CLICK ON PHOTO TO READ ABOUT THE FIRST MEMORIAL DAY, ONCE KNOWN AS DECORATION DAY.
SISTERHOOD AGENDA: GLOBAL PARTNER ACTIVITIES FOR JULY AND SEPTEMBER, 2011
ACTIVITIES
CONTACT INFO: info@yoginimafdet.com and www.yoginimaldet.com
Our World Cultural Center Presents
Fun Summer Camp For Girls & Boys
Wii Girls * Brother 2 Brother Programs
2251 Florin Road, Suite 20, Sacramento, CA 95822
Wii Girls Summer Camp
July 5 thru 29, 2011 * Monday thru Thursday
10 am to 3 pm
Other Activities Includes: Swimming, Bra Clinic, Roller Skating, 6 Flags Great America, Bowling,
Acting (Drama), Movie Making, Music & Arts, Farmers Market, other field trips & activities will be added.
Cost: FREE! We provide transportation, lunch, snacks and materials.
Criteria for Candidates: ages 12 to 14
6th 7th, 8th & 9th grades
Call Sister Rene to Register!
Brother2Brother Summer Camp
July 5 thru 29, 2011 * Monday thru Thursday
10 am to 3 pm
Other Activities Includes: Swimming, Manhood
Development, Roller Skating, 6 Flags Great America, Bowling, Movie & Music Making, Arts, Farmers Market, other field trips & activities will be add.
Cost: FREE! We provide transportation, lunch, snacks and materials.
Criteria for Candidates: ages 10 to 13
5th, 6th & 7th, grades
Call Brother Keon to Register! For More Information Please Call 916-706-2838
or email:ourworldculturalcenter@yahoo.com
CONTACT INFO: ourworldculturalcenter@yahoo.com
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IN REMEMBRANCE: 5-29-2011
GIL SCOTT-HERON, VOICE OF BLACK CULTURE
By BEN SISARIO
Published: May 28, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.
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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Gil Scott-Heron in his Harlem home in 2001.
His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had become ill after returning from a trip to Europe.
Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics.
Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and the stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. And he has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West.
“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D, the leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.”
Mr. Scott-Heron’s career began with a literary rather than a musical bent. He was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949, and reared in Tennessee and New York. His mother was a librarian and an English teacher; his estranged father was a Jamaican soccer player.
In his early teens, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote detective stories, and his work as a writer won him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in the Bronx, where he was one of 5 black students in a class of 100. Following in the footsteps of Langston Hughes, he went to the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and he wrote his first novel at 19, a murder mystery called “The Vulture.” A book of verse, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” and a second novel, “The Nigger Factory,” soon followed.
Working with a college friend, Brian Jackson, Mr. Scott-Heron turned to music in search of a wider audience. His first album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” was released in 1970 on Flying Dutchman, a small label, and included a live recitation of “Revolution” accompanied by conga and bongo drums. Another version of that piece, recorded with a full band including the jazz bassist Ron Carter, was released on Mr. Scott-Heron’s second album, “Pieces of a Man,” in 1971.
“Revolution” established Mr. Scott-Heron as a rising star of the black cultural left, and its cool, biting ridicule of a nation anesthetized by mass media has resonated with the socially disaffected of various stripes — campus activists, media theorists, coffeehouse poets — for four decades. With sharp, sardonic wit and a barrage of pop-culture references, he derided society’s dominating forces as well as the gullibly dominated:
The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother.
During the 1970s, Mr. Scott-Heron was seen as a prodigy with significant potential, although he never achieved more than cult popularity. He recorded 13 albums from 1970 to 1982, and was one of the first acts that the music executive Clive Davis signed after starting Arista Records in 1974. In 1979, Mr. Scott-Heron performed at Musicians United for Safe Energy’s “No Nukes” benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, and in 1985, he appeared on the all-star anti-apartheid album “Sun City.”
But by the mid-1980s, Mr. Scott-Heron had begun to fade, and his recording output slowed to a trickle. In later years, he struggled publicly with addiction. Since 2001, Mr. Scott-Heron had been convicted twice for cocaine possession, and he served a sentence at Rikers Island in New York for parole violation.
Commentators sometimes used Mr. Scott-Heron’s plight as an example of the harshness of New York’s drug laws. Yet his friends were also horrified by his descent. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr. Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe.
That image seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?”
Complete information about Mr. Scott-Heron’s survivors was not immediately available, but Mr. Byng, his publisher, said that they included a half-brother, Denis Scott-Heron; a son, Rumal; and two daughters, Gia Scott-Heron and Che Newton. Mr. Byng added that Mr. Scott-Heron had recently been working on voluminous memoirs, parts of which he hoped to publish soon.
Despite Mr. Scott-Heron’s public problems, he remained an admired figure in music, and he made occasional concert appearances and was sought after as a collaborator. Last year, XL released “I’m New Here,” his first album of new material in 16 years, which was produced by Richard Russell, a British record producer who met Mr. Scott-Heron at Rikers Island in 2006 after writing him a letter.
Reviews for the album inevitably called Mr. Scott-Heron the “godfather of rap,” but he made it clear he had different tastes.
“It’s something that’s aimed at the kids,” he once said. “I have kids, so I listen to it. But I would not say it’s aimed at me. I listen to the jazz station.”
Gil Scott-Heron.
What a way with words, and what a way with getting to the point past all the bull, mendacity, and beating-around-the-bush morass.
Mr. Scott-Heron’s famous “Revolution” poem still stands today as a testament to challenging the medocrity that has become the norm in America, as well as stating that real revolution waits for no one.
The revolution will not be televised simply because it will not be televised.
The revolution will be live, and when it comes, it will catch everyone by surprise.
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.
There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.
Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.
Mr. Sott-Heron was more than just one song. he was a man of beautiful lyrics and songs that were sublime—songs that stand the tests of time:
He will be sorely missed.
Rest in peace, Mr. Scott-Heron.
Rest in peace.
*****************************************************************************
JEFF CONWAY, ACTOR IN ‘TAXI’ AND ‘GREASE’
By ANITA GATES
Published: May 27, 2011
Jeff Conaway, the personable actor who won television fame on the sitcom “Taxi” and movie success in the musical “Grease” three decades ago and who later publicly struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 60.
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ABC, via Photofest
Jeff Conaway, left, with Tony Danza in the television sitcom, “Taxi.”
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Chris Pizzello/Associated Press
Jeff Conaway in Los Angeles in 2009.
He died of complications of pneumonia at Encino Tarzana Medical Center after being taken off life support on Thursday, a talent representative, Phil Brock, said.
Mr. Conaway was found unconscious at his home in the Encino section of the city on May 11 and was kept in a coma medically without ever regaining consciousness, Mr. Brock said. He said Mr. Conaway had been struggling with back problems and treating himself with painkillers while in weakened health.
Mr. Conaway’s addictions to alcohol and drugs were well known because of his appearances in 2008 on the reality series “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew,” starring Drew Pinsky. Mr. Conaway often appeared high and belligerent on the show. He had agreed to participate against the wishes of his agents, Mr. Brock said.
Mr. Conaway said numerous back surgeries were responsible for his addiction to painkillers. In early 2010 he had a serious fall that left him with a brain hemorrhage, a broken hip and a fractured neck.
Mr. Conaway spoke openly of his problems in 2008 when he appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show and told the host, “I’ve tried to commit suicide 21 times.” Asked about his methods, he replied, “Mostly it’s been with pills.”
In late February and early March, Mr. Conaway and his girlfriend of seven years, Victoria Spinoza, a singer who records as Vikki Lizzi, filed temporary restraining orders against each other, trading accusations of theft and physical violence.
Mr. Conaway had continued to work in films and television in recent years, but his career had plummeted since his greatest popularity, in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
The film version of “Grease,” starring a rebellious John Travolta (as Danny Zuko) and a wholesome Olivia Newton-John (Sandy) as improbable 1950s high school sweethearts, opened in June 1978, with Mr. Conaway in the supporting role of Kenickie, Mr. Travolta’s bad-boy sidekick. The tough-talking but vulnerable Kenickie goes through his own trauma, believing that his girlfriend, Rydell High’s bad girl Rizzo (Stockard Channing), may be pregnant.
Three months later, “Taxi,” a sitcom about a group of New York cabdrivers, had its premiere on ABC. The show’s ensemble cast included Judd Hirsch, Danny DeVito, Andy Kaufman, Tony Danza, Christopher Lloyd and Marilu Henner. Mr. Conaway’s character, Bobby Wheeler, was a vain and handsome aspiring actor who never seemed to get a break in his show business career.
In an admiring review of the show in 1979, John J. O’Connor, writing in The New York Times, described a scene in which Bobby had accidentally let his friend Tony’s two pet fish die. “I guess it was just their time,” Bobby tells Tony desperately, adding that maybe the deaths were “one of those murder-suicide things.”
The series lasted five seasons, but Mr. Conaway left after the fourth. In 1989, he explained his reason for the departure to The Toronto Star: “In ‘Taxi,’ I kept doing the same scene for three years. I was underused.”
Jeffrey Charles William Michael Conaway was born on Oct. 5, 1950, in New York City. His parents, a struggling actress and an advertising man, divorced when he was a boy, and he divided his time between his mother’s apartment in Flushing, Queens, and his maternal grandparents’ home in South Carolina.
He began acting as a child and made his Broadway debut when he was 10 in a small part in “All the Way Home,” a well-received adaptation of James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family,” starring Colleen Dewhurst, Arthur Hill and Lillian Gish.
Growing up, he modeled, appeared in commercials and played in a rock band. He spent a year at the North Carolina School of the Arts, then transferred to New York University. But because of a job offer, he never graduated.
That job was in the original Broadway production of “Grease,” which opened in 1972. He understudied several roles but was never cast as Kenickie, the role that made him famous in the film version. Instead, he eventually took over the role of Danny, the romantic lead.
A few years after “Taxi,” Mr. Conaway returned to Broadway in a new musical, “The News,” in which he played the editor of a big-city tabloid. But the reviews were negative, and the show closed after three nights. He continued to appear in films and did television again, most successfully in the 1990s science fiction series “Babylon 5.”
His last film work was as the voice-over narrator in two fantasy dramas, “Dante’s Inferno Documented” and “Dante’s Purgatorio Documented,” both in postproduction. His final screen appearance was in the film “Dark Games,” a thriller scheduled to be released this summer.
Mr. Conaway married and divorced three times. After an early marriage that lasted less than a year, he married Rona Newton-John, the sister of his “Grease” co-star, in 1980. They divorced in 1985. His third wife was Keri Young, from 1990 until their divorce in the early 2000s.
His survivors include two sisters, Michelle and Carla, and a stepson, Emerson Newton-John, a racecar driver.
When Mickey Rourke, after fighting his own battles with addiction, earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in “The Wrestler” two years ago, an interviewer asked Mr. Conaway what he thought about Mr. Rourke’s comeback.
“Hollywood can be a very stinging town,” Mr. Conaway said on a video posted by Hollywood.TV on YouTube. “They say it’s a forgiving business. It’s not that forgiving.”
**********************************************************************
JOSEPH BROOKS, MAKER OF JINGLES, SONGS, AND FILMS
Published: May 23, 2011
Before his life had tumbled into scandal and ended over the weekend in suicide at the age of 73, Joseph Brooks had carved out a glittering, idiosyncratic career as author of some of advertising’s most famous jingles, as a maker of movies and musicals and as the composer of a huge hit, “You Light Up My Life.”
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Associated Press
Joseph Brooks in 1978 with his songwriting Oscar.
Mr. Brooks’s death came after he was charged in 2009 with luring 13 women to Manhattan to audition for movie roles, then drugging and sexually assaulting them. He had not yet been tried, but he faced 25 years in prison if convicted. A son, Nicholas, is awaiting trial on charges that he strangled his girlfriend last December.
Mr. Brooks, who had been hobbled by a stroke in 2008, was found dead in his Upper East Side apartment on Sunday. The police said his head was wrapped in a plastic bag connected to a tube from a helium tank and that he had left a three-page note. The city medical examiners have ruled the death a suicide.
Joseph Brooks had lived life in superlatives. He cranked out jingle after jingle, many of which still rattle in the nation’s collective head. Thank Mr. Brooks for “You’ve got a lot to live, and Pepsi’s got a lot to give.” At one point in the 1970s, he said, he had 150 commercials on the air. He told The Washington Post in 1977 that he figured more people in the United States listened to his music than that of any other composer.
He wrote the song “You Light Up My Life” for the 1977 movie of the same name, which he produced, wrote, directed and scored. The song won him an Oscar, a Grammy and a 10-week run as composer of the No. 1 song in America, sung by Debby Boone. (Kasey Cisyk sang it in the movie.) The movie made $40 million on an investment of less than $1 million, despite being almost universally panned. (Many commentators have since pointed out that a central plot twist was the heroine’s one-night stand with a director.)
In his next movie, “If Ever I See You Again,” Mr. Brooks did everything he did for the first, and also starred. The hero, as written by Mr. Brooks, was a brilliant Madison Avenue music man.
His chutzpah became the stuff of legend. After every major studio and distributor turned down “You Light Up My Life,” Mr. Brooks paid for previews in several cities and spent $150,000 of his own money on ads. Columbia finally took the bait.
In 2005, after critics attacked his only Broadway show, “In My Life,” Mr. Brooks spent $1.5 million for ads saying the critics were wrong. A characteristic touch was taking a criticism by Ben Brantley of The New York Times, “jaw-dropping whimsy run amok,” and treating it as a compliment.
Mr. Brooks’s penchant for the large gesture was vividly evinced in “Invitation to the Wedding” (1983), which he directed and scored, and in which his wife at the time, the former Susan Paul, acted. Mr. Brooks hired John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson to star, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to play his music. The movie flopped.
Writers groped for ways to describe the majesty of the young Mr. Brooks’s self-regard. Grace Lichtenstein, writing in The Times in 1977, said, “Joe Brooks may be a relatively unknown director in motion pictures, but in the field of egotism he’s the most promising heavyweight contender since Sylvester Stallone.”
The Globe and Mail of Toronto noted Mr. Brooks’s eagerness to depict his own life, “perfections and all.”
Joseph Brooks was born on March 11, 1938, in Manhattan and grew up in Lawrence, N.J. He claimed to have marched up to a piano at 3 and played. “It wasn’t something that someone would say, ‘Hey, that’s the best thing I ever heard,’ but I was picking out tunes,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1982. “My grandmother called it an act of God.”
When he was 5 or so, around the time of his parents’ divorce, he developed a severe stutter and began to write plays. “I could put the words that were in my head into my characters’ mouths so they could be these intelligent, often very funny people,” he said.
Mr. Brooks led services at his synagogue at 12 and grew bored with five different colleges, including Juilliard, never graduating from any. He failed as a professional singer and drifted into the ad business, where he chose to think of his music as “50-second hits.” He moonlighted writing the scores for movies like “The Lords of Flatbush” (1974).
Mr. Brooks was making piles of money in the ad business from clients including Geritol, Dr Pepper, American Airlines and Dial soap. His drive to make jingles more evocative — using Ray Charles to sing about Maxwell House coffee, for example — earned him the Clio, a top industry award, 21 times.
He began “You Light Up My Life” by putting up $250,000 himself and raising $550,000 from others. He composed the song even as the movie was being shot.
Mr. Brooks had been married four times and was single at his death. In addition to his son Nicholas, he is survived by two other children.
As he wandered between unpredictable movie and stage projects — including a 1989 musical in London based on the 1926 Fritz Lang film, “Metropolis” — Mr. Brooks repeatedly returned to a favorite subject: himself. And he kept finding novel approaches. In his 2005 Broadway production, God sings the words to two of Mr. Brooks’s most successful jingles, those for Dr Pepper and Volkswagen.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 25, 2011
An obituary on Tuesday about the songwriter and filmmaker Joseph Brooks misstated Mr. Brooks’s role in the production of the movie “Eddie and the Cruisers.” He was a producer and musical adviser; he did not write the score, which was written by John Cafferty. (This error also appeared in an article about Mr. Brooks on June 24, 2009.) The obituary also misstated Mr. Brooks’s birthday in 1938. It was March 11, not May 11. And it misspelled the surname of the woman who is heard singing Mr. Brooks’s composition “You Light Up My Life” in the movie of the same name. She was Kacey Cisyk, not Cicyk.
Filed under Uncategorized
SKYWATCH: NEW MILKY WAY ARM, EPITAPH FOR SPIRIT, AND MORE
News
Thomas Dame
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Bulletin at a GlanceNews |
The Milky Way’s New Arm
May 25, 2011 | Astronomers have struggled for decades to discern our galaxy’s true shape. But they’re slowly getting the picture, thanks to the discovery of a long arm that traces the grand spiral to its outer limits. > read more
Closeup of a Black-Hole Powerhouse
May 23, 2011 | Come along with radio astronomers as they zoom in on the powerful, high-energy jets of Centaurus A and the supermassive black hole at its heart. > read more
Kepler’s Exoplanets: A Progress Report
May 26, 2011 | The Kepler exoplanet-hunting mission got top press-conference billing at the American Astronomical Society convention in Boston. But some reporters left wanting more. > read more
More Ado about the Cas A Supernova
May 27, 2011 | Legend has it that a bright noon star graced the birth of the 17th century British Monarch Charles II. Could it have been a daytime glimpse of the Cas A supernova? > read more
Sky & Telescope July 2011
May 19, 2011 | Sky & Telescope‘s July 2011 issue is now available to digital subscribers. > read more
Observing
Rajani Flanders
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Three Low-Cost Telescopes
December 13, 2010 | Our review of three high-quality $100 telescopes is now available for free online, complete with audio and video supplements. > read more
The Four-Planet Dance of 2011
March 9, 2011 | Every morning in May 2011, just before sunrise, four planets combine to form fascinating and ever-changing patterns. > read more
Saturn’s New Bright Storm
December 27, 2010 | A massive new storm in the ringed planet’s northern hemisphere is bright enough to see in small telescopes. > read more
This Week’s Sky at a Glance
Sky & Telescope diagram
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This Week’s Sky at a Glance
May 27, 2011 | Saturn and Porrima form a striking naked-eye “double star” in the south after dark, with Spica to their left and Corvus below them. At dawn, the waning Moon passes the planet lineup low in the east. > read more
Community
NASA / JPL / Texas A&M / Cornell
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An Epitaph for Rover Spirit (2004-2010)
May 27, 2011 | The lead scientist for the panoramic cameras on Mars Rover Spirit reflects with sorrow, joy, and pride on the life and death of one of the most important spacecraft ever launched. > read more
Let the Star Parties Begin!
April 14, 2011 | Want to gaze at the Milky Way all night or peer into the eyepiece of a 12-foot-tall telescope? Then escape the city lights and head for the nearest “star party.” > read more
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COLORLINES: OPRAH’S OFTEN TROUBLING ALWAYS COMPELLING BOND WITH WOMEN
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Filed under Uncategorized
HATEWATCH: KLAN BOSS RON EDWARDS SENTENCED TO FOUR YEARS ON DRUG CHARGES
Klan Boss Ron Edwards Sentenced to Four Years on Drug Charges
by Leah Nelson on May 26, 2011
A federal judge this morning sentenced Ronald Wayne Edwards (seen at right during a deposition in 2007), former imperial wizard of the Kentucky-based Imperial Klans of America (IKA), to 48 months in prison, The Associated Press reported.
Edwards, who was charged with federal gun and drug violations, pleaded guilty in March. Along with his longtime girlfriend, Christina Gillette, who pleaded guilty on drug charges, he was accused trafficking methamphetamines and painkillers. Gillette will serve 12 months and one day in prison, the AP said.
Edwards got his start with the Klan in the early 1990s as head of the Kentucky klavern (or local unit) of the Arkansas-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. That group, originally started by David Duke but since led by Thom Robb, tried to portray itself as a kinder, gentler Klan, seeking to adopt highways and follow other strategies meant to improve its image. But the group split in July 1994, when nine chapters departed to form the Federation of Klans over an accusation that Robb had absconded with funds raised through a telephone hotline and also a $20,000 gift that was allegedly meant for the group.
Edwards was briefly with the federation, led by former Robb follower Ed Novak, but the group collapsed around 1995. In 1996, Edwards started the IKA.
The Southern Poverty Law Center sued Edwards in 2008, contending that members of his Klan group attacked a 16-year-old U.S. citizen of Panamanian Indian descent on his father’s side because they thought he was an “illegal spic.” Also named as a defendant was Jarred Hensley of Cincinnati, who served nearly three years in state prison for assaulting the teenager at a county fair in northwest Kentucky. A jury found Edwards liable for 20% of the $2.5 million they awarded the teen.
The case is currently on appeal.
Just like a Klansman to get involved with drugs. Being a racist was not enough, he added overkill with the drugs and federal gun violations.
As for this tidbit:
“That group, originally started by David Duke but since led by Thom Robb, tried to portray itself as a kinder, gentler Klan, seeking to adopt highways and follow other strategies meant to improve its image.”
Please, spare me. A “kinder, gentler Klan?” No such nightmare exists. Adopt a highway, or whatever—dress up a pig, put cologne on it, and a hat—and it is still a pig. (A thousand pardons to the porcines of the world.)
And just what is an imperial wizard anyway? What kind of experience does that position require? How do they prepare their resume? Does the job involve stenography? Does the job require someone who presides over a bubbling cauldron nutritious meal of simmering pork rinds, watermelon peels, and moonshine, guaranteed to make a Klansman grow big, strong and handsome?
Or do they send snail mail and e-mails to Lucifer, to relay to him how soon they will be taking up residence in Hell?
Sheesh.
Filed under Uncategorized
IN REMEMBRANCE: SHERRICE IVERSON
It is hard to believe, but, today, little Sherrice Iverson would be 21-years-old today if she had lived.
SHERRICE IVERSON
Her short life was ended brutally on May 25, 1997 by Jeremy Strohmeyer in the Primadonna Resort, a Las Vegas, Nevada casino.
Strohmeyer still lives in solitary confinement lockdown, in the Lovelock Correctional Center in Lovelock, Nevada where he is classified as “medium” custody. The witness to the vicious crime, David Cash, Jr., still lives his life. In fact, Cash, still showed little remorse when in a radio interview he stated the following:
“I have a lot of remorse toward the Iverson family. It was a very tragic event…The simple fact remains I don’t know this little girl … I don’t know people in Panama or Africa who are killed every day, so I can’t feel remorse for them. The only person I know is Jeremy Strohmeyer”, but still insisted that he did nothing wrong.[3][12]
Sherrice never got the chance to live the rest of her girlhood, nor grow from a teenager into a young woman.
She is gone forever from us, and we will never know the many gifts she could have given us if her life was not taken from her. But her life was not in vain. After pressure was put on them by Sherrice’s parents, the Sherrice Iverson Bill was passed requiring witnesses to such a crime to report it to the police.
Rest in peace, Sherrice.
Rest in peace.
Filed under Uncategorized
DIANE BAILEY KEEPS HAIR AU NATUREL
Diane Bailey, a stylist, who owns Tendrils Hair Spa in Fort Greene, NY has been on a mission since 1987 to help Black women learn to love the beauty of their hair, as well as to properly care for their gravity-defying tightly coiled tresses.
Perms which do so much damage to Black women’s hair have caused hair loss, burns on the scalp, as wells as thinning and brittle hair. Not to mention the fact that little girls should never be subjected to the harsh and caustic chemicals that are in perms.
Caring for natural, multi-textured hair can be done, once one learns the proper way to wash, comb and style it.
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May 24, 2011, 4:39 pm Updated: 9:03 am
Diane Bailey Keeps Hair Au Natural
By SHANNON CARLIN, CUNY J-SchoolFor many women beauty is pain, but Diane Bailey says it doesn’t have to be so bad when it comes to hair care, at least.
Since 1987, the stylist, who owns Tendrils Hair Spa in Fort Greene, has offered specialty services that help women keep their hair natural without having to use harsh chemicals.
When Ms. Bailey first started her salon there weren’t many options for women with multi-textured hair.
“If you wanted to express yourself, you had to get a perm,” she said. “We wanted healthier options, options that would give a different type of aesthetic, a different type of beautiful.”
Now, Ms. Bailey wants to help parents figure out the best way to care for their children’s hair.
On May 15, Ms. Bailey offered a workshop called “Mommy and Me: An Introductory Guide to Multi Textured Hair Care” at Still Hip in Clinton Hill. The goal of the workshop, which Ms. Bailey intends to make an ongoing series, was to teach parents and their children that all hair types are beautiful — especially when you know how to care for it properly.
A lot of Ms. Bailey’s clients are African-American mothers who have had negative experiences with their own hair. From sores on their scalps caused by relaxing chemicals to traction alopecia, which is hair loss from constant pulling on the hair, these women want to keep their children’s hair chemical free.
She also said that she fields a lot of questions from mothers who are not of the same race as their children and do not have the same type of hair.
In the last ten years, the number of people in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill who identify themselves as multiracial has increased from 4.4 percent in 2000 to 4.9 percent in 2010. Although the 10-year increase was not significant, that percentage remains one of the highest in the city.
Nicole James, a mother of three, came to the workshop from Queens in hopes to learn how to style her daughters’ hair. She also felt that it was important to break the negative cycle of African-American women who hate their hair. “I want my kids to know there’s no such thing as good and bad, it’s just hair,” Ms. James said.
Ms. Bailey echoed that sentiment, saying that the 2010 Sesame Street video above, called, “I Love My Hair”, was ultimately the inspiration for the workshop.
“Just that little song that says, ‘Whether it’s straight or braided or locked, I am beautiful.’ She’s talking about the inside, rather than the outside,” Ms. Bailey said. “When I was a little girl no one said that to me…now these young women have that.”
Rock your hair, little girl!
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THE DOVE COUNTERBALANCE GENERAL INTELLIGENCE TEST
Also known if somewhat less delicately as the “Chitlin’ Intelligence Test”, the Dove Counterbalance Test was designed by Black sociologist Adrian Dove, in 1971, and is used for instructional and educational purposes and to also highlight that so-called IQ tests generally rate the knowledge of people who grew up cognizant of the information that particular IQ tests covers. Intelligence quotient tests seek to find the level of capability designed to test learning capability, memory, innovative and creative thinking and the ability to simultaneously address multiple problems that the test subject has on certain kinds of information and knowledge, but, many IQ tests reveal the weaknesses of cultural bias that lurk in so many IQ tests.
The Dove Counterbalance Test is based on Black American specific history and knowledge. The test requires knowledge on the familiarity of Black American community life in the 1950s and 1960s.
Created to test one’s knowledge of Black people’s food, culture, traditions, history, language, attitudes, and lifestyles, the test shows that IQ tests divulge a dissimilarity in people’s cultural backgrounds.
What may be known as a breakfast nook to many White people, as well as a bidet, may be something unknown to many Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and Black Americans.
What may be known to many Black Americans as talking out the side of your neck, and the dozens, may not be known by many other non-Blacks.
Some IQ tests are visual and spatial, as well as verbal and mathematical. The following IQ test item, is modeled after items in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test:
Other IQ tests are as follows: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, (aka, WAIS Test); Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Stanford-Binet, Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities, Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, and Raven’s Progressive Matrices (take the test here.)
IQ tests can also contain cultural influences that reduce their validity, especially in any supposed cultural fairness of the test when given to groups of people not familiar with the tests, creating what is known as Stereotype Threat. Claude Steele discusses stereotype threat.
Some IQ tests, such as the WAIS, cannot measure the cognitive ability of some groups of people such as children suffering from autism; or, groups not familiar with the cultural and linguistic modes of American and Western Europe society, such as the Khoi and San people of South Africa. On the other hand, if the Khoi and San people devised a test for non-San people, I am sure many of us would fail it miserably.
Getting back to the Dove Intelligence Test.
Some questions on the Dove test are as follows:
“A gashead is a person who has a…?” Or this one: “Jet is…?”
If you wish to go further, test your knowledge here on the Dove Test.
If you want to go even further, here are other IQ tests that show the cultural dissimilarities that occur when trying to assess a person’s cultural knowledge of groups or societies that are different from their own:
-the Elliott Discrimination Inventory Test, devised by Jane Elliott of the famous “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment”. The test items are about life in various countries in the United Kingdom; the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (aka, the B.I.T.C.H.-100 Test), created by Robert Williams in 1972; and the Koori Test, ( aka, Knowledge Of Operative Reflective Intelligence), created in 1982 by James Wilson-Miller, in which the test questions are about Australia’s Aboriginal people’s culture, tradition, lifestyle, and linguistics.
Other tests: the Redden-Simons Rap Test, a 50-item, multiple-choice test of vocabulary items typical of “street language” in 1986, in Des Moines, Iowa. On the short version of the Redden-Simons “Rap” test (12-items), “street” individuals averaged eight correct items, and college students averaged only two correct items.); Australian/American Intelligence Test, drawn from typical items on standard Western-European intelligence tests; and the 10-item Original Australian Intelligence Test, based on the culture of the Edward River Australian Aboriginal community in North Queensland. [SOURCE]
The purpose behind the aforementioned tests is to give people an idea of what it is like to be tested, assessed, and graded on test criteria that would be foreign to the test subjects, since it is not part of their cultural history.
Intelligence is not just book learning. It is more than learned knowledge.
Intelligence is also skills one has learned to handle the twists and turns that life throws them.
It is good to be able to utilize calculus, geometry, basic math, English grammar, and fractions, but, it would also be a testament to one’s knowledge and skills to know how to make a Dakota fire hole, to know how to make a snare to trap birds, to know how to build shelter on a beach, in the Sahara desert, in the snows of Northwest Alaska, or in the deep innermost reaches of the Amazon rain forest.
People’s intelligence increases as they age. (Well, it should.)
What one knew as a child becomes more as one grows older.
The true test of a person is not what they learned only in books.
The true test of a person’s intelligence is in the ability to acquire knowledge, to develop critical thinking skills, to think and reason effectively, how they make their way through life’s toils and travails, as well as how they evolve and adapt to life’s ever-changing dynamics in their environment.
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WEEK OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLES OF NON-SELF-GOVERNING TERRITORIES: MAY 25-JUNE 1, 2011
WEEK OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLES OF NON-SELF-GOVERNING TERRITORIES: MAY 25-JUNE 1, 2011
(OBSERVED ANNUALLY: MAY 25, AFRICAN LIBERATION DAY)
MUCH CAN BE DONE TO ASSIST NON-SELF-GOVERNING TERRITORIES, ASSEMBLY
PRESIDENT SAYS IN MESSAGE FOR WEEK OF SOLIDARITY
Following is the text of a message from General Assembly President Harri Holkeri (Finland) on the occasion of the observance of the Week of Solidarity with the Peoples of Non-Self-Governing Territories, beginning 25 May:
The international community annually observes the week beginning on 25 May, as the Week of Solidarity with the Peoples of the Non-Self-Governing Territories.
This year, we begin the Second Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism. In this context, the Plan of Action presented by the Secretary-General in 1991 and updated this year, in document A/56/61, constitutes a principled reminder of the work that remains to be done in order to reach the objectives of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples which the General Assembly adopted in December 1960, over four decades ago.
It is thus a time to renew the commitment of the world community to support the aspirations of the peoples of the remaining Territories for the full implementation of resolution 1514 (XV) containing the 1960 Declaration.
The United Nations has made a significant contribution to decolonization. During its existence, many Non-Self-Governing Territories have achieved a self-governing status and many of them have become independent nations. Since 1961, the work of the Organization in the area of decolonization has been carried out by the Special Committee of 24, entrusted by the Assembly with the historic mandate of examining the application of the Declaration and making suggestions and recommendations on the progress and extent of its implementation.
As we observe the Week of Solidarity, the Special Committee of 24, the policy-making organ of the General Assembly on decolonization, is holding its Caribbean Regional Seminar in Havana with the participation of representatives of Member States, the peoples of the Territories, organizations within the United Nations system, experts on the Caribbean as well as representatives of civil society. It should be a unique opportunity to learn more about the current situation in theTerritories, particularly those in the Caribbean region, and listen to the views of their inhabitants.
Just a few months ago, I had the privilege of paying a visit to East Timor, a Territory currently administered by the United Nations, which is just emerging into independent life. Although it was a relatively short visit, I was able to
experience first hand, the sense of expectation and hope of the East Timorese as they look to the future. The immense challenges a nascent East Timor will face, however, are not greater than the determination with which the Timorese are preparing to assume full responsibility for their destiny as an independent nation.
On this commemorative occasion, we look back with satisfaction at the achievements of the United Nations in the area of decolonization, but more importantly, we look ahead at the concerted work that must be carried out to fulfil the objectives of the Second International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism. Obviously, these tasks will require the cooperation of the administering Powers with the Special Committee. There is also much that can be done to assist the Territories, many of which are small islands, by the specialized agencies and United Nations programmes.
In my capacity as President of the General Assembly, I take this opportunity to emphasize the importance of supporting and implementing the decisions of the Assembly on decolonization in order to achieve the ultimate goal of the Second Decade: a world free of colonialism.
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Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 