At the beginning of this month, I was reading “This Week in Blackness” and it highlighted a just onto the newsstands cover story from Philadelphia Magazine. A comment made by Adam B at Daily Kos:
It’s an embarrassing article
Take a look at Philadelphia Magazine’s masthead. Notice anything missing?
sort of summed up for me what I suspected.
Movements for social change have always had people who with impassioned speeches have inspired their listeners to organize and fight for justice. But we should not forget that songs are another form of political speech and music has been a key factor in igniting and sustaining those who do battle daily to effectuate that change.
I would be remiss during Women’s History Month to fail to acknowledge those sisters of song who inspired me and countless others to march on to the next confrontation with injustice.
July 28, 1954 – March 5, 2013
“We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world.”
Hugo Chavez
Growing up, I loved the stories I read about Harriet Tubman, and her brave forays into slave territory to spy and lead others to freedom. At the time, there were a few other black women like Sojourner Truth, whose stories were written about as tales of resistance and I knew family legends that were passed down about my own strong enslaved ancestors, but the library seemed to be pretty bare of reading material on other black women who had resisted enslavement.
That is beginning to change, and I can only hope we will see more in the years to come.
(Trayvon Martin February 5, 1995 – February 26, 2012)
February 26, 2013 will mark the one year anniversary of the death of Trayvon Martin. His mother and father will be in New York City for a candlelight vigil in his honor.
Olaudah Equiano, c. 1745 – 31 March 1797
Most of us are familiar with the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself. We know what a towering figure he was in the battle against slavery and for suffrage. I remember reading this as a child and relating his story to those of my ancestors who had been similarly enslaved.
It’s Fat Tuesday!
Today is Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, or Carnival-the last day of celebration before people give up meat for Lent, and though the practice came from Europe it has now become a major part of African-diasporic tradition-from New Orleans, to Trinidad and of course Brazil, where the largest celebration in the world is held in Rio.
It sometimes takes years to correct or amend what 
we think we know as “history”, especially when simplistic themes become part of the conventional wisdom. For far too long what we get taught about the civil rights movement in the United States has been packaged with a focus on Martin Luther King Jr (who is certainly also misrepresented) and a few other male leaders. Often the role of women in the movement is ignored, or trivialized. Representations of Rosa Parks as a woman who was tired and sat down on a bus in Montgomery sparking the Montgomery Boycott, led by King, in no way tell us the real story of Rosa Parks, or of the other women who were key in the movement. Her history of activism before the bus incident was for many reasons obscured. But no longer.
The good news is that at the same time Rosa Parks is being honored by being immortalized on a Forever stamp from the U.S. Postal Service, an in-depth study of Parks has also been released which will go a long way towards correcting history.
Vicente Guerrero, Afro-Indio 2nd president of Mexico, who abolished slavery in 1829
Once again, the month of February is here, marked as Black History Month on calendars in the United States and Canada (October in Great Britan).
Schools, community groups and bloggers will focus attention on the historical contributions of blacks to our culture. When I was growing up it was called “Negro History Week.”
Given my background in public radio – working at listener supported radio stations, I got used to doing on air fund-raising drives which we called Marathons.
But since this is not public radio, and we are here at the Moose, I figgered I’d dub this a mini Moose-a-thon.