WHITEMAIL! (INSTEAD OF BLACKMAIL!)-THE WHITE HOMOSEXUAL SLAVEMASTER HAS SPOKEN! -BLACKS ARE STILL SLAVES IN AMERIKKKA AND MUST OBEY! – SO OBAMA MUST OBEY! -A JOURNALIST IN NIGERIA PINPOINTS HOW OBAMA WAS FORCED TO DO IT!-FROM PUNCH NEWSPAPERS,NIGERIA

Of principles, politics and Obama’s gay gamble
May 20, 2012 by Minabere Ibelema 7 Comments

When the United States President Barack Obama stunned the world by declaring his support for same-sex marriage, he explained that it was a matter of principle. He believes in equality for all people and that extending marriage rights to gays was an extension of that principle.

But there’s more to it.

The announcement was stunning, not so much for what Obama said but when he said it.

That Obama has been sympathetic to the gay community has been quite evident. Among other things, he saw to it that the Pentagon lifted the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that forbade gay military personnel from making public their homosexuality.

And his Justice Department refrained from representing the Federal Government in cases related to the Defence of Marriage Act, a law that forbade the recognition of same-sex marriages by federal departments and agencies.

For an administration to blatantly refuse to enforce a law that was duly passed by Congress and signed by a previous President is a rather serious matter. Though it is not without precedent, in some circumstances it could be impeachable.

Therefore,as a matter of law and politics, that stance was even more consequential than Obama’s declaration of support for same-sex marriage.

What was truly stunning then was Obama’s timing. Earlier in his political career, he had unequivocally opposed same-sex marriage. Then, as President, he had responded to a related question by saying that his personal view on the matter was still evolving.

That was, of course, the kind of answer that politicians give on issues of which they fear the consequences irrespective of the side they took. So, with about six months to go before the general elections, why would Obama risk it all by taking a stance now?

Well, it is a matter of blackmail and being backed into the wall. First, the latter.

When Vice-President Joseph Biden was asked recently about same-sex marriage, he said he was “comfortable” with it. It was inevitable that Obama would be called upon again to comment on the matter.

Obama was in a political quandary. He couldn’t afford to equivocate on a matter about which his vice-president had given a pointed response. He had to declare.

And then, there was the dimension of blackmail. No, not by any gay lover. Actually, the trending news before Obama’s same-sex marriage declaration had been about the release of love letters he wrote to his girlfriend in his earlier years.

The blackmail reportedly came from Hollywood, where some big wigs were planning a major campaign fundraiser for Obama. In case you are wondering the connection, Hollywood is a gay haven, perhaps second only to San Francisco.

According to the reports, some among the fundraisers pressured Obama to take a stand on same-sex marriage. The announcement, according to this thesis, was to appease that group.

Obama can use all the fund-raising help he can get. According to Bloomberg financial services, “The price tag on the 2012 presidential election is set to be the biggest ever.” That is higher than the combined price tag of more than $1bn for the 2008 election.

Even without a challenger in the primaries, Obama’s campaign has already expended more than $172m of the close to $197m it has raised so far. Yet the general elections campaign is merely in the warm-up stage.

Obama is set to duel it out with his enormously wealthy opponent, Mitt Romney. It is a circumstance in which even the most subtle blackmail can get it done.

Even then, the declaration of support for same-sex marriage is quite a gamble. If Obama were running for office anywhere in the world outside of Europe and North America, he is probably finished. Certainly, his stock has tumbled greatly in Nigeria.

Might the declaration cost Obama the election or help him? The best permutation at this time is, it all depends. Here’s what the political chessboard looks like.

Recent opinion polls show that a slight majority of Americans say that same sex marriage should be allowed.

The people who are most put off by Obama’s support of same-sex marriage are religious conservatives. But they vote solidly Republican, anyway. So, Obama has few votes to lose among them.

However, Obama’s staunchest supporters — blacks and Hispanics — are also overwhelmingly against same-sex marriage. Yet, he needs a heavy turnout by them — all voting predominantly for him — to win the election.

Obama knows this too well. His very next action after the announcement was to call the pastors of America’s largest and most influential black churches to explain himself. Predictably, he didn’t get many alleluias from them.

In fact, black pastors were already besieged with phone calls, texts and emails from dumbfounded members of their congregations seeking guidance. Many pastors had to address the issue in prayer meetings and Sunday sermons, with most disapproving but urging understanding.

“I believe the statement the president made and his decision was made in good faith. I am sure because the president is a good man,” Bishop Timothy Clark, of the First Church of God in Columbus, Ohio, told his congregation, according to USA Today.

In any case, African Americans’ support for Obama is so overwhelming and strong that it is unlikely that he will lose a lot of their votes in November. As would be predicted by the theory of cognitive dissonance, they are likely to find ways to rationalise away Obama’s decision.

The same may not be true of Hispanics, however. They are predominantly Catholic and, therefore, more conservative than African Americans in their view of social matters.

Independent voters, whose swings almost always determine the outcomes of presidential election, are another concern for Obama. Among them are people who are still sitting on the fence and for whom Obama’s position may be the tipping factor to the other side.

But the common wisdom is that independent voters tend to be swayed more by economic matters than social issues.

What is certain about all this is that Obama is an astute politician. He must have done the permutations and liked how the numbers turned out.

Echewe ozo May 20, 2012 at 7:37 am

If obama’s fada is a gay could he ve born obama d u.s president of today,when a man meets a woman during ovulation conception takes place nd dat is hw our mother’s bore us all,so dis unnatural method abi na shit una wan born,no bi shit fil d anus.to support stupidity or stupid gay is to make ve human extinction,b wise obama.
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James May 20, 2012 at 9:00 am

A confused society indeed.

michael May 20, 2012 at 10:46 am

AGBEKE AYANTUGA May 22, 2012 at 12:28 pm

WHITEMAIL! (INSTEAD OF BLACK MAIL!) -THE WHITE HOMOSEXUAL SLAVEMASTER HAS SPOKEN! BLACKS ARE STILL SLAVES IN AMERIKKKA AND MUST OBEY! -SO OBAMA MUST DO AS THE SLAVEMASTER TOLD HIM! NO FREEDOM FOR THE BLACK MAN IN AMERIKKKA!

PETE O’NEAL-Exiled BLACK PANTHER Finds FREEDOM in Africa!-JOIN HIM BLACK MAN and BACK HOME TO THE MOTHERLAND!

Former Black Panther patches together purpose in Africa exile





In America, Pete O’Neal was an angry man, an ex-con who found a kind of religion in 1960s black nationalism. In a Tanzania village, he’s been a champion of children.

Many of the young orphans gather round to watch, and lend their support, as Pete O’Neal has fresh ink applied to his fading black panther tattoo. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

By Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times

January 29, 2012

Reporting from Imbaseni, Tanzania — The fugitive shuffles to his computer and begins typing out his will. He is about to turn 71, and it is time. “My life,” he writes, “has been a wild and wicked ride….”

All Pete O’Neal has amassed fits on two pages: A small brick home with a sheet-metal roof. A few road-beaten vehicles. A cluster of bunkhouses and classrooms he spent decades building, brick by scavenged brick, near the slopes of Mt. Meru’s volcanic cone. Everything will go to his wife of 42 years, Charlotte, and to a few trusted workers.

He prints out the will late one Saturday morning and settles into his reclining chair to check the spelling. He signs his name. Then, to guarantee its authenticity, he finds an ink pad, rolls his thumb across it, and affixes his thumbprint to the bottom of the page.

“I think that’ll do it,” he says.

Map: Imbaseni, Tanzania

Photos: A former Black Panther in Africa exile champions kids

When last he walked America’s streets, O’Neal was a magnetic young man possessed of bottomless anger. He was an ex-con who’d found a kind of religion in late-’60s black nationalism, a vain, violent street hustler reborn in a Black Panther uniform of dark sunglasses, beret and leather jacket. With pitiless, knife-sharp diction, he spoke of sending police to their graves.

This morning, he sits in his living room uncapping medicine bottles. A pill for high blood pressure. Another for the pain in his back and his bad knee. An aspirin to thin his blood. Time is catching him, like the lions that pursue him implacably through his nightmares, their leashes held by policemen.

He pushes through his screen door into the brisk morning air. A slightly stooped, thickset man with long, graying dreadlocks, he moves unsteadily down the irregular stone steps he built into the sloping dirt. He makes his way past the enormous avocado tree, past the horse barn with its single slow-footed tenant, Bullet, past the shaded dining pavilion.

His four-acre compound bustles with visitors, many of them preparing for a memorial service for Geronimo Pratt, a former Panther who died in his farmhouse down the road, his affairs untidy, his will unfinished, his death a sharp message to O’Neal not to put off the paperwork any longer.

Most of O’Neal’s big dreams have faded over the years, or come to feel silly. Like beating the 42-year-old federal gun charges that caused him to flee the United States. Like the global socialist revolution that he was supposed to help lead. Like returning home to the streets of his Midwestern childhood. Like winning citizenship in his adopted African country, and the prize that’s eluded him on two continents: the feeling of belonging somewhere.

This is what’s left: the shell of a 20-year-old Toyota Coaster bus that bulks before him in a clearing. It’s a stripped-and-gutted 29-seater that he bought for $11,500 after years of squirreling away money. It came with dents, a cracked windshield, a peeling paint job, rotting floorboards, frayed seats.

Still, it seemed like a good deal until he found the engine had to be replaced, costing an additional $4,000. He’s hired mechanics and craftsmen to rebuild the bus nearly from the chassis up, and a few of them are milling around now, informing him in Swahili of their progress.

He rarely leaves home anymore. Crowds jangle his nerves; traffic makes his hands shake. Yet nothing feels more urgent than readying this bus for an improbable 300-mile trip to the edge of his adopted continent.

A group of American high school students, mostly white, is gathering in the dining pavilion. They’ve been coming by the busload for years, many drawn by the intrigue of staying with a former Panther. They pay him $30 a night for a bunk. The money — together with sporadic donations from sympathetic friends here and abroad — pays the bills.

Pete O’Neal in his Black Panther days. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

The students pause before the big poster featuring O’Neal as a fierce young militant, rifle in arms, Charlotte at his side. It’s hard to reconcile that image with the grandfatherly host who greets them in Swahili as if they were old friends, booming, “Karibu!” Welcome!

He asks where they’re from. A girl says Missouri, which happens to be his home state, and he hugs her theatrically. Everyone laughs. “All of you are welcome,” he says, “even if you’re from strange places.”

He plants them before documentary footage about his life. It’s easier than explaining the whole story himself. Where would he start? His childhood in segregated Kansas City, Mo., where the amusement park admitted black kids once a year, a day so cherished that they went in their Sunday best? Should he start with the stabbings and shootings in the projects where he grew up?

“I lived in the streets,” he says. “I didn’t have time to be happy.”

After one arrest, he was given a stark choice: reform school or the armed services. The Navy threw him out after he plunged a butcher knife into another sailor’s chest over an insult, nearly killing him. He drifted in and out of lockup. He pimped girls in three states. He wore $300 Italian suits and a blond wave in his processed hair.

To the FBI, the Panthers were homegrown terrorists who romanticized lawbreaking with overheated Marxist rhetoric. To O’Neal, who founded the Kansas City chapter of the party in early 1969, it represented a lifeline out of an abyss of drugs and aimlessness. He blazed with purpose: End racism and class inequality, fast.

“I would like very much to shoot my way into the House of Representatives,” he declared in a televised interview, angry at a congressman who was investigating the Panthers. Pressed to clarify, he added: “I mean it literally.”

He stormed into a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, screaming accusations that the Kansas City police chief was funneling weapons to white supremacist groups.

Shortly afterward, a federal judge sentenced him to a four-year prison term on a conviction of transporting a shotgun across state lines. Out on bail, he decided to run. He and Charlotte fled in 1970 to Sweden, then to Algeria, and finally, in late 1972, to Tanzania, whose socialist government welcomed left-wing militants.

The O’Neals had $700. After a few years they bought a patch of inhospitable brush and volcanic rock in Imbaseni, a cobra-infested village of thatched-roof shacks in the country’s remote northern interior. They were up before dawn, dancing with Al Jarreau on the tape deck, gathering locals for the day’s work. Their two young African-born children, Malcolm and Stormy, carried bricks and water buckets.

Soon they had four walls, a roof, and little else. Plastic hung over the windows. No toilets

Soon they had four walls, a roof, and little else. Plastic hung over the windows. No toilets. It was the back-to-Africa experience so many black Americans talked about, minus the option of escape. They learned to grow corn and raise chickens. He jarred pickle relish, smoked sausages and bottled barbecue sauce for sale to local shops.

His temper was thunderous. When he heard something in Swahili that sounded offensive — such as wa-negro, a neutral description of black Americans implying no malice — he would scream, ready to fight.

“We were cowboys then,” says Ikaweba Bunting, 63, a Compton-raised college professor who arrived in Tanzania in the 1970s and stayed for years. “We were big and hard-walking and hard-talking, and ready to beat people up — the whole street culture.”

Exile was supposed to be temporary. O’Neal corresponded with other Panthers and planned to return home to help lead the revolution. He watched from abroad as the party collapsed from infighting, arrests and an FBI campaign of surveillance and sabotage. People stopped talking about revolution. Radicals found new lives.

O’Neal’s exile became permanent. His fury abated. Some of it was age. Some of it was Tanzania, where strangers always materialized to push your Land Rover out of the mud, and where conflicts were resolved in community meetings in which everyone got to speak, interminably.

“It is so laid back, so reasonable, that to be otherwise makes you look, even to yourself, like a damn fool,” O’Neal says.

Around that first crude brick structure, the fugitive improvised a little island of hope. He built a small recording studio for musicians and a workshop for artists. He gathered castoff computers and invited locals to come learn. He sank a well and opened the spigot to the village. It was, as he saw it, in the spirit of the free breakfast program he’d run as a Panther.

“He’s had a chance to grow in a way that very few people get here,” says his brother Brian O’Neal, 58, who lives in Kansas City.

Had he stayed in the States, Pete O’Neal believes, he’d be long dead from a shootout or street fight.

If exile saved him, it has also meant a life in which the sense of being a stranger never goes away.

“There’s always a feeling of not being completely part of this culture. I know I am of a different tribe,” he says. “People like me here, they love me, but I’m always other than.”

Back in his house, he relaxes with a few shots of Jim Beam. He keeps a shotgun for snakes and a wall full of books. In mock-stentorian tones, he ridicules his early blood-soaked rhetoric. He puts a hand over his face, like an actor reminded of an embarrassing role, and says, “That was a man who was trying to find himself. He was trying to shed his skin, and emerge brand-new. I think he overstated and overacted.”

For his radicalism itself, however, he won’t apologize, even if — as he suspects — it is the one thing that might gain him safe entry back into the States.

“They will never convince me in my life,” he says, “that what I was doing wasn’t right.”

All the orphans get a razored haircut — both boys and girls — and wash off the loose stubble under cold water at the tap. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

A few years back, an ambition seized him. The village had scores of destitute children, orphans from dirt-floor shacks and subsistence farms. He collected donations and built a concrete-block bunkhouse down near his tomato and pepper garden.

He spread word that he had room for a few kids. More than 100 appeared at his door, many shoeless. He had to send the majority away. The most desperate, a couple dozen, he informally adopted.

Now, they roam his grounds in lively packs, playing four square on the basketball court. They sleep in rows under malaria nets. Volunteers and a few staff members watch over the children and give them English and computer classes.

They call him Babu. Grandfather.

How big is the ocean?

So big you can’t see across it.

Really?

So big you can go for weeks and never see land.

He shows them a globe.

See how much more ocean there is than land?

So is it bigger than Tanzania?

American high school students gather around Pete O’Neal in his compound’s dining pavilion. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

The American high school students have questions, so he takes a seat before them. It’s late, and he’s weary, but this is his living. They want to know what country he belongs to, exactly.

He has no passport, he explains, and the Tanzanian government has rebuffed his efforts to become a citizen. “I’m not sure where the hell I belong at this particular point,” he tells the students.

For years, he sought a way home. He found American lawyers willing to work for free to fight the gun charges. He would like to see his 91-year-old mother in Kansas City one last time.

His longing for the States comes at funny moments, as when he sees shrimp sailing through the air in Red Lobster commercials. He still dreams about the Kansas City he knew as a child, the bakeries and the public swimming pool and the ladies with their hats. But the city seems wrong, somehow, becoming weirdly unrecognizable.

In other dreams, he finds himself fleeing from things he can’t see or name, urging his wife, “Charlotte, you gotta run!”

He regards his complex of bunkhouses, workshops and classrooms as “socialism in microcosm,” he tells the students, though doctrinaire Marxism left him disillusioned. People, he concluded, are basically selfish.

Have his views on violence changed?

“I don’t have the particular type of courage that would allow me to turn the other cheek.”

One fresh-faced girl says she’s been in Tanzania a week, and thinks it might be neat to move here. Does he recommend it?

Patiently, he replies: “It ain’t that kind of party.”

Of late, he tells the students, he’s been haunted by the deaths of other exiled Panthers. One died in France last February, another in Zambia in October.

Then there was his close friend Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, the Panthers’ former field marshal, who spent 27 years behind bars on a murder conviction before a California judge overturned it.

In 2002, Pratt bought a big farmhouse nearby with his false-imprisonment settlement, and O’Neal felt as though he’d rediscovered a lost brother. They drove through the village listening to Richard Pryor CDs, laughing until they wheezed and tears rolled down their cheeks.

Pratt was hospitalized with high blood pressure in May. He hated any confinement. He pulled out his IVs and went home. Days later, O’Neal found him on his side, dead in bed, just 63. His memorial would be tomorrow.

“People are dropping, man,” he tells the students. He doesn’t say that his thoughts were circling his own mortality so relentlessly that he couldn’t sleep last night, and climbed out of bed to tally up what he would leave behind.

Pete O’Neal’s four-acre compound bustles with visitors, some of them preparing dance routines for the memorial service for Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, the onetime Black Panther who died in his farmhouse down the road. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

Hundreds gather for Pratt’s memorial service. O’Neal sits on the stage under the avocado tree and tells a few stories about their friendship: How Pratt always told him his toes were ugly. How they joked endlessly about who was the bigger hayseed.

Amid the prayers and the singing and the tributes, he manages to steal away for a few moments to inspect the bus. The seats are lined up in the dirt, ready to be scrubbed and resewn. The windows are taped up so the painting can begin. Panther colors: black and light blue.

He remembers discovering the ocean.

He was in his late teens, a heartland kid who believed his fearful precinct of Kansas City was the absolute center of the world, its ugliness and bigotry a true picture of the world. It is why, to his mind, violent revolution looked logical and inevitable.

Then he arrived in California to report for duty in the Navy, and turned his head and saw the Pacific. His breath was caught short by the immensity of it, all that blue stretching out into other lands, other stories. It was the start of a decades-long lesson that the world is bigger, more complicated and interesting than his little plot of bitter experience had led him to suspect.

His orphans have never left this inland region of cornfields and malarial swamps. They’ve never tasted salt water, or felt hot beach sand between their toes.

“They have no idea — no idea — what the ocean is,” he says.

Nights and weekends, they pile into his living room and watch documentaries about sea life. He tells them about whales, giant squid, blind fish in the lightless deep. He regales them with shark stories.

Will they eat me?

If they’re hungry enough, they’ll try.

Because they don’t like me?

No, it’s the natural order of things.

Now and then he indulges in what he calls “Kansas City exaggeration,” and even the majestic sea gets some burnishing. The sharks in his stories grow bigger than houses.

The kids study the TV. The sharks don’t look that big.

OK. But they do have sharks bigger t

panther in tanz

All the orphans receive a razor sharp haircut the boys and the girls and wash off the loose stubble under a tap of gold water.

pan2

Pete O’Neal shadow boxes with the young son of his deceased close friend Geronimo Pratt on the eve of his memorial inside his Tanzania compound. Pratt was hospitalized with high blood pressure in May. He hated any confinement. He pulled out his IVs and went home. Days later, O’Neal found him on his side, dead in bed, just 63. Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt — the Panthers’ former field marshal, who spent 27 years behind bars on a murder conviction before a California judge overturned it. In 2002, Pratt bought a big farmhouse nearby with his false imprisonment settlement, and O’Neal felt as though he’d rediscovered a lost brother. They drove through the village listening to Richard Pryor CDs, laughing until they wheezed and tears rolled down their cheeks.

MALCOLM X-OUR GREAT BLACK LEADER PRESENTED THIS TO AFRICAN HEADS OF STATE -AN HISTORIC BLACK FIRST !-WE NEED TO GET BACK TO OUR AFRICAN CULTURE AND STOP BEING 21ST CENTURY SLAVES IN AMERIKKKA!-FROM NATHANIELTURNER.COM

MALCOLM X IN IBADAN NIGERIA 1964

FROM nathanielturner.com

Appeal to African Heads of State

Speech by Malcolm X

Chairman, Organization of Afro-American Unity

Throughout June, 1964, MALCOLM X spoke, agitated, educated and organized to create a new, non-religious movement to promote black unity and work for freedom “by any means necessary.” On June 28, this new movement was born under the name of the Organization of Afro-American Unit, its “statement of basic aims and objectives” was released to the public, and Malcolm was designated chairman.

Shortly thereafter, on July 9, Malcolm again left the United States for Africa and the Middle East. His immediate objective was to attend the “African Summit”—the second meeting of the Organization of African Unity, which had been formed in 1963 to bring about joint action by the independent African governments.

The OAU conference was held in Cairo July 17–21, and was attended by nearly all the heads of the thirty-four member states. The welcoming address was made by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic who, while reviewing the events of the previous year, hailed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that had recently been enacted in the United States.

Malcolm was accepted as an observer at the conference. In this capacity he was permitted to submit to the delegates an eight-page memorandum urging their support of the Negro struggle in the United States and their help in bring the plight of the American Negro before the United Nations. The memorandum, which follows, was delivered to the delegates on July 17, one day before the events that came to be called “the Harlem riots.”

Your Excellencies:

The Organization of Afro-American Unity has sent me to attend this historic African summit conferences as an observer to represent the interests of 22 million African-American whose human rights are being violated daily by the racism of American imperialists.

The Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) has been formed by a cross-section of America’s African-American community, and is patterned after the letter and spirit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).

Just as the Organization of African Unity has called upon all African leaders to submerge their differences and unite on common objectives for the common good of all Africans—in America the Organization of Afro-American Unity has called upon Afro-American leaders to submerge their differences and find areas of agreement wherein we can work in unity for the good of the entire 22 million African-Americans.

Since the 22 million of us were originally Africans, who are now in America, not by choice but only by a cruel accident in our history, we strongly believe that African problems are our problems and our problems are African problems.

Your Excellencies:

We also believe that as heads of the Independent African states you are the shepherd of all African peoples everywhere, whether they are still at home on the mother continent or have been scattered abroad.

Some African leaders at this conference have implied that they have enough problems here on the mother continent without adding the Afro-American problem.

With all due respect to your esteemed positions, I must remind all of you that the good shepherd will leave ninety-nine sheep, who are safe at home, to go to the aid of the one who is lost and has fallen into the clutches of the imperialist wolf.

We, in America, are your long-lost brothers and sisters, and I am here only to remind you that our problems are your problems. As the African-Americans “awaken” today, we find ourselves in a strange land that has rejected us, and, like the prodigal son, we are turning to our elder brothers for help. We pray our pleas will not fall upon deaf ears.

We were taken forcibly in chains from this mother continent and have now spend over 300 years in America, suffering the most inhuman forms of physical and psychological tortures imaginable.

During the past ten years the entire world has witnessed our men, women, and children being attacked and bitten by vicious police dogs, brutally beaten by police clubs, and washed down the sewers by high-pressure water hoses that would rip the clothes from our bodies and the flesh from our limbs.

And all of these inhuman atrocities have been inflicted upon us by the American governmental authorities, the police themselves, for no reason other than we seek the recognition and respect granted our human beings in America.

Your Excellencies:

The American government is either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of your 22 million African-American brothers and sisters. We stand defenseless, at the mercy of American racists who murder us at will for no reason other than we are black and of African descent.

Two black bodies were found in the Mississippi River this week; last week an unarmed African-American educator was murdered in cold blood in Georgia; a few days before that three civil-rights workers disappeared completely, perhaps murdered also, only because they were teaching our people in Mississippi how to vote and how to secure their political rights.

Our problems are your problems We have lived for over 300 years in that American den of racist wolves in constant fear of losing life and limb. Recently, three students from Kenya were mistaken for American Negroes and were brutally beaten by New York police. Shortly after that, two diplomats from Uganda were also beaten by the New York City police, who mistook them for American Negroes.

If Africans are brutally beaten while only visiting in America, imagine the physical and psychological suffering received by your brothers and sisters who have lived there for over 300 years.

Our problem is your problem. No matter how much independence Africans get here on the mother continent, unless you wear your national dress at all times, when you visit America, you may be mistaken for one of us and suffer the same psychological humiliation and physical mutilation that is an everyday occurrence in our lives.

Your problems will never be fully solved until and unless ours are solved. You will never be fully respected until and unless we are also respected. You will never be recognized as free human beings until and unless we are also recognized and treated as human beings.

Our problem is your problem. It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem; a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights but a problem of human rights.

If the United States Supreme Court justice, Arthur Goldberg, a few weeks ago, could find legal grounds to threaten to bring Russia before the United Nations and charge her with violating the human rights of less than three million Russian Jews, what makes our African brothers hesitate to bring the Untied States government before the United Nations and charge her with violating the human rights of 22 million African-Americans?

We pray that our African brothers have not freed themselves of European colonialism only to be overcome and held in check now by American dollarism. Don’t let American racism be “legalized” by American dollarism.

America is worse than South Africa, because not only is America racist, but she also is deceitful and hypocritical. South Africa preaches segregation and practices segregation. She, at least, practices what she preaches. American preaches integration and practices segregation. She preaches one thing while deceitfully practicing another.

South Africa is like a vicious wolf, openly hostile towards black humanity. But America is cunning like a fox, friendly and smiling, but even more vicious and deadly than the wolf.

The wolf and the fox are both enemies of humanity; both are canine; both humiliate and mutilate their victims. Both have the same objectives, but differ only in methods.

If South Africa is guilty of violating the human rights of Africans here on the mother continent, then America is guilty of worse violations of 22 million Africans on the American continent. And if South Africa racism is not a domestic issue, then American racism also is not a domestic issue.

Many of you have been led to believe that the much publicized, recently passed civil-rights bill is a sign that America is making a sincere effort to correct the injustices we have suffered there. This propaganda maneuver is part of her deceit and trickery to keep the African nations from condemning her racist practices before the United Nations, as you are now doing as regards the same practices of South Africa.

The United States Supreme Court passed a law ten years ago making America’s segregated school system illegal. But the federal government has yet to enforce this law even in the North. If the federal government cannot enforce the law of the highest court in the land when it comes to nothing but equal rights to education for African Americans, how can anyone be so naïve as to think all the additional laws brought into being by the civil-rights bill will be enforced?

These are nothing but tricks of the century’s leading neo-colonialist power. Surely, our intellectually mature African brothers will not fall for this trickery.

The Organization of Afro-American Unity, in cooperation with a coalition of other Negro leaders and organizations, has decided to elevate our freedom struggle above the domestic level of civil rights. We intend to “internationalize” it by placing it at the level of human rights. Our freedom struggle for human dignity is no longer confined to the domestic jurisdiction of the United States government.

We beseech the independent African states to help us bring our problem before the United Nations, on the grounds that the United States government is morally incapable of protecting the lives and the property of 22 million African-Americans. And on the grounds that our deteriorating plight is definitely becoming a threat to world peace.

Out of frustration and hopelessness our young people have reached the point of no return. We no longer endorse patience and turning-the-other-cheek. We assert the right of self-defense by whatever means necessary, and reserve the right of maximum retaliation against our racist oppressors, no matter what the odds against us are.

From here on in, if we must die anyway, we will die fighting back and we will not die alone. We intend to see that our racist oppressors also get a taste of death.

We are well aware that our future efforts to defend ourselves by retaliating—by meeting violence with violence, eye for eye and tooth for tooth—could create the type of racial conflict in America that could easily escalate into a violent, world-wide, bloody race war.

In the interests of world peace and security, we beseech the heads of the independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

If this humble plea that I am voicing at this conference is not properly worded, then let our elder brothers, who know the legal language, come to our aid and word our plea in the proper language necessary for it to be heard.

One last word, my beloved brothers at this African summit:

“No one knows the master better than his servant.” We have been servants in America for over 300 years. We have a thorough, inside knowledge of this man who calls himself “Uncle Sam.” Therefore, you must heed our warning: Don’t escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by deceitful, “friendly” American dollarism.

May Allah’s blessings of good health and wisdom be upon you all. Salaam Alaikum.

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Malcolm X Speaks • George Breitman, editor • © Copyright 1965 by Merit Publishers and Betty Shabazz • Grove Press • New York, NY 10003 Remembering Malcolm Malcolm X Videos

posted 21 February 2006

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Feb. 21, 2006–41 years ago

Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem

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Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro

By Barbara Foley

A carefully argued, nuanced presentation of the genesis of the Harlem Renaissance. Foley’s breadth of knowledge in American radical history is impressive.—American Literature

Foley’s book is a lucid and useful one… A heavyweight intervention, it prompts significant rethinking of the ideological and representational strategies structuring the era.—Journal of American Studies

Foley does a masterful job of analyzing the racial and political theories of a wide range of black and white figures, from the radical Left to the racist Right… Students of African American political and cultural history in the early twentieth century cannot ignore this book. Essential.—Choice

In our current time of crisis, when ruling classes busily promote nationalism and racism to conceal the class nature of their inter-imperialist rivalries, one can only hope that readers will not be daunted by Foley’s dedication to analyzing the ideological milieu of the 1920s that contributed to the eclipse of New Negro radicalism by New Negro nationalism.—Science & Society

With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved.

Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.—amazon.com

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan / The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll / Only a Pawn in Their Game

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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg

The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804 / January 1, 1804 — The Founding of Haiti

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BLACK CLASSIC BOOKS

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updated 19 October 2007

LYNCHING PHOTO BOOK REVIEW- FROM http://www2.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/african/2000/lynching.htm

FROM http://www2.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/african/2000/lynching.htm
Lynchings in America
A History Not Known By Many
When I was a boy growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana, the word lynching was hardly ever mentioned. My parents only said these “mean” acts happened in the country (rural areas) with white men in white gowns (the KKK). In all my schooling, through high school and on to college, lynching was never part of a lecture or connected with American history. I knew of the word, lynching, but never, never the scope of this violent, hateful act.

On Thursday, January 13, 2000, an article entitled, “An Ugly Legacy Lives on, Its Glare Unsoftened by Age,” by Robert Smith was published in the New York Times. This excellent article revealed a world not known by many Americans living today and especially by me. Without my explaining here, it should be read by all persons, especially as it pertains to race and hate. Without understanding this past evil history, we cannot understand why hate is on the rise today in this year of 2000.

After reading the New York Times article, I wanted to know more about lynching and what could possibly be presented on this squeamish subject. It turned out that an exhibit of rare collected photo postcards were on display featuring lynchings as they took place in America from 1883-1960. I saw this exhibit. It was on view at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York City until February 12, 2000. This small gallery took in only about fifteen people at a time, and the line was long. Watching the viewers as they exited revealed what was inside: people with tears, some with anguish, some looked surprised with the horror they had seen.

This New York exhibition presented the collected photocards of Mr. James Allen, a white Atlanta resident who, for fifteen years, sought out these images of racial horror and self-righteous vigilante acts as rare finds. Since most of these photocards were kept as “keepsakes” by some families, Mr. Allen had to solicit ads for purchase. He paid from fifteen dollars to as much as thirty thousand dollars for individual cards. The sixty photo postcards and other material were temporarily housed in the library at Emory University to allow scholars to have access to it, but are now being held by their owner at withoutsanctuary.org.

Melvin Sylvester, Feb. 2000

Photographs:
1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana
Photo from the official 1977 Citadel yearbook
1919 lynching William Brown in Douglas County, Nebraska

1935 lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Lynching In America
A Book on the Subject
This book, Without Sanctuary: Lynching photography in America (by James Allen, Hilton Als, Leon F. Litwack, with a forward by Congressman John Lewis; Twin Palms Publishers, 2000), is a new, startling book on this shocking topic of lynching in America. This book is an extension of the exhibit held at the Roth Horowitz Gallery and the collected photo postcards of Mr. James Allen of Atlanta, Georgia. Pages of actual real life lynchings are captured with photos and dates with explanatory texts about where these dastardly acts occurred. Mr. Allen says, “Without Sanctuary is a grim reminder that a part of the American past we would prefer for various reasons to forget we need very much to remember.” The book is a vivid account of the existence of lynching on American soil. On view in the book are ninety-eight plates of lynchings and the victims and the people surrounding the actual executions. A few were white; a few were women; but most were African-American men used as prime targets for lynch mobs. To see this book is to try and understand, but it is not for the squeamish viewer or persons not able to transcend reasons why these acts should never have happened.

1936 lynching of Lint Shaw in Royston, Georgia

For Further Reading

About Lynching / Robert L. Zangrando, John F. Callahan, and Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. Modern American Poetry : An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Urbana, IL : Department of English of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.

The aesthetics and politics of the crowd in American literature / Mary. Esteve. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2003. PS169.C75E88 2003

Covers lynching in literature

American lynching : a documenatry feature / Gode Davis and James M. Fortier. Herndon, VA : Bitter Fruit Productions, 2005.

“This documentary explores racist events and attitudes indigenous to the Northern and Southern states that either condoned or condemned lynching as a practice.”

American Negro short stories / John Henrik Clarke. New York : Hill and Wang, 1966. PS647.A35C55 1966x

Includes “The lynching of Jube Benson” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Anatomy of a lynching : the killing of Claude Neal / James R. McGovern. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1982. HV6465.F6M35 1982

And the dead shall rise : the murder of Mary Phagan and the lynching of Leo Frank / Steve Oney. New York : Pantheon Books, 2003. HV6534.A7O54 2003

Anti-lynching crusaders helped free our country / Philip Dray. Newsday, A39 (741 words), June 15, 2005.

An apology for old form of terror : Senate expected to vote tomorrow on resolution regarding its failure to help end practice of lynching / Martin C. Evans. Newsday, A34 (600 words), June 12, 2005.

At the hands of persons unknown : the lynching of Black America / Philip Dray. New York : Random House, 2002. HV6464.D73 2002

The awful truth: a photography exhibition unearths the painful history of lynching in America / Danny Postel. Chronicle of Higher Education, 48(44):A14 (3 pages), July 12, 2002.

Black manhood on the silent screen / Gerald R. Butters. Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, 2002. PN1995.9.N4B88 2002

Includes “Oscar Micheaux: From Homestead to Lynch Mob”

Call for reconciliation : Minister attacked by Klansmen seeks understanding as alleged mastermind in triple killing faces trial / John Moreno Gonzales. Newsday, A07 (733 words), June 13, 2005.

Crime, but no punishment : Georgia town is still divided over the murders of four blacks nearly 60 years ago / Tina Susman. Newsday, A30 (1633 words), March 30, 2005.

Dangerous liaisons : gender, nation, and postcolonial perspectives / Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1997. JC312.D36 1997

Includes “On the threshold of woman’s era : lynching, empire, and sexuality in Black feminist theory” by Hazel V. Carby

The Duluth Lynchings Online Resource : a collection of historical documents relating to the tragic events of June 15, 1920. Minnesota Historical Society. St. Paul, MN : The Society, 2003.

“This web site facilitates access to over 2,000 pages of scanned documents to provide an in-depth and scholarly resource of primary source materials on the subject, designed also for those unfamiliar with this tragic event.”

The Duluth Lynchings Online Resource: historical documents relating to the tragic events of June 15, 1920 / Scott Ellsworth. Journal of American History, 91(1):349-350, June 2004.

Discusses the website: http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/

Ebony rising : short fiction of the greater Harlem Renaissance era / Craig Gable. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2004. PS647.A35E24 2004

Includes “Lynching for profit” by George S. Schuyler

Elite Georgia’s dark secret / Linda Kulman. U.S. News & World Report, 135(13):49, (800 words), Oct 20, 2003.

1915 lynching of Leo Frank

Etiquette, lynching, and racial boundaries in southern history: a Mississippi example / J. William Harris. American Historical Review, 100(2):387 (24 pages), April 1995.

Exorcising blackness : historical and literary lynching and burning rituals / Trudier Harris. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1984. PS153.N5H28 1984

F.B.I. discovers trial transcript in Emmett Till case / Shaila Dewan and Ariel Hart. New York Times, A14 (917 words), May 18, 2005.

A festival of violence : an analysis of Southern lynchings, 1882-1930 / Stewart Emory Tolnay and E. M., Beck. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1995. HV6464.T65 1995

The first Waco horror : the lynching of Jesse Washington and the rise of the NAAC / Patricia Bernstein. Houston, TX : Patriciabernstein.com, 2005.

Website to accompany the book.

Fresh outrage in Waco at grisly lynching of 1916 / Ralph Blumenthal. New York Times, A26 (1598 words), May 1, 2005.

Gender, class, race, and reform in the progressive era / Noralee Frankel and Nancy Schrom Dye. Lexington, KY : University Press of Kentucky, 1991. HQ1419.G46 1991

Includes “African-American women’s networks in the anti-lynching crusade” by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn

Go down, Moses : the miscegenation of time / Arthur F. Kinney. New York : Twayne Publishers ; London : Prentice HallInternational, 1996. PS3511.A86G6349 1996

Treatment of lynching in the William Faulkner work

Jasper, Tex., and the ghosts of lynchings past. New York Times, A26 (576 words), Feb 25, 1999.

Revulsion at the death of James Byrd Jr. demonstrates a sea change in public sentiment toward lynchings

Judge Lynch: his first hundred years / Frank Shay and Arthur Franklin Raper. Montclair, NJ : Patterson Smith, 1969. HV6457.S5 1969b

The killing season: a history of lynching in America / Philip Dray. The New Crisis, 109(1):41 (3 pages), January-February 2002.

Excerpt from “At the Hands of Persons Unknown: the Lynching of of Black America”

Kin disagree on exhumation of Emmett Till / Gretchen Ruethling. New York Times, A3 (357 words), May 6, 2005.

The legacy of a lynching / Robert F. Worth. American Scholar, 67(2):65 (13 pages), Spring 1998.

“Like a violin for the wind to play”: lyrical approaches to lynching by Hughes, Du Bois, and Toomer / Kimberly Banks. African American Review, 38(3):451 (15 pages), Fall 2004.

Critical essay

Local sequential patterns: the structure of lynching in the deep South, 1882-1930 / Karherine Stovel. Social Forces, 79(3):843 (14134 words), March 2001.

Lynch-law; an investigation into the history of lynching in the United States / James Elbert Cutler. New York : Negro Universities Press, 1969. HV6457.C8 1969b

Lynch Street : the May 1970 slayings at Jackson State College / Tim Spofford. Kent, OH : Kent State University Press, 1988. F349.J13S66 1988

The lyncher in me : a search for redemption in the face of history / Warren Read. St. Paul, MN : Borealis Books, 2008.
Chronicles the author’s experiences with having discovered his great-grandfather’s role in the Duluth lynchings of 1920 and his subsequent search for the descendants of the victims.

Lynching / John Simkin. Spartcus Educational.

Lynching in America : carnival of death / Mark Gado. TrueTV Crime Library : Criminal Minds and Methods. New York : Turner Broadcasting System, [2005?].

A lynching in the heartland : race and memory in America / James H. Madison. New York : Palgrave, 2001. F534.M34M33 2001

The lynching of persons of Mexican origin or descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928 / William D. Carrigan. Journal of Social History, 37(2):411 (29 pages), Winter 2003.

Lynching victim is cleared of rape, 100 years later / Emily Yellin. New York Times, Section 1, 24 (912 words), Feb 27, 2000.

Ed Johnson from Chattanooga, Tennessee

Masculinity : bodies, movies, culture / Peter Lehman. New York : Routledge, 2001. PN1995.9.M46M34 2001

Includes “Lynching photography and the ‘black beast rapist’ in the southern white masculine imagination” by Amy Louise Wood

Media, process, and the social construction of crime : studies in newsmaking criminology / Gregg Barak. New York : Garland Pub., 1994. P96.C74M43 1994

Includes “Communal violence and the media : lynchings and their news coverage by The New York Times between 1882 and 1930″ by Ira M. Wasserman and Steven Stack

Minstrel show; or, The lynching of William Brown (The Plays of Max Sparber) / Max Sparber. Minneapolis, MN : Sparberfans.Blogspot.Com, 1998.

“Retells the story of the real-life murder of an African-American man in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1919, through the narration of two fictional African-American blackface performers.”

The murder of Emmett Louis Till, revisited. / Brent Staples. The New York Times, A16 (912 words), Nov 11, 2002.

New documetary film may cause the 1955 Mississipi case to be reopened

The NAACP crusade against lynching, 1909-1950 / Robert L. Zangrando. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1980. HV6457.Z36

The Negro holocaust: lynching and race riots in the United States, 1880-1950 / Robert A. Gibson. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. New Haven : Yale University, 1979 ; posted 2005.

Curriculum unit.

The old religion / David Mamet. New York : Free Press, 1997. PS3563.A4345O39 1997

Play about a lynching in Georgia

On looking: lynching photographs and legacies of Lynching after 9/11 / Dora Apel. American Quarterly, 55(3):457-478, Sept 2003.

On lynchings: Southern horrors, A red record, Mob rule in New Orleans / Ida B. Wells-Barnett. New York : Arno Press, 1969. HV6457.B37

Plays of Negro life; a source-book of native American drama / Alain LeRoy Locke and Montgomery Gregory. Westport, CT : Negro Universities Press, 1970. PS627.N4L6 1970

Includes “Judge Lynch” by J. W. Rogers, Jr.

Race, rape, and lynching : the red record of American literature, 1890-1912 / Sandra Gunning. New York : Oxford University Press, 1996. PS173.N4G86 1996

Racial violence and representation: performance strategies in lynching dramas of the 1920s / Judith L. Stephens. African American Review, 33(4):655 (10281 words), Winter 1999.

Racial violence on trial : a handbook with cases, laws, and documents / Christopher Waldrep. Santa Barbara, CA : ABC-CLIO, 2001. KF221.M8W35 2001

Reading rape : the rhetoric of sexual violence in American literature and culture, 1790-1990 / Sabine Sielke. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2002. PS374.R35S54 2002

Includes “‘The one crime’ and ‘the real ‘one crime” : rape, lynching, and mimicry in Sutton E. Griggs’s ‘The Hindered hand’”

Remember, and learn : the lessons of racism’s ugly history. Newsday, A38 (223 words), June 15, 2005.

Revolt against chivalry : Jessie Daniel Ames and the women’s campaign against lynching / Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. New York : Columbia University Press, 1979. HV6457.H34

Rope and faggot / Walter Francis White. New York : Arno Press, 1969. HV6457.W45 1969

Rough justice : lynching and American society, 1874-1947 / Michael J. Pfeifer. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2004. HV6457.P44 2004

Selected works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett / Ida B.Wells-Barnett ; Trudier Harris, editor. New York : Oxford University Press, 1991. E185.97.W55A2 1991

Includes: “Southern horrors : lynch law in all its phases” ; “A red record : tabulated statistics and alleged causes of lynching in the United States, 1892-1893-1894″ ; “Mob rule in New Orleans : Robert Charles and his fight to the death”

Senate issues apology over failure on antilynching law / Sheryl Gay Stolberg. New York Times, A15 (739 words), June 14, 2005.

Senate remorse over lynchings / India Autry. Newsday, A27 (232 words), June 14, 2005.

Senators introduce lynching apology. New York Times, A13 (176 words), February 2, 2005.

The shadow of hate a film / Charles Guggenheim and Julian Bond. Washington, D.C. : Guggenheim Productions, Inc., 1995. IMC Video E184.A1S564 1995bx

Includes the Leo Frank lynching in Georgia in 1913

Strange fruit : plays on lynching by American women / Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1998. PS627.L95S73 1998

Their majesties, the mob / John Walton Caughey. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1960. HV6791.C38

Over 50 documents republished from various sources

Thirty years of lynching in the United States, 1889-1918 / National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. New York : Negro Universities Press, 1969. HV6457.N3 1969

The tragedy of lynching / Arthur Franklin Raper and the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching New York : Negro Universities Press, 1969. HV6464.R3 1969b

An ugly legacy lives on, its glare unsoftened by age : critic’s notebook / Roberta Smith. New York Times, E1 (1445 words), January 13, 2000.

Discusses an exhibit of lynching photographs at the Roth Horowitz Gallery.

Under sentence of death : lynching in the South / W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. HV6464.U49 1997

Unnatural selections : eugenics in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance / Daylanne K. English. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2004. PS228.E84E54 2004

Includes “Blessed are the barren : lynching, reproduction, and the drama of new Negro womanhood, 1916-1930″

War of words: the controversy over the definition of lynching, 1899-1940 / Christopher Waldrep. Journal of Southern History, 66(1):75 (2 pages), February 2000.

We are coming : the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century Black women / Shirley W. Logan. Carbondale, IL : Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. E185.86.L57 1999

“‘Out of their own mouths’ : Ida Wells and the presence of lynching”

We charge genocide : the historic petition to the United Nations for relief from a crime of the United States Government against the Negro people / Civil Rights Congress (U.S.). New York : Civil Rights Congress, 1952. E185.61.C592 1952x

Whispered consolations : law and narrative in African American life / Jon Christian Suggs. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2000. KF4757.S84 2000

Includes “Lynchings and passing”

“With the past let these be buried”: the 1873 mob massacre of the Hill family in Springtown, Texas / Helen McLure. Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 105(2):293 (29 pages), October 2001.

Without sanctuary : lynching photography in America / James Allen. Santa Fe, NM : Twin Palms, 2000. HV6459.W57 2000

Official website: http://withoutsanctuary.org/

Without sanctuary: lynching photography in America / Grace Elizabeth Hale. Journal of American History, 89(3):989-994, December 2002.

Witnessing lynching : American writers respond / Anne P. Rice. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2003. PS509.L94W58 2003

Wounds not scars: lynching, the national conscience and the American historian / Joel Williamson. Journal of American History, 83(4):1221 (33 pages), March 1997.

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MALCOLM X ! – THE BLACK TRUTH- “MYTHS ABOUT MALCOLM X ” BY REV. ALBERT CLEAGE

International Socialist Review, September-October 1967

Rev. Albert Cleage
Myths About Malcolm X:
A Speech

From International Socialist Review, Vol.28 No.5, September-October 1967, pp.33-42.
Mark up: Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Rev. Albert Cleage, chairman of the Detroit Inner City Organizing Committee, gave this speech at a memorial meeting for Malcolm X at the Friday Night Socialist Forum in Detroit, February 24, 1967.

You were very kind to ask me to be here.

I am not a Marxist – I don’t pretend to be, I don’t even pretend to know anything about it. I am a black man in a world dominated by white oppression, and that is my total philosophy. I would like to get rid of that oppression, and that is my total objective. So I bring to this occasion rather a simple approach – personal reflections on the significance of Malcolm X.

I can remember a number of occasions when I talked to him, when I was with him, when I spoke on platforms with him; and so I am not indebted to printed material for my impressions of Malcolm X. I remember the last time he was in the city – not so much the speech, which was not one of his best by any means; it reflected, I think, much of the tension that he was under, much of the confusion, the constant living on the brink of violence. But I can remember him backstage, in the Gold Room I think they call it, of Ford Auditorium. Recently he had suffered smoke inhalation, the doctor had given him an injection, he was trying to sleep, he was irritable. But he was here because he had promised to be here, because he thought some people were concerned about what he had to say.

I remember him at the King Solomon Baptist Church on one of the occasions he spoke there – sort of in concealment backstage, constantly harassed with the danger of assassination. And I can remember the occasion at the King Solomon Baptist Church when he gave the Message to the Grass Roots, which I think is his best speech, his most typical statement, and which I personally think is his last will and testament. I remember him, I talked to him, I agreed with him. He was a Muslim, I am a Christian, and yet I can think of no basic matter upon which we disagreed.

Two years after his death Brother Malcolm is more important to more people than he was at any time during his lifetime. I think this is true. Young people who never saw him, who never heard him, speak of him with reverence and say, “I love Malcolm.” This is a

tremendous thing. Older people who heard and saw him select from the things they heard and saw the things they want to remember, or even the things it suits their purpose to remember. This too is quite a thing – that an individual should be important enough to be remembered even with distortions or for reasons not quite only of love.

Brother Malcolm has become a symbol, a dream, a hope, a nostalgia for the past, a mystique, a shadow sometimes without substance, “our shining black prince,” to whom we do obeisance, about whom we write heroic poems. But I think Brother Malcolm the man is in danger of being lost in a vast tissue of distortions which now constitute the Malcolm myth. The Malcolm myth or the Malcolm myths, the complex of myths which more and more tend to cluster about Brother Malcolm, remind us of what happened to Jesus Christ. I think I understand much more now the things that are written and said about Jesus, because I can understand how the life of a man dedicated to people can so easily become a focal point for the things people want to make that life mean.

The Malcolm myth or myths depend for substance upon the last chaotic and confusing year or two of his life – fragmentary statements growing out of his trip to Mecca and his efforts to bring the problems of black people in America to the attention of African leaders. Out of this period of his life comes the confusing complex of myths. According to the myth, his pilgrimage to Mecca turned Brother Malcolm into an integrationist. I’ve heard that seriously stated by people who claim to be scholars and students of the life of Brother Malcolm. In Mecca, they say, he saw blue-eyed whites and blacks worshipping and living together, in love, for the first time in his 39 years – and his whole concept of white people changed. This is the myth. And he rejected his former position that the white man is the enemy and that separation is inescapable. This is the myth.

The implication here is that this new insight changed his orientation; that with this new insight he was now free to join the NAACP, or to sing We Shall Overcome with Martin Luther King, or to become a Marxist and join the Socialist Workers Party. And certainly, if we accept this basic myth as being true, as being fact, if his experience in Mecca changed his conception of white people, then all the implications certainly follow logically. If in terms of his experience in Mecca he came to believe that there is no enmity between black and white, that blacks and whites can march together in unity and brotherhood, then why shouldn’t he join the NAACP, or sing We Shall Overcome, or become a Marxist in the Socialist Workers Party?

I say that is the myth, and from my personal point of view, realizing that we are in the position of the blind man who inspected the elephant and tried to describe what an elephant is, I say I do not believe this myth. I reject it completely, totally and absolutely. I say if Malcolm X, Brother Malcolm, had undergone this kind of transformation, if in Mecca he had decided that blacks and whites can unite, then his life at that moment would have become meaningless in terms of the world struggle of black people, and we would not have any occasion to be here this evening. So I say I do not believe it.

Brother Malcolm knew history and he was guided by his interpretation of history. He interpreted the things that happened to him in terms of his knowledge and his understanding of the past. He would not have been taken in by what happened in Mecca. Brother Malcolm knew that the Arab Muslims had been the backbone of the slave trade. Those of you who have a sentimental attachment to the “Black Muslims” in America, or the Muslims that happen to be black, might not like to remember that the slave trade with black Africans in Africa was fostered, encouraged and carried on by the Arab Muslims in Africa. Brother Malcolm knew this. He would not have been taken in by the window dressing in Mecca. He would not have forgotten this important fact – that blacks and whites do not unite above the basic fact of race, of color. He would not have forgotten this in Mecca any more than in New York or Chicago or San Francisco. He knew that in Saudi Arabia they are still selling black Africans into slavery, they still make forays into Black Africa and bring back black slaves for sale in Arab Muslim countries. Brother Malcolm knew this. And to me it is preposterous to say that in Mecca he became an integrationist.

Also, according to the myth, Brother Malcolm tried to internationalize the black man’s struggle in America. Certainly he brought the black man’s struggle to the attention of African leaders. The implication is that Brother Malcolm felt that the black man in Africa could help us through the United Nations and that we would be better off before the white man’s World Court than before the white man’s Supreme Court. I do not believe it. Malcolm knew that one cracker court is just like another cracker court. He knew it, I know it and you know it. And to say now that he came to the conclusion that, if he could get the black man’s problem in America before the World Court, it would somehow mysteriously be changed and transformed is ridiculous. To take it before the World Court would have been interesting – but certainly no solution. We are no more apt to get justice before the World Court than before the Recorder’s Court downtown here in the city of Detroit. Crackers run both of them.

Don’t be afraid, brothers, don’t be afraid – I am not hurting the image of Malcolm. I am just’trying to save it, because you are about to lose it, you are about to forget what Malcolm said. By taking the last moments of confusion, when he was getting ready to be assassinated, and saying that the confused little statements he made in those last moments were his life – that’s a lie, that wasn’t his life. I heard him, I talked to him, I know what his life was, and he understood the relationship between blacks and whites.

Certainly Brother Malcolm wanted to relate our struggle, the struggle of black people in America, to the struggle of black people everywhere. I say to the struggle of black people everywhere, because

that is a struggle that he understood, that I understand and that you understand. I am not talking about relating it to the struggle of oppressed people everywhere, but relating it to the struggle of black people everywhere. But he expected little help from the Africans and the African nations. Malcolm wasn’t running around Africa thinking that the African nations were going to free us. Malcolm wasn’t that kind of an idiotic idealist. He went to our black brothers because they were our brothers. He talked to them about our problems because their problems are our problems, and we are as concerned about their problems as we want them to be about our problems. But he didn’t go to Africa expecting them to free us.

Sometimes we forget that, and we sit around waiting for somebody in Africa to send somebody over here to free us – “like Malcolm said they were going to.” He never said it and they are never going to do it. If you are going to be free, you are going to free yourself, and that is what Malcolm told us. The African nations can’t free us, they can’t save us. They couldn’t save Lumumba in Africa, they couldn’t wreak vengeance upon those who perpetrated his death in Africa. They couldn’t save the Congo; they couldn’t save the black people of Rhodesia; they couldn’t free the black people of South Africa. Then why should we sit here in our own oppression, our own suffering, our own brutality, waiting for some mysterious transformation when black armies from Africa are coming over here and free us? They could use some black armies from over here to free them.

Malcolm never said it, and don’t be misled by the statement that Malcolm tried to internationalize the black man’s struggle. He tried to tell us quite simply that the white man has given you hell here in the United States and he is giving black men hell all over the world. It is one struggle – black men fighting for freedom everywhere, in every country, in the United States, in Africa, in Vietnam, everywhere. Black men fighting against white men for freedom. He tried to tell you that the white man is not going to free you. I don’t care what persuasion or philosophy he has, he is not going to free you, because if he frees you, he must take something away from himself to give it to you.

Funny how we can so easily forget what Malcolm said. I don’t believe it. Certainly he wanted to relate it to the black man’s struggle throughout the world. He knew we were struggling against the same enemy. He knew that we could expect no more justice from the World Court than from a Supreme Court. So much for the Malcolm myth.

Brother Malcolm’s contribution is tremendous. What Brother Malcolm contributed to the black man’s struggle in America and throughout the world cannot be equaled or surpassed by the life of any man. Oh, we can think of individuals like Marcus Garvey. When he looked at the world and said, “Where is the black man’s government?” it was tremendous. Because he understood that the black man was engaged in a struggle against an enemy, and that if he was engaged

in a struggle there were certain things that were necessary – he had to have power, he had to have a government, he had to have economies, he had to have certain things. Marcus Garvey understood it. But no man surpasses Malcolm in his understanding of the meaning of the struggle in which black people are engaged everywhere in the world. And there was no subterfuge or confusion or weak-kneed pussyfooting in Malcolm as long as he lived.

I want to tell you this: we get all confused because we don’t know who assassinated him. I don’t believe that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad assassinated him. You believe whatever you want to, I do not believe it. And because we get confused about who assassinated him, we say there was never any good in Elijah Muhammad or the “Black Muslims.” I don’t believe that either. I believe that the basic truths that Malcolm X taught came from the basic philosophy and teachings of Elijah Muhammad. I believe that the basic contribution which he made, the basic philosophy which he taught, stems directly from the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the “Black Muslims.” I do not accept all the teachings of Elijah Muhammad or the “Black Muslims,” but I understand what Malcolm X did to those teachings. He took the teachings of a cult, with all the mythology of the “Black Muslims,” and universalized them so that black people everywhere, no matter what their religion, could understand them and could accept them.

I can accept the teachings which he abstracted from the cult philosophy and mythology of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I do not believe in the story about Yacub and creating the white man as the devil in 6,000 years, but that has nothing to do with the essential truth. I do not believe that the white man is the devil. He does devilish things, but I don’t believe that he is a devil. Because to say that he is a devil is to say that he is more than human, and I don’t believe that. You know that in the Christian religion the devil was flung out of heaven; he was an angel, he was more than a man, and to believe that the white man is a devil is to attribute to him supernatural powers. That is a cult mystique. There is nothing about the white man that is supernatural. He is just exactly like we are – that’s why we can understand him so well. There is nothing mysterious about what he does. He wasn’t condemned to be a devil for 6,000 years – he just acts like a devil because it suits his purpose, and he mistreats us, he oppresses us, he’s brutal to us, because it’s in his interest – not because he is a devil.

It is closer to the truth to say that he is a beast, and that is what Malcolm said. You would like to forget that now, but every time I talked to him, he referred to the white man as a beast. And those of you who are white here will agree with him that most white people are beasts – you can’t deny it. On the basis of the way the white man has treated black men in America and throughout the world for 400 years, you cannot deny that he certainly had a truth there when he said that the white man is a beast. But not a devil. A beast is lower than a man, a devil is higher than a man. Certainly the white man is not a devil, but he is in many instances a beast.

Malcolm was different when he was in the “Black Muslims.” You have got to remember that too – he had a power base then. You know, as quiet as it is kept, it is one thing to operate out of something, to talk out of something, to have something behind you when you go into a town or a city – to go knowing that there are people there who are preparing things for you. It is another thing to step out by yourself and try to go around the country without a power base, without any protection, without any organization in front. And that was the difference when Malcolm X stepped out of the Muslim movement and became an individual. Then he faced the harassment, the danger, the confusion and everything in these last years that those who want to distort Malcolm X want to make so much out of. At the beginning, when he was with the Muslims, there was a power base from which he operated, a philosophical foundation upon which he could build. And he built well and he operated well in terms of a power base. He abstracted the general truths that we still remember. And these things we have got to preserve – we have got to preserve, brothers, I’m telling you, we have got to preserve.

We have a great tendency to turn our leaders over to somebody else. Who is the custodian of Malcolm’s tradition? Who is the custodian? (Voice from audience: “We are.”) But we aren’t acting like it. You know who the custodian is, don’t you? – there he sits, right there. If Mr. Breitman stopped writing, nobody would write anything. And he’s doing it in terms of what he believes is a proper interpretation. If we want to preserve our heroes, we have to become the custodians of that tradition. Who is the custodian of DuBois? Black people? No, we don’t have one thing that he wrote. The Communist Party has it, and they will let us read what they want us to read. I’m talking to you black brothers, I don’t care what the rest of these people think. We have got to become the custodians of our own heroes and save them and interpret them the way we want them interpreted. And if you don’t do it, then you have to accept what somebody else says they said. Who is the custodian of Paul Robeson? (Voice from audience: “The Communists.”) All right, we don’t have it. The great things he said, all of the things – where are they? The CIA has taken over perhaps all of the African Encyclopedia that DuBois was working on in Ghana. Nobody knows where it is. We don’t protect these things. We are careless and we get caught up in the myths that other people spin for us. In another five years our children won’t know what Malcolm X was really like. Because we won’t write it down, and everything that is written that they can put their hands on will be saying that Malcolm X said something he never said, that Malcolm X meant something he never meant.

I say Malcolm X was tremendously important, beyond even our comprehension today, because Malcolm changed the whole course of the black man’s freedom struggle – the whole course of that freedom struggle not only in America but throughout the world. Black people everywhere in Africa, in the United States, everywhere, black people are fighting today a different battle than they fought before Malcolm began to talk. A different battle because Malcolm laid down certain basic principles that we can never forget. He changed the whole course. The first basic principle that Malcolm laid down that we can’t forget is this: The white man is your enemy. That is a basic principle, we can’t forget it. I don’t care what else they drag in from wherever they drag it – remember one thing, Malcolm X taught one truth: The white man is our enemy. We can’t get away from it, and if we accept and understand that one basic truth, his life was not lived in vain. Because upon that one basic truth we can build a total philosophy, a total course of action for struggle. Because that was the basic confusion which distorted the lives of black people, which corrupted the movements of black people. That was the basic area of our confusion, and Malcolm X straightened that out.

The white man is an enemy – he said it. We must break our identification with him, and that was his basic contribution. He didn’t just say it, he didn’t sit off someplace and just write it – he went out and he lived it. He asked for moments of confrontation. He said we have got to break our identification, we can’t go through life identifying with the white man or his government. You remember what he said down there at King Solomon Baptist Church: You talk about “your” navy and “your” astronauts. He said forget it, we don’t identify with these people, they are the enemy. And that is the basic truth. We must break our identification with the enemy, we must confront him, and we must realize that conflict and violence are necessary parts of a struggle against an enemy – that is what he taught. Conflict, struggle and violence are not to be avoided. Don’t be afraid of them – you heard what he said. There has got to be some bloodshed, he said, if black men want to be free – that is what he taught. Now you can’t take that and say that he believed in blacks and whites marching together. He said black men have got to be willing to shed their blood because they believe that they can be free. The white man is an enemy.

We must take pride in ourselves – you know that is what he said. But he didn’t make a mystique out of Africa. He didn’t sit down in a corner and contemplate his navel and think about the wonders of Africa. He said we have a history that we can be proud of. Africa is our history, African blood is our blood, African soil is our soil. We can take pride in our past – not by sitting down and contemplating it, but by using it as the basis for a course of action in today’s world, as a basis for confrontation with the enemy, as a basis for struggle, for conflict, and even for violence, if necessary. We fight because we are proud; and because we are proud, we are not going to lie down and crawl like snakes on our bellies. We are not going to take second-class citizenship sitting down, saying, “Well, in a few years maybe things will change.” We want to change it now. That is what Malcolm told us, that is what we believe, and that is the basis of our struggle today.

A corollary of that, which you must understand and which is essentially Malcolm’s contribution, is that integration is impossible and undesirable. Integration is impossible – he said it time and time and time again, under all kinds of circumstances – integration is impossible and undesirable. Now this was harder for black people to take than for white people. Because white people never wanted it in the first place, and were determined that it would never come to pass in the second place. But black people had been led to believe that it was a possibility, always just around the corner. So black people had pegged all of their organizational efforts toward integration. We sang We Shall Overcome Someday, believing that overcoming meant integrating. The NAACP pegged its whole program on the possibilities of integration. We are going to build an integrated world, we are going to build a world in which black people and white people live together, we are going to build an integrated world – that is what Dr. Martin Luther King said. “I’ve got a dream for America tonight, a dream when the children of slaves shall walk hand-in-hand with the children of slavemasters.” And we believed it until Malcolm X told us it is a lie. And that is a genuine contribution – it is a lie.

You will never walk hand-in-hand with anybody but black people, let me tell you. If you do, it is just a moment of mutual hypocrisy in which you are both engaged, for some purpose best known to yourselves. You may build a position of strength, a position of power from which you can negotiate with strength instead of weakness, and if you are willing to negotiate, then you can talk to the white man as an equal. That is as close to brotherhood as there is – there is no other brotherhood. If you talk to a man as an equal, he is your brother. But there is no other kind of equal. You cannot get down on your knees and talk up to a man and talk about brotherhood. Because you stopped being a brother when you got down on your knees. And if you are afraid to get up and look him in the eye and take a chance of getting killed if necessary, then there is no hope of brotherhood for you. Integration is impossible and undesirable – Malcolm taught it.

We have our own communities. The white man “gave” them to us. He forced us into them. He separated himself from us. And white people went all around the country all the time Malcolm was alive, saying, “He wants separation.” They had separated themselves from us in every area of life, and yet they said, “He is bad, he is wicked, he wants separation.” And if he had asked for integration seriously, they would have killed him more quickly.

He said we are going to control these separate communities. We have them, the white man “gave” them to us, and we are going to stop being ashamed of them. We are going to live in them and we are going to make them the best communities in the world. We are going to make the schools in them black schools and good schools. We are going to make our housing black housing and good housing. We are no longer going to believe that a block is no good till a white man comes and buys a house on it. We are no longer going to believe that if we can move into a community where half of the people on the street are white, that that is a better community. We are going to take our separate communities, we are going to work with them, we are going to control them, we are going to control their politics, we are going to control their economy – we are going to control our community.

Malcolm X laid the entire foundation for everything Stokely Carmichael says. Stokely hasn’t said one word that was not completely implicit in everything that Malcolm X taught. He is just a voice carrying on upon the basic foundation that Malcolm X put down. Integration is impossible and undesirable. We are going to control our own communities. We are going to stop worrying about being separate. We are not worried about busing black children into white neighborhoods. We are not worried about open occupancy, except that we want the right to live any place, and unless we are given that right, we will take it. And when we take it, we will still live together, because we do not want to live with you. That is a philosophy, that is Malcolm X’s philosophy. We have learned it, we still remember it, and there is nothing you can do today to take it away from us. But I’m telling you, brothers, we have got to write it down because they are about to mess it up so we won’t recognize it next year.

The whole civil rights movement has changed. The NAACP is washed up, through, finished. The Urban League is nothing but the social service agency it started out to be. The civil rights movement now is nothing but Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick – that’s it. Because they got the message. They are building today on what Malcolm said yesterday. The civil rights movement, the freedom struggle, the revolution – call it what you will – black men fighting for freedom today are fighting in terms laid down by Brother Malcolm. No other terms. You can’t go out into the community – the brother here said “let’s go out into the community” – you can’t go out into the community with anything other than what Malcolm X taught. Because they won’t listen to you, they won’t hear you.

The whole movement has changed. The last great picnic, as Floyd McKissick said, on the White House lawn, that “great freedom march” – that was the end, that was it. From here on in, black people are trying to build, to organize. Malcolm in his last days was trying to make the transition to organization, to structure; to fight not only in terms of words, of ideas, but to build the organizational structure. He didn’t do it. But he was making the transition because he realized that the next stage is an organizational stage – that if you want to be free, if you want power, you have got to organize to take it.

When you were just begging the white man to give you something, you didn’t need organization. All you needed was a kneeling pad so that you could kneel down and look humble. But if you want power, you have got to organize to get it – you have got to have political power, you have got to have economic power, you have got to organize. Malcolm realized that, and the feeble beginnings he made in the area of organization were pointing the way. Today we have got to carry on that organizational struggle that Malcolm pointed out.

I was in New York, I went to his headquarters while he was over in Africa, I talked with his lieutenants. They didn’t have the slightest idea of what was going on. They loved Malcolm, and they were sitting in the Hotel Theresa in a suite of rooms, but they didn’t have the slightest conception of how to organize. They were waiting for Brother Malcolm to come home so he could tell them what to do. I said, “My God, one man never carried such a load all by himself! He has men here who are supposed to be doing something and they are sitting there waiting for him to come back.” And they were carrying around his letters – he would write back a letter and they were carrying it around like it was the Bible: “Look, we’ve got a few words from Brother Malcolm.”

He did not want reverence – he wanted people who could do something, who could organize, who believed in action, who were willing to go out and sacrifice; and he didn’t have them. And all of us today – black people, brothers from coast to coast – when we get together and do reverence to Malcolm, let us remember that the last message was organize. We didn’t do it and that is why he died. We didn’t have organization enough to protect him. We didn’t have organization enough to give him funds to do what he had to do. We let him die. The message is the same today, and still we are not organizing, we are not doing the work that has to be done. If you love Brother Malcolm, write your poems at night and organize and work in the daytime for power. Because until you get power, Malcolm X is just a memory. When we get power, we will put his statue in every city, because the cities will belong to us. Then we can do him reverence.

But until we get power, let’s not play with images and myths. Let’s remember that he gave us certain principles, certain ideas, and we have got to do something with them. All of us have the task – to organize, to build, to fight, to get power. And as we get it, as we struggle for it, we will remember that we are struggling because we believe the things that he taught. That is the message of Malcolm, and don’t let anybody get you all mixed up. He never turned into an integrationist, never. He wasn’t fooled in Mecca, he wasn’t fooled in Africa. He told it like it was and he knew it like it was. That is our Malcolm. Some other folks may have another Malcolm – they are welcome to it. But brothers, don’t lose our Malcolm.

BACK TO AFRICA!! -THESE BLACK AMERIKKKANS CRIED WHEN WELCOMED BACK HOME TO AFRICA!

from yeyeolade.blogspot.com

Thursday, March 24, 2011
BACK TO AFRICA! – THESE BLACK MAYORS/SISTER VANESSA WILLIAMS WEPT WHEN THE OBA(KING) WELCOMED THEM BACK HOME! -GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER,NIGERIA,FEB. 2011
FROM ngrguardiannews.com.

Why Yoruba Obas Kept Vigil For Ooni In 1903
Sunday, 13 March 2011 00:00 By Tunde Akingbade/in Ile-Ife and Osogbo Sunday Magazine – Sunday Magazine
Ooni-and-exec-sec-good
ITwas the day of historical facts. It was an evening of reminiscences. It turned out to be another occasion for flashbacks. And the spot was the palace of His Imperial Majesty, Ooni of Ile-Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade Olubuse II, the Aroole Oduduwa, progenitor of the Yoruba race.
Prof. Siyan Oyeweso, Provost, School of Humanities and Culture, Osun State University, Ikire campus and Chairman of 4th World Conference of Mayors went down historical lane. Oyeweso narrated how the great grandfathers of Oba Olubuse II and the institution of the Ooni was revered and feared as the spiritual head of Yoruba nation.
The story went thus; the Ooni was asked to come to Lagos in 1903 by the British Colonial government to testify in a case between the Akarigbo of Remo and Elepe. In those days, no one could look in the face of the Ooni. All Yoruba kings under his authority and who domiciled along the route the Ooni was to pass to Lagos moved out of their bases and they did not sleep until the Ooni returned to Ile-Ife.
The Ooni was feared as a spiritual head. Yoruba Obas had reasoned that what the colonial government demanded from the Ooni was an abomination. For him to leave his palace at Ife and journey to Lagos was unfathomable. A sacrilege!
As Prof. Oyeweso recalled the historical feat, Oba Olubuse II who sat in splendor on the throne, nodded. Then Oyeweso, threw another historical bombshell.
“Only Ede and Ibadan remain cities that developed from military settlements (Army) to state that has people and not state (People) to army!” he said.

That night a crowd of Mayors from all over the world had paid a courtesy visit to the Ooni in the course of the World Conference of Mayors, which took place in Osogbo. Oyeweso, the Chairman of the organising team for the conference, which was supported by the Federal Government, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Osun State Government, said, “he is a son of the palace because the former Timi of Ede was one of those who used to pay his school fees in those days. This appeared stunning to the Ooni. Oyeweso called himself the ‘son of the warlord’ — the Timi of Ede who was a warrior in those days. It was believed that the arrows of the Timi carried furnaces whenever he shot them. That has become the praise name of descendants of the town.
The professor said Ile-Ife, the cradle of Yoruba race was not a kingdom but an empire. The Ooni of Ile-Ife then gave Prof. Oyeweso an assignment to find out if Ile-Ife, which existed about 8,000 years ago and 4,000 years before Abraham, the patriarch of Jews and Arabs was a Kingdom, Empire or what?
Earlier, Ms. Vanessa Williams, Executive Director of the National Conference of Black Mayors (NCBM) thanked the Ooni for the warm reception and for his leadership and for being the king of all kings in Nigeria.
“I have had the opportunity to see the Presidents and Kings all over the world. I have never been so nervous as I have been tonight,” said Ms. Williams.
Robert Bowser, President of NCBM looked in her direction. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Then she added; “we are happy to be back home. We thank you for preserving our history here.”
It was an emotional moment. The entire hall was in deep silence. Then the royal court’s praise singers interjected; Omi ki o! The King is greeting you! The Ooni beckoned on Ms. Williams to move closer to him. He then began to comfort her. The other visiting Mayors were also moved into tears. They were introduced one after the other.
More surprises were to come. Just as Ms. Williams introduced Dr. Jeffrey, one of the members of the American Mayors entourage, Oba Aderemi Adeniyi-Adedapo, the Olojudo-Alayemore of Ido-Osun, one of the Obas in the Kingdom exclaimed: “that’s my teacher!”
Oba Adeniyi-Adedapo called on Funlola Olorunnishola, the Media Advisor of the Ooni, Folusho Adedigba and Mr. Smollett Shittu-Alamu — members of the committee in charge of the visit to the palace to give him the microphone. Oba Adeniyi-Adedapo began to make some revelations.
The Oba told the gathering that Dr. Jeffrey was his teacher in the United States when he was studying for a degree in Architecture.
Said he; “Dr. Jeffrey, you will remember that I used to tell you in America that I am a prince in Africa. I am so overwhelmed tonight. I want to let you know that I am now a king under His Imperial Majesty, the Ooni of Ile-Ife, Kabiyesi, Oba Okunade Sijuwade Olubuse II”
Turning to the Ooni, Oba Adeniyi-Adedapo said: “these are the people who made me what I am when I was in America for 25years. Architecture was my major. Dr. Jeffrey gave us moral, financial support and everything when I was in America. He was a father figure to us.”
Looking in the direction of Dr. Jeffrey, the Oba said; “I cannot thank you enough. You are back home in Nigeria even though I am aware you are very close to Ghana. But this is your real home. The Ashantehene and the King of Accra know their father king is His Imperial Majesty, the Ooni of Ile- Ife. You are welcome back home. I thank you and I thank America your country for harbouring me for 25years. I went there with nothing and I came back home as an Architect and I am so proud of that country. God bless America, God bless the black race, God bless Ooni and God bless Nigeria!”
The Ooni later told the visitors that the population of those who claim ancestry to Yoruba race is about 240 million. They are found in Nigeria, USA, the Caribbean, Haiti, Venezuela, Argentina etc. He said even though in a place like Argentina, you have predominantly white people, a large percentage became white because of years of inter marriage.
The Ooni noted that there are several countries outside the USA where blacks also rule like President Barak Obama.
Earlier, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the Governor of Osun State said at the opening ceremony that urbanisation in Nigeria had brought municipal challenges like insecurity, housing, food, transportation, health care provision, education, jobs, waste disposal and social welfare.
“While the development countries still grapple with these problems, the situation in developing countries can be worse”, said Aregbesola.
At the closing ceremony of the one-week event Mr. Robert Bowser, President of National Conference of Black Mayors, Atlanta, said that it was a great opportunity for the Mayors to be present in Osun State. Bowser said the Mayors had seen Osun State and they had also seen the challenges the people face in the area of health, waste management, sanitation, infrastructure, education etc. He called on the state government to involve them in schemes to tackle some of the problems facing the state.
A Feast of Return, a dance drama written and produced by the poet, Odia Ofeimun, was performed at the event with other cultural dances. Present at the event were many traditional rulers in Osun State including Oba Oladele Olashore, the Aloko of Iloko-Ijesha; Oba Dokun Abolurin, the Oragun of Oke-Ila, Oba Rasheed Olasubomi, the Aragbiji of Iragbiji.
Posted by YEYE AKILIMALI FUNUA OLADE at 7:11 AM Comments (0)
Labels: AFRICA, AFRICAN AMERICANS, ANCESTRY, BACK TO AFRICA, BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK MEN, BLACK PEOPLE, BLACK WOMAN, BLACKS IN AMERIKKKA, NIGERIA, THE BLACK RACE

THE OONI,THE HIGHEST YORUBA KING COMFORTING VANESSA AFTER SHE STARTED CRYING AT THE "WELCOME BACK HOME" FROM THE KING!

OSEOLA MC CARTY-THIS BLACK WOMEN GAVE HER ALL TO HELP BLACK STUDENTS GET AN EDUCATION!

FROM yeyeolade.blogspot.com

Monday, March 14, 2011
OSEOLA MC CARTY -A GREAT BLACK WOMAN-GAVE HER ALL FOR BLACKS TO GO TO UNIVERSITY IN MISSISSIPPI(WHERE THEY JUST LYNCHED A BLACK MAN LAST YEAR!)-THIS IS BLACK CARING-TAKING CARE OF OUR OWN TO RISE!
Oseola McCarty

O1996 — Feature WritingOseola McCarty
nytimeslogo.jpg
All She Has- $150,000 -Is Going to a University
By:
Rick Bragg
August 13, 1995
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HATTIESBURG, Miss., Aug. 10
Oseola McCarty spent a lifetime making other people look nice. Day after day, for most of her 87 years, she took in bundles of dirty clothes and made them clean and neat for parties she never attended, weddings to which she was never invited, graduations she never saw.
She had quit school in the sixth grade to go to work, never married, never had children and never learned to drive because there was never any place in particular she wanted to go. All she ever had was the work, which she saw as a blessing. Too many other black people in rural Mississippi did not have even that.
She spent almost nothing, living in her old family home, cutting the toes out of shoes if they did not fit right and binding her ragged Bible with Scotch tape to keep Corinthians from falling out. Over the decades, her pay — mostly dollar bills and change — grew to more than $150,000.
“More than I could ever use,” Miss McCarty said the other day without a trace of self-pity. So she is giving her money away, to finance scholarships for black students at the University of Southern Mississippi here in her hometown, where tuition is $2,400 a year.
“I wanted to share my wealth with the children,” said Miss McCarty, whose only real regret is that she never went back to school. “I never minded work, but I was always so busy, busy. Maybe I can make it so the children don’t have to work like I did.”
People in Hattiesburg call her donation the Gift. She made it, in part, in anticipation of her death.
As she sat in her warm, dark living room, she talked of that death matter-of-factly, the same way she talked about the possibility of an afternoon thundershower. To her, the Gift was a preparation, like closing the bedroom windows to keep the rain from blowing in on the bedspread.
“I know it won’t be too many years before I pass on,” she said, “and I just figured the money would do them a lot more good than it would me.”
Her donation has piqued interest around the nation. In a few short days, Oseola McCarty, the washerwoman, has risen from obscurity to a notice she does not understand. She sits in her little frame house, just blocks from the university, and patiently greets the reporters, business leaders and others who line up outside her door.
“I live where I want to live, and I live the way I want to live,” she said. “I couldn’t drive a car if I had one. I’m too old to go to college. So I planned to do this. I planned it myself.”
It has been only three decades since the university integrated. “My race used to not get to go to that college,” she said. “But now they can.”
When asked why she had picked this university instead of a predominantly black institution, she said, “Because it’s here; it’s close.”
While Miss McCarty does not want a building named for her or a statue in her honor, she would like one thing in return: to attend the graduation of a student who made it through college because of her gift. “I’d like to see it,” she said.
Business leaders in Hattiesburg, 110 miles northeast of New Orleans, plan to match her $150,000, said Bill Pace, the executive director of the University of Southern Mississippi Foundation, which administers donations to the school.
“I’ve been in the business 24 years now, in private fund raising,” Mr. Pace said. “And this is the first time I’ve experienced anything like this from an individual who simply was not affluent, did not have the resources and yet gave substantially. In fact, she gave almost everything she has.
“No one approached her from the university; she approached us. She’s seen the poverty, the young people who have struggled, who need an education. She is the most unselfish individual I have ever met.”
Although some details are still being worked out, the $300,000 — Miss McCarty’s money and the matching sum — will finance scholarships into the indefinite future. The only stipulation is that the beneficiaries be black and live in southern Mississippi.
The college has already awarded a $1,000 scholarship in Miss McCarty’s name to an 18-year-old honors student from Hattiesburg, Stephanie Bullock.
Miss Bullock’s grandmother, Ledrester Hayes, sat in Miss McCarty’s tiny living room the other day and thanked her. Later, when Miss McCarty left the room, Mrs. Hayes shook her head in wonder.
“I thought she would be some little old rich lady with a fine car and a fine house and clothes,” she said. “I was a seamstress myself, worked two jobs. I know what it’s like to work like she did, and she gave it away.”
The Oseola McCarty Scholarship Fund bears the name of a woman who bought her first air-conditioner just three years ago and even now turns it on only when company comes. Miss McCarty also does not mind that her tiny black-and-white television set gets only one channel, because she never watches anyway. She complains that her electricity bill is too high and says she never subscribed to a newspaper because it cost too much.
The pace of Miss McCarty’s walks about the neighborhood is slowed now, and she misses more Sundays than she would like at Friendship Baptist Church. Arthritis has left her hands stiff and numb. For the first time in almost 80 years, her independence is threatened.
“Since I was a child, I’ve been working,” washing the clothes of doctors, lawyers, teachers, police officers, she said. “But I can’t do it no more. I can’t work like I used to.”
She is 5 feet tall and would weigh 100 pounds with rocks in her pockets. Her voice is so soft that it disappears in the squeak of the screen door and the hum of the air-conditioner.
She comes from a wide place in the road called Shubuta, Miss., a farming town outside Meridian, not far from the Alabama line. She quit school, she said, when the grandmother who reared her became ill and needed care.
“I would have gone back,” she said, “but the people in my class had done gone on, and I was too big. I wanted to be with my class.”
So she worked, and almost every dollar went into the bank. In time, all her immediate family died. “And I didn’t have nobody,” she said. “But I stayed busy.”
She took a short vacation once, as a young woman, to Niagara Falls. The roar of the water scared her. “Seemed like the world was coming to an end,” she said.
She stayed home, mostly, after that. She has lived alone since 1967.
Earlier this year her banker asked what she wanted done with her money when she passed on. She told him that she wanted to give it to the university, now rather than later; she set aside just enough to live on.
She says she does not want to depend on anyone after all these years, but she may have little choice. She has been informally adopted by the first young person whose life was changed by her gift.
As a young woman, Stephanie Bullock’s mother wanted to go to the University of Southern Mississippi. But that was during the height of the integration battles, and if she had tried her father might have lost his job with the city.
It looked as if Stephanie’s own dream of going to the university would also be snuffed out, for lack of money. Although she was president of her senior class in high school and had grades that were among the best there, she fell just short of getting an academic scholarship. Miss Bullock said her family earned too much money to qualify for most Federal grants but not enough to send her to the university.
Then, last week, she learned that the university was giving her $1,000, in Miss McCarty’s name. “It was a total miracle,” she said, “and an honor.”
She visited Miss McCarty to thank her personally and told her that she planned to “adopt” her. Now she visits regularly, offering to drive Miss McCarty around and filling a space in the tiny woman’s home that has been empty for decades. She feels a little pressure, she concedes, not to fail the woman who helped her. “I was thinking how amazing it was that she made all that money doing laundry,” said Miss Bullock, who plans to major in business.
She counts on Miss McCarty’s being there four years from now, when she graduates.
© 1995, The New York Times
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FROM findagrave.com

Oseola McCarty

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Birth: Mar. 7, 1908
Wayne County
Mississippi, USA
Death: Sep. 26, 1999
Hattiesburg
Forrest County
Mississippi, USA

Philanthropist. Became well known near the end of her life for her gift of $150,000 (her life savings) to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg in July of 1995 which sparked national as well as worldwide attention. She may not even knew exactly what the word philanthropy meant, but the elderly washerwoman gave away practically every dollar she ever made to endow a scholarship fund for poor students in Mississippi that made her a symbol of selfless giving. The Southern native was raised by her mother, Lucy, who moved to Hattiesburg when she was very young. Her father had died in 1926. At the age of 11 she had to drop out of the sixth grade to help her mother care for her ailing aunt. She was never able to return to school and took a job as a washer for families that would hire her, to help her family financially. Living frugally, she would go on and work for 75 years as a laundress beside her grandmother, who died in 1944; her mother, who died in 1964; and her aunt, who died in 1967. All leaving her money, which she added to her savings. In 1947, her uncle left her the modest, wooden-frame house in which she would live the rest of her life in. Alone in 1967, she continued to take in laundry until 1994, when in her eighties arthritis forced her to retire. All through her life she had taken pride in her work, had faith in God, and saved her money. Over her years of living she regretted that she never got her full education and that she never became a nurse. But one thing that she had achieved after was financial comfort. There was nothing in particular she wanted to buy and no place in particular she wanted to go. An only child who outlived her relatives, she lived a solitary existence, surrounded by rows of clothes she made pretty for people who knew her only as the washerwoman. Upon retiring and after some deliberation, she informed friends at her bank of the desire to give some of her money to her church, some to her family, and $ 150,000 to students at the University of Southern Mississippi so that they could receive something she never fully had, an education. “I’m giving it away so that children won’t have to work so hard, like I did,” she said in July 1995. Her gift established the Oseola McCarty Scholarship, with priority consideration given to those deserving African-American students enrolling at the University of Southern Mississippi who clearly demonstrate a financial need. The selflessness of this 87 year old woman’s gift sparked national as well as worldwide attention. The gift and dizzying media blitz that followed created a domino effect on the hearts and pocketbooks of people nationwide, and a group of local business people launched a private fund-raising campaign to match the donation. Contributions from more than 600 donors added some $330,000 to the original scholarship fund. After hearing of Miss McCarty’s gift, Multibillionare Ted Turner gave away a billion dollars. She would receive numerous honors for her generous gift of kindness. She did not want any monuments or any proclamations for her selfless act, said people who that knew her. Her more than 300 honors included honors by the United Nations, President Bill Clinton and the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the Presidential Citizen’s Medal (the nation’s second highest civilian award) and honorary doctorates from Harvard University and the University of Southern Mississippi. She also received the Community Heroes Award from the National Urban League, the Premier Black Woman of Courage Award from the National Federation of Black Women Business Owners, and the Achiever Award from the Aetna Foundation. In 1996, she had the honor to carry the Olympic torch through part of Mississippi and that same year, hers was the hand on the switch that dropped the ball in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. A collection of her views on life, work, faith, sayings, and relationships were published in her book, Simple Wisdom for Rich Living in 1996. She was later told in 1999 that she had liver cancer, about a year after she underwent surgery for colon cancer. She spent her last days as she wanted in the little house in Hattiesburg where she spent most of her life.
Burial:
Highland Cemetery
Hattiesburg
Forrest County
Mississippi, USA

Created by: Curtis Jackson
Record added: Mar 08, 2006
Find A Grave Memorial# 13561102

Oseola McCarty
Added by: Curtis Jackson
Oseola McCarty
Added by: Curtis Jackson
Oseola McCarty
Added by: John Paul Laughlin

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from nathanielturner.com
An Extraordinary Special Person, Extremely Frugal Making Great Personal Sacrifices

Oseola McCarty
A Symbol of Selfless Giving
During July 1995, an African-American cleaning woman from Mississippi Oseola McCarty (1908-1999), who from working all her life accumulated great savings, donated to the University of Southern Mississippi $150,000 for a student scholarship program. "I want to help somebody's child go to college," Miss McCarty said.
Bill Pace, executive director of the USM Foundation, which will administer McCarty's gift, said, "This is by far the largest gift ever given to USM by an African American. We are overwhelmed and humbled by what she has done."
An Extraordinary Woman of Sacrifice and Frugality
Oseola McCarty's lined, brown hands, now gnarled with arthritis, bear mute testimony to a lifetime spent washing and ironing other people's clothes.
There was nothing in particular she wanted to buy and no place in particular she wanted to go. An only child who had outlived her relatives, she lived a solitary existence, surrounded by rows of clothes she made pretty for people who knew her only as the washerwoman.
"I'm giving it away so that the children won't have to work so hard, like I did," she said in July 1995.
Born in Wayne County, Miss., on March 7, 1908, she was raised by her mother, Lucy, who moved to Hattiesburg when Oseola was very young. Her mother, she recalls, worked hard to support her young daughter.
"She cooked for Mr. J.S. Garraway, who was Forrest County Circuit Clerk, and … she would go to the schoolhouse and sell candy to make money. She would leave me alone. I was scared, but she didn't have no choice. I said then that when I could, I would save money so I could take care of my grandmother."
Young Oseola went to school at Eureka Elementary School. Even as a young child, she worked, though, and her savings habit started early.
"I would go to school and come home and iron. I'd put money away and save it. When I got enough, I went to First Mississippi National Bank and put it in. The teller told me it would be best to put it in a savings account. I didn't know. I just kept on saving."
When Oseola was in the sixth grade, her childless aunt had to go to the hospital, and, McCarty said, "I had to go and wait on her. When she came out of the hospital, she couldn't walk, and she needed me."
McCarty never returned to school. "All my classmates had gone off and left me," she said, "so I didn't go back. I just washed and ironed."
McCarty washed and ironed and lived frugally. She has never had a car and still walks everywhere she goes. She shows a visitor the shopping cart she pushes to Big Star, more than a mile away, to get groceries. For the visitor's benefit, she turns on the window air conditioner bank personnel only recently persuaded her to get.
Her grandmother died in 1944, her mother died in 1964, her aunt died in 1967, leaving her alone. Her mother and aunt each left her some money, which she added to her savings. In 1947, her uncle left her the modest, wood-frame house in which she still lives.
McCarty, who never married, said, "After my aunt died, I began to think, I didn't have nobody. I began to think about what to do with what little I had. I wanted to leave some to some cousins and my church. But I had been thinking for a long time … since I was in school … I didn't know how to fix it, but I wanted to give it to the college (USM). They used to not let colored people go out there, but now they do, and I think they should have it."
Miss McCarty's gift has astounded even those who believe they know her well. The customers who have brought their washing and ironing to her modest frame home for more than 75 years read like the social register of Hattiesburg. She has done laundry for three generations of some families. In the beginning, she said, she charged $1.50 to $2 a bundle, but, with inflation, the price rose.
"I just want it to go to someone who will appreciate it and learn. I'm old and I'm not going to live always." McCarty's gift establishes an endowed Oseola McCarty Scholarship, with "priority consideration given to those deserving African-American students enrolling at the University of Southern Mississippi who clearly demonstrate a financial need."
How It Really Happened
"When I started making $10 a bundle — I don't remember when … sometime after the war — I commenced to save money," she recalled. "I put it in savings. I never would take any of it out. I just put it in. It just accumulated."
Over the years, she put money into several local banks. While banks merged and changed names and management, McCarty's savings grew. Her grandmother died in 1944, her mother died in 1964, her aunt died in 1967, "and I've been havin' it by myself since then," she said. Her mother and her aunt each left her some money, which she added to her savings.
In 1947 her uncle gave her the house in which she still lives. Bank personnel, realizing that McCarty was accumulating sizeable savings, advised her to put her money into CD's, conservative mutual funds and other accounts where it would work for her.
Nancy Odom and Ellen Vinzant of Trustmark Bank have worked with McCarty for several years, not only helping her manage her money but helping look after her personally. It was they who helped her get the air conditioner. They also were concerned about what the future held for her.
"We both talked with her about her funds and what would happen to her if something happened," said Odom. "She knew she needed someone to take care of her."
Odom and Vinzant referred Miss McCarty to Paul Laughlin, Trustmark's assistant vice president and trust officer. "In one of our earliest meetings, I talked about what we could do for her," Laughlin said. "We talked about providing for her if she's not able. Then we turned naturally to what happens to her estate after she dies.
"She said she wanted to leave the bulk of her money to USM, and she didn't want (anybody) to come in and change her mind. I called Jimmy Frank McKenzie, her attorney — she's done laundry for him for years — and he talked to her. He made sure it was her idea.
Then I met with her to let her decide how to divide her money up." McCarty said, "Mr. Paul laid out dimes on the table to explain how to divide it up."
Paul Laughlin said, "I got 10 dimes (to represent percentages). I wrote on pieces of paper the parties she wanted to leave her money to and put them on the table. Then I asked how she wanted her money to be split up. She put one dime on her church and one each for several relatives. Then she said she wanted the rest — six dimes — to go to the college. She was quite definite about wanting to give 60 percent to USM. To my knowledge, she has never been out there, but she seems to have the best of the students in mind. The decision was entirely hers."
"I just want the scholarship to go to some child who needs it, to whoever is not able to help their children," Miss McCarty said. "I'm too old to get an education, but they can."
McCarty signed an irrevocable trust agreement stating her wishes for her estate and giving the bank the responsibility for managing her funds.
"Mr. Paul [Laughlin ] gives me a check, and I can go get money anytime I need it. My lawyer gave them permission to take care of me if something happens to me."
Paul Laughlin said the bank normally keeps such transactions in strictest confidence, but because of the uniqueness of McCarty's story, he asked for her permission to make it public.
"Well, I guess that would be all right," she said with her typical calm acceptance."She seems wonderfully at peace with where she is and who she is," Paul Laughlin said.
McCarty's arthritis in her hands forced her to retire from washing and ironing in December 1994, at the age of 86. Now she spends her days cleaning house, and she still walks everywhere she goes. But she said, "If I ever get able to, I want to go back to work."
The Excitement Expands
Oceola McCarty did not want any monuments, any proclamations, said people that knew her. But the selflessness of 87-year-old woman's $150,000 gift to the University of Southern Mississippi from her life's savings sparked national as well as worldwide attention.
The woman who had gone out only for some preaching at the Friendship Baptist Church in Hattiesburg and to buy groceries would be honored by the United Nations, would receive more than 300 awards. People all over the world knew who she was and what she did.
On a trip to Washington, McCarty was honored by President Bill Clinton and the Congressional Black Caucus. Miss McCarty, who declined an invitation to go by plane, was accompanied by Mary McCarty, a 50-year-old cousin from Shubuta and a high school social studies teacher in Waynesboro.
"I'm just tickled to death," McCarty said while waiting at the Hattiesburg train station, noting it was her first trip out of the South since a visit to Niagara Falls more than 50 years ago. McCarty will sat with President Clinton at a 7 p.m. Saturday dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus at the Washington Convention Center. New Jersey lawyer and businessman Lewis Katz helped organize the trip.
The following Monday, Miss McCarty received a presidential citation from Clinton at the White House.
Although McCarty has resided less than three miles away from the Hattiesburg university for most of her life, she visited the campus for the first time Aug. 29. She received a 30-second standing ovation from about 1,000 faculty and staff when she was introduced by USM President Aubrey K. Lucas. Lucas also presented McCarty with a framed letter from President Clinton, lauding her generosity.
"Hillary and I were moved by your gift to the University of Southern Mississippi. Your unselfish deed is a remarkable example of the spirit and ingenuity that made America great," the letter read in part.
Earlier in the day, she had met in Jackson, Miss., with Pat Fordice, the wife of Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice. Two days later, McCarty was introduced to more than 30,000 cheering fans at the university's season-opening football game. On Sept. 10, the Hattiesburg community celebrated "Oseola McCarty Day."
The gift and dizzying media blitz that followed created a domino effect on the hearts and pocketbooks of people nationwide, and a group of local business people launched a private fund-raising campaign to match the donation. Contributions began pouring in from scattered locations across the nation to the USM Foundation.
Contributions from more than 600 donors added some $330,000 to the original scholarship fund of $150,000. After hearing of Miss McCarty's gift, Ted Turner, a multibillionaire, gave away a billion dollars.
Along with all the plaques and trophies or other honors — she received the Presidential Citizen's Medal, the nation's second highest civilian award, and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University — she was awarded other things that were pure fun.
In 1996, she carried the Olympic torch through part of Mississippi. Later that year, hers was the hand on the switch that dropped the ball in Times Square in New York's wild New Year's Eve celebration. In fact, she said at the time, it was the first time she had actually stayed up past midnight.
Stephanie Bullock, an 18-year-old Hattiesburg High School honor graduate, was designated as the first scholarship recipient, getting $1,000 to help launch her college studies at USM this fall. When she met McCarty for the first time, she threw her arms around the woman's neck and whispered, "Thank you so much." The endowed Oseola McCarty Scholarship, with "priority consideration given to those deserving African-American students enrolling at the University of Southern Mississippi who clearly demonstrate a financial need."
Miss McCarty took others' excitement over her gift with the same quiet grace that she had taken all the bad and good that have come into her life.
"I can't do everything," she said, "but I can do something to help somebody. And what I can do I will do. I wish I could do more."
The woman who acted in anticipation of death found a life she could have never imagined. She flew on a plane for the first time in her life and laughed out loud when the food did not fall off the tray as the plane rumbled through the sky. She stayed in a hotel for the first time in her life, and before she checked out, she made the bed.
"People treated her like a monument," said Jewel Tucker, the secretary to the president of the university and Miss McCarty's traveling companion in those almost giddy years after the gift. "But she was really a movement. It will keep moving."
Time Draws Nigh
Miss McCarty was told that she had liver cancer, about a year after she underwent surgery for colon cancer. She wanted her last days to be spent in the little house where she spent most of her life. She was 91.
"I don't want to close my eyes because I don't know if I'll open them again," the tiny, frail woman told a visitor recently. "But I am not afraid."
Miss Oseola McCarty — the humble washerwoman who became The University of Southern Mississippi's most famous benefactor — passed away Sept. 26, 1999, after a bout with cancer. In a world in which people are suspicious of things too good to be true, Miss McCarty really was good and true.
"There's a lot of talk about self-esteem these days," she once said. "It seems pretty basic to me. If you want to feel proud of yourself, you've got to do things you can be proud of. Feelings follow actions."
Afterword
There are those who would draw the wrong lessons from the life of Oceola McCarty. She was indeed an extraordinary and special person, one who was extremely frugal and made great personal sacrifices. Some would say wrongly: Poverty is about individual failure. It is about family dysfunction, character disorder and self-destructive behavior. Of course, this is a class attitude. Those who would take such a position are apologists for the structural wrongs that exist in our society. They are the sycophants and opportunists for the powerful and the mean in spirit.
Source: http://www.pr.usm.edu/oolamain.htm
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updated 10 June 2008

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FROM sithru.blogspot.com

Oseola McCarty: The lesson of simplicity
Filed under Inspired , Simplicity , by sudara || සුදාර… on Saturday, December 25, 2010
0

She is one of the most amazing women in the world who is inspired by millions of people around the world for her donation of $150,000 for the scholarship of the University of Southern Mississippi. While this may not have been the largest single donation the school ever received,what was unique was that she had saved the money over the course of her life time from her modest earnings washing other people's clothes.

Oseola McCarty was born, reared and started her education in Mississippi. When she was in the sixth grade, McCarty left school to care for her ailing aunt and never returned to school. For more than 75 years, she earned her living as a laundress. She did laundry for three generations of some Hattiesburg, Miss., families.
McCarty never owned a car; she walked everywhere she went, pushing a shopping cart nearly a mile to get groceries. She rode with friends to attend services at the Friendship Baptist Church. She did not subscribe to any newspaper, considering the expense an extravagance. Similarly, although she owned a black and white television, she only received transmissions via the airways. In 1947, her uncle gave her the house in which she lived until her death. She also received some money from her aunt and mother when they died, which she also placed into savings.

"I want to help somebody's child go to college," she said after announcing the donation. Her gift endowed the Oseola McCarty Scholarship. "I'm too old to get an education, but they can." When asked about her ability to save so much money she says simply, "I didn't buy things I didn't need, The Lord helped me, and he'll help you, too. It's an honor to be blessed like that."

In 1998, she was awarded an honorary degree from USM, the first such degree awarded by the university. She received scores of awards and other honors recognizing her unselfish spirit, and President Bill Clinton presented her with a Presidential Citizens Medal, the nation’s second highest civilian award, during a special White House Ceremony. She also won the United Nations' coveted Avicenna Medal for educational commitment. In June 1996, Harvard University awarded McCarty an honorary doctorate alongside Maya Lin, Walter Annenberg, and Judith Jameson.

She passed away Sept. 26, 1999 from a cancer leaving a golden lesson of simplicity for all of us. A collection of McCarty's views on life, work, faith, saving, and relationships can be found in her book, Simple Wisdom for Rich Living, published by Longstreet Press in 1996.
Read the original story of donation
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Posted by YEYE AKILIMALI FUNUA OLADE at 1:22 AM
Labels: AFRICAN AMERICANS, BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK MEN, BLACK WOMAN, BLACK WOMEN, BLACKS IN AMERIKKKA, MISSISSIPPI, THE BLACK RACE
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BLACKS’ STRUGGLE IN BIRMINGHAM,ALABAMA,1963 FOR CIVIL RIGHTS-LEST WE FORGET!

It shows a white man with a baseball bat about to strike a middle-aged black woman. In the background, another white man rains down punches on another black woman’s head. Among the white spectators is a man armed with a steel rod, another holding a bottle, and yet another carrying a chain.

RACIST POLICE TURNED ON THE FIRE HOSES TO STOP BLACKS FROM FIGHTING FOR THEIR RIGHTS!

REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. BEING ROUGH HANDLED BY WHITE POLICE

YORUBAS!-SPEAK YORUBA TO YOUR CHILDREN ONLY IN THE HOUSE AND SAVE YOURSELF FROM BAD AKATA/WILD OYINBO CHILDRENYINBILO CHIL

from yeyeolade.blogspot.com

Thursday, March 03, 2011
SPEAK YORUBA TO YOUR CHILDREN AND SAVE YORUBA LANGUAGE!

http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/guest-articles/where-is-tunde-adegbola-our-linguistic-heritage-is-dying.html

05
Jan
2011 Where is Tunde Adegbola? Our linguistic heritage is dying!

Luqmaan K. O. Babalola
January 05, 2011
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Where is Tunde Adegbola? Our linguistic heritage is dying!

I had my first child in 1999. The little boy was growing up in an English speaking Yoruba family. My elder brother one day said to me: e je ki omo yin gbo Yoruba a. His message was quite clear, but the vogue then in Lagos was (and still is) English language and it was a pride even if your child cannot say a word in Yoruba or any other mother tongue. I did not see anything wrong in that until sometimes back around 2003 (I do not remember precisely), a fine gentleman, Tunde Adegbola, was at the Science Lecture Theatre of our university (of Ilorin) with a campaign for the resurgence of African languages and their integration into modern ICTs. I cannot recall from his talk but have culled from his webpage that the “core objectives of the African Languages Technology Initiative (Alt-i) encompass the need to make modern ICTs relevant to African Languages. As we go further into the information age, more and more human communication will be mediated by machines, and this will raise the demand, not only for humans to communicate through machines but also to communicate with machines. There is no reason whatsoever why we should be made to do this in English. In order to achieve these modes of communication in African languages however, there is a need to supplement the present objectives of the study of linguistics in African universities. Within the contexts of the linguistics of African languages, we need to develop frameworks and theories that can be passed on to and used by practitioners in Human Language Technology (HLT). To this end, Alt-i is involved in developing the relevant human and other intellectual resources to facilitate this process.”
I however recall that Tunde noted that regrettably many African languages are creeping into extinction and are being replaced by the Oyinbo language of the poorest and most disgusting standards. While appreciating Tunde’s efforts and initiatives on the ICT issues, it is the possibility of the African languages going into extinction that is of great concern in this piece. Let me be particular about the Yoruba elites of today. These are a people gradually consigning their language to dustbin of history. Many homes, even at home in Nigeria, no longer know Yoruba as a medium of communication. In fact they do not feel anything wrong with saying “my son does not speak Yoruba”. Some of them will say “he understands but cannot speak it”. They pride not only in speaking English language but in not being able to speak Yoruba. Sad and indeed very sad! Pathetic and too damn shameful! I have patiently studied issues about this unwholesome trend. I have asked questions: why the drift towards English language (and consequent abandonment of the local language even at homes) and what gains there are (if any) in the drift. The objective is not to advocate a change of our lingua franca, but to call attention to issues needing awareness: the fact that our local languages must necessarily be preserved and valued.
I have discovered that the people’s thinking is that since English is our official language as a nation and that it must be passed at credit level at the WASCE/SSCE before admission into any higher institution in the country, then the better if parents begin to speak it to their children right from home, nay right from birth. I do not know and have not found any better justification for the trend. Maybe some others may think speaking English language makes you fashionable, I do not know. But the thinking that speaking a language affords an opportunity for a pass in an examination is too damn shallow, only driven by zeal and never by knowledge. Think about it: a language spoken to a growing child is acquired by the child as indigenous language. He does not understand the technicalities of the language – just like our forefathers speak their various dialects and were unable to even read their “i” if stood before them like the (Nigerian) electric pole. It is for this reason that village school children who never heard English language spoken in their homes but have the rare opportunity of being well trained in its structures, may often do well and better than their city counterparts, whose adopted first language is the Queen’s. And needless to say there is not any good result from this approach to learning our national language. And how can there be? When, unspeakably laughable, the English language being spoken in many Yoruba homes today is not the type that can pass anyone in any examination, not even the school leaving certificate examination as it is evident in our nation’s educational system today.
I remember Tunde seized the audience when he started reeling out versions of English language of his own tribe – the Yoruba people of Nigeria. The large theatre was rent with crackling laughter as he mentioned something like (I do not remember precisely): “go and open the door down”, “don’t play rough play o”, “it is two, two naira”, “be going o” and “go and work your work”. Even the uneducated are convinced they have to try. They are encouraged not to feel shy, to just try and speak English language even if heavens will fall. What about the half-educated? Ha! It is real drama if you have an opportunity to listen. Isn’t it funny how our people think? Should you have a chance to see the written English language of our students in the tertiary institutions, you would definitely wonder if anything has been achieved via this approach to learning, nay if more harm than good has not been done. Many can no longer write formal letters or what used to be known as “application letters”. In fact asking them to write a report is close to asking them to climb up the firmaments. This is in spite of the fact some of them speak the Queen’s language almost naturally, having been nurtured in an elite home.
That everyone is in so much romance with a foreign language (or English, in particular) has its connotations. One, we are losing our native language and, two; we may not be gaining any as a people. Maybe we are inventing a new English language is the best that can be said of us. And there shall be no thanks for that – not from the Queen, whose language is being bastardized by a people ashamed of their identity, nor the identity-conscious people of Yoruba origin. Even if perfection is attained in a foreign language, it shall not suffice for us to reduce our mother tongue to mere figments of history. So where is Tunde Adegbola? Let him speak out loud against this drift. Let him seize every opportunity to tell the people to identify with their own. Let him make use of all media and concerned individuals to carry on the campaign for the renaissance of the Yoruba language. Let the government support this cause. Let individuals also lend their hands in their little ways – speaking the language and encouraging it at least. I have joined in the cause. I talk to people about it. I speak it except when otherwise necessary – maybe officially. I remember particularly mentioning it in a mosque class, emphasizing that there should not be so much preference for a language over the other to the extent of almost strangulating one. The Qur’an mentions that difference in tongues of humankind is a sign from their Lord. So let no one language submerge or consume the other. A people whose language is lost is a people whose identity is lost.
For the sake of information, we must know that the mother-tongue preservation campaign transcends any race. Peoples of the world are becoming conscious of the danger of losing a heritage as important as the tongue. I had a privilege of visiting the Republic of Ireland and found the Irish complaining of losing their Irish language to the English during the colonial era – I never knew the Irish were also colonized by the English. They are also making serious effort at bringing back to life their lost heritage. We must also know that the many nations of the world which pass on knowledge by the medium of the native languages are not made backward by that. Or what can anyone say of China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Russia and others, who do scientific researches and communicate their results in their languages. These nations have not lagged a bit due to their choice of medium of communication. Rather, doing this has facilitated their processes of learning. We can do same if given proper consideration. I had a rare opportunity of seeing that there are scripts (the Japanese for example) that run vertically, top to down, simply because they are not lost. The diversity enables much more appreciation of our make as humans and the nature. I must repeat, however, that changing our national language is not what is being advocated in this article. Rather the advocacy is that, at the least, our local tongues must not be allowed to give way. We must encourage learning them in every way we can. I have however heard people complain about the content of Yoruba language as a discipline in our tertiary institutions – that those fetishes of the Yoruba culture are being taught as part of language training! I have seen students rejecting studies in Yoruba language for this singular reason. I think this should be discouraged to enable more and more individuals to pick interest in learning the language. Our policy makers should leave fetish to the its people and allow our language to be studied by all interested.
The Hausa people of northern Nigeria here deserve a commendation for their tenacity with their linguistic heritage. They demonstrate real affection for their language every place and every time. How marvelous a people! They go even a step further, extending love and affection to aliens who speak their language. I am not sure, but I am disposed to believing the Hausa people will speak their native tongue, at least, in their homes even in foreign lands. This is an attitude that is commendable and preserving of the Hausa culture and tradition. It is in sharp contrast with the attitude of the Yoruba people to their own. They show grave disdain to tribesman who chooses to communicate with them in Yoruba! Sometimes they bully: “speak in English, please!” Sometimes you don’t need to be told you have to speak English language before them, their countenances tell you straight you have to change your language to English especially when you visit their offices. I remember a school friend said to me he cannot marry a woman whose English is not sound. Why? Everyone in his family speak English, even the grandparents, so could not imagine his woman not being able to communicate with family members (who are Yoruba) in fine English! What a people!
I should mention on the last note that the day Tunde gave his talk, I got home and said to my wife: “kosi oyinbo siso ninu ile yi mo”. She thought I was joking until I told her about Tunde’s campaign and reminded her of her own “don’t play rough play o”. She then surrendered. I made it a point of duty not to speak English language except officially so much so that people ordinarily assume, with my choice of language and cultural appearance, I am not likely to be educated. I am happy with that and I feel fulfilled, rather than wearing the emblem of a different people. Unfortunately, I must confess, I have not fully recovered from the loss of many years (until 2003) as I still struggle to find the choice words in my rich Yoruba language. As for “owe” (proverbs) and “asayan oro”, the creams of the Yoruba language, many would really need deliverance as the Pentecostals would say. This is the extent of the damage to our linguistic heritage! Yoruba ro o nu o.
Luqmaan K. O. Babalola teaches Pure Mathematics at the University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria.
kobabalola@gmail.comkobabalola@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ,babalola.ko@unilorin.edu.ng babalola.ko@unilorin.edu.ng This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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posted on 01-07-2011, 11:58:39 AM
Prof penkelemess
Re: Where is Tunde Adegbola? Our linguistic heritage is dying!
Prof,

thought-provoking.

I hope we get a lively debate going on this.

will try to contribute my little bit later.

THANKS

gerd meuer

posted on 01-07-2011, 22:38:05 PM
Nigeria on my mind
Re: Where is Tunde Adegbola? Our linguistic heritage is dying!
The fact that English is a mandatory requirement for admission into institutions of higher learning is a travesty in our academic philosophy. I remember a school mate who was an engineering major in my school days decades ago, before the explosion of cultism, before the degradation of scholastic standards, whose inadequate score in English prevented him from securing admission to a University. His situation was noteworthy because he had passed the subjects most pertinent to his major (physics, chemistry and maths) with flying colors. Many other brilliant scholars of the time were equally victimized.

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TUNDE ADEGBOLA IS SAVING YORUBA LANGUAGE!

OMOWE TUNDE ADEGBOLA IS SAVING YORUBA LANGUAGE AND IGBO,HAUSA AND OTHER AFRICAN LANGUAGES BY WORKING WITH MICROSOFT TO DEVELOP WINDOWS IN THESE 3 NIGERIAN LANGUAGES!

http://yeyeolade.blogspot.com/2011/03/saving-yoruba-language-omowe-tunde.html

Thursday, March 03, 2011
SAVING YORUBA LANGUAGE-OMOWE TUNDE ADEGBOLA IS IN THE FOREFRONT OF FIGHTING TO SAVE YORUBA LANGUAGE-HERE HE DEVELOPED MICROSOFT SOFTWARE FOR YORUBA,IGBO AND HAUSA!

http://www.nigeriacommunicationsweek.com.ng/details.php?category=computing&id=1110

http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/A-tande.jpg

Wednesday April 2, 2003

Microsoft to Deliver Windows, Office in Major Nigerian Languages

Microsoft has announced that it will deliver Language Interface Packs that will soon make Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office packages more locally-relevant and easier to understand for Nigerian end users in commemoration of the International Mother Language Day in Nigeria.

The disclosure was made when Jummai Umar-Ajijola, citizenship manager for Microsoft Nigeria led a team of Microsoft partners to make a presentation to the Chairman, Education Committee, House of Representatives, and Honourable Faruk Lawan in Abuja. The visit which also included a visit to the Federal Ministry of Education was part of the activities to mark the Mother Language Day, where the team was received by Alhaji Bello Ozigis, Permanent Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education on behalf of Hajiya Aisha Dukku Minister of State for Education.

Microsoft is working closely with the Linguistic Association of Nigeria and other advocates to complete work on the Language Interface Packs for the Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba languages, which will be compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office Word.

Hajiya Aisha, Honourable Minister of State for Education, is currently one of the championing forces behind the language program and presented the Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba glossaries to stakeholders in Abuja last December.

According to Dr. Tunde Adegbola of Alt-i, who is the moderator of the localisation process in Nigeria, the Windows Interface Packs are on track to be released this May, and the Office Interface Packs are scheduled for release later in October.

Honourable Lawan while speaking at the day’s festivities on behalf of the Honourable Speaker, House of Representatives, commended Microsoft for the continued efforts to grow a strong local IT industry and ensure that every citizen has fair and meaningful access to locally-relevant technology.

“Functional education and specialized training are the pre-requisites for a productive workforce, and good leaders. It is the only way to create a populace that is successful in all spheres of human life. All these cannot be achieved without understanding. This is the critical role that language plays. We are therefore committed to ensuring that everyone has access to functional education in language familiar to them. We commend Microsoft for the great initiative to bring technology to everyone through the Local Language Program,” Honourable Lawan said.

Microsoft’s Citizenship Lead for Nigeria, Jummai Umar-Ajijola added that governments around the world are facing a great challenge in today’s global economy – the need to quickly build a strong economy that can effectively participate in an increasingly-interconnected world.

“In an environment as diverse as Nigeria – with over 500 ethnic languages – the need to eliminate the language barrier around technology education is critical to the success of the efforts to bridge the digital divide.

“It is in the light of this need that Microsoft developed the Local Language Program to provide the tools and technologies required to develop, enhance, and expand local IT economies and to enable language groups of all sizes to participate in this growth,” she said.

Articles 13 and 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Declare that all persons have the right to express themselves and to create and disseminate their work in the language of their choice, and particularly in their mother tongue.

According to Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, director-general of UNESCO, “Languages do indeed matter in attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which the United Nations agreed upon in 2000.

“They matter when we want to promote cultural diversity, and fight illiteracy, and they matter for quality education, including teaching in the mother language in the first years of schooling. They matter in the fight for greater social inclusion, for creativity, economic development and safeguarding indigenous knowledge.”

“We are very excited about the potential that Microsoft’s Local Language Program has for driving technology penetration in Nigeria,” Dr Adegbola added.

“This is a further demonstration of the company’s commitment to supporting the reform agenda of the present administration by transforming education and creating opportunities for local innovation. We are also delighted to be a part of this great project,” he said.

5%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%FROM nairaland.com

Microsoft has completed work on glossaries for the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba translations of Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

By this, Microsoft Windows and the four applications in Microsoft Office 2007- Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Access, can easily be adapted to versions in the three languages.

The firm said a Language Interface Pack that would allow the applications to fully be available in the three languages was in the works and would be delivered in the coming months.

The Supervising Minister of Education, Hajiya Aishatu Dukku, presented the glossaries to stakeholders in Abuja on Wednesday, a development that Microsoft noted was one more landmark in its Local Language Program in Nigeria.

Currently, the LLP scheme is working on 101 languages in the world and five in the West Africa.

According to the Country Manager, Microsoft Nigeria, Mr. Emmanuel Onyeje, the LLP is Microsoft’s response to the need to provide people of all regions, cultures and languages, with access to technology in a language that is familiar and which honours their cultural distinctions.

He said, “Learning a second language should not be a prerequisite for using technology. That is why we are working with governments and language authorities to translate our software and extend it to a broader set of users.

“Through the Local Language Program, we are giving our local communities the tools and resources they need to bridge the digital divide and create opportunities for economic advancement.”

At the presentation of the moderator of the localisation process in Nigeria, Dr. Tunde Adegbola of the African Languages Technology Institute, explained that the glossary and LIP would equip local information technology communities with the basic tools to create customised language solutions that promote economic growth and preserve local languages.

Developed from the glossary, the LIP is the application that connects the local language to the computer, through a native language desktop user interface.

When the process is completed, the LIP will be freely downloadable from the LLP website.

Local solutions can be developed on top of the LIPs, enabling the creation of localised products that enhance the value of each LIP and ensure the successful use of technology.

Adegbola urged the stakeholders to study the glossary, which was developed in collaboration with governments, universities, and language authorities to ensure that the standard technical terminologies had been translated correctly into the local languages.

The Minister of Education, Hajiya Aishatu Dukku, commended Microsoft for the initiative to eliminate the language barrier, which presented a serious challenge for teaching and learning technology at the grassroots.

She further outlined the national policy on education, which recognised the language of the environment as the first language of instruction for the first three years of education with English only taught as a subject.

From the fourth year, English language becomes the language of instruction, while the language of the environment and French are taught as subjects.

She said that with the LLP, teaching technology would be much easier.

The minister said, “There are so many skills we may not be able to transfer except in our local languages. This initiative by Microsoft is a first step for us to start thinking of how we can develop our languages further in order to grow our IT capacity.”

By eliminating the language barrier to technology education through the local language programme, Microsoft believes that many more people will be encouraged to use desktop software in Nigeria’s local communities, improving access to technology.

This will create new economic opportunities, and enriching people’s personal lives. The move will go a long way to bridging the digital divide between the developed and developing communities around the world.

It is expected that the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba language stakeholder groups will review the glossary and work with Microsoft to produce the final copy to move the LLP to the NEXT level.&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
FROM DAILYTRUST.COM
Microsoft launches Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo Vista
Monday, 08 June 2009 02:00 Hamisu Muhammad & Sunday Williams
Microsoft Nigeria has launched a language interface pack for Windows Vista in three major Nigerian languages; Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as part of its Local Language Programme (LLP).
Launching the pack tagged, “LLP GO-live,” President Umaru Yar’adua who was represented by the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Alhassan Bako Zaku said the event is a turning point in the history of technology in the country. He said, “The initiative is a long awaited vehicle to take the benefits of Information Communication Technology (ICT) to the people at the grassroots in every nook and corner of the country. We truly believe that this will make IT solutions more accessible to the Nigerian community. It also represents a breakthrough for Nigerian linguistic and literary studies.”
He called on the people to take advantage of the huge opportunity of the language software to preserve and promote our mother languages while benefiting from continuing IT advancements.
Speaking, the General Manager for Microsoft Anglophone West Africa, Mr. Emmanuel Onyeje said the LLP has created a platform for Nigerians to embrace the now localized process to ensure that more of our over 500 indigenous languages are preserved by translating technology into them.
He said the translation of Microsoft Office in the three languages will be available later this year adding that when it becomes available, it will mean that Nigerians can access the productivity applications including Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint in familiar languages.
He said, “Indeed this is a momentous event for our nation. With the availability of the Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba languages interface packs for Microsoft Windows Vista and the Microsoft Office 2007 to come later this year, we finally have a platform that allows a higher critical mass of Nigerian access to technology.”
He explained that the language interface software packs were created by Nigerians (their partners) living in the country.
“We need to move from being consumers to developers. We ensured that this process was localized. The tools are freely available for us to embrace and celebrate our diversity .
Others can now take these tools and develop new applications based on the existing platform,” he said.
Also speaking, Dr. Tunde Adegbola, of African Languages Technology Initiative, said any language that does not provide the tool for intergenerational communication is set to die adding that with the LLP, we are at least assured that the Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba languages will survive the next generation.
He said, “The diversity of languages spoken in Nigeria is a key element of our collective identity and is vital that we preserve these traditions while simultaneously equipping our citizens for success in the 21st century.”