Akala

 

Apparently Akala is “second generation black Caribbean and half white Scottish.” He also has some things to say on a different kind of stage.

H/T: Mikko Kapanen

Black Girl Anthology

Concrete Orchid Media is seeking story submissions for an upcoming anthology about growing up as a black girl who never quite fit in. All women with a knack for expressing themselves using words, photography or illustration are invited to share their personal experiences about what it was like being the odd woman out.

Perhaps your fashion sense was way ahead of its time. Your skateboard was frowned upon, or your comic book collection was just too “weird” to reveal to your friends. Maybe your musical tastes dipped a little too far into other (a.k.a.: white) genres, or you simply refused to accept the traditional definition of being “ladylike.”

Wherever you are in your journey, or whatever your unique story may have been, your experience defining (and redefining) your identity will make for a colorful collection of touching, inspiring, and hilarious stories.

This book project was inspired by a recent interview with Miss Jack Davey of the band, J*Davey, who said, “in junior high, when all my friends were listening to R. Kelly, I was secretly hiding away listening to Nevermind by Nirvana. That was my own little private joy. My friends would be like, ‘you listen to Led Zeppelin?!’”

The purpose of this book project is to celebrate our beautiful eccentricities. Each contributor will have the opportunity to discuss when, where, or how her identity as “quirky” began to take shape, and how that experience affected a particular moment, or even shaped her entire life. Women of all walks of life are welcome to share their unique story in their own way.

If you, or someone you know, is an eccentric/quirky/awkward black girl with a flair for writing, photography, or illustration, please contact anthology@concreteorchid.com for more information.

The Bard Fiction Prize

is awarded to a promising, emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. In addition to the monetary award, the winner receives an appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for one semester, without the expectation that he or she teach traditional courses. The recipient gives at least one public lecture and meets informally with students.

2011 Bard Fiction Prize Recipient:
Karen Russell

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October, continues Bard's long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard's literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important American writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction to pursue their creative goals and provide an opportunity to work in a fertile and intellectual environment.

Bard College invites submissions for its
annual Fiction Prize for Young Writers.

To apply, candidates should write a cover letter explaining the project they plan to work on while at Bard and submit a C.V., along with three copies of the published book they feel best represents their work. No manuscripts will be accepted. Applications for the 2012 prize must be received by July 15, 2011.

Contact the Bard 
Fiction Prize:

Address: Bard College,
PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
Phone: 845-758-7087
E-mail: bfp@bard.edu

 

CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW's Annual Literary Contests:
The 2012 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize,
Jack Dyer Fiction Prize,
&
John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize

$ 2000 prize for Poetry     $ 2000 prize for Fiction      $ 2000 prize for Literary Nonfiction

 

We are pleased to announce the winners and finalists of the 2011 Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize, and Richard Peterson Poetry Prize.

Here are the results for the literary prize competitions, as well as all the finalists and the judges:

In fiction, the winning entry is “Mutare” by Greta Schuler of Washington, D.C. In literary nonfiction, the winning entry is “Flight from Hungary” by Erika Giles of Mercer Island, Washington. In poetry, the winning entry is three poems—“The Corner," "Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves," and "The Men Wore Hats"—by Catherine Anderson of Kansas City, Missouri. The finalists in fiction are "Strip Mine" by E. Farrell and “Inheritance” by Julia Phillips. Finalists in literary nonfiction are “Another Day at the Beach” by Jessica Hendry Nelson and “The Beginning” by Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo. Finalists in poetry are three poems—“In the Garden of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen," "Covenant," and "My Job as a Child"—by Julie Hanson and three poems—“Blackberries," "Abrams Creek," and “Lullaby"—by Nancy Pearson. The final judge for the fiction and literary nonfiction competitions was Carolyn Alessio, CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW’s prose editor. The final judge for the poetry competition was Allison Joseph, CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW’s poetry editor and editor-in-chief.

All three winners will receive $1500 and their winning entries will appear in CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, Volume 16, Number 1 (Winter/Spring 2011). Also, the finalists will be announced to our readers in this issue and each finalist will be offered publication in the issue with a minimum payment of $150 (all work in CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW receives $25 per published page). Congratulations to the winners and finalists, and thanks to all the entrants for their interest in CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW.

.

BELOW ARE THE GUIDELINES FOR THIS YEAR'S LITERARY CONTESTS:

One winner and two finalists will be chosen in each category. The three category winners will be published and the finalists offered publication (with a minimum payment of $200) in the Winter/Spring issue of CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW. The winners and finalists will also be announced in the March/April POETS & WRITERS and on the CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW Website.

Contest Guidelines

The postmark deadlines for this year's prize competitions are March 1, 2011 through May 2, 2011. Please do not send entries via FedEx, UPS, DHL, Express Mail--we don't want you to spend the extra amount when this is a POSTMARK deadline.

Entries must be previously unpublished, original work written in English by a United States citizen or permanent resident (current students and employees at Southern Illinois University Carbondale are not eligible). Name, address, telephone number, email address, and work title (or titles for poetry entries) should appear only on a cover sheet for the entry. The author's name should not appear on any subsequent page. All entries must be postmarked between March 1, 2011 and May 2, 2011. Late entries will be returned unread. Enclose a #10, self-addressed, stamped envelope for notification of winners. Do not include an envelope or postage for return of manuscript since entries will be recycled upon the decision of the final judges and notification of the winners.

Entry Guidelines (there is no theme for the Literary Prize entries; just send your best work): Poetry entries should consist of 3 poems; 100 line limit per poem. Prose entry length: up to 6000 words for fiction and up to 6500 words for literary nonfiction. One poetry entry, story, or essay per $20 entry; a writer may send up to three entries in one genre or a total of three entries if entering all competitions.

Entry fee: $20 for each entry (remember that a Poetry entry is three poems). Please make checks payable to CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW. Each fee entitles entrant to one copy of the 2011 Summer/Fall issue of CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, our special issue "New & Old ~ Re-Visions of The American South," and one copy of the 2012 Winter/Spring issue of CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, which will include the winners of these competitions. If you send two entries with $40, we will send you two copies of each issue; if you send three entries with $60, we will send you three copies of each issue. We will be happy to send these additional copies as gift subscriptions or to provide back issues if requested and available. Please let us know what you prefer and provide us with the necessary information.

Address:

Mail entries to: CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW Literary Contests, Dept. of English, Mail Code 4503, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 1000 Faner Drive, Carbondale, IL 62901. Please indicate on the outside of the envelope if an entry is "POETRY," "FICTION," or "LITERARY NONFICTION."

We do not at this time accept electronic submissions, but we hope in the future when we have our own server dedicated to submissions to offer this option. We will let you know when this becomes possible, but it is at least a year away given funding issues.

 

 

If you don’t find the information you’re looking for on our website, we can always be reached for information about subscriptions, current guidelines, upcoming themes, or contests by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW
Department of English
Faner Hall 2380 - Mail Code 4503
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
1000 Faner Drive
Carbondale, IL 62901

EMAIL: jtribble@siu.edu

PHONE: 618-453-6833
FAX: 618-453-8224

Free E-books from

PEN World Voices

Festival Writers

April 28, 2011 • Read more by Edward Nawotka 

 

By Edward Nawotka

The PEN World Voices Festivals has an extraordinary line up of writers this year. In case you weren’t able to make it to New York, the Festival organizers are offering free e-books summarizing some of the writing from each day’s participants and tailored to that day’s programming.

Instructions: click on the version you want to download. Open files directly in iPhone or iPad, or drag and drop the downloaded file from your desktop computer to your e-reading device. Enjoy. (e-books created with Instapaper)

Monday: .mobi (for Kindle) | .epub (for iPad, iPhone, Nook, most other e-readers). Includes work from Malcolm Gladwell, Molly Crabapple, Pierre Guyotat, Arnon Grunberg, and Hervé Le Tellier.

Tuesday: .mobi (for Kindle) | .epub (for iPad, iPhone, Nook, most other e-readers). Includes work from Ludovic Debeurme, Kjersti Skomsvold, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sandro Veronesi, and Carsten Jensen.

Wednesday: .mobi (for Kindle) | .epub (for iPad, iPhone, Nook, most other e-readers). Includes work from Sarah Schulman, Carmen Boullosa, Abdellah Taïa, Laurence Cossé, and Abdelkader Benali.

Thursday: .mobi (for Kindle) | .epub (for iPad, iPhone, Nook, most other e-readers). Includes work from Edmund White, Najat El Hachmi, Margaret Mazzantini, Elif Shafak, Peter Lerangis, and Kyung-sook Shin.

There’s also an active blogging community following the events and a list of recommended reading from “six stand-up book critics.”

 

Book Club: Sunday 29 May 2011

 

In May we are reading the most recent works of poet and writer Jackie Kay. Book club members can select either the memoir Red Dust Road or its companion piece, the collection of poetry entitled Fiere. Or they can do both.

We shall be meeting on Sunday 29 May at 3pm, at Waterstone's Piccadilly branch, on the 5th floor.

Red Dust Road

'What makes us who we are? My adoption is a story that has happened to me. I couldn't make it up.'

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realises that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, the journey that Jackie Kay undertakes in Red Dust Road is full unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions.

In a book shining with warmth, humour and compassion, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that our internal landscapes are as important as those through which we move.

Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is revelatory, redemptive and courageous, unique in its voice and universal in its reach. It is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny, and love.

 

Fiere

Jackie Kay's new collection is a lyric counterpart to her memoir, Red Dust Road, the extraordinary story of the search for her Nigerian and Highland birth-parents; but it also a moving book in its own right, and a deep enquiry into all forms of human friendship. Fiere - Scots for 'companion, friend, equal' - is a vivid description of the many paths our lives take, and how those journeys are made meaningful by our companions on the road: lovers, friends, parents, children, mentors - as well as the remarkable and chance acquaintances we would not otherwise have made. Written with Kay's trademark wit and flair, and infused with both Scots and Igbo speech, it is also a fascinating account of the formation of a self-identity - and the discovery of a tongue that best honours it. Musical and moving, funny and profound, Fiere is Jackie Kay's most accomplished, assured and ambitious collection of poems to date.

About the Author

Jackie was born in Edinburgh. She is a poet, novelist and writer of short stories and has enjoyed great acclaim for her work for both adults and children. Her novel Trumpet won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and she has published two collections of stories with Picador, Why Don't You Stop Talking and I Wish I Was Here.  Jackie Kay's full publication list on Amazon. She teaches at Newcastle University and lives in Manchester.  More about Jackie on her Wikipedia page.

Reviews: Red Dust Road

Aminatta Forna in The Guardian.

From The Scottish Herald. No idea who the writer of this review is - but  I guess that the phrase 'an unfashionably black child' is an oblique reference to the Angelina Jolie, Madonna and Sandra Bullock's adoptions. What do you think?  Otherwise it is such a strange thing to say.

Daisy Goodwin's review appeared in The Times. [This one is not behind the pay wall.]

An interview with Jackie Kay from The Telegraph.

Reviews: Fiere

Jackie Kay interviewed by Mark Lawson on BBC Radio 4's Front Row - it is the second item and starts at 6.43 minutes into the programme.

Bill Greenwell's review in The Independent.

Tolu Ogunlesi's review from the The Lagos Review.

Praise for Jackie Kay

'One of the liveliest talents of her generation'  Sunday Telegraph

'Kay's humour and optimism are transcendent' Sunday Herald

'Kay possesses a lyrical gift that infuses her prose with seductive colour' Scotsman

'She leaves the reader elated and amazed.' Daily Telegraph

First Impressions

I actually finished reading the book (Red Dust Road) about three weeks ago now, I think that Jackie Kay is a wonderful writer, her way with words is totally exquisite. Red Dust Road is dedicated 'For my family' and this book explores what is family - the reality and the reality that could have been. The care with which Jackie seeks to nurture relationships with the parents that gave her up is very moving and so generously written. The glorious bits are about the wonderful, loving, confidence giving people that brought her up, and I also particularly enjoyed the fact that this is also very much a love letter to the countries and peoples - family and friends - of Scotland and Nigeria.

In last Sunday's The Observer the journalist and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup responded to a a reader  on her problem page as follows: 'Having recently read Jackie Kay's brilliant Red Dust Road, adoption has been much on my mind of late. Her description of being a mixed-race child in a white Scottish Marxist home offers a compelling argument for opening our homes to similarly abandoned children. For the past 20 years such blending of colour and culture has been frowned upon and children were considered better off in orphanages than in a culturally "alien" but loving home environment.  Thankfully that obstacle has now been removed and in her homage to nurture not nature Kay makes a strong case for the benefits to all concerned of looking beyond our own biology for children to raise. '

You just know that this will be a rich and varied discussion at the next Black Reading Group. Hope that you can make it.

 

Video: Kehinde Wiley – World Stage: Israel

April 27, 2011 Posted by: gingerlynn

 

Kehinde Wiley
Shmuel Yosef (The World Stage: Israel), 2011
Oil on canvas
45 x 36 in (114.3 x 91.4 cm)

Last summer Nigerian-American artstar Kehinde Wiley (who you may remember from the Puma Africa campaign) traveled to Israel to photograph a cross section of young men from the region including a focus on Ethiopian Jews, who call themselves “Beta Israel.” The photographs were then used as the basis for his extraordinary paintings now on view from April 9th till May 28th at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in LA.

Photographer/filmmaker Dwayne R. Rodgers accompanied Kehinde on his trip, creating a poignant inside view of the work which includes talented young rappers, party-goers, and street scenes from Jerusalem, Lod, and Tel Aviv.

“For me the film is about the way in which Kehinde is not just a painter, but there’s a performance element to his work as well. This piece captures that facet of his work ,” Dwayne told Okayafrica, “there’s a moment when the art segways into the performance aspect which then segways into Kehinde’s reality. The paintings are the product of someone being alive. It’s not an abstract process – there’s a lot of social engagement.”

The STD Crisis:

We have to save our kids

This requires action, and now.

• By: Linda Villarosa | Posted: March 17, 2008 

Villarosa argues for strong action to save the children in the midst of the growing STD crisis.

It was hard to miss the recent terrible news that 3.2 million girls have a sexually transmitted disease. Worse, blacks were infected at twice the rate of white or Mexican-Americans, with more than half of black girls and young women reporting at least one. Again and again, those stats were splashed across newspapers, trumpeted on websites and floated at the bottoms of the TV screens.

Alright already—we got it. We know the numbers, but what's the why? Why are so many U.S. black girls and women infected and why is our rate double that of the others? Most news reports didn't bother to explain the difference in rates; because most of the reporters didn't ask.

The huge unanswered question—and the 10,000-pound elephant in the news—is: Do the high rates mean that compared with their peers, black teen girls are having more indiscriminate sex with less protection?'

The answer is no. Even the CDC was quick to point this out: John Douglas, director of the Division of STD Prevention, stressed that "This does not mean that African Americans are taking greater behavioral risks." And, in fact, previous studies of high school students have found that black youth more often use condoms and are much more likely to be sober when they have sex.

Poverty and lack of access to healthcare play a role in these numbers, but socioeconomic factors can't explain them away. In reality, a knotty tangle of factors heighten black women's risk of contracting STDs.

First and foremost, it's a numbers game. African Americans make up roughly 12 percent of the population but comprise nearly 50 percent of people infected with Chlamydia and almost 70 percent of those infected with gonorrhea. Like those of other races, we generally have sex with each other, which confines the infections within our social networks. In other words, we're keeping STDs in the family: Each unprotected sexual encounter with another black person is riskier than it might be among members in a group with a smaller pool of infection. It's not more sex; it's more infection. Truly, it takes only one time.

Still there's more to the STD epidemic than just numbers. In the Age of AIDS, why is anyone having unprotected sex at all—ever? It's not because they don't know better. This is what seems very baffling, but what we need to quickly understand.

High rates of STDs among bright, beautiful and talented young women is a tragedy and a crisis; the kind of national emergency that demands an action plan. What do we need to do—and do now—to stop a generation from getting infected with a disease that could make them sick, destroy their fertility or, at worse, kill them? Here are my ideas; let's hear yours, too:

1) Demand better sex education in schools. What is offered to school-age kids today isn't just inadequate; it's embarrassing.

A few years ago, when I asked my teenage niece what she learned in her high school "sexual health" class. She informed me that abstinence was the only way to keep from getting pregnant and contracting HIV because "condoms, don't work." In her community, a suburb outside of a large city in the South, schools must teach abstinence-only or lose federal funding. Educators can mention birth control only in the context of failure rates.

PLEASE!

Reams of studies have shown that abstinence-only education is not effective. And, obviously, in the real world it's not working and it hasn't worked for the past eight years. Popular culture, especially music, thrusts sex on kids every few seconds. So why is any young person going to believe a teacher insisting "don't ever have sex," while Soulja Boy is urging "super man dat ho?" (Translation: during sex, come on the back of a woman; when she wakes up with the sheet stuck to her back, she looks like she's wearing a cape!)

With a new administration poised to take office, now's the time to demand school-based sex education that makes sense in our world.

2) Talk the talk, and help other parents, too.

No one should be foolish enough to leave educating their daughters and sons about their bodies, sex and sexuality up to the school system. It's our responsibility as parents, mothers especially, to spell out the facts. However, many experts believe that African-American women have an extremely hard time talking about sex.

Dr. Gail Wyatt, an African-American psychiatrist, UCLA professor and author of the book "Stolen Women," believes these feelings of discomfort are rooted in slavery. Here's how she puts it: "Black women often react against the idea that we are sexually promiscuous—a myth perpetrated by slave masters to justify rape--by denying our sexuality. Women who had been raped or abused by the masters on plantations, were the ones who knew a lot about sex. So it was better to be ignorant about sex and sexuality rather than give off the impression that you'd been 'used.'"

These feelings linger—particularly when black women as "nappy headed hos" becomes a national discussion. Still, given the STD crisis, we must find ways to have open, honest, informed dialogues with our daughters. The challenge is to help them define who they are sexually, rather than let them be taken over by the music, or the images, or by someone of the opposite sex.

3) Don't let this be just a girls' issue.

We have to teach our sons about sex and sexuality and encourage men and boys to be part of the solution. Studies show that most girls have their first sexual encounter with a boy or man several years older. In fact, statistically, the younger the girl, the older the man. So even if boys get the message from both school sex education and their parents, who's going to make sure men are doing the right thing, too? We all must.

4) Let's begin a serious, community-wide discussion about the effects of the "man shortage" on sexually transmitted disease transmission.

Though women outnumber men in the general population, the gender gap is much wider among blacks. On college campuses, where many of the 18 and 19-year olds in the STD study now reside, the numbers are particularly lopsided. On some campuses, the ratio of women to men is several times higher.

Are young women sometimes hesitant to insist upon condom use, afraid of losing out on love and companionship? Are men "sleeping around"—and not using a condom every time in every encounter-- because they're in high demand? Yes and yes. Let's discuss.

5) We must demand better methods of protection against STDs

Nearly 50 percent of sexually active people will contract HPV, the country's most common STD. But condoms do not provide 100 percent protection against the disease; HPV can infect areas not covered by a condom. Same with herpes. There's now a vaccine to protect against HPV, but it's new, for girls only at this point, and not everyone's on board with it.

So where's the method that protects against both pregnancy and STDs, including HIV? Off in the future somewhere. The best we have now is the promise of microbicides. These are creams, foams, gels or other topical substances that a woman can apply to the vagina (or rectum) before sex to stop pregnancy and STD infection. There are currently dozens of products in development and several are being studied for effectiveness in very large groups of women. However, nothing will hit the market until 2010 at the soonest.

It's time to flip the switch. Let's move sexual health R and D attention and dollars away from yet another new form of Viagra and toward STD protection that's easy-to-use, woman-controlled, widely-available and inexpensive.

6) Take extra time to let all the girls and young women in your life know that they're valued and celebrated.

Once we give them the tools they need, it's ultimately up to individual young women to make safe sexual health decisions. If they feel good about who they are and where they're going, they will care enough about themselves to make good, sound choices.

Linda Villarosa is a health columnist for The Root. "Passing for Black" is her first novel. For more go to her Web site.

'The Forgotten Hero'

Of The Civil Rights Movement

October 24, 2010

 

Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto And The Battle For Equality In Civil War America
By Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin
Hardcover, 656 pages
Temple University Press
List Price: $35

Read An Excerpt

Download Forgotten_Hero.mp3

[7 min 12 sec]

 

A century before the civil rights protests in Selma and Birmingham, a 27-year-old African-American named Octavius Catto led the fight to desegregate Philadelphia's horse-drawn streetcars.

He did it in 1866 with the help of other prominent activists, including Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass. Catto raised all-black regiments to fight in the Civil War; he pushed for black voting rights; and he started an all-black baseball team — all before the age of 32.

And if you visit Octavius Catto's grave at Eden Cemetery, just outside Philadelphia, his epitaph reads: "The Forgotten Hero"

It was that forgotten history that prompted two reporters, Dan Biddle and Murray Dubin, to dig deeper. They talked to NPR's Guy Raz about their new book, Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America. 

Early Beginnings

Catto was born in Charleston, S.C., on Feb. 22, 1839. His mother, Sarah Isabella Cain, was a descendant of a prominent free mixed-race family. His father had been a slave millwright in South Carolina; after being freed, he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and ultimately became a leader in the black church.

The Catto family moved north to Philadelphia when Octavius was about 5. There, he stood out as a star student. He graduated in 1858 as valedictorian of the Institute for Colored Youth, which later became Cheney University, a historically black college.

Catto wanted to continue his studies, so he left to do postgraduate work and receive private tutoring in Latin and Greek in Washington, D.C.

Upon returning to Philadelphia, he began teaching at his alma mater. By his 20s, he'd already accomplished much: He founded the Banneker Literacy Institute; was inducted into The Franklin Institute, a scientific organization; and was an accomplished baseball player and founder of Pythian Baseball Club. Yet he was frustrated with the discrimination that kept him from accomplishing more.

The Political Arena

At age 24, Catto dove into the world of politics. It was the summer of 1863, just after the Confederate Army invaded Pennsylvania. Young Octavius responded to a call for emergency troops by raising one of the first volunteer companies with black soldiers and white officers. He also joined with Frederick Douglass to help raise all-black regiments.

Catto would walk through the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia putting up posters that read: "Men of color, to arms to arms, now or never."

"The message of [the poster] is it is now or never for proving that black men can fight bravely and sacrifice for the union," author Murray Dubin says.

Although Catto didn’t see action during the Civil War, he did earn the rank of major for his recruiting efforts.

Desegregating Public Transit

Only a year later, Catto turned his attention to desegregating Philadelphia’s horse-drawn public transit system. Throughout the war, family members and friends were unable to visit black troops who were injured because they were not permitted to ride on streetcars.

"After the Civil War, Catto and a lot of other black men and women decide they must do something about this, so a campaign starts," Dan Biddle says.

The campaign began quietly: People held meetings and wrote letters, but for Catto, Biddle says, that wasn't enough.

"While we can find very few instances of civil disobedience prior to that, somewhere Catto figured out that was the way to do it. And we believe what he did is organized pregnant women, he organized college students, to simply go on the street cars en masse," Biddle says.

Catto's early calls for acts of public defiance were almost unimaginable in that time.

The Vote, And The End

His final cause was voting rights for blacks. With the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, African-Americans were enfranchised, but there were many ways people tried to prevent them from exercising that right.

Catto worked tirelessly to help black people in Philadelphia register to vote for the 1871 election.

 

Temple University Press

Daniel R. Biddle (left) and Murray Dubin are both veteran Philadelphia Inquirer reporters.

 

"It [was] anticipated that just about every black man that is going to vote is going to vote Republican," Dubin says. "The white Democrats are well aware of this and felt skunked about how many black men had gotten out to vote in 1870 ... and it was clear that they weren't going to let that happen again."

The violence began the night before the election. Gangs of white thugs went to black neighborhoods to discourage residents from voting and murdered several black men. Catto was also a target.

"You have to understand, Catto was a very well-known guy — everyone knows who he is. He's a jock, he's a political figure, he speaks publicly. So whites and blacks know who he is. He cannot walk down the street unnoticed," Biddle says.

Catto was walking home, near his front door, and was confronted by Frank Kelly, a Democratic Party operative and associate of the party's boss.

Kelly was armed, Catto was not — and soon, he was shot dead.

The Legacy

Catto's murder sparked a public outcry, and his funeral was described as "the biggest public funeral in the city perhaps ever at that point, rivaling that of Civil War heroes," Biddle says.

But today, for the most part, Octavius Catto is a forgotten hero.

"I'd love to tell you that Martin Luther King knew about Catto and that's why he did what he did, but I can't prove that," Biddle says. But it was the shoulders of Catto and dozens of other men and women "that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Ralph Abernathy ... stood on top of."

Excerpt: 'Tasting Freedom'

by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin

Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto And The Battle For Equality In Civil War America
By Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin
Hardcover, 656 pages
Temple University Press
List Price: $35

 

October 10, 1871

The young white man had the number 27 tattooed on his hand and a bandage around his head when he began shooting at a colored man named John Fawcett. He missed. Fawcett, a hod carrier from the Philadelphia neighborhood of Frankford, ran up South Street to escape. Joined by a crowd, the bandaged man chased him.

Fawcett saw a cellar door in front of a store in the middle of the block. Before he could dive in, a white boy stuck out a foot and tripped him. Fawcett scrambled to his feet, and the bandaged man fired again.

That same afternoon, about a mile away, another Negro, a schoolteacher with the Roman-sounding name of Octavius Valentine Catto, left a pawnshop on Third Street and began walking home. People on the street knew who he was — an orator who shared stages with Frederick Douglass, a second baseman on the city's best black baseball team, a teacher at a black school of national renown, and an activist who had fought in the state capital and on the streets for equal rights. He was thirty-two.

It was election day 1871, and the busy South Street area — the institutional and emotional heart of the black community — had been rocked by violence since the night before. Was it all the Squire's doing? White policemen and Democrats who answered to him were attacking black voters, and scores had gone to the hospital. Catto had sent his pupils home early. Rather than going directly to his boardinghouse, he chose a safer route — up Lombard to Ninth Street, near his fiancée's home, and then down to South Street. He lived at 814.

Catto walked with an assured, athletic gait, as if his right to the pavement were guaranteed. Which it was — but only lately. Memories of slavery haunted every colored home. Generations of men and women had risked their lives to claim the simplest of rights — to learn in a schoolhouse, serve in the army, ride the railways, cast a ballot. Now those rights were being tested. Catto turned onto South Street at the moment when, in W.E.B. Du Bois's words, Americans of color "were first tasting freedom."

As Catto walked east, the bandaged man was looking for more Negroes to hurt, more Negroes who would not be able to vote that day. He passed Catto nonchalantly, but once he was fi ve steps beyond, the bandaged man turned and crouched. A young girl at 822 South shouted to Catto, "Look out for that man!"

The bandaged man was pulling out his gun.

INTRODUCTION

"A Hundred O. V. Cattos"

Say the words civil rights movement and the conversation veers to Selma and Birmingham and what people remember reading or seeing on small black-and-white televisions — sit-ins on buses and at lunch counters, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Governor George Wallace and Sheriff Bull Connor. It was all so very long ago, the 1950s and 1960s.

There are few memories before that.

It is difficult to point to a moment when a movement began or ended or emerged as distinct from another. But the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century was the second or third organized effort by African Americans to be treated as the equals of white persons.

This book is about the first civil rights movement, about its heroes, villains, and battles. Not the Civil War battles at Antietam or Bull Run but the street wars — pogroms, as the historian Roger Lane says — of whites against blacks in Washington, New York, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia. The heroes from the 1800s have not had highways named after them, or commendations from a thankful nation. So the stories of Henry Highland

Garnet, Caroline Le Count, and Octavius Valentine Catto are a new way for us to see an old century and an older problem. The nineteenth century had its charismatic racial villains as well — this time, another "Bull," William "Bull" McMullen, also known as the Squire.

This is a book about the North, about "free" blacks whose freedom was in name only. For the most part, they could not vote, testify, or participate in their community's July 4 celebration. Black people in the mid-nineteenth-century North were threatened not with whippings by slaveholders but with insults, brickbats, torches, and gunfire. They lived in a time when mob violence was so common that the word mobbed was a verb. African Americans were routinely assailed in the public square, in the courts and the legislatures, even in the privacy of their churches, schools, and homes. Their assailants? Everyone — from the resentful Irish poor to some of the nation's most powerful men.

Octavius Catto, his father, and his friends and allies fought a street battle for equal rights in Northern cities before, during, and after the Civil War. The men and women of Catto's generation presaged the better known civil rights era, sitting down as Rosa Parks did, challenging baseball's color line as Jackie Robinson did, marching for the right to vote as Martin Luther King Jr. did. But they did all these things a century before. Think about that for a moment — Caroline Le Count did almost the same thing as Rosa Parks did, but her streetcar in 1867 was powered by a horse.

So while ending slavery and bringing fugitive slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad captured the hearts and minds of abolitionists, black and white alike, we write, instead, about the peril and prejudice felt in New York and Boston and Detroit among African Americans. They had libraries, Odd Fellow lodges, choral societies, and ladies clubs but never the freedom to walk down the street safe from white boys attacking them, or, at the very least, spitting out the word Nigger.

And speaking of that vile word: It will appear often in these pages. At the risk of offending readers, we chose to include this and other racist words in an effort to depict accurately the talk of those days. For similar reasons we chose to use Negro and colored, the latter being a term many nineteenth-century African Americans accepted and preferred.

The man at the center of our story, O. V. Catto — who electrified a biracial audience in 1864 when he said, "There must come a change" — was a charmer of ladies, a hard-hitting second baseman, a talented teacher, and a Renaissance man of equal rights whom one historian likens to Dr. King and another to George Steinbrenner.

Catto spent too much money on clothes, ate too well at banquets, and reveled in late-summer parties at the New Jersey shore. He wrote poetry and fell in love — and now we are getting ahead of the story.

Catto, with a group of other African Americans who called themselves a "band of brothers," challenged one injustice after another. His story — their story — begins in lesser-known corners of our history, in Charleston, South Carolina, where people of color owned slaves and where teaching blacks to read was a crime punished by whipping, and ends in Philadelphia, where police used billy clubs on Negro voters and where business leaders condoned arson to break up an abolitionist convention within sight of Independence Hall.

This first civil rights movement did not begin or end with Catto. No, he stood on the shoulders of older heroes — Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Lucretia Mott. Catto's generation, in turn, left footsteps for twentieth-century men and women to follow.

As the Catto family descendant Leonard Smith says today, "There were a hundred O. V. Cattos." Their stories need telling.

We begin with the earliest Cattos, and their story starts in Charleston.

Excerpted from Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto And The Battle For Equality In Civil War America by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin. Copyright 2010 by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin. Excerpted by permission of Temple University Press.

Maga Bo is a producer/DJ based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His work spans the breadth of international urban bass music from hip hop and kwaito to baile funk and jungle ragga to dub, grime and dubstep with flares of samba, rai, bhangra, cumbia, skewed electronic beats and loudspeaker jitter.

His live performances are a hybrid mix of DJ set and live PA where he mixes diverse sounds culled from pirate cassettes bought on the street in various parts of the world, MP3s from the internet, obscure vinyl found in underground shops, original beats, unreleased remixes and exclusive tracks. Divergent sources are combined and mixed live in a dubwise fashion with a DJ’s feel for the dance floor and the hip hop mentality of creating by re-contextualizing. Projected video and photo images from his travels and recording sessions bring an extra visual dimension to the music.