Watch special appearances by Danny Glover, Mayor Ras Baraka, Nataki Kambon, Dr. Ron Daniels of IBW21 and more around Newark as a Model City. See Michael V. Roberts, Willie Barney of Empower Omaha and more talking real solutions and how you benefit with the Marshall Plan. Is Wanda Real? Mayor Ras Baraka, Dr. Ron Daniels, Connect TV S1 E14 Promo Black Model Cities and Shaking up government from the Inside Out
Once numbering more than 50, 13 historically black towns in Oklahoma are struggling to survive.
African-American women wait outside a rural church while other members of their families attend a church business meeting in McIntosh County, Oklahoma, in 1939. (Smith Collection, New York Public Library/Gado/Getty Images)
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — His baby brother, barely a year old, came down with pneumonia in September 1948, when Lonnie Cato’s family still lived in the historically black community of Vernon, 70 miles south of Tulsa. The streets, even in the middle of town, were still gravel back then, but Vernon seemed to be thriving with 2,500 residents, two or three general stores and a couple of cafes, where blacks, whites and Native Americans all mingled without seeming to notice skin color. Or, at least, not caring much about it.
Everybody, including Cato’s family, was poor. But they didn’t seem to notice that, either.
“Vernon was a happy-going, barefooted, sand-between-your-toes kind of place,” Cato remembers. “Shoes was a luxury. We only wore them on Sundays when we went to church.”
The town didn’t have a doctor. And by the time Cato’s family got his little brother to a hospital in Tulsa, it was too late. The baby died. And for Cato’s father, that was the end of Vernon.
“I’m not going to raise my kids where there’s no doctor care,” he told the family. And they moved to Tulsa.
Cato was too young to notice, of course. But his family was part of a much larger trend that started after World War II and continued for several decades, a mass exodus away from small towns in general and historically black towns in particular, leaving their populations gutted. The general stores closed. The cafes vanished. Houses fell into disrepair and entire neighborhoods turned into vacant lots, old foundations overgrown by weeds.
“We have to do something or these historically black towns will die,” said Cato, now 77 years old. “And I think there’s too much history to just stand back and let that happen.”
In hindsight, World War II was the turning point, Cato said. An entire generation of young men went off to fight and even the survivors never came back to Vernon, where they would’ve spent their lives behind a plow on a cotton farm.
“I didn’t want to look a mule in the butt anymore,” an uncle told Cato after settling in Kansas City after the war.
While growing up in Tulsa, where he graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1959, Cato often went back to Vernon, taking a two-hour bus ride to visit grandparents and cousins. The town shrunk smaller with each visit. And by the time he came home from Vietnam, where he served in the Air Force during the early 1960s, Vernon seemed barely recognizable.
“Young people kept leaving until only the old folks were left,” he said. “And as they died off, the town was dying, too.”
With no local businesses left to collect sales taxes, one of Cato’s uncles launched the Vernon Charitable Foundation in 1973 to collect donations from people who had moved away, helping to pay for the town’s upkeep. But that source of funding dwindled as former residents died off and their children, who had no memories of town, saw no reason to contribute.
By 2005, the Vernon Charitable Foundation decided to change tactics and, instead of going after donations, go after grant money. But for that, the town needed an elected mayor, an office that had never been filled, even during the community’s heyday.
Cato had just retired from American Airlines, where he was a mechanic.
“I guess I’m going to have some time on my hands,” he told the foundation, agreeing to be a candidate. In fact, the only candidate.
He has since been re-elected three times, with McIntosh County allowing him to continue living on six acres near Skiatook as long as he owns property in Vernon and is registered to vote there, Tulsa World reported. And he can point to several accomplishments, including preservation work on the old Vernon School, which is now a community center, and the town’s first-ever paved road.
Vernon, if not exactly revitalizing under Cato’s leadership, has survived. And that’s all Cato really hoped for.
“But I’m not going to be around forever,” he said. “Somebody will have to take over.”
Getting ready for bed one night last September, Cato noticed blood on his toothbrush.
“I must have damaged my gums while brushing,” he thought, and shrugged it off. But he woke up later to find blood soaking into his pillow.
A visit to the emergency room at 2 a.m. led to surgery on his mouth, which led to a diagnosis of head and neck cancer, leading eventually to surgery at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
Now in remission, he still has trouble chewing and swallowing, while he has lost nearly all sense of taste.
“I’ll trade taste for life any day,” he said with a laugh. “So it’s OK. I’m doing fine.”
But the health scare has convinced him not to run for re-election again in 2020, leaving Vernon – with a current population of exactly 37 people – to look for a new mayor.
Oklahoma used to have more than 50 all-black towns, established largely by freedman families who had come to Indian Territory with tribal slave owners in the early 19th century. All but 13 of those towns have vanished, and now they’re struggling to survive.
“It would be a travesty to let them die,” said Jessilyn Head, part of a husband-wife team from Oklahoma City who head up The Coltrane Group, an organization devoted to saving Oklahoma’s remaining historic black towns. “There’s too much history and heritage that would be lost forever.”
Too small and under-funded to thrive individually, the 13 towns need to work together to promote awareness and tourism, Head said. Most of the towns have at least one annual event that could attract crowds – Vernon, for example, has a Memorial Day celebration that serves as a kind of town reunion, drawing former residents from all over the country. Anyone with an interest in black history should pay a visit, too, Head said.
“But people don’t know about these towns,” she said. “That’s one thing we have to fix.”
The Coltrane Group is working with state officials to post highway signs to help travelers find historic black towns, and the group is building a new website that will promote tourism to the towns, she said.
“Slowly but surely we’re seeing interest start to grow,” she said. “It’s not going to happen overnight, maybe not even in our lifetimes, but these towns can be rebuilt and revitalized.”
Cato doesn’t have much hope for Vernon to grow. In fact, he doesn’t have any hope for that.
“It will never be any bigger,” he said. “That’s for sure.”
He’d be satisfied with mere survival.
“What’s left of this town,” he said, “should be held together so people will know how things used to be.”
READ MORE AT: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2018-04-09/mayor-hopes-to-preserve-oklahoma-historic-black-town
It came out in 1968—yet little has changed since the Kerner Commission denounced “white racism.”
In July 1967, when President Lyndon B. Johnson formed a commission to analyze the riots then engulfing several major American cities, the radical wing of the civil-rights movement eyed his appointees with grave skepticism. Not only did the 11-person commission abound with the most conventional of politicians—including its chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner—but a mere two of them were black. Racial militants might have tolerated that paltry number of seats had they been occupied by firebrands such as Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the term black power, or H. Rap Brown, who routinely railed against “the honkies.” These brazen embodiments of the new generation of civil-rights activism would have reliably conveyed the concerns and frustrations of black youth—a presumably vital task for the commission, given that most rioters ranged from 15 to 24 years old.
Instead of black insurgents, however, Johnson tapped the longtime NAACP doyen Roy Wilkins and Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, two men broadly regarded as more acquainted with executive suites than with edgy streets. Detractors viewed Wilkins as so fearful of bucking the Johnson administration that they branded him “Roy Weak-knees.” Although Brooke had recently become the first black person popularly elected to the Senate, national media observed that his time as state attorney general and his personal attributes hardly endeared him to black radicals, who stopped just shy of labeling him an Uncle Tom. “Because of his pale skin, his Episcopalian faith, his reserved New England manner,” Time magazine noted, Brooke “is looked upon as what might be described as a ‘NASP’—the Negro equivalent of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” Both Wilkins and Brooke, moreover, had sharply repudiated the nascent black-power movement, going so far as to equate it with white supremacy. Whereas Brooke called Carmichael and the arch-segregationist Lester Maddox “extremists of black power and white power,” Wilkins termed Carmichael’s ethos “a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.”
Surprisingly, when the Kerner Report surfaced, in February 1968, black-power supporters felt cheered, and President Johnson was chagrined. H. Rap Brown, who was in a Louisiana jail cell for inciting a crowd, released an exultant statement: “The members of the commission should be put in jail under $100,000 bail each because they’re saying essentially what I’ve been saying.” For his part, an infuriated LBJ canceled the White House ceremony where he had been scheduled to accept a bound copy of the report, avoided public commentary on the eagerly anticipated document, and refused to sign customary letters recognizing the commissioners for their service. But Johnson’s effort to ignore the report failed utterly. The Kerner Report became an instant publishing phenomenon; Bantam sold almost 1 million paperbacks in the first two weeks. Public appetite ran so strong that Marlon Brando read aloud excerpts of the volume on a late-night television talk show.
Some aspects of the report may resonate even more loudly today than they did in the late 1960s. For example, the commission’s repeated emphasis on the role of police brutality in alienating black citizens and sowing the seeds of urban discontent now assumes added significance, given the many images of unarmed black men whose deaths at the hands of the state have been seared into the national psyche. Indeed, some of the report’s assessments could—eerily and depressingly—have been written yesterday to describe America’s recent racial disturbances, in locales ranging from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore, Maryland: “Almost invariably the incident that ignites disorder arises from police action.” Apart from its sharply phrased critique of the riots’ origins, the report promoted an ambitious policy agenda, including major measures in the domains of education, employment, housing, and welfare.
How did a government document that black radicals anticipated would be a whitewash end up instead denouncing “white racism”? This improbable turn of events animates Steven M. Gillon’s deft, incisive, and altogether absorbing history of the Kerner Commission, which he convincingly depicts as “the last gasp of 1960s liberalism—the last full-throated declaration that the federal government should play a leading role in solving deeply embedded problems such as racism and poverty.”
The puzzle of the commission’s severe assessment of the conditions plaguing urban America only intensifies when one considers that Johnson held leverage over its chairman. It was widely understood that the Illinois governor hoped LBJ would nominate him to a federal judgeship. But Gillon, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, makes clear that Kerner served merely as a figurehead. The commission’s executive director, David Ginsburg—a fixture of liberal legal circles since the New Deal—shaped the report’s general approach, tenor, and language more than any official commissioner did, helping forge a fragile consensus among its members. Yet identifying the report’s central force also fails to explain its bracing conclusions. After all, LBJ chose Ginsburg for the important, if under-the-radar, senior staff position precisely because he was a Johnson loyalist, one who, as Elizabeth Drew put it, enjoyed a reputation as “the insider’s insider.”
With LBJ’s hand-selected personnel at the helm of a well-oiled apparatus, the question remains: Why did the Kerner Report assume its pungent tone and advance bold proposals rather than simply blessing the Great Society programs in anodyne language? Three primary reasons emerge from Gillon’s meticulous re-creation of the proceedings.
First, the commissioners’ visits to riot-torn cities around the country proved galvanizing. Some members had a vague understanding of life in ghettos, but the conditions they witnessed firsthand were far more dire than anything they had imagined. Unemployment was pervasive, schools had insufficient funds and virtually no white students, and neighborhoods lacked access to adequate sanitation. More sobering still was the profound sense of disillusionment and anger that the commissioners encountered.
In Detroit, Michigan, and in Newark, New Jersey, where the two deadliest disturbances of 1967 occurred, many rioters declared that they would not fight for the United States, even in a major war. During one particularly unnerving field visit, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a young Presbyterian minister who held a degree from Columbia University calmly informed the commission that the recent spate of violence represented “just the beginning.”
Look, man, we’re hip to you white people. We know … it’s no good trying to appeal to your morals; you’ve shown you don’t have any morals. The only thing you believe in is your property—that’s what this country is all about, baby—so we are going to burn it down.
Second, such provocative encounters convinced the commission that only tough language would reach its dual intended audiences. For white Americans, the commissioners concluded that firm rhetoric was necessary to jolt them out of their collective slumber about the nation’s inner cities. Shortly before the report appeared, one member—Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma—explained: “I believe that white people in America are decent people [and that] if they can be shown the terrible conditions in which other Americans live and how this threatens our society, they will join together to try to solve these problems.”
For black Americans, by contrast, tough rhetoric was required to prevent the black-power movement from gaining more adherents. The report expressly condemned black-power advocates for retreating from the integrationist vision and dismissed the self-styled revolutionaries as mere Booker T. Washingtons with attitudes. But for those criticisms to seem credible, the report also needed to contain language excoriating the nation’s racist past and present.
Finally, the Kerner Report was shaped by a desire to avoid the hostile receptions that had greeted two recent governmental tracts. Following the Watts riots in 1965, a California report explained the violence by invoking what came to be known as “the riffraff theory,” the notion that a group of perpetual misfits (many of whom had migrated from the South) had plotted the unrest. Scholars immediately assailed this view, and the commission’s own profile of the typical rioter in 1967 belied the stereotype: Generally, rioters were educated, lifelong residents of their city who—crucially—had at least seen or suffered police brutality. Also in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report chronicling the increase in single motherhood in black families, with its emphasis on cultural and psychological factors, drew fierce criticism for “blaming the victim.” These cautionary tales primed the Kerner Commission to focus on structural obstacles confronting black communities, rather than on the supposed personal failings of the rioters.
Half a century later, the nation’s racial demographics have upended the black–white paradigm that prevailed in 1968; no serious analysis of race could now disregard that increased diversity. Even more distant from the current national climate, however, is the commission’s repeated insistence that the fate of inner-city African Americans stands inextricably connected to that of their fellow citizens. To take just one example, the report stated:
This Nation is confronted with the issue of justice for all its people—white as well as black, rural as well as urban … In speaking of the Negro, we do not speak of “them.” We speak of us—for the freedoms and opportunities of all Americans are diminished and imperiled when they are denied to some Americans.
Though such sentiments in 1968 may have been more aspirational than actual, the collective perspective now sounds lamentably alien.
Yet the continuities between the Kerner Commission era and contemporary realities seem even more pronounced than the ruptures. In the political realm, a direct line connects Richard Nixon’s successful campaign for the White House in 1968 to our most recent presidential election. Nixon disparaged the Kerner Commission’s findings as too permissive, playing up his promise to restore “law and order” in America. “I am the law-and-order candidate,” Donald Trump pledged to a crowd in Virginia Beach in July 2016, and since assuming office he has practiced a singularly divisive brand of politics, seldom missing a chance to pit “them” against “us.” Furthermore, while many African Americans have made momentous strides in the past five decades, cities still contain destitute neighborhoods filled with racial minorities, which—as in the late 1960s—serve as breeding grounds for despair and alienation. The Fair Housing Act of 1968—the only major tangible legislative achievement traceable to the Kerner Report—has failed to address those grim pockets of isolation.
When LBJ spoke briefly to the commissioners at the start of their undertaking, he tasked them with answering three basic questions about the recent unrest: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” On the Kerner Report’s 50th anniversary, the stubborn persistence of racial ghettos gives rise to another, deeply disconcerting query:
READ MORE AT: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/the-report-on-race-that-shook-america/556850/
Four years of protests, petitions, lawsuits, monetary donations, bottled water distribution, pipe replacements, as well as scientific testing and Environment Protection Agency involvement, have not stopped the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
The Michigan city residents and activists protested Wednesday outside the state’s capitol building for help and recognition that their water problems persist. It was a demonstration that spoke to the longstanding frustration over failures by city, state and federal officials since 2014 to permanently ensure a basic right: clean drinking water free of lead, bacteria and poisonous contaminants.
Many community members also voiced their outrage over a recent decision from Michigan state that shut down a free bottled water program, sending residents to the city’s four remaining bottled water stations to get the last of the supply on Friday. The high levels of lead had been reversed, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder also said Friday. State officials added that the city’s water has tested below the federal lead and copper limit of 15 parts per billion (ppb) for nearly two years, NBC reported.
But taxpayers, who have poured more than $350 million into Flint, are not convinced that the water supply is truly clean.
The water lead contamination, resulting from a switch from Lake Huron to the Flint River water that wasn’t properly treated in 2014, has either made tens of thousands of people, including children, sick or exposed them to harmful contaminants and significant health risks. A Legionnaire outbreak claimed the lives of 12 people, with former emergency managers and water plant employees having been charged with felonies related to the deaths.
Water at Flint’s public schools tested for high lead levels, with varying amounts of lead detected in 44.5 percent of collected samples in the district, according to a recent Michigan Department of Environmental Quality report. The city’s 13 schools have approximately 4,500 children.
Fears over untreated water have not gone away, especially in the wake of the city’s recent order to end distribution of free bottled water.
Flint Mayor Karen Weaver‘s office will begin the second phase of an ongoing project to replace more than 22,000 lead-contaminated water service lines in the city, CNN reported. However, that measure, scheduled to end in 2022, doesn’t seem like enough with residents, especially people of color, still crying out for help.
READ MORE AT: https://newsone.com/3792133/flint-water-crisis-2018-residents-rally-bottled-service-ends-update/
Indept discussion on 21st Centry Black Survival Conference with Brother Kifaru
and repatriation with Brother Jerry Johnson
“Time For An Awakening” for Sunday 4/15/2018 at 7:00 PM, our guest was Researcher, Author, Loray Muhammad. As a continuation of our critical discussion on INTEGRATION, we heard from the Author of the book, BLACK INTEGRATION: A Failed Social Experiment. 1. Has it worked?(you know the answer) 2. Can it work? 3. If not, where do we go from here?
Following recommendations from the commitee appointed to conduct a 90-day review of the city’s monuments and markers that could be deemed “symbols of hate,” Mayor Bill de Blasio has ordered the removal of a statue of Doctor J. Marion Sims, credited by many as the father of modern gynecology.
For years, East Harlem residents and local officials have advocated for the removal of the statue, located in Central Park near Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street near the Museum of the City of New York, but it wasn’t until last year as the city prepped to remove Confederate monuments and other markers, that renewed calls surfaced for the statue of Sims.
The statue, which acknowledges Sims’s medical achievements, overlooks the fact that between the years 1845 and 1849, he performed gynecological exams on 12 enslaved women without anesthesia.
The statue of Dr. James Marion Sims will be removed on Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. and relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried. Per the city’s Park Department, plans are being developed to commission a new monument at the site
READ MORE AT:https://ny.curbed.com/2018/4/16/17244504/j-marion-sims-central-park-statue-removed-nyc
A indept discussion on Homossexuality
“Time For An Awakening” for Sunday 4/22/2018 at 7:00 PM our guest was Activist, Pan-African Scholar, Prof. James Small. The topic with Dr. Small, “Values to Move our People Forward: Cultural, Political, Economics”
The Texas prison system has shifted more than 4,000 inmates out of solitary confinement over the past decade – but those who are still there are increasingly likely to be African-American, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice data.
At the end of the 2008 fiscal year, 17.7 of the prisoners in administrative segregation were black; by the end of the last fiscal year, 24.7 percent were black.
Over the same time frame, the portion of administrative segregation inmates who are white decreased by 4 percentage points and the portion who are Hispanic dropped by just over 3 percentage points. Across all groups, the number of inmates in administrative segregation dropped.
Even as those shifts occurred, the overall prison demographics moved in the opposite direction. The portion of the prison population that is black was about 4 percentage points lower last year than it was in 2008, while a slightly larger fraction of TDCJ inmates are white or Hispanic.
Even though the percentage of black inmates in administrative segregation is on the rise, it’s Hispanic prisoners who are most noticeably overrepresented there. The overall prison population was about a third white, a third Hispanic and a third black as of the end of fiscal 2017 – but roughly half the administrative segregation population is Hispanic, a long-standing trend possibly tied to gang affiliation.
Administrative segregation is used to house prisoners deemed a security threat due to gang affiliation, escape risk or other evidence of ongoing danger to staff or fellow inmates.
The prison system reduced its reliance on administrative segregation through the use of innovative programs like Gang Renouncement and Disassociation. And in September, TDCJ eliminated the use of solitary confinement for punitive purposes, a change that impacted roughly 75 inmates still being isolated for rule-breaking.
A prison spokesman did not offer comment on the reasons behind the changing administrative segregation demographics.
Melanated women have overcome crazy obstacles despite the growing list of things that threaten their health, livelihood and overall well-being.
One of the things on that list includes hair care products: the everyday items used by Black women to smooth strands, lay edges, and moisturize manes. Studies have blown the lid wide open on the toxic chemicals in those products and linked them with illnesses. However, one new Silent Spring Institute study is the first to measure how much of those chemicals are present in Black hair care products.
Black women are routinely over-exposed and under-protected from toxic chemicals, which cause problems affecting the body’s hormones and its endocrine system. Yes, this exposure has spurred large health disparities among African-American women and other racial groups.
How these chemicals keep being used in products is beyond insane. The chemical usage also shows that fattening cosmetic industry profit margins sometimes comes at the expense of Black health.
The problems with these chemically laden products start upon their manufacturing. The items on shelves in drugstores and more places are mostly untested and rarely regulated, Jessica Helm, PhD, a Silent Spring scientist and the study’s lead author, said. Also, a lot of manufacturers don’t include a full product ingredients list.
Researchers looked at 18 products — hot oil treatments, anti-frizz hair polishes, leave-in conditioners, root stimulators, hair lotions, and hair relaxers — chosen as popular among surveyed Black women. Brands included Lusters, PCJ and Soft & Beautiful.
The researchers connected the dots between 66 chemicals and health problems affecting Black women, who have higher rates of hormone-mediated problems including pre-term birth, uterine fibroids and infertility than other racial groups. Black women also suffer from increased rates of breast and endometrial cancers as well as maternal-related deaths.
Forty-five endocrine disruptors were detected by researchers in Black hair care products, with between 6 and 30 chemicals in each product. Another startling find? Eleven products had seven chemicals banned by the European Union or regulated under California’s Proposition 65, commonly known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986.
A lot of these chemicals are found in everyday personal care items marketed to women but are found in higher concentrations in products for Black women. Also, Black women buy and use more hair items than other groups.
The study gives insight into the thinking that drives the cosmetic industry and its attack on Black health and Black pride. How can women fight back?
Demanding safer products and more disclosure about ingredients is a big step, researchers said. Women can also choose “paraben-free” or “fragrance-free” products as well as ones that are plant-based or made with organic ingredients. It’s clear that it’s time to stand up and boycott these health threats.
READ MORE AT:https://newsone.com/3795488/black-melanin-women-hair-products-study/
EBONY wants you to buy Black. A study by Nielsen—a global information and measurement company that gathers data on what people watch, buy and listen to—found that the Black community has a current buying power of $1.2 trillion.
Much of that money, however, is spent outside of our communities. It is important to connect consumers with Black-owned businesses so our money stays in Black communities and promotes our economic stability.
Below are the top Black businesses we think are worth your money:
De’Shade is a small designer eyewear company based in Los Angeles. The glasses are stylish and cost as little as $20 but still have a luxury feel. The company also prides itself on providing looks that are inclusive of all shapes, sizes and color of people.
Wild Moon was created by Toronto-based jewelry designer Asia Clarke. The line’s pieces are eco-conscious and use natural materials to create the art of the jewelry. The beadwork and material choices allow each piece to become a highlight to any outfit.
The MWR collection is a unisex accessories brand by Mia Wright-Ross featuring chairs, stools, bags and luggage that boast raw-edged seams and hand-stitched detailing. The handcrafted goods can be pricey, but they are design standouts.
Temple Zen offers all-natural hand-crafted skin care products for your face and body. The company uses organic herbs, oils, salts and vitamin-rich minerals to restore and promote natural cell rejuvenation. Although skin care can be expensive, all of TZ’s products are reasonably priced.
This company specializes in hand-poured organic candles made with coconut wax that are so fragrant, they fill a room with their scent before they are burned. The eco-friendly candles are restocked weekly (they sell out within minutes) and become available for purchase on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. EST.
Unwrp adds luxury to gift wrapping. The brand not only offers striking, unique print options and the ability to customize wrapping paper to make your gifts stand out, but it has also introduced reusable options that can be repurposed as fashion statements.
This NYC-based clothing line recreates some of pop culture and fashion’s biggest moments on its graphic tees. In addition to T-shirts, the company creates eco-friendly denim and outerwear.
Your go-to stop for pins, patches and keychains that honor Black culture, Coloring Pins takes Black moments such as the history of Black hair care or the “You have McDonald’s money?” question by Black moms and turns them into wearable statement pieces.
Ikuzi Dolls creates Black dolls that come in different shades with different hair textures and hairstyles, showcasing how diverse the our community is. It provides children with the representation that can be missing from mainstream toys.
This online bookstore, a family business, pairs Black readers with books written for, by and about us in almost every genre
Entrepreneur Mikaila Ulmer, 13, developed a fascination with bees after she was stung twice by them in one week when she was 4. After receiving her great-grandmother’s recipe for lemonade, she started her own business selling the drink, with a portion of her profits going to organizations that help save honeybees. Her lemonade can be found on store shelves at Whole Foods in several states.
Pyramid Books is bookstore based in Boynton Beach, Florida, that offers works from African-American authors of genres including fiction, nonfiction, self-help, metaphysics, mysteries, Egyptology and science fiction and specializes in books that are more difficult to find. Anyone wanting to learn more about the African diaspora can find books here that will serve their needs.
Fanm Djanm began in 2014 as a headwrap company but has transformed into a lifestyle brand. Its name means “strong woman” in Haitian Kreyol, and its mission is to motivate women to be bold and to wear bold prints. Its headwraps are handmade in Harlem, some of fabrics and dyes from African countries, thereby helping local businesses on the continent.
RWD Consulting is a management consulting firm headquartered in Washington, D.C. that caters to clients in the public and private sectors. With over 190 workers, the company offers various services in information technology, facilities and logistics, program and administrative support and health care. The firm brought in $7.9 million in revenue in 2016, according to inc.com.
The London-based company, which has been featured in EBONY, was born out of a lack of lingerie and hosiery options that matched the skin tones of women of color. Ade Hassan founded Nubian Skin in 2014 and has expanded the brand to include shoes. The company delivers worldwide.
This cosmetics business stemmed from frustration about lack of diversity in the beauty industry with regard to color range, unnecessary chemicals and linear depictions in the media. The Lip Bar offers a wide variety of shades of lipsticks, lip glosses and liquid mattes, and all products are vegan and cruelty-free.
Founder Kashmir Thomas combined her talents as an artist and her knowledge of pop culture references and turned it into a business. Her website sells clutches, shirts, mugs and prints that feature her awesome artwork. Her most recent pop culture references are from Beyoncé’s Coachella performance and Marvel’s megasuccessful Black Panther film.
Costbucket is a point-of-service provider that caters to small business owners. The company offers cloud-based accounting software, real-time updates on inventory management, customer accounts in addition to personal accounting managers who work closely with businesses.
Talley & Twine is a watch company that makes affordable and stylish quality watches. Founded by Randy D. Williams, it was created to represent the “intersection of where you started and where you finish.”
Specializing in clothes for the “socially conscious Black woman,” this company exemplifies #BlackGirlMagic and offers a wide variety of tees, sweatshirts, hats and mugs that make bold statements.
There are a host of other Black businesses that deserve your support, and the ones on this list are good starting points for those who want to invest their money in our community. We hope you enjoy our pick of businesses, and please comment/tag a business you would like us to feature.
READ MORE AT: http://www.ebony.com/career-finance/we-buy-black-top-black-businesses-you-should-support#deshade-eyewear
OK! SO WHAT’S ALL THE RUCKUS CONCERNING BRO. WEST? 
Is this just a concern among Millennial and post-Millennial and if so why? Are there deeper issues involved or is this all a media ploy to sell records and/or a publicity stunt? A lot of ink and airtime has been used on what Mr. West feels about those who were held in bondage in America and the Caribbean for over 400 years. Why? Why? Why? Maybe the better question might be who cares?
The Black Reality Think Tank will host a panel of Millennial and generation x activist and thinkers led by Ms. Shentelle Brooks who will attempt to shed light on this issue.
Program airs live at 8pm eastern time on Tuesday 5/8/18.
Studio Line: 215-490-9832
Listen live Online and streaming podcast at:
http://www.timeforanawakening.com/
Also at:
http://www.blacktalkradionetwork.com/timeforanawakening
http://ourradionetwork.com/rel…/time-for-an-awakening-media/
“Time For An Awakening” for Sunday 4/29/2018 at 7:00 PM (EST) our guest was Activist, Educator, Akil Parker. The topic ” Public School Curriculum vs Black Students. “, how it shortchanges our children and what we can do about it.
By SAM LEVIN
Exclusive: Rakem Balogun spoke out against police brutality. Now he is believed to be the first prosecuted under a secretive US effort to track so-called ‘black identity extremists’
Rakem Balogun thought he was dreaming when armed agents in tactical gear stormed his apartment. Startled awake by a large crash and officers screaming commands, he soon realized his nightmare was real, and he and his 15-year-old son were forced outside of their Dallas home, wearing only underwear.
Handcuffed and shaking in the cold wind, Balogun thought a misunderstanding must have led the FBI to his door on 12 December 2017. The father of three said he was shocked to later learn that agents investigating “domestic terrorism” had been monitoring him for years and were arresting him that day in part because of his Facebook posts criticizing police.
“It’s tyranny at its finest,” said Balogun, 34. “I have not been doing anything illegal for them to have surveillance on me. I have not hurt anyone or threatened anyone.”
Balogun spoke to the Guardian this week in his first interview since he was released from prison after five months locked up and denied bail while US attorneys tried and failed to prosecute him, accusing him of being a threat to law enforcement and an illegal gun owner.
Balogun, who lost his home and more while incarcerated, is believed to be the first person targeted and prosecuted under a secretive US surveillance effort to track so-called “black identity extremists”. In a leaked August 2017 report from the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, officials claimed that there had been a “resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity” stemming from African Americans’ “perceptions of police brutality”.
The counter-terrorism assessment provided minimal data or evidence of threats against police, but discussed a few isolated incidents, notably the case of Micah Johnson who killed five officers in Texas. The report sparked backlash from civil rights groups and some Democrats, who feared the government would use the broad designation to prosecute activists and groups like Black Lives Matter.
Balogun, who was working full-time for an IT company when he was arrested, has long been an activist, co-founding Guerilla Mainframe and the Huey P Newton Gun Club, two groups fighting police brutality and advocating for the rights of black gun owners. Some of the work included coordinating meals for the homeless, youth picnics and self-defense classes – but that’s not what interested the FBI.
Investigators began monitoring Balogun, whose legal name is Christopher Daniels, after he participated in an Austin, Texas, rally in March 2015 protesting law enforcement, special agent Aaron Keighley testified in court.
The FBI, Keighley said, learned of the protest from a video on Infowars, a far-right site run by the commentator Alex Jones, known for spreading false news and conspiracy theories.
The reference to Infowars stunned Balogun: “They’re using a conspiracy theorist video as a reason to justify their tyranny? That is a big insult.”
Keighley made no mention of Balogun’s specific actions at the rally, but noted the marchers’ anti-police statements, such as “oink oink bang bang” and “the only good pig is a pig that’s dead”. The agent also mentioned Balogun’s Facebook posts calling a murder suspect in a police’s death a “hero” and expressing “solidarity” with the man who killed officers in Texas when he posted: “They deserve what they got.”
Keighley, however, later admitted the FBI had no evidence of Balogun making any specific threats about harming police.
At the time of his Facebook posts, Balogun said he was angry and “venting” about the high-profile cases of police killing innocent black men and women in America, including Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. He was particularly disgusted with the way the media and law enforcement portrayed the killings as justified and said that when he wrote those posts “I just mimicked their reactions to our killings.”
In a letter Balogun wrote to the Guardian from jail, he said he felt he had been “abducted” by the FBI, a “prisoner of war on free speech and the right to bear arms”. Authorities were targeting him for promoting black-led community groups and fighting “government abuse”, he wrote, adding he was never a threat to anyone: “Violence is the method of our oppressor, our method is hard work, love and unity.”
When he was arrested, police confiscated his .38-caliber handgun and an unloaded AK-style assault rifle – and also, he said, took his book Negroes with Guns by the civil rights leader Robert F Williams.
“They were really desperate,” Balogun said. “This is pretty much like Stalin 1950 – ‘You show me the man. I show you the crime.’”
The prosecution’s case eventually unraveled – but in the process, so did Balogun’s life.
The government’s own crime data has largely undermined the notion of a growing threat from a “black identity extremist” [BIE] movement, a term invented by law enforcement. In addition to an overall decline in police deaths, most individuals who shoot and kill officers are white men, and white supremacists have been responsible for nearly 75% of deadly extremist attacks since 2001.
The BIE surveillance and failed prosecution of Balogun, first reported by Foreign Policy, have drawn comparisons to the government’s discredited efforts to monitor and disrupt activists during the civil rights movement, particularly the FBI counterintelligence program called Cointelpro, which targeted Martin Luther King Jr, the NAACP and the Black Panther party.
Michael German, a former FBI agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, said the BIE assessment was “extraordinarily overbroad” and that the concept was spreading to law enforcement agencies across the US as more black activists were facing surveillance and police harassment.
Authorities have not publicly labeled Balogun a BIE, but their language in court resembled the warnings in the FBI’s file. German said the case also appeared to utilize a “disruption strategy” in which the FBI targets lower-level arrests and charges to interfere with suspects’ lives as the agency struggles to build terrorism cases.
“Sometimes when you couldn’t prove somebody was a terrorist, it’s because they weren’t a terrorist,” he said, adding that prosecutors’ argument that Balogun was too dangerous to be released on bail was “astonishing”.
“It seems this effort was designed to punish him for his political activity rather than actually solve any sort of security issue.”
The official one-count indictment against Balogun was illegal firearm possession, with prosecutors alleging he was prohibited from owning a gun due to a 2007 misdemeanor domestic assault case in Tennessee. But this month, a judge rejected the charge, saying the firearms law did not apply.
For Balogun, who said that the Tennessee case stemmed from a dispute with a girlfriend and that he was pressured to plead guilty to get out of jail, the decision felt like a “victory”.
But since his release one week ago, Balogun has also been forced to confront the harsh reality of life post-incarceration: He lost his vehicle, job and home; his son was forced to move and transfer schools and Balogun missed much of the first year of his newborn daughter’s life.
“This has been a nightmare for my entire family,” he said, adding that he was still recovering from the monotony and isolation of incarceration: “It was like living like a dog confined to a small backyard.”
Balogun said he also had to accept the fact that the government would likely continue to monitor to him and could seek new ways to disrupt his life. But the threat wouldn’t stop him from organizing and speaking out, he added: “As long as my community needs me to serve them, I’ll be there.”
READ MORE AT: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-interview-black-identity-extremists-fbi-surveillance
The systematic denial of choices to black people and the increasingly high stakes of the choices we do have is infuriating.Victor_Tongdee / Getty Images/iStockphoto
Racial disparities in maternal health throw this lie into especially sharp relief. Research shows that for black women, the choice to birth children is frequently a life or death decision. Maternal mortality is now worse in this country than it was 25 years ago and black women are three to four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy related causes. In the 1990s, Dr. Arline Geronimus argued that as a consequence of continuous and heightened stress, black women’s bodies experience what she termed “weathering.” The idea was that our bodies literally age more quickly than white bodies, putting both ourselves and the babies we carry at risk of premature death.
I am now 37 years old. Last year, I received tenure from the institution where I work as a professor. I am the only person in my family’s generation who has not had children; my mother is the only one of her siblings who is not a grandparent. As I continue to recover from the stresses of my eight-years long, grueling tenure process — not to mention the otherwise stressful life of a professional black woman overachiever — I am left to wonder whether my body is too weathered to successfully carry both me and a baby through a pregnancy.
The idea that the choices and accomplishments that I worked so hard to achieve might be the things preventing me from having the personal and lifestyle choices that I wanted is devastating.
The idea that the very choices and accomplishments that I worked so hard to achieve might be the very things preventing me from having the kinds of personal and lifestyle choices that I wanted is — in a word — devastating.
Because my single mother preached her own Southern, black, Christian version of this gospel of neoliberalism sermon for the entirety of my childhood, I did make excellent choices, reminded as I always was, that “Baby, the only person who you can control is you.” I was particularly obsessed with avoiding premature parenthood, so much so that I treated sex a contagion, whose influence would spread and engulf my life if I came into contact with it even one time.
My mother had been a teen mom, a choice that curtailed her educational prospects and limited her economic power. I was acutely aware that having a baby too young could derail all my future plans, too. Although many of my feelings were shaped by both the Christian “True Love Waits” campaign of the 1990s and a society morally panicked about a teen pregnancy epidemic, much of my angst also had to do with being a finicky, nerdy black girl, lacking in confidence and uncomfortable in my own skin.
Neoliberal thinking can make you feel like you are in charge of your own destiny. It can make you believe that through sheer strength of will and good choices alone, you can rule your own world.
But because the stakes were so incredibly high, it was exceedingly difficult not to become a steadfast adherent to the dictates of neoliberalism. Neoliberal thinking can make you feel like you are in charge of your own destiny. It can make you believe that through sheer strength of will and good choices alone, you can rule your own world.
Then, you reach adulthood, have success and accomplishments in spades and you begin to wonder if perhaps you have overplayed your hand. The indefatigable reach of systems of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism shatters the Invictus-fueled fantasy that most of us are taught to believe. We are not the masters of our fate.
Despite delaying motherhood until I reached a required level of “social fitness” to mother, I now find that traditional mothering might not be within reach. Thankfully, I’m not wed to birthing a child, but the systematic denial of choices to black people and the increasingly high stakes of the choices we do have is no less infuriating.
Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued that racism should be understood as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” When black mothers and children are dying at increasingly worse rates, despite following the state-sanctioned ideological ruse of making good choices, the connection of racism to the production of premature death in black communities becomes exceedingly and excessively clear.
Black mothering has always been caught in the tricky maze of power relationships that shaped the founding of the United States. Black women were transported here as breeders to provide birth free laborers for the American republic. After emancipation, black women struggled to protect their progeny, and to resuscitate black motherhood from conservative narratives about welfare queens draining public resources. My mother came of age in the aftermath of the infamous Moynihan Report and became a teen mother one month after Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency.
Many of my choices as a young black woman growing up in post-1980s America were shaped by a desire “not to become a statistic.” Like Scylla and Charybdis, an impeccable grind and an unstoppable hustle might help you to outrun the statistical narrative, but weathered health brought on by too many years of stress and struggle might have the last, cruel laugh.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/59410463/11089868916_5c311e87bd_k.0.jpg?w=620&ssl=1)
