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Douglas Redd Cultural Summit—Dillard University, Prelude, March 14, 2009—After August 29, 2005, the demographics of New Orleans shifted dramatically. The shift, to overstate the case, changed everything: how we shop and how we cook; how we talk to one another; how we use celebrations as signs of hope and as mechanisms of denial and how we deal with or pretend we do not have to deal with racism, political corruption, and crime; how we educate and miseducate young people as we watch them walk down the road to death.  We do, however, continue to invent bullshit excuses for our shortcomings (lack of enforceable norms) and to perpetuate the myth of THE BLACK COMMUNITY as if time has not moved since 1968. There are African American communities in New Orleans, some of them very ancient and some, quite new. No such animal named THE BLACK COMMUNITY any longer exists.— Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English. Dillard University, author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery

Source: Summit Comments 2009.htm / Summit Summary 2009

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In the Summer of ‘82

In the summer of '82, I heard perplexing things.  One scholar proclaimed that if God had never spoken directly to a Black woman or man, his behavior was racist.  Where, asked the scholar, was proof in fact or fiction.  Moreover, the Black theologian refused to deal with Black atheism.
 
Another brother wondered if the historical Jesus had learned his religion from Coptic Christians.  What was Christ doing in Ethiopia during the Hidden Years, given that Ethiopia was the playground for the Greek gods?  Why has a story which centered on a Jew with hair like lamb's wool (I suspect said genuine Hebrew would have fought with the PLO) . . . why had this story sent African Americans into the recesses of beyond-salvation?
 
Even sisters dressed to the nines with five inch high heels or three inch long roaches exploring my laundry bag proved to be insufficient distraction.
 
God was popping up all over.  Especially in fiction. Alice Walker let the spirits speak in The Color Purple, thereby preserving her soul from eternal damnation.  Alice as instrument of spirit said: God is neither HE nor SHE but IT.  And likewise the Greeks found books in the Library at Alexandria that were Greek to them.  They invented philosophers to carry the weight.
 
Knowledge in books is often heavy.  Among other amazing facts I discovered that the State of Georgia suffered Washington's revenge in 1915.  As soon as Booker T. Washington died, the boll weevil invaded.
 
Brother Hakim worries about the class conflict in Nigeria.  Neither in Lagos nor in Atlanta can people venture outside after 9:00 p.m. Squirrels began to fold their arms and die for no reason on the Spelman campus.  Even for the celebration of such revenge, God was present.  Horror, I am convinced, is conversion. Jerry Ward

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David Walker knew very well in 1829 that consciousness and action are crucial if an oppressed population is ever to free itself from wretchedness.  We can not depend on the American criminal justice system for remedies, because the recent antics of the neo-con Supreme Court sanction anything and everything behind the twin disguises of judicial process and national security.  Like Walker, we must present the case of our plight in the courts of world, simply as a matter of record. Such a move would create a global environment for discussion, but the more meaningful work has to be done on site in Jena, LA and everywhere else by grassroots leaders and community people who are directly affected by police attacks. Security Guards Beat School Teen

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I do worry that the very people who contributed to the flavor and culture of New Orleans will truly be too poor to afford housing in the NEW New Orleans.  As one of my friends put it, "Katrina passed judgment on America and the country has been found wanting." Thanks, Rudy, for promoting open dialogue about life and death issues.  We can prevent rumor as easily as we can prevent terrorism. We can succeed, however, in asking questions about why we can not spend as much money to restore homes as we have spent to destroy Iraq. And those questions do need to appear in global cyberspace. Jerry Ward Reports on Dillard

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There is rancid irony in my giving loving attention to Richard Wright’s violence-drenched work as we approach his centennial. Men and women of all colors only half-listened to Wright and other writers who focused on peoplekind’s destructive potential, preferring to dance in the twilight zone of arts, self-congratulation regarding the achievements of technology and science, entertainments, romantic illusions. We have not changed much. We are still dancing in 2007. The irony consists of my not feeling exceptionally good about playing the role of a reverse John the Baptist. As Wright remarked in 1944 about the genesis of Black Boy, “to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth, harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution. Indeed I discovered that writing like that is a kind of war and revolution.” KATRINA REPORT  New Orleans 2007

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All I can say about this piece [What's So New About Obama?]  is that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were probably the last leaders to whom large numbers of black Americans were willing to accord genuine respect. Neither was a politician.  Now we have politicians who seem to believe class is far more important than race. Their minds are visually and visionally challenged. Obama and other figures mentioned in Zafran's article belong to a new breed of elected officials who may indeed lead white Americans and their black friends into or out of hell. Insofar as most black Americans exist willingly or unwillingly within the American body politic, they will be in various coaches on the train.
 
I judge these people [ so-called black leaders] to be persons with slight historical consciousness whom I have not elected or selected to lead me anywhere. They are interested in power (a vague concept), money, and idealistic hot air. Each of us must make an individual decision about who will indeed lead us daily. Those who lead me are all dead ---my known ancestors, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright; they lead me to use my talents for the benefit of my people, people who try desperately to be good citizens of the world.  Zafran's article is laughable because it is naive. Jerry Ward

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[Tom] Dent did not aim his parting shots at the philosophical traditions which defined the role of his alma mater in the history of African American culture. His target was the kind of pedagogy which served to miseducate and underprepare Negro students. Having been trained to think critically at Morehouse by the brilliant political scientist Robert Brisbane, Dent could discriminate nicely between the value of honoring tradition and the negation that resulted from blind “worship” of traditions. The work Dent would produce during the next four decades is marked by his penchant for reason, for surgical analysis of affairs, for being informed about the cutting edge of history’s progress. The Art of Tom Dent

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Institutional racism is the very backbone of the industry that champions and valorizes thug culture. That some presumably intelligent African Americans should be gears in the machinery of institutional racism is not astonishing. They have embraced the current version of the American Dream. After all, they have no obligations under the laws of brute economy to be more noble than Africans who sold other Africans to Europeans.

If Reginald Hudlin and Tracey Edmonds and the non-black black-oriented BET celebrate Kimberly Jones (aka Lil’ Kim) for her crimes, they are acting in ways that historical narratives allow us to predict. Although King did not include either thug culture or racial treason or sinister commodification in his dream-script, these things are undeniable components of our post-1968 America.

Ms. Tucker’s juxtaposing the memory of King’s death with the success of trafficking in lawlessness is sobering. It is regrettable that, on the other hand, she failed to place the abuse of King’s sacrifice in the context of the pervasive lawlessness that is honored at the highest level of American government and business. Messages on MLK Day

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Yesterday, I regretted discarding five boxes of LPs. These were choice albums I spent more than forty years collecting. With dry eyes and a wet heart, I consign my music to the curbside. My music is trash. LPs, cassettes, and many CDs have become trash. Emptiness pains like a fishbone caught in the throat. You can have more CDs, but you are not fond of CDs. Aretha Franklin does not sound right on a CD. She sounds corrected. So too do Stevie Wonder, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. "Cold Shot." Perhaps classical music sounds very good on a CD. Classical music is, after all, hypercorrect.

But Clifford Brown, Buddy Guy, Esther Phillips, Lynn Gold, Cassandra Wilson, Jerry Butler, the soundtracks of The Color Purple and For Colored Girls . . . and Shaft, and Tommy James and the Shantells are not hypercorrect. They, the recorded traces of their creation, are human in the grooves. When you want to hear Roland Kirk's Oleo, you must hear the grooves and scratches. It took you twenty years to begin to understand the musical structures of Oleo, and you do not want to have that pain and pleasure cheapened by a CD. Making Peace with the Loss of Things

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The Katrina Papers, by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. $18.95  /  The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)

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BLACK CLASSIC BOOKS   BCP Digital Printing

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posted 4 April 2006 / updated 9 April 2008