Harriet Tubman : The Underground Railroad

This is a short movie about Harriet Tubman , her life , the underground railroad  and Harriet Tubman's contribution to it .



Martin Luther King's Last Speech ..."I Have Been to the Mountain Top"

 

Remebering Black Wall Street : The True Story

"Mass graves holds the secerts of American race Massacre."

New  York --- Investigators are searching for the graves of up to 400 black Americans in an attempt to end the 78-year cover-up of one of the worst acts of mass slaughter in the country's history .

Dr. Clyde Snow , the worlds leading authority in forensic anthropology , is preparing to spend the coming months in his home state of Oklahoma , identifying the remains of hundreds of men , women and children believed buried in communal graves .

The dead are the long-missing casualties of the Tulsa race riot in 1921 , a little know chapter in American history which , if substantiated , would eclipse even the 1985 Oklahoma booming as the country's worst civilian atrocity .

1921 Tulsa Race Riot : Survivors & Decendants Recall

Camilla Williams , Black Opera Star , Dies At 92

Indianapolis --- Camilla Williams , believed to be the first African-American woman to appear with a major U.S. opera company has died . She was 92.

 

Williams died Sunday at her home in Bloomington , her attorney , Eric Slotegraaf , said Monday .She died of complications from cancer , said Alain Braker , a spokeman for the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music , where Williams was a professor emeritus of voice .

 

Williams' debut with the New York City Opera on May 15 , 1946 , was thought to make her first African-American singer to appear  at New York's more prestigious Metropolitan Opera.

 

In her City Opera debut , Williams sang what would bec ome her signature role , Cio-Cio-San , in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly." She displayed  "a vividness and subtlety unmatched by any other artist who has assayed the part here in many a year," according to a New York Times review of the performance .

 

She also appeared with the City Opera that season as Nedda , in Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci." The following year she performed the role of Mimi , in Puccini's "La Boheme," and in 1948 she sang the title role of Verdi's "Aida."

 

Williams first appeared overseas in 1950 in a concert tour of Panama , the Dominican Republic and Venezuela . She also appeared as Cio-Cio-San with  the London Sadler's Wells Opera in 1954 and later that same year as the first black artist to sing a major role with the Vienna State Opera .

 

Williams , the daughter of a chauffeur , was introduced to "Madame Butterfly," Mozart and other classical works at age 12 while growing up in Danville , Va. A Welsh voice teacher came to the segregated city to teach at a school for white girls  and taught a few black girls at a private home . By that time she had been singing at Danville's Calvary Baptist Church for four years .

 

"My grandparents and parents were self-taught musicians ; all of them sang, and there was always music in our home ," she wrote for her entry in the first edition of "who'Who in the World."

 

A graduate of Virginia State College , she was teaching third grade and music in Danville schools in 1942  when she was offered a scholarship from the PHiladephia Alumni Association of her alma amter for vocal training in Philadephia where she studied under Marion  Szekely-Freschi and worked as an usher in a theater /

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Alifetime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , she performed in her hometown of Danville in 1963 to raise funds to free jailed civil rights demonstrators and sang at the 1063 civil rights march in Washington,D.C. immediately before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King , Jr. gave his "I Have A Dream" speech . She also sang at King's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony the following year . The Chicago Defended lauded her in 1951 for bringing democracy to opera .

 

In 1950 she married Charles Beavers , a fellow Danville native  and a defense attorney whose clients included Malcolm X . He died in 1970 . The couple did not have children .

 

Williams retired from opera in 1971 and taught at Brooklyn College , Bronx College and Queens College until becoming the first African-American professor of voice at Indiana University . In 1983 , as a guest professor  at Beijing's Central Conservatory , she became that school's first black professor . She retired from teachin g in 1997.

 

A memorial service has been scheduled at the First United Methodist Church in Bloomington On February 18 . 

In Honor of Black History Month

Just a sampling of famous African descendants from the twentieth century

 This is Peter, a slave from Baton Rouge louisiana who shows the scars of abuse routinely suffered by many slaves in America

 Notice the shackles on Wilson Chinn's ankles

Slave cabins in Savannah Georgia

 A gathering of plantation slaves

 Five generations of the same slave family represented in this picture

 Slaves preparing cotton for the cotton gin

Slaves escaping across the Rappahannock  River

Rediscovered Letter From '1865' Former Slaves Tells Old master to Shove IT

In the summer of 1865 , a former slave by the name of Jourdan Anderson sent a letter to his former master . And 147 years later , the document reads as richly as it must have been back then.

 

The roughly 800-word letter , which has resurfaced via various  blogs , websites , Twitter and facebook , is a response to a missive from Colonel P.H. Anderson , Jourdan's former master back in Big Springs, Tennessee, Apparently , Col. Anderson had written Jourdan asking him to come to the big house to work .

 

In a tone that could be described either as "impressively measured" or "the deadest deadpan comedy ," the former slave , in the most genteel manner , basically tells the old slave master to kiss his rear end . He laments his being shot at by Col. Anderson when he fled slavery , the mistreatment of his children and there "was never pay-day for the Negroes any more than for horses and cows.

 

Below is Jourdan's letter in full , as it appears on letterofnote.com . To take a look at what  appears to be a scan of the original letter , which appeared in an August 22 , 1865 edition of the New York Daily Tribune . As Letters Of Notes points out , the newspaper account makes clear that the letter was dicater .

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Dayton, Ohio ,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master , Colonel P.H. Anderson , Big Spring , Tennessee

Sir , I got your letter , and was glad to find that you had not forgotten  Jourdan , and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again , promising to do better for me than anyone else can . I have often felt uneasy about you . I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this , for harboring Rebs they found at your house . I suppose they never  heard about you going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier  that was left by his company in their stable . Although you shot at me twice before I left you , I did not want to hear of your being hurt , and I am glad you are still living . It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again , and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther , Green and Lee. Give my love to them all , and tell them I hope we will meet in a better world , if not in this . I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hosiptal , but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intends to shoot me if he ever got a chance .

 

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me . I am doing tolerably well here . I get twenty-fine dollars a month , with victuals and clothing ; have a comfortable home for Mandy ... the folks call her Mrs. Anderson , ... and the children ...Milly , Jane and Grundy ... go to school and learning well . The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher . They go to Sunday School , and Mandy  and me attend  church regularly . We are kindly treated . Sometimes we hear them saying  , "Them colored people were slaves " down in Tennessee . The children feel hurt when they hear those remarks ; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson . Many darkeys would have been proud , as I use to be , to call you master . Now if you will write and say what wages you will give  me , I will better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again .

 

As for my freedom , which you say I can have , it is nothing to be gained on that score , as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville . Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly ; and we have conducted to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you . This will make us to forget  and forgive the old scores  , and rely on your justice and friendship  in the future .I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years . At twenty-five dollars a month for me and two dollars a week for Mandy , our earning would amount to eleven thousand six hundred dollars . Add to this the interest for the time our wages was kept back  , and deduct what you paid for our clothing , and three doctor's visits to me  , and pulling a tooth for Mandy , and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled tp . Please send the money by Adams Express , in care of V. Winters , Esq. , Dayton Ohio . If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past , we can have little faith in your promises in the future . We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers  , in making us toil for you for generations  without recompense . Here I draw my wages  every Saturday nught  ; but in Tennessee there was  never any pay-day for the negores  any more than fot the horses and cows . Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire .

 

In answering this letter , please state if there would be safety for my Milly and Jane , who are now grown up , and both good-looking girls . You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine  . I would rather stay here  and strave ... and die , if it come to that  ... than my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickness of their young masters . You will also please state if there has been any schools open                          ed for the colored children in your neighborhood . Tje great desire of my life now is to give my children an education , and have then form virtous habits.

Say howdy to George carter , and Thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me .

 

From your old servant ,

Jourdan Anderson 

Mississippi Delta - Still America's Shame

Now

1967

 

Returning to the Mississippi Delta 44 years after an iconic photo documentary highlighted the poverty in the region.

The Mississippi Delta is known as the poorest corner of the poorest state in America. And what little economic opportunity the region does hold is just a few factory closures away from collapse. The Mississippi Delta has long been a byword for hard times. The region is the home of the blues, and it has never quite managed to shake off its reputation as a place of misery, poverty and racial inequality. When a young photographer, Al Clayton, documented the area in 1967, the images he captured - of malnourished children and people living in abject poverty - helped bring national attention to the region's plight. "There was a part of it that was so depressing and painful to live with," he says. The black and white pictures, collected in the book Still Hungry in America, shocked the country, and for Mr Clayton, the experience was shattering. "It was hard to get through," he recalls.  Although the particular nature of the region's poverty has changed a half a century later, the region remains in crisis.

Nationwide, 14.3% of Americans lived in poverty in 2009. In Mississippi, the figure was 22%, and in some counties in the Delta, it was 48%.  The Delta, where children's bellies were once distended from malnutrition, is now the fattest region in America, and it leads the country in teen pregnancy and single parenthood. Some corners of Belzoni, a town Mr Clayton visited with civil rights worker Kenneth Dean, seem barely to have changed. Third Street is still lined with ramshackle, draughty wooden shacks

Even though they now have running water and toilets, the dilapidated houses look just the way they did 44 years ago. Two in a field off Highway 49 have been turned into museum pieces. "They were old in 1967," Mr Dean says as he casts his eye over the scene today. But some things have changed since Mr Clayton first pointed his camera at scenes of grinding poverty.

In the 1960s, the houses were inhabited by single mothers struggling to feed their children. Some of Third Street's original inhabitants remain, but most residents now are unemployed men, some strung out on drugs and alcohol. Belzoni is still full of single women, but many of them live in low-income housing on the edge of town. Thanks to the Head Start programme which began in the 60s and expanded dramatically over the years, their children are fed and educated in nurturing environments, like the pre-school centre run by the Friends of Children of Mississippi. The need for such programmes is great, says executive director Marvin Hogan.

More than 93,000 Mississippi children under six years of age live in poverty, Mr Hogan says. "That's a lot of children," he says. Some of their mothers work at the catfish processing plant in nearby Isola.

In the 60s, catfish helped to fill the employment gap left by the end of sharecropping and the mechanisation of agriculture. But competition from Asia has shuttered some of the area's plants, and the industry's decline poses a grave threat to the region, says Dick Stevens, president of Consolidated Catfish Producers. "I don't see something coming in here to replace it," he says. "It's only a blink away from being nearly as bad as it was years ago. In this area, you either work in a catfish plant, education or healthcare, or you don't work. That's it. There's nothing else."
'Still regressing'
 
In an effort to exploit what meagre opportunities do exist, a small job training centre in Belzoni runs courses in nursing and computing. Marcus Dennard, born to sharecropping parents the year Al Clayton and Kenneth Dean first toured the region, is training to be a nurse's assistant. Little else is available, he says. "The younger generation don't have anything to do," he says.  "We have no public transportation to get back and forth to work. They're all just standing around, doing what they can to survive."
The Delta, he says, feels trapped. "Everyone else seems to be moving forward and we still seem to be regressing," he says, "so I'm doing what I can."

In one room at the job training centre, two students are studying phlebotomy. In the 60s, they might have helped to inoculate children against the infectious diseases which ravaged communities throughout the Delta. Today, those diseases are mostly eradicated, but health workers battle different epidemics: obesity and diabetes.
 
In one major respect, life has improved. The routine racial coercion and violence suffered by African-Americans has gone, and Belzoni has a black mayor and sheriff. But a fundamental problem, rooted in this region's painful history, remains. "This large population, created here through the introduction of slavery, is still here," says Mr Dean. "How does this population rise up to normative, middle-American values and assets when its relationship to the land is severed?"