In 1965, Booker Wright, an African-American waiter in Greenwood, Mississippi, dared to be interviewed by NBC about racism in America, a decision that forever changed his and his family’s lives. Wright said during the interview, “I always learned to smile. The meaner the man be, the more you smile. Do all your crying on the inside.” He would later lose his job, be beaten by police, and ultimately be murdered. Wright’s story is told in the new documentary film, “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story,” a collaboration between our two guests: co-producer Yvette Johnson, Wright’s grand-daughter, and director Raymond De Felitta, whose father, Frank De Felitta, originally filmed the interview with Wright and later said he regretted it.
A Film Settles Accounts From the ’60s By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: April 20, 2012
Booker Wright, a black waiter in a whites-only restaurant in Greenwood, Miss., neither protested nor preached as the civil rights movement of the 1960s roiled the Delta. But the film “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story,” scheduled to premiere on Sunday at the Tribeca Film Festival, portrays him as one of the small heroes of that grand movement.
His feat: He dropped his mask of servility in a 1966 television documentary about the state, admitting that he was “crying on the inside” as he kowtowed to customers who sometimes denied him tips and uttered racial slurs. “The meaner the man be, the more you smile,” he explains.
The new documentary uses interviews with friends, family, ordinary residents and elected officials to talk about what might be called Mr. Wright’s double life — he also ran his own thriving restaurant, Booker’s Place, catering to black patrons — and about the town now and then, when it was a site of civil-rights-era horrors.
Beyond tribute or sociological excavation, however, “Booker’s Place” also represents a personal reckoning: The film’s director, Raymond De Felitta (“City Island”; “ ’Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris”), is the son of Frank De Felitta, the producer and director of that mostly forgotten 1966 documentary, “Mississippi: A Self Portrait.” Yvette Johnson, a co-producer, is one of Mr. Wright’s four grandchildren and had searched for years for more information about him.
It just so happened that Mr. De Felitta had posted a copy of the documentary by his father, now 90, online in 2011. (It’s no longer available.) That prompted the younger Mr. De Felitta’s producing partner, David Zellerford, to suggest a new Mississippi film project, and his research led him to Ms. Johnson.
Ms. Johnson, a 37-year-old writer who lives in Phoenix with her husband and two sons, had started a blog about her grandfather (www.bookerwright.com) and is writing a book about him. “I felt grateful they’d bring me along to protect my grandfather’s story,” she said by phone, discussing her first foray into film.
She and Mr. De Felitta conducted interviews for the new film, which has commercial releases in Los Angeles on Wednesday and in New York on Friday.
She recalled vaguely knowing that her grandfather, born in 1926, had once spoken to a television crew back in the ’60s, which led her to see him as a kind of “accidental activist.”
By all appearances, Mr. Wright relished his turn before the camera. He begins with a singsong recitation of the seafood and steak menu at Lusco’s Restaurant. A round-faced man with a slight mustache, outfitted in a white jacket and black bow tie, he goes on to explain that he endured for his three children.
“I just don’t want my children to go through what I go through,” he says, adding that he longed for them to be able to get jobs for which they are qualified. He then looks at the camera and states, “But remember, you have to keep that smile.”
Hodding Carter III, the journalist and former member of the Carter administration, grew up and worked in Greenville, Miss., and said his first reaction upon seeing the documentary was that Mr. Wright was a dead man.
“In one person, in one interview, in one place, you have personified what it was black Mississippi was saying to white Mississippi after all these years,” he says in “Booker’s Place.”
The words uttered by Mr. Wright in that NBC broadcast led to a beating by a local police officer. He lost his waiter’s job at Lusco’s, which he had held since he was 14. His own restaurant was vandalized.
A beloved and respected figure in a town that was a major center for the segregationist Citizens’ Council, he reopened Booker’s Place and bought a school bus to transport children in the Head Start program. He was shot to death by a black customer in his restaurant in 1973, which raised some conspiracy theories.
“Booker’s Place” “started out as history of Greenwood now and then, but it became focused on Booker,” Mr. De Felitta, 47, said in a telephone interview. “You can cast it as symbolic of larger concerns about race, which is still an important subject and which people are still interested in.”
The new film allowed Mr. De Felitta to preserve the work of his father, who made many documentaries but became famous for “Audrey Rose,” a 1975 horror novel. He said his father, who appears in “Booker’s Place,” felt guilty for exposing Mr. Wright to the public, especially in that area.
Emmett Till was lynched just a few miles away in 1955. The civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were killed in Mississippi in 1964, their bodies buried in a mound in Neshoba County, roughly an hour by car from Greenwood .
But Ms. Johnson said two important things came out of the “Booker’s Place” project. She met Frank De Felitta and assured him that he had done the right thing in giving her grandfather a platform. And after finally seeing the 1966 film and interviewing people in Greenwood, she decided that her grandfather was bold and deliberate in speaking up.
It turned out that Mr. Wright’s wish for his children to lead different lives came true. Katherine Jones, Ms. Johnson’s mother, became a director in telecommunications at the University of California, San Diego. (Ms. Johnson’s father, Leroy Jones, grew up near Greenwood and played defensive end for the San Diego Chargers.)
Her mother’s older sister, Vera Douglas, became a public school teacher in Greenville, Miss. Gloria Liggans, a stepdaughter of Mr. Wright from a common-law marriage, married, settled in Port Gibson, Miss., and is now a grandmother.
Surprisingly, Ms. Johnson, who recalls feeling somewhat adrift growing up in mostly white communities in San Diego, now sees Greenwood, where she has many relatives, as more of a home than San Diego or Phoenix.
“It’s beautiful; the people are kind and warm,” she said. “I’ve walked away with a sense of heritage that includes a hero in my lineage.”
Living the Language Last Modified: 18 Apr 2012 07:18
Aljazeera
Australia, which was once home to 200 languages, now suffers from the highest rate of language extinction in the world.
Australia suffers from the highest rate of language extinction in the world. Once home to more than 200 languages spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of the continent, now only about 20 are spoken on a daily basis.
The suppression of indigenous languages was an intrinsic part of the often violent methods employed by the British against the Aboriginals when conquering the continent. The resulting extreme marginalisation of the Aboriginal people can still be seen in modern Australia, where Aboriginals were neither allowed to vote in elections nor to settle freely until the 1960s. Even today, various government policies target Aboriginal communities but do not apply to other Australians.
Now the few remaining indigenous languages are in danger of dying out in the coming years. The struggle to preserve them often rests with a few dedicated individuals striving to not only re-learn the language of their ancestors, but to also teach it to others.
Michael Jarrett, who teaches the Gumbaynggirr language spoken on the Queensland coast, says: “When I was growing up, the Aboriginal people were forbidden to speak their language. So I didn’t get to hear fluent speakers talking together. But the land is starting to hear the native tongue again. The Gumbaynggirr language belongs in Gumbaynggirr territory. It hasn’t heard the language for many, many years.”
April 5th, 2012
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Democracynow.org
“My name is Kenneth Chamberlain. This is my sworn testimony. White Plains police are going to come in here and kill me.”
And that’s just what they did.
In the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011, U.S. Marine veteran Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. accidentally hit his LifeAid medical-alert pendant, presumably while sleeping. The 68-year-old retired corrections officer had a heart condition, but wasn’t in need of help that dawn. Within two hours, the White Plains, N.Y., police department broke down his apartment door and shot him dead. Chamberlain was African-American. As with Trayvon Martin, the black teen recently killed in Florida, there are recordings of the events, recordings that include a racial slur directed at the victim.
The opening quote, above, was related to us by Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., when he appeared on the “Democracy Now!” news hour talking about the police killing of his father. Ken Jr. was holding on to the LifeAid pendant that his father wore around his neck in case of a medical emergency. Perhaps unbeknownst to the White Plains police who arrived at Ken Sr.’s door that morning, the LifeAid system includes a box in the home that, when activated, transmits audio to the LifeAid company, where it is recorded. Ken Jr. and his lawyers heard the recording in a meeting at the office of the Westchester County district attorney, Janet DiFiore.
Ken Jr. repeated what he heard his father say on the tape: “He says, ‘I’m a 68-year-old man with a heart condition. Why are you doing this to me?’ … You also hear him pleading with the officers again, over and over. And at one point, that’s when the expletive is used by one of the police officers.”
One of Chamberlain’s attorneys, Mayo Bartlett, told me about the racial slur. Bartlett is a former Westchester County prosecutor, so he knows the ropes. He was very explicit in recounting what he heard on the recording.
“Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. said to the police, ‘I’m a sick old man.’ One of the police officers replied, ‘We don’t give a f—k, n——-!’” (that last word rhymes with ‘trigger,’ which they would soon pull). The recording also includes a taunt from the police, as related by Bartlett, “Open the door, Kenny, you’re a grown-ass man!” It was when Ken Jr. related how the police mocked his father’s military service that he broke down. “He said, ‘Semper fi.” So they said, “Oh, you’re a Marine. Hoo-rah. Hoo-rah.” And this is somebody that served this country. Why would you even say that to him?” Ken Jr. wept as he held his father’s Marine ring and Veterans Administration card.
The LifeAid operator that November morning, hearing the exchange live, called the White Plains police in a desperate attempt to cancel the call for emergency medical aid. Chamberlain’s niece, who lives in the building, ran down, trying to intervene. Chamberlain’s sister was on her cellphone, offering to talk to her brother. The police denied any attempt at help. One was heard on the recording saying, “We don’t need any mediator.”
The heavily armed police used a special device to take Chamberlain’s door completely off the hinges and, as chillingly captured in the Taser-mounted camera, burst into the apartment. Mayo Bartlett recounted seeing Chamberlain shirtless in the video, hands at his side, without the knife or hatchet that police claim he wielded, standing in his boxer shorts. “The minute they got into the house, they didn’t even give him one command. They never mentioned, ‘Put your hands up.’ They never told him to lay down on the bed. They never did any of that. The first thing they did, as soon as that door was finally broken off the hinges, you could see the Taser light up, and it was charged, and you could see it going directly toward him.”
The last thing Bartlett hears on the Taser tape is “shut it off,” meaning, turn off the video recording, which the police did. Within minutes, they would shoot Chamberlain twice. Four months later, no one has been charged with the killing. Democracy Now! cohost Juan Gonzalez revealed the name of the shooter through his reporting in the New York Daily News, as White Plains Officer Anthony Carelli. Carelli is to be tried in coming months for alleged police brutality against two brothers, the sons of Jordanian immigrants, who say Carelli beat one of them, Jereis Hatter, while handcuffed, and called him a ‘raghead’.
Trayvon Martin was killed Feb. 26. A Florida grand jury is expected to begin the investigation into his killing on April 10. The next day, April 11, a New York grand jury is scheduled to begin hearing evidence in the case of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. He was killed last November. In both cases, an African-American male was gunned down. In both cases, the shooter is known, but neither yet has been arrested.
William Kamkwamba was born August 5, 1987, in Malawi, Africa, a country plagued by AIDS and poverty. Like most people in his village, his family of nine subsisted on the meager crops they could grow, living without the luxuries—considered necessities in the West—of electricity or running water. Already living on the edge, the situation became dire when, in 2002, Malawi experienced the worst famine in 50 years. Struggling to survive, 14-year-old William was forced to drop out of school because his family could not afford the $80-a-year tuition.
Windmill
Though he was not in a classroom, William continued to think, learn—and dream. Armed with curiosity, determination and a library book he discovered in a nearby library, he embarked on a daring plan—to build a windmill that could bring his family the electricity only two percent of Malawians could afford.
Discovered
The windmill project drew visitors from many kilometers away, including Dr. Hartford Mchazime, Ph.D., the deputy director of MTTA, the Malawian Non-Government Organization (NGO) responsible for community libraries.
Mchazime brought press, including: The Malawi Daily Times, bloggers/engineers Soyapi Mumba and Mike McKay from the Baoabab Health Project in Malawi, and Emeka Okafor, program director for TEDGlobal, a prestigious gathering of thinkers and innovators.
Okafor diligently searched for William and invited him to participate as a TED Conference fellow. William’s presentation led him to mentors and donors willing to support William’s education and village projects.
Education
Fundraising by Dr. Mchazime allowed William to re-enroll in high school at Madisi Secondary School. After one trimester, William transferred to African Bible College Christian Academy, a private prep school in the capital city of Lilongwe.
In summer 2008, William completed a English immersion course at Regents Language Institute, Cambridge, U.K.
In September, 2008, William became one of 97 inaugural students at the African Leadership Academy, a pan-African prep school based near Johannesburg, South Africa. The school aims to provide rigorous academics, ethical leadership training, entrepreneurship and design education.
In a small, remote mountain top primary school in the Kenyan bush, hundreds of children are jostling for a chance for the free education newly promised by the Kenyan government. One new applicant causes astonishment when he knocks on the door of the school. He is Maruge (Oliver Litondo), an old Mau Mau veteran in his eighties, who is desperate to learn to read at this late stage of his life. He fought for the liberation of his country and now feels he must have the chance of an education so long denied – even if it means sitting in a classroom alongside six-year-olds.
Moved by his passionate plea, head teacher Jane Obinchu (Naomie Harris), supports his struggle to gain admission and together they face fierce opposition from parents and officials who don’t want to waste a precious school place on such an old man.
Full of vitality and humour, the film explores the remarkable relationships Maruge builds with his classmates some eighty years his junior. Through Maruge’s journey, we are taken back to the shocking untold story of British colonial rule 50 years earlier where Maruge fought for the freedom of his country, eventually ending up in the extreme and harsh conditions of the British detention camps.
Directed by Justin Chadwick (THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL/BLEAK HOUSE) from a script by Emmy-winner Ann Peacock (THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, NIGHTS IN RODANTHE, KIT KITTRIDGE), THE FIRST GRADER is a heart warming and inspiring true story of one man’s fight for what he believes is his right in order to overcome the burdens of his past. It is a triumphant testimony to the transforming force of education.
The filming process itself was quite extraordinary, as the children in the film – who are in many ways the stars – had never even seen a film or television set before let alone been involved in the filming process. Their involvement in the shoot was a totally novel experience for them and their enthusiasm and energy is captured beautifully on screen.
If you ask Colombia’s city dwellers and governing political class, they’ll tell you the country’s 40-year-old civil war is over. But The War We Are Living reveals the “other” Colombia, in rural areas far away from the capital, where the war is all too real – and now the battle is over gold. In Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women are fighting to hold onto the gold-rich land that has sustained their community through small-scale mining for centuries. Clemencia Carabali and Francia Marquez are part of a powerful network of female leaders who found that in wartime women can organize more freely than men. As they defy paramilitary death threats and insist on staying on their land, Carabali and Marquez are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war. If they lose the battle, they and thousands of their neighbors will join Colombia’s 4 million people – most of them women and children – who have been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods. Narrated by Alfre Woodard.
by KEVIN on Mrz 3, 2012 • 9:00 am
from icrates.org
The Jende Ri Palenge (People of Palenque) compilation on Soul Jazz provides an exhaustive collection of homegrown Afro-Columbian roots sounds and a comprehensive insight into a vibrant musical and cultural legacy fusing Latin and African influences. This ambitious new release is the result of an extensive project by Colombian filmmakers Santiago Posada and Simon Meija on location in San Basilio de Palenque; the first free slave (or “Maroon”) community in the Americas dating back the 16th century and the epicentre of Afro-Colombian culture.
Jende Ri Palenge is available as a 3-disc set, complete with remix CD featuring ambitious dubstep and electro reworkings of the original tracks by the likes of Osunlade, Matias Aguayo and Kromestar plus accompanying documentary DVD that narrates the history and evolution of the village with its heritage told by the villagers and performers themselves. Serious collectors can get hold of the release as a mammoth, limited-edition 5 LP plus DVD box set.
Posada and Meija set up the Palenque studio in 2008, recording over 200 hours of performances over a three month period whilst simultaneously shooting the documentary. The project highlights and explores a distinct, percussive roots sound, tracing its origins and rhythm back to Angola in West Africa, counterbalanced with Latin flavours and delivered with the urgency and vitality of a thriving local musical tradition. Jende Ri Palenge goes deep into the infectious, hypnotic West African rhythms laced with vocal chants and catchy refrains sung in the local creole (a fusion of Spanish plus West African vocabulary drawing on a hybrid of Bantu, Kikongo and Kimbundu).
The music creates a sense of displacement through a fusion of sounds and languages that is irresistibly individual, joyfully transmitted by the vibrant performances by homegrown performers. The collection covers a broad range of treasured local sounds and interpretations. The primal, rhythmic pulse of “Kunchuzo” and driving “Rama de Tamarindo” pay homage to Angolan semba rythms, with dashes of infectious latin / afro fusion pop in “Nena” the and frivolous “Mi Gallina”.
The compilation explores the day-to-day experience of Palenque dwellers, from the bawdy, irreverent “Destápame la botella” to the raw street tale “La Mato Donde La Encuentre” and edgy “La Preñà”, a tale of family shame that explores the darker side of life in the community. A taste of the African blues vocal tradition can be heard on “Palenque, un Rincón de Africa” and “Padre No Mande en Su Casa”.
The remixes of the Palenque material however yield mixed results, with a tendency to neuter the flow and edge of the original recordings, most notably on Secondo’s “Porque Te Ries de Mi” and Matias Aguayo’s remix of “Destápame la Botella” that loses the vitality of the original performance through the affected treatment of the vocals. Saying that, the Afro-Columbian sound fuses well with Kromestar’s eerie dubstep take of “Nena” and the spacy Aurelian Riviere reworking of “Candela”. Also effective is Osunlade’s transformation of the seedy “La Preñà” into a bright, commercial dancefloor groove.
Though not an easy introduction to Afro-Columbian music for the casual listener (undoubtedtly sweetened by the inclusion of the remix CD), hardcore Latin and African music fans will find Jendi Ri Palengue a gem of a release and a valuable musical and cultural resource illuminating an obscure corner of the South American musical history and society.
In a Black History Month special, Democracy Now! airs an extended interview with the legendary pianist and composer Randy Weston. For the past six decades, Weston has been a pioneering jazz musician incorporating the vast rhythmic heritage of Africa. His most famous compositions include, “Little Niles,” “Blue Moses,” and “Hi-Fly,” and his 1960 album, “Uhuru Afrika,” was a landmark recording that celebrated the independence movements in Africa and the influence of traditional African music on jazz. The record, which began with a freedom poem written by Langston Hughes, would later be banned by the South African apartheid regime, along with albums by Max Roach and Lena Horne. In 1961, Randy Weston visited Africa for the first time as part of a delegation that also featured Nina Simone. The trip would transform Weston’s life and lead him to eventually moving to Africa in 1967. In 2001, he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts — it is considered to be the nation’s highest honor in jazz. Weston talks about his collaboration with Langston Hughes, how Marcus Garvey and Paul Robeson influenced his life, his friendship with the Nigerian afrobeat star Fela Kuti, and his success with “having people understand the impact of African rhythms in world music, whether it’s Brazil or Cuba or Mississippi or Brooklyn. If you don’t have that African pulse, nothing is happening,” Weston said. Now 85 years old, Weston continues to tour the world, and in 2010, he published, “African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston.
In America, Pete O’Neal was an angry man, an ex-con who found a kind of religion in 1960s black nationalism. In a Tanzania village, he’s been a champion of children.
Many of the young orphans gather round to watch, and lend their support, as Pete O'Neal has fresh ink applied to his fading black panther tattoo. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
By Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times January 29, 2012
Reporting from Imbaseni, Tanzania — The fugitive shuffles to his computer and begins typing out his will. He is about to turn 71, and it is time. “My life,” he writes, “has been a wild and wicked ride….”
All Pete O’Neal has amassed fits on two pages: A small brick home with a sheet-metal roof. A few road-beaten vehicles. A cluster of bunkhouses and classrooms he spent decades building, brick by scavenged brick, near the slopes of Mt. Meru’s volcanic cone. Everything will go to his wife of 42 years, Charlotte, and to a few trusted workers.
He prints out the will late one Saturday morning and settles into his reclining chair to check the spelling. He signs his name. Then, to guarantee its authenticity, he finds an ink pad, rolls his thumb across it, and affixes his thumbprint to the bottom of the page.
“I think that’ll do it,” he says.
When last he walked America’s streets, O’Neal was a magnetic young man possessed of bottomless anger. He was an ex-con who’d found a kind of religion in late-’60s black nationalism, a vain, violent street hustler reborn in a Black Panther uniform of dark sunglasses, beret and leather jacket. With pitiless, knife-sharp diction, he spoke of sending police to their graves.
This morning, he sits in his living room uncapping medicine bottles. A pill for high blood pressure. Another for the pain in his back and his bad knee. An aspirin to thin his blood. Time is catching him, like the lions that pursue him implacably through his nightmares, their leashes held by policemen.
He pushes through his screen door into the brisk morning air. A slightly stooped, thickset man with long, graying dreadlocks, he moves unsteadily down the irregular stone steps he built into the sloping dirt. He makes his way past the enormous avocado tree, past the horse barn with its single slow-footed tenant, Bullet, past the shaded dining pavilion.
His four-acre compound bustles with visitors, many of them preparing for a memorial service for Geronimo Pratt, a former Panther who died in his farmhouse down the road, his affairs untidy, his will unfinished, his death a sharp message to O’Neal not to put off the paperwork any longer.
Most of O’Neal’s big dreams have faded over the years, or come to feel silly. Like beating the 42-year-old federal gun charges that caused him to flee the United States. Like the global socialist revolution that he was supposed to help lead. Like returning home to the streets of his Midwestern childhood. Like winning citizenship in his adopted African country, and the prize that’s eluded him on two continents: the feeling of belonging somewhere.
This is what’s left: the shell of a 20-year-old Toyota Coaster bus that bulks before him in a clearing. It’s a stripped-and-gutted 29-seater that he bought for $11,500 after years of squirreling away money. It came with dents, a cracked windshield, a peeling paint job, rotting floorboards, frayed seats.
Still, it seemed like a good deal until he found the engine had to be replaced, costing an additional $4,000. He’s hired mechanics and craftsmen to rebuild the bus nearly from the chassis up, and a few of them are milling around now, informing him in Swahili of their progress.
He rarely leaves home anymore. Crowds jangle his nerves; traffic makes his hands shake. Yet nothing feels more urgent than readying this bus for an improbable 300-mile trip to the edge of his adopted continent.
A group of American high school students, mostly white, is gathering in the dining pavilion. They’ve been coming by the busload for years, many drawn by the intrigue of staying with a former Panther. They pay him $30 a night for a bunk. The money — together with sporadic donations from sympathetic friends here and abroad — pays the bills.
Pete O'Neal in his Black Panther days. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
The students pause before the big poster featuring O’Neal as a fierce young militant, rifle in arms, Charlotte at his side. It’s hard to reconcile that image with the grandfatherly host who greets them in Swahili as if they were old friends, booming, “Karibu!” Welcome!
He asks where they’re from. A girl says Missouri, which happens to be his home state, and he hugs her theatrically. Everyone laughs. “All of you are welcome,” he says, “even if you’re from strange places.”
He plants them before documentary footage about his life. It’s easier than explaining the whole story himself. Where would he start? His childhood in segregated Kansas City, Mo., where the amusement park admitted black kids once a year, a day so cherished that they went in their Sunday best? Should he start with the stabbings and shootings in the projects where he grew up?
“I lived in the streets,” he says. “I didn’t have time to be happy.”
After one arrest, he was given a stark choice: reform school or the armed services. The Navy threw him out after he plunged a butcher knife into another sailor’s chest over an insult, nearly killing him. He drifted in and out of lockup. He pimped girls in three states. He wore $300 Italian suits and a blond wave in his processed hair.
To the FBI, the Panthers were homegrown terrorists who romanticized lawbreaking with overheated Marxist rhetoric. To O’Neal, who founded the Kansas City chapter of the party in early 1969, it represented a lifeline out of an abyss of drugs and aimlessness. He blazed with purpose: End racism and class inequality, fast.
“I would like very much to shoot my way into the House of Representatives,” he declared in a televised interview, angry at a congressman who was investigating the Panthers. Pressed to clarify, he added: “I mean it literally.”
He stormed into a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, screaming accusations that the Kansas City police chief was funneling weapons to white supremacist groups.
Shortly afterward, a federal judge sentenced him to a four-year prison term on a conviction of transporting a shotgun across state lines. Out on bail, he decided to run. He and Charlotte fled in 1970 to Sweden, then to Algeria, and finally, in late 1972, to Tanzania, whose socialist government welcomed left-wing militants.
The O’Neals had $700. After a few years they bought a patch of inhospitable brush and volcanic rock in Imbaseni, a cobra-infested village of thatched-roof shacks in the country’s remote northern interior. They were up before dawn, dancing with Al Jarreau on the tape deck, gathering locals for the day’s work. Their two young African-born children, Malcolm and Stormy, carried bricks and water buckets. Continue reading…
Written by Ruth Manuel-Logan on January 20, 2012 2:58 pm
Australia is ready to make some historic changes to its 200-year-old constitution by requesting its citizens to approve a clause that recognizes Aborigines as the country’s first occupants.
In a report handed to the country’s prime minister, Julia Gillard, an expert panel made up of 19 indigenous leaders, politicos, entrepreneurs, and legal eagles will review and revamp the document that still contains racist Aboriginal references, even though it had been previously amended back in 1967 when Aborigines were finally recognized as “real citizens.”
Like the Native Americans and other indigenous people, Aborigines were displaced by British settlers. The dispossession and dislocation from their land had devastating consequences to the Aborigines, because land was central to their identity. From that time, the Aborigines have endured a marginalized existence including being victims of racism and discrimination.Consequently, they are one of the poorest, unhealthiest, and most-disadvantaged people, with an average lifespan 17 years shorter than other Australians.
As for the constitution, possible revisions would include a section that would prohibit racial discrimination and acknowledge the indigenous people’s continuous relationship to their traditional lands and waters.
According to Prime Minister Gillard, changing the constitution would recognize the “unique and special place of Aboriginal people and strengthen the identity of our nation,” she told the Associated Australian Press. Gillard has reportedly pledged to hold a referendum on the constitutional changes before the next general election, due in 2013.
Perhaps this recent change to the country’s constitution is finally a step toward reconciliation as Australia strives to improve relations with the Aborigine population.
In 1965, Booker Wright, an African-American waiter in Greenwood, Mississippi, dared to be interviewed by NBC about racism in America, a decision that forever changed his and his family’s lives. Wright said during the interview, “I always learned to smile. The meaner the man be, the more you smile. Do all your crying on the inside.” He would later lose his job, be beaten by police, and ultimately be murdered. Wright’s story is told in the new documentary film, “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story,” a collaboration between our two guests: co-producer Yvette Johnson, Wright’s grand-daughter, and director Raymond De Felitta, whose father, Frank De Felitta, originally filmed the interview with Wright and later said he regretted it. 
“My name is Kenneth Chamberlain. This is my sworn testimony. White Plains police are going to come in here and kill me.”
Discovered
In a small, remote mountain top primary school in the Kenyan bush, hundreds of children are jostling for a chance for the free education newly promised by the Kenyan government. One new applicant causes astonishment when he knocks on the door of the school. He is Maruge (Oliver Litondo), an old Mau Mau veteran in his eighties, who is desperate to learn to read at this late stage of his life. He fought for the liberation of his country and now feels he must have the chance of an education so long denied – even if it means sitting in a classroom alongside six-year-olds.
If you ask Colombia’s city dwellers and governing political class, they’ll tell you the country’s 40-year-old civil war is over. But The War We Are Living reveals the “other” Colombia, in rural areas far away from the capital, where the war is all too real – and now the battle is over gold. In Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women are fighting to hold onto the gold-rich land that has sustained their community through small-scale mining for centuries. Clemencia Carabali and Francia Marquez are part of a powerful network of female leaders who found that in wartime women can organize more freely than men. As they defy paramilitary death threats and insist on staying on their land, Carabali and Marquez are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war. If they lose the battle, they and thousands of their neighbors will join Colombia’s 4 million people – most of them women and children – who have been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods. Narrated by Alfre Woodard.
The Jende Ri Palenge (People of Palenque) compilation on Soul Jazz provides an exhaustive collection of homegrown Afro-Columbian roots sounds and a comprehensive insight into a vibrant musical and cultural legacy fusing Latin and African influences. This ambitious new release is the result of an extensive project by Colombian filmmakers Santiago Posada and Simon Meija on location in San Basilio de Palenque; the first free slave (or “Maroon”) community in the Americas dating back the 16th century and the epicentre of Afro-Colombian culture.
The music creates a sense of displacement through a fusion of sounds and languages that is irresistibly individual, joyfully transmitted by the vibrant performances by homegrown performers. The collection covers a broad range of treasured local sounds and interpretations. The primal, rhythmic pulse of “Kunchuzo” and driving “Rama de Tamarindo” pay homage to Angolan semba rythms, with dashes of infectious latin / afro fusion pop in “Nena” the and frivolous “Mi Gallina”.
The compilation explores the day-to-day experience of Palenque dwellers, from the bawdy, irreverent “Destápame la botella” to the raw street tale “La Mato Donde La Encuentre” and edgy “La Preñà”, a tale of family shame that explores the darker side of life in the community. A taste of the African blues vocal tradition can be heard on “Palenque, un Rincón de Africa” and “Padre No Mande en Su Casa”.
In a Black History Month special, Democracy Now! airs an extended interview with the legendary pianist and composer Randy Weston. For the past six decades, Weston has been a pioneering jazz musician incorporating the vast rhythmic heritage of Africa. His most famous compositions include, “Little Niles,” “Blue Moses,” and “Hi-Fly,” and his 1960 album, “Uhuru Afrika,” was a landmark recording that celebrated the independence movements in Africa and the influence of traditional African music on jazz. The record, which began with a freedom poem written by Langston Hughes, would later be banned by the South African apartheid regime, along with albums by Max Roach and Lena Horne. In 1961, Randy Weston visited Africa for the first time as part of a delegation that also featured Nina Simone. The trip would transform Weston’s life and lead him to eventually moving to Africa in 1967. In 2001, he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts — it is considered to be the nation’s highest honor in jazz. Weston talks about his collaboration with Langston Hughes, how Marcus Garvey and Paul Robeson influenced his life, his friendship with the Nigerian afrobeat star Fela Kuti, and his success with “having people understand the impact of African rhythms in world music, whether it’s Brazil or Cuba or Mississippi or Brooklyn. If you don’t have that African pulse, nothing is happening,” Weston said. Now 85 years old, Weston continues to tour the world, and in 2010, he published, “African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston.
When last he walked America’s streets, O’Neal was a magnetic young man possessed of bottomless anger. He was an ex-con who’d found a kind of religion in late-’60s black nationalism, a vain, violent street hustler reborn in a Black Panther uniform of dark sunglasses, beret and leather jacket. With pitiless, knife-sharp diction, he spoke of sending police to their graves.
Most of O’Neal’s big dreams have faded over the years, or come to feel silly. Like beating the 42-year-old federal gun charges that caused him to flee the United States. Like the global socialist revolution that he was supposed to help lead. Like returning home to the streets of his Midwestern childhood. Like winning citizenship in his adopted African country, and the prize that’s eluded him on two continents: the feeling of belonging somewhere.
Australia is ready to make some historic changes to its 200-year-old constitution by requesting its citizens to approve a clause that recognizes Aborigines as the country’s first occupants.
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