Wheel of Musical Impressions with Jamie Foxx

This is just too, too funny not to share. We all need something to laugh about during this time of pandemic . . . .!!!

Aretha Franklin "Nessun Dorma" Liveᴴᴰ (Grammy Awards)

Truth Above Tyranny: A Live Book Release and MOVE Press Conference

FREEDOM & ABOLITION: A Critical Moment in the Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

Colin Kaepernick Speaks on Mumia's Freedom

What if a US presidential candidate refuses to concede after an election...

Thisis animportant concern for us all to be mindful of. Listen and react, so we all may explore these significant concepts effectively among us. Our future lives and country may depend upon our reaction to this as a country as well as individuals.

Kirk Whalum - Smile/God Has Smiled On Me (Sub. Español)

MRS. CARTER WORLD TOUR - BEYONCÉ AO VIVO NO ROCK IN RIO 2013 BRASIL

The Voice coach JENNIFER HUDSON blows everyone away with her voice!

1920/2020: or Processing Anxiety Around Voting by Dane Figueroa Edidi

UNSUNG Patrice Rushen

Rev. James Lawson

                                                   Rev. James Lawson 

Four major factors that have taught America to depend upon violence and animosity:
The decimation of America’s indigenous people and subsequent stealing of their land
The establishment of slavery
Sexism and the “headship” of the male
“Plantation capitalism” and its exploitation of the worker
The Rev. James Lawson,  who talked and walked with The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has been acclaimed in recent years as a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence — one of the most important civil rights leaders you never knew.

As a minister who trained many activists in nonviolent resistance, James Lawson made a critical contribution to the civil rights movement. In his 1968 speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King spoke of Lawson as one of the “noble men” who had influenced the black freedom struggle: “He’s been going to jail for struggling; he’s been kicked out of Vanderbilt University for this struggling; but he’s still going on, fighting for the rights of his people”
“Through non-violence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. Peace dominates war; faith reconciles doubt. Mutual regard cancels enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supercedes systems of gross social immorality.”

– Reverend James Lawson, called “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world” by Martin Luther King
James Lawson, A supporter of the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent protest, Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr. was one of the Civil Rights Movement’s leading theoreticians and tacticians in the African American struggle for freedom and equality in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1957, one of Lawson’s professors introduced him to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged him to move south and aid in the Civil Rights Movement. Heeding King’s advice, Lawson moved to Nashville, Tennessee and enrolled at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, where he served as the southern director for FOR and began hosting nonviolence training workshops for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  There Lawson trained many of the future leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including James Bevel, Diane Nash, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and Marion Barry.

The son of Philane May Cover and James Morris Lawson, Sr., Lawson was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1928 one of nine children.Lawson’s great-great-grandfather was a slave, but he escaped with his son from Virginia to Canada on the Underground Railroad.
Lawson’s father, James Lawson Sr., was raised in the British Methodist Church, helping his parents work a farm in Canada. When the family immigrated to America, Lawson Sr., a preacher, switched his membership to the AME Zion Church and then to what became the United Methodist Church.
By the time Lawson was in high school, he knew he’d follow his father into the ministry. He took much of his attitude toward others from his mother, who did not believe in violence. Lawson grew up in Massillon, Ohio, where he became a good student in predominantly white schools.But his commitment to nonviolence began long before, in an Ohio elementary school.   He used to punch people who called him racist names. But then he told his mother, Philane Lawson, about a proud day when he reached inside a car window and slapped a boy who called him the n-word.
His mother, cooking at the time, didn’t stop.
“What good did that do, Jimmy?” she asked.
That simple question helped set her son on a new path. “I made decisions that changed my life forever and basically directed me toward nonviolence,” Lawson said.

 He earned his AB from Baldwin-Wallace College in 1951 and his STB from Boston University in 1960. As a college student, he joined the Fellowship for Reconciliation and the Congress of Racial Equality.A. J. Muste, the executive secretary of FOR, and others in the pacifist movement, including James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and Glenn Smiley. He declared himself a conscientious objector and refused to report for the draft in 1951 A draft resister,  Lawson’s first chance to prove his commitment to nonviolence intervened. His draft number was called to fight in Korea, and he refused to take a student or ministerial deferment to avoid it. Instead, in April 1951, he faced a three-day trial for refusing to report.

He was sentenced to three years in federal prison. He was released after a year. In his time behind bars alongside violent criminals, Lawson learned something remarkable about fear — another of the big ideas that would come to define his work.
“There’s an idea in the New Testament that love vanquishes all fear,” he said. “There is all across the Bible the advice, “Do not be afraid! Do not be dismayed. When you see all these things happening, do not be alarmed.’

“There is an energy in the universe that can allow us human beings to be fearless in living out our lives and in facing whatever the tumult of living is.”Following his parole from prison in 1952, he traveled to India and performed missionary work with the Methodist Church.  Nagpur, India, where he was an instructor at a Presbyterian school, Hislop College. Lawson was surprised to find that some Western missionaries did not like Gandhi and considered him a troublemaker. But Lawson considered that Gandhi had exemplified Jesus’ teaching of love. While in India, he deepened his study of Gandhi’s use of

nonviolence to achieve social and political change. In 1956, Lawson returned to the United States and resumed his studies at Oberlin College’s School of Theology from 1956 to 1957, he married Dorothy Wood and had three sons, John, Morris and Seth. He went to Vanderbilt University from 1958 to 1960.
When Lawson and King met in 1957, King urged Lawson to move to the South and begin teaching nonviolence on a large scale. Later that year, Lawson transferred to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and organized workshops on nonviolence for community members and students at Vanderbilt and the city’s four black colleges. These activists, who included Diane Nash, Marion Barry, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and James Bevel, planned nonviolent demonstrations in Nashville, conducting test sit-ins in late 1959. In February 1960, following lunch counter sit-ins initiated by students at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lawson and several local activists launched a similar protest in Nashville’s downtown stores. More than 150 students were arrested before city leaders agreed to desegregate some lunch counters. The discipline of the Nashville students became a model for sit-ins in other southern cities. In March 1960 Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt because of his involvement with Nashville’s desegregation movement.

Lawson and the Nashville student leaders were influential in the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), held April 1960. Their commitment to nonviolence and the Christian ideal of what Lawson called “the redemptive community” helped to shape SNCC’s early direction (Lawson, 17 April 1960). Lawson co-authored the statement of purpose adopted by the conference, which emphasized the religious and philosophical foundations of nonviolent direct action.

Lawson was involved with the Fellowship of Reconciliation from 1957 to 1969, SNCC from 1960 to 1964, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from 1960 to 1967. For each organization, he led workshops on nonviolent methods of protest, often in preparation for major campaigns. He played a role in efforts such as the Freedom Rides and the Mississippi Freedom Project (Freedom Summer). He was expelled from Vanderbilt because of his civil rights activities. He became pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, and in 1968 was chair of the strategy committee for a strike by African American sanitation workers. He invited Martin Luther King, Jr., to come to Memphis to support the strike. King delivered his famous "Mountaintop" speech there the day before he was assassinated. Lawson continued his ministry, leading Holman Methodist Church in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1999, as well as his social activism and nonviolence training. Vanderbilt apologized to Lawson for expelling him, and he later served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the school. He also participated in the third wave of the 1961 Freedom Rides.

In 1974, Lawson became pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, California, and continued his social activism on Palestinian and immigrant rights; gay and lesbian issues; the Iraq wars; and poverty.  Rev. Lawson retired from Holman United Methodist Church in 1999.
He served as chairman of the Laity United for Economic Justice.  During this time, Lawson hosted Lawson Live, a weekly call-in radio show, where he discussed human- and social-rights issues.  He has continued to train activists in nonviolence and supports immigrants' rights in the United States, the rights of Palestinians, and workers' rights to a living wage. In 2004, he received the Community of Christ International Peace Award.

Lawson took part in a well-publicized three-day Freedom Ride commemorative program sponsored by Vanderbilt University's Office of Active Citizenship and Service in January 2007. The program included an educational bus tour to Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama. Participants also included fellow Civil Rights activists Jim Zwerg, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, C. T. Vivian and John Seigenthaler; journalists and approximately 180 students, faculty and administrators from Vanderbilt, Fisk, Tennessee State University and American Baptist College.
















                             Rev. James Lawson speaks at John Lewis' funeral

Rev. James Lawson trained many future leaders of the civil rights movement, including a young John Lewis, in the practice of nonviolence. Lawson spoke at Lewis' funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and vowed, "We will not be quiet."

      John Lewis & James Lawson in MLK50 Evening of Storytelling, April 4, 2018

Over fifty years ago, courageous men and women stepped forward to challenge the status quo and change an unjust society.  On April 4, 2018, two warriors of the movement, John Lewis and James Lawson, answer the question “Where do we go from here?”  while sharing their experiences in the fight for civil rights, and their hopes for the future during the MLK50 commemoration of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.

                                    Oral History Interview with James Lawson

Reverend James Lawson (STH'60) discusses his journey from a small town in Ohio to being recognized as one of the leading advocates and organizers of nonviolent resistance during the American civil rights movement. The conversation is led by questions from School of Theology faculty Dr. Phillis Sheppard, Dr. Walter Fluker and Dean Mary Elizabeth Moore.

              Shaping Your Destiny | Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr. | TEDxCrenshaw

Reverend James M. Lawson Jr. was instrumental in shaping America’s Nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. After incarceration for refusing to report to Korean War draft, he traveled to India to study Ghandi’s principles of nonviolence. After be- ing introduced to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and moving to Nashville, he mentored a number of young students and future civil rights leaders at Vanderbilt, Fisk University, and other area schools in the tactics of nonviolent direct action. His students were instrumental is movements such as the 1963 March on Washington, the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement, and The Freedom Rides, to name a few. His likeness was portrayed in the 2013 motion picture The Butler by actor Jesse Williams. The movie notes Lawson’s training sessions during the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s.

           James Lawson: Reflections on Life, Nonviolence, Civil Rights, MLK

  Rev. James M. Lawson has been called the “architect of the nonviolence movement” in America. The United Methodist pastor was a close ally to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Lawson trained the young people whose peaceful witness at lunch counters in the South sought to end segregation. At age 88, he looked back at the pivotal moments that shaped his life and ministry.

“Love and Solidarity: Rev. James Lawson and Nonviolence in the Search for Workers’ Rights”

A must see for students, teachers and activists to think about the legacy of civil rights activism and to understand the roots of contemporary political organizing.”For thirty years I have been writing books using a lot of oral history about the interconnection between labor and civil rights history. In Going Down Jericho Road: the Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign, James Lawson makes the observation that we do a disservice to Dr. King when we type him only as a civil rights leader. A nonviolent leader has an all-encompassing critique linking racism, poverty, war, and other structures of violence, and counterpoises to those structures movements of love and solidarity. My work has always connected the past to the present, in terms of thinking about how we can learn something from the past to help us organize for justice today.

https://www.tacoma.uw.edu/news/article/love-solidarity-screen-tacoma-seattle
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/lawson-james-m
https://fsm.berkeley.edu/
https://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/interviewee/james-m-lawson-jr
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2017/03/02/civil-rights-advocate-james-lawson-rooted-faith/98605166/
http://www.publiccounsel.org/pages?id=0100
https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-rev-james-lawson/
https://methodistmission200.org/lawson-james-m-jr/
https://www.indeonline.com/article/20100223/NEWS/302239816
https://books.labor.ucla.edu/p/83/nonviolence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lawson_(activist)

Black Is Beautiful

STAND UP! ✊�� - Cynthia Erivo Cover

Trinity United Church of Christ – Piksel Hive Campus

Trinity United Church of Christ – Piksel Hive Campus

A Conversation on Race and Privilege with Angela Davis and Jane Elliott

Watch Alicia Keys and John Legend battle head-to-head on Verzuz

Elie Mystal Says "The US Needs to Be Treated Like the Racist Pariah Stat...

Why Juneteenth Matters

                            A group of freed slaves during the Civil War.
Credit...

                                    Why Juneteenth Matters

      It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom.”
         By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist,The New York Times

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.

Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.

“Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”

“Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition,” Sinha writes, and “fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led the abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”

When secession turned to war, it was enslaved people who turned a narrow conflict over union into a revolutionary war for freedom. “From the first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the slaves themselves,” the historian Ira Berlin wrote in 1992. “Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom — and that of their posterity — atop the national agenda.”

A statue in Galveston, Texas, depicts a man holding the state law that made Juneteenth a state holiday.

All of this is apropos of Juneteenth, which commemorates June 19, 1865, when Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, to lead the Union occupation force and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved people in the region. This holiday, which only became a nationwide celebration (among black Americans) in the 20th century, has grown in stature over the last decade as a result of key anniversaries (2011 to 2015 was the sesquicentennial of the Civil War), trends in public opinion (the growing racial liberalism of left-leaning whites), and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Over the last week, as Americans continued to protest police brutality, institutional racism and structural disadvantage in cities and towns across the country, elected officials in New York and Virginia have announced plans to make Juneteenth a paid holiday, as have a number of prominent businesses like Nike, Twitter and the NFL.

There’s obviously a certain opportunism here, an attempt to respond to the moment and win favorable coverage, with as little sacrifice as possible. (Paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls for justice and equality.) But if Americans are going to mark and celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and awareness of the agency of enslaved people.

Emancipation wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom, which began as soon as chattel slavery was established in the 17th century, and gained even greater steam with the Revolution and the birth of a country committed, at least rhetorically, to freedom and equality. In fighting that struggle, black Americans would open up new vistas of democratic possibility for the entire country.

To return to Ira Berlin — who tackled this subject in “The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States” — it is useful to look at the end of slavery as “a near-century-long process” rather than “the work of a moment, even if that moment was a great civil war.” Those in bondage were part of this process at every step of the way, from resistance and rebellion to escape, which gave them the chance, as free blacks, to weigh directly on the politics of slavery. “They gave the slaves’ oppositional activities a political form,” Berlin writes, “denying the masters’ claim that malingering and tool breaking were reflections of African idiocy and indolence, that sabotage represented the mindless thrashings of a primitive people, and that outsiders were the ones who always inspired conspiracies and insurrections.”

By pushing the question of emancipation into public view, black Americans raised the issue of their “status in freedom” and therefore “the question of citizenship and its attributes.” And as the historian Martha Jones details in “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” it is black advocacy that ultimately shapes the nation’s understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. “Never just objects of judicial, legislative, or antislavery thought,” black Americans “drove lawmakers to refine their thinking about citizenship. On the necessity of debating birthright citizenship, black Americans forced the issue.”

After the Civil War, black Americans — free and freed — would work to realize the promise of emancipation, and to make the South a true democracy. They abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding, instituted universal manhood suffrage, opened the region’s first public schools and made them available to all children. They stood against racial distinctions and discrimination in public life and sought assistance for the poor and disadvantaged. Just a few years removed from degradation and social death, these millions, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction in America, “took decisive and encouraging steps toward the widening and strengthening of human democracy.”

Juneteenth may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to anyone else in this nation’s history.

Police shot wrong man 76 times - Justice for Jamarion Robinson

 



This happened in 2017.  Why don't we know about this   heinous incident involving an egregious amount of police brutality.  When will it stop?  This is why the protests are happening all across the country and around the world.  We must uphold the cry for CHANGE in policing our communities NOW!

Justice for George Floyd!! Black Socialist Worker Speaks

INCOGNITO TRIBUTE TO GEORGE DUKE - A BRAZILIAN LOVE AFFAIR

This may be a great musical rendition to enjoy on a Memorial Holiday such as today -- or any day you wish to relax and love creative swirls of music washing over your ears and into your hearts and minds . . .  Enjoy your day!

MILES DAVIS - Time After Time

Kirk Franklin - Smile Music Video featuring Steve Harvey

Rev. William Barber Delivers Masterful History Lesson, Declares 'It's Mo...

Tim Jackson, Advocate and Spoken Word Artist

Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III | The Cross and the Lynching Tree: A Requiem for...

The Greatest Showman By Ndlovu Youth Choir

Circle of Life By Ndlovu Youth Choir

Ndlovu Youth Choir in Concert - Africa Festival Würzburg (2019)

NC A&T Gospel Choir ATL Competition Set 2

Hallelujah Salvation and Glory,Through it all medley

The Aeolians Oakwood University Alumni 2020 "We Shall Overcome"

Benjamin Dube - I Need Your Touch - Gospel Praise & Worship Song

Dear God my father and creator, I need you again please touch my brother and heal him from all sickness in his body. God your touch will heal him, please use my family to stand in testimony of your great love for your creations. I love you God and want to stand with you in all I do.I know God you are what all of us need, please give us your touch.

JPMorgan Chase bank engulfed in racism scandal after ex-NFL player speak...

There is racism EVERYWHERE!  Who would have thought it would be exhibited in this manner in the banking industry.  Where will it stop?   WHEN will it ever stop!  Black people must eventually build up their own banking industry.  This man may be on the way to doing just that.  We can only hope and pray!

H.E.R. - "Focus" | Live at Sydney Opera House

H.E.R., SWV & Shai Perform 'A Song For You', 'Right Here' & 'If I Ever F...

George Duke - T-jam

Jazz in Pink KCET VIDEO

Jazz In Pink featuring Karen Briggs

Karen Briggs violin rendition of Lift Every Voice at West Angeles Church

Nina Turner's heartfelt response to the fatal shooting of black jogger

DL Hughley - Rancho Cordoba Police Officer Caught On Camera Gleefully As...

Nurse Blows Whistle on Medical Malpractice & Neglect

Richard Smallwood with Vision"Healing!"

Comedienne Rita Brent - Prays for Prince

A Prayer for Trump by Comedienne Rita Brent

Shana Tucker Informance

Republican Strategist Denounces the Party's Response to COVID-19 | Amanp...

So I Can Love You

This might be a very good time to remember All Those EMOTIONS of the past.  I know I used to juse LOVE them and couldn't get enough of them.  What about you?

Diddy’s “Black America & Coronavirus” Town Hall With Angela Rye, Killer ...

Phyllis Hyman - No One Can Love You More

Phyllis Hyman - Living All Alone

Together at Home with Jennifer Hudson

NANCY WILSON HONORED - THESE GOLDEN YEARS (live)

Nancy Wilson -- Heaven's Hands Live

How many of these famous background stars could you identify?

The Clark Sisters Perform "You Brought the Sunshine" on The Queen Latifa...

First Friday Concert 2-02-18 The Moipei Trio

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Here's Why Tamika Mallory And Many Others Won't Condemn Farrakhan ...

DEACON OTIS WICKNINE sings "Don't Let The Corona Get On Ya"

Moipei Quartet

- Moipei Quartet began their musical journey when they were young under the training of their father Nicholas Ole Moipei. Mostly their style of music is classical and oftenly perform a capella. In 2009, they released their first album ‘Land of the Lions’ Mary sings soprano and plays the clarinet and the saxophone, Magdalene sings deep alto and plays the flute, piccolo and violin, Martha sings in Saprano and plays the trumpet and the euphonium and Seraphine sings in alto and plays Flute, Violin and Piano.

Because We Believe (By David Foster) - Moipei Quartet Cover

'SOMEONE LIKE YOU' (By ADELE) - MOIPEI QUARTET COVER

----- Introductions are in order!!!

The Moipei Quartet, Kenyan’s four sisters won in the “Best of Africa” singing category in the biggest continental Gospel music awards. At the annual crown Gospel Music Awards in Durban, South Africa ,to honour the best of gospel music talent ,the teenage students triplets and a younger sister ,scooped the award for their song church of the vale, off their 16-song album in the land of lion. Their excellent performance of traditional songs included Pole Musa hit from the 1970s,has seen the Moipei sisters win many awards in the annual Kenya music festival and other contests. President Kibaki has honoured them with the head of state commendation given to people who have changed the lives and image of Kenya .

Count on Me (Bruno Mars) by the Moipei Quartet.

Interesting!!

Because we Believe (David Foster) by the Moipei Quartet.

Short People (Randy Newman) by the Moipei Quartet.

Pole Musa - The Moipei Quartet

The Moipei Triplets sing Hit the Road Jack!

BY MY SIDE - MOIPEI QUARTET

Jimmy Kimmel Remembers Kobe Bryant

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Mutiny 1999 TV Movie

Would you believe this is a movie  produced by Morgan Freeman about a true histocial
incident involving Black sailers in the U.S. Navy? There are also many familiar Black actors in this film. This is a matter I either forgot or did not know about that must never be hidden to our progeny over time. It is a part of the sordid history of Black people in this country and deserves to be properly acknowledged by all as to the way our people have been desecrated in this American society. We ourselves must recall our history in order to pave the way for advances for our race now and in the future.

    This  Fact-based story about 320 predominantly black sailors who were killed on July 17, 1944 while loading munitions on a ship in San Francisco.

. It also solidifies any claim for reparation in this country over the centuries. It also shows how this government degrades survivors who repudiate injustices. It thus serves as a warning as well as a motivation to fight back to achieve human dignity for all. Commentary Found: Some of the the talk around town then and to this day, was that the soldiers (in uniform) were being forced/ordered by someone or “someone's” higher in the chain of command into dangerously “racing” to move the munitions in a game of pure folly. And that the clearly pointless tragedy was the genesis of the so called “mutiny”. or so the story goes. The story hasn’t changed in the 50 or so years since I first heard it told.

In 1944,a Victory ship exploded at the Port Chicago navy base near San Francisco killing 320 and wounding hundreds more. The victims were mostly untrained African-American sailors, forced to do the dangerous (and segregated) job of loading live munitions.When 50 of the shaken survivors refused to continue the hazardous duty without proper training and equipment, the most explosive military trail in the nation's history began.

The Slave Narratives

                                     The Slave Narratives

The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans in Great Britain and its colonies, including the later United States, Canada, and Caribbean nations. Some six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist;about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets.
 

The slave narratives, are accounts of the life, or a major portion of the life of slaves, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave personally. Slave narratives comprise one of the most influential traditions in American literature, shaping the form and themes of some of the most celebrated and controversial writing, both in fiction and in autobiography, in the history of the United States. The vast majority of American slave narratives were authored by African Americans, but African-born Muslims who wrote in Arabic, the Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano, and a handful of white American sailors taken captive by North African pirates also penned narratives of their enslavement during the 19th century. From 1760 to the end of the Civil War in the United States, approximately 100 autobiographies of fugitive or former slaves appeared. After slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, at least 50 former slaves wrote or dictated book-length accounts of their lives. 

Narratives by fugitive slaves before the Civil War and by former slaves in the postbellum era are essential to the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history and literature, especially as they relate to the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, an area that included approximately one third of the population of the United States at the time when slave narratives were most widely read. As historical sources, slave narratives document slave life primarily in the American South from the invaluable perspective of first-hand experience. Increasingly in the 1840s and 1850s they reveal the struggles of people of color in the North, as fugitives from the South recorded the disparities between America's ideal of freedom and the reality of racism in the so-called "free states." After the Civil War, former slaves continued to record their experiences under slavery, partly to ensure that the newly-united nation did not forget what had threatened its existence, and partly to affirm the dedication of the ex-slave population to social and economic progress.

From a literary standpoint, the autobiographical narratives of former slaves comprise one of the most extensive and influential traditions in African American literature and culture. Until the Depression era slave narratives outnumbered novels written by African Americans. Some of the classic texts of American literature, including the two most influential nineteenth-century American novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), and such prize-winning contemporary novels as William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), bear the direct influence of the slave narrative. Some of the most important revisionist scholarship in the historical study of American slavery in the last forty years has marshaled the slave narratives as key testimony. Slave narratives and their fictional descendants have played a major role in national debates about slavery, freedom, and American identity that have challenged the conscience and the historical consciousness of the United States ever since its founding.

After the abolition of slavery in 1865, former slaves continued to publish their autobiographies, often to show how the rigours of slavery had prepared them for full participation in the post-Civil War social and economic order. In Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), Elizabeth Keckley chronicled her successful rise from enslavement in Virginia and Missouri to employment as the modiste and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln. Former slaves who joined the post-Civil War working class began to publish their stories later in the 19th century, often articulating their disillusionment with specious promises of freedom in the North in the manner of Norvel Blair’s Book for the People…Life of Norvel Blair, of Grundy County, State of Illinois,

     
  Found Voices : Slave Narratives The Full Broadcast -Nightline 1999


   A Story of Slavery: A True Story, Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It



https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/intro.html
https://www.britannica.com/art/slave-narrative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_narrative

I Want To Sing For Them All, By Meklit + Feat. Andrew Bird

Nina Turner Rips Moderate Call For Practicality: America Deserves Better...

Nina Turner Rips Moderate Call For Practicality: America Deserves Better...

Ella Josephine Baker

                               Ella Josephine Baker

    Ella Baker is one of the most significant pioneers of the civil rights era but was cast behind the scenes as women were often forced to take a backseat to men, even when fighting for common rights.

    An African-American civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s. She was a behind-the-scenes activist, whose career spanned over five decades. She worked alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses.

     Ella Josephine Baker Dec. 13, 1903 – Dec. 13, 1986 was born in Norfolk, VA the daughter of Georgiana and Blake Baker. She was the middle of three surviving children, bracketed by her older brother Blake Curtis and younger sister Maggie. Her father worked on a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk and was frequently away. Her mother took in boarders to earn extra money. In 1910 Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard.

Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company. Ella was seven when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina. Here she was regaled with stories about her ancestors and other Blacks who rebelled against slavery. She developed a sense for social justice early in her life. As a girl growing up in North Carolina, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. An enslaved woman, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave “owner.”

Miss Baker was an excellent student and attended Shaw University the oldest historically Black University in America,in Raleigh, North Carolina. In her book, “Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement,” Barbara Ransby explained how Ella’s background and upbringing would shape her path in life. Baker, she explained, was “nurtured, educated and challenged by a community of strong, hard-working, deeply religious people—most of them women—who celebrated their accomplishments and recognized their class advantage, but who also pledged themselves to serve and uplift those less fortunate.” With a focus on helping those less fortunate, Ella would leave the comforts and security of her hometown in order to bring change to the lives of the masses.

As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, Baker moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations. Baker worked as editorial assistant at the Negro National News. In 1930 George Schuyler, a black journalist and anarchist, founded the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL). It sought to develop black economic power through collective networks. They conducted "conferences and trainings in the 1930s in their attempt to create a small, interlocking system of cooperative economic societies throughout the US" for black economic development. Having befriended Schuyler, Baker joined his group in 1931 and soon became its national director.

The Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning.She served as the publicity director and a board member of the Harlem’s Own Cooperative, a consumer cooperative which specialized in grocery goods and dairy products. A cooperative (often called a co-op) is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise. Baker saw that through the collective bargaining position that the co-op possessed, the individuals who were a part of it gained and maintained economic and political power. For the rest of her life, Baker would fight to empower people on an individual level by spurring them to be a vocal part of the group effort. She also came to believe that the true power to make change lay within the power of the individual fighting to determine their future rather than be led along by the nose by those who labeled themselves as the “leaders of the masses.” Baker also involved herself with several women’s organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.”

She also worked for the Worker's Education Project of the Works Progress Administration, established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Baker taught courses in consumer education, labor history, and African history. She immersed herself in the cultural and political milieu of Harlem in the 1930s. She protested Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and supported the campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants in Alabama, a group of young black men accused of raping two white women. She also founded the Negro History Club at the Harlem Library and regularly attended lectures and meetings at the YWCA.

Baker lived with and married her college sweetheart, T. J. (Bob) Roberts. They divorced in 1958. Ella Baker rarely discussed her private life or marital status. According to fellow activist, Bernice Johnson Reagon, many women within the Civil Rights Movement followed Baker's example, adopting a practice of dissemblance about their private lives that allowed them to be accepted as individuals within the movement.

Baker befriended John Henrik Clarke, a future scholar and activist; Pauli Murray, a future writer and civil rights lawyer, and others who would become lifelong friends. The Harlem Renaissance influenced Baker in her thoughts and teachings. She advocated widespread, local action as a means of social change. Her emphasis on a grassroots approach to the struggle for equal rights influenced the growth and success of the modern civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

In 1938 Baker began her long association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was then based in New York City. In December 1940 she started work there as a secretary. She traveled widely for the organization, especially in the South, recruiting members, raising money, and organizing local chapters. She was named director of branches in 1943, and became the highest-ranking woman in the NAACP. An outspoken woman, Baker believed in egalitarian ideals. She pushed the NAACP to decentralize its leadership structure and to aid its membership in more activist campaigns at the local level.

She believed that the work of the branches was the NAACP's lifeblood. Baker despised elitism and placed her confidence in many. She believed that the bedrock of any social change organization is not the eloquence or credentials of its top leaders, but in the commitment and hard work of the rank and file membership and the willingness and ability of those members to engage in a process of discussion, debate, and decision making. She especially stressed the importance of young people and women in the organization.

She travelled throughout the south, organizing campaigns, recruiting members and doing fundraising. She was so successful that in 1943 she was named “Director of Branches.” In only five years she had risen to become the highest ranked woman in arguably the most powerfull Black organization in the United States. Her ascension, however, did not come easy, nor did it make her popular throughout the organization. She was very vocal about her belief in the need to decentralize the leadership of the organization and the need to place more emphasis in empowering members at a local grassroots level. She believed that an organization should be built from the bottom up and not from the top down and that the true strength came not from the polished words of its leaders but rather from the hard work, actions and decision-making of its rank and file membership. She particularly pointed out the need for participation by women and by youth within the organization, two groups that she would advocate time and time again.

While traveling throughout the South on behalf of the NAACP, Baker met hundreds of black people, establishing lasting relationships with them. She slept in their homes, ate at their tables, spoke in their churches, and earned their trust. She wrote thank-you notes and expressed her gratitude to the people she met. This personalized approach to political work was one important aspect of Baker's effective effort to recruit more members, both men and women, into the NAACP. Baker formed a network of people in the South who would be important in the continued fight for civil rights. Whereas some northern organizers tended to talk down to rural southerners, Baker's ability to treat everyone with respect helped her in recruiting. Baker fought to make the NAACP more democratic. She tried to find a balance between voicing her concerns and maintaining a unified front.

In 1946 she left her position with the national chapter of the  NAACP and returned to New York to look after an ailing niece. She continued to volunteer with the local chapter, however, and joined the New York branch to fight against police brutality and school segregation. In 1952 she became the president of the New York chapter, but she continued to butt heads with members of the national bureaucracy and left the organization in 1953 to mount an unsuccessful campaign to run for a New York City Council seat.

She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses, whom she first mentored as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

There would not have been a SNCC without Ella Baker. While serving as Executive Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), she organized the founding conference of SNCC, held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina during the Easter weekend of 1960. She had immediately recognized the potential of the students involved in the sit-in movement and wanted to bring leaders of the Movement together to meet one another and to consider future work

Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves. She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of SNCC.She has been ranked as "One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement." She is known for her critiques not only of racism within American culture, but also of sexism within the civil rights movement.

Baker recognized that “the young people were the hope of any movement…They were the people who kept the spirit going.” As she knew, “the average Baptist minister didn’t really know organizing.” But Ella Baker did and the students, sensing her abilities, listened to her ushering in a new era in grassroots organizing.

   Her belief was always that organizing people meant that they could lead themselves. After all, who else was better qualified to articulate their needs? She often said, “strong people don’t need strong leaders;” but facilitating this required extensive travel, conversation, and meetings. Baker was well-known for her indefatigable spirit.













                  
           

        Ella Baker: Making the Struggle Every Day


                     Cornel West's Thoughts On Ella Baker 




https://daejagray.wordpress.com/tag/t-j-bob-roberts-interestingly/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baker-ella/
https://www.coaachhealth.org/black-history-month-ella-josephine-baker/
https://www.greatblackheroes.com/civil-rights/ella-baker/
https://www.pinterest.com/maryblackston0092/ella-baker/
https://famousbiographies.org/ella-baker-biography/
https://www.famousafricanamericans.org/ella-baker

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