Glory!

The choir from St. Luke Community United Methodist Church, Dallas, Texas performs at the Local Legends celebration last Sunday.

Wow!  What power!

Time for a New Way

Here's Dallas ISD 5th Grade Winner of the annual Oratory Competition, Lyriq Turner presenting at the Local Legends celebration. I think you'll enjoy! Amazing young woman!

My People

My friend and teammate here at CitySquare, Keilah Jacques shared this poem with us recently.  Profound.

For My People

By Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker, “For My People” from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Walker.  Reprinted by permission of  University of Georgia Press.

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

     unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing  mending

    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

    dragging along never gaining never reaping never

    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

    Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

    to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

    people who and the places where and the days when, in

    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

    were black and poor and small and different and nobody

    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

    marry their playmates and bear children and then die

    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

    Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

    people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

     the dark of churches and schools and clubs

     and societies, associations and councils and committees and

     conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

     preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

    rise and take control.

Films for February

Looking for quality films to take in during African American History Month? 

Check this source!

Progress?

The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly in the air like birds and swim in the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers and sisters.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Misunderstood

A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us. As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood. Our white countrymen do not know us. They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us, as a people. The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influences of a nation’s scorn and contempt.

 

Frederick Douglas, in a statement on behalf of delegates to the National Colored Convention held in Rochester, New York, in July 1853

More than a month. . .

Should there be a Black History Month in the U.S.?

Some would answer "No."

Filmmaker Shukree Tilghman among them, sets out to end Black History Month with his film, More Than A Month. The film will be seen on PBS in February during Black History Month. 

View the video below.  Read the backstory on Tilghman's work here.  Tell me what you think.

Burns: Greatest event in U. S. history

Thank you, Mr. President

During a White House ceremony on Tuesday of this week, President Bush declared his support for the national celebration of African American History M0nth in the United States. I was fortunate enough to be in my car as he delivered his formal remarks and as he welcomed important leaders to the White House.

You can read his comments, as well as plug into great video/audio right here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/02/20080212-3.html.

In view of recent events involving the symbols of racism and race-based hatred, violence and injustice, I found encouragement in the President's words.

Let me hear your reactions.

Well done, Mr. President and thank you again.

.