Lonely Woman (Poem by Kalamu ya Salaam) / Let’s Have Some Fun & the past predicts the future / What Renaissance?
By Devin Burghart, Leonard Zeskind, and Charles Tanner Jr.
Why isn’t Washington paying what it owes to black farmers?
I had to fwd this one.
I had nothing better to add . . .
There is only ONE picture.
every day for the rest of their lives.
President’s hair feels just like his. Obama obliges.
R. Dwayne Betts. A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (2009): At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Bettsa good student from a lower-middle-class familycarjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a certifiable offense, meaning that Dwayne would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, weighing only 126 poundsnot enough to fill out a medium T-shirthe served his eight-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state.
A Question of Freedom: is a coming-of-age story, with the unique twist that it takes place in prison. Utterly aloneand with the growing realization that he really is not going home any time soonDwayne confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Above all, A Question of Freedom: is about a quest for identityone that guarantees Dwaynes survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.
This is about the vulnerability of black men in America.
By Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I gave him the two IDs and I demanded to know his name and his badge number. Are you not responding to me because youre a white police officer and Im a black man?
It looked like a police convention, there were so many policemen outside. I stepped out on my porch and said, I want to know your colleagues name and his badge number. . . .
It was the fault of the policeman who couldnt understand a black man standing up for his rights right in his space. And thats what I did. And I would do the same thing exactly again. . . .
I knew that I was in danger but I knew, too, that as soon as my friends could get to jail, starting with Professor Charles Ogletree, who is my friend and lawyer, that eventually I would be OK.
But what it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable all people of color are and all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policeman. And this man clearly was a rogue policeman.
They took me to the Cambridge Police station and booked me, fingerprints, mug shot, which has now been all over the universe.
The Face of Emmett Till (Updated) by Big TexSo I lived in southern Mississippi. Emmett Till, this 14-year old black boy, who’d gone to Tallahatchie County, Money, Mississippi in the Delta, to visit his great uncle for summer holiday, from Chicago, was lynched. And as a child of 12, I can not remember having felt more vulnerable, more frightened, morebut at the same time more angry.
US Aircraft and Elite Navy SEALs Defeat Three Somalis in a LifeboatWhat a weekend for American foreign policy! The United States Navy, backed up by warships from 20 other nations, knocked off three Somali guys crouching with rifles in a lifeboat tied by a rope to a U.S. destroyer. To hear the U.S. corporate media tell it, the Americans had won a huge victory over the forces of evil. The sole surviving Somali was in custodya 16-year-old who essentially gave himself up, earlier, after being hurt in a scuffle with the American cargo ship captain who is now celebrated as a hero of the seven seas and defender of United States national honor.
Barack Obama: The Death of White Supremacy?
Clinton or Obama: Whos Best on Darfur?
Henry Blasius Masuko Chipembere — Chipembere: The Missing Years.
A 19th-century Don ImusIn 1895 John W. Jacks, president of the Missouri Press Association, wrote an open letter denigrating Black women, claiming that they were “wholly devoid of morality and that they were prostitutes, thieves and liars.” He was referring to ALL of them. The letter was sent to Florence Balgarnie of the British Anti-Lynching Committee in an attempt to discredit Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching campaign in the South. Ida B. Wells had written her book on the number of lynchings in the South and had visited Britain and traveled throughout that country telling the world about lynching in America. The British population was outraged as the British Press gave a lot of copy to Ida B creating great embarrassment in the US. Sooooooooooo, more than 100 years ago, a white mannote that he was with a PRESS associationwas calling black women prostitutes or in the truncated version “hos” and this was more than 80 years before black male rappers used the term. Don”t get me wrong, I hate the term but let’s just set the record straight. Remember, John Henri Clarke said: History is the clock by which we tell our cultural and political time of day. Let us not be lazy with our history, it can come in handy.
Rudy I want to know….
“Anarcha’s Story” exposes the Nazi-like experimentation on African-American female Christian slaves by Dr. James Marion Sims (1813-1883) of South Carolina, the so-called “Father & Founder of of Modern Gynecology. His purported medical advances are still hailed despite his utter butchery and murder of the oppressed (black) and poor (Irish) women of America. Here is a measured and passionate account.
Diary of Zena el-Khalil: Lebanese Artist Living in Beirut Petitiononline / Army Chief Brig. Gen. Dan Halutz warned that “nothing is safe” in Lebanon.
Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye — Will Obasanjo Explode Yar’Adua’s Anti-Graft Balloon? Who Cares If Kenya Bleeds To Death?
When Music is a Poet’s Tool: Tame turmoil. Transform all the bile-flavored anger and anxiety into words. Vent. Review the outburst to discover the pattern the turmoil never told you it had. Reshape the pattern into stanzas or lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narratives. Polish. Repolish. Publish. There are times when poems must respond to natural disasters and subsequent pandemics to the reflux acid of war, racism, genocide. At those times, it is only normal for poets to let the turmoil roll. If you want a poem rather than the droppings of a vatic pigeon, you must dance in a music that takes you to the other side of natural disaster and national tragedy.
By Rodney D. Foxworth, Jr.
Send contributions to: ChickenBones: A Journal / 13219 Kientz Road / Jarratt, VA 23867 — I became aware of Rudy Lewis labor of love a few short months ago during a visit to Kalamu ya Salaams e-drum listserv. As soon as I saw the title of the journal I knew it was about Black folks, and the power of the written word. A quick click took me into a journal thats long on creativity, highlighting well-known, little known, and a little known writers, and commitment to the empowerment of Black folks. I contacted Rudy to ask if hed consider publishing some of my work. His response was immediate, and a couple of days after Id forwarded some poems to himthey were part of ChickenBones. What I didnt know was that this journal has been surviving for the last five years with very little outside financial support. . . If we want journals like this to thrive we need to support them with more than our website hits, praise, and submissions for publication consideration.
The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. From The Center For Nonviolent Social Change, Inc.
Is Gay Marriage Anti Black???
By Waldron H. Giles, Ph.D.
Were whites really more likely than blacks to die in Katrina?
A Review by Joyce and Leon Nower Arthur J. Graham. Subliminal Racism, Essays.
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Compiled by Workers of the Writers Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia. Illustrated. American Guide Series. Sponsored by The Sussex County School Board.
Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons (born circa 1853  March 7, 1942) was an American labor organizer and radical socialist. She is remembered as a powerful orator. Lucy (or Lucia) Eldine Gonzalez was born around 1853 in Texas, likely as a slave, to parents of Native American, Black American and Mexican ancestry. In 1871 she married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier, and both were forced to flee from Texas north to Chicago by intolerant reactions to their interracial marriage.
An Annual Clingan Christmas Letter, 2005 from Rev. Ralph G. Clingan, Ph.D.