Close But No Cigar - Tumblr Posts
fyeahblackhistory:
beautone:
W. E. B. Du Bois and Mao Tse-Tung (1959)
People’s Republic of China founder Chairman Mao Tse-Tung greets the African-American Pan-Africanist, Socialist scholar/activist W.E.B. DuBois during a trip to China in 1959.
Interview with Robert F. Williams (Feb. 26, 1925-Oct. 15, 1996), president of the Union County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Monroe, N. C., 1959.
Williams, a former Marine, was the first modern African American leader to both call for and practice armed self-defense against white racist attacks, intimidation and threats. His articulation of this right anticipated by five years the more famous call made by his friend Malcolm X after the latter broke with Elijah Muhammad's conservative Nation of Islam (NOI) on March 8, 1964.
This is a modern commentary, but Stokely and Eldridge would approve. This is black power, kujichagulia, home rule, self-determination, freedom.
You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen.
Thomas Sankara
(via selucha)
Thirty years ago today, Air Florida Flight 90 hit the 14th Street Bridge while taking off from Reagan National Airport. It crashed into the Potomac River, killing all but five of the 79 passengers. Summary | Photos | Video of rescue | The survivors | The skies today
Photo by Charles Pereira (U.S. Park Police)
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King Jr
…’And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society’… MLK
About 3 years before his death Malcolm became more aware of certain realities, started to speak out on them and was murdered.
This book is A favorite of mine the best of all the books King has written and probably the least read. In it, Dr. King critiques himself for giving the then youthful leaders of the Black Power Movement too overly optimistic views of the progress of integration. He also presents the pros and cons of Black Power. He states the need for America to do much more to improve race relations other than declaring racism to be wrong. He calls for the teaching of African-American history, and for the nation to focus more on helping the poor over military spending.
"He got the peace prize, we got the problem.... If I'm following a general, and he's leading me into a battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards, or awards, I get suspicious of him. Especially if he gets a peace award before the war is over."
Malcolm X
And this is why I'm writing this dissertation. Because I don't have a senator, and it makes me fucking furious.
The SOPA blackout is an irritating reminder that D.C. residents do not have voting representatives in Congress.
(And, yes, we still occasionally use Microsoft Paint here in the Style section of The Washington Post.)
The American white republic has to ask itself why it was necessary for them to invent the nigger. I am not a nigger. I have never called myself one. But one comes into the world and the world decides that you are this for its own reasons, and it is very important, I think, for the American in terms of the future, in terms of his health, in terms of the transformation we are all seeking, that he face this question, that he needed the nigger for something.
James Baldwin, 1963
How does James Baldwin still manage to be the truth from fifty years ago?