FYI, for those interested, “Yolanda and the King of Michigan, Part Two”, will be posted soon. Please let me know what you think of it.
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Category AFRICAN-AMERICAN
Yolanda Baltimore and the King of Michigan
Yolanda Baltimore and the King of Michigan / Claire O’Brien 2015
Five minutes after Yolanda Baltimore’s escape, everyone inside the Detroit Emergency Management Camp knew that she had not only spotted the sign on time, but had also displayed a spectacular, even singular finesse, the like of which may well not be seen again
Hearts soared with hope and pride. That Yolanda.
They could not have asked for a stronger sign. The sky brimmed over with the brightest stars anyone had ever dreamed. Immediately, over 500,000 people began moving outward from the center of Detoit. This movement was so intensely focused, so controlled, so slow and so impossibly quiet that it was almost impossible to see. At least that’s what the government observers who were supposed to be monitoring the Camp’s massive NSA security system kept reporting, until officers threatened to throw the next guard who “just couldn’t see right” down an open mine shaft into Camp Appalachia.
Alicia Evans-Gonzalez prepared to step into the flow of people from her position in a crumbling doorway in Section Nine, where she’d been pretending to nod off on the low-grade heroin that managed to make it past the machine guns, razor wire and drone attacks when bread and milk could not. The United North American Home Security Forces had no idea that actually, only a handful of people in the Detroit City Concentration Camp continued to use heroin. That meant 8,000 troops the UNAHSF didn’t know about.
Evans-Gonzales scratched herself convincingly, then lowered herself with one brief twist into the passing stream.
Ten seconds later, she had disappeared.
“We had no doubt we would win. We knew we would win” Evans-Gonzalez told her grandson, DeRay twenty years later as the two worked together at the 15th George Jackson Memorial Apple Harvest. “We just knew. We’d been preparing ourselves every moment, from that first morning we woke up to find the city surrounded by razor wire, electric fences and gun towers, attack dogs patrolling and helicopters buzzing overhead – right up to the night of Yolanda’s escape.”
Evans-Gonzales bit into a big Yellow Delicious apple.
“Well, of course we’d actually been preparing for generations,” she corrected herself as she chewed.
“But why didn’t you send a grown-up?” asked Deray, who thought of himself as twelve years old. Actually, he had just turned eleven.
“An adult wouldn’t have stood a chance. Believe me, we tried,” Evans-Gonzalez replied. “Six lives were lost before the People agreed that our only hope lay in the kind of person the guards had always ignored: a little girl.”
DeRay nodded.
“Sometimes we make everyone a king,” he said.
His grandmother smiled.
SPEAKING OF LITTLE GIRLS
Yolanda had crossed the Buffer Zone, a mile and a half of flattened rubble encircled by a high fence. Several times she had laid down flat at the approach of a helicoptor, but the searchlights had swept the sky, not the ground below, and she had felt very glad to be a small girl.
Now Yolanda stood very still, looking through the fence and standing free. Evening had just fallen, and it had begun to rain. She had nearly arrived at her destination, a small garage at the end of a one-way street, and had begun peering about sharply for the message she had retrieved in dozens of dreams over many months.
Yolanda was eight years old. The world was wet, but not dark – the impossible stars were almost too bright to know what to do with themselves. But the fence was very high. Yolanda might have been afraid, but then she wasn’t – how could she be? she asked herself.
We dreamed that Yolanda could fly
For surrounding her as far as anyone could possibly imagine, in every direction were the People, stretching out to her from the prison that could never hold them, from across the country, across the skies, across the oceans and across the centuries. There were the living, of course, as well as the people still to come. She did not know about other people’s ancestors, but as for her own, Yolanda Baltimore’s ancestors were here, right here – and they left no question about it.
Please click on the link above. It’s a contribution from Eddie Star at http://eddiestarblog.wordpress.com
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END OF PART ONE ∇ TUNE IN SOON FOR PART TWO
A Monumental Man
A young Muhammed Ali, Chicago/ Photo info unknown
!BASTA! ENOUGH! DEFEND BLACK LIVES!
Protesters Shut Down Campaign Speeches
Black Lives Matter founder Patriss Cullors lead a protest at Netroots Nation in Phoenix, Arizona, effectively shutting down the speeches of presidential hopefuls former Maryland, Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sen. Bernie Sanders,MSNBC.com reports.
“It’s not like we like shutting sh*t down, but we have to,” Cullors said. “We are tired of being interrupted.”
With shouts of “Black lives matter!” and “Say her name!” two hashtags that have been used to raise awareness about state-sanctioned violence against Black people in the United States, protesters refused to be silenced even as O’Malley and Sanders tried to stick to their talking points.
MSNBC reports:
Both candidates – former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – struggled to appease the angry protesters while sticking to their talking points and both ultimately failed to capitalize on the unexpected interruption, which comes amid a national conversation on racial tensions and police brutality. Just last week, a black woman named Sandra Bland died in police custody after being arrested for a traffic violation in Texas. Meanwhile, Friday marked the first anniversary of Eric Garner’s chokehold death at the hands of NYPD officers in Staten Island.
“Every single day folks are dying. Not being able to take another breath. We are in a state of emergency,” Cullors continued, hoarse from chanting. “If you don’t feel that emergency, you are not human.”
After much chanting – and pleas from event organizers to give O’Malley a chance to respond to their questions – the former Maryland governor began to speak about criminal justice reform, promising a detailed policy proposal soon and saying he supported forcing police districts to report brutality complaints. Protesters interrupted him, chanting, “Black lives matter!”
“I know, I know … Let me talk a little bit … Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter,” O’Malley answered earning boos and shouts from the protesters and gasps from the rest of the audience.
He left the stage shortly thereafter.
Sanders – who was widely expected to be the favorite candidate this weekend – took the stage to chants from protesters, who made it clear they wanted answers from him as well.
“Black lives of course matter but I have spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK,” Sanders said with visible exasperation. “I will answer your question, but I’d like to speak for a couple of minutes, I was told …”
Sanders left the stage, abbreviating his appearance significantly. Netroots Nation released a statement in solidarity with the protesters:
“Although we wish the candidates had more time to respond to the issues, what happened today is reflective of an urgent moment America is facing today,” the group said in a statement, highlighting next year’s conference location – St. Louis – which aims to put a direct focus on race issues in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting death at the hands of police nearby in Ferguson, Missouri.
Moderator Jose Vargas refused to silence the protesters, later tweeting:
“To folks who ask me why I didn’t stop protestors: We cannot silence people of color and women of color”
In an interview http://daviddayen.tumblr.com/post/124440944821/interview-with-ashley-yeats-black-lives-matter ) with journalist David Dayen, protest organizer Ashley Yeats echoed those same ideas. When asked how a candidate can bridge the divide between racial and economic justice when speaking to the progressive community, she said:
“When you talk about economic justice, who’s the poorest of the poor? Talk about gentrification, talk about mass displacement. Talk about the things that actually lead to poverty. Who is affected by that? Talk about whose neighborhoods are flooded with really harmful drugs. Talk about who’s denied access to resources. Talk about who [isn’t]? that is all in black and brown neighborhoods. So if you’re doing economic justice but you’re not talking to black and brown people, you’re not actually doing economic justice. So that’s the challenge I pose and that’s how you bridge the gap, get people to realize that if you’re talking about economic issues, black people are part of every category.”By
Homophobia, racism, and his own badge
NYPD Officer Accused Of Calling Woman A ‘Fucking Dyke’ Before Assaulting Her
Why is Sandra Bland dead?
This Is Our Selma
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II /Common Dreams
North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement has been tens of thousands into the streets to protest the repressive policies passed by the GOP government. (Photo: twbuckner/cc/flickr)
In 2006 the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to re-authorize the prized 1964 Voting Rights Act and President George W. Bush signed it. After the first Black President won two elections, five U.S. Supreme Court justices over-ruled 98 senators and gutted the law.
Their ruling, called Shelby, two years ago opened the floodgates, giving the green light to state legislators throughout the South. One North Carolina state senator even declaring that Shelby had removed the “headache” of pre-clearance. The right wing that had seized Mr. Lincoln’s party was turned loose to wage war on our sacred right to vote. These extremists filed a 14-page voter suppression bill on April 4, 2013, the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and added 57-pages of anti-democracy laws, with a single purpose: to abridge and shrink the growing electorate of color. Two hours after Gov. McCrory signed it into law, the North Carolina NAACP filed a lawsuit.
Monday, July 13, 2015, is the day of reckoning. Today we go to trial. Tens of thousands are joining us in the streets. This is our Selma.
The NC NAACP together with the Advancement Project, U.S. Department of Justice and other vulnerable voters will enter the Federal Court in Winston-Salem to put into the record evidence that shows these 57-pages are designed to slash democracy in North Carolina, particularly voting rights for people of color.
From cutting same-day registration, early voting by a week, early registration for all high school 16- and 17-year-olds, to requiring new hurdles for obtaining photo IDs which some 300,000 North Carolinian African Americans, Latino and older voters (even those who have voted for years) will have trouble completing. Add to all this, allowing poll watchers from anywhere to intimidate voters of color (we are easy to spot) at the polls.
This is precisely why voter suppression laws are so underhanded and so dangerous to our American democracy. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act protects voters against any law that makes it disproportionately harder for voters of color to participate. This standard is not about whether voter suppression tactics make it impossible to vote. The lawmakers who crafted that 57-page bag of tricks had sense enough to know not to say: “You are black, and therefore we are taking away your right to vote.” Even North Carolina’s legislators know they must stick to code-words and code-policies today.
When they held their hearings on the bill, scores of witnesses presented evidence that showed the new restrictions would make it “disproportionately harder for voters of color” to participate in the electoral process. Every legislator knew the restrictions would abridge our right to vote. They chose to pass it anyway.
Perhaps they knew their days were numbered if a fair voting system remained in place. Perhaps they were aware that same day registration, early voting, and provisional balloting made it easier for everybody — particularly poor and working people with children — to vote. Perhaps they had seen that these alternatives made it possible for working people who could not get off work to vote on Tuesday, voted in the thousands on Saturdays and Sundays. Turnout among North Carolina’s black voters skyrocketed, from 41.9 percent in 2000 to 68.5 percent in 2012, when 70 percent of African Americans used early voting. Although African Americans comprise 22 percent of North Carolina voters, they made up 41 percent of voters who used same-day registration. And we cast out-of-precinct ballots at twice the rate of White voters.
Black voters, in particular, need alternative voting measures because, after almost four centuries of exploitation and oppression, many of our sisters and brothers continue to lag behind whites in income, education, access to transportation and residential stability.
North Carolina is the test case for the national anti-democracy forces who desperately seek to constrict the new, multi-cultural, southern electorate. North Carolina may be the state with the worst anti-voter laws on its books today, but these voter suppression tricks have been exported to one southern state after another, with a confederate flag brazenness.
Now, like Selma in 1965, the moral call is central to the gains our courageous elders made toward achieving some justice and equality. Citizens from North Carolina and across the U.S., with attorneys and faith leaders at their side, are in Winston-Salem to wage a pivotal state fight. The outcome in Winston-Salem will impact voting rights across the nation.
It’s a sad and shameful truth that 50 years after the bloodshed in Selma — 50 years after our prized Voting Rights Act — African Americans have fewer, not more, voting protections today. This is a moral struggle. We call on people of faith and moral character to unite. Once again, we must put on our marching shoes. Once again, we must sound the clarion trumpets in the name of liberty, and justice, and the right to vote, for all.
#ThisIsOurSelma
© 2015 Huffington Post
African-Americans on the Great Plains
(John Johnson / Courtesy Douglas Keister / NMAAHC, SI)
Now Keister, who is 64 and lives in Chico, California, is donating 60 large-scale prints made from his collection for display in a permanent home—the National Museum of African American History and Culture, under construction and due to open on the National Mall in 2015. “They speak to a time and a place where African-Americans were treated as second-class citizens but lived their lives with dignity,” says curator Michèle Gates Moresi. “You can read about it and hear people talk about it, but to actually see the images is something entirely different.”
Determining exactly who those people were—and what skilled hand took their photographs—has taken significant detective work. After Keister read the Journal Star article, he took his negatives back to Lincoln and showed them to local historian Ed Zimmer, who was surprised to see how many there were. Together, they set out to identify the mystery photographer. “We took some wrong turns,” Zimmer says, but their search led them to a 94-year-old Lincolnite named Ruth Folley. “She went and got her box of family photos, and one of them matched ours, and she just said, ‘Well, Mr. Johnny Johnson took all of these.’” Her assertion was confirmed when Zimmer turned up a vintage print with a signature in the corner: John Johnson.
Through census records, Zimmer discovered that Johnson was born in Lincoln in 1879 to Harrison Johnson, an escaped slave and Civil War veteran, and his wife, Margaret. After graduating from high school and briefly attending the University of Nebraska (where he played football), Johnson found work in one of the few realms open to African-Americans at the time: manual labor. “He was a janitor and a drayman,” says Zimmer, “but also a very prolific and talented community photographer.” From roughly 1910 to 1925, he took as many as 500 photographs using a bulky view camera and flash powder. Some appear to have been commissioned portraits, while others feature co-workers, family and friends, and yet others convey Johnson’s personal interests—construction sites and local architecture.
As they scrutinized the portraits, Keister and Zimmer began to see something else emerge: an untold story of what historians call the new negro movement. Following World War I, African-American writers, musicians, artists and academics across the country sought to promote confidence, dignity and self-expression—a movement that would blossom into the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson’s portraits, they realized, were part of the same intellectual current. His subjects were formally posed and dressed in their best, and they often held books to show that they were educated. “Up until then, many photos of African-Americans showed the plight of the poor,” Keister says. “These photos are elevating. They’re ennobling.”
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Eléctrica in the Desert 