Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 718

Black Granddaughter of Segregationist Strom Thurmond Praises SC for Removing Confederate Flag

Essie Mae Washington-Williams and daughter Wanda Williams-Bailey in 2003Democracy Now talks with Wanda Williams-Bailey, the interracial granddaughter of the late South Carolina senator, former governor and longtime segregationist, Strom Thurmond, who died at the age of 100 in 2003. Months later, a woman named Essie Mae Washington-Williams came public to reveal she was the daughter of Thurmond and Carrie Butler, who was a 16-year-old African-American housekeeper in Thurmond’s home. Thurmond never publicly acknowledged Washington-Williams as his daughter or Wanda as his granddaughter.

Serena Williams Celebrates Historic Wimbledon Triumph with Second 'Serena Slam'

Serena Williams clinches her second 'Serena Slam' after winning the ladies' singles title on Day 12 at Wimbledon 2015.

#TheRemix: Mark Anthony Neal Talks Cosby's Downfall, Donald Trump + Rihanna's BBHMM

Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal calls in to #TheRemix with James Braxton Peterson to consider why we are still talking about Bill Cosby, why anybody takes Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate, and how Rihanna's "Bitch Better Have My Money" video can be read as a call for reparations. And because we manage to mention the brilliance of Kendrick Lamar in nearly every episode, Peterson and Neal discuss his "To Pimp a Butterfly."

The Long Wait Of Mamie Till Mobley by Charles Bane, Jr.

The Long Wait Of Mamie Till Mobleyby Charles Bane, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
On an August afternoon in 1955, Emmett Till and a group of other youngsters were milling around Bryant's Grocery Store in the small town of Money, Mississippi. Fourteen year old Till was not a native of the town. He had arrived in Money from Chicago with his cousin, Curtis Jones, to spend the summer with Jones' s grandfather, Mose Wright.
Accounts vary widely about what took place when Till encountered Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, inside the store she owned with her husband Roy, who was out of town until Saturday. Some witnesses claim that Emmett, on a dare, spoke to her directly with a breezy " Hi , baby."
But Emmett had a speech defect as a result of childhood polio and the stutter made him reticent. Others said that he whistled at the woman, then rushed out the door. But young Till had been raised better than that. He had always been respectful of elders. What is likely is that when Emmett walked into her grocery store, Carolyn Bryant fixed her gaze upon a boy not from her parts, and he did not avert her eyes, as his companions would have done instinctively. It would not have occurred to him to do so. He would have returned Bryant's look with open, inquiring eyes. It threw her into a rage.
If Till was ignorant of the code that governed the precarious relationship between Blacks and whites in the South, Mose Wright was not: when the elder heard a car pull up in front of his modest home late Saturday night, he was instantly alarmed. He stepped out his front door. Roy Bryant and his brother- in - law, J. W. Milam demanded he turn Emmett over. Wright adopted a careful pose:  The boy was not from here, he said. Give him a good whipping right now. A good whipping would set him right. They seized Emmett, forced him into the car, and sped off into the dark.  A few hours later, a boy walking past a remote farm heard screams of pain from a shed on the property. The following morning Bryant and Milam tossed Till's body, like refuse, into the nearby Tallahatchie River.
The murder of her son was a daily image before her when I contacted Mamie Till Mobley in the early 1990's for a series of interviews.  A retired school teacher, she was living quietly in Chicago. Time, as others knew it, had no affect on her. It had ceased to exist. The death of her only child could not have occurred forty years ago.
She had a soft lilting voice; she was diminutive.  This was at odds with the fury she unleashed on the South in the aftermath of Emmet's murder. She demanded that his coffin remain open for four days of public viewing prior to his funeral. She demanded that America look into the coffin and see "what they did to my boy".  Two Americas obeyed her: white America was shocked and repelled. Black America was convulsed in fury; and it was galvanized.
Louis Armstrong, who subscribed to the Chicago Defender in Harlem, was asked by the United States government to be the nation's representative orchestra on a tour of Europe. It was an unheard of recognition. He turned it down, telling a reporter, " The way this country treats my People, it can go to hell."
Mrs. Mobley demanded justice of Mississippi. She got that too, but she got it Mississippi- style.  
Bryant and Milam were charged with first- degree murder and the trial scheduled for late September at the County Courthouse in Sumner.Overnight, $10,000 poured into a defense fund. Prominent attorneys were hired. Under an onslaught of media attention, the South was quickly closing ranks. Black reporters who journeyed to Sumner for the trial were pointed to a small bridge table in the rear, away from the formal courtroom. The victim's mother was also directed to the " n*****r table". There they learned, to their astonishment, that Mose Wright had agreed to testify against the defendants.
Wright later said he could "feel the blood boiling" when he mounted the witness stand. Asked to identify the men who had come to his shanty for Emmett, he pointed at the burly Milam and said, "Thar he". He also identified Bryant. Immediately after his testimony, he was spirited out of the state by its NAACP Field Secretary, Medgar Evers.
No one in the courtroom doubted the foregone conclusion: the jury deliberated a little over an hour before issuing a verdict of "not guilty." But just as Emmett Till  did not comprehend the anger of Carolyn Bryant at their only meeting, it is just as likely that the defendants took no notice, as they exited the courthouse, of the rage left behind among the trial's reporters. They trumpeted the sham in national headlines that, in turn, passed a charge through the burgeoning civil rights movement.
Mrs. Mobley knew that: she watched its unfolding. But that is not the same as justice  which she waited for vainly in the decades that followed the trial. She founded the Emmett Till Foundation. She did not want the public to forget her son's sacrifice, that helped make the movement possible. And she did not forget Roy Bryant.
She pressed for her son's killers indictment, on lesser charges. The outlook was bleak: Milam had died. Bryant's wife divorced him (as of this writing, she is still alive, her whereabouts kept secret by her adult children).  Roy Bryant, who had served a brief sentence for food stamp fraud, was now suffering from heart disease.
In 1991, Mrs. Mobley received a gift from an unlikely source: the state of Mississippi: its legislature enacted a new, tough crime bill to match the public's mood. A provision revoked the statute of limitations in cases of kidnapping involving felonious assault on a child. She dreamed of Bryant in prison.
It was not to be. Bryant died in 1997. A Black state senator introduced a resolution calling for $100,000.00 in reparations to be paid to the Till Foundation. It withered, and disappeared.
Mamie Till Mobley passed away on January 6, 2003, and achieved, finally, her victory. With her death, time resumed as she grasped her son.
http://www.emmetttilllegacyfoundation.com
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Charles Bane, Jr. is a second generation civil rights activist and author of The Chapbook ( Curbside Splendor ) , Love Poems ( Aldrich Press) , and Three Seasons: Writing Donald Hall (  Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University ). He created and contributes to The Meaning Of Poetry series for The Gutenberg Project, and is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida.

#SayHerName: Black Women Speak out on Experiencing Police Violence

"A new report and campaign called #SayHerName addresses the lack of accountability for the deaths of black women and girls—and puts faces and names to the black and brown women whose lives have been cut short."--Fusion

The Charleston Imperative: Why Feminism & Antiracism Must Be Linked

The Charleston Imperative: Why Feminism & Antiracism Must Be Linked African American Policy Forum
July 7th, 2015
As we grieve for the nine African Americans who were murdered in their house of worship on June 17 2015, those of us who answer the call of feminism and antiracism must confront anew how the evils of racism and patriarchy continue to endanger all Black bodies, regardless of gender.
As antiracists, we know that the struggle against racial terror is older than the Republic itself. In particular we remember the work of Ida B Wells who risked everything to debunk the lies of lynchers over 100 years ago. Today, we see that fierce determination in Bree Newsome who scaled the 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol and brought down the Confederate flag. As feminists, we recognize how racism has been -- and is still -- gendered. Patriarchy continues to be foundational to racial terrorism in the US, both in specious claims that justify the torture of Black men in defense of white womanhood, and in its brutal treatment of Black women and girls. We also recognize that while patriarchy and racism are clearly intertwined, all too often, our struggles against them are not. 
If the reaction to the Charleston massacre is to be realized as something beyond a singular moment of redemptive mourning, then neither the intersectional dynamics of racism and patriarchy which produced this hateful crime, nor the inept rhetorical politics that sustain the separation of feminism from antiracism, can be allowed to continue.  

As antiracist feminists of every color, we refute the patriarchal, racist practices that endanger Black people across the nation. In so doing, we also insist that the extremism of Roof’s declaration that Black people “must go” because they are “taking over our country” and “raping our women” should not obscure how anti-Black racial logics are embedded in the routine decisions made by millions of people every day. Decisions about where to live, how to identify a “safe neighborhood” or a “good school,” whom to police, and to whom police are to be accountable, also rest on a longstanding demonization of Black bodies. These choices, grounded in ideologies of Black threat, frame separation from Blackness as a rational choice. The narratives that routinely diminish the life chances of African Americans are not yesterday’s problems. Dylann Roof was born in 1994, yet murdered nine Black people having thoroughly consumed narratives that continue to denigrate Black people over half a century after the supposed fall of white supremacy. The continued assault on Black churches--several which have been burned to the ground since the Charleston Massacre--tells us that even the most extreme expressions of this denigration are not isolated.

We must recognize, at last, that racial violence, including the cycle of suffering and slow death that hovers over Black communities, is structural as well as individual. Equally significant, racial violence has never been focused on males alone. A clear indication of the way that white insecurities can unleash murderous impulses against all Black people, is that Roof murdered six Black women as well as three Black men. In his perceived defense of white women, Roof killed Black mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives and daughters. To would-be purveyors of Black genocide, there are no collateral victims. Every Black body is a threat; every dead one is one step closer to their ultimate goal.
Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity -- whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics, or white wealth -- to justify the brutal assaults against Black people of all genders. Antiracists must acknowledge that patriarchy has long been a weapon of racism and cannot sit comfortably in any politic of racial transformation. We must all stand against both the continual, systematic and structural racial inequities that normalize daily violence as well as against extreme acts of racial terror. Policy, and movement responses that fail to reflect an intersectional approach are doomed to fail. We want a loving community across difference. In the memory of Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Daniel Simmons Jr. and Myra Thompson, we commit to a vibrant, inclusive, and intersectional social justice movement that condemns racist patriarchy and works to end its daily brutality and injustice. Anything less is unacceptable.
Click Here to sign the statement 

#SoulSummerNights: Tyrese--"Shame" (video)

Visuals for Tyrese's "Shame" featuring Jennifer Hudson; directed by Paul Hunter.

Office of Personnel Management Data Breach Impacts More than 21 Million Americans

'More than 21 million Americans had personal data stolen from files held by the Office of Personnel Management. Anyone who went through background checks to apply for a government position since 2000 has been affected, according to the OPM. That makes the data breach six times larger than was originally disclosed. PBS NewsHour's Gwen Ifill learns more from Josh Lederman of the Associated Press.'

Paul Beatty Talks about New Novel The Sellout with PBS NewsHour

Novelist Paul Beatty talks about his latest novel The Sellout with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown at Bus Boys and Poets in Washington DC.

Paul Beatty Talls about New Novel The Sellout with PBS NewsHour

Novelist Paul Beatty talks about his latest novel The Sellout with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown at Bus Boys and Poets in Washington DC.