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.

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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

More Hosea Easton, 1837 Afrikan Fya*

"I repeat, that emancipation embraces the idea that the eman- cipated must be placed back where slavery found them, and restore to them all that slavery has taken away from them. Merely to cease beating the colored people, and leave them in their gore, and call it emancipation, is nonsense. Nothing short of an entire reversal of the slave system in theory and practice — in general and in particular — will ever accomplish the work of redeeming the colored people of this country from their present condition. Let the country, then, no longer act the part of the thief. Let the free states no longer act the part of them who passed by on the other side, and leaving the colored people half dead, especially when they were beaten by their own hands, and so call it emancipation — raising a wonderment why the half dead people do not heal themselves."

~Hosea Easton, Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and the Civil and Political
Condition of the Colored People of the United States, 1837, Boston.

*Fya from way back ova deah.  Beloved predated David Walker Fya 2 years (boston yuts dem cohm wit dit -awo)

Written in 1837 (Awo) by a black wampanoag narragansett N8V Afrikan

"I have no language wherewith to give slavery, and its auxil- 
iaries, an adequate description, as an efficient cause of the mis- 
eries it is capable of producing. It seems to possess a kind of 
omnipresence. It follows its victims in every avenue of life. 

The principle assumes still another feature equally destruc- 
tive. It makes the colored people subserve almost every foul 
purpose imaginable. Negro or nigger, is an approbrious term, 
employed to impose contempt upon them as an inferior race, 
and also to express their deformity of person. Nigger lips, 
nigger shins, and nigger heels, are phrases universally common 
among the juvenile class of society, and full well understood by 
them ; they are early learned to think of these expressions, as 
they are intended to apply to colored people, and as being ex- 
pressive or descriptive of the odious qualities of their mind and 
body. These impressions received by the young, grow with 
their growth, and strengthen with their strength. The term in 
itself, would be perfectly harmless, were it used only to distin- 
guish one class of society from another ; but it is not used with 
that intent ; the practical definition is quite different in England 
to what it is here, for here, it flows from the fountain of purpose 
to injure. It is this baneful seed which is sown in the tender soil of 

youthful minds, and there cultivated by the hand of a corrupt immoral policy."

~Hosea Easton, A TREATISE ON THE INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER, AND CIVIL AND 

POLITICAL CONDITION of the COLORED PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES; AND THE 

PREJUDICE EXERCISED TOWARDS THEM, 1837

http://www.archive.org/stream/treatiseonintell00east/treatiseonintell00east_djvu.txt 

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click for hi-rez)

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click for hi-rez)

The World Breaks Everyone

“The world breaks

everyone and afterward

many are strong at the broken places.   

But those that will not break

it kills.  It kills the very

good and the very

gentle and the very

brave impartially.  If you

are none of these you

can be sure that it will

kill you too, but there

will be no special

hurry.”

~Ernest Hemingway (?)

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click for hi-rez)