O'Lawd

"When they put their Lord in your history, and you do not speak up, they become the Lord of your history." J.A.M.

Euroversal

We must always think about things
& we must think about things as they are,
not as they are said to be.

Cripple them.

"We blind our children....Blind them to their potential, the human potential.
Cripple them, dispirit them. Cripples make good clients, wards, beggars,
victims."
~Toni Cade Bambara, Broken Field Running

Everywhere


"The battlefield is everywhere."
~Baba Paul Robeson

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
















  "Let the blare of Negro Jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.  Let Paul Robeson singing "Water Boy" and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.  We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.  If white people are pleased we are glad.  If they are not, it doesn't matter.  We know we are beautiful.  And ugly too.  The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs.  If colored people are pleased we are glad.  If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either.  We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves."
~Langston Hughes, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

Shade -wibby Black Congo-oh.


"Is there a place to rest in your shade?
I want to rush toward you -- but a heavy debt lies in the way and turns me back.
I talk to myself about you, for I cannot return to you and sadness has made a home in my heart."
~Yahya bin Talib al-Hanafi
"...the question of the universal validity of European forms must not be confused with the successful expansionism of European culture.”
~Marimba Ani, Yurugu


Justice ness















"...blind goddess to which we black are wise, / Her bandage hides two festering sores / That once, perhaps, were eyes"
~Langston Hughes, from Justice