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Eden. 
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 Posted: Apr 04 2012 at 1:23pm |
Lil’ Kim is the only Hip-Hop artist besides Tupac Shakur to have a college course based on her. The course is called “Hip-Hop Eshu: Queen Bitch 101” English and Textual Studies 350 and is offered at Syracruse University.
Description: Students in Professor Greg Thomas’ class analyze how Lil’ Kim’s rhymes challenge male chauvinism and homophobia in the rap world, as well as transcend old standards of sexual politics. The Queen B herself paid the class a visit in November 2004, but naysayers have criticized the course for undermining a serious college curriculum. Unfazed, Thomas also teaches a graduate-level version called “Hip-Hop’s Queen Bitch Writings.”
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Eden.
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Posted: Apr 04 2012 at 1:30pm |
Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 to Divide Africa
In 1884 at the request of Portugal, German Chancellor Otto von Bismark called together the major western powers of the world to negotiate questions and end confusion over the control of Africa. Bismark appreciated the opportunity to expand Germany’s sphere of influence over Africa and desired to force Germany’s rivals to struggle with one another for territory.
The Berlin Conference was Africa’s undoing in more ways than one. The colonial powers superimposed their domains on the African Continent. By the time Africa regained its independence after the late 1950s, the realm had acquired a legacy of political fragmentation that could neither be eliminated nor made to operate satisfactorily. The African politico-geographical map is thus a permanent liability that resulted from the three months of ignorant, greedy acquisitiveness during a period when Europe’s search for minerals and markets had become insatiable.
At the time of the conference, 80% of Africa remained under Native Traditional and local control.
Fourteen countries were represented by a plethora of ambassadors when the conference opened in Berlin on November 15, 1884 by the imperial chancellor and architect of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck to settle the political partitioning of Africa. Bismarck wanted not only to expand German spheres of influence in Africa but also to play off Germany’s colonial rivals against one another to the Germans’ advantage. The countries represented at the time included Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden-Norway (unified from 1814-1905), Turkey, and the United States of America. Of these fourteen nations, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Portugal were the major players in the conference, controlling most of colonial Africa at the time.
The initial task of the conference was to agree that the Congo River and Niger River mouths and basins would be considered neutral and open to trade. Despite its neutrality, part of the Kongo Basin became a personal Kingdom (private property) for Belgium’s King Leopold II and under his rule, over half of the region’s population died.
At the time of the conference, only the coastal areas of Africa were colonized by the European powers. At the Berlin Conference the European colonial powers scrambled to gain control over the Interior of the Continent. The conference lasted until February 26, 1885 - a three month period where colonial powers haggled over geometric boundaries in the interior of the continent, disregarding the cultural and linguistic boundaries already established by the Native Indigenous African population. What ultimately resulted was a hodgepodge of geometric boundaries that divided Africa into fifty irregular countries. This new map of the continent was superimposed over the one thousand Indigenous cultures and regions of Africa. The new countries lacked rhyme or reason and divided coherent groups of people and merged together disparate groups who really did not get along.
Following the conference, the give and take continued. By 1914, the conference participants had fully divided Africa among themselves into fifty unnatural and artificial States.
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http://www.africafederation.net/Berlin_1885.htm
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Eden.
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Posted: Apr 04 2012 at 1:44pm |
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Eden.
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Posted: Apr 04 2012 at 1:45pm |
 
A Great Day in Harlem - Art Kane, 1958
A Great Day in Harlem Survivors - Gordon Parks, 1996 |
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Eden.
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Posted: Apr 04 2012 at 1:51pm |
New forensic techniques in archaeology reveal existence of high status Africans living in 4th Century AD York
“A picture of multi-cultural Britain in 4th Century AD has been revealed using the latest forensic techniques in archaeology. The new research, published in the March issue of the journal Antiquity, demonstrates that Roman York of the period had individuals of North African descent moving in the highest social circles.
Dr Hella Eckardt, Senior Lecturer at the University of Reading, said: “Multi-cultural Britain is not just a phenomenon of more modern times. Analysis of the ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’ and others like her, contradicts common popular assumptions about the make up of Roman-British populations as well as the view that African immigrants in Roman Britain were of low status, male and likely to have been slaves.”
“To date, we have had to rely on evidence of such foreigners in Roman Britain from inscriptions. However, by analysing the facial features of the Ivory Bangle Lady and measuring her skull compared to reference populations, analysing the chemical signature of the food and drink she consumed, as well as evaluating the evidence from the burial site, we are now able to establish a clear profile of her ancestry and social status.
“It helps paint a picture of a Roman York that was hugely diverse and which included among its population, men, women and children of high status from Romanised North Africa and elsewhere in the Mediterranean.”
The ancestry assessment suggests a mixture of ‘black’ and ‘white’ ancestral traits, and the isotope signature indicates that she may have come from somewhere slightly warmer than the UK. Taken together with the evidence of an unusual burial rite and grave goods, the evidence all points to a high status incomer to Roman York. It seems likely that she is of North African descent, and may have migrated to York from somewhere warmer, possibly the Mediterranean.
The Ivory Bangle Lady was a high status young woman who was buried in Roman York (Sycamore Terrace). Dated to the second half of the fourth century, her grave contains jet and elephant ivory bracelets, earrings, pendants, beads, a blue glass jug and a glass mirror. The most famous object from this burial is a rectangular openwork mount of bone, possibly from an unrecorded wooden casket, which reads ‘Hail, sister, may you live in God’, indicating Christian beliefs.” |
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Eden.
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Posted: Apr 04 2012 at 1:53pm |
 Slave women on the cotton plantation field in the 1800’s.
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indiecat
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Posted: Apr 04 2012 at 5:14pm |
picturesofwar: This day in history: Martin Luther King, Jr., aged 39, is assassinated by James Earl Ray while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. April 4, 1968 - 44 years ago today.
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Eden.
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Posted: Apr 06 2012 at 1:20pm |
The following is her obituary, which was published in the Independent 7 August 1996:
Ella Collins was the half-sister and guardian and in later life a trusted adviser of the black Muslim and radical leader Malcolm X. After his assassination in 1965 she took over the group he founded, the Organisation of Afro-American Unity, but later converted to orthodox Islam.
Malcolm said of her in his Autobiography that she was “the first really proud black woman I had ever seen”. She was “plainly proud of her very black skin”, he added, which was “unheard of among Negroes in those days”. She was active as a businesswoman, a teacher, a civil rights worker and a religious leader.
Malcolm, whose original surname was Little, was the son of the Rev Earl Little, a Baptist preacher and an organiser for Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association in Michigan. Earl Little was a jet-black- skinned man, four of whose six brothers had been killed by white men, one by lynching.
Ella Collins was one of Earl Little’s three children by a previous marriage. She was brought up in Georgia, then moved to Boston. Earl Little married again, a light-skinned woman from Grenada in the West Indies, Louise, whose father was white.
In 1931 Earl Little was killed in a streetcar accident. His son Malcolm believed he was murdered by a white vigilante group called Black Legion. For a while Louise Little struggled to bring up her children but, after a relationship with a man broke up, she had a breakdown and she spent the last 28 years of her life in a mental hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In 1940 Malcolm’s half-sister Ella Little Collins appeared like a guardian angel and invited the boy, then aged 15, to stay with her in Boston.
Ella Little grew up in Georgia, then moved to New York, where she became secretary to the brilliant but frequently outrageous black congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, who represented Harlem. She later moved to Boston, where she managed her mother’s grocery store and invested in house property, which she let out as rooming houses. She lived in Waumbeck Street in what was known as Sugar Hill, the most prosperous part of Roxbury, the black neighbourhood in Boston. To her half-brother it seemed she was “busily involved in dozens of things”, including clubs and civil rights groups.
Malcolm was thrilled by the bright lights of Boston and reassured by his half-sister’s strength and confidence. When he went back to Lansing, he wrote to her, saying he wanted to move to Boston and live with her. She arranged for official custody of the boy (now a ward of the state) to be transferred from Michigan to Massachusetts.
“No physical move in my life,” Malcolm wrote later, “has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions. All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d probably be a brainwashed black Christian.”
At about that time Ella Collins broke up with her second husband, a soldier called Frank. (Her first husband was a doctor, and she later married for a third time.) She had paid, with the money she made from her rented property, for several members of the family to move from Georgia to Boston.
Since her days working for Adam Clayton Powell, Collins had been committed to the struggle for civil rights, but in the 1950s Malcolm persuaded her to join the Nation of Islam, the so-called “black Muslims”, founded by Elijah Muhammad, another disciple of Marcus Garvey. She helped to establish the Nation’s mosque in Boston and a day-care centre attached to it.
When Malcolm became interested in Islam world-wide, as opposed to the Elijah Muhammad version of it, it was Ella Collins who paid for his first visit to Mecca. When he said he wanted to make the pilgrimage, she replied simply, “How much do you need?”, although she herself as a Muslim convert would have liked to make the journey, and she and Malcolm had disagreed on many questions.
They talked all night about his visit, which was to take him not only to Mecca but to Cairo, Beirut and West Africa, and marked a critical change in his political orientation in the direction of a less confrontational, more positive attitude.
In 1959 she left the Nation of Islam and became an orthodox Sunni Muslim. She set up the Sarah A. Little School of Preparatory Arts in Boston, where children were taught Arabic, Swahili, French and Spanish as well as other subjects.
When Malcolm was killed, she drove from Boston to New York to identify the body and helped organise the funeral, a major event in the development of a separatist consciousness among African Americans and also in alerting white opinion to the changing mood among urban blacks.
She told an interviewer a few years ago that Malcolm’s murderers “took something from me that I put a lot into”. Malcolm, she believed, was “at the point where he could become stronger than ever. I could see Malcolm becoming the greatest black man in the history of the world.”
In recent years she suffered a number of strokes and both her legs had to be amputated as a result of diabetes. She left a son, two grandchildren, three brothers and a sister.
Ella Little (Ella Collins), civil rights activist: born 1914; married three times (one son); died 3 August 1996. |
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Eden.
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Posted: Apr 06 2012 at 1:26pm |
 1970s Somali Basketball Team
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Eden.
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Posted: Apr 06 2012 at 1:32pm |
  
the 369th infantry regiment
The 369th. Nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters, ( The Germans named them Hellfighters because they fought like hell, never lost ground and never had any men captured. One third of the 369th died in combat). Were the first all-black regiment to fight in World War I. Even before they left for duty, the Hellfighters had to endure the racist taunts, jeers and violent attacks from their fellow white soldiers on the Camp Whitman base. The regiment had arrived in France in early 1918 and was trained for several months in French military camps. By May they were fighting on the Front lines, where they spent the next six months— longer than any other American unit during the war. The entire unit was given the distinguished Croix de Guerre by the French national government for their service.
But their heroism and valor were never recognized back home.
Despite the sacrifices and courage displayed by African American soldiers during the war, they nevertheless encountered a virulent backlash of white racism upon their return to the United States. A number of newly discharged soldiers- still wearing their uniforms- were lynched by white mobs. The post-war landscape was rife with racial and economic tension. The demobilization of the troops was met with severe and rising inflation and unemployment. At the war’s end, approximately 9 million people were employed in industries pertaining to the overseas effort. The war effort had provided openings for the migration of blacks into urban manufacturing jobs, but with the war’s end job scarcity fueled the notion among working class white workers that blacks were taking their places in the labor force.
Racial violence erupted in the summer of 1919, in what Harlem Renaissance poet and intellectual James Weldon Johnson would call “Red Summer.” On 27 July, in the Northern city of Chicago, Eugene Williams was drowned by white swimmers who threw rocks at the young African American boy for swimming too close to a white beach. The black community was outraged after police refused to arrest those responsible for Williams’ death. Rioting erupted throughout the city, and for the next five days, black neighborhoods were the sites of terror, burning and lynching. By the beginning of August, the city lay in disrepair, 38 dead, 500 injured, and over 1,000 black people homeless.
The fear of organized black labor was the catalyst for more racial violence and terror in Elaine, Arkansas. In early October, as black farmers and sharecroppers met to organize a union, a white mob swarmed down upon them in attempts to break up the meeting. The violence that ensued left over 100 black farmers dead and their farms destroyed. Throughout the South, independent black farmers and unions became the targets of racist violence and lynching.
Throughout the summer and fall, 24 other race riots erupted within American cities, all instigated by white acts of violence. In the Washington, D.C. riots, whites were shocked to find that black urbanites quickly organized collective resistance and militantly stood their ground. Indeed the war had meant something to black Americans; it meant that if they were to support the fight for democracy abroad, they would wage one for equality at home.
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