Friday, March 30, 2007

Special W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio Town Hall Meeting Online March 31 @ 11pm central/12pm eastern @ http://www.blogtalkradio.com/weallbe

On Saturday March 31,2007 @ 11am Central/12pm Eastern
Please Join Tha Artivist Presents…W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio For A Special Town Hall Online Meeting

March’s Theme Is “People You Should Know”…

The Town Hall Meeting’s Theme Is “Empowering Black Power”...

Our Special Guests Will Be…
Legendary entrepreneurs and Black community leaders Kermit Eady and Larry A. Barton, the founders of the Black United Fund of New York


Kermit Eady, BUFNY founder, now CEO of Eady Associates
http://www.kermiteady.com

When Black Self-Help Goes Wrong An Article By Kermit Eady
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/03/when-black-self-help-goes-wrong.html

We Will Also Discuss The Brooding MLK Memorial Controversy :
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/03/mlk-memorial-scandal-in-making.html

Another Special Guest Will Be…YOU!!!
That’s Right We @ W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio Would Love To Hear From The Audience Especially On An Important Day Such As This…Please Feel Free To Call Us @ 646-652-4593 or e-mail us @ r2c2h2@gmail.com with your questions and/or comments…

To Listen To The Show Live Please Go To The Following Website:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/weallbe

All shows are recorded and archived and are available for download 24/7 for your downloading and listening pleasure…Just go the previous mentioned link to check out past shows:
http://www/blogtalkradio.com/weallbe

W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Waiting For You!!!

It's About Time...


If you want to see more episodes of "The Arthur 'Soldier Boy Grip' Taylor Chronicles" please visit the official website


Black WWII pilots honored by Congress

By BEN EVANS, Associated Press WriterThu Mar 29, 6:23 PM ET

President Bush and Congress awarded the Tuskegee Airmen one of the nation's highest honors Thursday for fighting to defend their country even as they faced bigotry at home.

"For all the unreturned salutes and unforgivable indignities ... I salute you for your service to the United States of America," Bush told the legendary black aviators, standing in salute as some 300 of them stood to return the gesture.

At a ceremony in the sun-filled Capitol Rotunda, Bush then joined congressional leaders and other dignitaries in awarding the veterans — most of them in their 80s — the Congressional Gold Medal.

"We are so overjoyed," said Ret. Capt. Roscoe Brown Jr., after he and five other airmen accepted the medal on behalf of the group. "We are so proud today, and I think America is proud today."

Nearly 1,000 fighter pilots trained as a segregated Army Air Corps unit at the Tuskegee, Ala., air base. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had overruled his top generals and ordered that such a program be created.

Even after the black airmen were admitted, many commanders continued to believe they didn't have the intelligence, courage and patriotism to do what was being asked of them.

Not allowed to practice or fight with their white counterparts, the Tuskegee Airmen distinguished themselves by painting the tails of their airplanes red, which led to them becoming known as the "Red Tails."

Hundreds saw combat throughout Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa, escorting bomber aircraft on missions and protecting them from the enemy. Dozens died in the fighting; others were held prisoners of war.

"You caused America to look in the mirror of its soul and you showed America that there was nothing a black person couldn't do," said Colin Powell, a retired Army general and Bush's former secretary of state. Powell, who is black, thanked the airmen for paving the way for his career.

Charles "A-Train" Dryden, 86, a retired lieutenant colonel from Atlanta, expressed mixed feelings that the honor came so long after the war and that many of his colleagues had died without knowing that Americans appreciated their service.

Just a couple of days ago, he said, a fellow pilot was hospitalized in Atlanta and couldn't attend the ceremony.

"So many of the guys have passed on," he said.

Dryden recalled his pride in returning from Africa and Europe after serving in Tuskegee's original 99th Fighter Squadron, only to be stationed in Walterboro, S.C., where he saw German prisoners of war get privileges in theaters and cafeterias that were denied to black soldiers.

"That was the low point of my career," said Dryden, who uses a wheelchair.

Thursday's medal has helped convince him that the country recognizes the airmen's contributions.

"It's really something," he said at a breakfast before the ceremony.

Congress has awarded gold medals to more than 300 individuals and groups since giving the first one to George Washington in 1776. Originally, they went only to military leaders, but Congress broadened the scope to include authors, entertainers, notables in science and medicine, athletes, humanitarians, public servants and foreign officials.

The medal for the airmen, made possible through legislation by Rep. Charles Rangel (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., and Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., and signed last year by Bush, will go to the Smithsonian Institution for display. Individual airmen will receive bronze replicas.

"It means a lot to a lot of people," said Ret. Maj. George M. Boyd, 80, of Wichita, Kan., a Tuskegee pilot and adjutant who served 28 years in the military, including in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. "There was so much resting on our success or failure."

___

On the Net:

Congressional Gold Medal: http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/goldMedal.html

Tuskegee Airmen: http://www.tuskegeeairmen.org

No Justice, Just Us For EMMETT...


What Hatred Left Unchecked Can Do To A Beautiful Person...


Emmett and His Mother Mamie Till...The only way Mamie could identify her son's body was by the ring that he wore on his hand which once belonged to his late father Louis Till...


Emmett Till's Family Gets Autopsy Report


Fri Mar 30, 2007

More than half a century after 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman, his family sat down with federal investigators to discuss the final autopsy on the boy's exhumed body and to hear about the investigation.

The report released Thursday found that Till died of a gunshot wound to the head and that he had broken wrist bones and skull and leg fractures. When his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in the summer of 1955, the report said, "the crown of his head was just crushed out ... and a piece of his skull just fell out."

The report also set out a timeline constructed from witness statements, and it said a third man had given a deathbed confession.

Roy Bryant, the white woman's husband, and his half-brother J.W. Milam were charged in Till's death shortly after the killing but were acquitted by an all-white jury. Both men, now deceased, later confessed in a 1956 interview with Look magazine.

According to the new report, Leslie Milam, a relative of the two men, also confessed before he died.

"We just wanted the truth," said Ollie Gordon, Till's cousin and one of half a dozen family member who reviewed the report with federal investigators on Thursday. "Just knowing the truth has been comforting to the family."

The FBI reopened the Till case in 2004 and exhumed the boy's body in 2005, but it decided last year not to press charges. The case was turned over to local prosecutors, with the FBI suggesting a closer look at Bryant's wife, Carolyn Bryant Donham, now 73.

A Mississippi grand jury ruled late last month that there was insufficient evidence to indict her, essentially closing the book on the case.

"We felt that since the investigation took so long and the results as they were, we would sit face-to-face with the family to answer any questions," said Joyce Chiles, the chief prosecutor on the case.

Till's cousin, Simeon Wright, was with the teenager the night he was kidnapped from an uncle's home in Money, Miss., and he had pressed for a further investigation.

"From what I saw, I think they had enough evidence to indict," Wright said Thursday. "Every last person up to now has gotten away with murder."

In 1955, nearly 100,000 people had filed past Till's open casket during a four-day public viewing in the boy's hometown of Chicago. A graphic photo of his face appeared in Jet magazine, and that image stoked national outrage and fueled the civil rights movement.

Till's mother, who had wanted her son's casket open to expose the brutality of racism to the world, died in 2003. She was buried next to him.

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press.
More Emmett Till on the net:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/
http://www.emmetttillstory.com/
http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till
http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrights/emmett.html
http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/resources/lessonplans/hs_es_emmett_till.htm
http://www.heroism.org/class/1950/heroes/till.htm


Thursday, March 29, 2007

21st Century Hip Hop Plantation...


Hip-Hop, Mass Media and 21st Century Colonization

by Jared A. Ball, Ph.D, Communications Fellow

Given the societal need and function of mass media and popular culture, all that is popular is fraudulent. Popularity is in almost every case an intentionally constructed fabrication of what it claims to represent. Too few who comment on the lamentable condition of today's popular hip-hop seem to grasp this, the political nature of the nation's media system, nor the political function that system serves. Hip-hop is often taken out of the existing context of political struggle, repression, or the primacy of a domestic/neo-colonialism in the service of which mass media play a (the?) leading role.

Media, often incorrectly defined by their technologies, are the primary conduits of ideology or worldview and must be seen as such. Therefore, their highly consolidated ownership and content management structure (corporate interlocking boards of directors, advertisers, stockholders, etc.) cannot be understood absent their ability to disseminate a consciousness they themselves sanction and mass produce. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrable than in hip-hop.

Like mass media and popular culture, hip-hop too is often removed from its proper context as the cultural expression of a domestically-held internal colony otherwise known as Black America. The colonialism that prefigures its creation and subsequent popularity is too often absent from popular discussion of hip-hop and as such leads to confused analyses and a tremendous amount of inaction surrounding the issues involved. I use the term colonialism simply to draw attention to the systemic (i.e. intentional) maltreatment of a majority of those considered "citizens," and to the particular form that this maltreatment takes regarding North America's Black/African internal colony. By this I mean that the basic tenets of a colonial relationship remain intact for Black people in the United States.

That is: 1) Black people remain held in spatially distinct communities, neighborhoods, projects, etc. where they, 2) form the basis of this country's source of cheap labor and, 3) raw materials – which include cultural expression and, specifically, hip-hop. That is, held intentionally in poverty so as to create conditions of desperation, Black people must then sell their labor cheaply and/or be willing to conform themselves to the needs and will of an elite in order to "succeed." Hip-hop, like every other cultural expression generated from this community, has over the last twenty years been grafted to this structural need to systematically produce what is conducive to this system's survival. This is quite natural and understandable and would only be confusing were this not the case.

The pervasiveness of self/community-directed violence, misogyny, conspicuous consumption, product placement promotion, and general lack of ingenuity in popular hip-hop is the aforementioned specific systemic need produced systematically via its media representative, in this case, the music industry. Understood properly we would note that corporations are themselves legal entities that give sanction and anonymity to those involved in the process of protecting the ruling elite. Therefore, their ability to sign (via contract), promote, disseminate, etc. the cultural expression of the colonized allows them to determine the direction or content in most popular hip-hop.

The tremendous amount of hip-hop created that does not suit this political need, which again is primary, is simply omitted. And without this current analysis, even our brightest thinkers ignorantly suggest, as did Michael Eric Dyson recently on Paula Zahn's CNN special on the subject, that to be successful (i.e. "popular") politically conscious artists need "better beats." This precludes the continuing power struggle which necessitates both the maintenance of the Black colony, but also a specific image of that colony to be imposed on the country and world. In other words, there can be no popular representation of the colonized that does not reflect a justification or omission of their colonized status. It is the status of a neo-colony that needs changing, not the beats used by those expressing a desire for something different.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in defense of this system, explained this reality quite clearly when writing in The Grand Chessboard (1997) that what will separate the United States as an empire from those of the past is this nation's control over "international communication and popular entertainment." Media today are more pervasive, powerful, and capable of the maintenance of colonialism than at any other time in world history. This is the result of the intentional and concomitant rise of both mass media technology and their consolidated ownership in the hands of the world's only true "minority" elite: white men. Fewer people, almost all exclusively within the same self-identified racial, class, and gendered interest group, have a greater ability today than at any other time to produce a global consciousness conducive to their interests. Hence my earlier statement about the inherent fraudulence of popular culture.

In a society where culture is used as a primary component or mechanism of social control, that which becomes "pop culture" is fraudulent in that it is forced, as Fanon has explained, to "testify against" its creators and to serve those able to determine its reach or societal penetration. Rarely is what we know of as "popular" the initial intention of the culture or individual from which that expression comes. Most often what is the final product is what is decidedly different than what its creator initially set out to make and is more than likely no longer in their own best interest.

While much of what is made popular in hip-hop glorifies the impoverished conditions out of which the cultural expression emerges, little has changed regarding those fundamental colonial conditions. In the thirty years of hip-hop's ascendance and its annual generation of billions of dollars, the fundamental relationship between that population and the greater society remains intact. Hip-hop's popularity has done nothing to improve Black America's overall wealth, education, health-care, or certainly rates of imprisonment. In fact, the popularity of hip-hop is used to deny these conditions or explain them as natural to the conditions of African America. It is not to the people that these conditions are natural but, instead, to the condition of being colonized. Popular media and, therefore, hip-hop cannot be changed prior to a societal shift (revolution) in who holds power and how that power is to be wielded.

In future columns I will detail the historical shift in hip-hop, the corporate/industrial mechanism, detailing how the final product is shaped to these political needs and offer detailed strategies and current movements/artists whose work is in assertive resistance to this neocolonial condition.


Dr. Jared A. Ball is an assistant professor of communication studies at Morgan State University. He is editor-at- large of the Journal of Hip-Hop and Global Culture from Words, Beats and Life and hosts Jazz & Justice Mondays 1-3p EST on DC's WPFW 89.3 FM Pacifica Radio. Ball is also the founder and creator of FreeMix Radio: The Original Mixtape Radio Show, a hip-hop mixtape committed to the practice of underground emancipatory journalism. He is currently working on his first book Hip-Hop as Mass Media: The Mixtape and Emancipatory Journalism and can be found online at voxunion.com.

Getting Shoes on The Low,Low NBA Live Style...


Ben Wallace starts low-cost apparel line
March 27, 2007

By ANDREW SELIGMAN

AP Sports Writer

MOUNT PROSPECT, Ill. -- Stephon Marbury started it. Now, Ben Wallace is joining the cause.

Wallace is lending his name to the Starbury Movement, endorsing an affordable line of sneakers and apparel started by the New York Knicks' star. Wallace will begin wearing the Starbury II basketball shoe Thursday when the Chicago Bulls play his former team, the Detroit Pistons. And his own sneaker -- Big Ben -- is expected to hit the market in late August or the fall.

"Kids don't really understand what it takes to go out and buy a pair of $300 pair of shoes," Wallace said at a news conference on Tuesday. "We don't understand the pressure we put on our parents when we're growing up. This is one of the things where I think the parents will appreciate it a lot more than the kids right now because it eliminates so much stress from the parents. All parents want to see their kids have nice things."

Launched a year ago, the Starbury line is expanding from 50 products to 200 -- nearly all available for $14.98 or less at Steve & Barry's University Sportswear. It includes a joggers shoe, skater shoe, casual shoe, gym shoe, woven shirts, jackets, jeans, T-shirts, shorts, hats and other accessories.

At a time when youngsters feel pressure to wear expensive brands of shoes and clothing and are even being killed for what's on their feet, Marbury and Wallace are trying to provide an alternative.

Stephon Marbury Showing Off His Starbury

"Once parents and their kids begin to see that other pro athletes are getting down with this, then it just makes a world of difference," Marbury said in a phone interview. "It's not just one person doing it. Other people are wearing the shoes. Other people are putting their feet inside of shoes that they're saying are cheap."

Marbury and Wallace are not paid to endorse the products. Instead, they earn royalties on sales.

Marbury and representatives from Steve & Barry's started developing the line after discussing it over dinner about a year-and-a-half ago, while Wallace joined in about four months ago.

Marbury said adding the four-time defensive player of the year "gives the brand some credibility," and he plans to get more players involved. He hopes that, in turn, will help spread the word to children and their parents -- that there are good, cheaper alternatives. Alternatives he wishes were available when he was younger.

Growing up on Coney Island in Brooklyn, Marbury couldn't afford the top brands. So he wore "everything. No specific shoe."

For Wallace, it was a steady flow of hand-me-downs.

The 10th of 11 children and the youngest of eight boys, he grew up poor in White Hall, Ala. He knows he had shoes, but which brands? He couldn't say.

"I had to wait in line," said Wallace, who was wearing a White Sox cap, jeans, a striped short sleeve shirt and a pair of white Starbury low-top sneakers. "It's tough at times because you see everybody else getting new shoes. You want to be a part of that crowd. Sometimes, you're just not able."

But with the Starbury line and the Big Ben sneaker coming out, there are more opportunities.

Although the shoes are inexpensive, Marbury and Wallace said they're as durable as the more expensive brands.

"If you were to cut this in half, there's absolutely no difference between this and the most expensive sneakers on the market," Steve & Barry's spokesman Howard Schacter said, holding a red, white and blue Starbury II. "This provides arch support, a reinforced heal. It really is the same deal, and what Ben and Steph are wearing on court is exactly the same shoe."

Marbury said: "It's not that they're cheap; they're just affordable. Now, as we begin to sign more players, kids won't feel that burden."

Wallace acknowledged he had doubts, but they went away once he tried a few pairs.

"They last just as long as any other pair," he said. "I hope people do realize that regardless of how much you do pay for a pair of sneakers, eventually they are going to wear (out) somewhere."

Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.

Black Panther Proves That The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword...


New Book Celebrates Pictures That Speak A Thousand Revolutions...


Douglas (left), former art director of the Black Panthers newspaper, with Tahuti at a book-signing event at Oakland's East Side Cultural Center. Chronicle photo by Liz Hafalia
The Black Panthers advocated armed struggle. Emory Douglas' weapon of choice? The pen.
Jessica Werner Zack, Special to The Chronicle

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The work of San Francisco artist Emory Douglas is collected in the new book, "Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas." Image courtesy of Rizzoli New York

In January 1967, the organizers of San Francisco's first annual Malcolm X Grassroots Memorial tapped Emory Douglas, a 22-year-old graphic arts student, to create the poster and flyers for the Hunter's Point event. As Douglas remembers it, "There was talk about some brothers coming over from Oakland to provide security for Betty Shabazz (Malcolm X's widow), and when they got there it was Huey Newton and Bobby Seale."


Douglas, a member of City College's Black Student Union who was designing props and sets for playwright LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), had heard rumors about Seale and Newton. The two friends from Merritt College had, just three months before, co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. "Huey and Bobby spoke," Douglas recalls, "and I knew then I wanted to be a part of what they were doing."



Douglas was soon named the party's minister of culture, a position he filled until the Black Panther newspaper ceased publication in 1979. Art directing every issue, he created a visual history of the party's ideology and agenda, designing hundreds of provocative original illustrations, photo collages and political posters, more than 200 of which are reproduced in the recently released Rizzoli book "Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas."



The Black Panther Party was a controversial offshoot of the civil rights and black nationalist movements. Douglas' involvement with the party began one April evening 40 years ago, when he paid his first visit to Eldridge Cleaver's Duboce Park apartment, the so-called Black House. Douglas found Seale working on the inaugural, typewritten and mimeographed issue of the Black Panther. Douglas offered his commercial typography and illustration skills (first acquired in a Chino prison print shop as a teen sentenced to juvenile detention for burglary) to make the weekly paper look as potent and persuasive as its message.



Interviewed before a packed book release party at Oakland's Eastside Cultural Center, Douglas says that "since the black community at that time weren't by and large readers," he "created an 'everyperson' look everyone could connect with." In effect, he branded the militant-chic Panther image decades before the concept became commonplace. He used the newspaper's popularity (circulation neared 400,000 at its peak in 1970) to incite the disenfranchised to action, portraying the poor with genuine empathy, not as victims but as outraged, unapologetic and ready for a fight.

Some of his most powerful drawings show people in stances of active armed resistance, men draped in bandoliers, women holding infants and toting rifles.


Issues the Black Panther Party confronted are still with us, Douglas says. Image courtesy of Rizzoli New York


Douglas' art echoes expressionist elements of the African American artists he admires, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett. His style -- drawing with thick black outlines and creating woodcut textures -- is also similar to the Chicano poster art of the '60s and '70s. The images are full of anger and biting humor -- especially the many famous pig cartoons, iterations of the epithet the Panthers popularized for all embodiments of repressive authority. "It's important to remember the context" out of which the Panthers emerged, Douglas says. The Summer of Love punctuated a volatile period when the United States was riven by assassinations, war protests and race riots. "There were a lot of young brothers and sisters being attacked and brutalized by the police." Young activists like Douglas found their calling in the Panthers' imperatives to "Seize the Time" and make "Revolution in Our Lifetime" a reality.


Douglas lives in San Francisco's Excelsior district with his blind mother, and has continued to work as a graphic artist since the Black Panther Party's collapse in 1980. Chronicle photo by Liz Hafalia

Quiet and with an easy sense of humor, Douglas exudes a surprising calm for a man whose confrontational artwork Baraka describes in an essay in the book as functioning "as if you were in the middle of a rumble and somebody tossed you a machine pistol."



"They are dangerous pictures, and they were meant to change the world," the book's editor, Los Angeles artist Sam Durant, writes in his introduction.

One 1967 editorial by Cleaver criticizing the NAACP was illustrated by Douglas' "bootlickers gallery," which imposed photos of Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders against a crude cartoon of a black man prostrate before then-President Lyndon Johnson's cowboy boots.

"Emory's pictures are actually a lot less terrifying than the news photos of the day," says Kathleen Cleaver (Eldridge Cleaver's ex-wife) formerly the Panthers' communications secretary and now a senior lecturer at Emory University Law School. "It's amazing that he was able to maintain his gentle artistic being through those risky, extreme times. Cities were on fire, people were being arrested by the droves and police brutality was the order of the day."

Durant (whose own sculptures and installations have explored Black Panther history), says he sees the book as a corrective to "the ways the party has been misrepresented and maligned in the mainstream press, and perhaps even misused in popular culture. ... At a time when the police were an occupying army in the black community, they took up arms to defend themselves, simple as that."

As the Panthers' agenda broadened to include social programs, Douglas' posters illustrated the impact of the party's community outreach: free breakfast programs for children, grocery giveaways, health clinics and sickle-cell anemia testing.

"A lot of people would say they could look at the artwork in the paper and see in which direction the party was headed," Douglas says. He modestly admits that "some people did start buying the paper specifically for the art."


Emory Douglas' work documented Black Panther social programs such as its free breakfasts for children and grocery giveaways. Image courtesy of Rizzoli New York

Douglas lives in San Francisco's Excelsior district with his blind mother, and has continued to work as a graphic artist since the Black Panther Party's collapse in 1980. After a brief stint designing ads for Safeway ("That was definitely not my thing," he says), Douglas has been an illustrator and prepress manager for the Bayview/Hunter's Point Sun-Reporter newspaper since 1984. He is currently working on a "children's artwork series called 'Health is Wealth,' a dialogue between two kids about HIV/AIDS."

"My politics have evolved because politics always do," he says. "But I'm still concerned about the same things. I think people are drawn to my work right now because they see the same issues in it on the line today -- police brutality, education, housing. It's a different time but we have the same needs."

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Too Much Beyonce In His Bounce???


(For W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Subscribers Please Click On The Following Link To View Video:
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-much-beyonce-in-his-bounce_28.html)


Before I viewed the video I was expecting the worse...Personally I don't see anything too much wrong given the certain situation in society today...What I saw was a little boy with alot of talent and potential expressing himself through the art of dance and pantomime...I think people read too much into this...Remember to believe half of what you see and none of what you read...Instead of condemning the young brother and his parents we all need to be showing him some other examples of what it is to be a strong Black man in spite of sexual orientation going through hell in a White Man's Heaven...

There are too many examples of strong Black Brothers and Sisters who in spite of having some kool aid in the tank or too much bass in the vocals were and are noted for courageous acts of endearment towards humanity in particular our Black Brothers and Sisters...

People seem to forget that it was a Black Gay Man who taught Dr. King non-violent principles during the Montgomery Bus Boycott...This same Black Gay Man was the one who also organized The 1963 March On Washington and who helped Dr. King and others found and organized The Southern Christian Leadership Conference...He was also an important advisor of the great Black Labor Leader A. Phillip Randolph...WHO WAS THIS MAN???
None other than the great Bayard Rustin...Check out the following links to learn more about him:
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/02/bayard-rustin-forgotten-brothers-keeper.html
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/01/king-size-courage-made-up-for-dr-kings.html

James Baldwin was another Black Gay Brother who risked his life to speak out on behalf of our people...I could go on, but the point is this we have more in common as a people than some of us could ever appreciate or know in a lifetime...

Remember there are alot of "straight" guys who are a bunch of pussies when it comes to putting your life on the line to serve and empower our people...Just some food for thought...

Also check out my internet radio show Tha Artivist Presents...W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio...To Check out past shows please click on the following link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/weallbe

If you would like to be a guest on future shows please e-mail us @ r2c2h2@gmail.com or call 901-299-4355...Please check out last Sunday's show dealing with the brooding MLK Memorial Controversy...Featured guests were Judge D'Army Bailey the founder/visionary of the National Civil Rights Museum and famous Black visual artist Gilbert Young...Please click on the following link to listen to the show:
http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/blogtalkradio/show_14830.wax

Here's the press release for show:
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/03/this-week-on-we-all-be-radio-sunday.html

Blackliciously Gifted and Arthusiastically yours,
R2C2H2 Tha Artivist
http://www.r2c2h2.com
http://www.weallbe.blogspot.com
http://www.cafepress.com/r2c2h2
http://www.jazzlieutenant.blogspot.com
http://www.soldierboygrip.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/r2c2h2

Obama, Master of the Tall Tale???

>

Obama's Back Story

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, March 27, 2007

While I was whiling away my youth as an insurance investigator -- yes, yes, Cohen of Claims -- I met the lovely Penny, a wise and beautiful woman who utterly changed my life. She invited me to her family's summer place at the beach. The old house had a screened-in porch, and it was there, my first morning, that I encountered her father. He was dressed in khaki shorts and sitting at his typewriter, completing yet another book. I decided then and there that he had precisely the life I wanted. He was a writer.

I tell you this story to suggest something about Barack Obama. In his memoir, "Dreams From My Father," he recounts a watershed moment of his own -- a "revelation," a "violent" awakening, an incident that "permanently altered" his "vision." Twice he tells how as a 9-year-old he went to the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia (a country where his mother had taken him to live) and came across a Life magazine article about a black man who had tried to whiten his skin through some sort of chemical process. The result was a disaster.

"I felt my face and neck get hot," Obama wrote. "My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page."

The child had, for the first time, confronted racism and its hideous consequences.

Only there is no such issue of Life magazine. So says the Chicago Tribune, which has gone through the Obama memoir with commendable thoroughness. The newspaper conducted "more than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors" from Obama's youth and found both trivial and substantial differences between the stories Obama tells and those recalled by others. What emerges from the Tribune's reporting is a man who seems much less fixated than he insists on finding his racial identity.

When the Tribune told Obama that Life magazine historians could find no such story, Obama suggested it might have been Ebony -- "or it might have been . . . who knows what it was?" (The Tribune says Ebony's archivists also could not come up with such an article.) Indeed, the memory of the event/non-event is so firmly planted in Obama's mind that it seems to have become an emotional truth for him, far more powerful than an intellectual truth.

Two and two are four. That's an intellectual truth for you. But America is a uniquely great country. That's an emotional truth, and I'm far more likely to die for the latter than the former. So, I suspect, are you.

My own emotional truth concerns Penny and her father. Years later, when I reconnected with Penny, I mentioned that day on the porch and how much it meant to me. No such porch, she told me. I insisted otherwise and did not relent until she sent me a picture of the home. No porch. Still . . . I like the story my way.

In Obama's case -- and maybe my own -- there might be something more than foggy memory at work. He may be manipulating the facts in order to wrap raw ambition in the gauze of a larger cause. Sheer ambition is no longer tolerated in American public life.

Obama was only 34 when his memoir was published, but he was already on his way, a successful packager of himself. He already knew, I suspect, that a public figure -- he was already the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review -- has to have both a cause and a back story: the PT-109 incident that changes a life, the rural poverty that has such an impact on a boy from Plains, the hope that comes to the man from Hope. No one can seem too ambitious, careerist. Only CEOs can seem to be out for themselves -- that's because if they do well, or so they insist, so do their shareholders.

This tendency to manipulate facts may bear watching in Obama. (After all, we hardly know him.) But while his book is a warning flag, it is also an astounding display of a supple, first-class mind -- not merely a bright fellow, but an insightful one, and the single best piece of writing by a politician since John F. Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."

JFK, of course, is the politician to whom Obama is most often compared -- the wit, the physical grace, the eloquence, the youth. That's understandable, but superficial. The politician who really understood that life should unwind like a movie -- the arc, the reveal, the back story, etc. -- was Ronald Reagan. He always starred in his own movie and so, it seems, does Obama.

cohenr@washpost.com

Preaching About Adam and Steve...


John Nowak for The New York Times
The Rev. Dennis Meredith, center, pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta, began a change in his preachings against homosexuality five years ago when his son Micah told him he is gay.

March 27, 2007
For Some Black Pastors, Accepting Gay Members Means Losing Others
By NEELA BANERJEE

ATLANTA — When the Rev. Dennis Meredith of Tabernacle Baptist Church here began preaching acceptance of gay men and lesbians a few years ago, he attracted some gay people who were on the brink of suicide and some who had left the Baptist faith of their childhoods but wanted badly to return.

At the same time, Tabernacle Baptist, an African-American congregation, lost many of its most loyal, generous parishioners, who could not accept a message that contradicted what they saw as the Bible’s condemnation of same-sex relations. Over the last three years, Tabernacle’s Sunday attendance shrank to 800, from 1,100.

The debate about homosexuality that has roiled predominantly white mainline churches for years has gradually seeped into African-American congregations, threatening their unity, finances and, in some cases, their existence.

In St. Paul, the Rev. Oliver White, senior minister of Grace Community Church, lost nearly all his 70 congregants after he voted in 2005 to support the blessing of same-sex unions in his denomination, the United Church of Christ.

In the Atlanta area, a hub of African-American life, only a few black churches have preached acceptance of gay men and lesbians, Mr. Meredith said. At one of those congregations, Victory Church in Stone Mountain, attendance on Sundays has fallen to 3,000 people, from about 6,000 four or five years ago, said the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel, the senior pastor.

Some black ministers, like their white counterparts, said they had been moved to reconsider biblical passages about same-sex relations by personal events, like finding out that a friend or relative is gay. Some members of the clergy contend that because of the antipathy to gay men and lesbians, black churches have done little to address the high rate of H.I.V. infection among African-Americans.

“The church has to come to a point when it has to embrace all the people Jesus embraced, and that means the people in the margins,” Dr. Samuel said. “It really bothered my congregation when I said that as people of color who have been ostracized, marginalized, how can we turn around now and oppress other people?”

It is hard to know how many ministers who lead the country’s tens of thousands of African-American congregations are preaching acceptance of gay men and lesbians. Some leading African-American religious thinkers and leaders — like Cornel West, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes and the Rev. Michael Eric Dyson — have called for inclusion of gay men and lesbians. But other leaders are convinced that the Bible condemns homosexuality and that tolerance of gay men and lesbians is a yet another dangerous force buffeting the already fragile black family.

“It is one of several factors that are taking away the interest in traditional marriage in the African-American community,” said Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., the president of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, a black conservative Christian group. “I see the growing gay movement in the black community and our culture as almost evangelistic in nature, with what’s on television, with their legal agenda, all those things that have made homosexuality more acceptable.”

In the 13 years Mr. Meredith has led Tabernacle Baptist, he has presided over cycles of fraying and mending, this last time because of his preaching “love and acceptance,” he said. When he arrived in 1994, the congregation at Tabernacle had dwindled from several thousand members to about 110.

A compelling orator with the voice and showmanship of a stadium-rock star, Mr. Meredith quickly began to draw more new members. He preached against homosexuality. Then, five years ago, his middle son, Micah, told him that he is gay. Mr. Meredith and his wife began to read liberal theologians like Mr. Gomes and to look at Scripture again. What matters most in the Bible, Mr. Meredith said, was Jesus’ injunction to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, and that includes gay men and lesbians.

As he preached greater acceptance of gay people, Mr. Meredith saw the face of his congregation change.

About three years ago, many older members, those who had hung on through the church’s waning, and who drove in from the suburbs because they had attended Tabernacle as young people, gradually began to leave. They took with them their generous, loyal tithing. The 90-year-old church had money to cover salaries and utilities but had a hard time paying for properties it had bought nearby. In September, Mr. Meredith held a commitment ceremony in the church for two lesbian couples. More people left after that.

As attendance dropped, the church cut back to one service on Sunday, from two. On a recent Sunday, the pews were filled with some older people like the deacons and deaconesses, though the head deacon had left recently after telling Mr. Meredith that he had turned Tabernacle into “a sissy church.”

Under banners that read “Kindness,” “Peace” and “Love,” there were young families with babies. And there were transgender people like Stacy Jackson and Nikki Brown. There were also lesbian couples like Angela Hutchins and Stephanie Champion, sitting together in the front rows.

Mr. Meredith preached about Moses, about the vision God gave him to do the right thing. He told congregants about holding on to that vision, regardless of who they were.

“Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do it because of your lifestyle, because of your sexuality, because you don’t have an education, because you’ve done time,” he said. “Because God knew you before you were born, when you were still in your mother’s womb. If God loves everybody, who am I not to love everybody?”

“Amen,” people called out. “Preach it; preach it.”

Afterward, when the sanctuary was mostly empty, Ruth Jinks, a deaconess who has been at Tabernacle since 1969, sat in a pew, cane by her side, waiting for the church van to take her home. Gay men and lesbians do not make her uncomfortable, Ms. Jinks said. They have always been in black churches, under something of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But she seems to have tired of Mr. Meredith’s mention of them. She hears from acquaintances that she goes to the “gay church.”

“I don’t think you need to be speaking about it from the pulpit all the time,” said Ms. Jinks, who is in her early 80s. “I joined this church; I support this church. I didn’t join a minister. I’m planning on staying here and will not let people run me away.”

One of the junior pastors is the Rev. Chris Brown, who grew up in a black Pentecostal church in Montgomery, Ala.

“My pastor in Alabama said gays had three rights: to redeem themselves, to repent or to die of AIDS,” said Mr. Brown, 32.

He added, “The African-American church thinks AIDS is a gay disease, and that everyone who got it deserved to.”

DeMarcus Hill, 32, said he admired Mr. Meredith’s “ability to embrace those people who everyone had rejected.” Mr. Hill once attended and worked at Tabernacle Baptist, and he is still friends with the Meredith family. But after reading the Bible closely, Mr. Hill, who is studying to be ordained as a Baptist minister, said he could not stay at Tabernacle because sex outside heterosexual marriage was not countenanced.

Mr. Hill said he agreed with Mr. Meredith that God loves everyone, including gay men and lesbians. “But God corrects you because he loves you,” he said, explaining that for gay Christians, such a correction would probably mean lifelong celibacy or eventually being with someone of the opposite sex.

British Man "Out Gumps" Forrest Gump For Guiness World Record...

Briton Is First Man To Run Around The World

Forty-year-old Briton Robert Garside, seen here in India in 2003. Garside was on Tuesday officially certified by Guinness World Records as the first person to have run around the world.(AFP/File/Ravi Raveendran)
March 27,2007
A British man was on Tuesday officially certified by Guinness World Records as the first person to have run around the world.

Robert Garside, 40, said he was "so happy and relieved" after receiving his certificate in London as it had taken him nearly four years to fight claims that he had exaggerated his feat.

The self-described "Runningman" ran 35,000 miles (56,000 kilometres) across 30 countries, taking five years and eight months to complete his unprecedented journey.

Garside got more than just blisters and a certificate to show for his efforts.

"I met my wife on the run in Venezuela and she has been very supportive," he said.

Since finishing in June 2003, the Briton has faced accusations that he was exaggerating his achievements and has spent the years since compiling evidence.

Marco Frigatti, Guinness's head of records, was convinced that Garside followed the rules.

His team ploughed though video footage, local news reports, credit card receipts and statements from witnesses saying Garside ran the route.

"It is genuine," Frigatti confirmed.

"I have approved many records and this record had an astronomical amount of evidence and it could be cross-checked so we are happy and satisfied."

During his journey, Garside slept in the snow in the Himalayas, and at a monastery in Tibet, and also had to out-run thieves in Mexico and hot-foot it from gunmen in Panama.

He even spent five nights in a Chinese jail for not having the right travel documents.

In December 1996, Garside set out from Piccadilly Circus in the heart of London on his first attempt to jog around the world.

Then a 29-year-old psychology student, that attempt had to be abandoned when war broke out in Afghanistan.

It was only on his fourth try -- beginning at India Gate in New Delhi the following year -- that he succeeded, ending up back in the Indian capital in June 2003.

"I am unbelievably happy that an incredibly long project has finally ended up on a positive note," Garside said in remarks timed for Tuesday's ceremony in Piccadilly Circus.

"I am so happy and relieved and I am so grateful to all those people all over the world who helped me throughout the years I was running."

Mayor Ray Nagin Stop Naggin'...



Ray Nagin Should Stop Being a Wimp
by George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has made some bold statements about race in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Whenever subsequently pressed about such statements, however, Nagin keeps wimping out.

It is time for him to either shut up or stop backing down when challenged.
Nagin's latest saga involves a speech he gave to the National Newspaper
Publishers Association (NNPA). At the event earlier this month in Washington, D.C., Nagin made some clear references to race. The Washington Post ran a story about his comments under the headline,

'Nagin Suspects a Plot to Keep Blacks Away.' When the New Orleans Times-Picayune cited the Post's account of his remarks, Nagin wimped out.

'I did not say anything racial,'' he told New Orleans reporters. ''' My take on it is that it was some young reporter in the back of the room, looking for some way to get a nice story out. He jumbled everything I said up, and brought some things in the middle of the talk to the front, and painted this picture that was just not what I intended to do, nor would I say.''

Rather than trying to discredit Hamil Harris, the not-so-young Black Washington Post reporter covering the event, Nagin should have told the truth.

And the truth is that he was accurately quoted .I know because I was in the room. And so were members of International Business Kids, some future entrepreneurs who videotaped his speech.
Let's review what he said.

'It wasn't until I described my city, y'all know the story, until everybody in America started to wake up and say way wait a minute, what is he doing? What is he saying? Maybe we should try and do something different to make sure
that this man does not go any further. Because they realized that I wasn't a person to be controlled. I was going to speak my mind especially when I saw our people suffer.'

When Nagin referred to his description of New Orleans and said, 'Y'all know the story,' there was no doubt that he was referring to his getting in hot water for saying that God wants New Orleans to remain a 'Chocolate City.' Under pressure, he ate those words faster than he could chew a slice of chocolate cake.

For the record, many Blacks in New Orleans thought that Nagin was controlled by corporate interests during his first term and felt that he had done little for African-Americans after receiving 80 percent of the White vote. In fact, Bishop Paul Morton once described him as 'a White man in Black skin.'

After losing his White base, Nagin was forced to court Black voters. In an appearance before the National Conference of Black Mayors in Memphis, for example, he referred to 'people who don't look like us.' Rather than returning City Hall to a White mayor, Black voters in New Orleans held their nose and voted for Nagin.

In his speech to the NNPA, Nagin said: ''the prognosticators were saying there's no way you are going to win because see they had dispersed all our people across 44 different states with one-way tickets out. They thought they were talking about a different kind of New Orleans. They didn't realize that folk were awake and they were paying attention and they weren't going to let a plan unfold that changed all the history of what we have fought for over many, many years.'

Does Nagin really think an audience that was at least 95 percent Black didn't know he was referring to African-Americans when he said 'our people?'

And in case there was any doubt, after Nagin complimented Rep. Maxine Waters, he said:

'And Maxine started to talk around the country. I remember when we went to
Memphis. She talked to Black folks around the country and tried to wake them up and say look at what's happening.'

Here's the statement that drew so much criticism back in New Orleans:

'' Because ladies and gentlemen what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere. They are studying this model, this model of a natural disaster
dispersing a community and changing the electoral process in that community. We need to really understand what's going on. When I stood up and spoke out and they started to vilify, I knew there was going to be a reaction. It's a law of physics. For every action there's a reaction. I knew it was going to happen, but I didn't realize how strong it was going to happen...'

And apparently Nagin doesn't realize that he can't run from his words. If he believes what he says, then he should have the courage to stand behind his words and stop blaming the messenger for accurately reporting his message.


George E. Curry is editor-in-chief of the NNPA News Service and BlackPressUSA.com. To contact Curry or to book him for a speaking engagement, go to his Web site, www.georgecurry.com.

No Child Left Behind Will Be Playing Baseball...

Photos by Nikki Boertman/The Commercial Appeal
The Fairley High baseball team mentally prepares for its game against Northside on Monday. The Bulldogs, who went 23-7 last season, struggle to acquire the equipment needed for the game, something common among Memphis' inner-city schools.
Inner-city schools lack funding, equipment to support baseball programs
By Jason Smith
Contact
March 27, 2007

Their coach, Marcus Rogers, would have preferred them to have been playing or practicing Saturday on a baseball diamond, like many of the rest of Shelby-Metro's top high school baseball programs.

Instead, the Fairley Bulldogs spent Saturday morning and most of the afternoon gathered near the front entrances of a Whitehaven Wal-Mart, hustling team baseball cards for $10 a pop to raise money for transportation, equipment and other key needs for the Bulldogs' 2007 baseball season.

"Probably around 1 (p.m.), we'll drop (the price) down to like $5 because we've got to make some money," said Rogers, a former baseball standout at Fairley and 1996 graduate of the school now in his second year as the Bulldogs' head coach.

"Man, I'm ready to be through with this stuff and to concentrate on just baseball, but it's kind of hard. You've got to have money to do this."

As Saturday's inaugural Civil Rights Game at AutoZone Park commemorating the civil rights movement and baseball's role in it approaches, Rogers, reflecting on his own team's plight and those of the other predominantly black high school baseball programs in the city, described the harsh reality that faces today's inner-city teams.

Unlike their predominantly white county school counterparts that typically clobber the Bulldogs every postseason, Fairley has no baseball booster club, leaving Rogers and his players on their own when it comes to raising money for basic team needs.

Rather than practicing or playing, the Bulldogs have spent much of the early part of this season selling $10 team baseball cards that offer discounts and benefits at area businesses.

"Nah, we don't have (a booster club), but we're trying to get one together now," said Rogers, who despite the lack of financial support guided Fairley to a successful 23-7 campaign last season in his first year on the job. "I finally had a lady come to me the other day, (last) Thursday, and she started barbecuing and, you know, making smoked sausages, hot dogs, cole slaw, potato chips and drinks, and it was real nice.

"So I think she's going to go ahead and be the head of (the booster club), but we're still trying to get it together. I don't just want something thrown together. I want it like they've got it out there (at county schools). You know, organized."

The financial burden on inner-city teams is even greater at the middle school level, where city funding for baseball and softball was cut from the school budget in 1992.

While the Memphis Redbirds Foundation has helped to relieve some of the burden with its STRIPES (Sports Teams Returning to the Public Education System) and summer RBI (Returning Baseball to the Inner-city) programs, several schools are still struggling to field teams because of a lack of equipment.

"Money is a big problem," Riverview Middle School baseball coach Ire Johnson Jr. said.

"At Riverview, we don't have the asset of having new equipment or things like that. The Redbirds provided us with two gloves, but we still have to go around to some of the other schools in the neighborhood, borrowing old gloves and old cleats for the players. Working in a low socioeconomic area, parents really don't have the income to get these boys the proper equipment that's needed.

"The Redbirds and the STRIPES program, they'll supply you with like 12 balls, a bat and a couple of gloves, but, man, you're talking about a middle-school team with 15 to 18 guys. We've got four or five guys out there with just regular tennis shoes on because they don't have access to the proper equipment."

There are other factors, Rogers said, that have contributed to the steady decline of city-school baseball. A recent commentary on the subject in a local prep sports magazine that included some of Rogers' thoughts concluded that black kids are simply choosing to play other sports, specifically during the summer, when most of the area's top high school prospects are involved in competitive leagues.

While that may be the case, Rogers said, it's not the sole reason inner-city baseball teams haven't competed for state titles in decades.

"The white kids, in the summertime, they're playing the game," Rogers said. "The (high-school) season is nothing compared to what they're doing in the summer. They're going to Florida and California.

"Yeah, I have a couple of Puerto Rican kids (on the team) who played in a World Series championship last year in Anaheim (Calif.), and they play year-round. They've got a Puerto Rican league out there on Ross Road that they play in. But other than those two, I've got guys that play B-team basketball, are in ROTC and trying to get ROTC scholarships, and then my kids have to work. We're not as gifted as the Shelby County kids."

Rogers, the son of former South Side coaching icon Glenn Rogers Sr., didn't stop there.

"I'm going to be honest with you, and I thought a lot about this (Friday) night. I told the other (reporter) that interviewed me that it was about we're not playing year-round and all that, but something else hit me (Friday) night when I watched Maceo (Walker Middle School) play Cordova (Middle).

"Just being honest, it seems like all our good black (players), they play out there for Cordova. I see a couple of them in Germantown. You've got two at Collierville. I watch all those teams play.

"But it seems like once we as a people get a few dollars in our pocket -- and I know this is going to make some folks mad -- but once we get a few dollars in our pocket we move way out (away from the city). ... That seems to be what's happening. All the guys who have got the sons and nephews who are gifted, they send them out to (county schools)."

Steve Griffins, the Bulldogs' standout senior pitcher and third baseman, said it's tough competing with county teams when Fairley must spend so much time "hustling" just to play, but he's prepared to do his part.

"It's harder," he said. "The thing about the (county schools) is they've got people out there for them, helping them. We don't have anybody, so we've got to do what we've got to do to (play).

"I'm selling these (cards) like hot cakes, man. I've got to sell them because we're doing successful right now. We're 3-0 (on the season) and I think we've got a chance to beat them (county schools)."

-- Jason Smith: 901-529-5804

Copyright 2007, commercialappeal.com - Memphis, TN. All Rights Reserved.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Space Was The Place For His Father, But His Fate Belonged To The Race To Be Mass. First Black Governor...

Sun Ra The Jazz Mystic
Famous Jazz Musician Choses Path of Enlightenment Over Golden Child...
. Deval Patrick


Hey Yall You Know We Can Never Question Deval's Blackness!!!;o)

Patrick Shaped By Father's Absence
By Sally Jacobs, Globe Staff March 25, 2007


It was supposed to be Deval Patrick's day of triumph.

He was 18 years old and his family was gathered in the crowded Milton Academy gymnasium on a rainy summer morning in 1974 to watch him graduate. Suddenly, his father, who had largely abandoned the family 15 years earlier and had seen his son rarely, showed up unexpectedly. Deval was not happy to see him.

Patrick's family -- his mother, grandparents, and sister -- sat though the ceremony rigid with tension, angrily eyeing Pat Patrick at the end of the row. And then as they all drove in his grandfather's Buick toward a restaurant to celebrate, his parents began to fight. They screamed at each other, and curses flew. Patrick senior, an emotional man who had opposed his son's attending the elite private school, broke into tears.

Through it all, Deval sat quietly in the front seat. When the car stopped at a light he got out, slammed the door, and stamped back to his dorm.

"It was a disaster," the governor recalled in an interview in his State House office. "I am thinking, this is supposed to be my day. . . . I just bailed."

Over the course of a career that would take him from Milton to the governor's office, Deval Patrick has said little about his father. Nor has he been asked much about him. It has been a very private corner of a most public life.

But in fact, he had a complex relationship with his father, one that would ebb and flow over the years, ultimately shaping in part the man Deval Patrick is today.

As a child, he knew his father largely by his eloquent absence. Laurdine "Pat" Patrick, a gifted baritone saxophone player who traveled the world with the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra and a host of jazz greats, was often on the road. As he grew into adulthood, Deval would confront and ultimately come to know the passionate, often mischievous man who was his father. By the time Pat Patrick died of leukemia in 1991, the two men had found a certain peace.

Deval's experience of his father, as he sees it, motivated him "to be a better man than in some ways I think my father was as a father and as a person in relationship to his wife." But some family members speak of something more than that: They believe it galvanized him and taught him to rely, from a very early age, on his own judgment and ability. And it all began, in a way, when he chose to attend Milton Academy despite his father's stern opposition to a school so identified, in his mind, with the white power structure.

"If anything about my father helped shape the man who Deval is now maybe it is that he was rebelling against his father in doing what he has done with his life," said Rhonda Sigh, the governor's older sister. "I think everything he has done since then has been a way of saying: "I don't need your approval. I can do this on my own.' "
His parents' marriage ends, and the family struggles on
The end came with a phone call. It was 1959 on the South Side of Chicago and Emily Patrick, Deval's mother, answered the telephone. A woman on the other end was asking for her husband, Pat. Emily did not recognize the caller.
"He's not here," Emily said, as Deval recounts it. "Can I take a message?"
The message was this: "Tell him our baby needs shoes."

When Pat Patrick returned to his furious wife that evening, the marriage was over. Pat left home that night. He would not see Deval and Rhonda, then ages 4 and 5 respectively, for more than a year. Emily struggled to make it on her own, working at a dry cleaners and taking welfare for a while, before moving into a two-bedroom apartment with her parents. She and the children shared a set of bunk beds in one room. Not having a father around was hard for them all, but hardly unique in the neighborhood.

"There were a number of other families who were headed by women, like ours, so the model was not unfamiliar," recalled Deval.

Emily's anger at her husband simmered for years, but she went out of her way to cultivate a relationship between her children and their father. She encouraged them to write him letters. When he passed through town on a gig or to visit his mother once or twice a year, little Deval and Rhonda were dressed and ready for an outing. And every now and then, at Pat's urging, she dropped them off to play at the home of their half sister, La'Shon Anthony, who lived with her maternal grandparents in Chicago.

"I knew their mother knew about my mother," said Anthony, 47, a self-employed consultant in Chicago. "But whether the two of them ever saw each other face to face I don't know. It was not my place to ask."

W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio Special On Wed. March 28,2007 @ 2pm Central/3pm Eastern...

(W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Subscribers Please Click On The Following Link To View Video:
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/03/we-all-be-radio-special-on-wed-march.html)
The Two Daves: Dave Chappelle & Dbrad...
*Tha Artivist Presents...A W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio Special!!!*
Confessions of a B.E.T. Producer



All The Things You Wanted To Know About The Black Entertainment Television Network But Didn't Know Where or Who You Could Get A "In The Black" Answer From!!!

On Wednesday March 28,2007 @ 2pm Central/3pm Eastern Please Join Us And Our Distinguished Guest Former B.E.T. Music Producer and "Cultural Whistleblower" David Brad a.k.a. Dbrad...We will discuss why B.E.T. has done more harm than good to the perceived images of Black Folk, the politics of who gets their music videos played (David is responsible for getting some of the most successful Hip Hop artists of the late 90s and early new millenium such as DMX, Eve and Jay Z among others featured on such shows as B.E.T.'s Rap City and 106 & Park) and what we can do to counteract the problem...Dbrad was recently featured on the popular Wendy Williams Show...

Please call us @ 646-652-4593 and/or e-mail us @ r2c2h2@gmail.com if you would like to join the conversation.

To listen to this show live as well as to previous shows...Please click on the following link:

All Shows Are Recorded/Archived And Available To Download And Listening 24/7!!!

Please visit Dbrad's Official Myspace Page:
http://www.myspace.com/dbrad76


W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Waiting For You!!!

A Mayoral Opportunity For Youths In Memphis,Tn...


Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program - 2007 - Deadline: April 13, 2007

Mayor Willie W. Herenton is pleased to announce that the City of Memphis will sponsor a summer enrichment and employment program for the city's youth. The Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) for 2007 is now a major component of Memphis Youth Achieve—a new effort by the City of Memphis designed to ensure that the needs and aspirations of Memphis's youths are better served year-round.


Eligibility:
Resident of City of Memphis
Must be 14 years old on or before June 11, 2007
Must not become 18 years old on or before August 3, 2007
Youths 18 to 21 may register, but only for possible referral to private sector employers or to agencies and organizations that may provide assistance in locating positions or training.
Program Period:
June 11 through August 3 (eight weeks)

Registration:
March 26 through April 13.

Online registration will be available March 26th. (use link below instead of www.ebusinesstest.memphistn.gov -- part of the url for ebusiness is missing.)
Follow link to Memphis Youth Achieve.
Online Registration (starts on Monday, March 26, 2007)

Selection by Lottery:
Prospective participants in the Mayor's SYEP shall be chosen by lottery from the registrants. Success in the lottery does not guarantee participation in the summer program. Those unsuccessful in the initial lottery will be placed on a waiting list ranked by lottery number.

Stipends:
For the eight-week period.

Fourteen and fifteen year-old participants will receive stipends of $5.15 per hour for 20 hours per week
Sixteen and seventeen year-old participants will receive stipends of $6.00 per hour for 30 hours per week

Contact:
Thurman Northcross, Manager of Youth Services
Office of Youth Services and Community Affairs
City of Memphis
125 N. Main Street, Suite 200
Memphis, TN 38103
901-576-6262
Youth.Achieve@memphistn.gov

[Read additional] information on Youth Achieve Program

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Tha Artivist Presents...W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio Repped For Black History Month!!!

Tha Artivist Presents...W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio Shined Like The Crowned Jewel That It Is During One Of The Coldest, Shortest Yet Proudest Months Of The Year For People Of Color!!!

copyright by r2c2h2

February's Theme Was Profiling Ordinary People Making Extraordinary History Everyday...

Much Love And Thanks To The Listeners And Fans For The True Support And Love Of W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio From Day One...For Those Who Are New To The Movement, W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Looking Forward To And Welcoming Your Continued Support As Well!!!! Check Out What The Rest Of The World Has Been Missing And Please Spread The Word A.K.A. The Good News!!!

A.) Feb. 4 ,2007

Tha Artivist with Freedom Fighter and Renaissance Woman Ms. Neeci Sims...In addition to her activism Ms, Neeci has appeared in over 100 films directed by such icons as Woody Allen and Spike Lee...She's also a very talented visual artist...Go to her website and see for yourself.


Black Artists Unite!!! Proud Black Cultural Warriors Take On HollyWeird And The American Entertainment Industrial Complex...Special Guests Include Renowned Visual Artist and President of NIA Art Group Frank D. Robinson and Legendary Civil Rights Veteran and Renaissance Woman Bernice 'Neecie' Sims...
press release
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/02/please-visit-wwwcrmvetorg-to-get-in.html
actual interview
http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/blogtalkradio/show_11442.wax

B.) Feb. 11,2007

St. Criss in Purple Rain Mode

St. Criss is one of the hottest and most versatile musicians/music producers around...
press release
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/02/check-out-st-criss-interview-on-tha.html
actual interview
http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/blogtalkradio/show_11443.wax

C.) Feb. 18,2007

WE SHALL OVERCOME...

The late great Henry Hampton
Henry Hampton Archives Curator David Rowntree, Legendary Civil Rights Activist and Educator Dr. Gene C. Young and Legendary Civil Rights Activist and Renaissance Woman Ms. Bernice 'Neeci' Sims...
press release
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/02/listen-to-feb-18-installment-of-we-all.html
actual interview
http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/blogtalkradio/show_11444.wax

D.) Feb. 25,2007

Edmund Barry Gaither
Famous Director/Curator of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA)

press release
http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2007/02/famous-art-visionary-on-we-all-be-radio.html
actual interview
http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/blogtalkradio/show_11445.wax

How Can You Get Involved???
If you would like to be a featured guest please e-mail r2c2h2@gmail.com and call us @ 901-299-4355 if you're interested...Tha Artivist Presents...W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Radio airs live every Sunday @ 4pm Central...Feel free to call in and join our weekly conversations @ 646-652-4593...Look out for special broadcasts from time to time as well...W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Waiting To Hear Back From You Soon...

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Another Reason Why They Don't Care About Black People...


Girls walk along Andrews Street, which is paved with red bricks and lined with restored shotgun houses, in Freedmen's Town in Houston in this March 16, 2007 file photo. One of the last surviving communities built by freed slaves after the U.S. Civil War is on the verge of disappearing, despite long efforts to save it. (Richard Carson/Reuters)
Texas District Built By Freed Slaves Fades Away
By Jeff Franks

One of the last surviving communities built by freed slaves after the U.S. Civil War is on the verge of disappearing, despite long efforts to save it.

The old buildings of Freedmen's Town in Houston are being bulldozed to make way for new homes in a transformation that preservationists say is wiping out an important piece of history.

The U.S. South was once scattered with such communities, but most have faded away or been swallowed up by suburban growth.

The loss of Freedmen's Town is particularly significant because historians believe it was the largest of the freed slave settlements that was still intact architecturally and to some degree culturally.

Its long rows of narrow wooden houses, interspersed every block or two by churches, stood as a monument to the will of its founders to thrive despite bitter racism that forced them into isolation.

Freedmen's Town was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, with more than 530 buildings in a 40-block area in the shadow of downtown Houston.

Today, only about 30 of those buildings remain and their fate is uncertain.

A few groups are scrambling to save what is left because they say it is important that society not forget the dark era in U.S. history that produced the freed slave settlements.

NEVER AGAIN

"People need to know that even though slavery ended, there was still a long time of disenfranchisement. Just like the Holocaust museums, this can remind us of what should never happen again," said Catherine Roberts, founder of the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum, one of the remaining homes preserved in the neighborhood.

At the Civil War's end in 1865, southern blacks were freed from slavery, but not racism.

Driven away from white society by violence and persecution, they banded together to form their own towns and neighborhoods, some in remote rural locations, others at the edge of cities.

They had little money and no help from the government, but built flourishing communities apart from the white world that excluded them with segregationist "Jim Crow" laws.

"They had their own communities, they had their own schools and their own churches. At the time of segregation, it was really a parallel world," said historian Thad Sitton, author along with James H. Conrad of a University of Texas Press book called "Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow."

Freedmen's Town was built on swampland along the banks of Buffalo Bayou and soon became a vibrant place with tradesmen, teachers, businessmen, and shopkeepers.

At turn of the century, it hit full stride, said archaeologist Fred McGhee, who has studied the area for the local school district.

"That's when it was one of the most shining, glaring, beautiful black neighborhoods in the country. There were black businesses, shops, churches, civic organizations -- which was a remarkable thing given that at the time the city essentially ignored it," he said.

HARSH BLOW

The Depression dealt a harsh blow to Freedmen's Town, and from then on it declined economically, becoming steadily poorer and less stable.

Politicians, with support from developers who coveted the prime location, began promoting the idea of urban renewal for the neighborhood in the 1970s.

Black leaders resisted for years, insisting that Freedmen's Town be preserved, but by the 1990s political and economic pressure to redevelop had won out.

What began as a trickle of change in the old quarter has become a flood the past few years.

Developers such as Bob Perry, better known nationally as the chief funder of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign, have torn wide swaths through the old housing stock and replaced it with condos and townhouses.

As the number of new homes has increased, Freedmen's Town, once all black, has become more affluent and racially mixed.

The pattern, said Sitton, is a familiar one for the old black communities.

"Those that were located around cities have generally been absorbed," he said. "They're so-called 'gentrified' and lose their identity, and taxes go up and people move away," he said.

"There's remorse and recognition we're losing something important, but the economics of it is that nobody can afford to be nostalgic."

Even though Freedmen's Town was on the National Register of Historic Places, weak local preservation statutes allowed the wholesale demolition of the old homes.

But in the end, said Lenwood Johnson, who grew up in Freedmen's Town and led a long fight to protect it, one thing did in his old neighborhood -- money.

The desire to make a buck by putting up new homes trumped the interest in preserving history.

"The people with money wanted it and got it. This system is so controlled by corporate dollars," Johnson said.

"Now a people's history and culture is being destroyed. If you destroy their culture, you eventually destroy the people."



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