Posts tagged: Black history
i’d also appreciate actual black history during black history month and not recycled stories of the white man’s mythologized version of MLK.
I’d say go a step further and call that bitch history. Integrate all races, religions, creeds and codes into history, the more we know the better armed the future can be against repeating the atrocities of the past.
BLACK PANTHER HUEY NEWTON
Huey P. Newton, national defense minister of the Black Panther Party, raises his clenched fist behind the podium as he speaks at a convention sponsored by the Black Panthers at Temple University’s McGonigle Hall in Philadelphia, Pa., Saturday, Sept. 5, 1970. He is surrounded by security guards of the movement. The audience gathered is estimated at 6,000 with another thousand outside the crowded hall. (AP Photo)
Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going - Langston Hughes.
“We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.”
“My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.”
June 1964. Black Children integrate the swimming pool of the Monson Motel. To force them out, the owner pours acid into the water.
On the one hand, we have been told that black women, in slavery and afterward, were formidable people, “matriarchs,” in fact. And yet we know that all along, black women were dreadfully exploited. Rarely has so much power been attributed to so vulnerable a group.
The contradiction can be resolved, with sufficient attention to definition and evidence […]. But it needs to be understood from the beginning that the term “matriarch” would never have been applied to black women in the first place were it not for our culture’s touchiness over reduced male authority within the family. It is a telling fact that matriarchy has most often been used as a relative term. That is, women are called matriarchs when the power they exercise relative to the men of their own group is in some respect greater than that defined as appropriate by the dominant culture. Given this standard, women need not be the equals of men, much less men’s superiors, in order to qualify as matriarchs. The acquisition by women of just one commonly masculine prerogative will do, and hence it becomes possible to attribute matriarchal power to some of society’s most disadvantaged people. The woman who had no vote, no money, and no protection under the law was nonetheless a “matriarch,” so long as she also had no man present to compete with for authority over her children.
“No discussion of comparative race relations would be complete without consideration of the work of the highly motivated, self-trained historian, Joel A. Rogers. Endowed with unusual talent, Rogers rose to become one of the best informed individuals in the world on Black history, writing and publishing his own books without any kind of organizational or foundation support.”–J.G. St. Clair Drake
Joel Augustus (J.A.) Rogers (1883-1966) was a self taught historian and self publisher from Jamaica whose quest was to prove that black inferiority was a myth by researching, learning about, and reporting on African history around the globe (Africa, the Caribbean, America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America) because so much of this history was hidden from black people. Even though he did not have formal post secondary education within a college institution, Rogers still provided from his own findings an abundance of historical information during the early to mid 1900s within his texts along with philosophical, anthropological, social, scientific, political, and spiritual thought, but in a language that was comprehensible to everyone. He also believed in the theory of there just being one race, the human race, and that there is no distinction between black and white.
- From Superman to Man
-Five Negro Presidents
-Your History
-Sex & Race (3 Volumes)
- The Real Facts About Ethiopia
-100 Amazing Facts About the Negro
-World’s Greatest Men of Color (2 Volumes)
I recently learned about Rogers in my West Indians in the Harlem Renaissance class and was so fixated on the fact that he did all the extensive research, learning, and publishing himself, remained a humble guy, but still dealt with many formally educated black scholars (i.e. W.E.B. DuBois) who did not publish or acknowledge the value of his work. At least this made him more humble and determined to educate the masses by any means necessary! People today definitely need to be familiar with this man.
“Garvey’s Women’s Brigade”
James Van Der Zee portfolio, 1924.
