Dennis Roberts 1872- 1948
Thoughts about my grandfather - after Labor Day
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
The only picture of I have of my grandfather, working - is the one above.
He, like thousands of other black men of his time worked on the railroad, and was a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters - the first massive black labor organization in the U.S.
Because of him, and his labor, shining shoes, making up beds, and later waiting tables in a dining car - serving whites only, he was able to send his brothers and sisters to college, and educate my mom.
He, and many thousands of others like him were responsible for creating what we now call "the black middle-class".
This is the only thanks I can give him. He died the year after I was born - I bear his name, as he bore the name of an uncle who was enslaved on Virginia. Son of a slave, he fought for economic freedom and education for his family and community. College educated - he emptied spittoons.
Dennis Roberts -Ella Mae Williams Roberts, married 1907
My grandfather wasn't able to spend much time at home with his lovely young wife. He was however able, thanks to his job, to afford to stop her from working as a domestic, and afford her the luxury of staying home and raising a family. She had five children and died after the birth of my mom in 1919.
He had to keep working. Riding the rails, smiling for tips, while his heart was breaking and he worried about what would happen to his children. He had no job security. No union. He debated about breaking up his family and parceling out his children. But he instead gave them into the care of his younger brother, who he had sent to med school, and his sister, who he had sent to teacher's college.
My mother said she saw her dad once a month when he would come to Philadelphia to inspect his children, and query them about their behavior and schoolwork.
He never wore his uniform when he came home.
As she grew older - she used to take the train - free, to ride to DC. She was placed in the care of his brother porters. Once the train passed the Mason Dixon line she had a curtain drawn around her in the dining car, so that the vision of a little colored girl eating would not disturb white passengers who were being served their food by black hands.
By the time my mom was ready to go to college the money was there. Dennis had weathered the great Depression - and kept his job - thanks to the union founded in 1925.
So many of us have similar stories to tell.
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Today, we can read and view much of this history, thanks to the efforts of historians and filmmakers.
Hey boy! Hey George! The Pullman Porter: A Pullman Porter's story is one such story. Told by Johnnie F. Kirvin, at the age of 95. He was born in Dallas, Texas on March 25, 1914
Chicago is home to the A. Philip RandolphPullman Porter Museum. founded in 1995 by Lyn Hughes, its current director, and located in the Historic Pullman District in Chicago. Pay it a visit - online or if you get to Chicago.
Miles of Smiles: Years of Struggle
Miles of Smiles chronicles the organizing of the first black trade union - the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. This inspiring story of the Pullman porters provides one of the few accounts of African American working life between the Civil War and World War II. Miles of Smiles describes the harsh discrimination which lay behind the porters' smiling service. Narrator Rosina Tucker, a 100 year old union organizer and porter's widow, describes how after a 12 year struggle led by A. Philip Randolph, the porters won the first contract ever negotiated with black workers. Miles of Smiles both recovers an important chapter in the emergence of black America and reveals a key source of the Civil Rights movement.
Pullman Porters - Ordinary Men, Extraordinary History
Rising from the Rails
10,000 Black Men Named George
The railroads ran from the US to Canada - and Canadian blacks had their own struggles to fight.
African Canadian
North of the Colour Line: Sleeping Car Porters and the Battle Against Jim Crow on Canadian Rails, 1880-1920, by Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu
Philadelphia was and still is a major railroad hub, and many porters made it their home.
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
Often overlooked is the role that women played - as maids on the trains, and as members of the auxiliary.
Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
The man who spearheaded this movement, and so many others deserves his own diary.
A. Philip Randolph April 15, 1889 – May 16, 1979
Thank you granddaddy Dennis, thank you A. Phillip Randolph, and thank you to all those sleeping car porters who fought to become a part of organized labor in America.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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This former fishing village on Maryland's Eastern Shore is attracting a new wave of affluent blacks. The Root: St. Michaels: The New Martha's Vineyard?
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African Americans have had a tradition of summering in coastal resort towns since the 19th century. Areas such as Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and Sag Harbor, N.Y., have been attracting black families for more than a century. The primary reason blacks flocked to certain areas was that they were barred from or made unwelcome in other places.
In our modern, "postracial" times, many blacks have the freedom, money or clout to vacation wherever they choose. Like their white counterparts, affluent black families have acquired second homes that are used for more than a summer respite.
One town creating buzz among East Coast buppies and black boomers today is St. Michaels, Md. Historically a waterman and shipbuilding town, St. Michaels has evolved into an elegant yet quaint getaway for the Washington, D.C., power elite.
Only 90 minutes outside of Washington, the exclusive waterside community is an ideal alternative to traveling a longer distance to popular northern destinations. Proximity, however, is not the only quality that is attracting the attention of black Washingtonians. "Some of the best antiquing around" and "that old-town feel" are what attracted Timothy Hill to purchase a time-share in St. Michaels.
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The author of The Tanning of America says the genre has given young Americans a shared cultural experience. The Root: Steve Stoute on Hip-Hop and Race Relations
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Steve Stoute found startling evidence of the global influence of hip-hop in the mountaintop town of Èze in southern France. On the square of a village that boasts thousands of years of history, he saw a jewelry store named Bling. "Lil Wayne invented the word 'bling'," says Stoute, who has been an innovator in bringing hip-hop culture and commerce together, and is the author of The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy. "When I saw that, I was happy, I was shocked. It said to me, 'This [influence] is real.' "
Stoute has built a career on understanding and monetizing the global spread of hip-hop culture. He heads the ad agency Translation, which specializes in helping large companies understand and take advantage of hot trends and cultural shifts to better market their products. "The change [in branding] for luxury goods is very simple," he says. "The generation of hip-hop music has done a lot to influence mainstream culture by really driving it home. It became part of the aspirational dimension of America."
He vividly describes a scene from a 1986 concert involving LL Cool J, Run-DMC and Whodini at New York City's Madison Square Garden, the first big rap event at the landmark arena. Impresario Russell Simmons had invited executives for the German sport-shoe company Adidas.
When Rev. Run began performing his hit "My Adidas," he took off his three-striped shoe and held it above his head. Thousands in the crowd did the same. As Stoute tells it, the Adidas executive realized a vast market existed for their products that they had not tapped.
What Stoute, Simmons and other pioneers of the rap industry stumbled on was the appeal of the music -- and culture -- across racial lines, even if it was rooted in a shared materialism. "The hip-hop generation is not very apologetic about having aspirations," concedes Stoute.
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Rebels suspect the young men of being mercenaries for Kadafi. But the terrified sub-Saharans say they were merely laborers. LA Times: Black migrants now live in fear in Libya
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They huddle beneath dry-docked boats at the edge of the Mediterranean, petrified that the rebel gunmen who now own the streets will confuse them with mercenaries for the despot.
"We are workers, we are not soldiers," said Godfrey Ogbor, 29, voicing a plea shared by hundreds of men from sub-Saharan Africa trapped at this makeshift coastal camp 15 miles west of Tripoli. "We don't know politics. We have no guns."
But the new masters of Tripoli suspect that many are something else: shock troops for a reviled regime, collaborators who deserve no pity.
For decades, impoverished young sub-Saharan Africans came to Libya to work in construction, hotel, car-repair and other blue-collar and service jobs. But Moammar Kadafi also avidly recruited poor black men, both Libyans and sub-Saharans, for his security forces. Government rallies inevitably featured contingents of seemingly delirious gun-toting young blacks waving the leader's signature green flag. Rebels have not forgotten.
With Kadafi on the run, the hunt for loyalists has made all young black men suspect, vulnerable to arrest or worse on edgy streets where snap decisions substitute for measured justice.
These days, the world waits to see what kind of government emerges under new leaders: one based on tolerance and justice or on vengeance. The concern is particularly acute in Europe, where many fear that violence against blacks and others perceived as Kadafi loyalists could lead to a desperate new boat exodus across the Mediterranean.
These migrant workers have been hiding from Libya's rebel forces on a farm. Hundreds of migrant workers remain stranded in the nation. (Giulio Petrocco, Associated Press / September 2, 2011)
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South Gate resident Mary Johnson, who sent her four children to college, has a code of parental responsibility. It works at both under-performing urban schools and high-achieving campuses. LA Times: Pushing parents to get involved in kids' education
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Scads have been written the last few years about education reform, teacher evaluations and funding shortages. But relatively little has been written about two parties with huge control over the quality of any child's education.
The student and the parent.
Last week, I went to South Gate for a visit with Mary Johnson, a grandmother who knows a thing or two about how parents can step it up. It was her own grandmother, in fact, who provided the early training.
Johnson and her six siblings lost their mother when Johnson was just 2. So all seven of them went to live with grandma Emma Bessix in Dover, Del. The house had no electricity, but it had an established place where all the kids had to do their homework — or else.
Johnson later moved to California, studied at El Camino College, and, as a single, working parent, sent all four of her children to college. That was the expectation for the kids, and they knew it, just as they knew that until they graduated from high school, their mom would be on campus, volunteering for this or that, investing in her kids because nothing mattered more to her.
That work led to the formation of Parent U-Turn, a nonprofit advocacy and training program, and Johnson has been tapped by both UCLA and Pepperdine University to train parents and teachers. Her focus has always been on under-performing urban schools, but her code of parental responsibility works for schools on both sides of the tracks.
Parents aren't doing their job, says Johnson, if all they do is drop their kids off at school, and principals aren't doing their jobs if they don't encourage constructive involvement by parents. Johnson has been known to lead marches on schools and organize strikes, but she tells parents that while they have a right to demand the best that schools can offer, they also have an obligation to hold their own children accountable.
Mary Johnson tells parents that while they have a right to demand the best from schools, they have an obligation to hold their children accountable. (Francine Orr, Los Angeles Times)
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Reports of a new Christian Bible have been circulating on internet bible sales sites and trade publications. Sources who choose to remain anonymous, because they are not authorized to speak on the record, have divulged the title of the new tome is, "The Bible: the ultimate power book for the ultimate power player who has the wealth of spirit and flesh to assure a place in heaven by development of a geneticly modified camel that can pass through the eye of a needle."
Pre-sales are reported to be brisk with hedge fund managers and diversified corporate ceo's leading on the revenue charts.
Unlike most bibles in circulation, "The Bible: the ultimate power book for the ultimate power player who has the wealth of spirit and flesh to assure a place in heaven by development of a geneticly modified camel that can pass through the eye of a needle," will be serialized with updates daily and weekly.
Sources report the most anticipated installmensts will be the weekly...
Report from Paradise
In paradise the work week is fixed at thirty hours
salaries are higher prices steadily go down
manual labour is not tiring (because of reduced gravity)
chopping wood is no harder than typing
the social system is stable and the rulers are wise
really in paradise one is better off than in whatever country
At first it was to have been different
luminous circles choirs and degrees of abstraction
but they were not able to separate exactly
the soul from the flesh and so it would come here
with a drop of fat a thread of muscle
it was necessary to face the consequences
to mix a grain of the absolute with a grain of clay
one more departure from doctrine the last departure
only John foresaw it: you will be resurrected in the flesh
not many behold God
he is only for those of 100 per cent pneuma
the rest listen to communiqués about miracles and floods
some day God will be seen by all
when it will happen nobody knows
As it is now every Saturday at noon
sirens sweetly bellow
and from the factories go the heavenly proletarians
awkwardly under their arms they carry their wings like violins
-- Zbigniew Herbert
Translated By Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott
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The Front porch is now open. Grab a chair, and a bite to eat.