[mirage]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdqLAeyqVr8

Gil Scott-Heron, known as the grandfather of rap, he personally preferred jazz. He wrote a biography, he wrote a novel, but above all he wrote poetry to music. He also loathed modern rap which he dismissed as 'posturing.' He fought for black rights all his life.

The above song--B movie--is particularly pertinent now. "Mandate my ass."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...t-heron-review

I had the chance to see Gil Scott-Heron perform live in a club a couple of times in the late 70s.

Originally Posted by Catlady

Thanks again. I've now read Wilmington's Lie, as well as Tim Madigan's The Burning about the Tulsa massacre. Both were excellent, and I'm dumbfounded and disgusted that I never knew about the events described in these books.

Wilmington's Lie is about an out-and-out white supremacy coup in Wilmington, NC, in 1898, designed to oust and disenfranchise blacks. The Burning is about whites in Tulsa murdering blacks and burning down their homes and businesses in 1921, after the blacks tried to prevent a lynching.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm grateful to have been of help.

Sadly, these two events are extreme, but otherwise common expressions of white supremacist activity in the post-reconstruction era the repercussions of which continue to this day. We in the US should all have been educated about the goings on in that time. I think in a lot of (or at least some?) school districts now, that history is taught. But it certainly wasn't to me in my time.

Worth mentioning along these lines is Emory University professor Carol Anderson's White Rage. I think she's the head of African-American studies there. It touches briefly on a string of historical injustices (to put it mildly) perpetrated on Black Americans throughout US history. She followed that up with a book about vote suppression in the US. Uplifting these are not, but they are illuminating reading.