
Front Porch Time changes
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I hope everyone here weathered Irene. I am still having cable problems and hope to be here on the porch today at 4PM EST - we shall see.
But I have a question for Tuesday porch family about our post time. Due to my teaching schedule which is now Tuesday/Friday afternoons I can't be here by 4PM EST to post or comment.
Dopper has said it is okay to change the Tuesday post time to later - but I would like to get a sense of the community about what would be better:
5PM, 6PM or 7PM EST. See poll below.
My heart goes out to folks who are in the hardest hit areas here on the East Coast.
Apologies to everyone for not having a long commentary today but the storm got in the way.
Dee
PS - Back in 1800 a slave rebellion was postponed due to rain.
Gabriel Prosser and Jack Bowler assembled over 1,000 slaves to march on Richmond, VA, on this date in 1800. A storm, however, forced them to put the plan on hold in this early attempt at mass-action
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On August 30, 2007, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine informally pardoned Gabriel and his co-conspirators. Kaine said that Gabriel's motivation had been "his devotion to the ideals of the American revolution — it was worth risking death to secure liberty." Kaine noted that "Gabriel's cause — the end of slavery and the furtherance of equality of all people — has prevailed in the light of history", and added that "it is important to acknowledge that history favorably regards Gabriel's cause while consigning legions who sought to keep him and others in chains to be forgotten."[8] The pardon was informal because it was posthumous.
Harlem Renaissance author Arna Bontemps wrote Black Thunder, as an historical novel about this period in history

and historian Douglas R. Egerton has written an absorbing work from a class and race perspective:
Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802

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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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"Wine is never the same today as it is tomorrow. It even depends on where you drink it and who you are with and what mood you are in. It's a very, very nice thing." New York Times: Black South African Goes From Never a Sip to Vineyard Fame
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When Ntsiki Biyela won a winemaking scholarship in 1998, she was certainly a curious choice. She had grown up in the undulating hills of Zululand, living in a small village of huts and shacks. People tended their patches of pumpkins and corn. The only alcohol they drank was homemade beer, a malt-fed brew that bubbled in old pots.
Indeed, Ms. Biyela had never even tasted wine, nor had anyone she knew. Her choice of study was a fluke. Though she had been a good student, none of her grant applications for college were approved until an airline, hoping to promote diversity, offered to pay her way to study viticulture and oenology: grapes and wine. What was wine? the young woman wondered, guessing it was another name for cider.
She had never been outside the eastern province of KwaZulu Natal, but she boarded a bus and traveled across South Africa to the wine country of the Western Cape. She gazed at the immense mountains. She puzzled over the short, thin trees planted in perfect rows. She had no idea what they were.
Finally, Ms. Biyela tasted the beverage she had come such a distance to study. She and a handful of other black scholarship students met with a wine connoisseur, Jabulani Ntshangase. He opened a superb red, raised the moist cork to his nose and talked rapturously about the wine’s fruitiness and color and fragrance. She was expecting to sip something sublime when handed the elegant, long-stemmed glass. Instead, she was stunned. It was disgusting.
Ms. Biyela, having definitely adapted her tastes, is now one of this nation’s few black winemakers in an occupation that has been dominated by white people for 350 years. Her blends of merlot, cabernet sauvignon and pinotage have won gold medals and four-star ratings. She was named South Africa’s Woman Winemaker of the Year in 2009. Last month, she was busy judging the country’s entries for the International Wine and Spirit Competition.

Robin Hammond for The New York Times
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Very disappointing. Only four of 54 member nations attend the African Union donors conference in Ethiopia, aimed at raising money to ease the crisis in the Horn of Africa. La Times: Few African leaders show up for famine summit
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Most of Africa's heads of state failed to turn up Thursday for the first African Union donor conference in Ethiopia to raise money for the Horn of Africa famine, leaving activists disappointed with the pledges.
Of the African Union's 54 member nations, only the heads of Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea and Djibouti participated in the conference in Addis Ababa, along with the head of the transitional government in Somalia, the country hit hardest by the famine. Critics accused African leaders of failing to make good on their rhetoric about finding African solutions for African problems.
Activists said leaders had pledged about $50 million, but much of it was "in kind" assistance, with few details given on the services being offered.
The African Development Bank, meanwhile, said it would donate $300 million for long-term development in the Horn of Africa.
The African Union had come under fire for delaying the conference for several weeks because some leaders had conflicts in their schedules.

Mahbub Mualem, left, of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, speaks to Somalian President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed at the donors conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (Elias Asmare, Associated Press / August 26, 2011)
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Death of a hero RIP NewsOne: “Klan Buster” Stetson Kennedy Dies At 94 In Florida
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Author and folklorist Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan six decades ago and exposed its secrets to authorities and the public but was also criticized for possibly exaggerating his exploits, died Saturday. He was 94.
Kennedy died at Baptist Medical Center South near St. Augustine, where he had been receiving hospice care.
In the 1940s, Kennedy used the “Superman” radio show to expose and ridicule the Klan’s rituals. In the 1950s he wrote “I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan,” which was later renamed “The Klan Unmasked,” and “The Jim Crow Guide.”
“Exposing their folklore – all their secret handshakes, passwords and how silly they were, dressing up in white sheets” was one of the strongest blows delivered to the Klan, said Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press. She was a friend of Kennedy for about 30 years and did her doctoral thesis on his work as a folklorist.
“If they weren’t so violent, they would be silly.”
Kennedy began his crusades against what he called “homegrown racial terrorists” during World War II after he was deemed unworthy for military service because of a back injury. He served as director of fact-finding for the southeastern office of the Anti-Defamation League and served as director of the Anti-Nazi League of New York.
“All my friends were in service and they were being shot at in a big way. They were fighting racism whether they knew it or not,” Kennedy said. “At least I could see if I could do something about the racist terrorists in our backyard.”
Using evidence salvaged from the Grand Dragon’s waste basket, he enabled the Internal Revenue Service to press for collection of an outstanding $685,000 tax lien from the Klan in 1944 and he helped draft the brief used by the state of Georgia to revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947.
Kennedy infiltrated the Klan by using the name of a deceased uncle who had been a member as a way to gain trust and membership.
But the Klan did not know that Kennedy was giving its secrets to the outside world, including the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Anti-Defamation League and Drew Pearson, a columnist for The Washington Post.
When he learned of plans for the Klan to take action, he would make sure it was broadcast, thwarting them.

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In the twisted right-wing version of history, whites are bias victims. Meanwhile, the poor get stiffed. The Root: How Conservative Myths Stoke Racial Fear
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Many Americans are struck by how politics has taken such a sharp turn toward the openly racist since the election of the nation's first black president. Some Republicans have distributed cartoons depicting watermelon patches growing at the White House, and the president smiling with fried chicken and barbecue. One prominent South Carolina GOP activist even called the first lady a gorilla.
But I am also struck by how much the right has relied on outright fabrication of the country's history by insisting that institutionalized racism hardly ever existed. The right generally insists that white racism has no real effect on people's lives in the U.S., while exploiting racial fears and pernicious racial stereotypes with coded and not-so-coded language. The only "discrimination" is that directed against whites, pundits often argue. In fact, white Americans in general believe that whites suffer more discrimination today than African Americans do, according to a study released this May.
Many whites believe that blacks are hired and promoted and get home loans easier than whites because of "racial preferences." Some even argue that the criminal justice system is soft on black people. One white nationalist website complains that because of the civil rights movement, "all [black criminals] have to worry about is a slap on the wrist from a judicial system that couldn't care less about White victims."
What is remarkable about these "facts" is how far they are from the truth. Studies find that with identical résumés, those with "white sounding" names have a 50 percent higher response rate from prospective employees than do those with "black sounding" names. Whites on average outearn Latinos and blacks, with or without controlling for education.
Since the Great Recession, average white net wealth has increased to 18 times that of Latinos and 20 times that of African Americans. The Latino unemployment rate is about 40 percent that of whites, while the African-American rate is 100 percent higher. Whites and blacks consume illegal drugs at similar rates, but whites are less likely than blacks to be stopped by the police, arrested or convicted -- or to receive prison time once convicted -- even for first-time offenders of the same crime.
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A tale of two job markets NewsOne: Black America And Silicon Valley
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If you see the news today you should know that that we are still in the midst of an unemployment crisis. Even though things have improved since the height of the recent recession, unemployment levels still are at an all time high. The areas that appear to be the hardest hit are places with high populations of minorities. North Carolina has seen unemployment rates as go as high as 15% and African American leaders have declared that we are in a state of emergency . I can honestly say that this high rate is not due to minorities not trying to find employment and people have even said that discrimination is now playing a part in minorities’ ability to find employment. But whatever your opinions are about the reason, the fact is that the problem is real and is not going away even though many people try to ignore it. It is a part of our everyday lives.
On the other hand there is another job market that many of you may not follow as closely, the tech market. There is a significantly different phenomenon occurring there, a resource crunch. In this market companies can’t find resources fast enough and offer lavish compensation packages to woo candidates to jump ship from one prominent internet company to another. If you ask anyone is this market they will tell you it’s a sellers market if you have tech skills. If you ask anyone hiring in this market their immediate response would be ” Show us the person with the skills and we have a job for them!” So you may ask why I mention this two markets together. Well, there are several reasons:
Are they really looking everywhere? I recently met Tiffani Bell, who was a participant in the NewME Accelerator, a program that place African American internet company founders in Silicon Valley to learn from the internet’s best and brightest and attempt to bridge the race divide in the technology start-up world. This program will actually be profiled by CNN’s “Black in America” series in November. Tiffani is a technical founder who is a fluent coder in several languages who would be a great addition to any internet company. But Tiffani lives in North Carolina, far away from where these companies typically recruit. So the first question is if the crunch is so severe, why not widen the search outside your normal patterns?
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How to succeed in the "Innovation Economy" Black Enterprise: Why Black Entrepreneurs Must Create the Next Google
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Create or die.
That’s how “digital content architect” Michelle Ferrier dubs her program that brings together journalists, business owners, educators, programmers and the like to conjure up new vehicles for consumers of media. Moreover, it’s a fitting message for entrepreneurs in today’s unmerciful business climate.
While in Philadelphia attending the recent National Association of Black Journalists conference, I had the opportunity to meet Ferrier and a score of dynamic entrepreneurs, financiers and journalists during a special lunch meeting at a local Italian eatery. As you would expect, informal chats and introductory conversations eventually turned to our most pressing issue: The devastating impact of an alarmingly high Black unemployment rate of 16%. Instead of sharing a series of doomsday scenarios though, each attendee focused on targeted, long-term solutions.
The universal answer in the room could be boiled down to job creation through entrepreneurship. To do so will require adopting a philosophy akin to the one that drives Ferrier’s program: “Innovate, incubate, initiate.”
According to Deputy SBA Administrator Marie Johns, self-employed individuals represent 95% of roughly 2 million black-owned businesses nationwide. So it will take individual effort and partnership with government, corporations, foundations, HBCUs and other institutions to build Black enterprises of considerable size and scale.
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A sign of hope? Colorlines: What Explains the Post-Katrina Success of New Orleans’ Schools?
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New Orleans is in many ways not the same city it was before Hurricane Katrina touched down along the Gulf Coast six years ago. The landscape of the city was wholly changed by Katrina—and nowhere more than in its school system, which New Orleans rebuilt from scratch after the storm. Now, six years later and with the city’s school system all but remade, New Orleans is being cited as a prime example that aggressive reforms can lead to real progress in public schools.
Still, as New Orleans residents transition from discussing a city in recovery to a city that’s remade itself, they face many of the same hurdles as every other major reform-minded school district in the country—testing scandals, fights over school choice and the edging out of the most at-risk students. What no one contests is that Katrina ushered in an era of change. What’s still unclear is whether New Orleans’ school reforms have brought the city’s neediest kids along with everyone else.
This year New Orleans students showed marked improvement on the state’s english and math standardized tests and the state’s Graduation Exit Exam, which fourth and eighth graders must pass to move on to the next grade. New Orleans, which has always lagged behind the rest of Louisiana’s schools, is steadily closing the gap in math and reading test scores. In fact, say researchers at Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, if the rate of improvement in New Orleans schools stays steady, the city will surpass the state’s achievement on high-stakes tests.
What’s more, the achievement gap between New Orleans’ black and white students—which has always been stubbornly larger that the statewide achievement gap—is narrowing as well. This year’s data showed that the 56-point achievement gap that existed between New Orleans’ black and white students has narrowed to 42 percentage points.
There have been improvements all around. For the first time, 53 percent of the city’s black students performed at grade level on the state’s standardized tests, compared with 51 percent of the rest of the state’s black students, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported. In 2006, 40 percent of the state’s black students were performing at grade level or better, but the same could be said for only 32 percent of New Orleans’ black students.
So the big question now in front of education experts is: to what does the city owe its test score gains?

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Voices and Soul

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I was born in Oregon and monsoon-type rains are not terribly uncommon; but in 1964 a once-every-200-years flood inundated the Willamette Valley so that families were evacuated and many deaths occured. Hurricane Irene reminded me somewhat of that time of my youth. When I saw photos of the devastation along the eastern seaboard caused by the flooding, the memories of my own family's dislocation came to the fore.
The Coffins
Two days into the flood
they appear, moored against
a roof eave or bobbing caught
in the crowns of drowned trees.
Like fancy life boats
from an adventurer’s flag ship,
brass plating and grips,
walnut sheen, scroll work,
they slip through the understory
on this brief, bad river.
What have they discovered
and come back to account?
Or is this the beginning
of the marvelous voyage
and they plan never to return?
-- Michael Chitwood
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