Kind of Blue
Kind of Blue's JournalRECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
ABOUT THE FILMHenry Louis Gates Jr. presents a vital new four-hour documentary series on Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The series explores the transformative years following the American Civil War, when the nation struggled to rebuild itself in the face of profound loss, massive destruction, and revolutionary social change. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy, with millions of former slaves and free black people seeking out their rightful place as equal citizens under the law. Though tragically short-lived, this bold democratic experiment was, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, a ‘brief moment in the sun’ for African Americans, when they could advance, and achieve, education, exercise their right to vote, and run for and win public office.
https://www.pbs.org/weta/reconstruction/?utm_source=TheRoot&utm_medium=PaidCustom&utm_campaign=reconstruction_2019
Belgium Apologizes for Kidnapping Children From African Colonies
The apology is the first time that Belgium has recognized any responsibility for what historians say was the immense harm the country inflicted on the Central African nations, which it colonized for eight decades. Prime Minister Charles Michel offered the apology on Thursday afternoon in front of a plenary session of Parliament, which was attended by dozens of people of mixed race in the visitors gallery.
Over the past year, Belgium has taken a number of steps to reassess its colonial past. The apologies also come at a time when politicians across Europe are under pressure from a growing African diaspora and a younger generation that wishes to shed a new light on colonial history in order to tackle latent racism and discrimination in European society.
Some experts on colonial history noted that Belgium’s apology came late — nearly 60 years after the three countries gained independence.
Many white Belgian men, nevertheless, married black Congolese women according to local customs, producing children sometimes called métis. But in the eyes of Belgium, these children undermined official segregation policies and blemished the white race’s prestige, official documents from that time show.
Visitors at Mr. Michel’s speech to Parliament in Brussels. Dozens of mixed-race people were among those in attendance.
Fearing a repeat of the Red River Rebellion in Canada in 1869-1870, when métis people revolted and overthrew the local government, the Belgian authorities ordered métis children in Congo to be separated from their families, and from the black population as a whole.
“Children born out of parents of mixed color during colonial times were always considered as a threat to the colonial enterprise, to profits and to the prestige and the domination of the white race,” said Assumani Budagwa, 65, a Belgian engineer and amateur historian who was born in colonial Congo and whose family experienced the separation of mixed-race children.
Mr. Budagwa was a co-author of a Parliamentary resolution that was unanimously adopted last year urging the government to apologize and recognizing Belgium’s misdeeds regarding the mixed-race children with the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/world/europe/belgium-kidnapping-congo-rwanda-burundi.html
White at the Museum
In a segment titled “White at the Museum” aired yesterday (April 3) on Samantha Bee’s satirical program on TBS, Full Frontal, the Lucas Brothers respond in a light-hearted way to white nationalists’s use of Greek and Roman statues in their propaganda as a proof of the superiority of white culture. But if they end up watching this episode, alt-righters would be disappointed to learn that the whiteness of their beloved statues is but a myth. https://hyperallergic.com/493470/a-satirical-take-on-the-whiteness-of-classical-sculpture/Features Sarah Bond, Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Iowa, and Assistant Professor Chenjerai Kumanyika from Rutgers University, researcher, journalist, an artist, who joined in on the fun of destructing the myth of whiteness in antiquity.
She Survived a Slave Ship, the Civil War and the Depression. Her Name Was Redoshi.
Source: The New York Times
It has long been believed that a man named Cudjo Lewis was the last living survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the United States. Now a researcher at Newcastle University in Britain says she has discovered testimony from someone who may have lived even longer — a woman named Redoshi.
The new findings, published last week in the journal Slavery & Abolition, are likely to be subject to scholarly debate, because there are few records documenting the lives of the last Africans to be captured and brought to the United States on slave ships.
Regardless of Redoshi’s precise historical status, the researcher, Hannah Durkin, has pieced together accounts from different sources and census records to carve out the remarkable life of a woman who survived the treacherous Middle Passage voyage at age 12, was sold as a child bride, and lived through the Civil War and the Great Depression. According to Dr. Durkin, Redoshi died in 1937; Lewis died in 1935.
“It was thought that this woman was lost to history,” Dr. Durkin, a lecturer at Newcastle University, said in an interview.
But Redoshi was not lost. She is believed to have been taken from a West African village before being brought to the United States in 1860 on the Clotilda, the last recorded slave ship to arrive in the country after more than 240 years of slavery.
The rest of her life provides a stark example of the physical and psychological trauma left on those who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade, scars that continue to inflame tensions in the United States today.
Dr. Durkin wove together bits and pieces of Redoshi’s life that were found in Hurston’s unpublished writings and an interview she gave to The Montgomery Advertiser as well as in “Bridge Across Jordan,” a memoir by the civil rights leader Amelia Boynton Robinson. Redoshi was also filmed for an instructional film released in 1938 by the Department of Agriculture called “The Negro Farmer: Extension Work for Better Farming and Better Living,” possibly making her the only female Clotilda survivor who appeared on film.
The film, which was meant to showcase issues facing formerly enslaved people as they tried to become farmers, shows Redoshi as an old woman on the porch of her small home, made out of wooden planks on a plantation in Alabama. As a narrator speaks, she can be seen talking to someone as she sits in a chair, wrapped by a quilt. Her white hair looks fuzzy, marked by stray braids poking out of it, and her skin is dark and thick but still vibrant. She has a gaptoothed smile, and cheekbones rising up to her eyes.
Here she is and she is of my clan and here I am weeping to see myself in at least in another 25 years.
Thank you, Mother, for surviving.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6022124700001/?playlist_id=2114913880001#sp=show-clips
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/transatlantic-slave-trade-last-survivor.html
Soulful Strut or Am I The Same Girl
Love every version of this song.
Knew it as a kid as Soulful Strut but it wasn't until the '90s with brilliant Swing out Sister Corinne Drewery that I realized there were lyrics first sung by Barbara Acklin in '69, a hit for sure. But the instrumental Soulful Strut of '68 by Young-Holt Unlimited I think may have drowned out Ms. Acklin's song.
Genius of Love
Stepping in a rhythm to a Kurtis Blow
Who needs to think when your feet just go?
With a hippie-the-hip and a hippie-the-hop
Who needs to think when your feet just go
"Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon"
Who needs to think when your feet just go
"Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon"
James Brown, James Brown
James Brown, James Brown
There Really are Too Many. But it's soft-spoken Hamilton Bohannon
because I'm afraid he'll be forgotten. Let's Start 2 Dance, and the following is just a short version of what I danced to, is the longest playing dance song of all time as of 2014. James Brown told Bohannon, "The greatness is that there are only two with rhythms that nobody has that our rhythms are not alike but different, and strong like nobody else." If we veer into House music in this OP, Bohannon is where House starts - pure dance trance.
As of 2017, seems like kids haven't forgotten Bohannon. Love it
Stacey Abrams: 'I Don't Know Whether This Is the Moment for Me'
I resisted asking Abrams that question, but she managed to answer it anyway. “I am thinking about it,” she voluntarily admitted, as she has before. When asked about being Joe Biden’s running mate, however, her answer was new.
“We talked about the presidency and what it means,” Abrams said of her recent lunch with Biden. “We talked about whether I was thinking about running. We talked about whether he was thinking about running. But we did not have that conversation. And everything else is pure speculation, made up by somebody else.”
I can understand why someone who had just endured what Abrams had wouldn’t want to immediately subject herself to a 2020 campaign. For that matter, why would she want to be president?
“The reason I want to be part of the conversation about running for president is that too many people dismiss the idea,” she said. “This is not to cast aspersions on anyone else, but with an identical set of skills and identical set of experiences, to be discounted because I don’t look the way we think you need to look, or I’m not from a space where we think I should be from, and that is the only determinant that differs between whether I am lifted up as a candidate or not. That’s wrong.
“Now, whether I run this time or run in the future,” Abrams continued, “I believe we need leaders who actually want to lead everyone. I believe we have to have leaders who care about foreign policy and domestic policy, but who care about the least of these, who care about poverty, who understand that climate change is real, that my body is mine, that gun safety does not diminish the Second Amendment, and that has to be someone willing to have that conversation in Montana and in Mississippi and in Michigan as well as on Manhattan Beach. You’ve got to be willing to have that conversation everywhere.
“And so I don’t know whether this is the moment for me, and that’s what I’m going to think about. But I think I am more than capable of leading a country that is contained of so many good people who want what’s right. I’m a good leader, I’m a good executive, I’ve been outside the U.S. a few times, and I’ve done a little bit of foreign policy. But most importantly, I’m smart enough to be in charge of this country.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/stacey-abrams-2020-813613/
Fellow Blerds: Wakandacon 2019! An Afrofuturistic Celebration of Art. Community. Technology.
Self-Expression.It's an inclusive place where you can be a nerd about anything – pop culture, gaming, tech, womanhood, politics, or your own beautiful Blackness. Wakandacon is a fan-driven convention made to celebrate Black nerds and all of their creativity and passions.
In creating Wakandacon we imagined a place free and unshackled from the ravages of racism; of exploitation; of discrimination; of emotional, physical, and sexual violence. In a place where our histories are no longer narrowly delineated, we are no longer weighed down by what has been done to us. In a place where we are no longer defined by the expectations of others, we are released from preordained behaviors and predetermined futures.
While our event is targeted towards establishing a positive and supportive space for black people, Wakandacon is inclusive and all are welcome to come celebrate together. Visit the site https://wakandaconforever.com/about/our-philosophy
vimeo.com/290897058
And just for fun, a couple of favorite Black Panther Challenges of last year.
Can't help myself, one more. And, of course, the title Africans Around the World is about people of the Diaspora in love with the representation in the Black Panther movie.
Good Question at Quora: Why hasn't Trump gone after Rachel Maddow like he did Mika Brzezinski?
With many good and funny answers.
https://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-Trump-gone-after-Rachel-Maddow-like-he-did-Mika-Brzezinski
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Gender: FemaleHometown: California
Member since: Fri Aug 29, 2008, 10:47 AM
Number of posts: 8,709
