Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Joseph Patel, Robert Fyvolent and David Dinerstein won a well deserved Oscar for Best Documentary feature this year. From my perspective, Harlem won as well.
The Harlem of the Renaissance, the Harlem of the Apollo Theatre, the Harlem of Malcolm’s mosque and the Abyssinian Baptist Church — a Harlem that was home to the Negro Ensemble Company, the Black Arts Movement, the Schomburg Library, Striver’s Row, the Harlem River Houses and Carver Projects. Marcus Garvey Park was Mount Morris Park in 1969 when the Harlem Cultural Festival took place on Sundays at 3 PM, from June 29 to August 24, 1969.
An event that would have been lost to history, except in the memories of the many thousands who attended, had not Hal Tulchin’s film of the event that had never acquired a producer been given daylight and a successful premiere at Sundance, which I wrote about for #BlackMusicSunday in 'Summer of Soul' is a musical celebration of Black joy. I pointed out that the film “represents a sweeping range of Black music genres, including gospel, R&B, jazz, salsa, blues, and African drumming, as well as pop and rock. More importantly, it is not simply a series of performances; The film is about music that is inextricably linked to the lived political, cultural, and historical experience of Black people, not only from Harlem, but in the Black diaspora.”
Important also is that the film unites a diverse Harlem — East and West, Black American and Puerto Rican. The absurd artificial and false dividing line of 5th Avenue — with one side as “Black Harlem” and the other as “Spanish Harlem,” dissolves when you watch the film.
Here’s the magic, and moving moment of Questlove’s receipt of the Oscar, when he said “This is not about me,” ... “This is about marginalized people in Harlem that need to heal from pain.” I was weeping along with his mom, Jacquelin Thompson, when he spoke about his dad, Lee Andrews Thompson (lead singer of the Philly do-wop group, Lee Andrews and the Hearts)
After the ceremony, Questlove talks about how the film is a teachable moment.
The kudos are rolling in. My favorite is from forever FLOTUS, Michelle Obama:
And this “grats” from Jimmy Fallon.
If, by some chance you haven’t seen it yet, perhaps this trailer will whet your appetite.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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The University of North Texas library has received a grant totaling $126,989 from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission to fund its digital archive. The Black Academy of Arts and Letters archive is home to over 1,800 archival materials spanning over 40 years of Black cultural expression, and soon, they will be made publicly available to us all.
Works include that of Dallas legends such as Erykah Badu, Kirk Franklin, and Margaret Walker. With the help of the NHPRC grant, these materials, some of which are unreleased, will be digitized and made ready for streaming.
“These are unique recordings,” Head of Special Collections Morgan Gieringer said. “They don’t exist anywhere else. They only exist in this collection.”
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Mississippi could soon be singing a new song — or three. The legislature is considering a bill to replace the state's official song, "Go, Mississippi," which was adopted in 1962.
The original bill, House Bill 1487, proposed replacing the current song with "One Mississippi," written in 2016 by Mississippi musician Steve Azar for the state's bicentennial. The House overwhelmingly approved the measure.
The Senate, however, voted in favor of an amended version of the bill with three official songs, because "the extensive history and diversity of the State of Mississippi require the designation of three official state songs that can be sung with pride and affection."
The Senate wants Mississippi's official songs to be "One Mississippi," "Miss the Mississippi and You" by country legend Jimmie Rodgers and "Crossroads" by Delta blues pioneer Robert Johnson.
The two different proposals to replace "Go, Mississippi" are now being considered by a conference committee.
A song tainted by segregation
In 1962, when Mississippi considered an official song for the state, the legislature needed evidence. They invited a dance orchestra to perform the contenders at a joint legislative session. Also in attendance were The Hinds Junior College Hi-Steppers "clad in ruffled short, red-trimmed jackets and white boots with tassels," according to a report from the UPI news service.
The two songs under consideration were "Go, Mississippi" and "Mississippi, U.S.A.," both written by Houston Davis.
The legislators favored "Go, Mississippi," which some recognized as sharing the melody of then Gov. Ross Barnett's campaign song. Others objected for that same reason.
"Let's not make 'Roll with Ross' our state song," said one representative who took to his feet to object, according to the UPI.
Davis wrote "Roll with Ross" for Barnett's 1959 gubernatorial campaign. It included the lyrics:
Roll with Ross, roll with Ross, he's his own boss
For segregation, one hundred percent
He's not a moderate like some of the gents
He'll fight integration with forceful intent.
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"I really think getting them in high school is the way to go because, from everything I read, there’s more and more young people deciding not to go to college for many reasons,” said Diana Pittro, executive vice president of RMK Management Corp. The Grio: Internship program seeks to increase diversity in real estate profession
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Several real estate agents and companies in Chicago are reportedly working with local high schools to help the next generation of realtors gain access and exposure before college.
As reported by the Chicago Tribune, the nonprofit Urban Alliance is one such initiative that offers workforce readiness training and mentoring to Chicago youth through its signature High School Internship Program. The organization’s Property Management Pathway program (PMP) provides high school seniors considering a career in real estate with “professional skills training as well as industry training certified by the National Apartment Association,” per the website.
The program is open to students enrolled in Chicago Public Schools and recent graduates of Baltimore City Public Schools. Participants can focus on either leasing or maintenance and “earn a Certified Apartment Leasing Professional (CALP) credential or a Certified Apartment Maintenance Technician (CAMT) credential,” per the website.
“When you think about the industries that Urban Alliance is exposing young people to in terms of careers, these are conversations that oftentimes are not happening in friend groups, in family households and communities,” said Jonathan Hill, an Urban Alliance alumnus who is as a community engagement lead at Chicago-based software development firm Relativity. According to the Chicago Tribune, Hill’s organization sponsors Urban Alliance interns.
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If time is money, then Beitbridge must be a most expensive place. Late last year lorries carrying, among other things, cobalt from Congo, copper from Zambia and tea from Malawi snaked for miles as they waited to cross the Limpopo river into South Africa. Many were there for days. Some drivers bribe their way to the front; 1,000 rand ($68) is the going rate. Others cannot. In 2020 four drivers are said to have died in their vehicles while waiting.
African politicians say they want to end such bottlenecks. The African Continental Free Trade Area (afcfta), so far ratified by 41 of Africa’s 55 countries, could boost the region’s economies by making it easier to trade among them. In 2020 just 18% of exports were to other African countries (see chart), lower than the equivalent shares in North America (30%), Asia (58%) or Europe (68%). More trade within the region could lead to more jobs, higher wages and less poverty.
The afcfta pledges to grease the wheels of trade in two ways. The first is by reducing tariffs, especially between countries in different regional blocs, such as the Southern African Development Community and the East African Community. This could boost intra-African trade by 15-25%, reckons the imf. But double that effect would come from reducing “non-tariff barriers”, the grit that really gums up trade.
Poor infrastructure is one such barrier. Africa’s land area is big enough to accommodate China, India, the contiguous United States and much of Europe. Yet its railway network is not very much bigger than France’s and Germany’s combined. Many lines were built by colonial companies to link mines to ports, rather than countries to one another. And existing tracks are struggling. South Africa’s state network operator was eviscerated by corruption under Jacob Zuma, a former president. Newer Chinese-built railways in Kenya and from Djibouti to Ethiopia are under-used, either because they struggle to compete with road freight or because they lack ancillary infrastructure such as storage yards.
Ports are small and slow. Cargo waits for more than two weeks on average, as against less than a week in Asia, Europe and Latin America, says cdc Group, a British development-finance institution. Handling costs are around 50% higher than in other parts of the word, reckons the African Development Bank (afdb).
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A new study has revealed that rates of prediabetes among children have more than doubled over the past 20 years. The study, published March 28 in JAMA Pediatrics, looked at children between the ages of 12 and 19 from 1999 to 2018. During that time, the rate of prediabetes among the teens in the group went from 11.6 to 28.2 percent. Now the author of the study is worried that these new figures could be a dangerous trend that leads to long-term health issues in our children. “If we do not intervene, the children who have prediabetes have a higher risk of developing diabetes and also have a higher risk of all cardiovascular diseases,” said Junxiu Liu, Assistant Professor of Population Health Science and Policy at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York
Prediabetes is a common condition in adults, but according to the CDC, over three-quarters of those who have it don’t know it. The condition is classified as having blood sugar levels that are higher than normal but are not yet high enough to be considered diabetic. Among the dangers of prediabetes are an increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
This news should be especially alarming to African Americans, who are 60 percent more likely than whites to be diagnosed with diabetes and twice as likely as white people to die from the disease. Diabetes most commonly affects racial and ethnic minority communities because they are more likely to live in areas where there is a lack of access to healthy food.
“Our Black and Brown communities are more likely to have an abundance of fast-food restaurants and markets stocked with unhealthy processed foods as opposed to our white counterparts, where there tends to be a greater number of grocery stores and markets with an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables,” says Dr. Kimbra A. Bell, a Northwestern Medicine Internal Medicine Physician. “A lack of access to healthy, nutritious foods results in poorer health outcomes.”
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Jeremiah letting learned about coffee from his father. As a child in the late 1980s, he worked on his family’s one-acre (0.4 hectare) coffee farm in the hills of Nandi county, western Kenya. The cycle ran like clockwork: cultivate, plant, ripen, harvest and sell. “Every year was the same,” he says. “It was timely.
No longer. As the chairman of a co-operative, he now represents 303 smallholder coffee farmers who are suffering from droughts, unpredictable rains and rising temperatures that bring pests and disease. Warming weather in east Africa, the birthplace of coffee, is already beginning to harm one of the region’s most important export crops, which is worth some $2bn a year (see chart). Overheating coffee shrubs also foreshadow the harm that may befall other vital crops such as tea, Kenya’s biggest export. And if coffee becomes more expensive or less tasty, it is not just farmers who will suffer, but the big chunk of humanity who together glug down some 3bn cups of the stuff a day, at a cost of about $200bn a year.
Some of the world’s best Coffea arabica is grown on the fertile slopes of Mount Kenya. This variety of the plant, which originated in the highlands of Ethiopia and Sudan, produces beans that are tastier (and more valuable) than those from its poor cousin, Coffea canephora (known as robusta), which often ends up in instant coffee granules. Arabica is also more finicky.
Global warming may shrink the total area that is most suited to growing arabica beans by about half by 2050, according to a recent peer-reviewed paper. Rising temperatures may make some new places suitable for cultivating coffee, because they will raise the maximum altitude at which the crop can be grown, but such spots are relatively small and generally given over to other crops already. Overall “trends are mainly negative,” says Roman Grüter, one of the authors of the paper.
Arabica plants, which account for roughly 60% of worldwide coffee production and more than 98% of Kenya’s, thrive at altitudes of 1,000-2,000 metres in equatorial regions and at temperatures between 18°C and 21°C. Over the past 60 years average temperatures in some of Kenya’s coffee regions have already risen by 1.1°C, reaching daytime highs of 25°C, says Patricia Nying’uro, a climate scientist at Kenya’s Meteorological Department.
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Voices & Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
Spring settles on the west coast, an occasional rain squall cleans the air. A temperate mid-70's warms the ancient dry sea bed as the sun casts moving shadows of moving clouds pushed by a confluence of deep ocean waters and dry desert winds. An evocation of this landscape of concrete, glass and chaparral, of date palms, ice plant, the freeway and the back yard resonates from the rivers of cars ever-flowing through the hardscape of the bass-thump, all the way to the front yard laughter, all the way to the scented air of carport magnolias, and all the way to the afternoon BBQ out back.
where we come from, sometimes, beauty
floats around us like clouds
the way leaves rustle in the breeze
and cornbread and barbecue swing out the backdoor
and tease all our senses as the sun goes down.
dreams and memories rest by fences
Texas accents rev up like our engines
customized sparkling powerful as the arms
that hold us tightly black n fragrant
reminding us that once we slept and loved
to the scents of magnolia and frangipani
once when we looked toward the skies
we could see something as lovely as our children's
smiles white n glistenin' clear of fear or shame
young girls in braids as precious as gold
find out that sex is not just bein' touched
but in the swing of their hips the light fallin cross
a softbrown cheek or the movement of a mere finger
to a lip many lips inviting kisses southern
and hip as any one lanky brother in the heat
of a laid back sunday rich as a big mama still
in love with the idea of love how we play at lovin'
even riskin' all common sense cause we are as fantastical
as any chimera or magical flowers where breasts entice
and disguise the racing pounding of our hearts
as the music that we are
hard core blues low bass voices crooning
straight outta Compton melodies so pretty
they nasty cruising the Harbor Freeway
blowin' kisses to strangers who won't be for long
singing ourselves to ourselves Mamie Khalid Sharita
Bessie Jock Tookie MaiMai Cosmic Man Mr. Man
Keemah and all the rest seriously courtin'
rappin' a English we make up as we go along
turnin' nouns into verbs braids into crowns
and always fetchin' dreams from a horizon
strewn with bones and flesh of those of us
who didn't make it whose smiles and deep
dark eyes help us to continue to see
there's so much life here.
-- Ntozake Shange
“People of Watts”
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.