#BiblioPowerSyllabus

#Black Power Biblio-Syllabus

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Syl·la·bus - /ˈsiləbəs/

an outline of the subjects in a course of study or teaching.

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"A host of grass-roots education struggles unfolded 

between the mid-1960's and mid-1970's"

                                                                    --Russell Rickford

Black Power Movement  

• fostered new definitions of black individual and community

the ABC of black power thought by obi B Egbuna (1973)

Spreading the word...

The "word" was all about affirming: 

• black identity

• self-definition and autonomy

• solidarity among black people  

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"Quality integrated education!"

Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in May 1954, striking down segregated schooling, African Americans organized boycotts and demonstrations calling for the promise the decision implied of equal access to better schools 

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Black Power Principle:

"Do-for-self"

Outside of the formal academy--in the community and on the streets--Black Power activists were motivated by the same goals as students: "quality education," but were now asserting the responsibility to provide that education for themselves

Black Power activists created independent schools, taught in community centers, established publishing companies, printed newspapers and magazines, and opened black book stores.

As the Black Power Movement evolved, activists embraced Pan-Africanism, an approach that viewed solidarity with black people across the Diaspora, and on the Continent, the Motherland  

    

           Promoting knowledge of their racial and cultural heritage
           black activists began to dress in African clothing, to buy
          African symbols and art, and replace their American or
          "slave names" with African names

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"Schools and other sites of learning provided the critical terrain for battles over black studies, community control and African American identity."    -- Russell Rickford

"the critical terrain" of Education for Liberation:

Black Bookstores and 

other sites of Education Activism

     

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 Tree of Life Book Store

Kanya Ke'Kumbha

"A dream I had conceived...back in the early '60s... gathering 2 or 3 copies of books I loved from my own private collection and making them available to the citizens of New York City in a free reading room on 125th and Lenox in Harlem"

                                                                                      --Kanya Ke'Kumbha 

Kanya Ke'Kumbha and collaborator, Dr. Moore

• "Starting as a glimmer of an idea in its owner, Kanya Ke'Kumbha . . .

• it grew into a kitchen discussion group meeting...

• then a sidewalk stand...

• five years ago it moved into the 40-by-80-foot ground floor storefront at 101 West 125th St. " 

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National Memorial African Book Store

 101 W. 125th St. at 7th Ave.

Lewis Micheaux, owner

                                                      ____________________________________________

"House of Common Sense and the 

Home of Proper Propaganda"

                                                                                               -- Lewis Michaux

                                "Knowledge is power. 

You need it every hour!"
                                            --Lewis Michaux

                                                        ____________________________________________

Lewis Michaux featured on the Black Power Mixtape

                                                        ____________________________________________

                                  By Vaunda Michaux Nelson

                      Vaunda Michaux discusses her father Lewis Michaux, remembered in
                      the children's book, The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth & Harlem's Greatest 
                      Book Store (Audio)   
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Liberation Bookstore 

Lenox Avenue at 131st St.

Una Mulzac, owner

“[It's] not a matter of sales.  

It’s not a question of bookselling….

It’s the raising of consciousness.”

                                                        -- Una Mulzac

                                                                                                       Photo Credit: Challenge

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"A few days ago when my August 2010 post about Liberation Bookstore and Una Mulzac blew up with hits, I knew it was a signal that this matriarch and soldier in the army of black political struggle had, as one headline read, "joined the ancestors."Like many who lived outside of the Harlem community, and outside of NY state for that matter, I "knew" Una Mulzac and Liberation Bookstore more by reputation than by personal experience. In a wonderful culturally-conscious period between the early '80s through the mid-'90s, I heard the name of Liberation Bookstore invoked by brothers and sisters at black cultural fairs, literary conferences and black arts festivals in my hometown of Baltimore. From what these sisters and brothers said, I learned that Liberation Bookstore was a mecca where the conscious, the righteous brotherhood and sisterhood traveled to fortify themselves with black literature but also to meet up with other disciples of black culture who patronized Liberation and admired Una Mulzac." --Lisa Monroe                                              http://nowrisebooks.blogspot.com/2012/02/liberation-bookstore-owner-una-mulzac.html

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Repression of Black Book Stores

  "Experience has shown that Afro-American 
   cultural-type bookstores often serve as a 
   meeting place for black extremists and as       a nucleus for their activities.

   FBI, October 12, 1968"

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"FBI war on black bookstores"

Joshua Clark Davis  |  Feb. 19, 2018

"Investigations should be instituted on new stores...and you should recognize the excellent target these stores represent for penetration by racial sources."         ________________________________

"FBI war on black bookstores"

Joshua Clark Davis (The Atlantic article and book)

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Present day resonances of the 

Black Power Movement in Harlem 

Liberation University

Agyei Tyehimba, activist and educator

"See the Black Power Exhibit 

at the Schomburg in Harlem!"

Harlem educator, author and activist Agyei Tyehimba

went to see the Black Power Movement exhibit at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on April 1, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqBrhND1w-w

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Harlem Book Fair

Lenox Ave. at 135th St

Schomburg Center for Research 
in Black Culture

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Auturo Alfonso Schomburg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bagy_ssQPk

Schomburg Center | Published on Oct 22, 2015

In honor of our 90th anniversary, please watch Schomburg founder and our first curator Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, in the original reading room with librarian Catherine Latimer, c. 1937. This is the longest video footage of the founder on record.

This video is courtesy of the Moving Image & Recorded Sound Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Words change us, save us: give books to our young people!

   

  "A book of black poetry slides under a cell door in solitary confinement. And it changes everything." Sasha Bronner, Huffington Post, September 2, 2015

Bronner's article is an inspiring account of the power of words to change lives, whether encountered in a traditional classroom or in a jail cell.  

Imprisoned at sixteen after perpetrating a carjacking in Virginia, sixteen year old Reginald Dwayne Betts sought to rise above his circumstances by drawing on the most powerful tool he could get his hands on--books.  Betts read novelists such as James Baldwin and Ernest Gaines, John Steinbeck and Charles Dickens; he read philosophers Frantz Fanon and Max Weber, and poets including Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka and Lucille Clifton.

It was Betts' introduction to Dudley Randall's anthology, The Black Poets, that first convinced Betts that he wanted to be a poet. “...I had never thought about poetry as a way to communicate. I never thought about it as a way to talk about things other than love,” Betts said. He published two poems while he was in prison, followed by his first book, Rashid Reads His Own Palm, an eponymous reference to the Islamic name he adopted while in prison. .

A new book of his poems, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way) will be released later this month. In these poems, Betts reflects on Black men who were displaced in the community during the 1980's by the devastating invasion of crack cocaine, increased imprisonment and death:  “the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world.” The title, Betts says, “captures all that was lost and all that disintegrated in the chaos of drug laws and violence in the 1980s.”

After leaving prison, Betts earned his undergraduate degree and an MFA degree  He is currently completing his law degree at Yale University. 

Through his writing and his legal training, Betts is concerned with making an intervention for Black boys and men whose futures are still at risk as a result of failed social policies of the past.

Read Sasah Bronner's full story, "Yes, One Book Can Change Your Life, Even In Prison," at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/yes-one-book-can-change-your-life-even-in-prison_55e630dbe4b0aec9f3551027

Maya Angelou: giving birth to all of our brightnesses

When looking for two frustratingly lost books this morning, I came across this random assembly of titles on a shelf:  I read in their titles a tribute to the largess of Sistah Maya, who eloquently in her speech and posture, testimony and poems, was our dark symphony; a courageous chronicler of the brackish and briny currents of her own life, yet a messenger giving birth to all of our brightnesses; a fierce friend, we pray who is resting now adorned in the neatly fitted wings she desired and golden slippers.

Ella Baker biography by Ransby is insightful

Enjoying Barbara Ransby's biography of civil rights activist, Ella Baker--Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (The University of North Carolina Press, 2003)

Barbara Ransby's analysis of the conditions that shaped Ella Baker's formative years during the early decades of the 20th century in rural North Carolina is compelling reading--Baker's family members were landowners which afforded them economic stability (her maternal grandfather Mitchell Ross owned land); they practiced charitable activities that a measure of financial security allowed them to act upon and that reflected their Christian values (Mitchell Ross was also an influential preacher); the overall adherence to mutual aid practiced by the community of Christian men and women who were Baker's neighbors, underscored their dedication to uplift the disadvantaged tenant farmer class of Black people, and especially impressive to me is Ransby's explanation of the tradition of mutual aid  that the Black Baptist women auxiliaries performed in Baker's northeastern region of North Carolina (and presumably throughout the South), providing food and childcare, assisting the sick, sharing farming equipment and labor, when necessary.

These conditions were a foundation upon which Baker's later organizing and advocacy for social justice were built; Ransby says:

"[Baker] eventually adopted the notion that the more privileged, educated, and articulate members of the African American community were not only duty-bound to come to the aid of their less fortunate brothers and sisters, but also had to humble themselves in order to create the social space necessary for the more oppressed people in the community to speak and act on their own behalf. Ella Baker built on, but moved beyond, the religious teachings of her youth.  The values of charitable giving, sacrifice, and communalism that she internalized as a child became a part of her more secular world view as an adult. She ultimately identified with the plight of the poor and the working class, not as a gesture of Christian charity, but as an act of political solidarity. The choices she made over the course of her life distanced her from her relatively advantaged class background and merged her own consciousness and material self-interest with the concerns of the have-nots. In economic terms, she 'eked out an existence' most of her adult life" (44-45).

End of summer reads and beyond in 2013

Currently reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby (has stimulated my interest in the helping tradition practiced by Black Baptist women in North Carolina); On Ethnography by Shirley Brice Heath (absorbing methods of ethnographic study); First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School  by Alison Stewart (of imminent appeal to my interest in Black educators, schools and curriculum). End of summer reading list includes a first read of African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and these re-reads: Beloved by Toni Morrison; The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, and later in the year, a recurring read of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Langhorne Clemens. And you?

We have waited too long for our freedom - Nelson Mandela's speech on his release from prison

South African President Nelson Mandela challenged and helped to set in motion the dismantling of the dehumanizing system of apartheid through his unwavering devotion to liberation for Black people. His life is an example of the impact that one determined soul can make on world events, whether waiting as he did for 27 years imprisoned or stepping into freedom and onto the world stage before a worldwide audience on February 11, 1990.

Text of Nelson Mandela's speech: "We have waited too long for our freedom" http://www.blackpast.org/?q=1990-nelson-mandela-we-have-waited-too-long-our-freedom

AbcNews report, Feb. 11, 1990:
http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/feb-11-1990-nelson-mandela-freed-prison-9395738