The Slaves' War: The Civil War In The Words of Former Slaves

Andrew Ward's much anticipated book, "The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves" is slated to be released on June 10, 2008 by Houghton Mifflin.

The book uses first-person narratives from the 1930's Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project to look at the range of emotions felt by slaves when they finally found out they were free. The book also analyzes their view of Marse Lincoln, aka Honest Abe.

Here's a sample to get you into the content of this book:

"The war's end promised freedom, but slaves' expectations were mixed. "Some believed they'd get freedom and others didn't," Laura Abromson recalled in an interview in Arkansas. "They had places they met and prayed for freedom." According to Edie Dennis of Georgia, "Their great, soul-hungering desire was freedom--not that they loved the Yankees or hated their masters, but merely longed to be free and hated the institution of slavery."

But what was the freedom that beckoned to them? "We people on the plantation didn't know much about the war," wrote Robert Anderson in his postwar memoir From Slavery to Affluence. "It was impressed on us indirectly by everyone, that there was little chance of the slaves being set free. Some didn't care whether they were free or not, as there was little to look forward to either way." If freedom came, "what will we do?" they wondered. "We have no home, no money, no clothes, no nothing." On the other hand, "for some of the people, there could be no existence worse than the one they were in. It was a problem either way."

This book sheds light on so many of the conditions and experiences of our fore-parents that most of us don't truly consider. Change and the unknown is scary. If any one of us had been born of slaves and only knew the life of the slave, would running away and starting anew be as simple as we imagine? What did folks really think of Lincoln? Was he as revered as we learn in grammar school or was he viewed differently?

I guess we'll all have to crack open these pages as see for ourselves...

Melissa Harris-Lacewell's book: Barbershops, Bibles, and BET

This book was published in 2004, but with the elections upon us, the message seems more powerful and relevant than ever. Melissa is a truly gifted writer and thinker. Beyond that, she is straight-forward and does not try to sugar coat her message: America has made progress in the last 40 years, but "we might be in a more shockingly similar place than any of us would like to admit."

In a recent interview in American History, she says, "Black and white Americans perceive everything differently--from whether King Kong is a fun family movie or fundamentally a lynching film, all the way to whether O.J. Simpson was guilty or innocent, up to whether what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was fundamentally about race. It's more the rule than the exception that African Americans and whites see and experience the world across a vast difference in perceptions."

Melissa brings up how the current election has been skewed to be all about race and gender, emphasizing how little movement America has made to, "judge a person by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin." She brilliantly states, "In some ways Barack Obama's campaign is a very liberating, post-racial campaign that is freeing up the fetters of separate but equal. But at the same time it's reasserting in the 21st century the one-drop rule by establishing that Barack Obama--the child of a white mother and an African father--is considered black.

One of the most powerful messages Harris-Lacewell makes is that the Black community is disenfranchised by the media. The lack of accurate coverage on so many topics of relevance to our community go unheard or are skewed in a very subjective manner-- usually opposing the beliefs of the Black community. Consequently, she says that beauty shops, barbershops, street corners and stoops, and churches are a more legitimate source of gaining communal truth in the Black American community.

Did I mention that she's a professor at Princeton University? This sista is deep!

Check her out on Democracy Now/Youtube:





To read steinem's article, click here.

There's both sides, you decide....

Back to the Subject of Blackface.....

Just in case anyone's confused about the history of Black Face and why I seriously think it's not even close to being okay, here's a reminder:



And, here's another view from 2 years ago.... I especially value the part where they call it an "old demon" which should not come back out:



And just in case you still don't get it, here's the real thing:



Oh, and I MUST remind you of this:




I wasn't born in 1950, but I still know 58 years is a blink in time....

Have I said how much I LOVE YouTube??!!

Youtube and the Election: A Video Mosaic By Yours Truly

Another view on the Racialization of the current Presidential elections:




Just in case you don't remember or missed the S. Carolina comments:



And we've all heard about Rev. Wright, but how many people heard this one:



And, finally, the funniest thing ever:

Hank Willis Thomas' 82 Piece Unbranded Series Debuts in After 1968

Charles Guice Contemporary presents Hank Willis Thomas' Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008. The 82-piece tour de force debuts in its entirety in After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. After 1968, which opens June 7, examines the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, while exploring the continuing relevance of progressive social change.

In Unbranded, Thomas appropriates print advertisements that feature or target African American audiences, stripping the original texts and logos to reveal what's really being sold. The viewer is left to reflect on how advertising plays an integral roll in constructing, reinforcing, and exploiting stereotypes about African American life--and how the public has become complicit in accepting them.

By presenting these works--two images for each of the forty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King--Thomas reveals the visual language employed by advertisers, and the cultural biases in which they are rooted. With King's death, 1968 became the symbolic end of the Civil Rights Movement; Unbranded attempts to explore the evolution of African Americans in the "corporate eye" from that time until now.

For Thomas, the significance of these ads is two-fold:

"I am not only interested in how other people see us, but also how we see ourselves-- what we can learn about our own assumptions, as well as how we were are "othered". By "unbranding" advertisements I can expose what Roland Barthes refers to as 'what-goes-without-saying' in ads, and encourage viewers to look harder and think deeper about the 'empire of signs' that have become second nature to our experience of life in a commodified world."

A few select pieces by Hank Willis Thomas will be featured in Double Exposure, the upcoming exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

Double Exposure:African Americans Before and Behind the Camera at MoAD

Double Exposure: African Americans Before and Behind the Camera
June 19, 2008 – September 28, 2008

Hank Willis Thomas Smokin’ Joe – “You think you can get me to eat my flapjacks without my Blue Bonnet®? Try it!” From the series Unbranded, 1978/2006 Lambda print Courtesy the artist and Charles Guice Contemporary


Double Exposure: African Americans Before and Behind the Camera - A selection of works from the 19th and 20th centuries that are in the collection will highlight African American history, as well as the history of photography itself. Double Exposure will include historical photographs, albums, and cased images from the collection, as well as contemporary art that incorporate historical photographic imagery. The exhibition will present two predominant subject threads—popular culture and historical images of African Americans and the reality of black life as depicted by African Americans themselves. The photo based artworks in the exhibition comment on slavery, the civil rights conflicts of the twentieth century, and contemporary explorations of family, identity, and history. The contemporary section of Double Exposure will feature late twentieth-century photography, photo-collage, and mixed media. This portion of the show demonstrates the range of artistic possibilities in photography and showcases the strong influence of historical and family photographs on contemporary African American art. Among the techniques represented will be traditional silver prints, Polaroid, and digital prints as well as photographs on linen, wood and felt. This exhibition was organized by The Amistad Center for Art & Culture , Inc., Hartford, Connecticut. Traveling this exhibition is sponsored by Aetna.

Tropic Thunder vs. Birth of a Nation

I know I'm late on this one, but folks just keep trying to compare Robert Downey Jr playing a black man to Soul Man or black folks playing a white person.

I just had to put this out there 'cuz it seems like we're really sleeping on this issue these days. Seriously, which group is in power. Stereotyping only holds weight, like racism, when it's coming from the dominant group. Sorry folks, but people of color in this country are not in power-- not even when Obama makes it into office.

Can we take this back to 1915 with the release of The Birth of a Nation??!! Let me refresh your memory, sleeping giants. That film was created back in the day when Black folks were not allowed to play themselves. It was the first Hollywood blockbuster, and still receives rave reviews from critics like Ebert and Roeper... go figure. That film was also created to justify the existence of the KKK and slavery.

R.D. Jr. playing a black man can be considered on par with Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, and the Wayans brothers playing white people ONLY after the tables of power are made even. Right now, Hell to the NO! Let's focus on getting a Black person into the White House first and not getting assassinated, not having Black folks make up 40% of the prison population, not being the poorest group in America, having equal education and employment opportunities-- then, and only then, can the comparison be made.

My opinion (and that's why I blog) is that it doesn't matter how well intentioned the film makers and actors are, this act is unacceptable.

Does Spike Lee need to re-release Bamboozled for us to catch a clue? And don't get me started on how the Rev. Wright's video's were blasted all over the media for weeks, while Clinton's ADVISOR, Mickey Kantor can call Indianans "worthless white niggers" and we only hear about that for maybe 30 minutes on one day....

Is this just me being a stereotypical angry black man searching to pull the race card, or is this the system revealing it's true nature? What would Martin say?

Stephanie Ann Johnson

Binding Ties
















We Speak

















The Intersection

Stephanie Ann Johnson is an amazing light designer and installation artist. Stephanie is based in Berkeley, California and her site specific works deal with local, as well as, national issues in the Black experience. Okay, details aside, her work is mind-blowing. In works like, The Intersection, created for San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts, a surveillance camera is used to record your image (the viewer) and projects it into the artwork. This is what art should be about-- not just something beautiful and separate that you ponder, but something that involves you, really engages you, and brings some kind of a transformative experience. Stephanie has found a way to blend her day job with her art making-- talk about living artfully!
Again, watch out for this lady-- she's going to be exploding onto the scene.....