FEATURES
Reality Check
by Anitra D. Brown
A Saintly Effort
by Keli Fulton
Big Shirley's Story
by Fallon Jai
Oh Baby: New Orleans Baby Doll Tradition Thrives
by Theresa Crushshon
Ben Franklin High School Performs Worse as a Charter School
by Dr. Barbara FergusonColumns & Departments
The Biggest Fight of Our Lives
Now that the presidential election is behind us, we can step up the battle to reclaim, repair and transform the black world, including New Orleans
by J.B. Borders
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Charles Dickens wrote famously of the French Revolution, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
Dickens’s observations seem appropriate once more in describing the swirl of forces and emotions at play today in the United States of America – in the Age of Obama and the Great Depression, Part II.
Every era, of course, has an overarching narrative, a grand struggle that threads both large and small acts into a common theme. In the black world, these grand narratives generally have played out over the course of one-hundred-year periods. And it’s generally helpful to figure out where we are by understanding where we’ve been.
The eighteenth century, for example, was characterized by the domination and degradation of black people on an almost global scale. Then a big push back began and the major story of the nineteenth century became the battle for abolition of the slave trade. Though the state of Vermont outlawed slavery in 1777 and in 1792 Denmark became the first sovereign nation to abolish the enslavement of human beings, it wasn’t until 1888 that slavery was abolished finally in Brazil.
Liberation was the next logical step in this journey and it became the overarching theme of the twentieth century. In early 1885, several of the European nations reached an agreement about how to divide up Africa. Africans themselves objected strenuously to this plan and fought successful wars of liberation in every corner of the continent. But it wasn’t until 1994 that South Africa became the last black nation to win its political freedom.
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was part of the broader liberation struggle of black people in the twentieth century. Its roots can be traced to the summer of 1905 when 29 leading African Americans crossed the border into Canada and drafted a manifesto calling for full civil rights for blacks in the United States. That organization, the Niagara Movement, later morphed into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which organized and mobilized hundreds of thousands of people in the fight against legalized racial segregation in the U.S.
The battles and victories of the American Civil Rights Movement were critical milestones and inspiration to our skinfolk in Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and other pockets of the African Diaspora.
