(ThyBlackMan.com) At the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention Congressman George Tillman declared, “It is a scientific fact that there is not one full blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of….colored blood.” Nonetheless, the delegates proceeded to ratify a series of ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Each movie chronicles the day in the life of a Black neighborhood. One from the point of view of the goings in a pizza parlor, the other from the perspective of the happenings in a barbershop. The pizza parlor, an Italian American enterprise, has one Black employee and he ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) What a writer produces comes from the depths of “the never-never land of the spirit, of imagination; and all the arrows point away from the here and now,” said America’s most successful Black writer. His first published novel sold 500,000 copies within six months and more than a million ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) On the eve of the Viet Nam War, Malcolm X declared, “[As] long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled. You bleed for white people. But ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Of course he existed. Of that there can be no question. But was Martin Luther King not a mythic figure? Around him there has grown quite a bit of lore. He was swaddled in myth and legend from the very day he was born. His namesake, Martin Luther, ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Are You What You See or Are You What You Want To Be? Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. It began more than 300 years ago with whites in blackface doing exaggerated depictions of enslaved Africans. In time Blacks began playing themselves, deriding their own personas. ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Singer Pharrell Williams said that there is now a New Black, and he is one of them, thus generating a storm of controversy over the notion that we can, should, or have moved beyond the historic struggles of our past to a new, free, fresh and empowering identity. This ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Keep your eye on the ball. As they say, always keep your eye on the ball. Note the spectacular media uproar, and lightning swift retaliation, to the intemperate words of Donald Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers. And now we can all go back to playing the game. Yes, that ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Two weeks ago, President Obama launched an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. As a part of this initiative, he signed a presidential memorandum establishing the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force, chaired by Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary Broderick Johnson. The task force will help determine what public ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Have you ever wondered how jazz, and then later rock ‘n’ roll, developed out of the blues? How Black music came to be America’s music? Whether or not people who are not Black can really play Black music? Amiri Baraka speaks on these things in his 1963 classic, Blues ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) President Obama’s slumping approval numbers seem to confirm the belief that second term presidents run into trouble, sometimes big trouble, in trying to hold it together during their second term. In Obama’s case, the NSA spy debacle, the lingering anger over Benghazi, the AP leaks, and the big contentious ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Let me start off with a disclaimer: I am not a Beyonce fan, meaning I do not religiously follow her career or listen to her music. Though I don’t dislike Beyonce, I don’t keep up with her either. In high school, like every other black girl, I looooved me ...