NAACP 103rd Annual convention- keynote speech Ben Jealous
The long term struggle continues
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
After having heard NAACP President Ben Jealous' keynote at Netroots Nation this year, I looked forward to hearing his address to the convention taking place this week in Texas. I was overjoyed when I heard it would take place in Texas—a state we would love to see turn blue one day in the near future.
He did not fail to deliver.
Though I don't have a transcript of his remarks, some things stood out for me. He stressed that "We have a responsibility to think long term".
This is the essence of our struggle for civil and human rights. It is a long term struggle, and the NAACP represents the ability to be in it for the long haul—no matter how long it takes.
He addressed 5 major game changes.
- The end of mass over incarceration
- The end of mass under-education
- The end of great health disparities that divide our nation and kill children and their parents and grandparents
- The end of this country being the land of opportunity for some and suffering for others
- And the final end of ongoing battles to suppress the vote
He stated "We have never had to ask the question if we will win – we have only had to ask the question when we will win" and stressed "We are willing to go the distance."
This is the nature of long term struggle. Those founders on Feb. 12. 1909, 103 years ago are not alive. They depended on future generations to carry the fight forward.
We have.
He pointed out that the vote is the bottom line in driving towards the resolution of all our ills and reported that the NAACP has already registered 75 thousand people to vote, towards its goal to have one million new voters enrolled before November.
Of particular interest to me as an AIDS activist is the new initiate between the NAACP and the black church.
Black church and HIV
I was curious about the content of the manuals they are distributing—available for download online.
One key section stood out.
Race/Ethnicity – Effective HIV education must acknowledge the cultural, social, and political realities facing our community.
Age – HIV prevention must be relevant to different audiences, from the youth to our elders.
Gender - HIV education and ministry needs to be developed uniquely for men and women, as their experiences and expectations can be quite different.
Sexual Orientation – Effective HIV education and activism acknowledges the fact that there are members within our churches and communities that are in same-gender loving relationships. It is human nature to be attracted to another who may be of the opposite sex and/or the same sex. If any ministry is to reach all of our people, we cannot ignore this reality.
This is a major step forward, and I applaud the NAACP's efforts addressing a major threat to our health.
Most of the major events at the convention will be available online via webcast.
Webcast livestream
So the struggle continues, and I look forward to seeing new members joining the ranks of those already on the battle lines.
We still have a lot of work to do.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Baseball's negro leagues museum, Kansas City, Missouri. TheGrio: Negro Leagues Museum getting All-Star game boost.
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Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine sat back in the visiting clubhouse at Kauffman Stadium earlier this season, his feet propped up on the desk, and spoke glowingly of his first visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. The former player, longtime manager and lifelong baseball fan had never before stepped through its doors in the historic 18th and Vine District of Kansas City. Never gazed upon the countless artifacts or read the exhaustive research recalling a bygone era.
It opened the eyes of someone steeped in baseball history.
“Great, it was great. I think everyone should go,” Valentine said at the time. “During the All-Star week, they need to keep it open 24-7.”
Not a bad suggestion.
That may be the only way to fit through the doors the thousands of fans expected during Kansas City’s moment in the spotlight. By the time Major League Baseball plays its annual All-Star game Tuesday night, the museum will likely have experienced a significant windfall, financially and in terms of awareness, possibly ensuring its future for years to come. Museum officials expect to make upwards of $500,000 over the weekend.
The timing couldn’t be better for the museum, which has struggled back from the brink of closure brought on in part by damaging politics and petty infighting.
The museum was founded in 1990 by a group of former Negro Leagues players, including the late Kansas City Monarchs star Buck O’Neil, who would travel the world telling stories of the game’s great black players. One of his interviews proved to be a catalyst for the museum: He was featured in filmmaker Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, “Baseball.”
Riding the momentum, the museum moved into a new facility in the late 1990s, not far from the old Paseo YMCA, where in 1920 eight independent black team owners met to lay down the bylaws for what would become the Negro Leagues. The museum thrived until O’Neil died in 2006. Greg Baker was appointed president rather than Bob Kendrick, a close confidant of O’Neil whom many presumed would be the natural choice.
The museum began to lose money, in part due to the downturn in the economy, and it was close to shutting its doors when Baker resigned in 2010.
The history of the Negro Leagues is just one of many large displays that are included in the MLB FanFest at the Kansas City Convention Center, downtown. The attraction opens Friday July 6, 2012. (AP Photo/The Kansas City Star, Rich Sugg)
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3Bute turns African literature into crowdsourced comics. Colorlines: Beyond the ‘Single Story’
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I ask Bunmi Oloruntoba why he works in comics; his answer speaks volumes.
“In many ways, the medium is like the African continent itself: it’s misrepresented,” he says. “When it comes to the continent, you know, it’s the conflict, it’s war, it’s the famine. And in comics, it’s Spiderman, the Hulk, superheroes! One genre within the medium has grown so large that it eclipses the medium, and people can’t see the potential. Just like it’s hard to see the humanity, the complexity, the drive of all the things Africans are doing, because it’s been eclipsed.”
This eclipsing is what novelist Chimamanda Adichie has called the problem of the ‘single story.’ Oloruntoba, a Nigerian-born journalist and academic in Washington, D.C., is proposing a solution: collide Africa’s single-story problem against comics’ single-story problem, and see what interesting new particles appear. With literary editor Emmanuel Iduma, he runs 3Bute.com (pronounced tri-bute), adapting other writers’ stories about Africa into three-page comics — and then wrapping those comics in a ‘mashable’ layer that lets any reader dot the panels with their own public annotations. Mouse over a drawing of a laptop surrounded by partiers, and you can watch a Youtube music video of the Hausa hit they might be dancing to; mouse over a drawing of Charles Chikwanje boldly refusing to reveal the name of his gay lover on Malawi television, and get a recommendation for a biography of Bayard Rustin. It’s new-media innovation, historical context, Wikipedia rabbithole, and sometimes even loyal dissent, side by side. And all of it is a living antithesis to the single story.
It’s also a labor of love. Oloruntoba and Iduma are intending to collaborate with other visual artists just as soon they can pay them appropriately; until then, Oloruntoba is scripting and drawing the comics himself, with feedback and guidance from Iduma, both of them operating mostly on spare time. Oloruntoba’s visual style is fidgety and colorful and superhero-free, with Hergé’s eye for detail. Scanning a crowd scene, one gets the sense that he’s confirmed that every pictured haircut and t-shirt slogan exists somewhere in that city. And he’s forward about his mistakes as well. Author Jenna Bass, he says, has since informed him that her detective ‘Hunter Emmanuel’ is mixed-race, not black; not a fatal error, but one he remembers quickly. And he sounds very slightly sheepish about his decision to add a pulpishly gratuitous kidnapped white woman into his adaptation of Chris Kirkley’s ethnomusicological-tech-tourism blog post “Down and Out in the MP3 Market.” That comic got 3Bute a new level of exposure, getting them on tech-culture sites like Boing Boing — but as Oloruntoba says of this broad adaptation technique, “well, I haven’t done it again.”
The comics and their annotations aren’t at all intended to replace the stories, however; each comic page provides a link and summary to the original, along with a photo and short bio of the author. The goal of 3Bute, first and foremost, is to forge a way to bring the whole of African literature — the stories and the context — to that larger world audience that’s always been missed by the current methods.
Screen shot of 3Brut
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A PBS documentary examines how the disease has affected the black community. Frontline: Why People Still Won’t Get Tested for HIV.
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Three decades after the AIDS epidemic hit full-force, the United Nations says it’s possible to eradicate the disease by 2015 — in part by preventing new infections.
That will remain a major challenge not just elsewhere in the world, but also in the U.S., where an estimated one in five people with HIV don’t know they’re infected.
Studies have shown that people who know their HIV status are less likely to engage in risky behaviors that could lead to infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control. If they know they’re positive, they’re more likely to get treatment and take steps to avoid passing on the disease to their partners.
The CDC has recommended since 2006 that health providers test patients for HIV/AIDS as part of routine physical exams for everyone between the ages of 13 and 64. The government designated today, June 27, as National HIV Testing Day.
But testing rates have remained flat — around 20 percent — since 1997, according [pdf] to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
So why isn’t everyone getting tested on a regular basis?
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After years of working in South Africa, Samkeliso Moyo, once a girl with no shoes, is on her way to Zimbabwe and her children, carrying her savings and a dream like many across the continent. LA Times: A poor African woman's journey to home and security.
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It was more money than she had ever dreamed of, stuffed into stockings and concealed under her clothes like a python around her waist.
On the bus trip back to Zimbabwe, her homeland, Samkeliso Moyo was terrified that her secret money would be discovered or stolen, and she'd lose everything.
Born into the poorest family in her village, she grew up hungry, with no shoes and one thin cotton dress. She never once got a Christmas present. She ran away from exploitation and abuse at 11, and got her first job at 13, earning a few dollars a month. Eight years later, she made the journey to what for her was a land of opportunity: South Africa.
For years, she had worked there as a maid six days a week, built up a small trading business on evenings and weekends, rented out half of her room to a boarder, scrimped on phone calls to her children, whom she had sent to live in Zimbabwe. And somehow, she had squirreled away a miraculous $6,700.
The 32-year-old dreamed of buying something big, something that would make a difference to her children. She would never have to sleep in a park again. Or go to bed hungry. Or beg relatives and strangers for help. Would she?
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All over Africa, people like Moyo are making their way out of poverty. A report last year by the African Development Bank said the continent's middle class had tripled in the last 30 years, encompassing one-third of the total population, or 313 million people.
Samkeliso Moyo's hard-earned savings from her work as a domestic worker in South Africa enabled her to fulfill her dream of owning a home in her native Zimbabwe. (Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times / June 25, 2012)
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The NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization, holds its annual convention in Houston this week. As in any election season, the group is focused on voting rights and voter turnout. But this year, there's another issue that's front of mind: the dramatically high rate of unemployment rate among African-Americans. NPR: Urgency Reigns At Vote-Focused NAACP Convention.
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The theme of the NAACP's convention is "Your Power, Your Decision — Vote." As the national board of directors gathered in a hotel ballroom, the NAACP's Chief of Staff Roger Vann talked about the urgency of getting people registered and into the voting booth.
"Our goal is really to move about a million folks to the polls in November, which is a significant feat for the NAACP and really will be unmatched in the African-American space," he said.
Vann and other NAACP officials say they've spent months fighting voting laws that the organization considers restrictive, and they've been working to protect the right of everyone to vote regardless of their race or economic status.
At least 10 states, including Texas, have passed laws requiring people to show a government-issued photo ID card when they go to the polls. Supporters have said that will prevent voter fraud. Marvin Randolph, who heads the NAACP's get-out-the-vote efforts, calls it a newer version of a poll tax once used to disenfranchise black voters.
"What we're doing is at a time when other forces are trying to make voting harder, we're trying to make it easier for people," he says. "And we're not just focusing on how many people we can register — but it's how many people we can educate on the issues that they have to be voting about this year."
NAACP President, Ben Jealous
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
When all seems hopeless, when the hyena cackle of defeat is biting at pant cuffs and frayed nerves; when the crushing weight of today is laying low; when the heat stroke of burned out ambitions are sweating inside an oppressive solitary cage, a cage that is bolted in a boxcar rattling along this penal colony rail road earth; it is important to remember...
destiny
under volcanoes & timeless years within watch
and low tones. Around corners, in deep caves among
misunderstood and sometimes meaningless sounds.
Cut beggars, outlaw pimps & whores. Resurrect work.
Check your distance blue. Come earthrise men
deepblack and ready, come sunbaked women rootculture on the move.
Just do what you're supposed to do, what you say you gonta do
not the impossible, not the unimaginative,
not copy clothed as original and surely
not bitter songs in european melodies. Take hold
do the necessary, the possible, the correctly simple
talk of mission & interpret destiny
put land and selfhood on the minds of our people
do the expected, do what all people do
reverse destruction. Capture tomorrows
-- Haki Madhubuti
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