Ansar Dine, a radical Islamist militia, has set about destroying mausoleums and shrines in the historic Malian city of Timbuktu, which was once a great center of Islamic learning in the 15th and 16th centuries
After my last posting on Anti-Fascist dieselpunk and the Spanish Civil War, which owed much to Steampunk Emma Goldman’s original blog, I began thinking about the other great anti-fascist struggle also lost in the shadow of WWII. In 1935, before the
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Very interesting article about blacks who spied on the Confederacy. Some very engrossing tales of speculative fiction can be weaved from this rich factual raw material!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=137291418
Read more…an article from 2003 on the popular Willie Lynch document (most likely a forgery) by historian Jelani Cobb.
Willie Lynch is Dead (1712?-2003)
I long ago stopped listening to sentences that began with “The problem with black people” or ended with “and
Read more…150 Years After Fort Sumter: Why We're Still Fighting the Civil War
A few weeks before Captain George S. James sent the first mortar round arcing through the predawn darkness toward Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, Abraham Lincoln cas
Read more…*book review added per another discussion on BSFS on a related topic.
This book might come as a s
Read more…a surviving member of Germany's tiny black minority during the Third Reich
I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. The whole world is my province until Africa is free.--Marcus Garvey
A discussion of the black political philosophy of the 1900s would be incomplete without understanding the role played by Ma
Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia 1889 to his death
Ethiopia Home of Sages/ Thou art still our noblest pride/ We, thy sons, through future ages /Will take thee for our guide--W.A. Scott, 1915 from History of Alpha Phi Alpha by Charles H. Wesley.
The
On Feb. 21 1965, black activist leader Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El-Shabaaz, was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Almost a year prior on April 3, 1964, following his split with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, he gave
Read more…"Meeting of Saint Erasmus of Formiae and Saint Maurice" by Matthias Grünewald (1517-23)
As the story goes, Maximilian was Emperor of the Roman Empire with Diocletian as his colleague. An uprising of the Gauls known as "Bagaude" forced Maximilian to m
Read more…artistic rendition of Assyrian and Nubian soldier
Around 750BC, the city of Napata (around 400 km of modern day Khartoum in Sudan) rose to prominence. The city was part of an ancient kingdom, named famously after the Egyptian word for gold—"nub"—henc
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I think God intended the n*ggers to be slaves...Now since man has deranged God's plan, I think the best we can do is keep 'em as near to a state of bondage as possible…My theory is, feed 'em well, clothe 'em well, and then, if they won't work…whip '
Read more…Arab traders shown visiting the Malian King Mansa Musa
- medieval Catalan Atlas of Majorca, 1375 AD
According to African oral histories the small state of Kangaba, led by Sundiata defeated the nearby kingdom of Soso at the Battle of Kirina in 1235, fo
Read more…from the Book of Games of Alfonso X, 13th century
In 711AD medieval Spain was invaded by armies from the Muslim world. These invaders would rule the region for the next several hundred years, build lasting monuments and leaving an unmistakable influen
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Slavery always has, and always will, produce insurrections where it exists, because it is a violation of the natural order of things, and no human power can much longer perpetuate it.--abolitionist Angelina Grimke in her 1836 Appeal to the Christian
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The transformation of slaves, trembling in the hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievem
Read more…This article is a re-post, courtesy of PBS Africans in America: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
Benjamin Banneker - author, scientist, mathematician, farmer, astronomer, publisher and urban planner -was descended from enslaved Africans, an indentured
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Mural from the church of Abreha and Atsbeha in Eastern Tigray, Ethiopia. Legend has it that the blackened and soot filled ceiling was set afire by the warrior Queen Gudit, who is said to have conquered Axum around the 10th century.
Though a subject
Read more…taken from Jan 24 2011 Democracy Now.org:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/24/the_black_power_mixtape_danny_glover
We broadcast from Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the nation’s largest festival for independent cinema. One of t
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