Haiti we stand with you. Text "Haiti" to 90999 to send $10 through the Red Cross or Text "Yele" to 501501 to send $5 through Wyclef Jean's charity.
Commentary by Deoliver47, Black Kos Editor
In Search of Roots and Our History: AfriGeneas
As I watch and pray and gobble up news coverage from Haiti I think of all those people who have died and who are now part of a collective body that many there and here will call "the ancestors". Ojibwa wrote an excellent diary on the religion of Vodou, a key component of which is the belief in the presence of those who went before us in our lives, which is true for most African Traditional Religions (ATRs). Often mistakenly dubbed ancestor worship, it can be better termed ancestor reverence. From a non- spiritual perspective let us simply explain it as a way of being connected to a past, of having a foundation that provides both the individual and the collective body a sense of history, or as Haitians put it "histwa". If you don’t know your history, you are unsettled in the present, and cannot forge ahead to make a future.
Slavery and the slave trade created a disruption in the lives of those Africans who were wrenched from their own cultures and thrown willy nilly into foreign climes; involuntarily to work, to toil under the lash, and to die. Yet stubbornly those Africans clung to their roots, and knew that as long as they didn’t forget who they were, that ultimately they could survive anything. First and foremost, before God or any deity comes the sense, or spirit of the ancestors. In this, Haitians share a similar ethos with many Native Americans and Asians. Unwritten the stories of the ancestors were lovingly passed on, from generation to generation in stories and songs. This oral tradition served to preserve the sense of linkage and though slavery may have applied literal chains, the chains of spirit were far stronger than anything mortal man could bind us with.
There is no coincidence that the 1977 televised mini-series here in the US called "Roots"documenting Alex Haley’s search for his histwa was such an overwhelming success in the American black community. For too long Negros (for we were called that – a title simply designating us by color, for negro in Spanish is just "black") were told that we had no roots, no ties to anything at all except a past rooted in slavery here on American soil. We were told that genealogy, an avocation among many elite whites who sought entrée into ancestral bodies like the Daughters of the American Revolution or various other similar groups offering status, like heraldic groups or Hibernian Lodges was not for us. We had no roots other than the marker of our skin. The brand of slavery. Permanent and indelible. That "the brick wall" of slavery was impassible.
We were told we were a people without history.
The push back against the lie we had been fed happened in many subtle ways. Dr. Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week in 1926, founded the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1915, and founded the Journal of Negro History in 1916.
Later, his brainchild would become Black History Month. We transformed ourselves, from Negroes to become "African Americans" – to establish an identity that would in some way publicly proclaim a bond to an entire continent, but this was still unsettling. Rooted to whom? To where? How many generations had we lost since the slave ships stopped docking in Massachusetts or Charleston or New Orleans? How many families were torn apart and separated, shackled in chain gangs and marched off to other plantations, never to hear the stories and tales of the ancestors again?
In slavery times we were given new anglicized names, drumming was banned, our worship systems were forbidden; we were made Christians not by choice but by design. We survived, constantly reminded of our difference simply because we wore the mark of our skins like clothing that is only removed in death. We changed colors slowly as our genes became intermingled with those of our owners, and those of indentured Irish who toiled here along side us in servitude. Oft times we mixed with indigenous Americans, in some cases as their slaves, in others as adopted members of their nations. Kept separate and unequal behind laws we kept our sense of self as a collective body, not by choice but by the design of others. But nothing could stop us from telling those stories, of great great grandmother Suluca, the herbalist midwife, or great great grandfather Kojo, the carver and rice farmer.
And so, as millions watched Alex Haley’s journey, sanitized for a mass viewing audience, a new movement was born. Starting slowly at first, small African-American genealogy societies were born. Formed not to gain entrée into the DAR (though some of us found later that we were just as eligible as anyone named Peabody) not to lay claim to the founding Fathers of America (though we have seen those connections made as well) but to nourish those roots that are now transplanted but whose DNA will always have African markers.
Then came a new technology, an advance in communication. A connection called the internet and an equally amazing innovation of digitizing or records kept in musty boxes in libraries and national archives.The ancient Yoruba god of communication and owner of the crossroads Elegua, or Papa Legba was smiling. Now the children could be connected once more. For those "slaves " dubbed not human by law were also valuable property: bought, sold, traded, left to kin in wills along with the china and taxed. They were even counted in each census; not by name, but to provide a demographic boost in the balance of power of the southland. Years later after "freedom" was declared, those who had survived slavery into the 1930’s were sought out under a WPA Writers project program and interviewed.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.
Their "histwa" was put to paper, bound and collected in volumes. On other fronts, years later a massive project was undertaken by a woman – named Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (27 June 1929 - ) is a prominent historian and public intellectual who focuses on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Louisiana (United States), and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering a cache of extensive European colonial records in Louisiana, she created a database of records of over 100,000 enslaved Africans. It has become a prominent resource for historical and genealogical research of African Americans. Midlo Hall is an award-winning author and Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History, Rutgers University, New Jersey. She is also an International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Institute for the Study of Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Here is what she has to saydescribing her massive work:
These databases were created almost entirely from original, manuscript documents located in courthouses and historical archives throughout the State of Louisiana. The project lasted 15 years but was funded for only five of these years. Some records were entered from original manuscript documents housed in archives in France, in Spain, and in Cuba and at the University of Texas in Austin as well. Some were entered from published books and journals. Some of the Atlantic slave trade records were entered from the Harvard Dubois Center Atlantic Slave Trade Dataset. Information for a few records was supplied from unpublished research of other scholars.
Each record represents an individual slave who was described in these documents. Slaves were listed, and descriptions of them were recorded in documents in greater or lesser detail when an estate of a deceased person who owned at least one slave was inventoried, when slaves were bought and sold, when they were listed in a will or in a marriage contract, when they were mortgaged or seized for debt or because of the criminal activities of the master, when a runaway slave was reported missing, or when slaves, mainly recaptured runaways, testified in court. 3 Each coded field contains comparable information about each slave.
The searchable data baseis free for all those who seek to use it.
Midlo-Hall’s personal story is also interesting. A white civil rights activist in Louisiana, later in her life,in 1956, she married Harry Haywood, a leading black member of the CPUSA, and a son of former slaves.
AfriGeneas is founded
It was with materials like these in Midlo-Halls database, and thousands of others that our internet matriarch, Valencia King Nelson, herself a civil rights activist, created a huge body of resources online – with a staff of researchers; black, white and native american; most who volunteer to make it all happen.
Nelson who just turned 81(Happy Birthday Valencia!), is still going strong, expanding into new areas of research and training new generations of researcher/historians, using the internet as a valuable teaching tool.
For those of us who seek our histories and herstories, AfriGeneas is our home, built by the combined efforts of contributors: historians, genealogical researchers and ordinary people who share photos, family diaries, and wills containing slave data.
Starting with an online Bulletin board and internet mailing list, then to AOL and a Usenet newsgroup, AfriGeneas is now the foremost website for doing black family history research.
The website, online since 1999 covers a broad span of areas of interest to those seeking to learn, to share and to connect. There are databases, surname registries, live chat where experienced researchers can aid and assist newcomers and a long list of vital forums, covering all aspects of research and African Diasporic life.
Forums at AfriGeneas
Adoption Forum, Africa Research Forum, African American Cemeteries Forum,
African American History Forum, African-Native American Genealogy Forum
AfriGeneas Call to Action!, AfriGeneas Discuss!,AfriGeneas at the Movies ,Ancestral Cooking Forum, Books~Authors~Reviews, Brick Wall Forum, Canada Research Forum, Caribbean Research Forum, Creole Research Forum ,DNA Research Forum, Family Reunion Forum, Free Persons of Color Forum, Genealogy and History Forum, Genealogy Technology Forum, Health and Wellness Forum, Heritage Arts & Crafts Forum, Juniors Forum,Military Research Forum, Reconstruction Period Research Forum, Schools, Organizations, Churches and Institutions Forum, Slave Research Forum,
States Research Forum, Surnames and Family Research Forum, Underground Railroad Research Forum, Western Frontier Forum, World Research Forum (Multicultural & Multiracial Research) and a Writers Forum.
So if you have some spare time, look through those family trunks in the attic. Talk to the elders in your own families. Get their histwa’s, record their stories to pass on, before they pass on. If you think you may have documents that provide clues to the lives of black Americans, consider scanning them and sending them to AfriGeneas.
But ancestral research is not limited to those of us who are connecting to our African ancestry. I use the construction of a family tree in my cultural anthropology classes each semester as a teaching tool, to give students a sense of a connection to a real People’s History of the United States, like the history contained in the pages that great textbook written the late Howard Zinn, to see history as something all people can embrace. Black History Month has begun, yet again...and still our histories remain obscured. Our families, and ancestors are a key part of that history of the United States, the Caribbean, and this hemisphere.
As we say at AfriGeneas, let us all continue to be "guided by the ancestors".
___________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK IN HISTORY
Jan 31, 1865. The 13th Amendment, which on ratification outlawed slavery, was passed by Congress on this date in 1865.
Jan 31, 1919. Jackie Robinson, the first Black baseball player in the major leagues, was born in Cairo, GA, on this date in 1919.
Jan 31, 1920. The Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, originally founded at Howard University in 1914, was incorporated on this date in 1920.
Jan 31, 1962. Lieutenant Commander Samuel Lee Gravely became the first Black person to command a U.S. warship on this date in 1962. Gravely commanded the USS Falgout.
Jan 31, 1988. Doug Williams, football great, became the first Black to quarterback a Super Bowl team on this date in 1988. Williams led the Washington Redskins to a 42-10 win over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXII.
Feb 1, 1810. Charles Lenox Remond, an antislavery activist and one of the first lecturers in the antislavery movement, was born in Salem, MA, on this date in 1810.
Feb 1, 1865. Frances Louis Cardoza, South Carolina's first Black Secretary of State, was born in Charleston, SC, on this date in 1837.John S. Rock became the first Black lawyer admitted to practice before the Supreme Court on this date in 1865.
Feb 1, 1902. Langston Hughes, poet laureate, author, and playwright, was born in Joplin, MO, on this date in 1902. His writings about experiences gathered from his life have undoubtedly influenced many other writers.
Feb 1, 1926. Carter G. Woodson, the "Father of Black History," initiated the first celebration of "Negro History Week" on this date in 1926. In 1976 it was expanded to "Black History Month."
Feb 1, 1960. NC A&T students: Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, and Franklin McClain staged a sit-in at the F. W. Woolworth segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, on this date in 1960. This was the first of the many historic sit-ins of the 1960's. They were honored on a U.S. Postage stamp on the events 45 anniversary.
Feb 1, 1978. Harriet Tubman, abolitionist, author, and engineer of the Underground Railroad, was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on this date in 1978. She was the first Black woman to be honored on a stamp and the first to appear in the Black Heritage Series.
Feb 1, 1990. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, reformer who gathered the first statistical records on lynchings in the United States, was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on this date in 1990.
Feb 2, 1866. Samuel R. Lowery became the first Black lawyer to actually argue a case before the Supreme Court on this date in 1866. One year and one day earlier, John S. Rock was the first Black admitted to practice before the Court.
Feb 2, 1984. Ku Klux Klansman, Henry Hays, was sentenced to death for the 1981 strangulation/murder of 19-year-old Black youth, Michael Donald, on this date in 1984.
Feb 2, 1988. James Weldon Johnson, diplomat, the first Field Secretary of the NAACP, and co-composer of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (Black National Anthem), was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on this date in 1988.
Feb 2, 2009. Eric Holder was sworn in as the 1st Black Attorney General on this date in 2009.
Feb 3, 1870. The 15th Amendment, giving Blacks the right to vote, was ratified on this date in 1870.
Feb 3, 1956. Autherine Juanita Lucy became the first Black student at the University of Alabama on this date in 1956.
Feb 3, 1981. The Air Force Academy discontinued its ban on considering the applications of persons with the sickle-cell trait on this date in 1981. Many people felt the ban had stigmatized Blacks.
Feb 4, 1913. Rosa L. Parks, civil rights activist and inspiration for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was born in Tuskegee, AL, on this date in 1913. Her refusal to give up her seat on a bus led to the historical year-long boycott of the bus system.
Feb 4, 1964. Austin T. Walden became Georgia's first Black Judge since Reconstruction on this date in 1964.
Feb 4, 1986. Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree), preacher, abolitionist, speaker, and women's rights advocate, was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on this date in 1986.
Feb 5, 1884. W. Johnson, inventor, patented the Egg Beater on this date in 1884. Patent # 292,821.
Feb 5, 1933. J. Herman Banning, the first Black aviator to be granted a license by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the first Black pilot to fly across the United States, died in a plane crash on this date in 1933. Banning was not piloting the plane.
Feb 5, 1934. Henry "Hank" Aaron, baseball legend, was born in Mobile, AL, on this date in 1934. Aaron played for the Milwaukee (Atlanta) Braves over a 20-year span. He hit 755 regular-season home runs-more than any other baseball player.
Feb 5, 1958. Clifton Reginald Wharton, Sr. became the first Black to head a U.S. embassy in Europe on this date in 1958. Wharton was confirmed as Ambassador to Rumania.
Feb 5, 1994. White supremacist, Byron de la Beckwith was finally convicted of the murder of Medgar Evers on this date in 1994, nearly 31 years after Evers was gunned downed at his Jackson, MS, residence. Evers was a civil rights activist and the first NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi.
Feb 6, 1820. The Mayflower of Liberia, the first organized emigration of Blacks back to Africa, left New York for Sierra Leone with 86 Blacks on this date in 1820.
Feb 6, 1898. Melvin B. Tolson, author of Rendezvous with America and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, was born on this date in 1898.
Feb 6, 1945. Bob Marley, the "King of Reggae Music," was born in St. Ann, Jamaica, on this date in 1945.
Feb 6, 1993. Arthur Ashe, the first Black man to win the Wimbledon Men's Singles Tennis Championship, died on this date in 1993.
___________________________________________________________________
This weeks news by Amazinggrace and dopper0189, Black Kos Editor and Managing Editor
The disease turned from a benign illness to a violent disease in the 1960s, just as black men joined protests against racism. The Root: Black Men and Schizophrenia: What's the Deal?
African-American men are diagnosed with schizophrenia at rates four to five time more than other groups. Schizophrenia is a biologically based disease, with no genetic links to ethnicity or gender. Are black men inherently crazy?
From the 1920s to the 1950s, schizophrenia was considered a fairly harmless disease that primarily affected whites. The illness was associated with "emotional disharmony" and the suggested treatment for those affected was that they be nurtured, not feared.
But in the 1960s and 1970s, advertisements for new schizophrenia drugs appeared featuring scary-looking black men under the tagline, "Assaultive and belligerent?" Apparently, "cooperation" could be achieved with doses of an antipsychotic drug, Haldol.
Schizophrenia became a black disease. And black men, labeled paranoid, hostile and violent, literally became the poster children.
Jonathan M. Metzl, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, decided to trace the troubled history of schizophrenia. By gaining access to archives of Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a mental asylum located in Michigan that was open between 1885 and 1975, Metzl began unraveling the tangled roots of schizophrenia and race. He compiled findings in the new book The Protest Psychosis (Beacon Press, 2009). Part reportage, part analysis, part theory, Metzl challenges readers to peel back the layered complexities of race and medicine.
________________________________________________________________________
It wasn’t the devil that hurt Haiti. The Root: The Curse on Haiti.
According to Pat Robertson, when the Haitian slaves were battling the French for their freedom, they "swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘we will serve you if you will get us free from the French’... so the devil said ‘OK, it’s a deal,’ and they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got themselves free, but ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other." In spite of the absurdity of Pat Robertson’s claim that the devastating earthquake in Haiti was a sign of God’s curse on that peaceful people for some abominable sin their ancestors committed in the late 18th century, there has, in fact, been a pernicious shadow beclouding that nation’s horizons since its historic military defeat of its French colonial masters. And the opaque object causing that shadow can be traced directly to the United States.
Robertson, just to be clear, was referring to the fact that the first leader of the Haitian revolutionaries, a man named Boukman, employed Vodou (Anglicized, and broadly misunderstood, as "Voodoo"), to galvanize the slaves into rebelling against their masters in 1791. Vodou is a religion, just as Christianity, Judaism and Islam are religions. Vodou is a New World synthesis of African religions that slaves from the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the Fon people of Dahomey, and the Bakongo from Congo and Angola brought with them on the slave ships, and melded together, over time, in the crucible of slavery. Think of Vodou’s relation to Ifa somewhat like the Greek Orthodox Church’s relation to the Roman Catholic Church, and you will begin to understand its origins and evolution.
Christian missionaries, as is their wont, denigrated this religion created by black people by characterizing it, in a binary relationship with Christianity, as "devil worship." (They did the same thing with Ifa and Vodun in Nigeria and Dahomey, by the way, and lots of other religions.) Rev. Robertson is just the most recent example of this ignorant and manipulative tendency; and he should know better.
Actually, Robertson, and many other observers going back to the time of the Haitian Revolution, couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the sons and daughters of African slaves could ever possibly defeat a European nation in a war without supernatural intervention, without, in other words, a pact with the devil himself. That is a sign of how profoundly deep the currents of anti-black racism run in Western culture, and bubble up, in the most unexpected places, even today.
If there is a curse on Haiti, we don’t have to sully another person’s religious beliefs to find it. Perhaps curses, like charity, start at home. And the first two places to search for the source would be the White House and Congress, especially those historically dominated by Dixiecrats. Starting with Thomas Jefferson and continuing in a steady march that only really began to end when President Bill Clinton sent General Colin Powell to broker the deal for the generals to "retire" and restore Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a succession of American presidents and Congresses have systematically undermined the independence and integrity of the Haitian Republic. I thought about this ignoble, shameful history as President Obama proclaimed, for one of first times in the history of both republics, that "we stand in solidarity with our neighbors to the south," they "who share our common humanity." It was a noble sentiment, long overdue.
* * * * * *
As religious violence deepens in his home country, Nobel laureate and Nigerian political activist Wole Soyinka shares his unbridled thoughts on Islamic terrorism and why England is a "cesspit" with The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan. The Daily Beast: Wole Soyinkas "British" problem.
Seated under the portrait of a local maharajah, Wole Soyinka—as regal of face and mien as the potentate in the painting—leaned toward me and uttered words so harsh that I sat bolt upright: "England is a cesspit."
We were in India at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where he, a Nobel laureate for literature and vigorous activist for democracy in his native land, was the guest of honor. I'd seized the opportunity to talk to Mr. Soyinka, the world's most famous Nigerian, about the only other person who might tussle with him for that title: Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young man who boarded a flight in Amsterdam on Christmas Day with a bomb in his underpants.
"We should assemble all those who are pure and cannot abide other faiths, put them all in rockets, and fire them into space."
What did the 76-year-old Mr. Soyinka—who divides his time between the U.S. and Nigeria—make of his country's placement on a watch-list of states deemed to be incubators of Islamist terrorism? "That was an irrational, knee-jerk reaction by the Americans. The man did not get radicalized in Nigeria. It happened in England, where he went to university.
"England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there."
Why is Britain the way it is? "This is part of the character of Great Britain," Mr. Soyinka declares. "Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness." And so it is, he says, that Britain lets everyone preach whatever they want: It confirms a self-image of greatness.
* * * * * *
Why migration is the best solution for Haiti's recovery. Foreign Policy: Let them leave.
Long before the calamity in Haiti, many Haitians and their families benefited from working abroad, and many, including me, have suggested allowing more Haitian immigrants into the United States as a way to help the country's economy recover.
It might seem strange that the best solution to Haiti's woes lies outside its borders, but migration and remittances have been responsible for almost all of the poverty reduction that has happened in the island country over the past few decades. They have done enormously more good than any policy intended to reduce poverty inside Haiti during that time. Any poverty-reduction strategy for Haiti going forward that does not include what has been Haitians' most successful poverty-reduction strategy to date is not a serious one.
This idea is a no-brainer if we take a minute to look at the numbers.
First, Haitians have already emigrated in droves. There are around 535,000 Haitian-born U.S. residents at the Census Bureau's last count, out of roughly 1 million in total living abroad.
The vast majority of Haitians who have escaped poverty have done so by leaving the country. Pick any reasonable poverty line for Haiti; the vast majority of Haitians above it no longer live there. In a study I did with Harvard's Lant Pritchett, we chose a bare-bones poverty line of $10 per day (measured as a living standard at U.S. prices). That's total destitution -- just a third of the $30 per day that the United States considers "poverty" for a single adult. Eight out of 10 Haitians above that line currently live in the United States.
Most of this represents the effect of emigration on poverty. Only 1 percent of people in Haiti live on more than $10 per day, and there is no evidence that most Haitian emigrants come from the extreme tip-top of the income distribution, so very few people who emigrated would have an income that high if they had been forced to stay home. A typical low-skill male Haitian in the United States earns at least six times what he could earn in Haiti. And all of this just accounts for Haitians in the United States. Include the roughly 100,000 more who are in Canada and Western Europe, almost all of whom live on over $10 per day, and it's even starker: The vast majority of Haitians who escaped poverty did so by leaving Haiti, not as a result of anything that happened in the country.
_______________________________________________________________________
International Civil Rights Center and Museum - In Greensboro, N.C. New York Times: From Lunch Counter to Revolution.
The sign still says "F. W. Woolworth Co." in bright gold letters running across the building on South Elm Street, just as it did 50 years ago. And within that two-story structure, the same stainless steel dumbwaiters and commercial appliances line the mirrored walls. The lunch counter, which includes a bowling-alley-long tabletop that must dwarf any currently in use, is largely intact; the original chrome and vinyl chairs are still mounted in the floor. This site is an authentic, half-century-old relic, a remnant of the mundane, the insignificant, the quaint.
But one of the achievements of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which is opening Monday in that former Woolworth building, is that you begin to understand how such a place became a pivot in the greatest political movement of the 20th century.
In the museum’s 30,000 square feet of exhibition space, the mundane luncheonette reminds us that a cataclysmic social transformation took place over the right to be ordinary. For that was what was at stake — not subtle and arcane matters of law or obscure practices that challenged eccentric codes of behavior, but the basic acts of daily life: eating, drinking, sleeping, working, playing. It was here, at this luncheonette counter, that four 17-year-old freshmen at the all-black Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina — Joseph A. McNeil, Franklin E. McCain, David L. Richmond and Ezell A. Blair Jr. — arrived on Feb. 1, 1960, sat down and ordered some food.
* * * * * * *
How the country's murder capital got its groove back. NewsWeek: Straight Into Compton
For nearly a decade, the entrance to the city of Compton, Calif., just off the 91 Freeway, was a huge, vacant lot, overgrown by weeds. Surrounded by an eight-foot steel gate, the once-bustling auto dealership had become a haven for the homeless; a place where people dumped trash, loitered, caused trouble. Lampposts that once illuminated new cars and sale signs stood darkened, some tagged with gang graffiti. It was prime real estate—except that, well, it wasn't.
By the 1990s, the mere mention of the name Compton had become so toxic that the nearby southern California suburbs had the city of 100,000 erased from their maps. Its schools were crumbling. Drugs were rampant, and street-gang tensions had escalated into what historian Josh Sides describes as "a brutal guerilla war." The city became the U.S. murder capital, per capita, surpassing Washington with one homicide for every 1,000 residents—and the details were numbing. In 1989, a 2-year-old was gunned down in a drive-by as he wandered his front yard; a 16-year-old was shot with a semiautomatic weapon as he rode his bike. The image of Compton as a defiantly violent ghetto was crystallized by the rap group N.W.A., whose 1988 album, "Straight Outta Compton," went multiplatinum, even though it was banned by many radio stations; the record even attracted the attention of the FBI, which felt the group was inciting violence with its song, "F--- tha Police."
Two decades later, Compton has a new lease on life. The community is still poor, and unemployment is more than twice the national average. But the number of homicides is at a 25-year low, slashed in half from 2005. There are fewer gunshots and more places for kids to go after school. Alongside the liquor stores and check-cashing stands are signs of middle-class aspiration: a T.G.I. Fridays, an outbreak of Starbucks and a natural-food store. Along the way, blacks became a minority in Compton, which is 60 percent Latino today.
The change, say community members, is palpable. Residents walk dogs; they go out at night. Graduation rates are higher, and a recent canvassing effort counted more than 25 nonprofits targeted specifically toward youth, where a decade ago, there were few to none.
And that vacant lot off the freeway? Thanks in part to Compton's designation as an enterprise zone in 2006, it's been replaced by a $65 million suburban strip mall, whose palm trees and flower beds give it a look more reminiscent of Orange County than South Central. "Compton is a fundamentally different place," says Stanford University historian Albert Camarillo, a Compton native who is working on an oral history of his hometown. "It's one of these communities that's really in the throes of change."
________________________________________________________________________
Ta-Nehisi Coates nails it again! The Atlantic: Just Remembered Chris Matthews Was White.
Here's Matthews on Obama:
I was trying to think about who he was tonight. It's interesting; he is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. He's gone a long way to become a leader of this country and past so much history in just a year or two. I mean it's something we don't even think about. I was watching and I said, wait a minute, he's an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people and there he is, president of the United States, and we've completely forgotten that tonight -- completely forgotten it. I think it was in the scope of the discussion, it was so broad ranging, so in tune with so many problems and aspects and aspects of American life. That you don't think in terms of the old tribalism and the old ethnicity. It was astounding in that regard, a very subtle fact. It's so hard to even talk about it. Maybe I shouldn't talk about it, but I am.
I think it's worth noting that Chris Matthews wasn't trying to take a shot at anybody. I also think it's worth noting that he was attempting to compliment Obama and say something positive about what he's done for race relations. (See Matthews' clarification here.) But I think it's most worth noting that "I forgot Obama was black"--in all its iterations--is something that white people should stop saying, if only because it's really dishonest.
One way to think about this is to flip the frame. Around these parts, we've been known, from time to time, to chat about the NFL. We've also been known to chat about the intricacies of beer. If you hang around you'll notice that there are no shortage of women in these discussions. Having read a particularly smart take on Brett Favre, or having received a good recommendations on a particular IPA, it would not be a compliment for me to say, "Wow, I forgot you were a woman." Indeed, it would be pretty offensive.
* * * * * *
Melissa Harris-Lacewell reminisces. The Nation: The Obama I remember
Watching Barack Obama become President of the United States made me proud and hopeful, but I also found the experience somewhat amusing. I think many of us who were his Hyde Park neighbors and Illinois state senate constituents feel the same way. We may have always believed he was extraordinary, but because he was familiar it is sometimes hard to believe that he is now, as president, the purveyor of such power and the object of such scorn.
I don't know Barack Obama personally, but I had a kind of political intimacy with him during the years I lived in Chicago. He is familiar in a way that makes it impossible for me to see the President through the same prisms of perfection or loathing that many employ when assessing him.
I distinctly remember the last time I had a personal interaction with him. We were both standing in line at the 55th Street Walgreens. He was wearing flip-flops, short basketball shorts, and an old t-shirt. He was buying ice for a family picnic. Hardly the icon of fashion cool he became within two years of that moment.
I remember the first time I heard him give a public speech. He was a last minute replacement for an ill Professor Cornel West during the University of Chicago's Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration. (Pause for irony) The address was adequate, but neither memorable nor particularly inspiring. Hardly the soaring rhetoric that he so regularly and effectively delivers now.
I remember the first time I saw him campaign. He was running against Bobby Rush for a congressional seat on the Southside of Chicago. He could barely fill a community center room with 25 people. Hardly the teeming crowds who now stand in lines for hours in inclement weather to hear him speak or who braved bitter cold to see him inaugurated.
________________________________________________________________________
Voices and Soul by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Contributor
On 12 October 1492, Columbus landed on an island he "christened", San
Salvador. The Indigenous peoples there had named it, Guanahani. There
has been some controversy over the years concerning which island was
Guanahani; the original log book has been lost for centuries, and the
edited abstract made by Bartolomé de las Casas has been in grave
disrepair. West Indies poet Kamau Brathwaite explores historical links
and events that have contributed to the development of the black
population in the Caribbean. He envisions Guanahani on the day before
12 October, on the long island now called Eleuthera; a word derived
from the feminine of the Greek, "eleutheros"; meaning, "free".
Guanahani, 11
like the beginnings - o odales o adagios - of islands
from under the clouds where I write the first poem
its brown warmth now that we recognize them
even from this thunder's distance
still w/out sound. so much hope
now around the heart of lightning that I begin to weep
w/such happiness of familiar landscape
such genius of colour. shape of bay. headland
the dark moors of the mountain
ranges. a door opening in the sky
right down into these new blues & sleeping yellows
greens - like a mother's
embrace like a lover's
enclosure. like schools
of fish migrating towards homeland. into the bright
light of expectation. birth
of these long roads along the edge of Eleuthera,
now sinking into its memory behind us
Kamau Brathwaite
--
"A Poet is at the same time a force for Solidarity and for Solitude."
-- Pablo Neruda
====================================================================
The front porch is now open. Grab a comfortable chair, a rocker or squeeze onto the glider.
If you are new to the Black Kos Community, and are posting here for the first time, introduce yourself, and welcome!
