Open Letter to Chris Brown
Open Letter to Chris Brown
March 29, 2011
March 28, 2011
‘Aristide returns to Haiti’
Scroll down for Al Jazeera video: ‘Aristide returns to Haiti’
by Ezili Dantò
(March 18, 2011) – Aristide returned to Haiti today. I’ve not seen such genuine happiness on the faces of Haiti’s poor in over seven years.
Welcome, President Jean Bertrand Aristide and family. Today is a good day for the poorest of the poor in the Western Hemisphere. Their struggle and unimaginable sacrifices and sufferings bore fruit and it makes them smile. We thank the universal good for this moment. Blessed be the endless Haiti revolution against the organized tyranny of the “civilized” and “schooled” peoples.
Today, HLLN remembers the blessed Haiti revolution, Janjak Desalin and the indigenous Haiti army of today and yesterday.
On this day of the return, HLLN remembers the sacrifice of the warriors of Site Soley, Bel Air, Solino, Martissant who took up arms in self-defense against the occupation and coup d’etat. We remember the most hunted Black man in the Western Hemisphere, who, alone, fought the most powerful armies on earth for two long years before he was assassinated by U.N. bullets. We remember the lynching and crucifixion of Dred Wilmè.
Haiti’s former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, his wife, Mildred, behind him, mirrors the crowd’s jubilation on his return home March 18 from seven years in forced exile. The thousands who greeted him ran beside his car to his home, where thousands more were waiting to welcome him. – Photo: Alexandre Meneghini, AP
“On July 6, 2005, … Dred Wilmè in his family were assassinated in cold blood by 1,440 heavily armed U.N./U.S. troops. With their tanks, helicopters and advanced weapons, 440 U.N./U.S. soldiers entered Site Soley in the dead of night – at 3 a.m. – while the community was asleep. One thousand more U.N./U.S. soldiers surrounded Site Soley to make sure no one could leave. Bombs where reported unleashed and dropped on the unarmed civilian community.
“According to The Site Soley Massacre Declassification Project, the U.N. fired over 22,000 rounds of ammunition into this thin-shacked, cardboard-house, poverty-stricken Black community of about 450,000 Haitians, most having been forced off their safer rural lands by U.S./USAID/WB/IMF policies in the ‘80s and ‘90s.”
All human beings have the right to life and to self-defense, including the poor in Haiti.
Today, we remember and pay honor and respect to our fallen and faceless warriors – the beleaguered poor in Site Soley, Solino, Martissant, Bel-Air, Gran Ravine et al. – ravaged by exclusion and color-coded NGO charitable distribution and allotments that slays human dignity, brings perpetual dependency. We recall the 20,000 slaughtered by the imposed Bush Boca Raton regime from 2004 to 2006, slaughtered with the complicity of U.N./U.S. firepower.
We pay tribute to Father Gerard Jean Juste, Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and all those who gave their lives for this day of return of the people’s voice. We pay tribute to the tens of thousands of unknown Haitians, in Haiti and in the Diaspora, who never wavered.
We lift up Hazel and Randall Robinson for staying true throughout this long road and always, always supporting justice for the people of Haiti against all the odds. We lift up Minister Louis Farrakhan and Danny Glover who stood with the poor majority in Haiti and advocated for the return of Aristide in Haiti when most of the U.S. Black intelligentsia turned away.
We thank all those folks, from all the races and religions, who signed letters and advocated for this return. We pay tribute to all the small Haiti radio programs abroad and in Haiti who stood for justice, Mary at SF Bay View for standing firm and resolute. We remember the unknown fanm vanyans, Haitian women like Alina Sixto who sacrificed so much for so long without accolades and recognition and who never wavered.
We share this day by lifting up the work and life of our beloved John Maxwell. We pay tribute to the Africans – in Jamaica, in South Africa – who stood in solidarity with the people of Haiti despite threats of repercussions from powerful international forces, those who this week ignored the frantic calls from Barack Obama and the U.N.’s Ban Ki-moon to again delay and destroy the will of the people of Haiti. Thank you.
This historic return belongs to the poor suffering warriors of Haiti and blesses the spirits of those who perished too soon. Indeed it belongs to Haitian men like Father Gerard Jean Juste, to all the women community leaders who were singled out and massacred at the USAID/IOM “Summer for Peace” soccer gathering on Aug. 20 and Aug. 21, 2005, where Haitian youths were lured to their slaughter while attending a soccer game sponsored by USAID. Haiti’s young were brutally chopped up by U.N./U.S.-sanctioned coup d’etat police squads, working with their Lame Ti Manchet thugs and mercenaries.
This return belongs to Esterne Bruner, assassinated Sept. 21, 2006, by members of the coup d’etat enforcers, Lame Ti Manchèt.
Before his death, the courageous Esterne Bruner provided Ezili’s HLLN with the names of the members who committed the Gran Ravine/USAID-soccer-for-peace massacres, the names of the death squad of Lame Ti Manchet. None of these pro-coup d’etat enforcers have been brought to justice in U.N.-occupied Haiti because they helped demobilize the pro-democracy Lavalas movement.
This return that eases the insult of the bicentennial coup d’etat belongs to the hundreds of Haitians, sealed in containers and dumped off the coast of Cap Haitian to drown, as U.S.-supported thugs, still roaming Haiti free behind U.N. protection today, took over the North. It belongs to those forced onto mysterious U.S. ships off the shores of Haiti, held and tortured in secrecy, some for two years, because they voted Lavalas or held positions in the popular government of President Aristide.
It belongs to Haitian men like Emmanuel Dred Wilmè who never left his people, never even left his neighborhood. He never attacked anyone; he simply defended his community from attack from the coup d’etat overseers, from U.N. and U.S. guns and sycophants who hired thugs like Labanye to kill innocent civilians simply because they voted for Jean Bertrand Aristide and advocated for their country’s own domestic interests as opposed to the interests of the internationals, their Haiti billionaire oligarchy and poverty pimping USAID-NGO subcontractors.
There will always be more Dred Wilmés, more Father Jean Justes, more Lovinsky Pierre Antoines, more Esterne Bruners in Haiti as long as there is misery and exclusion imposed on Haiti by the powerful nations.
Most of all today, we say honor and respect to the Ezili Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network members, of all the races and nationalities, a 10,000-strong network against the profit-over-people folks, reaching 3 million per post and on our blogs, who stood with the voiceless and disenfranchised in Haiti for these last seven years against all the odds, against all the naysayers.
This historic moment belongs to all of you who stood with the indigenous Haitians at HLLN who work to make a space for Haiti’s authentic voices without officialdom’s approval. It’s a harsh journey.
The return could have been a six-hour trip to Brazil and then just a few hours to Haiti. But it took 18 hours because the “benevolent internationals” interested in our “democracy and stability” wouldn’t allow former President Aristide, the symbol of the poor’s empowerment in Black Haiti, to travel through their territories.
It took 18 hours for Aristide to reach Haiti. Going from South Africa to Northern Africa in Senegal took 10 hours, while from Senegal to Haiti took another eight hours. I hear England wouldn’t allow a landing either.
That long, long road is symbolic of the Haitian struggle. That long road Ezili’s HLLN has shared with you and with your support and forbearance. Unlike colonial celebritism with Sean Penn, no one will give us accolades for a mere six months journey in Haiti. Ours is a centuries-long journey. We overstand. The struggle continues.
A new era begins for us here at HLLN. We ask you help us define it. For we know the empire will strike back. We expect it and thus avoid the surprise blow. As usual, we shall take the road less traveled towards healing Haiti’s poor majority with dignity, human rights, self-sufficiency, justice and inclusion. We won’t sell out. Haiti and indigenous Haitians want justice not charity, not Clinton/Farmer U.N./U.S. paternalism. It’s a desperately humiliating, bumpy, wholly disemboweling, wholly healing and fulfilling ride. Against all odds, Ginen poze. Kenbe la – hold on. (See “Don’t be distracted by Aristide in Haiti” by Ezili Dantò and “Avatar Haiti.”)
Pierre Labossiere, Alina Sixto, Lavarice Gaudin, Jafrikayiti, Guy Antoine, Harry Fouche, Fritz Pean, Yves Point Du Jour, Jean Ristil Jean Baptise and too many others to name, congratulations on this day. Only we know what we’ve withstood in helping to overcome not one but two Bush coup d’etats on the poor majority in Haiti.
Sometimes the fierce guilt of surviving, the endless stretch ahead, the soul and psychic wounds wrought on by the shame and humiliation of powerlessness and lack of material resources to do more are too heavy a load. It’s too ugly and desperate to articulate the bullying and blows metered out by the most educated, most wealthy and most powerful on the most defenseless and non-violent people on earth.
Their collective suffering and deaths shall not be in vain. Justice will prevail, beauty will win, eventually – if not in our lifetime, then in the next. We are the Haitians, the indigenous Haitians. From generation to generation, from the womb to the tomb, our lives are about struggle.
Today, for a moment, we’ll smile* because in this shining and eternal moment that must see us through what will come at us next, we anti-Duvalierist Haitians managed to survive whole with dignity and to witness that against all odds, we beat back the elite’s rabid rage.
Ayibobo! The Haitian resistance against the Western bicentennial re-colonization of Haiti lives on.
COINTELPROs then and now
COINTELPROs then and now
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Written for the People’s Hearing on Racism and Police, Oakland, California, Feb. 19 and 20, 2011
At the age of 15, Mumia was already a journalist for the Black Panther newspaper. This photo was taken in 1970. – Photo: Philadelphia Inquirer
Ona Move! Long Live John Africa! All Power to the People!
I greet you all as we look at what’s happening in the world – and try to figure out why, and how? When most people hear the acronym COINTELPRO (FBI code-speak for its COunter INTELligence PROgram), they think of the 1960s and perhaps the Black Panther Party, the Weathermen or the antiwar movement.
In fact, this government program didn’t begin in the ‘60s, nor did it end in the ‘70s – despite what newspaper accounts report, or what government PR people claim.
I know this because I did the research, read government reports, read actual files – many uncovered by the break-in of FBI field offices in Media, Penn., in the early ‘70s – and works by FBI defectors, who told the inside story.
"Teachers Ba-ad!"
"Teachers Ba-ad!"
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Have you noticed that politicians flit from boogey-man to boogey-man, a process of demonization that is usually little more than misdirection from more pressing problems?
According to a number of new governors across the country, the newest boogey-men (and I guess boogey-women) are teachers, who are portrayed as greedy, selfish, and overpaid.
February 23, 2011
a Revolution waiting to happen
Deep inside every one of us is a Revolution waiting to happen
Remarks delivered at the Islamic Center of York in Toronto, Canada, on Feb. 12, 2011
by Cynthia McKinney
Cynthia McKinney speaks passionately at the Black Dot in Oakland during her Triumph Tour in August 2009 upon her return from breaking the siege in Gaza. – Photo: Kamau Amen Ra
One of our most famous Civil Rights Movement songs in the United States is by Gil Scott Heron. He sings, “You will not be able to stay home, Brother; You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out; Because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day; the Revolution will put you in the driver’s seat; the Revolution will not be televised; will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The Revolution will be no rerun, Brothers; the revolution will be live.”
Set-Up for the Sell-Out
The Set-Up for the Sell-Out
Written by [col. writ. 2/9/11] (c) '11 Mumia Abu-Jamal
These are one of those times that I hope I'm wrong - but I don't think I am.
The continuing crisis in Egypt seems to be reaching a point ripe for massive military and police repression -- not only to clear Tahrir Square in central Cairo, but to punish a people who have had the impertinence to call for the removal of their brutal, venal rulers.
I've had that feeling since the U.S., Egypt's main (money bags) backer, sent split signals in statements both public and private, that suggests that they actually like the status quo (which preserved 'stability'), but perhaps with a little cosmetic surgery.
Buju found guilty
Buju found guilty - Entertainers react to verdict
By Sadeke Brooks,
His music filled the air, shock surfaced on faces and his name was a constant topic on everybody's lips yesterday, as news came that reggae artiste Buju Banton had been found guilty of three cocaine related charges.
The artiste, real name Mark Myrie, received the verdict from the 12-member jury yesterday in the Sam M Gibbons building in Tampa, which houses the United States Middle District Court, Florida Division.
A Movie And A Movement
MOOZ-lum: A Movie And A Movement
There are films that we’ll see this weekend just for sheer entertainment value, but Qasim Basir’s “MOOZ-lum,” is more than a film it’s a movement. On the surface it’s a dramatic well-written film about Tariq, a young man struggling with defining religion for himself. He is Muslim and the lessons he’s learned at the hands of his religious teachers, including his father, bring him nothing but pain.
June 23, 2010
Mumia conversation with Cornel West
Mumia on the death penalty – and in conversation with Cornel West
From trees to needles: an address to the ‘Lynching Then, Lynching Now, The Roots of Racism and the Death Penalty in America’ national tour
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Friends, brothers, sisters: Ona Move!
The anti-death penalty movement is an offshoot of the global human rights movement as expressed by private associations and later by a variety of governments.
It is noteworthy, then, for us to cite the state abolition of the death penalty in Kenya in 2009.
We should also note the fact that the rate of juries meting out death sentences has fallen to its lowest in 30 years.
And finally, several months ago, the group that was perhaps most instrumental in fashioning the present death penalty, the American Law Institute, announced it would no longer participate in formulating laws governing the death penalty. The ALI, a distinguished group of 4,000 judges, law professors and lawyers, were the people who initially proposed the aggravating and mitigating circumstances that the U.S. Supreme Court adopted in 1976 when it reinstated the death penalty.
And yet, despite this, the death penalty is alive and well in America. Why?
It makes no economic sense, but politicians are wedded to it.
That’s because at its core, the death penalty derives from, and thus replaces, lynch law. Is it mere coincidence that the states which are most active in capital punishment are Southern ones?
April 29, 2010
My brother, Gang Starr’s Guru
My brother, Gang Starr’s Guru
Written by Harry J. Elam Jr.
Harry Elam
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Boston-born Keith Elam, who rose to fame as Guru, founder of the rap group Gang Starr and a person who sought to merge rap and jazz,died earlier this week. His brother, Harry, a distinguished professor of drama at Stanford, has written this remembrance).
“Positivity, that’s how I’m livin..’” So goes the lyric from my brother’s early hip-hop song, “Positivity.” My brother Keith Elam, the hip-hop artist known as GURU—Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal—died this week at the too-young age of 48 because of complications from cancer. ‘Positivity’ was what he sought to bring to the music and to his life, and for me that will be a large part of his legacy.
In February of this year, my brother went into a coma, and I traveled across the country from my home in California to see him. At his bedside, I stood and stared at his overly frail frame, his head that he had kept clean-shaven for the last 20 years uncommonly covered with hair, his body connected to a sea of tubes and wires. I listened to the whirl of machines around us and took his hand. As I did, my mind flashed back to now-distant times, so many memories. And I saw us as teenagers at the beach on Cape Cod playing in the water together. And I saw us as boys, driving to school. My brother was five years younger than me, so we attended the same school only for one year — my senior year, his seventh-grade year — at Noble and Greenough School, and I would often drive us both to school. Invariably, I made us late, yet my brother, never as stressed as me, was always impressively calm. At school he endured the jests and teasing from the other boys about being my “little brother.” I was president of the school and had charted a certain path at Nobles. But my brother found his own creative route at school, as he would throughout his life. His journey was never easy, never direct, but inventive. Through it all he remained fiercely determined with a clear and strong sense of self.
Over the years I had proudly watched my brother perform in a wide variety of contexts. While at Nobles, we had a black theatre troupe known as “the Family.” In 1973, we put on a play entitled ”A Medal for Willie,” by William Branch, and because he was only in the seventh grade, Keith played only a small role, but even then you could see his flair for performance, his comfort on the stage. At home, our older sister Patricia would teach him the latest dances, and he would execute them with verve as I watched from the sidelines, impressed with his moves, and not without a few twinges of jealousy since I’ve always had two left feet. As a teenager he raced as a speed skater. I do not remember how he became involved in the sport; I only remember traveling with my family to watch his meets in the suburbs of Boston. I do not remember if he won or lost, I do know that he always competed with great ferocity and commitment.
When he announced to me that he was dropping out of graduate school at the Fashion Institute of Technology to pursue a career in rap, I thought he was making a grave mistake and warned him against it. But as always he was determined, and in the end he would succeed beyond perhaps what even he had imagined. Early on in his rap journey, he visited me in Washington., D.C., over a Thanksgiving weekend. I was teaching at the University of Maryland then, and we went to what was perhaps the most dreadful party we had ever attended. As we hastened out the door, I apologized for bringing him to this party. My brother replied “let’s write a rap song about it,” and we did. The lyrics made us laugh as we collaborated on the rhyme scheme and rode off into the D.C. night. It is one of my fondest memories, this spontaneous brotherly moment of collaboration and play.
Keith’s big break came with Spike Lee’s film ”Mo’ Better Blues,” with his song “A Jazz Thing” underscoring the credits. I watched that film over and over again just to hear my brother at its end. Soon he was on to creating his first Jazzmatazz album with others to follow, and he became credited for creating a fusion between jazz and hip hop. To be sure, that fusion owes something to our grandfather Edward Clark and Keith’s godfather, George Johnson, who introduced Keith to jazz by playing their favorite albums for him. He credits them both on his first Jazzmatazz. That first Jazzmatazz album featured musical heroes of my youth, Roy Ayers, and Donald Byrd, and here was my brother featuring them on his album. And with this success, came tours. I have seen him perform all over the world, and each time he would give a shout out from the stage to his brother and my wife, Michele. And I was so proud. It sometimes struck me with awe that all these people were there to see my brother. I watched him deal out magic; he was in his element feeling the crowd, and them responding to his groove. This was my baby brother, the kid with whom I once shared a room. The kid whose asthma would cause him to hack and cough and wheeze at night keeping me up. But when I would complain, my parents would send me out of the room. The message was clear: Love your siblings, whatever their frailties. Shorter than me and slighter of build, my brother suffered from asthma and allergies his whole life, but he was always a survivor.
Back in 1993, when he played at Stanford University, I was in perhaps my third year as a professor there. As I walked into the auditorium that night, the assembled audience of students looked at me with a new awareness, “that’s the Guru’s brother,” not that’s Professor Elam, but the Guru’s brother.
And I was, and am, the Guru’s brother. I admired and loved him deeply, my little brother. And I was and am so proud of him, and how he made his dreams reality . And with the outpouring of love that has crowded my e-mail with his passing, I know that he touched so many with his music. My brother cared deeply about family. He raps of my parents in more than one song. They are featured on his video “Ex girl to next girl.” It was one thing seeing my brother on MTV; it was another seeing my parents. His son K.C. was the joy of his was the joy of his life.
The doctors told me back in February that there was not much chance of my brother recovering from the coma. But my brother has always been a fighter, always been one to overcome surprising adversities, so this seemed just one more. We prayed that he would again prevail. But it was not to be. Still his drive, his spirit, his energy, his positivity will live on, and so will his music. “that’s how I’m livin…”
Harry J. Elam Jr. is the chairman of the drama department at Stanford University and the author of several books, including “The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson.”
_________
Source:
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/04/23/my_brother_gang_starrs_guru/?page=1
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
January 20, 2010
A Supreme Court blow to Mumia Abu-Jamal
A Supreme Court blow to anti-death penalty icon Mumia Abu-Jamal
The Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed an appeals court ruling that would have given Mumia Abu-Jamal a chance to avoid the dealth penalty. Some opponents of capital punishment have championed Abu-Jamal's case.
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By Warren Richey Staff writer
posted January 19, 2010 at 2:05 pm EST
Washington
Continue reading "A Supreme Court blow to Mumia Abu-Jamal" »
October 16, 2009
Fidel Castro reflects on Juan Almeida Bosque
Fidel Castro reflects on Juan Almeida Bosque, African leader in the Cuban revolution
Fidel Castro
Continue reading "Fidel Castro reflects on Juan Almeida Bosque" »
June 29, 2009
Martin Luther King Jr. Biopic Set For Bigscreen
Martin Luther King Jr. Biopic Set For Bigscreen
DreamWorks has acquired the life rights to Martin Luther King Jr. and is bringing a biopic on the slain civil rights leader to the big screen, reports Variety. Steven Spielberg, Suzanne de Passe and Madison Jones will produce.
King's estate owns the copyright to all the speeches, books and famous works of the slained civil rights leader. This will be the first film to be authorized by the estate and gives the producers the right to utilize King's intellectual property -- including his famous "I Have a Dream" speech delivered during the 1963 March on Washington.
"We are all honored that the King Estate is giving us the opportunity to tell the story of these defining, historic events," Spielberg. "It is our hope that the creative power of film and the impact of Dr. King's life can combine to present a story of undeniable power that we can all be proud of."
"In trying to tackle such an ambitious project, the question we had to ask ourselves is, 'Why now?' " DreamWorks CEO and co-chairman Stacey Snider said. "The answer lies in MLK's own words: 'All progress is precarious.' With every step forward, new obstacles emerge and we must never forget that his life and his teachings continue to challenge us every day to stand up to hatred and inequality.
King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4th, 1968, at the age of 39.
SOURCE:
June 05, 2009
Lee "Scratch" Perry
Lee "Scratch" Perry
Lee "Scratch" Perry (born Rainford Hugh Perry, on March 20, 1936, in Kendal, Jamaica) is a reggae and dub artist, who has been highly influential in the development and acceptance of reggae and dub music in Jamaica and overseas. He employs numerous pseudonyms, such as Pipecock Jaxxon and The Upsetter.
April 02, 2009
Cynthia McKinney
Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is a former United States Representative and was the 2008 Green Party nominee for President of the United States. McKinney served as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993–2003 and 2005–2007, first representing Georgia's 11th Congressional District and then Georgia's 4th Congressional District. She is the first African-American woman to have represented Georgia in the House.
In the 1992 election, McKinney was elected in the newly re-created 11th District, and was re-elected in 1994. When her district was redrawn and renumbered due to the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Miller v. Johnson, McKinney was easily elected from the new 4th District in the 1996 election, and was re-elected twice without substantive opposition.
McKinney was defeated by Denise Majette in the 2002 Democratic primary, in part due to Republican crossover voting in Georgia's open primary election, which permits anyone from any party to vote in any party primary, and in part due to her "controversial profile, which included a suggestion that [George W.] Bush knew in advance of the September 11 attacks."
After her 2002 loss, McKinney traveled and gave speeches, and served as a Commissioner in The Citizens' Commission on 9-11. On October 26, 2004, she was among 100 prominent Americans and 40 family members of those who were killed on 9/11 who signed the 9/11 Truth Movement statement, calling for new investigations of what they perceived as unexplained aspects of the 9/11 events. McKinney was re-elected to the House in November 2004, following her successor's run for Senate. In Congress, she advocated unsealing records pertaining to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and an investigation into the murder of Tupac Shakur and continued to criticize the Bush Administration over the 9/11 attacks. She supported anti-war legislation and introduced articles of impeachment against President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
She was defeated by Hank Johnson in the 2006 Democratic primary, after finding herself in the national spotlight again over the March 29, 2006 Capitol Hill Police Incident, where she was involved in a confrontation with a Capitol Hill Police officer who did not recognize her as a member of congress. She left the Democratic Party in September 2007.
Members of the United States Green Party had attempted to recruit McKinney for their ticket in both 2000 and 2004. She eventually ran as the Green Party nominee in the 2008 presidential election.
March 02, 2009
Sister Souljah
Sister Souljah (born as Lisa Williamson in 1964, Bronx, New York) is an American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer. She is best known for Bill Clinton's criticism of her remarks about race in the United States during the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton's well-known repudiation of her comments led to what is now known in politics as a Sister Souljah moment.
Souljah was the executive director of Daddy's House Social Programs Inc., a not-for-profit corporation for urban youth, financed by Sean Combs and Bad Boy Entertainment.
She recounts in her autobiography that she was born into poverty and raised on welfare. At age 10 she moved with her family to the suburbs of Englewood, New Jersey, a wealthy suburb of New Jersey with tree-lined streets, which is also home to other famous Black artists such as George Benson, Eddie Murphy, and Regina Belle.
Souljah disliked what American students were being taught in school systems across America. She felt that the school systems purposely left out the African origins of civilization. Also, she criticized the absence of a comprehensive curriculum of African American history, which she felt all students, black and white, needed to learn and understand in order to be properly educated. She felt that she was being taught very little of her history, since the junior high school and high school left out Black history, art, and culture. The Englewood school district took an active role recruiting Black educators and administrators.
Souljah took a very active and special interest in learning everything she could about African history, which she felt was left out of the education curriculum in this country purposely: "I supplemented my education in the white American school system by reading African history, which was intentionally left out of the curriculum of American students." While at Dwight Morrow High School, a school that had a relatively even distribution of Black, Latino, and Jewish student enrollment and a majority Black administration during the time of her studies, from 1978 to 1981. She was a legislative intern in the House of Representatives. Souljah was also the recipient of several honors during her teenage years. She won the American Legion's Constitutional Oratory Contest, a scholarship to attend Cornell University's Advanced Summer Program.
Throughout college she traveled, visiting Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Finland, and Russia. Her academic accomplishments were reinforced with first-hand experiences as she worked in a medical center in Mtepa Tepa, a village located in Zimbabwe, and assisted refugee children from Mozambique. She also traveled to South Africa and Zambia. She graduated from Rutgers University with degrees in American History and African Studies. She became a well-known and outspoken voice on campus and active writer for the school newspaper. One of her noted campus initiatives was spearheading a campaign to bring Jesse Jackson to Rutgers to speak against the university's controversial investments in South Africa at the time, when divestiture from apartheid-era South Africa was a heated political issue. Sister Souljah was part of the Rutgers Coalition for Divestment which successfully organized the Rutgers University administration to divest 3.6 million dollars in their financial holding companies doing business in racist pre-Nelson Mandela, South Africa. Sister Souljah and students across the state of New Jersey also pressured and organized a successful campaign to get the state of New Jersey to divest more than 1 Billion dollars of it's financial holdings in apartheid South Africa.
In 1985, during her senior year at Rutgers University, she was offered a job by Reverend Benjamin Chavis of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. She spent the next three years developing, organizing, and financing programs such as African Survival Camp, a 6-week summer sleep-away camp in Enfield, North Carolina. She also became the organizer of the National African Youth-Student Alliance and outspoken voice against Racially Motivated Violence in cases such as Howard Beach, Yusuf Hawkins etc.
Sister Souljah became a controversial figure during the 1990s as a frequent guest on American televisions and radio talk shows. Sister Souljah became known for being unrelenting in promoting and protecting the interest of African People in America, the Caribbean and in the diaspora. Since she was a young intelligent, popular, and stylish, her frank talk on race issues became popular across the nation.
Sister Souljah is married to a man named Mike Rich and has one child named Michael Jr.
She appeared on several tracks as a featured guest with the hip-hop group Public Enemy, and she became a full member of the group when Professor Griff left the group after allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks. In 1992, she released her only album, 360 Degrees of Power. Both of her videos, "The Final Solution: Slavery's Back in Effect" and "The Hate that Hate Produced," were banned by MTV because of their inflammatory imagery. Her album sold only 27,000 copies, and so her label, Epic/SME Records, dropped her. It is believed that the album sold poorly because of public backlash from her comments in response to the beating of Rodney King, but it also received terrible reviews in the music press.
Souljah became infamous for her statements about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In an interview conducted May 13, 1992, she was quoted in the Washington Post as saying:
“ If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? ”
The quotation, which was taken out of context, was later reproduced in the media, and she was widely criticized. Presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly criticized that statement—and Jesse Jackson for allowing her to be on his Rainbow Coalition—thus the Sister Souljah moment was created.
In 1995, at the age of 31, she published a volume of autobiography titled No Disrespect (Times/Crown/Random House ISBN 0-812-92483-5). In 1999, she made her debut as a novelist with The Coldest Winter Ever (Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-671-02578-3). The latter was praised by The New Yorker. An indirect sequel of the novel, titled Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (Atria/Simon & Schuster ISBN 978-1-4165-4518-7), originally scheduled for October 14, 2008, was published November 4, 2008, and entered The New York Times bestseller list at #7 its first week out and remains there as of February 2009. Another novel, Porsche Santiaga, is due in 2010.
She also does occasional pieces for Essence Magazine and has written for The New Yorker.
As a community activist, Souljah has organized a number of service programs. In 1985, during her senior year at Rutgers University, she developed and financed the African Youth Survival Camp for children of homeless families, a 6-week summer sleep-away camp in Enfield, North Carolina. She has been a motivating force behind a number of hip-hop artists' efforts to give back to the community, organizing major youth events, programs, and summer camps with artists such as Lauryn Hill, Doug E. Fresh, and Sean "Diddy" Combs.
Souljah was the executive director of Daddy's House Social Programs Inc., a not-for-profit corporation for urban youth, financed by Sean Combs and Bad Boy Entertainment. Daddy's House educates and prepares youth, aged 10–16, to be in control of their academic, cultural, and financial lives. The students progressing through the program earn support to travel throughout the world.
February 26, 2009
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela; born September 26, 1936 as Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela, is a South African politician who has held several government positions, headed the African National Congress' Women's League and is currently a member of the ANC's National Executive Committee.
She is the ex-wife of former South African president and African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela. As a controversial activist, she is popular among her supporters, who refer to her as the 'Mother of the Nation', yet reviled by others.
Her Xhosa name is Nomzamo. Traditionally Xhosa names carry significance; Nomzamo means "trial". She was born in the village of Mbongweni, Bizana, in the Pondo region of what is now South Africa's Eastern Cape Province. She held a number of jobs in various parts of what was then the Bantustan of Transkei, including with the Transkei government, living at various times in Bizana, Shawbury, and Johannesburg.
She met lawyer and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela in 1957. They were married in 1958 and had two daughters, Zenani (b.1959) and Zindzi (b.1960). She is a diabetic.
Despite restrictions on education of blacks during apartheid, she earned a degree in social work from the Jan Hofmeyer School in Johannesburg, and several years later earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from the University of Witwatersrand, also in Johannesburg.
She emerged as a leading opponent of the white minority rule government during the later years of her husband Nelnon Mandela's long imprisonment; from August 1963 – February 1990. For many of those years, she was exiled to the town of Brandfort in the Orange Free State and confined to the area, except for the times she was allowed to visit her husband at the prison on Robben Island.
Her reputation was damaged by what many considered her sometimes bloodthirsty rhetoric, the most noteworthy example of this being a speech she gave in Munsieville on April 13, 1985, where she endorsed the practice of necklacing in the struggle to end apartheid. She said, "with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country".
During the 1980s as well as the early 90s, she attracted immense national and international media attention and was interviewed by many foreign journalists as well as national journalists such as Jani Allan, then Leading Columnist of the Sunday Times (South Africa).
Further tarnishing her reputation were accusations by her bodyguard, Jerry Richardson, that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela ordered him to abduct and kill an alleged informer, 14 year old James Seipei (also known as Stompie Moeketsi) in January 1989. This incident became a cause célèbre for the apartheid government. In 1991, she was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault in connection with the death of Seipei. Her six-year jail sentence was reduced to a fine on appeal.
During the transition from apartheid to democracy, she adopted a far less conciliatory attitude than her husband toward the previously dominant white community. The Mandelas' 38-year marriage ended in separation (April 1992) and divorce (March 1996). She then adopted the surname Madikizela-Mandela. Appointed Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology in the first post-Apartheid government (May 1994), she was dismissed eleven months later following allegations of corruption.
She remained popular among many ANC radicals, and, in December 1993 and April 1997, she was elected president of the ANC Women's League, though she withdrew her candidacy for ANC Deputy President at the movement's Mafikeng conference in December 1997.
In 1997, she appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chair of the commission recognised her importance in the anti-apartheid struggle, but also begged her to apologize and to admit her mistakes. In a guarded response, she echoed his words, admitting that 'things went horribly wrong'.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross; c. 1820 – March 10, 1913) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the U.S. Civil War. After escaping from slavery, into which she was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue over seventy slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era struggled for women's suffrage.
As a child in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various owners. Early in her life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when she was hit by a heavy metal weight thrown by an irate slave owner, intending to hit another slave. The injury caused disabling seizures, headaches, and powerful visionary and dream activity, and spells of hypersomnia which occurred throughout her entire life. A devout Christian, she ascribed her visions and vivid dreams to premonitions from God.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, then immediately returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". Large rewards were offered for the capture and return of many of the people she helped escape, but no one ever knew it was Harriet Tubman who was helping them. When a far-reaching United States Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, she helped guide fugitives further north into Canada, and helped newly-freed slaves find work.
When the American Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid on the Combahee River, which liberated more than seven hundred slaves. After the war, she retired to the family home in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African-Americans she had helped open years earlier.
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to slave parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward), while Ben was legally owned by Mary's second husband, Anthony Thompson, who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in Dorchester County, Maryland. As with many slaves in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of her birth was recorded, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later." Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman herself reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820. In her Civil War widow's pension record, Tubman claimed she was born in 1820, 1822, and 1825, an indication, perhaps, that she had no idea when she was born.
A map showing key locations in Tubman's life
Modesty, Tubman's maternal grandmother, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she was of Ashanti lineage (from what is now Ghana), though no evidence exists to confirm or deny this assertion. Her mother Rit (who may have been the child of a white man) was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father Ben was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on the plantation. They married around 1808, and according to court records, they had nine children together: Linah, born in 1808, Mariah Ritty in 1811, Soph in 1813, Robert in 1816, Minty (Harriet) in 1822, Ben in 1823, Rachel in 1825, Henry in 1830, and Moses in 1832.
Rit struggled to keep their family together as slavery tried to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other slaves and free blacks in the community. At one point she even confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them: "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that tales of this event in the family's history influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Because Tubman’s mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and a baby. At the age of five or six, she was hired out to a woman named "Miss Susan" as a nursemaid. Tubman was ordered to keep watch on the baby as it slept; when it woke and cried, Tubman was whipped. She told of a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried these scars for the rest of her life. Threatened later for stealing a lump of sugar, Tubman hid in a neighbor's pig sty for five days, where she fought with the animals for scraps of food. Starving, she returned to Miss Susan's house and received a heavy beating. Later, to protect herself from such abuse, she wrapped herself in layers of clothing, but cried out as she might if less protected. Another time, she bit a white man's knee while receiving a punishment; afterwards, he kept his distance from her.
Tubman also worked as a child at the home of a planter named James Cook, where she was ordered into nearby marshes to check the muskrat traps. Even after contracting the measles, she was sent into waist-high cold water. She became very ill and was sent back home. Her mother nursed her back to health, whereupon she was immediately hired out again to various farms. Tubman spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, once comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to grueling field and forest work: driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
One day, when she was an adolescent, Tubman was sent to a dry-goods store for some supplies. There, she encountered a slave owned by a different family, who had left the fields without permission. His overseer, furious, demanded that Tubman help restrain the young man. She refused, and as the slave ran away, the overseer threw a two-pound weight from the store's counter. It missed and struck Tubman instead, which she said "broke my skull". She later explained her belief that her hair – which "had never been combed and … stood out like a bushel basket" – might have saved her life. Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. She was immediately sent back into the fields, "with blood and sweat rolling down my face until I couldn't see." Her boss said she was "not worth a sixpence" and returned her to Brodess, who tried unsuccessfully to sell her. She began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings even though she appeared to be asleep. These episodes were alarming to her family who were unable to wake her when she fell asleep suddenly and without warning. This condition remained with Tubman for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
This severe head wound occurred at a time in her life when Tubman was becoming deeply religious. As an illiterate child, she had been told Bible stories by her mother. The particular variety of her early Christian belief remains unclear, but Tubman acquired a passionate faith in God. She rejected white interpretations of scripture urging slaves to be obedient, finding guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. After her brain trauma, Tubman began experiencing visions and potent dreams, which she considered signs from the divine. This religious perspective instructed her throughout her life.
By 1840, Tubman's father Ben was manumitted – released from slavery at the age of forty-five, as stipulated in a former owner's will. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had owned him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of forty-five. This meant that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached forty-five years of age were legally free. However, the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when inheriting the slaves, and seeing it enacted was an impossible task for Tubman.
In or around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated due to her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages – free people marrying enslaved people – were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where half the black population was free. Most African American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or possibly to honor a sister who had disappeared.
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, and her value as a slave was diminished as a result. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at this effort (and the unjust hold he kept on her relatives), Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. "I prayed all night long for my master," she said later, "till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though the sale was being finalized, she switched tactics. "I changed my prayer," she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way." A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments. Ironically, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and the family would be broken apart. His widow Eliza began working to sell the family's slaves. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to," she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other."
Notice published in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a three hundred dollar reward for Araminta (Minty) and her brothers Harry and Ben
Tubman and her brothers Ben and Henry escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Dr. Anthony Thompson, who owned a very large plantation called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County, and it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson there as well. Because the slaves were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, however, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to one hundred dollars for each slave returned. Once they had left, however, Tubman's brothers succumbed to second thoughts. Ben had just become a father, and the two men – fearful of the dangers ahead – went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterwards, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. The night before she left, Tubman tried to send word to her mother of her departure. She located Mary, a trusted fellow slave, and sang a coded song of farewell: "I'll meet you in the morning," she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land". While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the extensive network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free blacks, white abolitionists, and Christian activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck in Caroline County, Maryland contained a significant Quaker community, and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape, if not the starting point. From there, she probably took a common route for fleeing slaves: northeast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly ninety miles (145 kilometers), traveling by foot would take between five days and three weeks.
Her dangerous journey required Tubman to travel by night (guided by the North Star), avoiding the careful eyes of "slavecatchers", eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used a variety of deceptions to hide and protect her. At one of the earliest stops, the lady of the house ordered Tubman to sweep the yard to make it appear as though she worked for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, it is likely that Tubman hid in these locales during the day. Because the routes she followed were used by other fugitive slaves, Tubman did not speak about them until later in her life.
Particulars of her first journey remain shrouded in secret. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later: "When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven."
Immediately after reaching the city of Philadelphia, Tubman began thinking of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She began to work odd jobs and save money. At the same time, the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which forced law enforcement officials (even in states which had outlawed slavery) to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves, and imposed heavy punishments on those who abetted escape. The law increased risks for escaped slaves, many of whom headed north to Canada. Meanwhile, racial tension was increasing in Philadelphia itself, as the city expanded.
In December 1850, Tubman received a warning that her niece Kessiah was going to be sold (along with her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta) in Cambridge, Maryland. Horrified at the prospect of having her family broken further apart, Tubman did something very few slaves ever did: she voluntarily returned to the land of her enslavement. She went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the time of the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while he pretended to make arrangements to pay, Kessiah and her children absconded to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley ferried the family on a log canoe sixty miles (one hundred kilometers) to Baltimore. They met up with Tubman, who brought the family safely to Philadelphia.
The following spring, she headed back into Maryland to help guide away other family members. On this, her second trip, she brought back her brother Moses, and two other unidentified men. It is likely that Tubman was by this time working with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that she became more confident with each trip to Maryland. As she led more and more individuals out of slavery, she became popularly known as "Moses" – an allusion to the prophet in the book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom.
During an interview with author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman revealed some of the names of helpers and places she used along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck in Caroline County, MD. From there, she would travel northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and onto the Camden area where free black agents William and Nat Brinkley, and Abraham Gibbs guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still, a famous black agent, is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and Canada.
In the fall of 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She once again saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. John, meanwhile, had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some slaves who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed sixteen years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Frederick Douglass, who worked for slavery's abolition alongside Tubman and praised her in print
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States more dangerous for escaped slaves, many began migrating further north to Canada. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of eleven fugitives – possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier – northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter…." The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman showed a great admiration for one another as they struggled together against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. It read in part:
You ask for what you do not need when you call upon me for a word of commendation. I need such words from you far more than you can need them from me, especially where your superior labors and devotion to the cause of the lately enslaved of our land are known as I know them. The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. … The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.
Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman
Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman (1789 – 29 December 1815) was the most famous of at least two Khoikhoi women who were exhibited as sideshow attractions in 19th century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus—"Hottentot" as the then-current name for the Khoi people, now considered an offensive term, and "Venus" in reference to the Venus figurines.
Saartjie Baartman was born to a Khoisan family in the vicinity of the Gamtoos River in what is now the Eastern Cape of South Africa. She was orphaned in a commando raid. Saartjie, pronounced "Sahr-key", is the Afrikaans form of her name; it translates to English as "Little Sarah", where the use of the diminutive form commonly indicates familiarity or endearment rather than a literally short stature. Her original name is unknown.
Baartman was a slave of Dutch farmers near Cape Town when Hendrick Cezar, the brother of her slave owner, suggested that she travel to England for exhibition, promising her that she would become wealthy. Lord Caledon, governor of the Cape, gave permission for the trip, but later regretted it after he fully learned its purpose. She left for London in 1810.
Saartjie, pronounced "Sahr-key", is the Afrikaans form of her name; it translates to English as "Little Sarah", where the use of the diminutive form commonly indicates familiarity or endearment rather than a literally short stature. Her original name is unknown. Baartman was a slave of Dutch farmers near Cape Town thrade to England for exhibition by the suggestion of Hendrick Cezar, the brother of her slave owner. Lord Caledon, governor of the Cape, gave permission for the trip, but later regretted it after he fully learned its purpose. She left for London in 1810.
Saartjie was exhibited around Britain, being forced to entertain people by gyrating her buttocks nude and showing to Europeans what were thought of as highly unusual bodily features. Due to her steatopygia, she had large buttocks; in addition, she had sinus pudoris, otherwise known as the tablier (the French word for "apron") or "curtain of shame", all names for the elongated labia of some Khoisan women. (Although "sinus pudoris" refers only to the labia of Khoisan women, all labia vary in size and shape to some degree.) To quote Stephen Jay Gould, "The labia minora, or inner lips, of the ordinary female genitalia are greatly enlarged in Khoi-San women, and may hang down three or four inches below the vagina when women stand, thus giving the impression of a separate and enveloping curtain of skin". Saartjie never allowed this trait to be exhibited while she was alive.
Her exhibition in London, scant years after the passing of the Slave Trade Act 1807, created a scandal. An abolitionist benevolent society called the African Association, the equivalent of a charity or pressure group, petitioned for her release. Baartman was questioned before a court in Dutch, in which she was fluent, and stated that she was not under restraint and understood perfectly that she was guaranteed half of the profits. The conditions under which she made these statements are suspect, because it directly contradicts accounts of her exhibitions made by Zachary Macaulay of the African Institution and other eyewitnesses.
Baartman later traveled to Napoleonic Paris where an animal trainer, Regu, exhibited her under more pressured conditions for fifteen months. French anatomist Georges Cuvier and French naturalists visited her and she was the subject of several scientific paintings at the Jardin du RoI.
She died on 29 December 1815 of an inflammatory ailment, possibly smallpox, while other sources suggest she contracted pneumonia. An autopsy was conducted, and published by French anatomist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville in 1816 and by Cuvier in the Memoires du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1817. Cuvier notes in his monograph that Baartman was an intelligent woman who had an excellent memory and spoke Dutch fluently. Her skeleton, preserved genitals and brain were placed on display in Paris' Musée de l'Homme until 1974, when they were removed from public view and stored out of sight; A molded casting was still shown for the following two years.
Last resting place of Saartjie Baartman. On a hill overlooking the town of Hankey in the Gamtoos River Valley
There were sporadic calls for the return of her remains beginning in the 1940s but the case became prominent only after U.S. biologist Stephen Jay Gould published an account, The Hottentot Venus, in the 1980s. When Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994, he formally requested that France return the remains. After much legal wrangling and debates in the French National Assembly, France acceded to the request on 6 March 2002. Her remains were repatriated to her homeland, the Gamtoos Valley, on 6 May 2002 and she was finally laid to rest on 9 August 2002 on Vergaderingskop, a hill in the town of Hankey, over 200 years after her birth.
Baartman became an icon in South Africa as representative of many aspects of the nation's history. The Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children, a refuge for survivors of domestic violence, opened in Cape Town in 1999. South Africa's first offshore environmental protection vessel is named after Sarah Baartman.
Signboard at the grave, including the poem by Diana Ferrus
Poet M.K. Asante, Jr. wrote "Ghetto Booty: The Hottentot Remix" for Saartjie Baartman in his 2005 book Beautiful. And Ugly Too. The poem tells Baartman's story and warns the hip hop generation not to repeat racist cycles of black female exploitation.
Dame Edith Sitwell allusively referred to her in "Hornpipe", a poem in the satirical collection "Facade".
Diana Ferrus, a South African poet of Khoisan descent, wrote "A Poem for Sarah Baartman" while studying in Europe. It includes the desire "to wrench [her] away-/ away from the poking eyes... ."
Poet Elizabeth Alexander explores her story in a 1987 poem and 1990 book, both entitled The Venus Hottentot.
The science fiction author Paul Di Filippo used her story as the basis for the second novel of his Steampunk Trilogy.
Barbara Chase-Riboud wrote a fictional biography entitled Hottentot Venus.
Her life features in the 2007 Afrikaans romantic novel Frats by Chris Karsten.
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks fictionalizes her story in Venus. Playwright Lydia R. Diamond's play "Voyeurs de Venus" also examines her story through the guise of 20th century author.
In 2006, a feminist artist and filmmaker adopted the name Venus Hottentot to direct an independent film with erotic content called Afrodite Superstar with the intention of reclaiming the strength and voice of Sarah Baartman as a sexually exploited woman of color.
Canadian performance artist Mara Verna created a web-based project and travelling exhibition cataloguing her story.
Novelist Joyce Carol Oates uses the image and the story of the Hottentot Venus in her 2006 novel Black Girl/White Girl.
In 2007, community activist Jessica Solomon founded the artist collective The Saartjie Project which explores the politics of the Black woman's body through song, dance and theatre pieces. The Saartjie Project's first stage presentation opened to sold out shows in Washington DC's DC Arts Center in August 2008 in Adams Morgan and later appeared as a featured part of the Can A Sista Rock a Mic? festival held in October 2008. The Saartjie Project members include poet Margaux Delotte-Bennett, dancer Binahkaye Joy and writer Khadijah Ali-Coleman.
Source: www.wikipedia.org
February 25, 2009
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth (1797–November 26, 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843, of Isabella Baumfree, an American slave, abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Ulster County, New York. Her best-known speech, Ain't I a Woman?, was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
Truth was born into slavery around 1797. She was one of twelve children born to James and Elizabeth Baumfree, who were slaves of Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh. The Hardenbergh estate was in a hilly area called by the Dutch name Ulster County, New York (just north of present-day Rifton), in the town of Esopus, New York, 95 miles north of New York City. After the colonel's death, ownership of the family slaves passed to his son, Charles Hardenbergh.
After the death of Charles Hardenbergh in 1806, Truth, known as Isabelle, was sold at an auction. She was 9 years old and was included with a flock of sheep for $100 to John Neely, near Kingston, New York. Until she was sold, Truth spoke only Dutch. She suffered many hardships at the hands of Neely, whom she later described as cruel and harsh and who once beat her with a bundle of rods. Truth previously said Neely raped and beat her daily. Neely sold her in 1808, for $105, to Martinus Schryver of Port Ewen, a tavern keeper, who owned her for 18 months. Schryver sold her in 1810, for $175, to John Dumont of West Park, New York. Although this fourth owner was kindly disposed toward her, his wife found numerous ways to harass Truth and make her life more difficult.
Around 1815, Truth met and fell in love with a slave named Robert from a neighboring farm. Robert's owner forbade the relationship; he did not want his slave to have children with a slave he did not own, because he would not own the children. Robert was savagely beaten and Truth never saw him again. In 1817, Truth was forced by Dumont to marry an older slave named Thomas. She had five children: Diana, fathered by Robert; and Elizabeth, Hannah, Peter, and Sophia, fathered by Thomas.
The state of New York began, in 1799, to legislate the abolition of slavery, although the process of emancipating New York slaves was not complete until July 4, 1827. Dumont had promised Truth freedom a year before the state emancipation, "if she would do well and be faithful." However, he changed his mind, claiming a hand injury had made her less productive. She was infuriated. She continued working until she felt she had done enough to satisfy her sense of obligation to him by spinning 100 pounds of wool.
Late in 1826, Truth escaped to freedom with her infant daughter, Sophia. She had to leave her other children behind because they were not legally freed in the emancipation order until they had served as bound servants into their twenties. She later said:
“ | I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right. | ” |
She found her way to the home of Isaac and Maria Van Wagener, who took her and her baby in. Isaac offered to buy her services for the remainder of the year (until the state's emancipation took effect), which Dumont accepted for $20. She lived there until the New York State Emancipation Act was approved a year later.
Truth learned that her son Peter, then 5 years old, had been sold illegally by Dumont to an owner in Alabama. With the help of the Van Wageners, she took the issue to court and, after months of legal proceedings, got back her son, who had been abused by his new owner.
Truth had a life-changing religious experience during her stay with the Van Wageners, and became a devout Christian. In 1829 she moved with her son Peter to New York City, where she worked as a housekeeper for Elijah Pierson, a Christian Evangelist. In 1832, she met Robert Matthews, also known as Matthias Kingdom or Prophet Matthias, and went to work for him as a housekeeper. In a bizarre twist of fate, Elijah Pierson died, and Robert Matthews and Truth were accused of stealing from and poisoning him. Both were acquitted and Robert Matthews moved west.
In 1839, Truth's son Peter took a job on a whaling ship called the Zone of Nantucket. From 1840 to 1841, she received three letters from him, though in his third letter he told her he had sent five. When the ship returned to port in 1842, Peter was not on board and Truth never heard from him again.
"The Spirit Calls Me"
On June 1, 1843, Truth changed her name to Sojourner Truth and told her friends, "The Spirit calls me, and I must go." She became a Methodist, and left to make her way traveling and preaching about abolition. In 1844, she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts. Founded by abolitionists, the organization supported women's rights and religious tolerance as well as pacifism. There were 210 members and they lived on 500 acres (2 km²), raising livestock, running a sawmill, a gristmill, and a silk factory. While there, Truth met William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles. In 1846, the group disbanded, unable to support itself. In 1847, she went to work as a housekeeper for George Benson, the brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison. In 1849, she visited John Dumont before he moved west.
Truth started dictating her memoirs to her friend Olive Gilbert, and in 1850 William Lloyd Garrison privately published her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. That same year, she purchased a home in Northampton for $300.
In 1851, she left Northampton to join George Thompson, an abolitionist and speaker. In May, she attended the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio where she delivered her famous speech Ain't I a Woman, a slogan she adopted from one of the most famous abolitionist images, that of a kneeling female slave with the caption "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?"
Reminiscences by Frances Gage
Akron Convention, Akron, Ohio, May 1851
"There were very few women in those days who dared to "speak in meeting"; and the august teachers of the people were seemingly getting the better of us, while the boys in the galleries, and the sneerers among the pews, were hugely enjoying the discomfiture, as they supposed, of the "strong-minded." Some of the tender-skinned friends were on the point of losing dignity, and the atmosphere betokened a storm. When, slowly from her seat in the corner rose Sojourner Truth, who, till now, had scarcely lifted her head. "Don't let her speak!" gasped half a dozen in my ear. She moved slowly and solemnly to the front, laid her old bonnet at her feet, and turned her great speaking eyes to me. There was a hissing sound of disapprobation above and below. I rose and announced "Sojourner Truth," and begged the audience to keep silence for a few moments."
"The tumult subsided at once, and every eye was fixed on this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eyes piercing the upper air like one in a dream. At her first word there was a profound hush. She spoke in deep tones, which, though not loud, reached every ear in the house, and away through the throng at the doors and windows."
Over the next decade, Truth spoke before dozens, perhaps hundreds, of audiences. From 1851 to 1853, Truth worked with Marius Robinson, the editor of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Bugle, and traveled around that state speaking. In 1853, she spoke at a suffragist "mob convention" at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City; that year she also met Harriet Beecher Stowe.[2] In 1856, she traveled to Battle Creek, Michigan, to speak to a group called the Friends of Human Progress. In 1858, someone interrupted a speech and accused her of being a man; Truth opened her blouse and revealed her breasts.
"Ain't I a Woman?"
Truth delivered her best-known speech in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention. The speech has become known as Ain't I a Woman? after Truth's refrain.
The speech as shown here has been revised from the 19th century dialect in which Truth spoke.
“ | Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or Negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it. The men better let them.Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say. | ” |
--Sojourner Truth
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928), is an American poet, playwright, memoirist, actress, author, television producer and an important figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. She has been called "America's most visible black female autobiographer". Angelou is known for her series of six autobiographies, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (1969) which was nominated for a National Book Award. Her volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993. She has been highly honored for her body of work, including being awarded over 30 honorary degrees.
Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928 to Bailey Johnson, a doorman and naval dietitian, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a real estate agent, trained surgical nurse, and later a merchant marine. Angelou's brother, Bailey Jr., gave her the nickname "Maya". The details of Angelou's life, although described in her six autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles, tend to be inconsistent. Her biographer, Mary Jane Lupton, explains that when Angelou speaks about her life, she does so eloquently but informally and "with no time chart in front of her".
In 2008, Angelou's family history was profiled on the PBS series African American Lives 2. A DNA test showed that she was descended from the Mende people of West Africa. The program's research showed that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother, Mary Lee, emancipated after the Civil War, cut all ties with her slave past and renamed herself "Kentucky Shannon" because "she liked how it sounded". Little was known about Lee's background because she prohibited anyone from knowing about it. Lee became pregnant by her former owner, a white man named John Savin, who forced Lee to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father. A grand jury indicted Savin for forcing Lee to commit perjury, and despite discovering that Savin was the father, found him not guilty. Lee was sent to the Clinton County, Missouri poorhouse with her daughter, who became Angelou's grandmother, Marguerite Baxter. Angelou's reaction after learning this information was, "That poor little black girl, physically and mentally bruised."
Angelou's first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, recounts the first 16 years of her life. When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father sent them alone by train to live with his mother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas. Henderson prospered financially during this time, the years of the Great Depression and World War II, because the general store she owned sold basic commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments". Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At age eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. She confessed it to her brother, who told the rest of their family. Freeman was found guilty, but was jailed for one day. Four days after his release, he was found kicked to death, probably by Angelou's uncles. Angelou became mute, believing, as she has stated, "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone..." She remained nearly mute for five years.
William Shakespeare, whom Angelou "met and fell in love with" as a child.
Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother once again. Angelou credits Bertha Flowers, a friend and teacher, with helping her speak again and introducing her to classical literature and authors. These authors include Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, as well as black female artists like Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset. When Angelou was 13, she and her brother returned to live with her mother in San Francisco, California; during World War II, she attended George Washington High School and studied dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Three weeks after completing school, she gave birth to her son, Clyde, who also became a poet. At the end of Angelou's third autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, her son announced that he wanted to be called "Guy Johnson" and trained his friends and family to accept it.
Angelou's second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, recounts her life from age 17 to 19. As Lupton states, this book "depicts a single mother's slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime." Angelou made her living working in various jobs, most notably as a prostitute and as the madame of a brothel. In those years, Angelou went through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempted to raise her son without the benefit of job training or advanced education. Lupton states, "Nevertheless, she was able to survive through trial and error, while at the same time defining herself in terms of being a black woman."[20] Angelou learned how to perform professionally for live audiences, and exhibited a natural dancing ability and talent.
Adulthood and early career
Paperback book cover illustration, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angelou won a scholarship to study dance with Trinidadian choreographer Pearl Primus and married Greek sailor Tosh Angelos in 1952; the marriage ended in divorce after one-and-a-half years. Angelou tends not to admit how many times she has been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous",[22] although it has been at least three times.[23] Known by "Rita Johnson" up to that point, she changed her name when her managers at San Francisco nightclub The Purple Onion strongly suggested that she adopt a "more theatrical" name that captured the feel of her Calypso dance performances.[12] She co-created a dance team, "Al and Rita", with choreographer Alvin Ailey, who combined elements of modern dance, ballet, and West African tribal dancing.[24] She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 1954–1955, studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Ailey on television variety shows, and recorded her first record album, Miss Calypso, in 1957. Angelou's third autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, covered her early dancing and singing career. One of the themes of this book was the conflict she felt between her desire to be a good mother and a successful performer, a situation "very familiar to mothers with careers".[25]
By the end of the 1950s, Angelou moved to San Diego, California, where she performed in plays and met artists and writers active in the Civil Rights Movement. From 1959 to 1960, Angelou held the position of Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the request of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the early 1960s, Angelou briefly lived with South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; she moved with him and her son Guy to Cairo, Egypt, where she became an associate editor at the weekly newspaper The Arab Observer. In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to Ghana. She became an assistant administrator and instructor at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, was a feature editor for The African Review, and acted and wrote plays.[18][26] In her travels Angelou learned French, Spanish, and Fante.[26]
Angelou became close friends with Malcolm X in Ghana and returned to the US in 1964 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of African American Unity; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated, on her birthday (April 4) in 1968. She did not celebrate her birthday for many years for that reason;[27] she sent flowers to King's widow, Coretta Scott King, every year until King's death in 2006.[28] Inspired by a meeting with her friend James Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and Feiffer's wife Judy, she dealt with her grief by writing her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which brought her international recognition and acclaim.[29]
January 29, 2009
Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert
Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert (b. 1894) was, along with Leonard Howell, Archibald Dunkley, and Robert Hinds, one of the first preachers of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica following the coronation of Ras Tafari as Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia on 2 November 1930.
In about 1911, at the age of 17, he moved to Costa Rica where he spent 20 years at farm work, also becoming a member of the Ancient Order of Ethiopia masonic lodge. His background at this time had been with the Ethiopian Baptist Church, that had been founded in Jamaica by the 18th century Baptist preacher George Lisle. Hibbert returned to Jamaica in 1931, starting his ministry, "Ethiopian Coptic Faith", to teach that the newly-crowned Haile Selassie was divine, in St. Andrew Parish, in a district called Benoah. He reached this conclusion independently, having studied the Ethiopic translation of the Bible. Somewhat later, he transferred his ministry to Kingston, where he found that another street preacher named Leonard P. Howell was already teaching many similar doctrines. Like Howell and Dunkley, Hibbert was subjected to arrest and imprisonment by authorities, and he was also a founding member of EWF Local 17.
Hibbert was probably among the Rastafari elders, including Mortimer Planno, who were given the honour of meeting with Haile Selassie I on his historic 1966 visit to Jamaica. In 1970, Hibbert formally invited the Archbishop Laike Mandefro, whom Haile Selassie had sent to Jamaica as emissary of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, to teach Rastafarians about the Orthodox Faith, and in about 1971, Mandefro named Hibbert as a "Spiritual Organizer".
Leonard Percival Howell
Leonard Percival Howell (June 16, 1898 – 1981) was a Jamaican religious figure. He was one of the first preachers of the Rastafari movement (along with Joseph Hibbert, Archibald Dunkley, and Robert Hinds), and is sometimes known as "The First Rasta."
Born in May Crawle River, Jamaica, Howell left the country as a youth and returned in 1932. He began preaching in 1933 about what he considered the symbolic portent for the African diaspora—the crowning of Ras Tafari Makonnen as Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. His preaching asserted that Haile Selassie was the "Messiah returned to earth." Although this resulted in him being arrested, tried for sedition and imprisoned for two years, the Rastafari movement grew. [1]
Over the following years, Howell came into conflict with all the establishment authorities in Jamaica: the planters, the trade unions, established churches, police and colonial authorities. Nevertheless, this movement prospered, and today the Rastafari faith exists worldwide.
Leonard Howell died in Kingston, Jamaica.
Howell's doctrine of Rastafari
Though imprisoned for it, Howell published his doctrine with the title The Promise Key under the pen name G.G. Maragh. Some of the themes were later discarded in the movement, but the main ones in this book included: Opposition to the wickedness
The dignity of the Black race
God's revenge on the wicked for their wickedness
The negation, persecution and humiliation of the government and legal bodies of wicked world
Preparation to return to Africa
Acknowledgment of Emperor Haile Selassie I as the Supreme Being and the only ruler of the Black people.
Opposition to the wickedness
The dignity of the Black race
God's revenge on the wicked for their wickedness
The negation, persecution and humiliation of the government and legal bodies of wicked world
Preparation to return to Africa
Acknowledgment of Emperor Haile Selassie I as the Supreme Being and the only ruler of the Black people.
January 27, 2009
Empress Menen Asfaw
Empress Menen Asfaw (Baptismal name Wolete Giyorgis) (25 March 1889 - February 15, 1962) was the wife and consort of H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Empress Menen was the daughter of Asfaw, Jantirar of Ambassel. He was a direct descendant of Emperor Lebna Dengel, through Emperor Gelawdewos of Ethiopia and his daughter Princess Enkulal Gelawdewos and this genealogy was deleted from the official history of Etege Menen. The title of Jantirar has traditionally belonged to the head of the family holding the mountain fortress of Ambassel, and Jantirar Asfaw was one of them. Her mother was Woizero Sehin Mikael, half-sister of Lij Iyasu (Iyasu V), and daughter of Negus Mikael of Wollo. Woizero Sehin's mother, Woizero Fantaye Gebru, was a direct descendant of Emperor Susenyos in the "Seyfe Melekot" line. Empress Menen and H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie were the parents of six children: Princess Tenagnework, Prince Asfaw Wossen (Emperor-in-Exile Amha Selassie I), Princess Tsehai, Princess Zenebework, Prince Makonnen Ras of Harrar, and Prince Sahle Selassie.
According to both published and unpublished reports, the then Woizero Menen Asfaw was given in marriage by her family, to the prominent Wollo nobleman, Dejazmach Ali of Cherecha, and bore him a daughter, Woizero Belaynesh Ali, and a son, Jantirar Asfaw Ali. This first marriage ended in divorce, and Woizero Menen then married Dejazmach Amede Ali Aba-Deyas, another very prominent nobleman of Wollo. She bore her second husband two children as well, a daughter Woizero Desta Amede, and a son Jantirar Gebregziabiher Amede.". Following the sudden death of her second husband, Woizero Menen's grandfather, Negus Mikael arranged her marriage to Ras Leul Seged Atnaf Seged, a prominent Shewan nobleman, who was considerably older than Woizero Menen, sometime in late 1909 or early 1910.
Woizero Menen probably met Dejazmach Tafari Makonnen (later Emperor Haile Selassie) at the home of her uncle, Lij Iyasu. The rapport between the two may have inspired Lij Iyasu to attempt to bind Dejazmach Tafari to him more firmly through marriage ties. He therefore arranged the separation of Woizero Menen from Ras Leul Seged, and sent her to Harar to marry Dejazmatch Tafari Makonnen. They were married in early August of 1911. Ras Leul Seged apparently did not hold a grudge against Dejazmatch Tafari for this circumstance, blaming it entirely on Lij Iyasu who had ordered it. He was among the leaders who fought on the side of Dejazmach Tafari Makonnen in the Battle of Segale, and died in that battle.
The account given in the Autobiography of the Emperor, My Life and Ethiopia's Progress, mentions no previous marriage or children of Empress Menen and no such order by Iyasu, but states only that at the age of 20, they were married by their own mutual consent, and describes her as "a woman without any malice whatsoever". When Tafari Makonnen became Emperor of Ethiopia as H.I.M. Haile Selassie I, Menen Asfaw was crowned as Empress at his side. Empress Menen had no children by Ras Leul Seged.
Empress Menen was active in promoting women's issues in Ethiopia, was Patroness of the Ethiopian Red Cross, and the Ethiopian Women's Charitable Organization. She was also patroness of the Jerusalem Society that arranged for pilgrimages to the Israel. She founded the Empress Menen School for Girls in Addis Ababa, the first all girls school which had both boarding and day students. Girls from all over the Empire were brought to the school to receive a modern education, encouraged by the Empress who visited it often and presided over its graduation ceremonies. The Empress gave generously, as well as sponsored programs for the poor, ill and disabled. She was also a devoutly religious woman who did much to support the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. She built, renovated and endowed numerous churches in Ethiopia and in the Holy Land. Prominent among these are the St. Raguel Church in Addis Ababa's Merkato district, the Kidane Mehret (Our Lady Covenant of Mercy) Church on Mount Entoto, and the Holy Trinity Monastery on the banks of the River Jordan in Israel. She gave generously from her personal funds towards the building of the new Cathedral of St. Mary of Zion at Axum, but did not live to see it completed and dedicated.
When the Empress was exiled from Ethiopia during the Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941, she made a pledge to the Virgin Mary at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, promising to give her crown to the church if Ethiopia were liberated from occupation. The Empress made numerous pilgrimages to Sites in then British-ruled Palestine, in Syria and in Lebanon, during her exile to pray for her occupied homeland. Following the return of H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie I and his family to Ethiopia in 1941, a replica of the crown was made for future Empresses, but the original crown that Empress Menen was crowned with at her husband's side in 1930 was sent to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Empress Menen, although often seen wearing a tiara at public events that called for it, would never again wear a full crown.
Empress Menen performed perfectly in the role of Empress-consort. In her public role she combined religious piety, concern for social causes, and support for development schemes with the majesty of her Imperial status. Outwardly she was the dutiful wife, visiting schools, churches, exhibitions and model farms, attending public and state events at her husband's side or by herself. She took no public stand on political or policy issues. Behind the scenes however, she was the Emperor's most trusted advisor, quietly offering advice on a whole range of issues. She avoided the publicly political role that her predecessor as Empress-consort, Empress Taitu Bitul, had taken, which had caused deep resentment in government circles during the reign of Menelik II.
The Empress and some of her family were placed under house arrest briefly during the 1960 Imperial Guard coup attempt against her husband at her villa outside the Guenete Leul Palace grounds in northern Addis Ababa. Following the return of the Emperor and the crushing of the coup attempt, there was much speculation as to the conduct of the Crown Prince, who had been proclaimed monarch by the coup leaders. It was noted that the Crown Prince had accompanied his mother in a drive through the palace grounds, making stops at Imperial Guard posts to exchange pleasantries with the guards, on the night before the coup was launched. The ailing Empress had been urged to visit the posts by security officials, who were concerned about the soldiers' morale, and perhaps had an idea that something was brewing. The appearance of the Empress with the Crown Prince at her side may have been used by coup leaders as an indication to their followers that the Empress might sympathise with a movement that brought her favored son to the throne. It is extremely unlikely that either the Empress or the Prince had any idea of what was being plotted. However, a cloud of suspicion never left the Crown Prince, and the Empress was deeply saddened by this.
Following her death in 1962, the Empress was buried in the crypt of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa among the tombs of her children. Prime Minister Aklilu Hapte-Wold delivered her eulogy paying tribute to her charity, her piety, and her role as advisor and helpmate to the Emperor, as well as her personal kindness and goodness. On the third day memorial and commemoration after the funeral, the Emperor himself paid tribute to his wife by saying that although the Prime Minister had aptly described what kind of person his late wife had been, he wanted to say that during their five decades of marriage, not once had it been necessary to have a third party mediate between him and his wife, and that their marriage had been one of peace and mutual support.
Later, the H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie I built a pair of grand sarcophagi in the north transept of Holy Trinity Cathedral's nave, in order to transfer his wife's remains there and eventually be buried at her side himself. But due to the revolution, the Emperor was not buried there after his death, and the Empress remained in her original tomb in the crypt. During the ceremonial burial of her husband's remains in November 2000, the remains of Empress Menen were also disinterred from the crypt tomb, and placed in the sarcophagus next to her husband in the nave of the Cathedral, as he had originally intended.
Source: www.wikipedia.org
King Emmanuel Charles Edwards VII
King Emmanuel Charles Edwards VII (1915–1994) was an influential leader of the Rastafari movement order Bobo Shanti. He was born in Saint Elizabeth and died in Kingston, Jamaica. He established the Bobo Shanti faith, based on ancient Ethiopian tradition (e.g. customs of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church).
Early life
He preached the doctrines of Marcus Garvey and Leonard Howell, both prophets of the Rastafari culture.Later he himself came to be regarded as High Priest by his followers, and even more—they claimed him to be Adonai incarnate.
Bobo Shanti
In 1958, King Emmanuel VII officially founded the Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress (EABIC), while reconstituting the ancient Melchizedek tradition. King Emmanuel VII being the President-Founder, God, & King of the Bobo Shanti Order, was duly recognized as creational crowned champion of human rights and human justice, and ambassador for the repatriation and reparation network of His Divine Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. King Emmanuel VII's Royal Saints and Apostles i.e., Priests, Prophets, Empresses, & Princesses are referred to as "Bobo Shanti" or simply "Bobo Dreads." They are recognizable by their tightly wrapped turbans and flowing shawls, respectivley worn to cover their consecrated locks. In his years as President-Founder, God and King of the EABIC, King Emmanuel VII reestablished the principles for his ancient divine order and bequeathed these tenets to his Royal Saints and Apostles for spiritual guidance.
Because King Emmanuel VII was highly regarded as The Black Christ-in-flesh, the Royal Saints whom followed him on his sojourn identified each of their respective environments as previously recorded in the Bible. For instance, Ackee Walk was supposed to be Nazareth, where Jesus came from, Harris Street was Galilee, where Jesus went after leaving his native home, Eighth Street, Capernaum and Ninth Street, Bethlehem, for it was there that Yeshua, Queen Rachel's son, was born. The settlement in Bull Bay is named Mount Temon, where God originated, per Genesis passage. The Bobo Shanti trinity, consists of Marcus Garvey as the Holy prophet, King Emmanuel VII as the Holy Priest and Haile Selassie as the Divine King.
In all songs and readings from the bible, the Congress members generally use such phrases as: "KING EMMANUEL THE 7TH ADONAI GOD JAH RASTAFARI".
"HOLY EMMANUEL I KING SELASSIE I JAH RASTAFARI".
You can hear these phrases in reggae songs from singers like Sizzla, Capleton, Turbulence, Junior Reid, Fantan Mojah and Anthony B who are also followers of the Bobo Shanti order.
January 01, 2009
Another shade of Black Panther - Richard Aoki
Richard Aoki (Field Marshall)
Growing up was know easy job for Richard at the early stages in his life he and his family were placed in an Internment camp during World War II, a childhood prisoner held at Topaz Concenation camp in Utah from 1942-1945. He joined the military at a young age, Having left the Army after two years of service, Richard was intimately aware of the vicious treatment and punishment that the U.S. government could meter out.
Being Japanese-American and growing up in Black West Oakland, he was tight with Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, as well as David Hilliard years before the party started. He also attended Merritt College for two years before transferring to U.C. Berkeley in 1966. Richard remembers" we had discussed pressing political, social issues of the day, that we wanted to do something about it, so we got together one night and hammed out the 10 point program of the Black Panther Party.
Richard said, there were several Asian American members of the BPP, he was the only one attain a formal leadership role. Richard attended the first meeting of the BPP his connection to the community along with revolutionary politics and his action made it easy for other Panthers to accept him as a equal, he was made branch captain they accepted his rank, and later in the Party Huey promoted him to Field Marshall. Richard said, "one of the first things the Party did was patrol the police of Oakland, they were killing a dude a week, and set up Political Education classes for members and the community."
Richard says" I've seen where unity amongst the races yielded positives results. I don't see any other way for people to gain freedom, justice, equality here except by being inclusionst"
Enrolling at U.C. Berkeley soon after the founding of the BPP, Richard became a leading member of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). A student based organization whom platform closely resembled the Party's 10 point program. Richard would recruit blacks on the campus by passing out information and telling students about the Party and when Elrage Clever started teaching classes on campus in 1968(Experienmental class 139X) he was there organizing for the BPP.
From 1968, onward Richard was involved in networking with various groups cutting across communities, and nationalities. Richard says" One of the least understood aspects of the liberation movement era is the impact that many Black, Brown, Yellow, Red radicals had on one another. Ideological and organizational influences spilled across vast distances, while Panthers absorbed Maoism, Asian Americans took to the lectures and speeches of Huey Newton, Chicanos and Puerto Rican radicals replicated some of the BPP' Serve the People programs" as well as Native Americans like groups like AIM".
Richard was a founding member of the Third World Liberation Front on the campus of UO Berkeley in 1969 which was a formation of African Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Mexican Americans, Asian students, striking to win demands for a Third World College on campus.
The college would include departments for Chicano studies, and Native American Asian, and Africans studies, with the aim of the program being to help oppressed minority communities in American. TWLF is were striking for the same basic demands that the students at San Francisco State were. The formation of radical students successfully challenged, the most conservative intuitions in the nation the University system and won vital space in the form of Ethnic Studies Depts. On both UC Berkeley as well as San Francisco State campuses With these new departments has made higher education transformed the cultural imagation of many people and communities of color, thanks to people like Richard Aoki who paved the way for many others to fellow. Richard said, "That if it not for the BPP the many student and political groups for students rights would not have emerge."
Note: Richard donated some of the first defend weapons for police patrols to the BPP. Richard has always been active in the communities, and today after he has retired from his job, he still doing workshops and speaking about the past as well as present conditions like the War, Economy, and Police Abuse.
Source:hppt://www.itsabouttimebpp.com
Theophilus Albert Marryshow
Theophilus Albert Marryshow
By Veta Dawson, Contributor
BEFORE WE leave the integration movement and look at the movement towards independence in the individual territories, I would like us to examine the role/contribution of three persons who were integral to the integration movement.
Theophilus Albert Marryshow, born in Grenada on November 7, 1887, is dubbed the father of Federation, yet I am sure that many of you have never heard of him or only know the name. This lesson seeks to correct that. We must at least be aware of the many heroes that our Caribbean region has produced.
In 1915, he established a newspaper known as The West Indian. The very name gives you an idea of how Marryshow felt about the unity of the region. In fact, the paper was dedicated to two causes, self-government and creating a federation of the British West Indies. The quality of the paper and the respect it received ,resulted in increasing support of its readers to these two causes. Marryshow himself received support from the general public whenever he had occasion to speak to them and this no doubt catapulted him into his political career.
In the Trinidad Guardian of October 16, 1917, during the height of the World War I (1914-1917), Marryshow appealed to Trinidadians to join Grenadians in a demand for a more dignified and responsible form of government. It is instructive that in his letter, he said: "I speak not as a Grenadian to Trinidadians, but as a West Indian to West Indians."
In 1922, the (British) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for the colonies visited Grenada as part of a tour led by the Wood's Enquiry to look into the feasibility of an association of the Windward islands and Trinidad as the nucleus of a larger federation of the British West Indies. Marryshow presented his proposals for constitutional reform and indicated his support for the formation of a West Indies Federation.
In 1932, Marryshow attended a conference in Dominica to consider West Indian Federation and self-government of the region. In that same year, he was also part of a two-man delegation to Britain. The mission was to put forward proposals for a greater say in the government of the island. By this time Marryshow was one of the first five elected members in charge of one of the five electoral districts into which Grenada was divided, after and at the recommendation of the Wood's report. In this same year, Marryshow and G. Edwards received an address from the voters of Grenada claiming the right to control their own affairs within a self-governing West Indian Federation.
In 1939, another conference was held in St. Lucia and resolutions passed there called for closer union of the West Indies. Did I hear you ask if Marryshow was present at this conference? Of course, he was! War World War II (1939-1945) interrupted the movement towards a closer union or Federation, but Marryshow did not give up. He had a vision of the British West Indies as one unit.
Marryshow continued to press not just for constitutional changes for Grenada but for a Federation of the West Indies which he viewed as the destiny of the British Caribbean.
He felt that the ideas of Federation could best be advanced by the people's representatives in the various legislatures of the colonies. Each could best advertise and promote the concept of Federation and thus garner public support for its creation. The two, he felt, were intimately linked Federation and constitutional advancement, that is.
In 1947, at the Conference on Closer Union held in St. Kitts, Marryshow was among Grenada's three representatives. He was also present at the Conference of West Indies and served as one of Grenada's two Senators in the Federal House of Representatives when the Federation was created.
ADDITIONAL TEXT/SOURCES/INFO.
1. Augier, R.; Gordon, S, Sources of West Indian History
2. Brizan, George, Grenada: Island of Conflict
3. Steele, Beverly, Grenada: A History of its People
http://myspace.com/tamarryshow
* Veta Dawson teaches at the Immaculate Conception High School in St. Andrew.
December 31, 2008
Another shade of Black Panther - Richard Aoki
Richard Aoki (Field Marshall)
Growing up was know easy job for Richard at the early stages in his life he and his family were placed in an Internment camp during World War II, a childhood prisoner held at Topaz Concenation camp in Utah from 1942-1945. He joined the military at a young age, Having left the Army after two years of service, Richard was intimately aware of the vicious treatment and punishment that the U.S. government could meter out.
Being Japanese-American and growing up in Black West Oakland, he was tight with Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, as well as David Hilliard years before the party started. He also attended Merritt College for two years before transferring to U.C. Berkeley in 1966. Richard remembers" we had discussed pressing political, social issues of the day, that we wanted to do something about it, so we got together one night and hammed out the 10 point program of the Black Panther Party.
Richard said, there were several Asian American members of the BPP, he was the only one attain a formal leadership role. Richard attended the first meeting of the BPP his connection to the community along with revolutionary politics and his action made it easy for other Panthers to accept him as a equal, he was made branch captain they accepted his rank, and later in the Party Huey promoted him to Field Marshall. Richard said, "one of the first things the Party did was patrol the police of Oakland, they were killing a dude a week, and set up Political Education classes for members and the community."
Richard says" I've seen where unity amongst the races yielded positives results. I don't see any other way for people to gain freedom, justice, equality here except by being inclusionst"
Enrolling at U.C. Berkeley soon after the founding of the BPP, Richard became a leading member of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). A student based organization whom platform closely resembled the Party's 10 point program. Richard would recruit blacks on the campus by passing out information and telling students about the Party and when Elrage Clever started teaching classes on campus in 1968(Experienmental class 139X) he was there organizing for the BPP.
From 1968, onward Richard was involved in networking with various groups cutting across communities, and nationalities. Richard says" One of the least understood aspects of the liberation movement era is the impact that many Black, Brown, Yellow, Red radicals had on one another. Ideological and organizational influences spilled across vast distances, while Panthers absorbed Maoism, Asian Americans took to the lectures and speeches of Huey Newton, Chicanos and Puerto Rican radicals replicated some of the BPP' Serve the People programs" as well as Native Americans like groups like AIM".
Richard was a founding member of the Third World Liberation Front on the campus of UO Berkeley in 1969 which was a formation of African Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Mexican Americans, Asian students, striking to win demands for a Third World College on campus.
The college would include departments for Chicano studies, and Native American Asian, and Africans studies, with the aim of the program being to help oppressed minority communities in American. TWLF is were striking for the same basic demands that the students at San Francisco State were. The formation of radical students successfully challenged, the most conservative intuitions in the nation the University system and won vital space in the form of Ethnic Studies Depts. On both UC Berkeley as well as San Francisco State campuses With these new departments has made higher education transformed the cultural imagation of many people and communities of color, thanks to people like Richard Aoki who paved the way for many others to fellow. Richard said, "That if it not for the BPP the many student and political groups for students rights would not have emerge."
Note: Richard donated some of the first defend weapons for police patrols to the BPP. Richard has always been active in the communities, and today after he has retired from his job, he still doing workshops and speaking about the past as well as present conditions like the War, Economy, and Police Abuse.
Source:hppt://www.itsabouttimebpp.com
Kenny "Zulu" Whitmore
My name is Kenny Zulu Whitmore. I have been enslaved In Angola state prison Louisiana for the last thirty-two years, falsely charged and convicted of armed robbery and murder.
In December 1973 I was arrested on frivolous charges and held over for a magistrate hearing where a bond would be set. While awaiting my court appearance I found myself in a cage right across from a black man who struck me as a fearsome revolutionary. It turned out to be Herman Wallace. I was impressed with his words of wisdom, which enabled me to better understand the treatment and condition of my community by the police. I felt honored just to have been in his presence. There were others on the unit, but all you could hear was the voice of Herman. We talked all through the night after he learned why I was arrested. He explained that if my concern was to protect the people, my only route of doing so would be to educate myself of the political Kingdom and then organize the people to effectively challenge the ill that cripple the people. I realized my speaking out against drug dealers and police brutality alone would be viewed as a personal war and wouldn't achieve anything. He told me he and others had established a chapter of the Black Panther party in Angola, to fight against prison corruption. I gave him all my information because what he spoke of was what I needed in my life. I dare say it was my first true political education. The next day I learned he was there on trial for the death of a prison guard. At that time I believed he didn't stand a chance. In the mean time history has proven I was wrong. However, instead of focusing on his trial, he had many questions about community service and conditions. I ended up giving him my name and address. He told me he was officially making me a member of the Angola Chapter of the Black Panther Party. I was very honored but I had no idea what this man expected of me. But I knew about the Panthers and so I went back to the community with the idea of organizing the community against illegal drug trafficking.
On February 19, 1975 I was arrested again. This time charged with two counts of armed robbery of a Zachary shoe store. In June of 1975 all charges were dropped after both victims argued with the judge that I was not the person who did this crime. But I still couldn't go free. While awaiting an evidentiary hearing on the two robbery charges I was also charged with a 1973 robbery and murder. In this case the district attorney Ossie Brown came to me with a prepared confession and said, "You, Whitmore, were imprecated in the 1973 robbery and murder of Marshall Bond. And I know you didn't do this, but I need a key witness against the guy who did this and you are going to help me to get this guy." He, the then D.A., gave me the confession to read and sign. The D.A. told me out right, "You are going to take the stand against this guy and say what I have prepared in that confession for y'all. And I am going to give you five years. You will not go to Angola, and you will be out in two and a half years." I told him, "Man, I don't have any idea of what you are talking about." He said, "I am the district attorney and my word is three against yours. And I can do whatever I want to you. Now help me get this guy or I will send you to Angola for the rest of your life." I refused and they immediately started beating me with sticks.
On January 3-6, 1977 I was tried and found guilty of second-degree murder and armed robbery. The victim was a wealthy ex-Mayor, member of the KKK in Zachary, Louisiana, which is a small rural community in the northern part of East Baton Rouge Parish. In the early morning I was dragged from my house to the murder place. I was beaten up from that time till 10 in the evening in order to make me confess, which - of course - I did not.I was given life and ninety-nine years. I believe my incarceration on these charges is a direct result of my being out spoken against the police harassment and brutality in the community. The police had a procedure of randomly choosing a Black person and falsely charging them to clear their unsolved cases. On March 14, 1977 I arrived here at Angola. I was not here a good two hours before Angola guards jumped on me because I dared to complain of the guard throwing my mother's picture in the trash can. In a matter of minutes I was surrounded by guards in brown uniforms. I had an instant flash of Hitler's Brown Shirt Troops. They returned my personal property and within an hour I went before the classification board and I was assigned to CCR maximum security D-tier, which was known at that time as a militant tier. I was put in D#9. Once in the cage a Big Brother stopped and spoke to me. He told me his name was King Wilkerson. He told me that the tier was organized in a way to benefit everyone and explained to me what was expected of me while on that tier. King said Mondays were tier discussion days; any questions I might have about the structure of the tier would be discussed. Classes were held on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays: reading, writing, math, history and language. Albert Woodfox was teaching history. Albert Woodfox and I had become cool. Still, I had not learned of his connection with Hooks (Herman Wallace) until much later. But Woodfox and I fastly became best friends. About two weeks after being on D-tier, we had a confrontation with the guards and King was singled out and sent to Camp-J for breaking a guards jaw after they tried to jump him.
Since being on D-tier, I had heard the name Hooks many times, but had not had the opportunity to meet him because by the administration rules I could not go out on the yard for two years. And those two years were a learning experience - Woodfox was teaching me the principles of the BPP and the struggle here in Angola. Our goal was to organize all of the tiers of CCR.
In March of 1980, my two-year yard restriction was up. My third day on the yard Woodfox and I were out there with the brother everyone called Hooks. When I first saw him, I said to myself, I know this brother. I said "Herman from Baton Rouge Jail!". He remembered me and asked, "How long have you been here?" And Woodfox asked, "Y'all know each other?" Herman told him how we met and Woodfox said, "This is the little brother I have been telling you about." That very day on the yard our family began. Though Hooks made me a member of the Black Panther Party long time ago (1975), it was agreed upon by all of us that I would remain in the shadows to keep me from being exposed to the danger that they themselves faced. And I would be in a better position to walk from the shadows and by-pass some of the harassment that they were getting from the administration and the inmate hatchet men that the administration would place on the tier to try and destroy the collective lifestyle that had been established in CCR. And thus we could reach out in the general population area. In the spring of 1981, King had returned from Camp-J, and they put him back on D-tier with Woodfox and I. King had heard that I had become a member of the Black Panther Party through Wallace, and he too agreed that I should remain in the shadows out of the direct line of the administration fire.
Woodfox, Wilkerson, Wallace and I would often be on the yard at the same time. Thereafter, I think security suspected that I had become a member of the Black Panther Party. They started with their harassment. I had too many books and I needed to put this or that in my locker box. And when I would go before the classification board, they would tell me, "We heard you are a Black militant. We hate Black militants. Denied." And when I asked why I was being denied release from CCR, they would say "nature of original reason".
In September of 1981, I was sent to Camp-J for, as security said, a partially dismantled zip gun they found in my cell. 'Camp-J' was security for lil' torture camp. I stayed at Camp-J for three weeks before I was on transfer back to CCR. While back on the tier I was on, I saw the guards brutally beat two guys on the tier. Then they dragged them off as though they were dead animals. I immediately started to organize the tier. I asked guys on the tier to set their differences aside and become one voice. Two nights later three guards came down the tier harassing a few people about b.s. stuff, then they stopped in front of a guy's cell who clearly had mental problems. We all stood at the bars with homemade missiles to throw at them if they had attacked that guy. The guards left with a "we'll be back" look on their faces. The very next day I was transferred back to CCR, security's way of preventing me from spreading our revolutionary ideas at Camp-J.
The only reason I am being denied release from CCR is my connection with A-3 and my political concepts. My only reason for stepping out of the shadows is the truth of the guard's death back in the 1970's, which has now been proven to be part of a conspiracy against Albert and Herman. I was recruited by Herman Hooks Wallace into the Black Panther Party in 1974; once I got to Angola I participated in the Angola chapter of the Black Panther Party. Other comrades who made up the Angola Chapter, I later learned of. It was the prison authorities and the FBI trying to learn the names of Panthers and it was for that reason everyone became a shadow.
My being in the Shadow has nothing to do with my activism. I have been a part of the A-3 committee since its inception. Right now I have a motion before the court to correct my sentence. I have an illegal sentence for which I intend to prove that could very well set me free. The Louisiana State Court just recently ordered my trial court to respond to my motion, and if the judge applies this motion to the letter of the law, he would have no choice other than to correct this sentence and set me free.
So here I am, out of the shadow,
IN THE STRUGGLE.
Source:http://www.freezulu.co.uk
November 30, 2008
Dr. Jill Tracy Biden
Dr. Jill (Jacobs) Tracy Biden was raised in Willow Grove, PA. Jill is the oldest of five sisters, and the daughter of Bonny, a stay-at-home mom, and Donald, a banker. Both her parents are deceased.
Jill and Joe met when she was a student at the University of Delaware, an introduction arranged by Joe's brother. When Joe called to ask her out, Jill made sure to mention she was not impressed with his title and that he should feel lucky that she had voted for him. At the time, Joe had two sons, Beau and Hunter.
The couple dated for two years, and, on June 17, 1977, they were married at the United Nations chapel in New York City. Jill has said that when she married Joe, she knew she was marrying the whole family, including his two sons. Beau and Hunter joined the couple on their honeymoon.
In 1981, Joe and Jill had a daughter, Ashley. All of the children are now grown and five grandchildren -- Naomi, Finnegan, Maisy, Natalie, and Hunter Biden -- have been added to the family. Beau is the Attorney General of the State of Delaware and a captain in the Delaware National Guard. Hunter is a lawyer; and Ashley is employed as a social worker.
Jill is in her 15th year at Delaware Technical Community College, where she teaches English composition. She also spent 13 years in the public schools, where she was a Reading specialist and English teacher as well as a part-time teacher with the Rockford Psychiatric Hospital Adolescent Program.
While working full-time and raising a family, Jill earned two masters degrees: a Master's degree in English from Villanova University (1987) and a Master's degree in reading from West Chester University (1981). And in January 2007, Jill earned her Doctorate in Education from the University of Delaware. Her dissertation focused on how to retain students in community colleges.
Jill has always been active and engaged in the issues that matter to her most, like health care. Jill had four friends with breast cancer, one of whom died. She thought that as an educator there was something she could do. In 1993, Jill started the Biden Breast Health Initiative, which in the past 15 years has educated more than 7,000 ninth-through-twelfth grade girls in Delaware about proper breast health.
Jill is also involved with Delaware Boots on the Ground, an organization that helps military families whose needs are not being met by existing programs or who have fallen through the cracks. This summer, she also started a program called Book Buddies to get kids reading at an early age. The program helps low-income children and raises money to buy books.
Jill makes sure to keep active, running 5 miles 5 days a week. She also ran in the Marine Corps Marathon.
Michelle Obama
When people ask Michelle Obama to describe herself, she doesn't hesitate. First and foremost, she is Malia and Sasha's mom.
But before she was a mother -- or a wife, lawyer, or public servant -- she was Fraser and Marian Robinson's daughter.
The Robinsons lived on the South Side of Chicago, on the top floor of a brick bungalow. Fraser was a pump operator for the Chicago water department. He was a hero to Michelle and her older brother Craig -- even though he had multiple sclerosis, he hardly ever missed a day of work. Marian stayed home to raise Michelle and Craig, skillfully managing a busy household filled with love, laughter, and important life lessons. Fraser and Marian valued hard work, independence, and honesty. Today, their children point to their parents as their greatest teachers.
Michelle attended Chicago public schools, then Princeton. She studied sociology and African American studies, graduated in the class of 1985, and earned admission to Harvard Law School. When she returned to Chicago in 1988, she joined the law firm Sidley & Austin.
After a few years, Michelle realized that corporate law was not her calling. So she left to give back to the city she loves and to help others serve their communities. She worked for City Hall, becoming the assistant commissioner of planning and development. Then she became the founding executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that prepares young people for public service. Today, more than 350 young leaders have graduated from Public Allies Chicago.
Michelle got one great thing out of working for a corporate law firm -- that's where she met Barack. They were married in 1992. Today, they have two daughters -- Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7. Like their mom, both girls were born on the South Side of Chicago.
Since 1996, Michelle has worked for the University of Chicago. As associate dean of student services, she developed the university's first community service program. Later, she became the vice president of community and external affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center. Under Michelle's leadership, volunteering skyrocketed, both in the hospital and the community. Hospital employees serving in the community increased nearly fivefold, while community members volunteering in the hospital nearly quadrupled.
Since Barack began his campaign in early 2007, Michelle has met thousands of Americans, hearing their concerns and hopes for the future. As someone who knows the challenge of balancing work and family, Michelle has held roundtables with working women to hear about their struggle to do it all, particularly in a failing economy. In these discussions, Michelle heard the unique stories of military spouses, who work hard to keep their families together while their loved ones are away.
"We held a roundtable for military spouses at Fort Bragg," Michelle says. "It felt like the first time that many of these women had even been asked how they were doing. The tears and the stories went on and on. So we had another roundtable, and then another one."
Michelle looks forward to continuing her work on the issues close to her heart -- supporting military families, helping working women balance work and family, and encouraging national service.
"My first priority will always be to make sure that our girls are healthy and grounded," she says. "Then I want to help other families get the support they need, not just to survive, but to thrive.
"Policies that support families aren't political issues. They're personal. They're the causes I carry with me every single day."
U.S.A. Vice President-Elect
Joe Biden is a rare mix. A leader who has worked for decades in Washington, but has never lived there. An expert on foreign policy, whose heart and values are firmly rooted in the middle class. He has stared down dictators, and spoken for America's cops and firefighters. He is uniquely suited to serve as Barack Obama’s partner in the urgent mission to bring about the change America needs to put our country back on track.
U.S.A. President - Elect
Barack Obama was raised by a single mother and his grandparents. They didn't have much money, but they taught him values from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. He took out loans to put himself through school. After college, he worked for Christian churches in Chicago, helping communities devastated when steel plants closed. Obama turned down lucrative job offers after law school to return to Chicago, leading a successful voter registration drive. He joined a small law firm, taught constitutional law and, guided by his Christian faith, stayed active in his community. Obama and his wife Michelle are proud parents of two daughters, Sasha and Malia.
November 25, 2008
Statement From Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier
Written by Leonard Peltier
My Relatives and Friends,
Last night a change in this country took place that not too long ago
many people said would never happen.
An African-American was elected to the White House and by a major landslide,which gives him a mandate by the public to fulfill his promises. This landslideindicates the people have placed their hope with this man they call their president for a change in this country.
HOPE. There have been times if I can even recall what it really means
to have hope that justice is right around the corner. I've been
mislead and disappointed so many times that I would soon see justice
and to have it denied upon a technicality in legal appeals. Or like
what happened eight years ago. Everyone placed their hope and trust
with a couple named Bill and Hillary, but we were betrayed at the last
minute. I know that many of my friends, family and supporters were
crushed. I began to feel the weight and pressure of a lifetime being
unjustly imprisoned began to crowd me into a corner of my cell and
then in my mind. But, it was this thing that has been our battle cry
for so many years, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse". I remembered what
he stood for and remained a warrior until his last breath. It is a
strength that we stand upon when we are right. We were right to be in
Oglala and we were right to be prepared to defend ourselves. What
wasn't right is that a jury never got to hear any of this testimony,
and the rest of the trial was a product of the fabrication and then
manipulation of the FBI. This spirit of Crazy Horse is a spirit of
being in total resistance to the wrongs perpetuated towards your
people, community, family and yourself. Some of us called it outrage,
but that is just merely an emotion without resolving the issue. It is
when we make a conscious choice to try and balance the wrongs in this
society that we are being compelled by this spirit of resistance to
stand in defense of the wronged.
That spirit cannot be conquered, and I refused to submit and give in
when it appeared there may be no hope It was because of the letters of
support and encouragement from so many people that I continued on for
another eight years. And now people seem to feel there is a change
blowing in the wind and that the election of Obama is a manifestation
of that change.
I sincerely hope so, because I am now 64 years old and coming up on my
33 year of being confined and fighting for justice and my freedom,
Obama may be my last chance at securing my freedom. If there is one
thing I learned from earlier campaigns on my clemency is that he won't
just be able to do it by himself. He is going to need your support in
the form of public opinion on the case. That isn't going to happen
until we can create education and awareness on the circumstances of my
case across this country and send letters. Be a Branch Support Group
to help create public opinion. My case has to be a national issue on
justice denied, it may sound easy, but it isn't. The FBI has been an
opposing force in attempting to discredit my cause and that of Native
people since they focused their attention on the American Indian
Movement in the 1970's. When it appeared that Clinton might
actually grant clemency, the agents went and demonstrated at the White
House and utilized their resources to create doubt in the mind of
Clinton.
So in the national awareness goals of the branch support groups it is
going to be your challenge to keep the public interest focused. It is
also another hope that with a whole generation of people who were born
after my wrongful conviction that there will be a renewed source of
energy and actions.
One point that I would like everyone to focus on right now is a "30
year law" regarding my sentence and parole. At the time I was
convicted, the guidelines said:
"Any prisoner, …shall be released on parole… after serving thirty
years of each consecutive term or terms of more than forty-five years
including any life term, whichever is earlier: Provided, however, That
the Commission shall not release such prisoner if it determines that
he has seriously or frequently violated institution rules and
regulations or that there is a reasonable probability that he will
commit any Federal, State, or local crime." 28 U.S.C. section 28
U.S.C. §4206(d)
I've served more than 30 years of this sentence and have been
considered a model prisoner And the likelihood of committing any
crimes is non-existent due to my age and the humanitarian work I've
pursued to help my people since my incarceration. According to this
law, they have to grant me a parole to my next sentence. But as we've
learned from the past, we cannot take anything for granted so your
letters should be focused on this law to the parole commission and
congressional leaders. If the commission complies with the letter and
spirit of this law, we will have made a significant step towards my
freedom and we will need to maintain and increase this momentum.
The Committee and I have been discussing several ideas and projects to
make this a pro-active campaign. We are currently rebuilding the
former LPSG's into LPBSG's. This is necessary due to a breakdown with
the former Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. I had to turn to my
sister and niece to help me rebuild my defense committee from scratch.
We had no files, records, and merchandise. We have not been able to
make contact with the former coordinator of the LPDC. We are still
hoping to resolve this issue, but until then we needed to keep moving
with the campaign.
We still need all of our former contacts and supporters to reconnect
with us and to update the information so that my Committee can handle
correspondences and contributions. We need everyone who has supported
me to contact the LPDOC and sign onto our list serve so that you can
be updated with information on progress or activities needed in my
campaign.
I will need everyone to work with my Committee and clear any action
with the appropriate people within the Committee. It is important that
we all work together cohesively, instead of scattering our efforts or
resources. We do not intend to discourage ideas or creativity, but we
would like to incorporate such ideas into a unified larger effort and
not act prematurely on some plans we may have not disclosed due to
timing or details being worked out.
Some of the projects we have discussed are conducting rides, walks,
runs and events across the country to create this awareness of my
case. We are initiating efforts to ask bands and artists to host
fundraisers in their area. We've talked about strategies we could
undertake to further my cause, but a lot will depend on how quickly
people come to form my BSG and start organizing in their area.
I also understand that some of us have personality issues with other
people. I hope that many of you can pray or find a way to rise above
this obstacle and work together for one common purpose. I would like
to see so many of my supporters come together in a show of solidarity.
If there really is a change in the air, we will need each other to
bring about change in so many other areas. For me it has been about
our culture and right to be who we are, but foremost it has been the
children and the next generation. WE were supposed to leave a better
world behind for them and how much have we accomplished? I know that
somehow and someway my sacrifice will not be in vain and that the
years I've endured this pain of loneliness and suffering in
confinement will make a better world for those children and coming
generations. That along with my freedom is my hope, but I will not be
able to fulfill it without you. So take a few minutes and educate yourself on the
injustices of my case. It may shock and outrage you, but you can do
something about it, so join us.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
Leonard Peltier
Political Prisoner - Robert 'Seth' Hayes
Robert 'Seth' Hayes is one of the longest-held political prisoners in the USA. Born in the Bronx in 1948, Seth was imprisoned due to his activity in the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, a fighting formation which grew out of the Black liberation movement of the 1960's.
It was in the period of social upheaval in the late 1960's that Seth radicalized and joined the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation army. Drafted into the U.S. Army and sent off to fight in Vietnam, Seth was wounded and awarded a variety of military awards including the Purple Heart, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, and the Vietnam Campaign Medal. Back in the U.S., when riots exploded across the nation in response to the April 4th, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Seth's troop was ordered to assist in putting down the massive rebellions which took place and spread across the United States. According to Seth, "it was the saddest day of my life, and I could never identify again with the aims of the armed forces or the government."
After the assassination of Martin Luther King and the social upheaval which followed it, Robert Seth Hayes joined the Black Panther Party, working in the Party's free medical clinics and free breakfast programs. Seth, like many other activists was then forced underground by FBI and police repression of the Panther movement.
In 1973, following a shootout with police, Seth was arrested and convicted of the murder of a New York City police officer, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Seth has always maintained his innocence. Jailed for over 30 years, Seth has long since served the time he was sentenced to and while in prison he has worked as a librarian, pre release advisor, and AIDS councilor. He has remained drug and alcohol free throughout his entire period of incarceration and has maintained a charge free record in prison. Seth first came up for parole in 1998, but prison officials have refused to release him, and are effectively punishing him for having been a member of the Black Panther Party, and of having remained true to his ideals after 30 years behind bars.
Seth has been diagnosed with Hepatitis C and adult onset Diabetes since the year 2000. Unfortunately, despite his repeated requests Seth has not been receiving adequate health care from Clinton Correction Facility, (the prison where he is currently being held) and his condition has steadily deteriorated.
http://www.sethhayes.org
THE TRUTH ABOUT SIS. ASSATA SHAKUR
PLEASE DISTRIBUTE THE TRUTH ABOUT SIS. ASSATA SHAKUR FAR AND WIDE!
Written by Evelyn A. Williams
LET NO ONE BE FOOLED BY THE FILTHY LIES OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA! via: www.assatashakur.org
Assata Shakur's Appeal Attorney Shares Facts in Case (2005)
PLEASE REDISTRIBUTE
STATEMENT OF FACTS IN THE NEW JERSEY TRIAL OF ASSATA SHAKUR:
Written by Evelyn A. Williams, dated June 25, 2005
(Translations in French and Spanish available at www.assatashakur.org)
Traducción Española
Pour ceux parlant Français
As a member of Assata's New Jersey trial legal defense team, and her appeal lawyer, I think a correct statement of the circumstances of New Jersey Trooper Werner Foerster's death as established by exhibits, trial testimony and forensic evidence and that conclusively repudiate the revisionist lies now being advanced by the State of New Jersey as "fact", need to be repeated.
It is be remember that the only surviving eyewitnesses to the NJ Turnpike shoot-out were (1) Sundiata Acoli, (2) Trooper Harper, (3) Assata and (4) the driver of a car traveling along the NJ Turnpike at the time of the incident. Zayd Malik Shakur, a passenger, was killed during the shootout.
1. Sundiata did not testify at trial, nor did he make any pre-trial statements.
2. Harper's testimony and actions are contained in the following documents (admitted into evidence)
a. The three official investigative reports prepared by Harper, in which he wrote that after he stopped the Pontiac, he ordered Sundiata to the back of the car to show his driver's license to Trooper Foerster who had arrived at the scene. That Sundiata complied without incident. That as he looked into the inside door of the Pontiac to check the registration, Foerster yelled at him and held up an ammunition clip. He stated that at the same time Assata reached into a red pocketbook, removed a gun from it and fired at him. That he immediately ran to the rear of his car and fired at Assata, who had emerged from the car, and was firing at him from a prostrate position alongside of the Pontiac. And it was at this point that he shot her. (admitted into evidence)
b. His Grand Jury testimony where he swore under oath to the truth of the statements he had made in his 3 official reports. (admitted into evidence)
c. Trial transcripts of his testimony at both Sundiata's and Assata's trials where he admitted, under cross-examination, that he had lied in all three of his official reports and in his Grand Jury testimony. That the truth was that Foerster had never shown him an ammunition clip; that Foerster had not yelled to him; that he had not seen a gun in Assata's hand while she was seated in the car; that Assata did not shoot him from the car; and that he had not seen a red pocketbook.
d. Audio tapes of the official recorded NJ Turnpike radio communications between all NJ State Trooper cars traveling the Turnpike near the scene of the shoot-out, dated May 2, 1973, which revealed that two additional turnpike patrol cars, those driven by Trooper Robert Palenchar and Trooper Woerner Foerster, had been ordered to aid Harper at the stop prior to the shoot-out. (admitted into evidence)
e. The verbatim, hand-written record of what transpired inside the NJ Turnpike Administration Building when Harper entered it at or about 1AM on May 2, 1973, to report the shoot-out to Sergeant Chester Baginski who was in charge of maintaining the official record of turnpike occurrences on that (refereed to as the Station Bible). Harper reported that he had just been involved in a shoot-out after he had stopped a Pontiac containing three Black people, two men and a woman, that he had been wounded, and that the Pontiac was proceeding South on the turnpike. He gave the license plate number, but did not mention that Trooper Foerster had arrived at the scene. (admitted into evidence)
f. Audio tapes of the investigation conducted by Detective Sgt. First Class Richard H. Kelly in the Administration Building at 7:37AM that morning to determine why over an hour elapsed from the time Harper entered the Administration Building that night and the discovery of Foerster's body. Statements by each of the troopers present when Harper came into the Administration Building revealed that Harper had not reported Foerster's presence at the scene and that no one was aware of the fact that Foerster lay on the road beside his car in front of the Administration building for over an hour, when his body was accidentally discovered by Trooper O'Rourke who had left the Administration building to investigate the scene of the shoot-out, less than 200 yards away. (admitted into evidence)
3. Assata testified that Harper stopped the car without any known reason, shot her with her arms raised at his demand, and then shot her in the back as she was turning to avoid his bullets. Almost mortally wounded, and semi-conscious, she climbed into the backseat of the Pontiac to avoid further bullets. Sundiata drove the car five miles down the road and parked it, where she remained until State Troopers dragged her onto the road.
4. A driver traveling north along the turnpike at the time of the incident testified at trial that he had seen a State Trooper struggling with a Black man between a parked white vehicle and a State Trooper car whose overhead revolving lights lit up the area. He was unable to identify the Black man, and further stated that he saw no one else on the road or at the scene. He immediately reported what he had seen to New Jersey Police Headquarters.
It therefore remained only forensic evidence to help determine the facts of that night as much as they could be determined. The forensic evidence examined by both the New Jersey crime laboratory in Trenton, New Jersey and FBI crime laboratories in Washington, D.C. established the following:
1. The finger print analyses of every gun and every piece of ammunition found at the scene showed there were no fingerprints of Assata found on any of them. (The official analyses admitted into evidence)
2. Neutron Activation Analysis taken immediately after Assata was taken to the hospital that night showed there was no gun power residue on her hands. Effectively refuting the possibility that she had fired a gun. (The official analyses were admitted into evidence)
3. As a result of the bullet Harper shot under her armpit, while her arms were raised in, her median nerve was severed, immediately paralyzing her entire right arm, shattering her clavicle, and lodging in her chest so close to her heart that an operation to remove it was not feasible. A neurologist testified to that fact at the trial.
4. A pathologist testified that "There is no conceivable way that the bullet could have traveled over to the clavicle if her arm was down. That trajectory is impossible."
5. A surgeon testified that "it was anatomically necessary that both arms be in the air for Ms. Chesimard to have received the wounds she did."
The state offered no expert witnesses to refute this medical testimony.
6. Photographs depicting the gunshot entry wound under her armpit and the entry would of the bullet Harper shot into her back were admitted into evidence during the trial.
Therefore, since no evidence existed that proved Assata fired the bullet that killed Trooper Foerster, why was she found guilty of his murder? There are several explanations:
The first is that the climate of hatred, prejudice and racism that had so contaminated the Middlesex County jury pool in 1973 that a change of venue was ordered, continued to exist in 1977. The unanimous opinion of the 1973 jury pool was "If she's Black, she's guilty." After three defense motions for change of venue, Judge Leon Gerofsky granted the motion, stating, "It was almost impossible to obtain a jury here comprised of people willing to accept the responsibility of impartiality so that defendants will be protected from transitory passion and prejudice." The trial was then moved to Morris County where Assata's trial was severed from Sundiata's because of her pregnancy.
In 1977 Assata began trial for the second time in this same Middlesex County, and this time jury nullification was insured: The jurors chosen to determine Assata's guilt or innocence consisted of five jurors who were either relatives or close personal friends of state troopers or of state law enforcement officers.
However, Assata was not convicted of firing the shot that killed Trooper Foerster. She was convicted as an accomplice to his murder under New Jersey's "aiding and abetting" statute. Under New Jersey law, if a person's presence at the scene of a crime can be construed as "aiding and abetting" the crime, that person can be convicted of the substantive crime itself. Judge Theodore Appleby charged the jury that they were permitted to speculate that Assata's "mere presence" at a scene of violence, with weapons in the vehicle, was sufficient to sustain a conviction of the murder of Trooper Foerster. She was also convicted of possession of weapons – none of which could be identified as having been handled by her and of the attempted murder of Trooper Harper, who had sustained a flesh wound at the time of the shootout.
Now, 32 years after her conviction, a new, fabricated version of Foerster's death has emerged:
There is absolutely no evidence to support statements made by Col. Joseph R. Fuentes, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, who said that "It was later determined that Werner Foerster's service weapon was ripped from his holster as he lay wounded on the pavement, and he was executed with two shots to the head from his own service weapon."
But his motivation for making those statements is clear:
1. To justify Assata being placed on the domestic terror watch list along with Osama bin Ladin. He said, "Anyone with a mindset that would execute a police officer once they were on the ground is dangerous enough to be considered a domestic terrorism threat." But Assata is the only person convicted of a single domestic crime who has been classified a terrorist and put on the terrorism watch list, thereby nullifying the very definition of "terrorism"
2. To justify the $1 million dollar bounty to be paid from tax payers money. He said, "The reward money should make Chesimard a much more attractive quarry for professional bounty hunters."
New Jersey State Assembly Speaker, Albio Sires, a longtime member of CANF (Cuban American National Foundation, representing Cuban exiles), said: "If Cuba's citizenry could be informed of the $1 million bounty and the real story of Chesimard's crimes, there is an increased likelihood of her being brought to Justice…. We want the Cuban people to know the real story about Joanne Chesimard and not the deceptive representation advanced by the Castro regime. We want people to realize that she is not a hero and she is really a violent criminal who is wanted for killing a State Trooper and escaping justice."
By falsely asserting that Assata shot Foerster in the head while he lay helplessly on the ground, killing him "execution style", the US Justice Department hopes to strip Assata of any of the sympathy and political support she now receives in the United States and from the citizens of Cuba. By labeling her a cold-blooded cop killer, the hope is that the real circumstances of the NJ Turnpike as well as all the years prior to that event during which time Assata was relentlessly hunted with the stated purpose of killing her on sight for having committed crimes of which the government knew she was innocent, will be forgotten.
But even as official lies are now being manufactured to convert Assata into a terrorist, so that Cuba can be accused of "harboring a terrorist" and to justify kidnapping her, there are, in fact, two well-known and admitted, convicted terrorists who are now being given safe harbor in the United States.
The US government has refused to extradite admitted terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, (charged with the shoot down of a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing 73 civilians and convicted of other terrorist acts including the Bay of Pigs). The US government has also refused to extradite Posada's convicted fellow terrorist, Orlando Bosch, who escaped from Venezuela and came to Miami in 1987 with the assistance of the CANF, Jeb Bush and his father, the then US Attorney, Gonzalez, who personally approved the bounty, also approved prisoner torture at Abu Ghreb. Or that the approval came after New Jersey resident, Michael Chertoff, was named Secretary of the Department of Homeland Defense.
There are the facts. Let us not forget them.
- Evelyn A. Williams
The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: An Innocent Man on Death Row
Who is Mumia Abu-Jamal?
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a renowned journalist from Philadelphia who has been in prison since 1981 and on death row since 1983 for allegedly shooting Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He is known as the “Voice of the Voiceless” for his award- winning reporting on police brutality and other social and racial epidemics that plague communities of color in Philadelphia and throughout the world. Mumia has received international support over the years in his efforts to overturn his unjust conviction.
Mumia Abu-Jamal was serving as the President of the Association of Black Journalists at the time of his arrest. He was a founding member of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Black Panther Party as a teenager. Years later he began reporting professionally on radio stations such as NPR, and was the news director of Philadelphia station WHAT. Much of his journalism called attention to the blatant injustice and brutality he watched happen on a daily basis to MOVE, a revolutionary organization that works to protect all forms of life--human, animal, plant--and the Earth as a whole.
The Scene
In 1981, Mumia worked as a cab driver at night to supplement his income. On December 9th he was driving his cab through the red light district of downtown Philadelphia at around 4 a.m. Mumia testifies that he let off a fare and parked near the corner of 13th and Locust Streets. Upon hearing gunshots, he turned and saw his brother, William Cook, staggering in the street. Mumia exited the cab and ran to the scene, where he was shot by a uniformed police officer and fell to the ground, fading in and out of consciousness. Within minutes, police arrived on the scene to find Officer Faulkner and Mumia shot; Faulkner died. Mumia was arrested, savagely beaten, thrown into a paddy wagon and driven to a hospital a few blocks away (suspiciously, it took over 30 minutes to arrive at the hospital). Mumia somehow survived.
The Trial
The trial began in 1982 with Judge Sabo (who sent more people to death row than any other judge) presiding. Mumia wished to represent himself and have John Africa as his legal advisor, but before jury selection had finished, this right was revoked and an attorney was forcibly appointed for him. Throughout the trial, Mumia was accused of disrupting court proceedings and was not allowed to attend most of his own trial. Sabo lived up to his nickname of “Prosecutor in Robes.”
The Evidence:
The prosecution claimed that the shot which killed Faulkner came from Mumia Abu-Jamal’s legally registered .38-caliber weapon, contradicting the medical examiner’s report that the bullet removed from Faulkner’s brain was a .44-caliber. This fact was kept from the jury. Moreover, a ballistics expert found it incredible that police at the scene failed to test Mumia’s gun to see if has been recently fired, or to test his hands for powder residue. One of the most damning prosecution claims was that Mumia confessed at the hospital. However, this confession was not reported until nearly two months after December 9th, immediately after Mumia had filed a brutality suit against the police. One of the officers who claims to have heard the confession is Gary Wakshul. However, in his police report on that day he stated, “the Negro male made no comments.” Dr. Coletta, the attending physician who was with Mumia the entire time, says that he never heard Mumia speak.
The Witnesses:
The star prosecution witness, a prostitute named Cynthia White, was someone no other witness reported seeing at the scene. During the trial of Billy Cook (Mumia’s brother) just weeks before Mumia’s trial, White gave testimony completely contradictory to what she stated at Mumia’s trial. Her testimony at Billy Cook’s trial placed someone at the scene who was not there when police arrived. This corroborates the other five witness accounts that someone fled the scene. In a 1997 hearing, another former prostitute, Pamela Jenkins, testified that White was acting as a police informant. Other sworn testimony revealed that witness coercion was routinely practiced by the police. In 1995, eyewitness William Singletary testified that police repeatedly tore up his initial statement--that the shooter fled the scene--until he finally signed something acceptable to them. The following year, witness Veronica Jones came forward to testify that she had been coerced into changing her initial statement that two men fled the scene. Witness Billy Cook, who was present the whole time, has stated very clearly that Mumia is absolutely innocent.
The Sentence:
Due to police manipulation of witnesses, fabrication of evidence, and the rights of the defense severely denied, Mumia was found guilty. He was sentenced to death during the penalty phase based solely on his political beliefs. Mumia has been unjustly separated from his family for twenty-two years, with the threat of death looming over his head.
New Witnesses:
In 2001, court stenographer Terri Maurer-Carter came forward and stated that in 1982, before Mumia’s trial began, she heard Judge Sabo say, “Yeah, and I’m going to help them fry the n****r.” He was referring to Mumia. This backs up evidence of judicial bias and racism in Mumia’s case. In the same year, esteemed Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington stated that on the morning of December 9th, 1981, he went to the scene to report on it--and no police were present. This backs up prior claims that police didn’t handle the crime scene properly.
The Confession:
In 1999, Arnold Beverly confessed to killing Officer Faulkner. This confession is validated by a lie detector test administered by eminent polygraph expert Charles Honts. Despite concrete evidence supporting this confession, the Philadelphia District Attorney has refused to investigate, and the courts have not even allowed it to be heard. The injustice continues . . .
The Decisions:
On December 18th, 2001, Judge Yohn issued a decision on the Habeas Corpus petition
in Federal District Court. He upheld Mumia’s unjust conviction, but challenged the sentencing phase (the death sentence). This means there could be a new sentencing hearing after all appeals are resolved, but the only options are life in prison with no possibility of parole or another death sentence. This is not justice. There is massive evidence of Mumia’s innocence and he should be absolutely free. Mumia’s legal team
filed an appeal of this decision in January of 2002. Mumia remains on death row until
all appeals by both sides are heard.
Judge Pamela Dembe’s November 21, 2001, rejection of Mumia’s request to reopen the PCRA hearings was appealed by Mumia’s legal team. Judge Dembe based her decision almost entirely on the Peterkin case, which has just been overturned! On October 8, 2003, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the appeal, stating that the Beverly confession cannot be heard due to time limitations. The court also stated that Terri Maurer-Carter’s testimony is irrelevant. The struggle continues.
The Movement:
A broad international movement has formed in support of Mumia. Celebrities such as Danny Glover, Ossie Davis, and Susan Sarandon, world leaders like Nelson Mandela, Danielle Mitterand (former First Lady of France), and Fidel Castro, governing bodies
such as the Japanese Diet, 22 members of the British Parliament, and the European Parliament have all recognized the blatant injustice in this case and have called for a new trial at the very least. Millions of people throughout the world have taken to the streets to protest his unjust imprisonment.
Mumia’s case has been a unifying point for many social struggles because it concentrates issues vitally important to our future, such as the rise in prison populations, police brutality, the death penalty, persecution of political dissent, and the continuation of white supremacy and racism in the U.S. From death row, Mumia has continued to speak out for all who are oppressed through his journalism. He has published four books, and his weekly columns are published throughout the world. His case is one of the most important social justice fights of our time.
*For a statement by Immortal Technique on the Significance of Mumia, click here
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) • freemumia@freemumia.com • (212) 330-8029
Continue reading "The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: An Innocent Man on Death Row" »
November 03, 2008
Nina B.
Nina B is a native New Yorker who was born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn, two of hip-hop’s breading grounds. Hip-hop is her genre, and every rhyme she writes brings her one step closer to carving what will soon become her legacy in the history of the music game. At the tender age of six, Nina recorded her first rhyme on her playschool recorder. By age 9, she had written enough to have a catalog of poetry and music, which would soon pave the path to her becoming one of hip-hop’s most promising female artist. As a young girl, Nina experienced the harsh reality of the streets and the trials and tribulations life had to offer. This attributes to the realness in the rhymes that she writes and her strength to overcome adversity. Nina spent her teenage years writing and educating herself on the ins and outs of the music industry. By age 16, Nina was offered a major record deal, which she professionally declined. By nineteen, NINA B was an active participant in Russell Simmons/Bruce Willis Art Start and Hip-Hop Project, where she met Amber Ravenel, CEO of Ravenel Records. In 2003, Nina B signed with Ravenel Records, becoming the first female artist on their roster. Since then, Nina has released six mix-tapes, did a barrage of live performances at venues throughout the New York/Tri-State area, has been featured on some of hip-hop’s most notable sites, and publications. As a female artist signed to an independent label run by a woman, Nina B and Amber Ravenel have broken down barriers in what has always been considered a male dominated industry. Nina’s song ‘Can’t Stop” has been pick of the week on Hot 97’s morning show with Miss Jones and DJ Envy. She has made four appearances on Rap City, a record for an independent female artist. She has also been highlighted on The Drhama Hour with DJ Kayslay and his Sirius Satellite Radio Show, Cipher Sounds “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” Show, and “On The Spot” with DJ Green Lantern. These are all huge accomplishments for an artist not signed to a major record deal, being represented by an independent label. Combine Nina B’s consistency, diligent work ethics, and lyrical flow, with the misfortunes of her past serving as her strength for her future, and you have a female artist whose future and success has no limits.
http://www.ravenelrecords.com/ http://www.myspace.com/ninabmusic
Straight out of Brownsville; Agallah "The Don Bishop"
Agallah (also known as 8-Off The Assassinator or Don Bishop), born Angel Aguilar, is a Puerto Rican and Filipino-American rapper who was a member of the The Diplomats-affiliated group Purple City and the group Propain Campain. He was formerly known as 8-Off Agallah, but changed the name because it was controversial; 8-Off is a variation of the name Adolf, as in Adolf Hitler. He has ghostwritten songs for many well-known artists. In addition to producing his own music, he also produced tracks for Busta Rhymes, Remy Ma, The Diplomats, Guru, Rockin' Squat, Sean Price, Saigon, Mobb Deep and Big Pun. In 1996, he finished his debut album, Wrap Your Lips Around This but it was never properly released due to label folding. The album was available for a short time and is now considered a rarity.
It was 1996, the CMJ Convention. Supernat and Craig G had just finished up their now legendary battle when they handed the mic to a young lyricist. Not just anyone could follow such a battle, but they knew Agallah was one of the few that could. They gave me the mic and really they done smashed the crowd in half, Agallah remembers so to go .. them you got to come crush it so reality is I crushed like the whole convention with some bars and everybody was like yo, that kid is the truth, when is he dropping an album? That was the question with everybody. The answer is, finally, now, with the release of Ag's solo debut album You Already Know . The fans from that night may not have enjoyed the instant gratification of getting an album from Agallah right away, but nothing in Brooklyn native's life has come easy. Agallah is from the Brownsville projects, a place he deems the worst project in Brooklyn. These parts out here, he continued these projects, they're meant to intake you, swallow you and spit you out. In the case of Agallah the projects have done just that to him, and more than once. I done got the bad hand dealt to me, he explains my whole life has just been straight chaos. The chaos for Agallah started with his family. Growing up he witnessed almost everyone that was close to him pass away. Agallah's grandfather, whom he credits as the backbone of the family, passed away first, quickly followed by an uncle who died of AIDS. The final straw came when Agallah's mother was murdered. Shit just started being a domino effect like why the fuck is this shit happening to me? My moms passed away but my own family didn't tell me, somebody that I went to school with said yo they buried your moms. Agallah remembers they didn't even tell me where they buried her, so it hurts. They tried to hide it from me because they knew I would go crazy, which I did. Agallah grew his hair long after his mother's passing and started spazzing out. His wildness almost led to his own death one night at The Tunnel, a nightclub in NYC that was notorious for its violent episodes. One night I went up in there in the bathroom and somebody pulled out a razor, pick-pocketed me, slashed me on my neck and almost cut my jugular vein and left me for dead. Agallah calls the near death experience a wake up call. Who he was associating himself with become of extreme importance. Most people, however, figured Agallah was finished. Everybody was just like he's through, he's finished, he's done, ain't nobody looking out for the cat. The truth of the matter was, however, plenty of people were checkin' for Agallah, they were just all in the music industry. While his personal life was falling apart, his musical career was showing signs of life. Unfortunately, much like in his personal life, every time one of those signs of life came up the rug was quickly pulled out from under him. Agallah signed his first deal when he was 17, with Tommy Boy . He considered this his first invite to have his talent showcased. His talent wasn't showcased, though, as Agallah notes I was this young raw energy and they didn't know how to market or promote me so I lost the deal. From Tommy Boy he went to East West/Elektra and released the single Ghetto Girl. The label was in dire straights when Agallah arrived, however, and quickly went under. Working as both an MC and a producer Agallah was beginning to wonder if he'd ever get his chance to shine. I did it before Kanye or any of these producers that are out right now claiming they're rappers and producers. I've been doing it, I've just never gotten my shot with the right people, I never really got my due.
Agallah has been a presence on the underground hip hop scene for quite some time, although mainstream success has continued to elude him. Starting out as a producer, Agallah turned to rhyming and released a major label single on Elektra Records in 1995. In 1997 he made the classic duo "Till My Heart Stops" on Rawkus Soundbombing I with underground legend R.A. the Rugged Man. A collaboration with Mr. Cheeks of the Lost Boyz followed, although the album the single was to appear on, Wrap Your Lips Around This was never released. Additionally, there were production stints for the likes of EPMD, Das EFX, Onyx, and Group Home. During this time, Ag won the acclaim of top New York producers, such as Tony Touch and DJ Premier. In 2000, Agallah recorded the Sesame Street-themed single "Crookie Monster," which became an underground hit and featured production by the Alchemist.
In late 1999, Agallah teamed up with former EPMD member PMD and formed the hip hop group D.B.D. (Death B4 Dishonor). Other artists in the group were Ike Eyes, 215 and Deke O'Malley. The group was short lived but they recorded a demo album which featured artist Guru of Gang Starr, John Forté, special Ed and Lil Dap of Group Home, D.B.D. also released a single entitled "Feel This/Code Red" which was produced by KRS-One's brother Kenny Parker. The unreleased album can be found on various internet sharing sites.
A friendship with Shiest Bub led to the formation of Purple City Entertainment (also known as Purple City Productions) with Un Kasa, which attracted the attention of Dipset capo Jim Jones. Shiest had been doing promotional work for Cam'ron and Juelz Santana. For the new Purple City project, Agallah was christened "the Don Bishop", with Shiest as "the Emperor." Jones' enthusiasm for Ag's track "Gangsta" garnered the producer/MC a slot on the Diplomats Volume 4 mixtape.
Poised to take over the booming mixtape circuit, Purple City signed to Babygrande Records in late 2004. The following year, the label released a "greatest hits" collection that collected Purple City's best mixtape gems. Even as Purple City reached newer heights in 2006, Un Kasa departed the outfit due to business disputes, among other reasons.
Agallah's profile as a solo artist has also expanded in the wake of Purple City's rise, with the release of You Already Know (featuring appearances by dead prez and Nappy Roots, with production by DJ Premier and Alchemist) on Babygrande coupled with the release of the mixtape Propane Piff on Koch Records.
In mid 2007, Agallah stated in a Myspace bulletin that he is no longer signed to Babygrande.
Agallah also contributed the song "Risin' To The Top" to the smash hit and controversial video game Grand Theft Auto III, appearing on the "Game FM" radio station, Agallah teamed up with Rockstar Games once again to record the soundtrack for Midnight Club 2. Gamers can also hear Agallah's beats on EA Sports basketball game NBA Live 08.
The rappers third album, A.N.G.E.L. (A Nigga Gotta Envision Life), is due to be released in 2008 on his own label Propian Ent, and will feature productions by DJ Premier, Havoc, 9th Wonder and Agallah himself.
www.myspace.com/agallahdonbishop
www.wikipedia.org
November 02, 2008
Charles Hamilton.
Charles Hamilton is music. He's often stated that's all he does and hes in the studio more than anywhere else. Musician. Producer. Songwriter. Lyricist. Psycho. Hippie. Genius. These words all connect through one name: Charles Hamilton.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Charles Hamilton was exposed to music at an early age. "My mother was an entertainment journalist for the Cleveland Call and Post, so she would take me with her to events when I was just a baby."
His mother always made sure he had an instrument around him. She put different kinds of instruments in the basement of their Cleveland home, but he naturally gravitated to the keyboard. "At first, I was just playing the rhythm of the songs I would hear," says Hamilton. "The older I got, the more proficient I got at hearing the notes." For most of his life, he was self taught, picking up the lead and bass guitar in his teenage years, as well as the drums and harmonica. He says listening to other genres of music, being exposed to different cultures and experiencing life helped mold his musical sound.
Most of his music is sample-driven. Though he catches quite a bit of heat for his sampling, he insists it is for the good of music:
"When I sample, I'm not just doing it to sound good. I'm trying to tell a story. To convey an emotion. If I sampled it, there is a reason I sampled it. I believe that music is based on moments, and that there are some moments that people may have missed back in the day. They may have even missed it a year ago. When I sample, I'm giving the artist their respect, while simultaneously creating something new."
His influences read like a Lollapalooza bill.
"I'm a HUGE Incubus fan. I love Incubus, Eminem, N*E*R*D, Jay-Z, Modest Mouse, Korn, Dr. Dre, Thelonius Monk, Aerosmith, 50 Cent, Mariyln Manson, Alchemist, The Isley Brothers, Kanye West, Nine Inch Nails, Hi-Tek,... I just love good music. Good music that tells a story."
Utilizing a studio built in Frederick Douglass Academy (also in Harlem), Charles Hamilton spends countless hours in the studio, perfecting his craft and his signature sound. "The Lab (FDA's studio) means so much to me because when I literally didn't have anywhere else to go in the world, I can just go into my beloved alma mater and purge myself creatively." In this studio is where most (if not all) of Charles Hamilton's music is made. "Don't get me wrong," continues Hamilton. "I can do my thing in other studios. It's just something about home that makes my music breathe."
All the people that worked with Charles Hamilton or have seen him in the studio all say the same thing: phenomenal. Ted Wheeler, manager for hard-core rapper C Nellz (of whom Charles Hamilton produces for) affectionately calls him "Charles Grammy-ton". "It has always been my dream to win a Grammy," says Hamilton. "I study the categories, I study the winners and try to figure out how and why they won. If they won it, they deserved it." As a producer, he is currently working on several different projects, ranging from spoken word, to blues, to alternative, to hip-hop, to his own project, "The Pink Lavalamp." "I want to show the world that I, a Black kid from the hood, can connect the whole world through music. I also want to show the world that my hood is Harlem, the home of the Harlem Renaissance, which gave birth to most, if not all of modern-day art. Harlem is where art lives. The Greek god of Apollo was the god of entertainment. Where's the Apollo theatre?"
At his July 19th, 2007 show at the Bowery Poetry Club dubbed "Night of the Living Lavalamp", Charles Hamilton was on stage with his DJ (producer/turntablist Halo), alternative/blues band Mad Cow, hip-hop producer Black, and live painter Sarah Kolker. All of which are personal friends of Charles Hamilton.
"My man Halo and I met at a cookout me and my man Sciryl threw in the summer of 2007. That's like my twin. We had only known each other for a few weeks before we did the show. That's how much we hit it off on a creative level. I actually met Viktor from Mad Cow in the summer of 2006 when I was in a rap duo. We had been talking about working together for ages, and we finally did it at my show. I grew up with Black. He was the first person I knew when I moved to Harlem. Ironically enough, I taught him how to play the piano. And Sarah, I met her through my poet friend Aja-Monet. We hit it off very well" Aja-Monet also performed at "Night of the Living Lavalamp". "I hope to make 'Night of the Living Lavalamp' an ongoing thing at the Bowery. The Bowery is where I got my start when it comes to on stage experience when doing hip-hop. I love them for that."
It was at "Night of the Living Lavalamp" that Charles Hamilton met Rainmaker, spoken word artist and President of VinylPop (Charles Hamilton's company). "Rainmaker is just off the chain. We vibed at the show, but I was doing my Charles Hamilton thing on stage so I didn't get a chance to have a serious conversation. I met him again at an open house that Abiodun (from The Last Poets) has every Sunday. We just talked for hours about everything from music race relations to relationships. He exposed me to the most profound spoken word artists in the world. I am thankful to God for introducing me to him, among other things I thank God for."
Charles has a theory that god is a woman. He also is a avid fan of the color pink, which he also has a philosophy behind. "God is a woman and pink is the inside of a woman's womb and thats where life comes out of, so wearing pink is a way of showing respect to god." He has been approved by some of the biggest names in rap including Eminem, Dr Dre, Kanye West, The Game, and the list goes on. Charles has stated numerous times however that hip hop was not his first music love, rock was. He's said his uncle, ministers at church, and musicians as such as Eminem, Jay-Z, Dr Dre and Incubus were a big part of his life growing up. Charles is one of the only artists in the game who connects with his fans on a personal level via his blog, email, and even Myspace. Hamilton is a self-proclaimed Sega fan. The sonic has to do with his philosophical views such as sonic meaning sound. His music often references classic Sega games such as Sonic the Hedgehog, even sampling level BGM in "November 10". He owns a pink hello kitty guitar. He is obsessed with headphones, he uses the new Dr. Dre headphones for quality and uses Skullcandies for style.
The Pink Lava Lamp is Charles' first major album being released through Interscope and is still awaiting a release date. He blogs basically every day so for the up to the minute Charles Hamilton news, check out Charleshamilton.blogspot.com.
His debut solo album, "The Pink Lavalamp," is his way of illustrating his ideas for the future of music. "It is, without question, a hip-hop album," says Hamilton. "At the same time, I embody different genres of music to express different feelings and emotions that I feel in my everyday life. My music is ALWAYS based on my life. My happiness, my sins, my heartbreak, my anger, my quirkiness, my everything is given in my music. The music I grew up listening to told a story. So I'm taking the music I grew up with, as well as my story, AS WELL as my musicianship, to bring about a new sound. I don't want to sound redundant and talk about myself all the time, but I hope my story can help someone else's life. If my life were to be a movie, it would be the Antoine Fisher story all over again, but with a killer soundtrack and without a military background."
For more information on Charles Hamilton, VinylPop, and upcoming projects, call le'Roy Benros at (518) 469-9886 or LeRoy.Benros@gmail.com
Source: www.myspace.com, www.wikipedia.org
Grafh
Grafh, born Phillip Bernard, is from the Southeast Queens section of New York. His early years were spent in a climate submerged in the infamous crack wars of the 1980s. Attempting to avoid these pitfalls, a young Phillip took on rhyming as a past time. Unfortunately, street life would take charge in a way he never expected. A neighborhood mentor was gunned down right in front of Phillip; following that, he witnessed his father’s murder. With two close and sudden losses, Phillip was caught in a blend of mourning, rage, revenge, and a sense of providing a life for him and his mother. A rough time indeed, but he believed in the adage, "God never gives a burden too heavy to carry or overcome." With the help of a friend of his father, Phillip was encouraged to stay clear of the perils of the street. The family friend asked Phillip to consider other careers with more certainty and longevity than rap music, even making him promise to finish school. But Phillip didn't exactly keep his promise; with one foot in the street, his entire mind, body, and soul were dedicated to music.
At this time he took on the name Grafh, due to his talent for graphically painting pictures with his lyrics, and to insure his father's friend didn't hear of his street exploits and neighborhood rap battles. Grafh hit the rap circuit on a mission and it wasn't long before word of Grafh’s raw talents reached the office of Black Hand Entertainment, a Jamaica, Queens based record label with strong street ties. Once the rapper and record label staff eventually met, Black Hand’s CEO was surprised: Grafh was Phillip and the CEO was Chaz Williams, the family friend who’d told the young man to stay away from trouble. He is featured on the soundtrack to Dame Dash's Ultimate Hustler.
A mixtape veteran, Grafh has propelled his way into the major league on pure skill, dedication, and strategic independent positioning. Grafh's short stint at St. John's University qualified him to become president of the indie label, Black Hand Entertainment while still remaining its flagship artist. Relentless, and prolific is the best way to describe his mission, and music, which has been featured on HBO's Entourage, Fox's Meth and Red Show, BET's Ultimate Hustler. His music also appears on a number of video games, including EA Sports' NFL Streets, 25 to Life, and most recently Saint's Row. Grafh has just begun to impact. He is the brainchild of the Myspace Jumpoff record which is soaring over the internet. The record has received organic adds on the play list at stations like New York..s Hot 97, Washington DC's WKYS, and San Francisco's KMEL, with additional support coming in from the college and commercial non-reporting radio level. MTV was one of the first to feature Grafh and his Myspace Jumpoff record on Direct Effect. The record has received over 140,000 hits on his page alone. It is a featured video on Myspace.com, and is still gaining momentum. The growing success of the Myspace Jumpoff record is the true prelude to the long anticipated AutoGrafh album. Due to the high consumer demand for a Grafh product, it is scheduled as an indie release in January, 2007. Grafh has already began to work on recording his sophomore album, and is staying busy hosting the Black Hand Radio Uncut show on XM Satellite radio, doing a national prison tour, as well as performing at traditional venues across the country. Grafh is on the move, he never stops, and you can still catch his mixtapes at your nearest bootlegger! BLACK HAND IS THE LABEL AND THE MOVEMENT!
October 29, 2008
THE STORY OF THE WU-TANG CLAN
A Provocative Account of the Rise of Hip Hop's Most Controversial Collective
DVD and Soundtrack CD to Debut November 18th, 2008
DVD Offers Revealing Never-Before-Seen Interviews and Rare Concert Footage; CD Includes Classic Wu-Tang Clan Tracks and Solo Material
Los Angeles, California — The definitive story of one of the most influential rap crews of all time, Wu: The Story of The Wu-Tang Clan comes to DVD on November 18th, 2008 from BET Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment. An authorized account of the spectacular rise of nine young men from obscurity to the pinnacle of recording industry success, Wu: The Story of The Wu-Tang Clan sheds new light on their story with exclusive archival footage, interviews with the surviving members of the group and a wealth of material not available anywhere else. A must-have DVD for every hip-hop and rap fan, Wu: The Story of The Wu-Tang Clan will be available for the suggested retail price of $22.99 US.
Simultaneously, Loud Records / Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, is set to release the soundtrack companion CD, Wu: The Story of the Wu-Tang Clan. The disc will feature such key Wu-Tang classics as "C.R.E.A.M." and "Protect Your Neck" alongside solo material from Raekwon, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Ghostface Killah, and Cappadonna. The CD will be available at both physical and digital retail outlets on November 18, 2008.
In 1993, nine young men — Method Man, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, RZA, GZA, Ghostface Killah, U-God, Inspectah Deck an Masta Killa -- emerged from the Staten Island projects to form one of the most successful rap groups of all time: The Wu-Tang Clan. For over a decade, they operated as a fluid alliance of exceptionally talented MCs, establishing themselves as one of the most significant musical collectives of the era, as well as individual artists who challenged convention with thought-provoking lyrics and beats. The Wu-Tang Clan went on to sell more than 20 million albums and become the original global hip hop franchise, lending their talent and name to music, comic books, clothes, online games and more.
The ambition, talent and innovative spirit that drove The Wu-Tang Clan's unique contributions to the hip hop scene also made its members multi-platinum-selling solo artists and record producers, Grammy winners, screenwriters, corporate spokespeople, entrepreneurs and motion picture composers. The group launched the acting careers of Method Man ("The Wire", Garden State, How High) and RZA (American Gangster) and brought attention to the controversial life and tragic death of Ol' Dirty Bastard. Directed by Gerald Barclay, this awe-inspiring documentary also features industry notables: Bonz Malone, Popa Wu, Bobito Garcia, Ralph McDaniels, Gano Grills and 3rd Rail.
Wu: The Story of The Wu-Tang Clan was named Best Documentary at the 2007 Hip Hop Odyssey Film Festival and was an Official Selection at the London Black Film Festival, the American Black Film Festival, the Pan African Film Festival and the Sao Paulo International Film Festival. Billboard magazine will host a special screening of Wu: The Story of The Wu-Tang Clan at this year's UrbanWorld Film Festival on September 12. Additionally, the documentary will have its broadcast premiere on BET on Thursday, November 13, 2008.
About BET Networks
BET Networks, a subsidiary of Viacom, Inc. (NYSE: VIA and VIA.B), is the nation's leading provider of quality entertainment, music, news and public affairs television programming for the African-American audience. The primary BET channel reaches more than 84 million households according to Nielsen media research, and can be seen in the United States , Canada and the Caribbean . BET is the dominant African-American consumer brand with a diverse group of businesses extensions: BET.com, a leading internet destination for Black entertainment, music, culture, and news.; BET Digital Networks – BET J, BET Gospel and BET Hip Hop, attractive alternatives for cutting-edge entertainment tastes; BET Event Productions, a full-scale event management and production company; BET Home Entertainment, a collection of BET-branded offerings for the home environment including DVDs and video-on-demand; BET Mobile, a service venture into the lucrative world of ring tones, games and video content for wireless devices; and BET International, an extension of BET network programming for global distribution.
ABOUT PARAMOUNT HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Paramount Home Entertainment (PHE) is part of Paramount Pictures Corporation (PPC), a global producer and distributor of filmed entertainment. PPC is a unit of Viacom (NYSE: VIA, VIA.B), a leading content company with prominent and respected film, television and digital entertainment brands. PHE is responsible for the worldwide sales, marketing and distribution of home entertainment products on behalf of various parties including: Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Studios, Paramount Vantage, Paramount Classics, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, CBS, PBS and Hasbro and for providing home entertainment fulfillment services for DreamWorks Animation Home Entertainment.
ABOUT LEGACY RECORDINGS
The multiple Grammy-winning Legacy Recordings, Sony BMG Music Entertainment's catalog division, produces and maintains the world's foremost catalog of historic reissues, an unparalleled compendium of thousands of digitally remastered archival titles representing virtually every musical genre including popular, rock, jazz, blues, R&B, folk, country, gospel, Broadway musicals, movie soundtracks, ethnic, world music, classical, comedy and more.
A peerless resource encompassing the wealth, breadth, history and diversity of recorded music dating back to the birth of the medium, Legacy Recordings is home to the works of hundreds of musical artists of the 19th, 20th and 21st.
Press:
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BazanPR
(212) 643-4664 x22
Funky Four Plus One
Funky Four Plus One (also known as Funky 4 + 1) was the 'first' Hip-Hop/Rap group from The Bronx, New York, United States to receive a recording deal. They were notable for having a female MC, and were the first Hip-Hop/Rap group to perform "live" on a national television broadcast. Jazzy Jeff from Funky Four Plus One is not the same artist as DJ Jazzy Jeff from DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. When Jazzy Jeff was setting up a solo career after the (3rd) Funky 4 split up around 1983 he sued Jive Records (who had subsequently signed DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince) and he won a lawsuit over the rights to the name "Jazzy Jeff". Formed in 1977, the group was the first hip hop group to have a female MC, Sha Rock. Their most significant hit was the nine-minute "That's the Joint," which was sampled by the Beastie Boys on the song "Shake Your Rump." "That's the Joint" was sampled from A Taste of Honey's "Rescue Me". Their other notable recordings incuded the almost sixteen-minute "Rappin' and Rockin' The House", and Jazzy Jeff's recording of "King heroin", from which a beat was sampled for use in the theme of the "The Apprentice" which taken from the O'Jays' "Money". The group never recorded a full studio album.
, the group was the first hip hop group to have a female , Sha Rock. Their most significant hit was the nine-minute "That's the Joint," which was sampled by the on the song "That's the Joint" was sampled from A Taste of Honey's "Rescue Me". Their other notable recordings incuded the almost sixteen-minute "Rappin' and Rockin' The House", and Jazzy Jeff's recording of "King heroin", from which a beat was sampled for use in the theme of the "" which taken from the O'Jays' "Money". The group never recorded a full studio album., the group was the first hip hop group to have a female , Sha Rock. Their most significant hit was the nine-minute "That's the Joint," which was sampled by the on the song "That's the Joint" was sampled from A Taste of Honey's "Rescue Me". Their other notable recordings incuded the almost sixteen-minute "Rappin' and Rockin' The House", and Jazzy Jeff's recording of "King heroin", from which a beat was sampled for use in the theme of the "" which taken from the O'Jays' "Money". The group never recorded a full studio album., the group was the first hip hop group to have a female , Sha Rock. Their most significant hit was the nine-minute "That's the Joint," which was sampled by the on the song "That's the Joint" was sampled from A Taste of Honey's "Rescue Me". Their other notable recordings incuded the almost sixteen-minute "Rappin' and Rockin' The House", and Jazzy Jeff's recording of "King heroin", from which a beat was sampled for use in the theme of the "" which taken from the O'Jays' "Money". The group never recorded a full studio album., the group was the first hip hop group to have a female , Sha Rock. Their most significant hit was the nine-minute "That's the Joint," which was sampled by the on the song "That's the Joint" was sampled from A Taste of Honey's "Rescue Me". Their other notable recordings incuded the almost sixteen-minute "Rappin' and Rockin' The House", and Jazzy Jeff's recording of "King heroin", from which a beat was sampled for use in the theme of the "" which taken from the O'Jays' "Money". The group never recorded a full studio album., the group was the first hip hop group to have a female , Sha Rock. Their most significant hit was the nine-minute "That's the Joint," which was sampled by the on the song "That's the Joint" was sampled from A Taste of Honey's "Rescue Me". Their other notable recordings incuded the almost sixteen-minute "Rappin' and Rockin' The House", and Jazzy Jeff's recording of "King heroin", from which a beat was sampled for use in the theme of the "" which taken from the O'Jays' "Money". The group never recorded a full studio album.
They were the first hip hop group to appear on a national television show, Saturday Night Live, in a 1981 episode hosted by Deborah Harry (some have mistakenly reported that Run-DMC was the show's first rap appearance- in fact they were first to perform on MTV some years later).
The original members were The Voice of K.K. aka K.K. Rockwell (Kevin Smith), Keith Keith (Keith Caesar), Sha Rock (Sharon Green), Rahiem (Guy Todd Williams). Rahiem later left the group to join Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five. Sha Rock temporarily left as well, and they were replaced by Lil' Rodney C! and Jazzy Jeff, who became the 'New' Funky Four and with the return of Sha Rock who became the Plus One More.
With the addition of Lil` Rodney C! and Jazzy Jeff, the group became the "New" Funky Four, with D.J. Breakout and Baron. None of the Emcees were older than 17 when they signed with the Enjoy label, with "Rappin' And Rockin' The House". This utilized elements of Cheryl Lynn's,"Got To Be Real", over which a 16-minute rap commentary was placed. The tracks were recorded by a live band led by drummer Pumpkin, arguably rap's first production hero, and it was an impressive overall introduction.
,"", over which a 16-minute rap commentary was placed. The tracks were recorded by a live band led by drummer , arguably rap's first production hero, and it was an impressive overall introduction.,"", over which a 16-minute rap commentary was placed. The tracks were recorded by a live band led by drummer , arguably rap's first production hero, and it was an impressive overall introduction.,"", over which a 16-minute rap commentary was placed. The tracks were recorded by a live band led by drummer , arguably rap's first production hero, and it was an impressive overall introduction.,"", over which a 16-minute rap commentary was placed. The tracks were recorded by a live band led by drummer , arguably rap's first production hero, and it was an impressive overall introduction.,"", over which a 16-minute rap commentary was placed. The tracks were recorded by a live band led by drummer , arguably rap's first production hero, and it was an impressive overall introduction.
Shortly afterwards they switched to Sugarhill Records, losing the "Plus One More" and adding 4 + 1 suffix. Prior to this cast D.J. Mark The 45 King would act as Breakout's record boy after Pookie D, locating and passing records up to the decks as Breakout requested them. They made their debut for Sugarhill in 1980 with "That's The Joint", a song arranged by jazz-funk organist Clifton Jiggs Chase. Their performances at Bronx Club parties included full blown dance routines.
After a discrepancy with Sugarhill, Lil` Rodney C! and KK Rockwell left the group and started "The Original Double Trouble". At which time Rodney C! would marry Angela (Angie B) Brown of The Sequence fame aka (Grammy Nominated) Angie Stone. Jazzy Jeff went on to have a solo career.
In 2008, their song "That's The Joint" was ranked number 41 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop
August 20, 2008
H.I.M. Future Youth !
H.I.M Future Youth Apparel Design
July 13, 2008
Gorilla Zoe Unleashes Sophomore Album Don't Feed Da Animals
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Gorilla Zoe builds anticipation for the forthcoming Don't Feed Da Animals with buzz-worthy records, "Waddle" featuring Gucci Mane and "Dope Boy." Production from the industry's newest heavyweights, Justice League-"P*ssy Talk" and "Neighborhood," Don Vito-"Dope Boy," and Luney Tunez N Yo Area-"Waddle" to name a few are rounded out with seasoned producers, Jazze Pha "Locked Up or Dead," and J.R. Rotem "On the Corner."
According to Gorilla Zoe, Don't feed Da Animals is collectively "a huge album, filled with my life experiences, thoughts and feelings-real and uncut."
Exclusive new music and updated photos can be found on www.myspace.com/gorillazoe96 and fans are now able to contact Gorilla Zoe via a new marketing tool, www.saynow.com, by calling the artist directly at (678) 608-0521.
BIO
In 2007, Gorilla Zoe entered the jungle known as the rap game simply hoping to adjust to his new habitat. But, one year after his mega-single, "Hood Nigga," and the world-wide success of his debut album Welcome To the Zoo, Zoe is securing and defending his own territory with his newest effort, Don't Feed Da Animals.
Acting as both a forewarning and a told-you-so, Don't Feed Da Animals speaks to what happens when you don't follow advice. As hungry an artist as you will ever find, the rapper born Alonzo Mathis only needed one shot to prove that he had the talent and voice to become a household name. When Block Ent. CEO Russell "Block" Spencer gave Zoe that chance as a soloist and member of supergroup Boyz N Da Hood, it opened the gates for this Gorilla to wreak havoc.
"My first album was all real life; I was just talking about where I was at, at that time," says Zoe about his debut, which peaked at #3 on Billboard's Top Rap albums chart. "Now, I've tasted success and been around the world, but I'm still hood. You see me in the same places you met me. I don't have money like Bill Gates or Jay-Z, but I'm hood-rich and I'm telling my story from that point of view."
Songs like the autobiographical "Man I" speak to Zoe's ascension from a wayward youth strolling the streets of Atlanta looking for a place to stay, to a man who was able to improve his quality of life. So do songs like "Get Away" and "Dope Boi," where Zoe simply enjoys the fruits of his labor without alienating those who haven't made it to the top, yet.
"I've watched so many folks get money, leave the hood, and think they're better than everyone else," says Zoe. "I ain't gonna change who I am; I don't think success means you've got to leave or change who you are. But at the same time some change is good. Anything that doesn't change isn't alive. People, just like flowers, grow, bloom, and die. If I'm gonna grow, bloom, and die, I'm gonna make sure people love me."
In addition to traveling the world through touring, in the past year Zoe has made a name for himself via guest spots on both rap and R&B songs by his labelmates Yung Joc and JC. Hoping to display more of his versatility, Don't Feed Da Animals has plenty of songs showing Zoe's growth as a recording artist.
"Get Off Me" has the raspy-voiced rapper demonstrating complete mastery of his distinct vocal tones, while "Ladadi" has the hood nigga crushing all stereotypes and flowing over a Crystal Waters sample. He also experiments with different cadences on songs such as the high-tempo "Salute" and the hood narrative "Another Day."
"In making this album, I've learned what to do with my voice," says Zoe, citing the lead single, "On The Corner" featuring Sean Kingston, as a prime example. "I know what sounds fit me, so I'm in my zone right now. I understand that it's ok to just be me, instead of jumping in and out of trends."
Unafraid to do a little of what's considered the norm, Zoe manages to bring his own appeal to tracks like "S.W.A.G.G." featuring Shawty Lo and Rocko, and "44" featuring T-Pain.
"I look at everything and everybody accordingly," says Zoe. "I've seen people look at me like I'm nothing but a dope boy, or say I'm not a real hip-hop artist. I don't make music for those people. That's why I call mines 'relative music' - it's made for people to relate to. I'm the hood spokesperson and my clientele will grow with me."
Media Contact:
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Tahira Wright, Publicist
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June 23, 2008
Groundation
Groundation is bringing classic roots music into the serious times of the 21st century. Their sound is an organic fusion of Roots Reggae, heavy Funk/Jazz fusion, and transcendental Dub; their live shows are synonymous with high-energy positive communal vibrations, combining the message and determination of the best Reggae music has to offer with perpetually fresh Jazz-inspired improvisation...Truly not to be missed.
In addition, Groundation is the progenitor of Young Tree Records, a California-based Independant record label. Young Tree has put out works by the cream of the Roots Reggae crop, including The Congos, Pablo Moses, Andrew "Bassie" Campbell, Winston "Flames" Jarrett as well as the entirety of the expansive Groundation catalog.
The Groundation store is the only place to access the complete Groundation catalog as well as Groundation gear featuring the singular original art of long time Groundation- collaborator Giovanni Maki.
It is said that if you don't know your past, you don't know your future; well Groundation knows its past, and they're stepping into the future. While capturing the essence of true roots reggae, internationally renowned, Groundation aims to take the genre to a new height by blending elements of both jazz and dub in their sound.
Source:http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=33880067
Matisyahu
Known for blending traditional Jewish themes with reggae and rock sounds, Matisyahu is most recognizable for being a member of Chabad-Lubavitch, a chassidic group of Judaism, but has recently left Chabad-Lubavitch and is now a mainstream Chassid, looking into the Karlin Hasidic sect. As such, Matisyahu stands out for wearing the traditional clothing of Hasidic Jews and not performing on the Sabbath. Since 2004, he has released two studio albums as well as one live album, two remix CDs and one DVD featuring a live concert, and a number of interviews. Through his short career, Matisyahu has teamed up with some of the biggest names in reggae production including Bill Laswell and duo Sly & Robbie
Since his debut, Matisyahu has received positive reviews from both rock and reggae outlets. Most recently, he was named Top Reggae Artist of 2006 by Billboard.
Causion
A forceful and charismatic performer, singer/songwriter, musician Causion is charged with intense emotions. His deep social and conscious lyrics are filled with appealing messages that blend Reggae, soul and pop music. Born Gregory Colin Bailey in the beautiful twin-island nation of Antigua & Barbuda, Causion recalls, “I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a professional artist. I grew up in a family of established musicians and I did not have to reach far for either support or inspiration.”
Causion’s - new album ‘One Life To Live’, is definitely his best effort to date. It was self-produced with longtime collaborators Hopeton Lindo & Syl Gordon of 321 Strong Records and with the support of well-known engineer Jason Sterling from JasFar Records. The final production is impeccable. Fully equipped with the reality lyrics that make him a true contender for the title of conscious artist, Causion enlightens the masses on tracks like ‘Gang War’ and ‘Slave Addiction’. He shows us how to live a better life with ‘Give Jah The Power’. The album also includes the ballad-style ‘Keep Moving On’ and Pop sounding tunes ‘Feel The Vibes’ and ‘Hold On.’ There are several combination cuts with the likes of Hopeton Lindo and Gentleman. This collection will certainly keep hope alive. Recently Causion delivered an awesome performance of the above songs at his album launch party at the Seminole Paradise Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood Florida. He went on to give repeat performances at Reggae Carifest, Randall's Island Park -New York, the Miami Reggae Festival at Bayfront Amphitheatre in downtown Miami and in Delaware at the Kiwanis' Reggae Festival.
Antigua’s Reggae Ambassador, Causion first enjoyed recording success in 1988 with ‘African Girl’, featuring British DJ Spider Don. From 1990, after taking up residency in New York City, he recorded four singles. Causion’s debut album, ‘Time Will Tell,’ was released in 1998, This impressive conscious Reggae album contains 14 captivating tracks. In the artist’s own words, “It’s timeless - something for today and tomorrow.”
Over the years, he has toured throughout the US and the Caribbean with some of Reggae’s best artists, such as Rita Marley, Third World, Dennis Brown, Freddie McGregor and Judy Mowatt to name a few, giving stellar performances. In 1995 he was the first Antiguan Reggae artist to perform at Jamaica’s Sumfest, sharing the stage with Buju Banton, Mikey Spice and Mykal Rose among other luminaries. Some of the other major events he has performed at are the Bob Marley Music Festival in Washington, DC, the Reggae Cari-Fest New York City, Bob Marley Day in Camden, NJ, and Cry Freedom Antigua.
In 1999 Causion relocated to south Florida, where he soon appeared at Freddie McGregor’s ‘Reggae Meets Rocksteady’ show in 2001, and in 2002 he opened for Beres Hammond at the James L. Knight Center. He made several south Florida appearances before his performance hiatus to go into the studio for the recording of his sophomore album ‘One Life to Live’. Now Causion’s self-imposed performance pause is over and it’s once again time to enjoy the captivating and exciting artist Causion. source: http://www.1causion.com/index-1.html
Kayla Bliss
Born and raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with Jamaican heritage, KaylaBliss fuses her backgrounds and creates an edgy but classic merger of R&B and Reggae. With rock hard lyrics and infectious melodies, you cant help but be drawn into her original style.
Ms.Bliss started singing at the tender age of 4. She began learning techniques and musical theory at the age of 10, and hasnt stopped training. While she didnt enjoy the classical music, she embraced it and used it to make her own music crisp and piercing. "I use to experiment when i was younger with different kinds of songs. I would sing classical songs like r&b, and I would sing r&b songs like classical, and so on and so forth. I developed my style that way. I guess it worked because people like it."
Kayla always had a deep love for the English language. "I would cut all my classes for English, and my teacher didnt even snitch on me! She knew how much I loved it".
Her first song was a song entitled "Drowning" that expressed her sorrow after her parents called it quits. The song was therapuetic for her, and her desire was to effect people the same way. She wrote about everything, and from all different perspectives. "I write songs from a father speaking to a daughter perspective, friend to friend, son to mother... most of my inspiration for love songs come from my own experience with my father". KaylaBliss has become one of the most respected and requested upcoming writers over the past year.
KaylaBliss is a proud part of The Brooklyn R&B TakeOver (including Unique, 718, M.V.4, The BeleVista Boys, and Sasha). "We all chill, we all know each other. It kinda takes some of the stress off of the music game. Plus we all from Brooklyn!!!!"
No one can deny that KaylaBliss is an exceptional artist. No one can deny she's a phenomenal writer. Her music is true and personal, and her style is humble and cocky at the same time. You can try to describe it, but the first word that comes to mind will always be "bliss"
Source: http://www.myspace.com/kaylabliss
Joseph
Isreal
Joseph Isreal
Through its simple, sweet reflections of love, its headline-torn news reports, its tales of spiritual awakening and calls for unity, there is a thread running through the songs on Joseph Israel's debut disc, Gone are the Days. Combined, they quite simply point to a better way to live, to a better world.
Conscious and idealistic, they are songs that compose an album whose release marks the impressive and thoroughly independent rise of the white, Christian-born American, whose utter devotion to the music and culture of Jamaica and the messages of roots reggae can be felt throughout. If the album marks the 28-year-old, self-made musician’s coming of age as an artist, it does so through songs that, among other things, mark his coming of age as a man.
In the album's title-track, Israel preaches the need to question authority and what's been served up to us on the evening news or in the history books of our youth. It’s a song in which he recalls his own awakening, intellectually and spiritually: "So many paths, only one to choose/If you live for yourself, you will lose/In your heart, let true love rule."
Laced with Biblical imagery and featuring everything from a tender dedication to his wife ("Perfect Love") to an angry, rage-riddled lambasting of third-world oppression ("Hotta Fiyah"), the disc’s 13 tracks represent the realization of a life-long dream for the Arkansas–based Israel. And they also mark him as a bona fide member of the roots reggae community, despite his skin color or country of origin.
Recorded over several months in Kingston, Jamaica—at the fabled Tuff Gong studio (Bob Marley and the Marley family's studio), Shaggy's Big Yard studio, and others—Gone are the Days carries the endorsement of a cast of reggae vets. It finds Israel backed by a litany of such players, including saxophonist Dean Fraser, bassist Chris Meredith, lead guitarist Earl "Chinna" Smith, rhythm guitarist Ian "Beezy" Coleman, drummer Wilburn "Squidley" Cole, keyboardist Paul "Scooby" Smith, pianists Franklyn "Bubbler" Waul and Paul "Wrong Move" Crossdale, and percussionist Uzziah "Sticky" Thompson.
Israel duets with second-generation roots reggae star Luciano on "Ruff Times" and Luciano's fellow VP Records artist Mikey General on "Universal Love," while Erica Newell and Rochelle Bradshaw—backing vocalists for Ziggy Marley and Luciano, respectively—add backing vocals throughout. A devoted family man, Israel also features his wife, Kristy, on backing vocals, and their daughters, Rebekah and Chavah (they also have a boy, Cypress), add a sweet touch to the end of "Mankind" urging listeners to "Stop fighting/Love one another/Feed the mommies of little children."
"To have been able to make this record, it's very humbling to me," says Israel. "I just feel so blessed. To have been in a room with all these guys, I felt like there was angels in the room. The vibe was so high that I would just teach them the song and—boom!-in one take they had 'em."
Israel self-financed Gone are the Days, recording and independently releasing the disc in 2005. Just as Israel's songs caught the attention of everyone from Luciano to Mikey General, the disc in the months after its release caught the attention of Universal Music Enterprises, who is releasing the disc nationwide through their label New Door Records.
It's the next step in a career that has been building since Israel-born Joseph Montgomery Fennel in Tulsa, Oklahoma-was just two years old. It was then, while still a toddler, that he became smitten with Bob Marley and the Wailers' Babylon by Bus album, especially the track "Positive Vibration," his favorite song as a young child.
With his father both a reggae fan and the owner of a Fayetteville, Arkansas, club and restaurant called Jose's, and his uncle a big roots fan also favoring the likes of Burning Spear, young Joseph was surrounded by reggae. As a teen, he started delving deep into the music himself (the Marley cannon, Spear's classic Marcus Garvey, Bunny Wailer's Blackheart Man, Peter Tosh's Legalize It), and the inspirations behind it, from thinker-activist Garvey to Malcom X. At 14, his parents took him on the first of what would become regular trips to Jamaica. At the same time, he was getting into the likes of younger roots artists like Luciano, as well as genre-blending American artist Ben Harper.
A member of the varsity basketball team in high school, he quit sports, and during trips to Jamaica, began studying with Rasta elders such as Ras Bee-Bow of Negril and Bongo Hu-I, the great teacher and herbalist of Montego Bay. As the Rasta culture took root in Joseph, so did long dreadlocks. Israel felt a mystical identity to Jamaica, its people and music.
Back home in Arkansas, Israel began writing and performing. In 2000, he formed the band Kepha (translated as "the rock" in Hebrew), which released a single, self-issued disc, and opened for the likes of roots heavy weights Culture and Burning Spear. The group soon folded and Israel founded the Lions of Israel, with whom he started blanketed the American west. In summer 2003, he performed a solo acoustic set before Ziggy Marley on one stop on the latter's U.S. tour. The gig proved a pivotal one, as Israel clicked with members of Marley's backing band, including bassist Chris Meredith, who co-produced Gone Are the Days with Israel.
In the fall of 2003, Israel toured with popular roots artist Abijah, cutting the Lions of Israel's live CD on the last night of the tour. At the end of the year, he joined forces with Mikey General, who was being backed by Newell and Bradshaw. By tour's end, all four made plans to record a track together, what would become the closing track on Gone Are the Days, "Universal Love."
Co-written by and featuring General, Newel and Bradshaw, "Universal Love" was the first song recorded for Gone are the Days. It captures one of the main themes of the record: unity and kindness. Another is the need to live well, to do the right thing, to act righteously. Still another is overcoming adversity.
"We're living in, the most intense time ever, as far as I can see," says Israel. "But I think that one day very soon, the strongholds that are holding the people today that are keeping the people down, are going to be toppled-not by force, but by love and truth."
Says Israel: "This CD, what it's really all about to me, is bringing things out that haven't been said, and preserving the musical tradition that Bob Marley started, adding to the foundation that he laid, with original rhythms and real songwriting. This is not a religious album. I'm just trying to promote the truth, and hopefully other people will want to hear it. Source:"http://www.josephisrael.com/israel_bio.htm
Uriel Hamilton
Uriel Hamilton
Uriel Hamilton, born in Kingston Jamaica, has been singing reggae music as long as he can remember. After being discovered by Courtney Melody in 1994 Uriel recorded "All I Want Is To Love" with Million Records Company and Sonic Sounds Distribution. This began his professional music career.
Uriel's style is often compared to that of the reggae great Dennis Brown. His favorite artists are Anthony Hamilton and Stevie Wonder. Uriel grew up listening to Dennis Brown and contends that he has definitely shaped his career. He hopes to make a difference in music by putting soul back into music. Uriel understands that he is truly gifted and hopes to get the opportunity to share that gift with the world. As a Reggae Soul Singer he wants to deliver a formula of conscious listening love grounded sound.
After 25 Years professionally in the Reggae Music business Uriel has performed on many stages with countless well known artists such as Courtney Melody, Dennis Brown, Fred Lucks and Daweh. Congo just to name a few. His biggest stage performance to date has been the Reggae Carifest. While Uriel knows the Reggae Music Business that is not currently his primary focus. Uriel ultimately has a genuine love of music and getting his message across to the people. Which is that the rhythm of music today is very poor and animated. The element of the culture and the love in the music has been lost and its Uriel's plan to bring it back. Uriel's goal for the Reggae Music Industry and his career is to reach out to the youth and lead them in good ways to free their minds from the evils that currently perpetuate the culture.
Within the next 5yrs Uriel would like to start asking for JAH to give life everywhere and allow him to grow to love and build in Reggae Music. After experiencing his fathers talent as a guitar player and watching his brother perform for a short while but never pursuing his music career professionally Uriel realized his dream of being a musician. His relaxed style of listening music that sets a tone and speaks a message of peace and love and social consciousness of today's strife in the world.
Uriel will begin working on his debut "Soul of NY" with the first single "Sirens In NY" coming soon. source:http://www.myspace.com/urielhamilton1
Meta
& The Cornerstones
Meta and The Cornerstones
When you first meet Meta, of Meta and the Cornerstones, he emits pure musical talent and a humble spirit in his 6.3ft slim frame. Then, when you meet the band members of the Cornerstones you realize that you are in the presence of a group that is about to change the dynamic of Reggae music forever.
Born in Senegal, West Africa, Meta Dia grew a deep love and true appreciation for all types of music. As a child, while listening to his mother play Gregory Isaacs and Bob Marley on the radio his appreciation for Reggae music was founded and the desire to be a musician. In Dakar, Senegal, Meta is known as a pioneer for the voice and culture of Hip Hop. He began performing on the streets and stages of Dakar at the age of 14. In the year 2000, Meta formed his first group, YALLA SUUREN (God Bless) and gained celebrity recognition by the media. YALLA SUUREN was nominated as the BEST HIP HOP/REGGAE group by the French Cultural Center in 2000.
Moving to the USA in 2002, he began to collaborate with artists such as Sean Blackman, hip hop pioneer Toni Blackman and many others. He formed the band Meta and the Cornerstones with some of the best musicians in New York City: Adrian Djoman(bass); Shahar Mintz (solo guitar); Andre Daniel (Keyboards) and Ian Joseph (Drums), Daniel Serrato (Guitar) who brought their musical influences of the Caribbean, Africa, America and Middle East into the mix.
Meta's powerful writing skills, his phenomenal singing voice takes you back to the roots of Reggae music as he infuses his songs with hip hop, rock, soul and African influences performing in English, French, Wolof and Fulani. Meta and the Cornerstones have gained great respect and recognition in the USA and internationally. In 2006 he made a roaring statement when he performed alongside Steel Pulse & Luciano at the 2006 Annual Reggae Salute. In 2007 he was personally invited by International Superstar and Senegalese born artist Youssou N'Dour, to perform at his Annual ‘African Ball’ concert at the Nokia Theater, NYC.
The afro-fusion reggae of The Cornerstones and Meta's soulful, soaring voice creates a soul-pounding spiritual experience for the audience. Meta is creating something bigger than music, transcending oceans, borders, and languages. The power of what he is contributing is unifying and humbling. Meta and The Cornerstones have something big to offer whoever is listening.
Independently-produced, full-length studio album, Forward Music, was released May 29th, 2008. The album consists of 13 tracks that are electrifying and soulful. Avaiable on Cd Baby, Digstation and Myspace.
More Stores to be listed soon.
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT KALAB BERHANE kalab.berhane@gmail.com 757-339-5252
source:http://www.myspace.com/metaandthecornerstones
Midnite 
Hailing from the Island of St Croix, Midnite is one of the most promising roots reggae bands of the millennium. They are vanguards of conscious reggae who represent the King's and Queen's music to the fullness of Jah. Midnite's profound and innovative lyrics are sincere and deeply rooted to present the other half of the story. Their cd recordings and live performances will have reggae and non-reggae listeners open to the messages they bring.
Lead singer Vaughn Benjamin's electrifying voice seems an amalgamation of many great voices in reggae-soulful, chanting, edgy. Vaughn's potent lyrical style and his brother Ron's exquisite production, keyboard and bass musical directorship form the nucleus of this musical sextet, which includes Christian Molina (drums), Wayne Andreas (keyboards) and Edwin Byron and Edmund Fieulleteau (guitars). Midnite weaves the cultural lyrics of "old school" roots music with modern day experiences to create a unique listening encounter. Reggae - naked and raw is an apt description for Midnite's musical style, in which they forgo the frills of extensive remixes, overdubbing and other musical refinements.
"Unpolished" is the suitably named title of their debut album which includes such classics as "Don't Move", "Mama Africa", and "Love the Life You Live". Originally released in 1997, while the band was located in Washington, D.C., this crucial album has recently been made widely available on Rastafaria Recordings.
In 1999, Midnite linked up with Wildchild! Records for their second release "Ras Mek Peace". Incredibly, this album was recorded using only two channels and was mastered without any reverb, filtering, compression or equalization. Songs like "Hieroglyphics", in which graffiti is likened to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, showcase the intelligent songwriting that pervades all of Midnite's works.
Following the release of Ras Mek Peace, Midnite returned to live in St. Croix so that they could work with the local musicians and make recordings at their African Roots Lab without any outside interference. The fruits of these labours can be found on their third album "Jubilees of Zion", which was released on their own independent Afrikan Roots Lab record label. The expansive, hypnotic rhythms continue, alongside the messages of peace, universal brotherhood, and cultural resistance to Babylon.
In 2002, Midnite made their Northern California debut at the 9th Annual Sierra Nevada World Music Festival. The combination of Vaughn's searing lyrics, raw roots music and the warmth of the sun beating onto the masses at the village stage made for a potent and memorable experience for all who were present. That same month saw the release of Midnite's fourth album "Seek Knowledge Before Vengeance". Released on the Afrikan Roots Lab record label, this album raises the bar of cultural roots reggae, as we know it today.
Midnite explodes in live performances with sets that often exceed 3 hours. Their vigorous, weighty sound, driven by the punchy bass lines creates a vibe that penetrates straight to the heart. These epic musical communions have earned Midnite an enormous following throughout the roots community. This is especially true in St. Croix, Puerto Rico, France, Brazil, St. Louis, New York, Martha's Vineyard, Boston, Vermont, Asheville and here on the West Coast where they have toured extensively including another rousing appearance at the 10th Annual Sierra Nevada World Music Festival.
In the fall of 2003, Midnite released their first dub album "Intense Pressure" on the Rastafaria label, which includes some tracks from their prior releases along with some dubs of forthcoming albums. Midnite has released studio albums "Ainshant Maps" on their Afrikan Roots Lab record label and "Scheme A Things" on the Rastafaria label.
Midnite has also collaborated with I Grade Records for five releases: "Nemozian Rasta", "Assini" "Vijan", "Let Live" & "Jah Grid" Vaughn Benjamin lead singer of Midnite has also released albums under the name Midnite Branch I and collaborations: "Cipheraw", "Geoman", "He Is Jah" "Project III", "Full Cup", Thru & True, Aneed, "Sun's Of Atom", "New 1000", "Bless Go Roun", "Better World Rasta" and "Infinite Quality" on the Lustre King label.
For the first quarter 0f 2008 Midnite has recently recorded a brand new studio album "Maschaana" & pulled from the vaults a rare never released recording titled "Kayamagon" and a first ever Live to disc CD "Midnite Live" Vol.1, all of these new releases will be available in February 2008 to support the Midnite Winter 2008 Tour.
By breaking all the rules, Midnite is setting a new standard. Armed with a firm foundation in Jah Rastafari, their natural talents, and a strong and uncompromising musical vision, Midnite champions a unique sound that is on the cutting edge of modern roots music.
Source:http://www.midniteband.com/bio.html
Lee Scratch Perry 
Lee Scratch Perry
"I’m an artist, a musician, a magician, a writer, a singer; I’m everything. My name is Lee from the African jungle, originally from West Africa. I’m a man from somewhere else, but my origin is from Africa, straight to Jamaica through reincarnation; reborn in Jamaica..."
Lee "Scratch" Perry (born Rainford Hugh Perry, on March 20, 1936, in Kendal, Jamaica) is a Grammy award-winning reggae and dub artist, who has been highly influential in the development and acceptance of reggae and dub music in Jamaica and overseas. He employs numerous pseudonyms, such as "Pipecock Jaxxon" and "The Upsetter". Arguably the first creatively driven, "artist-producer" in modern recorded music, Lee "Scratch" Perry occupies the highest level of music making - standing comfortably next to pioneers like George Martin, Phil Spector, and Brian Wilson.
Perry's musical career began in the late 1950s as a record seller for Clement Coxsone Dodd's sound system. As his sometimes turbulent relationship with Dodd developed, he found himself performing a variety of important tasks at Dodd's Studio One hit factory, going on to record nearly 30 songs for the label. Disagreements between the pair due to personality and financial conflicts, a recurring theme throughout Perry's career, led him to leave the studio and seek new musical outlets. He soon found a new home at Joe Gibbs's Wirl records.
Working with Joe Gibbs, Perry continued his recording career, but once again, financial problems caused conflict. Perry broke ranks with Gibbs and formed his own label, Upsetter, in 1968. His first single "People Funny Boy", which was an insult directed at Gibbs, sold very well. It is notable for its innovative use of a sample (a crying baby) as well as a fast, chugging beat that would soon become identifiable as "reggae" (the new sound did not really have a name at this time). From 1968 until 1972 he worked with his studio band The Upsetters. During the 1970s, Perry released numerous recordings on a variety of record labels that he controlled, and many of his songs were popular in both Jamaica and the UK. He soon became known for his innovative production techniques as well as his eccentric character.
In the early 1970s, Perry was one of the producers whose mixing board experiments resulted in the creation of dub. In 1973, Perry built a studio in his back yard, The Black Ark, to have more control over his productions and continued to produce notable musicians such as Bob Marley & the Wailers, Junior Byles, The Heptones, and Max Romeo. With his own studio at his disposal, Perry's productions became more lavish, as the energetic producer was able to spend as much time as he wanted on the music he produced. It is important to note that virtually everything Perry recorded in The Black Ark was done using rather basic recording equipment; through sonic sleight-of-hand, Perry made it sound completely unique. Perry remained behind the mixing desk for many years, producing songs and albums that stand out as a high point in reggae history.
By 1978, stress and unwanted outside influences began to take their toll: both Perry and The Black Ark quickly fell into a state of disrepair. Eventually, the studio burned to the ground. Perry has constantly insisted that he burned the Black Ark himself in a fit of rage, but it was most likely an accident due to faulty wiring. After the demise of the Black Ark in the early 1980s, Perry spent time in England and the United States, performing live and making erratic records with a variety of collaborators. It was not until the late 1980s, when he began working with British producers Adrian Sherwood and Neil Fraser (who is better known as Mad Professor), that Perry's career began to get back on solid ground again. Perry also has attributed the recent resurgence of his creative muse to his deciding to quit drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis. Perry stated in an interview that he wanted to see if "it was the smoke making the music or Lee Perry making the music. I found out it was me and that I don't need to smoke."
Perry now lives in Switzerland with his wife Mireille and two children. Although he celebrated his 70th birthday in 2006, he continues recording and performing to enthusiastic audiences in Europe and North America. His modern music is a far cry from his reggae days in Jamaica; many now see Perry as more of a performance artist in several respects. In 2003, Perry won a Grammy for Best Reggae Album with the album Jamaican E.T.. In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Perry 100 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. More recently, he teamed up with a group of Swiss musicians and performed under the name Lee Perry and the White Belly Rats, and made a brief visit to the United States using the New York City based group Dub Is A Weapon as his backing band. Currently there are two feature length movies made about his life and work: Volker Schaner's "Vision Of Paradise" and "The Upsetter" by filmmakers Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough.
In 2007, Perry surprised the music world again when he invited "king of party music" and television personality, Andrew W.K., to produce his upcoming new full-length album, "Repentance". The album is due in 2008.
For more information about Lee Scratch Perry, read the excellent authorized biography, "People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee Scratch Perry", by David Katz.
May 22, 2008
School Days Love - Ajamu
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Ajamu, also known as King Ajamu is a Grenadian calypsonian. His music covers several Caribbean styles, including Calypso, Soca and Reggae. He has held the title of Grenada Calypso Monarch a record seven times in 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1995 and 2004. In 1998 he was given the title Member of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
Ajamu now has a band based in Brooklyn. In 2005 he and his band visited G/da and held a live concert. He then went to our sister isle Carricou and demonstrated his prowes in music for the enjoyment of all present. Etson Mitchell AKA Ajamu is from Mama CAnnes is St. Andrew. He started his music career singing in church and later by singing Raggae with his friends. He is considered to be one of the better musicians in Grenada by the people. Edited by A Roderiquez NB
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajamu
May 20, 2008
Malcolm X
original name Malcolm Little , Muslim name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz
born May 19, 1925, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.died February 21, 1965, New York, New York
Malcolm X.
© Archive Photos
African American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam, who articulated concepts of race pride and black nationalism in the early 1960s. After his assassination, the widespread distribution of his life story—The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)—made him an ideological hero, especially among black youth.
Born in Nebraska, while an infant Malcolm moved with his family to Lansing, Mich. When Malcolm was six years old, his father, the Rev. Earl Little, a Baptist minister and former supporter of the early black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, died after being hit by a streetcar, quite possibly the victim of murder by whites. The surviving family was so poor that Malcolm's mother, Louise Little, resorted to cooking dandelion greens from the street to feed her children. After she was committed to an insane asylum in 1939, Malcolm and his siblings were sent to foster homes or to live with family members.
Malcolm attended school in Lansing, Mich., but dropped out in the eighth grade when one of his teachers told him that he should become a carpenter instead of a lawyer. As a rebellious youngster Malcolm moved from the Michigan State Detention Home, a juvenile home in Mason, Mich., to the Roxbury section of Boston to live with an older half sister from his father's first marriage. There he became involved in petty criminal activities in his teenage years. Known as “Detroit Red” for the reddish tinge in his hair, he developed into a street hustler, drug dealer, and leader of a gang of thieves in Roxbury and Harlem (in New York City).
While in prison for robbery from 1946 to 1952, he underwent a conversion that eventually led him to join the Nation of Islam, an African American movement that combined elements of Islam with black nationalism. His decision to join the Nation also was influenced by discussions with his brother Reginald, who had become a member in Detroit and who was incarcerated with Malcolm in the Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts in 1948. Malcolm quit smoking and gambling and refused to eat pork in keeping with the Nation's dietary restrictions. In order to educate himself, he spent long hours reading books in the prison library, even memorizing a dictionary. He also sharpened his forensic skills by participating in debate classes. Following Nation tradition, he replaced his surname, “Little,” with an “X,” a custom among Nation of Islam followers who considered their family names to have originated with white slaveholders.
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam
After his release from prison Malcolm helped to lead the Nation of Islam during the period of its greatest growth and influence. He met Elijah Muhammad in Chicago in 1952 and then began organizing temples for the Nation in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and in cities in the South. He founded the Nation's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, which he printed in the basement of his home, and initiated the practice of requiring every male member of the Nation to sell an assigned number of newspapers on the street as a recruiting and fund-raising technique. He also articulated the Nation's racial doctrines on the inherent evil of whites and the natural superiority of blacks.
Malcolm rose rapidly to become the minister of Boston Temple No. 11, which he founded; he was later rewarded with the post of minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem, the largest and most prestigious temple in the Nation after the Chicago headquarters. Recognizing his talent and ability, Elijah Muhammad, who had a special affection for Malcolm, named him the National Representative of the Nation of Islam, second in rank to Muhammad himself. Under Malcolm's lieutenancy, the Nation claimed a membership of 500,000. The actual number of members fluctuated, however, and the influence of the organization, refracted through the public persona of Malcolm X, always greatly exceeded its size.
An articulate public speaker, a charismatic personality, and an indefatigable organizer, Malcolm X expressed the pent-up anger, frustration, and bitterness of African Americans during the major phase of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965. He preached on the streets of Harlem and spoke at major universities such as Harvard University and the University of Oxford. His keen intellect, incisive wit, and ardent radicalism made him a formidable critic of American society. He also criticized the mainstream civil rights movement, challenging Martin Luther King, Jr.'s central notions of integration and nonviolence. Malcolm argued that more was at stake than the civil right to sit in a restaurant or even to vote—the most important issues were black identity, integrity, and independence. In contrast to King's strategy of nonviolence, civil disobedience, and redemptive suffering, Malcolm urged his followers to defend themselves “by any means necessary.” His biting critique of the “so-called Negro” provided the intellectual foundations for the Black Power and black consciousness movements in the United States in the late 1960s and '70s (see black nationalism). Through the influence of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X helped to change the terms used to refer to African Americans from “Negro” and “coloured” to “black” and “Afro-American.”
Mandela, Nelson
Nelson Mandela
in full Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
born July 18, 1918, Umtata, Cape of Good Hope, S.Af.Nelson Mandela.
© David Turnley/Corbis
South African black nationalist and statesman whose long imprisonment (1962–90) and subsequent ascension to the presidency (1994) symbolized the aspirations of South Africa's black majority. He led the country until 1999.
The son of Chief Henry Mandela of the Xhosa-speaking Tembu people, Nelson Mandela renounced his claim to the chieftainship to become a lawyer. He attended the University College of Fort Hare and studied law at the University of Witwatersrand; he later passed the qualification exam to become a lawyer and in 1952 opened a firm with Oliver Tambo. In 1944 he joined the African National Congress (ANC), a black-liberation group, and in 1949 became one of its leaders, helping to revitalize the organization and opposing the apartheid policies of the ruling National Party. Mandela went on trial for treason in 1956–61 but was acquitted. During the extended court proceedings he divorced his first wife and married Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela (Winnie Madikizela-Mandela); they divorced in 1996. After the massacre of unarmed Africans by police forces at Sharpeville in 1960 and the subsequent banning of the ANC, Mandela abandoned his nonviolent stance and began advocating acts of sabotage against the South African regime. In 1962 he was jailed and sentenced to five years in prison.
In 1963 the imprisoned Mandela and several other men were tried for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy in the celebrated Rivonia Trial, named after a fashionable suburb of Johannesburg where raiding police had discovered quantities of arms and equipment at the headquarters of the underground Umkhonto We Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation,” the ANC's military wing). Mandela had been a founder of the organization and admitted the truth of some of the charges that were made against him. On June 12, 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
From 1964 to 1982 Mandela was incarcerated at Robben Island Prison, off Cape Town. He was subsequently kept at the maximum-security Pollsmoor Prison until 1988, at which time he was hospitalized for tuberculosis. Mandela retained wide support among South Africa's black population, and his imprisonment became a cause célèbre among the international community that condemned apartheid. The South African government under President F.W. de Klerk released Mandela from prison on February 11, 1990. On March 2 Mandela was chosen deputy president of the ANC (the president, Tambo, being ill), and he replaced Tambo as president in July 1991. Mandela and de Klerk worked to end apartheid and bring about a peaceful transition to nonracial democracy in South Africa. In 1993 they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for their efforts.
Nelson Mandela visiting a school in Johannesburg, S.Af.
Louise Gubb/Corbis
In April 1994 South Africa held its first all-race elections, which were won by Mandela and the ANC. As president, he established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which investigated human rights violations under apartheid, and introduced housing, education, and economic development initiatives designed to improve the living standards of the country's black population. In 1996 he oversaw the enactment of a new democratic constitution. The following year Mandela resigned his post with the ANC and in 1999 did not seek a second term as South African president. After leaving office in June, he retired from active politics.
Mandela's writings and speeches were collected in No Easy Walk to Freedom (1965) and I Am Prepared to Die, 4th rev. ed. (1979). His autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, was published in 1994.
Kenyatta, Jomo
Jomo Kenyatta
died August 22, 1978, Mombasa, Kenya
original name Kamau Ngengi
born c. 1894, Ichaweri, British East Africa [now in Kenya]died August 22, 1978, Mombasa, Kenya
Jomo Kenyatta.
John Moss—Black Star
African statesman and nationalist, the first prime minister (1963–64) and then the first president (1964–78) of independent Kenya.
Early life
Kenyatta was born as Kamau, son of Ngengi, at Ichaweri, southwest of Mount Kenya in the East African highlands. His father was a leader of a small Kikuyu agricultural settlement. About age 10 Kamau became seriously ill with jigger infections in his feet and one leg, and he underwent successful surgery at a newly established Church of Scotland mission. This was his initial contact with Europeans. Fascinated with what he had seen during his recuperation, Kamau ran away from home to become a resident pupil at the mission. He studied the Bible, English, mathematics, and carpentry and paid his fees by working as a houseboy and cook for a European settler. In August 1914 he was baptized with the name Johnstone Kamau. He was one of the earliest of the Kikuyu to leave the confines of his own culture. And, like many others, Kamau soon left the mission life for the urban attractions of Nairobi.
There he secured a job as a clerk in the Public Works Department, and he also adopted the name Kenyatta, the Kikuyu term for a fancy belt that he wore. After serving briefly as an interpreter in the High Court, Kenyatta transferred to a post with the Nairobi Town Council. About this time he married and began to raise a family.
The first African political protest movement in Kenya against a white-settler-dominated government began in 1921—the East Africa Association (EAA), led by an educated young Kikuyu named Harry Thuku. Kenyatta joined the following year. One of the EAA's main purposes was to recover Kikuyu lands lost when Kenya became a British crown colony (1920). The Africans were dispossessed, leaseholds of land were restricted to white settlers, and native reservations were established. In 1925 the EAA disbanded as a result of government pressures, and its members re-formed as the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA). Three years later Kenyatta became this organization's general secretary, though he had to give up his municipal job as a consequence.
Johnson, James Weldon
born June 17, 1871, Jacksonville, Fla., U.S.
died June 26, 1938, Wiscasset, Maine
died June 26, 1938, Wiscasset, Maine
Johnson
Brown Brothers
poet, diplomat, and anthologist of black culture.
Trained in music and other subjects by his mother, a schoolteacher, Johnson graduated from Atlanta University with A.B. (1894) and M.A. (1904) degrees and later studied at Columbia University. For several years he was principal of the black high school in Jacksonville, Fla. He read law at the same time, was admitted to the Florida bar in 1897, and began practicing there. During this period, he and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954), a composer, began writing songs, including “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” based on James's 1900 poem of the same name, which became something of a national anthem to many African-Americans. In 1901 the two went to New York, where they wrote some 200 songs for the Broadway musical stage.
In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him U.S. consul to Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, and in 1909 he became consul in Corinto, Nicaragua, where he served until 1914. He later taught at Fisk University. Meanwhile, he began writing a novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (published anonymously, 1912), which attracted little attention until it was reissued under his own name in 1927. From 1916 Johnson was a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917) was followed by his pioneering anthology Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and books of American Negro Spirituals (1925, 1926), collaborations with his brother. His best-known work, God's Trombones (1927), a group of black dialect sermons in verse, includes “The Creation” and “Go Down Death.” Johnson's introductions to his anthologies contain some of the most perceptive assessments ever made of black contributions to American culture. Along This Way (1933) is an autobiography. Source:http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9043858
Giovanni, Nikki
Nikki Giovanni
byname of Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr.
born June 7, 1943, Knoxville, Tenn., U.S.Giovanni, 1973
UPI/Corbis-Bettmann
African-American poet whose writings ranged from calls for violent revolution to poems for children and intimate personal statements.
Giovanni grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Knoxville, Tenn., and in 1960 she entered Nashville's Fisk University. By 1967, when she received her B.A., she was firmly committed to the Civil Rights Movement and the concept of black power. In her first three collections of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Black Judgement (1968), and Re: Creation (1970), her content was urgently revolutionary and suffused with deliberate interpretation of experience through a black consciousness.
Giovanni's experiences as a single mother then began to influence her poetry. Spin a Soft Black Song (1971), Ego-Tripping (1973), and Vacation Time (1980) were collections of poems for children. Loneliness, thwarted hopes, and the theme of family affection became increasingly important in her poetry during the 1970s. She returned to political concerns in Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983), with dedications to black American heroes and heroines. From the late 1960s Giovanni was a popular reader of her own poetry, with performances issued on several recordings, and a respected speaker as well. In Gemini (1971) she presented autobiographical reminiscences, and Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles (1988) was a collection of her essays. Source:http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9002501
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.Henry Louis Gates, Jr.born September 16, 1950, Keyser, West Virginia, U.S.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Rick Friedman/Black Star
American literary critic and scholar known for his pioneering theories of African literature and African American literature. He introduced the notion of signifyin' to represent African and African American literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before.
Gates's father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor; his mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, cleaned houses. Gates graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in 1968 and attended a local junior college before enrolling at Yale University, where he received a bachelor's degree in history in 1973. After receiving two fellowships in 1970, he took a leave of absence from Yale to visit Africa, working as an anesthetist in a hospital in Tanzania and then traveling through other African nations. In 1973 he entered Clare College at the University of Cambridge, where one of his tutors was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. Soyinka persuaded Gates to study literature instead of history; he also taught him much about the culture of the Yoruba, one of the largest Nigerian ethnic groups. After receiving his doctoral degree in English language and literature in 1979, Gates taught literature and African American studies at Yale University, Cornell University, Duke University, and Harvard University, where he was appointed W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991.
In 1980 Gates became codirector of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Yale. In the years that followed he earned a reputation as a “literary archaeologist” by recovering and collecting thousands of lost literary works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. In the early 1980s Gates rediscovered the earliest novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), by proving that the work was in fact written by an African American woman and not, as had been widely assumed, by a white man from the North. From the 1980s Gates edited a number of critical anthologies of African American literature, including Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), Bearing Witness: Selections from African American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (1991), and (with Nellie Y. McKay) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997).
Gates developed the notion of signifyin' in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988). Signifyin' is the practice of representing an idea indirectly, through a commentary that is often humourous, boastful, insulting, or provocative. Gates argued that the pervasiveness and centrality of signifyin' in African and African American literature and music means that all such expression is essentially a kind of dialogue with the literature and music of the past. Gates traced the practice of signifyin' to Esu, the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, and to the figure of the “signifying monkey,” with which Esu is closely associated. He applied the notion to the interpretation of slave narratives and showed how it informs the works of Phillis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, the early African American writers of periodical fiction, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, and Wole Soyinka.
In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) and elsewhere Gates argued for the inclusion of African American literature in the Western canon. Other works by Gates include Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (1994), Colored People: A Memoir (1994), The Future of the Race (1996; with Cornel West), and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997) Source: http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9002500
Evers, Medgar
Medgar Evers
died June 12, 1963, Jackson, Miss.
in full Medgar Wiley Evers
born July 2, 1925, Decatur, Miss., U.S.died June 12, 1963, Jackson, Miss.
Medgar Evers.
© Archive Photos
American black civil-rights activist, whose murder received national attention and made him a martyr to the cause of the civil rights movement.
Evers served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Afterward he and his elder brother, Charles Evers, both graduated from Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University, Lorman, Miss.) in 1950. They settled in Philadelphia, Miss., and engaged in various business pursuits—Medgar was an insurance salesman, and Charles operated a restaurant, a gas station, and other enterprises—and at the same time began organizing local affiliates of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They worked quietly at first, slowly building a base of support; in 1954 Medgar moved to Jackson to become the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi. He traveled throughout the state recruiting members and organizing voter-registration drives and economic boycotts.
During the early 1960s the increased tempo of civil-rights activities in the South created high and constant tensions, and in Mississippi conditions were often at the breaking point. On June 12, 1963, a few hours after President John F. Kennedy had made an extraordinary broadcast to the nation on the subject of civil rights, Medgar Evers was shot and killed in an ambush in front of his home. The murder made Evers, until then a hardworking and effective but relatively obscure figure outside Mississippi, a nationally known figure. He was buried with full military honours in Arlington National Cemetery and awarded the 1963 Spingarn Medal of the NAACP.
Charles Evers immediately requested and was granted appointment by the NAACP to his brother's position in Mississippi, and afterward he became a major political figure in the state. Evers's widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, was the first woman to head the NAACP (1995–98).
Byron de La Beckwith, a white segregationist, was charged with the murder. He was set free in 1964 after two trials resulted in hung juries but was convicted in a third trial held in 1994. Beckwith was given a life sentence, and in 2001 he died in prison. Source:http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9033366
Du Bois, W.E.B.
W. E. B. Du Bois
died August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana
in full William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
born February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, U.S.died August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1918.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
American sociologist, the most important black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934. Late in life he became identified with communist causes.
Early career
Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, a black institution at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of blacks. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of blacks in America, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914 at Atlanta (Georgia) University, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro; A Social Study (1899), the first case study of a black community in the United States.
Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential black leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of the whites. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington's strategy, rather than freeing the black man from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the black community into two wings—the “conservative” supporters of Washington and his “radical” critics.
Two years later, in 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, which was dedicated chiefly to attacking the platform of Booker T. Washington. The small organization, which met annually until 1909, was seriously weakened by internal squabbles and Washington's opposition. But it was significant as an ideological forerunner and direct inspiration for the interracial NAACP, founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association's director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the black protest from 1910 until 1934. (See also the Britannica Classic Negro literature.)
Both in the Niagara Movement and in the NAACP, Du Bois acted mainly as an integrationist, but his thinking always exhibited, to varying degrees, separatist-nationalist tendencies. In The Souls of Black Folk he had expressed the characteristic dualism of black Americans:
One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.…He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
Douglass, Frederick
Frederick Douglass
died February 20, 1895, Washington, D.C.
original name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
born February 1818?, Tuckahoe, Maryland, U.S.died February 20, 1895, Washington, D.C.
Frederick Douglass.
Courtesy of the Holt-Messer Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts
African American who was one of the most eminent human-rights leaders of the 19th century. His oratorical and literary brilliance thrust him into the forefront of the U.S. abolition movement, and he became the first black citizen to hold high rank in the U.S. government.
Separated as an infant from his slave mother (he never knew his white father), Frederick lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld, whose wife defied state law by teaching the boy to read. Auld, however, declared that learning would make him unfit for slavery, and Frederick was forced to continue his education surreptitiously with the aid of schoolboys in the street. Upon the death of his master, he was returned to the plantation as a field hand at 16. Later, he was hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker. Frederick tried to escape with three others in 1833, but the plot was discovered before they could get away. Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a labourer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.
At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. These extemporaneous remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was unexpectedly catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. From then on, despite heckling and mockery, insult, and violent personal attack, Douglass never flagged in his devotion to the abolitionist cause.
Frederick Douglass.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass felt impelled to write his autobiography in 1845, revised and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Douglass's account became a classic in American literature as well as a primary source about slavery from the bondsman's viewpoint. To avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, Douglass left on a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. Abroad, Douglass helped to win many new friends for the abolition movement and to cement the bonds of humanitarian reform between the continents.
Douglass returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglass's Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, New York. The abolition leader William Lloyd Garrison disagreed with the need for a separate, black-oriented press, and the two men broke over this issue as well as over Douglass's support of political action to supplement moral suasion. Thus, after 1851 Douglass allied himself with the faction of the movement led by James G. Birney. He did not countenance violence, however, and specifically counseled against the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (October 1859).
During the Civil War (1861–65) Douglass became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln, advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. Throughout Reconstruction (1865–77), he fought for full civil rights for freedmen and vigorously supported the women's rights movement.
After Reconstruction, Douglass served as assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission (1871), and in the District of Columbia he was marshal (1877–81) and recorder of deeds (1881–86); finally, he was appointed U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti (1889–91). Source:http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9031056
Davis, Ossie
Ossie Davis
died Feb. 4, 2005, Miami Beach, Fla.
byname of Raiford Chatman Davis
born Dec. 18, 1917, Cogdell, Ga., U.S.died Feb. 4, 2005, Miami Beach, Fla.
Ossie Davis, 1991.
CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images
American writer, actor, director, and social activist who was known for his contributions to African American theatre and film and for his passionate support of civil rights and humanitarian causes. He was also noted for his artistic partnership with his wife, Ruby Dee, which was considered one of the theatre and film world's most distinguished.
After attending Howard University in Washington, D.C., Davis moved to New York City to pursue a career as a writer. He served in the army during World War II but returned to New York City after the war with an interest in acting. In 1946 he made his Broadway debut in Jeb, during the run of which he met Dee, whom he married in 1948.
Davis and Dee frequently appeared together on stage, screen, and television—most notably in Purlie Victorious (1961), a play written by Davis and later adapted for the screen as Gone Are the Days (1963). Davis directed and wrote the films Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Countdown to Kusini (1976). He continued to work into the 21st century, combining his acting pursuits with writing and civil rights campaigning. Davis made several films with Spike Lee, including Do the Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992), in which he reenacted the real-life eulogy he had given for the fallen civil rights leader. Davis also spoke at the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. The recipients of numerous honours, Davis and Dee were jointly awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1995 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2004. source:http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9399742
Davis, Angela
Angela Davis
in full Angela Yvonne Davis
born Jan. 26, 1944, Birmingham, Ala., U.S.Angela Davis, 1974.
AP
militant American black activist who gained an international reputation during her imprisonment and trial on conspiracy charges in 1970–72.
The daughter of Alabama schoolteachers, Davis studied at home and abroad (1961–67) before becoming a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, under the Marxist professor Herbert Marcuse. Because of her political opinions and despite an excellent record as an instructor at the university's Los Angeles campus, the California Board of Regents in 1970 refused to renew her appointment as lecturer in philosophy. In 1991, however, Davis became a professor in the field of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz; in 1995, amid much controversy she was appointed a presidential chair.
Championing the cause of black prisoners in the 1960s and '70s, Davis grew particularly attached to a young revolutionary, George Jackson, one of the so-called Soledad Brothers (after Soledad Prison). Jackson's brother Jonathan was among the four persons killed—including the trial judge—in an abortive escape and kidnapping attempt from the Hall of Justice in Marin county, California (August 7, 1970). Suspected of complicity, Davis was sought for arrest and became one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most wanted criminals. Arrested in New York City in October 1970, she was returned to California to face charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy; she was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury.
In 1974 she published Angela Davis: An Autobiography (reprinted 1988). In 1980 she ran for U.S. vice president on the unsuccessful Communist Party ticket. Among her writings are the books Women, Race, & Class (1981), Women, Culture, and Politics (1989), and Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998).
source:http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9029505
Cosby, Bill
Bill Cosby
in full William Henry Cosby, Jr.
born July 12, 1937, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.Cosby, 1995
Peter Morgan—Reuters/© Archive Photos
American comedian, actor, and producer, who played a major role in the development of a more positive portrayal of blacks on television.
Cosby left high school without earning his diploma and joined the U.S. Navy in 1956. While enlisted he passed a high school equivalency exam, and after his discharge he received an athletic scholarship to Temple University in Philadelphia in 1961. During his sophomore year he left Temple to entertain at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he began to establish a trademark comedic style characterized by a friendly and accessible stage persona and a relaxed, carefully timed delivery. During the 1960s Cosby toured major U.S. and Canadian cities, commanding ever-higher performance fees. In 1965 he made his first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Cosby's first acting assignment, in the espionage series I Spy (1965–68), made him the first black actor to perform in a starring dramatic role on network television. His portrayal of a black secret agent won him three Emmy Awards and helped to advance the status of African-Americans on television. Cosby's subsequent projects for television included the series of Bill Cosby Specials (1968–71, 1975), the situation comedy The Bill Cosby Show (1969–71), the variety show The New Bill Cosby Show (1972–73), and the successful cartoon Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972–84, 1989). He appeared in numerous commercials and on children's shows such as Sesame Street and Electric Company; he also made several feature films, which enjoyed limited success.
Cosby's most successful work, The Cosby Show, appeared on NBC from 1984 to 1992, becoming one of the most popular situation comedies in television history. The Cosby Show depicted a stable, prosperous black family—Cosby's character was a doctor and his wife a lawyer—and avoided racial stereotypes. The show had broad cross-cultural appeal and won several major awards.
Cosby was awarded a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1977 and was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1984. His comedy records earned him eight Grammy awards. In 1986 he wrote the best-selling book, Fatherhood.
Source:http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9002510