Respect where it's due: BM/WW IR in History

Damm I need to get to cracking on learning more stuff.

 

awww...cute pictures! They both look so young and innocent!
"Young" peggy and Nastassja look very much alike, don't they?

 

Another one:


Walter White and his wife Poppy Cannon




Thurgood Marshall poses with the two principal officers of the NAACP: Walter White, the national secretary, center, and Roy Wilkins, the assistant national secretary.




NAACP le personnel in the 1920's : William Pickens, field agent ; unknown ; James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary ; Walter White, assistant secretary ; and unknown

Walter White served as executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1931 to 1955, and is credited with bringing the NAACP to national prominence. Historian David Levering Lewis has called White "the civil rights virtuoso of the mid-20th century, whose literary salesmanship helped launch the Harlem Renaissance and whose organizational leadership made possible Brown v. Board of Education.

During the twenty-five years preceding the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, White was one of the most prominent African American figures and spokespeople in the country. Upon his death in 1955, the New York Times eulogized him as "the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington."

In 1917 James Weldon Johnson, field secretary for the NAACP, visited Atlanta. He was impressed with White's enthusiasm and political skills and persuaded the national board of directors to appoint him the assistant secretary. In January 1918 White moved to New York and joined the NAACP staff.

For the next ten years White's primary responsibility was conducting undercover investigations of lynchings and race riots. Using his fair complexion to his advantage, White approached members of lynch mobs and other whites who had witnessed or were involved in racial violence. He tricked them into giving him candid accounts that the NAACP would then publicize. During these years White investigated forty-one lynchings and eight race riots, including the riots in Elaine, Arkansas, and Chicago, Illinois, during the Red Summer of 1919. On more than one occasion he narrowly escaped vigilantes who discovered his true identity. In the January 1929 issue of American Mercury, White published "I Investigate Lynchings," an account of his investigative exploits. His book Rope and Faggot (1929) is still considered an authoritative analysis of the extent and causes of lynching.

White was central in other ways to the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. He vigorously promoted the work of artists, including the poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, the novelist Claude McKay, the tenor Roland Hayes (a fellow Georgian), and the singer and actor Paul Robeson. White eagerly vetted manuscripts, introduced writers to publishers, and brought stage and concert performers to the attention of the public.

When James Weldon Johnson retired from the NAACP in 1929, White was elevated to the position of secretary. In this capacity he energetically led the association in its pursuit of full legal equality for African Americans. In 1930 he designed the campaign that successfully blocked President Herbert Hoover's nomination of John J. Parker to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a candidate for governor of North Carolina, Parker had gone on record as favoring the continued disfranchisement of African Americans, and he was known to be hostile to organized labor. The campaign produced enough popular opposition to Parker to defeat his nomination in the Senate. In the 1930 and 1932 elections the NAACP followed up this victory by working to defeat northern senators who had cast votes for Parker. Targeting senators from states with a substantial black minority, the NAACP's efforts met with considerable success. The Parker campaign and its aftermath marked the emergence of the association as a potent force in national politics.

During the administrations of both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, White's trademark style of working for political gain by rallying enlightened elites achieved stunning results. His close friendship with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt gave him direct access to the White House. He orchestrated massive support in Congress for an antilynching law, which was defeated only by a persistent Senate filibuster by southern Democrats. When the popular contralto Marian Anderson, who was black, was refused the use of Constitution Hall, White secured the Lincoln Memorial and assembled a sponsoring committee studded with New Deal officials for her Easter 1939 concert. Two years later, White took a prominent part in A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement, which pressured President Roosevelt into issuing an executive order banning racial discrimination in defense industries. He obtained a promise from President Truman to appoint a commission on civil rights, which in 1947 produced the landmark report To Secure These Rights. During White's tenure as NAACP secretary, the association launched a series of legal suits designed to achieve equality between the races in education. This effort culminated in the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared unconstitutional the doctrine of "separate but equal."


Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt with NAACP Board members chart 1947 program with NAACP executive officers. Includes Walter White, Roy Wilkins, James McClendon and Thurgood Marshall.

White soon faced a struggle in the NAACP as a result of his personal life. In 1922 he had married Leah Gladys Powell, a clerical worker in the association's headquarters; they had two children, Jane and Walter. That marriage ended in divorce in 1949, and the same year he married Poppy Cannon, a white woman born in South Africa. Within the NAACP this interracial marriage provoked protests and calls for White's resignation. One member of the board, Carl Murphy, wanted White fired. Others, led by William Hastie, argued that it was hypocritical for the NAACP to preach racial equality and then fire him for having an interracial marriage. White, ever the defender of integration, shrugged off the criticism, maintaining that one's choice of a mate was a private matter. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had joined the association's board of directors after her husband's death, saved White's position by threatening to resign should White be dismissed.

Although declining health soon forced him to turn over many of his administrative duties to Roy Wilkins, he remained the NAACP's executive secretary and most important public spokesperson until his death in 1955. At the time of White's death, Cannon was still living with him at their residence in New York City. Read more here


Poppy Cannon White:
"A Gentle Knight, My Husband, Walter White"
(sorry, no picture)

Poppy Cannon White was born in Cape Town, South Africa to Lithuanian Jewish parents. She was reared in western Pennsylvania and graduated from Vassar. Poppy Cannon (her professional name) centered her activities around her talents as a freelance writer. She began her career at the age of eight, writing "childrens news", and in college she earned money by writing for pulp magazines. Most of her interests were directed toward cooking and advertising. She was from time to time food consultant and advertising executive for General Foods and Heinz, and she was food editor for House Beautiful and Mademoiselle. She was also employed by the Maxon's agency and later by Peter Hilton Inc.



It was while she was with Hilton, during the early 1950's, that she handled publicity for the Republic of Haiti. In addition to these interests she wrote articles on a variety of other subjects, including race relations. Just prior to her marriage to Walter White she collaborated with him, helping to edit some of his writings.

Poppy Cannon and Walter White met in 1931, and despite the fact that both were married, they became very close. Mrs. Cannon was at the time the wife of Caesar Cannon, a Yale librarian, by whom she had one daughter, Cynthia Cannon. It was planned that White, Poppy Cannon, and Hope Spingarn would collaborate on a book of Negro cooking. A research trip was made by Mrs. Cannon and Miss Spingarn, but the book was never completed, and White and Poppy Cannon decided not to continue seeing each other.

They revived their friendship in the middle forties, at which time time Poppy Cannon was married to Charles Claudius Philippe, the maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf Astoria and the father of her second daughter, Claudia Philippe. In the years between their first and second meeting, Mrs. Cannon and her first husband had been divorced, and she had been married and widowed by Alf Askland, who was the father of her only son, Alf Askland, Jr. During the middle and late forties Walter and Poppy Cannon's association became very close, and they met and corresponded on both business and private matters. Their meetings were somewhat facilitated by Poppy Cannon's having volunteered her advertising expertise to the N.A.A.C.P. Poppy Cannon and Walter White were married on July 6, 1949, shortly after each of their divorces became final.

In addition to numerous articles, Poppy Cannon was the author of three cookbooks:Can Openers Cookbook,The Bride's Cookbook, and The Electric Epicure's Cookbook (1961). She also helped prepare the final version of White'sHow Far the Promised Land (published posthumously, 1955) and she wrote a memoir of her husband,A Gentle Knight, My Husband, Walter White (1958). Read more here

 

Okay, here is one which is off topic, but I did some research on Mary White Ovington, and I have to keep on thinking about her and her remarkable life.

She spent her entire adult life among blacks, was living as the only white person in Tuskegee, (co-)founded countles organisations, came in close contact and developed deep friendships with the most exceptional black men - many of them with a weakness for white women, she was neither a nun nor made out of wood, and yet I couldn't even find the slightest hint about her private, personal life or a relationship with a man, neither white nor black.

Was she married, was she not?
No romances?
No affairs?
What happend when invited some of these men to her cottage in the Berkshiresshe so she could take care of their health? (Yeah, I know, I know, I'm probably to only one trying to read between the lines here ... )

Anyway, since I have to keep on thinking about it, I decided to just post her biography and some pictures here, hoping that maybe one of you can offer some additional informations about her private life.

So here it is:


Mary White Ovington, Co-Founder of the NAACP



Ovington's candid memoir reveals a courageous woman who defied the social restrictions placed on women of her generation, race, and class, and became part of an inner circle that made the decisions for the NAACP in its first forty years. Her actions often brought unwelcome notoriety - as when lurid newspaper headlines announced her attendance at a biracial dinner in 1908 - yet she continued working side-by-side with such colleagues as DuBois, James Wheldon Johnson, amd Walter White, and began travelling across the country to help establish NAACP chapters in the deep south, the Midwest, and California.



Mary White Ovington was born in Brooklyn on 11th April, 1865. Her parents being part of the anti-slavery movement and supporters of the women's movement

In 1890 she joined the civil rights movement after hearing Frederick Douglas speak at a Philadelphia church. In 1904 Ovington begun a correspondence with W. E. B. DuBois, whom she met soon after on her first trip to the South and who introduced her to the founding members of the Niagara Movement.


Niagara Movement leaders W.E.B. Du Bois (seated), and (left to right) J.R. Clifford, L.M. Hershaw, and F.H.M. Murray at Harpers Ferry

DuBois was an inspiration to her—“you have talked to me through your writings for many years and have lately made me want to work as I never wanted to work before,” she wrote in her first letter. “Is it as hard, I wonder,” she later revealingly inquired, “to be of a despised race as of a race that does despicable deeds—I believe not.” A decade later he told her, “you are one of the few persons whom I call Friend.” She learned much from DuBois, received from him introductions into the black community, raised money for him, and sometimes criticized him. Among whites she was his closest advisor and mediated between him and those allies whom he had unwittingly offended. Over the next few years, working with various progressive organizations and as a reporter for Oswald Garrison Villard’s New York Evening Post, she promoted and publicized DuBois and his new organization, the Niagara Movement.

Ovington joined the Socialist Party in 1905, where she met Asa Philip Randolph (founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights). During the war she supported him and his magazine, The Messenger, which campaigned for black civil rights.


Asa Philip Randolph

In 1908, she became the only white resident of Tuskegee, and was severely criticized for moving there. “The Negroes of this city are subjected to the worst indignities of any group,” she responded, “and just because no one else sees fit to do anything about it is no reason why I won’t.”


Tuskegee Institute in 1906

After she left Tuskegee Ovington co-founded, with Dr. Velma Morton Jones, the Lincoln Settlement, a community center in Brooklyn. She was board president of Lincoln Settlement for 12 years and chief fund-raiser for decades. During this period she also helped found, worked for, or raised money for several small organizations serving blacks that would merge to form the National Urban League in 1911, the nation's oldest and largest community- based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream, .

In the wake of the 1908 anti-Negro riots in Springfield, Illinois, Ovington was inspired by a report by William English Walling which ended with the challenging question, “what large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to [the Negro’s] aid?” She suggested to Walling that a new interracial organization was needed, and they, with a few others, formed a committee that issued a call for a national conference. The 60 signers of the Call were both blacks and whites, among them DuBois, Francis Grimke, and Ida Wells-Barnett.



The resulting National Negro Conference, held in New York in 1909, contained a series of anti-racist addresses by distinguished scholars and clergy. The second conference in 1910 transformed itself into the permanent body known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1910 Ovington was appointed as executive secretary of the NAACP. The engagement of DuBois was one of Ovington’s chief goals. During the first twenty years of the Association she exercised her considerable diplomatic powers to keep him as Director and editor of the monthly magazine of the NAACP "The Crisis" (named after Ovington's favorite poem, James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis”).

Ovington served the NAACP from its founding in 1910 until 1947. Always on the Executive Board, she was acting executive secretary, 1910-11; acting chair, 1917-19; chair of the board, 1919-32; and treasurer, 1932-47. In addition she was the Director of Branches and did some writing, editing, and layout for The Crisis.



She traveled around the country gathering supporters and starting local branches. She was the chief money-raiser and architect of fund-raising campaigns. She organized conferences and publicity campaigns. She watched over the health of executive secretary James Weldon Johnson and other fellow-workers, often sending overstressed executives away on vacations at her cottage in the Berkshires.


James Weldon Johnson

Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, wrote about working with Mary White Ovington in 1947: "Her delicately pale blue eyes, her placid and sensitive face, and her beautifully tailored pastel clothes leave breathless and defenseless those who meet her for the first time after becoming angered because of her views. When, instead of the grubbily dressed, frantic-eyed, loose-moralled female which neurotic enemies always picture in their mines as typical of those who speak out for minorities, such visitors to Miss Ovington's office find her quite different, it is usually some time before they can gather their wits together enough to launch the planned attack."


Ovington wrote several books, among them
Hazel (1913), a children’s book; How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began (1914), a pamphlet; The Shadow (1920), a novel; The Upward Path: A Reader for Colored Children (1920), with Myron Thomas Pritchard; The Awakening (1923), a play; Portraits in Color (1927); Zeke: A Schoolboy at Tolliver (1931), a children’s book; and Phillis Wheatley (1932), a play. Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder (1995), edited by Ralph E. Luker, was drawn from articles originally published in the Baltimore Afro-American (1932-33). Ovington was a part-time journalist for much of her life, contributing to The New York Evening Post, The Crisis, Colored American, Journal of Negro History, Survey, Outlook, New Republic, Brooklyn Eagle, Woman Citizen, The Masses (which published in 1915 he short story, “The White Brute”), the Christian Register, and many others.

The only published book-length biography of Ovington is Carolyn Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (1998).


NAACP colleagues W.E.B. Du Bois, Lillian Alexander, Mary White Ovington, Amy Spingarn (Mrs. J Et Spingarn), and unknown. Snapshot from Lillian Alexander, probably from early 1930's.

Ovington who retired as a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1947 at the age of 82, and in doing so, ended her thirty-eight years service with the organisation. Mary White Ovington died in 1951.

Whole biographies here and here

 

One for those who like to hear about entertainers:

George McCrae and his second wife Yvonne Bergsma




George McCrae, Yvonne Bergsma-McCrae and James Brown

Since his smash hit "Rock Your Baby" rocketed him to fame in 1974, George has set the music world on fire with hit after hit. Two platinum singles, two platinum LP's and fourteen gold records, top music awards from all over the globe have attested to this amazing vocalist's popularity and talent.

George McCrae, the innovator, spearheaded the whole "Miami Sound" which became the nation's disco taste and the record that set the standard for every other pop recording artist to follow was 'Rock Your Baby''. Certainly the record of 1974 around the world, that one song sold in excess of 52 million copies making it one of the biggest selling pop records in history. Voted the "No. 1 Single of the Year" by Rolling Stone Magazine, Record World, British's Cash Box and the Dutch Music Poll. "Rock Your Baby" remained a number one hit on the charts in more than 82 countries for months.

George received the coveted "Luxembourg Golden Lion Award for outstanding Achievement by a Foreign Artist in Germany, (Frank Sinatra is the only other U.S.A. Recipient of this award). George was a 1974 nominee for the Best Male R & B Vocalist at the prestigious National Academy of Recording Arts and Science. The power of a super hit record to create international stardom for a new artist has never been more clearly evident than in the case of George McCrae.

Born the second oldest of nine children on October 19, 1944 in West Palm Beach, Florida and the son of a retired policeman, George McCrae had his first singing experience in church at the age of six. As a teenager he sang with the Roosevelt High School Glee Club and eventually formed his own group, the Jivin' Jets, before joining the U.S. Navy in 1963. Back on civie street, four years later, George sang in clubs and lounges around Florida and after seven years of modest musical success and a couple of records, enrolled in college to study law enforcement. But music was still on his mind and he decided to record "Rock Your Baby" as one last shot. It hit the charts like a tidal wave.

The man who zoomed to the top with his simple, sexy, hypnotic rendition knows that one hit, no matter how tremendous, is not the sole basis for a career. Hot on the heels of this phenomenal hit, "I Can't Leave You Alone" and "You Can Have It All" (singles pulled from the LP "Rock Your Baby") sustained George's spot at the top of the international pop charts. No longer categorized as just an R & B act, George continues to break his records successfully with the audiences of Europe and other Countries before they ever cross over to hit the R&B (dance) and Pop charts in North America.

His second hit album entitled "George McCrae" sustained his prominence with block busters such as "It's Been So Long" and "I Ain't Lyin" established George as a versatile performer and lead to further global tours. Again, in 1979 on the crest of his popular LP "We Did It", George toured Britain, Europe and the Middle East. His other chart smashes include "Sing A Happy Song" and "Honey I".

And what since1980? A self-imposed semi-retirement. "I wanted just to take it easy, because since 1974 I was on the road. I wanted a break to give me time to get myself together and spend time with my family and everything", admits the handsome vocalist.

In 1984, George was back on the music scene with a new sound, from his new LP "One Step Closer" and single of the same name reached the no.1 position contemporary charts in Canada and top 75 charts in England and Holland.

The ball started to roll again, in 1987 George re-recorded "Rock Your Baby" and instantly, he was back in the European dance charts.
Now it all happens again. George has been co-writing and co-producing new music, a platinum sound - the "McCrae sound" the sound that the fans have been begging for - smooth -soulful - sensational. New songs, new records, new sound, with just enough of the original magic to guarantee George McCrae another decade of worldwide stardom.
George McCrae's latest CD, LP, "With All My Heart" was released in July 1991, on Magnif /Dino label, Germany. The first single, "Breathless", top 20 dance charts, Europe. In 1994 he did it again with his latest CD, "Do Something" in which the title single went top ten in Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands.

In the year 2003, Georgie boy was back in a recording studio in Tarol, Austria working on his new upcoming CD. The first single from this new endeavor “Hold Me In Your Arms” has been released in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in November 2003. Whole biography here

Yvonne Bergsma was a Dutch model in the 60's/70's, which came to prominence in 1969 as the first woman who showered naked in a TV commercial. I couldn't find a picture of her showering, only one bathing - with clothes, sorry guys ... They live in The Netherlands.

 

:wink: Yes they do Silver.

:shock: Suffice it to say that there was "something" probably going on on the lo-lo with her and some of her black male colleagues. Either that or she was maybe ASEXUAL OR A LESBIAN...both of which I doubt.
If you turn up anything else on her Silver please post it and I'll do the same.

Here's a pic of Yvonne & George with Leo Sayer and a link to some more pics :arrow: http://www.georgemccrae.com/stars photos.htm :wink:

PS>Methinks that George doth have GOOD TASTE :!: She's a cutie. :wink:

 

You know what, that she might have been a lesbian is a possibility, you might be on something here! That, or it was kept on the lo-lo, so that nobody could accuse her - as Walter White put it - of being a "frantic-eyed, loose-moralled female". I guess i will go and buy her biography, maybe there is something written in there.

That's a cute picture of them!
I saw them in a "70's revival show" in TV, both were invited talk guests. George McCrae was singing of course and they also showed some of her old TV commercials. She is still stunning, eventhough she must be in her late 50s/early 60s now. They are a very nice and cute couple.

 

Cheikh Anta Diop and his wife Louise-Marie Diop-Maes


Cheikh Anta Diop - The modern `pharaoh' of African studies


Cheikh Anta Diop (with the placard) and his wife Louise Marie (in the right), demonstrating in Paris for African politicians' release during his student days

Cheikh Anta Diop, a modern champion of African identity, was born in Diourbel, Senegal on December 29, 1923. At the age of twenty-three, he journeyed to Paris, France to continue advanced studies in physics. Within a very short time, however, he was drawn deeper and deeper into studies relating to the African origins of humanity and civilization.

Becoming more and more active in the African student movements then demanding the independence of French colonial possessions, he became convinced that only by reexamining and restoring Africa's distorted, maligned and obscured place in HowComYouCom could the physical and psychological shackles of colonialism be lifted from our Motherland and from African people dispersed globally.

During his student days, Cheikh Anta Diop was an avid political activist. From 1950 to 1953 he was the Secretary-General of the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA) and helped establish the first Pan-African Student Congress in Paris in 1951. He also participated in the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956 and the second such Congress held in Rome in 1959.

Upon returning to Senegal in 1960, Dr. Diop continued his research and established a radiocarbon laboratory in Dakar. In 1966, the First World Black Festival of Arts and Culture held in Dakar, Senegal honored Dr. Diop and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois as the scholars who exerted the greatest influence on African thought in twentieth century.

In 1974, a milestone occurred in the English-speaking world when the African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality was finally published. It was also in 1974 that Diop and Theophile Obenga collectively and soundly reaffirmed the African origin of pharaonic Egyptian civilization at a UNESCO sponsored symposium in Cairo, Egypt. In 1981, Diop's last major work, Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology was published.

Dr. Diop was the Director of Radiocarbon Laboratory at the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa (IFAN) at the University of Dakar. He sat on numerous international scientific committees and achieved recognition as one of the leading historians, Egyptologists, linguists and anthropologists in the world. He traveled widely, lectured incessantly and was cited and quoted voluminously. He was regarded by many as the modern `pharaoh' of African studies. Cheikh Anta Diop died quietly in sleep in Dakar, Senegal on February 7, 1986.

Cheikh Anta Diop married in 1953 in Paris Louise Marie Maes, a French woman and graduate of higher Studies in History and Geography. She is working in the scientific field of geography in Africa and continues the scientific work her husband championed.

Read more here

 

And another Senegalese ...

Léopold Sédar Senghor and his second wife Colette Hubert





Léopold Sédar Senghor was the first president of Senegal (1960–1980), a poet, author, politician, and most importantly: a leader.

Senghor was the first African to be a member of the l'Académie Française (The group that decides the grammar rules of French). He was also the founder of the political party called the Senegalese Democratic Bloc.

In 1939, Senghor joined the French Army. A year later, he was captured by the Germans. In the two years he was imprisoned, mostly he wrote poetry.

Once the war was over, he took over the position of Dean of the Linguistics Department with the Ecole nationale de France d'outre-mer, a position he would hold until Senegal's independence in 1960. While travelling on a research trip for his poetry, the local socialist leader, Lamine Gueye, suggested that he should become a member of the Assemblee nationale francaise. Senghor accepted and became député for the circonscription of Senegal-Mauritanie, when colonies were granted the right to be represented by elected individuals. One occasion when Senghor showed his difference from Lamine Gueye, was when the train conductors on the line Dakar-Niger went on strike. The latter voted against the strike arguing the movement would paralyse the colony, while Senghor supported the workers, gaining him great support among Senegalese. In 1946, Senghor married the AEF governor's daughter with whom he had two sons: Francis and Guy.

The following year he left the African Division of the French Section of the International ouvriere that had given enormous financial support to the social movement. With Mamadou Dia, Senghor founded the Bloc démocratique sénégalais (1948). They would win the legislative elections of 1951, and Lamine Gueye lost his seat.

Re-elected depute in 1951 as an independent overseas member, he was state secretary to the Council's president in Edgar Faure's government from 1 March 1955 to 1 February 1956. He became mayor of the city of Thies, Senegal in November 1956 and then advisory minister in the Michel Debre's government from 23 July 1959 to 19 May 1961. He was also a member of the commission responsible for drafting the Fifth Republic's constitution, general councillor for Senegal, member of the Grand Conseil de l'Afrique Occidentale Francaise and member for the parliamentary assembly of the European Council.

Meanwhile, he would divorce his first wife and remarry in 1957 with Colette Hubert, a French national from Normandy with whom he had a son, Philioppe Maguilien . He published in 1964 the first volume of a series of five titled Liberté. The book contains a variety of speeches, allocutions, essays and prefaces.

Senghor helped Africans embrace common themes such as respect for nature and pride in dark skin - ideas that might seem simplistic today, but that helped French-speaking Africa divorced itself from the West and joined a cultural debate that was starting at the same time in English-speaking Africa.

Léopold Sédar Senghor spent the last years of his life with his wife in Verson, Normandy where he passed away on 20 December 2001.

Read more here and here

 

The third time charm ... the third Senegalese in a row ...

President Abdulaye Wade and his wife Viviane Vert




Her Excellency, Mrs. Abdoulaye Wade receives a bouquet of flowers as she steps onto Gambian soil from the Senegalese plane


First Family of Senegal and First Family of The Gambia walk towards cultural groups at airport


The First Family of Senegal clap enthusiastically as President Jammeh hihglights the fact during his address that NOTHING will ever break the brotherly relationship between Senegal and The Gambia.


Laura Bush hosts Viviane Wade, wife of President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, for tea Monday, Dec. 6 , 2004.White House photo by Susan Sterner

Abdoulaye Wade is the third and current President of Senegal, in office since 2000.

.He is also the leader of the Senegalese Democratic Party, a liberal party that is a member of the Liberal International. He led the opposition for decades and was at times exiled and imprisoned at Besançon prison for his political activities. He studied at the lycée Condorcet.

Abdoulaye Wade was born on 29 May 1926 in the town of Kebemer. He did his primary schooling in Kebemer and Saint Louis, followed by middle school in Sebikotane at William Ponty, and high school at Van Vollenhoven in Dakar. He received a scholarship to study elementary and advanced math at Lycée Condorcet (High School) in Paris. After his college studies at Besançon, France, he earned his doctorate in law and economics. It was in Besançon that Wade met Viviane Vert, a student of philosophy. Both were involved in student union organization in 1952. They married several years later and have a son, Karim, and a daughter, Sindjeli.

Wade worked as a barrister for a few years in Besançon before returning to Senegal where he opened his own law firm and began teaching courses at the University of Dakar. He became a permanent faculty member in the law school and department of economics, and later served as dean of the law school. His many professional activities include his econometrics research at Boston University, lecturing in the faculties of law and economics at Paris II, and consulting for the OAU and the African Development Bank. He is a member of the Stockholm-based International Academy of Comparative Law. Wade has been awarded the French Legion of Honor.

Read more here and here

 

You did your homework. Great research.

 

:wink: Silver be on it Soulthinker :!:

 

And since we were talking about African presidents, here is another one I want to add to this list eventhough it's said that he was "a controversial figure". Maybe some of our African members can add some additional background informations and details about the controversy.

Jomo Kenyatta and his second wife Edna Clarke




Jomo Kenyatta was a Kenyan politician, the first Prime Minister (1963–1964) and President (1964–1978) of an independent Kenya. He is considered the founding father of the Kenyan Nation. Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport is named after him.

Jomo Kenyatta entered politics in 1924 when he joined the Kikuyu Central Association. In 1928 he worked on K?k?y? land problems before the Hilton Young Commission in Nairobi. In 1928 he began to edit the newspaper Muigwithania (Reconciler).

He published his revised LSE thesis as Facing Mount Kenya in 1938 under his new name Jomo Kenyatta. During this period he also was an active member of a group of African, Caribbean and American intellectuals that included at various times C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, W.A. Wallace Johnson, Paul Robeson, and Ralph Bunche. He also was an extra in the film Sanders of the River (1934), directed by Alexander Korda and starring Paul Robeson.

In 1946 Kenyatta founded the Pan-African Federation with Kwame Nkrumah. In 1947 he became a president of the Kenya African Union (KAU). He began to receive death threats from white settlers after his election.

His reputation with the British government was marred by his assumed involvement with the Mau Mau Rebellion. He was arrested in October 1952, accused of organizing the Mau Mau and on April 8, 1953 was sentenced to seven years in prison and hard labour. Contemporary opinion linked him with the Mau Mau but later research claims otherwise. Kenyatta was in prison until 1959. He was then sent into exile on probation in Lodwar, a remote part of Kenya.

The state of emergency was lifted in December 1960. In 1961, both successors of the former KAU party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) demanded his release. On May 14, 1960, Kenyatta was elected KANU president in absentia. He was fully released on August 21, 1961. He was admitted into the Legislative Council the next year when one member handed over his seat, and contributed to the creation of a new constitution. His initial attempt to reunify KAU failed.

In elections in May 1963 Kenyatta's KANU won 83 seats out of 124. On June 1 Kenyatta became prime minister of the autonomous Kenyan government, and was known as mzee (a Swahili word meaning old man or elder). At this stage he asked white settlers not to leave Kenya and supported reconciliation. He retained the role of prime minister after independence was declared on December 12, 1963. On December 12, 1964, Kenya became a republic, with Kenyatta as executive president.

Kenyatta was a controversial figure. He is accused by his critics of having left the Kenyan republic at risk from tribal rivalries, given that his hitherto dominant Kikuyu tribesmen did not like the idea of having a president from a different tribe. He was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi.

He married Englishwoman Edna Clarke who gave birth to his son Peter Magana in 1943. He later left her to return to Kenya in 1946.
Read whole biography here


Woman offers Awori Mzee's 'original' wedding certificate

Police have blocked a meeting between Vice-President Moody Awori and a woman who claimed to have the original certificate of Mzee Kenyatta's marriage to an English woman. Security officers stepped in at the last minute to stop the woman from seeing Mr Awori, whom she was to give what she claimed was the original marriage certificate of the 1942 union between Edna Clarke and the man who would become Kenya's first president.

Edna, who died in 1995 at the age of 86, was Kenyatta's second wife. Mzee was an agricultural labourer in England, earning £4 a week when the two met three years before he returned home to join the nationalist struggle.

Their wedding – recorded in the certificate Dhiri offered the government – took place on May 11, 1942, at the Chanctonbury registry office at Storrington in Sussex. Kenyatta left Edna in England when he returned to Kenya in 1946 and married Mama Ngina.

Edna and Kenyatta had one child, Peter Magana, who worked for many years as a BBC producer and was a frequent visitor to Kenya.

It was after his return to the country that Kenyatta married Mama Ngina. His first wife, Wahu, mother of Margaret Kenyatta Peter Muigai, lives in Nairobi's Dagoretti area.

Edna had been working as a governess at an English couple's home when she heard of Kenyatta, who was described as a "very interesting Abyssinian". Abysinnia was the colonial name for present day Ethiopia.

Not even the fact that Kenyatta was already married to another woman back home – Mama Wahu – affected his relationship with Edna. She would later tell interviewers she never expected to return to Kenya with him.


Former Vice-President Joseph Murumbi and former First Lady Mama Ngina Kenyatta welcome Edna on her arrival into the country for Kenya's 1963 independence celebrations.

Edna visited Kenya as a special state guest during the Uhuru (independence) celebrations. Among the people who received her at the airport was Mama Ngina.
Whole article here

 

Silver, i'm really learning a lot from you. Trust me on that.

 

James "Jimmy" Boggs and his wife Grace Lee Boggs






James Boggs, born 1919, was a prominent African-American political activist, auto worker and author. He was married for forty years until his death in 1993 to Chinese American socialist and feminist activist, Grace Lee Boggs.

An African American born and raised in Alabama, Jimmy Boggs migrated to Detroit in the 1930s and worked for three decades as an autoworker and labor organizer. An organic intellectual, his book The American Revolution (1963) has been widely read by radicals within the US and around the globe.

From back of book American Revoution 1963:
"James Boggs, born in Marion Junction, Alabama in 1919: never dreamed of becoming President or a locomotive engi- neer. He grew up in a world where the white folks are gentle- men by day and Ku Klux Klanners at night. Marion Junction is in Dallas County where as late as 1963, although Negroes made up over 57 percent of the total county population of 57,000, only 130 Negroes were registered voters. After graduating from Dunbar High School in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1937, Boggs took the first freight train north, bumming his way through the western part of the country, working in the hop fields of the state of Washington, cutting ice in Minnesota, and finally ending up in Detroit where he worked on WPA until the Second World War gave him a chance to enter the Chrysler auto plant. He has been an auto worker ever since, and a rebel for as long as he can remember. The American Revolution has been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese."

Boggs was active in the far left organization, Correspondence Publishing Committee led by C.L.R. James from around the time it left the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s until Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs led a split in 1962, breaking with C.L.R. James. In later years, he would play an influential role in the radical wing of the civil rights movement and interacted with many of the most important civil rights activists of the day including Malcolm X, Ossie Davis and many others. Read more here



Grace Lee Boggs (born June 27, 1915) is an author, lifelong anti-racist activist and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. She eventually went off in her own political direction in the 1960s with her husband of some forty years, James Boggs, until his death in 1993.

Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer and speaker whose more than sixty years of political involvement encompass the major U.S. social movements of this century: Labor, Civil rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's and Environmental Justice.

Born in Providence, R.I. of Chinese immigrant parents in l915, Grace received her B.A. from Barnard College in l935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in l940. In the l940s and l950s she worked with West Indian Marxist historian C.L.R. James and in l953 she came to Detroit where she married James Boggs, African American labor activist, writer and strategist. Working together in grassroots groups and projects, they were partners for over 40 years until James death in July l993. Their book, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, was published by Monthly Review Press in l974.

In 1992, with James Boggs, Shea Howell and others, she founded DETROIT SUMMER, a multicultural, intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up, which completed its twelfth season in the summer of 2003. Currently she is active in Detroit Summer and with the Freedom Schoolers, and writes for the weekly Michigan Citizen. Her autobiography, Living for Change, published by the University of Minnesota Press in March l998, now in its second printing, is widely used in university classes on social movements and autobiography writing.

Her many awards include:

1993: Human Rights Day Award, Center of Peace and Conflict Studies, Wayne State University.
1998: Zenobia Paine Drake Award, Black Family Development.
2000: Discipleship Award from Groundwork for a Just World.
2000: Distinguished Alumnae Award, Barnard College.
2000: Chinese American Pioneers Award, Organization of Chinese Americans.
2001: Women's Lifetime Achievement, Anti-Defamation League.
2002: Legacy Award, Museum of Chinese in America, New York City.
2004: Grassroots Peacebuilder Award, Peace Action of Michigan.
2004: Senior Celebrity Award, Bridging Communities, Detroit.
2004: Doctor of Humane Letters degree, College of Wooster.
2004: Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues Award.
2004: Lifetime Commitment Award, Michigan Coalition for Human Rights.
2005: Lifetime Achievement Award, Michigan Women's Federation.
2005: Community Honoree Award, WAND (Women's Action for New Directions).
2005: Urban Woman Writer in Residence, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Wayne State University.
2005: Lifetime Achievement Award, Detroit City Council.
2006: May - Marygrove College,The Theresa Maxis Award for Social Justice.

A plaque in her honor is displayed at the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.
Read more here




Grace, Jimmy, love & vision
by Jack Lessenberry

If there is a more fascinating story of love and an intellectual partnership anywhere, I certainly don’t know it. Jimmy Boggs was a black autoworker from Alabama whose formal education stopped after a poor segregated high school.

Grace Lee was an older Chinese-American woman from Rhode Island. She had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr and was a follower of an esoteric West Indian Marxist and cricket enthusiast, C.L.R. James. They met in Detroit in the early ’50s, where she had come to put out a newsletter. She invited him over to dinner.

They barely knew each other. He showed up an hour late; he said he didn’t like her lamb chops and sneered at her taste in music. Then — that same night — he asked her to marry him. She agreed, and what followed was an amazing 40-year partnership.

What could a half-educated Chrysler worker have to say to a philosopher? Well, plenty. Grace’s mentor opposed the marriage, in part because he feared she would become a follower of his. Jimmy Boggs was — there is no other word — brilliant.



This, however, might not have been immediately apparent to a journalist or even a higher species of pseudo-intellectual. Boggs often talked like an Alabama sharecropper, liked to work under the hood of a car, and would cheerfully tell you how a hog once mistook his toe for a sweet potato and nearly bit it off.

Yet after working on the line all day, he would stretch out on the floor of the aging house they rented and write rapidly in longhand, on a legal pad. The passage at the start of this essay comes from his first and probably greatest book, The American Revolution: Notes From a Negro Worker’s Notebook, which was published in 1963.

Essentially, the book says that “Marx’s concept of socialism had become irrelevant,” Grace Lee Boggs remembers, talking to me about her husband in the very room where he wrote his book. Marx wrote in a time of material scarcity, when capitalists could not make money if workers refused to work.

James Boggs, one of those workers, saw clearly — long before most labor leaders and sociologists — that machines were making work disappear and many workers irrelevant. “The time had come,” Jimmy wrote, “to stop depending on Marx and to do for our time what Marx had done for his,” remembers Grace, her eyes shining, her mind as clear and incisive as ever. That’s what the two of them tried to do together, for decades.

They wrote and they marched and demonstrated. Grace and Jimmy organized neighborhood groups to fight crime by discouraging the purchase of “hot goods,” to demand to be treated with dignity, to try and figure out how to create a more fully human life for everyone. They fought incessantly to make a new American Revolution in a postindustrial Detroit that was largely crumbling and abandoned. They were, for most of their lives, ignored by the local media — and celebrated internationally.



Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were visitors at the house on Field Street. Kwame Nkrumah told Grace, quite seriously, that if she had married him they could have changed all Africa. Shortly after Jimmy’s book was published, without much fanfare by the little Monthly Review Press, he got a fan letter from Bertrand Russell, the best-known philosopher of the age. A correspondence followed in which Boggs — respectfully — lectured the grand old man on what the duty of philosophers should be.

Tragically, Jimmy Boggs was a heavy cigarette smoker, which ended up killing him in July 1993. He was writing pointed letters to the Free Press and speaking to classes right up until just a few days before he died. Almost the last thing he did was inspire the still-flourishing Detroit Summer, which brings older generations together with kids every year to “rebuild Detroit from the ground up.”

Last thing he did in life, that is; he is still inspiring people. Grace still lives in the home they rented for decades on Field Street. She has a new landlord now: The Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership bought the house, and has converted the second floor to a combination office, conference area and dormitory. For further details on what she and the center are doing, check out www.boggscenter.org.

Grace herself is still going strong; writing a weekly column in the Michigan Citizen, lecturing, traveling, mentoring. She doesn’t turn 88, after all, till later this month.
WHole article here

 

And one for the artists among us ...

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Suzanne Mallouk and Madonna




Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 - August 12, 1988) was an American artist born in Brooklyn, New York City. He gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a highly successful Neo-expressionist artist in the international art scene of the 1980s. Many recognize Basquiat as a leading figure in contemporary art, and his paintings continue to command high prices in the art market.

Born in 1960 to a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father, Basquiat left home and school at eighteen. His art was decisively shaped by years spent scratching a living in squats, and doing tags alongside partner Al Diaz under their shared name “Samo” (Same Old Shit). Despite a wealth of visual references to both contemporary and classic art that came to nourish the main body of his work, Basquiat´s work remained marked by his graffiti. Samo, the Basquiat-Diaz duo, began to gain recognition from 1978 through the graphic and poetic quality of their tags. But real success came in the eighties. After breaking up with Diaz in 1979, the young Basquiat exhibited in the Bronx with Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith and Kenny Sharf.

During the next few years, he continued exhibiting his works around New York alongside artists such as Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, as well as internationally, promoted by his gallarists Annina Nosei, Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger. By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly alongside Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, thus becoming part of a loose-knit group that art-writers, curators, and collectors would soon be calling the Neo-expressionist movement.

The same year, he was exhibiting alongside Keith Haring, and Robert Mapplethorpe at the “New York/New Wave” show, which led on to collaboration and joint shows with Warhol. His was a brief, but brilliant career, one of the highlights being his contribution in 1984 to the exhibition “An International Survey of recent painting” marking the reopening of the MoMA in New York. In 1985 Basquiat appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist". As Basquiat's international success heightened, his works were shown in solo exhibitions across major European capitals.



Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol did a number of collaborative works. They also painted together, influencing each others' work. Some speculated that Andy Warhol was merely using Basquiat for some of his techniques and insight. Their relationship continued until Warhol's death in 1987. Warhol's death was very distressing for Basquiat, and is speculated by Phoebe Hoban, in Basquiat, her 1998 biography on the artist, that Warhol's death was a turning point for Basquiat, and that afterwards his drug addiction and depression began to spiral.

Basquiat´s popularity was already sky-rocketing shortly after his death in 1988. Today he is one of the most expensive artists of his generation. He produced some 800 to 900 paintings, and around 1,500 drawings. Most are already in private or public collections. Demand for his work already exceeds supply, and good quality Basquiats are becoming more and more difficult to come by. With so few pieces around, buyers tend not to be picky about any one period or technique in his work.


Profit I
Basquiat's greatest masterpiece, knocked down for 5,000,000 US$ (EUR 5,487,000) at Christie´s in May 2002.

The catalogue states about Profit I:
"Executed in Italy in 1982 at the height of his creative development and fame, this epic canvas can be seen both in its scale and ambition to be his equivalent of Picasso's Guernica. Here Basquiat shows his understanding of the expressionist brushwork of de Kooning and Kline, and the frenetic graphic languarge of Cy Twombly. He mixes art historical precdent wih the raw primitivism of urban graffiti to paint an image of a black crucified hero, that is partly a self portrait and partly African warrior and Voodoo shaman."


Suzanne Mallouk

Suzanne Mallouk first met painter Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1980; she served drinks in a smoky Manhattan dive named Night Birds while he played Eartha Kitt's "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" over and over on a jukebox. Basquiat moved in with her weeks later, his only possessions including a broken radio and a tin can full of crayons.

Four years later, he was famous. Four more and he was dead, of a heroin overdose.

Suzanne Mallouk, to all intent and purpose, and if you want to talk in such poetic and potentially archaic terms was Basquiat's main muse.


A Panel Of Experts

There are several lovely paintings in which Mallouk appears, notably one called A Panel Of Experts where she is pictured in a boxing match with Madonna (He started dating Madonna in the fall of '82). In the painting the word 'Madonna' is crossed out, and the word 'Venus' (his term for Suzanne) left untouched.

The reason? Suzanne won the fight.

Read more here and here and here

 

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his wife Sharon Adams




Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. (born September 16, 1950, Piedmont, West Virginia) is a literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. Gates is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research there. Educated at Yale and Clare College of the University of Cambridge, he taught English literature and Afro-American studies at Yale and at Cornell before joining Harvard in 1991.
Gates discovered The Bondwoman's Narrative which is the first known novel written by an African American woman who had been a slave. He along with Anthony Anthony Appiah edited Africana; The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience.

He is also general editor of the The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, co-editor of Transition magazine, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of essays, reviews and profiles in other magazines, scholarly periodicals and newspapers.

Honors granted to him include the Zora Neale Hurston Society Award for Cultural Scholarship, the Norman Rabb Award of the American Jewish Committee, the George Polk Award for Social Commentary and the Tikkun National Ethics Award. He has been a Mellon Fellow at Cambridge and the National Humanities Center, a Ford Foundation National Fellow and a MacArthur Prize Fellow. Gates is also a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. emerged from Mineral County, West Virginia, to become one of the leading black scholars in the nation. He was one of the first African-American students to attend the newly desegregated public schools of Piedmont following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Gates took an interest in local civil rights issues and with three other blacks, known as the "Fearsome Foursome," pressured the Blue Jay restaurant and nightclub to integrate.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. was the first African-American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. The recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees and numerous academic and social action awards, Gates was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981 and was listed among Time Magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997. As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, an archive of black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities.


Henry ("Skip") Louis Gates Jr. with African American Literature Book Club Founder Troy Johnson

Raised in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who initially enrolled at Potomac State College, transferred as an undergraduate to Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in History and met Sharon Adams, a white campaign worker for Jay Rockefeller. He married her seven years later.


Henry Louis Gates Jr. -- the first African American in Piedmont openly to date white women

Gates's childhood memoir, Colored People (1994), written for his daughters, Maggie and Liza, who "didn't have a clue about who I was or why", describes how his school had "integrated without a peep" after the desegregation ruling of Brown v Board of Education in 1954. With blackpower, he "stopped being a Negro, turned black and grew the first Afro in Piedmont".

He was also the first African American there openly to date white women. Phillips saw the memoir as a "rose-tinted" version of the Jim Crow South. Yet Gates describes how doctors blamed a crippling injury at 14, which needed a series of operations and left him with a permanent limp, on his being an "over-achiever" - racist code for uppity. His mother hated white people.

"No one who met my mother would have thought she was a black nationalist," says Gates. "But the scars of racism are deep." He became a born-again Christian for a period through watching her suffer depression due to "severe menopause - a profound hormonal imbalance. She got better but never fully recovered; she was treated as a hypochondriac." She died in 1987.

"I was raised to be a doctor, like all smart black kids," Gates says. But after pre-med studies ("where 'nigger' was hung on me so many times that I thought it was my name"), he fled north to Yale and switched to history. He was among the first large intake of black students, in 1969-73. "I was in heaven; Yale was full of nerds who loved books; I met black people like me who wanted to be professors."

He was fascinated by black nationalism, yet distant from it. "I'm a little country boy," he says. "People from the hills of West Virginia are blessed with a hard-headed common sense. I was at a rally and said to a friend, 'I'm worried I'm not black enough'."

In a 1996 essay, "The Parable of the Talents", Gates criticised "black bourgeoisie-bashing" saying "where Du Bois saw saviours, who would uplift the race, a new generation saw only sellouts". He says, "Do you stop being black by being successful? In the 50s, the blackest thing you could be was a doctor or lawyer. But after the 60s, 'genuine' blackness was equated with rebellious identity, the hip-hop ideal. That's a travesty of our tradition."

Aged 20, he went to Tanzania with the Peace Corps, working at a mission hospital. "From the time I was 10 I wanted to visit Africa," he says. "We were growing Afros and wearing dashikis; I went to immerse myself in blackness. I hitch-hiked across the equator with a white fellow - the trip of a lifetime."

He discovered a cultural and genetic continuity between the old and new worlds "that had been systematically denied", and was struck that "most social problems we thought were race-based were class-based: race was a metaphor".

These insights fed his later work. He met his wife, Sharon Adams, who is white, in 1972, when she was working for Jay Rockefeller's campaign for governor of West Virginia, about which Gates planned to write a book.
"He lost, but I met my wife. She was so different from me - beautiful, brilliant and subtle." An artist and potter, she became a garden designer. Their two daughters are now at university.

Read more here and here and here

 

Movers and Shakers

You have many Blacks who are married to each other who are not politcally and socially active.

I do agree the stereotyping of Black males with non-Black female partners is wrong. However, I can understand where the stereotype comes from. There are cases of Black men and women in these relationships who feel disconnected with the Black community and contributes nothing to Black America. However, this has nothing to do with the fact they are in an interracial relationships but with their own issues of self hatred and dealing with their own feelings of intra-racism before they entered into an IR relationship. As far as I am concerned, as long as you are contributing to the true liberation of people of color whether it be here or internationally, I can really care less if your wife or husband is Asian, White, Hispanic, or Other. Even if you did not contribute a thing, you are a human being and are entitled to your power of choice. If those choices is not causing me immediate physical harm and I am not being verbally harrassed, then I have no right to physcially or verbally attack you because of the mate you choose. If I don't like it--keep my mouth shut, look the other direction, and show respect for the relationship.

Peace Profound,

Jacklyn

 

I learn something everyday. Pleased to be informed and this thread is magificent.

 

Re: Movers and Shakers

:idea: I was wondering how long it would take you to find this thread. As a fellow scholar & researcher you should just sit back and enjoy the enlightenment that Silver is providing in this particular realm. I know personally it has opened my eyes up to alot of things concerning history and especially the worldwide fight for equality & freedom that goes on even today.