Gloria Richardson [not an immediate relative as far as I know] was a major activist in the Civil Rights movement, she led the early 1960s Cambridge Movement in her hometown of Cambridge, Maryland. She turns 92 today. (Photo: Gloria Richardson pushes away a National Guard bayonet, 1963.)
This is one of the bravest gestures in American history. Why is this not an iconic picture? Put this on a stamp. Put it in all the history books about that era.
Or from this angle:
This showed up. I have no idea who or where it comes from. Odd. Sounds like an electronic voice.
Posted in African American, Race in America
Tagged Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Race and Gender
Okay, I won’t quarrel with cause/effect/outcome. I will quote a wise southern woman who lived through it all :
“Non-violence does violence to us all.”
It is my opinion that Americans who by birthright were entitled to every right and responsibility of citizenship should never have had to survive years of that particular iteration of racist domestic terrorism to be able to exercise those rights. Many did not survive, black and white, and I, for one, will never forgive our government for a single death or attack from the first sit-in forward.
Posted in African American, Civil Rights, Race in America, The South
In this year of the film “Lincoln,” and the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, let’s be clear that freedom was never bestowed upon black Americans.
Remember the thousands upon thousands of black soldiers in all of our nation’s wars, from the Revolution forward. Remember the thousands who fought and died in our Civil War to claim their freedom and that of their people.
This is the Saint-Gaudens memorial on Boston Common to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, just one among the black Union regiments. Contrary to the impression left by Hollywood, they were not utterly wiped out at Ft. Wagner. Their numbers restored, they took part in other battles.
The figure floating above the marching troops is the Angel of Death. Emancipation did not come with the stroke of a pen.
Posted in 19th century, African American, Civil War, Saint-Gaudens
A 13-year-old boy was in critical condition late Friday night after being shot while walking to church for choir practice on Humboldt Avenue in Roxbury, his mother and police said.
Gabriel Clarke, the 13-year-old Roxbury boy who was shot in the stomach as he walked to church Friday evening, is in critical but stable condition today and is expected to recover, according to police and his pastor.
“I honestly believe this is nothing short of a miracle,” said the Rev. Nigel G. David Sr., the pastor at their church.
Damn, damn, damn. I do not want to hear about miracles, and of course the shooter must be caught. For starters, I want to hear how the city and state plan to deal with entire communities filled with generations of citizens suffering post traumatic stress syndrome.
How can any child be expected to function academically while living under siege. And while knowing full well that the larger world has no interest in keeping them safe from deadly harm.
I want to know when the emergency committee of experts from schools, courts, hospitals, law enforcement, media, social service agencies, etc. will be convened with major funding, and not dismissed until city planning groups, university-school partnerships, job training and hiring commitments, lab schools, tutoring programs, etc, etc. charged with turning Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan into a national and international model for ways to turn throw-away minority neighborhoods into safe, functioning communities have done the job. (Add writing/editing skills to that list.)
And enough of expecting the clergy to lead the way. Some fine people, no doubt, but politicians cannot palm off the responsibility onto a group that, here in Boston, has been spinning its wheels for decades.
An active social gospel in the Neighborhood House tradition– with solid counseling, medical and dental clinics, meals-on-wheels, pre-school, child care, and other services– can always be a useful part of a larger vision, but we are not going to pray away an on-going emergency. The house is on fire, dammit!
Posted in African American, Child shot, Guns, Mattapan, Urban areas ignored
Tagged Boston, Clergy, Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, Urban blight, Youth Crime
He did not die for Mitt Romney to become president, dammit!
You have to read to the part near the bottom about Edmonia Lewis.
… ART, BUSTS AND SPHINXES
Lee B. Anderson filled a Manhattan town house with Gothic and Egyptian Revival furniture and Neo-classical statues of politicians and authors. Pinnacles and sphinxes sprouted from chairs, brackets and inkwells, and shelves were packed with busts of Patrick Henry and Washington Irving, among other luminaries.
Mr. Anderson, a retired art education teacher who died in 2010, often pasted labels onto his purchases, identifying makers and likely previous owners.
The collection is now being dispersed. On Sept. 8 and 9, Neal Auction in New Orleans will offer about 1,000 pieces from the estate, and about 1,000 more will appear in a Sept. 19 auction at Doyle New York. (Lots are mostly estimated at a few thousand dollars each in both sales.) More paintings and furniture are slated for Doyle in November and Sotheby’s in New York in January.
For Sept. 19, Doyle has placed a $20,000 to $40,000 estimate on an 1871 white marble relief of a gentleman in profile, sculptured by Edmonia Lewis. Mr. Anderson believed it represented Ralph Waldo Emerson. But Lewis, who had a black father and an Ojibwa mother, might have found Emerson distasteful; he considered nonwhites inferior.
Moreover, she apparently never met Emerson. “We haven’t found any record of a sitting,” said Albert Henderson, a historian who runs a Web site dedicated to the artist,edmonialewis.com, and is publishing an e-book about her.
Lewis had a busy workshop in Rome after the Civil War and often sculptured white activists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Robert Gould Shaw. Marilyn Richardson, an art historian who is writing a Lewis biography for the University of North Carolina Press, said the Doyle carving actually depicted the abolitionist Wendell Phillips.
He had flamboyant sideburns like the strands bristling on the 1871 sculpture. “She really captured him,” Ms. Richardson said in a phone interview.
[The medallion sold for $14,000.]
VARIETY . SPICE . LIFE 