When Mayors Trump Presidents All lives really Matter

At a time when all lives don’t really matter,

Somerville Mayor hangs ‘Black Lives Matter’ banner at City Hall

Somerville city officials hung a large banner bearing the words “Black Lives Matter” on the front of City Hall on Wednesday morning in solidarity with the grassroots movement that has spread across the country following the deaths of unarmed black people during police confrontations.

Mayor Joe Curtatone said he worked with members of Black Lives Matter Cambridge , a local offshoot of the national organization, to create the banner and show support for their message.

“We see this as an important opportunity for an important national conversation” about race, Curtatone said. He said the move was “a very clear statement we are making to the community that we recognize that structural racism exists in our society; it exists in our public and private institutions.”

By hanging the banner, Curtatone said, he is calling on other cities to foster conversations about improving race relations.

Read more at The Boston Globe:

Choose your leadership wisely !

Chris Hedges, Cornel West, and Richard Wolff “How To Kick-off A Revolution?”

Published on Jul 5, 2014

Laura Flanders, Moderator Professors Chris Hedges, Cornel West and Richard Wolff begin a ten part series at the Left Form that will focus on the great modern revolutionary theorists. They begin with perhaps America’s only real revolutionist, Thomas Paine, who in his three great works Common Sense, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason laid down the foundations by which rebellion is morally and legally permissible. They look at whether the conditions set by Paine have been met with the rise of the corporate state and ask whether Paine’s call for the overthrow of British tyranny should become our own.

What Does Revolutionary Black Love Look Like?

What Does Revolutionary Black Love Look Like?

I begin with the following premise: “Revolutionary Black love is a redundant phrase. For In a society that has spent and continues to spent countless effort and energy teaching Black people to hate themselves, the very existence of Black love itself is by definition, revolutionary.” Yet this point still doesn’t help us understand or describe Revolutionary Black love. To accomplish this, I dive into my own life for answers, and the larger ocean of Black experience itself.

MY TRUE SENSE

I made a recent Facebook post affirming our constitutional and human rights as Black people to defend ourselves in the face of unrelenting brutality and murder by racist police, white vigilantes and predatory members of our own communities.. Many respondents agreed (it’s difficult not to) and some explained that our capacity to “police” our own communities increases when we cultivate revolutionary love for each other.

I agreed completely. I often quote the iconic Argentine revolutionary Che Guervara who once wrote: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”

Our powerfully insightful intellectual James Baldwin noted, “The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another…

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Cuba stands their ground, won’t return Assata Shakur

Gustavo Machin, a representative of the Cuban government, told Yahoo news that the return of Joanne Chesimard also known as Assata Shakur was “off the table.”

Does Your Art Reflect the Times?

Here comments are a powerful challenge for artists. Whether you’re a filmmaker, photographer, musician, writer, painter, what have you. Do you feel the call to use your art, at some level, to make a difference in this world? To reflect the challenges of the day? There’s no judgment here. Just a question worth pondering. – Love Her !

Nina Simone Protest anthology – Revolution – Strange fruit

– Published on Jun 24, 2015

– As the Black Lives Matter movement grows across the country and the the nation mourns the death of the nine worshipers killed at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, we look back at the life of one of the most important voices of the civil rights movement: the singer Nina Simone, known as the High Priestess of Soul. While Simone died in 2003, a new documentary, “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” sheds light on her music and politics. Her song “Mississippi Goddam” became an anthem of the civil rights movement. She wrote it in the wake of the assassination of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four black children. We speak to the film’s director, Liz Garbus, and Al Schackman, Nina Simone’s guitarist and music director for over 40 years.

I Am Not Nonviolent”: New Nina Simone Film Captures Singer and Activist’s Uncompromising Voice

Nina Simone Biography
In 1993, Don Shewey wrote of Nina Simone in the Village Voice, “She’s not a pop singer, she’s a diva, a hopeless eccentric … who has so thoroughly co-mingled her odd talent and brooding temperament that she has turned herself into a force of nature, an exotic creature spied so infrequently that every appearance is legendary.”

Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam

Music Career:

Her family by that time had moved to Philadelphia, and she began to give piano lessons. When she discovered that one of her students was playing in a bar in Atlantic City — and being paid more than she was from her piano teaching — she decided to try this route herself. Armed with music from many genres — classical, jazz, popular — she began playing piano in 1954 at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. She adopted the name of Nina Simone to avoid her mother’s religious disapproval of playing in a bar. The bar owner demanded soon that she add vocals to her piano playing, and Nina Simone began to draw large audiences of younger people who were fascinated by her eclectic musical repertoire and style. Soon she was playing in better nightclubs, and moved into the Greenwich Village scene.

By 1957, Nina Simone had found an agent, and the next year issued her first album, “Little Girl Blue.” Her first single, “I Loves You Porgy,” was a George Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess that had been a popular number for Billie Holiday. It sold well, and her recording career was launched. Unfortunately, the contract she signed gave away her rights, a mistake she came to bitterly regret. For her next album she signed with Colpix and released “The Amazing Nina Simone.” With this album came more critical interest.

Nina Simone full Biography “The Best of Nina Simone more info:”

Resolving the Problem of Black Miseducation

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Putting Friere’s quote into a U.S. context, the U.S. educational system prepares our children to integrate and conform to its culture of values, expectations and views. From the societal standpoint, our children are to assume three primary roles: 1.To become a semi-skilled pool of labor for corporations who will follow instructions without resistance. 2.To become a relatively smaller pool of directors or managers (professional overseers) for the corporate plantation. 3. To become the defenders and enforcers (military and police) of the corporate culture.

MY TRUE SENSE

We are familiar with the oft-quoted Ghanaian proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Sometimes I wonder if we recognize the converse of this truth: “It takes a village to destroy a child” as well.

With this in mind, reasonable Black folk must concede that we cannot attach sole responsibility for the miseducation of our youth to negligent Black households. While easy and convenient, this approach fails to assign equal responsibility to our local places of worship, community organizations, and public schools.

Of these, the last community resource (public schools) remain convenient targets for those of us working to provide Black children with an empowering education. But if it takes a village, why do we single public schools out when it comes to education? For one, they are THE recognized institution responsible for education in our communities; Secondly, they have trained teachers, administrators and staff (whose salaries derive from…

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