CBS veteran reporter Bob Schieffer is a southern gentleman who has lived through the era of segregation. On yesterday's CBS News broadcast he accused Donald Trump of "peddling racism".  This was a pivotal momemt. Far too often when black people call out racism it is dismissed. Some say oh you are too sensitive, but it is encouraging to see veteran journalists like Schieffer take a stand and call this lunancy what it really is. http://www.huffingt … Read More

via politics from the eyes of an ebony mom

The man who extinguished the life of Malcolm X, 69 year-old Talmadge Hayer (aka Thomas Hagen), was paroled a couple of days ago in New York City (read story). He will be a completely free man on April 28, 2010. As you look at the pictures of this man ask yourself what do you feel; is this right?

Malcom X Blog by Abdur Rahman Muhammad

"What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians." –AMR MOUSSA, head of the Arab League, doubling back on the group's original support for the no-fly zone in Libya. Moussa says the current military action has gone beyond the wishes of the League. (via Jerusalem Post) … Read More

via NewsFeed

This the first time seeing a Pan Machine. I still prefer the traditional Steel.

It could be that both the Whitney and the curator of Keith Haring’s estate want to avoid providing Mr. Ortiz with financial compensation. If this is the case then one can only hope that Mr. Ortiz gets proper legal representation and forces both entities to do just so. Keith Haring’s untimely death seems to have made it convenient, for the two, to shut Angel Ortiz out of recognition as L.A. II, while marketing Haring as the sole artists.

As time goes by Keith Haring’s art gains value. As has the art of many renowned artists throughout the ages. Assuming that Angel Ortiz is legitimately the collaborator many say he is, then not only is he due belated recognition, he would also be entitled to hundreds of thousands of dollars, as per his share of the proceeds that the Whitney and the curator have thus far accumilated. Plus future earnings as well.

On Twitter, one tweet read that African-American actors could have been cast for any number of significant parts that were not “race specific.” Not lost on Hollywood is the fact that a number of American films have proven extremely marketable overseas. Some American films are earning even more revenue abroad than in the domestic U.S. market.

Take Gulliver’s Travels for example. To date Gulliver’s Travels has earned a total of just over 206 million dollars worldwide. Only 42 million dollars of that total was earned in the U.S. market. (Boxofficemojo.com)Even at the 2011 Academy Awards most of the Oscars went to British made films. The Kings Speech was the big winner. Even The Kings Speech has earned less that Gulliver’s Travels overseas. While The Kings Speech earned 130 million dollars, Gulliver’s Travels earned 164 million dollars abroad. However The Kings Speech managed to rake in 115 million dollars in the U.S. market. (Boxofficemojo.com) 

This is what Black filmmakers are going to have to forecast into their pitch strategies going forward. Black themed films have to consider appealing to a global consumer with content that foreigners can relate to. Or else Black themed films are going to have to produce stronger domestic box office numbers. Billions of dollars are sitting on the sidelines waiting for attractive pitches to come it’s way.

This means that African-American filmmakers are going to have to link with firms that can lobby for financial resources in these financially stressed times. New strategies have to be adopted in order to prevent what some call the “blackout” of the 2011 Academy Awards from becoming a trend. However a new century calls for new strategies, on the creative side, and the business end of creating quality films involving black talent. in front of and behind the camera.  

In 83 three years many feel that African-Americans in the film industry have been worthy of not only a lot more than 27 Award wins, but far more category nominations as well. As Stacey Muhammad pointed out, The Reel Oscar is a tribute to the accomplishments of African-Americans in front of and behind the camera. Also the concept revives the name of its namesake the legendary Oscar Micheaux.

I hope a network like BET can pick up of this endeavor and consider a broadcast prior to Oscar night. Other awards precede the Oscars such as the Spirit Awards, the Golden Globes and others which are broadcasted as well. BET can raise their profile and the profile of African-Americans filmmakers as well by broadcating such an award show the week of the Oscars. Say the friday before. I believe that with the help of Twitter and Facebook, such a show generate a huge rating which could translate into an ad revenue bonanza for BET.

With the right outreach I’m sure many Film Industry African-Americans would embrace, support, and take part in an awards show that would honor their accomplishments, as Stacey Muhammad envisions. Well I hope that the word gets spread around and that The Reel Oscars grows into a new phenomenon for the 21st century, since the 20th century left so many of our deserving talent marginalized, to say the least.

One last Reel Oscar award must go to Stacey Muhammad, the hostess extraordinaire. Great job!

As we celebrate President's Day the thought that four of our first 5 Presidents owned slaves has not gone unnoticed. I've been observing how President Ronald Reagan has undergone a major PR, revisionist makeover and could not help but wonder how much of a make over our early Presidents have undergone. BTW we set the record straight on Ronald Reagan with this essay we penned a couple of weeks ago.. Why All of Us Should Celebrate Ronald Reagan Day- … Read More

via Davey D's Hip Hop Corner-(The Blog)

A Slaveholder’s Diary

by Louis Masur

On Friday morning, Nov. 9, 1860, Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, a 57-year-old widowed plantation mistress, who lived some 10 miles east of Columbia, SC, wrote in her diary, “Oh My God!!! This morning heard that Lincoln was elected.” In the breathless entry that followed, she recorded her thoughts and fears:

I had prayed that God would thwart his election in some way & I prayed for my Country — Lord we know not what is to be the result of this — but I do pray if there is to be a crisis — that we all lay down our lives sooner than free our slaves in our midst — no soul on this earth is more willing for justice than I am, but the idea of being mixed up with free blacks is horrid!! I must trust in God that he will not forget us an unworthy as we are — Lord save us — I would give my life to save my country. I have never been opposed to giveing up slavery if we could send them out of our country — I have often wished I had been born in just such a country — with all our religious previleges & liberties with none of them in our midst — if the North had let us alone — the Master & the servant were happy with out advantages — but we had had vile wretches ever making the restless worse than they would have been & from my experience my own negroes are as happy as I am: — happier — I never am cross to my servants without cause & they give me impudence if I find the least fault, this is of the women, the men are not half as impudent as the women are. I have left a serious & what has been an all absorbing theme to a common one but the die is cast — “Caesar has past the Rubicon.” We now have to act. God be with us is my prayer & let us all be willing to die rather than free our slaves in their present uncivilized state.

There is much to unpack here. Southerners viewed the Republicans as an abolitionist party and, coming just a year after John Brown’s raid, they considered Lincoln’s election intolerable. Lincoln won by carrying every Northern state except New Jersey, which he split with Stephen Douglas; he was on the ballot in only five slave states.

Clearly, Brevard was deeply religious. Like many Americans, she would come to understand the war as God’s direct judgment on the nation. She sought in her life, she writes elsewhere in the diary, to “practice truth & love to God.” She often addressed God directly and hoped that by striving against sin and serving faithfully “thou wilt save us.”

On this date, her country was still the United States, but she knew what Lincoln’s election portended. The next day, the South Carolina legislature called for a convention to consider secession, and on Dec. 20 the state seceded. “I wish Lincoln & Hamlin could have died before this & saved our country disolution,” Brevard confessed. She would support secession in order to defend her way of life.

Brevard owned more than 200 slaves, and her entry illuminates the tensions in proslavery ideology. She was terrified of liberating her slaves because she believed they were uncivilized and could not possibly live side-by-side with whites in freedom. She says she would give up slavery, as long as blacks could be removed from the country — and, indeed, various schemes of colonization had been promulgated for decades; until 1863, Lincoln avidly supported colonizing blacks and even requested funds from Congress to do so.

Brevard believed that under the firm but benevolent tutelage of the master (or mistress), slavery transformed uncivilized blacks into contented servants. It was outsiders — Northern abolitionists — who made the slaves “restless.” She begins in her entry to distinguish between male and female slaves, and finds female slaves more “impudent,” by which she means not only saucy but sexually promiscuous (at another point she refers to females “meddling with the husbands of others”) — but then she drops the subject. It is taboo to speak of such things. She concludes again with her fear of the slaves being emancipated.

But at other places in her diary, she recognized that the slaves are not childlike, and that they are not happy in slavery. She erupted in anger “when I find out their feelings to me — with all I have done for them . . . I am every now & then awakened by the fact that they hate me.” She at times wished she could “cast them off without scruples of conscience,” but she believed she cannot do so “without a rebuke from my Heavenly father.” And yet she knew that all her slaves, if given a chance, “would aim at freedom — ‘tis natural they should & they will try for it.”

Brevard concluded “my Southern Sisters and brothers who think their slaves would be on our side in a civil war, will, I fear, find they have been artfully taken in.” The slaves feigned contentment to endure enslavement, but they dreamed of freedom. Many slaveholders also feigned contentment with the institution, but knew not what to do and so carried on.

Over the next four years, not only slaveholders but also non-slaveholders, in the North as well as South, would be challenged to reconsider their assumptions about the institution. Brevard expresses the feelings of one individual, a member of the planter elite. In 1860, one quarter of Southern families owned slaves, and more than half of those who did possessed fewer than five. Less than 1 percent of the slaveholders owned as many slaves as Brevard, though these slaveholders owned approximately one-fourth of all the slaves and held political power.

It is difficult to say how typical her experiences were — there probably were not many widowed plantation mistresses responsible for 200 slaves spread over several properties on the eve of the Civil War. There were even fewer who wrote with such candor and verve. But it is safe to say that many slaveholders, male as well as female, shared Brevard’s political and religious beliefs, and, over the course of the war, would also express growing ambivalence, and even bewilderment, about slaves and slavery.

Later in the day on Nov. 9, a cloudy, damp, drizzly afternoon, Brevard returned to her diary and concluded: “Nature seems to be weeping o’er our cause.”

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The diary is published in John Hammond Moore, editor, “A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War: The Diary of Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, 1860-1861″ (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993).

Louis P. Masur chairs the American Studies Program at Trinity College (CT) and is author of “The Civil War: A Concise History” (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).

     Recently the Los Angeles Coroner criticized the Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s decision to remove skeletal remains of Mitrice Richardson, after being told not to disturb the crime scene. The family and the coroner have both raised questions suggesting that a cover-up is being waged by Sheriff Lee Baca and the L.A.S.D., as the case of Mitrice Richardson’s remains unsolved, over a year past her disappearance following her release from police custody.

     Sheriff Baca has made statements indicating that “the case may never be solved.” While he has made those statements, his department has defended the removal of the skull and other parts of the remains of Richardson, as reported by the L.A. Times.

[Moving Mitrice Richardson's remains was a mistake, coroner's office says] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/11/moving-mitirice-richardsons-remains-was-a-mistake-coroners-office-says.html>

      Mitrice Richardson was arrested in Los Angeles County on September 16th 2009. Evidence obtained by several media outlets suggests that the police did not have the blessing of Mitrice Richardson’s mother for Mitrice to be released from custody that night. In fact, it was suggested that Mitrice be held over night for her own safety. This account was made available to the media via audio taped discussions with Mitrice’s mother herself.

     What soon followed was the release of Mitrice Richardson, from custody, just after midnight, September 17 2009. She was released without her vehicle, cell phone, identification, or money which she would have needed for transportation, according to media reporting of the case. Thus, began the disappearance of Mitrice Richardson.   

  [Mitrice Richardson, age 24, went missing after she was released from the Malibu Lost Hills police station at 12:37a.m. Thursday September 17th 2009. She suffers from mental health issues and was released into the remote Malibu canyon area without a car, I.D, phone, money or assistance. Mitrice was an upstanding citizen and student and deserved better treatment than what the Malibu sheriff's gave.    This did not have to happen.

Mitrice was a CAL STATE FULLERTON graduate with a 4.0 GPA and was set to begin a doctoral program."] http://www.findmitrice.info/>

     One thing that this case harkens back to is the case of Joan Little. Why? Because if the evidence developes to the stage where there may have been involvement of law enforcement in the death of Mitrice Richardson, questions will be raised as to whether or not she might have been violated while in custody.

     Joan Little was placed in custody at the Beaufort County Jail in North Carolina back in 1973. The same year another Joan was the subject of a major case in New Jersey. The other Joan was Joanne Chesimard, now known as Assata Shakur, was charged with the killing of a State Trooper and other charges. While in custody, in 1974,  Joan Little said a guard, Clarence Allgood (what a name), attempted to rape her. During a struggle Little managed to kill Allgood with an ice pick, and fled custody.

  [Ms. Little... convicted of a break-in and sent to prison in 1974. She was in the Beaufort County jail when Clarence Allgood, her 62-year-old jailer, was killed with an ice pick. Escaped From Jail]http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DEEDF143CF935A15751C0A96F948260

     What if Mitrice Richardson was in a similar predicament? What if she was unable to defend herself from an assailant who may have been attempting to assault her in a manner such as Joan Little was subjected to? Little was eventually acquitted of murder, as the jury believed her account. The facts from the Joan Little case raises suspicion into the possibility of the L.A.S.D. preventing the death of Mitrice Richardson from being solved for reasons which may reveal criminal contact between law enforcement and Mitrice Richardson.

     Complicating this case is the history of  Sheriff Baca. Baca was criticized for his relationship with actor Mel Gibson. When Gibson was arrested, he was then driven home by Sheriff  Baca who, according to the L.A. Times, is his “friend.” When Mel Gibson was quoted as making anti-Semitic remarks, Sheriff Baca was attending functions held by the Church of Scientology, and CAIR, an organization said to have been a fundamentalist groups from the Middle East.

  [Times reported that a civilian oversight committee had decided to investigate whether Gibson had received favorable treatment because of his celebrity status or his longtime friendship with Baca.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Baca

 Whether of not a correlation exists between the Joan Little case and the fate of Mitrice Richardson, at the very least a proper investigation needs to be conducted. Perhaps the L.A.S.D. should not be involved in that process. It may be time for federal intervention, and let the chips fall where they may. Protecting the integrity of a police department should not come at the expense of the Richardson’s family’s need for resolution and justice for Mitrice Richardson.

     Seeing the manner in which Johannes Mehserle was sentenced for killing Oscar Grant, and allowing for Mehserle’s excuse, “it was an accident,” is part and parcel of the distrust that citizens are having for the way cop cases in California, at the local level. It remains to be seen if the Federal Justice Department follows through on their intent to try Mehserle on Civil Rights charges. It also remains to be seen if not only a federal probe of the L.A.S.D. gets launched, but whether or not federal officials indeed probe the death of Mitrice Richardson.