News from East St. Louis

May 18, East St. Louis:

“DA-DUM-DUN”: Festival Honoring Miles Davis,
Henry Dumas, Katherine Dunham

An annual festival in honor of three world-class creative geniuses whose
expressions impacted—and were impacted by—East St. Louis (Illinois) will be
held on Tuesday, May 18, at 6:00 p.m., in Room 2083 of Bldg. B on the SIUE-East
St. Louis Higher Education Campus, 601 J.R. Thompson Dr., East St. Louis.

Miles Dewey Davis III, Henry Lee Dumas and Katherine Dunham—a musician, poet-
fictionist and dancer-choreographer, respectively—will be celebrated in jazz
(Miles Ahead Jazz Ensemble), literary expression (EBR Writers Club’s Soular
Systems Ensemble, featuring Michael Castro, Roscoe Crenshaw, Byron Lee, Susan Lively, Charlois Lumpkin, Patricia Merritt, Eugene B. Redmond, Darlene Roy,
Lena Weathers, Treasure Williams and Jaye Willis), dance (ESL Center for the
Performing Arts, under the direction of Theo Jamison) and a multimodal exhibit
(DavisDumasDunham, curated by Al Henderson II).

Born in Alton (Illinois), Davis (1926-1991) was raised in East St. Louis,
graduating from Lincoln Senior High School in 1944 and entering New York’s
Julliard School of Music that same year. A trumpeter revered across the globe
as a leader and re-shaper of musical tastes and styles, he died in 1991.
Drumvoices Revue, a multicultural journal co-published by SIUE and the Writers
Club, has featured poetry and photographs honoring Davis.

Writer Dumas (1934-1968), born in Sweet Home (Arkansas) and raised in New York
(Harlem), became a teacher-counselor in SIUE-ESL’s Experiment in Higher
Education program in 1967. At EHE, he mentored local poet Sherman L. Fowler and
was a colleague of Eugene B. Redmond, his current literary executor. Toni
Morrison called Dumas, who had written hundreds of stories and poems by the
time of his young death at age 33, “a genius, an absolute genius.” He is patron
saint of the EBR Writers Club, and his writings have appeared in multiple
issues of Drumvoices Revue.

Dunham (1909-2006) returned to her home state of Illinois after several decades
of studying, performing and teaching in more than 60 countries. Becoming an
East St. Louis resident in 1967, she taught in the EHE program and founded the
Performing Arts Training Center and KD Dynamic Museum. Earlier, during the
1940’s, she choreographed and starred in movies and stage productions
like “Stormy Weather”and “Cabin in the Sky.” This adopted matriarch of the ESL,
who was the first African American dancer to choreograph for the New York City
Metropolitan Opera (“Aida”), has been the subject of several volumes of
Drumvoices Revue.

Founded in 1986 and chartered by Sherman Fowler, Darlene Roy and Eugene B.
Redmond, the Writers Club meets on the first and third Tuesday, September-May,
in the room listed above. Trustees include poets-dramatists Maya Angelou and
Amiri Baraka. For more information about the Club or area cultural-literary
activities, call 618 650-3991 or write the Club at P.O. Box 6165, East St.
Louis, Illinois 62201; email: eredmon@siue.edu.
--Eugene Redman

Preview of the Month Zora Neal Hurston

Preview of the Month

Call for Poetry for Journal of Pan African Studies

The Journal of Pan African Studies Call for Poetry

All original, previously unpublished poetry will be accepted; however they must be relevant to the Black experience
in the U.S., and throughout the world.

Book reviews of recent and new publications in the domain of poetry are welcomed and encouraged.

For consideration, send final work in a MS word format as an attachment via
e-mail to jmarvinx@yahoo.com before September 30, 2010.

Poetry in languages other than English will be considered, however they must also be presented in English, and all
submissions must include a name, a short biographical statement, and an
e-mail address.

For more information on The Journal of Pan African Studies, visit: www.jpanafrican.com.

Contact: Marvin X, Guest Editor
Email: jmarvinx@yahoo.com

December 2010 edition of The Journal of Pan African Studies (JPAS)

The Journal of Pan African Studies is pleased to announce a special literary arts edition devoted to poetry edited by guest editor Marvin X, poet, playwright, essayist, activist, one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement ,called the USA's Rumi (Bob Holman) and the father of Muslim American literature (Dr. Mohja Kahf).

During the 60s Marvin was an associate editor of the Journal of Black Poetry, Black Dialogue and Black Theatre magazines. His work appeared also in Black Scholar, Black World and Muhammad Speaks.

All original, previously unpublished poetry will be accepted; however they must be relevant to the Black experience in the U.S., and throughout the world.

Book reviews of recent and new publications in the domain of poetry are welcomed and encouraged. For consideration, send final work in a MS word format as an attachment via e-mail to jmarvinx@yahoo.com before September 30, 2010.

Poetry in languages other than English will be considered, however they must also be presented in English, and all submissions must include a name, a short biographical statement, and an e-mail address.

For more information on The Journal of Pan African Studies, visit: www.jpanafrican.com.

Contact: Marvin X, Guest Editor
Email: jmarvinx@yahoo.com

Haitian Declaration of Independence

Haiti’s Founding Document Found in London
By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: March 31, 2010
New York Times

There is no prouder moment in Haiti’s history than Jan. 1, 1804, when a band of statesmen-warriors declared independence from France, casting off colonialism and slavery to become the world’s first black republic.


Haitian Declaration of Independence (pdf)
They proclaimed their freedom boldly — “we must live independent or die,” they wrote — but for decades, Haiti lacked its own official copy of those words. Its Declaration of Independence existed only in handwritten duplicate or in newspapers. Until now.
A Canadian graduate student at Duke University, Julia Gaffield, has unearthed from the British National Archives the first known, government-issued version of Haiti’s founding document. The eight-page pamphlet, now visible online, gives scholars new insights into a period with few primary sources. But for Haitian intellectuals, the discovery has taken on even broader significance.

That the document would be found in February, just weeks after the earthquake that killed so many; that its authenticity would be confirmed in time for the donor conference that could define Haiti’s future — some see providence at work.
“It’s a strange thing in the period of the earthquake we find the first document that made the state,” said Patrick Tardieu, an archivist at the Library of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit in Port-au-Prince. “People were searching for this for a very long time.”
Indeed, decades ago, Haiti’s leaders went hunting for a declaration they could call their own for the country’s 150th anniversary. Researchers combed Haiti’s libraries. Newspapers in the United States, which printed full versions of the declaration when it was made, were also considered a possible source.
But the originals seemed to have been thrown out or destroyed. In December 1952, the Haitian intellectual Edmond Mangonès wrote to his country’s Commission of Social Sciences to report that “the mystery of the original of our national Declaration of Independence” had not been solved. “All searches to date have been in vain,” he said.
Enter Ms. Gaffield, 26. She said she fell in love with Haiti while at the University of Toronto. It was 2004, Jean-Bertrand Aristide had just been ousted, and after a trip to Haiti, where she worked with street children, she decided to study its origins as a nation.
That eventually took her to Duke University, and last year, to the National Archives of Jamaica in Kingston. There, she found a letter from a British official who had just returned from Haiti around the time of its revolution.
“He wrote a letter to the governor saying, ‘Here is this interesting document that I received when I was in Haiti,’ ” she said. “And he said the declaration ‘had not been but one hour from the press.’ ”
The document he mentioned, though, was missing. She headed for London. On Feb. 2, she found herself poring through the leather-bound binders of Britain’s National Archives. About 100 pages into the book of Jamaican records from 1804, she came across a delicate, yellowed set of pages.
“What I first noticed was across the top it said, ‘Liberté ou La Mort,’ ” she said. There were a few differences from the accepted text of Thomas Madiou, the 19th-century historian who wrote a definitive, multivolume history of the country. Haiti was spelled Hayti in the pamphlet, for example, and in one sentence, Mr. Madiou seemed to have seen “idéux” (ideals) when the print shows it to be “fléaux” (ills).
The bottom of the last page read “De l’Imprimerie du Gouvernement.” That made it the official declaration historians had been looking for. In the hushed London library — even cameras snapping photos of important documents must be on silent mode — Ms. Gaffield could only smirk.
“Being very excited in a document reading room is a bit of a challenge,” she said. “You have to keep it all inside.”
Later that day, she e-mailed her Ph.D. advisers at Duke. They were thrilled. “It is a lost treasure,” said Deborah Jenson, a professor of French who has been overseeing Ms. Gaffield’s research. “This is really the first copy that is directly tied to the Haitian government.”
Professor Jenson said no manuscript version of the declaration with signatures — along the lines of the United States’ document — seemed to have existed. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s revolutionary leader, delivered the declaration as a speech on Jan. 1, 1804, and then had it printed over the next few months. Historians believe that he and others overlooked documentary preservation because they were too worried about another French invasion.
“They were building forts,” said Prof. Laurent M. Dubois, a historian of Haiti at Duke. “It’s part of the larger story: that Haiti knew it was going to be isolated, it knew it was attacking this broader social order.”
He said the pamphlet showed that Haiti was intent on sending out the declaration to get the world to understand its position. “This was a gesture of reaching out, of saying, ‘We have these grievances, and we have decided we have to be independent, to refuse and resist this social order we have lived under,’ ” Professor Dubois said. “They wanted recognition.”
That is exactly what some Haitians hope Ms. Gaffield’s find will bring to Haiti today. Mr. Tardieu said he dreamed of seeing the document returned to its home — “it would be the greatest gift,” he said — while others are praying that its discovery alone will reawaken the world to Haiti’s strong sense of self-determination.
“In the context of the Haitian tragedy, it is important for Haitians and the rest of the world to remember the independence of Haiti,” said Leslie Manigat, a historian who briefly served as Haiti’s president in 1988.
“We must recover,” he said, shouting in order to be heard through a phone in Port-au-Prince that cut out repeatedly. “We must find an alternative to the traditional meaning of independence, now, in the new world.”

People I know –a man called Slim

Rodney D. Coates

Some people will take you out for little more than a bottle of Ripple or a pack of Cigarettes. I mean, really, for many life ain’t worth a dollar or the paper it’s printed on. But then those peeps ain’t from my hood. There, you can find really stand up folks, who will take a slug for a brother or put one in to make a point. And then there was Slim. Almost on any day you could find Slim, leaning up against the telephone pole or sitting on the curb or scrunched up in the abandoned door way of a store that closed long back when. Even though the winter winds would blow cold air so frigid it would make the snot freeze on your nose, Slim didn’t give up that corner. He would greet us as we trudged through the dirty grey, black snow –crossing Broadway along 15^th street.

15^th street –was that strange no-where land where anything could happen, but mostly for us it was the boundary between our world and that forbidden zone that lurked to drag us into drugs, booze, broken dreams, and faded glories. 15^th street –Slim’s world that only the fallen walked indiscriminately, and only the foolish tread without trepidation. But 15^th street was the constant that immiscibly separated –yet synergistically involved. Two warring souls trapped in the cosmic construct of our being. Willing us to be damned or determined or was it damned determined to rise up from this pit. And there was Slim, staggeringly steadfast in his unwillingness to avoid anything close to work, unless it to open his bottle of Ripple.

Where you boyz up to?

School?

You boyz stay in school, don’t be no fool, and get the funk offa this here corner. Notin but death hangs out here.

Yes sir?

“Don’t need to call me sir .. Slim does just fine, just fine.”

Crazy laughing, nobody knows the depths of his insanity.

Then he slurs:

I ain’t near that crazy. Member –you work crazy, don’t let crazy work you, cause if crazy do you then you be gone for sure..for sure you be gone down that river where nobody returns cause there ain’t nothing to return from, cause you gone lost all your …..

We still walking, Slim still taking, funny nobody every waited till Slim finished, but then he never finished a sentence before he lost track of what he was saying. But he was Slim, and he was a friend of mine.

Fixin to find nother corner soon, this’n here gone trackin the riff-raff, no-account junkies. They steal you blind to get their fix, no self-respecting wino’d have anything to do wit dem. No, no self-respecting …hey you kids?

Yes

You better stay in school. Don’t wanna end up like ole Slim, standing on this here corner, nobody knows my name –but evbody calls’ me Slim. I ain’t no slim why once I weighed moren 200 pounds. But that was…that was…she used to call me….

Tears slip down a dirty face, as memories cascade against the traces of yesterday when another stood in this space.

You boys get on to school, now ya hear. Listen to ole Slim –this ain’t the life you need to live, dis ain’t the world that you need to cover, this nightmare ain’t the end of your dreams tis the beginning of your pain. Go on now…leave Slim to his Ripple.

Walking, long past that corner, long past that moment, long past the time when the best friend we had was a man called Slim.

for more of my work please go to:

http://www.redroom.com/author/rodney-d-coates

Black Bird Press News and Review: Henry Ramsey

The Life Story of Henry Ramsey, Jr.

An Autobiography;
Hardscratch Press 2008

“Henry Ramsey's open-ended conversation with his descendants is a gift for any reader. His frank and eloquent account of the journey from Jim Crow childhood to a life of activism, public service, and high achievement will be familiar to some, a revelation to others. The challenge he issues is for all: Never forget our past. Never stop working for our future. Always cherish our children.” —Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO, NAACP

(The Life Story of Henry Ramsey Jr., of Rocky Mount, N.C., and Berkeley, Calif., is 6x9 inches, 600 pages, soft-cover, with many photographs and a full index; $25. ISBN: 978-0-9789979-3-9. For more information or to order, contact the author at hramseyjr@aol.com or the publisher at jrbpels@hardscratchpress.com. )

Stylistically, Henry's story is a hodge podge of genres. It could have been a conventional autobiography with the classic example"Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington. There are indications of this as Henry commences with his origins and upbringing in a South Carolina segregated small-town environment.

As Henry's story progresses we have all th trappings of a Horatio Alger, rags to riches, bootstrap pull-up that pervades Booker' story as Henry succeeded from a high school drop -out to law school graduate (Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley); attorney; superior court, Alameda County; and Dean of Howard University Law School.

Then again it could have been a coming of age piece in the vein of Salinger's “Catcher in the Rye” given that Henry reflects on growing up in the aforementioned environment as somewhat of a rebel who questioned the status quo and certain aspects of familial and societal authority. There is also the question of identity as he grew up thinking that his name was Charles Arthur Tillman, Jr., and at age 17 learned that his true name was Henry Ramsey, Jr.

This context includes a spirit of adventure for, during his boyhood, Henry is shuttled between Rocky Mount, South Carolina, and Philadelphia due to dysfunction in his nuclear family. Eventually he drops out of school and joins the U.S. Air Force which provides additional series of adventures in the dynamics of growing into manhood.

Another direction that Henry's story could have followed is the compilation of disconnected but somewhat related memoirs. On a broader scale we have the guidance for this genre provided by
Du Bois' “Souls of Black Folk”. After all, Henry expressly states in his introduction that his reason for writing and publishing the story is to leave his children and grandchildren a record of family history and, apparently, documentation of his thinking on the great issues of religion and politics, including his role as a social and political activist.

In this connection he also shares personal experience and thoughts about treating and coping with medical impairments. Of course, if Henry's only motive for writing was to leave a record for his family, there would be no need for producing such a polished tone or promoting public book signings. Fortunately, for us, he has made his story available to the public at large.

If Henry had placed his story in any one of he foregoing genres and created a cohesive framework for tying it into that genre we may have been spared the somewhat pedantic resort to rather copious, often gratuitous, footnotes throughout each chapter which made for awkward reading.

On balance, Henry's story includes compelling accounts of his representation during the 60's of Richmond's Black police officers' effort to combat white officers racist conduct perpetrated against members of Richmond's African-American community. Similarly Henry gives a detailed report of how he intervened following the death of George Jackson at San Quentin and mobilized the support of Willie Brown, Ron Dellums, the late Carlton Goodlet and Rev. Cecil Williams to access the prison for the purpose of observing the condition of inmates.

At that time Brown was a member of the California Assembly, Dellums a member of Congress, Goodlet a physician and publisher of the Sun Reporter and Williams, of course a Reverend at Glide Church.

Henry was candid throughout the writing of his story. This is especially true when he explains the two instances of regrettable past behavior resulting from poor judgment on his part that caused him to be denied appointment to a Federal Court judgeship.

Equally impressive is Henry's discussion of his battle with diabetes. What makes this discussion valuable is not only the telling of his personal ordeal but the rather extensive medial research that Henry amassed and furnished for the benefit of his readers.

One of the more controversial chapters includes Henry's argument against the existence of God. In doing so, he first sets forth the traditional philosophical and theological theories advanced to support God's existence. Then one by one he methodically spells out his own cogent arguments why these concepts are invalid and why God does not exist.

A significant portion of Henry's story tends to be tedious or esoteric. An example of the former is Henry furnishing an overly detailed list of objectives for his deanship or the bit too extensive account of negotiations related to law school personnel matters. In regard to esoteric, I suspect that much of Henry's discussion of his involvement with judiciary organizations as well as activities related to the Judicial Council and judicial procedure is more suited to the interest of his professional peers than to the average reader.

Overall, Henry's story is highly informative and exhibits the writing craft of a skilled technician. As a special bonus it includes some great photographs, particularly those from the period when Henry, Willie and Ron had heads that were covered with a substantial body of natural black hair.
--Aubrey LaBrie

A Black Dialogue Brother
January 2010