richardmurray

Title: Air

Artist: Dada Koïta aka naturaldada ai

 

Posts from Dada Koita

https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=Dada Koïta &type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest

 

Many people in the usa are complaining about the supreme court's rulings as if the supreme court didn't make rulings that upended centuries of prior conditions. Making rulings that upend fifty years worth of rulings isn't as devastating. 

But the key here is state power. The future USA will be based on gangs of states in its fold. Those who try to fight that coming reality are fools. 

Withces Pendant 3d 

 

Witches Pendant details

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Witches-Pendant-3d-969563615

Coloring page

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Witches-Pendant-coloring-page-969562032

the original inspiration

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Necklace-20-Witchtember-2022-930260353

 

 

KWL Live Q&A – All About Audiobooks with Karen Grey

All About Audiobooks featuring Karen Grey

The Kobo Writing Life team is happy to announce our next Live Q&A on June 29th from 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST. KWL Director Tara and author engagement manager Laura will be joined by audiobook narrator, author, and audiobook production consultant Karen Grey! Be sure to have your questions about everything to do with audiobooks ready for this amazing talk.

Hello authors!

For our sixth live Q&A of the year (we’re halfway through, everyone – amazing!), audiobook narrator, author, and all-around audiobook expert and founder of Home Cooked Books, Karen Grey (who narrates under Karen White), will be in conversation with KWL’s director Tara and author engagement manager Laura, discussing all there is to do with audiobooks! We will be discussing everything from Karen’s career as an audiobook narrator to audiobook production processes to marketing your audiobooks and more.

https://kobowritinglife.com/2023/06/01/kwl-live-qa-all-about-audiobooks-with-karen-grey/

 

Questions to your experience: 
What must/need to/can't/shouldn't be in the description of an audiobook?
What is the most effective audio book excerpts or samples?
What is the most/least effective audiobook covers?
How should an audiobook be utilized in a newsletter?
What is the most unique utilization of audiobooks you know of?

 

Untimed Index Notes

How she started in the industry
The different labors in the industry: readers/profers/editors- you have to give the different labors time: readers will need to reread. Profers will ask for things to be reread. Editors will massage the audio for the audience.
Picking an reader- wait for the best voice, readers are booked. A reader needs to have read at least twenty books before.
Voice tags and changing your writing to fit audiobooks- read words aloud
If you are an indie author, if the narrator spoke it better than you wrote it, change the ebook. 
Give narrarators a pronunciation list
Accept the suspense of disbelief in a story involving characters not your native or multilingual
You can be the producers in terms of paying narrators
People are paid for how long when book is done not how long they work in composition, the rates are wide, be careful if they are for the full production or just narration
https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources/audiobooks
Cheapest marketing offer is her newsletter
https://airtable.com/shrwJOoufJITREr5H
Any do or do nots for audiobook samples or covers? 
Cover should be professionally created, a square, be recognizeable as ebook. Include narrators.
Sample- less than 5 minutes, choosing a good meaty section, if multiple narrators, represent all of them., highly recommend posting online, avoid any flag words
https://airtable.com/shrwJOoufJITREr5H
https://airtable.com/shrzWXKgatyH0qpny
Advertising on Kobo
Talk about audiobooks in newsletter
Link to use kobo graphics in advertising
https://kobowritinglife.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360059386211-Rakuten-Kobo-Logos-and-Website-Buttons
Audiobook publishers associations have done research , people are liking shorter books, audible has a rule, a book can only be in one bundle
One point of recording short thing, if anything is under an hour for Screen actors guild, you have to pay for one hour. 

 

Writing Grief in SFF

 

6:24  What is your definition of grief?
Grief is pain but in modernity in the anglophone, grief is connotatively, lamenting a death to someone in your personal circle. 

13:54 What is your favorite works about grief?
First to my mind: film-> the leopard 1963 < based on a book> ; music-> strange fruit sung by billie holiday <it was written by a white man for the record> ; dance-> wade in the water by Alvin Ailey troupe< music of the negro spiritual>; animation-> the wind rises 2013 <studio ghibli > ; literature -> The Raven , of edgar allen poe <I admit most of the craft I like or I have made myself doesn't involve grief, but I admit, I enjoyed my youth alot, loving embracing home, and embraced outside of it, I love the adventure so to speak>
I am willing to speak as to these entries, just ask in comments. 

22:53 What unique opportunities if any do you think the science fiction fantasy genre provides for writing about grief?
In generating a cause of grief or creating an environment for a character to grieve or generating a way to diminish /end/or be consumed by grief, science fiction allows a greater flexibility in the identity of such things. 

29:00 Do you have a process in writing grief or what in your crafting does grief influence?
I write everything from my heart. I tend to like adventure, a going somewhere, usually a positive or not frightening place. So it is rare I have grief naturally, but when I do, it is the same process as when I am not. When  I write something that makes me think of a funny memory I laugh, when I write something that makes me think of a sad memory I cry.
A nice film to think about is The Innocents 1961. It leads you up to a place where your own mind will dictate what you sense. We in modernity in the anglophone talk about being triggered, but it is a good example of a film , which is a collective art project, that allows the viewer to trigger themselves. 

30:41 how do you write someone who experiences grief differently from you, the writer?
To be honest, I write out world or character definitions so when I ask a question about them, I follow the guidelines I set. If I write a character like Ryunosuke Tsukue  , Sword of Doom 1966, who is a character based on a philosophy, then his actions need to reflect that. He may be called crazy, but he isn't being written as crazy, but who he is. Don't betray your characters, even if what they do goes against what you will. 

35:28 Do you have a recovery process from writing about grief?
No need but the reason is because my mind has always been a large place. I have places in my mind where my negativities reside or where my positivities reside or where my emotionless reside or where my disorderliness reside and I can go to wherever I want to go. Many people minds tend to be filled with too much of one or the other.

38:22 Do you see an importance of writing grief as a black writer or reading grief as a black reader?
In the anglophone, historically grief has a historical place as a communal while also individual torment at times, sequentially in the arts, it can be a non violent therapy from the artists to the readership/viewership/listernership.

43:19 Where do you see the conversation about black grief going or what authors have done a work that sticks with you in the present?
I recall a film from 2011 called inheritance, Keith David was behind it. I remember it mentioned an elephant in the room in the black community. In it, Keith David and the others in this group take their descendents and offer them up as sacrifice, stating they are not suitable to what the ancestors wanted. I think few films deal with the black community or parts of the black community unsatisfied with the result, ala modernity, to why the community grieved in the past. To rewrite myself, what if the ancestors who lived through enslavement in all forms all their breaths aren't proud or overjoyed at the modern black community? What if the college educated/business owning/integrated blacks in modernity aren't fulfilling the wishes of the ancestor?. I know it has been written before, I have. But, it is rare to see in film, which is one of if not the most expensive art craft.

49:34 Can Dominique speak more on being trans and being associated with death?
After listening to Dominuque....
We all have heard of people saying another person has died equivalent to physical death in their personal circle because of an issue. That is what excommunicado is, a word that means to be out of the community, but functionally a term started by the christian church after the Nicean creed to christian groups that did not abide by the new set of rules, meaning a living death.  A taking out of the community of the living, even though one is not dead. Are you alive if someone can not talk to you, look at you, write to you, touch you. Women in india who are banished from the lowest castes are in similar situations and the caste is ancient. In modernity in the anglophone this comes from some to those in their personal circle who have what is called in modernity  transgender change. 

55:14 When does grief go from science fiction to horror?
Well, science fiction can be a horror, of a fantasy or a romance or other. So, the way in which grief is utilized can or will give specificity to a science fiction work. Dominique said a point and I thought to the following... Sadly, griefully, but truthfully, many people, not all, in some places not most, will rather see those in their private circle whom they feel need to be in a dress , in a dress rather than alive. 

Authors featured
Shingai Njeri Kagunda: https://www.shingainjerikagunda.com/
Voodoonauts: https://www.voodoonauts.com/
Zin E. Rocklyn: https://twitter.com/intelligentwat
Dominique Dickey: https://dominiquedickey.com/

Thanks to:
Erica of The Broken Spine:    / @the_broken_spine &nbsp;
Suzan Palumbo: https://suzanpalumbo.wordpress.com/

Title: Dandelion
Artist: GDbee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2359&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest

 

Title: A Rose
Artist: GDbee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2358&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest

 

 

Title: I Am Extraordinary < cover art , written by Steph Curry> 
Artist: GDbee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2353&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest

 

 

Artist: Backyard Party Kings @ Oakland Carnaval
PHotographer: Ronald Reed ronwired
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ronwired/52128577619/in/feed-849661-1654575861-1-72157721622514785

prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2356&type=status

Ronald Reed post

https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?q=ronald reed&quick=1&type=core_statuses_status&author=richardmurray&updated_after=any&sortby=newest&search_and_or=and

Fashion Studio: Mario b productions
MC : Elise Hollywood Evans <microphone>
Photographer: Ronald Reed
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ronwired/52124150867/in/feed-849661-1654474362-1-72157721622343990

prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2355&type=status

Ronald Reed post

https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?q=ronald reed&quick=1&type=core_statuses_status&author=richardmurray&updated_after=any&sortby=newest&search_and_or=and

Model: Nzuri Soul with band
Photographer: Ronald Reed
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ronwired/52125051716/in/feed-849661-1654470295-1-72157721622345387

prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2336&type=status

Ronald Reed post

https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?q=ronald reed&quick=1&type=core_statuses_status&author=richardmurray&updated_after=any&sortby=newest&search_and_or=and

 

Title: Unknown
Artist: Nettrice Gaskins < https://www.nettricegaskins.com/ > 

Prior Post

?

Nettrice Gaskins post

https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=Nettrice Gaskins&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=and&sortby=newest

Title: Oceans Plus BRaids
Artist: GDbee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2352&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest

 

Title: I'm going to live my best with 
Artist: GDbee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2351&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest

 

Title: Come Lie With Me
Artist: GDbee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2332&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest

 

The Ancestral Tree
A juneteenth poem
the full poem
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-ancestral-tree-1

 

More Juneteenth art + poetry
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Juneteenth-2023-966928866
 
 

Youtube video

 

Tiktok video

@richardmurraytiktok The Ancestral Tree excerpt - a juneteenth poem - the full poem https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-ancestral-tree-1 more juneteenth poetry or art https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Juneteenth-2023-966928866 my free email newsletter for more content https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/#rmaalbc #aalbc #juneteenth #poetry #poem #rmtja ♬ original sound - richardmurraytiktok

 

My free email newsletter, click subscribe , its free

https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/

Juneteenth 2023 review

 

This Juneteenth 2023 I asked the larger community to come up with a unique cultural tradition and none came forth. 

White people say : 1949-1973 displacement programs removed over a million people and two thirds were black. 

Name an idea for a unique Juneteenth celebration
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10318-juneteenth-2023-name-an-idea-for-a-unique-celebration/

Most Black Leaders didn't advocate for reparations even though most Black people wanted and that made the usa, but it came with a negative price for Black people
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10327-most-black-leaders-didnt-advocate-for-reparations-even-though-most-black-people-wanted-and-that-made-the-usa-but-it-came-with-a-negative-price-for-black-people/

 

Movement to return land taken from Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. gains momentum
Jun 9, 2023 6:35 PM EDT
As cities and states across the country consider various forms of reparations, California has led the way in returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. This includes African Americans and Native Americans. But as Stephanie Sy reports, the wealth, the community and the opportunities lost are not easily recovered.

Read the Full Transcript
Amna Nawaz:

As cities and states across the country consider various forms of reparations, California has led the way in returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. That includes African Americans and Native Americans.

But, as Stephanie Sy reports, the wealth, the community and the opportunities lost are not easily recovered.

Stephanie Sy:

The story of Bruce's Beach is a story about what could and should have been.

Over 100 years ago, an industrious Black woman in Southern California dreamt of owning a beach resort, but was refused whenever she tried. Willa Bruce eventually acquired land in Manhattan Beach, telling The Los Angeles Times in 1912: "I own this land, and I'm going to keep it."

She and her husband, Charles, built a lodge, a place where Black vacationers could enjoy a stay at the beach.

Patricia Bruce-Carter, Relative of Bruce Family: They were having a beautiful time, and they built it to share, because whenever people came to California, they wanted them to have somewhere to go.

Kavon Ward, Founder, Where Is My Land:

When I think about Charles and Willa Bruce, I think about entrepreneurs, I think about Black excellence, I think about community.

George Fatheree III, Attorney For Bruce Family:

The reality is, the Bruces and their patrons were wealthy.

Stephanie Sy:

A stately photo of the Bruces on their wedding day, decked out in finery, foretold the makings of a power couple. The display of Black success outraged the white neighbors and powers that be, says attorney George Fatheree.

George Fatheree III:

In the light of harassment, intimidation, violence, their business just got more and more successful, and until the city of Manhattan Beach hatched a scheme to take the property via a racially motivated eminent domain.

Stephanie Sy:

The Bruces' dream was stolen, their property essentially seized for a pittance in compensation, and only after they sued.

Kavon Ward:

This is it, I would say from right here to maybe this building here.

Stephanie Sy:

Community activist Kavon Ward first learned of the Bruces a few years after she moved to Manhattan Beach in 2017.

Kavon Ward:

This country often tells us that — Black people, that we're lazy, or we don't work hard enough, or all we have to do is pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. And here we are in the 19-teens and the 1920s, and this Black couple did exactly that, only to have their land stolen and to die as cooks in someone else's kitchen, when they had this whole beachfront resort here.

Stephanie Sy:

Ward began campaigning for the land to be returned to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce during the summer of 2020.

Less than two years later, she succeeded, with the help of Fatheree.

George Fatheree III:

For a century, our government at every level has enacted policies to dispossess Black people of the right to own property and create wealth. And what was so powerful about the return of the property of the Bruce family is, we see a path forward to finally counter some of those false narratives.

Stephanie Sy:

As unique and complex as the Bruce's Beach land back deal is, it does offer a path forward for other groups that might seek a return of land, not least of which are the original inhabitants of Los Angeles.

Before Spanish missionaries arrived, the Tongva roamed a 4,000-square-mile swathe of Southern California called Tovaangar stretching from the coast to the mountains.

Samantha Morales-Johnson, Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Land Conservancy:

We have been very systematically erased. We were enslaved. We have gone through about three waves of genocide.

Stephanie Sy:

Twenty-seven-year-old Samantha Morales-Johnson recently became the land return coordinator for a Tongva conservancy, a job she could only have dreamed of as a child.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

This land was returned, which I was not expecting in my lifetime, let alone my grandfather's.

Stephanie Sy:

The one-acre property in Altadena was transferred last year by a Jewish landowner whose own family faced displacement and oppression.

Johnson said the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd raised the nation's consciousness.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

I think it made people more aware of all of the injustices that happen in America.

Stephanie Sy:

When Johnson was growing up, council meetings and holiday parties were held in a borrowed space.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

I think it was a converted taco restaurant with, like, a little parking lot. There was no earth to even grow anything in that concrete building.

Stephanie Sy:

The Altadena property, which overlooks a scenic canyon, marks the first time in nearly 200 years the Tongva have legally owned land to use as they wish.

So, this is the white sage.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

This is the white sage. This is the only place where we can plant all Native trees with full sovereignty and Native plants with full sovereignty.

Stephanie Sy:

Work is under way to remove the overgrown invasive species that were planted here. The old resilient oaks will remain. Eventually, the site will host tribal gatherings and offer educational programs.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

So, the beautiful thing about this land is that there is a lot of hope for restoration even underneath all of the mess that we have.

Stephanie Sy:

So-called land back agreements are still rare. Other recent examples include the purchase of nearly two square miles of land for $4.5 million by the Esselen Tribe in Central California.

And the city of Oakland recently returned five acres of a local park to the East Bay Ohlone Tribe. In L.A., different Tongva groups are looking for more opportunities to reacquire land.

Angie Behrns, Founder, Gabrielino/Tongva, Springs Foundation:

It's not really just about the land. It's preserving what's left of our land.

Stephanie Sy:

Long before the land back movement had gained traction, Angie Behrns, now 86, fought to lease this two-acre property in West L.A. It was the early 1990s, and the Kuruvungna Springs, which had been the site of a Tongva village, had fallen into neglect.

A small museum on the land shows the journey.

Angie Behrns:

When I stood at that gate and saw this area, I was so upset. I couldn't believe it. That's an archaeological and a historical society.

Stephanie Sy:

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns the land and built a high school next to the springs, agreed to lease the site for $1 a year.

Bob Ramirez, President, Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation:

This is the medicine garden we have, which has many varieties of medicinal plants.

Stephanie Sy:

The president of the Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation, Bob Ramirez, says the land is now abundant with Native plants and pristine drinking water.

Bob Ramirez:

Would you like to try some?

Stephanie Sy:

Yes, I would like to try some.

Bob Ramirez:

Yes.

Stephanie Sy:

Now is the time for the land to be returned, Behrns says.

Angie Behrns:

This is a sacred site. This is our place of worship. You have your temples. You have your churches. And what do we have?

Stephanie Sy:

But Ramirez says the "we" is debatable.

Bob Ramirez:

And there may be other people that say, well, wait a minute, if you're going to get that land, well, what about me? So it becomes contentious, I think.

How do you compensate this group and neglect somebody else? Is that fair? Is that just?

Stephanie Sy:

What is fair and just is also in dispute at Bruce's Beach.

Patricia Bruce-Carter, a distant relative of Charles Bruce, was at the ceremony in 2022 when county officials return the land to the Bruces' direct descendants. She thinks about what could have been if the land had remained in the family's hands all along.

Patricia Bruce-Carter:

I'm sure, at this time, there would have been multiple hotels and beachfront properties, and, I mean, just living the life.

Stephanie Sy:

A lifeguard administration center and parking lot stand where the Bruces' resort did. The descendants' lawyer, George Fatheree, says it would not be easy to develop.

And so less, than a year after the land was returned, the four recipients of the land decided to sell it back to the county for nearly $20 million.

George Fatheree III:

As an attorney, my responsibility is to advocate in the interests of my clients. As a citizen, as an — and as an African American citizen,I think that's an important question.

Who are the benefactors of restitution? Who should be the benefactors of reparations?

Stephanie Sy:

After her work getting the Bruces their land back, this is not the outcome community activist Kavon Ward wanted.

Kavon Ward:

I wanted to see strong, young Black entrepreneurs like Charles and Willa Bruce take up space here and be able to build and develop here, like the Bruces once we're able to do.

Community is what got the land back. So, yes, the family won, but the community did not.

Stephanie Sy:

The work, Ward says, will continue, the reckoning far from over.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Stephanie Sy in Los Angeles.

URL
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/movement-to-return-land-taken-from-black-and-indigenous-people-in-the-u-s-gains-momentum

The War Between The States
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10332-the-war-between-the-states/

Cornell West and the problem with Third Parties
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10336-cornell-west-the-peoples-party-and-the-problem-with-third-parties-in-the-usa/

How a shipping error poisoned Michigan
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2347&type=status

 

 

Work from Lilac Phoenix

 

 

I end with this paraphrase from Brenda stevenson < https://www.drbrendastevenson.com/ > from a PBS segment below, and a postparaphrase reply.  

It's a strange dance that we have with race in the USA. We come forward with many steps,, twirl around, and we are going in the opposite direction. So, this continues to happen. But I think everyone had to own up to the fact that we live in a racialized society. The ways in which we find ourselves or define ourselves as being American, in part, is to have digested some of that racism. So, no group is- does not have it. No group does not act on it. And we have to understand that and we have to have some real hard discussions with ourselves, our families, our communities, and with other communities about how we fit into this dynamic of race within our society. Do we perptuate racism, stereotypes, et cetera, or are we actively trying to recognize that we hold some of that within ourselves and that we act on it and we need to eliminate it, or at least get it to a level where we can all act towards one another with respect, dignity and equality? But it's very very difficult. It is bound in the roots of American society. And once you eat of the tree of the USA , it becomes part of you. 

For Juneteenth I have pondered freedom and the black community in the usa, and after various multilog side black people in various places I realize many, not necessarily most, but many black people are in denial about our village. The denial is through their preaching, and when I said preaching, I don't mean from a pulpit but in their desire for multilog that is inevitably dysfunctional. 
I repeat, when the usa was started three tribes in the black village in the usa existed. Enslaved to whites/Free fighting side whites against the usa being created/Free fighting side whites supporting the usa being created. 
Based on Sister Stevenson's quote, whenever a black person demands all black people in the usa are bettered for being in the usa, or nonviolence must occur in the black community, they are denying the internal reality all black people should know but don't because of the black tribes in the usa one common trait. NEarly all are filled with people afraid to admit the friction in the black community in the usa  based on the three original black tribes. 
Most free black people fought against creating the usa, and again after the colonies freed themselves against the usa hoping britian take over. That means most free blacks didn't accept the usa's constitution of any aspect of the usa culturally that so many blacks in the usa today say all blacks do or need to. 
And moreover, when the black community , as James Baldwin said of his father's religious community, has most who hate whites with a silent impotent passion. having black people who want to live with or comfort or find peace to whites or non blacks talk about why most blacks aren't engaged is a sign of their denial. 
The black community in the usa, has never done the hard work of reaching in itself, even while the whites watch and accept what its majority wants doesn't suit the desire its minority, that is in most positions of leadership want. 
Black people in the usa are individually freer in the usa than ever before. But, the Black Village communal desire isn't to be statian and most black leaders know it, and they don't know how to handle it, except to try and preach it away or hope some black person in the usa is born who can fit the usa's multiracial maze with their nonviolent, integrationist mantra while acquire or have the resources to guide the majority of black people with what black leadership in the usa usually doesn't have, opportunity, not talk.

 

 

How a simple shipping error poisoned most of Michigan
Story by Matt Jaworowski • 8h ago

ST. LOUIS, Mich. (WOOD) — In many ways, St. Louis, Michigan, is your typical small town. Main Street is one of the city’s primary throughways. The “downtown” shopping district spans just a few blocks. St. Louis doesn’t have a Walmart to call its own. That requires a quick drive over to the nearby city of Alma. 
But St. Louis has its own claims to fame. The town of approximately 6,800 people prides itself on being the “Middle of the Mitten” — measured to be the geographic center of the state of Michigan. Signs throughout the city boast about that fact.

A cynic could call it the middle of nowhere, but that isn’t necessarily true. At one time, St. Louis wasn’t just the “middle” of Michigan, it was also the center of a statewide controversy.

Just a couple of short blocks from Main Street, there is a giant swath of open land, about 54 acres in all. It’s surrounded by chainlink fence, with construction equipment and power stations lining the paths. The warning signs are faded by the sun. The lettering that was once a bright red is now a pale pink, but all these years later they still read “Private Property, No Trespassing.”

There is a gated driveway with a sign of its own. You have arrived at the former Velsicol Chemical Plant, now an EPA Superfund Cleanup site. < https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0502194 > On the other side of the driveway is a ceremonial bench, built on behalf of the city. The inscription reads, “We declare our mutual aim that our river and land be restored to their natural condition safe for any use.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been working off and on at the site for more than 40 years now — and the work continues. The Pine River and surrounding areas have been contaminated for much longer than that. But 50 years ago, a simple error at the since-demolished St. Louis plant spread that contamination from a handful of communities to the entire state.

“It is the most underreported disaster I have known in my long journalistic career.”

That’s how Joyce Egginton ends the first paragraph of her book, “The Poisoning of Michigan.” At the time, Egginton was an American correspondent for the London Observer. She says she stumbled onto the story tucked away deep inside an issue of The New York Times.

“I remember calling out to my husband halfway through the task, ‘Can you believe this one?’” Egginton wrote. “Way down on an inside page of the New York Times was a brief account of how in Michigan a large quantity of a highly toxic industrial fire retardant, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB), had been confused at the manufacturing plant with a nutritional supplement for cattle feed. As a result, there had been a massive, slow poisoning of dairy herds for almost a year before the accident was discovered. It was estimated that throughout that time virtually all 9 million people living in Michigan had been ingesting contaminated meat and milk on a daily basis.”

That snippet from The New York Times led Egginton to years of research and interviews, culminating in more than 300 pages packed with details, outlining a quietly escalating tragedy that centered around PBB.

PBB is a group of man-made chemicals that were first manufactured around 1970 and sold primarily as a fire retardant. They were also mixed into many plastics for consumer products, including computer monitors, televisions and textiles. But chemical manufacturers didn’t fully understand the health or environmental impact from these chemicals. Those questions came after the infamous “PBB Disaster.”

It was a late spring day in 1973 when a truck driver made a delivery from Michigan Chemical to the Michigan Farm Bureau’s central mixing facility outside of Battle Creek. The driver thought he had dropped off 50-pound bags of Nutrimaster — Michigan Chemical’s product name for magnesium oxide.

America’s first high-volume ‘PFAS Annihilator’ is up and running in West Michigan
Farmers regularly mix in magnesium oxide as a supplement for milking cows. The compound provides iodine, which cows need, and it also makes the cows thirstier. The more water cows drink, the more milk they produce.

This magnesium oxide was a grayish-white powder and was packed in 50-pound brown paper sacks. The powder tended to get clumpy when exposed to moisture. What the driver had actually delivered was Firemaster, another grayish-white clumpy mixture that was packed in 50-pound brown paper bags.

“Except for the color coding on the bags, Nutrimaster and the powdery form of Firemaster could easily have been mistaken one for the other,” Egginton wrote. “Which is exactly what happened when, during a temporary nationwide paper shortage in the winter of 1972-73, Michigan Chemical Corporation ran out of preprinted bags and made do by simply hand-stenciling the trade names in black.” 

Tens of thousands of animals tainted with PBB were slaughtered and buried in pits on state land to limit contamination spread. (Courtesy Archives of Michigan)
© Provided by WOOD Grand Rapids

Tens of thousands of animals tainted with PBB were slaughtered and buried in pits on state land to limit contamination spread. (Courtesy Archives of Michigan)
© Provided by WOOD Grand Rapids

Tens of thousands of animals tainted with PBB were slaughtered and buried in pits on state land to limit contamination spread. (Courtesy Archives of Michigan)
© Provided by WOOD Grand Rapids

 

In the ensuing few years, < https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-injury-prev/environmental-health/topics/dehbio/pbbs/history > more than 500 farms across the state had to be quarantined. Approximately 30,000 cattle, 4,500 swine, 1,500 sheep and 1.5 million chickens either died from PBB-related ailments or had to be killed. That doesn’t count the sick animals that showed clear signs of PBB toxicity but were still allowed to be sold off and slaughtered.

Rick Halbert, one of the first farmers to press the Farm Bureau on a problem with his feed, explained to Egginton how his herd’s health fell off a cliff.

“As months went by the toxic symptoms in his herd progressed, producing a mangey appearance, matted hair, thickened skin, diarrhea, emaciation,” Egginton wrote. 

Many cows also showed signs of distress during pregnancy, leading to a spike in aborted or stillborn calves.

Gerald Woltjer bought a farm in Coopersville from a farmer who was forced to sell because of PBB contamination. He figured the property could still be successful with a new herd. He was wrong.

“Within two years, Woltjer’s herd — which was never quarantined — was so sick and useless that he was on the verge of bankruptcy,” Egginton wrote. “He told of scrawny cows with perpetually bloody noses ‘who acted like they were blind;’ cows so weak that they could not get up to be milked; cows which had bodily infections but passed inspection to be butchered for human consumption.”

Woltjer realized the land was contaminated and PBB exposure had spread to his herd.

“The longer I lived on that farm, the worse it became,” he told Egginton. “After a time, there were no worms in the soil. There were no field mice, no rats, no rabbits, no grasshoppers. As the cattle were dying, the cats and dogs were dying, too. A fully grown cat would live only six weeks on that farm. Our three dogs went crazy. Our neighbors had bees that were dead in the hives. The frogs were dead in the streams. There was a five-acre swamp that used to croak at night so you could hardly sleep. Then, it was silent. And it was a long time before I knew why.”

Most farmers, completely baffled by the sudden changes, fell into financial ruin. Even with the state eventually instituting PBB testing standards and a program to help compensate for their losses, many farmers faced drastic decisions. For some, it came down to killing your animals or selling an obviously sick one to market in an attempt to make any money back on a floundering investment. Many farmers, like Garry Zuiderveen from Missaukee County, refused to pass along the PBB-contaminated animals.

“We should never have had to make that decision,” Zuiderveen told Egginton. “It was the darkest day in my life when I shot those cows. A farmer is an immensely proud person. Anything wrong with his herd reflects on his husbandry and his herdmanship.”

The Michigan Department of Agriculture eventually opened a large tract of state-owned land in Kalkaska County to be used as a burial pit for tainted animals. But for farmers like Zuiderveen, who clearly had a poisoned herd but tested below the state’s safety threshold, there was no help offered.

Zuiderveen ended up digging a burial pit on his own property. His neighbors and friends came to help, knowing it would be a difficult day.

“We hauled the milk cows from the barn to the burial site on three stock trailers and put them in six or eight at a time. Within 20 seconds after they were unloaded, we shot them with high-powered rifles. This finished them instantly. They did not suffer,” Zuiderveen told Egginton. “My dad would not look at them. Tears were running down his face, a man of 78. … Those fellows don’t know what they put us through. We should never have had to kill our own cows; we were too emotionally involved.”

Zuiderveen wouldn’t take any credit for doing “the right thing.” He credited his Christian upbringing and the concept of being “our brother’s keeper.”

“I knew that, from the information we had at the time, it was the only decision we could make and still face ourselves in the mirror,” he said.

Still, plenty of other farmers couldn’t pull the trigger. Between facing bankruptcy or foreclosure, many felt like there was no other rational choice. As a result, lots of PBB-tainted meat and dairy products were sold at market and scientists estimate virtually everyone who lived in Michigan at the time was exposed to PBB and had some level stored within the fats in their body.

 

Though there were studies being conducted and clear symptoms that could be traced to PBB exposure, specific findings on how PBB impacts the human body came long after the 1973 disaster. By the 1990s, researchers had been able to tie chemical pollution to a rise in hormone-related abnormalities, including breast cancer.

Michele Marcus is a professor of epidemiology at Emory University and is the lead scientist on the Michigan PBB Registry, < https://sph.emory.edu/pbbregistry/about/index.html > which began in 1976. She said that PBB essentially acts as estrogen in the human body. A PBB buildup throws off the body’s hormonal balance, leading girls to mature earlier and boys to mature later and be born with abnormalities in their urinary or reproductive systems.

Researchers also found that PBB was being passed down from one generation to another, even today finding a higher rate of miscarriages in women who were born from mothers or grandmothers who were directly exposed to high levels of PBB.

“The children of the mother are exposed as it crosses the placenta and then again in breast milk because (PBB) is lipophilic. It is stored in fat, and breast milk has a very high fat concentration,” Marcus said.

The latest studies are focused on how PBB impacts a person’s DNA. Marcus explained that PBB does not mutate a person’s genetic sequence, but it can impact how certain genes are “expressed.”

“You start from a single cell. You’ve got your DNA and then the cells change and they differentiate into heart cells, stomach cells, liver cells. And each cell type has a gene expression pattern. So genes are turned off and turned on depending on the function of the cell,” Marcus said. “This is kind of a new field, which is looking at the impact of chemicals or substances on gene regulation, not on the genes themselves. … We found that PBB does impact this methylation pattern and, in fact, that’s part of the evidence that it acts like estrogen because it affects this methylation pattern in the same way as estrogen.”

Some good, some bad: Michigan DNR updates endangered species list < https://www.woodtv.com/news/michigan/some-good-some-bad-michigan-dnr-updates-endangered-species-list/ > 
So can that gene regulation be inherited? Researchers haven’t come to a unanimous conclusion yet, but Marcus believes it can.

“This is a very controversial question and for many years the dogma was no, it can’t (be inherited) because those things are stripped when the sperm are developed. When the DNA replicates that is supposed to be all stripped off,” Marcus said. “But now it seems that that’s not complete. … There have been a lot of studies that are very, very clear in animals that it happens, and the human evidence keeps accumulating.”

The Michigan PBB Registry was launched in 1976 to gather data that could eventually be used to answer these kinds of questions. The study started with approximately 4,000 people and eventually added in their children and grandchildren. Eventually, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services wanted to shut down the research project. But thanks to funding from the National Institutes of Health, it was transferred to Emory University.

Decades later, the St. Louis community remains heavily invested in the PBB disaster and anxious to learn more about how it impacted their health and environment. In 1998, after meeting with the EPA and other state departments, a community group launched the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force. < https://www.pinerivercag.org/ > 

Jane Jelenek now serves as the chairperson of the task force. She didn’t live in St. Louis in 1973, but her husband worked at the chemical plant and had other friends and relatives who had direct exposure.

Jelenek said her work is not focused on looking to the past or securing compensation for people who were exposed; those efforts have long failed. Instead, the task force is focused on working with the EPA and holding it accountable to make sure the land is restored. She said it has been an up-and-down relationship.

“We found at our (monthly meetings) that they were more interested in the amount of dollars that they could get to do something that determined how much cleanup they actually would do. We did not think that was a very good measure,” Jelenek said. “And I remember saying at one meeting, ‘We don’t care about the money. We don’t care how much it costs. We just want it done.’”

When will it be done? Thanks to an influx of investment because of the latest infrastructure legislation, work has gotten a boost. Tom Alcamo, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site, hopes work will be done by 2026. Eventually, the Superfund site will be deemed clean and the land will be turned over to the community.

But the scars will remain. And traces of PBB are still being passed down from one generation to the next.

 

Instead of mixing in a nutritional supplement, the Farm Bureau was unknowingly poisoning thousands and thousands of animals. Even worse, the problem wasn’t limited to one specific type of feed. Any feed that was processed through the same mixer that used Firemaster was now being exposed to PBB, making it even harder for the investigators trying to find the root of the problem.

URL
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-a-simple-shipping-error-poisoned-most-of-michigan/ar-AA1c7k2n?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=1b3fa566178a4d0795f5d87c6d30bf42&ei=93
 

 

An illustration of the Union prisoners’ cemetery in Charleston, published in Harper’s Weekly two years after the May 1865 celebration.
© Alfred R. Waud/New York Public Library

 

Black people may have started Memorial Day. Whites erased it from history.
Story by Donald Beaulieu • Yesterday 6:00 AM

On May 1, 1865, thousands of newly freed Black people gathered in Charleston, S.C., for what may have been the nation’s first Memorial Day celebration. Attendees held a parade and put flowers on the graves of Union soldiers who had helped liberate them from slavery.

The event took place three weeks after the Civil War surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and two weeks after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It was a remarkable moment in U.S. history — at the nexus of war and peace, destruction and reconstruction, servitude and emancipation.

But the day would not be remembered as the first Memorial Day. In fact, White Southerners made sure that for more than a century, the day wasn’t remembered at all.

It was “a kind of erasure from public memory,” said David Blight, a history professor at Yale University.

The contested Confederate roots of Memorial Day
In February 1865, Confederate soldiers withdrew from Charleston after the Union had bombarded it with offshore cannon fire for more than a year and began to cut off supply lines. The city surrendered to the Union army, leaving a massive population of freed formerly enslaved people.

Also left in the wake of the Confederate evacuation were the graves of more than 250 Union soldiers, buried without coffins behind the judge’s stand of the Washington Race Course, a Charleston horse track that had been converted into an outdoor prison for captured Northerners. The conditions were brutal, and most of those who had died succumbed to exposure or disease.

In April, about two dozen of Charleston’s freed men volunteered to disinter the bodies and rebury them in rows of marked graves, surrounded by a wooden, freshly whitewashed fence, according to newspaper accounts from the time.

Then, on May 1, about 10,000 people — mostly formerly enslaved people — turned out for a memorial service that the freed people had organized, along with abolitionist and journalist James Redpath and some White missionaries and teachers from the North. Redpath described the day in the New-York Tribune as “such a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina or the United States never saw before.”

The day’s events began around 9 a.m. with a parade led by about 2,800 Black schoolchildren, who had just been enrolled in new schools, bearing armfuls of flowers. They marched around the horse track and entered the cemetery gate under an arch with black-painted letters that read “Martyrs of the Race Course.” The schoolchildren proceeded through the cemetery and distributed the flowers on the gravesites.

Other attendees entered the cemetery with even more flowers, as the schoolchildren sang songs including “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “John Brown’s Body.”

“When all had left,” Redpath wrote, “the holy mounds — the tops, the sides, and the spaces between them — were one mass of flowers, not a speck of earth could be seen; and as the breeze wafted the sweet perfume from them, outside and beyond, to the sympathetic multitude, there were few eyes among those who knew the meaning of the ceremony that were not dim with tears of joy.”

In 1865, thousands of Black South Carolinians signed a 54-foot-long freedom petition < look after the first image below >

The dedication ended with prayers and Bible verses from local Black ministers, followed by speeches from Union officers and Northern missionaries, a picnic on the racecourse and drills by Union infantrymen, including some African American regiments. The observance didn’t end until sundown.

And then, Blight said, the event was forgotten. Not right away — but within a few decades, any recollection persisted merely as rumor, in verbal anecdotes.

The reason, he said, is that “by the middle and end of Reconstruction, the Black folks of Charleston were not creating the public memory of that city.”

The Southern generals who stuck with the Union in the Civil War
The portrayal of the Civil War and its aftermath was controlled in the South by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Ladies’ Memorial Association, as well as Confederate veterans, Blight said.

“The Daughters of the Confederacy were the guardians of that narrative,” said Damon Fordham, an adjunct professor of history at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston. “And much of that was skewed toward the Confederate point of view.”

Blight chronicled the 1865 Charleston ritual in his 2001 book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” based on evidence that Fordham helped him uncover. Blight had been researching the book in 1999, in an archive of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, when he found a collection of papers written by Union veterans that contained a description of the May 1, 1865, events in Charleston.

If the description was accurate, Blight said, he knew that “that event in Charleston deserves its own full commemoration, just because of the poignancy of it, the sheer scale of it.”

But first he had to corroborate it. One of the first places he contacted was the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston. “I called up the curator there,” Blight recalled, “and I said, ‘I just found this in a collection of veterans materials. Have you ever heard of this story?’ And the guy said, ‘No. That never happened.’”

The “guy” was Fordham, who at the time was a graduate student at the college and a research assistant at Avery. Despite his doubts, Fordham knew the center had microfilm of the Charleston Courier, a daily newspaper from that time, so he checked it.

“About two hours later, he called me back, and he said, ‘Oh my God, here it is,’” Blight said. It was a Courier article from May 2, 1865, “describing this extraordinary parade on the old planters’ racecourse.”

Blight went on to find more proof, including an illustration of the fenced cemetery that was published in Harper’s Weekly in 1867. “Pretty soon I had all these sources that no one had ever bumped into, so one thing kept leading to another,” he said. “But even people in Charleston said, ‘No, never heard of it.’ That shows the power of the erasure of public memory over time.”

In the book, Blight describes a 1916 letter written by the president of the Ladies’ Memorial Association in Charleston, replying to an inquiry about the May 1, 1865, parade. “A United Daughters of the Confederacy official wanted to know if it was true that blacks and their white abolitionist friends had engaged in such a burial rite,” he wrote. “Mrs. S.C. Beckwith responded tersely: ‘I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.’”

In the 1880s, the bodies of the Union soldiers, the “Martyrs of the Race Course,” were exhumed and moved to Beaufort National Cemetery. The horse track closed shortly after that, and the 60 acres of land became Hampton Park, named for Wade Hampton III, a Confederate general and Charleston native who became governor of South Carolina in 1876. Hampton enslaved nearly 1,000 people before the war, and his governorship was supported by the Red Shirts, a White paramilitary group that violently suppressed the Black vote.

After slavery, Black people desperately searched for family through newspaper ads <look after second image below>
By the end of the century, no vestige of the racecourse, the cemetery or the 1865 parade remained.

More spring graveside memorials followed the one in Charleston. Several occurred in towns across the country in the spring of 1866, and many of these places — such as Columbus, Miss., whose commemoration became annual — claim to have held the original Memorial Day observance. Officially, the nation recognizes Memorial Day as having started in Waterloo, N.Y.

In Charleston, the freed people didn’t have the power to develop an annual tradition after 1865. But the city now recognizes itself, regardless, as the holiday’s birthplace.

“On May 1, 1865, a parade to honor the Union war dead took place here,” reads a state historical marker erected in Hampton Park in 2017. “The event marked the earliest celebration of what became known as ‘Memorial Day.’”

 

URL

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/black-people-may-have-started-memorial-day-whites-erased-it-from-history/ar-AA1bPFSs?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=07a93f22676c4438d2e3eafde7baa12e&ei=5

 

 

This 54-foot-long petition bears the signatures of hundreds of men who participated in the State Convention of Colored People of South Carolina in 1865. (Gwenanne Edwards/Library of Congress, Conservation Division)

 

In 1865, thousands of Black South Carolinians signed a 54-foot-long freedom petition
It goes on display Friday for the first time at the African American history museum in Washington.

By Michael E. Ruane
September 23, 2021 at 7:43 p.m. EDT

 

In November 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, a group of African Americans formed a convention in Charleston, S.C., drew up a petition demanding their civil rights and sent it to Congress in Washington.

“We the undersigned colored citizens of South Carolina, do respectfully ask … in consideration of our unquestioned loyalty [that in the] re-establishment of civil government in South Carolina, our equal rights before the law may be respected,” the handwritten document begins.

What followed were 3,740 signatures, then-Sen. Jacob M. Howard (R-Mich.) told his Senate colleagues after receiving the petition — on a document that was 54 feet long.

It was a striking appeal from the newly freed, and previously free, African Americans, asking that they not be forgotten in the country’s postwar reconstruction. Never displayed publicly before, it goes on exhibit Friday at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“The petition is a real touchstone for the expectations and the will of … African Americans …[who saw] this moment in the county’s history as a new beginning,” said Katy Kendrick, exhibitions curator at the museum. It’s a “very powerful and very direct claiming of full rights of citizenship.”

The petition is part of a new exhibit of 175 objects at the museum entitled “Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies.”

The exhibit covers the turbulent postwar era of Reconstruction as the vanquished Southern states sought to recreate prewar racial oppression, and African Americans fought, ultimately in vain, to prevent it.

And it examines the legacy of that struggle today.

It includes a frightening Ku Klux Klan head mask with horns, made of cloth and animal fur, owned by a Confederate army officer in North Carolina and used to terrorize Black residents.

It includes a document from the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency set up to help the 4 million people newly freed, that tells of a mother’s attempt get her two children back from their former enslaver.

Caroline Atkinson went to the bureau’s office in Vicksburg, Miss., in September 1867, two years after slavery had been abolished in 1865.

But her daughters Elizabeth, 10, and Mary Jane, 11, were still in the hands of one William Atkinson, who had refused to return them unless he was paid $100 — roughly $1,600 today.

She signed the document with an X. The bureau investigated and ordered the children returned to their mother, according to the museum.

There’s an old pew from a former Black church, as well as the stained glass windows picturing Confederate generals that was removed from Washington National Cathedral in 2017.

The Cathedral announced Thursday that the windows would be replaced with racial justice-themed windows created by Black artist Kerry James Marshall.

The exhibit also includes a Bible and nine-page Bible study guide loaned by a survivor of the massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where nine African Americans were murdered on June 17, 2015.

That church is across the street from the site of the old Zion Presbyterian Church, where the freedom petition was drawn up 150 years before. (Zion Presbyterian was demolished in 1960, according to a study by the College of Charleston.)

“Reconstruction was a pivotal moment … when the nation had an opportunity to make amends for the injustices of slavery and rebuild itself on a new foundation of racial equality,” Kevin Young, the museum director, said in a statement.

“While some gains were made, this was also a period of voter suppression … violence and unlawful incarceration,” he said. “Because of the work left unfinished … and the decades of discrimination that followed, the struggle … continues in society today.”

The signers of the petition to Congress met at the “State Convention of the Colored People of South Carolina” over six days in late November 1865 at Zion Presbyterian, according to an account of the proceedings printed by a local newspaper. At the time, Zion Presbyterian was the biggest church in Charleston and a center for the Black community.

In addition to the petition, the convention issued a number of resolutions, including:

“That in the death of the late President of the United States, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, this nation has sustained an irreparable loss and we, as a race, deprived of a noble friend. We sympathize with his afflicted family and will ever hold his name in grateful remembrance.”

Lincoln had been assassinated the previous April.

The convention resolved: “That we hereby object to a ‘negro code’ [of law]. … In our humble opinion a code of laws for the government of all, regardless of color, is all that is necessary for the advancement of the interests and prosperity of the state.”

Oppressive state laws restricting the lives of African Americans, called “Black Codes,” soon became a grim hallmark of Reconstruction.

The convention issued an address to the people of South Carolina:

“Heretofore we have had no avenues opened to us or our children — We have had no firesides that we could call our own. … The laws that have made white men great have degraded us because we are colored. …

“But now that we are free, now that we have been lifted up by the providence of God … we have resolved to come forward, and … speak and act for ourselves.”

And it resolved:

“As the old institution of slavery has passed away … we cherish in our hearts no hatred or malice toward those who have held our brethren as slaves, but we extend the right hand of fellowship to all and make it our special aim to establish unity, peace and love amongst all men.”

URL

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/09/23/african-american-freedom-petition-museum-reconstruction/

 

 

Mary Bailey searches for her children. Her ad ran Nov. 24, 1866, in the Daily Dispatch newspaper in Richmond.

 

‘My mother was sold from me’: After slavery, the desperate search for loved ones in ‘last seen ads’

By DeNeen L. Brown
September 7, 2017 at 7:30 a.m. EDT

 

Ten months after the Civil War ended, an enslaved woman who had been ripped away from her children started looking for them.

Elizabeth Williams, who had been sold twice since she last saw her children, placed a heart-wrenching ad in a newspaper:

“INFORMATION WANTED by a mother concerning her children,” Williams wrote March 17, 1866, in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia. Her ad was one of thousands taken out by formerly enslaved people looking for lost relatives after the Civil War.

Those ads are now being digitized in a project called “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” < https://informationwanted.org/ >which is run by Villanova University’s graduate history program in collaboration with Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel AME Church.

In four column inches, the mother summed up her life, hoping the rich details would help her find the children. She listed their names — Lydia, William, Allen, and Parker — and explained in a few words that she last saw them when they were “formerly owned together” by a man named John Petty who lived about six miles from Woodbury, Tenn.

She explained how her family was split apart when she was sold again and taken farther south into captivity.

“She has never seen the above-named children since,” the ad said. “Any information given concerning them, however, will be gratefully received by one whose love for her children survives the bitterness and hardships of many long years spent in slavery.”

The “Last Seen” ads started appearing around 1863. By 1865, when the Civil War ended, they were coming out in streams. Black people torn away from family members by slavery placed thousands of “Information Wanted” notices in black-owned newspapers across the country, seeking any help to find loved ones.

In the ads, mothers looked for their children; children looked for their mothers; fathers placed ads for lost sons; sisters looked for sisters; husbands sought their wives; wives tried to find their husbands. The ads showed in real time the destruction slavery wrought on black families, tearing people apart and scattering generations like leaves in the wind.

The ads often gave detailed physical descriptions of the missing, names of former slave owners, locations subscribers “last saw” family members and sometimes maps, tracing how many times they were sold from one owner to the next until they so far from family members all they had to cling to was sketchy memories.

Many of the Last Seen ads, dating from 1863 to 1902, were placed in the Christian Recorder, the official newspaper of the African Methodist Church. Others ads were placed in the Black Republican in New Orleans, the South Carolina Leader in Charleston, the Colored Citizen in Cincinnati, the Free Men’s Press in Galveston, Texas, and the Colored Tennessean in Nashville.

Judy Giesberg, the graduate program director at Villanova’s History Department, began noticing the newspaper ads while researching the story of Emilie Davis, a free black woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War and kept a diary while there.

“Emilie Davis would write about a lecture she would see or some event in Philadelphia,” Giesberg said. “If she said she went to see Frederick Douglass, we would look in the newspaper to see where he was. It was hard to overlook these ads.”

Sometimes the ads took up columns and columns that would make up whole pages, which captured the weight of the missing and the desperation of subscribers to find them.

Giesberg started collecting the ads with the intention of one day making them available to people online. “I started with the AME Church newspaper,” Giesberg said. “It was the first place I noticed the ads. When I started looking in other black newspapers, I found this was a common phenomenon to include ads taken by people who were one step out of slavery.”

Last August, Giesberg created the “LAST SEEN: FINDING FAMILY AFTER SLAVERY” website, where genealogists and other researchers can search for specific names and locations. Two graduate students — Margaret Strolle and James Byrd — read microfilm to find the material. The site uses volunteers to help transcribe the ads. There are now more than 2,000 ads on the site, of which 1,500 have been transcribed. Since January, the site has been visited by more than 1 million unique visitors.

“There are comparable projects that have collected runaway slave ads,” Giesberg said. What is unique about Last Seen ads, she added, “is they were taken out from the other perspective. They were taken out by the enslaved people.”

The Last Seen ads break down what genealogists and researchers call the “1870 Census Wall.” Before the 1870 Census, there were very few official records of black people.  Enslaved black people were often listed as property, by a check mark, a number or by a gender. They were often listed on bills of sale, like chattel. When researchers try to get information on enslaved black people, they often hit a brick wall when searching for information before 1870.

“What the ads do is reach from the other side of the 1870 Census Wall,” Giesberg said. “The ads place people together in a time before 1870.”

The ads tell real stories of real people with real names, humanizing enslaved people, something slave owners often tried to prevent.

“Slave owners often painted a portrait of enslaved people as part of a happy family in which white men were patriarchs,” Giesberg said. The ads go “beyond that myth, the myth of the benign slaveholder who believes he was a good slaveholder and all the slaves belonged to him. These ads are where real truth lies.”

Enslaved people lived with the constant fear that they or a family member would be sold.

“Slave owners’ wealth lay largely in the people they owned, therefore, they frequently sold and or purchased people as finances warranted,” according to a report by the National Humanities Center, a nonprofit that collects primary historical resources. “An enslaved person could be sold as part of an estate when his owner died, or because the owner needed to liquidate assets to pay off debts or because the owner thought the enslaved person was a troublemaker.”

An exhibit entitled “The Weeping Time” at the Smithsonian’s African American Museum of History and Culture explains the circumstances that often split families apart.

“Night and day, you could hear men and women screaming … ma, pa, sister or brother … taken without any warning,” according to a witness account in the exhibit. “People was always dying from a broken heart.”

Another witness described an emotional scene at a slave auction. A mother clings to her baby while being whipped with a lash because she refused to put her baby down and climb an auction block.

The woman pleaded for God’s mercy, Henry Bibb recounted.

“But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart rending-shrieks from the mother and child on the one hand, and the bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other,” Bibb recalled. “Finally, the poor child was torn from the mother while she sacrificed to the highest bidder.”

In a “Last Seen” ad placed on April 17, 1902, in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia, a woman seeks information about “my people.”
“My mother was sold from me when I could but crawl,” the woman writes.

Since the sale, “I never saw any of my people. I was about 39 years old last March and am married and living at Panama, Vernon Co., Mo. My name is Mary Delaney; it used to be Mary Long. Address me at Post office: Panama, Vernon county, Mo.”

In a “Last Seen” ad placed on April 17, 1902, in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia, a woman seeks information about “my people.”
“My mother was sold from me when I could but crawl,” the woman writes.

Since the sale, “I never saw any of my people. I was about 39 years old last March and am married and living at Panama, Vernon Co., Mo. My name is Mary Delaney; it used to be Mary Long. Address me at Post office: Panama, Vernon county, Mo.”

Some of the ads were intentionally vague, masking details, and  mysteriously leaving out specific names and locations. These ads showed mental calculations of a people one step out of slavery. Even after Lincoln declared enslaved people in Confederate states to be freed, they were suspicious about the terms of that Emancipation, fearing that at any time they could be pulled back into slavery.

In a June 7, 1883, ad placed in the Southwestern Christian Advocate in New Orleans, an unnamed man searched for his son. The ad is brief: “Mr. EDITOR,” the man wrote, “I desire to hear from my son. His name was Tony Jones. I have not seen him since the war. He lived with Thomas Jones. His mother was Julia Jones.”

If anyone should know Tony Jones — the enslaved man with the same name as his “master”— he asks them to write to him care of P.P. Brooks in Shelbyville, Tex.
The ad is unsigned.

Other ads gave insight into how people lived, their aspirations and successes.

In an ad placed June 28, 1883, in the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper in New Orleans, Betty Davis inquires “for my people.” Davis explained that she was separated from her mother when she was three years old.

“I am now 55 years of age,” she wrote. “I learned how to read when I was 50. I take and read the SOUTHWESTERN, it is food for my soul. I am anxious and would be glad to hear something of my mother or my brother Henry. Someone help me.”

Sometimes, the ads led to happy endings.

In an Aug. 26, 1886, ad that ran in the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper, which did not charge for publishing letters from subscribers, Alcy Boone wrote a letter to the editor saying she found who she was looking for:

“I have found my mother through the dear SOUTHWESTERN. God bless you and your paper; it resurrects the forgotten, the lost can be found.”

URL

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/09/07/my-mother-was-sold-from-me-after-slavery-the-desperate-search-for-loved-ones-in-last-seen-ads/

 

 

 

2023 Books of the Month

 

June 2023 – Grocery Shopping wit My Mother by Kevin Powell
Published by Soft Skull, December 6, 2022 | 192 Pages

“Kevin Powell returns with a poetic time capsule written with love in honor of his mother’s evolution. Powell investigates the nature of our country’s oppression through the generational wounds survived and passed on. These poems are a testament to the healing work of Kevin Powell, as they revel in the power of forgiveness, abundance, and lineage.” —Mahogany L. Browne, Lincoln Center’s inaugural poet in residence and author of Vinyl MoonWhen Kevin Powell’s elderly mother became ill, he returned home every week to take her grocery shopping in Jersey City. Walking behind her during those trips, Powell began to hear her voice, stories, and language in a new way—examining his own healing while praying for hers.

 

Grocery Shopping with My Mother dives into the complexities of relationships and contemporary themes with honesty and vulnerability. Creatively and spiritually inspired by Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, Powell’s poems shift in form and style, from praise chants to reverential meditations to, most importantly, innovative hope.

 

May 2023 – Recitatif by Toni Morrison, Introduction by Zadie Smith
First Published January 1, 1983, current publisher, Knopf Publishing Group, 2022

A beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison—the only one she ever wrote—about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith.

Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable at the time, they lose touch as they grow older, only to find each other later at a diner, then at a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and in disagreement each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.

Morrison herself described this story as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." Recitatif is a remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and about how perceptions are made tangible by reality.

 

Center for Black Literature

at Medgar Evers College, CUNY

(718) 804-8883

info@centerforblackliterature.org

www.centerforblackliterature.org

 

URL

https://centerforblackliterature.org/monthly-book-club/

 

forum post

 

I comprehend. 

If I gain fifty billion dollars tomorrow morning all mine, no tax needed. What will I say. 

Richard Murray has the most intramultiracial community of black people in the usa. 

NYC circa 2.5 million black people I am a leader of. and yes, I am also a leader of the black community in the larger usa, over night. 

Does anyone know me? no. 

But that doesn't matter. One isn't a leader because people know them or anyone says it publicly. you are a leader in any community when your resources, whether that is  fiscal wealth or government position or communal following or other gives you the ability to influence the community you are native to. 

If I am in NYC and I have fifty billion dollars, I am a leader. Is how I will lead be known? no.  

People will have the right to do to me what I do to Douglass or others and judge me on my results.

If I do nothing then anyone can say I was a poor black leader. if I leave NYC immediately and do things elsewhere a black person in NYC can say, Richard was terrible as a black leader in NYC.  

 

I quote myself

  Quote

 Frederick Douglass had an overwhelming majority in the black community, over ninety percent, that was truly monoracial in many racial ways. 

I don't see the connection to people knowing Douglass with the condition of the black community at douglass's time having an overhwhelming majority in itself. 

 

 

One point in history 

  Quote

Black population....those down South working in the fields?

Juneteenth is coming up and I think many black people or people in general in the usa really don't define reconstruction more functionally.   

At the end of the war between the states blacks in the south are happy, whites in the south are sad. And a ten year war between blacks in the south and whites in the south was waged. Black people lost terribly. Ten years after the end of the war between the states, blacks in the south are sad plus demoralized, whites in the south are happy plus invigorated. 

 That switch was so extreme that black people in the south could say they were born enslaved to whites, hated whites, were free from whites, tried to befriend or befriended some whites, went on a path of individual + communal improvement involving voting or communal activity that the black community hasn't performed as strongly since, had whites derail their entire communities improvement which is why the black community hasnt been as invigorated ever since and derail their individual lives all in one lifetime, leaving them bitterly hateful to whites with a total fear of violent action against whites. 

You said working in the fields as if most black people in the south simply continued enslaved, that isn't true, the gatherings of black people, movement of black people like the exodusters, the work of zora neale hurston  getting first hand thoughts from blacks at that time prove that is far from the truth. 

But, Black leaders led by Douglass made their choices. Remember the black church leaders had a vote on what to do, go violent or go peace, I can't provide you with exact names of who voted and no one can prove what exactly happened in the 1860s in a private meeting but, nonviolence reportedly won by one vote, and from then to today was set. 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Eating out er with Normina
Character: Odie1049
Artist:  Sensuax
Voice: Flirtyfawn696

https://www.deviantart.com/odie1049/art/Eating-Out-er-with-Normina-917756809

 

This is the first Odie1049

 

Search Artist on AALBC

https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=odie1049&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=and&sortby=newest

still image

  Quote

But how are they ALL...as a community...treated why White New Yorkers?

We acknowledge differences among ourselves, but do Whites acknowledge our differences as far as their treatment of us?

 

The quick one word answer is no. But that isn't a sufficient answer. In NYC, Whites acknowledge differences among themselves. One of the problems when black people talk about how the white community treats the black is the idea that the white community is unified against us, while unified in itself. 

What is my point? 

Before that, I have seen a muslim woman with a hijab holding hands lovingly with a jewish man with the jewish cap on very happy, so.. you see instance of everything in new york, i am speaking of majority here. Plus, I will use the phenotypical adjective for religious races, though I comprehend italin or irish are not phenotypical but geographic heritage labels.

Now, what is my point. 

In NYC at the least, and I think all over, The italian doesn't like the white jew, the white jew doesn't like the irish , the irish don't like the dutch. They all are whites who treat blacks as the enemy historically in a communal sense. But they are not united, they are against each other. The proof. I don't know if you know NYC history but their is blood on the streets in NYC from all the bloodshed these communities have spilled against each other.  My point? Black groups in NYC, like White groups oppose each other, all the time. I argue, Black groups oppose each other less than white groups. The variance. White groups tend to treat all black groups the same while black groups don't tend to treat all white groups the same. But, this goes into the difference between the black community side white community in the usa. Never forget pioneer. The white community in the usa for most of its history or the european colonies that preceded actually had complete power. The black community has never in the european colonies or today, had complete power over itself, and never another community. So... the black community in the usa does have a different heritage from the white community and just because I think it is warranted to say, the native american community also had a unique heritage. Said three people's are not in the same in their heritage concerning the usa in large ways. It can't be reduced to, all humans are human, that isn't sufficient. the native american is not the whites, the whites are not the blacks, the blacks are not the native americans. yes, hybrid examples or situations occur but the majorities are not the same in key ways. 

The question is why can't a majority of black leadership in the usa, implement a cognition of said variance in their ideas or policies. I actually have an unproven thought on that. A majority of black leaders in the usa have a position of human equality, individualism as a unifier that blocks said cognition. If you are frederick douglass or martin luther king jr or barack obama and one of your principles in your mind is a human unity a human equality that is pure or at the root how can you accept or implement ideas or policies that at their core accept human disunity or human inequality? 

 

Now you said the following with more

  Quote

One of the reasons for this is, unlike most White people who CLAIM to be different politically and religiously....Black people actually ARE different and are SINCERE about their differences.

White people may CLAIM to be Jewish or Christian but at the end of the day they both share the same values and ethics.
A few ritualistic differences but they pretty much dress and talk the same.

 

Well, concerning whites if what you said is true, then the commonly called Civil War, World War I , World II, Balkans war, the troubles < which is really another round of the irish-english wars> , the current ukrainian/russian war, the january 6th incident <which can be argued is an incident in the long line of post civil war incidents between whites in the usa> where many white people have killed or harmed or threaten to harm other white people more than any other with pride or happiness are merely hoaxes or deceptions. If you do, that is fine, I don't want you to change your mind, but I oppose that view. 

 

Concerning Blacks, I don't think internal black friction is any different in emotion than in any human group. In india, muslims ad being burned alive by hindus. In former yugolslavis as we speak, croats and slaves are battling each other, no differently than the factions of sudan.  But I will say this, Black internal communal friction in the USA, the usa and to some extent the entire american continent, is mostly nonviolent. To me, white internal communal friction in the usa is historically quite violent, while said black friction is not. But again, that goes back to the people's heritage being different. 

 

Now is white internal communal unity in the USA unlike other white people? yes. Brexit didn't happen because whites of england hated black people. BRexit happened because white of england didn't want whites of eastern europe populating rural england anymore. In Italy or Spain you see many incidents of friction between catalonians and basque or sicilians and neapolitians. But in the usa, after the commonly called civil war and the end of the commonly called world war II , the white community in the usa has a greater sense of white unity. But as january 6th proved, it isn't that strong. 

 

I end with, you and many black people before have claimed that whites are one big happy family who unite against all others, ala the hellenistic example, while all others lack the same. but I oppose that view. I think many black people and to be blunt, black leaders like to suggest black people are more caught up in our variances than whites. but the million man march, the black community in NYC proves that assertion false for me. I think the problem is the black community in the usa has a problem getting results, and in frustration blames itself because blaming itself is easier than blaming itself aside its environment equally.  

 

the italians invaded for the same reason germany or austria hungary hd similar plans and eventually invaded their european neighbors or made war machines. The Ottoman empire plus Russia are other stories. 
Spain/England/France/Holland/Portugal  for hundreds of years , since the 1400s had gone outside of Europe and dominated non european peoples. Making huge fortunes for  each of their fiscal elite beyond their dreams, manipulating < in some cases terminally or permanently> all non european peoples, all non european peoples. But in Europe their neighbors in the center: italy/austria hungary/germany all looked with envy or desire. Italy's ethiopian campaign or Togo to germany are examples of this desire<italy's case> or sated envy<germany's> playing out. Which couldn't be enough and led to the commonly called world wars, I personally call that war, the war of european empires. All in humanity wasn't at war, european empires were and at the time of the first war of european empires an overwhelming majority of governments outside Europe were controlled or managed by England/Spain/France/Holland/Portugal/Italy/Germany/Austria-Hungary/Ottoman empire <whom I consider european albeit muslim> / Russia <whom I consider eurasian at its heart>/USA <a european country not in europe>  . 

Few governments were not completely controlled or managed by one of those European powers. 

Ethiopia was one of them, Japan was the other. All others were completely controlled like china or brasil , or managed like a haiti or egypt. 

Italy in its desperation to be a european global player gambled. The worst time to gamble is when you are thinking desperately. 

Ethiopia unlike any other government in Africa had a few things that made it unique in all of africa. One, unlike most of Africa which is usually plains or hilly, Ethiopia is very mountainous. And absent modern, 2023, air warfare possibilities, mountainous areas are huge deterrents. The mountains will force any large ground assault to break up and that weakens it naturally in the favor of the defending position. So, when the muslim imperial growth in africa started, before the christian imperial growth, Ethiopia had learned to protect itself and because of ethiopia's bordering islamic empires, they were aware of all the latest militaristic inventions, like the gun or tanks. 

And when the christian imperial growth started in Africa, ethiopia was already more prepared and even had a native christian heritage. 

So italy to be blunt, made a bad gamble, bad leadership, and paid for it.