Tortuous History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa
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On Dec. 3, 1794, a Portuguese slave ship left Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, for what was to be a 7,000-mile voyage to Maranhão, Brazil, and the sugar plantations that awaited its cargo of black men and women.
Remnants of a Portuguese slave port in Mozambique.
Shackled in the ship’s hold were between 400 and 500 slaves, pressed flesh to flesh with their backs on the floor. With the exception of daily breaks to exercise, the slaves were to spend the bulk of the estimated four-month journey from the Indian Ocean across the vast South Atlantic in the dark of the hold.
In the end, their journey lasted only 24 days. Buffeted by strong winds, the ship, the São José Paquete Africa, rounded the treacherous Cape of Good Hope and came apart violently on two reefs not far from Cape Town and only 100 yards from shore, but in deep, turbulent water. The Portuguese captain, crew and half of the slaves survived. An estimated 212 slaves did not, and perished in the sea.
Underwater archeologists explore the site where the slaver went down off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa.
On Tuesday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture, along with the Iziko Museums of South Africa, the Slave Wrecks Project, and other partners, will announce in Cape Town that the remnants of the São José have been found, right where the ship went down, in full view of Lion’s Head Mountain. It is the first time, researchers involved in the project say, that the wreckage of a slaving ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered.
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It’s Time to Stop Blaming Black-on-Black Crime
By Charles D. Ellison, theRoot.com
The rhetoric around crime is factually wrong and allows some to ignore and pass the blame for systemic misdeeds.
For every unarmed black man, woman or child killed by unrestrained police officers, there’s an intellectually impoverished response when black people get visibly upset about it: What about black-on-black crime?…
Now black-on-black crime is a thing, with famous heavy-right rags embracing it as frequently as they knock the black president. It’s a fresh, new, nasty, stick-your-tongue-out retort to shut down any justifiable complaints from grieving black communities.
Which means we can talk days on end about being black, so long as it pertains to black people hurting other black people. Others have signed on, too, including some prominent black celebrities and half-intelligentsia…
Despite the intense national obsession with it, however, we haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that it never really existed in the first place. To refer to “black-on-black crime” not only defies common sense but grabs at baseless white racist science that removes blame for systemic deeds. There’s no more reason to assert “black-on-black crime” than there is to coin terms like “white-on-white crime” or “brown-on-brown crime” or let’s-just-insert-random-color-or-race-here crime. And, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not using those terms.
And we shouldn’t. Geography and basic population trends dictate that. Crime happens all around us, and it happens near where populations cluster. Over the past generation, we’ve allowed this unique, yet ugly designation of community crime patterns to stalk us like an angry ex-spouse, without any requisite understanding of how human beings live…
One reason is that we’re so accustomed to congregating and living where others look like us. As the data-crunching Nate Silver recently pointed out, even the “most diverse cities” are the “most segregated.” A Pew Research survey… also underscored that point: Americans talk a big diversity game, but “American communities appear to have grown more politically and economically homogeneous in recent decades.” Interestingly, that same Pew study found that a larger margin of African Americans preferred living in racially diverse communities—83 percent—than whites (60 percent).
University of Washington sociologist Kyle Crowder’s research has found that… forty-four percent of African Americans move to black neighborhoods, with just 5 percent moving into white neighborhoods. For whites, the percentage is higher, with just under 60 percent moving into neighborhoods with people who look just like them, as opposed to only 2 percent who move into majority-black neighborhoods…
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Longtime school benefactor meets with Obama, Biden
By John Fritze, the Baltimore Sun
Some 80 years after graduating from school, Vivian Bailey has taken the field trip of a lifetime.
The 97-year-old Columbia woman — a World War II veteran and retired federal employee who for more than a decade has been raising money for Howard County students — met Tuesday with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
President Barack Obama welcomes Vivian Bailey, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, to the Whits House.
Bailey, who grew up in segregated Tulsa, Okla., in the 1920s, never had an opportunity to travel as a student. After serving in the Army and two federal agencies, she has spent much of her retirement raising money so that students at Running Brook Elementary in Columbia can afford to take field trips.
Earlier this year she accompanied a group of fourth-graders from the school to Washington — traveling with the students for the first time. On Tuesday, she returned to tour the White House and to meet with Obama.
“It’s always been a wish of mine, ever since the president has been in office,” Bailey said in an interview. “When I walked in there, I was probably speechless for a second. It was a dream that I had. I was hardly able to talk.”…
Bailey has been raising money for students at the school for the past 15 years, she said, sending solicitation letters to friends and contacts she has developed over a lifetime. Sometimes the money is used for school supplies, but more often than not it helps students pay for travel.
“I wanted to make sure the kids got fields trips like they did in richer parts of the county,” she said.
Bailey served as a company commander in the Women’s Army Corps at bases in Georgia and Alabama during World War II.
After the war, Bailey moved to Chicago to work for the Veterans Administration. She took a job at the Social Security Administration in Chicago in 1952, and eventually moved to the agency’s headquarters in Woodlawn. She retired in 1975…
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African-Americans Who Attended Desegregated Schools Have Better Language Skills Years Later
By Rebecca Klein, the Huffington Post
African-Americans who attended racially diverse schools have better cognitive abilities decades after graduation, according to a new study.
The first black students to attend Central High School in Little Rock, AK receive awards on June 12, 1958.
The study, published around the time of the recent 61st anniversary of Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, surveyed African-Americans older than 50 who attended desegregated Baltimore schools and compares their cognitive abilities with a group that attended segregated schools. Researchers from Duke University, University of South Florida, University of Delaware and North Carolina State University didn’t find a difference in the rate of cognitive decline, but they did find that those who attended desegregated schools performed slightly better on measures of language and perceptual speed.
Adrienne Aiken Morgan, from Duke’s Center on Biobehavioral Health Disparities Research, said she’s not surprised the people who attended desegregated schools performed slightly better on cognitive measures.
“Education plays such a key role — both the number of years of education and quality of education — we know that plays such a huge role in cognitive performance,” Aiken Morgan said. “But it is fascinating to consider that this issue wasn’t related to any differential rate of decline over time.”
The study may hold implications for the education of African-Americans, as many U.S. schools have become more segregated in recent years.
“As segregated schooling is a proxy for inequalities in resource allocation for schools, it makes me concerned,” Aiken Morgan told HuffPost. “The disadvantages that you have in early life can very well affect you across time…”
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Tear down the ‘blue wall of silence’: New York Dem destroys sheriff who blames police violence on blacks
By Travis Gettys, RawStory.com
A New York Democrat shut down a black conservative Wisconsin sheriff who blamed police violence on black criminality.
David Clarke, the Milwaukee County sheriff, described “black-on-black crime” as the “elephant in the room” Tuesday during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the rising tensions between police officers and African-Americans.
“The conversation should be about transforming black underclass subculture behavior,” said Clarke, who frequently appears on Fox News. “The discussion must start with addressing the behavior of people who have no respect for authority, who fight with and try to disarm the police, who flee the police, and who engage in other flawed lifestyle choices.”
“Bashing the police is the low-hanging fruit,” the sheriff added. “It is easier to talk about the rare killing of a black male by police because emotion can be exploited for political advantage.”
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) agreed that black-on-black crime was a problem – but he pointed out that 83 percent of white homicide victims were killed by other white people. “Is white-on-white violence also a problem that we should have a robust discussion about?” the lawmaker asked the sheriff.
“It was mentioned that there was a cooperation issue in the black-on-black violence context – but I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase mentioned, ‘blue wall of silence,’” Jeffries said. “If we’re going to have a conversation about cooperation when someone crosses the line, seems to me to make sense that we also have to deal with what may be another elephant in the room, to use your term…”
“If we are going to have a responsible conversation, we’ve got to at least be able to agree on a common set of reasonable facts that all Americans can interpret,” Jeffries said…
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If You Type ‘N—- House’ Into Google Maps, It Will Take You To The White House
By Julia Craven and Amber Ferguson, the Huffington Post
President Barack Obama is no stranger to Internet racism, but this is just ridiculous: typing “nigga house” into Google Maps can land you at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
A screenshot of the glitch, confirmed by HuffPost Politics, was posted to Twitter by a user named Bomani Buckhalter.
“The screenshot first appeared from a fellow Howard University alum in our alumni GroupMe. I tested it out myself, and it started to spread rapidly in the other Howard University/DMV area GroupMe,” Buckhalter told The Huffington Post…
As Buckhalter noted, results can vary depending on a user’s location. One Twitter user found that typing the term into Google Maps took her straight to a Waffle House.
It’s unclear exactly what’s happening here. Reached for comment, a company spokesperson told HuffPost, “Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologise for any offence this may have caused. Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly.”
The spokesperson did not explain why the results are popping up…
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Military Weapons Used in Ferguson to Be Restricted by Obama Task Force
By Lauren Victoria Burke, theRoot.com
Civilian law enforcement will be prohibited from receiving certain military weapons—including tanklike vehicles, assault rifles and grenade launchers.
President Barack Obama is moving to restrict the type of military-style equipment that police departments can have, according to a report from the President’s Task Force on 21st-Century Policing.
The task force was established Dec. 18, 2014, after the issue of police brutality received international attention in the wake of Michael Brown’s death by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer. Police used armored vehicles, assault rifles and other military gear in the small city of Ferguson during protests after Brown’s death.
Police confront demonstrators in Ferguson, MO on August 15, 2014.
In the report, which is to be released later on Monday, the task force takes aim at police militarization. The report outlines a list of military equipment that is now prohibited for transfer to civilian law enforcement, including armored, tanklike vehicles that use a track system instead of wheels; grenade launchers; weaponized aircraft; and firearms over .50 caliber.
“Our review found that there wasn’t a single federal strategy but, rather, a different set of standards and a different set of rules by agencies for different programs, and no consistent standards for law-enforcement agencies that were seeking and requesting the equipment,” said Cecilia Muñoz, President Obama’s highest-ranking official on domestic policy, during a media call Sunday…
“The idea is to make sure that we strike a balance in providing the equipment which is appropriate and useful and important to keep local communities safe, while at the same time putting standards in place so that there’s a clear reason there was a transfer of that equipment, and so that there is clear training and safety procedures in place,” Muñoz said to reporters.
Post-Baltimore, Most Americans Believe Unrest Was Just One Big Criminal Act
By Charles D. Ellison, theRoot.com
The results are in: A majority of Americans think the Baltimore unrest was just another mad, black riot. The Pew Research Center surveyed the top five reasons an anxious public considered for the unrest, including anger over Freddie Gray’s death, frustration with police-community relations and the socioeconomic challenges. The poverty narrative didn’t stick, with 61 percent believing that “people were taking advantage of the situation to engage in criminal behavior.”
Demonstrators in Baltimore climb on a destroyed police car on April 27, 2915.
As expected, those attitudes differ sharply by race, with 50 percent of blacks blaming poverty as the reason, compared with 40 percent of whites (interestingly enough, a majority of African Americans—54 percent—also viewed the unrest as “criminal”). There’s also a nearly 10-point gap between whites and blacks when comparing perceptions on police-community relations: Most African Americans, 65 percent, believe that “tensions between the black community and police” contributed to the unrest, while just 56 percent of whites did. Instead, 66 percent of whites support the notion that it was just one more “wile out” in the hood.
These numbers are significant because they help in our routine evaluation of America on race, police conduct and a #BlackLivesMatter movement trying to find itself ahead of the next election. Polls help us put these experiences into context, especially as we struggle to understand the post-Baltimore public mood…
A just-released Public Religion Research Institute survey finds that there is massive disagreement between blacks (17 percent) and whites (46 percent) on whether people of color receive “equal treatment in the criminal-justice system.” But that is far fewer whites who agree that blacks get fair treatment than the 62 percent who believed it in the late ’90s.
Still, only 49 percent of whites, according to the Public Religion poll, think Freddie Gray’s death was part of a broader pattern of vicious anti-black police treatment, compared with 74 percent of blacks who do…
…America, for the most part, may not be as sympathetic to the broader discussion on poverty, as well as the criminal-justice challenges resulting from it. Most whites, especially, don’t want to hear it. Brothers smashing police cars on infinite news loops didn’t help the cause, either, and there’s a larger concern that both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in the next election cycle will sidestep systemic issues in favor of coddling white fear. Most polled (96 percent in the NBC/WSJ survey) are more worried about bracing for a long, hot summer of urban unrest than they are about finding solutions to prevent that from happening in the first place.
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Legendary Blues Musician B.B. King Dead At 89
By Jade Walker, The Huffington Post
…Born Riley B. King in Berclair, Mississippi, and raised by his grandmother, the future “King of the Blues” purchased his first guitar for $15 when he was just 12 years old. He dropped out of school in the 10th grade, and spent much of his early years picking cotton and working as a tractor driver.
While he began singing in a gospel choir at church, the blues took root in King during his teen years. The blues is considered by many to be the only truly indigenous American music, and over time, King would become its foremost ambassador….
Although he originally played to all-black audiences, King’s distinctive voice soon won him fans the world over. Between the release of his landmark album “Live at the Regal” in 1965 — which would later be declared a recording worthy of preservation by the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry — and the charting of his 1969 LP “Live and Well,” King became a true star. And by the late 1960s, he was making appearances on the “Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show.”
B.B. King and his guitar, Lucille, are in the Halls of Fame of the Grammy Awards, the Blues, the Rock and Roll, and the R&B Music. He is considered one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all times.
Playing on a Gibson ES-355 guitar he lovingly named Lucille, King would weave a musical tapestry of heartfelt soul and pain that masterfully fused elements of blues and jazz. These passionate sounds would not only enrapture audiences but influence many other artists, including Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix.
“When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody,” King told the AP in 2006. “I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.”
King won the first of his 15 Grammy Awards in 1951 and joined the Grammy Hall of Fame 47 years later. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and the R&B Music Hall of Fame in 2014. Rolling Stone magazine also ranked him at No. 3 in its 2003 list of the 100 greatest guitarist of all time….
When he wasn’t making music, King loved to fly. He was a licensed pilot and until he turned 70, would fly himself to many of his gigs. The indefatigable performer was known for appearing in 250 to 300 concerts a year well into his 70s. Only declining health made him cut back his workload to about 100 shows annually, and those were not as well-received as his earlier shows. King officially launched a “farewell” world tour in 2006, yet remained active until almost the very end, appearing on television program and in music festivals.
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Black Man Found Hanging From Tree In Georgia Committed Suicide: Officials
By Kim Bellware, the Huffington Post
The death of Roosevelt Champion III, the black Georgia man who on Monday was found hanging from a tree, has been ruled a suicide by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Roosevelt Champion III, whose death by hanging was ruled a suicide.
A forensic autopsy was performed on Champion Tuesday morning, the GBI told The Huffington Post in a statement, noting:
The results of the autopsy are that the manner of death is suicide and the cause of death is hanging. After a thorough autopsy examination, there was no evidence of any inflicted trauma to Champion’s body.”
Champion, 43, was found hanging from a tree behind a residence that was not his own, the Greensboro Police Department told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution…
Investigators initially found no signs of struggle or other trauma on Champion’s body, which could indicate foul play, according to Rusty Andrews, deputy director at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, talking to Action 2 News Monday.
Champion had been interviewed in connection with the murder of a woman on May 2 but had not been charged, Andrews told the station.
GBI Special Agent Joe Wooten told NBC Monday that several people had already been interviewed in connection with Champion’s death.
“I understand that there is a lot of concern” raised by the news of a black man being hanged in the Deep South, Wooten said. “Because of that, we’re going to be as transparent as we can be.”
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