We are in the business of writing and publishing
Very few things can be done while living Black that are not called into question by white America. For example, we, that is Black folk, have known for a very long time (much longer than white folk have been willing to acknowledge), that it is virtually a crime to drive while Black in most places in this country.
My maternal grandmother had an intense dislike for Herbert Hoover. She believed that Hoover was too much of an aristocrat to have empathy for the average American.
She knew fascinating details about all of the presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. She was married the year before Hoover came into power. Her first child, my mom, was born six weeks after Hoover was elected.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has been called in to probe sexual misconduct allegations against one of the nation’s oldest Black College Sororities, on the campus of Fort Valley State University.
The university was founded in 1895 as Fort Valley High and Industrial School to provide education for descendants of people who had been enslaved on Middle Georgia cotton and peach plantations.
Let me hasten to say, what happened at Starbucks in Philadelphia last weekend happens all the time in America, especially to Black men. In this respect there is not much to see here.It’s has happened to me, but not in Starbucks. I don’t go there because the coffee is too expensive for my taste buds.
Albert Murray coined the phase Omniamerican as a way to explain the cultural conundrum that the American melting pot is and always has been. He did not like the expression Black American or German American. Murray began with the “basic assumption that the United States is a mulatto culture.”
There was no better way to explain the bastardization of American culture than through the gutteral sounds of jazz music, which he loved and appreciated along with the blues and the classics.
I recently met Lydia Meredith at a local book club dinner. She is the author of The gay Preacher’s Wife: How My Gay Husband Deconstructed My Life and Reconstructed My Faith . The ladies in the book club did not know what to make of the book and sought to get the perspective of a heterosexual man, so they invited me.
Note: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book on the meaning of Memphis fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr.
In Memphis, “The King” may be Elvis, but the city since April 4, 1968 has been defined by what happened to “A King” on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel outside of room 306.
Like Dallas, Texas, Memphis, Tennessee suffers from a sense of metaphysical guilt over the blood, in this instance, of a King, who came in peace and was slain in its city. No city leader wants this type of tragedy to occur in their geopolitical space. It simply is not good for business; and if not good for business, city leaders walk on eggshells to cleanse their collective guilt for a crime committed within their political subdivision; and some may argue with their acquiescence.
David Hogg, 18 years-old and a survivor of the Parkland High School Massacre can teach a thing or two to alumni of Tuskegee University about the art of the boycott.
Last month, Laura Ingraham, host of the Fox News Show, The Ingraham Angle mocked Hogg because he has been turned down by four colleges for fall admission.
Breeding babies or breeding racial hatred?
In 1971, I was a college student at Tuskegee University. Two of my classmates and I decided to drive down to Ozark, Alabama to attend George Wallace’s kick-off run for President. Although, the crowd was not dressed in the garb of the KKK, they might very well have been.