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"Barack inspires me -- it's that simple. In the words of President Kennedy: "The world is changing. The old ways will not do... It is time for a new generation of leadership...In Barack, I see that next generation of American leadership: a figure who can transcend the divisions in this country that my family and I have fought so hard to tear down."
"Shoot, you cowards! You can't kill a revolution. You're only going to kill a man!"
The Rebellious Sixties? Yes, I Remember is coming this week. The Daddy must get permission to publish the
"As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder."
"I sat with the man, but I still don’t know what’s in his heart. He told me he did terrible things to dogs. He said he grew up with dogfighting as a boy, and that he never sufficiently questioned it as he grew into manhood...He said this experience has been a trauma and he’s changed forever. And he said he wants to show the American public that he is committed to helping combat this problem. He asked for an opportunity to help. I want to give him that opportunity. If he makes the most of it, and demonstrates a sincere, long-term commitment to the task, then it may prove to be a tipping point in our campaign to eradicate dogfighting."
“We never expected the White House would become the people’s house. It’s becoming nearer and nearer to being the people’s house and not just the white people’s house.” 
Listen up. On this date in 1922, the home of Frederick Douglass, one of the baadest freedom fighters and arguably, America's greatest orator, was dedicated as a national memorial.| |
| by Paul Laurence Dunbar | ||
A hush is over all the teeming lists, | ||
"With this historic vote, the Senate has affirmed that Justice Sotomayor has the intellect, the temperament, the history, the integrity and the independence of mind to ably serve on our nation's highest court."The third woman in court history, she'll be sworn in Saturday as the 111th justice and the first nominated by a Democrat in 15 years.
The Senate vote was 68-31 to confirm Sotomayor, President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, with Democrats unanimously behind her but most Republicans lining up in a show of opposition both for her and for the president's standards for a justice.
The 55-year-old daughter of Puerto Rican parents was raised in a South Bronx housing project and educated in the Ivy League before rising to the highest legal echelons, spending the past 17 years as a federal judge.
Sotomayor watched the vote on TV at a federal courthouse in New York City, among friends and colleagues.
Justice Sotomayor, congratulations!
"Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan."  |
| AP / LM Otero |
By Chris Hedges
LeAlan Jones, the 30-year-old Green Party candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, is as angry at injustice as he is at the African-American intellectual and political class that accommodates it. He does not buy Obama’s “post-racial” ideology or have much patience with African-American leaders who, hungry for prestige, power and money, have, in his eyes, forgotten the people they are supposed to represent. They have confused a personal ability to be heard and earn a comfortable living with justice.
“The selflessness of leaders like Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Harold Washington and Medgar Evers has produced selfishness within the elite African-American leadership,” Jones told me by phone from Chicago.
“This is the only thing I can do to have peace of mind,” he said when I asked him why he was running for office. “I am looking at a community that is suffering because of a lack of genuine concern from their leaders. This isn’t about a contract. This isn’t about a grant. This isn’t about who gets to stand behind the political elite at a press conference. This is about who is going to stand behind the people. What these leaders talk about and what needs to happen in the community is disjointed.”
Jones began his career as a boy making radio documentaries about life in Chicago’s public housing projects on the South Side, including the acclaimed “Ghetto Life 101.” He knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the troubled Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, where he works as a freelance journalist and a high school football coach. He is the legal guardian of a 16-year-old nephew. And he often echoes the denunciations of black leaders by the historian Houston A. Baker Jr., who wrote “Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era.”
Baker excoriates leading public intellectuals including Michael Eric Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Shelby Steele, Yale law professor Stephen Carter and Manhattan Institute fellow John McWhorter, saying they pander to the powerful. He argues they have lost touch with the reality of most African-Americans. Professor Gates’ statement after his July 16 arrest that “what it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen” was a stunning example of how distant from black reality many successful African-American figures like Gates have become. These elite African-American figures, Baker argues, long ago placed personal gain and career advancement over the interests of the black majority. They espouse positions that are palatable to a white audience, positions which ignore the radicalism and structural critiques of inequality by W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. And in a time when, as the poet Yusef Komunyakaa has said, “the cell block has replaced the auction block,” they do not express the rage, frustration and despair of the black underclass.
The conditions for black men and women in America are sliding backward, with huge numbers of impoverished and unemployed removed from society and locked up. Baker acidly calls this “the disappearing” of blacks. The unemployment rate in most inner cities is in the double digits, and segregation, especially in city schools and wealthy states like New Jersey, is the norm. African-American communities are more likely to be red-lined by banks and preyed upon by unscrupulous mortgage lenders, which is why such a high percentage of foreclosures are in blighted, urban neighborhoods. The Village Voice’s recent exposé that detailed brutal and sometimes fatal beatings of black and Hispanic prisoners by guards at New York’s Rikers Island was a window into a daily reality usually not seen or acknowledged by the white mainstream.
“I have three people within my immediate family that are men that have come home within the last 24 to 36 months from being incarcerated,” Jones said. “They are tired of going to jail. They don’t want to go to jail anymore. But there are no jobs. What service can they provide? My belief is those individuals coming home, these ex-felons, have more credibility to stop the violence in the inner city than the police do. It is their sons and nephews and their immediate families that are being the provocateurs of that violence. But if we are asking them to stop crime, what incentive are we providing them to do that?”
For the full story, click here:
Listen up. After his post on James Baldwin on Sunday, The Daddy received a number of emails from friends admitting that, although they had heard of Baldwin, they never read him. One said that, like many of his friends, he had a couple of books of Baldwin, even carried one of them around to impress his college friends, but he never "got into him." All asked what book they should read. Knowing that at least two of these brothers grew up in ghettoes (one in Milwaukee and the other in New York City), The Daddy suggested that they start with an essay that Baldwin wrote about the Harlem ghetto in which he lived entitled "Fifth Avenue, Upton." It appeared in Esquire magazine in July of 1960.
"Although Baldwin was quite active in the Civil Rights movement, he participated only by returning to the States in the 1950s and 1960s from France, a country to which he had bought a one-way ticket in 1948. After that time, he moved back and forth, never staying in the States for an extended period. Whatever his vantage point, Baldwin continued to prod Americans into better behavior, for he genuinely loved the country that was less willing than he would have wished to return that love."  |
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