What's the Deal With Black Fathers??? 06 15 2013 Norfolk, Virginia

From: cleverinfo@cleverspeaks.com 

JOIN OUR LIST Clever Communities In Action & Universal Zulu Nation Ch 30                                          Present                        Fatherhood in the Black Community  On Saturday, June 15th, 2013 we will have a panel discussion about fatherhood. Our panel will consist of married, divorced and single fathers plus fathers who are raising their children on their own. We will celebrate, dispel stereotypes, identify challenges and work on solutions pertaining to Black fathers.                                              THE DETAILS                                             Who:    All of us                                        What:   Fatherhood!                               Where: House of Consciousness                                            600 W 35th Street                                            Norfolk, VA 23508                               When: Saturday, June 15th, 2013                                               4:00-7:00pm  Why: Because "As a woman who was raised by a single-father, I refuse to accept the way this society has branded Black men as the poster children for deadbeat parents."                              Contact Info: 757.918.7879                                    cleverinfo@cleverspeaks.com        The Flyer for YOU to SHARE           Come out and join the conversation, listen, inspire and be inspired. Please forward this email and download the flyer above to share with your family and friends on facebook, twitter and instagram.     Hope to see you there!

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Homeless 17-year-old graduates high school as valedictorian

http://now.msn.com/homeless-teen-chelsea-fearce-graduates-valedictorian-of-high-school/

 

For most of her high school years, 17-year-old Chelsea Fearce and her family have bounced around homeless shelters, or lived in a car if they had one. Today, she graduated as valedictorian of her class from Charles Drew High School in Georgia. Her GPA is 4.466. Chelsea, studying by the light of a cell phone after shelter lights were turned off, also managed to enroll in some college classes during high school. She'll start as a junior at Spelman College next year, studying biology. "Don't give up," she said at her graduation ceremony, "Do what you have to do right now so that you can have the future that you want." [Source]

Trending topic: homeless valedictorian | Click to see more on msnNOW.com

Summer Solstice 2013 Workshop - Conducted by Heq Shemsu Heru Mehab Neter Sakusumen

 

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The Black History of Memorial Day (Happy Memorial Day) - Ashee

A celebration and burial of dead soldiers held by African-Americans on May 1, 1865 on a South Carolina burial ground was the first recorded Memorial Day, according to Yale University history professor David Blight. Blight says many Union soldiers were buried improperly in a burial ground that once was a race track. After the Civil War ended, many blacks returned to the grounds to give the fallen soldiers proper burials. “Blacks, many of them recently freed slaves, buried the soldiers properly. They put up a fence around the area and painted it. More than 260 were buried there. We don’t know the names. We don’t know the race.”  - David Blight 

African Americans Invented Memorial DayPosted by JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor in Society, War
Click here for the original article

According to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department, the first memorial day was observed by formerly enslaved black people at the Washington Race Course (today the location of Hampton Park) in Charleston, South Carolina. The race course had been used as a temporary Confederate prison camp in 1865 as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who died there. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, formerly enslaved people exhumed the bodies from the mass grave and reinterred them properly with individual graves. They built a fence around the graveyard with an entry arch and declared it a Union graveyard. The work was completed in only ten days. On May 1, 1865, the Charleston newspaper reported that a crowd of up to ten thousand, mainly black residents, including 2800 children, proceeded to the location for included sermons, singing, and a picnic on the grounds, thereby creating the first "Decoration Day".

David W. Blight in his own words from The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, lecture 19, To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings:

African-Americans invented Memorial Day, in Charleston, South Carolina. There are three or four cities in the United States, North and South, that claim to be the site of the first Memorial Day, but they all claim 1866; they were too late. I had the great, blind, good fortune to discover this story in a messy, totally disorganized collection of veterans’ papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard some years back. And what you have there is black Americans, recently freed from slavery, announcing to the world, with their flowers and their feet and their songs, what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a second American Revolution. That story got lost, it got lost for more than a century. And when I discovered it, I started calling people in Charleston that I knew in archives and libraries, including the Avery Institute, the black research center in Charleston–”Has anybody, have you ever heard of this story?” And no one had ever heard it. It showed the power of the Lost Cause in the wake of the war to erase a story. But I started looking for other sources, and lo and behold there were lots of sources. Harper’s Weekly even had a drawing of the cemetery in an 1867 issue.

The old oval of that racetrack is still there today. If you ever go to Charleston go up to Hampton Park. Hampton Park is today what the racecourse was then. It’s named for Wade Hampton, the white supremacist, redeemer, and governor of South Carolina at the end of Reconstruction and a Confederate General during the Civil War. And that park sits immediately adjacent to the Citadel, the Military Academy of Charleston. On any given day you can see at any given time about 100 or 200 Citadel cadets jogging on the track of the old racecourse. There is no marker, there’s no memento, there’s only a little bit of a memory. Although a few years ago a friend of mine in Charleston organized a mock ceremony where we re-enacted that event, including the children’s choir, and they made me dress up in a top hat and a funny old nineteenth century suit and made me get up on a podium and make a stupid speech. But there is an effort, at least today, to declare Hampton Park a National Historic Landmark.

 

What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead

By ADAM COHEN - New York Times

Published: May 28, 2007

 

Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.

Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day changed. It became a tribute to the dead on both sides, and to the reunion of the North and the South after the war. This new holiday was more inclusive, and more useful to a forward-looking nation eager to put its differences behind it. But something important was lost: the recognition that the Civil War had been a moral battle to free black Americans from slavery.

In “Race and Reunion,” his masterful book about historical memory, David Blight, a professor at Yale, tells the wistful story of Memorial Day’s transformation — and what has been lost as a result. War commemorations, he makes clear, do not just pay tribute to the war dead. They also reflect a nation’s understanding of particular wars, and they are edited for political reasons. Memorial Day is a day not only of remembering, but also of selective forgetting — a point to keep in mind as the Iraq war moves uneasily into the history books.

Many of the early Memorial Day commemorations, Professor Blight notes, were like Charleston’s, paying tribute both to the fallen Union soldiers and to the emancipationist cause. At a ceremony in Maine in 1869, one fiery orator declared that “the black stain of slavery has been effaced from the bosom of this fair land by martyr blood.”

Less than a decade later in 1877 — when Reconstruction ended in the South — at New York City’s enormous Memorial Day celebration, there was much talk of union, and almost none of slavery or race. The New York Herald declared that “all the issues on which the war of rebellion was fought seem dead,” and noted approvingly that “American eyes have a characteristic tendency to look forward.”

There were dissenting voices. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist leader, continued to insist that Memorial Day should be about the battle between “slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.” But the drive to make the holiday a generic commemoration of the Civil War dead won out.

The new Memorial Day made it easier for Northern and Southern whites to come together, and it kept the focus where political and business leaders wanted it: on national progress. But it came at the expense of American blacks, whose status at the end of Reconstruction was precarious. If the Civil War was not a battle to determine whether a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure,” as Lincoln declared in the Gettysburg Address, but a mere regional dispute, there was no need to continue fighting for equal rights.

And increasingly the nation did not. When Woodrow Wilson spoke at Gettysburg on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in a Memorial Day-like ceremony, he avoided the subject of slavery, Professor Blight notes, and declared “the quarrel” between North and South “forgotten.” The ceremony was segregated, and a week later Wilson’s administration created separate white and black bathrooms in the Treasury Department. It would be another 50 years before the nation seriously took up the cause of racial equality again.
Since 1913, Memorial Day has changed even more. It has expanded — after World War I, it became a tribute to the dead of all the nation’s wars — while at the same time fading. Today, Memorial Day is little more than the start of summer, a time for barbecues and department store sales. Much would be gained, though, by going back to the holiday’s original meanings.

When Memorial Day began, the war dead were placed front and center. The holiday’s original name, Decoration Day, came from the day’s main activity: leaving flowers at cemeteries. Today, though, we are fighting a war in which great pains have been taken to hide the nearly 3,500 Americans who have died from sight. The Defense Department has banned the photographing of returning caskets, and the president refuses to attend soldiers’ funerals.

Memorial Day also began with the conviction that to properly honor the war dead, it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they fought. Today we are fighting a war sold on false pretenses, and the Bush administration stands by its false stories. Memorial Day’s history, and its devolution, demonstrates that the instinct to prettify war and create myths about it is hardly new.

But as the founders of the original Memorial Day understood, the only honorable way to remember those who have lost their lives is to commemorate them out in the open, and to insist on a true account.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/opinion/28mon4.html?_r=0 

Sisters who helped change America - A Savitri Dixon-Saxon Pinterest Project

From Savitri Dixon-Saxon

The link is here:

Women about whom I'd like our daughters to know.

http://pinterest.com/savitrids/african-american-women-of-achievement/ 

 

Black women who changed America !

The full photo project is on the above website. Here are a few:

 

Mary Fields-An orphaned slaved, never married & no children. In Toledo, OH worked for the Catholic convent & bonded with Mother Amadeus. Later she moved to MT& helped build St. Peter'sschool. She protected the nuns, & needed noone to fight her battles.In 1895 she was the 2nd Af.AmU.S. mail carrier, for Cascade County, MT She and her mule Moses, never missed a day, and it was in this capacity that she earned her nickname of "Stagecoach", for her unfailing reliability.

 

Willa Brown, first African American woman to earn a pilot's license and trainer of pilots in WW2.

 

Patricia Russell-McCloud Author & Motivator Speaker Identified as one of the top five business motivators in America. Author of A is for Attitude: An Alphabet for Living.

 

Women about whom I'd like our daughters to know.

http://pinterest.com/savitrids/african-american-women-of-achievement/ 

Can Black Poltiics Be Revived? The Obama "Dog Whistle" & More - BA Report for May 22, 2013

 

This week in Black Agenda Report

Can Black Politics Be Revived?

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Obama's presidency has been disastrous for African Americans, who have been economically crushed and disconnected from their historical roots in social struggle. Political fantasists now urge us to put our faith in demographics, claiming that change will inevitably flow from the darkening of America's population. But, that's a trap which leads to a descent into South Africa-like conditions.

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

BLACK AGENDA TV - Wealthy South African Blacks Front For Corporate Power; From Dekalb GA to Detroit MI & More

 

by The Editors

Glen Ford interviews Molefi Ndlovu, on the role of "Black Diamonds" black millionaires in South Africa who front for the powerful, speaks on black faces in the Obama cabinet, and Bruce Dixon on the hijacking of elected governments from black Georgia to black Detroit.

Black Agenda Television, May 15, 2013

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Freedom Rider: The Obama "Dog Whistle"

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

The Obamas put a double-whammy on Black people, low-rating The Race at two institutions of higher learning, for the benefit of white people. In Maryland, Michelle lambasted those "mythical" creatures that think learning is "white," while her husband did variations on the same theme in Atlanta. Black audiences applauded, wildly. "Most of us still worship a man who has nothing but contempt for us."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

by Pascal Robert

Don't worry about Barack Obama. He's far too useful to the rulers of America to be derailed by scandal, or even a combination of scandals. "Obama's neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have his presidency threatened."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Demonstrators Demand End of Impunity for Banks

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

Hundreds of protesters massed at the Department of Justice to demand that banks be held accountable for their multitudinous crimes. That's like asking the Pope to convert to Islam. "If the Obama administration has been consistent on any one issue, it is the untouchability of the biggest banks."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Chicago Teachers Build a Movement

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Chicago teachers see themselves as engaged in a movement to defend the public sphere from corporate acquisition. "Wall Street hedge funders and other speculators are betting heavily on school privatization as the next great investment frontier."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Bullying Pulpit: Racism, Barack Obama and the Selective Call for Personal Responsibility

by Tim Wise

Once again, Barack Obama scolds Black men, this time at Morehouse College. The author, an anti-racist activist, writes: "To preach hard work to these men, as if they had never heard of it — as if they now intended to kick back and wait for things to be handed to them — is to not only insult their intelligence, but also to feed every vicious stereotype already held by too many white Americans."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Rise Up or Die

by Chris Hedges

As more and more of the nation is transformed into "sacrifice zones" like Detroit and Camden, New Jersey, with civil liberties stripped bare, the biosphere pushed to the point of no return, and the corporate security estate triumphant, "it is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Racism and Classism Are Alive and Deadly: US Public Policies Create Environmental Injustice

by Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese

The non-white poor bear the brunt of industrial environmental degradation, yet are barely represented among those groups that purport to protect the environment. "The failure to include and respect the diversity of voices of those affected by unfair practices is allowing the poisoning and disappearance of whole communities."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Bards Behind Bars: Prison Literature In The USA

by William T. Hathaway

Prison literature is a major component of U.S. literature – as it should be, since the U.S. prison population is, proportionately and in raw numbers, the largest on earth. There are insights in incarceration. "Prisons can crush some psyches and produce diamonds of art and wisdom in others."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

My Wise Country Cousin on Corporate Personhood

by Raymond Nat Turner

If corporations are people, what kind of people are they?

 

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 5/20/13

Black Studies Under Assault

"We have been under siege for ten years, maybe longer," said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, professor of African American studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. "It's been under attack because what African American studies represents is a fundamental paradigm challenge to the white academy." Monteiro was part of a conference on Black studies held over the weekend at Temple, the first institution to offer a PhD in the discipline, in 1988. "We are not beholden to these other departments and disciplines," he said. "In fact, our world view emerges from a deep critique of what they do – and that's where the blowback comes from."

FBI "Fishing Expedition" Against the Press

Attorney General Eric Holder's claim that he should absent himself from the investigation of the FBI's seizure of Associated Press phone records is "all about trying to maintain plausible deniability" of involvement, said Kevin Gosztola, a journalist with FireDogLake.com who has written extensively on government spying. It is "cowardice, frankly, said Gosztola, "to not want to face the media, who would be outraged when they found out that an establishment news media organization was the victim of an FBI fishing expedition."

No FEAR Act anniversary

The federal No FEAR Act, signed into law 11 years ago, "came out of an incredibly hostile work environment throughout the federal government," said Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, a whistleblower and former Environmental Protection Agency senior analyst. "Our goal was to change the culture of how government works. We didn't quite achieve that," she said, but "there was one moment in history when federal employees said: To hell with the jobs, to hell with the benefits, I'm going to fight for justice."

President Obama the Best Choice Imperialism Ever Made

"One of the greatest accomplishments for imperialism, is that he has moved more of our people into the imperial camp," said Kali Akuno, of the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement. Akuno spoke on the Your World News documentary film, The More Effective Evil: The Impact of President Obama on the Black Community and Humanity, produced by Solomon Comissiong. "Whoever the folks are who trained him and have been his handlers, from the imperialist perspective, should be given their props, because they picked a good one."

South Africa "Most Unequal" Society in the World

Many of South Africa's Black political elite "have used the opportunities to accumulate at the expense of the vast majority," said Molefi Ndlovu, a community activist and researcher at the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban. "That's why we can speak of South Africa as being the most unequal society in the world, more than Brazil and other places," said Ndlovu, speaking on the latest edition of Black Agenda Television. "It makes a lot of us a bit nervous about exactly where is the soul of the" [ruling African National Congress] party going."

Selective Federal Gun Prosecutions in Black Indianapolis

In conjunction with a local police offensive, the U.S. Attorney in Indianapolis has vowed to fully prosecute gun crimes in five so-called "hot zones" – all of them centered in Black neighborhoods – but not in the rest of the city. Rev. Byron Vaughn, of Prisoners Reformed United, says the policy represents selective, racial law enforcement. "They made it a racial issue," said Rev. Vaughn, a former prison inmate. People are being singled out because of "where they live."

Read this article on Black Agenda Report...

 

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International Day of Remebrance

Jegna vs Mentor ... Words Are Powerful

Jegna vs. Mentor

 
Hotep All,

You might want to think about this the next time you ask someone to be your "mentor" or choose to be a mentor, or start a mentor program. How about asking someone to be your "Jegna" or choose someone to be your "Jegna", or start a "Jegna" program in your community. And maybe, just maybe the words behind the meaning will have relevance and reflect a positive change on your ultimate goals.

Remember words are powerful, so know what you are asking for before you do it.

"Ignorance is doing something and not knowing, but it's plain stupidity when you do know and keep doing the same thing."

-------------------------
The Story of Mentor and Telemachus
by M'Bwebe Aja Ishangi

We must overstand that greek mythology is just that... a myth!

These made-up stories are of people that never existed. Why YT created them? Probably to validate their existence... But we must understand many customz we've adopted have been done so through ignorance of this "little white-lie". Case-in-point, the use of the word 'mentor' we so lovingly use for our Afrikan scholarz that have influenced us.

We forget the power we give to somethin' when you call on its name. Couple this with ignorance of the origin of these wordz, we actually disrespect somethin' we intend to respect.

The word 'Mentor' is defined as an "adviser, guide, guru, counselor, consultant; confidant." Look at the last word in the definition... 'confidant'.

Now let's look that definition up: "a person with whom one shares a secret or private matter, trusting them not to repeat it to others." Now let's look at the history of the word 'Mentor' again.

In Greek mythology, Mentor was the son of Alcumus and, in his old age, a friend of Odysseus aka Ulysses. When Odysseus left for the Trojan War he placed Mentor in charge of his son, Telemachus, and of his palace.

Many are not aware that greece was a society where homosexuality was the norm. Men took great pride in feelin' the greatest luv could only be experienced between two men, whereas women were only used for procreative purposes.

Here we find the source of the modern use of the word mentor: a trusted friend, counselor or teacher, usually a more experienced person. Some professionz have 'mentoring programz' in which newcomerz are paired with more experienced people in order to obtain good examples and advice as they advance, and schoolz sometymz have mentoring programz for new students or students who are having difficulties.

According to legend, Mentor and Telemachus had a bond that included a sexual relationship. Now when we use this word, we are unknowingly honoring and condoning the acts of this imbalanced man and society.
The history of the hedz who created the english language have a completely different value system than us.

That's why it's important we get in the practice of using the right terminology.

Author of African Psychology, Dr. Wade Nobles introduced a more suitable word when referring to those who've been an influence. The word is Jegna, which basically meanz "someone who demonstrates fearlessness; one who has the courage to protect their people, culture and way of life; and one who produces a hight quality of work."

Yeah, that's more appropriate...

For more info visit www.daghettotymz.com

Asar Maa Ra Gray
~ Nehast (Wake-up)

College Scholarship Info' Night - 5/15/13 & 5/16/13 Norfolk Virginia

ACCESS College Foundation's

 9th and 10th Parent Nights

 

Diggs Town Recreation Center

Weds. 5/15/2013 @ 7 pm

1401 Melon St, Norfolk, VA 23523

~~~~~~~~~~~~

East Ocean View Rec. Center

Thurs. 5/16/2013 @ 6 pm

 

9520 20th Bay St  Norfolk, VA 23518

 

FREE Event - Bring the family !

 

Learn how the ACCESS College Foundation helps Virginia's students by assisting to pay for college & preparing students for "good-paying" jobs ! 

FREE catered meal w/ RSVP!

 

DOOR PRIZES & GIFTS.

Each family receives a $25 college-fund starter-kit!

One family wins a $100 Virginia 529 Plan Grand Prize !

 

R.S.V.P. with name & number of guests attending:

Text message 757-932-0177 or svarner@accesscollege.org

Mother's Day Kid's Hip-Hop - I Love My Mama (Whole Lotta' Love) by DIVAGirl

On I-Tunes & Amazon.com ! http://www.DIVAGirl.bandcamp.com  

A Hip-Hop tribute for Mother's Day. A song for Mama ! Backed by production by Grandpa Crunk and fronted by R&B vocals from Zoe Wilks, DIVAGirl leads the 1st verse of the soulful R&B & Rap tune to send love to all the mothers out there ! Alongside her Hip-Hop and real life Big Brother, DIVAGirl rhymes about a love for mothers with footage of her actual mother and brother in the background.

The Video: http://youtu.be/V2S7jo7bSL4

CHROUS:
I gotta' whole lotta' love for you mama,
I gotta' whole lotta' love for you.
I gotta' whole lotta' love for you mama,
I gotta' whole lotta' love for you.
and Everybody Say - I love my mama.
All the men folk - I love my mama.
All the lady folk - I love my mama.
Everybody say - I love my mama.

(1) Hey Mama
Here's a little song you can dance to
A little bit of love
from me to you
When I'm in doubt
You tell me I can do
When I look at you
I kinda' see God too
Hey
You're my inspiration
You got me ready
Now I know what I'm facing
How'd you pass pre-school ?
Cause you ain't playing !
I know I stay blessed
Cause you stay praying.
CHROUS

(2) Here's a little something
I got to say
To all our mommies
Who passed away.
We miss your presence
Day by day,
To see you again
Is what we pray.
When that time comes,
Mommy it's on !
I got a Fam' full of love
I'm bringing along.
Words can't express
What you meant to me.
Rest In Providence
R.I.P.
CHROUS

(3) Going out to the mommies , and
Going out to the Aunties, and
Going out to the Grandmothers, and
Going out to the Godmothers, and
Going out to the School mothers, and
And to all my act a fool mothers, and
Going out to the teachers, and
To the sister-deacon-preachers, and
To the one who raised us, and
To the ones who made us, and
Our love it won't stop, and
Peace, Love, and Hip-Hop

CHROUS