Calling all South African Muslim Women! It's time to write your story!!!
We're putting together a book with a working title of: The Samoosa Express to Marriage and Beyond. The book is aimed at showcasing professional Muslim women in two domains: 1. before marriage and 2. when married and beyond. For the first domain (before marriage) we are looking for honest, funny or serious stories of women juggling family pressure, religious and cultural obligations, career, hopes, dreams and aspirations; in finding Mr. Right or not wanting Mr. Right. For the second domain we are looking for honest, funny or serious stories of professional Muslim women juggling home, family and career being married, divorced or single parents.
We want a minimum 1500 words story to be written and sent to zaheera.jina@yahoo.com by 30th June 2012. All submissions will be handled confidentially. If the story is chosen to be included into the collection, the author could choose to be profiled in the book or to remain anonymous. All contributing authors will earn from the book sales and a percentage of the book sales will go to charity.
Please send any enquiries to the above email address.
$500 cash Announcement on the Anderbo web site Publication of a book-excerpt on anderbo.com
Judged by Rick Rofihe
Rick Rofihe is the author of FATHER MUST, a collection of short stories published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Street, Open City, Swink, Unsaid, and online at Epiphanyzine, Slushpilemag, and Fictionaut. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, SPY, and The East Hampton Star, and on MrBellersNeighborhood. A recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, he has taught MFA writing at Columbia University. He currently teaches privately in New York City, and was an advisor to the Vilcek Foundation for their 2011 prizes in the field of literature. Rick is the Editor of Anderbo.
Contest Assistant: Carolyn Wilsey
Carolyn Wilsey has read fiction for Esquire and Swink, and for the OPEN CITY Magazine RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest.
–Initial judging will be based on the first 40 pages (ONLY) of your self-published book, which should be printed out on 8 1/2 x 11 paper, with author’s name and contact information on a separate page, along with a one-page letter describing your book
–Finalists in this contest will be required to supply the entire book at a later date
–Entries must be postmarked by October 15, 2012
–Writer must not have been previously published on Anderbo
–Mail submissions to Anderbo Self-Published Book Contest, Postal-22, 75 East 4th St, New York, NY 10003
–Enclose self-addressed stamped business envelope to receive names of winner and honorable mentions
–All entries are non-returnable and will be recycled
–Reading fee is $20. Check or money order payable to RRofihe
Dark Matter is a blog for speculative literature. Dark Matter refers to the unknown particles suggested by the Standard Model to explain observations of gravity which cannot be accounted for by observable matter and energy. It could also be considered a reference to the thoughts and ideas that ferment inside a human brain before they emerge through spoken or written words. The title was chosen to reflect the emphasis of the unknown in both scientific inquiry and creative writing. Modern science provides new opportunities for natural metaphor to search for and create meaning in all areas of human thought and endeavor. Dark Matter will use cosmological, evolutionary, quantum mechanical and traditional natural metaphor to elicit literary thought and infuse modern ideas into poetry and prose.
Dark Matter Guidelines
Dark Matter will publish poetry, flash-fiction, short fiction, essays, and musings. We are interested in all things speculative in literature. We are not interested in anything dogmatic or mystical. Use natural metaphor to explore meaning and challenge traditional wisdom. We especially want to encourage new writers, particularly those who may not have training in writing but want to express creative explorations. We are particularly interested in the perspectives of science students and scientists who would like to share their creative writing. Please follow the guidelines below before submitting your work or thoughts. When you are ready, send your post to hogeb@uhd.edu.
Poetry
We welcome any style of poetry, but the poem must be speculative in nature and/or use natural metaphor. We have no restrictions on length, though the longer the poem the more it will have to wow us. Please send no more than three poems at a time.
Fiction
We will consider flash-fiction and short fiction of no more than 1500 words. We are not interested in science fiction, though we recognize the distinction between speculative fiction and science fiction is difficult to define. Please send one story at a time.
Essays
We will consider essays on any science or nature topic. We will also consider essays on the role of science in literature and society. We have no restrictions on length, though concise well-crafted essays will have a better chance of impressing us.
Musings
What do you think speculative literature is? What is natural metaphor? How can allusion to modern science contribute to the richness of the literary landscape? Let us know what you think.
General Considerations
We encourage submission of new and previously published work, from emerging and established authors. We simply want to highlight the best speculative literature on the web. You may also submit your work simultaneously to other blogs, journals or anthologies, just keep in mind the guidelines of those publications when allowing us to post your work. We don’t want to interfere with the dissemination of good speculative literature, and we would be glad to re-consider work after publication elsewhere once rights to the work revert to the author.
We will generally respond within one month. If you have not received a response by then, you may query us about the status of your submission.
We will not publish egregious vulgarity, profanity, or sexual content. We will not publish anything that displays a lack of proper respect for any culture, creed, race, or religion. You can question dogmatic beliefs, but don’t attack. Stay positive and sell your point of view without resorting to aspersion and logical fallacy.
Report: 56% of Republicans and 25% of Democrats say there is too much Martin coverage
Considerably more whites than blacks say the same thing, according to the study
A friend of George Zimmerman defends the neighborhood watch volunteer
Rallies nationwide have called for Zimmerman's arrest
"AC360°" teams up with a child psychologist to see what factors contribute to children's opinions on race. Could these same factors have shaped how you view race? The special report, "Kids on Race: The Hidden Truth," continues at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday on CNN.
Sanford, Florida (CNN) -- While the story behind Trayvon Martin's shooting death continues to grab headlines, interest in the case is sharply divided along partisan and racial lines, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.
Far more Republicans (56%) than Democrats (25%) say there has been too much coverage of Martin's death, according to Pew, which surveyed a "nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults" last Thursday through Sunday about top new stories.
In addition, 43% of whites said the story has garnered too much coverage, compared with just 16% of blacks, Pew said.
Martin's death fractured not just public interest opinions; it also continues to divide supporters of the slain Florida teen and those of George Zimmerman, the man who admitted killing the 17-year-old but claims he did so in self-defense.
Zimmerman attorneys say media unfair
Trayvon Martin's last minutes
Taaffe: Zimmerman welts 'clear' on tape
Taaffe: Martin shooting 'a perfect storm'
Rallies nationwide have called for Zimmerman's arrest, decrying the Sanford Police Department's handling of the case.
On Tuesday, Martin family attorney Jasmine Rand insisted again that a former prosecutor in the case, State Attorney Norm Wolfinger, met with the now sidelined Sanford police Chief Bill Lee the night of the killing and overruled a police detective urging that Zimmerman be arrested.
Rand said the family's legal team has multiple, credible sources who say Wolfinger and Lee met that night. She declined to elaborate.
FBI agents were in Sanford on Tuesday, continuing their interviews in a civil rights investigation. Martin family supporters say the situation is a clear-cut case of racial profiling leading to an unjust killing.
On Monday, agents interviewed Martin's girlfriend, the 16-year-old girl who, phone records show, was on the line with him shortly before the fatal confrontation, Martin family attorney Daryl Parks confirmed Tuesday.
Martin's family and supporters say Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, profiled Martin, who was black, as "suspicious" and ignored a police dispatcher's request that he not follow him. Martin had a bag of Skittles and an iced tea at the time of his death.
The 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer has said Martin punched him and slammed his head into a sidewalk before the shooting, according to family members and police.
Zimmerman's legal adviser, Craig Sonner, said Tuesday that criminal defense lawyer Hal Uhrig would represent Zimmerman and that Sonner would serve as co-counsel if the case were to proceed. Uhrig spent more than six years with the Gainesville Police Department in Florida before graduating from law school in 1974.
Meanwhile, a friend of Zimmerman's said video of the neighborhood watch volunteer in police custody does seem to show injuries consistent with Zimmerman's report that Martin slammed his head to the concrete after the two exchanged words.
An enhanced copy of the video appears to show a bump, mark or injury on Zimmerman's head more clearly than does another copy of the video previously reviewed by CNN. That video had a grainy quality.
While the video does not appear to show major wounds, Frank Taaffe, Zimmerman's neighbor and friend, said Seminole County paramedics cared for Zimmerman before they released him to police.
"That's why you don't see him like he came out of a 12-round fight like Rocky Balboa against Apollo Creed," Taaffe said.
But Rand, the Martin family attorney, said Tuesday that it doesn't matter what the videotape shows.
"That does not change our position," she said. "Once again, George Zimmerman was the aggressor. He pursued Trayvon in this instance. If he did have any medical injuries, that did not give him the right to use deadly force and shoot and kill Trayvon."
Also Tuesday, Taaffe told CNN that the neighborhood had experienced a spate of burglaries over 15 months, which he said were committed by black men. But Taaffe said Zimmerman was not a racist.
"Young black men were never the topic of discussion," he said. It was that neighborhood homes had been repeatedly burglarized, he said.
Police records didn't appear to support Taaffe's assertion, describing four incidents involving black men. Taaffe declined further comment to CNN.
CNN's Vivian Kuo, Holly Yan, Tracy Sabo and Natisha Lance contributed to this report.
Watch Anderson Cooper 360° weeknights 10pm ET. For the latest from AC360° click here.
We cannot get the anguished face of Sybrina Fulton, the mother of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin–who was gunned down by a self-appointed neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., in late February–out of our minds. Her suffering and indignation–along with that of Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin–has galvanized citizens of diverse races, classes, religions and generations to organize rallies, petitions, hoodie marches and social media campaigns raising awareness of violence and bias against African Americans.
There are resonances here to another grieving, anguished mother, Mamie Till. In the summer of 1955, her son Emmett was lynched while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Till persuaded national and international print publications to run photographs of her son’s bloated, battered corpse before a shocked and outraged public. Concurrent with such mourning, writes Duke University professor Karla F. C. Holloway, has been a longstanding understanding of “the nexus between a black family’s grief and African America’s national experience.” In her 2002 book Passed On: African American Mourning Stories:A Memorial, she describes “African Americans’ particular vulnerability to an untimely death in the United States” and “how we die a color-coded death—the residue of riots, executions, suicides and targeted medical neglect.” Holloway’s theme is personal: She mourns her own black son’s death by homicide.
In these charged public responses to the private “residue” of death, I’m reminded of another way in which grief and national experience have intersected with black women’s lives. In the late 19th and early 20th century United States, lynch mobs in the Southmurdered African American men on a weekly basis. As the essays of Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory, edited by political scientist Evelyn M. Simien, tell us, African American women and children were also victims of these brutalities.
Outraged bythe violence and stereotyping that sanctioned this terror,journalistIda B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) and educator Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) cultivated what feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collinshas called “a recursive relationship between … intellectual and political work.” In their respective 1892 publications Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Voice from the South. By a Woman of the South, Wells-Barnett and Cooper educated white American men about how the suppression of blacks’ economic success and political activism was the true reason for most lynchings of black fathers and sons–rather than the spurious claim that they raped white women. The authors urged white American women to recognize how ending racial and sexual violence and gaining suffrage and other political rights were complementary rather than exclusive goals. They participated in and helped organize interracial campaigns and boycotts in order to publicize lynching atrocities and press for a national anti-lynching law.
By confronting a somnolent nation with the consequences of bigotry and fear, then stirring citizens into action, African American feminists have stood our ground, turning acts of violence and victimhood into opportunities for empowerment and advocacy. We’ve worked within black communities to develop anti-racist and anti-sexist strategies. We’ve claimed what Collins calls in Black Feminist Thought an “outsider-within” position “whose marginality provides a distinct angle of vision” on the politics of power and authority. This has enabled us to save our lives and communities by calling out the people, perceptions and policies that mask or deny the realities of African Americans’ experiences.
Take the example of what happened in 1979 when 12 black women and one white woman were murdered in Boston. Barbara Smith and other members of the black feminist Combahee River Collective organized self-defense workshops. They pressured the police and media to act as if the bodies and minds of blacks and women mattered. Also in 1979, and over the next two years, at least 28 black children and young adults—primarily young black men—were murdered in Atlanta. Here again, black women channeled sorrow into community responses that included increased knowledge about pedophilia and safe houses for latchkey children, and a public outcry that led to the eventual life conviction of Wayne Williams for two of the deaths. Black women novelists such as Toni Cade Bambara (These Bones are Not My Child) and Tayari Jones (Leaving Atlanta) have kept such contemporary stories alive as a kind of literary activism.
Why have black women so often stood at the forefront of such protests? Behind this history may be the lingering legacies of the sassy Sapphire and the mouthy Mammy. These stereotypes, historically used to justify our oppression, cast us as angry, loud, pushy and overassertive. Part of the work of black feminism has been to reclaim these negative attributes and reframe them as positive sources of women’s autonomy and empowerment. Black women can reinterpret “pushy” as “one who speaks truth to power” and use it as a source of strength.
Another reason may be social perceptions of us as less violent than black men. In her forthcoming study, “Girls on the Front Line: Gender and the Battle to Desegregate Public Schools in the United States,” historian Rachel Devlinhas found that civil rights organizations in the 1950s and early 1960s chose a disproportionate number of black girls to desegregate schools and colleges, in part because of this perception of our being less physically threatening than our male counterparts. In cases of murder and lynching, we can again leverage this stereotype, displaying our grief in order to humanize our dead husbands, sons and fathers in the public eye.
Because of such efforts, the world knows Trayvon Martin now. This largely is a consequence of his mother and father standing their ground, passionately resisting an injustice. Hopefully, more American women and men now know and recognize that by standing against hate and fury, and for racial tolerance, we build a meaning of America that is not exclusively yours or mine, but ours and everyone’s.
Support Sybrina Fulton by demanding that her son’s killer be arrested–sign the Care2 petition below:
Heavily armed neo-Nazis are said to be patrolling the streets of Sanford, Florida to protect “white citizens in the area” in case of race riots.
According to a blog at the Miami New Times, the patrols were initiated by Jeff Schoep of the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement in response to the shooting of African-American teen Trayvon Martin by self-appointed neighborhood vigilante George Zimmerman.
“We are not advocating any type of violence or attacks on anybody,” Schoep insists, “but we are prepared for it,. We are not the type of white people who are going to be walked all over.”
“Because nothing diffuses racial tension,” blogger Michael Miller comments wryly, “like gun-toting racial separatists patrolling an already on-edge commnity.”
Schoep is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist hate groups, as “a neo-Nazi true believer since age 10 who has managed, largely by luck, to end up heading one of the largest explicitly Hitlerite groups in America. Schoep’s group is known for the crudeness of its propaganda, the violence it works hard to provoke, and the faux SS outfits that have caused many other neo-Nazis to deride NSM members as ‘Hollywood Nazis.’”
Schoep’s group is best known for the rally it staged against “black crime” in an inner-city neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio in 2005. NSM members had to be rescued from an angry crowd by the police, and the day ended with some local residents attacking police and 100 being arrested. The NSM considered this outcome a great success.
Schoep asserts that he and the Florida residents he has recruited are acting “totally within the law” and that their patrols “wouldn’t intimidate anybody” and are simply meant as a “show of solidarity with the white community down there.”
He says he decided to launch the Sanford patrols following an offer by the New Black Panther Party to pay a $10,000 bounty for a citizen’s arrest of Zimmerman, which he took as proof that “the possibility of further racial violence… is brimming over like a powder keg ready to explode into the streets.”
“We are a white civil rights organization,” Schoep said of the National Socialist Movement, describing himself as a while equivalent of Reverend Al Sharpton. He added that he wasn’t even taking sides on the shooting because Zimmerman is “half Hispanic or Cuban or something. He certainly doesn’t look white to me.”
Muriel Kane is an associate editor at Raw Story. She joined Raw Story as a researcher in 2005, with a particular focus on the Jack Abramoff affair and other Bush administration scandals. She worked extensively with former investigative news managing editor Larisa Alexandrovna, with whom she has co-written numerous articles in addition to her own work. Prior to her association with Raw Story, she spent many years as an independent researcher and writer with a particular focus on history, literature, and contemporary social and political attitudes. Follow her on Twitter at @Muriel_Kane
Members of the National Socialist Movement during a patrol on the US-Mexico border in January
Neo-Nazis are currently conducting heavily armed patrols in and around Sanford, Florida and are "prepared" for violence in the case of a race riot. The patrols are to protect "white citizens in the area who are concerned for their safety" in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting last month, says Commander Jeff Schoep of the National Socialist Movement. "We are not advocating any type of violence or attacks on anybody, but we are prepared for it," he says. "We are not the type of white people who are going to be walked all over."Because nothing diffuses racial tension like gun-toting racial separatists patrolling an already on-edge community.Schoep, whose neo-Nazi group is based in Detroit, tells Riptide the patrols are a response to white residents' fears of a race riot.
A group called the New Black Panther Party recently offered $10,000 for a citizens' arrest of George Zimmerman, Martin's shooter. Schoep said the bounty is a sign that "the possibility of further racial violence... is brimming over like a powder keg ready to explode into the streets."
The patrols are comprised of between 10 and 20 locals and "volunteers" from across the state, including some from Miami, he added. He couldn't go into specifics on what kind of firepower, exactly, the patrols had with them.
nsm88.org
NSM members on patrol in Arizona
"In Arizona the guys can walk around with assault weapons and that's totally legal," Schoep said, referring to the group's patrols of the US-Mexico border. "What I can tell you is that any patrols that we are doing now in Florida are totally within the law."
Asked if the patrols wouldn't just make things worse -- spark a race riot, for instance -- Schoep insisted they were simply a "show of solidarity with the white community down there" and "wouldn't intimidate anybody.""Whenever there is one of these racially charged events, Al Sharpton goes wherever blacks need him," Schoep said. "We do similar things. We are a white civil rights organization."He went to great lengths to contrast his organization with the New Black Panther Party, who he blamed for scaring local whites and spurring the need for NSM patrols. Schoep admits that the NSM and the Black Panthers are actually alike in that they are both racial separatists. But he sees a double-standard in the government's treatment of the two groups."The Black Panthers have been offering bounties and all that," he says. "But if we called for a bounty on someone's head, I guarantee we'd be locked up as quick as I could walk out of my house."
nsm88.org
A photo from NSM's website
Schoep was also quick to clarify that he isn't taking sides in Trayvon Martin's controversial shooting. "That's for the courts to decide," he says. Besides, Schoep says, Zimmerman's not even white.
"I think there is some confusion going on," Schoep says. "A lot of people think that this guy who shot Trayvon was white... but he's half Hispanic or Cuban or something. He certainly doesn't look white to me."To some, sending in the storm troops seems like a sure way to incite -- not prevent -- a race riot. But Schoep says that's way off base."We don't wish for things like that," he says. "But there have been race riots in Detroit and L.A... So we know those types of things happen.""You can either be prepared or you can be blindsided," he adds. "This way, if something were to touch off a race riot, we'd already be in the area."How reassuring.Follow Miami New Times on Facebook and Twitter @MiamiNewTimes. Follow this journalist on Twitter @MikeMillerMiami.
A group of students in The Maysles Institute Teen Producers After School Program has come together to find solutions to gun violence in Harlem - by using their skills in media.
The New York District Attorney's office and Harlem Hospital initially asked the program to help highlight a citywide anti-gun violence initiative, anchored by the first ever gun shot victim trauma center in the community. The students were asked to produce a film about the nature of gun violence in Harlem and its effects on the community.
The teens worked along side law enforcement officials, medical professionals, and families affected by gun violence to shoot, produce, and edit the film. And in the process, they created their own production company called No Straight Media (a reaction to the rampant usage of "No Homo").
Six months in the making, the finished project, Triggering Wounds: A Story of Guns and Violence in Harlem, will be an integral part of the Harlem Hospital rehabilitation program. The 20-minute film will be shown to victims of gun and knife violence in Harlem Hospital as part of their efforts to reduce deaths and repeat incidences of violence.
Find the film's trailer below:
Triggering Wounds will premiere at the Maysles Institute on April 27th, followed by a week-long run from May 29th to June 4th.
First thing that needs to be noted is that we just had another police shooting of an unarmed man in Austin, Texas on Thursday night.. This happened after the report was compiled, so add another name to this grisly toll..
Second, folks have got to understand this is not coincident, it’s quite deliberate. Police have moved from a point of trying to de-escalate or prevention to a shoot first ask questions later policy..
The list below are just noting the deaths at hands of the police, its not highlighting the enormous amounts of brutality and outright disrespect many in the Black community have to endure on a daily basis..The report below is to say the least disturbing and underscores a low wage war going on in our communities…
Twenty-eight Black People (27 Men and 1 Female) Killed by Police Officials, SecurityGuards, and Self-Appointed “Keepers of the Peace” between January 1, 2012 and March31, 2012 - 28 cases of state sanctioned or justified murder of Black people in the first 3 months of 2012 alone have been found (due to under reporting and discriminatory methods of documentation, it is likely that there are more that our research has yet to uncover)
- Of the 28 killed people, 18 were definitely unarmed. 2 probably had firearms, 8were alleged to have non-lethal weapons.
- Of the 28 killed people,
. 11 were innocent of any illegal behavior or behavior that involved a threat to anyone (although the shooters claimed they looked “suspicious”);
. 7 were emotionally disturbed and/or displaying strange behavior.
. The remaining 10 were either engaged in illegal or potentially illegal activity, or there was too little info to determine circumstances of their killing. It appears that in all but two of these cases, illegal and/or harmful behavior could have been stopped without the use of lethal force.
[4]This list of28 names was collected between 3/28/2012 and 3/30/2012 by reviewing google
search results to the question, “who have police killed in 2012”. Only the first 65 pages out of 712,000,000 were reviewed.
[5] News One.com reported Rodriguez was African America however other reports and family
photos indicate he was Latino.
[6] Many written reports do not explicitly identify the race of the victim. Most, however, do show
photographs. In the case of Warren, no photo was displayed.
This document was researched, written and produced by Kali Akuno and Arlene Eisen working on behalf of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Black Left Unity Network, and US Human Rights Network.
Citation Information: W.E.B Du Bois, "Returning Soldiers," The Crisis, XVIII (May, 1919), p. 13.
We are returning from war! The Crisis and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. For bleeding France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German race arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood; for America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope; for the dominant southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation. For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality and devilish insult—for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also.
But today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world's madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.
It lynches.
And lynching is barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history. Yet for fifty years we have lynched two Negroes a week, and we have kept this up right through the war.
It disfranchises its own citizens.
Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white. The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and knows it lies.
It encourages ignorance.
It has never really tried to educate the Negro. A dominant minority does not want Negroes educated. It wants servants, dogs, whores and monkeys. And when this land allows a reactionary group by its stolen political power to force as many black folk into these categories as it possibly can, it cries in contemptible hypocrisy: "They threaten us with degeneracy; they cannot be educated."
It steals from us.
It organizes industry to cheat us. It cheats us out of our land; it cheats us out of our labor. It confiscates our savings. It reduces our wages. It raises our rent. It steals our profit. It taxes us without representation. It keeps us consistently and universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty.
It insults us.
It has organized a nation-wide and latterly a world-wide propaganda of deliberate and continuous insult and defamation of black blood wherever found. It decrees that it shall not be possible in travel nor residence, work nor play, education nor instruction for a black man to exist without tacit or open acknowledgment of his inferiority to the dirtiest white dog. And it looks upon any attempt to question or even discuss this dogma as arrogance, unwarranted assumption and treason.
This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought! But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.
BIOGRAPHY Gil Noble, producer and host of the public affairs program “Like It Is,” has interviewed famous African Americans like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer and Paul Robeson. During his career, he has worked to correct negative media representations of African Americans and has promoted ethics and objectivity in journalism.
Noble was born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrants Gilbert and Iris Noble. As a teenager, Noble was inspired by pianist Erroll Garner and decided to pursue a career in music. He formed the Gil Noble Trio and played in clubs around New York City while attending City College. After graduating, he worked for Union Carbide and modeled on the side. He met his wife Jean, also a model, during this time.
Noble attempted to break into broadcast by doing voiceovers and television commercials. He became a part-time announcer for WLIB, a Harlem radio station, in 1962. While at WLIB, he also reported, read newscasts, serviced the Associated Press teletype machine and tracked interview tapes. This experience gave him working knowledge of all aspects of a newsroom operation.
In 1967, Noble auditioned for a TV reporter position at WABC. On his second audition assignment, he was called to cover violence in Newark, New Jersey’s Central Ward. Blacks had been shut off by a National Guard barricade while white city officials and journalists stood at the perimeter. Noble was able to cross the barricade and get the story from the black community’s perspective. Because of his reports, he was hired. By 1968, he was anchoring weekend newscasts. At that time, WABC created a black-oriented program in response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Actor Robert Hooks was the host and Noble was the interviewer. When Hooks accepted an acting job, Noble replaced him as host. In the beginning, “Like It Is” focused on mostly entertainers, however, when Noble became producer in 1975, he turned its focus to the more serious issues of the black experience.
Over the years, Noble saw the documentary as the central focus and most rewarding aspect of his career. “Like It Is” has produced the largest collection of programs and documentaries on the African-American experience in the last half of the 20th century. He says documentaries “remain a powerful weapon to change false values, correct historical error and cure the poison of prejudice in the minds of black and white Americans.” In 2002, he survived an attempt by WABC to cancel his contract and show. Supporters of the show held rallies in its defense and the show remains on the air.
He loved the way Harlem talks, as when Chuck Berry rushed back onstage in his lounge slippers after a break at the Apollo Theater in the '60s and heard a rock 'n' roll fan yell upstage: "You need you some shoes, Chuck!"
Noble loved the way Harlem laughs, spins jazz and cries as it perpetually stares down death. He loved how Harlem always gets down with life, a life vigorously defended on the streets over the years by such activists as Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Eddie "Porkchop" Davis, Carlos Cooks, James Baldwin, John Henrik Clarke -- and most of all, Malcolm X.
Growing up with these prophets teaching hope and with Harlem making jazz, Noble, who died on Thursdayfollowing a massive stroke last July, was 80. He dedicated his life's work to preserving this rich American culture as a broadcast journalist, TV host and documentary maker.
For more than four decades, Noble was a potent force in New York television, co-anchoring WABC-TV news early on -- following the urban riots of the 1960s -- as he produced and hosted one of the first black public-affairs programs, Like It Is. His deft chronicling of current and historical events and personalities attracted a fiercely loyal following that occasionally rose up to defend the show from forces seeking to silence Gil Noble.
As did other African-American achievers of his era, Noble launched his career late and not without struggle.
At 6 feet 5 inches, the handsome Harlemite earned his way early on as a model, marrying his model bride Jean, in Moscow in 1959, with the U.S. ambassador in attendance. Settling down in Harlem with a young family, he worked as a bank clerk and part-time pianist with his Gil Noble Trio as he earned a degree from City College of New York.
He was tempted by broadcast journalism after taking a course in announcing school and working a stint of radio and TV voice-overs. After "striking mud" at a few stations, the 30-year-old prospect was hired in Harlem at white-owned, black-oriented WLIB radio by news director Bill McCreary, a broadcast pioneer who later moved to TV.
Initially, Noble shunned the lecturing of Malcolm X as a plague out on 125th Street; after Malcolm's assassination, however, he doubled back to the laser-sharp message with profound regret that he had avoided in the flesh what became his single greatest influence in spirit.
"Malcolm changed my life," he would say fondly and often. "[His] autobiography did more than acquaint me with his life -- it motivated me to study history. Malcolm made it clear that his power and effectiveness came from knowledge.
"My presence in television is the direct result of the black struggle," Noble wrote in his 1981 memoir, Black Is the Color of My TV Tube. "But for the social upheaval of the '50s and the '60s in America, I believe that I would not now be working in television as a news correspondent, weekend anchorman, producer and host of a one-hour program."
In the wake of the urban revolts in many cities following King's assassination, blacks pressured TV stations for inclusion on the airwaves that supposedly belonged to all of the public. Replacing their weekend morning diet of Tarzan movies, Hour of Power and The Three Stooges, several TV stations scheduled black-oriented public-affairs shows that mainly dealt with local issues, personalities and culture.
In 1968 Noble began splitting his duties as WABC-TV news reporter and co-host with actor Robert Hooks ofLike It Is, a one-hour, weekly magazine show. After changing the title from The Way It Is, the duo scuttled the original rock 'n' roll theme song and persuaded the white managers to hire jazz saxophonist Jackie MacLean, Noble's childhood friend, to compose a jazz theme. Hooks left to star in the crime series N.Y.P.D., and Noble hosted the magazine show under producer Charles Hobson, who oriented the format toward strong black themes and documentaries on significant heroes.
Noble teamed behind the camera with graphic artist and pan-Africanist Elombe Brath; Paul Robeson's granddaughter Susan Robeson, a researcher; and historian-scholar Paul Lee, who, with his brother Sunni Khalid, played a key role in producing some of the early specials focusing on Malcolm X. On camera, Noble rotated notable co-hosts such as Carol Jenkins, Felipe Luciano and Geraldo Rivera.
When, in the early '80s, the local news shows began infusing chitchat and monkeyshines into the broadcasts, Noble's anchoring duties were reduced because he refused to clown around on air. Relegated to weekends, he was finally assigned full time to produce and host Like It Is by the late '90s. This one-hour weekly show proved to be a platinum setting for Noble's talent as a provocative journalist, video historian and unapologetic "race man."
During some 43 years on the air, Noble used the long-form format of Like It Is to create a treasure trove of exclusive footage on cultural and political leaders such as Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Muhammad Ali, Bill Cosby, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dizzy Gillespie, Marcus Garvey, Max Roach, Harry Belafonte, Sarah Vaughn, jazz pianist Erroll Garner and educator Adelaide Sanford.
Before the invention of VCRs and DVRs, devotees of Malcolm X would reliably skip church on his birthday and assassination weekends in order to watch Noble's updated specials on the national Harlem icon.
In addition to these tall trees and the mountaintops, Noble dared take his cameras to the gritty and desperate bowels of the city. In 1981 he produced an extraordinary exposé on the scourge of heroin addiction gripping Harlem. "An Essay on Drugs" was his stunning TV account of this scabrous netherworld, featuring up-close scenes of street addicts blistered with pus sores surveying one another's necks, groins and underarms for a clear, remaining vein suitable for injecting a syringe of liquefied heroin.
Always, Noble would return to the upbeat at home and the movers and shakers abroad. As he had with Malcolm, he found Jamaica's Prime Minister Michael Manley particularly instructive. He chatted up Maurice Bishop of Grenada, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Sékou Touré of Guinea, and characteristically clocking the decolonization process on the African continent, he queried Robert Mugabe as a guerrilla leader fighting in the bush of Mozambique and later as president of a liberated Zimbabwe.
"Like It Is provides more new and valuable information and analysis than all the local news shows on all the local channels put together," wrote Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice in 1982, when the show was seldom the focus of mainstream critics' columns or reviewed for the treasure that it was. Nonetheless, Noble garnered seven Emmys, five honorary doctorates and several lifetime achievement awards, and he was most proud of the more than 650 plaques, citations and crystal-glass prizes the community awarded him over the years.
He did not make his mark without controversy.
In the early '80s, several influential Jewish leaders pressured WABC-TV, demanding punishment for a discussion Noble aired on the Lebanon crisis. They argued that the panel discussion was "imbalanced" and "inaccurate." Dozens of supporters were called on to picket the station to "Keep Your Hands Off Gil Noble."
As protesters worked the streets, an ad hoc committee of black leaders worked the suites to block the station manager's threat to ban Like It Is from addressing any international issues -- including uprisings in the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Haiti and Grenada, and the revolutions sweeping much of southern Africa at the time.
On a bleak, wintry night in Harlem, some 700 "friends of Like It Is" listened with their jaws tight at the Abyssinian Baptist Church as the Rev. Calvin O. Butts read a response from the station manager. The letter from WABC-TV Vice President William Fyffe promised the committee (novelist John O. Killens, City College professor Leonard Jeffries and others) that "In essence, the [Like It Is] format will continue as in the past."
Assured that WABC-TV had not yielded to the Jewish leaders' pressure to curtail if not altogether silence their treasured Voice of Reason, the Harlem crowd bundled up and strode defiantly out onto the boulevards, in step with that Leadbelly blues song: "Keep your hands off of him ... he don't belong to you."
Brother Gil Noble will always belong to Harlem.
Les Payne is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who appeared with Gil Noble on Like It Is many times over the years.
Thelonious Monk was one of the true, undisputed innovators of jazz. His influence, both in playing and composition, altered all of us as musicians and even more fans of the art form. Straight, No Chaser primes itself as the definitive film documenting Monk’s life. With insight from family, friends, and collaborators such as John Coltrane, Teo Macero, Johnny Griffin, and more the picture the film paints is one of incredible talent and collaborative spirit. Early on Monk took notice from fellow jazz legends Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and more, which only furthered his vibe and energy. Check out the entire film below and comment with your thoughts!
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Official Website http://kidjo.comMOVE ON UP - Angelique Kidjo with Bono and John Legend featuring the Bill T. Jones' FELA! Dancers. Directed by Kevin J. Custer.Continuing to garner acclaim for OYO, an album of music that inspired her while growing up in Benin, the album's first video for the single "Move On Up" featuring guest vocals from Bono and John Legend as well as the imagery, and appearances by the dancers, of the acclaimed musical FELA!, which won three Tony Awards. http://www.felaonbroadway.com/"The success of the FELA! musical on Broadway is the indisputable sign that people are now interested in the true richness, depth and beauty of African culture," said Angelique Kidjo. "I feel that the music from my continent is a universal language that can create a bond between all the different cultures of the world and this is what the musical is about. Collaborating with the FELA! dancers on the 'Move On Up' video has been an amazing experience for me: The Musical and the song carry the same message of joy and hope for the future of Africa and for the future of people everywhere.
The songs on Angelique Kidjo's new album "Oyo",embrace rhythm & blues, soul music, jazz,and Beninese melodies,as well as four of her own original works. Featuring her unique interpretations of songs from artists as diverse as James Brown, Otis Redding, Miriam Makeba, and Santana and including guests John Legend, Bono, Roy Hargrove and Dianne Reeves. Oyo is a truly diverse collection reflecting the music that inspired Angelique growing up. avavailable on iTunes, Amazon and everywhere music is sold today.
http://PBSspecial.kidjo.com * Angelique's rendition of Bob Marley's classic song with the Kuumba Choir Singers during her PBS special "Spirit Rising".
