Anisfield-Wolf juror Rita Dove is 61 today. Her father, chemist Ray Dove, took her and her brother from Akron, Ohio, to Washington, D.C. when she was 11, where Mr. Dove participated in the March for Jobs and Freedom.
This video, created by Rita Dove’s husband Fred Viebahn, features rich personal photographs and vintage film. Please note that the music in the background is former U.S. Poet Laureate Dove herself, playing bass viol.
The numbers are sobering: African American babies are twice as likely to die before their first birthday than white infants.
Journalist and breastfeeding advocate Kimberly Seals Allers works for better survival and health of black infants through her website, MochaManual.com, and her on-the-ground campaign. A big focus is to give newborns more of what Allers calls the “first food”—breastmilk.
Studies consistently show that breastfeeding boosts the child’s immune system and reduces the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), which kills black infants twice as often. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control finds that 59 percent of black mothers have breastfed compared to 75 percent of white mothers. While the proportion has been increasing over the past decade, Allers remains diligent. “When I say breastfeeding is a life or death matter, this is what I mean,” she writes.
A nationally recognized coalition of breastfeeding advocates have dubbed August 25 through August 31 Black Breastfeeding Week. The coalition includes Allers, Kiddada Green, founder of the Black Mothers’ Breastfeeding Association, and Anayah Sangodele-Ayoka, co-founder of the Free to Breastfeed project.
Using social media as the main driver, organizers are hosting Twitter chats and live YouTube discussions to promote breastfeeding among African-American families and to examine cultural barriers that sometimes discourage African-American mothers. The entire week is anchored by the simple hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter.
“From our role as wet nurses in slavery being forced to breastfeed and nurture our slave owners’ children often to the detriment of our children,” Allers writes, “to the lack of mainstream role models and multi-generational support, to our own stereotyping within our community — we have a different dialogue around breastfeeding and it needs special attention.”
“I defy gravity/I am stronger than any force/I am Brooklyn”
This isn’t a verse from one of Jay Z’s latest records, but rather the first lines from a high school student’s entry in the Science B.A.T.T.L.E.S. competition.
Students from nine New York City schools competed in June, part of a network of student rap contests that marry verbal dexterity with concepts from plate tectonics to Pluto. These aren’t lectures but true competitions—students in Oakland, California, rapped about whether Rosalind Franklin was ripped off by James Watson and Francis Crick in their discovery of the architecture of DNA.
Stage names were welcome—one student performed as “Double R Bars.” Teachers encouraged adolescents to be energetic and creative as they rhymed lyrics on stage in front of family and peers.
Christopher Emdin, associate professor at Columbia University and author of Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation, came up with the idea. His goal is simple: introduce scientific ideas in a way that’s fun and relevant.
“Not every student is going to be a straight-A student, and go on to college and declare a science major and be the next Einstein,” he says. “But through this project we definitely are going to have more scientifically literate young people.”
NPR captured behind-the-scenes footage in this seven-minute documentary of the rap battle. Watch it now:
Meet our esteemed manager, Karen R. Long, at the Cleveland Public Library’s Brown Bag Book Club on Wednesday, August 21 at noon.
Long, the former Plain Dealer book editor, will introduce Cleveland to the four 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners. Beginning Wednesday, September 4, a more in-depth discussion of each book will occur weekly:
Tickets to the Sept. 12 awards ceremony are sold out, but Long will raffle off six at her library talk.
Karen R. Long served as book editor of The Plain Dealer for eight years before becoming the manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Long is a vice president for the National Book Critics Circle, where she is a judge for its six annual prizes, awarded each March in New York City.
Karen will give her talk on the 2nd Floor of the Main Library Building, in the Literature Department. Interested guests will be able to check out the featured books after the talk. Questions? Call the library at 216-623- 2881.
Please call 216-623- 2881 with questions.
“In a time that spends so many words and dollars upon conflict, it is encouraging to be noticed for having said a few words in favor of peace.” ~Wendell Berry
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize announced that Wendell Berry is the 2013 recipient of the Richard Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, named for the late U.S. diplomat who brokered the 1995 Dayton peace accords.
A novelist, essayist, poet, farmer, and activist, Berry has spent his literary career exploring issues ranging from sustainable agriculture to national security. He was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War and protested the nation’s post-9/11 international strategy. Among his many honors, Berry received the National Humanities Medal in 2011 from President Barack Obama, and in 2012 was named the 2012 Jefferson Lecturer, the highest government honor for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
The only international peace prize in the United States, the Dayton award recognizes literature that promotes peace, social justice, and global understanding. Former winners of the Holbrooke lifetime achievement award include author Barbara Kingsolver, civil rights historian Taylor Branch, and peace activist Elie Wiesel.
Tim O’Brien, the 2012 Holbrooke recipient, will present this year’s award to Berry at the ceremony on November 3 in Dayton, Ohio.
Thanks to generous supporters on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, anti-racism activist Tim Wise has raised more than $41,000 for a feature film adaptation of his 2008 book, “White Like Me: Reflections On Race From A Privileged Son.”
A frequent MSNBC guest and lecturer, Wise, 44, has crisscrossed the country to discuss white privilege, racial bias, and discrimination. He wants the film to further the national conversation on race, specifically what it means to be white in this country.
“We live with the legacy of inequality,” Wise says in the trailer, “but also the legacy of obliviousness that allows those in the dominant group to rarely even think about these matters.”
The film is enhanced by an impressive list of scholars, including Princeton’s Imani Perry; Michelle Alexander, who ignited much discussion with her 2012 book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”; Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree and his colleague Nilanjana Dasgupta, who does National Science Foundation-funded research on implicit prejudice.
The film is scheduled to be released in September 2013. Watch the two-minute trailer below and let us know what you think:
Contrary to its pop culture rep as a hipster haven, Brooklyn has the unpleasant distinction of being the bloodiest of New York City’s five boroughs. According to a 2013 NYPD report (for the year 2011), 36 percent of all homicides in New York City occurred in Brooklyn.
In 2012, a group of engaged citizens formed Man Up!, a grassroots group designed to stop gun violence in its tracks. The results have been impressive: No shootings or killings for the past year.
The group’s strategy? Treat gun violence as a public health issue and react to it the same way as a disease epidemic. In layman’s terms, this means the members of Man Up! go into the most volatile areas (unarmed), mediate problems, and offer alternative options for those on a dangerous path.
These “violence interrupters,” as they are coined, are often former gang members or people whose lives have been touched by gun violence. This gives them the credibility and access to be effective on the ground.
The members of Man Up! have been trained by the Cure Violence Initiative, a 13-year-old organization founded by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin. After years of working abroad on disease prevention campaigns, Slutkin returned to the United States in the late ’90s and noticed similarities in dispersion patterns when looking at violent crimes on a map.
“The greatest predictor of a case of violence is a previous case of violence,” Slutkin said at this year’s TEDMED event. Violence, he said, tends to spread the same way as influenza: One person catches it and spreads it among others. Using the same epidemic strategies that helped reduce AIDS cases in Uganda, Cure Violence saw an 67% decrease in shootings during its first year.
Since 2000, the initiative has spread to more than 20 cities worldwide, including New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Baltimore. On average, cities using the Cure Violence model have seen at least a 41% drop in shootings and killings.
“This is good news,” Slutkin said, “because it give us the opportunity to replace some of these prisons with playgrounds, and turn these neighborhoods back into neighborhoods.”
The highly praised independent film, “The Interrupters,” premiered in 2011, showcasing community efforts to end gun violence in inner-city neighborhoods. Watch the trailer below.
As the George Zimmerman trial draws to a close, the simmer of daily conversation on social media has heated to a boil. And comments are growing sharper in anticipation of a verdict in a case that began the night of Feburary 26, 2012, when an unarmed Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by Zimmerman, who is claiming self-defense.
Now, a simple way to indicate support of Trayvon Martin’s family is spreading across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles. Instead of the typical signature photos of happy, smiling individuals, people are switching their profile pictures to a simple black square.
The “Justice For Trayvon Martin” Facebook Page turned its profile photo black Thursday evening. “We are blacking out our profile photos in a showing of love, unification and solidarity in support of Trayvon Benjamin Martin,” the page designer wrote. With more than 200,000 fans on the page, the notion spread quickly.
I asked one woman why she changed her picture. “As the mother of a black male…it is the least I can do to show my support to Trayvon’s family,” she responded. “Supporting the blackout might not change a thing, but on this day in history, it will show that I stood up in support of a mother who no longer has her son.”
When the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last month, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the watershed 1964 law had worked as intended: Racial discrimination had decreased and a record number of voters were now people of color. But how well do we remember the inequalities the law was protecting against?
A leader in the civil rights movement, Rep. John Lewis had a front-row seat to the tactics used to keep black people out of the voting booth. Physical intimidation, poll taxes, and literacy tests were all bent to the task. Segregationists designed literacy tests to be deliberately confusing. They imposed tight time constraints to increase errors. “Black people with Ph.D. and M.A. degrees were routinely told they did not read well enough to pass the test,” said Lewis, who won an Anisfield-Wolf award in 1998 for his memoir, Walking with the Wind.
The Civil Rights Movement Veterans has preserved copies of literacy tests administered in Louisiana and Alabama. A few sample questions below:
Lewis is organizing members of Congress to come up with new provisions for the Voting Rights Act. “We’ve come too far, made too much progress, to go back now,” he said in a recent MSNBC interview. “We’ve got work to do.”
When we first toured my daughter’s private school, I saw a little African-American girl toddling around. She was adorable with her short, curly Afro and cute pink bracelets that matched her pink sandals. I looked around for the girl’s mother and got a little nervous when I didn’t see any black women nearby.
But then a slim white woman with short blonde hair swooped her up. She had been standing next to the little girl the whole time. Why did I assume that a black child would have a black parent?
My assumption wasn’t too far from reality. Most recent data on private adoptions shows that most adoptive parents are white, and they tend to adopt white children.
Last month, NPR’s “Race Card Project” reported on an uncomfortable aspect of adoption: in many cases, black children cost less to adopt than biracial or white children. In one instance that the radio project examined, the fees to adopt an African-American baby were $12,000 less than those for a white child. Some representatives at the agencies say the cost differential is an incentive to coax potential parents to consider adopting children of a different race, as a simple marketplace response to supply and demand. There are more African-American children waiting on adoption lists.
I’m supportive of attempts to see more children adopted. All children should get a fair shot at finding a “forever family.” However, I’m not thrilled with African-American babies being on the clearance rack, so to speak. There are enough messages out there that black children are “less than.” Do we also need them to come to their families at a discount?
A mother to an African-American child asked on the NPR blog: “My son was cheaper than if he’d been white. How will he feel, if he ever finds out about that?”
One of my close friends, Shanelle Smith, shoved a thick book in my hands as we met for lunch. “You have to read this.”
It was upside down; I flipped it over. U.S. Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor beamed from the cover. “It’s very good,” Shanelle said, tapping the cover of My Beloved World for emphasis. “It’s my Lean In.”
Back in March, Shanelle and I had talked at length about Sheryl Sandberg’s “call to action” for working women as part of our informal book club. The child of two auto factory workers, my friend was turned off by Sandberg’s “middle class to riches” story, peeved that Sandberg had never met some of the barriers that low-income working mothers encounter. (Sandberg’s “working mom confession ” that her child had lice while on a private jet evoked zero sympathy.) Most women reading Lean In would never see the boardrooms Sandberg frequents, but I found enough truth nuggets to make it worthwhile.
Unlike Sandberg, Sotomayor isn’t dispensing career advice. The first Hispanic and only the third woman on the U.S. Supreme Court makes it clear that her story is personal.
Readers looking for a view into the inner workings of the Supreme Court will be disappointed. Sotomayor ends the book after her appointment to the U.S. District Court in 1992, calling it “inappropriate” to reflect on a journey still taking shape. That judiciousness has gotten her far in life.
Even without contemporary elements, her story is strong. Growing up with an alcoholic father who stayed sober just long enough to prepare dinner every night and a mother who worked long hours to avoid arguments, Sotomayor became self-reliant at an early age. Diagnosed with diabetes at 7 years old, she learned how to give herself daily insulin injections.
Her diabetes also spurred her career ambitions; on a visit to the doctor she received a pamphlet on careers she could aspire to as a diabetic. She noticed that a detective — an occupation the 10-year-old Nancy Drew wannabe considered her path to becoming a judge — was not on the list. She was undeterred. The pamphlet incident is now her go-to anecdote whenever she speaks to the juvenile diabetes crowd.
Sotomayor reminds readers repeatedly that she has reached the height of her career precisely because of her background, not in spite of it. She believes her devotion to her community guided the “small, steady steps” that led to the Supreme Court. She writes about her years at parochial schools in the Bronx, where she first learned the joy of passionate debate, and her study at Princeton and Yale Law School, where she learned to advocate for diversity and move in the world on a grander scale.
“Until I arrived at Princeton, I had no idea how circumscribed my life had been,” she writes, “confined to a community that was essentially a village in the shadow of a great metropolis with so much to offer, of which I’d tasted almost nothing. I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew.”
As she ascended in her career, first as an assistant district attorney and then as a private practice lawyer, her drive had ramifications for her personal life. She writes about the collapse of her marriage, noting that it was an amicable split and she remains friends with her former husband to this day. As for having children, Sotomayor took pleasure in being the “fun aunt” instead of having children herself: “The idea of another life utterly dependent on me, the way a child needs his mother, didn’t seem compatible with the professional necessity of living at this punishing pace.”
Reading this book in 2013, it’s good to remember that women of Sotomayor’s generation broke barriers as the first minorities to attend and graduate from institutions that had only recently started affirmative action practices. She detailed several instances of “casual” racism/sexism: the school nurse questioning her acceptance to Princeton; a law firm recruiter pushing her to admit that affirmative action is destructive; judges calling her “honey” in the courtroom. In spite of these slights, Sotomayor remained focused; her grit thrilled me.
Each chapter is a love letter to the values of hard work and dedication. As Sotomayor told committee members before her appointment to the federal bench: “I’m not intimidated by challenges. My whole life has been one.”
For readers who want to know what it was like to be nominated for the Supreme Court, here’s an excerpt from her interview with Oprah earlier this year:
A 2009 National Endowment for the Arts study found that only 8 percent of adults read any poetry in the previous year. Children do better. The Poetry Foundation discovered that the main reasons adults take a pass is loss of interest, lack of time, lack of access, and the perception that poetry is difficult and irrelevant.
U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey, recently appointed to her second term, is working to welcome more adults to the party.
“We can’t know what poem is going to be the poem that brings someone to poetry, comforts them in times of grief, tragedy, and loss, or celebrates with them in times of joy and triumph,” she told the Los Angeles Review of Books last year. “But it is our job — as poets, as teachers, as the poet laureate — to try to bring people to a wide variety of poems so they might find that one among the many.”
During her first year as poet laureate, Trethewey relocated from Emory University in Atlanta to Washington D.C., where she held weekly office hours at the Library of Congress, an nontraditional move for the role. This year, she will film a regular feature on the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, during which she will travel the country to examine how poetry plays out in the lives of everyday Americans.
Trethewey is also writing a memoir, currently untitled, recounting her experiences as a biracial child in the 1970s. It will be released in 2014. Readers who are impatient can pick up a copy of “Thrall,” or her Pulitzer-winning 2007 collection, “Native Guard.”
As an African-American woman, I’ve had strangers grab and rake their fingers through my hair (without my permission) on more than one occasion. They seem amazed at my soft curls and ask me questions about my hair care regime. Once, when I was flying, my Afro puff on top of my head seemed to require a very thorough pat-down by TSA agents. The woman who checked my hair for weapons remarked, “It’s so full! Wow.”
These encounters illustrate the reality for many black women—what grows out of your scalp (and how) is always more than “just” hair, as exemplified in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, “Americanah.”
On the Huffington Post, Antonia Opiah, founder of the site Un-Ruly.com, shared her thoughts on strangers’ requests to touch her hair, sharing one noteworthy incident that occurred as she was visiting Paris:
A young, blonde, inebriated mademoiselle stopped us somewhere in the 10th district and rattled off something very quickly and passionately in French. My friend Maxence translated: “She wants to touch your hair.” My response to such a solicitation usually depends on my mood. On this night I was tickled by being asked the question in French, so I obliged. She stroked me. She actually really got in there, so I had to curtly make her stop. I wonder if she got any satisfaction from it and if so, what kind? Did my hair feel good on her hands? Was some sort of curiosity finally satisfied? Or was I simply just a Saturday night amusement?
After this incident and similar stories from women, Opiah created “You Can Touch My Hair,” an interactive public art exhibit that took place June 6 and 8 in New York City’s Union Square Park. Three African-American women with varying hairstyles and textures stood in the square with signs reading, “You Can Touch My Hair.” Onlookers were encouraged to interact with them and, of course, touch their hair.
Of course, the idea is not without controversy. Some online commenters have been vocal about their opposition. One such commenter said, “I find this incredibly gross. This objectification of people of African descent has been ingrained in Europeans and non-Blacks for over a millennium, and this event seems to celebrate that dehumanization.” This commenter identified himself as a white male. Other commenters compared it to a petting zoo and made references to Sarah Baartman, the 19th century black woman put on exhibit at “freak shows” for her voluptuous frame.
“It’s an uncomfortable discussion for a lot of people, but sometimes we have to get comfortable in being uncomfortable to really break ground,” Opiah told the Huffington Post. More than 100 people stopped by the event on June 6, with the “touchers” ranging in age and ethnicity.
When someone asks me if they can run their fingers through my curls, I usually ask, “Why?” They often can’t give me a reason other than the fact that it’s different. Maybe Opiah has a point: maybe we do need to talk about it.
Watch the video of Day 1. Let’s discuss: Has anyone ever touched your hair without permission? Have you ever touched someone else’s hair?
Films on Princess Diana, Steve Jobs, and Jimi Hendrix should make 2013 a rich year for biopics. An intriguing new one just has been announced: a movie on the life of Lorriane Hansberry, playwright, author, and activist.
The big question is who will play Lorraine? According to Shadow and Act, Taye Hansberry, Lorraine’s grand niece, has been cast. She will also help write the screenplay. Jaleel White (from Family Matters) will play James Baldwin, one of Lorraine’s close friends. Production begins in the fall.
Lorraine’s most-known work, A Raisin in the Sun, was inspired by her family’s attempts to integrate a Chicago neighborhood. Unmarred by violent attacks against them and a court order to move, her family stood its ground. Their case, Hansberry v. Lee, eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which in 1940 set aside the restriction that African American families could not purchase or lease land in that Chicago neighborhood.
Hansberry began her professional life at the black newspaper, Freedom, under the tutelage of actor and activist Paul Robeson in New York City. She wrote her play concurrently, and A Raisin in the Sun premiered in 1959. It was the first Broadway theater produced by an African-American woman. Hansberry became the youngest person ever to win the New York Critics Circle award.
Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, opened in 1964 to harsh reviews. However much this hurt, Hansberry stepped up into a prominent role in the civil rights movement, speaking out against racism and homophobia.
The playwright was just 34 when she died of pancreatic cancer. After her death, her former husband, Robert Neimiroff, adapted her collection of essays into a play titled, To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Her close friend, Nina Simone, was inspired by the work and came out with a song of the same name in honor of Lorraine. Listen to it below:
If you can’t find the art you want, make it yourself.
That was famously the mindset of Jay-Z, when the rapper started Roc-A-Fella Records in 1995, and that DIY approach animates “Nollywood,” the Nigerian film industry.
Approximately 1,000 Nigerian movies are produced each year, surpassing the 800 films churned out annually in the U.S. For innovators everywhere, digital innovations have lowered technological barriers and production costs. Without a formal distribution model, Nigerian film prospers—many movies are watched at home in a nation of few theaters.
One of this year’s most anticipated projects is the adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, scheduled for release in November 2013. The book won an Anisfield-Wolf award for fiction in 2007. (Adichie’s new title, Americanah, went on sale this month.)
The film is in the hands of first-time director Biyi Bandele and stars Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Olanna and Odenigbo, lovers caught in the midst of the Biafran war.
A recent Washington Post story on Nollywood’s expansion to the United States explores Nigeria’s film ascendancy. Director John Uche says, “Nigerians are considered the best writers in Africa, following the griot tradition in West Africa. It is a culture of storytelling. We are taking that culture into film. What do they say? ‘Nobody can tell your story better than you.’”
Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Rita Dove delivered the 2013 commencement address to the graduates of Emory University in Atlanta.
The Anisfield-Wolf jury member spoke on the beauty of imagination and finding confidence as they journey into the unknown. Dove also received an honorary degree, with Emory President James Wagner praising her ability to “generously illuminate the world of beauty that formerly was hidden.”
How did you respond to Dove’s message? Just for fun—do you remember your commencement speaker or their message?
Where can one find Nat Turner’s Bible, Emmet Till’s coffin and Harriet Tubman’s shawl? Answer: the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens in late 2015.
Additionally, one of the nation’s oldest remaining slave cabins will be joining these artifacts in Washington, D.C., according to the New York Times.
The 320-square-foot cabin is being dismantled piece by piece, to be rebuilt inside the museum. It is one of two slave cabins in Edisto Island, S.C. They have stood on the Point of Pines plantation since the 1850s. Neither cabin has ever had electricity or heat, but continued to shelter inhabitants more than a century after slavery ended. The last known occupants moved out some 30 years ago.
Curator Nancy Bercaw said the museum was drawn to this particular plantation because slaves first emancipated themselves there after Union troops set up a stronghold in the Carolinas. The cabin will join the museum’s “Slavery and Freedom” exhibit that covers the post-Civil War era.
The museum will be the first new Smithsonian museum since the National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004. To get a preview, you can download “View NMAAHC” and “Changing America: To Be Free,” both free apps for the iPhone and Android.
Students at Humboldt State University in northern California analyzed more than 11 months of Twitter data to locate the biggest pockets of hate speech in America.
For the “Geography of Hate” project, students manually sifted through more than 150,000 tweets containing hateful speech targeting sexuality, race, and disability. Student read each tweet to determine whether the slur was used in a positive, negative, or neutral manner. Sample keywords included “homo,” “n*****,” and “cripple.”
To enhance accuracy of the map, researchers “normalized” the data to ensure that larger populations would not appear more racist simply because there are more people living there.
Researchers found that most of the slurs were not centralized to one particular region. A few terms were more concentrated—”wetback,” for example, was more prevalent in Texas than any other state.
The group also mapped racist tweets last November in response to President Obama’s re-election and found high concentrations in Alabama and Mississippi, both traditionally red states.
View the entire “Geography of Hate” map here and read the FAQ that explains its methodology in more detail.
Do any of the results of this project surprise you?
Anisfield-Wolf jury chair Henry Louise Gates Jr. has been busy the past few months, filming episodes of his new PBS series, “The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.” The six-part documentary will cover more than four centuries of African-American history, starting with the origins of slavery in Africa and moving to the present day.
Leading up to the series premiere, Gates has written a weekly column for TheRoot.com, “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro,” in which he uncovers little-known tidbits about African-American history.
“Over the past 500 years, our ancestors in this country have been as stubborn, determined, idiosyncratic, individualistic, argumentative and complex as the 42 million African Americans living today are,” Gates wrote in the inaugural column.
“Many Rivers To Cross” will premiere Tuesday, October 22 at 8:00 p.m. EST. A new hour-long episode will air each Tuesday until the finale on November 26.
Follow Gates on Twitter and Facebook, as he has been giving occasional behind-the-scenes peeks at filming locations and subjects.