Stand Up, Stand Up
Commentary by Chitown Kev
This past Saturday in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Michigan Wolverines unmercifully and delightfully annihilated the Penn State Nittany Lions 49-10 in the Big Ten Conference opener for both teams.
And this happened:
ANN ARBOR -- Surrounded by 110,319 people, at least seven Wolverines raised their fists in the air on Saturday, bringing a national movement to the University of Michigan.
The final score of Michigan 49, Penn State 10, was an aside to a pregame statement by Jourdan Lewis and his teammates. They stood at the 40-yard line, facing the flag in Michigan Stadium's south end zone. As the "Star Spangled Banner" began, belted into the afternoon air by the U-M marching band, they clenched their fists and lifted their arms.
Lewis was joined by Mike McCray, Khalid Hill, David Dawson, Channing Stribling, Devin Bush and Elysee Mbem-Bosse.
Lewis was the lone member of the group to meet with reporters afterward. He said the gesture was not meant as a protest, but as personal expression.
Their message, according to Lewis: "(There's) injustice here in this country that we see. We've got to take notice of it. That's really what it is. It's no disrespect toward the country or anything like that, but there is injustice."
The Great Khakied One (who also happens to be the former head coach of Colin Kaepernick) had this to say:
You had a handful of players raise their fists during the national anthem assuming some sort of protest. Did you know that was going to happen before kickoff, and what are your thoughts on that?
“No, I didn’t know that. I was told when I came back into the locker room. My thoughts are there is a freedom of expression, and somebody can speak their mind. I can tell you what I believe, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last four, five, six weeks. Because I’m the football coach, that doesn’t mean that I can dictate to people what they believe.
“I support our guys and I think this is something that, it’s not going away. It’s going to keep happening. But it’s not something that’s going to keep them out of heaven, so I’m not going to really worry about it. It’s something that doesn’t keep somebody out of heaven. They’re speaking their minds, so I support them.”
The reactions on all sides of this issue, from what I’ve seen, is about what you’d expect.
In the case of The University of Michigan, though, this doesn’t even come close to being the most controversial stand against racial discrimination involving the all-time winningest college football program. For that, we have to go back to 1934 to an event that made even more national headlines and is considered to both the blackest of marks on the University of Michigan football program and, in a way, one of Michigan’s [prouder] moments.
Noted sports journalist and University of Michigan football historian John U. Bacon:
It started when he named Harry Kipke Michigan’s next head coach.
Kipke persuaded the state’s best athlete, an African-American named Willis Ward, to decline Dartmouth and play for Michigan.
Yost almost came to blows with Kipke over the recruit, but the new coach stuck to his guns. Ward made the team in 1932, became an All-American honorable mention the next year, and helped Michigan win two straight national titles.
He was that good.
But trouble arose in 1934, when Yost invited Georgia Tech to play in Ann Arbor.
At that time Southern schools did not allow blacks to play on their teams, or even play teams with black players. So, when a Northern team played a Southern team, it was customary for the Northern team to bench its black players, and the Southern team to bench white players of equal skill.
As Bacon notes, it’s unfair to single out Michigan as being an exception to the rule. Not only was pulling out black players in Northern/Southern intersectional contests was a common practice at that time but black athletes also frequently had to sleep in segregated facilities for road contests and, on occasion, they were denied access to some common areas on campus.
On the other hand, not every Northern team was the two-time defending national champions.
It should also be noted that the refusal of legendary Michigan head football coach Fielding Yost to field black football players was also well known and even talked about on occasion in the black press (the oldest reference that I found pertaining to Fielding Yost’s refusal to play black players was a 1922 Chicago Defender story).
So when Willis Ward became the first African American football player at the nation’s premier college football program in almost 40 years, it was big news.
Pittsburgh Courier September 22, 1934 p. A4.
And as Ward become known for both his exploits on the track and on the football field, he became one of the most popular athletes in the black community.
The Michigan campus was in such an uproar over the decision to bench Ward for the Georgia Tech game that a ‘Ward United Front Committee’ was formed. The committee gathered 1,500 signatures petitioning the Administration and the athletic department to allow Ward to play or to make Georgia Tech forfeit the game. The campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily, wrote and published their outrage and may have even suppressed the first Michigan Daily article of future Michigan Daily writer (and future playwright) Arthur Miller:
Enoch Brater noted that Miller had friends from Arkansas who knew one of the Georgia Tech players. Brater described Miller’s involvement this way: “Remmel [Miller’s friend from Arkansas] took Miller with them to meet with members of the team, to protest but also to appeal to the athletes' sense of fair play. ‘Miller was right in the middle of this’, Remmel recalls. Not only did the visiting team rebuff ‘the Yankee’ Miller ‘in salty language’, but they told him they would actually kill Ward if he set one foot on the Michigan gridiron. ‘The Georgia Tech team was wild.’ Miller was furious. He ‘went immediately to the office of the Michigan Daily and wrote an article about it, but it was not published.’ . . . Remmel said that Miller ‘could not believe that the Georgia Tech team would have tried to destroy Willis Ward—but, I am sure they would have.’”[28]
Ward’s road roommate, center Gerald Ford, wanted to quit the team entirely, with Ward apparently talking his road roomie out it; a part of the story that became the basis for the documentary Black and Blue- The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game.
(I am aware that some doubt has been cast on portions of the Ford/Ward story. Having read (or listened to) all of the attachments at the link, I believe that the essence of this story is true with some of the details “embellished” but I have somewhat of a different hypothesis as to what went on between Ford and Ward and Coach Kipke).
And, of course, the black press was all over the story, with the Chicago Defender featuring the Ward/Michigan/Georgia Tech story prominently on the front page.
Page A1 of The Chicago Defender October 20, 1934
The game story itself, reported in the October 27, 1934 front page story of Dewey R. Jones of The Chicago Defender, is notable for one significant thing; it is the only news report of that time that told of the location of Willis Ward as the game was being played:
Contrary by statements over the radio or sent out by sports scribes to their newspapers, Willis Ward remained in his room at his fraternity house throughout the entire game. You can take this statement from you correspondent who was in the press stands and who knows Willis Ward when he sees him.
So for those who feel that politics and sports should not and do not mix, I ask you: When has that ever happened (definitely not in the ancient Olympic Games).
Politics and sports have always been and will always be intertwined.
And that is as it should be.
Credit: The Digital Collections of the Detroit Public Library
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The impressive 400,000 square foot structure, heralded by celebrities and celebrations across D.C., serves to memorialize, educate, and cement the African American story’s place in the American story. Washington Post: This museum ‘is more than a building. It is a dream come true.’
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In a speech filled with reminders of America’s dark and not-so-distant past, and hopes for a brighter future, President Obama helped to inaugurate the National Museum of African American History and Culture today in Washington.
The country’s first black chief executive stood before a crowd of more than 7,000 official guests — and thousands more gathered on the National Mall — and repeated the words of poet Langston Hughes: “I, too, am America.”
“African American history is not somehow separate than the American story. It is not the underside of the American story. It is central to the American story,” Obama said.
Behind him, the 400,000 square-foot museum stood as a testament to that notion. Serving as home to more than 36,000 artifacts, the museum exists to both memorialize and educate, sharing the “unvarnished truth” of America’s past and celebrating the triumphs of its present. It opens in the midst of a heated conversation about race, after two fatal police shootings of black men dominated the news this week.
The African American story, Obama said, “perhaps needs to be told now more than ever.”
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With little more than skiffs, ladders, and Kalashnikovs, the pirates of Somalia once hijacked giant cargo ships, extracted millions of dollars in ransom, and forced the world’s navies to send warships steaming to the Gulf of Aden. They stole headlines and Hollywood’s imagination as khat-chewing villains in the hit film Captain Phillips.
But after wreaking havoc in the sea lanes off the Horn of Africa, with more than 200 attacks every year at their peak, the once-notorious Somali pirates have virtually vanished. No cargo ship has been successfully hijacked off the coast of Somalia since the spring of 2012. This year, the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) reported only three incidents.
Defeating Somalia’s scourge of piracy required unprecedented cooperation by different navies, efforts to boost stability ashore, and, perhaps most importantly, the use of armed guards on commercial vessels, a radical break with shipping practices and tradition.
The bad news is that while the counterpiracy recipe seems to have worked, shipping companies are already warning about complacency. Many fear that the United States and other navies operating in the area could declare victory and go home, potentially allowing pirates to return.
What’s more, for all its success in the Indian Ocean, the Somali playbook appears unsuited to fighting piracy in the two corners of the world where it is still raging: West Africa and Southeast Asia.
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The rising sun glints off a silver and jade ring on a rangy hand. It belongs to Abu Sow, a tall, proud Senegalese man in a long green robe, who is watching as one of his wives milks one of the family’s cows.
To reveal the exact number of cattle he has would only invite disaster, according to local superstition, so he vastly underestimates. “I have 100,” he says, looking over the long, elegant horns of his sleepy herd.
Across the scrubby plains of their home in northern Senegal, Sow spots the approaching milk collector on his motorbike, dragging a trailer full of urns.
When he arrives, Coumba Diallo stops milking and pours her last gourdful into one of them. The collector tests the milk for acidity and writes down how much of it the family is selling this morning, before hurrying off with his load.
He and his three colleagues have to get to around 300 herding families, starting at 6am, and be back at the Dolima milk factory before the sun gets too hot and the milk turns sour. With some herders pooling milk collections it means around 30 stops for each collector.
These days, Sow is a wealthy man. He has four wives – the maximum a man is allowed. But eight years ago, his family’s situation was much more precarious. They had nobody to sell their milk to, and usually just poured it away.
Although 4 million people – 30% of Senegal’s population – are herders, almost all the milk drunk in the west African nation is mixed up from powder imported from countries such as Ireland.
Over a decade ago Bagoré Bathily, a Franco-Senegalese vet in his 20s, saw struggling herders having to sell their animals at low prices to survive and decided he had to find a way to connect the country’s milk producers with its drinkers.
La Laiterie du Berger is currently generating sales of dairy products, including milk, of £4m a year in Senegal. Photograph: Ruth Maclean
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A feel-good movie about a teenage Ugandan chess champion with some sly lessons about the rest of the world. Slate: Queen of Katwe
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Queen of Katwe, a Disney family production which tells the true story of the Ugandan teenage chess champion Phiona Mutesi, has the rare distinction of being a film set in Africa whose story doesn’t center around war or famine. That fact alone lends Mira Nair’s film, clearly aimed at a broad swath of family audiences, a winning buoyancy.Queen of Katwe, featuring three powerful central performances from Madina Nalwanga as the young prodigy, Lupita Nyong’o as her mother, and David Oyelowo as her chess coach, is adapted by William Wheeler from a book about Mutesi’s unlikely ascent in the chess ranks by sportswriter Tim Crothers. It has the structure of a not-so-original sports picture, with repeated cycles of practice, failure, and rededication to practice spiraling up toward eventual (and, this being a biopic, inevitable) triumph.
But Queen of Katwe’s originality comes not in its story but in its setting, explored by Nair with her usual skill at establishing a sense of place. For decades, Nair’s films, like Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and The Namesake have taken place in milieus whose socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural specificity have been craftily evoked, and in Queen of Katweit’s Katwe—the poor Kampala suburb of which the determined Phiona eventually becomes the symbolic “queen”—that’s the real star. Nair has decades’ worth of familiarity with the place, having lived in Uganda for years after first getting to know the area while researching Mississippi Masala, and her camera feels at its freest and most energetic when exploring the town’s bustling red-dirt streets.
Katwe is a tough neighborhood, yes, but Phiona’s family gets by in its own hardscrabble way. Harriet (Nyong’o), Phiona’s widowed mother, wants to pull Phiona and her younger brother Brian (Martin Kabanza) out of their after-school chess program so they can help bring in money for the family, but the program’s founder, aspiring civil engineer–turned–chess-tutor Robert Katende (Oyelowo), persuades her to let the children stay, suggesting that the girl in particular shows signs of real talent. Soon the even-tempered and tough-to-faze Phiona is easily beating boys in her own age group; as one tournament judge approvingly observes, “such aggressiveness in a girl is a treasure.” (That’s a sentiment too long missing from Disney movies.)
The 16-year-old Madina Nalwanga—who, like the actors who play her siblings, is a real-life native of Katwe—has an aura of stubborn composure that makes her seem perfectly credible as a formidable chess player who can see eight moves ahead of her opponent. As her skill level and renown on the chess circuit grow, Phiona travels with her team, becoming Uganda’s junior champion at age 11 and eventually competing against adults at the World Chess Olympiad in Siberia. The segments of the movie that take us away from Katwe and pit Phiona and her small-town team against cartoonishly snobbish big-city opponents are the film’s least enjoyable and most overwritten.
Madina Nalwanga and Lupita Nyong’o in Queen of Katwe.
Walt Disney Pictures
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