Its February! Happy Black History Month !

[dereperez]

I liked this video.

 

[loveguys72]

Here's my only question: why February, the shortest month of the year?

Oh, and Dr. George Washington Carver? I love that man! He gave me peanut butter. He was a GENIUS!

Also one hell of a scientist.

 

[Axxess]

I would simply hope that Harriet Tubman is known to anyone who took grade school in the United States, but I guess we all know better than to assume anyone paid attention in history classes. :/

Well, leave it to me to shatter your hope. I never learned about this Harriet Tubman person in school; I don't even know who she is now*. We only learned about Black History Month in elementary school, and every year it was the same two things: Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech and Rosa Parks. Every. Year. We didn't learn about Plessy v. Ferguson, Dred Scott, Jim Crow Laws, Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil rights movement in general until high school.

Happy "How Come There Isn't A White History Month?" Month! It's that time of year again…

Was it wrong of me to assume that this link was from reddit?

*I'll look her up after I'm done posting this.

 

[MissAnne]

Well, leave it to me to shatter your hope. I never learned about this Harriet Tubman person in school

Well this is probable.

When I went to college I learned that a lot of people had not learned much about Black History. Which is really just American history with Black people in it. I had to help my friend research some stuff about the Civil Rights Movement for a paper because she didn't even know where to start. I went on youtube and played something from PBS and she said "When did they have seperate drinking fountains?"

Needless to say, we had to start further back. It was really overwhelming to her and she got angry because she then realized that her school had skipped over an entire section of American History.

Personally, I can't even begin to explain how amazing Harriet Tubman was. She came long before the Civil Rights Movement and when you think about it, a lot of Black people wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her.

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist. She led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom along the route of the Underground Railroad.

It still amazes me that this woman not only had the courage to escape but she kept going back to help others. It really blows your mind.

 

[MissAnne]

Louis Gates Jr. (The Genealogy Man)did another documentary entitled Blacks in Latin America. It was really interesting. I watched it on youtube earlier this year. I hope that its still there because its worth watching.

While many people in the United States view Latinos as a race, the societies of Latin America are multicultural and multiracial. More people of African descent live in Brazil than any country in the world besides Nigeria. Another 8 million African-descended people live in Colombia, and millions more in the Caribbean countries of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama and elsewhere.

Here is another really interesting group of interviews done by Mun2. The actors are talking about being Black and Latino in Hollywood.

 

[MissAnne]

Black History Month was originally Negro History Week, and it occurred in February on the week that both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas were born.

when it was expanded to a month in the 60's/70's, it was kept in February.

http://www.africanamericanhistorymonth.gov/about.html

I didnt know that, thanks!

While watching that video in the opening post, the interviewer asked "What do you do to celebrate Black History Month ?" while they were joking about eating fried chicken it had me thinking. 'I don't do anything to celebrate BHM and maybe I should'. I would like to learn something new everyday.

 

[bankside]

Its Black History Month here in the USA.

Btw, this is officially recognised as black history month in Canada too.

The government of Canada site.
The Historica Dominion Institute site.

Lots of good info in both sites.

 

[ChickenGuy]

I posted this before somewhere, but can someone remind me again about these two historical events that are very vague in my mind and lacking in context....

1. A black man was admitted to a (college? university?) in the South in the 1960's and someone (a senator? governor?) had this famous photo taken where he is seen physically trying to blockade a door with his body. Have I got that recollection right? And was this the same occasion that the President (Johnson? Nixon?) had to send in troops like the National Guard or something?

2. This is some famous pilgrimage or something and is called a 'road to' somewhere or a 'bridge' or something and I remember that this time (2004?) Hilary Clinton showed up and put on a fake Southern accent in a speech or something - and later on, Al Sharpton said a statement to the effect of "there are SOME of us who come here EVERY year'" (was it the Democratic candidate race in 2004?) meaning Hilary was just there for P.R. and her public profile. Does anyone know more about this?

Thanks.

 

[gsdx]

1. A black man was admitted to a (college? university?) in the South in the 1960's and someone (a senator? governor?) had this famous photo taken where he is seen physically trying to blockade a door with his body. Have I got that recollection right? And was this the same occasion that the President (Johnson? Nixon?) had to send in troops like the National Guard or something?

That was James Meredith and the University of Mississippi. I've seen several documentaries about him. That man had guts. Most people would have given up the first day. Things got so bad that Robert Kennedy called in US Marshals to take control. His brother, John Kennedy, called in the army.

 

[ChickenGuy]

That was James Meredith and the University of Mississippi. I've seen several documentaries about him. That man had guts. Most people would have given up the first day. Things got so bad that Robert Kennedy called in US Marshals to take control. His brother, John Kennedy, called in the army.

Thanks for the info, gsdx. I looked him up on Wiki and YouTube.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Meredith

So it was slightly further back than I thought, in 1962.

Robert Kennedy called in 500 U.S. Marshals to take control, who were supported by the 70th Army Engineer Combat Battalion from Ft Campbell, Kentucky. They created a tent camp and kitchen for the US Marshals. To bolster law enforcement, President John F. Kennedy sent in U.S. Army military police from the 503rd Military Police Battalion, and called in troops from the Mississippi Army National Guard and the U.S. Border Patrol as well. In the violent clash, two people died, including the French journalist Paul Guihard, on assignment for the London Daily Sketch. He was found dead behind the Lyceum building with a gunshot wound to the back. One hundred-sixty US Marshals, one-third of the group, were injured in the melee, and 40 soldiers and National Guardsmen were wounded.

I can only imagine the sheer level of conviction, courage, and strength of will and spirit this young man needed to have. To try to study and graduate and when all of THAT insanity is swirling around you. Well done him.

50 years later, and he's still going strong.

 

[hungprep]

Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam…

 

[bankside]

I can only imagine the sheer level of conviction, courage, and strength of will and spirit this young man needed to have. To try to study and graduate and when all of THAT insanity is swirling around you. Well done him.

True. It also gives one occasion to think on the mind-boggling stupidity on the part of those who opposed his education. To be that committed to self-delusion and petty ignorance is also some kind of perverse achievement.

 

[xbuzzerx]

Well, leave it to me to shatter your hope. I never learned about this Harriet Tubman person in school; I don't even know who she is now*. We only learned about Black History Month in elementary school, and every year it was the same two things: Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech and Rosa Parks. Every. Year. We didn't learn about Plessy v. Ferguson, Dred Scott, Jim Crow Laws, Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil rights movement in general until high school.




Was it wrong of me to assume that this link was from reddit?

*I'll look her up after I'm done posting this.

I guess you probably already know since you said you were going to look it up, but she was big on the "Underground Railroad", guiding slaves along the system of safehouses (or hiding out in the woods) on the trek north to Canada. The travelling was mostly done at night, so navigation was often done by stars and moss on trees. If I RECALL correctly she was a little involved with the infancy of the women's suffrage issue as well. She had been beaten severely in her days as a slave and had permanent brain damage from an injury to her head, which resulted in lifelong fainting spells.

 

[DigitalFudge]

G3rls,


I don't know nothin about my history but I KNOW this man needs to be my future

 

[xbuzzerx]

Saw this on buzzfeed...

Happy "How Come There Isn't A White History Month?" Month! It's that time of year again…

I missed this link the first time around.

Well, if anyone is lurker reading the thread and secretly agrees with that idea, or is hesitant to ask what's wrong with it, I'll give a short answer. American History essentially is, barring some sidebars or segues in modern history books, white history. And it was even moreso in the past where contributions, inventions or participation by nonwhite people was marginalized or left out entirely. The entire movement to bring about ethnic studies and recognition of minority contributions was because you used to be able to get a PhD in History and not know a single thing about any minority contributions to the greater flow of American History.

American History remains, regardless of many people's bloated sense of "having stuff about other groups forced down their throat all the time, essentially still a story about mainstream history, which means white history for the most part. Black History month exists to shine some spotlight on the achievements and contributions of black Americans to our history which, in a formal textbook, will come only in a designated chapter about slavery or the civil rights movement or a sidebar about Frederick Douglas in a book which otherwise tells the effectually white mainstream story of history and from that perspective primarily.

 

[hungprep]

Someone earlier in the thread mentioned Langston Hughes…

Here’s a recent, very interesting, literary history I can recommend that focuses on the relationship Hughes had with Carl Van Vechten, a cosmopolitan, white, writer/photographer/socialite, in 1920-50s New York, who fostered the careers of a very large number of writers of the so-called, ‘Harlem Renaissance.’

As well as Langston Hughes, Van Vechten’s amazingly influential, mainly gay (but pre-gay lib), literary/musical/artistic/theatrical ‘salon’ included such otherwise-closeted, gay luminaries (and literary lights) of the age, as Gertrude Stein (who chose him, over her publisher Bennett Cerf, to be her ‘literary executor’ upon her death), W. Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward, Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, Donald Vining, Marsden Hartley, Hart Crane, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Thornton Wilder, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Charles Henri Ford, W. H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Paul and Jane Bowles.

He also knew (and entertained at his frequent ‘at homes’ in Manhattan and elsewhere around the world) such singers, musicians, and composers, as Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Arthur Gold, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, Leonard Bernstein, Lorenz Hart, and Billy Strayhorn.

Among the artists, photographers, and architects he befriended (and whose careers he also helped) were Jacob Epstein, Gaston Lachaise, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Thomas Hart Benton, Thomas Scofield Handforth, Paul Cadmus, Fairfield Porter, Pavel Tchelitchew, James Richmond Barthé, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham, Miguel Covariances (Van Vechten’s own photography teacher and mentor), George Platt Lynes, Horst P. Horst, and Philip Johnson.

Among the dancers, choreographers, balletomanes, critics, and actors of his personal acquaintance were Josephine Baker, Jerome Robbins, Lincoln Kirstein, Edwin Denby, Parker Tyler, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Laurence Olivier, Danny Kaye, Tallulah Bankhead, and the unfortunate Ramon Novarro.

‘Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White’ – by Emily Bernard

And click the link ‘Read’ at the beginning of the review (or here) for an introductory essay by Professor Bernard, Hands Across Time, which begins in the following fashion:

Carl Van Vechten detested “sincerely.” He reprimanded Langston Hughes more than once for signing his correspondence that way. For Van Vechten, letters were opportunities for affection and imagination. Over the course of many years of snooping through his mail, I rarely came across a recycled valediction. Once he wished Hughes “768 white penguin feathers for 76 black swans.” A few years later, it was “four brightcolored roosters to you and a hen to make them happy!” In July 1941, when Hughes was in California for work, Van Vechten ended a letter with “hands across the states.”

 

[MissAnne]

And, like someone said in the Buzzfeed comments, Black people arent the only ones with a heritage month.

There is an Italian American heritage month, Irish American heritage month, Hispanic heritage month, Asian Pacific American Month etc. but people still think that Black people are the only ones with a heritage month.

Maybe its because you hear about Black History Month the most.

I read somewhere that Black History Month was also created in order to highlight the achievements of Blacks in the US because, at the time, many were saying that Blacks weren't productive members of society with no positive contributions to the country. Black History Month dispels this stereotype.

 

[MissAnne]

 

[MissAnne]

Black Same Sex Couples

These people arent famous but these flickr photos are worth looking at.

Here is the link:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/hidden-in-the-open/sets/72157624480472079/detail/

I only wish that he could have found some women too.

Whelp...

 

[rareboy]

I enjoy all the heritage months.

And I love June because it is homo month.