The Holy Week Uprising

After Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in April 1968, riots erupted in nearly 200 US-American cities. During the days that followed his death, the U.S. experienced the greatest wave of social unrest after the Civil War (via). These riots were a direct reaction to King's assassination. His assassination is, however, not seen as "the" reason. Tensions had already been high before King's death. Segregation was officially over but still part of everyday life. Being Black meant discriminatory housing policies, income dispartities, poverty, and lacking job opportunities. Due to these conditions, Black US-Americans often had to move to (Black) low-income areas which were not only poorly maintained but also meant being hassled by local police (via)

(Above: "A crowd described as "militant, dancing and chanting" takes part in a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in Garfield Park on April 7, 1968. This photo was published in the April 8, 1968, Milwaukee Sentinel. The banner depicts black activist H. Rap Brown, who famously said the previous summer, "Violence is as American as apple pie.") 

58,000 National Guardsmen and Army troops assisted law enforcement officers in handling the violence. 43 people were killed, around 3,500 were injured, 27,000 were arrested and 54 of the cities affected saw more than 100,000 dollars property damage, Washington D.C. experienced the most property damage. There, twelve days of unrest meant 1,200 fires and 24 million in insured property damage (174 million dollars in today's currency). It took decades for some neighbourhoods to fully recover. The fires had destroyed buildings, made thousands of people homeless and jobless, too many had died in burning buildings. In Baltimore, which came second to Washington in terms of damage, crowds first gathered peacefully to hold a memorial service. After a couple of small incidents, 6,000 National Guards arrived and protests erupted (via).

“If I were a kid in Harlem, I know what I’d be thinking right now. I’d be thinking that the whites have declared open season on my people, and they’re going to pick us off one by one unless I get a gun and pick them off first.”
President Johnson

"America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. (A riot) is the language of the unheard."
Martin Luther King

"For years, many white Americans mistakenly conceived of racism as a “Southern problem” and believed that Jim Crow only resided south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The racial violence of the 1960s throughout the country rudely awakened the nation to the speciousness of this belief. 

Yet no sooner had that belief been discarded than it was immediately replaced with a new and equally false one: that America’s race problems extended only to our large cities and their inner-city ghettos, but not beyond that. The terms that we used — and still use — contributed to the misunderstanding of what was taking place. By using the term “riots,” we reinforce the notion that these acts of “collective violence” were spontaneous and apolitical and that they were disconnected to the protests for civil rights in the South. But a closer examination of them, individually and collectively, proves otherwise. 

This flawed understanding had real consequences. Focused on large cities, the national media gave sparse coverage to the revolts in York and other midsize and small cities, despite the fact that the majority of them occurred in such places. In 1969 alone, revolts rocked midsized cities like Hartford, Conn., Harrisburg, Pa. and Fort Lauderdale, Fla."
Levy, Washington Post

photographs via and via and via and via and via and via 

Beautiful Disruption. Nadine Ijewere's Photography.

Nadine Ijewere is a London-born photographer with a Nigerian-Jamaican background. With her approach, she aims to help establish "a new standard of beauty" (via). For her commissions, she usually does most of the casting herself choosing models who (apart from age) do not conform to the traditional industry standards and who are ethnically underrepresented (via). In 2019, she became the first Black woman to shoot a cover for Vogue (via).

My work is all about the celebration of diversity without creating a representation – particularly for women, as we are the ones who are more exposed to beauty ideals and to not being comfortable in who we are.

Nadine Ijewere

I find beauty in all its facets. My work is about showcasing different forms of beauty that I believe our society could do a better job of representing. We are so different, and I think it is especially important to show this in the world of fashion. I follow this principle when I cast models and also by exploring my own origins and identity.

Nadine Ijewere

Excerpts from an interview:

Looking at these images, I wish that I saw these kinds of images and people that looked like me when I was growing up. It’s such an important thing and it’s exciting that there are more Black creatives now using their culture and heritage to create amazing images that can be used for research or reference because it wasn’t necessarily available for me. Even now, it’s in a questionable quantity and finding images for inspiration is quite difficult, but it’s nice that the images we create can inspire the next generation. 

Positivity is important because for so long there have been negative connotations around the Black community and Black women and it’s something that we don’t really see celebrated or portrayed in a beautiful way. In the past, when you did see women of colour, there was always an element in place to make them conform to what the beauty ideal was – whether it’s straightening their hair or lightening their skin. It’s important for me to reframe that and show women of colour in a positive light, that’s what my work is all about.

I would have been a lot less self-conscious because growing up, I was always the sort of person who tried to fit in and change something about me. My hair was a big issue because I grew up in an environment that was predominantly white and went to a school that was the same so I was always trying to assimilate to fit in. 

I would straighten my hair a lot and would wear weaves and extensions instead of my natural hair because in fashion and beauty you never really saw girls with tight curls or Afro-type hair being portrayed as beautiful. If you did, it would be the images in Black hair salons of girls on relaxer kits with silky, straight hair. It was the image that was constantly shoved in your face, so of course you felt insecure because that’s not the hair you had. Even protective styles which are natural like cornrows and braids were seen as not beautiful or unprofessional. 

You become very restricted in a sense and you lose your sense of identity because you’re trying to fit in and be somebody else. I struggled with that for years, but having images like the images I see now would be incredible because it shows beauty as being multifaceted, there’s different kinds of elements and layers to it. It shows it in a different way and celebrates it across the board and that’s super exciting.

Nadine Ijewere

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photographs by Nadine Ijewere via and via and via and via

Tyler Mitchell's Sense of His Own Historical Moment

Tyler Mitchell's photographs are "a counterpart to the pernicious stereotypes that have long dominated visual culture" by showing Black people in different ways they might "look, dress and act", for instance, enjoying leisure time. Probably due to their soft light, pastel colours, and settings, Mitchell's photographs do not look politicial at first glance (via).

Mitchell was born in Atlanta in 1995. Skateboarding led him to photography, he then studied film and television at New York University and, in 2015, self-published a book about skaters in Havana. Three years later, aged 23, he was commissioned to photograph Beyonce for a Vogue issue. He became the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue (via).

This idea of my community and my friends, young black men and women, being able to enjoy pleasure, or leisure time — that’s revolutionary. I think about the pleasures and the freedoms we’ve been denied historically — or the way that free time and leisure time, for us, have been framed as something potentially violent.
Tyler Mitchell

Mitchell seems to have "a clear sense of his own historical moment". He believes that being a Black photographer carries a different weight since just a short while ago Black people could not afford cameras (via).

I’m indulging myself in the way that making pictures for me is a form of protection. I’m able to create and live out these little moments or small figments of dreams in which Black people exist within the space of a frame where they are unencumbered. They’re not having to be hypervigilant about social and political dangers, the hypothetical threat of a white gallery space, or any of these things that remind them to get out and stay out.
Tyler Mitchell 

Mitchell's work was partly inspired by Tumblr where he noticed that most of the images of free and sensual young people showed whites. He uses the documentary approach to capture Black identity "in an equally close and vulnerable light" (via).

People like Ryan McGinley and Larry Clark were just two examples of images that seem to proliferate the most on those types of platforms. They seem to get the most re-blogs or people would always repost them. Their most iconic images would usually be white youths, very sensuous and beautiful, enjoying life in groups in Paris or on road trips, you know So I’m thinking about my experiences and trying to make art about my experiences in the South. Being black and middle class, I think about the self-policing that has to happen within our community here. It’s baked into our psyche that we’re maybe not allowed to, or that we’re not supposed to, behave in those ways outwardly in society or perform those sentiments of joy… Obviously, we do enjoy leisure time, that’s a global thing. But my work is about bringing forward these ideas of leisure and play as radical things, because we’ve societally, politically, and within ourselves—in our psyche—been prevented from enjoying those freedoms. Utopia, by definition, isn’t achievable. Photography, by definition, is about constructing an image and framing an image and a point of view on the world. I’m playing with these ideas, the fantasy of things that are not real, or that I would want to be real.
Tyler Mitchell

I think the images suggest [a] core fundamental resilience, radiance and full human agency that Black folks command, even in environments that tell them otherwise.
Tyler Mitchell 

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photographs by Tyler Mitchell via and via and via and via and via and via

The Black Dog Syndrome

There is the notion that dark pets are discriminated against. Shelter workers repeatedly observe the phenomenon that black dogs have to wait longer to get adopted than lighter-furred ones and that they get euthanised more often. Speculations on the reasons why black dogs are discriiminated agaist vary and range from superstition, i.e., mythologies around black dogs being evil and scary to black dogs' faces regarded as less expressive or facial expressions more difficult to read. Photographs play a major role in the adoption process. When black dogs are photographed in a way that makes only a black silhouette and a big tongue visible, and the eyes and eyebrows get lost, there is little response since people might find it harder to huanise them and build a connection (via).

Other hypotheses floating around the trade: Would-be owners worry that a black dog will shed too noticeably on the furniture; black dogs get overheated more easily at adoption events and don’t introduce themselves; black dogs look older; black dogs strike people as boring. And one chow jowl-wrinkle that no one mentions: Studies suggest that people tend to choose pooches that bear some resemblance to them, whether that manifests in a lady with flowing tresses selecting a long-eared retriever or a saggy-faced man opting for a bulldog. Could the link between an owner’s and a dog’s appearance factor into the phenomenon? According to a Pew survey, 45 percent of white people own a dog, compared to 20 percent of black people. (Looking at presidential pets, Bo Obama is black, but then so was George W. Bush’s Miss Beazley.) (via)

In other words, there are a great many anecdotes but it is not yet clear if the Black Dog Syndrome is nothing more than an urban legend. Various studies do not support the syndrome (via). Some studies find some evidence, others find none (via and via). The relationship, if there is any, is not straightforward as the following abstract illustrates:

Most support for Black Dog Syndrome or Big Black Dog Syndrome is anecdotal or theoretical. Yet some animal shelters/organizations have implemented strategies to address what they believe are lower rates of adoption and/or higher rates of euthanasia for “Big Black Dogs.” This study examines the persistent anecdotes and theories on humans’ preferences and aversions to dogs of various shades, using hierarchical multinomial logistic regression to predict outcomes for an analytic sample of 7,440 dogs from 2010–2011 in an urban, public animal shelter serving Louisville, Kentucky, USA. The relationship between coat shade and dog outcomes was not straightforward; while no relationship existed at the bivariate level, after controls were added, entirely black dogs showed somewhat lower odds of adoption—and higher euthanasia risk—than those characterized as secondarily black or sans black. Breed category, breed size, and purebred status were stronger predictors of dog outcomes than coat shade. Big Black Dog Syndrome was not supported by these data; smaller dogs were more likely to be euthanized if they were partly or wholly black. These findings may offer nuances to adoption strategies employed by shelters/organizations, help make better use of resources, and, perhaps, improve the likelihood of homing or rehoming shelter animals. (Sinski et al., 2016)

And, finally some anecdotes: 

We recently had a litter of five very cute, very fluffy puppies, two yellow and three black. And the yellow ones all went immediately, but for the black ones it took weeks.
Mirah Horowitz

Marika Bell, director of behavior and rehoming for the Humane Society of Washington, D.C., says the organization has been tracking animals that have stayed at their shelters the longest since March 2013. They found that three characteristics put a pet at risk of becoming one of these so-called “hidden gems”: medium size, an age of 2-3 years, and an ebony coat. (via)

Employees at our shelter constantly witness visitors scanning the kennels as they walk down the aisles in search of a new friend and merely glance at the black dogs but stop completely when they approach a "colored" dog.” Pam Backer, cited in Castek (2010)

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- Castek, J. (2010). Black Dog Syndrome, link
-  Sinski, J. Carini, R. M. & Weber, J. D. (2016). Putting (Big) Black Dog Syndrome to the Test: Evidence from a Large Metropolitan Shelter. Anthrozoös, 26(4), link
- photograph by Eliot Erwitt (1953) via

Stereotypes about Black Bodies in French Medical Literature (1780-1950)

In parallel with the colonisation of African countries, colonial doctors and scientists started describing "African bodies" developing a hierarchy between Black peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa, i.e., from The Cape of Good Hope to Senegambia.  Interestingly, there were conflicts between some doctors and differing attitudes between home country practitioner medicine and colonial medicine on the field.

This research focuses on the descriptions of African people’s body according to French Doctors writings from the end of the 18th century to mid-20th century. Thoughthe black race is seen as monolithic group in the medical writings at the beginning of the period, the African multiplicity slightly came up under the colonial doctors’ pens. Their action and their work started developing in the last third of the 19th century in parallel with the colonization. Beyond the principal human races classification, the French doctors and scientists established a hierarchy between the black peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa, from The Cape of Good Hope to Senegambia. The view onAfrican bodies varied and became more refined all along the studied period, despite the permanency of numerous racial stereotypes. A sexual description of the peoples is added to the racial and ethnic taxonomy. Based on medical dictionaries, research monographs about human races or even on colonial medicine work, our work displays, within the descriptions of the black bodies, the overlapping of the theories about race, gender and kind, and also explains the similarity of the rhetorical methods used to define and describe the Other, should they be female or black. Moreover, this research highlights the way these representations thrived on scientific controversies, political concerns and interactions between home country practitioner medicine and colonial medicine on the field. Though the medical speeches stigmatize racial inferiorities or even the inversion of gender of the African people, this work also underlines the antithetical opinions and the conflicts between some doctors about these consensual.

To the ethnic taxonomy, a sexual description was added since hypersexuality was one of the most common prejudices about Africans, not only in medical literature. These supposedly overdeveloped sexes were associated with uncontrollable sexuality. The association, again, was established to justify female circumcision and polygamy. With sexology emerging, doctors and scientists intended to learn about the sexuality of the othered "in order to define sexuality in their own society by race (sic), gender or class". Understanding the so-called sexual practices of Africans was a means to help colonists to control and preserve their own sexuality. 

In effect, white expatriates who passed several months in the colonies underwent all sorts of temptations owing to the visible bodies of women, the so-called “free” sexuality and the climate — temptations to avoid for the sake of preserving the colonial power’s integrity and authority. Out of these fears arose discourses and warnings about racial mixing and its dangers for the white race.

Myths, random observations and racist theories about a "black sexuality" as the antithesis of a "white sexuality" (moderate, hygienic and connected with moral values) were introduced to maintain boundaries and support colonialism, the latter being marketed as a "civilising mission". Hypersexuality was seen as a main characteristic of Black people. Pseudo-scientific approaches, such as establishing a correlation between skull shape, brain weight and the size of genitals with carnal instincts and pleasures and intellectual weakness - were supposed to explain "Black hypersexuality".

It is still the same way that, with the N*gro, the intellectual organs being less developed, the genitals acquire more preponderance and extension. (Gazette Medicine of Paris, 1841)

In the first half of the twentieth century, women were portrayed as virile since they did hard work, had muscular bodies, short hair and were courageous while men were portrayed as effeminate because of their alleged laziness and intellectual inferiority, and hairless body. Colonial doctors regarded their mission as a civilising one as their work was also about redefining the social roles specific to each gender (Peiretti Courtis, 2018).

Discourse surviving black men for their physical strength and robustness also existed in medical books throughout the period studied and particularly at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century’s when the degeneration of the white race worries the medical and political sphere. The black body then becomes an example of virtue and resistance to offer to white men weakened by civilization and urbanization. African femininity is also valued during the nineteenth and first twentieth century when it comes to presenting a model of maternity to white women forsaking their mission. If Africans are erected, according to the political or social context in France, as an example for the French, everything seems nevertheless to bring them back to their body, presented as their main strength and wealth. These discourses have political consequences. Feminization but also the infantilization of black peoples led to a more general devaluation of Africans, which had political repercussions such as to justify the colonization of men considered inferior, intellectually or even physically close to women and children. And subject to their passions. Thus, the famous speech of Ferry in 1885 draws its roots in the breeding ground of the radiological medicine and in the tests brought by the scientists of an inferiority of the black race. Similarly, while the writings of colonial doctors have highlighted African diversity, they have generated, by aiming to rationalize the colonial work, a strengthening of ethnic groups but also differentiations and hierarchies still existing today in Africa.

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- Peiretti Courtis, D. (2018). Stereotypes about black bodies in French medical literature: race, gender and sexuality (1780-1950), Journal of Historical Archaeology & Anthropological Sciences, 3(3), link
- photograph by Sory Sanle via

Ernest Ralph Tidyman and the Creation of Shaft

Ernest Ralph Tidyman (1928-1984) created John Shaft for the 1970 novel of the same name and co-wrote the screenplay for the 1971 film version of Shaft. It was Ronald Hobbs, one of the very few Black literary agents at the time and the only one in New York City, who - in 1968 - had recommended to commission Tidyman to write Shaft (via and via and via and via). More books and more film sequels followed.

"Encouraged by his literary agent, Ronald Hobbs, Tidyman took up a commission on a $1,800 advance from Macmillan mystery editor, Alan Rinzler. Rinzler had been looking to spice up the publisher’s mystery output and had been looking for something new in the field. He had the idea of creating a black detective hero in the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe mould. After reviewing the initial pages Rinzler encouraged Tidyman to toughen up the lead character deeming Tidyman’s initial version too soft. He suggested a gesture of violence by having the hero throw a gangster out of his office window." (via)

Reading black fiction, you see that the central figure is either super hero or super victim, as in [William] Styron's book. The blacks I knew were smart and sophisticated, and I thought, what about a black hero who thinks of himself as a human being, but who uses his black rage as one of his resources, along with intelligence and courage.
Ernest Tidyman

"Tidyman’s true skill was an ability to define the hero and the bad guys without ever allowing racism to bump into itself. Everyone, black and white, was rooting for Shaft, the hero. The fact that he was black had nothing to do with it . . . and, of course, everything to do with it. Blacks and whites could root side by side, but in Shaft territory it was always going to be hipper to be black." (via)

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photograph of Ernest Tidyman via 

"Miss Black and Beautiful" and Raphael Albert's Photography

Raphael Albert (1935-2009) was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada where he struggled to make a living selling his artwork to tourists on the beach. He moved to London in 1953 with an old Kodak camera in his suitcase. There, Albert studied photography at college and worked part-time at Lyons cake factory. After graduating, he worked as a freelance photographer documenting the West Indian communities in London. In 1970, Albert launched the "Miss black and Beautiful" contest, followed by "Miss West Indies in Great Britain", "Miss Teenager of the West Indies in Great Britain", and "Miss Grenada". For thirty years, Albert documented the pageants photographically and commissioned other photographers to shoot them (via and via).

"Albert’s photographs offer a rare insight into an ambiguous cultural performance at a particular historical conjuncture. Most importantly, the photographs in the exhibition offer a rare insight into an ambivalent cultural performance of gendered and raced identities at a particular historical conjuncture. As such, they serve as testament to a profound moment of self-fashioning and collective celebration in London’s pan Afro-Caribbean communities. His images are imbued with an exquisite, revolutionary sensuality and a certain joie de vivre, which I find refreshing and illuminating at the same time. Many of the models in Albert’s photographs embody an aura of hedonistic confidence in a new generation of black women coming of age in Britain during the 1970s, fuelled by complex cultural politics of identity, difference and desire."
Renee Mussai

"One could argue that Albert’s photographs offer a counter narrative to dominant photographic moments of the time, such as images of protest with raised fists locked in revolt, and other signs of discrimination and racial turmoil as often seen in the work of black photographers contemporaneous to Albert, such as Neil Kenlock and Armet Francis. Refreshingly, there are no signs of displacement or marginality, nor a sense of alienation in Albert’s portraits–his pageant images offer a different, and perhaps lighter, form of cultural resistance.

But it is equally important to remember that Albert’s photographs of the late 1960s and early 1970s were taken at a time of “No dogs. No blacks. No Irish” in a country irrevocably tainted by Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” anti-immigration speech, delivered only three years after the introduction of the 1965 Race Relations Act, the first legislation passed in the UK to outlaw racial discrimination on the grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins."
Renee Mussai

photographs by Raphael Albert via (1- Miss West Indies in GB contestant at Blythe Road, London, 1970s, 2- Beauty queen posing against alpine backdrop, London, 1970s, 3 - Crowned beauty queen with fellow contestants, London, 1970s, 4 - Beauty queen, London, 1970s) and via

Cursed by Night. By Hannah Price.

Cursed by Night is a series of photographs taken between 2012 and 2013 in Brooklyn, Harlem, Harford, CT, and Philadelphia, PA. In it, my lens portrays a world of darkness to which black males are unfortunately tied, and by which they find themselves cursed. Together, these images form a narrative in which the aiblity to perceive the subject of each portrait is disrupted by the fearful projections of those who understand the world in rigid terms of black and white. This narrative finds its basis in reality: advancements in mobile photography and video have allowed the disturbing frequency of racial fear and its consequences highly visible. We all know how this story often ends.

The darkness of nights acts as both a backdrop and a shroud in my portraits. The subjects belong to it, but in this context they are visually and conceptually obscured by it. A famliar visual language dominates the images: the sharp shadows cast by street lamps, the empty sidewalk, the atmosphere of foreboding. We recognize this as the sterotypical landscape of danger, of menace, of black and everything associated with it. In these photographs, the darkness distorts the representation of its subjects, rendering them as threats, or as invisible. We recognize this as the stereotypical landscape of danger, of menace, or the absence of light and everything associated with it. In these photographs, the darkness distorts the representation of its subjects, rendering them as threats, or as invisible.

"Black" is inseparable from a dense web of figurative connotations, all of them negative: impurity, sin, death, evil. These associations make up the lens through which blackness is perceived by many, and ultimately they are inherited as the burden (the curse) of black men. By using this black and white mode of seeing and following its conventions, Cursed by Night aims to challenge and reveal its power. 
Hannah Price

My role as a photographer is to communicate visually. And personally, for Cursed by Night, I want to document life and politics along with adding the concept of horror. Black men being racially profiled has existed forever in America. Using visual techniques to force a conversation on this particular social issue was my personal goal. Mostly, I hope to just make people think about how they themselves react to black men, even though the work is dark and projects innocent black men in a negative light (which is what racial profiling does). This blatant imagery allows me to talk about the concept and how it affects innocent people’s lives –sometimes by taking their lives.I am also proposing that reaching an understanding of the difference between reality, and the perceptions maintained by non-black people, is the only way we the people can help end this curse.
Hannah Price

photographs by Hannah Price via

Born this day ... Ellis Haizlip

Ellis Haizlip (1929-1991) was the creator, executive producer and host of the TV show Soul! The vision was not to just entertain but to display and promote the variety of Black American culture and  to self-critically reflect various aspects (via) offering viewers "radical ways of imagining - of hearing, feeling, and seeing - black community". For instance, Haizlip refused to divide Black arts into high and low culture and made room for both. The show was extremely successful. In 1968, more than 65% of Black American households watched it regularly (via).

(...) the hour-long variety show was nominally meant to showcase an intrinsically Black perspective on art and politics. In practice, it proved to be something far more radical. (via)

Before Oprah, before Arsenio, there was Mr. SOUL!” On the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, one fearless black pioneer reconceived a Harlem Renaissance for a new era, ushering giants and rising stars of black American culture onto the national television stage. He was hip. He was smart. He was innovative, political, and gay. In his personal fight for social equality, this man ensured the Revolution would be televised. The man was Ellis Haizlip. The Revolution was SOUL! (via)

In the late 1960s, the federal government "sought to redress the grievances of Black communities by giving Black people a louder voice (or simply a voice at all) in publich media". In this very atmosphere, "an unusual show" with the mission to present "a panoramic display of Black artistic sensibilities and political expression" was born: Soul!. (via)

Most pivotally, “Soul!” was a hub of candid, ranging, and often radical Black social and political discourse. Melissa Haizlip explained to me that the show’s producer, host, and creative architect—her uncle Ellis Haizlip—had “an expansive approach toward Black culture.” At a time when a burgeoning Black nationalist movement called upon Black Americans to coalesce under a single ideology of liberation, Haizlip said that her uncle saw to it that “Soul!” presented the true “fluidity of Black thought and Black identity.” (via)

The primary function of Soul! is to give alienated black people a voice. And since TV probably is the most popular medium today, Soul! tries to fill the void for blacks who aren't urned o by any other medium. With this black priority, we don't have to become a multi-purpose program. Black people turn us on every week because they know they will see an undiluted black show. (...) I feel that RB music, especially with many of its new lyrics, forms the floor for black pride. It is totally ours and cannot be purchased or properly imitated by anyone else.
Ellis Haizlip, 1968 (cited in Ebony, March 1972)

(...) unrivalled music, dance, and poetry programming weren’t being deployed just in the service of making good television. Week by week, show by show, segment by segment, Ellis knew that he was helping shape notions of what being Black in America could even mean for hundreds of thousands of people. (via)

When accused of reinforcing stereotypes of "happy folks who just love to sing and dance", Haizlip responded:

Our job is to present black culture, and R&B music is a vital part of that. Entertainment can be a deep business, it's not all just finger-propping time. We give exposure to black artists of all types - people whom you practically never see on 'white' TV, and I feel good about what we're doing. 
Ellis Haizlip (cited in Ebony, March 1972)

We've actually presented black poets from the very beginning of Soul! and that has been revolutionary. Just name one other consistent TV outlet for those black poets who have been playing such a major role in helping black people deal with today's reality.
Ellis Haizlip (cited in Ebony, March 1972)

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photographs (Haizlip in his office at Channel 13, 1970, by Alex Harsley) via and via

"There is no such thing as a black photographer." The Golden Eye of Dennis Morris.

Dennis Morris became fascinated with photography when - eight years old - he was a choirboy in the Church of England. Donald Patterson, a member of the church, had donated photographic equipment to the church which the youth used. Patterson, in fact, was also one of the few to encourage Morris saying that he had a future in photography, telling him: "Dennis, you have the eye, the golden eye."

When Dennis told his mother that he wanted to become a photographer she was concerned about how he was going to make money from it. And when, aged 16, he told his career's adviser at his school about his plans, the reaction was: "The guy just looked at me like I was mad." Then the adviser said: "Be realistic. There is no such thing as a black photographer." (via) "Those were his words and I've never forgotten them. I told him about Gordon Parks and James Van Der Zee, but he just looked at me blankly and shook his head." (via)

When the careers master asked whether Morris wanted to shoot weddings, Morris was insistent: “No, I want to be a photographer.” The prevalent idea then, Morris explained, was that black photographers were good enough only to shoot the sentimental — weddings and babies — and not explore the other side of the profession: fashion and press photography. (via)

"Growing up Black" is a documentation of the West Indian communities living in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s a title I gave because when I was growing up, my generation was the first to be called black. My parents’ generation were called coloured people. We went from being called coloured people to being called black. Dennis Morris

But what we see in Dennis Morris’s pictures of black Britons in the 60s and 70s — collected together in a new book — both challenges the limitations inherent in that framing and provides a counter-narrative to it. For in the photographs of people at church and at play, styling and protesting during this critical period in our racial history, he transforms black Britons from objects to subjects and recipients of hospitality to cultural agents. We see not just a group of people shaped by their presence in Britain but shaping it: not content with being tolerated by ‘hosts’ they demanded engagement in their new home. Gary Younge

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photographs via and via

Donovan Smallwood's Langour

Langour is a series created by photographer Donovan Smallwood, in his words, a "love letter" and a "note of disillusionment", "an interaction between landscape and portraiture, serving as an exploration of nature, home, escape, and tranquility."

"I wanted to metaphorically capture myself in the landscapes, the spaces, and the people I photographed. Everything and everyone photographed served as a mirror for me and in that way the work has no choice but to be about being Black in a space of nature."
Donovan Smallwood

"A monarch butterfly lands on a white flower thick with petals. A soft gauzy light obscures and embraces a young man in a do-rag, eyes seemingly closed, the graceful branches of a tree mimicking his limbs at rest. 

But this is a clever play on the pastoral, for it is only at the end of the book that our location comes to light. The buildings of the Manhattan skyline emerge towering over the trees at the project’s last glance. We have been led through Central Park; a people’s park of green lawns, forest trails where a dark history lingers. A multitude of racist injustices have played out in its environs, none more famous than the devastating wrongful conviction of the ‘Central Park Five’, the name given to a group of teenage boys falsely accused of rape amidst a whipped up media frenzy and witchhunt in the late 1980s. It is here in this huge expanse of greenery, the living lungs of a city whose tensions spill into its supposed Eden, that Smallwood’s photographs have been made." (literally via)

photographs via

Switzerland

"When I’m in the UK, I’m a post-colonial subject. I have very clear ‘meaning’ on the street in London, because my relationship to British racism is a very direct and inescapable one. When my parents were in school in Nigeria, they were colonial subjects under British rule, second-class citizens under white supremacy. And so, my relationship to being in London is already defined by that. When I’m in Paris, it’s a version of the same thing. Even if I want to be anonymous on the street, for French people – for white French people – I have a meaning already. And, of course, in the US, I have an inescapable meaning too. I’m presumed to be either African or a black American. Each of those has a clear and fraught political meaning, and I have to participate politically in that meaning. Which means that there’s a certain kind of relaxation that I can never really engage in while in the US, what with the cops or the well-meaning liberals, or the racist right-wingers or the fellow black people in America who want me to be attentive to the struggles that are going on. All of which is, you know, fine. But I don’t want that to be my only experience of life.

And Switzerland? 

If I’m hiking in Valais in Switzerland and someone meets me on the hiking path, I think their first thought is, ‘Oh, here’s a hiker’. If I’m in a hotel in Lugano, people see that I’m black or I might be a bit unusual, sure, but they’re not thinking, ‘Here’s a post-colonial subject’, or ‘Here’s someone who’s moved to my country’. They’re probably thinking, ‘Here’s somebody who can afford to stay at this hotel’. Yes, you stand out, but the meaning of your standing out is not quite the meaning it has in other places. That’s my experience of the place. I’m sure it’s different for other people.

(...) What is this elsewhere that one is longing to be in? Part of the answer to this question, for me, is Switzerland. It is the place that, when I’m not there, I long to be there. But it is also a conceptual container for such longing. It is the object of the longing, but it’s a theoretical shape that I can use to think through the question of longing. I’m also thinking about farness in general, as a desirable, as a restorative. And that’s a farness that could, in theory, happen elsewhere as well. My years of revisiting Switzerland have been, I’d say, a lucky instance of putting that theory into practice. And now that I’ve put it into a book, who knows what will happen?"

Teju Cole

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photographs by Teju Cole via and via

F***ing Nerve (Lamont Humphrey, 2000)

When I'm born I'm black 

When I grow up I'm even more black 

When I'm in the sun I'm still black 

When I'm cold, guess what: I'm black 

And when I die I'm f*cking black too 

But you: When you are born you're pink 

When you grow up you are white 

When you're sick, man look at yourself, you're green 

When you go in the sun you turn red 

When you are cold you turn blue 

And when you die you look purple 

And you got the f*ing nerv to call me colored (...)

(lyrics via)

::: Tongue Forest ft. Lamont Humphrey on YouTube: LISTEN/WATCH

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photograph by John Vachon (1938) via

The Afrozensus

Every year, the Afrozensus is carried out, a survey among people of African origin living in Germany. The findings show that they have very diverse backgrounds since they come from 144 countries. At the same time, they do share some experiences, such as other people touching their hair without consent, an experience 90% of black people living in Germany make or have made. 80% get sexualised comments regarding their look or skin colour on dating apps, More than 56% have been asked whether they sell drugs and more than 56% say they have been stopped by the police without any obvious reason. Exotisised, sexualised, criminalised... but also homogenised and deindividualised. 

More than 90% say that people do not believe them when they talk about their encounters with racism. And when they express criticism they are accused of being angry (86%). Most of the people taking part in the survey (74.9%) call themselves "black" (via)

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photograph by Neil Libbert via

The Intersection of Stuttering and Blackness

"I have an ongoing practice of spelling my name JJJJJerome Ellis in certain circumstances. I do this because the word I stutter on most frequently is my name. You can choose which spelling you prefer." 

JJJJJerome Ellis

JJJJJerome Ellis is a black stutterer and artist based in New York. He is interested in how ableism disadvantages people with a stutter since they do not adhere to the flows of time. This disfluency, to him, becomes "a means to exist outside of ordinary time, as defined by a white-dominated world." His work is an approach to experimenting with freedom and to depathologising disfluency (via)

I was interested in the role that clocks and watches played o-o-on plantations in the antebellum south. How slave masters deliberately did not let enslaved people own [them], as a way o-o-of domination and control.

"On the album, I feel safe stuttering because it's just me. I have the opportunity to score my own stutter. That felt very liberating." JJJJJerome Ellis

This article argues that dysfluency, music and Blackness, because of their distinct relationships to time, have the power to forge alternative temporalities and help us heal from ‘temporal subjection’. As a Black composer who stutters, I write from first-hand experience. With reference to my own recordings and scores, I examine the ways I use musical techniques like loops and rubato to create these alternative temporalities. Stuttering (especially in the form I present with, the glottal block) creates unpredictable, silent gaps in speech. I call these gaps ‘clearings’. Slaves sang in the fields, and whites heard them; but they also sang (and danced) in the woods at night, out of earshot. Undergirding the clearing created by my stutter is that other clearing, in the woods, where my enslaved ancestors stole away to keep healing, resisting and liberating through music ‐ work that I continue today.

JJJJJerome Ellis

"Sometimes people just walk away. Perhaps because I didn’t adhere to t-t-the choreography t-t-that we are often used to. So much of the pain comes from not feeling fully human. Not feeling intelligent. People thinking that I might be evading a question. I don’t want my Blackness to come off as a threat and I don’t want my stuttering to come off as evidence of lying.”

JJJJJerome Ellis

YouTube Selection:

::: Loops of Retreat: LISTEN/WATCH

::: Stepney: LISTEN/WATCH

::: Dysfluent Waters: LISTEN/WATCH

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photograph via

The "long, hot summer" of 1967 (2)

On the evening of July 12, 1967, I was driving a carload of people back from a black power conference in Philadelphia, switching stations, trying to find some good music to keep me awake on the New Jersey Turnpike. A news flash caught my attention, loud and clear: 

“There has been a confrontation between police and a large number of people in the city of Newark…Police have declared a curfew…Police are out in force.”

I didn’t need music to keep me focused. We just had to get home. 

Fifty years later, I ask myself why I was in such a hurry to get back to Newark. At the time, I was a 22-year-old student at Yale Law School, spending my third summer as a community organizer and law-student advocate in Newark. I was raised in Richmond, Virginia, but Newark felt like my new home. Now my home was about to fulfill a prophecy.  

For weeks, black people had been saying the community was ready to explode. I heard it in bars and at neighborhood meetings. I heard it from speakers protesting the two hot issues of the day: Mayor Hugh Addonizio’s plan to build a medical and dental school on 150 acres in the Central Ward that would displace 20,000 mostly black and Puerto Rican residents; and the mayor’s decision to place James Callaghan, a white man with a high school diploma, in the position of board secretary (business administrator) for the Newark public schools, instead of Wilbur Parker, the first black CPA in New Jersey. “Keep this shit up and there’s gonna be a riot in Newark!” was the word on the street. (Applause meter off the charts; everybody agreed.) 

Most people didn’t want a riot, and even fewer had a sense of what to do if one broke out. But they knew it was coming. They knew about Birmingham in 1963, Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965. They knew about the death and destruction. Many wondered: Was it worth it? Some were too mad to care. 

So here I was, driving back into Newark late at night. I had no intention of burning or looting, or shooting police—not even the cops whose racism I had seen in action. I was totally committed to nonviolent resistance, by training if not by disposition. (...)

Most accounts of the Newark Rebellion—and I call it a rebellion—say the arrest and beating of John Smith, a black cab driver, triggered the outbreak of violence. Hundreds witnessed Smith being dragged into the 4th Precinct police station in front of the Hayes Homes, a high-rise housing project. Rumors spread that Smith had been killed while in custody. Local civil rights leaders tried to form a march downtown in protest. But as the crowd grew in front of the Hayes Homes, someone lit a bottle filled with gasoline and threw it at the police station. Cops poured out of the station in riot gear to drive off the protesters. As the crowd dispersed, looting broke out on nearby streets. The Rebellion was on. 

Why do I call the events of July 12 to 17 a rebellion rather than a riot? Riots are mindless, aimless, spontaneous outbursts triggered by some immediate event. But rebellions, like those waged by Thomas Jefferson and Nat Turner, are the result of long-simmering hurts with no other ways to redress grievances. Looking at the evidence, this was a rebellion. 

The situation in Newark at the time can be explained in two words: racial polarization. Whites held a virtual monopoly on power in Newark, despite token representation of blacks—what are sometimes called “house Negroes”—on the city and county levels. Racial polarization was entrenched. This in a city that, at the time, was 52 percent black and 10 percent Spanish speaking. 

The increasingly angry black community raised a growing chorus of demands for better opportunities. Repressive measures by the police force (which was 90 percent white) and government agencies like the Board of Education and the Welfare Department increased the hunger for self-determination in the black community. Blacks were the victims of unscrupulous landlords and crooked retailers, and of misguided development programs that turned into land grabs, destroying communities in the name of urban renewal. 

The white population had been flowing steadily out of Newark since the 1950s. Jobs were leaving, too. (...) 

On the second night of the Rebellion, I was driving around with three guys in my car. (...)

I was climbing up the hill on Court Street, heading west toward the Scudder Homes, when I heard the siren. It was a hot night; the windows of my white Ford Fairlane 500 were down. We neared the corner of High Street—now Martin Luther King Boulevard—when I picked up the whirling lights of a Newark police car in my rearview mirror. The siren was getting closer. They were coming for us.  

I pulled over to the grassy divider in the middle of Court Street. The squad car sped forward, angling in front of me, presumably to prevent our escape. Four cops jumped out, guns drawn, and ordered us out of the car with our hands up. One of them had a shotgun. 

We stepped from the car as directed. One of the cops yelled, “Up against the car, motherfuckers.” The street was deserted. We knew we were in big trouble. 

I had never before looked down the wrong end of a shotgun. It seemed like it was looking back at me. I turned and assumed the position, hands on the roof of my car, legs spread wide. 

The pat-down produced no weapons. Still, these guys were scary. One cop ordered me to open my trunk, which I did without hesitation. I thought about my Virginia plates. It was popularly held in government and law-enforcement circles that, when unrest came to Newark, it would be fueled by “outside agitators,” who would supply guns and ammunition. (...) 

It is hard to explain to anyone who was not there the climate of resistance in the streets during the 1960s. People organized to withhold rent from landlords who overcharged for slum properties; they demonstrated against welfare bureaucrats who punished their clients for violating the “man in the house” rule, which said families could not get public assistance if there was an able-bodied man in the household. People boycotted retail merchants who sold bad meat and schools that failed to properly educate children. People demonstrated against poorly managed, overcrowded public housing, and against rampant urban renewal that gobbled up residential neighborhoods without providing adequate replacement housing. And of course, they spoke out against police brutality.  

The ordinary democratic processes didn’t work for black people. All that was left was the politics of confrontation. Up to 1967, those confrontations had been nonviolent. (...)  

On another corner, across from the Morton Street School, Central Ward Democratic leader Eulis “Honey” Ward and I watched as local residents ran into the furniture stores on Springfield Avenue. Out they came with sofas, chairs, lamps—whatever they could carry. They hauled their goods up flights of stairs and came back down with worn-out, dilapidated furniture, leaving it on the sidewalks for the trash collector. What Ward and I couldn’t see was the deliberate removal of credit records from the filing cabinets in these stores. Without these records, the merchants wouldn’t be able to find people who had bought on credit. 

Not all white merchants were targeted. Those with a reputation for fairness were spared—although this message was not always easy to communicate to passing looters. The few black merchants wrote “soul brother” on their windows or doors to avoid the riotous invasion or the torch. On South Orange Avenue, neighbors wrote those words outside a shop owned by a Chinese merchant they wanted to protect from looters. But they couldn’t protect him from the police. The next morning, the merchant discovered bullet holes in his shop. Law-enforcement officers were singling out stores that appeared to be black owned for their own brand of retaliation and lawlessness. (...) Junius Williams

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photographs via

The -ism Series (37): Mammy-ism

Abstract: AfricanAmerican women can experience some feelings of self-hatred to the extent that they evaluate and then devalue their physical characteristics (facial features, skin color, hair texture, personal behaviors) referencing beauty standards set by European Americans who imbue White supremacy. These same Black women may find themselves acting out certain behaviors in historically defined and ascribed roles dictated by individual and institutionalized racism, roles that help to maintain the dependency and oppression of Black women. One such role ascribed to a Black woman is that mammy.



This article addresses the concept of mammy and the maintaining of the mammy cultural image. The diagnosis of Mammy-ism is discussed as an example of one way that AfricanAmerican women historically assume the role and acquiesce to this socially determined inferior status, demonstrate attitudes of self-alienation, and display mental confision. As a result, African social reality and survival thrust are displaced with European social reality and survival thrust. African women who display the above characteristics suffer from the mental disorder of Mammy-ism. The Azibo nosology categorizes Mammy-ism as a subcategory of Psychological Misorientation (genetic Blackness minus psychological Blackness). (Abdullah, 1998)

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- Abdullah, S. S. (1998). Mammy-ism: A Diagnosis of Psychological Misorientation for Women of African Descent. Journal of Black Psychology, 24(2), 196-210.
- photograph via 

My great-grand-aunt Hattie McDaniel

I was at home contemplating the story about HBO Max temporarily pulling “Gone With The Wind” from its schedule, a 1939 film that included my great-grand-aunt, actress Hattie McDaniel. Suddenly, my disgust was elevated because it reminded me of the treatment she received from Hollywood and society. Her story was among the countless horrors from slavery to George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. We are talking about the destruction of millions of Black people, their families and their communities, and this is still happening in the current year of 2020.



In my own family, McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her performance in “Gone With The Wind,” was one of the many prime examples of this systemic mainstay of horror. Her parents, Henry and Susan McDaniel, were born into slavery. Henry, a Civil War veteran, was denied his military pension for decades after sustaining permanent injuries during battle. He continued to work tough labor jobs even in his diminished capacity. Susan also was motivated by her older, performing siblings (Otis, Sam and Etta) and longed to be on the road with them entertaining the masses. A young, impressionable Hattie inherited their work ethic and that drive catapulted her to success.

After her Oscar win, Hattie was still forced to play a maid or servant by Hollywood in film after film. Her goal was to survive as well as entertain, but she desired equal treatment just like everyone else in the world. She served her country as the chairman of the Hollywood Victory Committee (Negro Division) during World War II to entertain the troops and help sell war bonds.

Yet when she sought out better roles in Hollywood, they were not available to her. Her wish to be buried at the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery alongside her peers was rejected because of her skin color.

She and other Black cast members were not allowed to attend the premiere of “Gone With The Wind” in Atlanta in 1939. When she bought a home in the West Adams district in Los Angeles in the 1940s, her White neighbors formed a “restrictive covenant” against her and other minorities to remove them from their homes because they were Black. America has always looked at us as subhuman.

Beyond my family, the trans-Atlantic slave trade — which included slave-trading participants from Portugal, Italy, Denmark, France, Spain, England, the Netherlands and North America — sold Black bodies like cattle by the millions, and millions more were killed in the process. (...)

The Civil War (over 600,000 dead White bodies) was a war over who (and who did not) have the rights of ownership of Black people. The countless rapes of Black women. There were scores of White Christians (children included) buying food and drink as they were entertained by the hanging of Black men and women in trees. You have probably seen the photos, which can only be described as sheer horror. And there they were on display with broken necks, bodies limp and lifeless, battered, set on fire, and covered in blood from the gaping bullet holes from the target practice. And today, we are still witnessing similar executions such as the ones George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and countless others have experienced.

I have spoken with the staff and/or leaders of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the Motion Picture & Television Fund, the Rocky Mountain Public Media/PBS, Turner/HBO Max and others. Organizations are donating money to the NAACP, but that is not the answer. One solution is to make sure every city in this country regardless of ethnicity has the proper infrastructure and economic inclusion. The process will be uncomfortable (as it should be) for those who harbor a hatred and guilt they cannot reconcile.

This nation’s tragedy is that our very existence in America is the evidence of a crime and the most constant theme of Black existence in America.
Kevin John Goff

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photograph via