Friday, January 10

Tag: black

Driving As A Black Person In America Was So Dangerous Black Folks Had To Publish A How-To Manual For Simply Surviving On The Road
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Journalism

Driving As A Black Person In America Was So Dangerous Black Folks Had To Publish A How-To Manual For Simply Surviving On The Road

America was a dangerous place when Jim Crow mandates ruled the land. Laws separated blacks and whites, the KKK was alive and well, and lynchings were far too common. One white woman's lie even started the 1923 Rosewood Massacre - an event that completely destroyed the lives of many black citizens. Racial discrimination after the Civil War was so severe and potentially life-threatening for blacks that Victor Green developed a book that helped navigate the racist waters. Green's original 1936 Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual pamphlet that focused on safe spaces in New York City, but it eventually expanded to include the whole country. The innovative work suggested travel destinations and establishments that weren't racist so that African Americans could avoid the danger and humiliati...
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Traveling while black: Why some Americans are afraid to explore their own country
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Journalism, VIDEO REELS

Traveling while black: Why some Americans are afraid to explore their own country

Her mom always smiled - except when the family made its annual summer drive to visit the grandparents in Magnolia, Arkansas. “The smiles were gone while we were traveling,” said Gloria Gardner, 77. It was the 1940s, and traveling to her parents’ home town was not approached lightly after the family moved to Muskegon, Michigan, during the Great Migration. Stopping for food or bathroom breaks was mostly out of the question. For black families, preparing for a road trip required a well-tested battle plan in which nothing could be left to chance. There were meals to cook and pack in ice. Sheets were folded and stacked in the car to use as partitions if they were left with no choice but to take bathroom breaks roadside. And there was another item that Gardner recalls her parents never forgo...
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Journalism

Ignorant Republicans Didn’t Know That No Black People Willingly Served The South To Keep Themselves Enslaved

The South continues to lie about the Civil War. They’ve done it for eons, with the most prominent lie being that, somehow, the war was not about slavery. Now, they want to put that nonsense into public schools – all under the guise of “honoring” the black people who served in the Confederate Army. There’s just one problem with that: Historians can find absolutely no record of black people willingly serving as Confederate soldiers. According to Walter Edgar, who is the head of the Institute of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, says of the situation: “In all my years of research, I can say I have seen no documentation of black South Carolina soldiers fighting for the Confederacy. In fact, when secession came, the state turned down free (blacks) who wanted to volunteer bec...
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Journalism

How to Get Wealthy If You’re Black

Forget all those slow outdated ideas about how black people can become wealthy by working hard and climbing the corporate ladder, investing in stocks, bonds and mutual funds, and owning a home. While those are safe investments for retirement and can help you increase your net worth, who wants to wait until they're 60 years or older old to receive the earnings from those turtle-like investments? Of course, you should keep contributing the maximum to your 401(k) to the point where your company stops matching, as well as maintain your planned contributions to your Roth IRA. But if your like me you want the what I call, "Now Money!" If you analyze the Forbes Richest Americans and The Black Economy's Wealthiest Blacks lists you may be disappointed to find out none of those included became weal...
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Journalism

Online game to players: Don’t touch black people’s hair

Art director Momo Pixel moved to Portland, Oregon in 2016, and confronted a challenge she had never experienced before: Strangers reaching out to grab or stroke her long braided hair, often without her permission. “I would be walking down the street visibly mad,” Pixel recalled. One day, she told her boss about it. In trying to mimic that scene, he playfully ducked imaginary hands coming toward him. Pixel remarked that it would make a funny game. With the support of her employer, advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, an online game, “Hair Nah! ” was born. Since Pixel shared it on Twitter on Nov. 15, the game received more than 51,000 likes and 27,000 retweets and caught the attention of celebrities including television producer Shonda Rhimes and Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. ...
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Journalism

Houston Neighbors Said No To Walmart And Invested In Black-Owned Businesses After The Hurricane

Three months ago, Hurricane Harvey ripped through Houston and coastal Texas, killing 82 people, displacing more than 60,000, and leaving parts of Houston with severe wind and flood damage. As the city recovers from the strongest hurricane to hit in more than 50 years, many of its residents in historically Black neighborhoods continue to struggle for resources and support. “Houston is the tale of two cities,” explains Andrew Cobb, cofounder of West Street Recovery, a nonprofit disaster response organization that formed out of Hurricane Harvey to aid residents in underserved neighborhoods. “A lot of people in Black and brown and low-income neighborhoods still need help.” “If you flew in from the airport and drove around, you’ll probably be like, ‘Well, I don’t see the problem,’” he says. “B...
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Journalism

How the Bankruptcy System Is Failing Black Americans

Black people struggling with debts are far less likely than their white peers to gain lasting relief from bankruptcy, according to a ProPublica analysis. Primarily to blame is a style of bankruptcy practiced by lawyers in the South. Novasha Miller pushed through the revolving doors of the black glass tower on Jefferson Avenue last December and felt a rush of déjà vu. The building, conspicuous in Memphis’ modest skyline along the Mississippi River, looms over its neighbors. Then she remembered: Years ago, as a teenager, she’d accompanied her mother inside. Now she was 32, herself the mother of a teenager , and she was entering the same door, taking the same elevator. Like her mother before her, Miller was filing for bankruptcy. She’d cried when she made the decision, but with three boy...
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The Emasculation Of The Black Man
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Journalism

The Emasculation Of The Black Man

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most requests is conformity. Self reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs." {Ralph Waldo Emerson - American Poet 1803 - 1882} In an ideal society, one will appreciate the accomplishments of individuals who have succeeded in either expressing their talent or demonstrating a conviction to lead those who are in need of leadership. We don't, however, live in an ideal world and there are those who would use any opportunity to denigrate, degrade and devalue anyone who exhibits determination and success. The African community has been particularly susceptible to innuendoes, rumours and prejudice. After conducting a research into black heroes in modern d...
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Black Lives Matter: A Movement of Deception
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Journalism

Black Lives Matter: A Movement of Deception

First, I encourage everyone to go the #BlackLivesMatter website and read the "About Us" and "Herstory" pages. Please read "the call to action" by the women who created the #BlackLivesMatter slogan and who affirm, "We are working to (re)build the Black liberation movement." What I found interesting is the point the women made in the "Broadening the Conversation" section which stated, "Progressive movements in the United States have made some unfortunate errors when they push for unity at the expense of really understanding the concrete differences in context, experience and oppression." To that point, their statement reminds me of the beginnings of a well-known terrorist organization who called themselves "kuklux" which understood the concrete differences in context of the post civil war ...
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