KKK Child and African American State Trooper (1992 Photo)

Poynter has the background on the photo HERE. [click to enlarge]

Cherokee Want to Oust Black Claimants

Reuters
Cherokee Indians: We are free to oust blacks
US government wants second-largest Indian tribe to recognize as citizens 2,800 descendants of slaves that were held by Cherokees

updated 9/14/2011 9:00:20 AM ET

The nation's second-largest Indian tribe said on Tuesday that it would not be dictated to by the U.S. government over its move to banish 2,800 African Americans from its citizenship rolls.

"The Cherokee Nation will not be governed by the BIA," Joe Crittenden, the tribe's acting principal chief, said in a statement responding to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Crittenden, who leads the tribe until a new principal chief is elected, went on to complain about unnamed congressmen meddling in the tribe's self-governance.

The reaction follows a letter the tribe received on Monday from BIA Assistant Secretary Larry Echo Hawk, who warned that the results of the September 24 Cherokee election for principal chief will not be recognized by the U.S. government if the ousted members, known to some as "Cherokee Freedmen," are not allowed to vote.

The dispute stems from the fact that some wealthy Cherokee owned black slaves who worked on their plantations in the South. By the 1830s, most of the tribe was forced to relocate to present-day Oklahoma, and many took their slaves with them. The so-called Freedmen are descendants of those slaves. After the Civil War, in which the Cherokee fought for the South, a treaty was signed in 1866 guaranteeing tribal citizenship for the freed slaves. The U.S. government said that the 1866 treaty between the Cherokee tribe and the U.S. government guaranteed that the slaves were tribal citizens, whether or not they had a Cherokee blood relation.

The African Americans lost their citizenship last month when the Cherokee Supreme Court voted to support the right of tribal members to change the tribe's constitution on citizenship matters.

Read the full story HERE.

New book on "Black National anthem"

CNN
Professor at historically black college questions 'black national anthem'
By Liane Membis, CNN

(CNN) -- "Lift Every Voice and Sing" is an uplifting spiritual, one that's often heard in churches and popularly recognized as the black national anthem. Timothy Askew grew up with its rhythms, but now the song holds a contentious place in his mind.

"I love the song," said Askew, an associate professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college. "But it's not the song that is the problem. It's the label of the song as a 'black national anthem' that creates a lot of confusion and tension."

The song and its message of struggle and hope have long been attached to the African-American community. It lives on as a religious hymn for several protestant and African-American denominations and was quoted by the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery at Barack Obama's presidential inauguration.

After studying the music and lyrics of the song and its history for more than two decades, Askew decided the song was intentionally written with no specific reference to any race or ethnicity.

Askew explains his position in the new book, "Cultural Hegemony and African American Patriotism: An Analysis of the Song, 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,'" which was released by Linus Publications in June. The book explores the literary and musical traditions of the song, but also says that a national anthem for African-Americans can be construed as racially separatist and divisive.

"To sing the 'black national anthem' suggests that black people are separatist and want to have their own nation," Askew said. "This means that everything Martin Luther King Jr. believed about being one nation gets thrown out the window."

Askew first became intrigued with "Lift Every Voice and Sing" while working on his master's degree at Yale University. He was a Morehouse College music graduate, young, passionate and hungry for knowledge about African-American culture. A fellow classmate suggested Askew explore Yale's collection on James Weldon Johnson, an early civil rights activist who wrote the song decades earlier.

Johnson first wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as a poem in 1900. Hundreds of African-American students performed it at a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday at Jacksonville, Florida's Stanton School, where Johnson was principal. Johnson's brother, John Rosamond Johnson, later set the poem to music. By 1920, the NAACP had proclaimed the song the "Negro National Anthem."

"I remember methodically going into the Yale library every day and sitting there on the floor, rummaging through 700 boxes of James Johnson's work," Askew said. "I became so fascinated in his life and letters, that I wanted to know more about the creation of the song and how it related to our modern understanding of it."

He found letters of appreciation to Johnson from individuals of all different ethnic backgrounds. At that moment, Askew had a revelation: The song he'd known as the "black national anthem" was for everybody.

Some will call his perspective on the song a contradiction, Askew said, especially because he works at a historically black college. But he argues that universities like Clark Atlanta accept students of many races and ethnicities; a national anthem for one race excludes others, and ignores an existing national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Francis Scott Key.

"Some people argue lines like 'We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,' signify a tie to slavery and the black power struggle," Askew said. "But in all essence there is no specific reference to black people in this song. It lends itself to any people who have struggled."

He's not the only one who sees fault in a national anthem just for African-Americans.

Kenneth Durden, an African-American conservative blogger, responded to Askew's claims on his blog, "A Free Man, Thinking Freely." He said in an interview that Askew is right to make connections to King's view of one America.

"King always appealed to the American dream for all," Durden said. "He was a patriot and he never wanted blacks to deny or separate themselves from being American. I think claiming an anthem for ourselves as black people is doing just that."

What troubles Askew more is that the song became an identity marker for African-Americans.

"Who has the right to decide for all black people what racial symbol they should have?" Askew said. "Identity should be developed by the individual himself, not a group of people who think they know what is best for you."

Hilary O. Shelton, senior vice president for advocacy and policy for the NAACP, said Askew's ideas might be far-fetched.

"I don't see anything that is racially exclusive or discriminatory about the song," Shelton said. "The negro national anthem was adopted and welcomed by a very interracial group, and it speaks of hope in being full first-class citizens in our society."

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" isn't meant to cloud national identity or persuade African-Americans to be separatists, Shelton said. It's often sung in conjunction with "The Star-Spangled Banner," or with the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance at NAACP events.

"His presumption is that this song is sung instead of our national anthem -- that we are less American and we are not as committed to America because we take pride in the Negro national anthem," Shelton said. "It is evident in our actions as an organization and here in America that we are about inclusion, not exclusion. To claim that we as African-Americans want to form a confederation or separate ourselves from white people because of one song is baffling to me."

Read the full post HERE.

Teaching African American Studies in Russia

Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog has some guest bloggers this week, and I have really enjoyed a couple of posts by Jelani Cobb (who has a blog HERE) on the experience of teaching African American history in Russia. Here are some excerpts:


From "A View From the East":

Jun 17 2010, 1:15 PM ET | Comment
[Jelani Cobb]

Some years back I made a resolution to ignore the second half of any sentence that began with the words "We are the only people who..." Almost always the next clause featured some shortcoming of the race and after years spent drenched in the backwaters of Afrocentrism (the patchouli era), I'd had my fill of black specificity.

"We are the only people," came to be an advance warning that I was talking to someone who probably didn't know much about any people other than (a small segment of) black ones. More subtly, an expression of the speaker's fixation on the values of a wider world they both rejected and envied.

I spent the past spring semester teaching African American history at Moscow State University. People tend to toward a common reaction when I mention this. "What was that like?" The inflection hinting that two decades after the end of the Cold War, Russia -- at least in the minds of Americans -- remains foreign in a way that few other places are. There's a lot I could say about that experience but the shorthand version is the we are not the only people.

.............

In the thirteen years I've been teaching African American history, the common theme has been the way in which the black experience has stood outside of, and therefore defined, American democracy. But from the first day in my classroom at Moscow State University, the unintentional theme was the common threads of the past and its weight in the present. Paul Robeson once said that of all the places he'd visited, Russians reminded him the most of Negroes. He had a point.

Russia's serfs were freed just two years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
.....

During World War II somewhere between 20-25 million Soviet citizens were killed, meaning on its most basic terms, that they lost more people in four years than died in the entire course of the Transatlantic slave trade.
.........

I traveled 7000 miles and found myself immersed in a culture that was defined, but not destroyed by brutal history, whose people bore the mark of that past even as they took pride in the fact that other people might not have survived such trials. Familiar.

.......... I was reminded of that blues truth that suffering doesn't recede into the past, it gets handed down through history like an inheritance. What one chooses to do with that inheritance is ultimately the only thing that matters.

So no, we aren't the only people. And the only problem comes with needing to be.

It's great stuff, please read the full post HERE.


And a post "That Russian for 'Hope'":

Jun 18 2010, 12:41 PM ET | Comment
[Jelani Cobb]

If you are a black man teaching African American history in Russia in 2010 you will be asked about Barack Obama. A lot. I began my class by projecting an image of black slaves picking cotton on a plantation alongside a picture of the Obama inauguration and explained that my goal for the semester was to explain how we moved from the picture on the left to the picture on the right.

Yesterday the NYT ran a story on a Pew study of Obama's impact on foreign perceptions of the U.S. abroad. Given the previous administration's antagonism toward the UN and references to "old Europe" it's not exactly surprising that the country's popularity in Western Europe surged post-Bush.

But it was worth noting that Russia was one of the two countries that showed the largest increase in positive sentiment toward the United States since Obama's election.

...........

For it's own reasons, the Soviet Union highlighted the history of slavery, lynching, disfranchisement and Jim Crow. As a consequence, even now the Russian students had more base knowledge of African American history than many students I've taught in the United States.) That said, the election of a black president might have been farther outside their expectations than many other places.

The question I encountered most often was whether or not Obama was actually calling the shots. I initially took that as a matter of racial skepticism—surely the black guy was some sort of racial PR stunt. But at some point I realized that the question also had to be understood in context of who was asking it. Many of the Russians I talked to didn't believe their own president was calling the shots. It wasn't cynical, it was raw experience that made it reasonable to doubt whether Barack Obama was actually in charge.

Read the full post HERE.

Cartoon: Gansta Rap As Modern Day Minstrelsy

I don't know the original publication source of Bill Bramhill's 2005 cartoon:




You might also be interested in this 2007 story on the minstrelization of hip-hop.

White Sorority Wins (African American) Stepping Contest (via The Root)

Can We At Least Keep Stepping to Ourselves?
Nope. We've got to share our traditions. Just like white sorority Zeta Tau Alpha will share their win with Alpha Kappa Alpha.

By: Lawrence C. Ross Jr. | Posted: February 26, 2010 at 6:35 AM

The Root

It’s the closest thing to Armageddon that many Black Greeks have seen since Laurence Fishburne’s character, Dap, ran around the fictitious Mission College campus yelling, “Wake Up!” in the classic movie, School Daze. Stepping, a bastion of black Greek life, has just undergone a revolution, and some black folks are pretty ticked off about it.

It all started on Feb. 20 when Zeta Tau Alpha Sorority, a predominantly white sorority, entered the Sprite Step Off National Step Competition in Atlanta, and beat three National Pan-Hellenic Council sororities: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta and Zeta Phi Beta, winning the $100,000 first prize. While many black Greeks gave the ZTAs their due, the blowback was immediate from a lot of angry black Greeks who couldn’t believe a white sorority could honestly beat black sororities.

.....

And while the nine African-American fraternities and sororities signed a licensing agreement with Sprite, earning an estimated $75,000 per organization, there was nothing in their agreement that prevented a non-African-American fraternity or sorority from competing. Enter Zeta Tau Alpha Sorority from the University of Arkansas.

Immediately after word got out that Zeta Tau Alpha had won, Twitter and Facebook blew up with accusations that Sprite was biased in favor of the white sorority. Others claimed that it was a stunt for MTV2, which broadcasted the contest.

Some postings even said white organizations shouldn’t be allowed to participate in stepping competitions in the first place, since stepping is a black Greek cultural tradition. Others accused Zeta Tau Alpha of being the equivalent of modern-day minstrels, debasing the art form by their very presence.

Then on Feb. 25, Sprite announced on Facebook that they had discovered "a scoring discrepancy" that they could not resolve. They decided to make ZTA and AKA co-winners of the competition, giving each organization $100,000 in prize money.

But in the grand scheme of things, that outcome is a minor detail. There's a bigger principle at stake here. In 25 years as an Alpha, I've helped judge countless stepping contests. And although judging is subjective, there's no way anyone can objectively state that the ZTAs didn't perform to a standard which would merit getting first prize in the Step Off. (See the videos below of the winners and runners-up, and tell me if I’m wrong.)

Zeta Tau Alpha:


And here is Alpha Kappa Alpha:


[M&C note: IMO, with the exception of that leg-on-back-of-neighbor move, which was great, ZTA looked and sounded better in the unaccompanied sections--I say they deserve the win]

The problem with the arguments presented by the critics is that they tend to gloss over the question of whether the Zeta Tau Alpha steppers were actually better than their competition. Instead, most of the criticism has been reactionary and sought to deny Zeta Tau Alpha the opportunity to compete based solely on their skin color.

By doing that, black Greeks do a disservice to our historic legacy. African-American fraternities and sororities were born in circumstances that sought to combat judgments based on race. And to do the same as those who would deny us opportunity, based on the notion that we’re somehow protecting our black cultural integrity, is morally bankrupt.

he founders of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity were denied access to the campus library at Indiana University because they were black. The founders of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority protested when white women ordered them to the back of a women’s suffrage march in Washington, D.C.

Too often, black Greeks place too much significance on stepping, and overemphasize its historical weight. We claim that the stepping tradition was passed down from some ancient African traditions. (It wasn’t.) We claim that we’ve been doing it for nearly a century. (We haven’t.)

According to Philander Smith College president Dr. Walter Kimbrough, author of Black Greek 101 and the person who has done the most research on the origins of stepping, stepping is a relatively recent tradition, growing out of probate shows of the 1970s.

Black cultural traditions like stepping are always nurtured within our community, exposed to the outside world as an artistic gift, and then adapted and adopted by others who want to participate. The idea that our traditions can remain purely “black” is folly.

......

Read the entire post HERE.

The same author also did an op-ed on this for CNN. Check it out.

Henry Louis Gates arrest a signpost on racial road

AP

Analysis: Gates arrest a signpost on racial road
By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP National Writer Jesse Washington, Ap National Writer 25 mins ago

It took less than a day for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates to become racial lore. When one of America's most prominent black intellectuals winds up in handcuffs, it's not just another episode of profiling — it's a signpost on the nation's bumpy road to equality.

The news was parsed and Tweeted, rued and debated. This was, after all Henry "Skip" Gates: Summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale. MacArthur "genius grant" recipient. Acclaimed historian, Harvard professor and PBS documentarian. One of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" in 1997. Holder of 50 honorary degrees.

If this man can be taken away by police officers from the porch of his own home, what does it say about the treatment that average blacks can expect in 2009?

Earl Graves Jr., CEO of the company that publishes Black Enterprise magazine, was once stopped by police during his train commute to work, dressed in a suit and tie.

"My case took place back in 1995, and here we are 14 years later dealing with the same madness," he said Tuesday. "Barack Obama being the president has meant absolutely nothing to white law enforcement officers. Zero. So I have zero confidence that (Gates' case) will lead to any change whatsoever."

The 58-year-old professor had returned from a trip to China last Thursday afternoon and found the front door of his Cambridge, Mass., home stuck shut. Gates entered the back door, forced open the front door with help from a car service driver, and was on the phone with the Harvard leasing company when a white police sergeant arrived.

Gates and the sergeant gave differing accounts of what happened next. But for many people, that doesn't matter.

They don't care that Gates was charged not with breaking and entering, but with disorderly conduct after repeatedly demanding the sergeant's name and badge number. It doesn't matter whether Gates was yelling, or accused Sgt. James Crowley of being racist, or that all charges were dropped Tuesday.

All they see is pure, naked racial profiling.

"Under any account ... all of it is totally uncalled for," said Graves.

"It never would have happened — imagine a white professor, a distinguished white professor at Harvard, walking around with a cane, going into his own house, being harassed or stopped by the police. It would never happen."

Racial profiling became a national issue in the 1990s, when highway police on major drug delivery routes were accused of stopping drivers simply for being black. Lawsuits were filed, studies were commissioned, data was analyzed. "It is wrong, and we will end it in America," President George W. Bush said in 2001.

Yet for every study that concluded police disproportionately stop, search and arrest minorities, another expert came to a different conclusion. "That's always going to be the case," Greg Ridgeway, who has a Ph.D in statistics and studies racial profiling for the RAND research group, said on Monday. "You're never going to be able to (statistically) prove racial profiling. ... There's always a plausible explanation."

Federal legislation to ban racial profiling has languished since being introduced in 2007 by a dozen Democratic senators, including then-Sen. Barack Obama.

U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., said that was partly because "when you look at statistics, and you're trying to prove the extent, the information comes back that there's not nearly as much (profiling) as we continue to experience."

But Davis has no doubt that profiling is real: He says he was stopped while driving in Chicago in 2007 for no reason other than the fact he is black. Police gave him a ticket for swerving over the center line; a judge said the ticket didn't make sense and dismissed it.

"Trying to reach this balance of equity, equal treatment, equal protection under the law, equal understanding, equal opportunity, is something that we will always be confronted with. We may as well be prepared for it," he said.

Amid the indignation over Gates' case, a few people pointed out that he may have violated the cardinal rule of avoiding arrest: Do not antagonize the cops.

The police report said that Gates yelled at the officer, refused to calm down and behaved in a "tumultuous" manner. Gates said he simply asked for the officer's identification, followed him into his porch when the information was not forthcoming, and was arrested for no reason. But something about being asked to prove that you live in your own home clearly struck a nerve — both for Gates and his defenders.

"You feel violated, embarrassed, not sure what is taking place, especially when you haven't done anything," said Graves of his own experience, when police made him face the wall and frisked him in Grand Central Station in New York City. "You feel shocked, then you realize what's happening, and then you feel it's a violation of everything you stand for."

And that this should happen to "Skip" Gates — the unblemished embodiment of President Obama's recent admonition to black America not to search for handouts or favors, but to "seize our own future, each and every day" — shook many people to the core.

Wrote Lawrence Bobo, Gates' Harvard colleague, who picked his friend up from jail: "Ain't nothing post-racial about the United States of America."

___

Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Arrested-Mistaken For Burglar By Neighbor While Entering His Own House

HuffPo

Are you kidding me?

Huffpost - Henry Louis Gates Jr. Arrested, Police Accused Of Racial Profiling

MELISSA TRUJILLO | 07/20/09 09:26 PM

BOSTON — Police responding to a call about "two black males" breaking into a home near Harvard University ended up arresting the man who lives there – Henry Louis Gates Jr., the nation's pre-eminent black scholar.

Gates had forced his way through the front door because it was jammed, his lawyer said. Colleagues call the arrest last Thursday afternoon a clear case of racial profiling.

Cambridge police say they responded to the well-maintained two-story home after a woman reported seeing "two black males with backpacks on the porch," with one "wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry."

By the time police arrived, Gates was already inside. Police say he refused to come outside to speak with an officer, who told him he was investigating a report of a break-in.

"Why, because I'm a black man in America?" Gates said, according to a police report written by Sgt. James Crowley. The Cambridge police refused to comment on the arrest Monday.

Gates – the director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research – initially refused to show the officer his identification, but then gave him a Harvard University ID card, according to police.

"Gates continued to yell at me, accusing me of racial bias and continued to tell me that I had not heard the last of him," the officer wrote.

Gates said he turned over his driver's license and Harvard ID – both with his photos – and repeatedly asked for the name and badge number of the officer, who refused. He said he then followed the officer as he left his house onto his front porch, where he was handcuffed in front of other officers, Gates said in a statement released by his attorney, fellow Harvard scholar Charles Ogletree, on a Web site Gates oversees, TheRoot.com.

He was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge after police said he "exhibited loud and tumultuous behavior." He was released later that day on his own recognizance. An arraignment was scheduled for Aug. 26.

Gates, 58, also refused to speak publicly Monday, referring calls to Ogletree.

"He was shocked to find himself being questioned and shocked that the conversation continued after he showed his identification," Ogletree said.

Ogletree declined to say whether he believed the incident was racially motivated, saying "I think the incident speaks for itself."

Some of Gates' African-American colleagues say the arrest is part of a pattern of racial profiling in Cambridge.

Allen Counter, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard for 25 years, said he was stopped on campus by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.

"We do not believe that this arrest would have happened if professor Gates was white," Counter said. "It really has been very unsettling for African-Americans throughout Harvard and throughout Cambridge that this happened."

The Rev. Al Sharpton is vowing to attend Gates' arraignment.

"This arrest is indicative of at best police abuse of power or at worst the highest example of racial profiling I have seen," Sharpton said. "I have heard of driving while black and even shopping while black but now even going to your own home while black is a new low in police community affairs."

Ogletree said Gates had returned from a trip to China on Thursday with a driver, when he found his front door jammed. He went through the back door into the home – which he leases from Harvard – shut off an alarm and worked with the driver to get the door open. The driver left, and Gates was on the phone with the property's management company when police first arrived.

Ogletree also disputed the claim that Gates, who was wearing slacks and a polo shirt and carrying a cane, was yelling at the officer.

"He has an infection that has impacted his breathing since he came back from China, so he's been in a very delicate physical state," Ogletree said.

Lawrence D. Bobo, the W.E.B Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, said he met with Gates at the police station and described his colleague as feeling humiliated and "emotionally devastated."

"It's just deeply disappointing but also a pointed reminder that there are serious problems that we have to wrestle with," he said.

Bobo said he hoped Cambridge police would drop the charges and called on the department to use the incident to review training and screening procedures it has in place.

The Middlesex district attorney's office said it could not do so until after Gates' arraignment. The woman who reported the apparent break-in did not return a message Monday.

Gates joined the Harvard faculty in 1991 and holds one of 20 prestigious "university professors" positions at the school. He also was host of "African American Lives," a PBS show about the family histories of prominent U.S. blacks, and was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997.

"I was obviously very concerned when I learned on Thursday about the incident," Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust said in a statement. "He and I spoke directly and I have asked him to keep me apprised."

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Mos Def vs. Christopher Hitchens

A deeply personal and great post by Coates pushing back at the nihilism of Mos Def, who he really digs and admires. It pains him to do it, but he does it for the greater good:

A few people have asked me to comment on this. I'm a bit hesitant, because this tape hits me somewhere very personal, and requires that I say some critical things about people I like. I think Mos Def was offering up that corner consciousness, in which brothers preach nihilism under the cover of an alleged "Knowledge of Self" or "Thinking for oneself." I think Christopher Hitchens, rightfully, sonned him. As a Mos Def fan, and member of the hip-hop generation (whatever that means) I felt embarrassed. That's probably not my right, but I felt that way. Here's where it gets really weird, I held one person responsible for the whole debacle--Cornel West.

I don't know that this is fair, but I immediately thought back to when West and Mos Def were on The Bill Maher show and Mos basically said he didn't believe Bin Laden brought down the towers. West pointed out that he disagreed, but instead of pushing Mos, he went into this explanation for why black people tend to be paranoid. His explanation was perfect in substance, but bad for Mos Def. I thought the elder radical owed it to the younger radical to challenge him, to push him past nihilism and paranoia.

Again, this is all about me and my constant ruminations over my status as a lapsed black nationalist. With that in mind, two things need to be said.

Read the full post HERE:

Motown Drummer Uriel Jones dies at 74

Funk Brothers Jones and James Jamerson.

NYT

March 26, 2009
Uriel Jones, a Motown Drummer, Dies at 74
By BEN SISARIO

Uriel Jones, a drummer with the Funk Brothers, the studio musicians at Motown Records who played without credit on virtually every hit during that label’s heyday in the 1960s, died on Tuesday in Dearborn, Mich. He was 74.

The cause was complications of a recent heart attack, his sister-in-law Leslie Coleman said.

Drawn from the ranks of Detroit jazz players by Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of Motown, the Funk Brothers were the label’s regular studio backup band from 1959 to 1972, when Motown moved to Los Angeles and left most of them behind.

The players appeared on songs by Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas and many others, and “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” a 2002 documentary, opens with the claim that they “played on more No. 1 records than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined.” Yet the group remained largely unknown until that film’s release.

The band’s main drummer was the formidable Benny Benjamin, but as he became sidelined by drug addiction, Mr. Jones and another player, Richard Allen, known as Pistol, gradually took over drumming duties. Mr. Benjamin died of a stroke in 1969, and Mr. Allen died in 2002, shortly before the release of the film.

Mr. Jones joined the Funk Brothers around 1963 after touring with Marvin Gaye, and plays on Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” the Miracles’ “Tracks of My Tears,” Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” and Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” among many other songs.

Born in Detroit, Mr. Jones began playing music in high school. But his first instrument was the trombone, said his wife, June. She survives him, along with three children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

“He wanted to box also,” Ms. Jones said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “When he went to band classes his lip was swollen and he couldn’t play the trombone, so he had to switch to the drums.”

Mr. Jones remained in Detroit after Motown left, and continued to play in local clubs with other Funk Brothers alumni, including Earl Van Dyke, the keyboardist, who died in 1992. After “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” Mr. Jones toured widely with other surviving Funk Brothers.

In interviews later, he said he regretted being underpaid, but held no grudges against Motown.

“We know now that we didn’t get the money that we was supposed to,” he told The Call and Post, a Cleveland newspaper, in 2002, “but the way I look at it is, ‘What would my life had been like without Motown?’ I’d rather it had been with Motown.”

How will Obama's presidency change hip-hop?

SLATE
culturebox
Stompin' in My Air Force One
How will Obama's presidency change hip-hop?
By Jonah Weiner
Posted Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009, at 6:50 AM ET

Barack Obama arrived at the Oval Office with a long parade of expectations in tow. One special-interest group with a particularly colorful wish list is the hip-hop community, which has been plotting this moment for years. If Obama makes his policy decisions based on Nas' 1996 single "If I Ruled the World," for instance, he will appoint Coretta Scott King to a mayoralty, fling open the gates of Attica, and grant every citizen an Infiniti Q45. If he follows the Pharcyde's more modestly pitched "If I Were President," he'll buy Michelle some new clothes and treat himself to a new pair of sneakers. If he heeds the urgent lessons of Public Enemy's 1994 video for "So Whatcha Gone Do Now?" Obama will staff the Secret Service exclusively with beret-clad black militants or else risk assassination at the hands of a far-reaching neo-Nazi conspiracy.

Hip-hop fantasies of a black executive have popped up throughout the genre's history, visions of empowerment that speak to a real-life condition of powerlessness. In this sense, they're merely a loftier version of the standard hip-hop fantasies of potency, whether it's sexual domination, VIP access, or street-corner supremacy.

With Obama's win, this dynamic stands to change. For 25-odd years, hip-hop has been black America's main ambassador to the white American mainstream. How will hip-hop see itself now that the most powerful man in the country is a) black and b) a Jay-Z fan? Obama is doubtless the warmest—and smartest—rap critic ever to take the oath of office. When he has praised hip-hop, he has done so with near-impeccable taste. (His admiration for Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Ludacris, and Kanye West would displease no rap blogger worth his RSS feed.) When he's criticized it, he's spoken with none of the condescension or cluelessness politicians often bring to the endeavor. For him, hip-hop is an art form, not culture-war fodder. "I love the art of hip-hop," he told MTV last year. "I don't always love the message." Though it's too early to say precisely how, there are already clues as to the effect Obama's rise will have on both.

In the short term, the answer is simple: euphoria. Since November, Young Jeezy has teamed up with Jay-Z for a remix of the former's "My President," in which Obama figures as the ultimate status symbol: "My president is black, my Maybach too." Busta Rhymes and Ron Browz released a remix of the club hit "Pop Champagne," the title of which rhymes neatly, they discovered, with "Barack campaign." Nas, Common, and will.i.am recorded giddy follow-ups to the Obama-boosting tracks they penned during his run.

In the long term, one useful way to imagine Obama's effect on hip-hop is to consider the music that might have resulted from his defeat: probably some of the angriest hip-hop we'd have heard since the late '80s and early '90s. That was the era of N.W.A, young men broadcasting wrathfully from blighted Compton; Public Enemy, Long Island agitators with the Panthers in their hearts and revolution on the brain; and a subsequent school of East Coasters, Nas and Mobb Deep among them, who traded sawed-off animus for a hollowed-out, anaesthetized cool. Despite hip-hop's prosperous rise in the intervening years, an Obama loss would have offered a painful reminder of the ways black success in America remains circumscribed.

Does his win risk obscuring this? Will Obama make grappling with social inequity and racial injustice trickier for rappers? It can be harder to speak truth to power when power looks like you. The rap duo Dead Prez exemplifies this dilemma with the recent "PolitriKKKs," a song that offsets conciliatory language—"I don't want to discourage my folk, I believe in hope"—with skepticism about the new president: "Either way it's still white power, it's the same system, it just changed form." In three months, the song's official video has notched a scant 12,200 views on YouTube—a would-be party crasher turned away at the door, left to hawk downers in the parking lot.

The predicament doesn't just apply to rabble-rousers like Dead Prez. There is something inherently radical about hip-hop, period, a genre in which the historically voiceless command the microphone and, from the repurposed DJ equipment of hip-hop's South Bronx infancy to the artist-owned labels of today, the means of production. Obama's rise might weaken the position of those less explicitly political MCs, for instance, who rap about the allure of the drug trade in neighborhoods low on viable careers, or those whose gangsta tales make an implicit point about the conditions that create gangstas in the first place. Even an unabashedly crass commercialist like 50 Cent casts his boasts of alpha-male domination as a socioeconomic symptom: "Some say I'm gangsta, some say I'm crazy—if you ask me, I say I'm what the 'hood made me." Going forward, there may be less patience for this line of thinking. Our president overcame the disadvantages of growing up black and fatherless—what's your excuse?

This raises another point, about Obama the role model. For years, America's most visible black heroes have been athletes and entertainers; commentators have observed that Obama's place in the mainstream imagination was prepared for him by people like Arthur Ashe, Sydney Poitier, Tiger Woods, and Will Smith. We can add to this list Jay-Z, probably the most iconic hip-hop role model of all time. Indeed, the two men form a mutual appreciation society: Jay-Z has called himself "the Barack of rhymers"; Obama appropriated Jay's shoulder-brush maneuver on the stump and gave him choice inauguration seats.

Their affinity goes deeper. Among Jay-Z's masterstrokes is that he never tried to rewrite the rules of the game beyond the one that said a black man couldn't win. While he takes pains to portray his success as, at bottom, a racial coup, he's never been interested in dismantling the status quo so much as infiltrating and mastering it. This is a fair description of what Obama did, too—with one crucial exception. For Jay-Z, the fact that he got rich as a businessman constitutes its own rebellion. Obama, though, is a former community organizer who chose public service over private-sector paychecks. His example might open up new sorts of narratives in hip-hop, ones where power isn't a synonym for wealth.

In this regard, T.I.'s 2008 CD, Paper Trail, might be the first proper album of the Obama age. It is a work of personal reckoning well-suited for the "new era of responsibility," the bipolar chronicle of a gangsta passionately defending and critiquing the choices that have brought hard times upon him. (T.I. will be headed to jail this year for amassing a small ballistics stockpile.) "Your values is in disarray, prioritizing horribly," he raps, "unhappy with the riches 'cause you're piss-poor morally." This might mark the first time that moral shortcoming has been invoked in a diss rhyme—and the line gains heft when you imagine T.I. aiming it not just at competitors but at himself. More recently, the flamboyantly boorish Cam'ron released a charmingly downsized single, "I Hate My Job," which imagines the daily frustrations of an office girl with dreams of a nursing career and an ex-con trying to re-enter the workforce. At a basic level, Obama—and, to be sure, the recession—has put social awareness into vogue, and if he helps to foreclose a certain radicalism in hip-hop, these examples suggest a new style of political engagement, distinct from the long-marginalized sermons of so-called conscious rap.

What changes would Obama himself like to see? In campaign-trail interviews, he said he could do with less materialism, misogyny, and N-words in the music, even as he recognized the complex circumstances that foster those preoccupations. Talking about rap, he often sounds like the hip homeroom teacher affectionately telling his students to stand up straight. In one of Obama's most widely circulated quotes about hip-hop, he offered a gentle sartorial admonishment: "Brothers should pull their pants up." On the score of materialism and misogyny, his wish might come true. Getting natural-waist jeans into heavy rotation on BET? Well, fixing the economy might be easier.
Jonah Weiner is a senior editor at Blender and has written about music for the Village Voice and the New York Times.

Music for Many Firsts at Inauguration Events

NYT
January 22, 2009
Music Review
Music for Many Firsts at Inauguration Events
By JON PARELES

President Obama danced his way through 10 official inaugural balls on Tuesday night to the song “At Last,” which was a hit for Glenn Miller in 1941 and, more influentially, in 1961 for Etta James. Her version made the song, written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, an R&B standard and a wedding perennial. It has been revived and recorded steadily ever since by performers including, most recently, Beyoncé, who sang it for Mr. Obama’s first public dance as president at the Neighborhood Ball, broadcast on ABC.

A good campaigner wields symbols deftly, and Mr. Obama chose brilliantly with “At Last.” It’s an adoring, slow-dance love song with a title that can evoke far more. Politicos can take it to mean the end of the Bush administration and the Democrats taking control. And Americans of all ethnicities can take it as a clear reference to Mr. Obama becoming the first African-American president: a decisive turning point in a history of slavery and racial discrimination. The song treats the moment not with self-righteousness or resentment, but as a long-awaited embrace: “Here we are in heaven/for you are mine at last.”

Music had long anticipated this moment. African-Americans repaid the historical injustice of slavery with generous and profound cultural gifts, making American music a free-for-all where fertile, powerful ideas — like swing, call-and-response, the modes and phrasing of the blues, the drive and dynamics of gospel and the immediacy of hip-hop — could triumph in the marketplace and on the dance floor.

For performers of every background, American popular music (and much of the world’s popular music) is, unmistakably, African-American music. Americans have long accepted black musicians as stars; sooner or later, politics had to follow. And Mr. Obama’s inaugural events, which strove to involve everyone, were suffused with African-American soul like the rest of American pop culture. Aretha Franklin, wearing an outsized, glamorized church-lady hat, sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the swearing-in ceremony with the flamboyance of a gospel hymn: “Let freedom ring, let it ring!”

The evening before, at a concert to mark Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Ms. Franklin treated her free concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts like a gospel service, including only one secular song (“Chain of Fools”) and hurling her voice skyward while promising to praise Jesus everywhere. “I’ll stand up and tell it in the White House!” she declared.

The language of gospel, blended with secular American optimism, emerged in Mr. Obama’s campaign slogans, like “Change you can believe in.” Now, savoring the outcome of that campaign while considering the state of the nation, the inaugural music drew on another cornerstone of African-American tradition: the determination to face troubles and hard times with hope. The inauguration’s official face was bookended with those two aspects of the music, moving in two days from a somber introduction to a joyful finale.

The earnest opening ceremony televised on Sunday from the Lincoln Memorial, which HBO telecast free for cable and satellite viewers, was more than aware of the symbolism of Lincoln as emancipator and of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington.

The chords and choirs of gospel music were used by Bruce Springsteen (with “The Rising”) and even the country singer Garth Brooks to sing about striving for better times. Stevie Wonder (with Usher and Shakira) sang his socially conscious “Higher Ground” at the Lincoln Memorial, then returned at the determinedly upbeat Neighborhood Ball, with an all-star singalong on his “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours.”

Song titles told the story at the Neighborhood Ball: Sting (with Mr. Wonder on harmonica) with “Brand New Day,” Shakira singing Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road,” Mariah Carey with “Hero.”

Bill Clinton’s 1993 pre-inaugural concert showed his baby-boomer taste, for good and bad. Bob Dylan performed “Chimes of Freedom” on the Lincoln Memorial steps, followed two days later by an Inauguration Eve concert filled with presumably reassuring 1970s soft rock from Fleetwood Mac and Barry Manilow. Political differences offered George W. Bush less of a talent pool; Wayne Newton, the country duo Brooks & Dunn and the Latin pop singer Ricky Martin (who would later turn against Mr. Bush over the Iraq war) performed at his pre-inaugural event.

Stars who had shunned the politics of the Bush administration happily flocked to Washington for Mr. Obama’s inauguration. “Today is the beginning of no more separation, no more segregation!” Mary J. Blige exulted at the Neighborhood Ball before singing her own “Just Fine,” a song about hard-won self-esteem. (Two days earlier, at the Lincoln Memorial, she had poured emotion into Bill Withers’s comforting song “Lean On Me.”)

While it was a gospel and soul inauguration, it was also a hip-hop inauguration. Rappers who are charismatic, articulate, self-made successes may well see Mr. Obama as one of their own; he also gives them someone to boast about besides themselves.

Jay-Z, who performed his “History” at the Neighborhood Ball, also headlined a premium-priced concert on Monday night at the Warner Theater, a few blocks from the White House. Among his guests was Young Jeezy, who has a song called “My President Is Black”; Jay-Z added verses of his own: “My president is black/In fact he’s half white/So even in the racist mind/he’s half right.”

It continued, “My president is black/but his house is all white.”

The Youth Ball, an official inaugural event telecast on MTV, featured Kanye West — a Chicagoan, like Mr. Obama — who rewrote his song “Heartless” to pay tribute to the new president: “From miles around they came to see him speak/The story that he told/to save a country that’s so blue/that they thought had lost its soul/the American dream come true tonight.”

Other constituencies presented unofficial events, celebrating their new sense of inclusion and, perhaps, reminding the incoming administration of their clout and attention. There were musical celebrations from Chicago independent rockers, from the voter-registration group Rock the Vote and from the gay, lesbian and transgender voters of the Human Rights Campaign. At a Latino Inaugural Gala on Sunday night, more than a dozen legislators and two cabinet nominees turned out along with salsa, pop, mariachi and Latin rock bands to celebrate a Hispanic turnout that voted 2 to 1 for Mr. Obama, which provided the margin of victory in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico.

In pop as in politics, self-promotion is never off the agenda. Michelle, Sasha and Malia Obama were dancing in the front row at the Kids’ Inaugural on Monday, telecast on the Disney Channel, where Disney-nurtured stars of tween-pop including the Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato sang their peppy hits about “burning up” and breaking up. With sublime shamelessness, Miley Cyrus looked at Mr. Obama’s daughters and said, “Girls, I know you guys must be awful proud of your dad, and so am I,” then brought her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, onstage to sing.

While the new president’s politics and identity were the overwhelming draws for so many musical celebrants — bringing out countless performances electrified by the moment — he also has a musical ace in the hole: his name.

The percussive “Barack” followed by the three open-voweled syllables of “Obama” give him the most singable name in presidential history, and from the National Mall to the inaugural balls, amateurs and stars alike kept finding new ways to chant, sing and shout it.

AACM: Four Decades of Music That Redefined Free

New York Times
May 2, 2008
By NATE CHINEN

“First of all, No. 1, there’s original music, only.”

Those words would have consequences, yielding everything from runic silence to braying cacophony, from open improvisation to orchestral scores. Baubles and bells. Bicycle horns. The rumble of a hundred tubas. Ancient drums and electronic striations, and flashes of full-tilt swing.

The pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams uttered that statement of purpose one afternoon some 43 years ago, in a meeting on the South Side of Chicago. In the process he laid the groundwork for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization that has fostered some of the most vital American avant-garde music of the last 40 years.

Though noncommercial, often pointedly conceptual and unabashedly arcane, this music has had a profound influence over the years on several generations of experimental musicians worldwide.

The scene plays out vividly in “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and Experimental Music,” an important book by the trombonist-composer-scholar George Lewis due out from the University of Chicago Press this month. Reconstructing that inaugural meeting from audio tapes, Mr. Lewis conveys not only Mr. Abrams’s aim but also the vigorous debate begun by his notion of “original music.” (Whose music? How original?) From the start, it’s clear, the association expressed its firm ideals partly through collective discourse.

Next Friday night another sort of discourse will unfold at the Community Church of New York in Murray Hill, when the association convenes a panel discussion with a handful of its current members, including Mr. Lewis, the multireedist Henry Threadgill and the pianist and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers. The conversation will precede a concert featuring Mr. Lewis and Mr. Abrams in an improvising trio with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

The evening was conceived largely as a celebration of Mr. Lewis’s book, which in turn was conceived largely as a celebration of the organization, an African-American body now rooted in both Chicago and New York. Mr. Lewis narrates its development with exacting context and incisive analysis, occasionally delving into academic cultural theory. But because the book includes biographical portraits of so many participating musicians, it’s a swift, engrossing read.

“I told George, ‘It’s like you wrote a Russian family novel of the A.A.C.M.,’ ” said the critic Greg Tate, who will moderate the panel.

Mr. Abrams reflected on the book and the organization last week in a conversation on the roof terrace of the apartment building in Clinton where he has lived since 1977. “The A.A.C.M. is a group of individuals who agree to agree, or sometimes not to agree,” he said. “Our cohesiveness has been intact because we respect each other’s individualism.”

Mr. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case professor of American music and the director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, offered a similar thought. “As I saw it,” he said in his office, “here’s a group of people who had a robust conversation going on, with basically no holds barred, and yet managed to manage their diversity without falling apart, without falling into factionalism.”

Such is the basic philosophy of an association once pegged by the jazz critic Whitney Balliett as “a black musical self-help group.” Three years ago, as part of its 40th-anniversary celebration, some clearer definitions emerged at a colloquium presented by the Guelph Jazz Festival in Ontario.

The saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell began by recalling how the organization grew out of the Experimental Band, led by Mr. Abrams on the South Side of Chicago. “We wanted to have a place where we could sponsor each other in concerts of our original compositions; provide a training program for young, aspiring musicians in the community; reach out to other people and other cities; and have exchange programs,” he said.

Noticeably absent from Mr. Mitchell’s description, and from the language of the early planning meetings, was the word jazz. This was partly in keeping with the arm’s length the organization intended to establish between its art and the commercial realm of nightclubs, then the de facto setting for any African-American art music. Partly, too, these musicians were concerned with a breadth of style that reached beyond jazz, to encompass serious classical composition, as well as music from Africa and the East. Having inherited the new freedoms of 1960s jazz innovators like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, the artists in this movement were ready for a next step, one they could claim as their own.

“This is a book about mobility and agency,” Mr. Lewis said. He links this impulse conceptually to the Great Migration, illuminating how the association’s first generation came from families that had moved to Chicago from a postslavery South. He examines the continuing debate over the organization’s exclusion of nonblack musicians, shedding new light on the phrase Great Black Music, which many in the association adopted.

“What a lot of us are looking for,” he added, “is a much more open-ended conversation than any simplistic prescriptions of blackness will allow.”

Pluralism has always been an ideal of the organization. Reporting on a marathon WKCR radio broadcast in 1977, Mr. Balliett quoted one unidentified member, responding to a question of style: “The A.A.C.M. sound? If you take all the sounds of all the A.A.C.M. musicians and put them together, that’s the A.A.C.M. sound, but I don’t think anyone’s heard that yet.”

The utopian tinge of such language was hardly lost on the artists themselves. “If this was to be a revolution,” Mr. Lewis writes, “it would be a revolution without stars, individual heroes or Great Men.”

But the association has had its share of great men (and a few great women): audacious improvisers like the trumpeter Lester Bowie, the tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson and the violinist Leroy Jenkins; visionary composers like Mr. Abrams, Ms. Myers, Mr. Threadgill, Mr. Mitchell and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the most celebrated of all its groups, has always principally emphasized the elusive chemistry of its players, who in the group’s heyday included Mr. Bowie and Mr. Mitchell alongside the multireedist Joseph Jarman, the bassist Malachi Favors and the drummer Famoudou Don Moye.

Yet even in the most solitary of settings — the solo saxophone recital, as represented by Mr. Braxton’s landmark 1968 album, “For Alto” (Delmark) — the aesthetic of the organization called for something other than the jazzman’s heroic voice. For this reason, Mr. Lewis said, the association represents a postmodern ideal: “You’re thinking about it in terms of multiple subjectivities rather than a unified subject.”

Unlike Coltrane or even Ornette Coleman, who each developed a recognizably penetrating sound, these artists largely favored a sense of identity that was protean and slippery. And their resistance to habitual gestures was fierce.

“With the A.A.C.M., you’re not rooted in a set of simple, codifiable practices,” Mr. Lewis said, “but you’re rooted in an attitude, in a creation of an atmosphere, in an orientation to experience.”

Not surprisingly, this approach never enjoyed mass acceptance, though the Art Ensemble of Chicago has always played to large concert audiences. The greater impact of the association has been felt among other artists. It inspired the formation of the Black Artists Group in St. Louis in the late 1960s. And as its first generation gradually relocated to New York in the 1970s, its experimental ethos connected with a larger circle of musicians. One was the alto saxophonist and composer John Zorn, a chief architect of the so-called downtown scene of the 1980s and ’90s.

Mr. Lewis’s book takes a cleareyed view of the historic tensions between the Chicago and New York chapters of the association. Within his narrative those tensions sit side by side, unresolved, as they are in real life. The flutist Nicole Mitchell, a younger member of the organization who now serves as its first chairwoman, suggested as much in an e-mail message this week: “New York and Chicago will continue to be very distinct organizations.”

But Ms. Mitchell, who lives in Chicago, framed those differences in positive terms. “For example, new members only come through in Chicago, and the A.A.C.M. School only exists in Chicago.” She was referring to the organization’s educational program, which, as she put it, “continues to fill a gap that is still present today on Chicago’s South Side.” And she pointed out that the two chapters had grown much more interactive in recent years, partly as a result of events surrounding the 40th anniversary in 2005.

Matana Roberts, an alto saxophonist, weighed in as a younger member of the Chicago chapter who now lives in New York. “The Chicago organization and the New York organization have different goals,” she said. “The people who came to New York were pretty major performers on an international level, whereas there are a lot of people in Chicago who perform on more of a local level. So I think there has been a lot of misunderstanding. But in the last five or six years, things seem to be pretty well connected.”

The association’s presence in New York can be harder to find than it is in Chicago, but it has grown increasingly pervasive. Certainly its spirit of self-preservation and collectivity can be found in the Vision Festival, presented each June on the Lower East Side by the artist-run nonprofit organization Arts for Art. (This year’s event will feature performances by numerous members of the association, including Mr. Lewis.) A related entity, Rise Up Creative Music and Arts, has been presenting performances each weekend this spring, also on the Lower East Side. On Friday the series will feature Ms. Roberts in a solo performance.

The association’s practices can also be found around the city on a regular basis, thanks to artists like the pianist Vijay Iyer, a nonmember who has worked extensively as a sideman with Mr. Smith and Mr. Mitchell. Both of the albums released by Mr. Iyer last month reflect his deep experience with the organization; one, “Door” (Pi), is a product of the collective trio Fieldwork, which could be considered a sort of unofficial byproduct of the association. (Fieldwork’s other two members are the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who has backed Mr. Abrams in concert, and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, who is now a teaching assistant for Mr. Lewis.)

For Mr. Lewis, who began work on “A Power Stronger Than Itself” more than a decade ago as a professor in the music department at the University of California, San Diego, the association presents a continuing story, especially given the relatively recent arrival of talent like Ms. Mitchell and Ms. Roberts. And as he has demonstrated in his own career, the older members of the organization have continued to create and innovate.

Mr. Abrams made much the same point. “Certainly there has been great development, and I think at the base of that development is constant work,” he said.

And at the heart of that work? Originality, of course. Or as Mr. Abrams put it, “The word and the work are the same.”

'Why?': Remembering Nina Simone's Tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King. Jr.

NPR

Visit NPR for the audio of the story, including clips of Simone's performance.

'Why?': Remembering Nina Simone's Tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King. Jr.

Weekend Edition Sunday, April 6, 2008 - Three days after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, performer Nina Simone and her band played at the Westbury Music Festival on Long Island, N.Y. They performed "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)," a song they had just learned, written by their bass player Gene Taylor in reaction to King's death.

Simone's brother, Samuel Waymon, who was on stage playing the organ, talks with Lynn Neary about that day and reaction to the civil rights leader's assassination.

"We learned that song that (same) day," says Waymon. "We didn't have a chance to have two or three days of rehearsal. But when you're feeling compassion and outrage and wanting to express what you know the world is feeling, we did it because that's what we felt."

Waymon and the band's performance of "Why? (Then King of Love is Dead)" lasted nearly 15 minutes as Nina Simone sang, played and sermonized about the loss everyone was feeling.

The song later appeared on several greatest-hits collections, most recently on the Anthology release from RCA.

Here's a YouTube video:

Guitarist-activist Vernon Reid on how MLK's death affected black music

THE ROOT
King: The Soundtrack
A conversation with guitarist-activist Vernon Reid on how MLK's death affected black music.
By Martin Johnson
TheRoot.com
Updated: 12:55 PM ET Apr 3, 2008

April 4, 2008--If you liked music, then the Johnson home was the place to be in the late '60s. My brother Phillip always had the latest Motown or Stax singles. My sister Phyllis (yes, they're twins) played the Beatles, and the Stones, and of course Sly and the Family Stone. When he was home from college, my eldest brother, Byron, listened to blues and this guy with an especially raspy voice that he just called Bob (as if he was a friend from around the way). In addition, my Dad liked to play his Miles Davis, Lambert Hendricks and Ross or Duke Ellington records whenever possible, while my mother seemed to know the words to every Burt Bacharach-Hal David song (or at least every one sung by Dionne Warwick).

The South Side of Chicago had lots of great music pouring out of its homes, but I'm sure we ranked near the top of the charts.

Music added an ever-playing soundtrack to what was already a lively place. Our kitchen doubled as a salon where my parents, siblings, and their friends, held forth on a variety of issues of the day: the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the latest goings on with Mayor Daley and what not. I didn't watch much TV growing up; listening to the discussions in the kitchen was much more interesting. I felt like I was privy to a very cool scene.

The events of April 4, 1968 struck us like a ton of bricks. I was only eight and still sorting out the vernacular of violence. I needed to know if shot meant killed and if killed meant dead. I thought these were simple yes or no questions, but I got mostly anguish in response.

We used to turn off the music to listen to Dr. King's speeches. That night we turned off the radio.

Eventually music came back on in the Johnson household, and as the weeks and months began to pass, even my young ears could discern a change in the sounds. The happy, optimistic sounds that had characterized much of my sibling's playlists had become wary, stern and borderline confrontational.

What would soon follow the harrowing days of April 1968 was an era of black self determinism in popular music that remains unparalleled. The line between musician and activist blurred.

I recently discussed this era with guitarist/activist Vernon Reid. He started with the groundbreaking electric jazz group, Ron Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society and went on to form the pioneering rock band Living Colour. In 1985, he cofounded The Black Rock Coalition, an organization that helped pave the way for artists of color to resume a more self deterministic path for their music. His work over the last decade has created dynamic fusions between rock and electronic music.

Reid is also an enthusiastic student of music and culture and a critical thinker. We exchanged e-mail recently about the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination and the effect it had on the evolution of black popular music:

MJ: Where were you on April 4, 1968, how did the news of Dr. King's assassination hit you, and what was the reaction in your Brooklyn neighborhood?

Vernon Reid: It was one of the darkest days of my childhood. Both my parents were very distraught. My father was furious. My mother was as sad as could be. I remember people shouting in the streets--The public rage and sorrow was palpable. My aunts were very upset.... My Catholic Middle school was very quiet too, everyone acknowledged the seriousness of the event. There was a palpable sense that White America itself had done it. Of course, most white folks were deeply ashamed and horrified at the crime too, but these were extremely polarized times. President Johnson, for all his flaws, set the right tone when he addressed the nation at the time of the tragedy, thinking back.

MJ: By most accounts, the '60s were part of a golden era for black music, as styles evolved rapidly in many different places, especially Detroit and Memphis, but elsewhere too and sometimes on black-owned labels. However, with the exception of songs like "I'm Black and I'm Proud" and the work of Nina Simone, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, before King's killing most music engaged in little social commentary.

Vernon Reid: Black People have always had to watch "what we say" for fear of the consequences and repercussions of our speech. From the Republic's earliest days, the poet, the pundit, the wit, and the troubadour of African descent have always been acutely aware of the expectations and temperament of audience they've faced, very careful to conceal the reality of the lives we've been forced to live, while simultaneously bearing witness to the myriad joys and sufferings of life under varying degrees of constant oppression.

It's a neat trick. Part of the genius of Institutional Racism is that long after Ol' Massa's Gone Away and The Last Overseer hung up his whip, fear has been a constant companion of the African American, justified or not. Black performers are uniquely vulnerable to that fear, because the stage exposes and further objectifies. The safest route then is to merely entertain, to make and keep people "happy" (unchallenged and unchanged, but edified). Not to take anything away from the skill and talent required. This is a long and powerful tradition, subverted, raged, and signified against, but potent nonetheless.

The `60's Era was a massive turning point in Black popular culture with regards to social commentary---incendiary change was in the air; the fiery rhetoric of X and King among many others was not to be ignored-while pop music like Motown's was in denial, folk singers like Odetta and Richie Havens heard it all loud and clear, as did jazz artists like Coltrane, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus... In a supreme irony, Hoover's F.B.I. was searching for the seeds of revolution in Martha and The Vandellas.

MJ: A Change Was Gonna Come, however. What impact do you attribute to the death of great leaders like Dr. King and Malcolm X?

Vernon Reid: The words and subsequent deaths of King and X had a tremendous effect on a wide range of African American musical artists--the civil rights movement was a motif in much of the work of Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, The Isley Brothers, War, Mandrill, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, etc.

In jazz, the evolution of Coltrane's journey into freedom and abstraction was arguably of a piece with the progressive and radical social movements of the time. The screaming saxophone became synonymous with the idea of international black self-determination. With that said, the Deaths of X and King were designed to send another message--this is what happens to Dreamers and Malcontents who step out of line--once again The Fear made flesh asserts itself- Watch your step- It's as current as the unarmed deaths of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell.

MJ: In the years that followed the King assassination, it seemed that black popular music moved toward social commentary and a mood of self determinism took root. Marvin Garye made his opus, What's Going On. Edwin Starr's "War" was a pop hit. The Temptations Masterpiece, and oodles of songs by Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scot-Herron and others laid bare the truth about life on the streets and discontent in the community.

What changed and how? Was an iconoclast like Jimi Hendrix influential in his style, if not the way that he brought a new level of virtuosity to music?

Vernon Reid: I believe that Hendrix represented the pinnacle of the American Drama--an unruly avatar who heedlessly commingled tradition and anarchy to radically re-invent the role of electric guitar, and radically expand the notion of Black Identity by exploring it's outer reaches.

MJ: For you, what were the highlights of this era?

Vernon Reid: Jimi's version of the "Star Spangled Banner" during the final set of Woodstock was a defining moment, as was The Band Of Gypsies second set version of "Machine Gun" on New Year's eve 1970. Marvin's "What's Going On" is a masterwork, Miles' work from "In A Silent Way" on into the `70's. Gil Scott Heron's "Winter In America" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." War's "The World Is A Ghetto." Sly's "There's A Riot Going On." JB's "A Revolution Of The Mind." "We People Who Are Darker Than Blue" by Curtis Mayfield. "To Be Young Gifted And Black" by Nina Simone. Fela' Kuti's "Expensive Sh*t." The very first rock concert I ever saw was Funkadelic at Madison Square Garden supporting Cosmic Slop-now that was a highlight!

MJ: Why did it end?

Vernon Reid: A decade of war. upheaval, and assassinations from Kennedy to King had exacted a generational toll. It's instructive that Marvin Gaye's next big single after "What's Going On" was "Let's Get It On"- no less of an iconic song, but a harbinger of the Me Decade to come.

MJ: Was reviving the latitude of this era, one of your principal motives in starting the Black Rock Coalition in 1985?

Vernon Reid: The BRC was the start of a community of outsiders who refused to know their expected place. We were certainly influenced by a powerful and courageous legacy of activists like Medgar Evers and Angela Davis on the one hand and artists like Hendrix, Miles, Sly, Ornette, Coltrane, Simone, Mayfield. It was also influenced by the then current artistry of artists like Prince, Fishbone, AR Kane, and Bad Brains who lit the way forward.

Martin Johnson is a New York-based writer.

Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes

New York Times
December 2, 2007
Music
Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

NASHVILLE

TWO years ago, the book “Lost Delta Found” criticized the American folklorist Alan Lomax for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the 1940s. Maybe more important, the book argued that our appreciation of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider audience. With the release of “Recording Black Culture,” an album consisting largely of newly unearthed acetates made by one of the collectors, John Work III, we now have the music itself to buttress this claim.

Mr. Work, the most eminent of the black folklorists, was not merely an acolyte of Mr. Lomax but clearly had ideas of his own. Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Mr. Work sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on “Recording Black Culture,” instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.

Robert Gordon, who edited “Lost Delta Found” with Bruce Nemerov, cites the hot, driving piano on Mr. Work’s recording of a group of Primitive Baptist women singing a song called “I Am His, He Is Mine” as an example.

“There’s nascent boogie-woogie in that music,” said Mr. Gordon, who has also written a biography of the blues singer Muddy Waters, whom Mr. Work and Mr. Lomax recorded on their trip to Coahoma County, Miss., in 1941. “That piano would have made many loyal churchgoers angry: a harbinger of the response to R&B and rock ’n’ roll.”

The pressing harmonic and rhythmic interplay of the Heavenly Gate Quartet singing “If I Had My Way” offers further evidence of this evolution. The heavy syncopation heard there and in Mr. Work’s recording of the Fairfield Four’s “Walk Around in Dry Bones” presage doo-wop a good decade before vocal groups like the Clovers and the Coasters would establish it as the soundtrack for young black America in the 1950s.

This isn’t to claim Dead Sea Scrolls-like significance for the music on the new CD. Black Americans, though, were making the transition from rural to urban life. Spirituals were being supplanted by music that was more agreeable to black communities in which congregations were buying pianos so they could play the songs of contemporary gospel composers like the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey during worship. Mr. Work was committed to capturing these changes as they were happening rather than after the fact.

Issued by Spring Fed Records, a label based in Woodbury, Tenn., “Recording Black Culture” demonstrates not only Mr. Work’s understanding of the dynamic way vernacular music functioned in black culture but also his omnivorous musical appetite. In addition to dramatic examples of gospel singers anticipating rock ’n’ roll, the selections include rare recordings ranging from black Sacred Harp singing to the virtuoso banjo playing of Nathan Frazier, performing as half of the banjo-and-fiddle duo Frazier & Patterson.

Classically trained at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (now a part of Juilliard), Mr. Work became a professor of music at Fisk University in Nashville; from 1947 to 1966 he was the director of the school’s spirituals chorus, the Jubilee Singers. His son John Work IV recalled that his father, who died in 1967, was also conversant with jazz.

“I remember Duke Ellington coming to the house on at least three occasions,” John Work IV wrote in an e-mail message from New York City. “On one of these, I am sure that I was a slight embarrassment to my father when Maestro Ellington went to the piano and played ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and one other major composition and I could recognize neither.”

Mr. Work’s expansive grasp of black music was reflected in his approach to collecting source material. “Instead of pigeonholing musicians in terms of what he wanted them to play, Work acted as a fly on the wall and recorded what was there at the moment,” said Evan Hatch, the producer with Mr. Nemerov of “Recording Black Culture.” “He accepted what was indicative of the culture, as opposed to only going after what he expected or thought should be there.”

Mr. Work’s method of documenting the music proved a corrective to the sometimes romantic approach of Mr. Lomax, who viewed the spiritual, for example, as the apex of black culture and largely ignored the new sounds emerging from Southern black churches. “Blues had become established,” Mr. Gordon said, “and churchgoers began to ask, ‘Why should the devil get all the good tunes?’”

Mr. Lomax also seemed preoccupied with old work songs at a time when the cotton fields were becoming mechanized. “Workers weren’t just dragging the big sacks behind them in the fields anymore,” Mr. Nemerov explained. “Muddy Waters was a tractor driver.

“But to be fair to the Lomaxes,” he added, referring both to Mr. Lomax and to his father, the pioneering folklorist John Lomax, “they were interested in preserving music that wasn’t going to be around in 10 years’ time. You can’t fault them for that, but not knowing all the details, modern listeners get a skewed view of what black people liked to sing. Thus you have people listening to this music 20 or 30 years later going, ‘Oh, look, black people love to sing ‘Go Down, Moses,’ when that wasn’t really the case.”

Racial dynamics at the time might have contributed to the Lomaxes’ view of the music. Because of the prevalence of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, many Southern blacks might have been wary of white folklorists from the Northeast. As a black man and a Southerner, Mr. Work would have had a much easier time gaining entree to churches, dances and other social events than would his white counterparts.

“Work clearly would have had a rapport with the church singers, especially with the church hierarchy, being from a religiously based college like Fisk,” said David Evans, the director of the doctoral program in ethnomusicology at the University of Memphis. “There was also the reputation of the Jubilee Singers. All of that would have given him a kind of in.”

Unable in some cases to gain such access, the Lomaxes turned to the prisons, where inmates like Lead Belly had no choice but to sing at the warden’s bidding. “Lead Belly of course is an icon of American music, so it’s not to be dismissed,” said Mr. Nemerov. “Nevertheless, the Lomaxes gave America a very peculiar view of black music. Professor Work’s recordings give us a much more balanced view, both in terms of music and social class, of the black culture of the time.”

Why Mr. Work did not publicize the acetates that have been meticulously remastered on “Recording Black Culture” remains unclear. When Mr. Nemerov found the discs in the attic of the Work home near the Fisk campus a few years ago, they appeared to have been played frequently, suggesting that they were dear to Mr. Work.

Some of the recordings that he had made with Mr. Lomax, largely the work songs and spirituals favored by Mr. Lomax, had been deposited in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. The rest of the performances, which have gone unheard by the public for the better part of seven decades, give a more expansive view of the black vernacular music of the time.

“Professor Work had big ears,” Mr. Nemerov said. “The overarching theme here is just how much music there was in the black community before World War II. It just seemed to be everywhere, and in every layer of black culture, not just in the cotton fields and prisons.”

The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise

September 23, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise
By DAVID MARGOLICK

FIFTY years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle — until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.

On the night of Sept. 17, 1957, two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour with his All Stars band in Grand Forks. Larry Lubenow, meanwhile, was a 21-year-old journalism student and jazz fan at the University of North Dakota, moonlighting for $1.75 an hour at The Grand Forks Herald.

Shortly before Mr. Armstrong’s concert, Mr. Lubenow’s editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an interview. Perhaps sensing trouble — Mr. Lubenow was, he now says, a “rabble-rouser and liberal” — his boss laid out the ground rules: “No politics,” he ordered. That hardly seemed necessary, for Mr. Armstrong rarely ventured into such things anyway. “I don’t get involved in politics,” he once said. “I just blow my horn.”

But Mr. Lubenow was thinking about other things, race relations among them. The bell captain, with whom he was friendly, had told him that Mr. Armstrong was quietly making history in Grand Forks, as he had done innumerable times and ways before, by becoming the first black man ever to stay at what was then the best hotel in town. Mr. Lubenow knew, too, that Grand Forks had its own link to Little Rock: it was the hometown of Judge Ronald Davies, who’d just ordered that the desegregation plan in Little Rock proceed after Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas and a band of local segregationists tried to block it.

As Mr. Armstrong prepared to play that night — oddly enough, at Grand Forks’s own Central High School — members of the Arkansas National Guard ringed the school in Little Rock, ordered to keep the black students out. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s meeting with Governor Faubus three days earlier in Newport, R.I., had ended inconclusively. Central High School was open, but the black children stayed home.

Mr. Lubenow was first told he couldn’t talk to Mr. Armstrong until after the concert. That wouldn’t do. With the connivance of the bell captain, he snuck into Mr. Armstrong’s suite with a room service lobster dinner. And Mr. Armstrong, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, agreed to talk. Mr. Lubenow stuck initially to his editor’s script, asking Mr. Armstrong to name his favorite musician. (Bing Crosby, it turned out.) But soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe what he heard. “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.

Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.

Mr. Armstrong had been contemplating a good-will tour to the Soviet Union for the State Department. “They ain’t so cold but what we couldn’t bruise them with happy music,” he had said. Now, though, he confessed to having second thoughts. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said, offering further choice words about the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?”

Mr. Lubenow, who came from a small North Dakota farming community, was shocked by what he heard, but he also knew he had a story; he skipped the concert and went back to the paper to write it up. It was too late to get it in his own paper; nor would the Associated Press editor in Minneapolis, dubious that Mr. Armstrong could have said such things, put it on the national wire, at least until Mr. Lubenow could prove he hadn’t made it all up. So the next morning Mr. Lubenow returned to the Dakota Hotel and, as Mr. Armstrong shaved, had the Herald photographer take their picture together. Then Mr. Lubenow showed Mr. Armstrong what he’d written. “Don’t take nothing out of that story,” Mr. Armstrong declared. “That’s just what I said, and still say.” He then wrote “solid” on the bottom of the yellow copy paper, and signed his name.

The article ran all over the country. Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze broadcast it on the evening news. The Russians, an anonymous government spokesman warned, would relish everything Mr. Armstrong had said. A radio station in Hattiesburg, Miss., threw out all of Mr. Armstrong’s records. Sammy Davis Jr. criticized Mr. Armstrong for not speaking out earlier. But Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and Marian Anderson quickly backed him up.

Mostly, there was surprise, especially among blacks. Secretary Dulles might just as well have stood up at the United Nations and led a chorus of the Russian national anthem, declared Jet magazine, which once called Mr. Armstrong an “Uncle Tom.” Mr. Armstrong had long tried to convince people throughout the world that “the Negro’s lot in America is a happy one,” it observed, but in one bold stroke he’d pulled nearly 15 million American blacks to his bosom. Any white confused by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s polite talk need only listen to Mr. Armstrong, The Amsterdam News declared. Mr. Armstrong’s words had the “explosive effect of an H-bomb,” said The Chicago Defender. “He may not have been grammatical, but he was eloquent.”

His road manager quickly put out that Mr. Armstrong had been tricked, and regretted his statements, but Mr. Armstrong would have none of that. “I said what somebody should have said a long time ago,” he said the following day in Montevideo, Minn., where he gave his next concert. He closed that show with “The Star-Spangled Banner” — this time, minus the obscenities.

Mr. Armstrong was to pay a price for his outspokenness. There were calls for boycotts of his concerts. The Ford Motor Company threatened to pull out of a Bing Crosby special on which Mr. Armstrong was to appear. Van Cliburn’s manager refused to let him perform a duet with Mr. Armstrong on Steve Allen’s talk show.

But it didn’t really matter. On Sept. 24, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock, and the next day soldiers escorted the nine students into Central High School. Mr. Armstrong exulted. “If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy,” he wired the president. “God bless you.” As for Mr. Lubenow, who now works in public relations in Cedar Park, Tex., he got $3.50 for writing the story and, perhaps, for changing history. But his editor was miffed — he’d gotten into politics, after all. Within a week, he left the paper.

David Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of “Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink.’’

House votes to cut Cherokee funding over Freedmen Issue

House votes to cut Cherokee funding
Decision follows tribal decision to oust descendants of black slaves
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:33 a.m. PT Sept 7, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Cherokee Nation would lose some of its federal funding under House legislation passed Thursday if it doesn't reinstate descendants of its former slaves as tribal citizens.

The bill delays the funding cuts until the issue has been addressed in federal court, potentially giving the Oklahoma-based tribe years before it would lose any money. Critics said it sends a clear signal that lawmakers are not happy with the Cherokee decision earlier this year to oust descendants of black slaves, known as Cherokee freedmen.

"The fact that the Cherokee freedmen issue has been raised on floor of the House of Representatives demonstrates the gravity of the issue," said Rep. Diane Watson, a California Democrat who introduced broad legislation earlier this year to cut off Cherokee funding. "If the Cherokee Nation does not move expeditiously (to) comply with its treaty obligations, Congress is poised to take stronger action."

The Cherokee language was included in a bill authorizing funding for Native American housing assistance, which passed 333-75.

'I think this can be worked out'
The House originally adopted an amendment from Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., prohibiting money from going to the tribe unless it reversed its freedmen decision. It later softened the language with a second amendment from Rep. Dan Boren, D-Okla., that would delay the funding cuts as long as the Cherokee continue recognizing the descendants' tribal status as the matter works its way through federal court.

Mike Miller, a Cherokee spokesman, said the tribe appreciates Boren's efforts to slow things down.

"No federal court has ever said that the Cherokee Nation does not have the right to determine its own citizenship," Miller said. "What this does is allow an opportunity for the facts to be presented in an impartial forum in court."

"I think this can be worked out," Boren said, estimating that the tribe gets about 10 percent of its $300 million in annual federal funding through the housing assistance bill.

Race versus tribal identity
The dispute dates back to a post-Civil War treaty with the U.S. government. In that treaty, the tribe - which originated in the Southeast but was forcibly moved to what is now Oklahoma in the 1830s - agreed to free its slaves and give them full rights as tribal members.

The freedmen were considered tribal members from 1866 until 1975, when a vote of the tribe denied them citizenship. The Cherokee Supreme Court decided in 2006 that vote was in error and restored the freedmen's rights.

After a petition drive, the tribe passed a referendum March 3 amending the tribal constitution to again disqualify freedmen. The vote affected more than 2,800 freedmen who had applied for citizenship.

The tribe insists the issue has nothing to do with race and is a sovereign matter of tribal identity. Cherokee leaders said recently that freedmen would continue receiving tribal benefits until the issue is resolved in court.

The bill is HR 2786.

Juneteenth

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Cherokee Nation votes to expel 'freedmen'

Cherokee Nation votes to expel 'freedmen'
Tribe revokes membership of an estimated 2,800 descendants of slaves
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 8:09 p.m. PT March 3, 2007

OKLAHOMA CITY - Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.

With a majority of districts reporting, 76 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of “by blood” tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission’s rolls from more than 100 years ago.

The commission, set up by a Congress bent on breaking up Indians’ collective lands and parceling them out to tribal citizens, drew up two rolls, one listing Cherokees by blood and the other listing freedmen, a roll of blacks regardless of whether they had Indian blood.

Some opponents of the ballot question argued that attempts to remove freedmen from the tribe were motivated by racism.

Tribal officials said the vote was a matter of self-determination.

The petition drive for the ballot measure followed a March 2006 ruling by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court that said an 1866 treaty assured freedmen descendants of tribal citizenship. Since then, more than 2,000 freedmen descendants have enrolled as citizens of the tribe.

Big money at stake
Advocates of expelling the freedmen call it a matter of safeguarding tribal resources, which include a $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, and Cherokees' share of a gambling industry that, for U.S. tribes overall, takes in $22 billion a year. The grass-roots campaign for expulsion has given heavy play to warnings that keeping freedmen in the Cherokee Nation could encourage thousands more to sign up for a slice of the tribal pie.

"Don't get taken advantage of by these people. They will suck you dry," Darren Buzzard, an advocate of expelling the freedmen, wrote last summer in a widely circulated e-mail denounced by freedmen. "Don't let black freedmen back you into a corner. PROTECT CHEROKEE CULTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION."

The issue is a remnant of the "peculiar institution" of Southern slavery and a discordant note set against the ringing statements of racial solidarity often voiced by people of color.

"It's oppressed people that's oppressing people," said Verdie Triplett, 53, an outspoken freedman of the Choctaw tribe, which, like the Cherokee, once owned black slaves.

Cherokees, along with Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, were long known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they adopted many of the ways of their white neighbors in the South, including the holding of black slaves.

Court challenges by freedmen descendants seeking to stop the election were denied, but a federal judge left open the possibility that the case could be refiled if Cherokees voted to lift their membership rights.
© 2007 MSNBC InteractiveThe Associated Press and The Washington Post contributed to this report.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17442676/