Saturday, June 3, 2017
The Gathering: A Time for Reflection, Revival, & Resistance
The Gathering: A Time for Reflection, Revival, & Resistance
by Repairers of the Breach
The Gathering: A Time for Reflection, Revival, & Resistance
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove will co-host a monthly program to equip communities with resources for faithful reflection and public action on moral issues. “The Gathering” will include an introduction to a moral issue, immersion in freedom songs that inform how we engage the issue, an interview with someone who is directly impacted by the issue, and a theological engagement with the issue that names a specific call to moral action.
Live in Raleigh, North Carolina, “The Gathering” will be livestreamed and podcast as a formation resource for individuals and communities (to register your group for livestream, https://goo.gl/forms/ZGvT4kNanwBwOPPe2). This resource is intended to serve as a multi-media "periodical" to connect and inform the Moral Movement.
When: Sunday, June 4, 2017
Where: Church on Morgan, 136 E. Morgan St. Raleigh, NC 27601
Free parking is available across the street from church on Morgan and in the City Lot off Wilmington Street.
Time : 6:00pm -7:30pm
If you are not able to join us in-person, please join us via livestream at www.breachrepairers.org
Everyone is welcome
For more information contact National Social Justice Organizer Rev. Erica Williams at ewilliams@breachrepairers.org
Repairers of the Breach
Repairers of the Breach, Inc. is a nonpartisan and ecumenical organization that seeks to build a progressive agenda rooted in a moral framework to counter the ultra-conservative constructs that try to dominate the public square. Repairers will help frame public policies which are not constrained or confined by the narrow tenets of neo-conservatism. Repairers will bring together clergy and lay people from different faith traditions, with people without a spiritual practice but who share the moral principles at the heart of the great moral teachings. Repairers will expand a “school of prophets” who can broadly spread the vision of a nation that is just and loving.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in. — Isaiah 58:12
Our communities are torn apart by hateful violence and words, often in the name of opportunistic and hypocritical interpretations of the world's oldest holy books and teachings. To repair the breaches caused by centuries old systems of racial and gender inequality, we need thousands of clergy and lay leaders who will dedicate their lives to rebuilding, raising up and repairing our moral infrastructure. They shall be called, "The Repairers of the Breach: The Restorers of Our Communities".
"When Silence is Not an Option" | Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II
April 2nd, 2017 - In the spirt of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Repairers of the Breach President and Senior Lecturer, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II delivers a powerful sermon to reflect the current time at the historic Riverside Church in New York City. The Riverside Church is where Dr. King preached his controversial "Beyond Vietnam" sermon 50 years ago on April 4th, 1967, exactly one year before his death.
Friday, June 2, 2017
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama: BET's Love and Happines
Watch the final White House concert hosted by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama: BET's Love and Happines
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Daisy Lee Gatson Bates
Daisy Lee Gatson Bates
Daisy Bates (1914-1999) is renowned as the mentor of the Little Rock Nine, the first African Americans to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. For guiding the Nine through one of the most tumultuous civil rights crises of the 1950s, she was selected as Woman of the Year in Education by the Associated Press in 1957 and was the only woman invited to speak at the Lincoln Memorial ceremony in the March on Washington in 1963. But her importance as a historical figure has been overlooked by scholars of the civil rights movement.
Daisy Lee Gatson Bates November 11, 1914 – November 4, 1999 was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957.
Tribute To Daisy Bates
Daisy Lee Gatson was born on November 11, 1914. She grew up in southern Arkansas in the small sawmill town of Huttig near the Louisiana line. She was raised by the closest friend of her father, Orlee and Susie Smith. He left the family shortly after her mother's death. In The Death of my Mother, Bates recounted learning as a child that her birth mother had been sexually assaulted and murdered by three local white men. Learning of her mother's death and knowing that nothing was ever done about it fueled her anger.
Daisy's adoptive father Orlee Smith gave her some last advice while on his death bed.
He said, "You're filled with hatred. Hate can destroy you, Daisy. Don't hate white people just because they're white. If you hate, make it count for something. Hate the humiliations we are living under in the South. Hate the discrimination that eats away at the South. Hate the discrimination that eats away at the soul of every black man and woman. Hate the insults hurled at us by white scum and then try to do something about it, or your hate won't spell a thing."
Daisy Gatson attended the segregated schools in Huttig, but it has not been determined how much formal education she received. It is unlikely her education went beyond the ninth grade and may have been no more than four grades.
At the age of fifteen, she met her future husband, L. C. Bates, then a traveling salesman living in Memphis, Tennessee. After the death of her foster father, she apparently moved to Memphis in 1932. Little is known about her until she and her future husband moved to Little Rock in 1941.
In Little Rock they started the Arkansas State Press, a weekly statewide newspaper devoted to advocating civil rights for African Americans. Gatson and Bates were married on March 4, 1942, in Fordyce (Dallas County). Although she rarely wrote for the paper, Bates gradually became active in its operations and was named by her husband as city editor in 1945.
As ardent supporters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), both Bates and her husband were active in the Little Rock branch. In 1952, she was elected president of the Arkansas Conference of Branches, the umbrella organization for the state NAACP. She and her husband worked closely with other members of the Little Rock branch as the national strategy of the NAACP shifted in the 1950s from advocating a position of equal funding for segregated programs to outright racial integration.
Although well known in the black community, Bates came to the attention of white Arkansans as a civil rights advocate in 1956 during the pre-trial proceedings of the federal court case, Aaron v. Cooper, which set the stage for the 1957 desegregation of Central High School.
The case was filed for the purpose of enforcing the rights of black children in Little Rock to attend schools with whites in accordance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Questioned by Leon Catlett, an attorney for the Little Rock school board, Bates refused to allow herself to be called by her first name. She told the attorney, “You addressed me several times this morning by my first name. That is something that is reserved for my intimate friends and my husband. You will refrain from calling me Daisy.” Without hesitating, Catlett shot back, “I won’t call you anything then,” to which Bates responded, “That’s fine.” This challenge to one of white supremacy’s oldest traditions—that of controlling and intimidating African Americans by treating them as though they were children—became part of the front-page story in the next morning’s Arkansas Gazette.
The federal courts at the time allowed the Little Rock school district to set its own pace for desegregation of its public schools, but they could not prevent Bates’s involvement with the first nine students who attended Central High School during the school year of 1957–58. Although Wiley Branton of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) was the local attorney for the NAACP and handled much of the litigation, Bates, in her capacity as president of the Arkansas Conference of Branches, was recognized as the principal spokesperson and leader for the forces behind school desegregation. In this role, she was in constant contact with NAACP leaders and in constant conflict with segregationists using intimidation in Arkansas. For much of the school year, she was in daily contact with the national office of the NAACP in New York as segregationists battled to destroy the NAACP in Arkansas as well as to intimidate her, her husband, and the Little Rock Nine and their families into giving up the struggle. On occasion, individuals attacked the Bateses’ home in Little Rock, forcing them to stand guard nightly.
"…Daisy Bates and her charges arrived at the school. With surprising ease, they were admitted through one of the less conspicuous entrances. Seconds later, a white female student climbed through a first-story window and yelled that she wasn’t going to school with ‘niggers’. … The sweep of the television cameras showed a crowd that was calm. Many were smiling. None was visibly armed in any way. Things were moving so calmly that the cameramen were observed staging some action. A black was shown on film being kicked in the seat of the pants, but I was told by authorities on the scene that this had been staged. In the crowd, however, were some eight agitators known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation who were there for no good purpose but to create as much chaos as possible. These recruits did not come from Little Rock. They had no children in the school; they were provocateurs. They began to mount on car tops and scream to the crowd. … The agitators first tried to bully the police into defecting. … Tempers began to rise … The leaders of each assault on the police lines were collared and put into police wagons and taken to jail. More than forty persons were taken into custody. No one in the crowd tried to intervene to prevent the arrests and removal of the troublemakers. No one in the crowd had clubs or weapons of any kind. These two points convinced me that 98 percent of the people there were not part of an organized mob…."
In recognition of her leadership, the national Associated Press chose her in 1957 as the Woman of the Year in Education and one of the top ten newsmakers in the world. In 1959, as a result of intimidation by news distributors and a boycott by white business owners who withheld advertising, the Bateses were forced to close the Arkansas State Press.
Bates remained at the center of the desegregation battle on behalf of the NAACP and the civil rights movement in Arkansas until June 1960 when she moved to New York to write a memoir of her desegregation experiences in Little Rock, The Long Shadow of Little Rock. She remained president of the Arkansas Conference of Branches until 1961, when she was succeeded by George Howard, Jr., who later became a federal judge. Chosen to fill a vacancy on the national board of the NAACP in 1957, Bates was reelected to successive three-year terms through 1970.
Her prominence as one of the few female civil rights leaders of the period was recognized by her selection as the only female to speak at the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
In 1968, Bates moved to the all-black town of Mitchellville (Desha County) to become executive director of that community’s Economic Opportunity Agency, a federal anti-poverty program. She remained there until 1974, commuting to Little Rock on the weekends to be with her husband. This began a new phase in her life that was marked by a commitment to demonstrating that poor African Americans could achieve economic self-sufficiency in partnership with government. Bates secured grants and donations for several improvements in the community, including a sewer system and a Head Start program.
Bates revived the Arkansas State Press in 1984, but it was financially unsuccessful. She sold the paper in 1988 to Janis and Darryl Lunon.
In ill health the last years of her life, Bates died of a heart attack on November 4, 1999, at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock. She is buried in Haven of Rest Cemetery in Little Rock.
In 2001, the Arkansas legislature enacted a provision that recognizes the third Monday in February as “Daisy Gatson Bates Day.” Thus, her memory (along with those of American presidents) is celebrated on that date as an official state holiday. There are streets in various towns in Arkansas, including Little Rock, which bear her name. In February 2012,
Monday, May 22, 2017
Friday, May 19, 2017
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Sunday, May 14, 2017
Thank you God for my mother
Thank you God for my mother, thank you for the love she gave to all of us. There were many times I did not understand, sometime I was just hard headed yet thru it all she loved me,talked to me and guided me.I did not really understand how much she loved me till I was a teenager. I then learned how much she prayed for me and how much she had faith than I would grow to be a good person and be positive in the world.
I thank you God for being my God and creator and I thank you for my mother.
Shirley Ceasar - Everyday is like Mothers Day - Momma Dedication.wmv
Chester DT Baldwin - I Still Hear Mama Praying / "Sing It On Sunday Morning"
Hattie B's Daughter - Dorothy Norwood, THANK GOD FOR MOTHER
THE PILGRIM TRAVLERS - MOTHER BOWED ( and prayed for me )
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Friday, April 14, 2017
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Shirley Graham Du Bois
Shirley Graham Du Bois
The Rev. David Graham feared that a mob was coming to burn down his church. The community meeting he had organized to protest the killing of a young Black boy by a policeman had stirred up trouble. So Graham stood before his congregation with a loaded gun and a Bible, told the women and children to get out of harm’s way, and prepared, alongside 21 armed men, to fight.In the end, nothing came of it, but the reverend’s young daughter, Shirley, about age 6, was marked forever by the scene and others like it in the American South at the turn of the last century. As a result, she devoted her life to fighting racism and oppression as a writer and an activist. Unlike the contributions of her second husband, famed civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, Graham Du Bois’ have largely been forgotten,
Shirley Graham Du Bois (November 11, 1896 – March 27, 1977) was an American award-winning author, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American and other causes. In later life she married the noted thinker, writer, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. The couple became citizens of Ghana in 1961 after they emigrated to that country. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
She was born Lola Shirley Graham, Jr. in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1896, as the only daughter among six children. Her father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and the family moved often. In June 1915, Shirley graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington.
She married her first husband, Shadrach T. McCants, in 1921. Their son Robert was born in 1923, followed by David in 1925. They divorced in 1927. In 1926, Graham moved to Paris, France, to study music composition at the Sorbonne. She thought that this education might allow her to achieve better employment and be able to better support her children. Meeting Africans and Afro-Caribbean people in Paris introduced her to new music and cultures.
After meeting Africans in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne in 1926, Graham composed the musical score and libretto of Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro (1932), an opera. She used music, dance and the book to express the story of Africans' journey to the North American colonies, through slavery and to freedom. It premiered in Cleveland, Ohio. The opera attracted 10,000 people to its premier at the Cleveland Stadium and 15,000 to the second performance.
In 1931, Graham entered Oberlin College as an advanced student and, after earning her B.A. in 1934, went on to do graduate work in music, completing a master's degree in 1935. In 1936, Hallie Flanagan appointed Graham director of the Chicago Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. She wrote musical scores, directed, and did additional associated work.
According to the Oxford Companion to African-American Literature, her theatre works included Deep Rivers (1939), a musical; It's Morning (1940), a one-act tragedy about a slave mother who contemplates infanticide; I Gotta Home (1940), a one-act drama; Track Thirteen (1940), a comedy for radio and her only published play; Elijah's Raven (1941), a three-act comedy; and Dust to Earth (1941), a three-act tragedy.
Due to the difficulty in getting musicals or plays produced and published, Graham turned to literature. She wrote in a variety of genres, specializing from the 1950s in biographies of leading African-American and world figures for young readers. She wanted to increase the number of books that dealt with notable African Americans in elementary school libraries.
In the late 1940s, Graham became a member of Sojourners for Truth and Justice – an African-American organization working for global women's liberation. Around the same time, she joined the American Communist Party.
She and Du Bois married in 1951, the second marriage for both. She was 54 years old; he was 83. They later emigrated to Ghana, where they received citizenship in 1961 and he died in 1963. In 1967, she was forced to leave after a military-led coup d'état, and moved to Cairo, Egypt, where she continued writing. Her surviving son David Graham Du Bois accompanied her and worked as a journalist.
Du Bois couldn’t have had that last important phase of his life without the partnership he had with Shirley. Before their marriage, Du Bois was in a “sparring match” with communists, says Gerald Horne, a historian at the University of Houston, but that quickly changed as he came to see his wife’s logic. While older activists fought solely against racial discrimination, “young lions like Shirley said no, economics is also affecting us” and supported the Communist Party.
Graham Du Bois continued supporting radical causes. She was the founding director of Ghana Television, met with government officials in China and introduced Malcolm X to Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. She embraced Malcolm X like a “son” and was “instrumental” in his success, by providing him with support and contacts. She may have been a controversial figure in her time, but it’s puzzling why Graham Du Bois never earned a bigger entry in history books.
Souces: Libby Coleman - THE BADASS WIFE OF W.E.B. DU BOIS, Professor Adrienne Gosselin - Michael Schwartz Library Cleveland State University, Wikipedia,
Shirley Graham Du Bois speaking at UCLA 11/13/1970
Shirley Graham Dubois
David DuBois: My Mother, Shirley Graham DuBois
David DuBois: My Mother's Marriage to W.E.B. DuBois
Alice Augusta Ball
Alice Augusta Ball (July 24, 1892 – December 31, 1916) was an African American chemist who developed an injectable oil extract that was the most effective treatment for leprosy until the 1940s. She was also the first woman and first African American to graduate from the University of Hawaii with a master's degree.
Alice Augusta Ball, a pharmaceutical chemist, was born in Seattle, Washington in 1892 to Laura Louise (Howard) Ball, and James P. Ball, Jr. Alice Ball's father was a newspaper editor, photographer, and a lawyer. Her grandfather, James Ball Sr., was a famous photographer, and was one of the first African Americans in the United States to learn to daguerreotype. James P. Ball, Sr. moved to Hawaii for health reasons in 1903 with his family and opened a studio. He died less than a year later and the family returned to Seattle in 1905. After returning to Seattle, Ball attended Seattle High School and received top grades in the sciences. She graduated from Seattle High School in 1910.
Alice Ball entered the University of Washington and graduated with two degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry in 1912 and pharmacy in 1914. In the fall of 1914, she entered the College of Hawaii (later the University of Hawaii) as a graduate student in chemistry. On June 1, 1915, she was the first African American and the first woman to graduate with a master of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Hawaii. In the 1914-1915 academic year she also became the first woman to teach chemistry at the institution.
In her postgraduate research career at the University of Hawaii, Ball investigated the chemical makeup and active principle of Piper methysticum (kava) for her master's thesis. While working on her thesis, Ball was asked by Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, an assistant surgeon at Kalihi Hospital in Hawaii, to help him develop a method to isolate the active chemical compounds in chaulmoogra oil.
Chaulmoogra oil had previously been used in the treatment of Hansen's disease (leprosy) with mixed results. Most patients with Hansen's disease were hesitant to take the oil over the long term because it tasted bitter and tended to cause an upset stomach.
Ball developed a process to isolate the ethyl esters of the fatty acids in the chaulmoogra oil so that they could be injected, but died before she could publish her results. At the time of her research Ball became ill. She worked under extreme pressure to produce injectable chaulmooga oil and, according to some observers, became exhausted in the process. Ball returned to Seattle and died at the age of 24 on December 31, 1916. According to her obituary, she suffered injuries from inhaling chlorine gas during a class demonstration in Honolulu.
Arthur L. Dean, a chemist and the president of the University of Hawaii, continued her work, published the findings, and began producing large quantities of the injectable chaulmoogra extract. Dean published the findings without giving credit to Ball, and renamed the technique the Dean Method, until Hollmann spoke out about this. In 1918, a Hawaii physician reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that a total of 78 patients were released from Kalihi Hospital by the board of health examiners after treatment with injections. The isolated ethyl ester remained the preferred treatment for Hansen's disease until sulfonamide drugs were developed in the 1940s.
Although her research career was short, Ball introduced a new treatment of Hansen's disease which continued to be used until the 1940s. The University of Hawaii did not recognize her work for nearly ninety years. In 2000, the university finally honored Ball by dedicating a plaque to her on the school's lone chaulmoogra tree behind Bachman Hall. On the same day, the former Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, declared February 29 "Alice Ball Day" which is now celebrated every four years. More recently, Ball was honored by the University of Hawaii Board of Regents with a Medal of Distinction in 2007.
Souces: http://www.blackpast.org, Wikipedia
Alice Augusta Ball
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