it
but only after returning
to the temple. & I do not touch the stones—
each volcanic rock carried by hand to the construction.
each stone split
by European hand &
thrust into the Cathedral.
I don't know if you understand the birth of nations:
everything old is made to look new
or gone.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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“Something Good – Negro Kiss” is the first known film with footage featuring African Americans showing love. A short film shot in 1898, it shows two vaudeville performers, Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle, enacting a scene of affection and joy.
For audiences back then, this was quite daring and bold. During that time, they could only experience Black performers through minstrel shows.
The scene in “Something Good – Negro Kiss” is a playful exchange that resembles Thomas Edison’s “The Kiss,” an 1896 short that frequently played at the end of movies.
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“I'm thrilled and I want to thank the president for making me chair of FERC. It is the greatest honor of my professional career,”. The Hill: Biden names chair of energy regulatory board
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President Biden officially named Willie Phillips as the chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Friday — a position he has held on an acting basis for about a year.
The commission works independently from the Energy Department to make decisions about pipelines, power lines and other cross-state energy issues.
Biden nominated Phillips to the commission in 2021 and made him its acting head after former commissioner and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) President Richard Glick’s term ended.
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About six-in-10 Black adults say supporting Black businesses is an extremely or very effective strategy for gaining movement towards equality in the U.S., according to a survey from the Pew Research Center.
As previously reported by USA TODAY, the number of Black-owned businesses compared to the number of Black Americans in the U.S. is disproportionate. Black Americans make up about 12.4% of the country's population, but Black business owners represented only 2.4% of all employer-firm owners. This disproportionate representation of business owners goes the opposite way for white Americans, who made up a majority (86%) of employee-firm owners, while representing about 59% of all people living in the U.S.
The number of Black-owned businesses is up 14% from 2020, according to the Census Bureau. There were 161,031 Black or African American-owned businesses in operation in 2021, with $183.3 billion in annual receipts, according to the most recent data available.
Black-owned firms employed about 1.4 million people, according to the 2022 Annual Business Survey. These businesses collectively paid $53.6 billion in annual payroll. More than a quarter (45,015) of these businesses were in the Health Care and Social Assistance sector.
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A strong performance in financial markets, particularly an outsize gain for the stock market in 2021, helped entrench existing trends of wealth inequality during the pandemic, new data released this week show.
According to a report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the real net worth of white individuals outgrew that of Black and Hispanic individuals by 30 percentage points and 9 percentage points, respectively, from the first quarter of 2019 through the second quarter of 2023.
The period featured a remarkable level of government financial support and, after the initial shock of the pandemic, a surprisingly strong job market. The unemployment rate for Black Americans in particular is now at 5.3%, near a record low, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 3.7%. Earnings for the typical Black full-time worker are up 7.1% since before the pandemic.
Closing the wealth gap is more difficult because a significantly larger number of white households traditionally have money in stocks and mutual funds. A separate Fed survey shows that as of 2022, about 65.6% of white households had investments in stocks, compared with 28.3% for Hispanic households and 39.2% for Black households.
“The study really shows the difference between making gains when it comes to income, and closing that gap, versus when it comes to wealth,” said Janelle Jones, Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
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Aspiring soccer players used to leave the continent to pursue their dreams in Europe. Now they are coming home. Foreign Policy: The African Cup of Migrations
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Amid hotly contested elections, nations abandoning regional blocs, and ongoing security challenges, people across the continent have found some relief in the ongoing African Cup of Nations, or AFCON, a tournament for Africa’s top men’s soccer teams. The 34th edition is being hosted by Cote d’Ivoire, no stranger to domestic uncertainty itself. But this year’s competition is, more than anything, a testament to the increasing influence that migration is playing on and off the field—and not in the ways one might expect.
When Sadio Mané scored the decisive penalty to secure Senegal’s triumph over Egypt at the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon, Isaak, a professional Ghanaian footballer in his late 20s, could not have been further away from the action. Watching the final online in his room in eastern Thailand, Isaak’s thoughts most likely turned to what might have been had he managed to better navigate some critical forks in the road of his football career.
Isaak is one of several dozen African players we interviewed for our new book African Football Migration. Their experiences and trajectories reflect the reality of life for the majority of African footballers who aspire to successful careers overseas – but frequently labour far beyond the bright lights of the elite game enjoyed by icons like Mané.
Migration has long been an important livelihood strategy in many African countries. Migrating through football has more recently come to be viewed by increasing numbers of young people as a viable route to significantly improving their life chances.
This trend is a consequence of multiple intersecting factors, ranging from economic precarity, a declining faith in education and a weak local football industry. The commercialisation of football economies in Europe and some Asian countries over the last 30 years has made them prized destinations for aspiring African migrant footballers.
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Manoel Ribeiro has never known a world without Rio de Janeiro’s best-known flea market, the Feira de Acari.
The swarming suburban bazaar was founded outside his home in 1970, the year of his birth. It existed in 1993 when the market trader was shot nearby during an armed robbery and lost the use of his legs.
And, until last month, it continued to thrive – a Sunday institution famed for its suspiciously low prices and immortalised in songs by celebrated Brazilian musicians. “The Feira de Acari is a success. It has everything. It’s a mystery,” the singer-songwriter Jorge Ben Jor sang in one hit.
If Derek “Del Boy” Trotter – the fictional wheeler-dealer from the British comedy Only Fools and Horses – had been born in Rio, it would have been here that he plied his trade.
But as dawn broke two weeks ago, the Acari street market was nowhere to be seen after Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, ordered a sudden end to its half-century existence.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Ribeiro, 53, as he drove his motorised wheelchair to the market where he has worked for over 40 years.
Instead of wooden stalls stacked with merchandise and secondhand clothes, Ribeiro found dozens of police officers and guards carrying riot guns and rifles. The canine unit had deployed two Belgian shepherd dogs to keep angry traders at bay.
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