Afro American Quotes

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

I loved going to the library. It was the first time I ever saw Black newspapers and magazines like JET, Ebony, the Baltimore Afro-American, or the Chicago Defender. And I’ll never forget my librarian.

But I like my big Afro. I also liked when my hair was longer and relaxed. I’m happy to have choices. They’re mine to make

I feel that the kinks, curls, or tight coils in Afro hair is beautiful and unique. No other race on this planet has hair like ours - that makes me proud.

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro American invented rock and roll yet has only been rewarded or awarded for their accomplishments when conforming to the white man's standards. I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro American has once again been the only race that has brought a new form of original music to this decade: hip-hop/rap.

Africa! Africa! Africa! Africa my motherland! Africa, your people cries for you! Africans must educate their citizens. Africans must reach out to it's people and empower them to build the nation. Africans you are the only people who can liberated your citizens from poverty through education. Africans must pay the price to rebuild the continent.

Art is only important to the extent that it aids in the liberation of our people.

Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppress the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population.

You may be amazed that you are still unique and beautiful as your natural self. Only you can decide if this style is for you.

The miscegnation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

Women hating men is not an aberrant or unexpected response, but rather natural response to being controlled, and to being viewed as less than human by an oppressor. Afro-American slaves hated their owners; women hate theirs.

The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home, and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system - the violence is already there, and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself. When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence' what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists.

Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition.

The objective of stereotypes is not to reflect or represent a reality but to function as a disguise, or mystification, of objective social relations.

Hacking shampoos, conditioners, gels and creams with your oil(s) of choice is a great way to promote healthy strong hair growth.

Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston’s ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.

This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man's only way into it). The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned.

Children of the Cosmos never say goodbye, only minor interruptions appear like small forevers. Only time when we must communicate with the vibrations of desperate souls, and then it’s morning again, and the sun steps out from hiding, and our world glistens. Spectrums flash and fade, streaks of purple and orange shot with soulasphere. Our voices ripple and prance, our bodies glow like stars and melt; transformed and reformed into compressed constellations that will continue to continue. Yet we are only children of the Cosmos.

Ephram broke through. “You kiss me, woman! Don't let sorrow steal 'way truth. Don't blaspheme who we is.

Nor could I see any reason for allowing our more chastened view of political possibility (not too long before I began this novel A. Phillip Randolph had to threaten our beloved F.D.R. with a march on Washington before our war industries were opened to Negroes) to impose undue restrictions upon my novelist’s freedom to manipulate imaginatively those possibilities that existed both in Afro-American personality and in the restricted structure of American society. My task was to transcend those restrictions.

Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two undefined and currently undefinable proper nouns. I mean that, in the case of Africa, Africa is still chained to Europe, and exploited by Europe, and Europe and America are chained together; and as long as this is so, it is hard to speak of Africa except as a cradle and a potential. Not until the many millions of people on the continent of Africa control their land and their resources will the African personality flower or genuinely African institutions flourish and reveal Africa as she is.

In the discussion at Phi Beta Sigma, a social fraternity I joined for a while, I expressed my anger about society and white racism. The other told me that I sounded like a guy named Donald Warden who was preaching Blackness at the Berkley campus of the University of California. He was the head of an organization called the Afro-American Association. I went to Berkley to find Warden and hear what he was saying. The first member I met, though, was Maurice Dawson, one of Warden’s tight partners. He turned me off with his arrogance. I had come searching for something, and he scorned me because I did not already know what I was seeking. I could not understand what he was saying about “Afro-Americans.” The term was new to me. Dawson really put me down. “You know what an Afro-Cucan is?” “Yes” “You know what an Afro-Brazilian is?” “Yes” “Then why don’t you know what an Afro-American is?” It may have been apparent to him, but not to me. But I was stilled interested. Maurice taught me a lesson that I try to apply to the Black Panther Party today. I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing a line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly feel into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.

So our next move is to take the entire civil rights struggle – problem – into the United Nations and let the world see that Uncle Sam is guilty of violating the human rights of 22 million Afro-Americans right down to the year of 1964 and still has the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world?

Ascoltavo abitualmente Musical Caravan, lo show di Bill Cook, il sabato sera nella mia stanza buia. Il tema introduttivo era Caravan di Ellington, ritmi afro-orientali molto esotici, molto sofisticati, una cadenza da danza del ventre sulla quale, da sola, valeva la pena di sintonizzarsi; Caravan, nell'interpretazione del Duke, mi faceva sentire piacevolmente nell'illecito anche quando me ne stavo rannicchiato tra le lenzuola fresche di bucato di mia madre.

In the preface to Southern Horrors, she wrote, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.

The jury was composed of eight blacks and four whites. Hoffa and his attorney, the legendary Edward Bennett Williams, struck only white jurors in the selection process. Hoffa had a black female lawyer flown in from California to sit at counsel table. He arranged for a newspaper, The Afro-American, to run an ad praising Hoffa as a champion of the “Negro race.” The ad featured a photo of Hoffa’s black-and-white legal team. Hoffa then had the newspaper delivered to the home of each black juror. Finally, Hoffa’s Chicago underworld buddy Red Dorfman had the legendary boxing champion Joe Louis flown in from his Detroit home. Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Louis hugged in front of the jury as if they were old friends. Joe Louis stayed and watched a couple of days of testimony. When Cye Cheasty testified, Edward Bennett Williams asked him if he had ever officially investigated the NAACP. Cheasty denied he had, but the seed was planted. Hoffa was acquitted. Edward

Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans. The step backward has a new name today. It is called the “white backlash.” But the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. It was caused neither by the cry of Black Power nor by the unfortunate recent wave of riots in our cities. The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation. The white backlash is an expression of the same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white America on the question of race. What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillation? It lies in the “congenital deformity” of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception. The roots of racism are very deep in America. Historically it was so acceptable in the national life that today it still only lightly burdens the conscience.

NOTE: The character of Aoleon is deaf. This conversation takes place in the book via sign language... “Feeling a certain kind of way Aoleon?” She snapped-to and quickly became defensive. “What in the name of the Goddess are you on about?” Shades of anger and annoyance. The old Aoleon coming out. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t poke at you like that. It’s okay you know. There’s nothing wrong about the way you feel.” As if suddenly caught up in a lie, Aoleon cleared her throat and ran her fingers absentmindedly over her ear and started to fidget with one of the brass accents in her snowy hair. A very common nervous reaction. “No…I mean…well I was…uh...” “Aoleon, I know about you and Arjana.” he admitted outrightly as he pointed at the drawing. She coughed, stuttered, smiled, but could bring herself to fully say nothing. Words escaped her as she looked about the room for answers. “My sight is Dįvįnë, lest we forget. I knew you were growing close.” “Yes. Well…she’s…something else.” “Indeed?” he responded. Images flashed briefly in Aoleon’s head of her father’s old friend. Verging on her fiftieth decade of life. She was a fierce woman by all accounts. One who’d just as soon cut you with words as she would a blade. Yet, she was darling and caring towards those she held close to her. Lovely to a fault; in a wild sort of way. Dark skin, the colour of walnut stained wood. Thick, kinky hair fashioned into black locs that faded into reddish-brown tips that were dyed with Assamian henna; the sides of her head shaved bare in an undercut fashion. Tattoos and gauged ears. Very comfortable with her sexuality. Dwalli by blood, but a native of the Link by birth although she wasn’t a Magi. Magick was her mother’s gift. “I heard her say something very much the same about you once Aoleon.” “Really?” Aoleon perked up right away. “Did she?” “Yes. After she first met you in fact. Nearly exactly.” Aoleon’s smile widened and she beamed happiness. She sat up assertively and gave a curt nod. “Well, of course she did.” “She’s held such a torch for you for so long that I was starting to wonder if anything would actually come of it.” “Yeah. Both you and Prince Asshole.” Aoleon exclaimed with a certainty that was absolute as she once again tightened up with defensiveness. Samahdemn walked his statement back. “Peace daughter. I didn't know your brother had been giving you a row about her. Then again, he is your brother. So anything is possible.” Aoleon sighed and nodded. “Not so much problems as he’s been giving me the silent treatment over it. Na’Kwanza. It’s always Na’ Kwanza.” Samahdemn nodded knowingly and waived a dismissive hand. “He’s just jealous. He always has been.” “So I’ve noticed.” “Why would you hide it? Why not tell me?” “I don’t know.” she said; shrugging her shoulders. “I didn’t know how you’d take it I suppose.” “Seriously? You were afraid of rejection? From me? Love, have I ever held your individuality against you? Have I ever not supported you or your siblings?” She shook her head; a bit embarrassed that she hadn't trusted him. "No, I suppose not." -Reflections on the Dįvonësë War: The Dįvįnë Will Bear Witness to Fate

OUCH "The arrabal (a term used for poor neighbourhoods in Argentina and Uruguay) and carpa (informal mobile theatre set up inside tents, once common in Latin America), with their caliente (hot) rhythms such as the rumba or the cha-cha-cha, were conquering audiences all over the world, a trend allegorised in song lyrics about their popularity among the French and other non-Latin Americans - "The Frenchman has fun like this/as does the German/and the Irishman has a ball/as does even the Muslim" ("Cachita") - even as they filtered in the presence of a blackness - "and if you want to dance/look for your Cachita/and tell her "Come on negrita"/let's dance" - denied in the official discourse of those Spanish=speaking countries wielding the greatest economic power in the region: namely, Argentina and Mexico, the latter of which would eventually incorporate Afro-Latin American culture into its cinema - although being careful to mark it as Cuban and not Mexican.

THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN ACADEMIC.

Just because you are anti-police, that does not necessarily mean that your whiteness has disappeared or that anti-Black racism is gone. Remember what James Baldwin told us, “White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.”5 Even Dr. King—yes, the one that even conservatives love to tout as the content-of-your-character caricature—argued that he was disappointed in the “white moderate” who “is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice . . . who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”6 White liberals are who we should be concerned about. Of course, Malcolm X warned us to be aware of the fox and the wolf—by which he meant that white liberals would try and be your friend in order to take advantage of you, but the wolf would always make clear its intentions and commit an act of violence. Finally, let’s not forget the words of South African and Black Consciousness movement freedom fighter Steve Biko, who wrote of white liberals: Instead of involving themselves in an all-out attempt to stamp out racism from their white society, liberals waste lots of time trying to prove to as many blacks as they can find that they are liberal.

People, especially young white people, in America and in Europe are aware of what's happening in the ghetto even if their fathers maintain an obstinate ignorance. All over Europe I've seen young people who've studied the methods of the Black Liberation movement, applying those same methods to the job of forcing a bit of humanity into their profit-crazed and economically teetering countries. Of course it's got its amusing sides too and very often one is forced to rush somewhere for a drink after he's seen a group of the blond German youths with hair frizzled and worn in Afros. The parents of these kids have all picked the portrait of the President of the United States as a symbol of what was good in America...But I've been in no part of Europe where there wasn't the picture of a good American--and it was always Angela Davis!

Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?" by Yggdrasil The sine-qua-non of inner party power is a multi-cultural elite alienated from its tribal and racial kinsmen. It is the native elites - the indigenous leaders who might resist the inner party's drive for power that are always the target. ... For the reform version of communism developed by the Frankfurt School that now dominates the ‘liberal democracies" and the NWO, the masses of the nations are important as consumers ... What remains relevant to the inner party are the inner party's potential competitors, the native national elites with community ties to their brethren. In the Soviet Union, the inner party elites (using Lenin and Stalin as their cover) resorted to murder and forced resettlement to remove the native national elites, a fast, direct and brutal form of decapitation. In the "liberal democracies" the inner party uses a slower and less visibly brutal method of decapitation. Thus, in the liberal democracies of today we have "affirmative action" - a set of laws that places tremendous pressure on private businesses to displace native elites at the top with minorities who will be less plausible targets of discrimination lawsuits. These laws exist everywhere in the European world, and with the exception of the U.S. were enacted long before any significant minority constituencies (other than the inner party itself) existed to lobby for their passage. The entire program of displacement and decapitation within the liberal democracies was carefully drawn up and explained in "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno, et. al.(1947). It is a prescription for identifying any person who displays any bond of obligation to his own kind and the will to resist those who threaten the interests of his kind. Such "authoritarian personalities" are to be denied university admission and consigned to low status occupations, which is precisely what the laws of affirmative action and social rules of political correctness accomplish. Indeed, as I read the tables from the 1939 Soviet census published in Sanning's work [The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning] I recalled my own research showing that the inner party, representing 2.4% of the U.S. population comprises 28% of the student body at Harvard, while the descendants of European Christendom comprising 70% of the population supply only 18% of the students. The American Majority has been effectively displaced at Harvard. Relative to their share of the Population, they have 2.4 times fewer students than do the inner party's Afro-American coalition partners. ... The United States Department of Labor has maintained a tracking study of 12,000 young people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 known as the National Longitudinal study of Youth ("NLSY"). The CD Roms with all the data can be purchased from Ohio State University. These data show that at each given level of IQ (all participants were tested) the income and educational attainment of the descendants of European Christendom is much lower than for Blacks, Hispanics and Inner party members of the same IQ. In what will surely be a surprise to most middle and upper middle-income Euro-Americans, the effects are most pronounced at the highest IQ levels. In other words, it is the majority elite that suffers the widest disparity in income and education when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and Inner Party members within the same IQ range. When the effects are broken down by sex, we find that among males the disparity is most pronounced in the highest IQ ranges and disappears entirely by the time you descend to the 50% mark. The widest disparity exists among the top 2% of the population (those with IQs above 130).

Walter Francis White was cocky. Harlem loved him for it, even if some folks wondered why he said he was Afro-American. Physically, he was not only white, he was . . . one of the whitest white men ever to have an octoroon for a grandfather.

The mounting wave of discontent culminated in a riot that broke out off base in April 1942 as black and white soldiers queued outside Waldron’s Sports Palace. What happened next is unclear. In one version, a black soldier wanting to use a telephone took offense when a white MP told him he couldn’t leave the line. In the ensuing violence, some fifty shots were fired and three soldiers lay dead, two black privates and one white MP. The post’s public relations officer later explained opaquely that the melee was triggered by “some persons with a little too much race consciousness getting off track.” The situation remained unchanged one year later, when the Afro-American reported that the base was still a “veritable powder keg.” The incidents certainly belied the findings of a 1942 report by the Army General Staff that concluded that the policy of segregation had “practically eliminated the colored problem, as such, within the Army.” Even when violence wasn’t an issue,

I have seen disparaging comments on social media toward my fellow African American and Afro-Caribbean people throughout the diaspora. People saying things like, “they’re wearing beauty shop dashikis” or “they’re grasping at straws because they don’t know anything about Africa.” Listen, we get our healing the way we need to. And if I put on a beauty shop dashiki, it’s because that is what I have access to. And I will rock it—proudly—and be connected to my motherland and my Source in the way that my womb energy tells me is connective for me.

Or: you, an Afro-American, confront a cop who "knows" all, not sombunall, Afro-Americans "are" violent and dangerous. He uses excessive force. You get angry and fight back. You have just confirmed your suspicion about white cops — and he has confirmed his suspicion about Afro-Americans.

in honor of Aponte and his companions was placed there in the 1940s, though it was stolen in more recent times. Among Black communities in Havana, his memory was kept alive from generation to generation. Afro-Cuban historian José Luciano Franco recalled that in the 1960s, stories of Aponte’s accomplishments—including his participation in the American Revolution—were well known in popular neighborhoods.

the January 21, 1956, edition of the Baltimore Afro-American, he published another such letter, this time prompted by the Huie revelations. This one was directed

Reporter James Hicks also began a riveting four-part series in both the Cleveland Call and Post and Baltimore Afro-American. Hicks enthralled readers with his blow-by-blow account of the trial and his role in the dramatic search for witnesses

As for me, I admire above all Noble Drew's aesthetic, his unique and special blend of Afro-American, Native-American, High Magical, and Oriental symbolism and imagery - as well as his courage, his martyrdom, and his revolutionary stance against "Pharaoh." By Americanizing the prophetic spirit he injected our culture with a kind of folk Sufism. On the esoteric level, anyone who loves Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice is a member of the "Asiatic race" and the Lost/Found Moorish Nation of North America.

The Mutiny Act of 1807 finally settled the legal status of Afro-British soldiers by effectively emancipating all slaves in British military service.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Louisiana Slave Database 1719–1820, in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699–1860. CD-ROM. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2000.

Among his peers, Pablo Guzmán had a unique upbringing. He graduated from one of New York’s premier academic high schools, Bronx Science, where students were engaged with the political debates of the day, from the Vietnam War to the meaning of black power, thanks to the influence of a history teacher. Guzmán had also been politicized by his Puerto Rican father and maternal grandfather, who was Cuban. Both saw themselves as members of the black diaspora in the Americas. The job discrimination and racist indignities they endured in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and in New York turned them into race men committed to the politics of black pride and racial uplift. When Guzmán was a teenager, his father took him to Harlem to hear Malcolm X speak.188 He also remembers that his Afro-Cuban grandfather, Mario Paulino, regularly convened meetings at his home to discuss world politics with a circle of friends, many of whom were likely connected through their experience at the Tuskegee Institute, the historic black American school of industrial training, to which Paulino had applied from Cuba and at which he enrolled in the early 1920s.189 Perhaps because of the strong black politics of his household, Guzmán identified strongly with the black American community, considered joining the BPP, and called himself “Paul.” His “field studies” in Cuernavaca, Mexico, during his freshman year at SUNY Old Westbury, however, awakened him to the significance of his Latin American roots.

I must be honest. Negroes—Afro-Americans—showed no inclination to rush to the United Nations and demand justice for themselves here in America. I really had known in advance that they wouldn’t. The American white man has so thoroughly brainwashed the black man to see himself as only a domestic “civil rights” problem that it will probably take longer than I live before the Negro sees that the struggle of the American black man is international.

the tempest created by the black revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue and communicated by mobile people in other slave societies would prove a major turning point in the history of the Americas.

Though rarely counted as carefully in population censuses, free blacks and browns seemed to cause much greater day-to-day concern among government officials and white residents in both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue than in the Spanish colonies.

by 1739 Saint-Domingue was the world’s richest and most profitable slave colony.

forms of resistance already endemic to the region continued to thrive and spread. The practice of Africans fleeing their enslavers, for example, was already a tradition of long standing at the turn of the eighteenth century.

since Haiti became emancipated, there are already in the Antilles more free negroes and mulattoes than slaves.”44

devised clandestine ways to transmit information quickly and effectively.

To the north, the victorious rebels did not extend their revolutionary principles to include the unfree, and by 1787 it was clear that the new nation would be built in large measure on the backs of the enslaved black workers who constituted fully a fifth of the population of the United States.

On Hispaniola, tensions between French and Spanish officials eased considerably in 1764 after the Spanish governor allowed a detachment of the maréchaussée (mounted militia) from Saint-Domingue to cross the border in pursuit of a band of runaways which had inhabited the mountainous stretches separating the colonies since 1728.

Smaller contingents of black loyalists ended up in the Bahamas and other British islands.

even a “successful” free black immigrant like George Liele could prove a troublesome presence in Jamaica. Liele, a Baptist minister, was responsible for introducing the Baptist faith to Jamaica and enlisted hundreds of black converts.

the planters and the commercial bourgeoisie undertook the similar task of supporting the Revolution while at the same time working to keep the social forces which it unleashed from spilling over into the colonies.

sailors took the lead by mounting violent protests against the exploitative working conditions of the slave trade.

After the war, local groups—Quakers and non-Quakers alike—kept alive the opposition to the slave trade.

Such concerns were not misplaced. Throughout the eighteenth century, planters found the links between city and country both vexing and essential.

powerful religious mystic

The apparent unrest among Irish soldiers and seamen in royal service in the early 1790s coincides closely with the emergence of nationalist republicanism in Ireland, a new and vital stage in the developing opposition to British rule.

European sailors and African slaves.

To Toussaint’s dismay, British cruisers patrolling the waters off Saint-Domingue strictly enforced these limits on maritime activity.

While the early Christians succeeded in undermining the authority and confidence of their rulers and rising up out of slavery, the Afro-American experience has been just the opposite. Already a people in slavery, when Christianity was imposed upon them, the Blacks only assumed another burden, the tyranny of the future—the hope of heaven and the fear of hell. Christianity increased their sense of hopelessness. It also projected the idea of salvation and happiness into the afterlife, where God would reward them for all their sufferings on this earth. Justice would come later, in the Promised Land. The phrase “All Power to the People” was meant to turn this around, to convince Black people that their rewards were due in the present, that it was in their power to create a Promised Land here and now.

It didn't take long after moving to Paris for Ricky to realize that her experience of the city was not universal. 'The Afro-French have a very different experience here,' she told me. Janet McDonald, a lawyer, told THIS AMERICAN LIFE host Ira Glass about having a similar realization after she moved to Paris from Brooklyn in the 1990s: 'For African Americans, we're in a very bizarre position. It's almost like being an honorary white in apartheid South Africa. And I noticed that, as my French got better and better, sometimes I wasn't as well received as I would be if I played up my American accent.

And all the more so because the voice seemed well aware that a piece of science fiction was the last thing I aspired to write. In fact, it seemed to tease me with allusions to that pseudoscientific sociological concept which held that most Afro-American difficulties sprang from our “high visibility”; a phrase as double-dealing and insidious as its more recent oxymoronic cousins, “benign neglect” and “reverse discrimination,” both of which translate “Keep those Negroes running-but in their same old place.” My friends had made wry jokes out of the term for many years, suggesting that while the darker brother was clearly “checked and balanced”-and kept far more checked than balanced-on the basis of his darkness he glowed, nevertheless, within the American conscience with such intensity that most whites feigned moral blindness toward his predicament; and these included the waves of late arrivals who refused to recognize the vast extent to which they too benefited from his second-class status while placing all the blame on white southerners.

So he was Spanish. But he still looked Black to her. Like many white people, Sara made no distinction between a Black American and an Afro-Latino.

Monrovia is Liberia’s capital city and has a population of over a million people. According to the 2008 census Monrovia had a population of 1,010,970. A total of 29% of the total population of Liberia lives in Monrovia, making it the country's most populous city. In mid-1950, when President Tubman’s administration governed the country, it had an estimated quarter of that number. At that earlier time the minority of Afro-Americans controlled Liberia but the native tribes in the majority had very little say in the running of the country. More recently, because of interracial marriages between ethnic Liberians and Lebanese nationals a significant mixed-race population especially in and around Monrovia had developed. Because of civil unrest most American Liberians fled to the United States and other countries. After the restructuring of the Liberian government very few returned to Liberia creating an educational deficit or brain-drain. More recently more are returning to Liberia but not without problems. The primary fear is that they will bring back money earned overseas and will be in a position to recapture power and eventually the government. Photo Caption: Monrovia Liberia

the Afro-American experience, rejecting the false history, spurious logic, and expedient politics that collapse the situations of Afro-Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and indigenous Americans into a single category. He correctly insists that there is no counterpart for any other descent group to the one-drop or any-known-ancestry rule that, with minor exceptions, has historically identified Afro-Americans.

Athletes, we were supposed to just be there, and in class I made it a point that I was prepared for every exam, that I got on that Dean's List. Because I wanted them to see that there was a black person on the Dean's List who was an athlete. I accepted the challenge, because I want you to know that we bleed just like you do. We have feelings just like you do. Let us read the same books and we'll understand it just like you do!

To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.

The blues are beautiful. It’s a distillation of black America. It’s a cultural heart. It says so much for Afro-Americans, North American Afro people. And it must have something, ’cos it swept the world in many forms, including country-and-western, which I love.

The human race comes from a black mother.

In her groundbreaking article, "The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in Afro-American Biblical Interpretation," Martin asks a provocative question: "How can black male preachers and theologians use a liberated hermeneutic while preaching and theologizing about slaves, but a literalist hermeneutic with reference to women?" I would like to ask the same question of white preachers and theologians.

I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race.

When Afro-Americans are viewed as active subjects of history, Afro-American history becomes the story of a gallantly persistent struggle, of a disparate racial group fighting to enter modernity on its own terms.

her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances.

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Meanwhile, angered by white violence in the South and inspired by the gigantic June 23 march in Detroit, grassroots people on the streets all over the country had begun talking about marching on Washington. “It scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death,” as Malcolm put it in his “Message to the Grassroots” and in his Autobiography.6 So the White House called in the Big Six national Negro leaders and arranged for them to be given the money to control the march. The result was what Malcolm called the “Farce on Washington” on August 28, 1963. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC and fresh from the battlefields of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama where hundreds of blacks and their white student allies were being beaten and murdered simply for trying to register blacks to vote, was forced to delete references to the revolution and power from his speech and, specifically, to take out the sentence, “We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” Marchers were instructed to carry only official signs and to sing only one song, “We Shall Overcome.” As a result, many rank-and-file SNCC militants refused to participate.7 Meanwhile, conscious of the tensions that were developing around preparations for the march on Washington and in order to provide a national rallying point for the independent black movement, Conrad Lynn and William Worthy, veterans in the struggle and old friends of ours, issued a call on the day of the march for an all-black Freedom Now Party. Lynn, a militant civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, had participated in the first Freedom Ride from Richmond, Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947 and was one of Robert Williams’s attorneys.8 Worthy, a Baltimore Afro-American reporter and a 1936–37 Nieman Fellow, had distinguished himself by his courageous actions in defense of freedom of the press, including spending forty-one days in the Peoples Republic of China in 1957 in defiance of the U.S. travel ban (for which his passport was lifted) and traveling to Cuba without a passport following the Bay of Pigs invasion in order to help produce a documentary. The prospect of a black independent party terrified the Democratic Party. Following the call for the Freedom Now Party, Kennedy twice told the press that a political division between whites and blacks would be “fatal.

কারা গড়েছে সবকিছু কারা সবচেয়ে চতুর কারা সবচেয়ে বড়ো কারা সবচেয়ে ধনী কারা বলে তোমরা কুৎসিত আর তাদের দেখতে সবচেয়ে সুন্দর কারা শিল্পের সংজ্ঞা বানায় কারা বিজ্ঞানের সংজ্ঞা বানায় কারা বোমা তৈরি করেছে কারা বন্দুক তৈরি করেছে কারা ক্রীতদাস কিনেছে, আর তাদের বেচেছে কারা তাদের নাম দিয়েছে কে বলেছে ডাহমার পাগল ছিল না কারা ? কারা ? কারা ?

Located at 6° 17′ 57″ N, 10° 47′ 41″ W, on the Atlantic coast near Cape Mesurado, The city and outlying districts are administered by the Monrovia City Corporation. Monrovia is Liberia’s capitol city and has a population of over a million people. According to the 2008 census Monrovia had a population of 1,010,970. A total of 29% of the total population of Liberia lives in Monrovia, making it the country's most populous city. In mid-1950, when President Tubman’s administration governed the country, it had 250,000 people or an estimated quarter of that number. At that earlier time the minority group of Afro-Americans controlled Liberia but the indigenous tribes having the he majority of the population had very little say in the running of the country. More recently, because of interracial marriages between ethnic Liberians and Lebanese nationals a significant mixed-race population has developed. Because most of these people are merchants they primarily lived in Monrovia. During the civil wars and the ensuing unrest, most American Liberians fled to the United States and other countries. After the restructuring of the Liberian government very few returned to Liberia creating an educational deficit or brain-drain. More recently some are returning to Liberia but not without problems. The primary fear is that they will bring back money earned overseas and will be in a position to recapture economic power and eventually the government.

Practically every kind of people eat somethin' that somebody else make a godawful face at. If that don' tell ya what this race-hatin is all about, nuthin will. In this life, we gotta give ourselves a chance to digest a lotta things we don' understand right off.

Over time, people of African descent have changed how they wished to be called. In the 1700s and earlier, sons and daughters of (Africans) were common. By the 1830s, Colored Americans, People of Color and Afro Americans were used. By the early 1900s, a younger generation felt that Negro was a new term of pride. In the 1960s, a new younger generation felt that Black or Black American was the better term. Today, many people use the term African American, coming almost full circle to the 1700s.

there are plenty of Caucasians who have lips quite as thick and noses quite as broad as any of us. As a matter of fact there has been considerable exaggeration about the contrast between Caucasian and Negro features. The cartoonists and minstrel men have been responsible for it very largely. Some Negroes like the Somalis, Filanis, Egyptians, Hausas and Abyssinians have very thin lips and nostrils. So also have the Malagasys of Madagascar. Only in certain small sections of Africa do the Negroes possess extremely pendulous lips and very broad nostrils. On the other hand, many so-called Caucasians, particularly the Latins, Jews and South Irish, and frequently the most Nordic of peoples like the Swedes, show almost Negroid lips and noses. Black up some white folks and they could deceive a resident of Benin. Then when you consider that less than twenty per cent of our Negroes are without Caucasian ancestry and that close to thirty per cent have American Indian ancestry, it is readily seen that there cannot be the wide difference in Caucasian and Afro-American facial characteristics that most people imagine.

One afternoon, in the suffocating damp heat of a Washington summer, I was taken to learn about the American game of baseball. The game remained something of a mystery to me, but I learned more about the actual separation between the white and black races. In the stadium I and my white escort were seated on the side reserved for whites, and on the opposite side of the stadium were seats for the blacks, of whom there were many more than the whites. In buses, too, separation of the races was strictly enforced, with whites at the front and blacks at the back. The public toilets were strictly separate. No Afro-American would think of entering a hotel or restaurant frequented by whites; the division was absolute. Blacks had their own eating and sleeping places. And of course, all schools were segregated. There was nothing like this in Baghdad. While there were very few black students in both the boys’ and the girls’ schools, they were treated just like the rest of us and many real friendships developed between the two. This easy relationship existed although it had been only a few years since Ottoman days, when Iraqis were able to buy black slaves openly, a practice that was banned when the British army arrived in 1917. Yet here in the United States, the Land of Liberty and Equality, at least in the southern states, no white man could sit down in a restaurant and have a meal with a black friend. Though this discrimination no longer existed legally, it was clearly still in practice in the nation’s capitol.

I stepped away from the vehicle, taking a long look at it. Emblazoned on the back was the logo for my business, OuNYe, Afro-Caribbean Food in huge bold black font on a red background. The black and red contrasted with the flags of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica painted over the entire truck. To name my business, I used a word from the Yoruba language. Which had been spoken all over the Caribbean by our ancestors, the West Africans who were brought there as slaves. Ounje is the Yoruba word for nourishment, and I’d decided to play a bit with things and put the NY right at the center.

Afro-Americans accepted Christianity's celebration of the individual soul and turned it into a weapon of personal community survival. But their apparent indifference to sin, not to be confused with an indifference to injustice or wrongdoing, guaranteed retention of the collective, life-affirming quality of the African tradition and thus also became a weapon for personal and community survival. The slaves shaped Christianity they had embraced; they conquered the religion of those who had conquered them. In their formulation, Christianity lacked that terrible inner tension between the sense of guilt and the sense of mission which once provided the ideological dynamism for Western civilization's march to world power. But in return for this loss of revolutionary dynamism, the slaves developed an Afro-American and Christian humanism that affirmed joy in life in the face of every trial.