Social Justice…the Mission of Another Black Youth Organization … Think We Have A ‘Movement’ … After All… The Perfect Birthday Gift for Me
28 Thursday May 2015
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in28 Thursday May 2015
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in27 Wednesday May 2015
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inListening to an earlier Me.issa Harris-Perry broadcast, I discovered Phillip Agnew, who got involved in ‘the struggle’ when he began demanding Florida governor Rick Scott to repeal the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law.
He’s now executive director of the Dream Defenders, a business designed to formalize Black activism against oppression… what phenomenal idea.
Read for yourself what his ‘about’ page says: The Dream Defenders develop the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power; building alternative systems and organizing to disrupt the structures that oppress our communities. http://huff.to/1IToLWX
26 Tuesday May 2015
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inOur Demand Simple: Stop Killing Us
I am so proud of ‘our’ young people…taking charge, organizing 2015 style & making a great difference. A thousand hats off to:
DeRay McKesson
Johnette Elzie
Ashley Yares
Clifton Kinnie
23 Saturday May 2015
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in22 Friday May 2015
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in21 Thursday May 2015
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inTwo of the most influential Americans of the 20th Century were born on this day to parents who had fled the the Jim Crow South and faced heartbreak in the North that propelled them on their respective paths during their short lives.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry, whose beloved play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” became a classic in American theater, was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago, to Carl and Nannie Hansberry, a real estate broker and a school teacher, who had journeyed to Chicago from Mississippi and Tennessee during the Great Migration.
Malcolm Little, who as Malcolm X would become one of the most recognized and debated figures in American history, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, to Earl Little, a lay minister who had journeyed north from Georgia, and Louise Little, who had been born in Grenada.
Hansberry’s parents left the Jim Crow South only to discover hostility in the North. She was eight years old when her father bought a house in the all-white Washington Park section of Chicago. There she witnessed violence against her family as her parents tried to stand their ground.
The neighbors attacked them and filed suit to force the Hansberrys out, backed by state courts and restrictive covenants. The Hansberrys took their case to the Supreme Court to challenge the restrictive covenants and to return to the house they bought.
The case culminated in a 1940 Supreme Court decision that helped strike a blow against segregation, though the hostility continued. A mob surrounded their house at one point, throwing bricks and broken concrete, narrowly missing young Lorraine’s head. It would not be until the late 1960’s that fair housing legislation would take effect.
The turmoil inspired Hansberry to write “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a black family on the South Side of Chicago living in dilapidated housing and at odds over what to do after the death of the patriarch. The play debuted on Broadway in 1959 and was nominated for four Tony Awards. The film version was released in 1961 with Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands reprising their Broadway roles.
Hansberry said that their housing ordeal had “required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house.” She recalled being “spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.”
Malcolm X was six years old when his father, who had been been under continuous attack for his role in civil rights in the North, died a violent, mysterious death that plunged the family into poverty and dislocation. Despite the upheaval, Malcolm was accomplished in his predominantly white school, but when he shared his dream of becoming a lawyer, a teacher told him that the law was “no realistic goal for a n—–.” He dropped out soon afterward.
He would go on to become known as Detroit Red, Malcolm X and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, a voice of the dispossessed and a counterweight to Dr. Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights Movement. Denzel Washington portrayed him in Spike Lee’s 1992 film ” Malcolm X.” TIME Magazine has named “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as one of the 10 most influential works of nonfiction of the 20th Century.
Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965 at the age of 39. The site of his birth home in North Omaha is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Lorraine Hansberry died at age 34 in January 1965 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The house that her family had to fight for back in the 1930s, at 6140 South Rhodes, is now a Chicago landmark.
For more information: “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” by Lorraine Hansberry. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as told to Alex Haley.
— The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
16 Saturday May 2015
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inBlack Men Are Good Dads… Not Absentee or Dead Beat Dads, Says Center for Disease Control
We’ve been told, quite frequently and repeatedly that the problems in the black community that we’ve seen in Ferguson and Baltimore recently are not the fault of biased, paramilitary, paranoid and violent policing (even if the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that black people are three times more likely to be subject to law enforcement uses of force).
But what we’ve heard the most, is that the real problem is the Breakdown in the Black Family™. That too many black fathers have abandoned their children.
If only black fathers would spend as much time and energy on their kids as white fathers do. If only…
…the Centers for Disease Control— checked to determine just how involved Black fathers are, whether or not they are married to the mother of their children or live with them. What they found was that, in reality, black fathers are actually more attentive to their children than other fathers generally are.
16 Saturday May 2015
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inThey Tell Lies But Know The Truth…FHA Created All The Poverty, Miseducation, Unemployment , etc. Experienced By Public Housing Residents, says the Economic Policy Institute (http://n.pr/1IMV4Fy)
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Nixon’s Secretary of Housing & Urban Development, George Romney, said that “the federal government has created a white noose around African-American communities in urban areas, and it was the federal government’s obligation to untie that noose.”
He was speaking of the fact that the FHA had purposefully created segregated public housing projects like Freddie Gray’s’ Gilmore Homes in Baltimore and where I was raised, Barry Farms, in Washington, DC (haven’t you ever wondered why there were no or not a significant number of whites in public housing…no where in the U.S.?). Though Romney implemented programs to force the projects to desegregate, Nixon got rid of him.
We the people may not know this history, but politicians know the federal government created these segregated Black public housing projects which would render its residents indegent for generations…well into the 21st century…2015 and beyond. And, they know the federal government is obligated to correct the situation. But as long as we, African Americans, in particular don’t know the history, it’s easy for the arrogant politicians to maliciously ‘blame the victim’ while continuing to pretend compensation isn’t due.
CLASS ACTION SUITE TIME…FOR REAL, FOR REAL.
14 Thursday May 2015
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in
Barry Farms, where I was born; my Mom said we were one of the 1st families to move i…my Dad was ex-military.
Gov-FHA Helped Whites Create Wealth & Guaranteed $0 Wealth for Blacks
FHA’s New Deal housing program purposefully created intergenerational wealth for whites via suburbsn home ownership & $0 for Blacks relocated into public housing.
Gillmor Homes public housing project where Freddie Gray lived was opened Sept 1942 by FHA. 1930’s, the gov created segregated public housing projects for Blacks across the country it created suburbs…close to jobs, etc. for whites….giving them loans to buy houses while denying loans to Blacks. In 2015, those suburban homes are worth more than $500,000…government created wealth for today’s white suburban children & grandchildren. Whereas, the government’s purposefully created & strategically located public housing projects…isolated & distanced from jobs, etc…assured today’s Black residents’ children & grandchildren, like Freddie Gray, $0.00 wealth…according to the Economic Policy Institute.
08 Friday May 2015
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inWhy Not ‘Affordable’ Housing AND ‘Home Ownership’ For the Poor Since It Only Cost $500 via Gov Programs?
Why won’t social service providers recommend ‘ownership’ in addition to ‘voucher’ affordable housing assistance to the clients and homeless of DC? #PUUR_Racism is amazed that the ‘most well meaning’, particularly Black, person, even those working toward racial equity, never recommend &/or usually vote down ‘ownership’ though it’s possible for as little $500 via some government 1st time home owner programs.
Is it because…it’s difficult for ‘gatekeepers’ to broaden their perspective and assist their clients join the middle class?
.