While You Are At Work, They Take Care of Your Children

No Child Left Unmedicated
By Phyllis Schlafly (2004)

A plan to subject all children to mental health screening is underway, and the pharmaceutical firms are gearing up for bigger sales of psychotropic drugs. Like most liberal, big-spending ideas, this one was slipped into the law under cover of soft semantics.

Its genesis was the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFCMH), created by President George W. Bush in 2002. The [Commission] recommends “routine and comprehensive” testing and mental health screening for every child in America, including preschoolers. The [Commission] proposes utilizing electronic medical records for mental health interrogation of both children and adults, to search for mental illnesses in school and during routine physical exams.

Book: Dreams Of Africa In Alabama

Dreams of Africa in Alabama; The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America
Sylviane A. Diouf, 2007

Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007)

Description
In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slavery trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as enslaved.

Book: Ain’t I A Beauty Queen

Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race
Maxine Leeds Craig, 2002

 Description

“Black is Beautiful!” The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro became a veritable icon of the Sixties.

Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities.

Too Much Black 1.1

From Too Much Black
By No Black Pete (2011)

It is what they tell us. It is what they want us to believe. That we can have financial independence that will lead to a better life as we are accepted for who we are and where we are at.

Believing the lie made us outsiders, and forever bumping our heads against the glass walls keeping us out. Like unwanted stepchildren we are kept at bay with empty words and holed pockets.

YES, You Are A Beauty Queen!

Dear Miss Cicely Tyson,

Girrrrl, why are you so late?!

One of the first books to get showcased on this site: Am I Not A Beauty Queen? I had to let go of this for a while. The news of the passing of greatness was saddening. Even across the pond, we know who Miss Cicely Tyson is. YES, you are a beauty queen, but so much more than just that. Some of us need reminders. Still, I can safely claim that Black people everywhere have gotten used to see you bring beauty, grace and class to tv screens.

This tribute is unfinished, only meant as a belated starter.

Winnie Mandela and Coretta Scott King

Photo credits: AP. In this Sept. 11, 1986, file photo, Winnie Mandela, left, wife of jailed African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela is joined by Coretta Scott King, widow of American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr., in Soweto.

Writing Their Scripts

15 Things You Did Not Know about the History of Black People in London before 1948
By Charmaine Simpson, December 2012

The presence of Africans in England dates back to at least the Roman period when African soldiers who served as part of the Roman army were stationed at Hadrian’s Wall during the 2nd century CE. Septimus Severus, the emperor who was born in Libya, spent his last three years in Britain before he died in York in 211 CE.

I will present 15 facts aimed at raising the level of knowledge, and uncovering the hidden histories, of people of African and Caribbean descent who have contributed to London before 1948.

1. The earliest known [public] record of a Black person living in London is of “Cornelius a Blackamoor” whose burial on 2nd March 1593 was recorded in the parish register at St Margaret’s Church in Lee.

Ben Hausa Ali – White Playing Hausa With Arabs

THE MEMOIRS OF ABD-ALLAH AL-GHADEMISI OF KANO, 1903-1908.
PART I: THE BRITISH CONQUEST OF KANO
By MUHAMMAD SANI UMAR AND JOHN HUNWICK, in: Sudanic Africa, 7, 1996, 61-96

These native servants are the quintessence of loyalty, and devotion, and as time goes on, I am to find out that without them Nigeria would have been untenable by the white man. – F.P. Crozier, Five Years Hard, London 1932, 72-3.

Introduction
Some time in 1902 a young man named Abd-Allah arrived in Kano, ‘from the north’, presumably from Ghadames. We know nothing of the circumstances of his arrival, or of his ancestry. The document translated below is currently our only source of information on him. In it he describes himself as a ‘student’, but it is not clear in what sense he uses that term. There is no indication that he came to Kano to study, but we know that some years later he was acting as a clerk for his paternal uncles in Kano, who were evidently merchants.

Hausa People

Hausa

Location: Northern Nigeria, northwestern Niger
Population: 15 million
Language: Hausa
Neighboring Peoples: Kanuri, Fulani, Akan, Songhay, Yoruba

History
Origin myths among the Hausa claim that their founder, Bayajidda, came from the east in an effort to escape his father. He eventually came to Gaya, where he employed some blacksmiths to fashion a knife for him. With his knife he proceeded to Daura where he freed the people from the oppresive nature of a sacred snake who guarded their well and prevented them from getting water six days out of the week. The queen of Daura gave herself in marriage to Bayajidda to show her appreciation. She gave birth to seven healthy sons, each of whom ruled the seven city states that make up Hausaland.

Banneker versus Jefferson

 To Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Banneker, 19 August 1791

From Benjamin Banneker

Maryland. Baltimore County. Near Ellicotts Lower Mills
August 19th: 1791

Sir

I am fully sensible of the greatness of that freedom which I take with you on the present occasion; a liberty which Seemed to me scarcely allowable, when I reflected on that distinguished, and dignifyed station in which you Stand; and the almost general prejudice and prepossession which is so prevailent in the world against those of my complexion.

I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of Beings who have long laboured under the abuse and censure of the world, that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt, and1 that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and Scarcely capable of mental endowments.

Benjamin Bannaka

A Man of Many Firsts

In 1753, Benjamin Banneker engineered the first striking clock made entirely of wooden parts. This invention marked the advent of his rise to fame as people would travel from far and near to witness his remarkable invention. Made entirely of hand carved wood parts and pinions, the clock struck on the hour for over 50 years.

Banneker was the first to track the 17 year locust cycle, a valuable revelation to farmers enabling them to prepare for attacks by locusts on their crops. He was among the first scientific farmers to employ crop rotation and water irrigation techniques. He enjoyed eviable results as a tobacco farmer, and harvested his own food crop.

Banneker was among the first Americans, and the first African-American, to publish almanacs, a valuable tool in an agricultural economy. His almanacs were publicly sold from 1792 to 1799, and did quite well.