so-treu:

Muhammad Ali and singer/songwriter Bill Withers chat during the Zaire ’74 Music Festival that preceded the epic Ali vs. Foreman’Rumble in the Jungle’ fight on Oct. 30th, 1974. Other performers included– James Brown, B.B. King, the Spinners, the Fania All-Stars, Miriam Makeba and  Zairian musical artists, all chronicled in the 2008 film,’Soul Power’.

When asked later if it felt like a moving, historic racial event at the time Withers recalled, “No. It was two big guys going to fight each other at four o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t this great intellectual pursuit. And there’s a certain reality to going someplace where there’s a dictator. You notice the disparity in the wealth.” And in regard to the African-American movement that was hapeening to re-discover their roots? “Awwww, come on, man. It wasn’t a great historical moment. Interesting, but that was that. No great spiritual experience. Mostly what everybody found out was–we had been shaped and transformed by American culture and the history we had here, and they had been shaped by whoever colonized their place. They weren’t speaking any African languages. We were speaking English and they were speaking French. How African is that?” — Photograph by © Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis via

source.

so-treu:

This is archival footage of a fife and drum group of Ed and Lonnie Young of Mississippi. I believe it was recorded by Alan Lomax, sometime between 1959 and the early 60s. They use a fife made of cane, and drums adapted from military bands.

It is interesting how similar it is, not just in form but also in actual content, to the fife and drum playing of “John Canoe” processional music of Jamaica. I have put just a quick sample of that from a 1954 recording, at the end.

fife and drum music is a fading but still ongoing tradition.

(seriously living in mississippi is like living on a music multivitamin or something)

#nornthernmississippistandup

anothergirlontheirt:

jadedid:

deejaybird:

Cudjoe Lewis is believed to be the last African born on African soil and brought to the United States by the transatlantic slave trade. He was a native of Takon, Benin, where he was captured in 1860 during an illegal slave-trading venture. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808. Together with more than a hundred other captured Africans, he was brought on the ship Clotilde to Mobile, Alabama. Cudjoe and 31 other enslaved Africans were taken to the property owned by Timothy Meaher, shipbuilder and owner of the Clotilde. 5 years later slavery was over so Cudjoe and his tribespeople requested to be taken back to Africa, but it was left ignored. He and other Africans established a community near Mobile, Alabama which became called Africatown. They maintained their African language and tribal customs well into the 1950s. He died in 1934 at the age of 94. Before he died, he gave several interviews on his experiences including one to the writer Zora Neale Hurston. During her interview in 1928, she made a short film of Cudjoe, the only moving image that exists in the Western Hemisphere of an African transported through the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Between Zora and Du Bois… seriously. They did everything I can only hope to be able to scratch the surface of doing.

Nothing I or you ever do will match this. Effing amazing.

derica:

The West Indian Front Room | More about this project here

anothergirlontheirt:

waheedpix:

Ernestine & Racehorse Billy

The back reads:  “This is not my girl, but she is my racing partner & one of the best around here.  Her name is Ernestine, and the fellow is Racehorse Billy.”

March, 1920’s

[Donated by the Earl McCann Collection]

©WaheedPhotoArchive, 2011

That inscription is so boss.  What will the back of your metaphorical life photos say? Hmmm…

writeaction:

Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation - Trailer

In 2009, Manthia Diawara, with his camera, followed Edouard Glissant, on the Queen Mary II, in a cross-Atlantic journey from South Hampton (UK) to Brooklyn (New York). This poetic meditation then continued in Martinique, the native home of Edouard Glissant. The extra-ordinary voyages resulted in the production of an intellectual biography in which Glissant elaborates on his theory of Relation and the concept of “Tout-monde.” Documentary film directed by Manthia Diawara.

beautone

(Source: youtube.com)

afrodiaspores:

liquornspice:

happyapple:

Afro-Mexican

I wish there was more context for this pic.

The photographer is Sal Rojas, founder of BrownPride.com, from a 2008 series on Afro-Mexicans in Costa Chica called “The Third Root” (a phrase referring to the three ethnic groups that have historically combined to create the Latin American raza cósmica). This image is entitled, “Niña indígena afromexicana.” Credit is due.

(via lati-negros)

derica:

Glenn Ligon | Gold Nobody Knew Me #1, [2007]

Talking about deracination, African survivals in the New World, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, and this came to mind.

(via leonineantiheroine-deactivated2)

Filmed by Horace Ove’ - British filmmaker, painter and writer and one of the leading black independent film-makers to emerge in Britain since the post-war period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Ove

James Baldwin and Dick Gregory talk about the Black Experience in America and relate it to that of the Caribbean in contemporary Great Britain. Filmed at the West Indian Student Centre of London.

wwwbeautifullensecom:

“America never liked Josephine Baker… above all, they resented that she’d left America. What, she was supposed to stay here and become a maid?” - Dorothy Dandridge

(via blackfeminismlives)