Freedom's Sisters - Honoring 20 African American Women

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Assata Radio-Pan-Africanism in Action!

Assata Radio-Pan-Africanism in Action!

First Black Mayor of Columbia, SC

                       
Steve Benjamin Elected as Columbia, SC Mayor

Voters in the South Carolina capital, Columbia, elected the city’s first black mayor. Mayor-elect Steve Benjamin won Tuesday’s runoff election by 56 percent of the vote. Earlier this month Benjamin won by a little over 1,000 votes, which was not the majority needed to avoid a runoff.

Known as one of the rising stars of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Benjamin ran in a heated race that brought out an unexpected 2,000 voters on election day.  He ran against Councilman Kirkman Finlay who comes from a long line of Columbia politicians and who earned 44 percent of the vote.

Benjamin, 40, hails from Orangeburg, S.C. but spent his childhood in New York City. He obtained his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of South Carolina. He spent three years running the South Carolina Department of Probation, Pardon and Parole, leaving the agency for an unsuccessful run for attorney general in 2002.

At his victory party, Diddy’s “All About the Benjamins” blared over a sound system as Benjamin and his family greeted well-wishers. In giving his acceptance speech, Benjamin noted an envelope in his pocket containing a $100 donation from his grandmother who died last month. He said, “She wanted to be here with us, and I know that she is.”

Notre Dame's first black valedictorian

         

Katie Washington, a biological sciences major from Gary, Ind., has been named valedictorian of the 2010 University of Notre Dame graduating class and will present the valedictory address during Commencement exercises May 16 (Sunday) in Notre Dame stadium.

Washington, who earned a 4.0 grade point average, has a minor in Catholic Social Teaching. She has conducted research on lung cancer at the Cold Spring Harbor labs and performed genetic studies in the University’s Eck Institute for Global Health on the mosquito that carries dengue and yellow fever. She is the co-author of a research paper with David Severson, professor of biological sciences.

Washington directs the Voices of Faith Gospel Choir at Notre Dame, is a mentor/tutor for the Sister-to-Sister program at South Bend’s Washington High School and serves as the student coordinator of the Center for Social Concerns’ “Lives in the Balance: Youth Violence and Society Seminar.”

Upon graduation, Washington plans to pursue a joint M.D./Ph.D program at Johns Hopkins University.

Remembering A Student Movement

By: Charlie Cobb Jr.

Posted: April 15, 2010 at 6:29 AM

Remembering a student movement that changed America forever.

In July 1962, I went with two students from Jackson, Mississippi's sit-in movement to a little town in Sunflower County called Ruleville. We'd only been in town for a couple of days when, while walking down a dirt road, a car stopped in front of us. A white man holding a pistol ordered us into the car. He was the mayor. He was also a justice of the peace; he owned the town's hardware store and headed the local White Citizens' Council.

Pistol in hand, he brought us to the hardware store, where he ranted about New York Communists and told us to get out of town. The leader of our little threesome, Charles "Mac" McLaurin, responded, saying we were in Sunflower County to encourage and help people register to vote. The U.S. Constitution gives us the right to do this, Mac told him. The mayor's unforgettable response: "That law ain't got here yet."

This story begins two years earlier. On Feb. 1, 1960, four students attending North Carolina A&T, a historically black college in Greensboro, N.C., purchased school supplies at Woolworth's department store, then sat down at the store's lunch counter for coffee and doughnuts. "Negroes get food at the other end," the waitress told them, pointing to the far end of the counter where there were no seats and blacks were expected to carry their orders outside. The four stayed seated until the store closed.

By the end of March, the sit-ins had spread from Greensboro to 80 other Southern cities. Two and a half months after Greensboro, on the weekend of April 15-17--Easter weekend that year--about 150 student activists gathered at Shaw College (now Shaw University) in Raleigh, N.C., where they gave birth to the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (usually pronounced "Snick").

For me, the sit-ins were a wake-up call, and I became deeply involved with movement, first as a student protester and, before long, as a field secretary for SNCC in Mississippi from 1962 to 1967.

The deeper meanings of the sit-ins, like much of the Southern freedom movement of the 1960s, are not very well understood. There are black people today in places that black people once could not occupy. Back in the day, we could hardly imagine a black person in the White House or even reading the news on television.

But African Americans are not in these positions today because a sudden change of heart occurred in this nation. There was pressure: a significant amount came from young people on the campuses of historically black colleges and universities. In fact, the student eruption triggered by the Feb. 1 sit-ins may have been the only time when HBCUs, as a collective body, have had national political impact. And young black people who came off these campuses to organize kept the pressure on for years, primarily through SNCC.

On April 15, I will be joining SNCC veterans at a conference and reunion on Shaw University's campus. The discussion will begin with some of the important lessons contained in the sit-ins. It would be a mistake to reduce the sit-ins to a simple demand by black students for a hamburger or Coke where only white people were allowed to eat. The sit-ins were important because the students were challenging themselves, making their way in a fashion that would become very significant to the larger freedom movement. Before the sit-ins, civil rights seemed like something grown-ups did. Now, as SNCC's legendary Bob Moses once put it, remarking on his reaction in Harlem to the sit-in students in the South: "They looked like I felt."

The bonds we formed in the student protests 50 years ago were strong despite the diversity of political opinion and economic class among SNCC members. Listen to another legendary SNCC leader, Charles Sherrod, the first of  us to leave school and commit to working full-time as a SNCC field secretary: "You get ideas in jail. You talk with other young people you have never seen. Right away we recognize each other: People like yourself, getting out of the past. We're up all night, sharing creativity, planning action. You learn the truth in prison; you learn wholeness. You find the difference between being dead and alive."

For all of the youthful energy and commitment to challenge and change that erupted in 1960, the reason for SNCC's existence comes down to one person--a then-57-year-old woman--Ella Baker, one of the great figures of 20th-century struggle. In a deep political sense, we are her children and our 50th anniversary conference is dedicated to her.

In the 1940s, Baker was the NAACP's director of southern branches, organizing and assisting local chapters across the South. In 1957, she was instrumental in the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), becoming its first executive secretary (actually "temporary" executive secretary because she was a woman in an organization of male preachers). She immediately recognized the significance of the sit-in movement and got $800 from King to bring together the student activists to her alma mater, Shaw College, to create SNCC while fending off efforts by SCLC to make us a student arm of that organization.

What she stressed, and what came to define SNCC, was the idea of organizing from the bottom up. "Strong people" she would say, "don't need strong leaders." She encouraged us to think that our work was community organizing.

In 1961, other sit-in students left their campuses to work full-time for SNCC as "field secretaries." Again, we saw challenge in this as much as political commitment. Traveling by bus to Houston in the summer of 1962, I got off in Jackson, Miss.,to introduce myself to the students who were sitting in there. Why? Because Mississippi was identified in my mind--as it was in the minds of many young black men of my generation--with the murder of Emmett Till. I wondered what kind of black people were these Mississippi students who dared confront one of the most brutal and violent regimes in the United States. When I explained that I was just passing through on the way to a civil rights workshop in Texas, Lawrence Guyot,, who would later head the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), looked at me with total disdain, "Texas? For a civil rights workshop? What's the point of that when you're standing right here in Mississippi?" I got the message, felt the challenge, and stayed.

SNCC's mission was to organize in the toughest areas of the Black Belt South. Older veterans of struggle, mainly local NAACP leaders, guided us in organizing efforts for voter registration. They felt that if the potential political power reflected in the number of black people were harnessed through registration, change could come through the exercise of that power.

We dug in. Truthfully, until passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we never got huge numbers of people to even try to register to vote. There was too much violence, too much economic reprisal, too much intimidation, all ignored by the federal government and supported by the local so-called forces of law and order. In Mississippi, when Byron De La Beckwith was found not guilty of the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the state's major newspaper had a front-page photograph of De La Beckwith shaking hands with a smiling Gov. Ross Barnett.

Not being run out of Mississippi was a victory in itself. We made our way to strong people who were willing to expose themselves to reprisal in order to fight for change. And our work had greater impact than we realized at first. In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which we helped organize, decided to challenge the legitimacy and seating of Mississippi's officially recognized Democratic Party at the National Democratic Convention that year. President Lyndon B. Johnson and other national party decision-makers exercised what can only be called raw white power and denied seating to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. This was because of the clout wielded by southern white Democrats--power they owed to their exclusion of blacks from the political process.

We were bitter about it because we thought we had failed. But the party promised changes that would expand the participation of women and minorities. In 1972, these changes were formalized into what are now called the McGovern Rules, outlawing explicitly racist local party affiliates and increasing the number of women and minorities in party leadership roles.

The candidacy of Barack Obama--and Hillary Clinton, for that matter--would not have been possible without the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge that generated the pressure for these new rules. President Obama owes a great debt to this Mississippi challenge of 1964 as well as to the black people in Mississippi and across the South whose blood still soaks the soil.

Civil rights victories--the 1964 Public Accommodations Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act--were a dilemma for us in SNCC. In five years, we learned that the problems of black life in America were greater and deeper than these two pieces of legislation could remedy. "Where do we go from here?" we asked ourselves, and we never really found an answer.

Differences of political opinion that had been relatively unimportant in the heat of struggle loomed larger now. Was willingness to face terror enough to qualify for membership? How strong should central authority be? Is nonviolence still relevant? What about self-defense? How do whites fit in? The MFDP's challenge of the status quo and its refusal to kowtow to liberal Democratic Party pressures, our stance against the war in Vietnam, our support for a Palestinian state, and our use of the slogan "black power" brought the wrath of former allies down on our heads. I think our stances were all legitimate, but they cost us politically.

Complicating all this was the simple fact that we were tired. We stopped organizing, in a sense, losing the best in ourselves. As Bob Moses put it, SNCC was like a boat in the water that had to be repaired to stay afloat, but had to stay afloat in order to be repaired.

Our disintegration will also come up during our gathering in Raleigh, and there are undoubtedly lessons in it for today. Some of us will not have seen each other for years. Still, I think that while "repair" has gone on for decades, most of us are still afloat. And there are lessons in that, too.

Charles Cobb Jr. is senior analyst for All Africa. His latest book is On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail.

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Ella Josephine Baker was a civil rights activist best known for her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her emphasis on grassroots activism and her ability to work with several organizations and causes at a time made her one of the most effective leaders in the civil rights movement.
Ella Josephine Baker - African American Trailblazers

Ella Baker: The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 - December 13, 1986) was 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 twentieth century, including: W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr.

On the heels of regional desegregation sit-ins led by black college students, Baker persuaded the SCLC to invite southern university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend.

At this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed. Following the conference Baker resigned from the SCLC and began a long and intimate relationship with SNCC. Along with Howard Zinn, Baker was one of SNCC's highly revered adult advisors. It was with Baker’s help that SNCC (along with Congress of Racial Equality) coordinated the region-wide freedom rides of 1961 and began to work closely with black sharecroppers and others throughout the South.

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Shani Davis wins gold

Shani Davis wins gold in men’s 1,000 meter speedskating


Shani Davis was born on Friday, August 13, 1982, in Chicago, Illinois. Raised by his mother on the city's south side, he started roller-skating at local rinks at age two. By age three Shani was darting around the roller rink so fast that skate guards would chase him just to ask him to slow down. Seeming to become bored with roller-skating, at age six a coach suggested that Shani switch to ice skating. Shortly thereafter, his mother started working for an attorney, Fred Benjamin, whose son happened to be involved in speed skating at an elite level. It was at that time that Benjamin suggested that Shani give speed skating a try.

Shani joined the Evanston Speedskating Club at age six and within two months started competing locally. Though immediately taking to ice, at competitions Shani was generally more interested in running around with his competitors and playing video games than he was with competing. Nevertheless, by age 8 he was winning regional age-group competitions and began to hear about the Olympic ideal from his Northbrook competitors and friends. Shani's mother encouraged him to participate and, in an effort to build his endurance, woke him most mornings to run a mile on a track close to their home. As there were -- and still are -- no speed skating clubs in inner city Chicago, at age 10 Shani and his mother moved to the far north side of the city to be closer to the Evanston rink.

Shani won five National Age Group Championships (1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2003) and also won a North American Championship in 1999. Though Shani was the first black speed skater to earn a spot on the U.S. Olympic Team in 2002, Shani does not concentrate on making black history. Shani began making skating history at age 17 when he became the first U.S. skater to earn spots on both the short track and long track Junior World Teams and accomplished that feat three years in a row in 2000, 2001 and 2002. At 22, not only did Shani win his third consecutive U.S. All-Around Championship and Regional Qualifier (long track events), Shani became the first U.S. skater to make all three World Teams in the same season in the 2004-2005 (World Sprint, World All-Around and World Short Track), medaling at all three events, and ultimately winning the 2005 World Allround Championships held in Moscow, Russia in February 2005. At 23, Shani won Gold and Silver at the 2006 Olympics held in Torino, Italy and also repeated his World All-Around Title in March 2006 in Calgary. In 2006-2007 season, Shani won world titles in the 1000 meter and 1500 meter events. In the following season (2007-2008) Shani repeated his 1000 meter World Title. For this 2008-2009 season, Shani won his first World Sprint Title in Moscow and his third 1500 meter World Title and currently holds two world records (1000m and 1500m).

In 2006, Shani Davis became the first African-American to capture an individual gold medal at the Winter Olympics when he won the 1,000 meters in long-track speedskating, a feat that led him to be described as the Tiger Woods of the predominantly white sport. Davis has drawn comparisons to Eric Heiden, who won five Olympic gold medals in 1980 and is considered America’s greatest speedskater.

Are You Listening

Are You Listening

Rev. Pat Robertson & Rush Limbaugh! You are the Moral Judge

The historical impact of the Haitian Revolution allowed the U.S to Purchase Louisiana. If you research this you will see that when France lost Haiti they pretty much lost their money maker. The Louisiana territory which they still owned was then viewed as dead weight, and since France needed money for their renewed war with England Napoleon sold Louisiana on April 30, 1803 to the US for less than 4cents an acre. Public school wont tell you this.

Even Armstrong Williams could not take this !!!

MOVE YOUR MONEY

MOVE YOUR MONEY


People all over the country are choosing to move their money out of bigger banks and into smaller, community-oriented financial institutions that generally avoided the reckless investments and schemes that helped cause the financial crisis.

Fueled by the personal initiatives of thousands, it’s a grassroots effort that has the potential to shift power in the financial system away from Wall Street and to Main Street.

Check out the video, read up on what inspired the idea, connect with others through Facebook and Twitter and then use the tools and links provided to find a community bank or credit union in your area

Move Your Money: A New Year's Resolution

Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger. Tell us which community bank you use, and why.

Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.

The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.

We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?

Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating.

Eugene, the filmmaker among us, remarked that the contrast between the big banks and the community banks we were talking about was very much like the story in the classic Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter.

It was a lightbulb moment. And, unlike the vast majority of dinner conversations, the excitement over this idea didn't end with dessert. It actually led to something -- thanks in great part to Eugene and his remarkable team, who got to work and, in record time, created a brilliant, powerful, and inspiring video playing off the It's a Wonderful Life concept. Watch it below.

Within a few days, the rest of the pieces fell into place, including an agreement with top financial analysts Chris Whalen and Dennis Santiago, who gave us access to their IRA (Institutional Risk Analytics) database. Using this tool, everyone will be able to plug in their zip code and quickly get a list of the small, solvent Main Street banks operating in their community.

The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It's time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don't have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks -- and unlike the big banks they don't provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.

Think of the message it will send to Wall Street -- and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won't wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start. We simply can't count on Congress to fix things. We have to do it ourselves -- and the big banks are the core of the problem. We need to return to the stable, reliable, people-oriented approach of America's community banks.

So watch Eugene's amazing video, then go to www.moveyourmoney.info to learn more about how easy it is to move your money. And pass the idea on to your friends (help make this video -- and this idea -- go viral!).

JP Morgan/Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America may be "too big to fail" -- but they are not too big to feel the impact of hundreds of thousands of people taking action to change a broken financial and political system. Let them gamble with their own money, not yours. Let's turn big banks into smaller banks. We'll all be better off -- and safer -- as a result.

Make it your New Year's resolution to move your money. We can't think of a better way to start 2010.

Kwanzaa

        The Kenyan Boys Choir - Jambo Bwana

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African American Myspace Graphics


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Some things you need to know

Alfred A. Edmond Jr.
BlackEnterprise.com Editor

Inherent in God's commandment that I love my neighbor as I love myself is that if I don't love myself, I won't love my neighbor.

Success results from fulfilling your potential; greatness results from helping others to fulfill theirs.

Fears always causes far more suffering than the things I'm afraid of--most of which never come to pass or aren't nearly as bad as imagined. Fear does not herald the coming of the enemy--it IS the enemy. I shall not surrender to it. God is on my side. (Joshua 1:9)

Don't forfeit your joy in the present because you're too focused on trying to recapture the past and chase the future.

Adults recognize leaders the same way kids do. Who does what they say they'll do? Who can I rely on? Who pays attention to me?

Don't be so caught up in prayer that you forget to praise. God should hear "Thank You!" at least as much as He hears "Please?"

In the midst of battle, don't be so focused on the enemy that you lose sight of your goal. Check for the haters, but keep your eyes on the prize, and be encouraged!

We are not defeated when we are victimized. We are defeated only when we surrender to our victimization. While we cannot always avoid the former, we can always choose to reject the latter. That choice marks the fine line between temporary victimization and ultimate victory.

I made it this far because others pray for me when I don't have the sense to pray for myself. Lord, I am grateful! Let's rejoice in the day and pray for one another!

Living in the past is prison. Living for the future is slavery. Freedom can be found only in the now. Be present, & be free.

Free the Scott Sisters.
Please put the petition on your page and encourage all your friends to sign. We can make a difference when we work together.

http://www.change.org/actions/view/free_the_scott_sisters_2


http://www.tagged.com/freethescottsisters


Learn more here - JUSTICE FOR ALL
http://www.ronsworldlife.com/

Just a little grove

to help you feel your life move

"good God"

Maceo Parker plays Marvin Gaye "Let's Get It On"

WE CAN CHANGE THE WORLD

When we change our self,

Then We can change our community,

Then We can change our city or town,

Then We can change our state,

Then We can change our country,

This will bring change to our world!!!

We Are The Ones to make this change happen..........

______________________

Love is the answer, A active love that makes us stand for justice, push for truth and shows Gods Power through the Love he gave us to share in this World.

***************************

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Ron's American World

God Bless Us

Justice For All

Ron's World Sunday Music

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