Author |
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, January 01, 2007 - 5:26 pm
IMANI (Faith) WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN? Nothing is certain. Science tells us that there is no thing at all that we can be absolutely certain is true. Nonetheless, there are things that each of us believes, to a certainty, are true. What fills that bill for you? The belief in the Creator? The belief in the ancestors? Some believe in nothing.... They milled and mingled and stomped their feet against the cold, in their thousands, in their hundreds of thousands, and the liquor flowed. They cheered to warm themselves in the cold night, as they marked the passing of the year in the place called Time. They laughed and sang. For joy, or to cast out fear? The brilliantly shining talisman stood upon the tower in the center of Time, in the city that is the brain of the country that rules the world. And this image was multiplied, electronically, a billionfold. Through science, a belief in science above all, they fashioned an empire that spans the globe. The gods of math and science and commerce, the Trinity of the West, have measured everything, to everything assigned a number, a digit. And now what? And then the shining globe atop the Square at the center of Time, and the World, began to fall. And they prayed to the god of number intoning the sacred single digits backwards to the "O" that is nothing and also the infinite, the circle...... Scant minutes afterwards, the sea of white dispersed, becoming lost in a city of many hues, in the Empire Nation that is becoming increasingly diverse. And is it not written that the meek shall inherit the earth? Now that numbers have done their work, and the world is united as one, the old creeds, the original faith shall begin to blossom again. If science has proven that nothing is certain, then even science itself is purely belief. What do you belive in? This is the 7th, and final, day of Kwanzaa. Today we celebrate IMANI (Faith). Today we renew our BELIEF in God, our people, our teachers and our leaders, and the virtue and victory of our struggle IMANI!
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Treasure
Member
06-26-2002
| Monday, January 01, 2007 - 6:07 pm
Thank you very much, Ladytex and Mocha. I have enjoyed reading about Kwanzaa. Thank you for the opportunity to learn about this week long celebration of family and community. It has given me much to think about over these 7 days. Again, thank you so very much.
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, January 01, 2007 - 6:42 pm

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Ladytex
Member
09-27-2001
| Monday, January 01, 2007 - 6:45 pm
Treasure, my pleasure
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, January 01, 2007 - 6:59 pm
Hey that rhymed lol.
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Ladytex
Member
09-27-2001
| Monday, January 01, 2007 - 8:02 pm
yeah, I'm a poet and didn't know it .... *snicker*
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Biscottiii
Member
05-29-2004
| Monday, January 01, 2007 - 9:00 pm
Thank you too! First time I've read all the information and understand just how beautiful, insightful, and meaningful Kwanzaa truly is. Just wish that I had read it earlier so that I could share with friends & family and they could know, too, what was happening while the week was going by. Will do so before next year tho! Bisc
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Monkey
Member
09-10-2006
| Monday, January 01, 2007 - 9:25 pm
Mocha and Ladytex, I just read the information on Kwanzaa and thank you for sharing it. Very interesting and very beautiful. I had never heard of it before and am so glad I got the opportunity to learn something new. This thread has been a wonderful tool for sharing information about important subjects. You both make us better people with your willingness to share, reach out and teach. I agree with Hermione about day 2's message. Amazing. Thank you again. 
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 9:30 am

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Retired
Member
07-11-2001
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 10:14 am
Adding my thanks here. I always learn something new in this thread. 
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Ladytex
Member
09-27-2001
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 10:18 am

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Zachsmom
Member
07-13-2000
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 10:39 am
I purchased This book the other day. I have not read it yet. I was wondering if others would like to have a 'reading' with me and discuss? here is from the publisher: In this founding work in the literature of black protest, first published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) eloquently affirms that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to beg for those rights that belong inherently to all mankind. He also charges that the strategy of accommodation to white supremacy would only serve to perpetuate black oppression. Essential reading for everyone interested in African-American history and the struggle for civil rights in America. Maybe under this thread we can have another thread for a reading group for this and other books that relate to Black History?
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 11:24 am
Already read it. But a reading thread sounds like a good idea or have a thread in the Library section??
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Zachsmom
Member
07-13-2000
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 11:50 am
Mocha, I thought about the library section on the board, but I think it would be lost as not many posters go there. Plus, it belongs here.
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Grannyg
Member
05-28-2002
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 1:59 pm
I add my thanks for sharing this too. I read it last year and was amazed. This just helped me remember what it's all about.
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Ladytex
Member
09-27-2001
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 2:09 pm
I'd love a reading section, too, but my funds don't stretch to too many of the books we would read, and our lil podunk library wouldn't have many of them either. Their Black History section is woefully inadequate even though I have donated some of the books that I had.
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Ladytex
Member
09-27-2001
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 3:10 pm
Ella Fitzgerald Immortalized on Postage Stamp Date: January 2, 2007 Written By: Scott Verrastro On Jan. 10, 2007, Ella Fitzgerald—“The First Lady of Song” who is widely acknowledged as one of jazz’s most innovative vocalists—will be commemorated on a postage stamp as the 30th inductee in the U.S Postal Service’s Black Heritage series. The image used for the stamp is based on a photograph taken around 1956 by renowned illustrator Paul Davis. The first-day-of-issue dedication ceremony takes place in New York City at Jazz at Lincoln Center, located on Broadway and 60th Street, 5th floor. Fitzgerald, who was born in Newport News, Va., on Apr. 25, 1917, got her start as an entertainer in 1934 when she entered and won an amateur competition at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Her talent was first recognized by Chick Webb, who hired her to sing in his orchestra; by 1938, they had a hit record with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” After Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald took over the band and further sealed her reputation as one of the rising stars of jazz. Mostly known for her extraordinary, three-octave vocal range and flexibility, Fitzgerald’s uncanny gift for pitch, rhythmic sense and impeccable diction allowed her to master the art of scat singing (the vocalization of unintelligible syllables). Using her voice much like a saxophonist or trumpeter taking a solo, she was a natural fit for bebop and soon found herself playing with Dizzy Gillespie and eventually with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Count Basie and Joe Pass. Keeping up a frenetic performing pace over the years, Fitzgerald recorded frequently and toured internationally, often up to 40 weeks a year. She broke racial barriers—becoming the first black artist to play the Copacabana (in 1957)—and sang at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. She won 13 Grammies and in 1987 earned a National Medal of Arts. Ella Fitzgerald died on June 15, 1996, completing a long and fruitful career of remarkable artistic longevity. link
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Tishala
Member
08-01-2000
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 3:22 pm
Yay for the brilliant First Lady of Song! Ladyt, Souls of Black Folk is also available online as an e-text here. At any rate, it's a great book and one of the most prophetic books. It has that famous line, "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line" and his ruminations on African American "double consciousness."
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Ladytex
Member
09-27-2001
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 3:37 pm
It is a great book, my social studies teacher made us read it my junior year of HS. She was such an awesome, eye opening teacher.
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Pamy
Member
01-02-2002
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 4:38 pm
Adding my heartfelt thanks to LadyT and Mojo for sharing Kwanzaa with us every year...every year I learn something I didnt the year before.
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Landi
Member
07-29-2002
| Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - 9:03 pm
that's my thoughts exactly pamy. every year i learn something new in this wonderful thread that i didn't know the year before. and i feel truly blessed that ladyt and mocha posted about all of the days of kwanzaa so that others can learn also. thank you.
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Ladytex
Member
09-27-2001
| Friday, January 05, 2007 - 5:29 pm
Black priest's story unknown to many By MARTHA IRVINE AP National Writer © 2007 The Associated Press CHICAGO — There are only small signs that Augustine Tolton was here. A few buildings, including a home for senior citizens, carry his name. But the Roman Catholic church where he preached his sermons to flocks of adoring parishioners on Chicago's South Side is long gone. And few know the story of the man himself _ a slave who grew up to become the first acknowledged black Catholic priest in the United States. "When he was alive, his life would probably not have been considered that newsworthy. He lived at a time when to be a person of color automatically meant that you were not a person of significance," says Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory, who served from 2001-2004 as the first black president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "So the very fact that he was able to accomplish what he accomplished under severe limitations was to his credit." Even Gregory, a native Chicagoan, did not know Tolton's story until he was well into adulthood. "We need to find vehicles to make him better known today," he says. To that end, a book about Tolton's life _ "From Slave to Priest" _ is being reissued by San Francisco-based Ignatius Press. The biography was written by Sister Caroline Hemesath, who first published the work in 1973. It is a story of struggle and perseverance. The second of three children, Tolton was born in 1854 to Catholic parents who were slaves in Missouri, just a few years before the start of the Civil War. His father, Peter Tolton, was one of many slaves who escaped to join the Union army and fight for black freedom _ and who died battling for that cause, according to Hemesath's book. Augustine, along with his mother, Martha Jane, and his two siblings, escaped across the Mississippi River to Illinois, frantically rowing a boat while ducking Confederate gunfire. Eventually, they landed in Quincy, Ill., where Martha Jane, Augustine and his brother Charley worked in a tobacco factory. Tolton met priests and nuns throughout his life who helped him, including some who taught him to read. Others, however, were angry that a black boy was being educated with whites and tried to stop him from realizing his dream of becoming a priest. After years of rejection by U.S. seminaries, pleas on his behalf from sympathetic Catholics finally allowed Tolton to study in Rome, leading to his ordination in 1886, when he was 31. Tolton had hoped to become a missionary in Africa as an escape from American racism. Instead, he was assigned to a church in Quincy and later Chicago _ a bitter disappointment that he nonetheless dutifully accepted. He went on to face more hardship and resentment, and little financial support for the black churches he oversaw. "If anybody had an excuse to leave the Catholic Church, it was him," says Harold Burke-Sivers, a deacon in a Portland, Ore., parish, who is also African-American and who wrote the introduction to the newly issued biography. But Tolton recognized that Catholics who discriminated against him were violating church teaching on the dignity of all people and he dedicated himself to changing that, says Burke-Sivers. "He saw what the church could be," he adds. Tolton was credited with becoming a unifying force for black Catholics, especially in Chicago. "Good Father Gus," as his parishioners often called him, was known for his eloquent sermons, his beautiful singing voice and his gift for playing the accordion. By 1893, however, Hemesath wrote that Tolton was beginning to be plagued by "spells of illness," though he shrugged them off, preferring to focus on his work and his parishioners. That work was cut short when he collapsed and died during a brutal Chicago heat wave in 1897. He was 43. Burke-Sivers believes it is a story that is still relevant _ not only for black Catholics. "Young people can look to Father Augustine's legacy and be inspired _ and be able to say, 'If he could do it, so could I,'" Burke-Sivers says. At the same time, some wonder what Tolton would think about the struggles black Americans still face inside and outside the church. Only about 4 percent of the nation's 64 million Catholics are African-American, according to an estimate by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Just last month, New Orleans Archbishop Alfred Hughes issued a wide-ranging pastoral letter decrying racism and acknowledging the problem still exists in the church. "After all these years, nothing really has changed," says Adrienne Curry, managing editor of the Black Catholic Chicago Web site, who also works for the Archdiocese of Chicago. "I think Father Tolton would be saddened but hopeful at the same time _ just like we are." link
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Saturday, January 06, 2007 - 4:57 pm
Death of town's 1st black mayor ruled suicide January 3, 2007 WESTLAKE, La. -- The first black mayor-elect in a largely white Louisiana town committed suicide days before he was to take office, the coroner said Tuesday. The body of Gerald Washington, 57, was found Saturday night in the parking lot of a former high school with a pistol nearby. He had been shot once in the chest, investigators said. The death was ruled a suicide Tuesday, the same day Washington was to take office. The Calcasieu Parish Sheriff's Office said it was asking Louisiana State Police to investigate the death. The mayor-elect's family did not accept the coroner's ruling and has asked for a state police investigation, Sheriff Tony Mancuso said. Washington, a three-term councilman, got 69 percent of the vote in winning the election to lead the 4,500-population town of Westlake, which is 80 percent white. http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/194958,CST-NWS-mayor03.article
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Chewpito
Member
01-04-2004
| Saturday, January 06, 2007 - 5:38 pm
Wow, what a shame, I think it sounds kinda fishy to me... If I was the family Id want a investigation too... .........Did any one read about the noose thing in NY a week or so ago, where a black worker showed up to work and there was a rope hanging and racial slurs... I cant remember the details but it was stated that most of the crew were black except for the bosses.. I just dont get it... Ill try to find the link..
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Chewpito
Member
01-04-2004
| Saturday, January 06, 2007 - 5:46 pm
http://robots.cnn.com/2007/US/01/05/chernoff.noose/index.html
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