Nonprofit Thursday: Schomburg director in town this Saturday

“Slavery By Another Name” panel adds Schomburg director

This Saturday’s panel discussion on the PBS documentary “Slavery By Another Name”, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name by Douglas Blackmon, now includes Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the renown Schomburg Center in Harlem. Previously announced panelists include: Susan Hall, community relations director for the Western Reserve Historical Society;  county councilman Julian Rogers; civil rights attorney Dennis Niermann; motivational speaker Basheer Jones; radio/tv personality Sandra Bishop; and filmmaker Marquette Williams.

A portion of the riveting documentary, broadcast last week in its entirety, will be shown before the panel discussion. The program begins at 6PM this Saturday, Feb. 25 at New Bridge, 3634 Euclid Ave., Cleveland OH 44115. Call 216.867.9775 for info.

Muhammad was appointed director of the Schomburg Center in November 2010. He is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Learn more about him here and here.

League Park Update

If you are interested in learning more about the recently announced plans for the restoration and reconstruction of League Park and the redevelopment plans for the surrounding neighborhood, you are invited to attend the community meeting on next Wednesday, Feb. 29 at 6PM at Faith Temple Church of God, 7035 Lexington Ave, Cleveland OH 44106. The meeting is sponsored by the League Park Heritage Committee and the City of Cleveland.

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Cleveland State Black Studies Dept. hosts Ghana film festival

The School of Communication and the Howard A. Mims African American Cultural Center will be presenting an UMOJA Round Table event, “African Films Versus Reality: A Student Film Showcase”, on Feb. 29.

The event is free and will feature two former Imaging Africa (Com 428) students’ films from 4PM to 5:30PM in the Main Classroom Building, Room 135/137.

Mai-Kim Dang, a Cleveland State film graduate, and MiLisa Coleman, a digital media major, will be present to discuss their films and their experiences in Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia.

Light refreshments will be served, and the event is open to the public. 
Dang and Coleman visited the African continent as a result of two different travel abroad programs.

Dang visited Ethiopia through a Fulbright research grant while Coleman visited Ghana and Burkina Faso through the Morehouse Pan African Global Experience (MPAGE) study aboard program. The ability to get first hand accounts of Africa should be useful in addressing many of the misperceptions Americans have about Africa.

Imaging Africa is a class taught by instructor Eric Siler and is designed to enable students to understand images, stereotypes, and myths associated with the historical development of film with African content.

Instructor Siler encourages CSU students to participate in the screenings and see what former students have done with information learned in his class.

For more information, please contact Prester Pickett, coordinator of the Howard A. Mims African American Cultural Center at (216) 687-3656 or visit http://www.csuohio.edu/class/blackstudies/.

Thoughts on Black History

If you haven’t participated in or supported at least two events by today’s halfway point in this Leap Year African American History Month, then get your act in gear. And this injunction is intended for you irrespective of your race, ethnicity, place of national origin, gender, age, or sexual orientation. [See the last paragraph].

Black history is of course American history. I, for one, would hate to be ignorant of a substantial portion of my fellow neighbors. I never cease to be amazed at how little so many of us know about so much of American history, especially as it relates to black people. It’s simply not possible to understand much of anything in today’s world without an appreciation for what has taken place.

This country is home to just about the most ahistoric people on the planet. An American culture that exalts youth, instant gratification, and the next big thing, has little appreciation for the traditions that inform far older cultures on distant continents, i.e. Europe, Asia, and Africa.

We give only lip service to history in our society. We’re so far out of touch with the country’s origins that we credit folks who offer up pseudo historical accounts [think Newt Gingrich and George Will] as having big brains or being super smart, when all they are doing is relying on some coded account of events that supports their present day political views.

All too often those historical accounts are coded to express American superiority and exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is uniquely virtuous, indisputably blessed by Providence, justifiably entitled to rule over lesser nations, and endowed with a right of  supreme veto.

February, thanks to Carter G. Woodson, offers us at least four weeks a year when healthy antidotes to that warped view are at least on the agenda.

You may already have missed one of this month’s best such antidotes, “Slavery By Another Name”, which aired this past Monday on PBS television. Based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book by Douglas A. Blackmon, the show offered an understanding of how southern state governments colluded with private enterprise to establish a system of peonage after the Civil War that in some ways was more brutal than slavery had been.

It was hard to watch the program and not relate the world it revealed to today’s system of incarceration. It seems that we are becoming increasingly exceptional in our knack for the forced rendering of a distinct segment of humanity into an alternate or surplus labor force for private economic profit. Read either Blackmon’s original work or that of Michelle Alexander [The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness]   And we offer a hat tip to Deuteronomy 8:3 Café for hipping us to this work, a predecessor to Blackmon’s: Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Southern Convict Lease System, 1865-1933 by Milfred C. Fierce.

If you missed last week’s panel discussion of “Slavery By Another Name” at Karamu last week featuring both the book’s author and the film’s producer, you have a second chance to view a portion of the documentary and participate in a community discussion. On Saturday, Feb. 25 there will be a panel conversation at New Bridge, 3634 Euclid Ave., Cleveland OH 44115 around the film and related topics. Guests and panelists include: Susan Hall, community relations director for the Western Reserve Historical Society,  county councilman Julian Rogers, civil rights attorney Dennis Niermann, motivational speaker Basheer Jones, radio/tv personality Sandra Bishop, and filmmaker Marquette Williams. Call 216.867.9775 for info.

Finally, we commend to all Real Deal readers this recent piece from Diverse Issues in Higher Education: Why Ethnic Studies Courses Are Good for White Kids Too.