R.I.P. John Hope Franklin

The world lost a great historian and scholar in John Hope Franklin this week who died in Durham, North Carolina at the age of 94 years old. His long career as a Historian took him many places from his undergraduate days at Fisk to completing his Masters and PHD at Harvard University. He taught at several schools and chaired many history departments. As the head of Brooklyn College's History Department he became the first person of color to chair a major history department. Following his tenure at Brooklyn College, he went on to chair at the University of Chicago before becoming a tenured professor with a chair at Duke University where he taught until 1992.

there are many other highlights in his life. He served as President of the American Historical Association, served on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund with Thurgood Marshall during Brown v. Board of Education, and stuck it out with W.E.B. Dubois. He's also written several books, including the seminal From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans.

Let's all take a moment to honor Franklin and his illustrious and groundbreaking career.

WE HAVE A BLACK PRESIDENT! A CHANGE DONE COME!!!!

AND MICHELLE OBAMA IS FIRST LADY!

I had given up on blogging, but this is an auspicious occasion.

Throwback Pop Culture Clip

THROWBACK Thursdays are back,

why...cus I'm studying and this is obviously better.
In honor of my Sean Bell posts, here are a few old clips.
To all the people arrested yesterday, keep your head up and:




I have the actual Inner Circle music video for the song, Bad Boys which was popularized by the television show COPS. I also have a clip of COPS and of the Martin Lawrence and Will Smith film, Bad Boys. :

The Inner Circle video, Bad Boys


A Clip from FOX TV's COPS


Clip from Bad Boys II with Nelly's Tailfeather in the background, because what's more throwback:



Not exactly in the throwback category, but we all need some irony in our life. A Clip from CSA, a mockumentary on what life would be like if the Confederates won and the hit television show: Runaway:

I'm Still Here: The Miller Boys

So I know, I say I'm going to bring the freshness for Black History Month, and what do I go and do...get a job. I did have exciting posts planned. I was going to revisist last year's historic superbowl featuring black coaches and forever immortalized by Kanye and Common in their song South Side on Superbowl Sunday. I was also going to look at past black runners for the Democratic Nomination on Super Tuesday (Shirley Chisolm, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Carol Mosley Braun and any others I may have inadvertently left out of this list). The plans were great, but the month is only half past, so do look out.

Shameless. I've been a bit ghost, kind of like The Miller Boys, but I wanted to share some of their latest work with you.

All truth, Master P and Romeo are of an era past, but these videos reaching out to the past are worth taking a little watch. You can fast forward Romeo's part, but the cartoon version would make a good showing for some second graders. Okie dokes, thats it for now.

Cartoon Version "Black History"


Official Video

Happy (US and Canada) Black History Month

We celebrated out here in the UK in October, but you know, I follow the US calendar mostly. This is the 22nd year of the expansion of what was previously Negro history week into an entire month. There are concrete reasons for choosing February: the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. However, we'll start off the month with a (not so serious) examination of whether or not February should be the month in which black history is celebrated.

I present to you, the original drug abuser: Gil Scott Heron in a recent performance at New York's SOB's (Sounds of Brazil...cool shows, often). The revolution may not be televised, but this "luminary" has been put on You Tube.


HAUL,
The Queen

Talib's Genius

So, I'm sitting, working with my internet disconnected listening to Talib Kweli's " Happy Home" featuring Candice Anderson off his MySpace album with Madlib, called Liberation. "Happy Home" is a pretty cool song that tells the story of Kweli's family going back to his grandparents and how his parents met. This is my umpteenth and a gazillionth time listening to this song, and it is pretty high up in my most played I Tunes list. This time, I caught something else in the lyrics "Back in the day it was hard for black actors/ They had to lighten their skin with Max Factor/ But my grandfather Stan wasn't Nothing But a Man,"when discussing his paternal grandfather. I've usually paused on the Max Factor part, in sheer amazement at their hold on the entertainment history in that time period (watch the credits of an I Love Lucy episode) but this time my ears picked up something different. He slipped in the great and oft-forgotten Ivan Dixon movie "Nothing But a Man."
"Nothing But a Man" is a great 1960s movie about black people, directed by and starring the great black actor Ivan Dixon. Admittedly its a little rough, but it was a budget movie in the 60s, what do you want???? Unfortunately Discon became most famous for being an assembly line worker/Sgt. in Hogan's Heroes. However, he was also involved in awesome projects that are Vanity Dark recommended like the movie version of "The Spook Who Sat By The Door" and "A Raisin in the Sun." For a Wiki on Dixon click here and for information on "Nothing But A Man" click here. Get up on that history.

But back to Talib...

So I do a little research. Talib Kweli's last name is Greene and according to IMDB, there is a Stanley Greene in the movie who played quite the prominent role as the Reverend.

This is an exciting find and indeed a great moment in pop culture history. Talib has quite family tree. NYU educated parents, actors, and afros all settled down in Brooklyn. Hot [Thing]. I really appreciate how he wove that bit of pop culture history into the story line. For me, that's genius. It also makes more sense now that Talib was at NYU studying theater (you must hear him joke about him being the one with the education and Mos Def being the one with all the movie roles...lol).



Sigh, I'm too excited about this and not excited enough about the symbiotic yet disadvantageous relationship between social movements and the media.

HAUL,
The Queen

And now for a little Bklyn History

Thanks to the NYTimes. There's a pretty informative article this week about the Underground Railroad and the form it took in Brooklyn, leading to the designation of Duffield, a popular street in Brooklyn's Downtown as Abolitionist Place, "On the Trail of Brooklyn's Underground Railroad." The article also touches on the history of Weeksville, an important historical but oft forgotten neighborhood of Brooklyn. Get edumicated here.

Watch the NYTimes video on the subject here

If you ever want to really get into NYC history on an almost block by block basis, there's this guy that often does specials on PBS. I can't remember his name of the title of the program right now, but they are on point.

On another note, does anyone else feel intrigued by the case of Pinky? yea..

For related reading check out Monied Metropolis by Sven Beckert. It gives everything through an economic history of the city. Quite informative.

Haul,
The Queen

America's Most Smartest Model

So the obvious play on grammar in the title is cute, but why is American and well everyone obsessed with watching people be stupid? Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader is cool, AMST is entertaining but extremely sad to watch. At least Beauty and the Geek has Geeks..this just has one smart guy who has a graduate degree already, and the redeeming black guy. You can check out the casting special on VH1 and its also one of ITunes free downloads of the week. Why oh why did the black man not know who fought in the Civil War or what The Emancipation Proclamation was? Luckily they showed another black man later on to salvage the race, but this was straight foolishness. I'm not sure what statement was being made by including that portion in the casting special, but it sure should be a wake up call.

The Sankofa bird is a bird that flies with its head looking backwards. It's imagery is symbolic of the familiar quote "a people who do not know their history cannot know where they are going." No, the one man on the show is not all black people in America, but it is important for the entire nation to be aware of that part of history. The hundred years following the Emancipation Proclamation was one of the most turbulent times in American history. While there was the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, a lot more of the period was spent in nationwide distress. During that time, the memory of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War was so important to the nation, and it is continuously used as a bartering tool for rights and privileges in the nation. Martin Luther King used it in his speech at the Abraham Lincoln Memorial where he had a dream, the Million Man March used the memory of Lincoln and recently Barack Obama launched his campaign in Lincoln's hometown and penned a nice little piece in Time magazine called "Through Lincoln's Eyes." It was never about blacks truly loving Lincoln, but more about understanding his importance to national memory and how to use that memory to achieve equality.

7 score and 4 years after the U.S.A. was founded, this is still a major part of who we are. For someone of color to be blatantly ignorant of this on national tv (basic cable may as well be national), and for VH1 to decide to air it, does not show progress, but rather regression.


Go read some David Blight and Lerone Bennett Jr.