Troy

A Terrific Bookstore in Tampa's Ybor City, Best Books Rich Treasures they feature New, Used, and Rare Books. I've become friendly with these booksellers over the last couple of years. I found them to be cool people as they always expressed their gratitude in my efforts to help them. On my most recent visit. Gigi, one of the co-owners who is also a genealogist was telling me about her book, Thomas the Melungeon: His Locust Family of Free Persons of Color Civil and Revolutionary War Patriots. As we were discussing the book, it became clear we had relatives in the same region of North Carolina. As budding genealogist myself I happened to have my DNA available and we compared our DNA and found the genetic link--we are kin! Our ability to find the shared ancestry is possible because my maternal grandmother's people were never enslaved. Wilder still, I'm also related to her husband, thought the family ties are less clear because the likely connection is through my paternal ancestor the "Johnson" line was lost due to slavery in the deep south... @Delano, I think this qualifies as magic Family or not, I still would have created this video highlighting the store. If you are in the area, check them out and tell 'em, "Cousin Troy" sent you!

@Delano, sure given that definition of magic--absolutely! I can give you many examples. But closer to home, meeting you is an example. Some might call it serendipity others might say coincidence, still other may say it is if no consequence. But I think it is more than that... My connection with @Mel Hopkins and @Cynique is more of the same. I agree with Cynique in that prayer, meditation and other similar practices are our attempts to realize what you call magic. Unfortunately the dogma of religion and people who exploit spirituality for profit pervert our attempt to connect with the universe. I'm reading a book on native Americans and their closeness with nature... they seem be wiser that those with advanced degrees Sadly corporations have exploited technology that could help bring people closer and turned it into our obsession for their profit.

@Delano are these alligences you see forming for or against Trump?

Discover the best black books coming out February 2017, and more in our January eNewsletter.

Correct! Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, and Wole Soyinka of St. Lucia, America, and Nigeria respectively were the only Black people to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. I attended the conferences Clarence mentioned in which Morrison and Walcott were honored.

Mel the minimum wage as increased incrementally before many of the Occupy protestors were even born. The link you provided says that NY State will increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2021! This does not seem like a resounding win worth boasting about and that is assuming that you can attribute the change solely to Occupy (the article did not make this assertion). I have protested in the past. We even occupied on an office building on Syracuse University's campus. But I was less of an activist and more of young adult experimenting, learning who I was. Real, substantive change only seems to come by force. America was founded by force, slavery ended by force, Hitler was stopped by force. Power only answers to force. I have little hope that marching will change anything-- unless the changes you are looking for is a few extra bucks phased in over several years.... Right now the powerful are boldly snatching even more power. The republican legislators who the marchers are supposedly influencing were completely impotent as Trump bum-rushed their party. They are useless; marching to influence them is a waste of time--unless some serious financial pressure can be brought to bear.

Humm reminds me I didn't get this book yet ;-)

In the case Mel, my comments are based on what I thinking at the moment. This is both; subject to change, based upon additional information; and subject to critique, which I obviously welcome. In the case, I was thinking about the impact marching as on individuals who support Trump and Trump himself. There is nothing I've seen that is capable of swaying Donald Trump's mind other than money and power, none of which the protestors are offering. Indeed Trump and his people are not above making shit up out of thin air and calling them "alternate facts" that Cynique points out. The idea that the media even entertains these lies is sickening. Does anyone think anything that the marcher will effect Trump in a positive way? I don't and that is my point. Since the Trump supporters can easily tune out the marchers are consume media that completely denounces them as out of touch limousine liberals I don;t see these marches affecting them either. Now @Mel Hopkins I had not considered the impact on legislators. I don't have much hope on this front either. The Occupy Movement did a boat load of protesting and Wall Street is more dominant than ever. I'll look at the research nonetheless. With the benefit of hindsight can anyone point to a single piece of legislation that was impacted Occupy's protracted protesting? Surely we can all describe Wall Street increased influence over government, capped by the election of Trump.

OK maybe you two are right... I've modified my position on this issue.

MLK and the people around him would have been on Twitter trying to figure out how to reach an audience. They would have been rendered mute in today's world; where popularity is determined by corporate entities revenue rather than what nurtures their auduence. Right now the flavor of the day is Black Lives Matters, corporate media can't wrap their stubby little fingers around the concept of more than one activist organization at a time.

In places like NYC and DC, this marching is "a thing" as they say. In places like Tampa, which is part of Hillsborough County (who voted for Hillary), and not exactly the sticks; you don't hear any talk about marching. This is more big city folks from the coasts talking to each other. Maybe holding some demonstrations in the rust belt and other places where Trump had the most influence might be more impactful. It is the same reason the press completely missed Trump's reach, they interact and reported in the very same bubble the marchers are in. The really very crazy thing is that I don't think writing to politicians will have an impact either. They are part the problem. In fact, Trump who ridiculed Hillary as being owned by Goldman has now made these very some people part of his cabinet. I don't hear any Trump supporters complaining about this. I'm not convinced they even understand what this means... You can't complain about the rich when the government is a plutocracy. All you can really do is, do the best you can. You could also fight for radical change, but not enough people have the stomach for it. Youngsters who normally drive this sort of radical change are too distracted by social media; as if griping about Trump's tweets will make a difference. Kinda make what the Panthers, SNCC, SCLC and other organizations did so much more impressive. These organization despite the charismatic Brothers we hear most about, were really were run by women.

The Tampa Bay Black Heritage Festival is an annual, cultural arts & music festival that takes place over the course of 10 days in Tampa Bay, Florida. They host an Author Village which I checked out on Saturday and met a bunch of authors. I was only armed with an old cell phone, but I managed to shoot a couple of videos and a bunch of photos.

OK let me know where you find the answer.

Two out of three is not bad :-)

Hey Del would you define magic? For example, would waving a wand over someone who died 100 years ago and resurrecting them be considered magic? How about extracting DNA from a dead person and cloning them, would that be considered magic? Something that was considered magic 100 years ago is simply science today. Perhaps the same could be considered for whatever you consider magic today. I'd define magic as an occurrence which can not be explained scientifically. So I believe in magic. What we perceive as magic is often the result of an over active imagination or tricks and quirks in human perception.

Del I meant to write I did "not" run the numbers (I corrected what I originally wrote). Unifying and divisive are antonyms, so it is not clear what you mean using these terms to describe the president.

I don't disagree. That line, "Perhaps the American public is more afraid of sexual advances from Hillary than Trump." was rich LOL. BTW, the number of women was not a sample; it was the entire electorate dude. Honestly, I did not run the numbers. But we do know the majority of white women voted for Trump. If we eliminated all the votes cast by white women, it is possible that difference could have swung the election the other way. It would not take too much heavy lifting to figure that out if that is indeed the case.

I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle Del, it will have zero impact on Trump. It will, however, help galvanize people in such a way that they thwart anything bad Trump might do and prevent this shit from happening again.

Last night after, writing the post above, I began running a new poll. To ask the question Where did you buy your last book. Of course, the software available to collect this information is far superior to what I used back in 1999. I was able to find and implement a new poll in a matter of minutes. The company I used is called Get Site Control. I never heard of them prior to looking for poll taking tool software. Get Site Control also provide a variety of other widgets for your site or Blog. Creating a feature rich website is much easier than ever before, but we have much less diversity on the web because massive corporate sites dominate. It really is a great loss of creativity, but I digress... Here are the results of the Where did you buy you last book? question thus far: Of course, given Amazon's dominance, I don't expect any relations with this question. The main purpose is to contrast the responses with those given 17 years ago. I also recognize that since this question is posted on this website, that there are inherent biases, so I would not extend these answers to the general population. But given the fact that internet penetration is so much higher today compared to Jan 2000 when the question was first asked. The survey is probably less biased than the one taken 16 years ago. Finally, it will be interesting to see if I get 856 responses and how long it takes.

NY Dems plan on Boycotting Trump's Inauguration. @Delano, you may want to follow this story to understand the thinking about what a boycott can do.

These questions were posed before the advent of social media and during what I'd describe as the height of the "Black Literature Renaissance" in 2000. Check out all the questions and answers: https://aalbc.com/fun/survey.htm The really interesting thing is that even though this site gets orders of magnitude more traffic in 2017, than in 2000, I doubt I could get as many people to respond to surveys like this. Part of the reason AALBC attracts more visitors is that there are FAR more people with Internet access than there were 17 years ago. But they reason I suspect I'd get less participation is that visitors are generally far more engaged on social media and the large corporate sites than they are on smaller indie sites. This is one of the reasons there is less choice and diversity on the web than there was 17 years ago, but that is a rant for another day I plan to ask visitors many of the same questions I asked back in 1999, I'll really anxious to see what people think today compared to almost two decades ago.

Image was always important to Obama. I'm sure this is why he avoided the Black press, ditched Dr. West and Tavis Smiley from jump street all of whom all would have been held more accountable for his actions regarding Black people. Instead, he latched on to sycophants like Al Sharpton. This is not an issue of "messaging" as Obama likes to claim, this is an issue of the struggles of Americans. Perhaps the democrats can find a truly progressive candidate to run against Trump in four years and truly make America great.

I actually did look at that. I was interested in seeing if there were some really large contributions too. Basically, the largest contribution (when I looked) was $5,000, there are about 25 others who gave $1,000 or more. Making up about 25% of the total. The vast majority of other contributions were relatively small over 6,300 contributions averaging about 50 bucks each. An impressive large level of grassroots support. That segment of the Black community @Cynique, is apparently not so silent. While I refuse to begrudge Talladega for cashing in here; I don't like the idea of an HBCU celebrating the inauguration of Donald Trump, but I'm not paying the schools bills... I read the Jennifer Holiday saw the light and backed out. Perhaps she felt the long-term financial impact of alienating the gay community exceeded the short term gain of performing at Trump's Inauguration. Apparently, the Black community does not exert the same power as the Gay community. Instead we are willing to do anything for money, not unlike of future president.

I still have not heard the President's farewell speech, but I have heard clips and I watched an Interview on TV last night. In each instance, I've heard Obama state that the country is better off as a result of his presidency. In fact, in the interview I watched last night, Obama said this was "objectively" true in any way you want to measure it. As an entrepreneur; educator; and someone who has been involved in a wide variety of industries including, defense, financial services, publishing, and technology the notion that the country is better off now, than it was 8 years ago, does not ring true. While it is true, based upon the data I have access to, that the Nation's GDP has increased, during this same period of "growth," income has remained stagnant and wealth inequality as increased. If we measure the success of the economy based upon the increase in wealth of the extremely wealthy, then Obama is right. However. if we look at the prospects of most Americans, the picture is bleaker. I see education costing more and more, so much more that a decent one is out of reach of many—especially for those you can't, or refuse, to take on oppressive debt. At the same time, the prospects of a decent, well-paying job, as a result of this expensive education is no longer guaranteed. I see opportunities for running independent businesses, swiftly evaporating as super massive and ultra wealthy corporations are allowed to operate as virtual monopolies, utilizing the capital markets, tax loopholes, and politicians in a way that would be considered criminal is an individual engaged in this behavior. We have witnessed the death of journalism; and the rise of fake and biased news spewed by people armed with misinformation and biased opinions on platforms whose sole motivation is revenue. Trump's dysfunction became much more newsworthy than the coverage of legitimate candidates. If the country is doing better, why have the American people decided to radically change direction and go with Donald Trump? I submit for the very same reasons we chose Obama over Clinton in the primaries and again over Romney in the general. We were full of "hope" for a "change." Of course, wealth inequality did not start with Obama, but not only did he not reverse it, it grew under his watch and people are feeling the pain. Bernie Saunders spoke directly to this pain, while Obama attempted to convince us everything was going great. This is why Bernie's message resonated so strongly with many people, while Hillary just promised more of what Obama delivered--the rich getting richer. When Hillary modified her message to be more Saunder's like, she came across as a typical poll-monitoring politician, more commonly known as a liar, the chants of "lock her up" made perfect sense to many. Now that Trump is practically in office, the media will continue to cover his silly tweets and fail to directly challenge his lies. Our country is broken. God help us.

I see Talladega desperately wanted to participate in Trump's inauguration festivities. They did even have the money to do it and have resorted to setting up a Go Fund Me campaign with the goal of raising $75,000. At the moment I'm writing this they have raised $354,251! Clearly, they have a lot support despite the negative reactions from some. Well, there's the upside: Talladega has cleared over $354K, and counting. A nice sum for a day's work. The beauty for the Trump people is that they didn't even have to spend a penny.